K-501 the Holocaust as Judgment (1 of 2) — Art Katz

The Holocaust and the Necessity of Examining Judgment

No man is fit to open the issues of the Holocaust. It's too holy, too sacred, too monumental, too unthinkable, and too unspeakable. And yet the paradox is that if we forestall or withhold an examination, we seriously devastate ourselves and almost assure the reoccurrence or the enactment of the next.

So it's a terrible tension. It's too holy to touch, and yet the indifference and the ignorance of it will make us victim of the next. Judgments need to be examined, however painful. And the great and classic prototype that eventuated in the call of Moses and his apostolic sending, if I can say that, was his willingness to turn aside to see.

A bush that burned and was not consumed. And I'm taking the liberty to say that that represents and is symbolic of the judgments of God that are not yet requited, not yet answered, not yet met, not yet understood.

Still pending. God is yet wanting something. And you can't sweep these things under the carpet. However long they are deferred, there will be an eventual day of reckoning. And the final day of reckoning is irremediable.

The Day of the Lord and the Church's Loss of Judgment

The day of the Lord and the day of the judgment of God. And after that, there's no court of appeal. There's a finality that is absolutely chilling. And you know what the amazing thing is? That not only is the world totally indifferent to that fate, to that possibility, but the church itself is asleep with regard to it.

We have lost probably one of the most divinely intended things that would have brought an iron into the soul of the church and a seriousness into the quality of the church and an intensity to its faith and to its mission.

Namely, the issue of judgment and the last judgment. If you miss contemporary judgments, you're not going to have an understanding of the last. Judgments are continuous and related, but you can understand why it is that even the church itself shrinks from the contemplation of judgment.

It's painful. And yet, God is a judge. And judgment is one of his attributes, as is also love, patience, mercy, kindness, righteousness. In fact, God would not be righteous were it not for his judgments.

And when his judgments are in the earth, the scripture says, the world will learn righteousness. So you cannot exempt judgment from God or you dissolve God as God. You have a God of another kind, of your own making, who's a Patsy.

And you can call him Jesus until you're blue in the face, but there'll not be any answer from heaven. It's simply not God as God if you remove this component from his being. So mercy does not mean anything independent of judgment.

And God is a seamless garment, like the robe of Jesus that could not be parted. It had only to be gambled for. You cannot divide the Lord. He's indivisible. And his judgment is an integral, contiguous aspect of his total being.

And the church that loves him and serves him needs to submit to the totality of God as God. And it's not taking castor oil, because God's judgments are not punitive. It's not a God exercising his power as if to pull wings from flies.

It's a God whose judgments are always proportionate to the sins of those who are being judged. It's never, what's the word, arbitrary. It's always in perfect divine accord with what is being judged. And if he had refrained from exercising his judgments, you can imagine what the condition of the world would be in his creation.

It's abysmal. And we can see what's happening in our court system. It's loathe to judge. They cannot bring themselves to bring judgment. And probably the primary reason is that those who judge are themselves taking liberties and living immorally and wanting to force all judgment for themselves and therefore cannot bring it against others.

And so the whole fabric of society suffers for the want of righteous judgment. So let's pray that the Lord will give us a sober disposition to consider a subject that has real life-changing possibility.

Lord, we thank you, precious God. We thank you and we ask your forgiveness at the same time because we have shared in the shallowness of the church. We've not had a stomach for this and even for the consideration of judgments as it pertains to ourselves.

We have always read the things that befall us in another way. We have attributed it, like the world, to accident, to men, to circumstance. We rarely understand or choose to see it as the hand of God. So Lord, we ask an adjustment of our seeing and our thinking because it befalls us as your last days prophetic people to speak the word of God in judgment and to warn men of judgment before the very end comes.

And may you have, my God, a yielded prophetic people who will not balk. So we bless you, Lord, and we just ask you to take over, communicate what you will, and give us an understanding in a life-changing way as only you can by your Spirit.

And we just thank you for the privilege of it, for the assembly of souls, my God, whom you've brought from near and from far, some as complete surprises, but not a surprise to you. Bless us all together, Lord, and put something memorable into our spirit, our understanding, our consciousness that will affect our walk, our conduct, our service.

The Crucifixion as the Central Event of History

And we thank you and give you the praise in Jesus' name. Amen. What one thing would you single out of all of the things that could be considered that is absolutely pivotal, central, has affected, will continue to affect mankind in every aspect and consequence?

The single greatest and yet most denigrated or most essentially ignored event in time is the crucifixion of Jesus. I'll never, I don't care what facility a man can have in speaking, no one can ever aptly describe and give attention to the centrality of that single uttermost event, the intervention of God in the affairs of men in time and in place himself, in his own person, and how it was expressed in a peculiar form of ultimate suffering and death that blows the mind and blows every religious category totally away.

That as one German theologian that we had discussed said, true faith begins where the atheist thinks it should end. It's at the devastation of Jesus that authentic faith has its only beginning and true beginning.

Because there's something about the nature of the ultimacy of that event in its devastation that is calculated to destroy religious categories. Man has a penchant, P-E-N-C-H-A-N-T, a disposition to be religious.

And whatever the motive for that, it ironically robs events of their deepest meaning and domesticates them so that they can be fitted in to the mentality and framework of men for their convenience. And in it they think they're doing God's service.

So we need always and frequently to come back to the central place of beginning and see it afresh and more deeply. And it may well be that it's the mercy of God that he has not revealed it in one fell swoop to any of us or our frames could not bear it.

But how many of us would ever think that what Jesus on the cross represents is the judgment of God? Do you ever think in those terms? That if you want to know what judgment is, the death of Jesus on the cross is the statement of God's judgment.

We never really think in those terms, but all sin was subsumed and placed upon him. He was the sin bearer. He suffered the judgment for the sin of Israel and of all mankind, past, present, future. So there's no way to describe the suffering beyond the atrocity, the physical aspects of things, that this was probably for him being holy and righteous, which if you can convict me of sin at the heart of the deepest suffering of the cross.

And yet mankind has a talent to domesticate that and to rob it of its power. And the Jewish people in the nation Israel have relegated the event itself to a virtual oblivion. There's a remarkable way in which something can be dismissed historically and we push it from our consciousness or we minimize it or see it as some kind of secondary thing, that he was a political threat to the Roman Empire or whatever it was, or he invited it by his own rash statements and just as well to be done with this presumer.

The Crucifixion, Jerusalem's Destruction, and Judgment on Rejection

So I want to take some time tonight to talk about the consequence of the rejection of judgment as judgment. The failure to see it and to understand it invites its own judgment. And that's why world Jewry this evening is yet under the threat of a future judgment because its understanding of past judgments have not been recognized.

The two great judgments of modern times was the crucifixion of Jesus and the Holocaust of the Jew. And there's a connecting logic between these two events. And I don't know that I could myself describe it, but I know that I know that the two are extraordinarily linked.

You cannot disassociate them. The one made possible and even required the other. And they're statements of the same kind, both judgments on the son and sons of Israel, so to speak. I think last time we talked about the predicament that Judaism faced with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, which Jesus prophesied that not one stone would be left on another.

So here was yet another opportunity to recognize the qualifications of the crucified one by the accuracy of his prophecy now being borne out 40 years after his stating it, 40 being the number of trial and testing.

They had 40 years to consider the event of his death and his resurrection. And in the failure in that time to surrender to the truth of it and to the apostolic testimony of that truth, both in the preaching of the apostolic church and the apostles themselves, but in the quality of that church.

Remember, great grace was upon them all and with power gave the apostles testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that generation of Jews not only had the testimony of Jesus now fading from memory, but the continuation of that testimony in the apostolic church with great power.

And after the refusal and the persecution of those who sought to bring that testimony, the judgment of God fell in one of the greatest devastations of Jerusalem since 586 BC, where I think over a million were slaughtered.

The blood was reputed to be as high as the bridle on the horses. And it's really the most pathetic thing to read about that final day of judgment in Jerusalem, where Jews thinking that the temple would not be destroyed, climbed up on the roof of it and burned to death.

And the whole thing was set afire because of some kind of simplistic presumption that God would not allow his own temple and his own holy city to be destroyed. How could they presume that if God allowed the destruction of his own son?

This almost invites a dum-da-dum-da. Had they understood who it was who was crucified and that the father did not withhold his own son in suffering the devastation of judgment, I don't think they would have been so hasty to believe that a temple or a city would be spared when God's judgment comes.

Are we finished with this issue? In the presumption of men about what they think God will do and will not do? Not at all. I'm giving you a rehearsal of something called the inviolability of Zion. A presumption that is historic, that we've missed again and again, that somehow God will not do.

And the most recent expression of it is, well God is not going to bring Jews all the way from Russia by the hundreds of thousands and from Ethiopia and then allow a devastation in which they will suffer death or dispersal.

Will he? Great question. We would not be quick to say that he won't if we understood what he has allowed in the past. And what may be yet necessary in the future. So, the temple is destroyed and the priesthood is dispersed, which had been the central pivot of Jewish biblical faith.

What now? What sacrifice can be made without a Levitical priesthood and the place where God ordained that it should be performed? What do you do, not only with the temple destroyed, but with the veil of the temple over the holy place that had been rent from top to bottom when Jesus gave up the ghost and had been sewed up for 40 years?

As we said last time, that Jews who came in to that visible thing had to see the terrible mock of men sewing together a curtain and thinking to continue with normative Judaism with the statement of God's disdain and rejection of it in the thing that is sewed up.

What is it about man? The depths of our, I don't know, what's the word, the depths of our? Deception. Deception. Depravity. Depravity. Ingrained in an unwillingness to recognize truth and bow before it.

And what does that do? It creates the conditions for yet another and more severe and inevitable judgment. So, there was a conference, I don't know in what year, maybe some decades after the catastrophe of 70 AD at a town called Yavna in which the Pharisaical leaders of Judaism established present day rabbinical Judaism.

Rabbinical Judaism and the Loss of Sacrifice

The temple is no longer now the locus and the central object of Jewish attention and worship, it's the synagogue. And because it's not to be fixed in one place in Jerusalem, which is now destroyed and God's people dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, synagogues can be found in any locality where Jews are.

So what do you do for blood offering and sacrifice? You perform mitzvot and good deeds, fasting and prayer. This is the rabbinical alternative. Think of the presumption that somehow God will sanction and endorse this innovation.

Though it says in Leviticus 17, without the shedding of blood, there is no remission for sin. God's inviolable word, which he has exalted above his name. So this is a little thumbnail sketch of the predicament of Judaism to this very day.

And who are the most vehement opponents to men like myself and to any evangelical expression of the faith to the yet unbelieving Jewish community? But these, quote, defenders of the faith, which is not at all the faith of God, but the innovation of men in the absence of any possibility of fulfilling God's biblical requirements.

Well, I want even to develop the tragedy of that yet more. What did the dispersal of Jews into the Gentile world mean? Why in the history of Jews was Passover and Easter season the most dread time in the annual calendar in Christendom?

Why did they lock themselves behind doors? Why was there always the greatest bloodbath? Why, if there was the Black Plague or the Bubonic Plague, were Jews always blamed? Who somehow never suffered the plagues themselves?

You know why? Because they kept kosher. Because they were more fastidious about religious cleanliness and external kinds of things, a probably statement from the ravages of disease that came through Gentile neglect and ignorance.

But can you imagine how suspect a body they would be as a minority in Gentile nominal Christian communities as somehow not experiencing the plagues that have befallen the Christians and still stubbornly rejecting Christ?

Can you understand that there's a way that even if you're polite, which Jews are not always, In fact, Luther's great fear in the Reformation was that Jews would undo the truth of the Reformation and contradict it by their unwillingness to recognize in the Reformed faith the biblical messianic hope.

And he had a three-day debate with a number of rabbis, and he, who had been formally sympathetic to Jews before that time, and once said that if I were a Jew, I would no sooner be a Christian than a dog, seeing how lousy the testimony of Christ has been to Jews, completely changed his attitude when he had this debate with Jews and found that in order to avoid the evident Christological meaning of the prophetic scriptures that the rabbis were required to blaspheme God.

I don't know that I can demonstrate that. Well, I think maybe I can. If you deny the biblical testimony in the New Testament of the divine birth of Jesus, the angelic coming to Mary, the virgin birth, what then is the clear and evident alternative to that understanding?

And even in the Talmud, there were thinly concealed references to the illegitimate birth of Jesus through a relationship between a Jewish woman and a Roman soldier, and he was given a certain name, but every Talmudist recognized to whom the allusion was intended.

So Luther, who was a Hebrew scholar, and the Enlightenment, the Reformation brought a renaissance in the interest in Hebrew and the original languages, could also read Talmudic references and concede the blasphemous implications of the continuing Jewish denial of Jesus.

In a word, Jewish presence in nominal Gentile Christian communities invited disaster. Christ-killer. Blasphemy in the implication of Jesus' illegitimate birth. The continuing refusal to receive the witness of those who believed put Jews in an unsavory place of predicament.

Can you see that? And what I'm saying is that that is not at all accidental. That itself is the continuing outworking of the initial rejection, which is affirmed and confirmed by every subsequent generation of the sins of their fathers, so long as they themselves continue in a silent affirmation of that rejection.

Can you follow that? So the sins of the fathers are indeed visited upon the sons until there's a conscious breaking of that continuity by rejecting the decision of the fathers in choosing Barabbas over Jesus.

The implication of that rejection continued to affect Jewish communities and does to this day. I'm writing here. Even now the logic of our American Jewish position disposes us to oppose public Christmastrations.

Is that what you call it? The nativity scene? Who's behind the American Civil Liberties Union legal opposition to public displays of the nativity scene? Principally Jews. They do not want to see America Christianized because it would put them as a minority religion in an untenable position.

And so that's why prayer has come out of the schools. That's why even a picture of Jesus in a public building or even the Ten Commandments or any allusion to God, to faith, let alone Christ, is abhorrent and threatening to Jews.

It's the logic of the libertarian humanistic view that sees themselves as a threatened island in a Gentile Christian sea. But what is the consequence for them in continually exacerbating and irritating even a nominally Christian country?

Will there one day be a backlash as is now being prepared in the former Soviet Union because the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution were Jews, all of them atheists, and all of them believing with Karl Marx that religion was the opiate of the masses and dead against religion and Russian national orthodoxy.

And so now that 80 years later the revolution has become undone, the Soviet Union is dissipated and there's now a rising up again of something that had been suppressed and even persecuted, native nationalistic Russian orthodox religion.

And now you're beginning to hear from some of the exponents that it was the Jews and the Bolshevik Jews and the atheistic Jews who put such a hiatus on our religious life for 80 years that has left devastating consequences that they are the enemies of the faith.

And so I'm expecting, and I don't think it's an exaggerated fear, a backlash against Jews for their opposition to religion and because religion in Russia more than the United States is a national religion.

And that's what we're seeing in the crisis in Yugoslavia. National religions, Serbian, Croatian, Islamic, fighting a religious war which is also a national thing because they don't separate church state as we do.

It's one thing. Jews were also internationalists. The international working class, I used to sing this as a former Marxist and radical, is part of the idealism of Jews for the unification and the unity of the human race.

Brotherhood brought about through secular means of an international working class that shared the Marxist ideology. That means an attack against any kind of nationalism that would keep people from recognizing their distinctive identity as a nation.

And what's happening now, in fact, with a movement toward a one world kind of a thing and a breaking down of national distinction. Probably to scratch deeply enough, we'll find Jews foremost in their same endeavor.

Why? Because there is a messianic kind of impulse that has never found expression in legitimate biblical messianic faith but finds a perverse expression in secular things of a political and social kind which I'm saying will invite the backlash of nominal Gentile religionists who will see Jews as a threat both to their national and religious distinctions.

So Jews have become a kind of antibody, an indigestible presence in the Gentile nominal Christian world. And I'm saying that to say that there's an ongoing consequence to the rejection of Jesus. That that single enormous event cannot brook rejection.

You have either to fall at the cross and to acknowledge God in it or suffer a consequence of so costly a rejection of the truth. Because the event of the crucifixion of Jesus was truth in the uttermost.

It was God. It was the statement of God about the condition of man, about the intrinsic sin of man, the depravity of man, of how horrid a thing sin is in the sight of God by what was required to expiate it, namely the devastation or the holocaust of Jesus.

It was a one fell swoop statement of God about man and about God in the deepest meanings that to reject that is to reject reality and to bring such a warp not only with regard to God but with regard to everything.

And which warp will catch you up in only a matter of time. I don't know what the statistics are of the incidents of Jewish mental and emotional breakdowns. I would suspect that we run a much higher percentage than mankind at large.

It would have to be that we're out of tune with reality. A mindset opposed to God because it's opposed to Christ and so that has got to have consequences. We are matriarchal in our society rather than patriarchal.

Our men are cuckolded. I know that in my own life I had suffered the problem of anger for years and something even a certain bitterness toward women that had to be dealt with by God over a period of time and finally it was explained to me it's a response to the centrality of my mother in my own home in the absence of a father but even that absence had a lot to do with her own failure to be a submitted wife in the way that would have been her experience and ability had she been a woman in the faith.

We have lost the sense of the fatherhood of God. There's no way to have it except through the relationship of the son. The son is the key to the father and will reveal the father to whomsoever he will.

Jesus' Prophecy of Jerusalem's Judgment

There's an ongoing judgment once an initial judgment is not understood and rejected and it reverberates still and it's still incurring its own intrinsic and inevitable judgment and that's why Jesus wept when he looked out over Jerusalem in the last of his ministry.

How does that go? About the day of my visitation? Luke 19. Turn to Luke 19. Let's look at that. To know the pathos of Christ, what that rejection would apply for all of the generations that followed and is still yet before us.

Luke 19 from verse 42 or verse 41. Now as he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it. Jerusalem is also symptomatic or symblematic of the whole of the nation. To see Jerusalem is to see the whole of Israel and the whole of world Jewry.

So he's not just weeping over a piece of landscape, he's weeping over a nation. Saying, if you had known even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace but now they are hidden from your eyes.

For days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side and level you and your children within you to the ground and they will not leave in you one stone upon another because you did not know the time of your visitation.

You think that that's a statement that's appropriate only for Jews? Is there a day of visitation that's appropriate for anyone? Is there a moment of truth that can come and that can be missed and set in motion such consequence for that one who refuses to see it?

Probably the most tempering thing that would make the church the church and bring it to a disposition of humility is the example of Israel before it having missed the day of its visitation. We would be less prone to miss ours, whatever that day would be.

For each of us, if we understood the consequence that came from their failure. What do you make of that statement? And Jesus is weeping over this and level you and your children within you. It's not just you who's going to suffer this, but your children also.

Both in 70 AD, which is what he's referring to, but I think he saw past that and through that. He saw the Jewish kids that were killed through all of the Middle Ages. He saw the million and a half children that were destroyed in the Holocaust, thrown up in the air and speared on bayonets, were plucked from their mother's arms when they came out half-crazed from the cattle cars after three days in congestion and heat without water and thrown immediately into troughs of burning gasoline.

He saw that. You missed the day of your visitation and you're setting up something for yourself that will be a day of reckoning that will reverberate throughout all your generations and it's not yet over since.

There's a day of Jacob's trouble yet future, which according to the testimony of Jesus eclipses everything that we have now already mentioned. But how do you explain and how can you explain that children are the necessary victims of the judgments of God?

Are they guilty? Could they have known? Why must they suffer? Because of the rejection and the indifference of their parents. Your children, he says, within you. One day we're going to have to give answers to questions like that.

In fact, that question is invariably asked in any discussion with Jews about the Holocaust and where was God. Why did the Jews have to suffer? I mean, why did the children have to suffer? Okay, the adults, that's one thing.

And in fact, as we've discussed once before, of all Jews who have suffered, the irony is the great preponderance of them were Polish Orthodox Jews. Even the Hasidic Jews, which were almost devastated in Central Europe.

Why didn't God, if it was a judgment, bring it on American and Western secular Jews who are clearly atheistic or agnostic? Why on that segment of Jewry that was the most religious? Can you answer that?

See, this is what we have to grapple with, saints, and we've not done it. And that's why we can't give answers. And this is why God waited to see if Moses would turn and look into the burning bush. And the moment that he saw that Moses turned to see, God called to him out of the burning bush by name and said, take off your shoes, for this ground upon which you stand is holy ground.

If Moses had passed on by, and every human impulse would have justified passing by a strange phenomenon that must have sent out a kind of an eerie radiance, a sense of something like human wisdom would have said, however strange a thing, you're wise to pass it by.

But not only did he stop, he turned aside to see. And when God saw that he turned aside, he called him Moses, Moses. So here's what I want to say. Moses is the classic deliverer of Israel. Nothing less than a man sent out of the presence of God as a mandate and a call would suffice to it.

Moses' Call and the Revelation Hidden in Judgment

Deliver Israel out of Egypt and into a land flowing with milk and honey. It took an apostolic sending, but it took a call, but it waited on a response of a very particular kind, a turning aside to see.

Why the bush burned and was not consumed. It was more than just casual curiosity. It's a man who wants to know the deepest answers to inexplicable things, sensing that in them is the revelation of God to be found in a way that is not to be revealed anywhere else.

Can you follow that? And that's my premise, that there's a revelation of God that waits only in that place, in the place of judgment that is not to be seen anywhere else. You know why we're so shallow and so frilly and there's such a lightness in the church and why we're so given over and so susceptible to fads and every kind of thing that comes down the pike?

It's because we do not know God, as we put it. Because the deepest revelation of God is in the midst of the burning bush of unrequited judgments. And we have not the stomach and have not turned aside to see, to ask the ultimate questions of why.

Because in that would have been a revelation of God that would have justified both our sending and our call. God is not going to send someone to confront Pharaoh who goes half-baked and goes with only a charismatic knowledge of God.

He'd get blown out of Pharaoh's court in the very first encounter. The knowledge of God is all. And what did we say was the revelation of God in the Holocaust of Jesus that reveals God as he in fact is, more so than any single event that had preceded it or has subsequently come.

That to refuse that testimony of God in Jesus on the cross is to refuse the testimony and the revelation of God as God. In what form? His mercy. Well, it's true. His mercy and his judgment are expressed in sending his own son to bear the sins.

Let me put the question another way. With what view of God are Jews today necessarily saddled because of the rejection of the revelation of God that came at the cross in which they boast and yet leaves them with an inadequate and distorted, which is to say, untrue knowledge of God.

The Trinity and the Church's Knowledge of God

Monotheism. Isn't it remarkable how tenacious or fierce Jews are as if they are the defenders of the monotheistic view of God when the monotheistic view of God is itself an error. And because they promulgated that error in the rejection of the triune God at the cross, how is the cross the revelation of God in the totality of all his persons?

It's the son crying out to the father, giving his life in sacrifice without spot by the eternal spirit. You have all three aspects of the Godhead. I know it's a sublime mystery. I know that I don't know what I'm talking about.

But I know this, that God is jealous over the revelation of himself in his triunity and that not to understand him in his composite makeup is not to understand him. And that in fact the church of Jesus Christ today is suffering for the want of the knowledge of God in his triune genius.

You say, how come? Because even though we technically subscribe to the doctrine, we don't in fact believe it. And we don't cleave to it as if it's an important distinction. The irony is we are living monotheistically.

And one of the ways in which it's reflected came to me as revelation in Texas where they were talking about church leadership and there was a certain segment in the church that wanted a single pastor and others that were vying for a plurality of elders.

And in the message that I gave, I said to the ones that wanted a single pastor model, I said, you're quite monotheistic in your view, aren't you? I never before saw that. In other words, they were projecting from their notion of God onto their notion of the church.

And that the idea of a plurality of elders is a reflection of the plurality that is to be found in the Godhead. And operating in what kind of mode? What is the genius of God that is expressed by Jesus in John 17?

That they might be one as we are one. That the world might know that the Father has sent me. The whole issue of the success of the church's evangelistic mission rests on the revelation of God as he is in his corporateness.

How can we succeed in that if we ourselves are monotheistic in our own mindset and individualistic in our own mode of living and behavior? God, as Ern Baxter said, is a sweet company. And so sweet that the son defers to the father and the father defers to the son and has given him all things.

Jesus, knowing that he had come from the father and was going to the father and that the father had given him all things, rose after supper and took off his garments and girded himself with a towel and washed his feet.

He would not have been able to do it if he did not know that he had come from the father and was going to the father and the father had given him all things. There's a remarkable liberation that frees you for humility when you know that you know that you know that the father has given you all things.

Who did not know that and was unable to receive a profligate brother who came back to the father? But the eldest son, remember? You never did this for me. You never slew the fatted calf for me. You never gave me a robe.

You never gave me a ring. And the father said, but don't you know that everything I have had is yours? He didn't know it. So the view of God and the father and the relationship between the persons of the Godhead is key for us.

I'm only just, I'm just touching something lightly. I can't say enough. And I wait for the opportunity and the leisure to read men who have spent their theological lives pondering the depth of the mystery of the triune Godhead and know that they know that they know.

It's central to the faith. And we ourselves have had recent encounter with monotheistic triune God-rejecting people and what a clash. Not only about the Godhead, but about everything. Their view of everything had a certain warp, a certain distortion.

We could not see eye to eye. Dear though they were, this one thing was crippling in their view of everything. So I'm saying that in the rejection of the cross Jews condemn themselves to an inadequate view of God which they tenaciously hold and in which they think they're doing God's service.

And to hold an incorrect view of God is to lose God. If you don't know God in spirit and truth, you don't know God. You can call him what you will. You can call him the God of Israel. Or you can call him Jesus.

If it's not God as he in fact is you may find that the day of calamity that your call, like those who waited for an answer from the false prophets of Baal doesn't reply. They leap, they dance, they cut themselves.

There was no answer. There was silence. But the fact that they leaped and cut themselves indicates that they believed that they knew God. But the day of reckoning came when the falseness of their presumption was revealed.

That may well explain why Jews were disillusioned about God in the Holocaust. They called, but there was no answer. But they were calling on a God of their own projection and not the God who in fact is God.