Paganism - the Cancer of the Church — Art Katz

My God in your heart and significant let it become that for us because of the power of your spirit and give us my God the ability to follow you to retain what you're speaking to assimilate to take it in to affect my God.

Our conduct our walk our service. We thank and give you praise for all of these days in this concluding day in Jesus holy name amen. Well I was up to close midnight reading a number of things last night and reviewing and considering possibilities and then this morning my eye fell on the book by my chair and became a bit alive for me.

Paganism Within Western Christianity

I want to begin with that it's the issue of paganism not in other lands but our own and paganism not in other religions but our own. That is to say the growing threat of paganism in contemporary Western Christendom more in the liberal or mainline denominations than perhaps in the wave that we represent.

But if it's not presently with us it will be knocking on our door also not announcing itself as paganism but containing its essential elements that would contradict and bring the true faith down and lessen the reality of the church.

So I just want to read a book that contains met of papers that were brought at a conference on this subject of church concern edited by call Broughton br a double ATEN who's a very well-known Lutheran theologian.

And in his introduction he writes. The so-called Christian nations of the West are in fact the new mission fields which the churches cannot evangelize because they have not faced the renewed paganism that is the actual religion of those to whom the gospel must be spoken but to whom the gospel has already been spoken or some form of the gospel has already been spoken are the people who at least suspect that they are the candidates for paganism or that paganism is already insinuating itself and moving through traditional Christianity and threatening it.

So there's a mission field right here about the purity of the faith or the authentic apostolic character of the faith. He talks about a conference of women in Minneapolis actually of witches who prayed on this at their Sunday morning service to our maker Sophia.

We are women in your image with the hot blood of our wombs we give form to a new life. And it goes on. It sounds like pagan revelry and very sensual. So the element of sensuality sex is a predominant strand and theme in pagan things and perhaps answers the question in part why would people forsake or be indifferent or reject authentic faith in God to embrace something counterfeit.

Because it panders to the gratification of their more base lusts which the true faith calls to be renounced or crucified. Those that have crucified the affections how does it say. And the lusts the flesh and the lust thereof those are the laws.

So the true faith calls for the crucifixion. The false faiths provide gratification but they provide it in a way that ostensibly seems religious and God celebrating and so that you have the best of all worlds you have a seeming spirituality while at the same time a justification for your lust.

And Broughton says whatever else is to be said of such quote worship unquote. It is of course the opposite of biblical faith and amateurish but more explicit reinvention of the fertility worship of Ashtoreth and Baal against which the faith of Israel defined itself.

So it sounds like it's an ages old battle and it's not over. It's not just the curiosity of antiquity and Canaanite religion that we can look on with a kind of disinterested interest. It's a vital contemporary concern.

Now and to the end of the age is the same vying for truth about God before men. And the issue is life and death. And the issue is eternal salvation or eternal hell. And time has not lessened the issue but in fact the end of the age will make it yet even more fierce and more difficult.

Because yet now more subtle the ancient idolatries could be easily identified by the visible images of actual idols. The contemporary paganism is more subtle. It doesn't have visible objects. I say it doesn't.

It may have. And it has been released even among Christians when they have taken mementos or souvenirs off their walls masks that have come from Africa or other exotic looking objects that they think are quaint and experience an actual relief.

Something lifts off and out when those things are taken away or destroyed because they contain the spirit valence of demonic powers. Culture is not neutral. There's a culture that has its origin from below.

And there's a divine culture. And we need to be fearful and sensitive to the one and willing and open for the other. That's why Abraham had to come out of nation kindred and father's house lest he bring with him into the land of promise with the Lord would lead him any of the valences and spirit dimensions of the Babylonian thing from which he came up.

Abraham's Separation From Idolatry

In order to call these required a radical and surgical separation. Get the out. You can't find the word as less uncompromising than the word out. Get the out of what. Those things that have the greatest pull and soul bondedness that are familiar with what we're praying about with it with the Hutterites.

These are things that are familiar and dear and hallowed by time. And let go of that. What did my mother say to virtually the day of her conversion. I was born a Jew. I'll die a Jew. It was more important for her to retain the idolatry of Jewishness than to know God in truth.

That's how powerful this these forces are. Because lest you missed the point or think that Abraham was made of better stuff than ourselves he never did get out right away. When when Genesis 12 says so Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken.

You might think that God spoke Abraham acted. But what happened between the initial speaking and Abraham acting is a long season of delay where he leaves with his father he leaves with his mishpochah with his relative Lot and his family.

And instead of crossing the river goes alongside the river a little further south to another place called Haran. And there he remains. And Haran means delay. And there he accumulated servants and possessions.

And evidently it was a delay of quite a lengthy time. And what finally released him. His father died. So when his father died he was released. Maybe it is something of a companion piece to Isaiah 6. In the year that King died I saw also the Lord high and lifted up.

Something had to go in order for that revelation. Something had to die of soul bondedness and attachment to release the prophet to it the more erstwhile and complete and total dedication to the purposes of God.

So the question for us is is there something waiting to die. Do we wait just for longevity to take its toll. Or can we bring something to a death that hinders a complete separation because we have not yet come out.

Christology and the Historical Gospel

So the church would need needless to say is in a mixed bag condition. He writes. It was it was. And there's foolishness to the Greeks to believe that God would choose to embody himself in one individual human being.

It was and is an insult to human dignity and pride to teach that the word of salvation must come charismatically from the outside the proclamation of the body of truths that constitute salvation. So our salvation is predicated on a statement of God rooted in history and event.

The birth of a single individual in an unusual way through divine conception and called to be king. And his very name means salvation is from God. It was and is an insult to human dignity and pride to teach that the word of salvation must come to us from the outside through a message.

That message the foolishness of the gospel and that the objective saving history of God in Jesus Christ becomes gospel only through the apostolic proclamation the charisma this particularity this insistence this message this man this name this birth this salvation is offensive to men.

They'd like to believe many paths to truth. Of course they never arrived there but it gives a certain aura of spiritual concern and dignity but saves them from the actual discovery and communion with the God who is God and brings them into a relationship of requirement according to his word.

This is the way walking in it. So that's that's the way the faithful always be at issue. And why it's in contention still with paganism and other alternatives. So the issue of the faith is the issue of Christ.

The issue of Christ is called Christology. Any ology is the study of what the prefix is. Biology is the study of life and you can think of other ologies. Theology is the study of God. Christology is the study or the examination of Christ.

The centrality of Christ his person his office his history his proclamation his acts. The rejection of Christology is characteristic of the whole of present-day American theology. What a statement. What a sweeping statement.

Christianity basically amounts to religion and ethics in American theology. This is his quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer who lived in America for a season of time studied or attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York.

And this is the observation of this keen German theologian about American Christianity. The question is to what degree is it still true even 50 or years or more after that observation that American Christianity is not insistent upon its dogma upon Christianity upon Christology upon its truths.

It's more easy come easy go wishy-washy using right words and phrases but not as insistent upon the dogmatic the content of the faith. Which is the dogma. D-o-g-m-a. What how it. What's the definition for that.

Because the insult that springs from that word is dogmatic to be dogmatic. Well you're narrow-minded. You're dogmatic. You're insisting on one statement. There are many ways of perceiving this. Our faith is dogmatic.

And when we lose that connection we lose the faith even while we retain the words that pertain to it we have lost its core and its reality. And I before we leave this morning I'm going to just read a few things of that description.

Higher Criticism and the Loss of Faith

In Germany the German faith was effectually lost. And it and the first instances of that loss take place in the realm of theology and what takes place in the ivory tower and among men who are at that level.

But it's not long before it filters down to the grassroots and affects the church itself. So there's a flight away the search for the historical Christ. What are the the new quest and the higher criticism where they were going to bring now to the Bible.

And a thorough examination. And not just by faith receive everything that said there incredulously but see whether it passes the test of severe scholarship and rigid examination of the kind that we would bring to other disciplines.

Why not bring it to this. What is this so sacrosanct that it can't bear examination. Who says that it's all correct. It might be scribal errors or worse. And there were contradictions in scripture. It simply began a whole wave of things that led to the breakdown of the detriment of the most holy faith.

One rabbi said there are things that are not for us to examine. It's holy holy holy. It's like man touching the ark to come to the things of God with the same irreverence by which he would come to Shakespeare or to theory of evolution.

You can't bring that kind of mentality to God. He's not first of all he's not going to honor an investigation of himself in that spirit. And he'll allow you to come to a place of confusion and even of loss of faith.

And my thesis is that Nazism and the destruction of Western civilization. Think of if the Germans had won the war what what this world would be today even in their loss. Think of what was devastated and destroyed not to speak of course of the six million Jews.

The whole eradication of European Jewry. Because of the failure for Germany to maintain a viable Christian faith it had lost its apostolic if ever it knew it. Certainly by the time of the 20th century it was so weak and so infeabled.

It had lost its dogmatic character. And the question is why. Because the issue of Christology what is Christ what is the word anointed King Jesus came preaching the gospel of the kingdom. Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand.

Is it time now to restore the kingdom. The whole issue of Christ as King goes back to the first angelic pronouncement to Mary and you should give birth to a son his name shall be called Jesus and his father shall give to him the throne of David that he might rule over the house of Israel for ever.

You know that we have lost that connection. We ourselves the church even the charismatic of the New Testament forms have lost this root of the faith that Christ means anointed King. That there's a kingdom at stake not just a religious alternative or the improvement of our life or salvation from eternal hell.

That the fundamental issue is King. And one of the great scholarly breakthroughs in modern times is a book called Christ Christ Christus victus Christ the victor. The triumph over the powers of the air came with with the crucifixion of this King who defeated death by death.

And that this was the great thing that was apprehended and understood by the early church that they had obtained a victory over those things that had tyrannized mankind since time immemorial. The King had come and had broken into the powers of darkness in a way from which they would never recover and set in motion their ultimate defeat by the sacrifice of himself.

And that on the over his head in three languages Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews is not just an intended insult but a more profound statement of this drama the glory of it then his malefactors knew to lose this is to lose the faith.

The Kingdom of God, Israel, and the Jewishness of Christ

So why. Why has it been lost. Because it's the kingdom of David. Because it's the kingdom promised to Israel. Because it's has its inception in Israel. Because its rule in its law goes forth out of Zion and its word out of Jerusalem.

And the instinctive and intrinsic deep anti Jewish anti-semitic thing that is latent in Gentiles who are only thinly Christianized and not deeply converted shuns and dislikes and wants to throw off these cords from us and have a kind of Christianity amenable to our own culture our own nationality and so on.

And that kind of Christianity must fail. Failed in Germany failed in Japan. It will fail here unless we have resuscitated the heart and the core of the matter the issue of Christ as King. That's Christology king of what the promise of God made to his father David of a kingdom to come to Israel but not for its own enjoyment but so as to bless all the families of the earth.

The issue of Israel's kingdom is the issue of the nations coming under the sovereignty of God who established their number in terms of the sons of Israel. There can be no real Christology. He writes without the eschatological prophet from Nazareth.

Think of the stubborn specificity of God not just a Christ. You know why. Because these filthy pagan mongers and new age characters use the word Christ will come Christ has come Christ this Christ that that everyone is Christ and the gurus the men of wisdom of the Christ.

But the Jesus of Nazareth this Jewish kid who was born in Nazareth born in Bethlehem Hebrew of the Hebrews or Paul could make that claim. What of Jesus this is the Messiah. To lose that stubborn and tenacious identification is to lose the ballgame.

Is Jesus of Nazareth. And what do we hear in white supremacist groups in America that call themselves Christians. Jesus were not a Jew. They cannot bring themselves to that acknowledgement. They stumble over the stumbling stone in Zion and want to frame a kind of Christianity with Jesus who is not that you were not born in Nazareth.

Or somehow that's not the proof that did not come out of Nazareth. But what Jesus in fact then do they have though they use the word what Christ do they have. Because if it's not the Christ who is king as the Jesus born in Nazareth there's no salvation.

Because that's what his name means Yeshua Jehovah is the Savior. And any other play on that name that points to another deity of our own composition and choosing though we use the name leaves us without the benefit and the power of that salvation.

Elijah, Baal, and False Expectations of God

And when the false prophets of Baal were contending against Elijah and they made their own sacrifice and cut up their own ox they fully expected fire to fall. Because not only are they deceivers of men they are themselves deceived and deceived to believe that they somehow knew God they they called him Lord because the word was Baal and they danced and leaped and jumped and cut themselves.

And still there was no answer nor could there be an answer. For there is no God that could conform to their expectation. They were barking up the wrong tree. It was a pagan alternative to the God who was a lone God celebrated by the lonely prophet.

Elijah got the idea men are going to be disappointed in the last days. And then maybe they're disappointed now why doesn't God do this. And how come he doesn't do that. And I prayed and doesn't hear and then disappointed.

Look what's happening in Israel and the church is a mess. What's being disappointed is the human conception of a God of their own making who was an errand boy and will placate and bring to them the kinds of things that they desired at their will as they pray.

But that God is not going to bring answer because he's not God. At the very first miracle at the gate beautiful was performed in the name of the child Jesus. And several times it comes up in the early apostolic proclamation of the child Jesus that why are they celebrating the child.

He didn't die as a child. But why did. Why do they keep making that reference. Maybe because the issue of child is the issue of birth as a son of David and that brings the vital linkage with the Christ who is Christ that God honors by the his presence and his power in the miracle that's obtained.

So this needs to come back into our own consciousness because to lose this is to lose everything as this writer says who is not himself Jewish. There can be no real Christology or no real Christianity really without the eschatological prophet from Nazareth his own relationship to the Jewish people and to their God.

We can't get away from the stubborn thing of the Jewishness of the faith his teaching his miracles and his attitude toward others cannot be understood except in this context that these things are embedded in the culture of ancient Greece.

Humanism, Sentiment, and the Glory of God

And in this system of values humanity is at the center. Man is the measure of all things. What will we say the Christianity today where the measure of all things is not the glory of God but the benefit that accrues to man.

Don't miss this. What would we say about Christianity today. I'll even go further our best Christianity today of the most advanced and charismatic Christianity where man is the measure of all things rather than the glory of God.

And that the issue that underlies the whole premise of the church and its activity and function is what benefit accrues to men has. Is that not the ultimate triumph of humanism that has come to the church.

Is this not the deepest root of paganism that has effect affected the church and is it's cancer. And there's only one thing that is powerful enough to count the man this incessant and intrinsic putting of ourselves at the center which is the root of paganism.

And that is an abiding passionate jealousy for the glory of God. And what is Paul but the greatest exemplar of that glory as were the prophets before him. So that when Paul ends his great statement on the mystery of Israel and the church Romans 9 through 11 and with the great blast of profuse praise all the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God who's been his counsel so and so forth for of him and through him through him are all things to whom be glory forever.

The greatest issue for Paul was not Israel's restoration and was not the church brought to its ultimate maturity apostolic constituency that would affect it. The greatest issue for Paul exceeded both Israel and the church.

It was the glory of God forever. And paganism is a direct attack at that core and wanting to substitute for God's glory man's satisfaction religious satisfaction but man's satisfaction nevertheless. And if we make that our conscious purpose we are already opening the door to these nefarious and paganistic influences.

Is that to say that there's no benefit my God I'm so benefited I can't contain it. But we don't make the benefit the premise of the faith. We don't make the benefit that accrues the first purpose. We don't make the experience of what we enjoy the reason for our quest that still has man and his gratification at the center.

And it's a false center and opens the door the doors to that which brings down the faith as much as there is to love and admire in this vision of man at the center the concepts of beauty virtue truth justice humanity at ideal levels it stands in polar opposition to the Hebrew Christian vision rooted in the revelation of Israel's God.

They're nice. They're humane they're nice considerations. And I want to give me a grace to say this. Why am I an enemy of sentiment. Why do I blanch and cringe at people expressing sentiment for ostensibly nice things as I said to my dear wife last night wanting to improve the plumbing in the house of someone in one of the villages in the West Bank is nice.

But there are considerations that are greater than nice. But our warfare is not the evil versus the perfect but the good versus the perfect. The nice things the commendable things that the world and even the church applauds and sanctions because it's shut through with human consideration and sentiment.

The first thought that came to me when the Lord revealed himself in the first reading of the Gospel of John aboard the deck of that tramp stinger on my way to Athens was what will your mother think about this.

How will this affect your mother. The very first issue I had to face as a candidate for the faith was sentimental loyalty or the truth of God. And I shared with someone about the property here how we were gave up our interest in this camp.

We were the founders were the first one. The Lord spoke to me the vision for this place. I then subsequently invited other brothers to participate not having the means myself. And then there was a falling out over the issue of sin and we had to make a decision has been Israel.

Do we stand with the brother in loyalty and affection having a personal history with him over the years. Or do we stand with the issue of righteousness and those that were bringing judgment that this brother was seeking at that time we thought to avoid.

We stood with what we thought was righteousness cut ourselves off from the camp gave over our interest in the property stayed on our side of the road and lost everything in which we had invested finance money our life and our energy for another eight or ten years.

We have this building now and this six acres only as a grace that has come back to us from God. We gave it up for righteousness sake when we had to choose between sentiment and personal human loyalty and affection as over against an issue of justice and righteousness for the church and for the kingdom.

Discipline, Chastisement, and Love for Children

So watch that watch this deadly thing that continually sucks at us and nowhere more effectively than in the realm of our own children. Are you beating your children and knowing that it will not kill them.

That's the word says beat them with rods. It will not kill them because if you hate their souls you'll abstain from bringing the kind of discipline that they need that only you can perform. And I'm persuaded that a lot of what we call youth rebellion and turning away from parents and their culture what they represent is an unconscious expression and a cry for the failure of parents to show ultimate expression of love which can only be shown in chastisement because the word says so.

But what have we done. We've put the word aside for sentiment and tender feelings and humane things have taken high priority. A book came to us some years ago in community on rearing children christianly and I gave it to a brother with a young child an erudite skilled brother in the word.

The book was perfectly biblical and he gave it back to me to say it's too hard. And that's how the door is open. Saints to the deterioration of the faith through sentiment through deference to man and feelings.

Not so much our children but our own feelings because we cannot bear the pain of inflicting pain and therefore we avoided. But I'm very fond of quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet where if you've not heard this before it's worth hearing.

And if you've not read the play I commend it one of the great masterpieces of literature where Hamlet learns that his father was murdered by his own brother and that his mother has married the murderer and it breaks upon him through revelation.

He cannot believe that he's astonished. His father was a giant and this brother was a coarse vile philanderer and opportunist and got into the castle by marrying the wife of the man whom he killed. And so there's a scene in which Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude and he grabs the locket from around her neck and opens it and in the locket is the picture of the deceased husband and of the present husband and he shoves it right into her face and he says something like you've chosen this bum for the one who was a giant a man of stature and it breaks upon her soul.

She was deceived and seduced and it comes like a startling realization of what she has done. And he says you're lying betwixt incestuous sheets. And she cries out of a hot piercing cry that I'm sure everyone watching the play would just be muffling their tears.

Hamlet no more. I mean cool it back off. I can't take it. The realization. And Hamlet says this classic line sometimes one must be cruel in order to be kind. This is what what Paul was with Peter when Peter was compromising and doing one thing with the Jewish believers another thing with the Gentiles and Paul would not for an hour allow that dissimulation for Bonavus was already being affected and the cancerous deception was already.

He had to stop it right now. Faith to his face. Not for an hour would he allow the thing to continue. It's going to take that kind of jealousy and that kind of insistence and this kind of even though your kids are howling or your mother is howling you've got to stand for God even if it's cruel.

And it will be considered cruel rather than humane. But the kind of humaneness that the world will celebrate and for which even Christians will applaud you is the opening of the door to the deception and to the loss of the faith which in the end affects entire nations and therefore in their wake is corruption and death incalculable.

The Collapse of German Christianity and the Rise of Nazism

I don't have unless the Lord himself by his spirit underlines this in your heart words will have to fail to communicate what happens in the failure of the faith. And the lessening of the faith is not only a consequence to those who have allowed this erosion but what comes into the nation of which they ought to be.

The statement and standard of God is so horrible that well if we have not learned from Germany and Japan we have not learned. So in this last session that we've talked a little bit about Japan I just want to say a few things about the collapse of the church and the faith in Germany.

And this is a classic study by a Jewish historian at Columbia University. This was his PhD dissertation at Berkeley and I picked it up at the Cass Lake library for five cents at a book sale. Thank you Lord for that providential day.

The politics of cultural despair. A study in the rise of Germanic ideology in which he shows that the greatest of the ideologists those who shape Nazi doctrine were almost invariably the disillusioned or disappointed sons of Protestant ministers or out of pious Catholic families without exception they were all the victims of a failed Christianity questing and looking for some alternative to the God who had failed.

Very few historians secular historians ever take this perspective. They look at Nazism as the breakdown of the Weimar Republic and the failure of liberal institutions in a time of inflation the harsh requirement of the Versailles Treaty against Germany that made the nation a pauper nation etc.

And all of those factors are true. But the sum total of them cannot give the deepest understanding of the rise of this demonic phenomenon that led to the loss of European Jewry and almost to the collapse of Western civilization itself.

Let alone the cost and bringing that demonic thing down at least the physical expression of it. Because as one has wisely said those spirits that came upon Germany though Germany was defeated in war the spirits remain and await their next opportunity.

So if the conditions by which they had opportunity to come in and to penetrate and to pollute German Christianity and to leave an enormous void that even the sons of ministers were disillusioned and without hope and without a deep engagement with God and looking for some kind of alternative and that when Hitler came upon the scene they grabbed him as Messiah Führer means leader and he was celebrated with as worshipful a devotion as ever the church gave to Christ in the generations that preceded Hitler's coming.

So we need to gain just a few insights out of that collapse. And he talks that the book is about certain of the principal ideologists who fashioned the Nazi mindset who cast their discontent into political visions which were as divorced from reality as their creators were from society.

And because of this longing they made the leap from cultural criticism to politics assuming that cultural evil could be dissolved by the establishment of the right kind of faith and community. It's interesting that almost invariably they were looking for a kind of corporate life.

There's a cry there's something in man that knows that to be isolated and to lack meaningful significant relationship is to become stultified and to die. Germany has a much deeper sense of this than we Americans were so individualistic because long before Hitler there were nature youth groups pioneers and fireside singing and looking back into German culture and even now closer to Hitler time into pagan origins of Germany to find something that would bind them all together in the absence of God they had to find an alternative that would be a basis for the kind of comradeship.

The word comrade was a fixed word in German vocabulary and even in Russian communist vocabulary seeking the same thing outside of God. The failure of the church to be community and to meet the vital and organic need of men for authentic relationship as comrades as brothers with shared destiny and significant purpose for being was not provided by German Christianity and therefore the void was filled by its demonic alternative called Nazism.

Christian Community and the Image of God

The question is has that void been filled today? Our own Christianity is so totally individualistic that again and again when I speak in Bible colleges and places like that I say you guys who have the greatest prospect for community are not employing it.

You're just a bunch of individuals who of necessity are required to share the same facilities so that you can each be received your your credential for your personal ministry. But you're not related to each other's community.

You're just using the same facility and what is a Sunday service. But they're coming together of isolated individualities for the purpose of a paying personal benefit listening to the man who's bringing it forth or the worship team and leaving that to go back again into the privacy and isolation of their own homes.

We keep that up. Our kids are going to be looking for what is instinctively a need that God himself has created and they'll find it in ways that will more than embarrass us but bring a shame. It's interesting that the two guys that blew up that school in Colorado and those kids were neo-nazis.

They idolized Hitler they wore trench coats they had military garb they fantasized they wanted something heroic even if it meant their own death let alone the death of others. And the parents were absolutely a star stunned that their children could be capable of this kind of bloodletting without conscience right in an American normative called Christian home because the question is how Christian was the Christian if it is not vital in meeting man and the deepest engagement that he has being made in God's image because God himself is a sweet company.

He's not a solo deity. He's a father and a son in the Holy Spirit. And they are in a market with remarkable relationship together. One without the other is inconceivable to themselves. One defers to the other they enjoy their fellowship.

The son was a delight to the father long before he ever made his appearance on the earth. And we're called to demonstrate the mystery of the Godhead that when we will be one as they are one the world will know that the father has sent him.

There's a father who sends. There's a Holy Spirit who testifies the three. This is not my phrase with the God I had coined it I would have retired. God himself is a sweet company. So what I'm saying is only that Christianity which is apostolic that Christianity which is the dogmatic faith of a Christ born at Nazareth called to be king in a kingdom that he is already advancing by his coming that will come to Israel benefit all nations.

The Kingdom as Christian Hope and Discipline

This is the faith. We don't apprehend the faith that way and lay hold of it because it has expectancy for a future. There's a hope with that we have part in that kingdom. We shall rule and reign with him in that kingdom this life whatever its difficulties is preparation and discipline for that role.

If we lose that we lose the incentive for this life and we have no hope for the life to come. And therefore we while we were yet Christians were copping up were fornicating with taking liberties were reading pornography were slipping a bottle with whatever form it takes it's the evidence that we have not been fully engaged in God.

We've lost the Jewish kingdom root. So they sought to destroy the present in order to usher in a future Reich R .E .I .C .H. you know this German word? What does it mean? Third Reich. The Dritter Reich.