Dvd 21 the Time of Jacobs Trouble — Art Katz

The Universal Meaning of the Cross

In my spirit this morning, I asked my brother to remind me when I began, and the word is universal, that the event of the cross, though it took place in time and history in a particular locality, cannot be confined to that.

The nature of the event is so great that it is intended for universal reality, universal expression, universal benefit, but of necessity it can't take place universally in every place and at one time.

It takes place historically in the moment of God in the place chosen, the least of places outside of Jerusalem, out the dung heap, outside the camp, in a despised nation, but its intention is universal.

And I don't believe that that universality has yet been established. I don't believe that that event has had its widest amplification over the breadth of this globe. Somehow, ironically, it has been contracted and only upheld by a small, relatively small audience, so there's a greater and larger world that has not yet been affected by and probably does not even know or understand this event that has taken place, and yet it's incumbent upon all men everywhere to know of it, to receive its benefit or to refuse it.

So if that's true, if it gives to God a problem of how before the age concludes in judgment can all the world have opportunity to consider the event of Christ crucified. Can he have his son pass through a second time and give a reenactment of the first crucifixion, who's already now enthroned in heaven?

Israel as the Witness Nation

And so I believe, and I'm rare in this, that Israel, called to be the witness nation, is intended as the vehicle to provide that reenactment in essence of the suffering through which its own Messiah and Lord has passed, so that the universality of its message can be broadcast not by speaking but by demonstration.

And at the same time, they themselves will be healed and saved by the very thing through which they're passing. It's like something of multi-levels taking place all at one time. And as I hinted last night, the judgment of Israel, and that's what the cross is, is a judgment.

The wrath of God fell on Jesus. That was intended for us. It was devastating, as we know, and what he had to bear physically and in the agony of his soul. If you'll remind me, there's a remarkable selection this morning from Spurgeon on the one statement, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

As being the epicenter of the Lord's suffering at the cross. This was the midnight of his moral anguish, is the awareness that the father had to turn his face from him. And isn't it remarkable that this is in measure what Israel itself will experience.

They will feel God forsaken. That's why in some place in Isaiah, in that selection of chapters, it says, you're inscribed in my hands and don't feel like an abandoned daughter, but you have always been foremost in my consciousness.

But Zion is going to say, God has forsaken us. So there's a necessity for Israel in some measure to experience the deep pangs, the moral anguish, as well as the physical suffering through which the Lord himself has previously passed.

And as I hope to show you this morning from the great text of Isaiah 53, that in the experience, if you'll excuse my language, and the mutuality of their sufferings, they will recognize his. There's something about the nature of suffering that reveals, have you noticed? That somehow if we're all hale and hearty and everything is just coming up roses, we are somehow kept from reality.

And we are only too eager to clutch those flesh comforting things. But when we're sick, when we're despairing, when we're broken, when circumstances of a kind have done us in, it opens a portal to the reality that is reality that is otherwise disguised by the blandishments and the amenities that the world is very happy to provide.

So long as it keeps you in a false reality, the true reality is hidden. And there's a remarkable way in which suffering reveals it. So if Israel is to fulfill its destiny, and this has got to be foremost in the consideration of the church, that God has given a call that you ought to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world.

And Paul says in Romans, the gift and callings of God are irrevocable. Once God has made them, he's obliged to fulfill them, or how is he God? If Israel does not come into her destiny, God is nullified as God.

He has put all his eggs in one basket, the fulfillment of his word, where it would be least expected by a nation who doesn't give a rap for that fulfillment in their present apostasy and unbelief and hardness against God.

And yet God must fulfill it. It's as if he has stacked all the cards against him so that he will be all the more glorified eternally when there shall be this fulfillment because he has spoken. And what is the church, among other things?

It's that strange amalgam of people who are not bearing the world's credentials and are scorned by it, but who are jealous for the honor and the glory of their God and recognize that if his word is not fulfilled and he is compromised and contradicted by his own failure, the issue would be unspeakably tragic for all of the eternal future, all the future.

If God is not God, he has got to come through with a people who don't even know their calling, let alone have even the slightest disposition to fulfill it. Because if we took a survey today of present-day Israel, their deepest ambition is to be the Hong Kong of the Middle East, to be a financial success, to establish their own little civilization without God.

They want to flourish. They want to succeed, but they have no God consciousness except for that small orthodox minority and even there, their intention and thoughts are gobbled and perverse in many ways.

So we have to understand the magnitude of what yet must be completed that concludes this age, Israel's redemption, the fulfillment of its calling, a nation of priests and a light unto the world. And so I often say increasingly in these days, standing before different audiences in different parts of the world, in Africa where I will soon again be, that if you see me, you have a foretaste of God's millennial glory.

Here's a piece of Israel redeemed and restored and serving in the capacity for which we were intended as a light. And you know that you're receiving a light of a very special kind. It's not that we're boasting in ourselves, but it's our calling.

We have come into our own and God has given a certain capacity to express his mysteries by that priestly people when in fact they become priestly. And to be able to communicate the mysteries of God, the nature of God, in those places in the earth that have been antagonistic against him and where Israel itself has suffered at their hands.

So can you imagine messengers going forth out of the redeemed nation into Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, those centers of terrorist activity that now delight in Jewish blood and will succeed in taking it, and that to go back into those same nations and speak to them the counsel of God and the wisdom of the Most High, but not in some berating way, which I in my earliest service occasionally indulged.

That I had a little secret delight in zapping the goyim, the Gentiles. Yes, I was speaking the truth, but I gave it a little extra twist because there was something yet resident in my Jewish soul that was historic in its origin in which I'm paying you back for what we have received over the millennia.

But the Lord has dealt with me, sanctified the vessel, met and revealed this lingering thing to purge, because a priest has got to be free of any taint and of any use of his priesthood in order to redound unto himself a benefit in any way.

His service has got to be the most impersonal. That's not to say detached and antiseptic and indifferent, but there must not be any quotient of return unto himself or it's no longer priestly. Imagine a nation like that, how shall I say it, without sounding so vain as a nation of catses?

And I'm not the perfect statement, but it's better than no statement. It's a little foretaste, a sign of God's intention for an entire people. Interesting that my name cats actually means priest. One of those happenstance things from both father and mother, because cats is a contraction of two Hebrew words, though the word cats in German means cat.

But in Hebrew it's Kohan Tzaddik. The K-A is from Kohan, which means priest. If you know a Jew by the name of Kohan or Kahn, that's the derivative for the Hebrew word and Tzaddik is righteous, priest of righteousness.

So I know there's a great Melchizedek priesthood that even eclipses the Aaronic. So from both ends I seem to be fortunate to have inherited such a name, a title, a calling, and I believe functioning in it by the grace of God.

And not the least of the reason is to whet the appetite of the church, that they should appreciate the mystery and know that what they're receiving in only a small measure is an index of the greater blessedness that God intends for all mankind through that one people whom he has chosen.

The Irrevocable Calling of Israel

Because as we shared this morning in the prayer time, I will choose whom I will choose. I will elect whom I will elect. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And how is that chosenness of God more revealed than when he will choose not the most conspicuous, the most gifted, the most promising, who seem to have the credentials, but the least, the most rebellious, the most apostate, the most difficult, the most horrible in their historic apostasies and idolatries, that's the people he's chosen.

And to redeem them and bring them into the gifts and callings of God that are without repentance, that are irrevocable, is an ultimate statement of God himself, both in the uniqueness of his choosing, because he'll always choose what is least, that he might be most distinguished in the success through it.

And so we have the revelation both of his wisdom, his nature, and also his power to succeed in such an undertaking as this, that will be the basis for the everlasting tribute and acknowledgement and praise of God from shore to shore, from one end of the earth to the other throughout all generations.

So great is the accomplishment of God's redemptive purpose in the earth. And what's his instrument? How I have despaired. The church. The church is the chosen agency. Gentiles are going to be the instrument of Israel's restoration, many of whom have no stomach for it and left to themselves would just assume that the dry bones remain dry.

Because so long as they are dry, then they as the church remain and obtain the singular blessedness of God. They are the people of God. And why share the glory with a bunch of dum-dums who have had their chance and lost it?

That's why the older brother of the prodigal son could not enter the feast. He couldn't understand why the father was so rapturous for the return of a profligate son who had expended all of his substance on whores and eaten the husks with the pigs that the father should run to meet him and kiss him and give him a garment and a ring and make a feast for him.

And there's the older son outside moping, you never made a feast for me and I've always been faithful and blah, blah, blah. You know that dutiful Christian? He said, your brother who is lost has been found, he who is dead is alive.

You should rejoice. But there's something of a rivalry, competition. The son, the older son wants to bask uniquely alone in the father's favor and does not want to share it with someone who patently does not deserve it.

You've got to dwell on that story because it's the issue of the church. Will the church who has been faithful in a dutiful way all through these generations actually be willing to see the return of the prodigal and then have the glory in which it alone basks shared when it wants to be the foremost consideration of the father?

We'd be fools not to consider what lurks in our deeps. Because when you shall be called upon prophetically, corporately, to address the dry bones that they might live, you'll be faced with this issue.

If you don't prophesy, they remain dead. But your prophecy has got to be more than just a mechanical gesture. It's got to be a desire to see those bones alive, to share the glory, to be magnanimous and rejoice for the return of the prodigal, and to know that you know there's enough glory to go around for both, right?

And your desire and that your faith is more than just a mechanical factor. It's a live faith. It desires to see their restoration or else your word will fall to the ground. Merely to prophesy dutifully is to fail.

Merely to meet the Jews in the wilderness of the nation and give them an overt, what's the word, minimal accommodation is to fail. God says, I will meet with you speaking to them in the wilderness of the nations face to face.

They have got to see more than just Christian obligation. They've got to see the face of God, which ran to meet the son and to kiss him before he even arrived. And that from Gentiles? Lord, my faith staggers.

Can you perform that? That's as much a miracle as Israel's restoration itself. It requires as much resurrection power to bring Gentiles from their present mentality and disposition to that kind of prophetic reality so akin to God that God says it's my very face from where they presently are.

The Spoken Word and Prophetic Preparation

And what's the medium by which all of this is to be accomplished and upon which it rests? The word of God, spoken. So someone has rightly said every true preaching is a bringing of the hearers to death and a raising of them again.

And I've seen God succeed in this under hopeless situations. Talk about motley assemblages where as you scan the faces, you despair. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that there's any possibility of fulfillment.

But before those days are over, the faces have changed. Or is it I who am perceiving them? We've changed together. And I see the resurrection through the word actually taking place. People being raised up out of their graves of religious convention and into a new place of prophetic and apostolic understanding and commitment.

It's a great drama, Saints, a great saga. And so I berated an African congregation in Kenya on my last visit, arriving in Short Pants. I thought that the meeting was that evening, but no, it was that afternoon.

In fact, the church was already assembled, expecting us to come in. And there I'm in my short pants, where you don't dare appear a minister in short pants. So I had one of the other brothers share and I sat in the back of the room.

But I could hear and see it was not the Lord's fulfillment. I had to get up, stand in front of them and say, do you believe that God can anoint a man in short pants? See what God was testing and challenging was their religious, what's the word, their false propriety of what is appropriate.

Well, the Lord anointed the man in short pants. And the reason I remember this comes up now over the word great. I'm appealing to you to understand the greatness of our call in the conclusion of the age and this drama, this redemptive drama of God, which God knew from the beginning.

Even before it commenced, it was already known of him and determined by him to make his son a lamb slain from before the foundations of the world. And that it would have this consequence and be the polar event that concludes the age and returns Israel through a church that has itself appropriated the cross and its power.

It's great. And so I sensed in these Africans a lackluster attitude. They had no vision. They were content for Christianity being a succession of services because outside the building, what is there to hope for in a poverty stricken Africa?

And so I said to them, someone was sent to tell Saul who had seen the vision of the resurrected Christ and was blinded and lay like a dead man for three days, neither eating or drinking. Tell him what great things he must suffer for my namesake.

And I said to the church, we are called to great things. God wants to lift you out of a cesspool of despondency and limitation. We're called to greatness, to great things. And so that's what is being put before us in these days.

Isaiah's Prophetic Vision of Universal Revelation

In Isaiah 40 something or other in the 40s, maybe someone can help me with says, my salvation shall be known something like that throughout all the world. My arm, if somebody can look through their concordance, the word arm, yeah, it's there, but there's a reference in the 40s and somewhere in the Isaiah 40 something where the arm of the Lord shall be revealed.

It is in 52, but there's another place, I'm sorry, 40 verse five, 40 verse five. Yes, that's it. Mark that verse. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

If that is the word of God, we need to ask as careful students exegeting the scripture, when has that been fulfilled? Has it yet been fulfilled? Must it yet be fulfilled if God has spoken it? All flesh shall see it together.

It's very much in keeping with Isaiah 52 that was introduced last evening, but needs again now to be considered in the 15th verse, so shall he sprinkle many nations. The king shall shut their mouths at him for that which had not been told them shall they see and that which they had not heard shall they consider.

I'm saying, and I'm not saying thus sayeth the Lord, my perspective is the absolute dictum that this is the word of God. This is the way in which this must be seen and understood. But I am saying this is the way that I see it and I understand it and I'm offering it to you for your consideration as more than an opinion.

To whatever degree I have a prophetic call which no man can take for himself except it be given and I'm seeing through the eyes appropriate to that calling, I see these scriptures as not yet fulfilled but future.

All flesh must see it together. That which men had heard and had not seen has yet to come to them. They've yet to be sprinkled. The blood has been shed, but the appropriation of the blood waits for their faith to be kindled to understand and to appropriate and the recognition now of their being sinners of the provision made 2 ,000 years ago and now made demonstrable, visible before them through the suffering of the nation on its own road to Calvary.

That's my prophetic view of the future that seems to tie in with all that I understand and all that has been given to me about the wilderness of the nations, about Amos chapter 9, I will sift you through all nations.

The Time of Jacob's Trouble

All of the prophetic texts indicate a last days apocalyptic devastation for the nation, an uprooting, a passing and Jesus himself, great prophet, said in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 in answer to the questions of his disciples, tell us what are the signs of the end and of your coming?

And in his reply, you can look it up yourself at your leisure, he gives a number of statements of what will characterize the end, upheavals in nature, devastations of a kind that we're now seeing with greater and greater frequency and social unrest and upheavals in society, wars and rumors of war, why this 21st, 20th century is an age of unparalleled bloodshed and persecution of the church.

And he says of the nation, there's coming a time of trouble such as never before has been nor again ever will be. And if that time were not cut short, no flesh shall survive, no Jewish flesh because it's the trouble of Israel.

But for the elect's sake, that surviving remnant, if I can add to it, who will return to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads, for their sake that time will be cut short. Well that computes, that figures, there's a time of trouble greater than what the nation has previously known, I mean including the Nazi holocaust, I mean it will be greater than that which took six million Jewish lives?

Yeah. How much greater? Well, when the Lord himself comes and his feet stand on the Mount of Olives, when all nations have come against Israel to destroy it and Jerusalem has already been ravaged and its women raped wholesale, he finds that two-thirds have already perished and the one-third is brought through the fire.

So if that's any kind of ratio for the devastation that falls on Jews everywhere because it is the time of Jacob's trouble, wherever Jacob is, present Israel is Jacob, but Jacob is the name universally of a people who have not yet been made Israel, they don't yet worship at the altar of God.

So two-thirds, let's say roughly speaking 15 million Jews in the world, 10 million will perish in three and a half years' time. I can't even imagine the logistics of this. It took the Nazis, the Germans, bless them, who have the scientific and mechanical ability to work out a program of annihilation, who else could have done it with such efficiency as to cremate six million in a short period of time and right to the very last days of the war that the military historians to this day cannot understand how material and manpower would be moved toward the concentration camps and the death camps and away from the defense of Germany itself, as if that were the greater priority, which in Satan's sight it was.

And why the Allies never bombed the tracks going into Birkenau, Auschwitz, why? Because when God says, I will hide my face from you, it means he will hide his face from you. He'll not allow his judgments to be shortened.

They will have the full measure when the time has come. Why did the nations not receive Jews in flight from Europe? The famous ship, the St. Louis, that had about close to a thousand Jews, men, women and children, going from port to port, from New York to Havana to Latin America, not one would take them in.

In the end they had to return to Frankfurt and ended up in the gas chambers. God's judgments are remarkable and need to be seen as judgment if we are to receive the redemptive benefit, because they are not punitive but redemptive.

They're God's provision for repentance, for an understanding of the question that should have been raised and is yet to be raised. What could have been, if this is judgment, we Jews, what could have been the magnitude of our sin that justified such devastation in such proportion?

Because we think we're nice guys. Hey, listen, we've discovered scientific discoveries and polio and I don't know what else we've done and so many advantages to civilization. How could we have deserved that judgment?

Of what sin were we capable and have performed that God had sought its recognition and repentance over the ages and we have not seen nor considered that required this? And if we'll not recognize this as judgment and there's yet a repentance that must come if we are to be restored to him in repentance, then what occasion is yet future that would succeed where the Nazi Holocaust did not?

And that's what I believe is yet before us, the time of Jacob's trouble. And what will make it greater in the fulfillment of the word of Jesus, that this is the greater trouble that exceeds anything that the nation has previously known or will again know, is its magnitude.

It will not be confined to Poland and to Germany, to Europe. It will be global. He will allow us to be pursued, harassed and hunted down in all nations. Why will we be found in the wilderness of the nations?

Because there'll be no safety whatever in any urban center where the amenities of civilization are to be enjoyed. There we will be discovered. We have got to flee and find the most remote places. And you know what will astonish us?

God has already prepared a passage and it's called a highway of holiness. And the wilderness will be glad for us and the trees will clap their hands and nature will rejoice when they see our bedraggled kinsmen coming through because it knows better than the church that this is the sign of the consummation, the last trial, the last suffering, the last sifting of Israel in order to be fitted for its millennial and eternal destiny and glory.

Am I saying too much? Can you absorb this? The fact that I'm saying it, I'm marveling.

Comforting Israel in the Wilderness

The Second World War, because she had quite a few Jewish friends in the Netherlands and many of them committed suicide before, not allowing themselves to be taken away. And so when you say six million Jews in the concentration camp, this would not include the ones who did this in that number.

And so there are actually very many more than those six million who took their own lives. And I was just thinking that perhaps the same thing could happen again. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to do it now. No, I told you you're not.

I told you yesterday. Don't distract us. No. Even by being informational. With Jewish people fleeing and seeking a safe haven, that there is more to it for us than just providing a shelter. There has to be a security for them that would stop them from doing the same thing.

It's interesting that the whole section of scripture that we're considering in which this great concluding saga is spoken, begins with Isaiah 40. The first words of which are, comfort ye, comfort ye my people.

The church has got to have a capacity to speak to its Jewish kinsmen and those who will pass through in a comforting way that does not mean making nice. They may be hard words, they're true words, but it will bring a solace because my Jewish people are without any kind of biblical understanding.

For them, all they can see is, here comes another onslaught, another devastation, another anti-Semitism that has its origin in the New Testament where Jews are spoken of in so negative a way that it has spread the virus of anti-Semitism throughout the Christian world.

They will look upon this holocaust as another statement of the failure of Christendom. And they're coming to you who are Christians. Talk about the Lord in the most implausible circumstances. And so they're going to come baited, they're angry, they're frustrated, they've been stripped of everything, their fortunes.

Just as the Jews were in Germany, they were expelled from their professions, from their apartments. It came suddenly, they could hear the thump of the boots of the Nazi henchmen coming up their stairs, they knew their doom was sealed.

I've written something in an apartment in Germany, in Berlin, at the typewriter, at the computer, sitting in an apartment that I knew that I knew was once occupied by Jews. It was the former Jewish neighborhood, and that's where I was in those days.

And I'm writing, and I'm very rarely creative and literary in this way, I'm writing as the Jew who's hearing the sound of the thump of heavy booted steps coming up, and his mind is racing, what do I do now?

My doom is sealed, I've got a few moments, what do I take? The memorabilia, my wife's photograph, the things that are dear, and in the end he can take nothing. Who will go to her grave site? Who will put a stone on her grave?

You know how Jews do? The sign of their visit, they leave a stone on top of the tombstone. Who will visit her if I'm absent, if I'm taken? His mind is racing with all these thoughts, and before he can think them through, the doors burst open and there are these men with their swastikas and escorting him and taking him on his way to his own death.

That's what we're going to see. Horror, brutality, suddenness, and men not having time to understand, it'll come upon them suddenly, and that same Jewish man for whom I paid a thousand dollars to attend his banquet, oh, don't let me drift off into all of these little anecdotal stories, though they're rich.

Imagine me giving a thousand dollar contribution to a secular cause in order to be invited to the banquet, given only to donors for the magazine commentary, the most dignified and significant Jewish publication in the world, which I cherish, because my heart is out for its founder, Norman Podhoretz, who is exactly my age, exactly from Brooklyn, exactly in the army when I was in the army, exactly in Germany when I was in Germany, only his life has gone this way, my life has gone that way.

I covet his soul. He's written a book on the prophets. He's a man who has a PhD in literature, English literature. He won a scholar's award to go to Cambridge, and on top of that has attended the Jewish Theological Seminary.

The guy's a brilliant, conservative mind, but totally outside of redemption. So, I paid. I debated, Lord, should I, shouldn't I? I've never made a contribution to a secular cause. A thousand dollars is an ultimate measure.

I did it. Got the invitation. Someone sent me a check for $135, and I bought, I already had purchased, and now this was the compensation, my Norman Podhoretz suit. I've only worn it once at the banquet, but you should see me in it.

Mamma mia, distinguished pinstripe, beautiful cravat. And so, I took Eileen Smith, my spinster lady friend from Staten Island, and we made quite a couple, and he greeted the guests at the door at this posh New York club where this banquet was being given, and when I gave him my name, he remembered that I had already sent him a little booklet on the prophetic call, the spirit of prophecy, forgetting that on the very first page, I'm quoting from Revelation, that the spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus.

Someone said, Art, you need to write exclusively for Jews. And so, he saw me at Katz, oh, he said, I'm too old to be evangelized. I said, all the more reason. Pray for him. Why did I bring that up? Because that dear man, brilliant as he is, he has just won a national award for distinguished service as a civilian, given him by President Bush, who reads his magazine and articles devoutly because the man is so brilliant and the magazine is so remarkably rich.

And yet, for all that, he doesn't have a fig of a notion of the time of Jacob's trouble. Can you imagine my frustration in New York? I should be shouting from the rooftops and warning a people of the devastation that is to come.

The Highway of Holiness and the Gathering of the Nations

I'm breaking my head to think how are those Lubavitcher Hasidim, these ultra-Orthodox Jews who celebrate Rabbi Menachem, what's his last name, Schneerson, who has died in 1991, whose resurrection they're awaiting, how will they be saved out from New York City, from Brooklyn, when they are in the midst of a black ghetto?

Why are they there? Because that was the cheapest place to find housing, that they could move into a neighborhood with a synagogue and walk to shul on Shabbat because you're not allowed to drive. How many of us are willing for such sacrifice?

To give up our places in the country, our little dream houses, our privacy, to come into a black ghetto in order to have access to the center of our faith, the church, and be able to walk from our households to it on every Shabbat.

That's these people. I love them. I'm already mocked. I've already been kicked out of a Bible study. I've already been spurned by a family who had originally taken me in and told me how much they loved me and what a blessing it was until the authorities of their movement told them, don't extend hospitality to this man.

He's a seducer. And he's persuaded that that magician, Jesus, is the Messiah, who learned his secrets from us in order to turn Jews away from the law and to himself. I'm in an impossible situation except for the grace of God.

And it's more than just the ability to share with them the faith that they might be saved, but also to work out for them a route of flight and escape from that ghetto when the trap closes. And those black people around them who have never enjoyed their presence, and there has already been race riot when one of them hit a black kid with his car and killed him, there were three days of rioting that only the mayor of New York City could quell, who at that time was a black man himself.

So there's something right under the surface, percolating, waiting to erupt of anti-Jewish hatred by these black people. How will they be saved out of it? What route will lead them out of Brooklyn and out of New York City and up through the northern outermost regions and into New England and into Vermont and Maine and all those places through the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains and into Canada?

And then through Canada, down through the porous border that you can walk across or swim even a boat across and come into where we are in Minnesota and the haven that God has been preparing there for 31 years.

And then moved on from us to the places further south until they reach Mexico, which is the central staging area, where when I went to Monterrey, Mexico, people came up to me and said, long before you ever came out, the Lord had already told us that we ought to be a place where Jews will be assembled.

And I was out in the wilderness outside of Monterrey, sleeping out, and woke up in the morning and I looked out, it was Sinai. I had never seen such a desert area. In fact, to get there, our vehicle sank into the lake bed and we couldn't go on.

We had to be extricated and find another route to come to this place where this Mexican brother believed Jews will be assembled and it's a vast place. It's, I don't think I've ever shared this publicly.

How do you guys rate? I'm just, I think the Lord wants you to know how real this is. This is not a figment of my imagination. That we have been for 31 years in the Arctic zone of North America in poverty, struggle to establish a place of refuge for Jews in flight.

Not only coming out from Canada, but maybe going into Canada. It may be a two-way street. Because I have so often said, the issue is not the shortest distance between two points. The issue is the maximum exposure to the highway of holiness where Jews will meet Christians of every shape, size and description and race and nationality.

From the most urbane and sophisticated to the most elementary and primitive. Indians in the Sierra Madre mountains will expect them. The black Africans in Kenya, where I was that last time, that when we finally got to them, I thought, oh, Nairobi, praise God.

I've been in the bush long enough. Now, real church, real city, capital city, and I'll really be able to unburden my soul and use the King's English. No. We went outside and up into the slum districts outside, and we could hardly get there with a car.

I never saw such pock-holed streets where the car can fall all the way through and never be seen again. And finally we came into the little parking area, and there was the building. It was a cargo container, or hardly more, metal, with rude benches, no electric.