Romans 11 - Part 2 — Art Katz

Israel and the Church at the Center of Christian Faith

Of your faith, your church, what you understand about faith, the Holy Spirit, church government structure, evangelism, world missions, everything hinges on this one pivotal thing with a people with whom you have little to do or even little consider, namely, the Jew, of which I am one.

And I'm not speaking this because I'm Jewish, I'm speaking it because I'm a messenger to the church and because God is rectifying in these last days these ages-old omissions. Let's pray again, especially for the young people.

They may not comprehend conceptually the complex and intricate reasoning of Paul out of Romans chapter 11, of which the theologians, scholars say that is the heart of the book of Romans. Everything leads to it from chapter 1 through 8, and then everything follows from 12 through 16, but the centerpiece to which all things lead and from which all things derive is this issue and mystery of Israel and the church.

I'm struck this morning looking out on you, on how Gentile you appear. How else should we look, brother? Well, I would hope for something that would have subdued and rounded the edges and taken the harshness out and the Gentilic quality out and have put an Hebraic element in.

Something to transpose, something to bring a quotient that God intends as normative for every saints. He doesn't want to Judaize you, God forbid, but he would like to Hebraicize you and that is not a cultural thing, that is a spiritual thing.

It comes with being imbued with the genius of our faith that has its origin and its matrix in that which is Hebraic. The psalmist, David, the apostles, all of the writers of the scriptures but one were all Jews steeped in and expressing an Hebraic perception of God, of the faith, of reality itself.

And once you're infused with this, it will touch everything and make you yourself a presence in the community and in the earth that is redemptive. And if any Jews could catch wind of it and sniff it, they're on the road to salvation.

So Lord, great grace we pray to restore that which has been lost. Something difficult to comprehend and something that our flesh does not necessarily desire to consider. Reinsert, my God, what was central in Paul's whole apostolic mindset for the church.

Give us an understanding, my God, that will not only touch all aspects of what we believe, but will transfigure it. We need more than a facelift. We need a powerful, mighty, potent coming of the Lord in truth.

And for us, my God, to pray for revival outside of the purview, the construct, the parameters of the biblical New Testament faith is to ask in vain. If you're going to revive us, you're going to revive us within the parameters of the scriptures themselves.

And especially this which has been lost to our consideration, that is being called for at the end of the age where the end of the age does not end. So I ask your blessing, Lord. Bless these children, young and old.

Give them a capacity to hear and to receive and to consider. We thank and give you praise for the privilege of this morning. And what's on your heart for us in Jesus' name. Amen. We'll turn to Romans 11.

Paul's Apostolic Burden for Israel

We should be looking at Romans 9 through 11. But I hope that you'll be sufficiently stirred this morning that you'll do that yourself. But we'll get right to the heart of Paul's great statement, which he understands and conveys.

Not necessarily because he himself is a Jew, but because he himself is an apostle. It's remarkable that chapter 9 begins with the hot cry of Paul the apostle, that he would even wish himself a curse for his brethren's sake, that they might know Christ.

And most of us who read that think, oh, what a precious man, what an identification with his own kinsmen. But you know what I suspect? This cry does not issue out of Paul's ethnicity. Am I getting too fancy for you guys?

Out of Paul's Jewishness, it issues out of Paul's apostolicity. You say, big deal. What's the difference? The difference is this. If Paul's identification with the Jew is only a fleshly and natural and ethnic identification, we can admire that, but we can't share that.

But if Paul is crying out of his apostolic heart, which is to say the heart of God, for who is in greater proximity and union with God's heart than the apostle? That's what an apostle is. That's why the apostles are foundational to the church, because they communicate the foundational understanding and desire of God's own heart.

They come to us out of his very presence. They communicate the sense of God as God himself is, and not as we thought him to be. Oh, may God revive apostles and prophets, the foundation, cornerstones, the pillars of the church, for only they can bring these foundational teachings.

And that's what you're enjoying this morning. I'm not an evangelist. Sorry about that. I'm not even a teacher. I'm a prophet. I'm a prophetic man. What shall I say? Shall I deny that I'm Jewish, that the sunlight is shining, that today is Sunday?

So much shall I deny my calling, because no man chooses his calling, it's given. But God forbid that we should reject it and fail to acknowledge it or speak out of the authority of it. So you're privileged this morning, because only a man out of a foundational calling can convey foundations.

That's why the church is essentially without them. That's why we're barking up the wrong tree. That's why we have programs that are sound and fury, signifying nothing, and end in frustration and essential failure, because we haven't attended to the foundations.

Out of the foundations comes the superstructure, and the superstructure raised up on the foundations must be of exactly the same quality, timbre, and kind as the foundations themselves. It's not only the foundation that God wants to be apostolic and prophetic, but the entire church.

It's stature, it's mindset, it's heart, it's disposition, it's understanding, it's authority, it's witness. That's the church. The great question is, will the denominations allow it? Will they make room for it?

If it threatens their interest and their programs and their organization and their structure, will they allow again the restoration of biblical foundational things that don't necessarily flow together with organizational premises?

The Church's Apostolic Foundations

Well, I love Paul. My God, what a privilege, what a gift to the church, who was an enemy and a murderer, and was profoundly converted, and made the chief of the apostles, though he called himself the chief of sinners.

And you know what? That's not some obsequious reference. See how your English will improve if you listen to me? That's not some ingratiating salesman's cutesy little reference that seems to be humble.

That's Paul really believing that not only he was, but he is the chief of sinners. How do you explain that, Art? This man is sublime in his spirituality, deep in his profound understanding of the faith, and he sees himself as a sinner?

Yes. Because the deeper you penetrate into God, the greater your apprehension of the reality of who God himself is, the more the awareness of the depths of your own sinfulness. I pray every day, Lord, to purge me from the iniquity that is ever before me.

Praise God for the blood. Okay. To leap right into this, in verse 11 of chapter 11, Paul is answering, as an apostle, the question raised for him by the church at Rome. This is Paul. This is the apostle.

This is nuts and bolts. This is not some academic theoretician who likes to play around with conceptual things. Paul is right there, grounded, right in the reality of the church, its issues, its questions, and its struggles.

He's a lover of the church. When he had to take his leave of the church and say, you'll see my face no more, they came all the way from Ephesus to Miletus because Paul bid them to say goodbye. Can you picture this, these Gentiles?

They hung on his neck and wept that they would see his face no more. There's never been anything like that to that point in history that Gentiles were so enamored of a Jew that they wept when he announced, you'll not see my face again.

He was their father. He was their mother. He labored day and night that Christ be formed in them. He loved them with the love of God. He broke through the historic enmity of Gentile and Jew because he was an apostle.

He was deep in the faith and in the reconciliating heart of God that made the two one new man. And when we'll have that again in the church, the church will be full of the glory of God. You ought to be inviting Jews to Dunville if they're not living here, but I'll tell you what, the time is not too distant when they'll be coming through.

Not because they want to, but because they will have to. Because there's going to be a last day's persecution again of Jews that will eclipse the Nazi time. They're going to be so persecuted, so uprooted, so driven, so pushed through the nations that they'll find themselves in backward places and out of town and rustic and rural and primitive locations that they would never have chosen.

They're going to be knocking at your door. We'll see in that day what your relationship with them is. We'll see in that day whether you will recognize them as the least of these his brethren and you'll be willing to give them water and food and clothing and shelter at a time when they are universally hated.

Will the true church please stand up? Because the true church will be identified in that day by its identification with the despised people because they are the least of these his brethren. Because the church is not afraid to suffer.

Because the church doesn't mind getting caught and being found out and going to their concentration camp. They count it a privilege even if that should befall them so much as they have helped God's ancient people to be called again to his salvation as the redeemed of the Lord returning to Zion.

I can't tell you all this in one morning in one message. But we have it in books, we have it in tapes and I somehow have been plucked up by the Lord as one of the single authoritative figures who is presenting this schema, this scenario of last days affliction for Jews all around the world.

Don't think it makes me popular. Don't think that other Christians want to hear it. Don't think that messianic Jews want to hear it. But it's true and it's coming and we need to be prepared for it. So the church in Rome wants to know is God finished with the Jews?

It's a question that is even being asked today. Listen, they're still apostate. They're still hostile. They reject the gospel. They're the toughest people to witness to. They're not just indifferent to the gospel.

They're actively hostile. They come up with their alternate messianic schemes called Marxism or Freudianism or some other ism that some Jewish genius has conceived as an alternative to the salvation of God.

They are our adversaries. Paul says in Romans 11, they are our enemies. They are the enemies of the gospel and then he adds this remarkable phrase for your sake. You're having trouble with me? What would you have with Paul?

He's full of bewildering contradictions and paradoxes and perplexities because our faith is not a little simple teacup thing. It's charged with remarkable complexity. The gospel is simple. Salvation is simple.

But after that, then we need the apostles and the prophets. They are the enemies of the gospel. Yes, we know that historically. I began in ministry as a missionary to the Jews. I know how tough they are.

I know how tough I was. I would have scared you stiff. Even now you're not too comfortable. And I'm spirit filled. I'm a tongue speaker. So what will it be when they come unbelieving, unregenerate, uprooted, plucked out, shot, the bottom has gone out from them.

They're not going to be at their best behavior. They're going to be rude and ungrateful and ready to turn you off and rub you the wrong way and irritate you and quicken and awaken the depths of the resentment that lies only beneath the surface in most gentile lives, unless that gentile life is profoundly regenerated and filled with the spirit of the God of the Jews.

They'll test you. And that's why God is moving them through the nations. Not only to test them, to test you. Otherwise you would have sat in the pew and felt you had it all together. But the Jew will find you out.

He found Luther out, the greatest of the apostolic giants and the leader of the Reformation movement of Germany. A giant failed in this one test. There's something about us Jews. We're abrasive. We rub you the wrong way.

And if you're just superficially religious, your little Sunday face will hardly last the moment. But if there's a depth of the sanctifying work of God that has reached deep to the wellsprings of resentment, self-pity, bitterness, the kinds of things that operate in most Pentecostal assemblies, I know because I never received my baptism in my Assemblies of God church.

I received it on the sloping floor of a farmhouse with a few saints who loved Jews and were studying Hebrew. Why didn't you receive it in your Pentecostal church? How can you? My God, that place was so charged with resentment, with unresolved relational conflicts and unspoken this and that, that people would not even leave through the same door.

But the Spirit of God is going to be there to induct you into the Jordan of the Spirit? No way. I remember when I preached that, by your mercy, this is right out of Romans 11, Paul says, by your mercy they may obtain mercy.

And some woman cried out of the congregation, Archie said, we don't even have mercy for each other. How shall we have it for Jews? And my answer was, exactly. And you never would have recognized that or cried that out unless you were being pressed by a requirement that you now know you're not able to make.

Listen, dear saints and dear kids, if mercy is only a word in your vocabulary, if only it's a creedal and doctrinal supposition but is not authentic in your experience as only a prostitute saved by God would know it, or a drug runner, or some decrepit bum whose life was in gutters and in vomit and was saved by God, these know the mercy of God.

But we respectable middle-class people who have never conspicuously sinned, we know it only as a concept, we don't know it as a reality. And God says that by your mercy you'll extend mercy, not the concept, the reality.

So get mercy. And in fact, you know what? We need mercy this morning. If God does not give us mercy, does not give me mercy to bring this forth, and mercy for you to receive it, our whole labor is in vain.

So the whole issue of the Jew in the unique genius of God awakens and calls for the deepest realization of God, of his mercy, of the faith, of the reality that would not otherwise be our requirement. It's the issue of the Jew that makes the Church.

The Jew compels us to be what we ought and have shrunk from becoming because the cost is too great, because the cross has only become a piece of Church architecture and not the thing in which we would want to be impaled.

Gentile Salvation and the Mystery of Mercy

So Paul answers the question, are they finished? Listen, they slew the prophets, they killed the Lord of Glory, they saw to his crucifixion. Aren't they finished now? Didn't God give them their chance and they blew it and now we can be the Israel of God?

Isn't that the way we're supposed to understand that? Paul says, God forbid that you should think that. Praise God that this is in the book. By no means have they stumbled that they should fall. It's not a fall, it's a stumbling.

Listen to the way the Holy Ghost gives Paul an artful way to describe the dilemma of Israel. Yes, they have rejected their Messiah, that ought to be the end of everything, but Paul does not call it a fall in a sense of a finality with no hope of return.

He calls it a stumbling. See how these apostles are? How gracious they are in their words and in their hearts. It's only a stumbling. Because one who stumbles can be lifted up again. But one who falls, he may be down for the count.

They've only stumbled historically. Don't count them out. And their salvation has come to you because they have stumbled. God has turned from them and given you the message that they have rejected. And you now have received grace.

You who are far off and without hope in the world, without God and without hope, who drank beer out of skulls and fornicated like jack rabbits and killed one another just with a look. You, God has saved.

And by the blood of their Messiah has brought you into their covenants and hopes and promises. And into the commonwealth of Israel itself. So how come you look so gentile? Why don't you show that you've been brought into something that is Hebraic, that the grace of God has admitted you into salvation, for salvation is of the Jews.

You guys knew nothing about that. You've come into their salvation. You've been grafted into their tree. You ought to be reflecting that and showing at least this much a conspicuous gratitude that there was a faith for you to enter, that there was a faith that had been maintained, that there was an expectation of Messiah, that though the mainstream of Jews rejected it, there was a faithful remnant who received him and continued to make this faith known, like Peter.

But Peter required a vision and a trance in order to understand that you goyim, that's the Hebrew words, nations, the gentiles, my mother spits that word out, the goyim. She used to say to me when I was a kid, you're just like them.

You're goyish, because you've blown your whole allowance. You went and did it in one fell swoop. You didn't save. Jesus saves, but Moses invests. You're just like them, the goyim. My mother is 95, living with us now as a still in unbelief, and I've been a believer 36 years.

She's seen her son's life transformed and she's still resisting, but she's right next door to me, eking out the last days of her life. You know what she can remember at the age of 95? When she was thrown into the swimming pool in London, England, by her gentile teacher who said to her, sink or swim, you fat Jew.

My mother has not forgotten. And I'm not even sure that even happened, but somehow over the years she has believed it has happened. It's in keeping with what she understands about Gentiles as being hostile to Jews, and she clings to this.

There's a deep prejudice, a deep fear, a deep enmity. And now she's living in a Christian community, almost entirely Gentile, but for the exception of me. And they're loving her, and spoiling her, and lavishing affection and attention on her, and she's got to recognize this is more than human kindness.

This is God. And the sweetness of this people toward me, because I'm a bitchy old lady who's grumbling and griping and discontent and finding everything wrong, and yet they patiently bear it and are sweet to me.

It's going to save her. Okay. Listen to this. They stumbled, but through their stumbling and their fall, salvation has come to the Gentiles. Well, you knew that. But what you didn't know is what follows.

So as to move them to jealousy. You didn't just receive something without a string attached. There's a profound string attached. There's a reason why salvation has come to you. So that you then, in turn, can move them to jealousy who have forfeited what you have received.

I want to tell you that the church that does not take that to heart, this mandate and this requirement given to Gentile believers is ipso facto out of the apostolic faith. It's only become a denomination.

It's only become a purveyor of services. It only brings a modicum of blessing. It is out of the reality to which God calls us because we have forfeited our identification, our mandate, and our obligation to the people for whose salvation God yet waits through you.

Move them to jealousy. What are you going to show them that will make them jealous? You don't think they have their synagogue services replete with Hebrew and liturgy that goes back through the ages, that puts our few little choruses in the shade?

You don't think they have eloquent rabbis that make our preachers look like country hicks? You don't think that they have every advantage that there's nothing in our services that is going to necessarily attract them, let alone make them jealous?

Where do we find the explanation? Is there an asterisk and there's a footnote at the bottom of the page? Paul does not explain. He just gives us the mandate, the charge, and the requirement. And you know what?

We have totally ignored it. As Paul begins the book of Romans, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. Why should he even raise that question? Because the gospel itself is not intellectually respectable. It's not commendable.

It's a foolish statement about God laying aside his deity and taking upon himself the form of flesh, being rejected, crucified, and that by his blood that was shed in that atrocious death that came upon him, you're saved.

There's nothing about that that's commendable to human intellect. But Paul's not ashamed of it because it's the power of God. That message itself is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

Well, we've not gone to the Jew first, and we've not even gone to them last. We have not gone to them at all. I'm not saved because of you. I'm saved because of the grace of God that picked me up off the side of the road as a hitchhiker 36 years ago looking for philosophical answers as a disillusioned ex-Marxist.

I lived in Christian America for 35 years and was never once affected, influenced, in any way challenged. The Church has failed to take up this mandate because this mandate would transform the Church itself.

Yes, the Jew is the beneficiary, but the Church, in fulfilling this obligation, is required to go deep. The Church is required to become earnest. The Church is required to become authentic. Its relationships have got to be more than the casual conglomerate of individuals sitting in pews, but the congregation of God's people living a heavenly mode of life while they're in the secular earth.

It's got to be transparent. It's got to be true. It's got to be authentic. It's got to be real. It's got to be unfamed. When Jews will see this, they'll know, you could never have attained to this by yourself.

This is very God. It reveals God in the way you live, in the way you deport yourself, the way you look, the way you talk. There's a reality. It's a kingdom that you're expressing, not a denomination. And it's the kingdom of the God of Israel who sent his Son with the first word, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Moving Israel to Jealousy Through the Church

To fall below that, and only to become religious, only to have a series of Sunday services and an occasional program, is to betray the faith. There's no way that we can fulfill this mandate if we accept that kind of Christianity because it's convenient, because it doesn't require of us, because we can perform that.

But to move Jews to jealousy requires something beyond our ability. You know what it requires? The life of God himself. And that's what makes them jealous. You'll be able to say with Paul, for me to live is Christ.

You'll tap into the resurrection life, and you'll despise any human substitute that will get you by. You'll be the sons and daughters of the resurrection. And what is there in our present church life that requires this radical appropriation of God's life?

Zero. Nothing. Hey, listen, we can do this by ourselves. We can conduct meetings. We can speak from the platform. We can introduce. We can this. We can that. We can have programs. But get apostolic. Take Paul seriously.

Receive the mandate of God toward a despicable people for whom we have no natural affinity, and they not for us. And find out what God means by moving them to jealousy by some demonstration of heaven while yet in the earth, as is corporately displayed in an unfamed way by a people who have transcended earthly things and religious things.

And you'll find that you can only do that on the basis of the life of God himself. Resurrection is not a doctrine that to which we give approval. It's a mode of life to be lived. And we're falling short of it because there's no present requirement that compels us.

And because whatever is presently required, we can fulfill humanly, naturally, and religiously. And thereby fall short of the glory of God. Praise God for Jews. Praise God for the mystery. Praise God for the requirement.

Or else we would have been as satisfied with our condition and just want a little revival to kind of just tone it up a little bit. Improve our denomination. Give a little luster to our services. But this is ultimate requirement.

This is beyond anything that we can perform out of our humanity, out of our religiosity. This requires God. Even my preaching this morning is that. If it was a cutesy message, a little revival thing, look, my no hands, anybody could perform that.

But to open the mystery of God, neglected through the ages, and needing now to be restored and taken to heart as the mandate of the church and the reason for its being, that takes Holy Ghost, Pentecostal, resurrection enablement.

So we prophetic men not only proclaim the long-forgotten message, but we demonstrate by the means by which it's to be fulfilled. What do you mean, Art? Here's what I mean. God is not only putting before you this requirement that has never subsided, never dissipated away.

God has never changed His mind. He's still waiting for this fulfillment. The Lord has pent up in the heavens, it says in Acts 321, waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began.

He's not coming until He has something to do with the restoration of His people because He's going to rule out of their Zion. Don't you know that? The law shall go forth out of Zion? Where is Zion? Don't be among those dum-dums that say, God's not interested in real estate.

Oh yeah? He's interested in this piece of earth. It's His. His Jerusalem, the city of peace, His Israel, His land. It's the holy land, not presently in its character and its occupants, but ultimately in its intention.

And that when the rule of God goes forth and the law goes out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, nations shall study war no more. They'll not need to study it. There'll be no need for war, for peace will reign supremely through the equity, justice, and righteousness of God who rules now over His own creation because He has been established and restored into one place that He has chosen as the locus of His kingdom, the holy hill of Zion where He has put His king who is a descendant of David and will rule forever.

You don't know that? Wow! You don't have this in your consciousness? No wonder that your Christianity is just a sum of services. You don't have a kingdom context. You don't have a kingdom expectation.

You don't understand the whole drift of history. You don't understand what's breaking forth in Israel now is the very prelude to the fulfillment of the things that I'm speaking and not some historical aberration or accident.

You guys ought to be alive on the edge of your seats watching those newscasts and knowing that Israel is the time clock of God and we're coming close to the end. And something is required from us in their restoration that by our mercy they may obtain mercy.

Israel, the Rapture, and End-Time Tribulation

If we have indeed a mercy to give. So, why did God make Paul an apostle to the Gentiles? This guy was the prized student of the Rabbi Gamaliel. He knew this Judaism right to his fingertips and God makes him the apostle to the dum-dums.

And He takes Peter who has no background, he's only a fisherman and makes him the apostle to the Jews. Can you figure that out? Only if you know this that Paul understood that the issue of Israel's restoration was the issue of the Gentiles.

Was the issue of the church. And therefore God with the interest of Israel's final redemption in mind sent Paul to the place where the action is taking place. The church. The Gentile church. To move them to jealousy, to extend mercy.

And what a church that is. For if their rejection in verse 15 is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? Literally life from the dead. For when the Lord comes as their final deliverance sets His feet on the Mount of Olives against all those nations that have come to destroy Jerusalem and pours out upon the city of David the spirit of supplication and prayer the dead rise.

Those that are asleep in Christ rise first and those that, how does it say, are helping someone. Those that are alive and remain. You know what that means in Greek? Those that have just, are barely surviving last day's persecution.

Not that they happen to be alive. They are alive because and not asleep because God has retained them in the face of the last day's diabolical opposition to the church and to the people of God. And when He comes they meet Him in the air.

That's the rapture, not before. And they come with Him and escort Him. The perusia, the word perusia in Greek is meeting a dignitary as He is approaching His place of honor and accompanying Him to that place.

It's not being taken up and out so that we can avoid and be saved from tribulation. It's in the time of tribulation that the church is called to shine, to exhibit itself, to show its courage, to show its sacrifice, to show that it is aligned with the cross of Christ and understands that there's no glory without the suffering that precedes it.

Revelation says the woman shall be given the wings of an eagle and shall flee into the wilderness where a place has been prepared for her and where she is fed for three and a half years. Who's going to provide that place?

And who's going to do that feeding if the church has been remarkably removed? That's only a theory. That's less than two centuries old and the church fathers never ever dreamed about anything like that.

It's those that endure to the end that will be saved. It's a cataclysmic end. It's an end of final violence between kingdoms of dark and lightness in which the church has its opportunity to show itself and to be purified and purged through the intensity of those last days that it might ascend to its place in the heavenlies to rule and reign with him as the overcomers.

You see, when you begin to put the key back into place, you begin to restore the centrality of Israel, then it affects every issue, even the question of rapture, which I don't want to go off on this morning.

The Olive Tree, Faith, and God's Severity

So, verse 17, if some of the branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted into the place to share the rich root of the olive tree, don't boast over the branches, for if you boast, remember that it's not you who supports the root, but the root supports you.

You will say, the branches were broken off that I might be grafted in. That's true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand only through faith. So don't become proud hot shots, but stand in awe and reverence and fear, for if God did not spare the natural branches, will he spare you?

So note the kindness and the severity of God, severity toward those who have fallen, God's kindness toward you, provided you continue in his kindness, otherwise you'll be cut off also. God did not hesitate to break off the natural branches.

How long had they been in their own tree? For millennia, but he broke them off. So don't think that you're a Johnny-come-lately who has been grafted in, that you could not be broken off if you do not abide in the faith.

Therefore, Paul says, fear. You want to know the most conspicuous absence in the church today as I travel around the world and I touch it in its myriad forms? The absence of the fear of God is the most conspicuous lack in the church worldwide.

We're too glib. We're too shallow. We're too light. We're too, I don't know what. There's something missing. There's a depth of something that ought to pervade the church. It's the deep respect and awe and fear of the Almighty God who will not hesitate to judge and to break off.

You know why we don't have it? Because we have missed this mystery. Because we have not been instructed by how far God will go with his own ancient people. We've not understood God. And one of my books out there speaks on it, on the Holocaust, Where Was God?

I dare you to read it. Not only will it instruct you of a biblical way to understand the Holocaust past and to anticipate the Holocaust coming, it will totally and radically alter your entire view of God for the better.

We have a shallow view because we have omitted the judgments of God. It's not compatible. It doesn't fit with God as being sweet, God nice, God kind, God loving. How do we figure God judging? Isn't there a contradiction somehow?

Or is he a seamless garment? And you can't single out one attribute and place that over another. In fact, to remove the judgment of God is to remove God as God. And then you have some wishy-washy, saccharine sweet, sugary Jesus in which you have put the name, but it's not true.

You need to know the severity as well as the goodness of God. And God's dealing with Israel. Past, present and future reveals it. It will temper you. It will modify you. It's what you need. That's why if you don't understand this mystery, you will become inflated, wise, pompous, hot shot.

We got it together. We are bringing in the kingdom. We are the kingdom. We displace Israel. All of those things are the symptoms about which Paul warned. We lack the temperedness of God. And that very temperedness, that moderating influence would itself make us attractive to Jews.

You know what the Jews have called the church historically? The arrogant kingdom. You know who turns off the shrill, cheapy, tell evangelist first? Are the Jews. They saw through them before you did. The hucksters.

The men whipping up their own kingdoms and deriving millions by you sending your seed faith to them. What if they had you send it to India and let them live by their faith and not yours? Jews have seen right through that.

I'll tell you something about us Jews. We have an instinct for what is real. We may be deceived in many ways ourselves, but there's something about us that senses what is authentic. And until you put that up before us, we're not going to be moved to jealousy.