9-11 Tragedy — Art Katz

And everything's okay. Well, Dave is right that I'm not going to be speaking on the subject of Israel tonight, but something else that has been gestating in my spirit. I'm waiting to hear myself what that is.

And so I have a whole lump of holy clay to be thrust on the wheel and for the Lord to put his fingers in and see what emerges from the ooze. I have David Wilkerson's article, have you seen that on the recent catastrophe?

Outstanding. It even forbids anyone touching the subject after that. So I have also my own small comment that I composed and put on our website, some thoughts and a few other things that I've been carrying in an article from a newspaper and we can go in any direction.

I'm going to pray in just a moment. But however it comes out tonight, one thing I can assure you, the books are good, extraordinarily good. That would be almost, I don't know what, a slight to not avail yourself while they're here.

I don't think you'll find any of them in a bookstore, maybe the Spirit of Truth, but the Holocaust book, my Lord, I just got a dig from a Lutheran theologian whom I went out of my way to hear and I showed him the book.

Oh, he said, the Holocaust, where was God? This should make you a lot of money. I said, no, I think it's more likely to have me stoned. A very revealing comment and I'm still trying to understand why there was an instantaneous recoil from that man to myself.

Not that I've not experienced that before. I wonder if it's something like the legacy of Lutheranism and the Anabaptists who were dismissed by Luther as shvamorai, which is translated fanatics, because they elevated men who had no theological credentials, like a Jacob Hutter who was a hat maker and died maybe within the first 10 years of his Christian life.

In fact, I was just at Innsbruck in Austria at the very place where he was burned to death as the nobility and Catholic hierarchy watched from the golden adach, the golden roof, little portico of the man burning below who had been subject to torture for a few months in which they poured brandy into his wounds and lit them.

So I do come out of a tradition of that kind and I want to consciously remain in that tradition in the unbroken continuum of saints of every generation who have suffered for his namesake and who are to this day repellent to those who occupy ecclesiastical roles of significance in church systems.

Apostolic Character Beyond Theological Credentials

Can you follow that? Good. So this theologian, I went out of my way to hear him, arriving from Amsterdam at about midnight, 1 a .m. Holland time, to find that the agency with whom I had arranged for my rental, car rental, was closed.

And there's a little note to call thrifty cars and I called them, they couldn't do a thing for me, I had to fish around with three pieces of luggage, sweaty, hot, one o 'clock in the morning and then drive 50, 60 miles out of the countryside to a farm where I was being put up for the night.

And then all of that to hear this theologian whose writings I have admired and who speaks often, makes references to apostolic succession, which is the the mood questioned about Catholicism and Protestantism.

And in the luncheon that followed the last session yesterday with the question-and-answer time, having shown him my book Apostolic Foundations and completely ignored it, my question was, to what degree do you understand the phrase apostolic succession to imply a certain character of lifestyle, a certain mode of being, and where in Christendom do you find it pursued anywhere?

And what will you say are its distinctive constituent elements? How'd you like that for a question? And the man jerked and found a glib way to talk around it and out of it, but he had no answer. But I commend this book to you that he ignored.

It's a gem, a classic. Someone said it's the summation of all your life art. Apostolic character, apostolic proclamation, apostolic perception, the subject of eternity, the principalities and powers of the air.

This is a treasure trove, and being now readied for publication in Germany, where all these books are in several foreign languages, but I highly commend this and the Holocaust book, the issue of God's judgment, which if we had read it and understood it, we would not have been so shocked by the recent catastrophe in New York, the spirit of truth.

Truth as the Foundation of the Church

I don't know anyone else who has picked up this theme to examine what does God call the foundation, how does he say it, the truth, the foundation, the pillar of the church is the foundation and pillar of truth.

Have you heard that? That's a verse, the scripture, but so little understood, so little desired, so little loved. Truth is more than something to be acknowledged. It's got to be passionately sought or you'll be a victim of deception.

So I can commend that. This is in French, Lithuanian, Dutch, I don't know the other language, oh, Tamil in India, where we're going in February. You can pray for me, first time into that part of the world, and a little gem called apostolic conversion.

If this is not first understood and taken to heart, the rest does not follow. Many saved, but few converted. What does it mean to be converted from an apostolic point of view? And on our website, you'll find an entire book called The Prophetic Call, which is not yet in print, but a publisher who did the Holocaust book said, Art, please send us 50 pages of something on the subject that has now become so avid a consideration for many Christians and the new popularity of propheticness.

And so this is a selection from that larger book, but it's a little gem that stands for itself. So tonight, the whole package is yours for $100. Thank you, Lord, precious God on high. You know that we're sticking our necks out, my God, and gladly willing to stumble, chokes, blutter, and fail, if only to give you an opportunity to sound some things that cannot come except by that willingness.

So, Lord, may we hear your voice, and there are many who have commented on the catastrophe in New York and Washington, and we're almost now grown to a place of weariness with everyone wanting to get into the act and make his own prophetic pronouncement, but we'd love to hear, Lord, a little something from you on this subject and invite you just to sift through what I have before me and draw from it what you will.

Give us a statement, Lord, out of your own heart of a kind that will challenge and change us, deepen us in our appropriation of the faith. Let us not pass over the devastation that has come right into our own nation as some kind of momentary aberration and has passed, and we need not anticipate something like that again, but to draw its meaning, recognizing that you're sovereign, that anything that happens anywhere and everywhere is under your oversight, if not your actual instigation, and therefore we dare not miss its meaning.

So help us, my God, to probe and understand and use this earthen vessel tonight to that end, and we thank you and praise you for the privilege of exploring the issues of truth and the issues of the faith, a wonderful privilege, exquisite for us who are in the faith.

In Jesus' name, amen. Well, I dabbled a little note somewhere in... I always forget the name of that city. I've just come from it in Alabama, Birmingham. I don't know why the thought came to me, and I have it before me, to say to the Church, don't expect hope for solution in this present world.

The Present World and the Coming Kingdom

Isn't that a... what a statement to open an inquiry. Don't expect hope in this present world, and the phrase, this present world, is right out of Paul and was current to the apostolic generation and the prophets that preceded it, implying present world as something transient and passing, because all of them look significantly to the eschatological future.

This is passing away, but what we're expecting and waiting for is the Lord to come from heaven, the establishment of his kingdom, the consummation of the age. This is only temporary, this present world.

So don't look for solution in this present world, because its problems, like Israel's, are intractable, an issue like Israel from the effectual dismissal of God from his own world. This is the thing that's in my heart to explore, that we have effectually, we all the more as Christians, dismissed God from his own creation, while purportedly at the same time to be honoring him.

David Wilkerson speaks about idolatry, but I would take it one step further. The worst and the most subtle and powerful of all forms is that form of idolatry that is practiced in Jesus' name, where though we invoke the name Jesus, what we have in our thought and heart about that name is something other than who he is in himself.

Maybe someone who will help us along in the way, find us a boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, take care of our ills, our economy, an errand boy. You can have a mentality of that kind about God and Jesus that is effectually what you understand when you invoke the word.

So the mere fact that you can manipulate or utter the word does not save you. In fact, it puts you under a greater condemnation and judgment, because it's taking the Lord's name in vain in the most profound sense, and you're making what is intended to be authentic as an ultimate idol.

Recognizing God in Judgment

So the issue is to knowing God as God, and one of the things that help us to know him as God is to assess his judgments and to recognize his hand in them, and that they have fallen upon Israel historically and will yet fall upon Israel in the world in the time of Jacob's trouble, and are falling upon us, and may be the first installment of tragic episodes will give us a depth of understanding about God that nothing else can provide.

Our website is called The Burning Bush. Why? Because the rabbis say that as many... that what God was waiting for in Moses was his willingness to turn and look into the fire, that he could have circumvented an uncomfortable revelation that has strange connotations, and if you want safety, just bypass it and don't even be disturbed by the phenomenon.

But Moses turned aside to see and to ask why this bush burns but is not consumed, and when God saw that, he called to Moses twice, Moses, Moses, the ground upon which you stand is holy. God honors those who will turn aside to see, and the rabbis, I don't often quote them, but in this case I like what they say, is that what impressed God was that anyone who will turn aside to see need not think that he can turn back again.

Once you make this turn, there's no turning back to the way in which you saw previously. This seeing of God in the fire is an ultimate revelation of God himself in judgment. Fire is always a symbol of judgment, and he waits to be found there.

But who has a stomach for that? We'd love to discover or learn about God and his love, his mercy, his goodness, kindness, etc., etc., but we omit his judgment, forgetting that he has a seamless garment that could not be parted out.

You have to take the whole thing whole. You have to eat the lamb whole, and not just pick the parts that you like. Devour the whole lamb, and his judgment is an intrinsic. What is mercy independent of judgment?

What is righteousness independent of judgment? For when his judgments are in the earth, the world will learn righteousness. His judgments are painful, and he does not give them without having exhausted every means of grace to bring men to a consciousness through his word of that which would affect the change for which, in the failure, judgment must come.

But I praise God for his judgments, painful though they are, and maybe the worst thing is to allow them to pass and to dismiss them as accident, or aberration, or the activity of a Hitler, or obsessed Islamic fanatics, and not understand that all of these things are in the employ of God.

The Enlightenment and the Dismissal of God

So what is God complaining about? What is he trying to stir us to acknowledge is that the effectual dismissal of himself from his own world, something like the Enlightenment, something like Thomas Jefferson, the deists who acknowledged that God had set the world in motion, something like a clockmaker, and then backed off and allowed us after that to take over.

He just gives us a playground for our use, but he is not expected to be a participant in the creation that he himself has framed. That was the attitude of the deists, you know, that Jefferson scissored out sections of the Bible that were uncomfortable for him.

But the point is that we who do not see ourselves as deists, in our mentalities, scissor God out. And we liken to be quoted when sessions of Congress are invoked, or when we marry, or bury, or give sermons, but in every other way in the effectual practical affairs of our life and of the nation, not only do we not expect God to be present or to intervene, but we would be offended if he does so.

There's nothing more offensive to modernity and to the modern mind than the intrusion of God in the affairs of men. We want to do it ourselves. So he is effectually being dismissed in his own world. One thing to be dismissed by atheists, but to be dismissed by his own people, who have lived so long with that dismissal that they think it normative, is a sorry condition that can perhaps only be corrected by judgment.

Israel, Islam, and Apostolic Faith

So that's what Israel has done and is doing presently. If you read, keeping up, as far as much as its back is to the wall, as much as its condition is utterly alarming, as much as there's no evidence of any way in which they can negotiate with an intractable enemy, still with all of the mounting cycle of violence and retribution and generating new waves of violence and vengeance and so on and so forth, there's not even a thought or a disposition to consider the God of our fathers.

Maybe we ought to pray. Maybe we ought to fast. Could it be that the God of the psalmists, who called him my fortress, my hope, my strength, is God still, and that he can be consulted and sought, and that he could be the answer for a predicament for which we have no solution except the increase of violence?

Who thinks like that? And how is this violence coming? Through Islamic terrorism. It's ironic how God appoints the instrument of judgment, ironically, to be the consequence of our own simple rejection.

That if you know the history of Islam and its origin, and this illiterate demonic man, as was described to me today rightly, who took his cue from Jewish monotheism and the Christian monotheism, though it's subscribed to a Trinitarian view of God, doctrinally, in actual practice, lived, as we still do today, in a monotheistic way.

And so Islam is another monotheistic idolatry, another perversion of the faith, which has ironically come to haunt and to threaten the very life of that nation which inspired Muhammad, by its own example, after the advent of Jesus.

Why do you say that, Art? Because the advent of Jesus was the revelation of the triune God par excellence. The Son on the cross, the Father in heaven, to whom the Son is crying out, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

And giving himself without blemish, without spot, as sacrifice, by the eternal Spirit. Our Jewish rejection of Jesus crucified is equally, at the same time, the rejection of the triune God, and condemns us to continue in a monotheistic insistence after that revelation.

So while God may have tolerated the simplistic view of himself as in a single term, after the revelation of himself in this triune form, to continue in that is an offense against God. And so we have created the very monster that now seeks to devour us.

The Kingdom of God as Literal Rule

And that same monster, Islam, has threatened Christianity historically, right to the gates of Vienna, and the very great apostolic centers like Antioch, and, I'm tired, what are the great apostolic centers?

Ephesus, and the city in Egypt, not Cairo, but Alexandria, that were great centers of apostolic activity and a vibrant church, were in time overrun by the Islamic Horde, and like Constantinople today, have been turned totally Islamic.

The great church and cathedral of Constantinople is today the Islamic, what do you call it? Mosque of Istanbul. So we mustn't dismiss those things as mere historic accident, but a statement from God that because your faith is defunct, because you have not maintained its apostolic integrity, I have allowed it to be judged by that people whose, we call it fanaticism, whose fervent and avid faith shames us, and who have a theocratic view of God that we lack as Christians and have all the more right to believe.

Are you following me? You have to be clever to follow me tonight. The words are very lean and clear and sharp. Have you noticed that Islam is theocratic? Of course their God is a false God and a no-God, but they believe that he's intended to rule over the world and over nations, and they're going to prove that and establish that through violence.

They have a theocratic view that God is not to be confined to a Saturday phenomenon or a Friday phenomenon, but to rule the world, which is the view that is appropriate to us for believing in the king as not some mystical figure and the kingdom as not some kind of internal and subjective inward thing, but an actual rule of God over his creation out of the holy hill of Zion in the city of Jerusalem in the redeemed nation Israel.

Because of our failure to believe that, continue that, and expect that, and because when we say thy kingdom come, we're speaking in airy, figurative, and abstract terms, and do not expect a literal kingdom, we're being shamed by a people who do.

The Reaping of Judgment

Because Jews celebrate a German culture and civilization as the finest expression of humanism, that is even had become the messianic alternative for which they could no longer believe in scripture, they died at German hands.

But inhumanely, that the celebration of this liberal civilization of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all of the great giants of literature, philosophy, became not only their annihilators, but in the most cruel and inhuman terms.

Can you see God in this? Do you have a sense of this? His judgments are so ironic, are so just, and it's not that he inflicts them, oh you did this, now I'm going to do that, but whatsoever a man has sown, that too shall he reap.

You honored Germany as a messianic alternative, and you thought that it was the answer for the world, now you're going to die at the very hands that you so celebrated, whose culture was only paper-thin and had become now bestial, who failed to save you for 2 ,000 years in Germany, will now annihilate you.

So the judgments of God are not inflicted, they issue out of our own intransigence and our own sin. The very character of it determines the form of the judgment. Elementary, my dear Watson, you don't have to wait for a Jewish guy to come and share these foundational views, and that's why we have not warned the world.

We don't really believe that there's a day of the Lord that is coming, that is going to judge the world by that man whom he has raised from the dead. So the world dismisses us as a Sunday culture, rightly, because we don't exhibit and bear a word of impending judgment.

We don't live as if we believe it itself is coming, and we ourselves are so taken up with the world and so affected by it, that in our deeps we want to see it to continue and not to be judged. The last thing that we would desire is to see world judge that we've come so to enjoy and appreciate.

Can't it be improved? Like Abraham crying out for Ishmael, can't Ishmael live? Can't the world be improved, Lord, progressively? Can't Israel be improved progressively by increasing amelioration to grow into and become the messianic hope?

Must it face judgment and death and then resurrection? See, even the very thought of that is an offense to most Christians. We are humanists, more than we know, and prefer progressive improvement and amelioration rather than apocalyptic judgment, devastation, death and resurrection.

Therefore, we don't have a message for the world. So I went out on my way to hear this theologian, but it was hollow. He was correct, but it was hollow. There was nothing about it that was, in fact, apostolic.

Doctrinal Correctness Versus Apostolic Demonstration

When I raised the question, all he could do was choke and stumble. He could not answer, because you can only answer it in the measure of the reality which you have appropriated. But if you are satisfied merely with terminology, with a vocabulary, with doctrine, then how can you answer, not only in a question, but how can you answer as witness in the world?

And we have been satisfied with mere doctrinal correctness rather than existential demonstration of the things that we purport to believe. And for that reason, we're being judged. We have become a phraseological Christianity.

Listen, I was a high school teacher for several years, and I know the system. Induct the students into a certain vocabulary of response, which they can answer back and get the appropriate grade so they can be promoted and go on to their credentializing and whatever they're going to do in the world.

But actual comprehension, actual appropriation, actual reality is not the thing that is to be sought or communicated. Just have them to respond verbally and appropriately, and they get an A. It's as if, if we have the technical word, we have the corresponding reality.

You know what that's called? Deception. May God keep us from glib, anxious speaking, if there's not a corresponding reality with those words. Lest we be deceived to think that because we say the right thing, we are the right thing.

In fact, what is apostolic is the thing in itself. It's not the man who has the vocabulary, it's the man who is the very demonstration of what he speaks. And Paul, of course, is the most marvelous example.

Paul at Athens and the Resurrection Witness

And that's why at Athens, which was the epitome of civilization, he could challenge its philosophers and rulers about the shabby way in which they conduct themselves in all falsity, purporting to seek truth but never coming to the knowledge of it, and wanting to hear some new thing every day.

And that's why they allowed the babbler to come up to Mars Hill, for the novelty of what he might bring. But there was no earnest desire for truth that could be lived. Why? Because these philosophers had their own retinue of boys.

Homosexuality was flagrant, and it was quite commonplace for the most distinguished ethicists to have a young boy with whom they could engage in homosexual acts. Therefore, he said, on my way here I observed your monuments to the unknown God, but I'm telling you phonies that you're not going to get away with it hereafter, because him whom you ignorantly worship and desire to remain ignorant about, I declare unto you.

How'd you like a guy like that today? Not confronting the Mars Hill of the world, but the Mars Hill of the church, and then telling them that God has winked in times past, but he commands all men everywhere now to repent, for he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by that man whom he's raised from the dead.

Come on, Paul. These guys have no Bible school background. They've never heard about resurrection, one being raised from the dead. It's an offense to Greek intellectuality, to the rational mind to believe that God could raise the dead, and that this one whom he has raised is going to be the judge of the world.

How are they to believe that? They have no background and basis for it, and that because he was raised from the dead, this is the distinction, his right to be judged? And he turned away and walked away.

Most dismissed him. Some said, well, here again, this man, and never did. Some claimed unto him and believed. And the great question is, how could Paul put forth a message of a day that God has appointed by which he will judge the world, which includes Athens, on the basis of a man raised from the dead, to a people, philosophers, who do not believe in that kind of supernaturalism, and who are greatly offended by any reference to resurrection?

And the whole answer is that he could speak it and walk away, because he was himself the living demonstration. He was the man of the resurrection. How else do you explain his message? I perceive that in all things you're too superstitious.

What a way to begin. Hey, haven't you ever been to Bible school? Don't you know about principles of evangelism? You don't begin by insulting your audience. He began by insulting his audience. Why? Because the message, like the man, was itself a resurrection phenomenon.

The Church as a Living Demonstration

And if we had a church like that, of whose foundation the Apostle is, and are continuing in that kind of reality, and confrontation with the unbelieving world, we would not be experiencing planes flying into buildings, flown by frenzied Islamic fanaticals, who are really sober, middle-class, educated, and refined men, by every other reckoning.

This isn't the scum at the bottom of the barrel. This is the best of Islamic society, and they can determine to give themselves in that kind of violence. There's got to be a factor that we should consider.

A judgment, because we have diminished God. That's what I wanted to talk to you tonight, I don't know if I'll get to it, about trivializing God by domesticating him, by turning him to our purposes, by putting him in our employment, rubbing a genie lamp in prayer, praying for blessing.

I mean, if you could see it by the eye of God, it disfigures him. It makes him an errand boy. Hey, we're talking about the Most High, the God who created the heavens and the earth, and all that in it is, is not someone for our convenience.

We are for his convenience. We've got it all wrong. And to use him and his word to commence sessions of Congress, and various other kinds of functions that take the edges off of our secular life, and bring a little amenity of a flourish of a religious kind, is the employment of God for the purposes of man.

And when you get away with that for a long period of time, it effectually minimizes, trivializes, and diminishes God as God. And the fact that the fear of God is absent, even from the congregation of God's people, indicates how far we have gone in this, that we have lost the sense of awe and reverence and fear of the Most High, or we would not be so conducting ourselves.

Western Immorality and Islamic Judgment

It's really remarkable that Islam is offended by the immorality of the West, that men who do not think it a scruple to fly innocent victims into commercial towers and take thousands of lives with them, are offended by our moral life, by miniskirts, and sex, and perversion.

And in what city is there not a gay day parade, sanctioned by the mayor or the governor, in the United States of America? And this deeply offends them, and we don't even blink an eyelash at what ought more deeply to offend us.

And therefore God uses them, in the incensed indignation they have, as being morally superior to a West that is degraded and cannot, therefore, be an instrument in the world. They're bringing a greater morality.

It's a judgment upon our immorality that they could celebrate themselves at our expense, because they see us, what to them is Western, is a synonym for Christian, one and the same. I was looking at some of the gorgeous girls there at the seminary, I mean really endowed bodily, and I thought to myself, okay, so you have it, but do you have to exhibit it?

Who says that you have to wear a snug sweater, and one that ends at your belly button, so if you stretch to get your books off a shelf, there it is exposed, at a Christian seminary? Because you have it, do you have to exhibit it?

Are you unconscious that you are being a provocation and a temptation to young men? Where's your decorum? Why don't you conceal, which the Muslim women do, with their black garments and whatchamacallits around their heads, that you can't even barely see anything that suggests their femininity, while we, in our culture, exhibit it brazenly, without censure, and in the church.

War, Weapons, and the Failure of Force

So what's our answer now to this attack? We're mounting a reply in a physical way. We've been stung. Our nation has been assailed, and we only know how to act in one way, with force. And so what do we obtain?

Tens upon thousands or hundreds of thousands of refugees, shattering their little villages in their mud huts, leaving them homeless in a situation that cannot be won by such means. But what other means have we but force, the use of arms, and one of the things I have, that I found in the Herald Tribune on my flight from Amsterdam, Lockheed fighter award cheered in Britain.

Lockheed has won a contract for warplanes. I don't know how many billions of dollars, for the conceivable future, that would even award contracts to other suppliers of parts in Great Britain and elsewhere.

It virtually revives the economy. It's interesting that when the Lord comes, and the Lord shall go forth out of Zion, the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, men shall study war no more. And they'll turn their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, all implements of peace.

For we have no idea what the economy of weaponry means in the world. We are number one of the world's manufacturers and sellers of instruments of death. And I thank God for the privileged tour I had of the Douglas factory in Houston, where the F -16 bomber fighter is made, because I have a friend who works there as an engineer, and I've been pleading with him to seek employment elsewhere, but the money is too good.

And I went on a Saturday when men were working overtime, and the Lord gave me the name, as I looked, the word I have never ever used before nor since, as I looked at these employees with their beer guts hanging over their belts.

And the word was gnome, G-N-O-M-E. They are gnomes. They're not human. They've become something else. They're deformed in their humanity. They're technicians of a kind that are ever so slow in their movement, in making sure that they clock that time and a half or double time, and are living a life of great indulgence, manufacturing these instruments of death.

And when I saw the name on the plane, Thailand, the new name for Burma, I mean, some of the most small and insignificant nations have to have an F -16 or more because their neighbor has one. It's not that they're so much as threatened as they are challenged in the whole issue of prestige, of power, of armaments, and that whole mentality that pervades the world of which we are at the center.

So I won't even read from this, but just to know, the world is wicked. And someone told me today that those bombs that are being dropped in Afghanistan, what are they called, where the bombs open up other bombs and affect a great area?

Cluster bombs. Each one costs, what, $60 ,000 each? Well, at the same time, I'm listening to national public radio that unemployment is increasing in America and many are affected who do not even qualify for any kind of aid or help.

And so the contradiction of this kind of investment in death and the inability to provide men with the things that pertain to their integrity, their families, their maintenance, is a contradiction that ought to leave us gasping.

Judgment, Prophetic Witness, and the Church

And probably not the least reason for it is the ineptitude of the church, its quietness, its inability to see these things and to protest or cry out or call the nation to righteousness and to tell them that there's a day in which God will judge all nations by that man whom he has raised from the dead, that he's winked in times past but calls men now everywhere to repent.

I would say that the church that is unable to proclaim that, has not the courage to proclaim it, does not see that the imminence of that day and that we're pointing to this day of judgment, the conclusion to the age, disqualifies itself as church and condemns itself, however correct this vocabulary, to being a kind of Sunday culture that does not even engage its own children.

Our own children are bored with what we are about and come under protest and at the first opportunity will not come at all. We've not persuaded them that what we are about deserves their participation and we don't even see that.

We look the other way. Isn't it amazing? And we give them crayons and things to doodle with. One of my last meetings in Holland, a prominent church in Groningen, I'm sitting and looking this way and there's a whole lineup of kids in their puberty or early teens doing their thing, playing with little toys or coloring books or reading comic books while the adults are worshiping God and are totally unmoved and non-reflective of what is taking place and they're not encouraged to be participant but to be quiet by doing their thing.

How is that a preparation for reality when we'll not even have the courage to see the truth of the condition of our own children and ask why it is that what we are about does not engage them. It engages us, at least we enjoy the worship, not so sure that it's rising above the ceiling that the Lord himself is being blessed, especially if it's something to affect the atmosphere.

The Spirit of Truth and Prophetic Seeing

That's why you've got to read the book The Spirit of Truth. Truth is more than a technical matter. There's a spirit of truth. We've got to see through the outward forms and the superficial external things to the truth of something, have the heart and the courage to recognize it, which is why the son of man who's called to prophesy to Israel's bones or they will not live needs first to be brought down and into the valley of dry bones by the hand of the Lord and the Spirit of God.

He can't stay up, his elevated charismatic place. He's got to come into the grit of things as God sees them or he cannot speak for God if he'll not see with God. And we also have got to come into the grit.

So this use of force now in retaliation and in what seems to be a no-win situation and complicates and generates a further anger against the great Satan, which is the way the Islamic nations see us, for we're fulfilling what they expect from us, mindless, wholesale devastation that cannot win.

But we have no other alternative. We've got to act. We've been stung and the patriotism calls for this and we're going to get the culprit. Dead or alive, I think that was the president's term, as if we're still in the Lone Ranger, cowboys and Indians time when there's a shootout at the KO Corral and the good guys win.

The Changed World After September 11

What our dear president doesn't know and what his shallow Christianity has not revealed to him is that with the bombing of the crashing of those planes into those towers, the world has changed and will not ever again be the same.

Not only have the rules changed, the rules have been removed. You're not going to find the bad guys at the KO Corral and get rid of them, bum bum bum, with a few blasts and go back to things as they were.

This is a whole nother world and whole new dimensions of consideration have come with that act of violence that need to be recognized and that patriotism, as we have understood it, is inadequate and even the Christianity that we are happy that the president has obtained is at a level inadequate to meet the crisis that has come.

But it's our kind of Christianity. He's a reflection of our kind of evangelicalism. So if you turn to my website, you'll find tragic event. Click on that and you'll read the shaking of all things that can be shaken.