Dvd 32 Wilderness Appointment — Art Katz

And we hear them speak their many languages, and see their intensity, and their passion, and their character, and their nature. And our hearts call upon them for the Kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God, proclaiming His salvation throughout the earth.

Well, bless you saints. How many are here for the first time today? Can you raise your hand? Hi. Wow. We have to start all over from scratch. My, I thought I was bringing a concluding word, and had done all the spade work, and now this was just the finale.

But we may have to, I don't know how, the Lord will have to sum up again, give you a sense of what we have been discussing. So I want to pray for an extraordinary grace to conclude. I'm always calling upon God as the Alpha and the Omega.

He gives the beginning, I believe He did so this morning, and He must now bring the end. And trust that you who are catching up and have come for a first time will somehow catch a sense of what has already gone forth, and to know that the tapes of it are available.

Israel, the Last Days, and the Veil Over the Church

I don't know how the Lord is going to lead me in some kind of survey of Scripture. I've heard echoes of complaint that this man makes grandiose and sweeping statements, but very little Scripture to substantiate.

My problem is not finding Scripture. The problem is the surfeit, S-U-R-F-E-I-T, of Scripture. It's an embarrassment of riches. You're inundated. I don't know of a subject more replete with Scripture than Israel in the last days.

The remarkable thing is that despite the plethora, I'm taking all my liberties in English tonight, P-L-E-T-H-R-I-R-A, despite the supreme abundance of Scripture on the subject of Israel and the last day's travail, calamity, devastation, and return, there is so little understood about that.

I have to conclude that we simply are not reading the prophets. And just to assuage your own sense of guilt, I myself was in the same boat. The prophets were there, but they were not consulted except to find a preaching text.

There seems to be a veil over the eyes of the church about the revelation of Israel's last day's dealing, sifting, and return as there is over Israel itself with regard to the Messiah. Both veils need to be lifted when it, when your heart shall turn toward the Lord, when you're willing for the full implications of his lordship, when every last reservation has been removed and there's a total abandon to God, it's remarkable how the flood of revelation and understanding comes.

If you're curious how I myself have come to it, it has nothing to do, I don't think, with the fact that I'm Jewish. I've been Jewish now 67 years, but the mystery of Israel has only been my preoccupation for about the last 10 years.

And as it happens, it was birthed out of death. I don't think that this is accidental, I think somehow it's significant, that the community of which I've been speaking earlier today, after its 10th year of life together, after we had worked our way through so many remarkable crises, and we're beginning to see daylight, and to become established, and to have a prophetical school where men like Sam came, then the Lord brought the entire thing into death.

We were required to be unraveled and closed down. We were required to abandon the property and leave it to the vandals and to the elements without explanation. It was just made increasingly clear to me, God wanted to bring the whole thing into death.

That included, at that time, my marriage, my ministry, the legal status of the Ben Israel ministry, the whole thing. And I remember the stout resistance of one of the three elders who said that he was there for my prophetic ministry, but would not receive this word from me.

And despite my many attempts to persuade him, God is wanting a total forsaking and an abandonment, he insisted on staying because he loved the rustic location and everything else about it. We had one final time of confrontation.

I shared again what I believe God's intention was, and I didn't know why he was requiring it. That's what makes it a death. He's not under obligation to explain. No, he couldn't see it. We went to bed that night, and it was finished.

The next morning was departure. I had already left the property. He was the only one remaining with just a handful of souls. And when I saw him come to the breakfast table, I said to him, What happened to you?

His face was a study. Oh, he said, before I went to bed, I prayed, Lord, if I'm mistaken, please correct me. But he was the kind of man who was not often mistaken. And the Lord said to him, and I'm quoting his words exactly, If you'll not leave, I'll kill you.

He left. And the property was abandoned for three years. It may have been 30 years. I was put on sabbatical silence. All of this without explanation, forbidden to preach. I sought employment. I was in my, I don't know, early or mid-fifties.

I had a couple of university degrees and the worth of a few books and a communicator. I couldn't find a dishwashing job. I was a piece of obsolescence. It was humiliation unto death to come home after a day of weary employment seeking, defeated and unwanted.

And just as the Lord would have it, I visited a Lutheran seminary, being in that neighborhood one day in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was surprised at the atmosphere that seemed to prevail. I had never taken seminary seriously.

And I looked in the catalog and they had some juicy courses. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian Ethics, Church History. I thought, you know, it wouldn't be a bad thing to audit a course one day. Well, it just so happened that the Lutheran professor who had invited me to stop by was still on the premises and we had a cup of coffee.

And I told him how I wouldn't mind auditing a course. He said, Artie said, why don't you take the two-year program in theology? And something inside went boing. But it was so incomprehensible that God would ask me, a Jew raised up by the Spirit, to go to a liberal Lutheran seminary that I could not reconcile it.

I remember driving home that day muttering under my breath. And I got home and there was the mail of the day and the top letter was from Mosh Rosen of Jews for Jesus, who had recruited me years before to bring me into Jewish mission work.

And to whom I had written and asked the question, what do you think I ought to be doing, Mosh? The Lord has dissolved the community and the ministry. I can't find employment. What ought I to be doing?

He said, number one, you need to be studying theology. Confirmation. And then I dragged my feet for many weeks until it was put up or shut up. I had to make a decision. I took a brother with me, a real rugged end-time man who has scant patience for theology.

I thought, let the Lord confirm it through him. And he did. We went to the seminary and I asked if we could sit in a class and audit it. It was on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and what a disappointment. The professor had leather patches on his elbows and he smoked a pipe.

He was like out of central casting from Hollywood. And the thing was quite droll, D-R-O-L-L and flat. And I thought, boy, this is theology? Maybe I hope this brother is going to discourage me. And we left the class.

His face was downcast. I knew he was terribly unimpressed. We came to the door and he turned and he faced me and he said, Artie said, I believe that the Lord wants you to come here because of prudence.

There's a scripture in Proverbs about wisdom and prudence. I wish I could remember the exact word. And the moment he said that, that word was like a shaft in my heart. And I agreed that I was not to be there for theological reasons, but for characterological reasons.

And for two years when I went, I was daily sifted among the feminists who constituted over 65 of the student body, and many of whom were full-blown witches and foaming at their mouth at me because I had the audacity to call God he, and use sexist language, and didn't I know about the mother goddess preceding the father?

We actually had a lecture from one of these women in one of my classes on witchcraft, not to alert us and to warn us, but to draw us. I went up to the professor after the class and I said, if Luther knew what was being done in an institution bearing his name, he'd turn over in his grave.

Oh, he said, but we need to be informed. I said, that's too high a price to pay for information. Well, I don't know why I'm telling you all that. It was a bloody time for me. I was separated from my wife, threatening divorce or worse, living in the basement of a home of a Lutheran charismatic couple who, when I came back every day, bloodied and bowed, would bind my wounds and clean them up and pray for me and resuscitate me that I could go back for another day.

Now, I began that seminary in an off quarter where I could not take the courses required to begin the study of theology, so they fixed up a program for me, and I ended up taking a course in Judaism and Christianity, anti-Semitism in the 20th century, modern thought since Luther, and all of a sudden it dawned on me I'm in a Lutheran seminary for Jewish purposes and that I would have to write a paper to conclude my study.

It would be on the Holocaust. And not because of any course that I took or any professor's instruction, but in the inadvertent way that God will. Going to the library to find one book, your eye falls on another.

The Lord himself just began to open to me a stream of increasing revelation of the mystery of Israel and the church in the last days. And when that first quarter ended, I was in my 14th month of sabbatical silence, and the phone rang.

I had determined that I was going to work out the implications of what the Lord was showing me for the church in the last days about Israel, and the phone rang. It was a call from California from a pastor I didn't know.

Artie said, We've been praying over here. You don't know us, but we believe that God wants you to speak to us a seminar on Israel and the church in the last days. Boing! That little witness from God. I went, and that was the end of my 14 months sabbatical silence.

I say all that to say this. What I'm sharing with you has been born out of death. Real, felt, taste, experienced death. To go back to an abandoned community, to get something left behind, and to hear the doors creaking in the wind, and an absolute stifling silence where there had been the voice of 55 saints is to taste death.

To come to it in the winter, in the bleakness, and to drive the 20 feet into the driver as far as you could because the snow had not been cleared, and to let the dog out of the car, and for him to go 5 feet and then come back with his tail between his legs will give you an idea of the death that we had to taste.

We experienced the desolation of God. Now we are back on that property. My wife is back. My children are back. Another band of souls is back. Jim is with us. The whole structure of the life is changed.

We're on the resurrection side. Somehow there's a connection between death and resurrection and the mystery of Israel. Not only the revelation of it, but equally the communication of it. And for those of you who were not here this morning, I shared briefly how I was ravaged last night by powers of darkness and absolutely run over by a Mack truck, and even now I still have a substantial headache and feel hot and flushed and somewhat out of it.

That has to do with today's speaking. If this is what is required for the speaking on the subject, what shall be required for its fulfillment? So I want flat out to say that the requirement to be to Israel, what I believe God calls the church to be in the last days, is a resurrection requirement.

It simply cannot be fulfilled on the basis of well-meaning, religious, or even charismatic ability. We must eminently be the sons and daughters of the resurrection and meet them and greet them and sustain them and be to them what we ought in their own flight and despair or the whole thing will have failed.

Death, Resurrection, and the Church's Preparation

Maybe we can begin. Have I prayed yet? Oh my Lord, precious God, Jesus, forgive me for saying so much without first clearing it with you. But if I've said already things that were not of you, will you please just blot it out of the memory and the consideration of these who have heard and will hear on tape?

But if this was somehow a necessary prelude that even your church needs to come of age and understand that we're not marketing some novel things or radical things for their own sake, but revelation of profound things reserved for the last days that were given out of death and need to be communicated out of death and fulfilled out of death, then help them to understand the centrality of death and resurrection.

Demonstrated by yourself in your own suffering unto death and being raised in exaltation on high. And that this is Israel's necessity also and that is the reason for her own last days travail that is future.

Lord, communicate these things, especially to those who are just arriving for the first time tonight and give them a substantial understanding. And we bless you and give you the praise in Jesus' name.

Amen. Let's turn to Ezekiel chapter 20. This is a principle text that the Lord has quickened for me. It begins in verse 33. And I believe that we need to understand it not as something past in Israel's history, but something future.

What is confusing is that so much of Israel's past is like Israel's future. There's a cyclical thing, a pattern of God's dealing with that nation. Sin, judgment, exile, sifting, restoration, return. And that will be the pattern of the end as well.

But there are ways to distinguish whether we're reading something of Israel's past or something of Israel's future because this is a great question. If it's all finished and Israel has done her last suffering and need not experience any future plight or devastation, it's a totally different story.

Then we can well encourage them to believe that they are secure within the boundaries of their own present nation and need not fear again devastation and exile. But if these things are to come and they have a false sense of security that these things are past and that the time of Jacob's trouble was the Holocaust and it's finished and need not be expected again and devastation does come, it will not only be a physical but a moral devastation and not only for those upon whose heads it will come but even an unsuspecting and unprepared church.

Not the least of the reasons that God sent me into Israel three, four or so years ago with the message of Ezekiel 37 that I shared this afternoon was to save Christians from a possible falling away in disillusionment if their vain hopes were not fulfilled for Israel's success and establishment and they were to see the nation devastated and expelled again out of its own land.

Their question would be, where is God? Some are still asking that question about the Holocaust. And how about the scriptures that said that they would be safe within their boundaries? What confidence can we have in God and his word may well trigger something of the last day's apostasy of which Paul warns.

So we're not talking about a small thing saints. We're talking about a remarkably significant thing not only for Israel but for the church itself. If this is true in the scenario that we anticipate of widespread affliction, flight, devastation and death for the majority of what constitutes world Jewry today a devastating war and loss and defeat in Israel and possible expulsion as a result of that defeat and captivity then we ought to be about the business of preparing ourselves in the anticipation of those things.

By the way, that is the reason why we ourselves are in the location that we are for 21 years. We are in one of the most remote wilderness locations of America. We are eight miles from the closest town, population 200 if everyone's there.

We are in one of the most severe weather locations in the United States. The temperatures are almost always below that of Alaska. Our winter is nine months long and we're there because God has supernaturally called us to prepare a place of refuge for Jews in flight in the last days.

I can't tell you how much God has had to rub my face in the grit of this reality because of my own reluctance to consider scenarios of this kind. I despise sensationalism. I don't like melodramatics, flight, refuge, taking in, hiding, moving on to the next place.

But I want to tell you, and I'll make it very brief, I have physically been on those places. Place after place, we are in a continuum of places throughout North America. I've been into Mexico and have seen segments of a route of escape through the wilderness of that nation that is unbelievably frightening, that except God reveal himself supernaturally and provide supernaturally in the heat and arid wasteland of that wilderness, no one could survive.

You say, why would God sift modern, urbane Jews through the wilderness? Your very question is embarrassing for you. Haven't you ever been sifted? Haven't you ever been in wilderness condition with God?

Has your life been that safeguarded and circumspect? God has not brought you to places of unbearable trial, of dry, long dealings where you're required to search out your soul and find God in ways that you've not before known him?

That could only have been revealed in wilderness when everything else that would have modified or blurred the issues are stripped away? No one needs that experience more than those who have blurred the issues of life and eternity by their mindsets, their ideologies, their philosophies, their way of living as Jews have.

I'll tell you, it was a revelation for me in community, as you'll read if you get the book Reality here, when we butchered our first pig and our first lamb. I was a nice Jewish boy who grew up with supermarkets, and you go into the frozen food department or the butcher case, and there's the meat all nicely packed and cellophane.

It was another thing to see the grip and the reality of animals that we had brought up from a lamb to the point where they had to be slaughtered, and that pig died hard. I've never heard such screeching and howls and shrieks out of the bowels of hell to preserve that filthy protoplasmic life.

But the sheep went as a lamb to the slaughter, not a sound, not a jerk. The contrast was staggering. When we butchered the pig, the knife that went into it went right into its heart. There was a perforation, but it didn't stop it from its howling and shrieks.

There's something about the realities from which we are insulated and protected by modern life itself that has cellophaned and packaged God. We ourselves are a bit of packaged cellophane. A lot of us are cardboard cutouts and papier-mâché saints that if the wind blows too hard or something comes of an adverse kind, we become soggy or collapse and fall.

We need a bit of wilderness, and they desperately will need this being stripped of everything as I myself needed it 32 years ago when I was uprooted, not only out of my physical place, but my ideological place as a Jew with opinions, stripped of everything, my opinions weren't worth a bean, my humanist presumptions and confidences gone, and thrust into the nations and moved from place to place and there to meet a believer here and a believer there, and one who picked me up with a car there, and one who said this to me there, and one who gave me the New Testament there, that by the time I reached Jerusalem over a year later, I was a prepared vessel for God to call me by name as I wandered lost into a bookstore, a Bible bookstore in that city, and was commanded to remain, and out of which I came four days later saved.

Wilderness is a necessary experience for those who have been insulated from reality, from truth, and from God. Jews are in the forefront of that unreality in all of their urbanity and sophistication. Verse 33 of Ezekiel 20, As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, will I rule over you.

Ezekiel 20 and the Wilderness of the Nations

Okay, you Bible scholars, is God ruling over Israel today? Has he ruled over Israel historically in modern times? Absolutely not. In Israel's increasing predicament today in that nation, is God being consulted or sought as an answer for the terrible problems that they face, ringed about by hostile nations, and a hostile Palestinian presence within?

Have they consulted God in giving away portions of their own nation to serve as foothold for the enemy, who doesn't need now the four minutes that would have been required to send nuclear or germ-tipped warheads on missiles from Iraq or Iran, but within minutes, Israel's destiny can be altered by a flood of hostile men armed to the teeth, who were only allotted to be 9 ,000, according to the Oslo Agreement, as a police force to stabilize the occupied areas, and have now become more than 20 ,000 former terrorists armed to the teeth for more than just local policing.

When will it come that the dam will burst and all hell will break loose on a nation that has to learn that they're not going to obtain their security by a covenant with death? I will rule over you. And if God doesn't rule over that nation, over which nation will he rule?

For the law of the Lord must go forth out of that nation, out of Zion, and out of Jerusalem, but it's a word to all nations. But it must begin with that nation in the very place where he was crucified by them.

I will rule over you, but it will take a fury poured out. I will bring you out from the people and will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered with a mighty hand and with a stretched-out arm and with fury poured out.

We don't have to be Bible scholars to know when God repeats himself twice in two verses with a phrase as cogent as that, he means it. And I'm interpreting the fury poured out to be a global anti-Christ persecution against Jews where they will not be safe in any nation in the world, including your own.

They will be uprooted. They must be. They will be compelled to flee. They must be, because God says, I will meet with you, not in the place of your comfort and security and in all of your nicely established categories, but in the wilderness of the nations.

I will bring you into the wilderness of the people, the nations, and there will I plead with you face to face in verse 35, just as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness in the land of Egypt, so I plead with you, saith the Lord God, I will cause you to pass under the rod and will bring you into the bond of the covenant.

Some will actually come to faith as the course, as the result of God's struggling and pleading with them in this hour of severity that comes. And these will constitute the redeemed of the Lord who return to Zion mourning and sighing, fleeing away and everlasting joy upon their heads.

They will come into the bond of his covenant and I will purge out from you the rebels and them that transgress against me. I will bring them forth out of the country where they sojourned. They shall not enter into the land of Israel and you shall know that I am the Lord.

How much of an exegete, you know what that word means? The Greek word to draw out the meaning from scriptures. Do we have to be to recognize that what is being described is not something of Israel's past but something of Israel's future?

How do you know what? Because it says, and you shall know that I am the Lord. This is what is required for that knowing, nothing less. It's not God being arbitrary, God being cruel, it's God being righteous and meeting out what is exactly necessary, knowing the condition of this people and judging them for their sin and yet meeting them in the judgment and revealing himself to them that they might constitute the redeemed of the Lord that returned to Zion.

I tell you, if the redeemed of the Lord do not return to Zion, the Lord himself will not be their king on the holy hill of Zion and we will still have to contend with lousy human governments and warfare and vexation in the nations.

They'll not study war no more until he rules. The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue of the theocratic rule of God. We're not talking only about the fate of an ethnic group. We're talking about the conclusion of God's redemptive cosmic plan for the nations in which he insists that this one nation be the pivot and the locus of his government over all nations.

I will rule over you and over them. I will purge out the rebels from among you that transgress against me. By the way, are you hearing okay in the back? Is there enough volume? Yeah? I will bring them forth out of the country where they sojourn and they shall not enter into the land of Israel.

You should know that I am the Lord. I suspect that the rebels will constitute the greater part of world Jewry and will not survive the process of attrition of those last days. It will be a remnant that constitute the restored nation.

And here's the point for you. There'll be no remnant at all that could survive at all except for the mercy received through you in the wilderness of the nations. You say, what part of New Zealand are you talking about?

Some little known remote section? Well, as I said earlier today in my last visit to New Zealand, as I was speaking on this subject, the Lord impressed me to say to the hearers, the whole of New Zealand is a wilderness among the nations.

You're different. You're out of the way. You're something else. You've not been drawn into the vortex of great enterprise and great commercial success and great influence among the powers. You yourself are a little wilderness of the nations.

And I believe for that reason there might be a greater expression throughout this entire country of Jews in flight than is to be found elsewhere. It's remarkable how God appoints things like that. It may well have been that it was for this time of the kingdom that you have come and that everything till now is preparation.

That there's been no really notable distinction for New Zealand in New Zealand except the preparation for this one act that preserves a remnant of God's people Israel by which they can return to Zion and be the establishment and the locus of his rule over the nations.

And is that bad? That everything till now is preparation for this conclusion of the ages that releases the coming of the king, his kingdom, and his glory? We ought to praise God if he would give us this privilege, this honor, and this distinction.

But I want to tell you it's not going to be a patsy, cheap, and easy thing to perform. Notice the text. I will meet with you, God speaking to Israel, face to face in the wilderness of the nations. How can he be in so many places at once?

And what does he mean by that? I'm persuaded. See, this is now a prophetic man interpreting prophetic scripture. My spirit, something in the way that I am wrought in God, something in the way that he has raised me up and given me understanding, persuades me that what this means is that the revelation of himself will come through the face of the Gentiles who extend to Jews mercy that they might obtain mercy.

And do it in an unbegrudging way as if it is not their religious obligation. But joyously, even if it imperils their own life. I'm saved because of the revelation that came to me in my wilderness trek of 32 years ago when I saw in the face of a Gentile girl with whom I should have had nothing to do and was the symbol of all that I despised in Protestant Christianity middle class existence, the light that lightens the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel.

I want to say your faces will have to be much more joyous than I'm now able to observe just listening to this scenario. You'd have to be some kind of strange people who counted a privilege to be caught up and drawn into these final purposes of God even with the issue of peril and the possible loss of life.

Because these Jews will be ruthlessly and relentlessly pursued unto death. What do you think your prize will be if you're caught helping them? I'm very fond of saying, will the true church please stand up?

That this issue of the last days will identify who in fact the church is. Something is required of us more than a begrudging submission to this truth. It needs to be joyously demonstrated. Counting it all joy, the privilege to be participant in the conclusion of the ages.

And if it takes our life, well so much the greater. We have an eternal reward that shall not fade away, a crown of glory. I'll bet you if we took a survey tonight, just of you sitting here, and you were ruthlessly honest, there wouldn't be one among ten of you who has any real consideration of eternity at all.

We're not eternally minded. We're this life minded, we're now minded, we're in the world minded. We're lacking one of the most vibrant and dynamic expectations that made the early church the church. It's expectation of the world or the ages to come.

Unto him be glory in the church, world without end, throughout all ages, by Christ Jesus. Paul concludes Ephesians chapter 3. We are not eternally minded saints, and it shows. We're as fearful, as easily intimidated, as insecure as men in the world.

And the great liberating power of anticipating the reward to come for faithful service in this life is not a predominant factor in present Christian living. You say, how have we lost all this? You've lost it in exact proportion as you have lost or never known the mystery of Israel.

For the issue of Israel is the issue of eternity, is the issue of last days, is the issue of millennium, is the issue of reward. So, notice verse 41 in the end of it, that when I bring you out from the people and gather you out of the countries wherein you have been scattered, I will be sanctified in you before the heathen.

Elsewhere it says in the prophets, I will not do this in the corner, but before the face of all nations. I will be sanctified through you. What does that mean? I will be revealed to the nations in a way that they have not considered me.

When they observe palpably and visibly and historically in time, both my judgment and my mercy executed on Israel. God's dealings with Israel is the revelation of himself that concludes the age. No one will have to question then, was this Zionism?

Was this a return that men themselves have affected by their own political ability or wealth? It will be so utterly supernatural, so radically and unequivocally, God, both judging and restoring, both making desolate and returning, that he will be sanctified before the face of all nations.

In fact, the judgment upon all nations rests upon their response to God after they see this. As for Israel, you shall remember your ways in verse 43, when I shall bring you back in verse 42 to the land of Israel, to the country for which I lifted up my hand to give it to you farthest, when I shall bring you back is different from when you brought yourself back.

Look what happened then. Friction, animosity, hatred, the requirement for the use of violence to sustain and to preserve your political existence. Even now, Israel has recently concluded that of the necessity for torture, as the justification for torture when you capture suspected Hamas terrorists, who might have information, which if you can extract it, it might save Jews who would otherwise be blown up in another bus explosion.

Can you imagine Jews ever willfully, consciously, as principle, condescending to the torture of helpless prisoners for their preservation? That's the extremity to which men will be driven when they are required to preserve their own existence independent of God.

There's much more that I could say that would make you shudder about the conditions that are increasingly prevailing in Israel. It's already past the point of no return, and if every fear were requited, and every security obtained, and Arafat and the PLO really sincerely agreeing to the peace terms, and Israel could enjoy security, it would just be another political state.

It would be the Hong Kong of the Middle East. It would be a flourishing commercial center with its massage parlors, its prostitution rings, its gambling casinos, which already presently exist like any other nation.

Though God has a destiny for that nation to bless all the families of the earth. That's why this last day's sifting is so radically required. You say, Brother, if this is true, and the Scriptures seem evidently to support your view, what ought we to be thinking and doing if we are the ones in the wilderness place who make their survival possible?

Revelation 12 speaks about a woman in the wilderness, pursued by the dragon who seeks her destruction, and she's given the wings of an eagle to come into the wilderness where she is fed for three and a half years.

That is the confirmation in the book of Revelation of what we're reading in Ezekiel 20. That's why I say there's a plethora, an abundance of Scripture that confirm this last day's view. The remarkable thing in the face of all of the testimony of the Word is the ignorance of the church with regard to it as we are so close now to the event itself.

And that's why our Sunday is more or less like any other Sunday. A succession of services, a kind of spiritual roulette, hoping there'll be some novelty, a visiting speaker, a blessing from Toronto, some kind of thing to break into the dullness and the grayness of our predictable Christian life that has sunk to this level because we lack the animation and motivation that would have called us to sainthood and to maturity and to being the people of God who can embrace and fulfill our calling that concludes this age through them.

The absence of our consideration of Israel has skunked us. It has left us obsolete. It's left us high and dry. And because it is central to God's last day's purposes through the church. Face to face, your face.

Isaiah 35 and the Prophetic Wilderness

Isaiah 35 speaks about this wilderness trek. There are other places. I'm limited by time. Once you begin to open your understanding and check out the scripture references in the margins, it's bye-bye baby.

You're on a journey that will astonish you. You'll not have to scrounge for a few scriptures to sustain your view. You'll be overwhelmingly inundated in the flood of scriptures that confirm this. And you will share my astonishment.

How could we have so long been ignorant when there's such a voluminous testimony of God of this coming agenda? Isaiah 35 speaks of the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for them. As the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose, it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing.

The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it. It's not in Lebanon. It's in the nations. But the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it. Who's going to give it? The Lord himself, supernaturally. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing.