The Scandal of Specificity — Art Katz

Israel and the Scandal of Specificity

Israel. It's the word that Paul used because it's not evidently disclosed to our understanding and there needs to be something from God the Revealer to apprehend this which is at the heart of his faith.

So I make two disclaimers from the beginning, lest you think that I'm choosing a subject because I'm Jewish, I have a special affinity. That's not so. I often say if the Lord had chosen another people I would be celebrating his choice, but the fact of the matter is I should not deny that choice lest you think that I'm partial to it because I am Jewish.

God's Particular Choice of Israel

It's a strange ambivalence, intention, contradiction, but God is a God who chooses. Remember the two God, two trees in the garden and gave us the issue of choice and that was the pregnant issue that would determine rebellion or fellowship and when he calls Israel his chosen people, his chosen nation, we need to pay a special attention to what God chooses because in his choosing he reveals himself as God and some have called this the scandal of specificity because they don't like when God gets that particular.

They like when we can generalize, when he doesn't mean this, he doesn't mean Zion as a particular point or physical place in the biography of Israel. Zion is a more general term that describes the people of God in every generation, etc., etc.

There is a sense and a significant and valid sense in which the word Zion can stand for the people of God, but there is also a literal and geographic intention of God that must not be displaced by the secondary and spiritual consideration.

I'm giving you a principle of hermeneutics or interpretation because the issue of interpretation is critical and Israel has essentially the ethnic specific choice of God. This particular people with a particular history, a particular location, and a particular destiny has been shunted by the church historically right through to this present Allah and because of the scandal of the specificity of God's choice and if I can sense the wisdom of the heart of God in making such a choice, he said, I didn't choose you because you were the greatest.

I chose you because you were the least because in choosing you as the least, in choosing Zion as the place of my sanctuary and dwelling and the locus of my eternal millennial and eternal theocratic kingdom, I chose Zion for the same reason I chose you, because you're the least and because Zion is a hill, but it's a holy hill.

In terms of the great mountains that God might have chosen that we would think in our humanity of eating off the wrong tree that would be the logic of God's choice, Mount Olympus or the Geneva or United Nations in New York.

No, God chooses a dung hill. He chooses a cave to begin the whole Davidic kingdom. He chooses a stable to make his own point of entry into time and into history because this is God. He's revealed in his choices.

He has a preference for the least, for the weak, for the foolish, to confound the things that are supposedly or ostensibly wise and great. What you need to understand, and I wish that I had all kinds of time to develop it, is that at the heart of the whole genius of the faith is a moral struggle between two opposing moral views, two wisdoms, two kingdoms, darkness and light, two intentions of prevailing over creation itself is the underlying struggle in the whole primeval history of creation to this present hour, and Israel somehow is the pivot and the point of this struggle, particularly in the last days, because if the powers of darkness can destroy this people and destroy this entity as one that can be located in time and place as ethnic and visible, it will have removed the ground for the realization of a kingdom that must be established through them and with them in the place and locus of God's choosing desire.

Do you understand? That's why you're going to see the most vehement, bitter, ruthless, merciless, anti-semitic crushing of this people in the last days, of which the Hitler time was almost just a kind of preview.

It was the powers of darkness who are really the ruling powers. The prince of this world comes, Jesus said. He acknowledges that he still has a kind of, though he's been defeated at the cross, there's still a prevailing usurpation of it in a governmental way that affects nations and their conduct.

And they don't want to give that up. They are usurping powers and love to jerk and to manipulate. And every present day genocide, whether it's Rwanda, in Africa, whether it's Indonesia, wherever you look, cannot be explained except in terms of the underlying and invisible powers of darkness that prevail and want to establish their rule.

Their ultimate end is chaos. Their wisdom is destruction. They play upon force. And so God of necessity has to prevail and succeed by the very antithesis of another wisdom different than their own. That's why it says in the Psalms that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, God has perfected praise.

In order to stop the mouth of the enemy or the adversary, God has got not only to obtain a moral defeat that will be eternal, but he's got to obtain it on the moral ground of his own righteousness. And therefore, he avoids the use of force, violence, intimidation, threat, and plays upon weakness, humiliation, and the things that are with the reflections of his own character and being.

So, Lord, send us on an excursion to understand that the issue of Israel is not some affinity for that political state that presently exists and which is doomed, that must necessarily go into a destruction, into an expulsion, into a devastation, into a scattering, into an exile, and then also from the survivors and the remnant, the restoration and the return that will reveal both the judgment and the mercy of God.

Lord, this is awesome. How do we approach it? It's a mystery where we come, my God, with hat in hands and tiptoe. We don't want to be brash. And I'm just asking that you would select from the multitude of scriptures and prophetic things which will give this people tonight a sense of this great drama, which is the context of the church itself.

There's no way that the church can understand itself, its activity, its call, except it sees itself in the context of this restoration that concludes history, that brings in this long-standing historic stiff-necked and apostate people back again to their God and to their place in the garden, in the land that he has chosen, where they will then eat from the right tree and be to the nations all that he intends.

So this is a great drama, Lord, and the church is no accidental split off or some Johnny-come-lately phenomenon. It is birthed out of and called to and for the consummation of this mystery in the last days.

And who can begin to speak this? So grant us grace, Lord, by your spirit and single those things out now that would give us a precious framework of understanding that will affect all our categories as it ought, and we thank you and give you praise in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, I just quickly opened my Bible and was looking for something else, and somehow I had a bookmark in Deuteronomy. Maybe you want to turn there, the last statement of Moses before his own passing away.

The Song of Moses and Israel's Latter-Day Warning

It's called in chapter 32, The Song of Moses. And I don't know if it was literally sung, but I believe it was meant to be memorized. And maybe there was melody that went with it so that it could be sung from father to son through the generations, because it contains a warning of such an explicit kind of what would befall Israel's descendants in the latter days.

And I can say as a Jew who grew up in a normative Jewish environment and culture, which is to say non-religious, non-spiritual, though I was bar mitzvahed, I went to Hebrew school, knew nothing of this.

The word God was not so much as mentioned. We had no knowledge of scripture as being divinely inspired. The prophets were some kind of strange thing that you chanted on the day of your bar mitzvah only to get the right intonation, but without a knowledge of the content.

You can't believe how dark we are in our darkness. So don't be in any way intimidated by Jews that they have a supreme knowledge of scripture and they'll make you look like the fool. The fact of the matter is that any Sunday school kid that has the most elementary understanding of even the basic stories can far outwit the most celebrated and intellectual Jew.

So had we known this, had my father sung this to me, had I had a father who could sing, the fact that we can sing and the fact that we don't have fathers, that we have a matriarchal mother, woman dominated society, is all of the perversion that comes to a people who have forfeited the great father.

In the loss of him, we have lost everything. And it's amazing that despite all of that and not from pillar to post and the Holocaust, which is not just the Nazi phenomenon, but the one that went on behind drawn shades and closed doors in apartments in Brooklyn, New York and Manhattan and all of the places where Jews have been dispersed.

It's been a Holocaust and attrition of broken lives and bodies and varicose veins and nervous breakdowns and suicides more than you can know for the want of the relationship with God that was his normative intention for us as a people.

So just to leap in, well, I think it's interesting to take a look at verse 8. I have not in 36 years as a believer ever heard anyone ever make a comment or preach this publicly. But look at this, verse 8 of chapter 32, when the most high apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, mankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.

Now, you may have something else in your margin. There are some optional readings. Some say the sons of God, some say the sons of Israel. But more than I'm able to say, there's an angelic correlation in the heavenlies with the physical and visible manifestation in the earth.

There are sons of Israel and there are also an angelic counsel in God that are relative to those sons. But the point of the matter is this, that when God established the nations, he did so in recognition of Israel, that from the very beginning in the concept of God, there was a, that Israel was to be the pivot and the center of his relationship with all nations.

And when you read the Psalms, you'll see how frequently the cry of the psalmist is against the nations. Lord, how long are you going to suffer them? Show them that they're just men. How long are you going to tolerate their intransigence and their arrogance who will not bow to you as the God of all the earth and the God of all the creation, the maker of the nations?

The psalmist knew that their God was not some little ethnic and tribal deity. Their God was the creator and the God of all nations. And the whole issue and struggle is bringing those nations under the dominion of God through the governmental structure that he has in his mind, whose center is Zion and whose people is Israel.

If you can picture the 12 tribes of Israel, one tribe had the exclusive function of being the priest to all the rest. That ratio of one tribe out of 12 had only a priestly function. And so can you imagine that a nation in total would have a priestly function to all nations?

That's God's design. And we had better recognize it because when the smoke clears and the last ravages are over and the millennial conditions prevail, that's what we're going to see. The nations will come up to Jerusalem.

Literally, they will bring their goods and their blessings. They will bow before the feet of those whom they formerly oppressed. It says the Gentiles of 10 nations will clutch the skirt of a Jew and say, take us to your God for you know him, really know him because you've been through the mill.

You have been sifted. You have been refined at his hand in the most severe dealings that any people have ever received. And yet also you have experienced his mercy and his restoration out of his own power.

You know him supernaturally. You know him in his judgment. You know him in his severity. You know him in his grace. You know him in his mercy. You know him. It's not a Talmudic knowledge. It's not a head knowledge.

You know him in the most authentic way that people can know him because in fact you are the first and only nation that has ever been raised from the dead. The issue of God is the God who makes those things to be which are not.

It's the God who creates ex nihilo, out of nothing. It's the God who raises the dead. And I want to say, point blank, there'll never be a fulfillment of what God spoke to Abraham. And remember that God, as God, his reputation, his name, and his honor depends on the fulfillment of his word, his promises, his covenants.

The issue of Israel is the issue of a God who can pay off and fulfill what he has long ago spoken, despite every adverse condition to the contrary, even Israel's unwillingness to be the chosen people, to be a nation of peace and light of the world.

When you talk to modern Israelis today, you know what they say? We want to be like every other nation. We want to be the Hong Kong of the Middle East. And they're fast becoming that. And when they try to entice their Palestinian neighbors to join in the prosperity that would be theirs if they laid aside their aggressive and violent intentions, they're not kidding.

They are going to be a center of Babylonian prosperity. And I mentioned already the class separations that are taking place and the mistreatment, exploitation of foreign workers, as well as Israelis themselves.

So why did I bring that up? This is a nation that in order to fulfill the promise of God to Abraham that from your lines will come with people who will bless all the families of the earth, not impress them, bless them.

See, we're very impressive in what we can do coming out of concentration camps with nothing but a tattooed number and a tatted shirt. And give us 10 years and we'll have a garage filled with cars and kids going to private schools while you're still struggling at minimum wages.

No wonder you're resentful and envious. But in that kind of success and the arrogance that it breeds, how can we bless anyone? We're contemptuous, we're disdainful of the goyim. If you ever heard my mother spit that word out, you would shudder, the goyim.

She was as polite as she could be to that German visitor. Tell the story, you haven't told that yet. Oh, you haven't heard this? We had a German guest the other day and we're seated at the dining table and I'm introducing them.

He's married to an American woman and I said, this is a brother who's from Germany. They're living now, calm. Oh, my mother said, well, he can't help it, he was born there. The poor guy choked and spluttered.

If my mother wasn't 95, I think he would have punched her in the nose. She can't understand why I go to Germany. She won't set her foot in a Volkswagen. Of course, she comes into my Mercedes Benz.

And that's where you learned your social skills, right? That's the end of the story.

My mother tooted me. So we're joking, but we need to understand God's design. That even the nations, the number of the nations is relative to the sons of Israel, not sons by mere ethnic or genealogical birth, but sons also in the spiritual sense that we too are being called to sonship, to rule, to authority, to dominion over God's creation, to sharing with him the precious privilege of co-rulership because a son has only one intent and passion is the glory of the father.

He never has an agenda for himself. Can you imagine Israel coming to that place where it has no intention for itself per se as a people, but to celebrate and to glorify its God and its maker? That will be a historical fact when the smoke clears at the end of the age, but it will take death and resurrection.

Israel's Predicament and the Necessity of Divine Wisdom

And so Israel is on a course with death now. We can see the state set, the enemies are glowering and in its frantic defenselessness having to negotiate and have anything continually blow up in its face.

And God has brought a predicament to Jews and to Israel of a kind that even Jewish intelligence cannot solve. And we have had to come to that place. How did I come to that place? I had to come to a place where my confidence in mind and wisdom and human goodness was shown to be threadbare, vacuous, without substance.

So that when I was apprehended by the Lord in the first reading of a New Testament of the woman taken in the act of adultery, I'd never read that before. And my new Jewish hero, who was inspiring my heart, that was better than Karl Marx and Freud and all of the other Jewish heroes who have collapsed, was faced with the issue of this woman taken as, what do you say, hotshot?

You said you've come to fulfill the law, not to destroy it. This woman was taken right in the act of it. What can he say? Judgment, there's no other alternative. And my heart was pounding because I was an adulterer myself, justifying it in the modern contemporary Jewish manner.

It was love, it was poetry. I don't know how we do it, but now I knew it was sin and that it deserved judgment. And I was in the predicament with that woman. I was, you know, when you read the scriptures like that, it becomes another book.

And I tell you what, guys, the scriptures are going to become like that for us, another book. What we have only been reading as Bible study now will be a nuts and bolts provision of God for people living in extremity in the last days under persecution.

And these letters will be written to us with instruction and guidance. The issue of the church, of eldership and government, that the role of the Holy Spirit will no longer be an idle matter of a Bible study.

Never go through what we were doing before. It will be our very sustenance. It's what I've long waited for, that the conditions of our life will begin again to approximate those to whom the scriptures were first given.

And so we'll come full circle and the church will again be an oppressed island of sanity in a sea of hostility and worldliness. So Israel is en route to its death and it cannot extricate itself. So one of the provisions of the Oslo Agreement was a minimal police force for the Palestinians to maintain their own order.

I believe that the number was 9 ,000. What they have in fact now is more like 50 to 75 ,000 of an army armed to the teeth. These are not local policemen to maintain local order. This is a hostile army pointed at Israel's throat and waiting its first opportunity.

I can show you in scriptures that we could not have understood until this present predicament historically was unfolded that shows Israel not only as a defeated nation but a humiliated nation. You can read it at your own leisure.

Isaiah 50, 51, where they drink to the dregs, the cup of God's wrath. It's not some arbitrary thing that has befallen them. It's not even just the malice of the nations that surround them. It's God's own judgment employing those nations to bring Israel to a place of defeat and humiliation because there's no going up without first going down.

And we will resent God and have a controversy with him over the severity of these dealings unless we understand what the end of them is. A transformed nation brought back out of humiliation and death to a place of honor and distinction before all nations throughout the millennial period and eternally.

If we know God's intention for this people because they are chosen, not because they have a merit. It's not because they're qualified in any way. In fact, their lack of qualification has been our historic embarrassment.

God says, I'm not doing this for your sake because you have blasphemed my name in every nation where I have driven you. I'm doing this for my sake, that my name which you have blasphemed shall be honored when the world and the nations will see my mercy.

Because what is mercy if there's any way in which it's deserved? Mercy is not mercy except that's undeserved. And what nation is more qualified in this undeservingness than my own? And all of us when we think of it, when we think of it, and God's dealing with Israel will make us think of it.

Because if you begin to, if you start to get irritated at God's singular selection of Israel and something rises up in you almost inadvertently without, unconsciously, they don't deserve it, then what it's revealing is that though you have subscribed to the doctrine of grace, in effect, you have been living an Old Testament works and merit-based religion.

And your response to Israel and God's mercy and grace that are totally undeserved will bring up from your deeps the truth of where in fact you are. And this is part of the mystery. That's why you can't understand the church, independent of Israel, that Israel, even in her apostasy and backsliddenness and vileness, performs a function for the church that is critical and without which the church itself cannot come to its maturity, its sonship, its bridal character.

There's a reciprocal dealing and relationship. Oh, I could show you scriptures. I wish I had all kinds of time. And I thought in fact that the three speakings would be that time, but the Lord had another thing, though it's related.

For example, in Psalm 102, God says, the set time to favor Zion has come. The deliverer will come out of Zion. And Paul quotes this in Romans 11, that when the fullness of the Gentiles be come in, so all Israel shall be saved as it is written.

Can you see that if you negate Israel as a visible and ethnic entity, how then is their fulfillment? There's got to be a people that are recognized, that recognize themselves as being that, and that the world recognizes.

Because it's God's dealing with that ethnic body that is the revelation of himself, both in judgment and in mercy. When the deliverer comes, I will take transgression from Jacob. Israel will be acted upon.

They will be so inept, so incapable of anything in their own behalf and must be reduced to that, that God might become all in all. They'll not know him as deliverer and as savior and as redeemer and as healer unless they experience these powers of God vested upon them in their total and inept hopelessness.

So we're going to see a nation so thoroughly reduced, it will be incapable of affecting anything that pertains to its own salvation. And when that salvation and deliverance comes, can you imagine the praise?

Well, you can read it in the Psalms. Some of the Psalms are eschatological, as if they are written after the event and they're celebrating the triumph of God's restoration and giving him eternal praise in the restored Zion.

It had to be written then, but it's for future use. And so picture Israel celebrating this God that has brought it back out of dungeons and out of desperate places and darkness because they will be cast in the farthermost corners of the earth.

The powers of darkness want to either destroy them or to keep them as far from Zion as they can be kept because their restoration will be the end of the false usurping powers of the air. Because the Lord himself, it says in Acts 3 .21, is contained in the heavens.

He has imposed upon himself a restraint out of his own wisdom and faith until all that has been spoken by the prophets of restoration will be fulfilled. Read Acts 3 .21, and the church in its typical usurping, what's the word, misappropriating arrogance has taken a literal statement about Israel and turned to take it to itself.

The prophets spoke nothing about a restoration of the church, but God knows one is needed and will not come until the church will humble itself and receive the centrality of Israel in the plan of God and bless the Lord for it and agree with it out of their hearts.

Israel represents the last bastions of want of surrender on the part of the church. It measures that, though it doesn't know it. When it says they don't deserve it, it's really saying something about a lack of an appropriation of the grace of God for itself.

Israel, the Church, and the Mystery of Grace

It's not unlike the prodigal son and the older brother. You remember that the father ran to greet the son so grateful for his return and he did not withhold from him, letting him go and being reduced by his own misuse of his freedom till the time he was eating the scruff with the pigs.

And he says, my father's servants do better than this. I'll go back if he'll have me. Well, the father already had him. He ran to greet him with a robe, with a ring, with a kiss, and with a feast. But the older brother was, what's the word, outside and refused to come in.

Look at the depth of this obstinacy and powdered and you never did this for me and you're doing it for him and he squandered his substance. And the father said, but don't you know that all that I have has always been yours?

Evidently he didn't know and we don't know it either because if we knew it, we would have a largesse of soul and a magnanimity full of grace to welcome back this prodigal son without any thought that it would mean for us a loss of our privileged place with excuse me listen i'm a jewish believer can you understand i resented and resisted this revelation.

I was so centered in the church that i looked upon the restoration of israel as somehow threatening the church and its glory because unto him be glory in the church. So who are these upstarts coming back out of a history of apostasy to become central.

But the lord showed me hey cool it. There's plenty of glory both for my church and for my nation. The fact of the matter is that they have reciprocal and similar but uniquely different rewards. Yes the restored israel does not receive a glorified body.

It receives an extension of natural life where if a child dies of an infant at the age of a hundred it's considered an abnormality and much blessing on the land and its increase. But the church is glorified literally glorified.

We are raised up we are given bodies of a kind that fit us for our millennial and eternal destiny which is to ascend and descend upon the son of man. Remember what jesus said to nathaniel. I saw you standing under the tree.

I saw you mourning and lamenting the loss of israel's dignity and call and the seeming hopelessness of the situation. The way some of us often feel about the church. Oh thou art the christ. Thou art the son of god.

You're the king. You saw that you must be the holy one the awaited one he said. And i'll show you something greater he should have said. I'll show you the greatest angels ascending and descending upon a son of man.

He was making making an allusion to the same thing that jacob saw in his dream. That is the consummation of the a people who are in a transcendent condition where they can move through the dimensions that are both earthly and heavenly in their governmental function.

You remember how aggravated paul was when he saw two corinthians going to the court of law to settle a dispute between them. Going to a civil court. He said. What are you guys up to. What. What are you doing.

You're going to the court of law to resolve a difference between you let the least of those in the church handle that dispute. Don't you know he said. You're going to rule over agents. Don't you know.

You're going to rule over nations. They didn't know and we don't know. So we have a millennial and eternal destiny in keeping with the theocratic rule of god established with israel's restoration and the lord's return which is the fulfillment of all that the prophets have spoken.

We need not be jealous. In fact it'll be in in compliance with and in accord with their with israel's earthly place. And we in our heavenly place. Everyone says when the fullness of the gentiles be come in so all israel shall be saved.

What is the fullness of the gentiles. A people for his name from among all nations. And evidently a certain number that can be fulfilled. And i'm just i don't say this as thus sayeth the lord but as an opinion that the number is specific and relates to the vacancies in the heavenly places where the usurping and fallen angels had continued in their gift and call which is irrevocable but had misused it to become the gods of this present world and to turn the allegiance of men away from god into themselves.

You know you can't understand nazism or mass tribal genocide in africa any of the other things without understanding the place of these powers as they affect nations. But they are going to be cast out of the heavens.

Who then replaces them. Who's qualified to rule. That's why paul said some will rule over five cities and some over 10. On what basis. On the basis of your overcoming life in this world and in the context of last day's persecution where our reward is not just a cloud with a heart maybe you like that but actual participation in the government of god from the heavenly place while israel is operating from the earthly place.

And for the first time at the end of history and at the commencement. What makes the millennium. The millennium an agreement between heaven and earth from the earth to restore israel in concert with god and his purposes as sons who have no purpose for themselves but to glorify the father and to bring the benevolent rule of god to the nations.

And the wisdom of god. When we talk about government in the biblical sense we're not talking about bureaucracy shuffling papers or self-aggrandizement. We're talking about making known the essential wisdom of god on how to live how to be merciful how to be wise in the depths and intricacies of relationships and conflict.

We can bring that to nations. How. Because we've learned those lessons in the church. Our church was not just a succession of sunday services. It was meeting real issues head-on face-to-face and looking either an eyeball to eyeball and dealing and learning from those experiences.

We didn't shun it. It's our school. And we'll graduate and have rulership with him in proportion to the expertise the knowledge and the humility that has been gained in this life. Because we cannot rule except we rule in the spirit of the lamb himself.

Amen. And that's why israel itself as a nation has got to be broken. Because now it is so arrogant. But it's brokenness that has to do with servanthood. And that's why israel itself must walk the road to calvary of its servant lord before them.

The same kind of thing they'll pass to the nations. There'll be no beauty that any will desire them. It'll be marred more than any man. When you read isaiah 53 you come to a place in the chapter where the text shifts and it's no more the prophet narrated describing someone broken.

But it's the nation itself speaking. Oh he was wounded for our transgressions. Oh with his stripes we are healed. Oh now we understand that he was stricken by god and spittin. And we thought that what.

What makes them change. What makes them see what they had not seen till now. And must say to understand their messiah and his suffering in relationship to his servanthood. It's their own suffering. It's their own road to calvary.

It's their own rejection. It's their own being despised. And that ties in with matthew 25 with the issue of judgment. For the nations is one thing only that separates the sheep from the goats. What did you do for the least of these.

So i know that i know that i know that there's a coming time where a nation shall be brought into humiliation and death first in israel itself which we could not possess because the possession of the land is relative to the relationship with the lord.

And our ability to keep his covenant will not have the land except as gift except as inheritance except on the basis of a covenant keeping ability that god will give us when he makes for us a new covenant of an everlasting kind which you as believers have already received.

And that covenant will never again be broken. It's everlasting. How come. Because it has nothing to do with our jewish ability of covenant keeping. Here's what makes it new not its content but its fulfillment.

I will write my law in your hearts. I will be your god. You will know me. It will no longer be one teaching another. You will all know me from the least to the greatest. And so that's the desired conclusion.

Israel's Restoration and the Church's Responsibility

When israel is brought first through terrible devastation and sifting that is appropriate to its call and destiny. You can't be a servant. What does that. What does it mean a servant. It's not some officious guy throwing his weight around who has the credentials and you better heed me.

Or else because i'm jewish i'm miserable. It's someone broken grateful even to be able to breathe who by every reckoning deserves eternal obliteration and somehow has not only been saved and delivered and whose national identity is still preserved but is called to the honorific place of serving the most high god as priest with him that can come under the people that they're going to serve.

So can you imagine jews bringing the gospel to jordan to to iran iraq to their present enemies to palestinians to those now where a good arab is a dead arab and bringing it with compassion with mercy with love that will take the profoundest brokenness that any nation has ever experienced.

And in fact they wrote the the repentance that comes to israel in zechariah 12 when we shall see him whom we have pierced. Picture an expulsion of a nation some residue remaining behind which has always been the case in every expulsion.