The Compassion of God — Art Katz

God's Mercy as His Very Being

Some statements of Karl Barth about God, that theology is the queen of the sciences, they used to say in Germany, when theology was taught at their universities as one of their faculties of departments, but it was looked upon as the supreme faculties, the supreme form of learning, because it called upon every other discipline.

A true theologian has to understand about history, about philosophy, about ancient religions, about language, and so all of learning is brought to bear on the issue of God. So here's a theologian himself launching out and making some suggestions of how he understands God as the result of his laboring in the word and his own life, his own history, but I think he makes some precious statements and it would be revealing for us.

And we ask that, Lord, we want to be the beneficiaries of what you have invested in this man, who has since passed on, but his work continues, my God, to bless, and so little known, deserving much greater audience than it does, and we ask, Lord, that our knowledge of you might be enhanced and something triggered and released through his own insight and that you lead us on from here, my God, to fiasco or to glory.

We're willing to take the risk, Lord, because the issues are much greater always than reputation, and so we ask that blessing now, in Jesus' holy name, amen. We'll try this on for size. Because grace, the gracious love of God, consists in God's own disposition and nature, it is therefore God himself.

Grace is not an attribute of God, it's God himself. It's what he is in himself. It's not something attached or something that is invoked. It is very God. It is God's very being. His very being is mercy.

And that's why when his mercy is revealed, he is revealed. And his final act in history is exactly that. It's the revelation of God's mercy as it will come to the most undeserving people, Israel. It'll be pure mercy.

In fact, what is mercy if it's deserved? Mercy only means something when it comes to the undeserved and is the pure gift of God, because no qualification from man has evoked it. It's simply God giving himself as mercy.

So the mercy of God lies in his readiness to share in sympathy and the distress of another, a readiness which springs from his inmost nature and stamps all his being and doing. Do you like that? Worth repeating?

But before I repeat it, I want to say this. Everything that Calabar is saying about God is everything that God is wanting in us, that it would be the stamp of our being, that our mercy would not be some kind of exertion of something for the moment, but it would be the expression of what we are through and through, that we are something in the cookie.

What do they say? That when you cut a bologna or a salami, that wherever you cut it, it's the same thing. Through and through, it's consistently the same thing. This is what God is in himself, and the reason that we're interested, among other things, is that this is what he's wanting us to be in ourselves, the thing in itself.

There's a German expression, Ding an sich, the thing in itself. So what is apostolic and what is prophetic? It's the thing in itself. What's a phony and what's a false edition? Someone who affects apostolicity, someone who affects and gives the impression of prophetic authority or insight with a certain kind of flourish.

But the genius of what is prophetic and apostolic is the thing in itself. What God is wanting in the Church is the thing in itself. It's the Word made flesh. It's God written in his people, formed in them, that however you squeeze it and press it or make demand upon it, it cannot help but be other than what itself is.

See what I mean? If it's only an affectation, it's got to run dry. I mean, we could be nice guys for an hour, perhaps. We can keep a Sunday face. But under the stress and duress of the end times, something much more will be required.

Under the stress and duress of what will be imposed upon us by Jews coming in their unregenerate condition, bitter and vexed, and having been suddenly uprooted and having lost everything, again in modern times, how will we respond to that?

It will not be enough merely to try to be patient, try to be kind. It's either we are patience itself and kindness itself, or it will fail. And they will test it. And Israel and the Jew have historically and always been that test for the Church.

It's God's design. And the Church has always failed the test. Always. The greatest of God's men, Luther himself, failed. He ran out of patience. He was the one who had said earlier, I don't blame these Jews for not getting saved.

The way we treat them as Christians, I don't blame them for shrinking from this Gospel. But later on, as he went on and tried to persuade Jews and saw that they were as resistant to the Reformation faith as they were to Catholicism, began really to get to him.

And then finally he felt that they actually threatened the Reformation because of their cynicism and unbelief. It constituted a danger. And then he began speaking in such ways as to equip Hitler four centuries later to actually burn their synagogues, destroy their Torahs, their Talmud.

Everything that he lashed out in his invective, Hitler fulfilled. So if a giant like Luther could collapse before the thing that Jews represent, if the grace of God in him was not sufficient, and he being a giant in the faith, what shall we say?

And there are other examples. Chrysostom, it's called the golden-mouthed orator, and he was a notorious anti-Semite. His apostolic writings are supreme, but when it comes to the Jew, forget it. They vexed him because they were proliferated in all of the Mediterranean communities where the church was having its existence.

And what they were doing was saying, you say you know God and you have found the Messiah, but you've only elected to endorse a criminal who died outside the city limits and you don't even know Hebrew and you profess to be able to understand and to interpret it.

This is our book. And they go on like that, to vex. Who was one of the early martyrs that they burned at the stake and he could not be consumed by fire? Someone had to go in and stab him. Who was that?

Polycarp. When you read the martyrdom of Polycarp, one of the lines that is written in passing is, and the Jews were the first to go out and to seek the combustible materials. It's really interesting.

So what will it take after such a history as that to give them a revelation of their God in some unaffected way, simply by being what he himself is, that they cannot disregard nor gainsay that demonstration and have to become the redeemed of the Lord even against their own historic opposition.

Israel, the Gospel, and the Church's Mission

When Paul says in Romans 11, they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake, he's not playing on words. There has been no more formidable opposition to the gospel and to the church than Jewish opposition.

Not only physically in the persecution of the apostles in the apostolic church, but even the alternative messianic schemes that Jews have composed, like Karl Marx, with Marxism. It's a messianic scheme.

It's an alternative for brotherhood based on a complete material level. What shall we say of psychiatry and Sigmund Freud? An attempt also for the redemption of disturbed souls independent of God. What shall we say of this guy who wrote books on children?

Spock, another Jew. Wherever you look, they have been influential in presenting to mankind alternatives to God's redemption. So in that sense, they're the enemy also. But when you finally have won the enemy, you've won it all.

That's why God says, this gospel is the power of God at the salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. If you can succeed with them, what is there in the Gentile world that will in any way be intimidating?

So don't start where you think you can succeed, out in the boondocks where you're more likely to have success. Start where I was crucified. Begin in Jerusalem, and then unto Samaria to the uttermost corners of the earth.

Begin where it's most difficult. Begin where the persecution against me was most evident. That's a complete contradiction of logic and of reason. We would say begin where it's easiest, and develop confidence, and then finally as a final thing, have a showdown.

Go directly where the opposition is the most severe. Because all authority has been given to me in heaven and earth. Go ye therefore. Don't look at your frailty. Look at my words and what I have promised.

Mercy as Consistent Character

Okay. God's very being is mercy. The mercy of God lies in his readiness to share in sympathy with the distress of another. A readiness which springs from his inmost nature and stamps all his being and doing.

It lies therefore in his will, springing from the depths of his nature and characterizing it. How would you like someone to make a statement about us like that? That what issues from us issues out of the depths of our nature and characterizes it.

If there's anything that contradicts the church, it would be something that would be affected, a put on, a whitewash, an outward and external demonstration, an amen and a hallelujah where there's no real rejoicing in the heart.

Choruses that are mechanical or down on a collection plate that is not given with a generosity of spirit. You see what I mean? If the church has any requirement to be the church, it's got to be the thing in itself, through and through.

But what thing? That which God himself is. And in the last days, in the final showdown, this is what will be tested. And we will be found wanting if we are not in that reality and in that place. So I'm not satisfied.

I'm catching glimpse, but I see too often the infrequency, the lack of consistency. And that's never true of God. He's always the same, yesterday, today, and forever. It's through and through. It's not an externality.

It's not a put on. It's not your best foot forward. It's your foot. It's what you yourself are. And this is what God is after in us. And how far will he go to obtain it? He'll separate a man from his wife only to show him what he would not otherwise have seen.

A kind of longing that almost borders on something illicit, if it affects your disposition in such a way as to throw you off course. That it has a place more than is legitimate in God. Maybe I'm exaggerating.

I'm just playing on something current. But all of us are being found out of where we come to the end of our source in God and begin to exhibit those aspects of our humanity that show he's not yet quite formed in us.

And I appreciate that revelation. Painful. Disconcerting. Embarrassing. Humiliating. But there it is. And God is truth. So he doesn't want to show. And the issues are too great and a show can never succeed in it.

We have got to be what he himself is in himself. So the main point that the meaning of the word grace makes clear is that God's love and grace are not mechanical but have their true seat and origin in the movement of the heart of God.

It is here that we can appreciate the meaning of the idea of personality in God and what has to be defended against the conception of God as some kind of an impersonal deity. We need to struggle to hold fast to God and not to allow some lesser understanding of him that is not him in some abstract way, some formula.

And this expression of God's grace is in the full scope of his own personal freedom. Everything that God is and does is determined and characterized by the fact that there is rooted in him that he himself is this original, free, powerful compassion that this is rooted in his heart in his very life and being as God.

The mercy of God is the reflection of the statement that the Father is the Father of mercies and that Jesus is and that God is rich in mercy. God's mercy is now is new every morning. Remember that? These wonderful scriptures, well much more that can be said along those lines.

I just highlighted some of these precious remarks to remind us that this is what God is in himself. And the text that I hope will be a good foil for this is Psalm 102. We're not going to look at the whole psalm.

The first part of it when you read it at your own leisure sounds like it could have been written by an inmate in a concentration camp. It talks about his skin on his bones and his desolation. My days pass away in verse 3 like smoke.

My bones burn like a furnace. My heart is stricken and withered like grass. I'm too wasted to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning, my bones cling to my skin. I'm like an owl of the wilderness, like a little owl in the waste places.

Verse 9, I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears with my drink. So I don't know why it is. Well maybe I do. I could suggest that this would not be too extreme a description of Jews in their last day's extremity.

It is so reminiscent of what was already experienced in the Holocaust of the Nazi time. And if Jesus said that that which is to come will eclipse any previous suffering, then this would not be an exaggerated summation of the kind of distress to which Jews will be brought in the coming time of Jacob's trouble.

And what we're going to consider then is set in this context. Jews are in their final place of extremity and it's an extreme place where their bread is like mingled with ashes. Their skin clings to their bones.

They're desolate. They're like an owl. They're the most abandoned of all creatures. Why? In verse 10, because of your indignation and anger, for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. So here's a recognition that what is being suffered is not some happenstance, not some kind of aberration in history.

You know this word? As modern commentators are apt to say about the Holocaust, it was a freak incident. If that man Hitler had not lived, it would not have taken place. It's just one of those freaky aberrations, those historical things that happen from time to time for which there's no real explanation.

More of an accident than anything else that has to be suffered. Not so. It was an explicit expression of the sovereignty of God, and more than that, it was the fulfillment of the word of God spoken thousands of years before by Moses.

In Deuteronomy chapter 28 through 32, and in Leviticus 26, and the prophets themselves warned of it and even described some of these last days' sufferings. That at night you will wish it were day. At day you will wish it were night.

The sword will pursue you in terror. The sword from within and the chamber and terror from... The sword from without and the chamber and terror from within. You'll not have that interpretation or that rendering in every edition, but this Bible has it.

Deuteronomy 32 actually uses the word, the terror of the chamber within. And who could not have lived through these historic times since the Holocaust and when you hear the word chamber, immediately it evokes the recognition.

It's the gas chamber. What a suffocation. What a terrifying death. And then it says in Deuteronomy 32 and the young man and the maiden something like will be found on top and beneath the gray-haired and the infant and the suckling.

Exactly the composition of the bodies as they opened the gas chambers. The youngest and the most virile clambered to the top for the last gulp of air before suffocation, but the elderly and the young and the infants were always trampled at the bottom.

Written by Moses thousands of years before the event in Deuteronomy 32 as a warning of what would befall us in the last days. You read the Holocaust book it goes into much more, but just to say that much here that it's incumbent upon the Jews in their last days extremity not to dismiss it as a historical accident or a freaky circumstance, but to see it as coming from the hand of God as a chastisement intended for their good.

And here the psalmist who describes this last days affliction and suffering also acknowledges that it's because of your indignation and anger for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. My days are like an evening shadow I wither away like grass.

So up to this point the psalmist speaking in behalf of his own people and identifying with them is describing the excruciating conditions of their last day trial and extremity. Then he shifts gears but you oh Lord in verse 12 are enthroned forever.

So what can we say then forever includes the Nazi time today and tomorrow. Forever is all time past, present and future and God is enthroned in all time. So everything that has happened in time is the result of that enthronement.

He's sovereign. He rules from heaven and he even rules that Jews should be reduced to this condition. Because it's only out of that reduction and being reduced like this, nigh unto death that there can be any kind of hope for resurrection.

And except that this nation be resurrected, what can be hoped for in the nations? Who was it who was writing about Jonah, is occupied with Jonah? Willie. He's fascinated with Jonah and rightly so. And remembers that in some previous conversation, what is it that brought Nineveh to repentance?

Some scrangly Jew who was trying to flee from the obligation to bring them the word of repentance, did not even want to see them repent. He had it in against them. He would rather see God do them in. And even complained about God as he was sitting under that tree and God had to rebuke him.

But so then how is it that an unwilling servant who was trying to run away from his obligation is nevertheless swallowed up by a great sea creature and spit out on the beach and then reluctantly fulfills his obligation and the entire nation repents in a depth of repentance that has never before been seen historically nor ever since.

Show me a nation that has repented as Nineveh did in that day. That they even prohibited the animals from eating. A fast was declared which not only men had to observe but even their creatures. And I believe they put dust and ashes on their own heads.

I mean it was a repentance of a complete kind. How was that? Because the man who was spit up out on the beach having been three days in the belly of the whale was three days in the grave. And when he came up on that beach he came up as the man of the resurrection.

And nothing is going to precipitate an authentic response to God but that. And if Israel is going to be the nation's that, it must come to them in a resurrected form. And the only catch about resurrection, more of us would be wallowing in resurrection, is that it must be preceded by death.

And Hosea says he has stricken but now he will make us alive. And hereafter we will live before him. That's real living. Resurrection life is life. That's definitive life. Anything less than resurrection life is, what can we say, a facsimile thereof.

It's an intimation or an approximation but it's not the real thing. The only real thing is resurrection. And it's necessary for Israel and the purposes of God to come into that mode and therefore a death must precede it.

You, O Lord, are enthroned forever. Some purpose is being served in your enthronement that will glorify your name because your name will endure to all generations. Now we come to the part that I want to dwell upon.

Compassion on Zion at the Appointed Time

You will rise up and have compassion on Zion. You're not going to just find it in that moment. You have always had compassion because you are compassion. You are mercy even when Zion is going through its affliction.

You have not become all of a sudden stony hearted. You're not some impersonal deity who can look down with contempt as your people are groaning because you said in all of our afflictions you're afflicted.

You identify, you share in that suffering. You're not some impersonal deity that detaches himself from something through which your people need to pass. You're in and with your people in that thing. That's what you are as God.

That's what compassion is. Come, passion. Come means with. How do they graduate? Come laude. That means they graduate with laudatory things with praise, with an acknowledgement for significant achievement.

Compassion means with suffering, with identification. If we're going to be as God we're going to have to be compassionate with Israel in her last days affliction. It's not enough just to clock out tongues and say too bad, what a pity.

Somehow be with them in it as God is with them in it. This is so beyond any kind of sentimental feeling for Israel. In fact it will blow the whistle on sentiment. In that day sentiment will reveal itself for the shabby thing that it is.

An inadequate human response that might impress men for a moment but has no redemptive power. Only compassion does. Compassion is God. It's his mercy. You will rise up. I love that phrase. It sounds very resurrection like.

You will rise up. There will be a manifestation of your life which will be expressed as compassion for it is time to favor her. The appointed time has come for your servants hold her stones dear and have pity on her dust.

The nations will fear the name of the Lord and all the kings of the earth your glory. For the Lord will build up Zion. He will appear in his glory. He will regard the prayer of the destitute. He will not despise their prayer.

Let this be recorded for generations to come so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord. That he look down from his holy height from heaven the Lord looked at the earth to hear the groans of the prisoners to set free those who were doomed to die so that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion and his praise in Jerusalem when peoples gather together and kingdoms to worship the Lord.

That is talk about poetry as being a condensed statement an intensification that if this had to be written out in prose form in what is being said here it would take pages to express. This is the most intensely compressed statement of something that not only is at the heart of last days but through the last days and into the millennial glory and into eternity itself of referring to unborn generations who will praise the Lord for what he will do and exhibit when Israel passes through this extremity having compassion and arising and favoring Zion at a time when Zion doesn't deserve it.

In the midst of her judgments this affliction that Israel suffers is a judgment. It's not some arbitrary thing that God is saying they have to pass through because there's a principle of death that precedes resurrection.

The death is the result of judgment that is deserved for historic sin, for recent sin and the sin of our fathers never acknowledged. So he's just in that but he's also compassionate in that but the question is what releases God to finally have mercy on Zion and to turn the situation around so as to bring a praise to his name that unborn generations looking back on his coming forth at that time will forever celebrate him.

This is in keeping with Paul's conclusion of Romans 11 or the depth of the riches for unto him be glory forever. Something happens in point of time at the end of the age but it's a happening of such a magnitude and kind that generations to come will have occasion to honor God in the remembrance of it.

What's the something that in the midst of the most terrible afflictions of judgment when this people are nigh unto death and even into death and groaning as prisoners. This is not fanciful. Jews are going to find themselves in chains.

We're going to find ourselves in dungeons and in dark places of absolute hopelessness cast away in the father most remote corners of the world where only God himself can bring a release and a deliverance and a return to Zion from that abject condition.

This is the worst that Israel has ever known and ever experienced. Jesus said that that if this time were not cut short no flesh would survive. But it's in that time that God suddenly arises and says the set time has come.

It is finished. Now it comes the time of release and deliverance having nothing to do with their deserving. They're in a judgment that they deserve but I will arise and have mercy on Zion and deliver them even the captive, even the one in the dungeon even the one in chains.

I'll bring him back. And when you read the prophets the phrase I will, I will I will just hits you between the eyes. What a difference between a Zionist return which men affect by their own wealth their own energy, their own skill hiring planes and bringing people back as against I will I will return you I will bring you out, I will deliver you.

Why is that important? Because it's literal and when God will it cannot be done without being done before the face of all nations. They are going to see the extremity of God's judgment but they're going to see also the extremity of God's mercy and to see God both in judgment and in mercy is to see God.

Paul says in Romans 11 Oh the severity and the goodness of God. This is what God is in severity but also in mercy and that his mercy takes place over his judgment his mercy is supreme even over his judgment and we don't know God unless we make allowance for both.

We spoke this morning in our little prayer time that the fundamental error of all mankind and the church is an inadequate or warped or distorted knowledge of God that maybe we have celebrated certain attributes over others we like kindness, we like goodness, we like love but do we like judgment?

Are we as willing to acknowledge that God in his judgment is as much God as God in his mercy and until we receive God in his totality for what he is in himself have we really received God and if we see God only partially is it really God or are we forming a deity of our own imagining who cannot answer so the revelation of God as he in fact is is the salvation of mankind and it saves them once and for all from their false gods.

It's no longer a question about Allah or Hinduism or any other kind of false or occultic thing the God of Jacob and the God of Israel has once and for all in one last measure revealed himself as being the only God the creator but also the God of Israel Israel's judge but Israel's redeemer.

This is why the issue of the dealings with Israel in the last days is for all mankind and he says again and again it will not be hid in a corner it will be before the face of all nations so the question now before us what is the thing that determines that the set time to favor Zion has come.

The Church as the Key to Israel's Redemption

The question is there's got to come a critical juncture there's got to come a moment when God himself elects to reverse the judgment that he himself has brought and to take a people who have been reduced to nothing by that judgment who deserve to be counted down and out and historically once and for all finished as having any purpose in God having suffered such judgment twice in this century and judgments throughout their history including their expulsion from Israel the destruction of the temple, the loss of the priesthood and that's why what is the letter to the Romans it's Paul's answer to the church at Rome over one question what about Israel?

Is God finished with them? Are we now the Israel of God? Can we safely assume that because they have stoned the prophet sent unto them and destroyed the holy one of Israel, the Messiah that they are finished they're down, they're out they had a calling but they have forfeited it.

I want you to know that there are many segments of the church today who believe that now but they will never quote Romans 11 isn't it remarkable if you leave out just Romans 11 you can make a very good case for saying that God is finished with Israel and history will will commend such a view they deserve to be finished by any human reckoning but this is exactly where God reveals himself as God, he's not making a human reckoning, he's making a divine reckoning that is to say he's acting, speaking and doing out of himself of what he is in himself.

Mercy is not something that God lays on it's what he is and so there comes a time when nothing more will reveal it than the reversal of this judgment that comes in a moment that God himself has chosen and it's such an abrupt turn and so visibly seen that there's no question because prisoners are taken out of their dungeons, the shackles of men are loosed and God will bring them back on litters and on donkeys on the backs and shoulders of kings and queens that the very people who afflicted them will be the people who are bringing them back and lick the dust of their feet and count it a privilege to in any way have served a people who were once so universally despised we're going to see in our generation in these last days Jews universally despised hated with the most bitter vehemence as we saw in the Nazi time like this man who shot up the people there in Los Angeles smiled, the picture of him when he gave himself in, like I'm doing a service I'm alerting the nation, it's time to kill all Jews and I don't want to die before I've performed my measure until it comes, I can talk until I'm blue in the face and you'll not really believe it, you'd have to see it it would help you if you understood the Nazi time it would help you to see the process by which Jews who were so included and formidable in their German society and civilization became progressively non-citizens, they weren't allowed to sit in the parks Jews not welcomed you can't buy in their stores you can't sell to them, finally they're removed from certain professions.

They were professors in universities with long histories of a distinguished kind and having published many books, they're out their books were burned before they were burned. It was a process by which a German civilization was brought to a place of sharing the fanatical and demonical hatred of the Jew that resided in Hitler as so abiding a passion that to the last day of the war and here the military historians can never dope this out the Germans continued to expend manpower and resources in the annihilation of Jews in the factories of extermination instead of employing those things in their own defense that they were so fanatical in the necessity, this compulsion to destroy Jews that it even exceeded their own necessity for defense that's how rabid it was and will yet become they will be universally hated.

There's the rise and fall of Third Reich, William Shira, there's a number of books on the history of the rise of Nazism. I've got a book that is an outstanding gem that I picked up for five cents in a book sale at the Cass Lake Library written by a Jew Fritz, I can't remember his last name now it was his doctoral thesis at Berkeley and what it is, is an examination of Nazism as an occultic phenomenon.

You know what he goes on to show? That the most preeminent leaders of the Nazi movement those who were the ideologues the ones who formed the ideology were almost invariably the disillusioned sons of Protestant ministers.

Isn't that a remarkable thing? It's a statement of a rejection of faith and a launching into its opposite they became demonic and of course Hitler himself. And so that was a dress rehearsal as formidable as that was, six million Jews as well as millions of others being systematically cremated what we're going to see in the last days will eclipse it and I'm reminding myself, who was with me?

Was it Simon or John Parsons? We were at Auschwitz the most notorious death camp in Europe, in Poland and Auschwitz is the German of the Polish word, Auschwium was the Polish town that was a soldier's barracks that the Germans took over and then began the process of annihilation but it was inadequate.

And so three kilometers away from scratch they designed an entire factory of extermination called Birkenau and that was the thing that did me in. The railroad tracks still exist that come through a gate that say Arbeit macht frei your work will free you and they were coming to their death but the lie was over the gate that somehow it's a labor camp you know when some of the first installments of Jews coming to these camps, someone wrote that the women made their faces up with their cosmetics thinking they were coming to some kind of rest camp for the duration of the war and they went right from there directly into the ovens so it's a maniacal thing but to see that Birkenau and the train track going right up through the gate to the place where the gas ovens were, the crematoria and then the barracks for those who were not immediately killed but had served in labor, as far as the eye could see, every building was down but what remains in every place is the foundation and the smokestack and I don't have a word, I have some pictures it's like looking over a vast piece of real estate with the foundations of these barracks in every place in the layout that the Germans plotted in that mentality for which they're so famous their scholarship, what makes German scholarship is the fastidious attention to detail the energy to read and to footnote and to examine is the same energy and persistence to detail that affected a system of human annihilation.

It was a great issue, a problem of logistics how do you kill and dispose six million victims and so as we were walking away that day, John Parsons said if what is to come is to eclipse this Nazi time, how many other camps like this will have to yet exist, not only in Poland or Germany but everywhere in the world where Jews are.

If God does not cut this time short, no flesh would survive, but I would say the greater majority of Jews that are alive in the world today will not survive the time of Jacob's trouble. There will be a surviving remnant.

That means that there are about 10 million Jews in the world today, outside of Israel, and that the great majority of these will perish. Because God says elsewhere, I will bring them out of the nations where they have sojourned speaking about the rebels who have transgressed against me but I will not bring them into the land.

They'll be uprooted but they're not going to make it to Zion. They'll perish in the way. So it boggles the imagination and only the fiercest kind of demonic hatred against the Jew can explain the energy that will systematically see to their annihilation.