K-058 Restoring the Tabernacle of David — Art Katz

The Literal and Grammatical Sense of Prophecy

Interpretation is that scripture should be taken in its first evident and grammatical sense in the context in which it is given. If it does not make sense in that context, then we're at liberty to seek another.

And I think that using that hermeneutical principle, that God means Mount Zion, that he's speaking about a literal Israel because he speaks about those that are halt and lame whom he has afflicted cannot be a reference to the church, and that with that people he shall establish his reign in Mount Zion from henceforth even forever.

That it's not a transient or a passing thing, but a once and for all and eternal would help us to understand the vehemence and the bitterness of the powers who are not just temporarily set back, but finally and once and for all eternally done in.

And that God himself will reign over them in Mount Zion may be an offense to some that the manifest demonstrable living God as king will actually preside and rule in a certain locus on the earth with a particular people, that the word of the Lord shall go forth out of Jerusalem and the law of God out of Zion.

So that the issue of a restored Israel is not just a question of God's mercy toward an historically apostate nation, but the issue of God's divine rule over his creation. And that's what complicates and makes it so massive an issue.

By the establishing through them of a promised theocratic kingdom initiated by the return of the kingdom of kings whose coming precipitates their repentance and conversion, they shall see him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for one's only son.

That the nation Israel that becomes the agent in league with their king in making manifest his rule is not the Israel that we presently know. It's a remnant, powerfully disfigured, made lame and halt by the severity of God's dealing toward them.

And that the remnant that survives the process and the power of the depth of repentance and conversion that will be theirs is another people altogether. One that we could hardly imagine so sanctified by the depth of God's dealings that every family apart mourning, that there will not have been a sorrow and a grief and a repentance as deep in the history of the church as the bellow and cry that shall afflict this people in the moment of the Lord's revealing.

We need to adjust our mindset because we can be so very easily influenced by Israel as it presently is and not understand the transfigured people whom God will employ as the instrumentality of his kingdom.

And by the way, the church that will be transfigured in the very necessity of being God's instrument toward Israel's restoration, as I will speak about later on. Little wonder if this is true, that if the issue of Israel's restoration is the issue of God's theocracy and divine rule, that the heathen rage and imagine vain things.

The Davidic Throne and the Promised Kingdom

But from the very first angelic pronouncement to Mary in Luke 1 verses 31 through 33,. And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. And he shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.

And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end. That's the first angelic pronouncement to Mary that very much underlines the issue of God's divine government and the fulfillment of the promise made to David that out of his loins one would come who would be a king.

It's a fulfillment of what is spoken of familiarly in Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6 and 7. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and a government shall be upon his shoulder. And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end. And I want to underline these words tonight in the context of which I'm speaking. Upon the throne of David, to order it and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even forever, the zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

So that fulfills the prophetic promises of God and the national expectation of Israel, which is expressed or reflected even in the comment of the disciples of Jesus in his 40-day tenure in his resurrected body when they very legitimately asked him, and is this now the time to restore the kingdom to Israel?

And if the Lord ever had an opportunity once and for all to nullify the validity of that question and to say, when will you guys ever learn that you have completely misunderstood in your carnality and selfish nationalism to think that my kingdom would be confined to any limitation such as pertains to your people or your nation or your boundaries?

He had it at that time, but he did not rebuke them. He did not nullify the question as being invalid. He merely set it aside, so to speak, for a fulfillment at a later time. Because I believe that the whole tenor of scripture indicates in its evident sense that God intends that literal rule in that literal place as the fulfillment of the Davidic promise for a kingdom.

Ezekiel’s Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration

Ezekiel 37 is a prophetic reference of the same thing that indicates a future fulfillment, talking about the valley of dry bones and a nation being restored from death. Verse 21,. Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whether they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land.

And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all, and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all, neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions.

But I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them. So they shall be my people, and I will be their God. And David my servant shall be king over them, and they all shall have one shepherd.

They also shall walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them. And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers dwelt. And they shall dwell therein, even they and their children, and their chosen children for ever.

And my servant David shall be their prince for ever.". Again seems to confirm, yet again, the statements of God about a literal return, a literal rule over literal people in a literal place, called the Davidic kingdom, and he shall be their prince, I'm sorry, for ever.

Moreover, I will make a covenant with them, it shall be an everlasting covenant, none other than what we call the New Testament, the one and the same, coming to them under the title of the everlasting covenant, and bringing them into the bond of God.

There's something about the modern mind that is scandalized, as I've said, about such particularities of place, people, time, that wants to remove the offense by spiritualizing it or allegorizing it away, which has been the characteristic treatment of the church in modern times toward these prophetic verses.

And I believe that it was this that Paul had in mind when he said in Romans 11, that I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren. What's the mystery? The mystery is the re-emergence of Israel in the latter days and at the end of time.

For lest you become wise in your own conceit, and not the least of that conceit has been the way in which we have handled these prophetic scriptures and found cunning and rich ways to employ them as it pertains to the church.

And I myself have done so, and I want to say that it's a rewarding use of scripture, and a provocative one, and a rich one, because the scriptures are so generous and rich in their meanings that it is not out of place to make such applications, to say that Zion is the church.

But what I want to say is this, we have a first obligation to apply the scripture in the intent in which God first gives it, namely in its grammatical and literal sense. Then we may be free to find an application in a metaphorical or allegorical way that could be rich, stimulating, and profitable.

But to substitute the latter for the former is doing despite to the word of God. And not only that, it leaves us unprepared for the anticipation of the very things that are being described, let alone the role that God intends and that is reserved uniquely for us as the church to fulfill.

But why should we not operate by a sound historically accepted hermeneutical first principle? I'm just repeating myself, receiving the word first in its evident grammatical and contextual sense and while still acknowledging its possible richness and application to other things as a secondary application.

Israel’s Restoration and the Glory of God

So in a very important way then, the issue of Israel's national redemption becomes also the issue of the veracity of the word, the issue of God's honor, because it deals with his covenant promises and therefore becomes the issue of God.

And finally, if it is to be fulfilled, it becomes the issue of his glory. All the more that he does all these things with the least promising of all natural candidates, a apostate and backslidden and unrepentant nation.

And if he cannot honor his promises to Israel, it raises the question about his promises to the church. What confidence can we have in a word of God that is no longer valid for them and yet somehow is applicable and appropriate for us?

God is consistent and that this kind of double dealing with the word of God I think has not served his interest in the church historically. So to honor his promise to a people, and I want to enlarge upon that about their present character that will indeed become embarrassingly worse, but if he cannot honor it for Israel in their hopelessly abandoned and destitute and forsaken condition as a despised people, is it all the more the issue of his power, which is the issue of his glory.

We need somehow to catch a sense of what is the stratagem of God and what is this final and last day's issue as was raised in the questions pertaining to apostles and prophets. Why the reemergence of apostles or Old Testament type prophets?

And I can paraphrase the question, why the reemergence of Israel? Because God has an agenda, because God has a purpose, and the purpose is to the demonstration of the eternal praise of his glory. It's his glory while it's demonstrated in the last days, but of such a monumental kind that it reverberates eternally.

How do we presume to be prophetic and not understand that, not welcome that, not participate in that, and not instruct the church in the things that should be central to its own understanding if this is God's stratagem at the end of the age to this people, and that the whole testimony to support it comes in the prophetic scriptures, and yet consider ourselves prophetic and hope for a church of prophetic constituency, which as I will show you at the end of my remarks is the absolute issue of Israel's restoration at the end.

The condition of the church is the absolute determinant of whether or not there's going to be this fulfillment. God has so established it, though he could have done it sovereignly and independently of the church.

The church is his agent, because in employing the church, something of necessity must occur with it that transfigures it in order to fulfill its mandate toward this people. As for example, in Romans 11, have they stumbled that they should fall?

That is to say, be permanently forsaken and out of the purposes of God? God forbid, Paul says. But through their fall, salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. And we only need to contemplate the condition of the church, even in its best condition.

And if we have any rudimentary knowledge of Jews to know that the best of our present condition is not at all yet calculated to begin to impress, let alone to move this severest of all critics, the enemies of the gospel for our sake, to jealousy.

That is to say, if we were to take the mandate seriously, we have an incentive of which there is no other given by God that compels us to a quality of life and confession and character that can, while at the same time moving them to jealousy, remarkably qualifies us for our eternal destiny, which is to rule and to reign with him from heavenly places.

There's a mystery here. There's a purpose here. And we need prophetically to understand it. So can the church be prophetic and miss this, let alone be opposed to it, is the question that I'm raising tonight.

The Church’s Veil and the Mystery of Israel

It's remarkable how voluminous the scriptural evidence is for such a restoration, and yet it remains unseen by the church. One would suspect a veil over the heart of the church of a kind equal to the veil that is over the heart of Israel.

We are, as a church, as blind to the mystery of God toward that people as that people is with regard to the Messiah and to their own scriptures. That veil needs to be removed. And I believe that this is the set time to favor Zion, and that God is in process of removing it.

And just biographically to say this, lest you think that I'm making these statements by virtue of being a Jew, I want you to know that I've been a Jew for 61 years and a Jewish believer for 26 years, but that this has not been part of my understanding until the last three or four years, that I'm speaking it by virtue of not being Jewish and defending some kind of vested self-interest, but I'm speaking it as a prophetic man to whom God has given some measure of revelation of this mystery.

I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest you be wise in your own conceit. It's a mystery, and therefore cannot be made known by virtue of our, what shall I say, intelligence or a mental examination of scripture.

That somehow there's a remarkable veiling, though there is a prolific weight of evidence even with that. And even being students of the scripture, somehow there's a way until it's revealed because mysteries must be revealed.

And I believe that that time is coming, the Lord is removing the veil because it is so central not only for Israel, but particularly for the church. And I just want to go on record saying a statement that I make very often in speaking of this.

In my opinion, there is no way for the church to come into the maturity and the constituency and configuration of God's apostolic and prophetic intention independent of the mandate that God has expressly intended for it with this people Israel.

Isaiah’s Vision of a Glorified Zion

Let's take a look. There's almost an embarrassment of riches. You can almost open the book at the prophets at random and chapter after chapter after chapter speak of such a restoration. But to leap into Isaiah chapter 60, catch a sense of what is reiterated again and again and again.

Interesting that in my New American Standard, the title in italics over chapter 60 says a glorified Zion. And when it begins with familiar verses of a rise and shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you for behold, darkness will cover the earth, deep darkness, the peoples, the nations, that is to say, but the Lord will rise upon you and his glory will appear upon you and nations will come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Now, I know that we have liberally used this in reference to ourselves as the church and I'm not denying that there's an application that has a validity, but we must not for that reason deny its first application to a people who's rising at a time of global darkness is yet a more dramatic, cogent, and glorious expression of God's dealing.

And that as I hope to show you as we read on here, that this can no way be construed to mean the church if we see it in the context of all that is said in this chapter. Lift up your eyes round about and see, verse four, they all gather together, they come to you.

Your sons will come from afar and your daughters will be carried in the arms. Then you will see and be radiant and your heart will feel and rejoice because the abundance of the sea will be turned to you, the wealth of the nations will come to you.

Many references in Isaiah and elsewhere in the prophets of this people being brought from afar, your sons and daughters will be brought from afar, from Egypt and from Cush and from other nations of the Middle East and the coastlands and the places to which I have driven you.

That is perfectly in keeping with the secular history of Israel known to all, that we have been a people in exile and I have a sense, and I won't say it as a thus saith the Lord, and I don't think that our exilic experience is yet finished.

I believe there's yet a calamitous conclusion to come that will fall upon my kinsmen in the Middle East and yet perhaps another expulsion, though they have said never again, and they will find themselves again one last time and he'll call his sons from Egypt one last time and from Cush and those places and his sons and his daughters, that is to say the saved remnant from among them, will be brought from afar.

That's why there's a radiance, that's why sighing and mourning shall pass away. When the redeemed of the Lord are returned to Zion, having been there previously as the unredeemed and the unregenerate and if I can say it, the presumptuous, thinking that by their own Jewish prowess, and is there any other nation who is more qualified to have such thoughts, that by our prowess and our ability and our expertise and our energy, we would establish our own state and call it Zion.

But of course the socialistic Zionism is a very different kind of Zion than the one that is prophetically to be fulfilled by the power of God alone, when his people are so destitute, so afflicted, so driven out, so without hope, that only the power of God can be the factor of their return and then you shall know in that day that I am the Lord who has both spoken this and performed it.

They must know that, else they cannot be the blessing to the nations that God intended they should. What then shall their message be if they would have established themselves by their own prowess, namely Jewish virtue, Jewish brilliance and Jewish ability, which has not one whit of redemptive power in it.

But to bring the message of a God of mercy who saves us from desolation and forsakenness and affliction and restores us and makes us a people upon whom his light shines and his glory is to be seen, is a message of yet another kind.

Verse 7 ends, all the flocks of Kadar will be gathered together to you, the rams of Nabaloth will minister you, they will go up with acceptance on my altar and I shall glorify my glorious house. At the end of verse 9 again talks about, surely the coastlands will wait for me and the ships of Tarshish will come first to bring your sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them for the name of the Lord your God and for the Holy One of Israel because he has glorified you.

The issue of Israel's restoration is not the issue of the restoration of an ethnic people, it's the issue of God's glory. And if there's anything that distinguishes apostolic and prophetic men above any and all other considerations it's this, the profoundest jealousy for the glory of God.

No accident that Romans 11 ends with a pain of praise, P-A-E-N, where Paul breaks the limits of language and cries out all the depth both of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God who has been his counselor because Paul glimpses in the mystery of Israel a design of God, an agenda of such a kind that not only has God glorified in the restoration of a nation seen as forsaken and desolate by all the nations of the earth, a testimony therefore to the nations, but that the instrument which he has used for their restoration by whom they have obtained mercy is itself an exalted body and glorifies God not only in time but in eternity.

Israel as the Object of Mercy and Prophetic Fulfillment

All the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How do we know that these verses are pertaining to the church? Haven't we used them liberally in that way? Verse 10, foreigners will build up your walls and their kings will minister you for in my wrath I struck you and in my favor I have had compassion upon you.

That can never be a statement of the church. Only Israel has provoked God to wrath and in his wrath has he struck them. And yet he says for a little while but then I will console you and comfort you, comfort you my people for they have suffered double for their sins, for their transgressions.

Verse 14, they will call you the city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel. They will call you. Verse 16, you will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the breast of kings, then you will know that I the Lord am your savior and your redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob.

The same phrase about the God of Jacob to whose house we shall go when his hill is established over all the other hills in the Latter days. The house of the God of Jacob who is also the mighty one of Jacob, the savior and the redeemer and they will know it when he brings them back from all the places where they have been dispersed.

When they will have the Lord for an everlasting light and their God for their glory. Verse 19, verse 20, for you will have the Lord for an everlasting light and the days of your mourning will be finished.

Then all your people will be righteous. They will possess the land forever that I may be glorified. I remember how my first year as a believer was virtually wasted because I brought to the scripture the same gifts and mentality that I employed as a university student on secular literature.

I thought that I had to bring my interpretive gifts to the scripture that I used in assessing Shakespeare and found out after a year of spinning my wheels that I was going nowhere. The day that my life began to turn in a significant way toward God and the formative things of God began was the day in which I began to take the word of God at its face and value in its evident grammatical sense.

And I believe that what I experienced will be the experience of the church when they consider this. I wonder if our faith books, I know that the factors are complex that would indicate why it is that we have been so long obstructed in understanding what seems to me to be the evident truth of the restoration of such a people.

Clearly Israel afflicted in the wrath and judgments of God and yet restored and will be glorified by him. And how shall they be glorified? Because he becomes their everlasting light. He becomes present and this fits with all of the other scriptures that he will dwell with them and will be their king.

Can we accept that? Does our faith stagger at the literalness of such a fulfillment? All the more when as we watch what is presently happening with this people in that place and in the earth, it seems less capable of fulfillment, which is all the more reason why God will be glorified in the doing.

Zephaniah 3 .15, the king of Israel, the Lord is in your midst. We sing this. The Lord your God is in your midst. He will exalt over you with joy. Praise God that the church enjoys singing such choruses and finds an application for itself.

But I'll tell you what, there's a greater joy and a greater delight and a greater glory and a greater honoring to sing that with the understanding that it does not in its first application mean us but them.

The Tabernacle of David as the Davidic Kingdom

And I can go on to give scriptures about how from the very beginning the whole issue of the tabernacle of God is the issue of God's presence with his people. And in mercy shall the throne be established and he shall sit upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David, judging and seeking judgment and hasting righteousness.

I don't want to take time to speak about the way in which we have considered charismatically the tabernacle of David as being the issue of the restoration of Davidic worship. And as much as I enjoy and applaud that restoration, I believe that there's a deeper meaning that has been lost to us and that has been a typical expression of our chutzpah as the church, the conceit of the church to think that so great a thing as the restored tabernacle that has fallen down is the issue of worship.

It shows how much we have missed that is, in my opinion, the issue of the Davidic kingdom, the theocratic government of God that has fallen down and will be raised up again in the coming of the king and that all nations will come to it.

That's not to deny the importance of worship, but it's to assert the first meaning of those scriptures, I believe in Micah, that the tabernacle is nothing other than the dwelling place of God on the holy hill of Zion, which is also at the same time the locus of his government and of his rule.

Psalm 102 and the Church’s Love for Zion

Psalm 102, excuse me for dipping into different versions here. Verses 8, my enemies reproach me all the day. They that are met against me are sworn against me for I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping because of thine indignation and thy wrath, for thou hast lifted me up and cast me down.

It's clearly God's judgment and wrath upon this people. But in verse 13, thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion. Isn't it interesting that the word mercy is the predominant word in Romans 11 with regard to the role of the church toward Israel, that by your mercy they may obtain mercy.

Where did Paul get the theme of mercy, but from the very scriptures that we're now considering. Thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion, for he will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. That's the long and the short of it, for he is who he is and he will be whom he will be.

For the time to favor her, yea, the set time is come. For thy servants take pleasure in her stones and favor the dust thereof. So the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord and all the kings of earth thy glory.

When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory. These few verses deserve such exegetical attention. And just to make a few suggestions because I have not the time. It looks like that the word for thy servants take pleasure is not merely an acknowledgement of something congruent with God coming to have mercy on Zion, but the very thing that releases that mercy or that expresses that mercy.

That when something in the church will take place that has a pleasure in her stones and favors her and the dust thereof, something is released in the operation of God by which his mercy comes to that people.

It's a causative factor and not a mere accompaniment to Israel's restoration. In the same way that so the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord. By seeing these things, the fear of God, his judgment and his mercy, his goodness and severity is so pronounced and writ large that the fear of the Gentiles toward him is affected.

And the kings of the earth by glory, when, when the Lord shall build up Zion, and I'm saying that that Zion is that literal hill in that literal place with that literal people in the Davidic messianic theocracy, when he shall appear in his glory.

When thy servants take pleasure in her stones is something to dwell upon. I think we can all just frankly admit as servants of the word and lovers of truth that there has not been a conspicuous love affair between Gentiles and Jews historically and even to this hour.

That even in our truest moments when we examine our own hearts toward this people, I'm speaking now as a man of the church rather than of my own nativity, that there's something about a Jew that is not calculated to warm the cockles of our hearts.

There's something about Jews that is abrasive. We had a little taste of that this morning. Something irritating. Something about their success. Something about their very nature, their aggressiveness that I don't believe is inadvertent or accidental.

I believe that they are created in the very image of God. More for the testing and the purifying of our hearts than perhaps any other purpose that is served by that makeup. When will her dust have favor in our sight and her stones?

We have come to such a place beyond, what shall I say, charismatic fascination with the mystique of Israel or liking the toughness of the Israeli or whatever it is that has appealed to the church up to now.

None of that will stand the test of time. This is a much deeper affection, namely that of God himself who has inscribed them in the palms of his hands and will not allow the seasons to cease without fulfilling his word for them.

That maybe the very issue of Israel for the church is the issue of God. Our proximity to him, the knowledge of his heart and the union with his heart in loving what he loves and hating what he hates despite every natural and antagonistic and irritating factor to the contrary.

A church that can rise above the natural and the inflammatory and the irritating and the vexatious to love a people whom all the world is coming to despise and to love the stones and the dust thereof because we know that in that stones and dust is the issue of his soon coming and his reign and his glory is another church.

And it's a church for which God is waiting and will not have independent of this mystery. I want to end tonight with a little reference to Ezekiel 37. We've already looked at it. I want to go back there because I want to end with the implication of all this as I have now several times stated for the church and we all know what that chapter describes.

The Son of Man and the Valley of Dry Bones

An Israel that has become a valley of dry bones, hopeless and so staggering a statement of death and hopelessness that the prophet has to be brought by the spirit down into the valley of dry bones. That however much the prophet is the man of truth, it's a truth of such a grim kind for which even he has not the stomach to consider.

That he needs to be brought by the spirit even as I'm trusting God through such a foolish instrument as this. You who are hearing me and those who hear this tape will be brought by the spirit down from the arrogance and conceit of our own mind and allegorizing of these scriptures to the humbling of ourselves to fall before the truth of them.

So too we need to be a prophetic people like the son of man who is brought by the spirit of God down into the valley which is always a place of depression which is full of bones and he caused me to pass by them round about behold there were very many and they were very dry.

He set me down in the midst of that valley and moved me all about and around. He rubbed the issue of the death of Israel into the face of this prophet significantly called the son of man because if we need to be reminded of anything it is the apparent foolishness and disjuncture of prophetic calling to be mouthpieces for very God in the humanity that we ourselves are that was demonstrated again yesterday by myself.

We are sons of men eminently and always will be and always will be in that tension between the holiness of our calling and the contradictory elements of our humanity and it's in that tension that God yet requires an obedience namely to speak to these bones and to prophesy to them and I appreciate what David has been speaking to us about the nature of prophetic utterance.

This is more than warning, this is more than prophetic exclamation, this is more than information. This is the pro-creative word. This is the word as event and you say well why didn't the God who formed creation by his own word have to employ yet another agent called the son of man because I believe it gives us a picture of what is God's strategy at the end of the age not only for their sake but for ours because I believe if I can say that in my intuitive heart that what God is waiting for and will not act without is a son of man company that is to say the church, the true church, the remnant people of God brought to a full prophetic and apostolic constituency and character and authority whose single speaking, talk about the issue of unity, is not some kind of ecumenical folder role or feigned unanimity but the work of the spirit of God which is no light thing to bring us to an accommodation and an agreement where we speak the same thing and see the same thing and say the same thing.

And it is evident to any man who has any experience in God at all we are not going to come to that place without pain. It is going to take us suffering to bring us from the present islands of opinion that we now constitute to have a unanimity of mind which is one with his that when we speak it will be a word in agreement which is the issue that makes it a word not of information but a word of creation that brings life from the dead into hearing.

That's why Paul was made the apostle to the Gentiles. That's why nine-tenths of my ministry has been to the church because the church is the key to Israel's restoration. A church that is habituated to obedience.

A church whose prophetic faith will stretch but not break when it has to consider that a word from its mouth will bring life to that which is so dead, so forlorn, so utterly bereft of life that it itself says in this text we are cut off, we are without hope, we are dry bones.

With the God I could hold one up tonight and you can feel it in the texture of it, the aridness that turns to powder as you touch it. That's the condition to which God is going to bring us people. Why?

Because we are so much in ourselves, so impressive in the power of our own natural life that the only way that we can be the fulfillment and the blessing to the nations is as Abraham himself whose body was as good as dead to be the people of the resurrection.

But who has the faith to believe for that? And if the word is not spoken in faith, can it be the causative agent to their being brought to life from that condition? In other words, a sham faith, a feigned faith, a faith that is only correct but is not a living faith, a palpable faith, a dynamic faith will fail.