K-534 Israel and the Apocalypse (3 of 3) — Art Katz

Israel’s Possible Defeat and Expulsion

I want to review a paper that's called Is There Any Scriptural Support for the Possibility of a Defeat and Expulsion Again of Israel into the Nations? Is there a scriptural support for a possible defeat and expulsion of Israel into the nations?

And the origin of this is that my publisher circulated an Ezekiel 37 tape as the tape of the month and called me one day and told me how much he was moved by it. He said, but there's one flaw, he said.

You make a passing reference to the possibility that Israel might have to experience a defeat and an expulsion from the nation. He said, I can't see that. I don't see that in script. He said, that's a flaw that might turn people off from an otherwise good message.

He said, now if you see it, please let me know, but I don't see it. So I just put aside his letter. We didn't have time then to take it up. Three days later, three o 'clock in the morning, boom, I woke up my eyes up and I went right to the word processor and I typed in the title that I've just read to you.

And by faith, I rolled up my sleeves and opened the scriptures to put up or shut up on this issue. The time had come when I could no longer just intimate a possibility. Either there was a scriptural basis for it or I should not make reference to it because I had been saying that whatever it takes to affect a death, that God will do in order to obtain a resurrection.

Even if the mourning and sighing is the loss of the nation itself. So now we're exploring that. And now after we've had the first part of the morning that we have, I think you'll now be able to follow me as I read through this.

The Prophetic Pattern of Israel’s Judgment and Restoration

So first I want to reiterate a series of principles or statements that you're going to find reiterated again and again in the prophets on the pattern of Israel's last days experience that eventuates in entering into the millennial blessing.

The last days restoration of Israel to the land and to her God is set forth almost invariably in the prophetic scriptures in an apocalyptic context of an evidently recently experienced calamity and devastation.

Not past calamity, but a recently experienced calamity right up to the point of restoration and establishment as the millennial nation. The magnitude both of the judgment and the restoration is of such a kind that not only Israel but the nations are obliged to recognize God as its author.

The magnitude of what shall come is of such a kind that no one will dismiss it to say, well this is just a political squabble. It's clearly the work of God and it's the work of God as judgment. The judgment as an exile out of the land is at the point of violence and is an exact proportion to the iniquity of the nation.

This is a very important point. Otherwise, the implication is that God is capricious and unjust and that he brings the devastation just for the point of bringing it. It affects many purposes, but it is in proportion to Israel's own iniquity and sin.

And there are many scriptures that show that where God himself says it, so much as to say you have brought this on yourself and this is an exact proportion to your sin. And if you receive publications from Israel, you can see that that sin is mounting morally and in every way.

In fact, I'm learning from believers that they're taking their kids out of Israeli schools as no longer being tenable. That the schools are such an incitement to sin and to rebellion and scandalous behavior that some of them even have had to leave the nation to have their children educated elsewhere.

We Jews have always been the avant-garde, you know, the advance, when it comes to modernity and the latest teaching and innovation, that's where we are. And Israel is evidently rife with that spirit, even in its schools.

The judgment as an exile, so is an exact proportion to the iniquity of the nation. The nations that perform it also make captive at great humiliation and suffering its victims and later receive at God's hand an exact retribution in devastation to themselves.

So how can we know that what we're reading prophetically is a statement of Israel's past or yet a future devastation to come? One of the ways we can know it is that the nations that are employed to bring that devastation bring upon themselves their own devastation because they go beyond God's chastening to exact the humiliation and the suffering from its victims.

So the emphasis upon dwelling securely and none making them afraid of sighing and mourning, fleeing away, indicates both the extremity through which this remnant of survivors has passed and the recentness of the experience still fresh in their memory.

Why does God say, I'll wipe away every tear or you will dwell securely in the land or none shall make you afraid? Because evidently, right till the time of their deliverance, that's what they're experiencing.

They're being made afraid. They're insecure. They are fleeing. The near annihilation from which they have been saved, the utter hopelessness of their condition as captives in the hands of vengeful peoples who relish their advantage over them makes clear the supernaturalness of their deliverance and return at the hand only of their God.

Their condition is so utterly hopeless, then they've not only suffered defeat, but they're suffering humiliation. We can look for a moment, Isaiah 51 and 52, it's remarkable, you know, to read this about in verse 17 of 51, Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which has drunk of the hand of the Lord, the cup of his fury, thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling and wrung them out.

There is none to guide her among all the sons whom she hath brought forth, neither is there any that taketh her by the hand of all the sons she has brought up. These two things are come upon thee, and who shall be sorry for thee, desolation and destruction and the famine and the sword?

By whom shall I comfort thee? Thy sons have fainted. They lie at the head of all the streets as a wild bull in a net. They are full of the fury of the Lord and the rebuke of thy God. Therefore, hear now this, thou afflicted and drunken, but not with wine.

Thus sayeth the Lord thy God that pleads the cause of his people, Behold, I have taken out of thy hands the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury, thou shalt no more drink it again, but I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee, which have said to thy soul, bow down, that we may go over, and thou hast laid thy body as the ground and as the street to them that went over.

Isaiah’s Cup of Fury and Israel’s Future Deliverance

You know what you can say about prophetic scriptures? They come into their fullest clarity when the historical moment has arrived in which they are about to be fulfilled or are being fulfilled. In other words, until the rise of the Intifada and the Arab-Palestinian uprising against Israel and the growing vexation and hatred among Arab nations of Jews, this would not have been explicable.

This is more than just defeat. This is putting the salt into the wounds. This is rubbing the vanquished, their face into the dirt. This is taking relish in their defeat and saying, lie down and we will walk over you.

And they do lie down because they are defenseless at the hands of those who have inflicted this and it's the cup of God's fury. Notice that. This is not some kind of thing that happens of itself politically.

It rises out of political conditions, but God himself is the one who is implementing this as a judgment and as the rebuke of thy God in verse 20, but now I'm taking this cup out of your hand, you'll not drink it again, and I'll make them drink it who have inflicted this upon you.

So the question is, are we reading about something historical, something out of Israel's past or something out of Israel's future? And I have to say in my own prophetic spirit and heart, I believe it's future.

And we know that these chapter designations were not in the original scriptures, but are given for the convenience of the reader. So it brings a kind of an artificial cessation or break that God never intended.

So we just read right on at the 52, awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion, put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city, for henceforth there shall no more come unto thee, the uncircumcised and the clean.

Hereafter, now that you've suffered this, that will be a last suffering and no more will you have to bear that. God's already calling them the holy city, put on your garments, you've drunk the cup of your judgment, now is going to come my mercy and my grace.

Shake thyself from the dust, arise and sit down, O Jerusalem, loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion. And I have to say that I believe that this is not a metaphor, a suggestive word, but an actual and a literal word, that this will become a captive people.

And in the book of Joel and other of the prophets, as I'll mention in my paper, it talks about being sold into slavery, where a boy is sold for wine and a girl for other things. Can you imagine the humiliation of Israel?

Not only its defeat, but being cast out into the nations and sold as slaves, an actual captive people. For thus saith the Lord, you have sold yourselves for naught and you shall be redeemed without money.

This is the consequence of your own sin. For thus saith the Lord God, my people went down a forth time into Egypt, a surgery on them, the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. Now therefore, what have I here, saith the Lord?

My people is taken away for naught. They that rule over them make them to howl, saith the Lord, and my name continually every day is blasphemed. Therefore my people shall know my name, therefore they shall know in that day that I am he that doth speak, behold it is I.

How do we know that this is not a reference to past sufferings? This one single verse alone confirms it. In that day they shall know that I am the I am that I am that doth speak, behold it is I. That's never been acknowledged, therefore these sufferings are yet future and that they are inflicted with a vehemence and a bitterness and a relish, a delight to rub Israel's face in the dirt is perfectly and fitting historically with the context of nations, of Arab nations that are vengeful and feel that they have rightly so to a great extent been victims at Israeli hands.

The Herald of the Reigning God and the Millennial Kingdom

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that brings good tidings, that publishes peace, that brings good tidings of good, that publishes salvation, that saith unto Zion thy God reigneth. This is a reference now neither to Israel that is vanquished nor to those that are vanquished as well, but another people who bring good tidings and say that thy God reigns, that's us folks.

And our saying of it is not mere suggestion. When we say it, it shall be the creative prophetic word of God that establishes peace like peace be unto you. When we shall say to Israel that is, have you ever seen these boxers after 15 rounds that have been knocked down numerous times and they're hanging on the ropes and they're finished, and to say thy God reigns, you're without hope, you're devastated, you've been made captive, you've been humiliated, but your God reigns and he will set you again in a place of glory and honor as beyond anything you've ever known, even exceeding the days of Solomon and of David, and nations that have tread upon you will bow down before you and bring their wealth, and your sons and daughters that have been carried away captive shall be on their shoulders returned.

And your word is not just suggestion. Your word is event. Your word is a saving word and a restorative word. It's a word of hope because you know God and because your word is God's word. And so here's another veiled reference to the fact that there's another entity in the world at that time to which, in my opinion, is the church of the last days able to speak such creative words and not conveniently taken up to escape a time of tribulation.

Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice. With the voice together shall they sing. Notice one voice, not voices, shows the condition of God's people and their true unity, not some ecumenical counterfeit, where they shall see eye to eye when the Lord shall bring again Zion.

Break forth into joy. Sing together, you waste places of Jerusalem. You're going to see this in the prophets. Waste, desolation, ruin are repeated again and again and again. Ezekiel, I think, 35, 36, talks about the waste places being restored.

It's clearly a statement of a brutal devastation that has come within the land itself. The waste places of Jerusalem. For the Lord hath comforted his people. He hath redeemed Jerusalem. The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.

How accountable will those nations be that have seen the mighty God restoring the people out of a place of complete devastation and ruin? And the rebuilding that will come is not going to be your conventional housing project.

It's not going to be some kind of slapdash Jim Crackery. It's going to be an eternal masterpiece of God. I just saw the two trade towers that have gone up in Tel Aviv for the diamond merchants of which Israel is so proud.

And I think to myself with a certain wistfulness, that will not stand. You think that because you put up a skyscraper that you're pronouncing something that's going to endure? God will level everything made by man.

And when he restores, when he rebuilds, as unto the Lord, it will be a glory. Okay, so much for the reference to captives whose deliverance is clearly at the hands and by the power of a supernatural God whom they shall know as the I Am.

Destruction, Resurrection, and the Removal of the First Order

The task of rebuilding the waste and desolate places and ruined cities at their return indicates the extent of the disaster which has befallen them and which has taken place necessarily in the land. Jerusalem is in the land.

And if Jerusalem is destroyed, what can we hope for Tel Aviv or Haifa or Tiberias or any other present place? This suggests a previous presence in the land to which they return as survivors. Now, in other words, there needs be a Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem that be destroyed.

And that explains the existence of Israel from 1948 to the present hour. Something had to go up that it might come down. God takes away the first that he might bring the second. First the earthly, then the heavenly.

First the natural, then the spiritual. The mistake of the evangelical charismatic church was to have celebrated the first thing as the permanent and the abiding and the eternal thing, not knowing that God gives the first to take it away that he might bring the second.

How many of us have experienced that truth in our own lives? Took away the first, then Israel, to give a second. He raised it up in order to remove it. He gave a ministry, takes it away. He brings you up to bring you down.

Then to bring you up in an enduring and abiding eternal way. Our failure to recognize God's dealings with Israel is an embarrassing revelation of our ignorance of God, because we have not perceived his dealings in us, and have not understood that except something comes out of death as resurrection, it cannot be down to the glory of God.

Only that which is resurrected out of death pertains to God's glory. Everything else that precedes that makes that death inevitable and necessary, or it's not a death. The unhappy thing with the evangelicals today is they're not willing to relinquish and to let go unto death, but want to see the present thing preserved and improved in the hope that it will become the everlasting glory.

In a word, they're refusing an apocalyptic view, which requires unnecessary judgment and devastation before there's a glory. And they are the same kind of Christians, I'm afraid, who find that they cannot quite receive that there's a suffering that precedes a glory itself for the church.

In the last analysis, I'm finding what I've all along always understood, that every issue is always ultimately the issue of the cross. And that believer who has not made his peace with the cross, and understand that there's a suffering that precedes a glory, necessarily will not allow that for Israel either.

So there's a previous presence in the land to which they return as survivors, for the redeemed of the Lord shall return unto Zion, might imply that they actually were cast out of it, and in the process from the point of being cast out until the time of the return, in the sifting through the nations, they come back as the redeemed of the Lord, but they did not leave it as redeemed.

That they receive a new heart and spirit thereafter is a final and conclusive proof that this devastation is yet future in Israel's experience, and constitutes a final dealing of God before the commencement of the millennial blessedness.

Israel’s New Heart, Spirit, and Millennial Service

There has been no bestowing of the Spirit of God in present Israel, and there'll not be a bestowing of the Spirit until a nation is restored, for the Spirit is given for its millennial service. It's the enablement to be the messengers and the ambassadors of a newly established kingdom, and to bring that message to the very nations where up till now, they had been heretofore hated, resented, or feared.

It's their sons and daughters that shall prophesy. See, we have, what shall we say? We're premature in everything, or we have usurped everything, and have thought that the Holy Spirit and the charismatic movement was the fulfillment, when it's only if it is this at all, a presentiment and a suggestion of the greater glory which has not yet come.

We ain't seen anything yet. The Holy Spirit has not yet been poured out on all Jewish flesh. It is their prophecy. We've only gotten the little residue and the aura of it. It is for them for whom it is intended, as the bearers of the millennial kingdom, in that power and that spirit.

And so also this statement, quote, and the house of Israel will know that I am the Lord, their God, from that day onward indicates that it is not yet a day that has come. Ezekiel 39, 22. That this knowledge had to come in so costly and painful a way is unspeakably tragic.

It is the final outworking, the logic and counterpoint of the lament of God in Isaiah chapter 1 of a nation that, quote, does not know, does not consider. They refuse to know me, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 9, 6.

And evidently, therefore, could only come out of an unparalleled calamity, seeing that previous national disasters, including the Holocaust, did not occasion these ends. How do we know that this is yet a future day?

Because it's a day that eventuates in the knowledge of the Lord, which every previous disaster did not provide. The same brother that I have described to you with whom I had this intensive discussion, usually there's a one-way conversation, I could not say much, also believes that the time of Jacob's trouble is past and that it was the Holocaust and that Israel need not fear any further retribution or dealing.

Well, how can it be that if that Holocaust and that time of trouble did not result in the knowledge of the Lord? Therefore, there's a suffering yet future that will. So let's consider a text in which these elements that are to be found in the whole prophetic testimony is summed up.

Ezekiel 39 and the Glory of God Among the Nations

And I think that the text that I'm choosing is Isaiah, Ezekiel 39, verses 21 through 29. You can open to it now or look at it at the future time. I'm quoting from it here. And it begins, and I shall set my glory among the nations.

Ezekiel 39, verses 21 through 29. And I shall set my glory among the nations. So right away, smack dab is the whole statement of God's thrust. That the issue is the issue of God's glory in the nations, but of necessity, it must begin with this nation.

And all the nations will see my judgment, which I have executed, and my hand, which I have laid on them. Isn't it interesting that God equates his glory with his judgment? How many people know the verse that when my judgments are in the earth, the nations will learn righteousness?

We've got to not just make our unwilling, reluctant peace with the judgments of God, but embrace the judgment of God, even when it comes to us as being precious. And when a saint will, he's come to sainthood.

He's come to the knowledge of God, and he's come to the love of God. To balk at God's judgments or to reluctantly have to bear them is a statement that you've not yet come to the place in God that is yet wanting.

Because his glory is his judgment, and it's his righteousness, which I have executed, and my hand, which I have laid on them. And I've done it in such a way, in other words, that the nations themselves are required to and obliged to see it.

There's no question about it. Who's doing this? This devastation is of such a magnitude that it cannot be dismissed as a mere controversy between nations. It's clear that the humiliation of Israel and its defeat and the extent of its devastation is the judgment that comes from God.

And the house of Israel will know that I am the Lord their God from that day onward. That Israel today does not yet know that God shows that that day has not yet come, but that it will come is clear, or we have no confidence in the prophetic scripture.

And the nations will know that the house of Israel went into exile for their iniquity. Let not any man say that God has allowed some capricious devastation to come to Israel because he's severe. It's an exact proportion to their sin.

The fact that it's devastating shows the magnitude of their sins and that it's the sin of Israel, the covenant people. We suffer a double penalty. There's something that affects us more grievously, and maybe that will help us to understand not only the judgment that is future, but the judgments that are past.

As for example, the Holocaust, which is yet a conundrum, not only to the Jewish community, but to the Christian community. Where was God? Because we do not understand iniquity. We do not understand sin.

We don't understand our evil. We therefore don't understand our judgment. The magnitude of our sin is revealed in the magnitude of our suffering as is required in the magnitude of our judgments. That's not easy to consider, but except that we consider it, we'll not be reconciled to God.

Because it's only the repentance that comes out of our judgments that the issue of restoration is established. I don't know if we'll get into it this week. I've got notes. I've got materials. What I have prepared on this message for Germany, what God has shown me about Israel's long tenure in Germany.

There's so much I can say. But to this day, the Jewish community per se has consistently refused to acknowledge the truth of original sin and the fallenness of man in the garden as being a statement of the condition of man before God as inherently sinful and needing redemption.

They reject that, quote, Christian theological doctrine and perspective. We do not believe that man is innately evil. Where do you think the view that man is innately good has come from and that there'll be progressive improvement?

The views that came into the Enlightenment and from the Renaissance were greatly and largely from Jewish sources. We are the inveterate humanists. We have celebrated man. And therefore, we celebrate a German civilization as the epitome of man's achievement.

And therefore, it was at the hands of the Germans that we needed not only to be destroyed, but to be destroyed bestially. That which we celebrated as being the most humane was the most inhumane. And was that an accident?

Or is that the ironic statement of God to instruct us that the idol that we had so much celebrated and that we ourselves had contributed to and constructed that we had aided and abetted that German civilization that rejected its own Protestant faith and turned it into a false piety or into a liberalism in which God was dead became the nation and the nexus out of which came our execution and death in the most vile and criminal way without pity and without compassion.

Because we did not believe that man could be capable of such horror because we projected upon Germans what we thought ourselves to be. Namely, without sin and had to be rudely awakened and have or have we been awakened even to this day to understand.

And that's why there's still a bitterness against Germany as if there's something intrinsically rotten about Germans that we Jews could never have performed. Only circumstances are being provided by which increasingly we're performing against the Arabs what the Germans once performed against us until we will finally surrender to the truth of what God's word has always said.

There's no man good, no, not one and if God were to mark iniquity, who can stand? And this is why Paul was kicking against the pricks because he wanted to establish his own righteousness and it'll make a murderer out of a man to learn that he can't do that.

And in becoming the murderer, he learns the truth that he's not righteous. And that's exactly the course upon which Israel is now bound. I think somewhere in that text or the litigus 26 which is a companion text in the last days, you will consider this.

Some of you may know my encounter with Elie Wiesel, the greatest Holocaust Jewish writer himself, a survivor, the only survivor from Auschwitz whom I heard speak publicly in New Jersey one day at a Jewish gathering in which he said that he was studying the scriptures twice a week with a rabbi and something went bing in me but I didn't ask it publicly but afterwards I got him aside privately.

I said, in the fact that you're studying the scriptures now twice weekly, to what degree would you be willing to acknowledge that all of our Jewish suffering and calamity are the judgment spoken to us, the fulfillment of judgment spoken in the concluding chapters of Deuteronomy and Leviticus including the Holocaust.

He just jerked and he said, I refuse to consider that and turned away. What does it mean when you refuse to consider what God says because the implications are unthinkable for your humanistic categories and because you have subscribed to a view of inherent Jewish virtue that could not be capable of sin to a degree that would justify such a magnitude of judgment.

You know what I would say? That what is summed up in the statement, I refuse to consider that is the very sin that precipitates the judgment because it exalts man above the word of God. I will determine what I will consider and I will determine what I will reject.

That is the heart of what sin is in the celebration of man over God. And when Israel is guilty of that presumption against their God, they invite the worst kind of reprimand. What will bring them to that desperate acknowledgement of complete fertility and hopelessness when their hope has been the nation itself but the very things that we're now describing.

Now this is critically important because if we don't understand God's dealing why Israel must necessarily come to an end of itself, we'll either take up a false position of defending her when she's indefensible or condemning her for doing the very thing that God inevitably is requiring.

So this understanding that the Lord has given me saves us either from false defense and false celebration of what is indefensible which would make us liars or condemning Israel together with other nations that condemn her.

And what realistically perceives Israel's plight in the context of the prophetic scriptures that are calculated to bring a nation to the end of itself, that it might thereafter become the millennial blessed nation that will bless all the families of the earth.

If we had not this calling, God might not have had to deal with us as severely. That's why I said, except you understand the eternal millennial context, you'll be offended by the lengths to which God will go.

But when you understand it, then you can more graciously receive his dealings, which is true not only about Israel, but yourself. You'll understand why God will not let you go and why he'll jealously take you like a dog takes a rag, darling, and shakes it in its teeth until all the stuffing breaks loose.

How many people have felt that way? I've got a word for you from all, yeah. God has called you to be a winnowing machine and you're going to make the hills into chaff and winnow and sift. I say, oh yeah, I think that's true.

But what you need to know is before I'll be winnowing others, there's a God who will be winnowing me. So our naivety about Israel and our reluctance to understand the severity of God taught her is an embarrassing statement of our real failure to understand God for ourselves and to project upon Israel what we hope for in ourselves, namely a much easier success.

You know, like, isn't it good enough? Isn't charismatic good enough? Isn't present Israel good enough? You sap, you do err because you know not God nor the power of God nor the glory of God. What satisfies you does not eventuate in his glory.

You might have nice meetings, but what is that? Unto him be glory in the church, not success. And for that, God will go much further. So I gave them over into the hand of their adversaries and all of them fell by the sword according to their transgressions.

Here again for their iniquity, according to their transgressions, I dealt with them and I hid my face from them. One of the great questions that the Holocaust raises is where was God? I remember that I stopped in at a conference on revisionism sponsored by the Hillel at the University of North Carolina.

I happened to be in that neighborhood. I came on the last days and they were talking about this whole school that denies that the Holocaust ever took place and that it's a Jewish hoax in order to engineer the obtaining of Israel.

Though there's nothing more historically better documented than the Holocaust itself. And so finally, the question answer time, I said something like, there's only one thing worse than denying the historicity of the Holocaust.

It's the failure to seek its meaning. I said, you have only been dabbling in the statistics, but you have never asked the ultimate and the true questions. And the greatest of which is where was God? You attribute everything to man and make no acknowledgement of God, which may be the very reason for which you have suffered the Holocaust.

That was spoken to Jewish people. And so where was God? He hid his face from them, which is to say he did not intervene to spare them from the consequences of their own sin. And when you read about the Jewish influence in German Christianity and German culture, bringing a humanistic dimension and turning it from real biblical orthodoxy meant that a country was going to come to a place where it had no spiritual foundation, but the shallowest kind of Catholic and Lutheran Sunday phenomenon that it was such a vacuum that made the evil of Nazism an inevitability.

When you begin to study this, you learn that the greatest Nazi leaders, the ideologues of Nazism, those who were the, so to speak, the theologians, because it was a religious phenomenon, were the disappointed sons of Lutheran ministers or expatriates from Catholicism who were, in a certain sense, deeply spiritual men who could not find any answer to their spiritual craving in conventional Christendom as it existed in Germany and found it in occultism and finally in Nazism and set in motion the things that eventuated in Israel's annihilation, which Israel itself was participant in creating.

So you can believe God's judgments are just. I happen to know what I'm saying, but whether we know it or not, his judgments are perfect. But the thing is, if we do not recognize and receive the value of that judgment, we are fated again to experience it.

Warning the Church Against False Comfort

You'll see how I end this paper. I sent this paper to some of my most serious detractors in Israel, and I concluded, maybe I'll read it now, in the light of these scriptures to prematurely encourage Israel and the church to believe now for millennial blessing and security in the land is tantamount to false comfort.

Isn't it interesting that we're coming to a time of the true prophets and the false prophets, those that say peace, peace, and those that are saying calamity is at hand, repent. Such calamities, if they come, and these texts give us at least a reasonable basis for that possibility, will leave the naive and the unsuspecting devastated.

Somebody brought up that point in our break time. Well, Art, if what you're suggesting is true, when this happens and people are unprepared for it, they're going to collapse in their faith. They'll say, well, where is God?

And how can we trust the scriptures? We thought this was the fulfillment. And now look, he's allowed this nation. I can't believe it. And when I went to Israel to speak that Ezekiel 37 message two to three years ago, this was the underlying sense that for reasons for which I was being sent to save people from falling away.

To begin to introduce and to sound a note that would save them from the consequence of their naivety, that when the calamities come, they would be better prepared to understand them and not condemn God for his failure to preserve Israel when of necessity they were biblically and prophetically set up for just such things.

Do we not have a prophetic responsibility, therefore, to sound a warning of such possibility? If there's only a possibility, if there's just enough scripture to suggest that this might be a possibility, should we not at least express that?

Do we not have a prophetic obligation to sound a warning and say, will you at least consider this? If this is true, what ought you to be doing as a nation or in acknowledging a God who threatens such disaster, seeing that there is virtually no expectation for such a scenario?

Is this not the church's prophetic task, the expression, however misunderstood and resisted, of an ultimate love? I told you that when I spoke Ezekiel 37 at Christ Church in Jerusalem, I think someone shouted right out of the audience, cats, you're as loveless as ever.

You've never changed. You're the same. But, and I'm saying here, what is love? Is an ultimate love to sound a warning rather than to give people a false assurance in something that is going to eventuate in their doom?

Will such a view not profoundly alter our present posture toward Israel by inspiring the very gospel witness we have been loath to make? It's interesting that the Christian embassy position is not to promulgate the gospel to the Jew, but only to win their friendship and to establish the relationship.

And I'm saying something quite opposite. I'm saying if this threat is imminent, what we not to do exactly opposite, shouldn't we be promoting the gospel? Shouldn't we be bringing Israelis to the knowledge of the Lord and save them out of the death and the calamity that is future?