(K-Char-01) the Knowledge of the Holy — Art Katz

The Knowledge of God Beyond Doctrinal Certainty

Lord, don't let me bumble my way through, the subject is too critical, and what shall we ask, Lord, that not the least that we should come away with a sense of divine discontent with our sense of knowledge of you, that we would not be self-satisfied or self-applauding we have arrived, that we have a comprehensive knowledge of God, that we have our doctrinal house in order, and yet miss the sense of yourself that evokes awe, reverence, devotion, and ultimately adoration.

So we're asking, Lord, that you'll use this time to stir us to that quest, which is a lifelong quest. Whoever arrives at that kind of knowledge, but who will ever begin to attain it, who is not aware of the need.

So Lord, help us in this, my God, I pray, to feel our way into this subject. We thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. Have you understood anything that I've said so far? No? Okay. Maybe just to reiterate a few of those things.

We mustn't assume that if we are correct doctrinally that that implies that we have a knowledge of God as God. Just put that into your thinker. Put that into your consideration. We mustn't assume that because we have a correct doctrinal understanding that that equates and is equal to the knowledge of God as God.

What am I saying by that? Am I in any way negating the necessity for correct doctrine? Not at all. It is greatly to be desired. But we would be naive to think that merely to have a correct doctrinal understanding in itself constitutes the knowledge of God in the way that he needs to be understood, appreciated, loved, served, worshipped, adored.

It would be tragic if we substitute doctrinal certainty for this deeper awareness. They are not opposed, but we must not think that the one constitutes the other. Thank you, Lord. So I'm looking at a book that has come into my hand just before departure by A. W. Toza, The Knowledge of the Holy.

And his first chapter is devoted to the question, why we must think rightly about God. And his prayer that commences this chapter is that they that know thee not may call upon thee as other than thou art, and so worship not thee but a creature of their own fancy.

It's possible even in the name of Jesus to substitute a deity of our own making and our own creating for the one who in fact is. The fact that we put the name Jesus on something that constitutes our knowledge and sense of God doesn't necessarily assure us that we are celebrating the God who is God.

That name can be applied casually and indifferently and well-meaningly by many who do not understand and have not identified and been in a true relationship with the Lord as the Lord. So the mere use of the name is not an assurance.

It might actually be a gate to deception, how careful we need to be. That's what he's praying here, that we might call on God, not as the God who is, but the creature of our own fancy, our own imagining.

And especially in his charismatic generation, in the prosperity era, and the desire for health, well-meaning, blessing, it's so easy to have an inward image of who it is that we think that we're calling upon as one who will do our bidding and satisfy our need, but we're not calling upon the God who is God and the Lord who is Lord.

It's a deity, it's an image, it's an inward projection. We're making God in our own image. The fact that we put the name Jesus on that image does not make it, in fact, Jesus. These are the dangers and the pitfalls of which we need to be conscious.

So how then can we have an assurance that the Lord whom we're calling upon is, in fact, the Lord, and that the God that we're celebrating is, in fact, God? This is a real quest and we need the input that comes to us from men like Tozer who have wrestled over questions just like this and are not often to be found in our generation, who prays that, therefore, enlighten our minds that we may know thee as thou art, so that we may perfectly love thee and worthily praise thee, that we might know you as you are.

Wrestling With God’s Justice and Judgment

Playing around with Scotty's kids this morning at the breakfast table, I was told that one of them is a thinker, that that's what distinguishes him. He's a young little kid. I said, well, what do you think about the recent devastation of Katrina?

You think it was an accident, a geological disturbance, you know, a kind of thing, an event that takes place in nature? Or is there another explanation for a disaster? Could you believe that God himself is in that disaster?

And if that's true, wouldn't that make God cruel? How could God be in a disaster that destroys communities and leaves a thousand or more dead? And there are greater devastations than that, numerically.

If God is the author of those devastations, how can we reconcile that God with what we understand of God as love, justice, mercy, kindness, goodness? Got the idea? That's a remarkable question to place to a ten or twelve year old kid.

But is it one that we ourselves are able to consider? Can we reconcile God in wrath, anger, and judgment as being also the God who is the God of love, kindness, goodness, and mercy? Or do we keep those considerations from us for fear that if we open ourselves to those considerations, we might lose the little measure of security that we presently enjoy about who we believe God to be?

You do, poor dear. Such a visitation should not come upon you. You guys are about to graduate? Is that it? Imagine if you're still wet behind the ears. Imagine if you're ready to go out into your ministries and you have an inadequate sense of God as God, that you don't know him as you ought, and that he's more the projection of your own fancy and your own minds than what he is in himself, because you have never opened yourself to consider those kinds of questions about God in judgment, God in anger, God in wrath, that would threaten the safe way in which you like to believe God to be.

Unless you're willing to take the risk of that threat, you're in danger of deception about your knowledge of God. Unless you have factored in God in judgment and God in wrath, how shall you know God in mercy?

What is mercy independent of wrath and judgment? In fact, the deepest love of God, someone has rightly said, is the love of his judgments. Can you imagine not just tolerating the judgments of God? Well, I guess it was necessary.

I'm not happy for it. It discomforts me that he would go that far and express his anger and indignation at a cost so great, but what can I do? I just have to tolerate what God chooses to do, but I'm not happy for it.

I find it difficult to reckon myself with a God who will do that, like the Holocaust, the Nazi Holocaust, and six million Jews. 1 .1 and a half million of them were children and infants, and to say that God was present when that took place and knew it and did not intervene to impede or to stop it, or even to go further, that what took place was in fact in keeping with his will and even his word that had been spoken in earlier statements in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and through the prophets and Psalms, that there will be a last day's devastation, and that this is that devastation, and that God is fulfilling his word in something that takes six million Jewish lives, who are his covenantal people.

Are you guys following me? Am I from Mars? You know what's wrong with you? You're American, all too American, which is to say, you don't wrestle, you don't anguish, you aren't comfortable and assuring thoughts about God, about yourself, about your future, about your ministry.

You don't want to be jostled, you don't want to be discomfited, you don't want to have your categories stretched out or put into question. You're nicely approaching graduation, and so who brought this character in to upset you in any way, except that this itself is the mercy of God.

I wouldn't want you visited on your generation if you are presently in a place of shallowness with regard to God, however correct you are in your categories. The world doesn't need correction, correct categories, it needs the reality of God as God.

And remember that when Jesus was crucified, they took his garment and they could not part it because it was seamless. They had only to gamble for the entire thing, because the garment of Jesus is one whole thing without seam, which means that his judgment, wrath, the anger, indignation of God is as much part of God as his mercy, his goodness, his kindness, and his love.

In fact, if you had a more prophetic and deeper understanding, your ultimate recognition would be that his judgment, wrath, and anger, and indignation is the mercy of God. It's not something opposed to the mercy, it is a mercy.

That when every other device has failed, and men will not heed nor regard God in his mercy to keep them from a final cataclysm called hell, he will bring devastations in the earth in the hope of obtaining a repentance and a return.

When everything else fails, God will use judgment, not in a punitive way, but in a redemptive way, in the hope of stirring people to the consideration of himself as God. Got that? So I appreciate men like A .W. Tozer who have wrestled with these questions.

The Holocaust, Prophecy, and the Church’s Moral Responsibility

If you haven't seen my book on the Holocaust, you need to. The Holocaust, where was God? How can we account for so great a catastrophe in modern times through the most enlightened nation of the world, Germany, that gave to the world Heinrich Heine and Mozart, Beethoven, and Immanuel Kant.

Have you heard, do you know these names? Kant is the most profound ethicist and philosopher who gave the world a definition of ethics, what is right. Germany is a philosophical nation, a deeply cultured nation, great in writing, science, philosophy, music, and yet also the engine of the destruction of Jews in modern times through the Holocaust, and the same Germanic genius with systematic ability that was required for the execution of six million.

Have you considered how can that be? How do you reconcile a nation that is exemplary for its culture and the magnificence of its civilization is also the engine of the destruction by the same German genius of six million Jews, almost abolishing and eliminating entire European Jewry by the same qualities that make that nation to excel as civilization.

If you have not considered that question, you're not yet ready for ministry. You're not yet ready to graduate. You're not yet ready to bring anything to anyone if you have not raised that question and considered that question.

The church that has refused to consider it is itself, what shall I say, wanting, is pathetic. The failure to consider the great moral questions of our generation robs us of any moral sense. And what is a church that has not a moral sense of what is right, what is just, how do we explain, how do we understand God in a world of this kind, and how much of its malfunction is already his judgment?

And his judgment for what? So in my book, which has evoked the most hostile reaction in the two Jews I know that have read it, one was the head of the Israeli Bible Society. I don't know how he got the book, but he said, usually I throw such stuff directly into the garbage, but yours was so unbelievably vile, so reprehensible, so altogether disgusting, that I'm required to write you and to, what's the word, rebuke you because the thesis and the theme was totally vile in his consideration.

What's the theme? That the Holocaust was not an aberration of history. It was not a mistake or an accident. If Hitler had not only, had not lived, that the Holocaust was itself a fulfillment of those things that had been prophesied in Hebrew scriptures, in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and in other places, of what would befall us in the last days for our covenant rejection of God.

At night we would hope, wish it were day, at day we would wish it were night. The sword would come to us and the terror of the chamber within, I think I'm quoting from Deuteronomy 32, that even gives a picture of the chamber, the gas chamber, and it talks about the bodies stacked up, that the infant and the ancient, the gray-haired and the aged, and then the young men and the women, was exactly the composition of the bodies when those ovens, gas ovens were opened.

On the bottom were the aged and the infants, and on the top were the young men and the women. Why? Because in the process of suffocation, as the gas began to fill that chamber, those that had the virility and the strength clambered to get up to the top where the air yet remained, and those who were the weakest, the infant and the aged, remained at the bottom.

That's spoken of in Deuteronomy chapter 32, as if God foreseeing the consequence that the judgment would take, already gives a picture fulfilled explicitly and in detail in the time of the Nazi Holocaust.

Can such a judgment be deserved, if it is judgment? And of what are we Jews guilty, that would justify that kind of judgment, that not only takes the adults, but the children. A million and a half of the six million were children and infants.

Surely they're innocent. Why should they suffer the consequence of the guilt of their parents, except that God says that the guilt of the fathers comes upon the children to the third and fourth generations.

That part of what makes judgment judgment is that the innocent suffer with the guilty. Oh, you dear God, Lord, mercy. So you even need mercy to consider these questions. And up till now, you've not needed mercy.

All you've needed was to be clever. But if you have not needed mercy even to consider these questions, how shall you have mercy to extend? Because there's yet another Holocaust coming. The time of Jacob's trouble that Jesus said, if this time were not cut short, no flesh would survive.

But for the elect's sake, the time will be cut short. In Matthew 24 and Luke 21, when Jesus was asked, what are the signs of your coming and of the end of the age? There's coming a time of trouble for the nation, such as it has not ever before known or will ever again know.

And if that time were not cut short, no flesh would survive. From just that kind of reading, and I'm no great Bible scholar, I would say you would have to conclude he's speaking about something yet future.

Because he's asked, what are the last days signs of your coming? And he's saying a time of trouble spoken of in Daniel and Jeremiah 30, 31, the time of Jacob's trouble. And that's future, and it will exceed every previous trouble that Israel has known.

That means that the magnitude of that which is future will exceed the Nazi Holocaust. That if Nazi Holocaust took six million, what will this Holocaust take? Because when Jesus comes, two-thirds of those present in Israel and Jerusalem have already perished.

The women are ravaged, and one-third passes through the fire. If that ratio is true, not just with Jews that are in the land at the time of the Lord's appearing, but Jews in the world, two-thirds perish.

We're talking roughly about the annihilation of 10 billion Jews in modern times. In your generation that is yet future, how are you going to stand it? How are you going to bear it? Maybe you'll be among those that will fall away from the faith.

Because Paul said in the last days there'd be a great apostasy and a great falling away. And I think it will come from the disillusioned, shallow Christians who had happier expectations and cannot reconcile devastation of this magnitude with God who is righteous.

They were unprepared for the realities of the last days because they did not understand nor know God as God, because they did not factor in and had no stomach for his judgments. I'm probably the only guy alive from whom you'll hear these things.

And the fact that I am alive yet to speak to them is a mercy from God, because such a man is not fit to live. Remember when they threw dirt on their heads and vowed that Paul was not fit to live? I'm every day more approaching that definition because the world wants to put its fingers in its ears.

My Jewish people do not want to be warned of coming catastrophe. They say this shall not come upon us, and that is the very statement of their apostasy and their unbelief. You can pray for me. Three years in New York City without any visible fruit, called by God explicitly and supernaturally, come to New York, Art, and be present to the Jewish community there.

Three years, maybe a dozen contacts in that time, some very big fish who have shunned me, scorned me, slammed the door in my face, full of contempt, because what I represent, even though they won't give me an opportunity to articulate and speak it, is reprehensible and vile, because it has to do with a sense of impending disaster that human flesh shuns to consider.

This is the special duty of prophets to bring, the sense of impending judgment. What's the difference between true prophets and false? The false prophets placate, they make nice, they defer to men, they tell them they have nothing to fear.

Peace, peace, when there is no peace. And Jeremiah says, you've healed the wounds of my daughter lightly. The true prophet speaks the things as they in fact are, and will soon come to be, because he knows God and is not offended by the judgments of God, and will proclaim them, even though people despise him for that very proclamation.

So tell me, what is the church that has not a sense of prophetic responsibility, and shuns that itself from considering it, let alone expressing it? What kind of a church is that, that has voided its prophetic responsibility to sound warning to its own generation of the judgments that are impending and imminent, and must necessarily come to pass before and in the Lord's coming?

What kind of a church is that? It itself is apostate. We must wrestle with the God who judges, and we'll know that we have surrendered to him, and have come to a place of adoration, because not only that we tolerate his judgments, but we love his judgments, because his judgments are righteous all together.

The Cross, Sin, and the Righteousness of God

In fact, can you know righteousness independent of the judgments of God? Paul talks about the righteousness that is revealed in the gospel. How? Because the Son of God suffers the judgment of God that should have come upon sinful men, but he takes it upon himself and bears the judgment and the stroke of God that leaves him mangled and so devastated in his own being that Isaiah 53 says, he had no beauty that we should desire him.

He's marred more than any man, because he's become the object of the judgment of the righteous indignation of his father. That's the cup that he had to drink at Gethsemane. Have you understood that where Jesus suffered at the cross was the judgment of God?

Because if you have not considered that, then how shall you know righteousness? A holy God requires judgment, and because animals could not themselves be the suitable object of that wrath, but only a type of a once and for all sacrifice to come, and man could not himself be it, because it requires something sinless, then the Son of God himself had to bear it, and voluntarily and freely did so.

And that's how the gospel is the revelation of the righteousness of God. You cannot know righteousness if you shun the subject of judgment, and have not made peace with a God who requires judgment for sin and iniquity, because he is holy.

And if you don't know the holiness of God, and what that holiness requires, and judgment against sin to placate, how in fact do you know God? You know about him, but you know him in a way that can be communicated to an unbelieving world that doesn't want to be disturbed, or to a Jewish community that doesn't want to be warned.

Can you persuade them? Paul said, knowing the terror of God, I persuade men. If you don't know the terror of God, how shall you persuade? Are you reading Oswald Chambers every day? Do you have a devotional life?

You get up early in the morning before the day begins and spend time with the Lord in prayer, in his word, and taking advantage of the giants that have left us such treasures to contemplate as A. W. Tozer, Charles Spurgeon, Oswald Chambers, and today's selection from my utmost forest highest, he cites the scripture in 2nd Corinthians, for he hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him, and talks about sin as more than just a series of boo-boos.

Sin is a condition. Sin is inimical, intrinsic to man. Something very deep then was required to save men from this heredity, this utterness of sin, and that provision is the crucifixion of Jesus at the cross of Calvary, the message of the gospel, which he says has lost its sting and its blasting power.

The gospel has become domesticated, robbed of its power, because we have not understood what it represents. If you have not understood the enormity and the magnitude of sin, the terror, the vileness of this condition, which is an affront to the holiness of God, how should you understand what was required to expiate it?

We're no more, let me think, I want to say this rightly, we cannot exceed our concept of sin. If our concept of sin is shallow, as it is for most Christians, even at their best, everything else will suffer loss, because we cannot then understand the cross, the death of Jesus, what was required to expiate this sin in the eyes of a holy God that the Son understood, recognized, and was willing to bear freely and voluntarily, came down heaven to become that sacrifice.

And what is our message when we say that we're sharing the gospel? Believe in him and it'll do you good, and it'll find you a boyfriend, girlfriend, health, prosperity, business, what the benefits will be if you believe.

Believing in what? So, I appreciated today's selection. We have ignored this issue of sin as a condition that is the deepest offense to the holiness of God. The indifference of men to God, the rejection of God in the world, and maybe nowhere more hideous than when God is superficially acknowledged in the opening sessions of Congress or the swearing-in of a Supreme Court justice or other ways in which God is employed by men to sanctify and to justify their conduct and their operations, as if he's some kind of, what's an accommodation, someone to do our bidding that we can invoke, but do not give him the regard and the respect and the acknowledgement and the surrender and the worship which is his due.

There was a horrific rejection of God, not only in the unbelieving world, but even in the ostensible church. That is an offense against his holiness. Jesus bore in his own person the whole massed sin, massive sin of the human race.

He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, and by so doing he put the whole human race on the basis of redemption. He put it back where God designed it to be, and anyone can enter into union with God on the ground of what our Lord has done at the cross.

It is finished and complete. And I wrote in the margin, it's not the act per se of sin so much as what it reveals of the truth of our condition and somewhere in Matthew where Jesus rebukes those who are decorating the graves of the prophets and saying that if we had lived in the time of our fathers we would not have done to the prophets what they have done.

Jesus says all the blood of the prophets is upon you because you say that, because you think that you're absolved from the guilt of your fathers because you were born later and you did not yourself directly participate in their death, that's how little you know of the truth of your condition.

You're not absolved because of the accident of time and history by which you were born after. The fact that you say that you would not have done is the statement of your guilt because you do not understand the truth of your condition and therefore you're implicated and guilty of all of the deaths of the prophets from between the porch and the altar right up to the last.

And in fact before long you'll even kill me. There's a human condition dear saints in which we are all joined. It's called sin and we're not absolved because we have not performed any grievous sin in our own experience.

So therefore for what shall we be contrite or broken or trembling? Because unlike David we did not commit adultery with Bathsheba nor did we see to the death of her husband. That's his baby, that's his problem, that's his sin.

Oh yeah? So you think you're better than David? You think you're made of better stuff than him? Because you have not been brought the circumstances of the kind to which he was brought that made that sin possible for the sweet singer of Israel, the king of Israel, the David that foreshadows the greater David to come, that he was capable of that kind of sin but you're not?

You don't know yourself yet. You don't know the truth of your own condition yet. Therefore you've not repented yet. Not based on what you did but what you're capable of doing by virtue of your nature.

How then shall you adore the one whose sacrifice has saved you from the consequence of that condition and giving you the gift of righteousness in exchange? How deep is your worship? How much is it the work of spirit or is it soul?

And what is your message and what is your witness? What is your authority? What is your credibility if you have not deeply appropriated the cross because you have not seen yourself as identified with David and all who have slain the prophets sharing that human condition.

The fact that you grew up in nice middle-class neighborhoods does not absolve you. That's why the first public act of Jesus was to go down into the Jordan and be baptized of John and John was astonished.

I need more to be baptized of you. What are you doing? Jesus says this serves the purposes of righteousness. I need to be identified with the sin of my people just like Daniel of old who cried out our sins and by joining the nation in the waters of repentance I'm not above their condition I'm joined with them in it and I'm already indicating what my human what my destiny is at the cross I will actually bear that sin.

You know that the father so appreciated this voluntary act of his son that when he came up out of the water the heavens were opened and the dove came down and abided upon him and the voice of the father rang out and said this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

The father was pleased by the act of his son who did not hold his skirts up and as being holier than thou but went down into the place of repentance in identifying himself with the sins of the nation because he was the son of man as well as the son of God.

Got the picture? So if we would say we have not done what our fathers did is to deny the truth of our condition as men our essential inexorable sinfulness. So to say as being Poles, Polish, well we would not have done what the Germans did is to fail to identify yourself with the truth of the human condition.

What Germany did was more than a national sin it was a revelation of the condition of man and what he is capable of performing under the circumstances that permit it and that their culture and their civilization and being even the land of Luther and of the Reformation did not save them from being the executors of the Jewish nation and it's not because they're German it's because they're man and because we are man also whether we're Polish or anything else we need to identify with them in their sin and be broken with them and sharing that identification and repent and have a remorse and a contrition or else you're going to be shallow, complacent, braggadocio, what's the word, hot shots who know how.

The thing that you need more than anything else upon before graduation is brokenness and if you're going to wait for the sin of Bathsheba you'll wait indefinitely. You don't need to perform David's sin to share in David's condition.

You need only to identify with Psalm 51 and say Lord I see myself like that, blot out my transgressions. I'm not waiting for it to be proved by my falling. I know that I'm capable and if I've been saved from the shameful consequence it's only your mercy but I'm asking for forgiveness as if I were one with David in his iniquity.

Blot out my transgressions and take my iniquity from before me or what is my message. You've got to be the message not just proclaim it or how do you appeal to men for repentance if you yourself have not obtained it and not been broken by the acknowledgment of the truth of your own condition.

Our problem is our failure to see in the death of Jesus the truth of ourselves, our disobedience and shallow presumption and indifference toward God and his requirement to be holy as he is holy. This is not an option, this is a command.

If you remove the issue of holiness the cross has no meaning, the sacrifice of Jesus is vain and equally is our message. God requires holiness, holiness requires judgment, judgment reveals righteousness and all together they move us toward an apprehension of God as God.

Holiness, Separation, and the Prophetic Life

Am I sounding like some Old Testament prophet? Am I bringing you some Jewish thing that the New Testament has negated or that the New Testament has fulfilled? Has God changed? Is there an Old Testament God, New Testament God or is he the same yesterday, today and forever?

Do you know God in the awesomeness of the Old Testament? You can prepare yourself for Sunday's message on Psalm 18, begin to read it. It is colossal, it's a statement that not one of you can ever in a million years ever begin to conceive let alone express.

It's a knowledge of God as God that betrays and reveals our shallowness and until we can appropriate and come into the depth of that knowledge and understanding what are we and what the Lord has already put upon my heart before he came.

Psalm 18, read it in advance, it's staggering, it's conceptual in a way that is completely out of tune with our time. So either our time and our age is out of tune with God or that Psalm is an anachronism that is only a curiosity that we need not take seriously.

But as for me in my house, I prefer to take Psalm 18 not only seriously but as definitively as being the statement of reality. And as far as this age is concerned, deception, vanity, passing away, Psalm 18 is enduring.

Psalm 18 is the statement of truth, reality of God, timeless and eternal. And it's to that that I want to relate myself and assimilate and walk and live in that reality because it'll make you strange even before Christians like today.

But if you're not strange, how are you in the faith? Because we're called to be strangers and sojourners. If you're too comfortable, if you're too accepted, if you're too socially agreeable, you're a Christian but you're a nice guy too, you're probably out of the faith even while you're subscribed to its correct doctrines.

You've got to be strange. We are an anomaly. We're out of joint with this age. We're chafed by it. We can't bear it. It's painful to live in this world and in this life and see its advertisements, its TV, its ed, its newspapers, its culture, let alone we should subscribe to it.

One dear lady who came to us prophetical school, she said, my son is the youth leader in the charismatic congregation of Vowel Location. And they went from their youth meeting to see Kill Bill, sanctioned by the church, and that somehow they have a degree of spirituality by which they can listen to rap, contemporary so-called music rock, see films of that kind, and not be adversely affected by it.

And the church sanctions that. You guys hate the world. Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. You realize how despicable the world is and who is its prince and its architect, its wisdom, its ethos, out from the bowels of hell.

And the most vile thing about it is not its pornography and the vilest expressions that are things that are immoral and amoral, it's the things that are depicted as somehow good and acceptable and benevolent and beneficial that are intrinsically false.

The day that I yanked out the cord from our television set is when I came into the room and saw my kids and the kids of the community watching a program on the Olympics, a drama of the love affair between a Russian and an American athlete.

And when I saw what was being depicted as romance and as love, and there was not an iota of pornography or any foul words spoken, which made the thing much more vile because it was depicted as good. I yanked out the plug and that was the end of the TV in my home.

Do you have that kind of sensitivity? Are you chafed by living in this world? Do you see how vile its values are? Do you see how it encourages men to misspend their life, their energy, their time, how false its values, its aspirations, its ambitions?

Do you see how much it is like something sweeping even into the church and affecting and coloring the church, touching men for their ministerial ambition? So often the leaders of our congregations are much more compatible with CEOs of corporations than they are with the prophets and apostles of old.

Have you not chafed over that? Have you not anguished over that? Or have you made your peace with it and in your secret heart you even desire to be elevated and find a place of prominence in that very system?

Shame on you. Sentimentality trivializes the cross as a rejection of its truth and allows men to have an attitude of utter impertinence and human arrogance against God in their sin. My son is in that very condition, both my sons and the one that I'm presently living with in Brooklyn with his long hair that I've got to pull out of the sink that is clogging the drain.

He would much rather sooner part with his life than part with his long hair. What is it about that hair and his identification with it that is so central to his unbelieving being? I won't hear a word about God, though he's living with a man who is eminent in the purposes of God and rare, my own son.