Messianic Community Tzaneen - Session 1 — Art Katz

Well, I don't know that I've ever waited longer to come to the place of speaking and to trust that you've not run out of spiritual steam and you can take something more than a little homily, something more like, I don't know what, a substantial foundational proclamation out of the book of Ephesians of the mystery of which Paul was the steward and that is little understood by the church and needs to be brought profoundly to the church's attention and to its foundations.

See, I've got a task before me. So Lord, grace, grace, grace, to communicate what's on your heart for this people this morning. Grant something, my God, of the measure of grace that you gave to your apostle Paul in the revelation of that mystery in which he was a steward.

Bring about it, my God, to me, that I can, so to speak, second-hand forward it to this people. We bless you, Lord, that it's a timeless and imperishable word and may it find lodging here and affect, my God, all of the seeing and the perception of this people and walk to conduct their service as you were, rightly should.

And we thank you for that, the operation of your spirit, your anointing. Grant it, my God, a measure to the significance of this sharing. We give you praise and glory for the occasion. In Jesus' name, amen.

The Mystery Revealed in Ephesians

Well, my text is from Ephesians, chapter three. I just read from the beginning of that chapter and you'll see how difficult or you'll be reminded of how difficult the book this is. This is the reason Paul is already speaking to something that has preceded the commencement of chapter three.

That's why we need to be reminded that these chapter designations are a convenience, but they cut into the flow of Paul's apostolic mind. It's hard to cut in and separate. You almost have to begin from the first word of chapter one and not end until you've come to the conclusion of the entire book.

That's how organic, joint, related is the flow of Paul's seeing. But just to be abrupt and to enter, this is the reason that I call him a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles. For surely you have already heard of the commission of God's grace that was given me for you and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation as I wrote above in a few words, a reading of which will enable you to receive my understanding of the mystery of Christ.

This is one of Paul's favorite words, is mystery. And it's a word that is rarely or ever sounded or even considered by the contemporary church. But it needs to be restored. There's something about the depths of God that can only be understood and sought and found as mystery.

The only way that we know the word mystery as modernist is a detective story. But a mystery is some sublime and foundational perception of God that is ordinarily concealed and hidden until a moment in God comes when it is to be revealed.

There's no way to appropriate a mystery by intellectual endeavor. Scholarship will never obtain it. It can only come by process of revelation and it's given to those who have an office who will steward the mysteries of God and make them known to men.

The Apostolic Foundation of the Church

Beloved Apostles, give up the word apostolic. I've said and I say many times and so you have heard me over the years, if you don't salivate when you hear the word apostolic, you've not yet been touched by the genius of that word.

And if you've not been touched by the genius of that word, how shall it have come not only into your vocabulary, but into your experience? How do you perceive yourself if you don't perceive yourself as apostolic?

What then are you if you're not rooted in this timeless and foundational thing that has been the glory of God since time immemorial and that the church is founded upon the Apostles and the prophets, Jesus Christ being the chief cornerstone.

Where's that from? Ephesians, I think even in this chapter. So I want to encourage the church yourselves to an unabashed seeking of the foundational content of the faith, lest we become flimflam, some ephemeral, passing charismatic-y kind of a phenomenon that we enjoy, but leaves little impact in time and let alone eternity.

Of course, as you're going to see, the word eternity and eternal is a set piece in Paul's apostolic mindset and that brings a whole dimension of perception of the faith when that one word is inserted into our consciousness.

I would say that by and large today that word is entirely omitted from the consideration of modern saints. It sounds almost antique. It's archaic to talk about something eternal. Well, it has a distant aura and maybe we'll consider it after we die.

Well, it's too late then. It's now that eternity needs to be considered and to be considered deeply and taken into our inmost being and consideration. Or, ironically, we will be profoundly irrelevant in time.

Another paradox? We will be irrelevant in point of time unless we have taken eternity into our deepest consideration. So it saves us from being just the product of time and of culture because to touch eternity is to touch the God who is eternal, from eternity to eternity, ever was, ever is, ever will be, and it brings such dimensions and depth into every consideration.

So I encourage you in that. Just to say that the Paul who was so occupied with the things eternal was not for that reason made irrelevant. He wasn't on some lofty plane thinking only of transcendent things that make him useless on the earth.

There's no man more practical, more dealing with the nuts and bolts of the church in its daily operation than Paul himself. And yet he's the one who speaks of his citizenship as being eternal. He's the one who sees the things that are invisible and eternal and they're so real for him that they eclipse the things that are seen, even the things that are felt.

So that even his sufferings, he considers both momentary and light in view of the eternal weight of glory. He has brought the dimension of eternity into such depths. His apostolic consciousness that even affects the question of pain.

Apostolic Suffering and Eternal Perspective

Because to be occupied with the subject of eternity is to invite pain. It's to mark you as someone whom the powers of the air must consider and take note. You become instantly dangerous the moment that eternity comes into your consciousness because it affects all your seeing and all your subsequent conduct.

However, something qualitative has shifted that makes you return from a yawn of indifference on the part of the powers of darkness into an object of fear and trembling. And it's going to invite repercussion, retaliation even, and a kind of oppression and suffering that would not have been your experience if you had not opened yourself to that category.

There is such a thing as apostolic seeing, but there's such a thing also as apostolic suffering. But the remarkable thing is that the seeing obviates the suffering. When Paul says that his afflictions are momentary and light, he's not playing on words.

He's graphically stating what is his subjective experience. Pain does not affect him as it does others. He's not living in fear of it or of death. It's momentary. How is that? Because he sees it in the context of that which is eternal.

Paul's seeing is intended for our seeing. That's why the Apostle is the foundation of the Church. God is not just setting before us a curio of Paul, a kind of a strange misfit, but he's setting before us the formidable thing in itself as it was expressed and experienced by that man as being the foundation for our own being.

And that the whole Church should grow up into the reality in which Paul conducted himself. You know what it said of those men? These are they that turned the world upside down. So in former generations in verse 5, this mystery was not made known to mankind as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.

And that is that the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise of Messiah Jesus through the Gospel. Well, this is not even my subject. I'm just trying yet to come to it, but how do you dare read this and pass it without some kind of acknowledgment of what is being spoken here?

Because this very thing in passing, I think, is almost totally absent from the consciousness of the Church. You know what the mystery is? That you guys, you Gentiles, who were once removed from God without God and without hope in the world, have by the grace of God been brought by the blood of Messiah into the covenant promise and hopes of Israel, into an already existing body of believing Jews who have held fast their faith in anticipation of Messiah and have now realized Him in His coming, and you now can be sharers with them in the promise of Messiah Jesus through the good news, the Gospel, that this is as is available to you by the grace of God.

That the Church is not some innovation, different from, well, I have to be careful here, as I say, different from Judaism, is profoundly different. If you think of Judaism as some rabbinical phenomenon, as it now is, but in terms of the Hebraic biblical anticipation and faith from Abraham, this is the continuum, and the only thing you guys have been invited in, that's the mystery that has been concealed and now revealed.

Even Peter required a trance to recognize it. Remember? He was so, for everything that he was, he was yet orthodox. This was the Jewish faith. It was not for the goyim. Those were the ones into whose houses Jews were not even allowed to come, let alone to eat or break bread or have fellowship.

So in order to think that these who were outside of Jewry would be invited in to their faith, required a revolution in a trance, coming down in a sheep, and he even protested in the trance, in the trance.

I've never eaten anything unclean. The Lord said, kill and eat. He said, I've never eaten. He's protesting out of his Judaic experience, and God says, what I have made clean, called on unclean. And at that moment, there was someone banging on the door downstairs sent from Cornelius's house, where he would not have responded nor gone to proclaim the message to Gentiles had he not first received the revelation in a trance.

I'm rehearsing all that to show you how radical and innovation it is that Gentiles should be admitted into the Jewish faith. Now the question is, is for Jews to be admitted into their own faith, who themselves now are without God, without hope in the world.

They're too much in the world. And now God is saying to you, who have received this grace and this benefit, to make, move them to jealousy by the evidence that you have come into the reality which they have forfeited.

Got the picture? Are you getting the picture? So, of this gospel in verse 7, I have become a servant according to the gift of God's grace that was given me by the working of his power, although I am the very least of all the saints.

This grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for the ages. I'm going to stop there because what follows this is the punchline.

Humility and Receiving the Revelation of the Mystery

But just, not to do disservice to God or to you, because there's something about Ephesians that is so compact, it is so infiltrated with truth, it is so dense in its content that we're not trained by the world and even in the church to read this rightly.

We gloss over it. It sounds too phantasmal. It's too florid. It's too, it's like Paul's special rhetoric, as if it's not to be taken seriously. It's just to be honest, his mode of communication. And therefore we miss it.

This book is sublime and it takes such an intensity of concentration and attention to plumb it. So, I feel guilty myself of just reading it that casually where he says, although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace is given.

But dear man, it's because you're the very least of all saints that this grace is given. Not only are you the very least, but you've got to know that in your deepest consciousness. Therefore, God can afford to give you the grace of the revelation of the mystery that will not be afforded to other men.

If you think you're something, you're disqualified. Only when you know that you know that you're the least of all saints, are you qualified to receive the revelation of the mystery that was hidden from the ages and is now being revealed.

This must be some rhetorical flourish. Paul certainly knows that he's the chief of the apostles and he says in some kind of self-effacing way, I'm the least of all saints. What is he, a salesman that needs to affect a false modesty?

Have you ever wrestled with this? I don't think so. This is critical, saints. Because if this is true of Paul, what must our qualification be to receive the revelation of the mystery in which he was stood?

Does that require a humility on our part, where we see ourselves as the least of all saints? When just at the time when we're celebrating our growing maturity and spiritual success and the enjoyment of our fellowship, we should think ourselves the least of all saints?

Come on. How do you explain this, cats? Here's how I explain it. The deeper that a man is in God, the more he knows that he knows he's the least of all saints. This is not some affected false modesty, because the apostle cannot enjoy anything that is false.

He's a servant of the truth, even of his own condition. This cannot be some play on words. This has got to be authentically the statement of the truth of the man himself, and he knows it. The only thing I can think that's akin to this is Moses saying that I'm the meekest of all men on the face of the earth.

Because both Moses and Paul are the apostles of their generation, and both know because of their proximity and union with God, how little they are. It's only the bumptious hotshot who has commandeered a certain vocabulary and familiarity and phrases and makes a show of things that thinks he's got something and is something.

The deeper a man is in his relationship with God, the more he knows that he knows he's the least of all saints. And that inward and authentic knowledge, which is not a false modesty, I can't say this enough, opens to him a revelation of the mysteries of God that would not otherwise be afforded him.

So now we've got to come to this, and we've got to enjoy the benefit of these mysteries and ourselves make them known. Are you on your way to becoming the least of all saints? So what is the grace that was given?

And could Paul have communicated these mysteries without grace? Can I communicate it without grace? Can you receive it without grace? We're not dealing with hocus-pocus and some web formulation. These are the foundational mysteries of God that any church that is to be called the church must have surely as its immovable foundation.

Can we come to that without grace? You know, I could speak this a hundred times, and I probably have over the course of the years, but the hundred and first time requires as much grace as the first. Are you dependent on the grace of God?

Are you willing to be God's fool? And unless that grace be given, you're just going to be a stumbling bone with your foot in your mouth. You would be better off giving your testimony than attempt to speak from an apostolic text like this.

So here already I'm filling out something of the genius of what an apostle is. A man of deepest humility because he knows that he knows in view of the God whom he is privileged to know more intimately than most, that he's the least.

And that without the grace that that God gives, he cannot put two words together. I'm sure Paul was remarkably eloquent and gifted prior to his conversion as the prize student of the Rabbi Gamaliel. I was also before my conversion articulate, personable, able.

Why, I led students off of cliffs as a history teacher. They would follow me like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I have such a dash and such a an ability to communicate and I was the atheist. I was leading them into socialism or into atheism.

When I became a believer and stood before students again, it was remarkable how defunct I was in those very giftings that were elementary when I was outside of God. I was stuttering, choking, spluttering, unable to put two words together.

When you say, God, what was the big deal? It's just a history test. I went, yeah. Any kind of apostolic mindset knows that a history class is the issue of eternity. More so than those kids sitting in their youth section in their Sunday churches.

And what is before us is not just the communication of history, but the issue of life and death and eternal things. And now you're stubborn and now you're incapable until God gives grace. You know, when I take a sabbatical, when I see speaking, when I begin to hear myself, as if I have come full circle now, and I'm no longer now speaking out of the heart of God, but my memory of having spoken out of the heart of God.

When I begin hearing myself as a memory and reciting things that were spoken once authentically and now spoken by remembrance, it's time to quit, time to stop, and go back to the source and find a place of refreshing and renewing in God before you open your mouth again.

Or else you'll just be speaking palaver that will aid no one. And so what is Paul's call? To make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things in order that, and stop right there.

We dare not run on and read the next word for fear of missing the whole thing that Paul is about to state. How would you like an apostle to come and to tell you in one fell swoop what is the purpose of God in the creation of all things?

Do you think you're alone? Do you think that it would affect what we are about to do? Can we be about something that is not in relationship to God's purpose for his creation? I see a few of you are getting drowsy.

I'm going to pray a little for you. Revive a little. Lord, don't let any sin doze off. They had such vigor and exuberance only at 15 minutes a half hour ago, and now when the word comes, they're getting dull?

It ought not to be. So I'm asking my God, revive. Stir them. Let them be attentive to the word and hear it to their great benefit and to others through them in Jesus' name. We are about to hear Paul's apostolic understanding of why God has created all things.

God's Eternal Purpose for the Church

That this is a purposeful creation through a purposeful God, and it's incumbent upon us to understand what that purpose is and when you find out, it'll knock you out of your seat. It's the last thing that you would have thought or expected, and it will radically affect every consideration thereafter.

Isn't that a lavish statement to make for what we are about to hear? Are you leaning forward in the stir? What is the purpose of God's creation for all things? In order that through the church. Wow! I'm already staggered.

That creation has to do with the church exclusively and totally. The whole of the cosmic order, the galaxies, the planets, the earth, their movement, their seasons, the ability to sustain life is for the church?

Yes! In order that through the church something might take place. God did not think it too lavish and extravagant to create the cosmos. What do you think of that? What kind of church is that? And what kind of function is he expecting from that church that he did not think it too extravagant to establish creation for it?

Once we know this, we'll forever be saved from spiritual inferiority. Or think of the church as a Sunday addendum, or a Christian culture, or a purveyor of services, or any of the kinds of things by which the church has come to be known in the world and is.

Because it has lost its apostolic distinctive and character, because it has never known nor considered what God's purpose for it is in creation. That'll doom you to mere religiosity, to purveying services, to gratifying men.

And they'll love it, and they'll pen for it, and society will give you every kind of consideration. You'll be harmless and without consequence in the world if you have not understood what your purpose is in God, for which he did not hesitate to create all things in order that through the church.

Through the church what, Lord? That men would be blessed? That your gospel would go forth? That salvation be made known? That many benefits be accrued to men? Not a whisper of that at all in what is going to follow.

Got your safety belt on? This is going to destroy all your categories. There's not a word that follows that has a thing to do with benefit to men. There's not a word that follows that has anything to do with God's salvation being made known, or any of the kinds of things that we think are our ultimate purpose in God.

I'm not disowning or minimizing those things. I've drawn your attention to the singular thing that Paul specifies, because we don't understand that and embrace that. The gospel that we do proclaim and the services that we do perform will be perfunctory, limited, and lack the apostolic grandeur and depth and weight that would really make them a penetration in the world.

God says nothing about the benefits that accrue to men. You need to know that, because ours is a generation whose whole civilization is predicated on benefits to men. Man-pleasing and the gratification of men is what this whole world is about.

What's in it for you? What's the benefit for you is a mentality we have even brought into the church that is not even suspect, because it's the unspoken premise by which the world lives its whole life.

We are number one. What's in it for me? What's the benefit? What's the pleasure? What do I obtain? Then I'm willing perhaps to extend myself. There's a deep egocentrism that pervades the whole of the world's water, and it has infiltrated the church itself.

Because the one thing that was provided to break its power, you have ignored. And that is the purpose of God through the church. What is the purpose? That the manifold wisdom of God through the church, in its rich variety, might now be made known to the rulers and authorities from the heavenly places.

Oh, what a disappointment. Is that all? What kind of purpose is that? To display, to make something known, not even on the earth, but above the earth, through an invisible spectral realm of principalities and powers, some kind of angelic entity that broods over the earth, that that is an important enough for God to have created an earth, that a church might have its existence on it, to demonstrate to those powers his wisdom.

This Paul, I don't know, he's off on some wild tangent, or he's touching something that is at the heart of everything, one or the other. Either he has radically missed it, or we have. Also, I believe Paul.

And so I want to understand what he's saying here. That God did not think it to lavish, to create the worlds, the earth, give it its form, that there might be an entity on it called the church, whose essential function and purpose is not to bless men or to confer benefits, but to make a demonstration to an invisible realm of entities above the earth and in the air, called the principalities and powers of the earth.

What do you think of that? Not only has it nothing to do with men, per se, but it has nothing to do with you, in terms of any advantage that will accrue to you, by making that demonstration known. As a matter of fact, if you're still thinking in terms of the benefit that will accrue to you, by obedience and service to God, you cannot make that wisdom known.

Because that wisdom is altogether entirely opposite, antithetical, and inimical to the wisdom of the world that makes self-interest its first principle. If you're still thinking of benefit for yourself, or for your church, or for whatever, you're not exhibiting the wisdom of God.

The wisdom of God has to do with a people willing to sacrificially be for God in such a way that his soul will be gratified, independent of any benefit that might come to them. It has nothing to do with the church's own benefit or self-interest, but one thing only, that which is important to God.

You know that what the heck of it is? He doesn't even explain why it's important. He doesn't say why that's his purpose. He merely states it. And just to make sure that we're not going to miss it, as if this is some kind of abstract consideration that is irrelevant, he concludes by saying, this was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he carried out in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Whatever this purpose is, however much we understand it, whatever this wisdom is, whatever those powers are, this is in accordance with the eternal purpose of God in Christ Jesus. Now you show me a church that has not sought, nor understood, nor desired, nor embraced the eternal purpose of God in Christ Jesus, and I'll show you a flaky outfit.

I don't care how, what measure of success it enjoys for itself. It has no apostolic consequence for God or for the world. Unless we have understood, sought, and embraced the eternal purpose of God. Because if we're not concerned with God's eternal purpose, what then are we?

What then are we concerned with? What's the object of our attention? What's the purpose for all being? Our own satisfaction? To establish a groovy fellowship and enjoy its emptiness? Is that the purpose for which God created the earth?

I want to say the church that is that church, and for which the world is desperately hurting, and in the absence of which the world is freaking out, is a church that has as its foremost purpose in being, is to surrender to, and to submit, and to desire the fulfillment of God's eternal purpose.

So if we're going to be occupied with God's eternal purpose, we've got to be occupied with eternal. Just our movement toward understanding that purpose compels us to come onto the ground of that which is eternal.

God, he could not have used a word of greater weight and moment than eternal. I don't know why God wants to make this demonstration. I know that he's already made a demonstration himself against the principalities and powers of the earth.

Spiritual Warfare Against the Powers of the Air

Remember that? In which he revealed them as defeated, and he took their, how does he say, concoctions, he disarmed the principalities of the earth, and made them an open spectacle. It was Jesus' coming that even revealed the presence and the reality of the principalities and powers of the earth.

They were always there. They were always present. They were always afflicting, and jerking, and manipulating nations, and the world, and races of men. They were the unseen gods of this world. They are still that now.

You can't understand Rwanda, and Bosnia, and any of the other horrendous things, or the Nazis of World War II, and the systematic abolition of Jews, independent of the principalities and powers of the air.

Do you know who they are? What they are? What they are about? Do you understand the cosmic setting of the faith, into which we have been called? Do you understand that there's a conflict, since time immemorial, between these powers and God, over who, in fact, is going to rule over this very creation?

Remember Psalm 2? How the king's rage and the rulers take thought against God and against his anointed? Why doesn't God say that the kings and the rulers are... It's not kings, it's another word in Psalm 2.

The visible, earthly magistrates and the rulers take thought against God, and against his anointed, and want to break their bands asunder. They rage, and they form at the mouth. Listen, you guys. This is exactly what we're going to see in the last days.

When the devil is cast into the earth, it has been a short time. We're going to see the rage, the intense fury of the powers of darkness that know they have but a short time, and that their usurping misgovernment of creation is to be over, for there's a king coming and a kingdom that will once and for all end the usurping false rule.

Am I going too far? Is that the setting of the last days? Indeed. But how effectual will we be if we have no consciousness of these dimensions? And you know one thing about them? They love for you to remain in that ignorance.

They love to be concealed. They love for you not to be ignorant of what is the actual motivating force, the underpinning, the powerful diabolical thing that moves nations and men, that is invisible and unseen, but powerfully effectual.

Someone said that that church which is ignorant of the existence of the principalities and powers dooms itself to irrelevance. It merely bats at the air unless we understand that over Cyprus, Israel profoundly, South Africa, my God, wherever there's been a history of violence, wherever there's been contention, strife, racial enmity, blood flowing, the powers of the air have had their hooks in and have left their residue behind and have principalities yet prevailing because of that history.

Look at Nazi Germany. The land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner. My God, the end of German brilliance and genius is limitless. And yet, within a decade, a regime came with the skull and crossbones on their Gestapo hats and completely took over the reins of government and made it the apparatus for the annihilation of world Jewry.

You think that that's a statement of German brilliance? What demonic influence. No longer content merely to root above Germany and to exert its influence but to take over the whole apparatus of state and society and make it an instrument of death.

Wake up, you guys. Because someone has rightly said, though the military power of Germany was defeated through World War II, those powers of the air that had provoked Nazism remain and seek their next opportunity.

We need to brace ourselves for ultimate conflict. And it's in that ultimate conflict that we will have opportunity for the ultimate demonstration for which God waits. How are these powers to be defeated?

By the demonstration of a wisdom entirely contrary to their own. What is their wisdom? Power, force, threat, intimidation, brutality, violence. That's what came upon Jesus at the cross. The powers of the air had their hapless victim.

And did they ever enjoy it? Oh, I could just see them salivating over what they now had to manifest their wisdom on this victim. Did they ever do a job? Have you seen the famous painting in Colmar, France, the Eisenheim Altar by the 16th century artist Grunewald called The Crucified Christ?

I'm converted because of that painting. I was an atheist though I stood before that painting. I've seen Jesus on black velvet pillows with sequins as a Jewish atheist that left me with a yawn when I stood before this colossal masterpiece of a man with gaping wounds and impregnated in his flesh with the prickly things that were on the end of that cat and nine tails with which he was lashed.

And his white lips in death and his head down on his chest a crunched, brutalized piece of humanity gnarled and a nail pierced. Oh, my God. That's a Holy Ghost masterpiece of the truth of what came upon Jesus in the Holocaust which he bore.

For all men for sin. Make light of that. And take a garland that crossed with roses as Goethe said and you destroy the faith. And you leave the church without its message or the understanding of even its own salvation.

You need to see that masterpiece. The Holy Ghost. It's a horror. You want to avert your face, you can't look at it. But you need to see the powers of the air in their fury ventilating their intrinsic wisdom.

And it's the wisdom by which the world lives. Force, violence, intimidation, threat. What do you think happens to Christian prisoners in Romanian dungeons and other places in China where believers are in the hands of their captors?

Their torture is not just men delighting in the lust of violence. There's a demonic quotient. They want these men to say uncle. They want them to forfeit the faith. They want them to deny the Lord who sent them.

The brutality and the things they inflict are demonic in its ingenuity and ferocity. It's the same thing that came upon Jesus at the cross. There's a fierce conflict since ruling. And there's only one agency in the earth that God has established that can both recognize the dimensions of this conflict and affect it.

And that agency is called the church. But a church of what kind is the question. A church that shares Paul's apostolic view and knows that creation will no longer suffer torment and real deliverance will finally come when these powers are brought to their final and ultimate defeat.

Jesus inflicted their first profound defeat. And where did he inflict it? Where did he make of them an open spoil and disarm them? At the cross. He received their worst fury. The most malicious abuse.

But how did he receive it? The physical pain in which he bore is beyond our understanding. But while he's bearing it and hanging from his own tendons there are his own people to whom he came as Messiah jeering and taunting him.

And saying come down and we will believe you. If ever a man had the right to break his silence and to say you dirty so-and-sos now that I'm suffering here for you that I have to hear in my last moments the indignity of your taunts and your jeers for the very reason that I'm bearing your sins well then you deserve every...

But he opened not his mouth. He went as a lamb to the slaughter. As the lamb is silent so also is he. Had he so much as cried once or ventilated his exasperation once he would have been disqualified. Because what was at stake in the remarkable crush that came upon him was the opportunity to reveal the wisdom of God for another kind under extreme duress.

What did they say? Suffering reveals? You know the old Russian school of acting that they used to say I want to suffer? Why do they want to suffer? Because suffering strips me away. Suffering reduces things to their absolute core.

Suffering removes the amenities and the things that soften our view and tend to compromise it. Suffering brings you to ruthless reality. And ultimate suffering is ultimate revealing. And what was revealed in the ultimate suffering of Jesus?

Not a response in kind to rail in anger and bitterness against those who are inflicting but to say Father forgive them for they know not what they do. A magnanimity of God. A graciousness of God at the point of ultimate suffering and duress was the thing that issued out of Jesus.

Not because he was reading a script but because he was what he was as only suffering would ultimately reveal the truth of it. That's a picture of us, of the church in the last days. We're going to be brought to a crunch.

And what we do and what we exhibit and what we express in crisis is what we in fact are. Got the picture? He started it. By an initial defeat we ended it by the demonstration of the same doctrine that he showed forth at the cross.