The Radical Controversy — Art Katz

The Gospel’s Exclusive Claim

In the exclusive way, and makes Judaism and Islam and every other kind of thing null and void, that would be an act of the most outrageous arrogance that modern men can conceive. And the only ones who can insist in that absoluteness are not the arrogant but the meek, though you'll not be perceived as that.

So this is a tremendous head-on collision. God himself is the architect, the author of it, not only for Israel's sake, but necessarily for our sake, because if we avoid it, as I've said, the gospel is going to become something less than other than God's radical intention, and society itself will reflect that kind of generality that makes Christianity only one of several other and viable options.

And ain't we got fun, and we're all in this together, and we have a wonderful ecumenical spirit and a wonderful world where everything goes and everything stinks, and everything is a path to hell, because there's not the righteous who insist on the truth uncompromisingly, however painful.

Southern Baptists and Evangelism to the Jewish People

I prayed for the Southern Baptist today. I feel like I've been bar mitzvahed. Today I am a man. And after 35 years, my first prayer for Southern Baptists. You know why? Because we were praying this afternoon in a Southern Baptist church, and one of the other brothers mentioned Southern Baptists, and praying for that church, and something stirred in my spirit, and I was reminded of the recent declaration of the Southern Baptist what do they call it Association to proclaim the gospel to the Jew.

And it came out during the Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur season. Talk about insensitivity to make an announcement of that kind, and to make it during the high Jewish holiday season. Outrageous. But I said, Lord, bless them for their courage.

Bless them because they knew that to openly proclaim something like that was to make themselves a laughing stock, and buffoons, and an object of derision and contempt by the Jewish community and those liberal churches who side with them.

After all, haven't they suffered enough already? Leave them alone. I praise God for the Southern Baptists that will not leave them alone. So I heard that there was a recent televised debate between a rabbi who represents, of course, the Jewish community, and some Southern Baptist minister.

And the rabbi said, are you inferring in your determination to evangelize us that somehow our Judaism is defective and wanting in any way? And the Southern Baptist, whose Adam's apple probably bobbled, gulped and said, oh no, we just want to add something to what you already believe.

Good thing I wasn't there. I would have added knuckles to his nose. Listen, saints, if Judaism only needs something to be added to it, then poor Paul was utterly deceived that he was willing to exchange his salvation, that he might be accursed for his kinsmen's sake, if only they needed was a little improvement, amelioration and an addition.

They need to be radically converted. And Judaism is as occultic and as deviant and as opposed to the truth as any other variety of form and religion and all that contends against God. There's only one truth, one faith, one way, one call, one righteous path to life and to eternity, and it's in the Holy One of Israel, Yeshua HaMashiach, Jesus the Christ, whom God sent, and it's the scandal of God's specificity.

Put up or shut up. What are we going to do with him? A Judaism that neglects and rejects him is ipso facto, null and void, and is even in opposition to the truth of God. Now, if we can say that to them in love, and however lovingly you're going to say it, it will not be perceived as being loving.

It will be perceived as being insulting. All the more, when they have their lives together in a much more seemly way than ourselves. Their wives are not being mistreated as our wives are. They don't bark at their wives as we do.

And the various other things in which we fall short wretchedly and are in the process of God's sanctifying work, they have no problems. They are the men of the year. They're moral, they're ethical, they've got it all together.

And you're going to tell them, with your defective marriage and your kids with an earring and something through the nose, that they need your Christ? Everything is stacked against us, so that only the truth alone might prevail, however foolish the instrument through which it is expressed.

Bearing the Reproach of the Gospel

That's where you come in. Okay. So there's a radical controversy. That was the church at the first, and it'll be the church again at the end, when the scandal of the gospel is revealed. And there's no polite way to proceed in this.

And we're going to hear the soft hearts and the ones that are commiserating with Jews. Why don't you leave them alone? I'm still haunted by that statement. I was on an airplane, and next to me was a Jewish woman.

And you know the way the Lord does? Don't think that I speak to everybody in airplanes. I'm not under any compulsion to win points. But when I speak, you can believe I'm being prompted. And I was speaking to this woman vigorously, a Jewish woman next to me.

And finally, the woman that was sitting by the window, self-righteous Gentile of I don't know what kind, turned and said, and why don't you leave her alone? Will we be able to bear that reproach that comes to us from Christians who will tell us that they've suffered enough already?

And why don't you leave them alone? As if there's no issue of great moment, as if eternity is not at stake. Your insistence in not leaving them alone implies that the issues are very great. But how great are they for us?

Is it a notch in our belt that we're wanting, or are we absolutely persuaded that the issue of eternity is at stake? And that's so great an issue that this soul should gnash her teeth and wail without relief and without remedy eternally because we have left her alone, that we cannot contain ourselves and we're compelled to being misunderstood.

You know, we continue like that, we'll be more than considered arrogant, we'll be obnoxious, and we'll suffer some consequence. We might even be taken to court for defamation of character because you're implying that a very nice Jewish woman or a man or so on is a candidate for hell when they've got university degrees and they have never barked at their wives and there's no evidence to support your supposition.

We could be taken to court. We could be fined. We could be financially penalized. We can find our business dealings impinged upon by Jews who have these kinds of connections and are going to wrap our knuckles because we have become obnoxious.

What will we do when the proclamation of the gospel begins to cost us something? When we begin to become a stink and a reproach and an object of derision and that we're impolite and we're dragged into courtrooms and fined and penalized because we've been prejudicial or incriminating or defamatory.

That's happening now and people are winning millions in lawsuits. This is the age of litigation and lawyers are making themselves rich at it and winning. Are you willing to be made a pauper? Are you willing to have your business lost?

Lean on your home because you have defamed the character of the Jewish people? I believe it must become that in the end. That we come again to this kind of apostolic absoluteness and receive not only the rebuke and the anger of the Jewish community but liberal Christians and churches who stand with them in ecumenical identification.

This narrow insistence of the gospel is going to make us a stink. We might well become strangers, pilgrims and sojourners in the earth. And who likes to feel strange? The heck of the matter is that that is our definitive description.

We're called to be pilgrims and strangers and sojourners in the earth. Those that are passing through who will never be at home in the world, who will always be a sore thumb and a round peg in the square hole or vice versa.

How is it that we're so well accepted presently and that we can be Christians in all this too and find acceptance and respectability that there's a way to be a Christian and conduct ourselves without any of these offenses?

But what kind of a Christian is that? The issue of the Jew is the issue of the faith, is the issue of the truth of God, is the issue of our reality and knowledge of God and our faithfulness and service to God as no other people represent.

The Scandal of the Messiah’s Identity

The Jew is the epitome of a wisdom, is a representative of a mentality, of a lifestyle, of certain suppositions, of certain unspoken assumptions about life, about truth, about reality. And when you come with your foolish gospel that contradicts all that and is centered in the despicable execution of a supposed messiah who died with criminals outside of the city in the dump and the garbage heap and say that he's not only the messiah of Israel, the holy one and the promised one and the fulfillment of Israel's messianic expectancy, but very God himself, you're bordering on a near insanity.

Or you're blowing the truth, you're blowing the whistle on the insanity that presently passes for truth. The conventional wisdom of the world that no one challenges and allows people to die and perish and go into an eternal wailing because they've lived the lie and no one ever blew the whistle or indicated that it was in any way in question.

We're not talking about a religious alternative. We're talking about the issue of truth, righteousness, eternity, the purpose for life and being, and there are whole numbers of mankind who don't have a glimmer of sense about this at all and subscribe to a conventional wisdom of which we Jews are the world's architects and purveyors.

I mean, after all, who writes the scenarios, the films, the books, the articles, conducts the interviews, the radio, the TV, the communications? It's us! And we have sucked the whole world into a mindset that has every appearance of acceptability and good reason, and there's only one fly in the ointment, this Jesus of Nazareth, who died a criminal's death in excruciating torment, changes everything and controverts what would otherwise be acceptable into the recognition of it as a lie, as a lying system, and the end thereof is death.

Somehow the issue is going to have to come up. Who was this guy who was crucified and who was responsible for his death? Yes, I know that in the predetermined counsel of God there was one who had to suffer and die for the atonement and the sins of mankind and for the people Israel, but does that exempt those who agree to his death from their own culpability and personal responsibility in choosing and desiring it?

And what of the subsequent generations who have followed and have affirmed that decision by their silence? Are you guys following me? I'm getting fancy now, but it's okay, it's on tape and you'll hear it again.

You know what I'm saying? No one is exempt for the greatest historic holocaust that has ever taken place in time in history. God cannot come down in flesh and suffer rejection and excruciating torment and the vile abuse at the hands of men unto the death and scandal of a criminal and that this event should be neatly swept under the carpet and made a little Easter bunny chocolate thing or a Christmas tree shopping extravaganza to affect western culture.

There's got to be a reckoning over that event and we are all accountable for the one attitude toward it or the other. We're either going to choose Barabbas and have already chosen Barabbas or we'll choose Jesus.

But we cannot be indifferent and our silence centuries later does not save us from the implication. Our silence condemns us as an agreement of what our fathers have performed. Unless we repentantly disavow what they have performed, we are identified with their choice and with their decision.

I will eternally suffer the result of that. Following me? You can't crucify God and think you can get away with it. And you cannot be born to a later generation and think that you're not implicated in the act though you were born generations later.

It's that kind of an act that reverberates throughout all history and all generations and no man will be independent of either the identification or the repudiation with that act. And so we Jews are very sensitive to the charge of deicide, God killers, Christ killers and that has been the rallying cry of anti-Semites throughout history when they broke upon us, the Cossacks with their horses and the pogroms in Russia and Europe and the Crusaders and all the kinds of things that we have suffered through all the ages always was attached to the cry, Christ killer.

And so now you in the 20th century at the advent of the new millennium are going to raise that cry afresh? Rats of rock. Here's the dilemma guys. It's true. We were culpable and we presently are culpable out of ignorance in seeing to the execution of the one who was promised to us.

And it was not just a momentary goof that we missed it in a moment of time and we should have known better. It was the culmination of a long history of sin and transgression. It was the culminating act of that which had many generations to precede it so that by the time Jesus came we were so dulled by our sin and by our apostasy we could not even recognize him who had been promised and saw him as a threat that could only be met by annihilation and death.

It's not just a one moment's boo-boo that we missed and you're holding us responsible for that one thing? You need to understand my dear Jewish brother and sister that that one thing is the sum of all things and it's the all thing.

It's the long continuation in sin and apostasy and detachment from God and from his word and from true worship and from the operation of his spirit that made you candidate for the destruction of the one who would have saved you.

And you know what? The fact that you've not seen it and that it's not of any consequence for you presently shows that you are still in that present condition and state of sin. Repent therefore. Come out from that untoward generation.

Disassociate yourself with the decision of your fathers to have executed the holy one of Israel. Acknowledge that they missed it, they erred and that you do not want to suffer an identification with their error and you are disavowing that connection and affirming him whom God hath sent.

That's called repentance and it's the one or the other. Who's pressing that issue on my kinsmen? Any of you guys here in Nashville? Is this the first city where there's going to be breakthrough? Where the church is going to come of age and realize that this is not some isolated and detached issue that we can take up at leisure along with other of our concerns.

The Priority of the Jew First

But that when the Lord says to the Jew first, he means that in his priority. And that if you have circumvented that obligation and not taken for yourself that mandate, what are you communicating to the powers of the air above in your supposed allegiance and loyalty to him whom you call Lord?

That's why the principalities and powers can yawn right in our face. They're not at all threatened by us. And we can talk about taking cities and howl and shriek and turn up the vibes and turn up the amplifiers and we're going to do it with worship and the powers of the air over Nashville go, what else is new?

The only thing that would have impressed them is your obedience to the word of God and the acknowledgement of Jesus as Lord who has established a priority that we have chosen to neglect. And not only have we not gone to the Jew first, in the last analysis we've not gone to him at all.

See what happens when you take your liberties and you're a slouch and you don't take the word of God seriously in the things that he sets before us, in the priority that his wisdom requires. And if you take that liberty with the word regarding to the Jew, what other liberties are you taking?

How else are you treating the word of God? Where else have you become callow and casual and doing your own thing at God's expense? Everything comes back to our relationship with this people. And have you noticed that they're around?

In Nashville and in Timbuktu and in Oshkosh. I've met them in Yugoslavia, in Tokyo. There are Jews in China. There's not a place you can go in this world where we are not. That's the consequence of our being dispersed in the nations as God's judgment and our shame and our exile.

But it also gives you the opportunity not to default in the obligation which is yours because we are actually present. And if we're not present, we will become present in the time of Jacob's trouble when we shall be uprooted in every nation and forced to flee from a coming persecution that will bring us to Nashville, Tennessee and to other places where we have never thought to tread, like where we are in northern Minnesota.

And why do you think we're there? To prepare a place of refuge for Jews who will be coming through in flight from persecution in the last days. Then your attitude to the Jew will be a put up or a shut up.

Sanctification, Community, and Suffering

And if you've not been able to relate to them in their present pleasantness, how will you relate to them in their adversity? When they'll be all charged up and bent out of shape and suddenly uprooted and shocked that the nation in which they thought they had the greatest security was no more a haven than Nazi Germany had become.

And it's all the Christian's fault because the New Testament is anti-Semitic and talks about the Jews in a negative way and that has contaminated and affected populations and made Jewish annihilation a reality.

They're not going to come in their best mood. And how will you respond then? This thing about sanctification is not a luxury. It is the imperative of the age. If we're going to take these tasks and these mandates and be so related to this people in a final crisis time as this, we had really better become saints.

And we'll never become it so long as our sainthood has for its means mere Sunday services. We're going to have to start going from house to house daily breaking bread. We're going to have to be willing to be subject to the examination of each other and correction and adjustment and rebuke and all the kinds of things that will not allow for a callow indifferent kind of Christianity.

We'll provoke one another to good works. We'll see that we have godly character, that we're a holy people, that we take the word of God seriously because the end of all things is in view. And if this should cost us and the Jews should get mad or we should be identified by taking them in and be hauled in by the authorities and go to their concentration camps or lose our life as martyrs, it's not with a pouting lower lip like how come me Lord, but with a gratitude and rejoicing for the privilege of suffering for Christ's sake and revealing him in that suffering for another as a Gentile to a Jew, what did they ever do for you that you should so extend yourself?

And the fact that you will shows that something is operating more than any natural factor, namely the spirit of God, which is the love of God, which is the unconditional love of God for this people even at their worst.

How are you going to come to that? If your church, if your Christianity is only a succession of Sunday services and you've not been in that intensive frequent relationship with each other that makes the church the church and is called the community of God.

The whole issue of the Jew requires a tightening up of the ship, requires a certain earnestness about the faith and a certain expectation about eternity. That if it costs our lives, praise God, because we have obtained by that an eternal crown of glory.

We're a church that is not eternity minded. We have no eschatology. We're caught in the today. We don't see the thing that is future and eternal and the rewards that God confers that make sacrifice in the present life a rejoicing.

The issue of the Jew compels us to have a back to apostolic verity, to understanding the faith as it was given at the first and being the dynamic and glorious house of God that it was at the first and must again be at the end.

Israel, Judgment, and Responsibility

What are the speakers say? You can say amen. Well, I'm still on page one. So we have to deal with the issue of the crucifixion of Jesus, Jewish guilt and implication, not only for the generation that affected that crucifixion, who said, let his blood be upon us and upon our children.

But every subsequent generation, including the present one, stands in some relation of obligation for or against the decision of their fathers. And of course, the question is going to come up. But what about the Holocaust?

Six million Jews? What do you Christians say about that? And it took place in Nazi Germany, the land of Lutheran, the land of the Reformation. What kind of Christianity is that? And where was God? You know, the only answer I believe is the one that is stipulated in this book, that it was the promised judgment of God that however long deferred will and must necessarily fall, especially in the latter days, that there's a judgment of God.

There's a judgment for sin that however much we forsake and forget, you cannot be absolved of covenantal obligation either for blessing or for curse. The fact that you're indifferent to covenant does not negate it.

And if God promised a curse for failure to keep covenant, he will bring it. And in this book, I cite the trial of Adolf Eichmann. You know who he was, the architect of the whole system of annihilation that was apprehended in Argentina, I believe, by Jews and brought to Israel and put on trial and hung.

And the attorney for the state of Israel, the prosecuting attorney said prophetically without realizing it, however long a man's crimes may go unrecognized and undetected, there must come a time in which finally justice will prevail and that the consequence of his crime be effected.

That no amount of time can defer that which must ultimately come. And if that's true for a Eichmann, is it not true also for a nation? And was it not true in the Holocaust time? That raises whole questions about God, about a God who judges, but a God who is also merciful, about a God whom we do not know as we ought if we have not considered him in this way.

And if we have not considered him in his word and will not understand him in history, how will we face him in the day when we stand before him in the day of eternity and see as we are seen? So is the Holocaust a Christian failure or the consequence of historic Jewish sin?

Is Jewish proliferation in the nations, the fact that Jews are located in Nashville, Tennessee, in Hollywood, California, Brooklyn, New York, where I come from, is that God's provision to bless the Gentile nations by proliferating us among you?

Or is it a statement of God's judgment that we're out of the land and in the place of exile? How do you read that? And how do you communicate that? So this all requires some kind of awareness of the things of the end, the end times, but not just a mental understanding, but a lifestyle that corresponds to it.

Living in Light of Eternity and Judgment

Because you can't tell people about eternity and eternal judgment if you don't give evidence that you're already living in the reality of that eternity and that your lifestyle confirms it. You're not fearful about the future.

You're not saving for the rainy day. You know the Lord's coming. You know that there are things that lie beyond this life. And the way you look, the way you talk, the way you bear yourself, your values, how you invest your time and energy either supports and underlines the truth of your view or renders it a lie.

Are we living as if we believe the Lord is coming, that judgments are coming in the earth, that it'll begin first with the house of God and go on then to the nations? And there was a time when God winked and times passed, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.

Do we have a face and eyes and a tone and a voice that corresponds to these convictions, or are they only just opinions? Our opinions, our Christian culture, our view, and no one is under obligation to take it seriously.

There's a difference between an opinion and a conviction. An opinion is a cheapie. A conviction is costly. And to communicate the truth as conviction is going to take not just a subscription to that truth, but a lifestyle that makes clear that you've subscribed to it.

Got the idea, guys? No wonder that we have been ignored by the Jewish community and not considered any kind of a threat, because we're too much with the world. Though God's judgment condemns it, we're not radically separated from it.

We're not willing to suffer for the issues that we're putting before men, even the suffering of their rebuke. To face a Jew and have him shout you down or show you the fool that you are with a much more eloquent English than you're ever capable, to be misunderstood, to be looked upon as arrogant and how dare you, who has the chutzpah, the audacity, the guts to do it?

You know what? Even though these Jews might rage at your audacity to suggest such things to them, they have to in their hearts admit that you have had to be prompted by love. Why else would you suffer their rebuke?

Your very willingness to suffer, their misunderstanding, the willingness to suffer is itself the statement of the love of God. And you may suffer in your business, suffer in the courtroom, suffer penalty, suffer possible prison terms.

The willingness to suffer for the eternal salvation of men is the thing that validates the truth of our conviction being more than an opinion. Men don't suffer for their opinions. It's the issue of the salvation of souls, full of gravity, for the alternative is eternal hell.

And we're willing, therefore, to suffer the inevitable reproach and rebuke. We're willing to suffer. So when you touch the Jew, you touch a world system. It's really remarkable, the irony that we were called to be a nation of priests and a light to the world.

But as we have defaulted in that calling, we're a light of another kind. And we're found in places of influence that are not promoting the light of God, but a darkness. And we're identified with that world and the world with us.

When you scratch us, you scratch something far more than just an individual life. You're touching a system, a world of values, of which the principalities and powers of the air prevail. The rage, the anger, is more than just an individual and personal vexation.

Apostolic Sending and Corporate Prayer

It is the fulmination and the foaming of the mouth of the powers of the air who have prevailed and have activated and operated through this people. I'll tell you, we better not just go idly and knock on a door unless we are sent out of our fellowships with the laying on of hands by people who have interceded and have fasted for the remarkable collision course that must come in bringing the radical message of the gospel to an unsuspecting Jew who abhors it because it contradicts not only his religious views, but his entire wisdom and requires a repentance and a forsaking of a whole lifestyle to embrace something that will make him a stink within his own community.

And you're going to do that without being a sent one? If we men had to come up on the platform tonight to pray for me to speak this, what is it going to take for you to do this? And whose hands are you going to allow to be laid upon you?

Some guy who's casual? You don't even know him? You've never seen him in the fellowship before? What's he doing with his hands and fingers before he laid them on your head? That means we're going to have to know each other in the spirit.

That means we're going to have to have tested relationships and know the character of the saints who make up our fellowship together and who are willing to intercede, which is a form of suffering. True prayer is a form of suffering.

True witness is a form of suffering. There's a humiliation. There's a shame. There's a self-denial. Fasting is a form of dying. You'll not do it unless you believe that what is at stake is eternity. And you'll not do it unless you're doing it together.

You know what? It'll compel you to be the church. It'll compel you to move from being the casual sum of individual islands of individuality into the corporate people of God, the church, whose prayer is no greater, no more authentic and compelling than its relationships, whose praise and worship is not the expression of its musicality, but the truth of its relationship to each other and to God, none of which is cheap.

Church itself is a suffering before it's a glory. And this issue of the Jew will compel us to be such a church. And that was the wisdom of God from the first. It's for our sake that they have suffered being broken off from their own root that we might be grafted in.

They stand as the continual challenge to us about the issue of whether Jesus in fact is Lord. They don't know those things, but they perform those things. There's a mystery here and it behooves you to understand it.

And Paul said, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery, brethren, lest you become wise in your own conceit, unless you go thinking that you can bring the kingdom now and some other hotshot stuff or that you have displaced Israel once and for all, you'll have some noxious asinine notion that completely misses God's ultimate intention for that people through you.

And you will suffer the loss of the challenge that would have compelled you to have become a saint. And your eternal state will reflect that failure. What you're willing to get by in this life and be a lackadaisical Christian and avoid more or less the more serious sins, but they'll take your liberty from time to time and get by and who knows anyway, and there's no real fear of the Lord and there's no significance to your Christian living and no one has really been affected by it.

And you're willing to go on like that day by day, year by year and die in that you'll have your reward. That is to say, you'll have no reward. You'll, you'll be embarrassed and humiliated and chafed and know that there's no remedy and no second shot in eternity for what you've missed in this life that you've chose to be lackluster, loose and casual and indifferent.

We're talking about eternity saints. This is only a life that is a preparation, but we're not living as if we believe that. And it's a suffering for the glory that will be revealed. If Jews could only see a church like that, oh my God, how many would begin to ask us, how did we come to a faith of this kind that we're willing to be sojourners and pilgrims and strangers in the earth and, and be foolish and be looked upon as strange, perverse, arrogant, misunderstood.

Confronting the World’s False Assumptions

And for their sake, we need to confront a world system predicated upon false premises, false values that is unspoken, universally shared assumptions that no one challenges. It's the conventional wisdom and the world that lives by it will perish.

That does not believe that there's an eternity and thinks that this life is the everything and, and make hay while the sun shines. And if, and if your marriage doesn't work, try, try again. After all, you're still young and you still got your looks.

And, and if you don't take care of number one, who will, who is blowing the whistle on these obnoxious lying assumptions by which men and women are dying everywhere and filling mental institutions and having their, what you may call it, veins breaking and, and erupting in tumors and every kind of physical disability, because they're not living in righteousness and truth.

And that is considered so normative that the drug companies are raking up the billions in suffocating and stupid, stupefying the pain of physical suffering in lives, not lived in righteousness. Where's the church?

We need to confront that world. And my Jewish people are at the heart of it. Steven Spielberg, the dream factory, well-chosen. We're the makers of myths and fables and, and mirages and make-believe flight from reality until the bottom falls out and we find ourselves walking into a gas vault, a chamber, a horrible moment of reckoning of truth too late to remedy.

Prophetic Warning and the Coming Tribulation

Listen, Saints, if I know anything about scripture, there's another Holocaust coming. It's already on the way. Anti-Jewish hatred is billowing in many nations and it will erupt. Jesus said that there was never a time in history before nor will there ever be again as this time of Jacob's trouble.

And that if that time were not cut short, no flesh would survive. But for the elect's sake, the time will be cut short. There is an elect, there is a remnant that God will save out of that final time of attrition.

And if he does it, he'll do it through you or it'll not be done at all. There's a fury coming, it's demonic, full of hatred, retaliation. And the object of it is my own Jewish kinsmen and they have no knowledge or expectancy at all, living a kind of a fool's life because no one has spoken to them the truth of the prophetic things that must shortly come to pass.

There's nothing that is more an object for derision and scoffing than prophetic things, than those freaky people who are giving you the dates when things are going to happen and they're waiting on the roof for the Lord to come and he doesn't come.

They laugh at that. But there's a reality that is inescapable of the things of the last days, of the conclusion of the age. There's a sense, an eschatology, a sense of end things. There's an apocalyptic view of the conclusion of the age that comes in judgment and fire, that even if you don't know the exact date, you know that it's imminent and that it will come.

And knowing these things, what manner of men ought we to be? And what manner of warning ought we to issue? There's no more ridiculous figure in popular magazines than this character with the long beard and the sandwich board walking up and down the streets of a city and saying, repent for the world is doomed.

That's an object of a chuckle when it ought to be the most sober reflection. If it's not some freak walking with a sandwich board, but good, sensible men and women, professionals, educated, working people, clear in their eyes and face and voices were saying to their Jewish friends and kinsmen for whom they have prayed, let me make something clear to you, that the word of God is irrevocable and here's the description of what God says we need to expect at the end.

Come into the arc of safety while you can. We can't do this without God's saints, without prayer, without intercession, without seeking him, earnest seeking. It's a lost art in Christendom. Who knows how to seek the Lord?

We sought after him and we found him. We cried and he heard us. When's the last time that was true for any of us? You know why? Because nothing is that imperative that has required a cry.