An Apocalyptic Burden

An Apocalyptic Burden and Impending Judgment

I'm learning that we're being called for, being picked up early, and this might be the last opportunity to express the kind of burden that I carry. I carry a strange burden, and it makes me strange. It's an apocalyptic burden.

It's a burden of impending judgment and doom for Israel, the time of Jacob's trouble for world Jewry, the near annihilation of the Jews that are presently in the world, the flight out of nations where they are presently established, some degree of security and prosperity.

How would you maintain a normal disposition if you had some sense of this impending disaster and look upon a church that is impervious or ignorant of this imminent devastation? That's my point. I'm not saying that to appeal to your sympathy, but prophetic men were on madness.

Of course, they had a glimpse of things that are future, but they see them with a certain kind of cogency and immediacy as if they were about to happen indeed. When it does come, it will come with such suddenness as to really not only devastate those upon whom it comes, but those in the world who are sympathetic and related to Israel and had hoped in the establishment of her nation.

Apostasy, Israel's Failure, and the Church's Blindness

Paul speaks about the last days falling away of the church. The great apostasy, and I suspect that not the least reason for it, will be a massive disappointment that God will have allowed the great experiment of Israel to prophetically fail.

And so where is God to allow a second time in the 20th century a massive devastation of world Jewry and the failure of their hope for a state that would have been their long hope for a place of security in the world?

And what about the scriptures that seem to have promised it? Wasn't this the state that was born in 1948? And how could the Lord allow it to come to a tragic end and the Jews there be dispelled? In flight from devastation or in actual captivity and brought again into the nations?

It's for that reason that I believe the Lord gave us the impetus to go to Israel 40 years ago and establish a conference in Jerusalem, a city where I was saved 35 years ago and where I'm well known by most of the believers there and have been welcomed every previous time.

Because they used to say that when Art comes he brings the word of the Lord with him. Now Art is no longer welcome because he brings the foreboding sense of an imminent disaster which men don't want to contemplate.

What is it about us that flees from this unwilling to consider devastation and judgment? It's kind of flight from reality and so I don't want to give you the whole history of it but if you are on internet and you want to see my reply to my detractors and those who find my views offensive and even sent me a letter of opposition signed by 13 of the most prominent messianic and other leaders of ministries in Israel whom I've known for many years describing me as a false prophet or a man in error and doing serious damage to the body of Christ in Israel and giving aid to the enemy, my reply to those statements is to be found on our website.

Www .bentisrael .org. And up comes something called the burning bush. Very significantly titled because the bush represents the burning bush but fire is almost always invariably a statement of judgment.

Moses and the Burning Bush as a Pattern for the Church

There's a bush that's burning that we have no disposition to examine and when Moses was willing to turn aside to see and look into that bush, not as curiosity but to understand why the bush burning was not consumed, it was at that point that God called him to be Israel's deliverer.

And there'll be a corollary of something of that same kind for the church of the last days willing to look into the burning bush of judgment because God is in the midst of that bush. And there's a revelation of God and a call of God that is only to be found in that radical place.

But the rabbis rightly say why it is that God called Moses when he saw that he turned aside to see, implying that there's a real issue of human volition and choice that we need not look into it. We can circumvent them and go around because we instinctively sense that there's something here that's foreboding.

It's not safe to look into a subject of that kind. It might not only damage, it might devastate all of our familiar categories and require a whole revision of how we understand the faith, how we understand God, how we understand the church, how we understand Israel.

Israel as the Issue of God and His Glory

The issue of Israel is the issue of God. The issue of Israel is the issue of the faith. And to misapprehend Israel, to see Israel humanly or sentimentally, is to miss not only God's profound statement that is in the restoration of Israel, but to miss God.

To sentimentalize Israel is to sentimentalize God. To project upon Israel a happy ending is to bring something of the same kind of subjective imagining that we employ for ourselves. We ourselves shrink from catastrophe.

We shrink from apocalyptic things, from judgment. We also want a happy ending. And we project upon Israel the same kind of desire that we have for ourselves. Our view of Israel, in fact our view of God, our view of theology, is so much the projection of what is basically the disposition of our own heart and desire for ourselves.

There are few that are ruthless toward themselves that can receive the perspective of God that is painful in its first consideration, though its ultimate end is glory. So, do you know why it is that we miss the issue of Israel?

Because we're intent only on Israel's success, which humanly speaking is to be desired. But from the point of view of apostolic consideration, there's a much greater purpose of God for Israel. It's not the establishment of a state, however long desired, and a place of security for people who have had their entire history in exile, that the issue of Israel is not the issue of success, but the issue of God's glory.

That's why Paul ends his remarkable statement in Romans, chapters 9 -11, that I commend to you because it's remarkable how much the Church has missed it, and that every segment of the Church that celebrates itself as the Israel of God and speaks of the Kingdom of God now, necessarily omits Paul's profound statements in Romans 9 -11, particularly the 11th chapter, that makes clear there is no kingdom till Israel's restoration.

That Israel's being brought back from the dead is life for all nations, but there is a death that precedes that life. The issue of Israel is the issue of resurrection, and the issue of resurrection is the issue of glory.

Jeremiah's Prophetic Anguish and the Burden of Scripture

So I can only gasp and spurt and choke out the things that God has put into my heart and understanding, and leave you in whatever condition that that word will bring you, because I can never bring this systematically.

This is not a matter of lining up prophetic scriptures and bringing a logical statement. This is a prophetic profusion. This is something that has to come out of the course. You can understand why Jeremiah complained to God that he was even born.

He didn't want to bear the anguish of his own message, because he saw the impending judgment, and he saw how uprooted, hard, and unwilling the nation was to hear his statement. So I'm in something of the same pickle.

Well, you know what the remarkable thing is? That there's such a profusion of scripture that speaks of an end-time devastation, both for Israel and world Jewry, that you wonder how anyone could miss it.

My problem is knowing where to select. It's not being able to scrape and define a scripture or two that buttresses my view. So Lord, precious God on high, this, as you know and I know, is important tonight.

Because to be adjusted to your view and your seeing is not only to be more aligned with you with regard to Israel, but with regard to God himself, because it brings in necessarily the issue of God in judgment.

And if he'll not spare his own people Israel twice in the same century, how then will he spare us? And if judgment begins first with the people of God, how long then will it be before it falls upon the nations?

Mercy, the Remnant, and the Church's Role

And so this is really remarkably important for our whole perception of reality itself, and those things that are imminent and soon to take place in the United States. It's not just a matter for our curiosity or our understanding, that I tried to share with brothers over the lunch table today.

The issue of Israel's survival, of a remnant that shall return to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads, and mourning and sighing fleeing away, is the issue of their being rescued out of this last day's devastation by a church that is in the earth and that extends mercy that they might obtain mercy.

And it will not be a mercy that's cheap. Mercy is never cheap. It will not be a mercy that's deserved, because by definition, mercy is never deserved. It's given to the undeserving. And Israel is an undeserving nation.

It's not because of perversity that God is going to save a remnant and restore that remnant to Zion, and give it an honored place of preeminence among all nations, and make it central and pivotal to all nations.

But it's because God has elected. It's because God has chosen. Because He will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy. And because Israel is a perfect counterpoint and an opportunity for God to demonstrate to the nations what His essential nature is, which is to say that He will have mercy upon whom He will have mercy, all the more God, because the nation itself is undeserving.

The same God who condemns Israel for blaspheming my name and all nations where I have driven you, is the same God who will rescue Israel from all nations to which they will yet be driven, and driven through.

And South Africa is certainly no exception. I tremble for the 80 ,000, 90 ,000 plus Jews in this nation when the bottom falls out, and the suddenness with which a great anti-Semitic wave of hatred and terror falls upon Jews worldwide.

Matthew 24, Luke 21, and the Time of Jacob's Trouble

It will be precipitated by events in Israel themselves of which Jesus spoke in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, the other discourse, when He was asked by His disciples, what are the signs of the end of the age of your coming?

He talked about the persecution of the church, but He also spoke about a horrendous event erupting in Jerusalem itself, that they should pray that it should not take place on the Sabbath, and that they should flee to the mountains of Judah, that some kind of horrendous travesty will take place in the temple.

There are two interpretations, one of an anti-Christ figure demanding worship, who had negotiated a treaty for Israel that was brought in false peace, and has abruptly ended after three and a half years by the coming of this negotiated, demanding Israel's worship, at which point Israel balks and it releases the vitriolic hatred against them, by which a great devastation falls upon Jerusalem and Israel, or it can be an invading army that is the abomination of desolation.

Whatever it is, something has got to commence in Israel and in Jerusalem, but it's not confined there. It's for that reason that it was a necessity for the establishment of a state, because the scenario requires events to take place in Israel that precipitate this time of Jacob's trouble, of which Jesus says in this discourse, if that time were not cut short, no flesh would survive.

But for the elect's sake, that time will be cut short. And that this affliction that is coming will eclipse all previous devastations known to world Jewry. And if therefore that is future, that means that the devastation must eclipse the Nazi holocaust that took six million Jewish lives.

And I believe that that time is future, and part of my controversy with my brothers in Israel, who think that because they're in the land and have a greater proximity to events there, that somehow that provides them with a key of interpretation that is only exclusive to those who are in the land.

The issue of understanding the prophetic scriptures is not physical proximity in the land, but spiritual proximity to the God who gave those scriptures. And he gives that privilege to men who have a prophetic call.

And in fact the issue of who are the true prophets of God may well be what kind of view they are presenting to us, either of a peace-peace when there is no peace, and preaching a kind of false comfort that Israel has already experienced this time of Jacob's trouble, and it was during the Nazi holocaust.

Even though a child could see that what Jesus is describing must have its inception in Jerusalem, and the holocaust had its inception in Europe and in Germany. So if the time of Jacob's trouble is future, and will uproot Jews in all nations, and will eclipse the Nazi holocaust, and it is triggered by a devastation that comes first to Israel, and the stage now is presently being set.

In fact, a woman asked me at the ladies' meeting, when do you think these events will take place? How long do we have? I said in terms of Israel's readiness to be devastated, it could take place tomorrow.

I think the Lord has his hand of restraint upon the enemies of Israel, who are vehemently bent upon Israel's destruction. The only thing I think that restrains is that the church is not ready. Because Israel is not a factor in its own restoration.

It will be brought to a place of inertness, of devastation, of any capacity in itself to affect its own restoration and return. If you know Jews, and you know Jewish history, you would understand why that is a necessity.

God is not wanting to show forth the dexterity of Israel, and Jewish expertise or prowess to be hit squad at the cold and heavy events. His object through Israel is to bless all the families of the earth, and not to impress them.

The issue is not Jewish ability, the issue is the mercy of God, that will bring a nation into judgment unto death, and then restore it by the same power that raised Jesus and raises us, that they might be a millennial and everlasting tribute to God, and bring the blessedness that Jews in their natural condition are incapable of bringing.

That's why, which other eternity but life from the dead? There's a death that must proceed that life. And we're going to see, if I'm correct in my expectation, the first resurrection of a nation. We have seen individual resurrection of Jesus, which is the prototype, and the same power by which that nation also will be raised.

And we have supposedly experienced that in our own baptism. In fact, if we haven't, and we have only made water baptism a kind of religious requirement, and an ordinance of obedience, and have not seen it, understood it, and received it, as a death to our own humanity, and a resurrection to newness of life, we ourselves will be incapacitated to beat to Israel what we must.

The church is the key to Israel's redemption. God has elected and appointed that, because that pertains to His glory. He's taking that entity that is most, excuse my language, inimical, opposed, an entity with Jews.

The history of the church with Jews is a shock and a horror, and yet God is going to take that agency and make that the instrument of God's redemption for Israel. But a church of what kind? Not a church that is just sympathetically disposed to Israel, and goes to plant a tree, or runs to a feast of tabernacle celebration, but a church that is itself in the resurrection mode, and whose speaking is in resurrection power and resurrection authority.

Ezekiel 37 and the Resurrection of Israel

Because when Israel will finally come to a place that God has long been awaiting, as is described in Ezekiel 37, we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones. When Israel will acknowledge its absolute impotence, when the power of the people will be shattered, as it says in Daniel, then God moves to raise a nation that is incapable of raising itself.

Because Israel represents man. Israel is the statement of man's human self-sufficiency, human expertise, human ability to save itself. The whole history of the state of Israel is itself a testimony of the remarkable ability to take and resuscitate a dead liturgical language and make it a modern-day language, to become itself a high-tech state, to be a formidable military presence, to have atomic arsenal, to be the great Hong Kong of the Middle East, and not want to be a chosen people for the redemptive theocratic purposes of God.

So in terms of showing forth human ability, Israel can say, look, my no hands, but that does not glorify God. It just exalts a nation, humanly. Israel is God's witness nation to the nations. It will not understand the subject of Israel, except in the context of nations.

They are the first and the foremost of nations. Now they are the tail, but they will one day, as a restored lemon, be the head. And if nations will not go up to that Israel and acknowledge that Israel's God and learn the ways of the God of Jacob by going up to the house of God in the city of Jerusalem, God promises through Zechariah judgments.

Israel, the Nations, and God's Chosen People

There's something stubborn in the nations that is gentilic, Aryan, proud, that does not want to submit to God's chosenness. The issue of God's choosing Israel is to be a stumbling stone in Zion for nations that would have thought themselves more preeminent and more likely a candidate to be central to God's purposes than this despicable people who have blasphemed his name, having no distinction among themselves, and are apostate and away from the purposes of God, and that are stubborn and stiff-necked people throughout their entire history.

They were appointed and elected for that. How else shall God's mercy be made manifest and demonstrated except for a people of that kind? But they have to be absolutely reduced to such an ineptness that they are incapable of effecting anything of their own restoration or return from the places to which they are soon to be driven by the devastation of war and judgment that God is going to pronounce upon the nation and Jacob everywhere.

It's the time of Jacob's trouble, wherever Jacob is. And God says in Amos chapter 9, I will sift you, because of the sinful nation, I will bring you with the judgment, but I will not altogether annihilate you, but I will sift you through the nations, that not so much as one kernel shall fall to the ground.

Sifting through the nations is God's last profound revelation of himself, both in judgment and in mercy. That has not yet happened, but it will soon happen. And that's why when I'm in Odessa, in the Ukraine, in an unprepared way, I can say to the Pentecostal Church that prides itself in helping Ukrainian Jews to go to Israel out of its black seaport of Odessa, Oh, you think you've done God's service?

Are you exalting yourself for having done good? Your real test is yet to come. Not to send Ukrainian Jews to Israel, but to receive them back in flight and terror and panic when the hellish devastation shall suddenly break upon their heads.

Let's see what you'll do then in the history of your anti-Semitism where the people are going to come back in an unkept state, disordered, utterly devastated, and in flight. The issue of the nations is the issue of their response to Israel in that most despicable, broken condition in which God will allow them to pass.

Isaiah 53 and Israel's Future Suffering

Very much resonating the road to Calvary that Jesus himself walked. So I'm reading Isaiah 53 in a new way. I love that text. And you know that there's been a long controversy between Jewish commentators and the Christian.

Christians, of course, rightly see Isaiah 53 as the most profound messianic text describing a suffering servant who is none other than the Lord himself who takes the sins and the transgressions of his people upon himself.

Everybody hearing me fine? They claim that Isaiah 53 speaks of the nation itself, that it is a suffering servant, and suffering for Gentiles and for nations and bringing some kind of resentive value through their suffering to the nations.

Well, there's more to that than we should be quick to dismiss. Not so much of Israel's past in the nations, but Israel's future being passed through the nations in a broken and grotesquely disordered state that the time of Jacob's troubles will bring upon her.

Look at some of the scriptures that precede Isaiah 53, and they're full of references to physical violence and devastation. In Isaiah 49, verse 8, thus says the Lord in time of favor, I have answered you on a day of salvation.

I have helped you. I have kept you and given you as a covenant with the people of the sons of the land to apportion the desolate heritage, saying to the prisoners, come out, and to those from darkness, show thyself.

For he who has pity on them will leave them, my spirits of water will help him, and will turn all my mountains into a road, and my highway shall be raised up. So God is already speaking of desolation, of ruin, of prisoners.

The word captive and captivity is just proliterated for all of these prophetic scriptures because he brings them up out of dungeons. He brings them up out of hapless situations where no man himself can help save them.

Israel's Self-Confidence and the Dry Bones

God is going to exhibit himself supernaturally to a secular and rationalistic people who even when they are orthodox have not the faith to believe in the supernatural power of God. And that power has got to be demonstrated because all of these prophetic statements end with a revelation of God as a deliverer in supernatural power so that Israel says, he says, by this you will know that I am the Lord who has spoken and performed this.

And you will know in that day that I am the Lord. Well evidently that day has not yet come for Israel does not yet know the Lord who can deliver by supernatural power and raise them up out of their own abject death the moment that they acknowledge we are cut off, we are without hope, we are his strong bones.

You say, that sounds very much like the holocaust of the Nazi time. Well it does have a reminiscence of dry bones but where did you hear the nation make a statement of that kind to acknowledge their destitution, their impoverishment, their inability to lift themselves up from that state.

Instead we hear another kind of slogan that is current to this day, not that we are cut off, but never again. If you go to Dachau today, in six foot high letters before the museum of the holocaust is the statement never again.

I was just in Treblinka in Poland and there in front of the granite monuments of all of the nations to which Jews came that expired on that ground are the words never again in English, French, German, Russian, Yiddish.

Never again is the statement of Israel's defiant self confidence that though they may have been victims of the Nazi time coming out of a ghetto existence and Talmudic helplessness, that is the last time that nations will do them in.

The statement never again is not a statement of God being their strength, their power and their defense. It's a statement of their own prowess and their own ability. Can a nation with that mindset be a blessing to all the nations?

The very phrase never again invites devastation and indeed it will come. And I believe that this statement in Ezekiel chapter 37 verse 11 when they themselves say we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones.

God will effect the restoration. He's waiting for that acknowledgement. But it's not an acknowledgement that's going to come abstractly or as a speculation. It comes out of the grit and the reality of a very real devastation and death that leaves them as good as dead and without hope.

What's the word of Israel's what's the name of Israel's national anthem? HaTikvah. Which means the hope. Only it's not a hope in God. Israel itself, the state has become a Jew's final idolatry. It's hope and it's salvation and it's confidence is in itself.

Well maybe other nations might be like that and we do indulge in exactly that kind of self-salvation. But this elect people cannot be allowed. Do not understand the severity of which God speaks in Romans 11.

He says, consider and behold the goodness and severity of God. Who of us has done that? If you'll not see the severity of God in God's dealing with Israel, you'll not understand God. If he does not withhold severity from Israel, what then about nations?

The Holocaust, Human Depravity, and Divine Judgment

God as judge is most profoundly depicted in scripture in every chastising that Israel has borne all through her history. And God says, and yet they have not laid it to heart. I have brought them into the fire and they have not laid it to heart.

I've got a book up there that's available for as many tonight who are interested called The Holocaust. Where was God? An appeal to Jewish consideration. If the Holocaust did not bring world Jewry to a consideration of that devastation as judgment, if they dismiss it as some historical aberration, if they think it can be attributed only to a madman Hitler, and that God is not a God who is sovereign, and that an event of that magnitude could take place in his ignorance or his indifference, what then must he do to persuade them that he's the sovereign God of all the earth, and that he makes wars to cease, and he breaks the ball asunder.

He raises up kings and deposes them. And so something like the Holocaust is going to be an inadvertent slip historically that cannot be explained? The book has a premise that the judgment of the Holocaust, as every previous devastation that Israel has experienced, is in exact proportion to its sin.

You say, what, there's another Holocaust coming, and this one will be global? How then must the sin of world Jewry then eclipse even that of their fathers? And in Jeremiah 13 -31, where the prophet speaks of the time of Jacob's trouble, he says, your sin is incurable.

You have exceeded the sins of your fathers. And anyone who is a student of present-day Israel has got to be increasingly alarmed and disturbed by the moral collapse of that nation. Listen, you guys. We Jews have always thought that we were superior to you morally and ethically.

It's the kind of fantasy that one can indulge when we live in a ghetto and stroke our beers as we contemplate the Talmud. But you know what Lord Acton said? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Humanism, Israel, and the Depravity of Man

The only reason that Israel could indulge itself in some fantasy about some presumed moral superiority, is that they were not in a place where they had to engage in the practices of nations that are immoral in order to establish their own preservation.

That has now happened. Not the least of the reasons for the establishment of Israel is not to succeed, but to fail. Israel has got to recognize its own profound failure. It's the kind of thing that Germany has got to recognize, who make reparations for the Holocaust for the Jew, but have never broken before God nationally, to recognize that in the Holocaust is the statement of its own failure not as Germans, but as man.

You know, the one quote Christian doctrine that Jewry looks upon as abhorrent is the depravity of man. They refuse to subscribe to the view that there's something inherently wicked in man, and that man is no good thing at all.

Because we Jews are the most preeminent humanists and the celebrators of man. In fact, our whole undoing that will bring this devastation upon us is the outworking of humanistic presumption that has no basis in fact with regard to man.

That is to say, to think that Arabs can be appeased, and that Islamic hatred against Israel and against the Jew can be placated by appealing to Palestinians and to Arabs to lay aside their vendetta and their desire for vengeance, and to cooperate with Israel in a program of peace by which they can share with her the prosperity that will come to the Middle East.

And there's no question that if the Arab nations would do it, they would be prosperous. The only mistake is that the Arab nations are not ruled by the premise that man will always seek his own best interests.

Israel does not know man. It does not know itself. It does not know the human condition, and it is assuming that Arabs would respond as they would respond if an invitation to consider your best interests were taken seriously.

The Arab world is not considering its best interests. It is out for devastation, and it is ruled by demonic power that seeks Israel's annihilation, and God will allow that to be ventilated and expressed.

If for no other reason than just to show Israel that its humanistic presumptions that are calculated outside of what God says in his word is the truth of the human condition and what has been revealed in history, and revealed even in the Holocaust of the Nazi time, is in fact true, not only about Arabs, but about themselves, that there's no man good, no, not one, and if God were to measure iniquity, who can stand?

The Fall, Self-Assertion, and God's Judgment

Oh, you dear saints, please praise God I'm leaving tomorrow. But if you ever read commentary how many here would know the name Eric Fromm, a Jewish sociologist one of the prominent intellectuals. He subscribes to a view about the fall in the garden that will blow you out of your seat.

Adam and Eve actually were challenged by God to defy God himself. They were invited to break his commandment that they should not eat of the tree, because in doing that they were taking the first step to human self-assertion and human self-realization which God himself desired.

Can you follow that? It's the most uncanny and perverse interpretation of the Adamic fall that has tainted all mankind with that same corruption ever since and it is read by Jewish theologians and intellectuals as actually being an appeal for human self-assertion to defy God and that God even welcomed and has set up the stage for that defiance to take place.

What can you say for people like that? No wonder God says your sin is incurable. You are the epitome of mankind. You are the picture of man in his stubborn self-will and resolute independence of God.

And therefore you must be judged the more severely and therefore not only will I demonstrate before the nations the severity of that judgment by dispersing you into all nations I will demonstrate the mercy of God by restoring you from all nations for I will plant you in the land and bring you back from every nation where unto you will be scattered.

The Northern Refuge and the End-Time Community

And I'll do it supernaturally. I'll establish a highway of holiness. You'll find yourself uprooted. Your Steven Spielbergs and heads of CEOs of corporations and C-group distilleries and all the kinds of places of prominence and wealth that Jews enjoy will find themselves walking dusty and dirt, red-cracked mud earth like the road that brings them up to this place and out in the place where we are in northern Minnesota and any number of places that I have already seen, visited, touched, and have witnessed as being places chosen for refuge and flight for Jews in their last days time of Jacob's trouble.

You want to know why we're in northern Minnesota and not in a tropical location on your own? Because we are 100 miles from the Canadian border. Because we are strategically located in the wilderness of the North American nation.

And it's not a place that I chose. I'm a New Yorker by birth. I'm an urbanite. I'm not a man for the rustic north woods wilderness location. But 25 years ago when I was a speaker in the area and living safely in New Jersey 20 miles from New York and two and a half million Jews, they said, oh, there's a property for sale.

Would you care to see it? I said, sure, let's go for a ride. They took me to a bankrupt boys camp with a no trespassing sign and a big chain across the entrance to that camp. I get out of the car and I step over the chain and when my foot came down on the property, the Lord said same God that called me by name Jerusalem 35 years ago, Dominion, the name that that property has worn down for a quarter of a century.

End time teaching center, community refuge. And on the basis of those few words, without further explanation, our house in New Jersey was disposed of and our whole lifestyle was radically upturned and we were brought out to that location thinking that everything would be on that 94 acre camp.

The Lord showed us the farm across the road where a retired Lutheran couple were waiting to die and I had knocked on their doors the first few they ever saw and said, I believe God has a kingdom intention for your property.

Oh, we have no intention to sell, they said. And three months later sold me that property in which I invited them to remain and the husband died the following year, the wife was with us for 21 years as my spiritual mother and watched the world come through the door.

A Church Prepared to Receive Persecuted Jews

End time teaching center, community refuge. You cannot be a refuge except you be a community. And this is what I'm seeing as a pattern of God in many places of the earth today. These freedom in people, these establishing locations, they're critically and strategically located and there'll be such a remarkable networking between these physical entities but it will not be the result of any human organization.

This thing must not bear even the faintest scintillation of anything humanly organized. It has got to be totally the work of God's spirit. See why our relationships are critically important. Why one wrong word from me or your misapprehension or anything that would dent our relationship or cast a shadow over it might light on the fact of linkage of networking that God intends for the future.

I've come to a point since, as much as I love the word of God and love to preach the word, I have hardly and ever now allowed the luxury. Now it's for nuts and bolts of sending out a word of alert to a church that is naive and has no expectation of the enormous things that are about to come for which they alone are the appointed salvific agency of God.

But a church of what kind? Because to take these Jews in when they shall be despised the world over and be marred more than any man and have no beauty that any should desire them is not just being discomforted or being inconvenienced or being put into a place of ultimate risk.

Corrie ten Boom was a prototype of what God will again require from believers. Because to take Jews in, in an anti-Christ Nazi spirit that seeks their annihilation is to put yourself at risk of experiencing death.

Are you going to be willing to do it? And why should you? What's in it for you? And what did they ever do for you? And you should put yourself and your own family in such jeopardy for Jews who deserve what they're getting.

That is going to be the tenor and the world opinion in a soon coming time. I don't know what's going to bring it, but it's the release of demonic spirit. It will be touched off by a war, by economic recession, by all those things.

I don't know what by what. They will be despised. Why should you extend yourself to a despised people who have no comeliness, no beauty that you should desire them? In fact, those Christians who seem to trip over themselves and run to Israel now and are so delighted, I think will be among the first of those who are so grievously disappointed in Israel's failure that their so-called love, which is only sentiment, will quickly turn exactly the opposite.