Tulsa 2000 - Part 2 — Art Katz

From U .S. history, remember? Something out of the American Revolution, one of the first encounters between the colonialists and the British. Don't fire until you see the whites over their eyes. I haven't said that or remembered that in over 30 years till now.

What does that mean? I didn't hear that. I love to give sudden quizzes. Well, praise the Lord. The prophetic man is always asking, what does that mean? We had a birth in our community that came early, unexpectedly, where Simon and Naomi, one of our couples, began to have strange disturbance about the time of our summer prophetical school and convocation.

And then she was rushed from one hospital to another and has just now had the birth of a child they thought would have to be, what's the word? C-section. C-section and prematurely encouraged. But they waited and she had a natural birth of five and some pounds, some ounce baby.

And with the largest placenta they had ever seen. So we're asking, what does this birth mean? The unusual circumstances of this birth, the placenta, coming right at the time of our 25th anniversary. And brought forth to no small extent by the intercession and the travail of the Ben Israel community itself for the birthing of a baby boy whose name is Micah.

So we see him as a prophetic event. The birthing of a prophetic entity through travail, struggle, premature, great expense and the attendance of God is more than just a circumstantial thing. We're always looking, what's the meaning?

What is God wanting to say? Which is not a bad disposition. I wish that the church would have it and not so readily dismiss its circumstances as just being circumstantial. Okay, well I'm happy for a Saturday morning with you guys.

Isn't that a precious way to spend the Shabbat morning? So we thank you Lord, my Lord. What a privilege. Close us in with yourself. Cut us off at the pass. Quiz us. Bring up, my God, things that are upon your heart.

And have a full abandon to yourself. Enjoy yourself, my God, and romp and do what you will, where you will. And we just thank you for the privilege. We'll follow so well as we can, wherever you lead us, my God.

And we thank you for the privileged use of a Shabbat morning. Even the Rosh Hashanah morning, my God, when Jews are going into their synagogues. That we are here, my God, by your ordination. So come and guide us and take your full liberty, we pray.

Receive our acknowledgment of how privileged we are to be closed in together with you. And a sent servant. Thank you, Lord. We bless your name. Have your perfect way. First word to the last. In Jesus' name.

Hosea's Warning of the East Wind

Amen. Well, I want to look into this Psalm 102 this morning. But before we get there, I want to glean a little bit more from Hosea. Of last night's text that was so inadequately addressed. I looked at it again this morning.

It came from my devotional reading. And somehow a lot of things were quickened this morning. That I was not in a position to either see or attend yesterday. But it would be a pity to rush on and to miss it.

So we're looking at a text in Hosea chapter 13, verse 15. Kind of an ominous note about Jewish history. Although he may flourish among rushes, the east wind shall come. A blast from the Lord, rising from the wilderness.

And his fountain shall dry up, his spring shall be parched. It shall strip his treasure of every precious thing. We just have to take a deep breath and a pause. Because the scriptures themselves are so unique.

Such another kind of literature. The Psalms are unique within that uniqueness. And prophetic proclamation is equally unique. Such a weight of things, so compressed and so terse a statement. That it requires a very special attention.

And we have not been schooled to give to the scripture that kind of attention. We have been schooled by Gone with the Wind. By novels, by glib casual reading. We don't know how to invest ourselves in the word.

And the danger is we would just read through something like this and gain nothing. So let's just ponder this. First to say again, this is such an echo. A statement that has resounded through the whole of Jewish history.

Though we may have prospered for a season. And what would be more a statement of that than German Jews. I wish that you could have been with me at the most recent visit to Berlin. And the ruins of their reform synagogue.

An elaborate piece of architecture even in its ruins. And then the exhibits that go back and show. There was one photograph showing the stately congregation. Somehow the building probably so vast as it was, was not adequately heated.

They were sitting with their winter overcoats on. But such overcoats with fur collars, with their fedoras. With their top hats, with their nice starch collars and ties. And the women resplendently dressed.

If ever you saw a picture of affluence, security, comfort, assurance, stateliness. It was this Jewish congregation. But you're seeing it in the ruins of their synagogue. Devastated by the bombing of World War II.

And probably also by Kristallnacht. You know that night in October was it? When every synagogue or many of them was set afire. Kristallnacht is the German word for glass. The shattering glass that came out of these synagogues as the Nazis rampaged through.

And then right on the heels of that was the setting in motion of the whole process of Jewish annihilation. So wherever we Jews have had opportunity to prosper, it's only for a season. And surely sooner or later the bottom falls out.

If any Jewish community ever thought itself secure, it was the German Jewish community. Reformed Judaism was born in Germany. That is a secular adaptation of Judaism that is acceptable to a mind that is offended by the supernatural.

Can you guys follow me? Yeah? How did they come to a mentality like this? Because they were German Jews. Because rationalism is a German mentality of that generation. And they wanted to be accommodated to that civilization.

Do you know that this generation of Jews was opposed to the reestablishment of a Jewish community in Palestine? They wanted to be integrated into their diasporic exile homes. They wanted to show the German nation that they were first and foremost German Jews, German citizens.

That their first loyalty was to Germany. And only secondarily as a cultural and historic response to their Jewishness. That's why Reformed Judaism had its birth in Germany. And yet, however accommodating that community was, it was obliterated.

And that's exactly what God is saying through Hosea. And it ought to be a somber warning for American Jews. What? You're comfortable here? You're secure here? You're respected here? Take note that wherever you have enjoyed that kind of security in the world, it has only been temporary.

And there's a moment in which the axe falls and you find yourself again thrust out and suffering. So although he may flourish among rushes, you know what rushes are? Those reeds that grow by riverbanks?

I don't know why this kind of metaphor is being used by the prophet. It's set in nature because the blast that comes is a natural phenomenon known in the Middle East. There's a special name for it. Maybe somebody here knows it.

Where these unexpected heat, dry heat comes out with a wind and a gush unexpectedly. And so blistering away that wherever it passes it brings a devastation. You might have been abounding by the riverside, by access to water, by the rushes.

But when this heat comes, everything withers. So God is using a metaphor of nature as a warning to Jewish communities. Don't be deceived by your present affluence, security and comfort. Because that kind of affluence that you're enjoying is obtained independent of me.

You have an obligation being the Israel of God to make me known. But your very lifestyle that is the expression of godlessness, of only a superficial Saturday accommodation to me. But that your main purpose and being is your own success and prosperity is contrary to the witness for which you are intended.

And therefore though I allow you to enjoy the benefit of it for a season, there must come a time in which it will be judged. As I read this this morning I thought that though this is set in time and in history.

It's actually a warning of an eternal blast where everything withers but it is irrecoverable. It is a final and ultimate judgment for which reason God gives preliminary judgments. I have to check. Am I okay?

Am I coming through? Do you know the name Baselius Schlenk? If you don't, you need to. Talk about 20th century oracles. This is the German founder of the Evangelical Sisters of Mary in Darmstadt, Germany.

Who is a prophetess and has written some remarkable books on repentance, on Israel. It's a German movement born out of the rubble and ruin of World War II. Where the firebombing that fell on Darmstadt was so horrendous Darmstadt was not a military target.

But it was firebombed just as trying to think of these other German cities. One was famous for its ceramics. Dresden. Dresden, China. You know it's nice to talk to a literate audience that knows something about history.

I can help a stumbling speaker. The description in those places was the heat was so intense from the firebombing. People in flight were caught in the melting asphalt and trapped. And the air was sucked right up from the city.

So that tens of thousands died from asphyxiation before they were burned. And this movement interpreted that as a judgment upon Germany. For being the diabolical rod of God's judgment upon Israel. And so the whole movement was born out of a repentant attitude toward the Jew.

And indeed they have a home in Israel for surviving Holocaust victims. And they had, I don't know if they still have it, on the Mount of Olives. A precious little place where I used to bring groups whenever we conducted a tour to Israel to visit.

And these are just sweet sisters. I'll tell you how remarkable an environment they have or had. That I'm told that David Wilkerson, when he visited there, threw himself on the compost pile. The sense of holiness was so great, so hallowed, over there at Darmstadt property, that the story goes, and I think it's true, he flung himself upon the compost heap.

I didn't move, I was not so moved myself, but I was profoundly affected. The moment that I walked through that gate, you were no longer in Darmstadt, you were in heaven. It was a hallowed atmosphere. And there was a time when they dispersed their women's movement.

See, this is outside of our American experience. That there are pious communities of women who have chosen to be married to the Lord and have forsaken natural marriage. They wear wedding bands, they're married to the Lord.

Very precious dedication. And when they dispersed, and I had an occasion to visit their representation in Egypt, I thought it's one thing to have a hallowed atmosphere in Germany, but let's see you have it in Egypt, in Cairo.

The city of 14 or 16 million that stinks from the dung of camels and oxen and goats and donkeys, where in four lanes of traffic you have six or seven lanes of cars, who move by censor, by honking of horns, they feel each other's presence.

It's another environment, you can't even begin to understand it, coming from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The congestion, the filth, the air, the spitting, the nose blowing. You don't dare shake hands or extend a left hand to any person.

It's considered an insult because that's the hand you use in tending to your hygiene after you have defecated in a land that does not know what toilet paper is. That's a luxury only the West can afford.

Can you understand things like that? So I remember going up the steps of their apartment in Cairo, thinking yeah, it's one thing to maintain this pristine, hallowed atmosphere in Germany, let's see you pull it in Cairo, and the door opened and I was back again into heaven.

So it's possible to bring heaven to earth and to maintain a heavenly environment, even in the midst of congestion, traffic, noise, filth, and all the rest. Now how did that come in? What made me turn aside?

About a movement born in repentance toward the Jew. So I commend Basilia Schlink, S-C-H-L-I-N-K, for your consideration. Her book on repentance, The Secret of the Joy-Filled Life, is an all-time 20th century classic.

And when I was asked once to recommend what one book would you recommend to be translated into Russian, this was at a time when there was not much access in that nation for the church, I said this one book on repentance, The Secret of the Joy-Filled Life.

Because it came out of the hard school of judgment. Because they prophetically interpreted the calamity of the destruction of World War II on Germany as a statement of God's judgment for the mistreatment of Jews.

They were prophetically attuned to interpret their history prophetically. And to explain that meaning to the nation itself. So would to God that we had a church in America and in the world that could explain to the Jewish communities within its midst the meaning of Jewish history.

And what the pattern of it is, that however successful a season we may enjoy and rise to places of prosperity, affluence, and security, you always need to remember that the pattern is that there's a day that comes when the east wind blows and brings a withering blast and dries up and removes all of the treasure that you have obtained.

And why is that? Because the treasure that you have obtained, you have obtained independently of God. It's through your own striving, your own effort, your own energy, and you have assumed that God has gone behind to bless and condone or consecrate, but you're living out of your own independence from God.

And he allows you a season of prosperity, some kind of an acceptance, even a thought that maybe finally we have found a home where we can have a security. The United States of America. Germany. What is the United States next to what Germany had meant for Jews?

The land of Goethe. G-O-E-T-H-E. Fichte. Hegel. Nietzsche. Schopenhauer. Great philosophers. Kant. K-A-N-T. Ethical philosophy. The ideals. The land of reformation. The land of culture. The land of history.

That such a nation could one day fail to provide the kinds of amenity of civilization that its culture suggests. And that within a decade that whole thing could come tottering down. And that nation that is most esteemed for its civilization can become the most brutal, the most vile.

That the death, it was not just a systematic death, but the cruelty of that death. The stripping of their identity as human beings. The giving of a number, not even a name. And the whole relentless persecution of Jews right through to ashes was out of the land of Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Mendelssohn.

All of the great names of music, philosophy, culture, poetry, literature, art. And if that could happen within a decade in a nation of that history, what could happen then in America? What kind of assurance and security can Jews have here?

Where our civilization is only skin deep. And if Jews are enjoying any sense of assurance or security, how much confidence can they have? And how much would it take to bring the whole thing down? And that's what we're being warned of in the scripture.

Although he may flourish among rushes, the east wind shall come. Notice the prevalence of the word shall. Shall come a blasphemy of the Lord, rising from the wilderness, and his fountain shall dry up, his spring shall be parched, it shall strip his treasure of every precious thing.

This shall is irrevocable finality. It's unassailable certainty. Shall, it's inevitable, must come. I'm speaking, it shall. There's no if, or maybe, or I guess, or it shall come. Whatever you're enjoying now, there's a moment that shall come, a blast out of the wilderness, even the image out of the wilderness.

Like German civilization turned to a wilderness. Civility turned to brutality. Something coming unexpectedly will take all of your prosperity, all that you've enjoyed, and bring a blight, and make it to be parched, and strip this treasure of every precious thing.

It's a fearful statement. And what in fact is hell but this? This is a statement of what can happen in historical time, but it is also a statement of what will happen eternally. And it's for that reason that God allows preliminary judgments, where you're stripped of your treasure in this life, that you might recognize the hand of God in it, because it says, the Lord, a blast from the Lord, not from Hitler, not from Nebuchadnezzar, a blast from the Lord, not from Arafat, but from the Lord.

It's a judgment from the Lord in historical time, in order that you might be awakened to the fact that you're under double jeopardy as Jews. You have a double indictment. You have a double obligation.

You're the only singular, covenantal nation. I have not spoken to any other nation as I have spoken to you. I have not called any other nation to the kind of relationship to which I've called you. To the Jew first, blessing, but also curse.

You have a double obligation and you suffer a double consequence. So if I allow these things to befall you in time and in history, it's a warning of what will be a final and irrevocable judgment that will be eternal, where you'll be stripped of every treasured thing.

What does it mean to be prophetic? It is to understand history and contemporary events as a statement of that which points to what is eternal. Baselius Schlinck speaks of the judgments in time as being preliminary judgments, because what is the ultimate judgment?

Hell itself, eternally, in which there's no recovery, no second chance, there's a finality. And if this is not at the foundation of our perspective, we have no ground to see ourselves as being a prophetic church.

If we do not understand the issues of time as seen in the context of eternity, we do not see. And this is the character of our American Christianity. It is not set in the context of eternity. There's no solemn sense that these things are coming from God as forewarning of a time in which there will be a final and irrecoverable judgment.

That this is a preliminary to save you from that. Well, that's so remarkable a way to understand time and history and circumstance. That's so unusual. That is prophetic. That's God's own seeing. That's the way God sees.

And that's the way he would communicate and commend reality to men. What is the church? It's God's agent in the earth to communicate to an unseeing and a world that is unwary, unsuspecting, the truth and the meaning of its own history, life, and eternal future.

Because it can't be expected to see as you see. It has not your advantage. It has not the Spirit of God. It has not the Scriptures. They're secular. They're lost. They're blind. They think that this life is everything.

They're caught up in material things and success and they're living a fool's paradise. They don't know that there's going to be a blast coming out of the wilderness that will strip their treasure of everything.

And that the author of that blast is not accident but God himself, the Lord. In judgment. That there's a sword of Damocles over their head that can fall at any moment. There needs to be a warning proclaimed.

It's a fool's paradise to think that your treasure is secure. Whether you're a Jew or a Gentile or a prosperous nation, the blast of God can come at any moment of his choosing and deserves to come. And it's not because he's malicious nor cruel but because he's just and merciful that that blast comes now.

While we have yet to understand it and bring us to a place of repentance, because the treasure that we have accumulated, we have accumulated independent of him and have made it our idolatrous substitute for him.

And so he allows the blast to come that we might recognize this is the hand of God and repent and be saved from an eternal blast where we're stripped of all treasure eternally. This is prophetic seeing.

This is definitive reality. This is the way in which the church and every nation should understand its own history and circumstance and be able to relate to the nation this understanding for it is God's and it is intended for their repentance.

The drought in the southwest, when I flew over Midland, Odessa, my God was it barren. Why? All of the freaky weather circumstances. Inundation with so much rain and flood in one place and absolutely out in another.

Reversal patterns, all kinds of adversities and crises are preliminary judgments. Are you saying every single thing? Well, why not? Isn't God sovereign over every single thing? And if there are exceptions in which it is caprice, in which it is an accident and not the deliberated judgment of God, that at least from our point of view as believers, our first consideration is that it is from the hand of God as judgment.

And if it proves not to be that, then we're free to consider other speculation and other thought. But our first disposition always ought to be to see things coming as from God in judgment, which is not itself a cruelty but a grace to save us from a greater judgment that is eternal and irrecoverable.

I'm giving you the broadest parameter of how reality itself is to be understood prophetically. For to understand it in that way is to understand it in God's way. That's our calling as church. And to understand it so that we might proclaim it.

To those who are completely naive and unsuspecting and lost. What does lost mean? You're in a darkness of misconception and deception about the meaning of your own life and existence. You're not interpreting it rightly.

You're living a fool's paradise. You think this is going to go on forever. And you'll enjoy this kind of lavish lifestyle that is itself morally an offense. But the day will come that there's a blast that will come out of the wilderness.

And it will strip your treasure of everything. If God gives us that to understand, he gives it to us that we might proclaim it to the unsuspecting. But how should we proclaim it with prophetic credibility if we ourselves are living in that fool's paradise?

See what I mean? We're robbed of credibility if we ourselves are enjoying that prosperity and living that lavish lifestyle in a way that is hardly to be distinguished from the world itself. We can only speak prophetically as one coming out of the wilderness with a loincloth.

You understand? As being separated from that world that is having a ball at the expense of God without any acknowledgement of him. But if we ourselves are playing their game, we're robbed of any testimony, of any credibility, we cannot pronounce a warning.

And therefore their blood will be upon our hands. Church is not a picnic. It's a responsibility. It's a profound calling. The church has, as its intrinsic call, this prophetic function. What, are we to be all outcasts?

All Elijahs? No. But as a corporate entity, yes. We have a function in the corporate life as the prophetic presence of God in the community and nation in which we're placed. And this is how we need to perceive reality because we have the privilege of the Scripture to instruct us.

But you see how that has to be read? I'm almost embarrassed for last night and the feebleness in which this Scripture was introduced. But this morning, we're hoping to do it a little bit more justice.

And in this, to give you an example of how the Scripture itself needs to be understood, needs to be searched, that we cannot bring our gone-with-the-wind reading mentality to the Word of God. I show my mother something in the Psalms.

I said, Mom, read Psalm, whatever it was current at that time, Psalm 118, I forgot. So she read right through 118 to right through 125 in about 15 minutes. Yes, she read it. She mechanically read it. She gained nothing.

I said, What? You read all through that in so short a time? Yeah. But my mother checks out eight books a month from the library. Large print edition of every piece of romantic pap that you can imagine full of erotic detail for a 95-year-old woman.

She's ruined by the reading pattern of a lifetime in which she reads through the books, retains nothing. It's an amusement and a moment's distraction and brings this reading habit to the Scripture and gains zero.

Because she does not know how to dwell, how to ponder, how to ruminate word for word that this is not gone with the wind, this is holy writ. This is the Word of God to teach us how to understand and how to live rightly and not only to avoid judgment but to save others from it who are totally naive and unwary and are on a collision course not only in time but in eternity.

He may flourish. The east wind shall come. See what I've done here? Every shall is yellow marked. I want it to leap off at me from the page. Shall. No if and or but. It's not a speculation. It's not a possibility.

That may be. It's an inevitability. Shall come. It's irrevocable. Fight against it. Be warned by the Word. It shall come. Live now in anticipation of that shall. Do now what will save you from that blast because the Word of God says, shall.

Do you read it that way? This is high seriousness. This is making this the measure of all things. This is taking God's Word to heart because He's not a man that He should lie. He doesn't play with words.

We do. Words and communication are cheap. Trivial. But when God says something we need to heed it. And if we'll heed God in His speaking then how much more will we be tempered in our own? How much more will we be saved from triviality?

From cheap, anxious, how you doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Our words will be measured, sane, significant. It will be a blessing, it will be a sacrament to hear a Word coming from a saint.

Because we know that it will be well chosen and well spoken because the saint by his training will avoid anything that is trite. It's a grace to hear the Word from a saint. And conversation because we have been schooled and raised up by the Lord about the significance of speaking words by Him who is the Word and it affects everything.

Prophetic Condemnation of Religious Compromise

Well, what I would give, Lord, to be speaking this to a congregation of my own people on the Shabbat morning in their synagogue where we're blocked out and the rabbis hold full sway who endorse the lifestyles of their congregants because they receive the benefit.

Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur is a fashion show. Go into your local synagogue, you should be there and see what they come like we in our Easter finery they in their Yom Kippur best. And all nicely, what's the word, sanctimoniously endorsed as appropriate lifestyle by the paid flunkies who give them a little seasonal encouragement until next year so long as they pay their dues.

It's a system of lie and deception to reinforce men in their mode of life that they have chosen independent of God and slightly sanctify by a casual allusion to Him holy day occasions where there is no solemn searching of one's soul or being contrite before God in failure because they have no knowledge and any rabbi who dares to suggest that you need to examine your lifestyle and that it's being lived independently of God and your good deeds and your charities are only throwing a bone to the most high that that man would be out the next day and his $150 ,000 a year income with him and whatever other benefits which by the way bears a remarkable comparison with our own Christianity.

We have flunkies of our own who are well paid and handsomely rewarded so long as they don't raise the questions about the truth of our life. It's a stink before God. The whole filthy system of it but where's the cry?

Where's the cry coming up out of the earth? Where's the prophetic anguished cry of God about this? Where's the blowing of the whistle on the whole fraudulence of it? That it's a mock, that it's against God and that there'll be an eternal comeuppance that there's a blast that will be coming out of the wilderness that will be an eternal blast and all treasure will be lost and men will rue and lament for eternity their misshaped, misbegotten, mislived lives.

Too late to remedy anything. Where's the cry? It's a blast from the Lord. Oh dear saints, if we will not see in the adverse circumstances that come to us, that come to the nation, that come to the world, that come to Israel as coming from the Lord we don't see.

If we don't see God in judgment we don't see and if we don't see God in judgment we don't know God. We have created a fiction of our own and put the label Jesus upon it that satisfies our own carnal hearts and in no way is the truth of himself unless we understand that the blast comes from God.

This is the deepest respect for God in judgment. To allow that to be dismissed as accident or the aberration of history or Hitler who comes to power or an Arafat or whatever as somehow not coming from God is to do the gravest injustice to God himself.

It's to say that he's not sovereign. It's to say that it's accident and caprice that rules in life and God is somewhere obscure. He has set the thing in motion. It's ticking away but he's no way involved or intervening or present in the history of what takes place in his creation and with mankind and with Israel.

What a slight, what an offense to discount God as God while seeming to pay him an honorable respect and yet not to see him as a viable presence in his own creation and moving it toward his own end. So if you don't bring this perspective to the Jews of Tulsa, who will?

They surely don't have it. If you don't bring it to the church at large, who will? For the church doesn't have it. The world is secularized. It's devoid of God. It's full of its own ruminations and speculations but God is not a consideration.

It's a horrendous denial to the God who is creator and coming king. It shall. Unassailable certainty. From the Lord. Unquestionable source. Humankind. Here's the commentary of Eugene Peterson praying with the prophets.

Humankind cannot hope to salvage anything from its sin. God will wipe out both the sin and its so-called benefits in much the same way as the dread east wind comes out of the desert and drives up everything in its path.

He says humankind, and I wrote over it, that's what Jewry is. That's what Israel is. Why is Israel the object in the textbook of God's instruction for us all? Because it is the summation of mankind. It is the personification of man.

This is man in his independent self-will and rebellion. It's an instruction for all nations in God's dealing with that nation. God will wipe out both the sin and its so-called benefits. This is the blast from the Lord because God is the supreme causative agent in history.

Believest thou this? God. I wrote this in. The supreme causative agent in history. Not only in nations but in your history. You see God as the supreme causative agent. Unless we see God like that we do not give him the respect and acknowledgement that is his.

What then is our praise? What then is our prayer? What is our so-called worship if we have not seen God in this way? It's hollow. It needs to be aided and abetted by objects and sound equipment. The praise of Israel that knew God did not need any electronic assistance.

It bellowed up. It gushed. It was a testimony. They knew that they knew that they knew. This is before the advent of modernity. In ancient times before there was such a thing as evolution or the thought of it they knew that they knew why did God bring Abraham from Ur of the... Chaldeans Chaldeans to a land of promise.

Follow me in the land that I will show you. What was Ur? What was Chaldea? What was the whole Mesopotamian civilization? The Fertile Crescent. Fertile for what reason? Rivers. The mighty Euphrates and the Tigris along which Ur was located.

Those rivers moved their banks over a course of time so much as 10 miles those civilizations fail. He called Abraham from a land that looked down to rivers as the source of their economy their traffic, their commerce, their civilization to a land where there was only one river hardly worth talking about the Jordan.

No more than a glorified stream. The Jabbok where Jacob wrestled with the angel. These are not major tributaries. They are only significant spiritual waterways. But you don't derive your economy from them.

You don't look down for your Nile to overflow its banks and to bring its sediment and its riches. You look up to the heaven from whence cometh your early rain and your latter rain if you are indeed being blessed by the God who issues it in your covenantal faithfulness to his way.

You see the radical shift for Abraham from looking down to looking up to see God as the causative agent for these early and latter rains are not geophysical phenomena they are a blessing that comes down by a God who sees the people living in the consciousness of him and their covenant responsibility.

We've lost that sense. We've lost it. We're seeding clouds with airplanes and creating rain or trying to assuage the lack of rain we don't see God as causative agent. This is the age of science, modernity, man.

This ancient view needs to be restored for this is very truth. And you're going to do it in your occupation, in your field of endeavor with your sophisticated colleagues where you'll be an anachronism.

You'll stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. You'll be looked upon as freaky. They'll be whispering about you behind the water cooler. He's gone strange. He used to be a nice guy. He was a Christian but he was a nice guy.

Now he's so suffused with God. Everything is God, God, God. He sees God in everything. Come on, give us a break. You become strange. And indeed, that's what we're called to be. Strangers, pilgrims and sojourners in the earth.

If we're not strange and we're acceptable we are out of the faith. Christianity has only become a commonplace that they can well afford to tolerate and even give us tax benefit and deductions because it threatens nothing.

But validates a whole system that is anti-God and we're just a little something to ordain the opening of sessions of Congress and for the candidates to say that they believe God or that they're born again.

To take this view of God as causative agent and that he's already bringing preliminary judgments into the earth as a forewarning of a soon coming and final irremediable judgment that is called hell. And that is eternal and unchanging and fixed is to mock you as queer.

You're strange, you're out of it. That's why they took believers and brought them to mental institutions in Russia under its communist rule and gave them shock treatments and put them in straitjackets because they had this strange devotion to an invisible deity.

Didn't you know that? It's a kind of insanity that society needs to cure by drugs and shock treatments because here's this stupid people in deference to an invisible deity and living as if he's true and as if he has spoken and has called us to another way in opposition to the way that is demarcated by the secular political authorities who are in the know and have all the marbles.