Israel on the Road to Calvary — Art Katz

Good evening Saints. What about the person who brings the hard word? You think that's a snap? I can tell you tonight, I have never come to the pulpit more reluctantly and with a greater sense of dread than now.

How do you figure that out? Because I have a formidable task. Formidable. It means extremely difficult. Complex. Because I think the Lord wants me to attempt by his grace some kind of statement on eschatology.

The Church’s Expectation of the Last Days

On the last days, that's appropriate for the church, that is the church, to consider, to receive, to integrate into its understanding that it might have a right expectation of the things that pertain to the end.

Eschatology, the study of things that pertain to the end. And it has everything to do with the cross. The single, great, epical, E-P-O-C-H-A-L. Somebody is not standing by the dictionary tonight.

So, you who have received mercy last night or have been renewed in mercy, you have a first opportunity to extend it to a Jew. Me. I need mercy. Think I'm kidding. This is a disaster. This is calculated for disaster, for failure.

There's no way that one can succeed in a subject as complex, as difficult as what I am burdened to share tonight. Nevertheless, Lord, with you, nothing is impossible. And for those aspiring young saints who think that it's an easy thing to trip up to the platform and be valuable with a gift of gab, as if it's falling off a stool and there's nothing to it, let them know that the true preacher comes to this holy desk with dread, with fear, with reluctance.

He comes unwillingly like a snail. He would rather be somewhere else and not be charged with the responsibility of the Word. So, my God, only you can succeed. And if you succeed, it will be joy unspeakable and full of glory.

If you fail, not because of any inadequacy in you, but the difficulty that I represent for you to succeed through, then it will be a dull thought. It will fall to the ground with a thought. And we will leave joylessly and listlessly scratching our heads and wondering, what was all that about?

So, my God, come and unburden your own soul. We're so grateful that you are the high priest and the apostle of our confession, as well as prophet, priest, and king. And so I'm asking my God, if there's a possibility of union with you, by which we can say with Paul, for me to live as Christ, then let that mystery be explicated and demonstrated tonight through this unwilling piece of dust that you will take to yourself and charge with your own life and present out of your own wisdom and ability the Word of the living God appointed for this night that was determined by you before the foundations of the earth were laid as a work to walk in.

So come, my God, and delight your soul and succeed out of your own great power. It's more than the issue of reputation. It's more than the issue of enjoyment. It's the issue of a word that will fit the church for its role, its participation, in the consummation of the things that conclude the age through Israel's restoration by the cross.

In Jesus' name, Lord, we pray. And God's people said, Amen. I think the principal text tonight will be Isaiah 53. How many are unfamiliar with that text? Raise your hand. Oh, my. Oh, my. Okay. May tonight prompt you to immerse yourself in the greatest single prophetic text that describes the suffering of the servant of God at the cross composed seven centuries before the event by the inspiration of the spirit that foresaw the execution of the servant of the Lord who is himself the Lord in such detail of agony and rejection that is an astonishment.

It is so Christological. Excuse my language. It's about time you caught up with me. Christological. It is so Christ-centered that the Jews, my people and kinsmen, have wisely omitted it from their synagogue use.

When I read to my Jewish mother Isaiah 53, she said, Where in the New Testament are you reading? She understood this was about Christ. I said, I'm not reading from the New Testament at all. I'm reading from the classic Hebrew prophet Isaiah.

Oh, she said, I never heard that. I said, You never will in a synagogue because the Haftorah selection, the reading from the prophets that accompanies the reading from the Torah, from the books of Moses, every Shabbat, week by week, is already determined by rabbinical council so that at a certain point in time, they read up to Isaiah 52, 12, and the next week they continue with Isaiah 54.

Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and the Crucifixion

And the great text is omitted from Jewish consideration, which leaves the task for you. Well, let's turn to it. And Isaiah 53 rightly begins in Isaiah 52 from verse 13. Behold, my servant shall deal prudently.

He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. This kind of language exceeds any appropriateness about the servant being a man. It's the kind of language that is appropriate to a servant who is himself God, extolled and very high.

And then the whole thing shifts abruptly. And many were astonished at thee. His visage, his face was so marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of man. So already crucifixion is beginning to be described, the most cruel and savage form of bringing a man to death that human ingenuity aided by satanic inspiration could ever produce.

So here is the form of death to which Jesus is to be submitted, being described in the spirit by the prophet seven centuries before the advent of Rome. Who employed crucifixion as a principle execution for those who are unworthy of being beheaded.

Paul was beheaded and not crucified. Crucifixion was reserved for criminals, for rebels, for traitors, for insurgents. This servant who is yet to be extolled very high evidently has first to be brought very low.

And his visage, his face marred more than any man, his form more than the sons of man. So in that condition, see what I'm inserting here, shall he sprinkle many nations with what? With his blood that is extruded by this torture unto death.

King shall shut their mouths at him, for that which had not been told them shall they see. And that which they had not heard shall they consider. This, dear saints, is a key verse tonight. This message, whatever the Lord will give it grace to become, has got to make an ultimate demand of you.

It will stretch you to breaking. You'll want to cry out, enough cats, I can't take more. This is too great a demand for my thought. All of the complexity of this, the meaning of these verses, the picture being described, that one shall suffer so much that his form and visage is marred, so wracked, so painfully devastated that you could hardly recognize him as a man.

And if you have ever seen the great classic painting, the masterpiece at Colmar, France, on the crucified Christ, what is it called, the Eisenheim Altar, wouldn't hurt you to look that up. You'll see a holy ghost masterpiece of the 16th century, which I had the privilege of seeing as a Jewish atheist, and was so astonished and stunned I was transfixed by this nine-foot-high painting of a man impaled on a cross, so gnarled and twisted I had to question, was I looking at a man or some kind of animal, and whose jaw was dropped, his lips were white, and his hair bedraggled, and the look of excruciating pain as the final fixation of his features, and in his body are pieces of wood and bone and glass, whatever it was that he put on that lash, the nine tails, each strand of that whip had at its end a piece of bone, a glass or stone, that would cut through the flesh into the bone.

Jesus was more dead than alive when they nailed him, having been beaten to a pulp, punched, had his beard pulled, spit at. He was deformed, he was grossly maligned. So he had no form, no visage or beauty that we should desire him.

You turn your face away, you can't bear to look at that ugly depiction, and I'm saying it's a Holy Ghost masterpiece. And that was the man naked. I know when you see those pictures he's got a nice loincloth, but I can tell you that part of the suffering of crucifixion was the humiliation of having your hands nailed so you couldn't even cover your private parts.

You're exposed, you're naked, you're a criminal, you're executed outside the camp, not even the dignity of within the city. You're a scum, you're a worm, and your God suffered that. That has got to stop every man and give him pause to thought.

The Prophetic Fulfillment of Isaiah 52:15

So here's what I want to say, that this last verse, 15, has not yet been fulfilled. What do you mean, Art? I don't think that kings have yet seen or understood. Their mouths have not yet been shut. It's not yet been told them what they shall see.

What they had not heard shall they consider. And I'm saying all that to say this, there's one crucifixion yet to come by which king shall see that which they had not heard and shall consider that which had not been spoken of.

And so shall he sprinkle many nations. You say, but Art, that took place 2 ,000 years ago. Yes, but what nation has acknowledged it? Even Christian nations lack something in the depth of their appreciation of this remarkable suffering and death, let alone nations that subscribe to other gods.

The kings have not yet seen. The nations have not yet been sprinkled. It has not yet been told them what they shall see and hear and understand. If that's true, Art, are you saying that Jesus will then again be crucified a second time?

No. What I'm saying is, and I'm the only one saying it because no one wants to consider it, but I'm prophetically obliged to express it, that the crucifixion of Jesus is to be reiterated and expressed and demonstrated and set forth before all nations by his own people, Israel, the Jew, in their last day's suffering and their road to Calvary, called the time of Jacob's trouble, when they shall be marred more than any man, when they shall be beaten so to a pulp, so driven that they'll have no beauty that any should desire them.

They will be repulsive in their flight, and yet because of it, the Lord, through that suffering, is reiterating and setting before the consideration of the nations what they had not understood nor seen the first time.

They have opportunity now to see enacted and depicted by the nation of what had been suffered and experienced before by its Lord. Can you follow that? Can you see why I came reluctantly tonight? Who wants to speak that?

Who can communicate that? Art, you're talking about a grotesque suffering for an entire people. Yes. It's a judgment because Jesus bore it in judgment. Did you know that? The wrath of God upon the sin of mankind, his righteous wrath, his justifiable wrath and anger fell upon his son.

It was undeserved by him but born, but Israel will deserve its judgment. It's every day moving more sinfully toward a fulfillment that must come to them as a nation. And I hope to show you the multiple purposes that are served by God in the visible suffering of that nation before all nations in one night.

Mercy Toward Israel in the Judgment of the Nations

It may keep us here till midnight, but if you don't hear it from me, you will not hear it. And if you don't hear it, don't understand, don't consider it, how shall you be fitted to extend mercy to that people when they go through this time of national suffering and shame and expulsion and marring and beating and disfiguring, where if no one extends to them a hand of mercy, a towel to wipe their face, a cup of water in their nakedness, as it says in Matthew 25, when did we see you naked and thirsty and hungry and in prison?

Jesus said, if you did not do this, if you did not succor, S-U-C-C-O-U-R with the English spelling, if you did not extend mercy to a people in that condition, you did it not unto me. For these are the least of my brethren.

I want to tell you, dear saints, that will indicate and show who in fact the true church is in the last days. Those who will have mercy when it will not be convenient to extend it, because if they are pursued and beaten, left for dead, that there's not a place of safety in the nations, because this shall be enacted globally, that if they're so hated and ferociously pursued, what will be the fate of those who dare to stand with them and identify with them and extend mercy to them?

You're liable to catch it, and why should you? Not only being Gentile, but Chinese, what's in it for you? What do they ever do for you? That you should extend yourself at risk to be identified with a people when they shall be marred more than any man.

There'll be only one explanation, and it's beyond nationality, it's beyond race, it's beyond culture. It's that you are among the righteous and could not do otherwise than extend mercy, no matter what the consequence for yourself.

That's why he says to those who extended it, come and enter the kingdom prepared for you, you righteous. Oh, this is so remarkable. For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground.

He has no form, no comeliness, no attractiveness, and when we shall see him, there's no beauty that we should desire him. That cannot be a description of Jesus before his crucifixion, because before his crucifixion, he was ruddy and handsome and a precious and supreme piece of humanity like the David before him.

This is a description of a man who has suffered abuse, punched, plucked, spit at, whipped. There's no beauty we should desire him. He's despised and rejected a man, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from him.

He was despised and we esteemed him not. Who's speaking here? Come on, you guys have got to become Bible scholars. You've got to become exegetes, not dum-dums. You've got to not just read passively. You've got to interject yourself and wrestle and draw out.

There are several voices in this Isaiah 53. We have to identify who's speaking at a certain part. This is no longer Isaiah himself speaking. This is not the prophet narrating. This is now the people themselves.

This is Israel. This is the Jewish people who are looking back 2 ,000 years to this suffering servant and saying there was no beauty that we desired him. We rejected. He was despised. He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.

Israel’s Recognition of the Suffering Servant

We hid our faces from him. We had nothing to do with this guy. We didn't esteem him. But now, in verse 4, we are coming to understand that in that condition, as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and devastated in his body and his face, he hath borne our sorrows, our griefs, and carried our sorrows, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, and he was bruised for our iniquities, and the penalty, the chastisement for our peace that should have come upon us was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. Oh, you dear young saints, you naive, innocent, shallow saints, what a description is this?

That Israel, who has for 2 ,000 years rejected Jesus and put him aside as a magician, a misfit, someone who irritated the Roman authorities and earned for himself an execution, and he deserves no more consideration than that, are speaking another tune here.

This is a new acknowledgment. He was wounded for our transgressions. All we like sheep have gone astray. Show me a Jew today who will acknowledge that and say that. What then does this prophetically mean, dear man?

It means that there is a short time in which Jews will suffer in such a way that it will open their understanding and a consideration to consider him, whom they have now for two millennia rejected and set aside, and see him not only in a new way but a true way, for to see him as the crucified Lamb of God who bore our transgressions and our iniquities and suffered in our behalf and by whose stripes we are healed is to be saved.

So what's going to happen, Art, that this Jewish worldwide Judaistic community that has rejected him is going to see something new that they have not seen till now? What will enable and bring them to that new seeing?

Suffering, rejection, persecution, being marred more than any man. Because I have coined the phrase, the mutuality of suffering. Nothing reveals like suffering. That's why those aspiring actors who attended the dramatic schools of Russia and New York used to say, I want to suffer.

Suffering reveals. Suffering is deep. The things that are shallow and flimsy fall aside. The things that are facetious, the things that are imagined, the things that are deceptive, when suffering comes, you become strangely single-eyed and have a view toward reality that is no longer disguised by your amenities or your comfort.

Can you follow me? This will bring you of age. And it's about time. You're on time, you guys. So what are you saying, Art? Summarize this for us. We can hardly follow you. I'm saying this. This statement that is being made here in this prophetic text is yet future.

It's a people who have long rejected the Holy One of Israel as being of no consequence and are now seeing Him newly out of the mutuality of their own suffering. Because now they are being marred more than any man.

They are being rejected and despised. And somehow when you suffer what He suffered, you begin to perceive His sufferings in a new way. And in fact, if it were not for that provision, Israel would never see the Lord, never understand His sacrifice, never receive its benefit.

And if they do not avail themselves of what He wrought on the cross unto salvation, how shall they bless all the families of the earth? What do you mean, Art? I mean Israel's destiny, spoken by God to Abraham, that this people shall bless all the families of the earth.

I've raised them up to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world, which includes Asia, which desperately needs that light, which only this priestly people can bring when they are in the priestly condition.

Israel’s Priestly Calling and Restoration

But to come into that condition will require a suffering. Lord, mercy. Because a priest is not a technician. He's not a religious functionary. A priest is identified with those for whom he intercedes as well as with God.

The priests were barefooted. They were clothed from head to toe, but the feet themselves were never shod. How come? Because it had to be on the earth. It had to be an identification with the grit reality of those to whom they were sent as the ministers of God in compassion and identification, in sympathy and in mercy, or else their intercessions would have been vain.

Today's Jew is in that description? Far from it. They don't give a rat for the nations. And yet God has called them to be a light to the nations and a nation of priests. So the question then comes, how can modern Jewry fulfill their destiny, which God spoke to Abraham, which if it is not fulfilled, how is God God?

If it's not fulfilled, if the callings and gifts of God are irrevocable and without repentance and they're not fulfilled, how valid is the God who made that gift and calling? How valid are his covenants and his promises that they would be restored and fulfill this destiny millennially and eternally despite 2 ,000 years of apostasy?

The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue of God as God for the nations. Everything, the Lord has put all his eggs in one basket. The whole issue of his truth and reality is his ability to take this apostate people who have been marked by their brilliance in finance and in art and culture and psychiatry, Freud and Marx and all of these great geniuses, but they have not been a priestly nation.

How do they go from this present preoccupation with the world and finance and money and wealth and fame and playing a violin to becoming a priest? Through suffering, through the road to Calvary, through walking the same kind of path that the Lord before them had trod, where they will be despised and rejected of all men and have no beauty that any should desire them, let alone Singaporean Chinese.

Got the idea? God has stacked everything against himself that if he should succeed in forming such a people out from such suffering for which most of them shall not survive, we're talking about a surviving remnant.

How do you know that art? Because I put two and two together. Because I combined Old Testament and New Testament prophecy. Because I take the Lord seriously. When he was asked by his disciples, Lord, what are the signs of your coming and of the end of the age?

Matthew 24 and Luke 21. And he said, among those signs, there'll be havoc in nature, great upsurge, calamitous geophysical eruptions like the tsunami, earthquakes and social unrest and wars and rumors of wars and persecutions.

And as far as the nation is concerned, he said, there shall come upon them such a time of trouble as will exceed any trouble that that nation has ever previously known. Do you know what troubles they have experienced?

Nobody knows the troubles I've seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. You guys need to do some homework and get a volume of the history of Israel and see what they suffered in the Middle Ages. In this very Passover Easter season, the cry of Christ killer went up.

And the accusation that some Gentiles' blood was being used to make the ceremonial matzah or the wells were polluted and the great black plague that took one third of Europe was a conspiracy by Jews because they were not affected by the plague.

So therefore, they must be responsible and therefore burn them at the stake, which they did. How come they didn't suffer the plague? Because unlike you, they kept kosher. They didn't eat pork. Because in that generation in time, pigs roamed the streets and lived from the garbage that was thrown out of windows.

They were saved by obedience to God. In the elementary rules of diet given in the Torah. But it earned for them persecution. And it will again. Do you guys know what is happening in the world? Do you know it's dangerous to be a Jew in France today?

That the leaders of the French community have told their people, don't go out into the street with your yarmulke on. Don't wear your little beanie that reveals you as a Jew. Put something else on your head, wear a cap.

Because you'll get beat up. Because you're only 500 ,000 in a nation with almost 10 million Muslims. And you're an open target. There's a growing pall over the earth of hatred against the Jew already.

If they're not safe in France, they're not safe in Great Britain. They'll not be safe in Germany. Where will they be safe? Will they be safe in the United States? Oh, is that so? Then why has the Lord for 30 years have us to establish a place of refuge and haven for Jews and fight for persecution in North America?

Oh, you guys. Better than my speaking to you is that I should just be rung out before you. Because there's no way to summarize and communicate the substance of all the things in which I have been privileged by God to be instructed and to instruct others in one speaking.

Which if you fail to understand it and receive it, you're condemned to becoming only charismatic. What a fate. Too horrible to consider. He wants you to be apostolic and prophetic. How do you know that, Art?

Because I'm here. And here more than once. He's persistent. He has faith to believe beyond my ability. He has an intention for you. And he's given you a precious pastor and leaders to cultivate and nurture and bring you to a place of maturity where you can receive a hard word and gave you opportunity to obtain mercy last night that you might extend it to them.

Sifting the Nations and the Sheep and the Goats

But Art, there's hardly just a handful of Jews here now. But how many will come through all of the shipping that takes place here in Singapore that goes out to nations and from nations? How many will come with those cargo ships and containers and by one means or another passing through?

How do you know that? Because the scripture says, I will sift you through all nations. Why? Not only to sift you, but to sift the nation. Not only to sift the nation, but to sift the church in the nation.

So that when the Lord takes his throne and pronounces his first judgment in separating sheep from goats for their eternal destination, either in the kingdom or in the lake of fire, it's over one question, only one question.

What did you do with the least of these, my brethren, when you saw them naked, beat up, pulverized, chased, persecuted, marred? Because your response to them is your response to me. And your failure to respond shows that your so-called faith was facetious and shallow, inadequate if not counterfeit.

Because if you were authentically in the faith and were in the righteousness of God, you could not do other than to succor them, than to comfort them, than to take them in, than to love them and bathe them with your own tears and wipe their wounds and heal them and feed them a good Chinese meal and send them on their way to the next destination which you know by the Spirit.

So we're reading in this text, and I can tell you, dear saints, this is new to me. I have loved and read Isaiah 53 for many years until it pleased the Lord to show me who in fact is now speaking. It has shifted.

It's no longer the prophet narrating the text. Now it's the voice of a people who have come to a new recognition of a critical kind that they must come to in order to be saved. And the only way they came to it is because their seeing has been affected by their own suffering.

While at the same time, their suffering is duplicating the sufferings of the Lord 2 ,000 years before them so that kings who had not known and not understood shall see. So the purpose in one sense is to reveal the Lord to Israel and at the same time to reveal the Lord to the nations through Israel's suffering for they shall see in the suffering of that nation that of the Lord 2 ,000 years before which they did not understand, did not receive, did not consider.

And now as it's passing through all nations, they cannot hide their face from it. They must see it and understand what that Jewish suffering represents because it so reiterates and captures again the suffering of the Lord 2 ,000 years before.

It's a remarkable last day's stratagem from God. It's an eschatological sweep of genius to redeem a nation and the nations by the same single stroke of a last day's suffering which is the reiteration of the cross.

Praise God that this is being recorded. So you'll have many opportunities to hear this again until it comes into your spirit and consciousness and understanding. Surely, verse 4, he hath borne our griefs.

Blood Sacrifice, Atonement, and the Need for Mercy

The Allah is Israel, the Jews, and carried our sorrows. And yet we didn't esteem him. He was stricken. We considered him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But that affliction was for our transgressions.

We didn't understand that, that there had to be a blood sacrifice. Though it said in Leviticus 17, without the shedding of blood there's no remission for sin. But since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and the dispersal of all the priesthood of which I'm descendant, one of the few, there's been no blood sacrifice.

So what's the atonement for sin? A day in the synagogue, day of fasting, and mitzvot, good deeds. But, Art, that's a shabby substitute for blood. Me, you're telling? Who invented that, Art? The rabbis.

Rabbinical Judaism. So that for 2 ,000 years my people have been living without the covering, the kaporah of their Messiah and his blood. And therefore they have been open to every assailment, every attack, every vicious expression coming from the hateful Gentile world against them without the protection of the blood of the Lamb.

How much do you esteem that blood? How much do you invoke it daily upon arising and in prayer? Lord, your blood upon my head afresh, upon my door, upon my house, upon my children, upon my family. I don't dare leave this room.

I don't dare start to go to work without invoking the blood. And, Lord, going to bed that night, I'm too tired to pray, but this much I want to say, your blood be upon my head and upon my children, upon my house, afresh through the night hours, so that the evil one will not have opportunity to harass, to molest, to give me dreams and fantasies that I wake up with a bitter taste in my mouth.

Are you invoking the blood? The most precious provision of God for your continuing salvation? That if there be any iniquity, you can appeal to the blood for forgiveness and for washing, which I have done today.

Ought you? You're an impeccable saint. You needed the blood? We look to you as an example. Well, you dear man, why did Paul say that he's the chief of sinners? Was he talking about what he was before his conversion or what he was and is presently?

The deeper you come in God, the more you know what a wicked sinner you are. What's your sin, Art? My sin is the iniquity of priesthood. My sin is the profusion of much speaking, because the scripture says in much speaking is sin.

Well, Lord, I can't help it. As they say in the American Midwest, I'm called to be a speaker. Well, that does not absolve you from the sin that is inherent in your very calling. And that's why even after speaking as solemnly and as seriously as you know how, you can almost count on it something inadvertent, something out of your humanity, some illustration, some point, some accent that was not from me, got into there and corrupted the text, corrupted the speaking.

It was defiled. You're always conscious of the iniquity of much speaking, of the iniquity of priesthood, of the iniquity of ministry. We need the blood. I dare not come to this platform tonight if I had not prayed before coming for the fresh application of the blood to purge me, make me chaste, so I could be a vessel for whom the word of the Lord can be expressed without being tainted.

Because there's much at stake tonight, not just a man's reputation, whether you like him or you don't like him. What's at stake tonight is your call to the eschatological conclusion of the age where the church is the salvific agent of God for a people who are so battered, so bruised, so marred more than any man that none will have any mercy for them.

There'll be no beauty that any should desire them except for you. You'll have a strange love for that people in that marred condition, in their ugly spirit being churned up. Your heart palpitates for them because it's the love of God for his own people and not some little sentimental thing rising up in your fancy if you're that united with him in Christ.

The Jew is the test of where we in fact are in God. When did we see you naked and thirsty? Well, you didn't see me. You know why? Because you turned your face away. You didn't want to see. You wanted to be absolved of any obligation that would threaten you, your security, your comfort, your family, your future.

Righteousness Requires a Response

Like the German brother, the old man I met years ago in Berlin, who was there, he said, when the brown-shirted Nazis with their swastika armbands were downstairs in the Jewish neighborhood beating the Jewish kids to a pulp and breaking the shop windows and making the old men to wipe the sidewalk with their beards.

I said, brother, what did you do? He said, what could I do, Odd? I pulled the shade down and I walked away. You're going to have an opportunity either to pull the shade down and walk away or come down and expose yourself and be vulnerable in their defense.

Even if you don't succeed, you still have an obligation, rather than to be passive and unmoved. Righteousness requires response. And you better start cultivating it now and not wait for that moment in which you'll be embarrassingly found wanting.

Now you ought to be writing letters to the editor of the newspapers. Now you ought to be standing for issues of righteousness in your society. Now you ought to love righteousness and hate iniquity and express yourself in that regard in a way that you're heard and felt and your presence counts so that it becomes a mode of being that when the ultimate crisis and test comes, you'll pass it.

Oh, we like sheep have gone astray. I can't wait to hear my Jewish people acknowledge that. We have turned everyone to his own way, highly individualistic, full of our own opinions. What do they say? If you have two Jews, you have three arguments.

Everyone turned to his own way and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He's brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before his shears is done, so he opened and openeth not his mouth.

If I think that I'm walking a tight wire tonight prophetically, how about Isaiah in the seventh century describing a suffering servant who as he's going to his death and being beaten to a pulp and spat at and castigated and saying come down and we will believe you, bears all of that insult, all of that injury without a single word of retaliation or answer.

He bears it silently as a lamb to the slaughter. If Jesus had so much, once opened his mouth and spat out from the cross, you dum-dums don't you know what you're doing? I came for you and I'm suffering this for you and you're telling me come down and you'll believe me?

What does it take? He had every reason, every justification to let them have it. I would have, you know that, but he went as a lamb to the slaughter. That's an obedient son. If he had missed only this one particular, he would have invalidated his entire messianic credential.

How come that these Jews should be astonished that he went as a lamb to the slaughter because they're not going silently? They're groaning, bitching, complaining. How come us? Why me? Why did I ever do to suffer this?

I was living so comfortably in Toronto. I had a penthouse and a condominium. That, that, that, that, that, my business. And now I've got nothing. I'm stripped. I'm hated. I'm despised. I'm pursued. How come me?

Where's God? Full of complaint. And the contrast will be staggering. He who suffered more exceedingly anything that we ever bore because not only was he a man, he was equally God. It's God crucified who is going to his death silently as a lamb to the slaughter.