Ger-02 Israel's Coming Calamity — Art Katz

Good evening, you dear sisters and other of the guests who have come, especially the gray heads, which I now also enjoy. So it's good to be back after almost 20 years. The Lord has inserted this night.

So I'm happy for the privilege and sad for the message. Sad because I know that it's difficult and your dear hearts for Israel will be offended. You're bruised at the hard things that we need yet to consider for that nation's future.

So I bring a rare perspective. I believe that it's God's and it's not often welcomed and especially rejected in Israel itself. So you can pray for my coming trip to Israel in this month, March 29th. A first visit after five years where the last visit was not warmly received and I have already been informed that this visit will not be warmly received either.

Israel's Coming Calamity and Jacob's Trouble

Because the title of the last conference which we had to conduct at our own hotel saying that no Messianic or other fellowship was willing to receive me was entitled The Coming Calamity of Israel. And that calamity is closer now than it was five years ago.

It's an inevitable calamity, a time of Jacob's trouble worldwide. It has its first eruption in Israel itself. It's not God's final word. His final word is restoration, even resurrection. But of course that must always be preceded by a death.

That's the calamity. We should not be astonished at this when we consider Israel's destiny not merely to establish a successful state and national home more importantly to bless all the families of the earth.

And bless them how? By a character and nature that the present nation does not yet possess seeing that it is still Jacob. Where we have to recognize that this Israel is still dealing with Jacob and not yet with Israel.

One should perhaps call this state Jacob's state because we are still showing the nature of Jacob. How should it be otherwise? Can a leopard change its spots? Or an Ethiopian his color? That transformation must come from God.

And it's coming soon. So I want to pray a prayer grace to again express this theme which we express everywhere the Lord brings us not just to distress God's people who have a heart toward Israel but actually to prepare them that they might anticipate this time of Jacob's trouble for no nation will be exempt from seeing this reality in which God will sift Jacob through the nations and sift the nations through Jacob that the Lord himself might judge the nations even separating the sheep from the goats one by one over one question only what did you do for the least of these my brethren?

Be assured that his brethren will become least entirely reduced shattered in all of their categories walking the road to Calvary like the Lord before them marred more than any man having no beauty that any should desire them despised and rejected of men except those few that shall take them in and extend mercy that they may obtain mercy or there'll be no survival at all.

The redeemed of the Lord shall return to Zion he did not leave it in that condition. It's the reason for which present Zion has to be left as well as Los Angeles and Chicago and Cape Town and Pretoria and every place in the nations where Jews have found security and affluence the redeemed of the Lord shall return to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads not only because of the confidence that they will not again be rooted up and out but having suffered the humiliation and the abasement of their God, the chastisement and the humiliation and the abasement of their God even unto death mourning and sighing fleeing away.

They will then be exalted above all nations. All nations will come to Jerusalem to acknowledge Israel's God. It will not add to our arrogance or superiority which we have always believed or expressed or felt above Gentiles, above the nations but our enduring character will be other than that utterly broken and contrite.

We will abhor ourselves for all of our sin and iniquity acknowledging the sins of our fathers as our own and that the judgments with which we were judged were altogether just in that day. God says I will remember my covenant toward you.

Jacob will have become and Jacob will have been changed to Israel and will be a blessing to all the families of the earth and will be the center, the hub of the theocratic government of God over all nations.

Yes, of course, we don't want to spiritualize this and then push it away what the church has done historically. The law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem not the present city which shall be reduced to rubble and to dust but the everlasting and millennial city entitled God is our righteousness that will be built upon the rubble of today's city as unto the Lord.

So Lord, mercy for these dear ones. They're too sweet, too tender to have to consider a scenario of this kind. Give us the moral strength to bear the reality that is yet to come. They should not astonish us for anything that pertains to your glory as Israel's destiny does must of course be a resurrection phenomenon.

And how can it be that without the death that precedes it give us the courage and strength to bear that and to be to this people what we must not only to take them in in the hour of their extremity and distress but to explain to them the meaning of their distress which we knew was coming for the scriptures were full and God had sent us messengers to rightly interpret them and to prepare for them a place of refuge where they shall be fed in the wilderness of the nations not only naturally but spiritually that the redeemed of the Lord might return to Zion mourning and sighing and fleeing and everlasting joy upon their heads in Jesus' name.

We pray Amen. Shall I go further? Some of you are looking at me quite mean some of you are looking at me quite hard. This is not my message it's the Lord's and Klaus and I have been talking as we have been driving from place to place about Jacob himself still descriptive of this present nation and so much the pattern, the prototype of the things that are yet future.

So we have been looking at the scriptures in Genesis picking up the essential thread of the Jacob story so much the present pattern also. And we'll share that a little bit and leave time for questions and answers to try and explain so well as we can.

Jacob's Supplanting of Esau

So let's review together from chapter 28 the inception of the conflict with Esau the threat to Jacob's life then and now. Jacob means usurper and supplanter. He desires the right things but seeks to obtain them by the operation of his wit a schemer willing to employ devices and what's the word expediencies.

And it would not be an exaggeration to say that the present state of Israel is such a Jacob's state really a kind of supplanting and usurping of something that already was in Esau's possession invoking prophetic scriptures as a kind of justification but not really believing them.

Seeing that the state was essentially the work of men from an atheistic, socialistic, Zionistic background where you have to recognize that the founding of this state was done by men with a socialistic, atheistic background.

Why has God allowed it? To set in motion the very friction and tension that Jacob of old had to suffer with his brother Esau. Because we know that when Jacob again desired to return to his home the great threat was his outraged brother Esau a crisis that Jacob was not able to meet by virtue of his wit.

With all of his cleverness he has got to come to his senses. He has to come to a place where he recognizes the futility of a dependence upon himself. For Jacob is not a Jewish personality. He is the statement of man everywhere self-sufficient man wanting to succeed on the basis of his own wit and energy ignoring the God of our fathers.

We are essentially a Jacob world. The nation is acting out a drama for the consideration of us all. So there is a wonderful glimpse of Jacob en route in flight from his brother Esau in the wilderness.

Chapter 28 where the sun had set on Jacob where he took a stone and made that a pillow had the dream of the ladder of the Lord with the Lord on top of it. And the Lord identifies himself as the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac.

But he does not say the God of Jacob because he is not yet Jacob's God. That reality has not been established. It's no one's by virtue of birth or ancestry. Something is required of a radical kind. So this is a first expression of God.

So this is the first expression of God where the Lord repeats the promise that he made to Abraham and to Isaac that one day Jacob himself will inherit. Verse 16 says Jacob awaked out of his sleep. Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not.

He was afraid how dreadful this was place. This is the house of God and the gate of heaven. So Jacob vowed a vow in verse 20. This is a Jacob prayer so revealing of what the man is in himself full of personal pronouns.

I, I, I, me, me, me if God will be with me will keep me in the way that I will go give me bread and clothing so I come again to my place. Then shall the Lord be my God. That's Jacob religion. That's commercial transaction not unknown in the history of Christianity in Germany and the Judaism that was birthed in Germany that was a kind of commercial transaction a small acknowledgement of God so long as we can continue in the way that we want to go a Saturday or a Sunday religion whose real center is one's own self the way that I want to go.

And if God will comply with our terms we will even be magnanimous enough to give him a tenth. This is the religion of convenience whether it's called Judaism or Christianity and we are both guilty for it.

And our idolatry is the worst because we have employed the name of God in it. Every religion is an idolatry that has man at its center and it's practiced the world over. But for us Jews with our history with God with our privilege in God with the deliverance out of slavery and through the wilderness the giving of the law the prophets for us the penalty is double for our sins.

For we are to be a witness to all nations of God as God and not a deity of our own making that serves our convenience where we can really give our energy and passion to the things that really count business, commerce, culture.

Yes, our own things. Commerce, business and culture. So Germany has produced this bourgeois religion and until you repent of that then it will still go on. Like this. We know from the story of Jacob that he went into the land for many years where there was no further encounter with God until the appointed time for his return has come and God has His time a set time and He is about to perform it again.

Jacob's Scheming and the Unplacable Esau

Jacob was afraid he sent his messengers before him to appease his brother Esau with the gifts that he would give him something like Israel's present activity to appease its Palestinian and Arab neighbors even with whole pieces of the land itself.

That's how far a Jacob is required to go when he seeks to find an answer to his own dilemma and distress independent of God. But this present Esau is not to be placated. No amount of territory will satisfy him.

This is ultimate enemy beyond Israel's ability to placate it is satisfied with one thing only Israel's extermination for the very presence of a Jewish state in that region is standing insult to the Islamic Allah.

This is not mere circumstance. It's the very logic of history itself ironically issuing out of our own sin who created Islam after all for the monotheistic heresy that it is that inscribes on the mosque on the temple mount God has no son.

Mohammed was impressed and inspired by Israel's apostate example of a nation that in rejecting Christ rejected the revelation of God in his triune fullness where there is no greater revelation than the cross the son giving himself without spot as sacrifice to the father by the eternal spirit.

This is a costly revelation from God to reject it cannot be without consequence. And so our sins bring our own judgment. We celebrated Germany as the ultimate civilization as even being the messianic answer because we loved Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer and all of the German genius of civilization Goethe.

We were more endeared to your culture than yourself and we so admired it that it had become a messianic substitute. This was humane civilization the exaltation of man philosophical and moral and cultured.

What is the ironic judgment that issues from that to be brought to death by that same nation not just systematically but bestially worse than animals far from the refinement of Kant and culture and morality and far away from all of this cultivated society and its morals where the people lacked what distinguishes people, humanity.

And that was God's ironic action in court that we drew upon ourselves by worshipping a false god. And so also Islam today. It's a heresy a monotheistic heresy that we ourselves have inspired who still insist on a monotheistic view as if by it we are doing God's service that he may have winked in times past but after the profound revelation of the fullness of the Godhead through the Son and His Spirit and the Father to insist on a narrow monotheism now and to be proud of that will invite its own judgment.

And Islam is that judgment that cannot be placated it cannot be appeased and Israel will yet taste its fury. So there's something in the pattern of Jacob sending over all that he had. There is something to be seen in this pattern when Jacob sends over all that he had his wives, his children, his animals his possessions, his home.

Jacob's Stripping and the Search for God

That's how I came to God when I was stripped and put up into the world and into the nations as a disillusioned ex-Marxist with his ideologies and philosophies my gods who had failed and thrust out into the world just looking for philosophical answers and only by the mercy of God and the prayers of one of my own former students and her mother was I pursued by the hound of heaven unto salvation.

Oh the depth of Jewish intransigence, self-assurance idolatry and their worship for a God who is waiting to encounter us whom we have been safely avoiding whom we have been safely avoiding that our lifestyle not suffer.

And this moment comes when we send all that we have over not just our possessions but our confidences our substitutes for God even called Judaism itself which is more an ethical humanism than it is a faith predicated on the knowledge of God which is more an ethical humanism than it is a faith predicated on the knowledge of God.

And when that night comes where we cannot save ourselves the same man that wrestled with Jacob of old waits to wrestle with us. May we have the same instinctive wisdom of Jacob that we will not let him go.

May we have the same instinctive wisdom of Jacob that we will not let him go when we wrestle with that man through the night which night is coming for Jacob all over the world. And may we receive the blessing that changes Jacob to Israel.

Jacob's Wrestling and Transformation

And may we receive the blessing that changes Jacob to Israel a strange blessing. I will not let you go except you bless me. So he touched him in the socket of his thigh where the cowboys wear their six shooters.

Where the cowboys wear their six shooters.

The belt of our virility and macho manhood. The belt of our virility and macho manhood. The belt of our virility and macho manhood. God knows where to touch. He broke the power of the Jacob life. He broke the power of the Jacob life.

It's self-sufficiency that was able to acknowledge the God of their fathers. But not yet his God but not yet his God. And when the sun rose on Jacob he limped. And when the sun rose on Jacob he limped.

And everyone who's been touched by God limps still. And everyone who's been touched by God limps still. People have said to me on this trip, are you tired? People have said to me on this trip, are you tired?

I'm always tired, I'm always weak. I'm always dependent, I don't have inspiration. I don't know how to speak this time. I don't know how to speak this time. I don't know how to speak this time. And there's more than just a successful meeting at stake.

And there's more than just a successful meeting at stake. Certainly not the reputation of a man. It's the issue of Jewish survival. It's communicating a view of coming reality. It's communicating a view of coming reality that is unthinkable and offensive to us that God would a second time bring such a holocaust that God would a second time bring such a holocaust.

And you have only one occasion to hear it. There are not many speaking it rather other more pleasing messages. Peace, peace healing the wounds of his daughter lightly healing the wounds of his daughter lightly.

Israel's Moral Crisis and the Coming Judgment

For nothing has changed in the false prophets and the true the one is always giving assurance. Yes, Israel is going through difficulty and it will become worse but they'll recover. Why do you take a more severe view, brother?

Why do you take a more severe view, brother? Because I see this hope of Israel's improvement as humanistic as if it's an inevitable progress as if it's an inevitable progress. Oh, you dear saints, if you are any student of the present state of Israel, you know that a point has already been reached of which there is no return.

The moral character of the nation, the necessary employment of violence, the corruption in the highest levels of leadership, the conflict within themselves that is religious and political, the employment of torture in suspected decaptive terrorists.

Once you have employed those things, those experiences that survival presses upon you, if you will not turn to your God as your protection and seek by your own wit and ability to save yourself from the distress, then you will be required to employ devices and acts and procedures, contrary to every hope for the state of Israel, a disappointment to ourselves, but the very necessary revelation from God.

We will have occasion to see the Israel that we have sought ourselves to establish through our Jacob strength, that has exacerbated the Esau in our midst and made him an implacable enemy that cannot be appeased and requires of us acts that contradict any moral meaning for the state and will result in an inevitable disaster, not only a defeat, but a humiliation, you can read it yourselves in Isaiah and in other places where we have to drink the cup of God's wrath, but we will not always have to drink it.

He'll take the cup from us and give it to them who have so ruthlessly exploited them, who were not satisfied merely to defeat us, but in that Islamic and Arab temperament, requiring vengeance, where it is then about repentance, revenge, without showing mercy, bow down so that we walk over you and we will see that actually fulfilled in the humiliation and expulsion of the nation and again into the nations so that the word of God in Jeremiah can be fulfilled.

Jeremiah's Promise of a Greater Return

You will no longer speak of me as the God who brought you out of Egypt. What do you mean? That's our distinctive historic experience. It's by that that our nationhood was birthed. True, but there's a greater event coming and this will be your millennial and eternal memory, not the God who brought you out of Egypt, but the God who has brought you back from every nation wherein I have scattered you, and so we will know our God, not academically nor rabbinically, but actually as the God of judgment and the God of mercy, the God who chastises sons and comforts them, whom we will meet face to face in the wilderness of the nations and there we will come into the bond of his covenant and into under the rod of his authority for this Ezekiel tells us in chapter 20, with a fury poured out, mentioned twice in two verses, with a fury poured out, I will rule over you and bring you into the wilderness of the nations and there I will meet with you face to face and there you will come into the bond of my covenant that the redeemed of the Lord might return to Zion, that they didn't leave it in that condition.

The Church's Mercy Toward Israel

What kind of face will they find in the wilderness? What kind of face? Religious obligation? I guess because these people are a threat and to be identified with them now, where they are hated all over the world, imperils my own life.

And what if it should be at a time of the Antichrist, where his hatred of the Jew permeates the nations and at a time when we cannot buy nor sell without his mark, we'll have to receive them not in our prosperity but in our poverty.

They threaten even the store that would be required for our own survival. Who would welcome them under those circumstances? What a strange people who love not their life unto death and counted a privilege to be to Israel what they must, expressing the unconditional love of God, a love that cannot be offended or disappointed, even by Jews who will not be grateful for you will not require their gratitude and you'll not be offended by their conduct.

So reduced will they be as the least of these his brethren that you might have opportunity to fulfill the words of Paul that by your mercy they may obtain mercy. The issue of Israel's survival and restoration is not Israel.

It's the church, but a church of an ultimate kind that is not inconvenienced by their coming, but counts it all privilege. So much beyond religious obligation that it shows to them the face of their own God, where it is nowhere more powerful than when it comes through a Gentile.

That's how I got saved, moving through the nations 37 years ago, seeing the light of God in the face of Gentiles, which is the glory of the people of Israel, a glory I didn't know existed till I saw the light expressed through a Gentile face.

The Face of God in Former Enemies

And of all Gentile faces, nowhere more powerful than in Polish faces, Latvian and Lithuanian and German, and every place where Jews have suffered persecution, where they have most reason to fear, there they will be most astonished.

So I spoke this morning at an evangelistic outreach in Magdeburg, in a market, and as I was waiting to be called on, I could not contain myself at the faces that I was observing. I have never seen such darkness, such expressions, so grim.

Is there anything more fearful and more ugly than an unregenerate German with their spiked hair or their shaved heads, their earrings, or having lived a life without God, mean, capable of cruelty? I was frightened by those faces, and I told them that.

Your faces have terrified me, for nothing has changed. You're as capable now as you were then. Your cruelty is just under the surface of your life, and your face condemns you. Your face testifies against you.

You can't live a life that you have lived without showing it. You're left of God. There's no light in your face. There's no grace. There's no kindness. There's only a narrow, selfish, physical preservation of your bodily life.

That's what we Jews will expect to see, but that people will not be taking us in. They will be pursuing us. But you will take us, and we will see in your face what Jacob saw wrestling with the man and changed all his seeing, even if he saw himself.

When I see your face now, it's as if I see the face of God. Jacob is no more Jacob. This shall be your name, Israel, and Jacob built an altar. In the last verse of chapter 33, his first altar, his first sacrifice, his first acknowledgment of God who is God, and he limped there, and he called that altar El Elohe Yisrael, the God of Israel.

Israel's Restoration and God's Glory

That's the one who will bless all the families of the earth. That word must be fulfilled. God made that promise to Abraham and reiterated with the patriarchs. If we do not fulfill that, if we do not become a nation of priests and a light unto the world, how then is God God?

How is his word his word? How is his promise his promise? The issue of Israel's restoration is the issue of God. For his glory forever, Paul says. But that restoration is the issue of the church who exhibits to Jacob the face of his own God.

That's why Paul says, oh, the depth of the riches. Both of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God. Who shall be his counselor? Who shall give to him and it shall be given again? For of him and through him and to him are all things.

To whom be glory forever. There is an issue greater than the establishment of a nation state. It's the God of glory forever. And we are privileged to have part in that. And to conclude the age. And bring the Lord.

Their David. Whose sanctuary and dwelling will be their Jerusalem. And his throne their Zion. That the law of the Lord shall go forth to all nations. Who will study war no more. So Lord bless this speaking.

Give us an understanding. Of the breadth of this mystery. And our privilege part in it. The church among the nations. The church among the nations.