Dvd 17 the Mystery of Israel and the Church — Art Katz

And their integrity, and we hear them speak their many languages, and see their intensity and their passion, and their character and their nature, and our hearts call upon them for the Kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God, proclaiming His salvation throughout the earth.

The Mystery of Israel, the Church, and God’s Eternal Purpose

The issue of history, which is the issue of the nations, is the issue of the church.

We have now come to the time when we're going to discuss the fulfillment of the mystery of Israel and the church. In other words, the function and the purpose that each provides for the other. And Art, in order to do this, I think we have to bring in the topic of the principalities and powers of the air.

And in order to do that, I'd like to read a very weighty quote of yours that you've written in your book called The Mystery of Israel and the Church. As we have said, the church that can move Israel to jealousy is the church that can defeat the powers of the air.

Whatever is required for the one serves also for the other. We know that there are two mysteries to be fulfilled. One is the mystery of Israel, and the other is the eternal purpose of God, through the church, of manifesting the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers of the air.

There are two mysteries that are waiting to be fulfilled for which purpose God has created all things.

Well, that's a remarkable statement, but true. And my experience confirms that the church that is ignorant of the mystery of Israel is equally ignorant of the mystery spoken in Ephesians chapter 3 of the eternal purpose of God for the church.

And that somehow both mysteries are reconciled in one at the end of the age. The fulfillment of the one is the fulfillment of the other. But what do we mean by that? Maybe we should look briefly at the text in Ephesians chapter 3 where Paul speaks of his privileged call to make all men see in verse 9 what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world has been hidden God who created all things by Jesus Christ to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God.

That is so remarkable a statement that unless the Lord gives us a special grace, we will pass it over. It will be a gloss. We will look upon it as some kind of Paul getting away with things and speaking at a high lofty level that sounds good, but we're not to take it terribly seriously.

But I think that we need really to focus in on this very heart of the church and its mystery called to a fulfillment of an ultimate kind that seems so foolish that it has to do with a demonstration that only the church itself can make of the manifold wisdom of God.

What is that? And to whom is that demonstration made? Not to the world, but to some ethereal lofty presence in the heavenlies of something called the principalities and powers of the air. And most of us flinch from even that kind of recognition because it's out of keeping with our enlightenment view of reality not having to do with invisible spirit entity.

And yet the irony is that the invisible realm is the ultimate realm of the very ursprung, the German word, the origin and foundation of all reality. And only the church is called both to recognize and to deal with that realm of spirit reality called the principalities and powers of the air.

But deal with it how? By a defeat that only it can bring as the church in manifesting the wisdom of God. What is that wisdom? Well, it has to do with what Jesus himself demonstrated at the cross when he made of those same powers a mock and a defeated, disarmed enemy and made of them a public spoil, a display.

By what? By a wisdom demonstrated in himself at the greatest suffering that the powers themselves had inflicted in bringing him to the cross. Because Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that if the rulers of this world had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Paul there is not speaking about earthly rulers, but the ultimate rulers that move the wellsprings of nations in the world, that realm of powers that abide in the air and above nations to influence if not control them.

You say, oh, that's a speculative concept. Oh, really? How can you understand the phenomenon of Nazism and remove that consideration? In modern times, the taking over of the whole apparatus of the state by the powers of the air unto the annihilation of European Jewry is the very demonstration of their truth.

And Paul is saying that they crucified the Lord of glory. Had they known, they would not have done so. If they had known what would be the result of the outworking of their spiteful vehemence against the Son of God, they would not have crucified.

Yes, they used the instrumentality of Roman law and Jewish indignation against Christ. And they expressed it in the wisdom peculiar to themselves, violence, power, death, threat, intimidation, and fear.

And that's exactly the same complex of things that will come against the church in the last days by those same powers. And when we will demonstrate in our response to them what Jesus did at the cross, the age will have been ended.

That is to say, the wisdom of God is the character of God and nowhere more revealed than when it is the object of the contrary wisdom, which is the powers of the air in their vengeful display of murderous intention against God and against his people.

So I'm feeling frustrated. This needs explication of an extensive kind. And yet I'm hoping that a little opportunity here will begin at least to initiate an inquiry into the heart of what we often pass over.

And yet it is the call of the church that except that the church make it manifest, it will not be made manifest at all. So, and it has to do, it says in verse 11, according to the eternal purpose which you purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord, the church has got to embrace what is God's purpose.

And the remarkable thing is it has not a thing to do with any benefit that accrues to itself by its willingness to take upon itself such a fulfillment because it's only God's satisfaction. It is his eternal purpose.

It has not even anything to do with that which comes to the church or to the world. But with the principalities and powers of the air. So a church that is willing to take God's eternal purpose into its consideration, not just as a consideration, but as foremost consideration, though it has nothing to do with its own self-aggrandizement or benefit, is exactly the church.

And what rules the world is self-interest. So the church in putting the purpose of God before its own demonstrates in that one act that the powers of the principalities that play upon the world do not play upon it.

We are not ruled by self-interest, by programs, by success, but we are ruled by the eternal purpose of God, not only when it does not bring us any benefit, but opens us to an opposition of a kind that would require perhaps even our life and would not have been our fate if we had not sought to fulfill the eternal purpose of God.

The Cross as the Wisdom of God

The wisdom of God is self-sacrifice. The wisdom of God is the character of God. It's the humility of God. It's the selflessness of God demonstrated at the cross for others. And the whole world is moving in the wisdom of the powers to seek for itself its own satisfaction, its own delight, its own benefit, its own benevolence.

To break that power is something that only the church can demonstrate because it has a purpose beyond itself given by God to fulfill an eternal purpose that God waits only for the church to demonstrate.

But it cannot be fulfilled by individual virtuosos. The church means the entire conglomerate, the entire corporate entity that has as its first purpose for being not its own satisfaction, but God's. When the powers see a church like that, they tremble.

For Jesus they know and Paul they know, but the church at Portland, Oregon, or Timbuktu or Chicago that is still rooted in its own selfishness, its own programs, its own satisfaction, its own success, does not threaten them at all.

A Martyr Church That Moves Israel to Jealousy

So how does this tie in with the mystery of Israel? The church that is jealous for the fulfillment of God's eternal purpose without any benefit to itself will be jealous for God's eternal purpose for Israel without benefit to itself.

It will be to Israel that self-sacrificing entity and demonstrate in its willingness to suffer for another what is the unique wisdom of God demonstrated at the cross. In a word, it's a formula for suffering, for death, for martyrdom.

The church that is a martyr church is the church that exemplifies and demonstrates this wisdom. And when the powers of the air see it, they are defeated. For how shall they tempt such a church? How shall they manipulate such a church that is not ruled by its own self-interest and is willing in the fulfillment of God's purposes, not only to suffer and to sacrifice, but even to run the prospect of death?

In the absence of that, we have churches today that are institutions that seek their own fulfillment. They are self-perpetuating bodies that seek only their own self-aggrandizement, their own success.

And they may well succeed in those programs, and in succeeding, even confer a modicum and a measure of blessing to those who participate. But they will not fulfill God's eternal purpose for the church.

And the church that will not consider and make as its first purpose His eternal purpose is disqualified in any way from being the prophetic and apostolic entity to which we are called. We are not called to be an institution that mediates blessings for men.

We are called to be an entity that fulfills the eternal purposes of God. And only a church that can and will can be to Israel what it must. Only a church like that will move it to jealousy. For so long as Jews see nothing more than their own Jewish institutions replicated by Gentiles, to what jealousy will it move them?

But a people who are willing to be a sacrifice. Isn't it interesting that the very first verse after Paul's remarkable statement in Romans 9 through 11 on the mystery of Israel is to make of our bodies a living sacrifice.

Israel’s Restoration and the Church’s Sacrificial Calling

So, the two mysteries have got to be fulfilled. And when we will be to the Jew what we must in the last days, at the likely risk of our own life, like those precious saints of World War II who hid Jews and were found out like Corrie ten Boom and were brought into concentration camps and into terror and death, will this mystery be fulfilled?

So, may God give the church that vision, that desire. It's interesting that in the first speaking on the subject of the mystery of Israel, after 14 months of sabbatical silence where the Lord forbade me to speak on any subject and began to open to me this mystery and was broken by an invitation coming from a pastor whom I did not know ought.

We believe that God wants you to speak to us a seminar on Israel the church in the last days. The exact phrase to which I had come as the Lord had begun to unveil this mystery. And I came to that congregation in California and fasting and in prayer for 10 days, not having spoken for 14 months, which is itself is a death, and opened up from the very first message the mystery of the church that will move Jews to jealousy and to say to those hearing me, where has the church historically fulfilled this as a church?

Individual cases, yes. But as the church at large, the Jews are yet waiting for such a fulfillment. And I did not answer what kind of a church it would be. And I went on from message to message, went to bed after the sixth message on Saturday, Sunday morning being the seventh and concluding message, not knowing what it would be.

And three o 'clock on Sunday morning AM, the Lord wakened me with a start with one word, martyrdom. My final message was that the church that will move Israel to jealousy is a martyr church. Whatever martyrdom means, as was exemplified by the first martyr Stephen, so also it will be exemplified by the church of the last days and a martyrdom for a people now hated all the world over the Jew and yet embraced by Gentiles, the church in a loving way at the risk and cost of its own life.

Who can explain this? This is beyond institution. This is beyond religion. This is beyond sentiment. This is a church that has come into such a union with God himself as to express his character, which is the wisdom of God, the self-sacrificing nature of God for another.

And so in the fulfillment of our role toward the Jew, we fulfilled the mystery spoken here in Ephesians, but it needs to come into our consciousness because it will affect and change everything. It will make our programs to look shoddy, trivial, inadequate, and give us the kind of focus and parameters of faith for which we were intended and need to hear again.

This apostolic call brought to us by a foundational men, apostles and prophets who alone can make this ring with conviction in our own hearts so as to embrace the sacrifice that it will require. What we're seeing instead is a kind of propheticness and apostolicity of a cheap kind that requires nothing and is very appealing to people who are situated in their comfort and in their security and can dabble in a vocabulary that seems to give a certain note of excitement but not require the sacrifice unto martyrdom that is the genius of the church and the very wisdom of God explicated at the cross and now waiting for a final statement as it comes from the body of Christ itself as it will be called to perform for Jews despised everywhere in the world but by themselves.

When Jews see this coming from Gentiles, they'll be moved to jealousy. There will be no way to explain it. It will be the very revelation of the character and nature of God himself unto their salvation.

So may the church brood over this call and be willing to adopt it at whatever cost to itself. For that very willingness is the wisdom of God. The church that forsakes its own self-interest, its own program and opens itself to the retaliation of the powers of the dark of the air who now recognize in it Jesus we know and Paul we know and now we have to acknowledge we know you now also.

Now you're a threat. Now we're going to retaliate. Now is going to come upon you things that you would not have had to experience had you remained in your intrinsic Christian selfishness. But now that you have consciously vowed to make this the first purpose for your being, you're a mocked enemy and upon you will be the expression of our vindictiveness and you'll only be and how does that serve the purpose of God?

Because the church can only bear it corporately, only bear it in prayer and count it privilege. So may the church come of age and fulfill these great mysteries that wait the consummation of the age. The issue of Israel is the issue of the church, but the church of what kind?

Not one that plays with the vocabulary of that which is apostolic and prophetic and has its own little darling men who have given themselves such titles, but those who can bring to us the timeless and eternal purpose of God in such a way as to gain our willingness to fulfill it at whatever cost.

We can't fulfill this except through suffering and the very willingness to bear suffering for another, namely the satisfaction of God and not our own because it fulfills his eternal purpose is itself that demonstration.

Contrary to all the ethos of the world that says take care of number one, see to yourself first, your own enjoyment, your own satisfaction, even as Christians and so long as we remain in that mentality, the powers of the air can yawn in our face all the more when we profess to take cities for Christ.

By what? By worship, by technology, by amplifiers or by the demonstration of a wisdom which can only be ours at the cross of sacrifice and suffering because it pertains to his satisfaction and his glory.

May the Lord raise up such a church in these last days is our cry and the reason for which we are establishing these very videos today.

Stephen’s Martyrdom as a Pattern for the Church

Art, I'd like to follow up with a further look at the situation between the first martyr Stephen and Saul who of course later became Paul. We note that Saul did not become a believer at that time as he witnessed this and I'd like to read a quote of yours and have you respond to it.

As Stephen's radiant face and martyr death was a seed that later brought about Saul's conversion, so the church's radiant face brought on by a genuine union with Christ will be a pre-witness for Israel and the capstone comes when they shall see the Lord himself whom they have pierced.

Something sets them up in watching the death of a people willing to be martyred for their sake though they may not immediately respond. Something is sown in their thought, consciousness and hearts that prods them and goads them which the Lord later calls for in a future revelation by which the whole thing comes together and they understand.

What a marvelous observation. I'd like you to expound on that please.

This is a remarkable paradigm. I agree with Watchman Nee that often what is given in the scriptures at first has a final ultimate consummation at the end and surely the conversion of Saul to Paul, the commencement of the career ministry of the great apostle, commencing with the demonstration of Stephen's martyrdom is not something that we can ignore because Paul kicked against the pricks.

Why? He saw something demonstrated by a busboy, the least of men that he knew that no amount of religion could ever obtain. It exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees because Stephen died not reluctantly or begrudging his fate or with some expression of self-pity.

That would cancel out the meaning of martyrdom but a joyous privilege of giving himself in the form of Christ's own sacrifice and being called to it without reluctance, without misgiving, with complete confidence in the sovereignty of God that I'm fulfilling the purpose for which I have been called and I'm fulfilling it in such a way as God need not explain to me and I can bear even the stones of that painful demise with rejoicing and even with compassion for those who are inflicting it because I'm seeing the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

His face shone like an angel. He was filled with the Spirit. What a picture of God's intention for the church of the last days that martyrdom is not some unwilling and reluctant thing that we have to take in some self-pitying way but with a joyous embrace.

Whether or not our life is required, the issue of martyrdom is not what befalls us in a final moment but characterizes all our moments. It's a mode of being for those who continually see a heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of the Father which means that his sovereignty is being fulfilled whether it requires our life or not.

That was an ultimate demonstration for Saul and finally he could not shake it and when the Lord confronted him, he confronted him on the basis of what he had seen in Stephen's willing sacrifice and so I think again in the last days, a Saul nation called to an apostolate like Paul.

We have an apostolate as Jews to all the nations. That's the reason why Paul was made an apostle to the nations, to the goyim, to the Gentiles and he said, what you see in me is a man out of time and out of joint but what you see is a preview of my nation's own calling to the nations and we can only fulfill it in the grandeur that comes with an embrace of that apostolate that requires the deepest conversion and final confrontation in opposition to that which we think most threatens our Judaism which is what was represented by these heretics like Stephen dying for his so-called apostate Judaism but dying in such a way as to reveal what only suffering and death can reveal.

For suffering and death reveal ultimately and that's why the centurion at the cross seeing the suffering and death of Jesus born with the same kind of magnanimity and grace and trust and joy as Stephen had to say truly this was the son of God and when we who cannot even stand any rejection or someone speaking adversely or things imagined or real can bear an ultimate sacrifice with the same joy, Jewry will see the ultimate revelation that only willing suffering and sacrifice can reveal because that is the nature of God.

That is God. What Jesus revealed at the cross and what Stephen revealed at his stoning was nothing less nor other than what God is in himself a self-sacrificing God who ultimately at pain gives of himself for others even unto death.

That's God's very nature and we Jews have not seen it from that which is called the church. The church has been for us an object of foreboding and mistrust rather than some self-yielding self-sacrificial entity willing to bear even our insult even if we should be the instrument of their martyrdom which we may well have to be and bear it with grace they will then be so pricked as to lay the foundation for their own ultimate and deep conversion by which we can be to the nations what Paul was to the church.

We will come into our apostolate as he came into his by an example set before us by a willing sacrifice a Stephen church of the last days. So the paradigm is powerful if we will but see it and be willing for it and when we go deeper into the anatomy of martyrdom and that of Stephen what was he but a waiter on tables and had to feed the widows and listen to their relentless complaint and accusation that this one is getting more than that one.

He was shaped in the character of God by the daily buffeting and suffering that came from the embrace of ordinary things to which he was called and we will come to it equally in a same way. We need to come to the school of martyrdom the character of martyrdom in the daily things that are before us in the obedience in the school of the spirit as God will give it to us so that in the ultimate moment we can be with all our moments before us were self-sacrificing and yielding because as I'm saying martyrdom is not the issue of a final moment but all our moments where is the church today called to that kind of consciousness and to that kind of role.

It needs to be and in fact that is what church in fact is is the congregation of martyrs who bear one another in the suffering that we invariably even bring to one another in misunderstanding and immaturity and the various kinds of things that we bear that we might come to the character of God and the moment ultimately when it will be required of us.

So may the God may the Lord raise up a Stephen people for the last days whose demonstration to Israel will be the very factor of their radical conversion the embrace of their apostolate and to be to the nation's the kind of blessing that Paul was to the Gentile Church that we said to the believers at Ephesus the leaders of the church you'll see my face no more and you know what manner of man I was to you from the beginning I never took anything from you but day and night with tears both in public places and from house to house I proclaimed all the counsel of God when they heard that he would see his face no more they wept.

Apostolic Seeing Beyond Sentimentality

Where in history have Gentiles ever wept when a Jew has announced his coming demise but he was to them a mother a father brooded over them that Christ be for them he was a self-sacrificing giving yielding Jew for the church for the Gentiles that God calls Israel to be to the nation's yes to Jordan to Iraq to Sudan to Palestinians to all those who are presently harassing us and for whom we should have every reason for resentment and rejection.

God calls us to be the loving ministers of the gospel of his grace and mercy and the brokenness that will come to us in the last days and the example provided by the church itself. So it's a very great mystery and it'll take a very great grace to fulfill it and that grace will be given us when the Lord sees our willing hearts.

What I'm hearing you say is that we need a church that transcends the sentimental view that the church has and many Christians have of many issues in life themselves God Israel. In other words it's a sentimental view and not a view based on the timeless wisdom of God.

Now how can the church get to the place where it is truly apostolic where it truly views things with a view towards the end which was truly something that highlighted and demarcated the apostolic view.

The issue is the cross and even the willingness to bring to death or to die to our sentimental view. A sentimental view is always softer than God's own seeing and always makes a lesser requirement. Sentiment is the great enemy and opposition to the love of God and I don't know that he can shed abroad that love in our hearts so long as sentiment itself fills it.

We have to be willing to forsake the lesser for the greater but sentiment is a self-serving device and so it stands as an impediment to the agreement with God in his own prophetic seeing. It's no accident that before the son of man could prophesy to the dry bones in Ezekiel he first had to be brought out by the hand of the Lord and by the spirit and brought down and into the valley of dry bones.

He had to be brought out from his charismatic advantage and his superficial seeing that was an enjoyment to himself and to be brought down and into a valley of the reality and truth of things as God himself sees them and as the flesh itself wants to shrink from seeing.

We would much rather sentimentalize than see the truth of something. Not only of Israel but ourselves, the church, the nation, our children. We're continually faced with the issue of true seeing and so the character of the church has got to take on some apostolic proportions that means the operation of the cross that separate us from the sentimental and humanly tinctured viewing to that which is of God's.

Eschatological Vision and Separation from the World

There's a whole mindset to which we're called and Israel is the key to the opening of this whole thing because Israel is the issue of God's cosmic drama, the issue of an ultimate fulfillment, an ultimate redemption of a nation out of suffering and death and into a final millennial stature that blesses all the families of the earth.

And so the church has got to know that we're moving toward a consummation. It sees an end that changes its view of one Sunday merely succeeding another. There's a dimension of expectancy of apocalyptic judgments that must come of what's the word for the expectation of the end.

An eschatological seeing that is intrinsic to apostolic calling and the church that begins to embrace these things will signal to the powers of the air that it is an entity that needs to be opposed and the church is willing to bear that opposition because it has caught glimpse of the ultimate glory of God that comes through this consummation.

But in doing that, it breaks its harmony with the world. It brings itself into a place of disjuncture with the world. It takes upon itself the view that the apostles and prophets have always had of the world as intrinsically evil and opposed to God.

It sees through the subtlety of the world and in its best forms as being intrinsically opposed to God and needing to be hated and for which one needs to be separated. And that brings upon it a further opposition but it gives the church a view of true value and it begins to walk in a way that it has shocked off the illuminates of the world and is a living example of those who are moving by another wisdom and its very example frees those that are captive to ambition, to fame, to success.

It's a church that because it has such a view of the things that are ultimate and final and is moving consciously toward that at the cost of willing sacrifice is emancipated from the kinds of bondages that fall upon men in the world.

Its very existence is a testimony and a statement of what it means to be free in Christ and what it means to live by another wisdom. And the evidence that they have succeeded in this is that its own children are persuaded.

Instead of the reluctant teenagers that fill the balcony or for whom we have to find some cutting program the children themselves witness the authenticity of what it is that their parents are about and willingly join themselves with it in a last day sense of impending consequence that justifies all.

This is apostolic and unless the church is demonstrating this to Israel how shall Israel itself take upon itself its apostolate? So there are certain aspects of understanding, a mindset, a mode of being that is at the heart of that which is apostolic that the church needs to find and demonstrate and that this is the authenticity that the powers of the air despise and fear and it shatters all that is sentimental and shallow, external, superficial and calls for real submission to an authority to a breaking of the power of our self-interest our willingness to submit what we think is the will of God to the authority in the church and it brings a reality and a tightening of all dimensions of the faith that heretofore were shallow and only just verbal and phraseological rather than actual.

And the key to the whole configuration of mindset and practice is the understanding of God's ultimate intention for Israel that can only be obtained by a church of this kind. And so a church of this kind has its power and authority reflected in its own prayers and its own intercessions, its own witness, its own life together is already a reality of a kingdom come and that which is future.

But it needs to be seen, it needs to be embraced, it needs to be sought and it's clear that we cannot move from where we presently are to that kind of reality, that kind of demonstration except at the cost of sacrifice which is the issue of the cross itself.

In a word, the mystery of Israel requires the cross to be restored to the church in all of its meaning and actuality as being something more than a decoration a motif, an architectural image. And that is the wisdom of God, the reality of God, the power of God and the glory of God.

That Jews wait to see as Paul needed to see it in the demonstration of a self-sacrificing martyr Israel needs to see it in the demonstration of a self-sacrificing church.

Ananias and Sapphira and the Demand for Wholeheartedness

Art, I know that you believe passionately that the things that occurred in the apostolic church are very crucially instructive for us today. Let's look at the episode with Ananias and Sapphira two individuals who had the judgment of God fall on them because they offered the part in place of the whole.

I think that's a particularly significant episode and one that is very appropriate for the church in its present condition. Today we would be impressed with the kind of offering that they made and we would ask no questions.

We're only too glad to receive the sum. But an apostle discerned the deception. And it's not only a deception against men, it's a deception against God. Why have you lied against the Holy Spirit? And the lie is to give an appearance of something being the whole of the sacrifice when it is in fact only the part.

And I think that that cuts to the heart of our present Christianity. We speak the vocabulary, we make the motions, but there's an element of deception by which we ourselves are deceived because of an unwillingness to bring the whole and to make a measure of our giving to stand for it.

And God was so jealous over the character of the church that he did not think it too extravagant to slay both husband and wife who thought to pull off this deception, but they could not escape the tremendous discernment of the apostle himself, equally jealous for the truth and the reality of the church.

And so we need to be sobered by this. And I've often asked the church, are you willing for a return of this kind of divine jealousy that will carry out feet first, those who are playing at the game and making the appearance of something that is only in part and not at all?

I think that the candidates to be carried out would be numerous, but it says that great fear fell upon them all. And I think that there was more instruction for the young men who carried out both husband and wife and buried them than could have been gained in years in schools of discipleship and in seminaries.

So until we come to a reality where our lives match our profession, we're not going to be either the answer of the fulfillment of the eternal mystery of the purposes of God that will challenge the powers there and finally defeat them, nor be to Israel what we must.

There needs to be an utterness toward God, a totality in which we ourselves will not condescend to a practice either in word or deed that appears to be other than what it is. We will recognize, in fact, that we have been shallow in our commitment and that God is calling for an utterness that we have been unwilling to give.

That's what martyrdom is. And that's the nature of God and it's the call of the church. It is the faith. It's not some novel interpretation. It was God's intention for the first, this ultimacy toward God of the laying down of all.

Apostolic Jealousy and the Church’s Integrity

And so interestingly that the same apostle who discerned the deception was himself brought not long after to a kind of deception by which he had to be nailed by Paul about being one thing toward the Jews and another thing toward the Gentiles and taking liberties with the truth and challenging the truth of the gospel itself, which for Paul he would not tolerate for a moment, but confronted him to his face.

We need to come back again to the apostolic jealousy for the high calling of God, the standard of truth, of character, of conduct that made the church an object of fear that people were afraid to join themselves to it.

Which fear is today absent from the church because it has become a casual entity of yet another kind. Until we are restored to this, we cannot fulfill our own destiny. We cannot move Israel to its destiny.

And so what was given at the first needs again to be fulfilled at the end. And the same God who brought these to their death is God still and jealous still and has been patient and has even winked in times past, but is now commanding all men everywhere and especially the church to repent for its shabby and sentimental and other alternatives to the call of God that requires a kind of personal ruthlessness to our own self-interest.

That alone makes the church the church and the thing to which we are called and alone by which Israel will be saved and something that will bring her to jealousy. It's the cross. It's at the center of everything.

It needs again to be embraced and be embraced willingly and joyfully. And for us to acknowledge that we have been playing games and that our present Christianity is to a very large extent a gamesmanship, a using of the vocabulary, a bringing in part, but with the withholding of the whole that makes a mock of the faith and allows the powers of the air to yawn in our faces at the very time that we're supposedly be taking cities for Christ and in fact are taking nothing and leaving the Jews totally untouched by our very presence in their midst.