South Africa - 2000 - Part 2 — Art Katz

I'm in the kind of mood that reminds me of the advantage that athletes have before they enter the ring. They have 15 minutes or a half hour in the dressing room to warm up and get the adrenaline flowing.

But we don't give speakers the same privilege and consideration. You're just expected to boom, you're on. So Lord, give me the equivalent by your spirit. And get the juices running, Lord. Stir and remind me of the delight that I have myself in the great subject, Lord, that I've been asked to speak on this evening.

And bless your saints. Make it memorable, Lord. Make it significant. Make it foundational. Make it worth everything. Let it have consequence, rich, Lord, for time and for eternity. I thank you and give you the praise for the privilege of being the mouth for your speaking.

Come now as the high priest and the apostle of our confession. Who doesn't need any warm up at all. We are instant, my God, in season and now. We thank you and give you the praise in Jesus' name. Amen.

Apostolic Foundations and the Nature of Apostolic Ministry

Well, Gary has asked me to speak on what is apostolic or the genius of what is apostolic. And a very great subject and very dear to me that deserves several speakings. There's a book coming out. If you want to see it now, it's already on our website.

And that's www .benisrael .org. And up comes the burning bush. And I don't know how it's listed in the books or topics or what, but apostolic foundations. And that's a transcript from spoken messages of a dozen or so years ago.

At a YWAM conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I spoke on apostolic foundations. Apostolic character, apostolic perception, the principality of the powers of the air, the church, apostolic proclamation.

What are the unique attributes and distinctives that make something apostolic? Do you like that word? I'm not talking about the name of the denomination. You know that one. I'm talking about the foundation that Paul himself speaks of in Ephesians.

I think it's at the end of chapter 3. The foundation of the apostles and the prophets. Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. So there's something so dear and ultimately precious about what is prophetic and apostolic and foundational.

That we need to be reminded and need to aspire toward and to respect and to respect and expect. If it has not been a feature of the life of the church in recent history, I believe God is restoring it.

And that we'll see something of the same glory of that apostolic calling at the end as was true in the beginning. So if you turn to the book of Thessalonians, although it seems to have directed me that way of all of the text that we employ.

Just pick out a few of the highlights that will give us an insight into the genius of what is apostolic. The root we know is the Greek word apostolosis or something like that. That means sent one. So that's the technical and Greek word but it doesn't tell us enough.

Sent for a reason and sent out of ascending body to communicate and to perform and to have an authority of a particular kind. And this kind came to the pagans and Thessalonians. Paul says in verse 5 of chapter 1.

For our gospel did not come to you in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. Just as you know what kind of men would prove to be among you for your sake. Well we have enough right there to spend the rest of the evening.

Just to begin with our gospel. For Paul the gospel is not nomenclature. It's not three steps or five steps on how to get saved. It's a precious body of understanding and something to be transmitted. It's an all inclusive statement about God and about his call.

It's not just a reduced formula on how to get saved. It's our gospel. It's not only rich but it's personal. It's something that's dear to Paul and he communicates it as something more than a formula. It has been reduced to a formula in our generation.

We need to revive and restore the rich complexity of what the gospel is. That is more than just how to get saved. And it did not come in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

Just as you know what kind of men would prove to be among you for your sake. What has that got to do with the proclamation of the gospel? Why does he mention in the same breath what kind of men would prove to be among you?

Evidently if something is apostolic the message is not some abstract thing but something out of a vital life of the man who bears it. And the character of the man is somehow a signature and a validation of the message itself.

You can't separate the man from the message. And therefore he mentions, it seems immodestly, what kind of a man he proved to be. So something was demonstrated to his hearers that they would not argue with the statement that he makes about himself.

That he proves to be a certain kind of man bringing a certain kind of message because that message is antithetical to the whole pagan world. It's not going to be a message of convenience. It's going to be a message of profound inconvenience because he says in the same chapter that they are already suffering the affliction of the gospel for having received it.

So how does a man come and bring something that is at variance with the mentality, the style of life, the mode of being, the value system in which these people have lived their lives for generations and come in crashing and evoking a ghost who yet remain in it and for that reason it will come at a price.

Follow me? This is no small thing. This is a major divine penetration from heaven to earth that upturns everything, that brings radical requirement and is implicit with suffering because the speaker himself is a suffering message and he bears the signs of his apostleship in his own body.

And they know therefore if they are going to receive a message from a man who suffers this for bearing it what will the implication be for receiving it? Therefore it's no ordinary communication. Can you see how far we are removed from things apostolic?

So the man is the message and therefore Paul by the inspiration of the spirit makes the issue of his character relative to the message that he brings. And he's so assured of the kind of man that he is that he says we prove to be among you.

It's not something hypothetical. Take your guess. How do you see it? It was so demonstrable what the man himself was in his character as was the message itself. And Paul, so to speak, boasts of it. And he goes on further.

You also became imitators of us. No. Paul is either a piece of arrogant humanity boasting in himself and identifying himself so with the Lord that if you follow him you're following the Lord. And not only that he's following but if you follow me you'll follow him.

That's either embarrassing arrogance or authentic humility. What do you think? Would you be embarrassed to say that? There's a remarkable selflessness about Paul. He's totally unconscious because he said for your sake.

There's no sense of himself. If he's saying something it serves a purpose for them. It's not the issue of what he is in himself or drawing attention to himself. He labors for their sake and for the Lord's sake.

As you know what kind of men we prove to be among you for your sake. So there's something about the genius of what is an apostolic that is divorced radically from religious self-interest and ambition.

That's why we don't see it in our generation. Paul does not give a rap about his reputation. In fact he didn't have much of one. And yet he says you know what manner of man we prove to be among you for your sake.

Evidently they recognize that also. That this wasn't a man seeking something that would redound to his benefit by bringing them this message. And perhaps that was so rare in their experience that they knew this is from God.

They had not seen men promoting something in which their own self-interest is absolutely divorced. I don't know how old you are in the Lord or what your history is. But my observation is that the last place of refuge and hiding for self is in the realm of Christian service and spirituality.

Don't ask me to prove it. I know it. I've seen it. Maybe I've demonstrated it. There's something about the nature even of legitimate work for God that gives self a last place to hide and find a kind of a guise and a covering of a spiritual kind.

It's very rare to find someone so absolutely detached from himself that he seeks nothing. I mean one. He was a rarity. And this is the nature of what is apostolic. A man is so separated from ambition and self-interest that God can send him.

Remember how the first apostolic call came? In Acts chapter 13. Separate unto me Paul and Bonibus for the work unto which I have called them. That came into Antioch by the Spirit while men were worshiping God of a diverse ethnic and racial kind.

Their differences racially and ethnically did not in any way uproot upon their worshiping God together. They had come to a transcendent place where nothing of the ancient world and its enmities and hostilities and fears which were rife between black and white, Jew and Gentile, Mediterranean, Roman, all of these volatile...

Am I getting translated the way I'm supposed to? Incendiary things that ignite men were there in Antioch as they were in all the ancient world. Historic enmities and fears and jealousies. But something had happened in the church at Antioch over a course of time to which we are not privy.

God does not tell us. He just gives us the abrupt statement that when they were found ministering or worshiping the Lord together the Holy Ghost said, separate unto me Paul and Bonibus. So they laid hands and they sent them forth.

The reason I think that the Holy Spirit could say that is because these men were separated. And separation is the name of the game. It began with Abraham. Get thee out of nation kindred and father's house.

And follow me in the land that I will show you. The first principle of apostolic faith is separation. Radical separation. So radical even beyond nationhood and all of the powerful identities that men have for which they foam at the mouth and will kill each other.

The last separation and the most powerful and the most subtle is the separation from religious ambition itself. To have an apostle is to have one who can be sent because he has no agenda of his own to perform.

He's absolutely selfless. That's what Paul could say, for the Lord's sake. And it's not just a play on words but that the Thessalonians would say, Amen. That's right, we know that. When we'll see men again of that kind we'll have results again of this kind.

And we'll see authority again of this kind and power again of this kind because God can't give, he can't bestow that measure of himself in so unlimited a way by men who still have their own agendas, their own intentions, their own ambitions, their own concerns, their own pride, their own need to be recognized, their need to be applauded.

The Apostolic Body and the Sending of Ministers

Paul was separated. And where did that separation take place? At Antioch. So the genius of what is apostolic is not the uniqueness of some man who happens to have this call and look, on no hands here I am but a man who has been prepared and formed in a body of an apostolic kind and is sent out from that apostolic body to convey to the world the realities and the transcendence, the freedom, the reality of God that has come to the entire body.

The issue of what is apostolic has its inception in a body that sends not just the one who is sent. If there were no Antioch, there would be no Paul. In fact, Paul was called Saul until he was sent. His name changes.

He was a teacher and he became an apostle in the act of being sent. He had come of age. In a body that had come of age whose sending established the apostolic fact. In fact, God goes so far as to say that they fasted and laid hands on them and sent them forth so they being sent forth by the Holy Spirit went.

I don't suppose there is any water in the house or a can of something or anything went. Thank you. Here, praise the Lord. Great shall thy reward be. And so they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost went.

Did you hear that? Men laid their hands on them and the Holy Spirit says in scripture they were sent by the Holy Ghost. God equates laying on the hands of men with being tantamount to ipso facto the same as being sent by the Holy Ghost.

What do you think of that? We lay hands on someone tonight and send them forth out of this body and it would be in God's sight the same as being sent by the Holy Ghost. If we are going to move toward things that are apostolic we need even to revive the sense of the significance of the laying on of hands and sending.

Have you done that recently? Would you be embarrassed to do it? It's the kind of thing you don't think about anymore. It has an antique flavor. Well, I'll tell you what. I would not be here tonight except that I was sent forth by the laying on of hands from northern Minnesota.

Now I prayed this evening and I grabbed James's hand. We had a minute before he had to leave. I said, Lord, let it be something sent from one body of an apostolic kind to be received by another body in an apostolic.

We're not just talking about the subject tonight. I hope to some measure we're demonstrating it. That we're not just about the subject but in the subject and some expression of the reality that must be restored before the Lord comes.

How critical this is. If this is the foundation of the church and we have not an authentic foundation what then shall we hope for? But this is no Johnny come... How do you say it? Lately? Huh? Johnny come lately?

That's not what I want to say. This is not some easy thing. This is not some good thing. This is not a three month course and you have produced an apostle or a prophet. This is an organic creative wonder of God that requires a formative body of the same kind and character who are in such a quality of relationship that it didn't matter who was black, who was white, who was a Jew, who was a Gentile.

Not that these distinctions were absolved but that they were transcendent. And in that transcendence they not only had a message they were a message. The kind of thing that I would say South Africa needs today.

Are you getting there? Is it an intention? Do you have apostolic desire? Do you have an apostolic intention? Are you willing for the sacrifice and the suffering to obtain this reality? Do you have any feeling, any imagining for it at all?

Or is it so void, so past tense, so irrelevant, so out of our present consideration that it's only a theoretical or a historical curiosity and not a present aspiration? Got the idea? So I love this subject and I always say you'll not have it until the saliva runs out of the corners of your mouth.

When you start to drool you'll know that God has finally registered something in the deeps of your being. Otherwise it is only an abstract category, an interesting study. But you've got to salivate and wipe your chin then you'll know you're in love with the word, the genius of the word and the reality of the word and you desire it so desperately that you're willing for any sacrifice to obtain it.

I hope you're coming to that, how he demonstrated it. It takes it out of the areas of speculation. Like you guys looking me over tonight. Lord, how long must I suffer this? Every time and in every place that I must be looked over like should we or shouldn't we give this man a consideration and who is he and what is he about?

And I've got my doubts because look, he looks this way and he sounds like this. Do you think the day will ever come that we'll know each other in spirit? That we don't need a long period of introduction and acquaintance?

That I don't have to take a deep breath and wade through your looks? And that there's a sense of expectation from the first word and that the first five minutes are not lost in trying to touch spirit?

That we have it in an instant way? And that your suspicions are dissolved? That the man's not here for anything and we don't want to take an offering or anything else or sell our books? Though they're marvelous every one of them.

Prove something. That Paul made a demonstration. He was the thing in himself. That's what proved it. Through and through the cookie he was the real thing. Because there are a lot of phonies around saints I don't know if you've noticed.

I've been a believer now 35 years and I don't know that I've seen a season where there are more prophets being exalted and acclaimed and men professing to be apostles than you could know because they have it on their door than ever before.

I don't think Paul needed that kind of external identification. He was the thing in himself. I love that. The Germans have a word for it. Ding an sich. The thing in itself. You squeeze him. You can test him.

It doesn't matter where or what. The reality is thoroughly through the man. He's not just a mongrel in words. He hasn't learned a few pet phrases like the current crop of apostles who have lifted from Paul certain things and then apply it to church situations with a certain air of gravity and authority that gives the impression that they must be the real thing.

Could you tell the difference? I'll give you a clue that will never fail you. The true thing is always meek. I was once reading a brother's book and I came to the phrase apostolic meekness and I was gone.

Apostolic meekness. How do you say that? You're saying Paul was meek when he said follow me as I follow Christ and let me be your example? That's meekness. Or have you been spoiled to think that humility is oh don't call me I'm not a public speaker please really that self-defacing salesman's psychology.

Meekness is just acknowledging what is true. Meekness is being totally obedient to God without let and without hesitation. Meekness is not something you can learn or develop. Meekness is God. Meekness is the essential character of God himself.

Learn of me for I am lowly. I am meek of heart, lowly. If an apostle is going to be meek it's because he'll be meek in proportion to the fact that he has learned of him and in fact is in him. The apostle is in union with God and the foundation that he brings to the church is not just his enormous understanding of the mystery of the church and the purpose of God through it but also perhaps most profoundly the sense of God with it.

Apostolic Meekness and the Sense of God

You know what I pray? Frequently, Lord in this meeting please if I ask you anything communicate the sense of yourself. We're dying for the want of the sense of God. We've never had it or if we've had it in any measure we've lost it.

Our meetings are destitute of any sense of yourself as God. We're correct as all get out and our doctrines are okay but the sense of God that causes awe reverence, fear, we don't have. And if an apostle is a foundation he brings that foundation and only he can bring it.

How come? Because his intimacy and his union with the God who is meek is the foundational truth of his own life. Paul said I have my headquarters in heaven. The topics in those initial talks on apostolicity was eternity.

Paul was not just eternally blinded he lived and had moved and had his being in the eternal realm. How do you know that? Because he says in Corinthians that my afflictions when I see my afflictions in view or in light of the how do you say the eternal riches somebody help me my sufferings are both momentary and light in view of the eternal weight of glory.

His afflictions were momentary light my God that man will bear through eternity marks in his body that we wouldn't begin to approach in a dozen lifetimes. How many times was he shipwrecked, beaten with rods, stoned to death.

The sufferings of Paul are monumental it's apostolic suffering written in his body and the man says with all candor he's not playing on words my afflictions were both momentary and light in view of the eternal weight of glory.

He was so suffused with the realities of eternity while he was yet on earth that he had the capacity to dull his pain and to diminish the sense of sufferings that might otherwise have overwhelmed him.

He not only acknowledged eternity he brought eternity into the present in such a way as to affect how he would perceive and experience apostolic suffering itself. How are you doing? You don't have to answer I know what you mean.

It's visible Paul's too much with you you're living in the present. You're too much South African and not enough heavenly and there's no cheap way to attain that. And I'm not talking about Paul's privilege being called up into the third heaven.

I don't think that that's where his sense of eternity came from or his union with God or his sense of God or his sense of that dimension. I think it probably had more to do with the grit of early morning times of prayer of seeking the Lord of devotion.

He moved to live and had his being in God and he communicated God whether he spoke to Greeks or to Egyptians. He had an authority that came from God was God and came with the order of God. That's an apostle.

Aren't you jealous, aren't you? Lord, bring such a one again in our generation. Let there be one for our nation. Let me be one. Let me be part of an apostolic body that can be convivial and hospitable to bringing forth, nurturing such a one that he might be sent out of our midst by the laying on of our hands.

Let us be that Antioch. Hey, you've got the ingredients here but are you using them? Are you meeting with the frequency that Antioch met more than some days in midweek Bible studies. Are you open to the the depth of God's sanctifying working of which the church itself is its own ingredient.

Or are you always looking at the back of somebody's head. You have the interaction you have the confrontation. You have the vital up-working with one another by which God sifts and refines and establishes these apostolic verities.

Or are you just a conglomerate of individualities that need the services on Sunday polite as all get up but non-apostolic got the idea? The issue of what is apostolic is the issue of what is the church the genius of the church according to God's intention and not the institutional or charismatic model with which we are familiar which is only an addendum to our lives and not the first purpose of our being.

You're only Sunday churchgoers. So how can it be an environment out of which that which is apostolic can issue. You've got to become a vital community living on the sharp edge of faith being buffeted by the world knowing the oppression of the powers of darkness the exact measure of the truth and reality of what you are about in God as I said last night and Gary said please repeat this again.

Your jobs, your employment, your professions your businesses are only the secondary enablement of God for the mere perpetuation of your bodily life but not your first purpose. Your first purpose is the church.

Your first purpose is the body of Christ. Your first purpose is the eternal purpose of God the things that pertain to His glory for which that can only be obtained and made manifest in a people who are joined in one heart and mind and will to those ends.

Have I described your fellowship? If there's anything that can be said about an apostolic he's jealous, insanely jealous of the glory of God. Isn't that the way Paul ends Romans 9 -11. And when's the last time you read that?

The mystery of Israel and the church where he the last three verses Paul is bye bye baby Paul is, he loses it. The language can't contain the ecstatic praise that issues with Paul that did not need the help of an overhead projector.

Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. Paul has seen something that we have not yet discovered. And if I'm around long enough you'll discover it. It's got to do with Jews not sentimentally understood not the affinity for Israel with an admiration for their hit squad ability and how exciting they are.

That's another it's another kind of understanding and appreciation of what they represent relative to the kingdom of God the coming kingdom, the theocratic rule of God the actual establishment of God's political autonomy over nations through a piece of earth and a people whom he has elected and appointed called Israel, of which the present state in the Middle East is not yet the fulfillment, but only a preliminary step toward that the whole book of Romans is a masterpiece.

Thessalonians is a masterpiece, all that Paul wrote but the most systematic statement of his apostolic mind is the book of Romans and the centerpiece, it's not an asterisk nor an addendum at the end, but everything leads from chapter 1 through 8 to present it and then from 12 to 16 are the implications that arise from it.

What is the centerpiece? The mystery of Israel of which he says brethren, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery lest you become wise in your own conceit. I'm seeing everywhere the exact fulfillment of Paul's remark hot shot, inflated, pompous presumptuous church that even thinks that it is the Israel that has replaced Israel, has no consideration for the destiny of a people that when it is affected, Paul says it will be to the glory of God forever.

That's how Romans 11 .33 -36 says all the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God. He's seen something about Israel this failed people this apostate people who have blasphemed the name of God in every nation to which they have been driven and yet in the end because of the mercy of God independent of any qualification that they have, for they have no qualification, God will redeem and restore them and give them not only a place, but the place of preeminence and honor before all nations all the depth of the riches of God, not of Israel to whom be glory forever.

Eternal-Mindedness and the Glory of God

So there goes Paul again, he's glory minded and he's forever minded the two most conspicuous aspects of which we are devoid. Come on, confess up you're not forever minded, you're tomorrow minded, you're next week minded.

You're retirement minded but you're not forever minded. You're living in the now and it's a now that is impoverished because God intended that eternity not be an abstract category for which we wake and enter when we die but that we bring the glory of that whole understanding into our present because it's only the awareness of the things that are eternal that have the power to transfigure the present.

Would you say that the present needs to be transfigured? We're dying saints, from secularism. We're dying from everydayism. We're dying from monotony and boredom and predictability from the terrible mundane earthly life of the world devoid of that dimension for which this life has preparation, we do believe that you see why you need apostles?

See why I love Paul? I don't know where he got it but I think that's available to us also wherever he got it is available to us also if we have apostolic intention this much I know he didn't get it cheaply and without cost and to the degree that you get it, to that degree you're a mock man right now.

The power's in the air. The church, where are we? Who? Jesus they know, and Paul they know, but the church at I forgot, where are we? Malvern. Who? I'll tell you one thing about the principalities and powers.

There are a lot of things you need to know. In fact I'll tell you that you don't know any more about the principalities and powers than you know about the mystery of Israel and the church two mysteries.

And I'm not talking about demon deliverance however valid that might be it has to do with individual deliverance. I'm talking about a much more massive and cosmic question of the powers of darkness that brood over every nation and every locality and jerk and manipulate races and nations to their own diabolical ends and are vying against God for the possession of creation.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the cosmic conflict that has been going on since time immemorial and is coming to a final apocalyptic resolution in the last days which of course you're expecting, and expecting in a way that it affects your present if it doesn't affect your present you have not yet apprehended eternally, and eternally has not yet happened, that's why Paul can say in verse 9 for they report about us what kind of reception we had with you and how you turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God and to wait for his son from heaven whom he raised from the dead that is Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come.

Paul is both eschatological and that you must learn eschatological the things that pertain to the end that must come the inevitability of the thing toward which we're moving our life, our Christian life is not a succession of Sundays.

It's a movement toward a conclusion and a climax of the most resounding kind. So that's Paul is eschatologically minded. He's tuned in for the things that pertain to the end but he's also apocalyptic minded.

That end does not come without judgment. It's the wrath to come and it's to come on all nations. Therefore there's an urgency in his proclamation, it's not are you saved brother, it's be saved out from this untoward generation upon whom the judgment of God is going to fall, that's another gospel, it's the gospel of the kingdom.

And when that gospel is proclaimed to all nations then will the end come. So let's take inventory. We're not eternally minded we're not apocalyptic minded because we don't have a stomach for judgment, we don't want to consider the wrath of God not only because it's painful in the firing devastation that shall come, but also because it seems to contradict what we like to believe about God.

He's a nice guy and he's kind and we like to that way whether God comes in wrath there's got to be something wrong that is incompatible with what we understand about God or our understanding is incompatible with God himself.

Well one of my books is missing tonight. I wish it were here. You needed it desperately. It's called the holocaust. Where was God. Where was God in the wrath that was poured out on Israel in the Hitler time.

Where was God when his covenant people were systematically annihilated to the tune of six million one and a half million of which were children. Either he was asleep or he was awake but indifferent or he was moved but impotent and impotent and incapable of altering.

Have you thought about that. That's why the book is written to go to church to consider something that has come in our generation and is coming again in a holocaust more massive and global than the first of which God himself is the author.

And you're going to be in the place of threatening your faith. You might be among that number of which Paul said would be a sign of the last days namely a great falling away. Have you ever thought about that.

What would provoke nice believers who fall away from the faith in numbers sufficient for Paul to call it a great apostasy. A great falling away evidently is going to be substantial. And my own suspicion is two disappointments.

One is the failure of Israel to be established finally as the homeland of the Jewish people when that nation shall go up with a puff politically militarily and its inhabitants destroyed or cast out again into the nations.

And you thought according to scripture that that was the final fulfillment of their prophetic hope. So where was God. And how can you have trust in the scripture. And the second disappointment unlike unto it is the rapture that does not take place.

Where you find that you're still here while you're going is rough. So Paul had a different set of expectations. You know the remarkable thing is he's talking about the day of the Lord the day of God's judgment the day of God's wrath as being imminent that these Thessalonians were saved out of something soon to fall upon all nations.

He communicated the sense that this is at the door. And we know that it's two thousand years later and it's not happened yet. So Paul must have been all wet. He must have been all confused in his expectations.

And God did not rebuke him or remind him that his timing is off but allowed him to communicate to the church in every place. The imminence of God's judgment as being at hand. How do you figure that. The only way that I can figure that is that God expects the church of every generation to have this expectancy and this sense of urgency that the issue is not an issue of chronology of what year or what month or what day but a sense of something approaching something near something urgent that brings to the fellowship a dimension of high seriousness that cannot be obtained in any other way.

It's not some psychological taking advantage or playing upon fears. It's a realistic anticipation of that which must shortly come to pass much more true. Now two thousand years later and Israel hanging on the ropes the key to which this whole judgment thing is going to be brought in.

And yet the ironic thing is we who are closer to the event that Paul expected and communicated have the least of the sense of urgency that the Thessalonians had two thousand years before. That's how far removed we are from apostolic reality.

Separation From the World and Apostolic Urgency

It's remarkable what kind of a gospel Paul must have preached because it turned these men to God from idols to serve a living and true God not just to attend services. What the giving up of their idols meant.

What it meant to their families and their neighbors. What price they paid for the repudiation of their whole culture and civilization. We can only imagine. And that's where the affliction came from that they had to experience.

It was a radical turning because of a radical message from a radical man with a radical sense that the time was now because God was at hand and about to judge the stock human for the world is and you can see it in virtually any magazine is the cartoon of a man wearing a sandwich board with a sign that says repent for the the world is coming to an end.