Honor Your Father - Part 2 — Art Katz

It's remarkable to go back to the beginnings in Genesis as a counterbalance to the character of our present age. Our reality is to be found in the book and not in the contemporary trends of our time and how salutary, healthy, life-giving the word of God is from its origins to speak to the most pressing contemporary issue of our life.

So may we be encouraged in just the amount that is being revealed to us in the exploration of this text of what a resource we have in the word of God, timeless and valid for all generations and especially the last.

Honoring Authority Despite Human Failure

Find another expression in keeping, the chosen people are chosen though they are not presently fulfilling that call. To what degree is it appropriate to us to honor them for the call, for the office even when it is presently in abeyance because of sin.

What's the issue of authority in the things that are called, the offices that are given that require our respect even when there's a seeming contradiction between the office and the office holder when his character seems to betray the very office that was given is there still a respect due to the office itself as an authority given of God.

So we read the remarkable episode with David and Saul in the cave, Saul being his persecutor, David having great opportunity once and for all to remove this threat to his life and being encouraged by his soldiers to do so, it even hurts his conscience so much as to cut the cloak of Saul's garment and when Saul awakens to find that David could have killed him but did not he said you're more righteous than I and David bows before Saul on his face and he cries out and calls him my father and I know that I know that this is not a man employing artifice or courtesy in order to win some respect or esteem or maybe to even discourage Saul from his murderous quest.

It's a man who knows that the anointing is off of the king but it was once given and still the authority of God and he's honoring him as father. That has got to be such a statement, such a ultimate highlight in the career of David that I think I can confidently say and have said it was the whole issue of the Davidic kingdom to come.

The whole issue of what the kingdom of David would be which is to say the kingdom of God is caught up in that capsule moment when David goes on his face and says to Saul his enemy and persecutor my father not as a device employed for his ends but as a heartfelt as Reggie said a genuine respect for the office of the man even though the man himself is in the lowliest, so lowly a condition as to be the persecutor unto death of the future king of the kingdom.

Are you getting that? Isn't that remarkable? Do we respect the office? Do we respect the call? And if Israel is presently out of a call and Paul says in Romans, but God has not cast them away, it's not his enduring disposition, it's a momentary parenthesis.

What our attitude toward them to be and later on before this week is out, I'm going to share with you from a book by a Jewish theologian on the mystery of Romans, what's the fellow's name? Mark Nanos.

Do you know him, Hans? In his interpretation of Romans chapter 13, Paul's exhortation to the church to honor and to submit to the authorities that are over it has been historically construed as Paul calling the church to honor the society or the state in which the Roman church existed which was an emperor worshiping state and it has baffled Christians for generations how Paul could commend that to Christians that they should honor a state that celebrates as God, man, the Caesar, the emperor.

But in his own interpretation, he says, no, Paul's not calling for that. He's calling for the Gentile believers of the Roman church to submit to the authority not of the state but of the synagogue. The air went out of me like I was hit in the solar plexus.

What? Believers should submit to unbelieving Jewish authorities in the synagogue? Because at that time, the Christians were looked upon as a Jewish sect and there was quite customary for them to take their place in the synagogue as being righteous Gentiles submitting to recognizing the salvational faith of God through Israel.

And that's why he says to them, don't get hung up on questions of what you shall eat and don't fight over issues of diet and we'll go on to some of this. Now it makes a new sense. But that Paul could require that?

If it's true, if that's a valid interpretation, it's remarkably radical. What is the implication for us today? Do we have some kind of a deference that we owe to Jewish authority? To some respect to the synagogue or to present day Judaism that would be becoming in God's sight and even temper us?

I think that those Gentile Christians in that generation in Rome in submitting to unbelieving synagogue authorities broke something in them had to break because they were in the superior spiritual position and yet acknowledging the honor of those who had not yet had the light of Christ.

That calls for something that's a humbling. When you see yourself as spiritually superior and having to bend and acknowledge the authority that comes from one who does not share your light and with whom you can argue and dismiss.

That factor, that dynamic has been lost to the present church and I think it constituted for the church of that generation in Paul's time the very thing that made the church the church, that gave it the spirit of the lamb and the disposition of humility and the practicality and the requirement of having to relate to authority that was Jewish and not yet believing.

So we'll explore that further on. But on what basis should that respect be given? On the basis that even though they are presently out of the place of God, even so to say apostate fallen but God has not cast them away and they will be restored, the office that was given needs to be respected.

Why? Because of the giver. Not to respect the office given though it can hardly be fulfilled in that condition is not to respect him who has given it. The thou shalt of God, thou shalt honor is so deep, so pervasive and because we have not taken it up in our consideration, there's a dimension of the deepest kind missing from what we ought to be as the church.

Shem's Honor in Noah's Fall

That Shem-like character that he himself exhibited in the crisis of Noah's drunkenness. Can we suggest that God has tested the church and is testing the church by Israel in the same way that the sons were tested by the glory departing from Noah?

It's the issue of the glory departing that is the issue. It's easy to give deference and respect to whom it's due when they're acting appropriately according to the office and title that they've been given.

But when they fail in that and the glory departs, what is your response then? So there's a remarkable parallel between the testing of the sons through the fallenness of Noah and the testing of the church by the fallenness of Israel.

If we can give Israel the honor, do it, not because she's in her glory, but all the more because she's out of her glory, then are we really showing the Shem-like character for which God is wanting and waiting, you understand?

It's not only because even though they are outside their glory, but especially because they are outside their glory, are we tested? Think of that in every application, whether it's an elder in the church, whether it's a father in the household, we're tested all the more by the seeming failure and contradiction of the one who has been given the office, tests the depth of our heart, whether we respect the office itself, the title itself, the givenness itself, even in the apparent contradiction of that person or nation at that moment.

All the more especially are we tested when we could easily get off the hook and say, well, if that's the way that Israel is going to deport itself, if that's the way she has blasphemed his name in every nation, she's no longer worthy of the acknowledgement or honor that ought to be initially due her.

No, all the more reason that she needs to be honored. And what does that mean then? How does that honoring find its expression? Is it just some private thought that we have or is there a practical way in which it can be expressed to the nation that is being ravaged at every side and being demeaned in the press and needs to hear something from us that is heartfelt and sincere, that is not sentimental, not slobbery, not looking the other way as if you're doing all things well, but even in all your failing, yet we express to you the honor that is your due.

You are the chosen people of God. He has given you that call and because he has, we respect him who has given it. If David could respect the murderer that Saul had become and say, my father, out of a deepest heart of respect, what ought we to say to those who have been the fathers of our faith?

All the more, especially in their fallenness, especially because their glory has departed, are we tested. Everything of Jesus's acts has this foundation to honor his father. He's the supreme servant son whose whole purpose for being is to honor the father.

Though in that honoring of the father, there's a dishonoring that comes to him. Have you thought ever that if Hadshem had gone along with Cain and Ham, he would have been the next successor. He's the firstborn.

So what a wonderful opportunity to get Noah out of the way. He's had his fling and he's had his time and now he's shown in his failure that maybe that time has come to an end and it's time for me now as the firstborn and the eldest son to take over the spiritual reins.

Don't think that that temptation was not put before him and that the enemy of our souls was not there saying, take advantage of your discredited father and come into the place that you really deserve and you'll show much more than he ever did what it means to be God's supreme servant.

Spiritual temptation is the most powerful of every kind, but you can see from the instant obedience of Shem to cover his father that he would not for a moment consider any benefit that he might obtain out of his father's fallenness.

So we see there again the character of God, the character of Jesus. And how about the fallenness of Jesus before his own disciples who had thought it had been he who would have restored the glory to Israel, but alack and alas, there's that poor pathetic cadaver hanging on the cross, hardly human and totally discredited.

He had to bear that sense of failure of their expectancy, their disappointment and the high illusion that they held about him as being a necessary part of the whole servant suffering walk required to honor the father.

And of course he's still in many ways suffering a disrespect worldwide and even in the church. So if it was becoming to the Lord himself in his earthly tenure to be an object of fallenness whose glory had departed and to leave his admirers deflated and alack and alas in their countenances fallen, to what degree can we walk out this life as servant sons and not be that kind of an object to those around us?

Are you understanding me? How willing are we to be misunderstood or to fail and God doesn't explain to us that we're going to get drunk. He doesn't explain to us that this is going to happen in order to do this.

It merely happens and you have to bear it without explanation and trust that it will redound to the glory of God the Father. But that there must come a dishonoring of yourself as the price necessary to reveal the secret hearts of those about you in order that they might themselves become sons out of repentance.

The Lord suffered that, Noah suffered that, God the Father suffered that, suffers that continually and we who have any call to authority and place in the government of God, I think in some measure have to expect and to experience that.

Are we willing to glorify God the Father at the expense of our humiliation? And that Israel herself has suffered a dishonoring for the church's sake. She has no consciousness of it but even in her apostasy she's fulfilling a servant son function that was necessary for the church's sake to test us over the issue of the respect for the calling and the chosenness of God for that people.

And how long has she borne that reproach and the failure to acknowledge us, the acknowledgement that should have come from us? And that is the issue of the church itself. There's a brave statement. The issue of our attitude toward present Jewry, toward present Judaism, toward present Israel and whether we will give them a respect due their call even in their present apostasy and departure of their glory is the issue of the church itself as church.

How far will God go at the expense of an entire nation people, Israel and the Jew to bring us to the place of Shem character for which he waits and which is the conclusion of the whole age for if we do not obtain it into what tent will Japheth come?

Japheth then will be the enlarged terror of the world in his capability for turning his enlargement into death. Unless he comes into our tent, into that tent of Shem and receive there the modifying mediating influences that reside in Shem alone, he will be a threat to the whole of the world and to himself.

It's a race for time, so to speak. So how far will God go to obtain the fulfillment of this mystery whose first expression is given as it has every right to be in the book of beginnings? A great deal of the resistance against me and against the message of Israel is that Israel comes from Christian Zionists and those who celebrate the nation presently and the people in a kind of romantic, highly idealized way that does not reckon on the realities that are every day being exhibited in Israel that God insists must be exhibited that we would finally acknowledge the truth of God's word.

There's no man good, no, not one. We Jews do not have any intrinsic virtue above man. So instead of acknowledging and seeing what God is after, they look away and they justify and explain every kind of thing that the present state of Israel is required to employ in its preservation, the use of torture, violence, all those kinds of things.

This is contrary to God's intention for the church toward Israel, not to idealize and romanticize an image that we have created and forced and put upon them that is completely contrary to what is the truth of their condition, their reality, but to esteem them and to respect and to honor them in the revelation of what their present character is.

Disillusionment and False Ideals

So I want to get at the issue of being romantic and idealizing and having mental concepts and the way in which we celebrate certain present day evangelical leaders and ministers and to have whole followings that is based on this thing of illusion.

And maybe what we respond to as disappointment, angry disappointment and disrespect is not because the man has failed, but our ideal of him has failed. Our anger is the collapse of a humanly contrived, elevated notion that that man had no obligation to fulfill.

But it disappoints us and our anger indicates our disappointment that something is amiss with us more than the man himself. Instead of the benign patience and forbearance of correcting a brother with a... how does that scripture go?

You would just spiritually restore the brother. Instead of that spiritual attitude of identification that brings the restoration, we walk away in a huff of disappointment and justify ourselves at the expense of the fallen one.

Because what we're really responding to is not so much his fall, but the collapse of the ideal that he represented to us that has to do with our own self-aggrandizement. Why do we idealize? Why do we impute to others a loftier thing than God's intention?

It has something to do with something that we want someday perhaps to enjoy, but it's false. It's an illusion. It's unreality. So on July 30th in Watchman and Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, he takes up something he calls the discipline of disillusionment.

That disillusionment is not a bad thing. It's actually a grace from God, for illusion is life. And we know that the father of lies is an illusionist and that the whole world lives in a fantasy land of romanticism and that's why marriages collapse, families are destroyed because of the things that are in our culture that are cultivated that we think the marriage is going to be and totally fits us for the reality to which we're called to experience.

And the moment that we're disappointed in it, we're ready to throw it over and try, try again. So he writes, the refusal to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering in human life. It works in this way.

We love a human being and do not love God. We demand of him every perfection and every rectitude and when we do not get it, we become cruel and vindictive. You see that in the disappointed spouse, cruel and vindictive.

This lofty love that was so romantic suddenly turns and becomes its very opposite. We are demanding of a human being that which he or she cannot give. We have an unrealistic perception of man, if of our spouses, what of ourselves, because we have not recognized the truth of our own condition that there's no man good, no not one.

So there's only one being who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Why our Lord is apparently so severe regarding every human relationship is because he knows that every relationship not based on loyalty to himself will end in disaster.

You cannot directly relate a human being to another human being. If Jesus is not the prism, the mediator between husband and wife, there's going to be an inordinate demand made of the one of the other that cannot be fulfilled and must necessarily end in disappointment.

Every relationship has got to be seen in and through Christ and has got to be affected and realized in and through Christ. Not just invoked as a kind of a catch word, but a very reality. The relation directly one to another is idolatrous.

It must pass through Christ to come to the other in the redemptive way that it can only come if he himself is the third fold cord of that union, of a three fold cord that cannot be broken. If he's out of the picture, you can count on disaster and however happy they might be for a season on the happy accident of compatibility or they're saved from tensions and so on, inevitably it has to end not only sadly but tragically and cruelly and vindictively because a human ideal has been disappointed.

The last refuge of humanism is idealism. And don't think that we have been saved from it because we're Christians and we're opposed to humanism. It will find a last opportunity to find lodging in our souls in idealism because idealism is human celebration, human imagining, human conception, human desire of something unrelated to the reality of something as God has given it.

And so the first requisite is to recognize that the relationship is God given and that the disappointment is a very benevolence of God to save us from a faulty, a marriage based on faulty idealism that cannot be fulfilled.

So I wrote here, Shem was not disillusioned about his father Noah. Why? Because he did not have a lofty notion of his father that was conceived and conjured up out of his own soul, which one day he would hope to share in that elevation that is false.

He saw his father realistically as a man in his mortality, in his frailty, in his weakness, but it did not in any way lessen the respect, reverence, and honor for the father. But I would say all the more would augment it because any respect that is predicated on a false supposition that issues out of our imagination or idealism or humanism is not a respect at all.

It's a respect for our ideal, but not for the man himself. So a true son makes no demands. There's not a standard to which Noah must conform or to which an elder must conform, though of course we know there are biblical guidelines that constitutes a condition for eldership, but we ourselves do not impose anything beyond that.

And even with those requirements, we have a disposition to be understanding of, what's the word, magnanimous if it is not met to the letter, or it's not met in a way that we think it ought to be met. After all, ought not an elder to have his house in control?

How does the word go? In order. In order. Well, what if his wife this, what if his children this? Is that an automatic statement that he's in this order, or are there perplexities and details and conditions that God is requiring for him that have not been required of you, for which you need a tolerant respect while it's being outworked, and not be quick to jump on what seems to be a breach of the conditions that God has stipulated.

That's a Shem-like attitude. That's a precious grace, because we know that we ourselves are dust. So Shem was not disillusioned. He made no demand, and he cultivated no ideals. I said Jews might be willing to forgive Germans the concentration camps and the systematic annihilation of six million of us, but we cannot forgive them the collapse of our ideal that German civilization represented for us.

We'll forgive them our death, but we'll not forgive them the collapse of our ideal, because German civilization had been for us our messianic hope. We had become so alienated from the scriptures and from the divine fulfillment that we saw in German civilization, its high ethical and philosophical and literary quality of that fulfillment.

And when that failed, and they became our monsters of execution, we can more quickly forgive them the execution than we can forgive them the collapse of the ideal that sustained us. Can you follow that?

Idealism is the last refuge of humanism, and God's solution to that is to be disillusioned. Disillusionment is a grace, but it's not a pleasant grace. We want to cling to our illusions because they serve very clear purposes in establishing a whole mode of understanding and life in which we want to find our part and want ourselves to be recognized by others, but it's false.

So the whole world lives in the lie, in illusion, and God's mercy to us is to allow us the privilege of disillusionment. But how does he give it to us? He gives it to us through men in whom we have attached ourselves and looked with great expectancy only to see them crash, or the people Israel themselves.

And in that, his intention is that whatever is false in the way in which we beheld either that servant or that nation, it needs to come into death, that we might behold them realistically and rightly, and still give them the respect due even in their apparent failure.

Follow me? This needs to sink so deeply into our spirits. It's really ironic that this whole message of the Tent of Shem had its birth last year, last summer, coming back with wide-eyed naivety, thinking that though I had received a severe reaction where it was first spoken, that here at Ben Israel I would find accommodation and a home, but instead I got something of the same backlash of reaction against that word as I found elsewhere.

Well, okay, I can bear that, but the reaction and the backlash was expressed openly so that the messenger was openly exhibited as an object of failure and a man dangerously flirting with heresy publicly by members within our own body before those that were called like you to the school and to the convocation.

Isn't it remarkable that that humiliation had to be borne that we now receive some measure of the benefit, of the blessing of it? That suffering preceded whatever measure this glory is, but it had to be borne.

This is servanthood, this is sonship, to be an object that you're, I often say, the greatest use that God has made of me at Ben Israel is to be the object of disillusionment for those who come. That's my principal ministry and I have handled it wonderfully.

I've never failed to disillusion and I've not been that great a failure under my own roof and with my own children and my own wife. But it's a painful transition to forsake and forgo that because so much is attached to that false and illusory thing, our own image.

We want to see the false thing continued in the other so that our hope one day to share in that kind of elevation and exaltation and admiration from others will be given to us. If it collapses for him, then it collapses for us and we don't want to consider that.

The Tent of Shem as a Culture of Honor

So can you imagine a church in which an elder and a leader is respected, honored, even in his frailty and in his mortality and in his failure? And that that affects the whole atmosphere in which the church has its life and passes not only to the elder but to every member?

That's the church. That's the Tent of Shem into which our Jewish community must first come that we establish for it that they in turn might fulfill that tent for the Japheth nations of the world. We ought to exhibit to them their call.

But this is what the Tent of Shem is. It's not just a drapery. It's an environment. It's a reality. It's a truth. It's a mode of being. And at its heart is the issue of honor and respect. And that was exhibited by the first son of Shem in the covering of his father.

Though he had every advantage to gain in leaving his father uncovered and enjoying Ham and Canaan in mocking the father and becoming therefore the new heir and takeover guy. He forsook that because he respected the God of Shem.

And no one knew that. And the prophetic blessing that comes out of his mouth is not for Shem personally but blessed be the God of Shem because what you have done for me is so clearly the expression of that God.

What you expressed in that moment is a God who honors, a God who says thou shalt. It's foundational for life and for reality. And when that is lost, everything is lost. And we see it in our schools. I praise God I'm delivered from having to be a teacher today.

In this generation I had enough struggle 30 or 40 more years ago of the disrespect for students in the classroom for their teachers, disrespect for authorities, disrespect for the police, disrespect for courts because there's no respect for God who gave these authorities to which we should be submitted.

Calling teachers by their first name as if it's Buddy Buddy. In my time that was unthought of that you would call a teacher by his first name. It's Mr. Katz. So we need to know there's been a tremendous loss of what is foundational not only to the church but to civilization itself.

And how shall it be restored? But by the church to civilization. By our own modeling to the world the reality to which God calls all men everywhere, all nations that we ourselves will exhibit to them in the respect and honor that they see that prevails in the church, the kind of thing that ought to guide and govern them in their relationship in society.

Following me? Thank you Lord. That when we get the flashing red light behind us for speeding and we say yes officer, it's not because we want to beguile him and maybe get off the hook, it's because we respect the fact that he's an officer.

He's got the badge, we respect his authority. We're not condescending to honor him by his title in order to find that it will relieve us of the penalty of our speeding. We're rendering honor where honor is due.

The Church's Witness to Israel

Thank you Lord. It is on other grounds entirely, it's the way in which the church should have beheld and respected the Jew whose view of God was as wrathful father. This is how, this is the respect that we should have given to fallen Israel.

What would the history of the church and Israel have been had the church from its very beginnings rendered unto Israel the respect and honoring that was its due even in its fallenness. But when you read the early friction of the church and the synagogue, it's a diatribe of accusation, of superior triumphalist attitude over the fallen church and the Jews were baiting the church.

You guys don't even read Hebrew and you're telling us what those scriptures mean and you think that this Greek magical figure, Jesus is the Messiah, no way. And you guys are in error and so the church stunned and stung by these accusations with the kind of authority that the Jew has, that the synagogue has even in its fallenness reacted instead of with a respect, they reacted in kind and railed against them.

That's been the whole history from the beginning of the relationship of the church to the Jew to this day. How then shall we be a witness to that people? By what means shall we move them to jealousy? How do we even get them to consider a word that will come from us when we have such a track record?

But the thing is it will not only benefit and bless them, it will bless us. We will find ourselves changed in our own deportment, in our own character when we can find ourselves respectful to the Jew and to Judaism, though we know that it's in a blindness and it falls short of the precious glory that we have come to enjoy.

It will change us. It softens. It tenderizes. I don't have a word for it. It mellows. But without that we are a jangling cymbal. We're a noise. We're a clang. Our voices are metallic. Even when we say the right thing and the nice thing, there's a metallic clang that turns off the one to whom that spoken word is addressed.

Something comes with deference and respect that affects the character and the inner life of the person who can give it in all sincerity in an unfamed way. Well, how did it come for Shem? It came, I believe, though the scriptures are silent, out of the kind of union and relationship with his God, because what he expressed was God's own character.

So in other words, we can't become this by principle or by method or by technique. We can only become it to the degree that we reflect and express the life that is our life, which is God's, for this is his nature.

See what I mean? Anything else would be a performance. It would be a put on and most Jews would see right through it. So the quest for us is to come into that union with the God of Shem, that Shem himself enjoyed and that we would have every even greater right to enjoy through Christ and yet have fall short of that reality.

And we'll come to a repentance in our failure when we see that we are metallic and brittle and that our respect is only superficial and, what's the word, perfunctory. Look that one up. And we'll know that, no, we're playing at this.

It's an act. It's not heartfelt. It's not genuine. We need the reality of this that comes from God himself and to forsake the one in repentance is to open us to the receiving of the other in truth. A portion of an answer to your question in my own experience is speaking to Christians who have a romantic view of present Israel and the Jew.

And so in my ministry of disillusionment, I raise questions for them that would bring them to consider that there's something unreal in the way in which they are connected with present Israel. There's a word in psychology where you receive a certain benefit by a relationship.

Symbiotic. I accuse them of a symbiotic relationship. There's something in it for them in the way in which they are celebrating the Jew in Israel and that that is not priestly. And the only ministry that will bless Israel is what is mediated in a priestly way, which means that there's no benefit that redounds to the servant toward the nation.

And so they've got to get off this romantic kick and relate in another way in reality, realistically, without any return to themselves. And that would be a priestly benediction for the Jew, though many of them appreciate what they're now receiving because they want the support of the evangelical church while entire nations are increasingly turned against Israel and anti-Semitism is becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

So they appreciate any expression of support. But the deepest thing that will bless them is that which comes from the life of God and not something out of our own humanity romantically mediated. Do you understand?

So, yes, in that way we're correcting them. But we correct them not only with word. We ought to correct them also with example. Now let me really lower the boom. If the church is capable of this philo-Semitism, which is an idealization out of its own humanity toward Israel and unreal, to what degree are we guilty of that not only toward Israel but toward Jesus himself?

Prophetic Correction of a Romanticized Jesus

To what degree is Jesus being celebrated romantically rather than realistically, rather than authentically spiritually? We ourselves have formed an image and have even produced a worship, which in fact is a false god.

It's not the man himself, Christ Jesus, who in his humanity suffered this humiliation and covered us by his uncovering nakedly on the cross. As I often say when I preach this, don't think that that nice little flowery garment was around his loins that the Renaissance and Gothic artists employ in depicting Jesus crucified.

He was dark naked. He could not cover his nakedness. The greatest shame before Orthodox Jews is to be naked at the cross. That's what made the cross the suffering that it was. Jesus bore that nakedness that we ourselves shall be covered.

But if we are romanticizing another Jesus, who is our errand boy and gets us a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a marriage or a job or a health or whatever it is, an ideal or something that facilitates our worship atmosphere with wonderful music and all of that goes with it, this is unreality to the uttermost.

This is disrespectful to God. This is dishonoring to the God who is God. And so to what depth and extent must disillusionment come to the church to bring it to the reality that it must obtain? And who is it who is going to blow the whistle?

Who is going to sound the trump? Who is going to say that what you're about is false and pretentious and self-coined and self-imagined and it's not the celebration of the Jesus who is Jesus? Who sees through that barrage?

Who sees through that hype and who will have the courage, if ever he's invited to the platform, to address it? It must come from a prophet. It's not from a teacher. That's the prophetic function is to blow the whistle, to bring down the thing that's false, to shred it mercilessly in the same way that Elijah slew the false prophets of Baal.

It wasn't enough to defeat them by the invoking of the fire upon the sacrifice. They had to be destroyed. They said, spare not. Where is that ruthless man who can be set before the church in its best forms, in its charismatic celebrations, and blow the whistle and say, this whole thing is a hyped-up falsity that constitutes a basic disrespect and dishonoring of God and not be stoned and be willing to be stoned because so much is at stake that it's worth even your own death.

That's why this is a prophetical school. Because the word prophet itself has fallen into disuse and has become romanticized and anyone is picking up the label and says, I'm now it and recites a few fanciful prophecies.

So even there, if the reality is lost in what is prophetic, what shall we hope can come to the church to bring it to reality? How much then must we nurture and patiently uphold and invest in prayer those whose callings are authentic and will perform the will of God in the last days and be his trump, men like myself.