Even So Come Lord Jesus - Part 2 — Art Katz

Because I believe this morning you're wanting to take us within the veil into dimensions of an ultimate kind, from which we have been shrouded by the commonplace, everyday, predictable, mundane character of our contemporary Christianity.

So, roll it back Lord, you've paid the price for our entry into the ultimate cosmic dimensions of the faith that make the faith the faith and the church the church. So what more pedestrian audience can you have that has not been schooled in this, is even intimidated by it, even recoils and shrinks from it than an Australian congregation, but you're triumphant.

So my God, if you can succeed in Australia with the cosmic view of the faith, where then shall you fail? So we ask your blessing Lord, precious God on high, enlarge our hearts, our minds, our understanding, for we have been shrunk and reduced, crippled even, bring us into the full parameters of the faith my God, larger than life, by the operation of your spirit and word, this morning and this day, let it be an historic penetration, let the powers of darkness shudder and tremble and break and flee at the reality that is conveyed this morning and today by your word and spirit, not ever to recover, and we thank and give you praise in Jesus name, Amen.

The Cosmic Dimensions of Christian Faith

That's called a didactic prayer, D-I-D-A-C-T-I-C, it means you're praying, but you're teaching. You're praying to the Lord, but you're communicating something to the hearers as well. So I have let the cat out of the bag, now you know what I'm after and what I'm about and what I am suspecting, it took through the night, hours and this morning to finally make it a little bit clear what the obstacle and the difficulty is, it's you, you're stunted and you have been inducted into a Christianity of such narrow and commonplace dimensions that when a speaker tries to introduce a larger sense of the faith as it touches all the earth in a cosmic sense, you're altogether rattled, you've not been trained for it, you're not going to change everything today, hallelujah, and what a coincidence, my morning devotional readings have encouraged me in this direction, both of them are by Eugene Peterson, ever hear of him?

He's a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, I think it's Canada or British Columbia, and he has paraphrased the entire Bible and put it into idiomatic and colloquial English of American kind, like he'll say something like, Jesus will say, cool it, you know, all of a sudden you're stunned that the Lord is talking in everyday English, but it arrests your attention, and the man has a remarkable grasp of the faith.

In his selection, it's called Praying with the Prophets, he takes you through the major prophets, minor prophets, not all of them, and verse by verse, day by day, and then his own comment, and then a prayer.

The comment was about Babylon serving the purposes of God as the arm of his judgment upon Israel, but she must not think because she wins a military victory over God's chosen people, that she is being rewarded or is exempt from God's dealings.

So this guy has got his head screwed on right, he understands God's action in history, and this is his prayer. God of righteousness and justice, of mercy and grace, wide-eyed, I mediate on your ways among the nations, on your judgments in history, on your will accomplished in human affairs, ruling and judging all the earth, I give you my praise in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

And here's what I've written under his prayer, that praise, like the faith from which it issues, is weak and inadequate, except that it perceives God in his sovereignty over all nations, especially in his judgment.

Our praise is weak, if not inept, unless it issues from a faith that comprehends the majesty of God in his action in history, through and over nations, and especially in his judgments. If we see God only narrowly, like what did he do for you today, and he healed my bunions, and you know, yes you can praise him for that, but it's limp next to the great chorus of praise that goes out when you recognize God as God, in his cosmic dimension.

And don't ask me to define cosmic. It's larger than life, it's larger than the world, it's larger than our present reality, it's the all-inclusive, ultimate, eternal intentions of God. What we really are about is something set in cosmic conflict between the powers of darkness and God.

I don't know if I'll speak of that more explicitly in the time that's left, but just to say that much now, and you can do your own homework in Ephesians chapter 3 and verse 10, where Paul tells us in one fell swoop, what is the eternal purpose of God for the church?

It's cosmic. So I'm not using that to say, to get fancy, look my no hands, I'm throwing weighty things at you because I enjoy them and they sound lofty. I'm communicating them because they are nuts and bolts provision of God for the church.

To omit the cosmic dimensions of the faith is to stunt us and to limit us to just what is before our own immediate nose and to shut out any view of God that includes his majesty. So we can sing about it and attempt to praise him for it, but it will be weak and hollow unless it's out of a context of faith and understanding that embraces the whole cosmic dimensions of the faith.

Follow that? Well, then you're an exceptional saint if you can, because statements like this need to be heard several times over. Somebody has said about me, you need to be unpacked, Art. Your statements are so compressed, contain so much, someone needs to unpack them.

Well you do that when you hear the tape recording with several others in a small circle and go over it slowly and shut the machine off. What did he say? Where's the scripture? Get into it, dig out that truth, make it your own.

That's one statement. And then in another of his devotional books, today's selection is remarkably apt. Hope is not a doctrine about the future. It is a grace cultivated in the present. It is a stance in the present which deals with the future.

As such, it is misunderstood if it is valued only for the comfort it brings, about everything going to be alright in the future, because God is in control of it, therefore relax and be comforted. Christian hope is different.

Christian hope alerts us to the possibilities of the future as a field of action. It's not the end of a nice story. It's a place of participation that will not be concluded for the future unless we have part in it, in the present, and it fills the present with energy.

I would have said it brings a dynamic to the church that nothing else will bring. The early church had a dynamic that we lack, namely an expectancy about the future, the Lord's own coming, the bringing of his kingdom, his glory and honor.

All the earth will praise him. The psalmists are full of that kind of expectation. Expectation of that kind is dynamic, it has an energy for the present. It's a contemplation of the future, but the result of it is to activate the present, for unless the present is activated, that future is not obtained.

So you have to get out of your little narrow Australian categories, past, present and future, and come into the realm of God, where there's such a dynamic of the present moment as containing the future, as well as the past.

We are an extraordinary people, we're peculiar. We're not limited past, present, future, well that's the future. The future is now, eternity is now, the past is present, what do you mean Art? What I mean is, right now, are you ready for this?

Invisible and overhead of this place where we are assembled is a cloud of witnesses, of saints who have gone on before us, who have suffered and died for the most holy faith, and are not complete without...

God sees to it that the past is configured into the present, and the present into the future. Unlike earthlings who only know the present moment, they have no past, they have no hope, no expectancy, no future, pitiful, limited things, living beneath God's intention for the expansiveness of those created in his image.

So you have to break out of those categories that the world has clamped upon you. For example, secular and sacred. Well sacred is Sunday, but secular is Monday through Saturday. Baloney, it's all sacred, it's all holy.

So the world has its little confining categories that make it safe for the timid who like to know what the limits are and not to exceed them. But God calls us to an expansive apostolic and prophetic faith that runs over the edges.

Got the idea? Eternity is now. You mean right now, Art? Yes, I mean right now. Right now, this morning, time is standing still. Something is being touched. A moment of time has come in the appointment of God that will affect everything, everywhere, henceforth and in the future, and for which everything till now has been preparation.

Believe that? But sainthood is a phenomenon and it's remarkable to have a view like that, to have a faith like that, an expectancy like that, that something is taking place in a moment of time that touches all eternity, and that that moment was known of God, prepared for God, and that what is actually happening this morning is a work to walk in and to fulfill that was established before the foundation of the earth was laid.

Class dismissed. You're freaking out. You can't take it. Class dismissed. That's your limit. Can you believe that this morning we are fulfilling and performing something that was established in the mind and heart and will of God before the foundation of the earth was laid?

He foresaw a moment of time in Australia when some Jewish squirt would come by invitation in the arrangement of God and be given the burden to speak from Psalm 102 that would bring a dimension of understanding into the church that makes the church the church and the agent of God's salvation for Israel and the issue of his coming.

Now you know why Paul gasps frequently, Lord, who is sufficient for these things? If Paul gasps, what shall we do? God is always calling us to things beyond our ability, cosmic and ultimate things. Okay, back to the drawing board, Psalm 102.

Psalm 102 and the Integration of Past, Present, and Future

I'm not going to let you get away without immersing yourself in the grandeur of this great statement. Okay? You want to read it? You want to read that? Okay. Mm-hmm. Have you been reading my Holocaust book?

That's the principle scripture of the Holocaust book. That which is past is now. That which has been has always been, and God requires that which is past. See, he's not fixed in these categories of past, present, future.

The one runs into the other, which means you cannot bury the past, which the world loves to do. It wants to sweep the past under the carpet and so you can go on without being distracted by the uncomeliness of the past.

That's not God's way. God's way is a full integration of facing the issues of the past, even the failed past, maybe especially the failed past, that you might receive the benefit of correction and instruction in the present as it will affect the future.

Well, I'm an ex-history teacher, so I have a preoccupation with the past, but you know what I've noticed? When I go to Switzerland and the city of Basel, where the Anabaptist saints were imprisoned in towers or burned at the stake for their radical Protestant faith that was more radical than Protestantism, and you go into the building where they were imprisoned that still remains, it is now an art gallery and the information center, and you say to the woman at the desk of the information center, what remains here from the Anabaptist history of suffering and persecution in the 16th century?

And she says, huh? Doesn't know from beans what is represented in that building. You go to Dachau, the concentration camp outside of Munich, and every barrack in which men rotted before they were sent into the ovens has been removed, and the whole place is nicely tidied up and landscaped with crushed rock, and one barrack has been rebuilt according to specifications, but that is not the statement of the past.

The past has been buried and put away because Germany is embarrassed by it, but they have an obligation to maintain some kind of historical reminder, so what do they do? They build one barrack according to specifications.

That's very German, but it's not the barracks of death that I remember from 1952 when the stink of death was there, and they had no time to tidy up. The whipping posts were still in place. Bones were still in the ovens, so there is the propensity of man to bury the past and the desire of God that the past is now.

Okay, so last night we began a review of this great psalm that begins with some kind of sufferer who sounds very much like a concentration camp inmate, and if this is an eschatological psalm, that is to say, though it's written in the past, it speaks of the future.

Could this be descriptive of Jews suffering in a future concentration camp? Because the Lord himself said, there's a time of trouble ahead for Israel that will exceed anything they have previously known, both in magnitude and in horror.

He doesn't say that, I'm supplying that, so that this is perfectly appropriate to begin with one man, but he's descriptive, he's a picture of a people who are being mocked and taunted in their imprisonment, whose flesh and skin clings to their bones.

They can't even eat their bread, they're like an owl of the wilderness in the waste place. Like a lonely bird on the housetop, verse 8, all day long my enemies taunt me, those who deride me use my name for a curse, I eat ashes like bread and mingle tears with my drink.

What a pathetic statement. But what makes it different from the Nazi holocaust is that this man who is expressing the heart cry of his suffering has come to a realization of a kind to which Jews did not come as a result of the Nazi holocaust.

Because he says in verse 10, because of your indignation and anger, for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside, my days are like an evening shadow, I wither away like grass, but you oh Lord are enthroned forever.

You know that God is waiting to hear this from his people Israel? That our sufferings historically, when our blood flowed in the streets of German villages in the Easter time, when we were called Christ killers, right through to the Nazi holocaust, that God is waiting for us not to see ourselves as victims, pouting in our self-pity, but as those who acknowledge that everything that has befallen us is in consequence of our sin.

And that God's judgments are altogether righteous. When we will acknowledge that, the set time to favor Zion has come. Instead, what have our sufferings produced? What has come out of the holocaust? Never again.

What a bravado, what a, what is a Jewish word for it, it's chutzpah, it's arrogance and conceit to think, well they got us last time because we were defenseless, but this time never again. Now we have our own army, our own air force, our own atomic arsenal, never again.

As if we are the agents of our own safety, our own preservation, our own salvation. We have displaced God entirely. You think he's going to be satisfied with that? His judgment saints are not punitive, but redemptive.

They have an object in mind, and they are the consequence of our sin. He's not inflicting something. He's allowing our sin itself to have its outworking in exact proportion to the magnitude of the sin.

That's not only true of Israel, it's true of us. So he's not malicious, there's just a divine law that the wages of sin are death. They are the consequence of a violation against God, of the indifference or the rejection of him, or yourself becoming Lord, and it's cumulative.

God is not required to pronounce the verdict the day after your sin. He may allow it to linger for over a period of time, maybe waiting in hope that you will see the error of your ways and come to a repentance before the necessity for judgment through the word.

That's why he sends the prophets who rise up early and beseech and appeal to the nation to recognize their transgressions, their covenant unfaithfulness, and to repent in turn. But when the word is not heeded and received over a period of time, when that grace is exhausted, then God has got to convey the same message through judgment.

If the word will not instruct us, then our judgments will instruct us. So God is waiting for Israel to recognize that its sufferings have not been an accident, an aberration of history, the coming of a Hitler, that if he had not been born it could have been avoided.

No. He was born for that purpose because God is enthroned in the heavens. You know why Israel remains in this kind of stupor of ignorance that compels God to bring yet greater judgments for its awareness?

Because the church in its midst has not instructed it. Rather they have made knives. They have appealed to their self-pity. You are more Christian than Christians, I know. Oh, you are suffering that.

Oh, those nasty people who inflicted that upon you. Yes, those Germans. You didn't deserve that. You confirmed them in their own self-justifying and yet the scripture says, hold not back but let your voice be like a trump and tell Jacob their transgressions and Israel their sins and you didn't do it, cowards.

You make knives, you soothe because you're doing for them what you would have others do for you. You want to make knives. You don't want to face hard reality facts and deal with them, though painful. You rather cover it over with a plaster or a whitewash and soothe.

You can't believe how much of the church's present attitude toward existent Israel is so much the projection of its own desire for itself. They want present Israel to succeed. Why? Because they want themselves to succeed.

They want the church to succeed because success is the ideal, the end of Christian contemplation. What's wrong with that part? Here's what's wrong with it. The real purpose is not success but the glory of God forever.

Paul doesn't then Romans 11 with of him and through him and through him are all things to whom be success but to whom be glory forever and any Christian who has the most rudimentary knowledge of the faith knows that there is an inescapable principle central to God at the very heart of reality that is a suffering that precedes a glory for which even the Lord himself was not exempt.

He could not ascend to be at the right hand of the Father and have a name given above every name in earth and in heaven except he was first abased and he first went down into unspeakable suffering and humiliation.

Therefore God has exalted him and given him a name above every name. We don't like that. We don't want exaltation because we don't want suffering. What we want and maybe Australia is the case in point is a middling success.

Not too harsh, not too high. Get by. It's a very gentile attitude. But what in the last analysis is the fear of man? It's fear of being threatened, intimidated. We want to surround ourselves with a shield so that we're in a kind of cocoon of safety and reasonable middleness, neither extreme of heights nor the depths of despair.

Suffering Before Glory and the Risk of Faith

But if you read the biography of Oswald Chambers, how many people do not know the name, have never read him? Oh, my Lord, that has got to be rectified right away. Get into a Christian bookstore and get Oswald Chambers' daily devotion called My Utmost for His Highest.

No Christian bookstore? It's not carried? It's available worldwide and in many languages. Maybe I've come all this way to tell you about Oswald Chambers, who died when he was 36 or 38 in Egypt of the complications of an appendicitis.

Talk about the Lord taking someone too early. But his wife fastidiously took notes of all of his preaching. He was a missionary, spoke to the English troops, the YMCA, in Egypt before World War I or during World War I.

I have been to Zeitoun in Egypt and have served the Lord there and have looked for his tomb and cannot find it. All they can find is the remains of the mission outpost which he served, which is now a used car lot with old German Mercedes Benzes stacked up on that lot and being repaired.

And there's one old building with the debris and the clutter of the older furniture that goes back to that mission post, but no one can locate his body. What a saint. What insight. What a grasp. Why did I bring him up?

Oh, when you read his biography, you read of the man who went through the dark night of the soul, that while people were applauding him for the exceptional quality of his insight and his extraordinary eloquence, the man was inwardly being devastated and grasping and fighting for reality of God in his life.

No one could see it. No one was aware of it, but he himself, he went through a long protracted night of the soul where he was tempted to give up the faith and even to forsake his own life. That's how the Lord allowed him to be brought to such a pitch of despair.

He went all the way down in multiple deaths, but the day the moment came, the set time to favor Zion came for him and the Lord lifted the veil and brought him up and into a place of remarkable perspicuity of the understanding of the faith that has blessed generations of saints ever since.

Our problem is we're unwilling to go down in order to come up. We'd rather have a middling course that is neither extreme to one way or the other that gets by. As a history teacher, I had students come to my desk at the commencement of every school year.

Mr. Katz, what is the minimum that we need to do in order to get by? I thought the true motto of the United States of America is not in God we trust, but we'll let the world play that game, but it's unbecoming for the church.

We're not in the get by business. We're in the risks of the faith. Okay, so the Lord is waiting for an acknowledgment on Israel's part that he is enthroned forever, which means the past, the present, and the future, which means the Nazi holocaust and the holocaust yet to come, spoken of in my holocaust book and one for which you need to brace yourself, for the Lord said that this will exceed the Nazi time, both in its magnitude and in its terror.

So if the Nazi time only took six million Jewish lives in Europe, this holocaust will take maybe almost twice that number worldwide and cause Jews to be uprooted in every present place of security and affluence and to be cast out into the world and through the nations in a final sifting by which a surviving residue and remnant constitute the redeemed of the Lord that return to Zion.

If I don't speak of this tomorrow, don't let me leave because they're going to be passing through Australia as they will be the Philippines and Singapore and Indonesia and in every country where we are sent because my message in every nation is prepare yourself and anticipate Jews in flight through your nations.

How do you know Art? Because I have in my eve faith to believe what God says. I will sift you, it says in Amish chapter nine, through all nations and not so much as one kernel shall fall to the ground.

It's a global sifting because God's intention is not only to sift Israel, but to sift the nations through which they pass for the first question he's going to ask when he takes his throne and establish eternal judgment or blessing is what did you do for the least of these my brethren?

You could not ask that question of the Gentiles of all nations except that they had opportunity in their nations to see the least of the brethren coming through. Can you see why what we are about is so important?

The fat is in the fire. The church is not some passive Sunday entity enjoying its services. It is the vital salvific agents of God for Israel's ultimate redemption because something has got to happen and trend be transacted in their passing through in their final hour of extremity.

When you will have opportunity to fulfill what Paul speaks in Romans that by your mercy they may obtain mercy, but what if you have no mercy to give? What if your mercy is only a doctrine, a verbal acknowledgment, but not an actuality?

Because you haven't needed it. You're nice middle class people. You haven't offended anybody. You don't need any mercy from God. Your salvation is of course what you expect. You were doing the kingdom.

He needed you. You don't see yourself as destitute, desperate, saved out of death, undeserving of any consideration. You're as bad as any whore, any drug addict, any bank robber, any murderer, though you've never committed those things, you're entirely capable.

The fact that you didn't is not a statement of your virtue. It's just the accident that did not require it, but you have as much gratitude for your salvation as any despoiled whore plucked up out of the gutter.

Because you know that there but for the grace of God go I, I'm entirely identified with her and I have received mercy. And what is mercy? Mercy is something that is totally undeserved. There's no requirement, nothing that we can perform that compels God to be merciful.

It's because of what he is, not what we are. And when he will have mercy on all, it will be the exhibition of what he is before the face of all nations. Israel is his witness people, not because of their virtue, but because of their failure.

What they demonstrate in their apostasy and backsliddenness and stiff-neckedness is the grace of God in his mercy. Because he said, I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. You want to know what I am as God?

I'm a God who chooses. I have perfect right because I'm the creator, I'm the almighty, and I will do what I will do. And I'll elect what I will elect. I'll have mercy upon whom I'll have mercy. And in that chosenness, in my privilege as God to do what I will because I am that I am, I make the statement to all the world that I am God.

And to make it convincingly, I'll show you that I'll choose to have mercy on the last one that you would think would deserve it. Because you are full of conditions of deserving. You have criteria to which people have to live up in order to deserve some consideration.

Your husband was a preacher, but I'm a God who does not reward mercy as if it's deserved, but is because I cannot help myself. It is what I am. And my whole object is that the world should be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the seas.

No one, not many really know me. Very few seek me. And the knowledge of me is salvation because to know him is life eternal. So Israel has chosen to reveal him and the church. So somehow this victim of God's last days judgments is not really a victim and recognizes that somehow the God who has had indignation and anger has lifted me up and thrown me aside.

And that my days are like an evening shadow. I was a way like, I'm a vapor, I'm nothing. But you, oh Lord, you mentioned you saying that I am nothing, but you, oh Lord, are enthroned forever. And your name endures to all generations.

When the Jewish people, the nation Israel has chosen once will come to the acknowledgement that God is enthroned forever and that that forever includes the times of their worst sufferings, which they acknowledge that he was aware of and didn't look away and that evidently intended and that they will rest in the righteousness of God who permitted those judgments, the end will have come for that constitutes knowing God.

To know God is to know he is righteous altogether, that he is perfect in all his ways, that he is a living God from eternity to eternity, self-existent, that nothing takes place independent of his knowledge and that it is serving his ultimate purpose, including the hard things, maybe especially the hard things.

When we will acknowledge God in them, we have acknowledged God. When we rejoice with his judgments, not just tolerate them, we know God and love him. For you cannot extract his judgments from his, from God.

His garment is seamless. You can't like his mercy and his love and his patience and his wisdom and feel cool toward his judgment. No way, you've got to take the whole lamb. You don't pick and choose the taste of your, the whole lamb with the head, the legs and the appurtenances thereof, because what you think is the least desirable part is the most choice.

Because when God's judgments are in the earth, the world will learn righteousness. I'll give you a reward if you can write a simple paragraph on what righteousness is. Try it sometime. It's virtually indefinable.

You have to intuit what righteousness is. Righteousness is God. His judgments are righteous. They have to be. They issue from him. The Lord is waiting for this acknowledgement, and it's for that reason that the Holocaust book was written.

If you look closely at the cover, it says, an appeal for Jewish consideration, that Jews might have a key of interpretation of their own worst historic experience, the Holocaust. As not being an accident, not being the result of a madman Hitler, but the fulfillment of God's prophetic warning given in books written by Moses going back to Deuteronomy and Leviticus, and made mention of throughout all the prophets of what would befall us in the latter days.

I've only gotten one response so far from the head of the Israeli Bible Society, a Jewish scholar by the name of Dr. Bacon, or Bacon, depending on your pronunciation. And he said, usually when trash like this comes across my desk, I throw it immediately into the wastebasket.

But your book was so foul, I don't forget his language, I mean, it was, he was beside himself, it was so execrable, it was so, that I had to take the time to write you. You phony, you pseudo-intellectual, haven't you ever heard of the Spanish Inquisition?

Don't you know about the Crusaders in the Middle Ages extorting money from the Jewish communities in Europe on the way to the Holy Land and setting them afire in their synagogues? Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know?

Sure I know. You dum-dum, that's what the book is about. They were all statements of judgment, because Jesus wept over Jerusalem. And so if you had known the time of your visitation, but now, alack and alas, you have set in motion by your rejection something that will haunt you throughout all of the generations in every nation in which you will be dispersed.

Your rejection of me is unspeakably costly, and it will culminate in a holocaust. And even that will not be sufficient to instruct you, so there needs to be one final time of Jacob's trouble, in which those who rebel against me and transgress against me, I will bring them out of the nations where they have sojourned, but I will not bring them into the land.

They'll perish along the way. But a retinent will return. The redeemed of the Lord. I would have taken you under my wings as a hen takes her chicks, but you would not. So this acknowledgment in Psalm 102 has never yet been historically established.

That's what makes this an eschatological psalm. It speaks of something future that one day will be expressed. So why is it written now? Because the book of Psalms is closed. Because the canon is closed.

Everything that is in the scripture is already all-inclusive. It only waits its fulfillment. What did someone say? About two-thirds of all prophecy yet remains unfulfilled. That is to be found in the Old Testament.

Zion, Israel, and the Church's Eschatological Calling

They knelt down and prayed with him and hung upon his neck with tears that they would see his face no more. That is a picture of Israel and the nations in the ages to come. They're not going to be a bunch of hotshots.

You needn't fear them. They will be broken. They'll come under you in priestly supplication. They'll give everything for you. You'll love them. They'll not withhold anything and they're not seeking to take from you.

They'll be a nation of priests and a light unto the world. God will have fulfilled his intention. When the set time to favor Zion has come, you will rise up and have compassion on Zion. For your servants hold its stones dear and have pity on its dust.

Dear, dear saints, this requires remarkable perspicacity. To take this little statement and open it. Because prophetic statement and the Psalms are poetry. And tell me what is the difference between poetry and prose?

If this were to be in prose rather than poetry, it would have taken two pages to express. But poetry is an intensely concentrated form of communication that uses words sparingly and symbolically to suggest meanings that you need to draw out by the operation of the spirit.

It will do something for you. So what does it mean that the set time has come? How do you know that? Because his servants, God is waiting for something in his servants. Not the Jews, not Israel. Israel is in prison.

But his servants have compassion on her stones and pity on her dust. And I can only interpret that. And intuit what that means. That the servant people of God, the true church in the world. Far from what the world is doing that delight and are taking great relish in Israel's predicament.

For the stones and dust are not the antiquity of Israel's ancient past. They are the present cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon. And every city in the present state. Reduce the stones and dust.

How do you know that? Because the prophets say that upon your return. When I will return you and bring you back from every nation in which I have expelled you. You will rebuild the cities that have been laid waste.

And have been left in ruins. There is a desolation coming to present Israel. And I don't know how many present Christians will be able to bear it when it comes. Have an idealistic and romantic view of Israel.

That God cannot allow it to suffer loss. Because they think that present Israel is the fulfillment of prophecy. And that God has an obligation to defend and maintain it. They will be crushed. Because their notion of God will fall.

With Israel's fall. And they will say where was God? And when they see this nation cast out again. And Jews disperse throughout the world in another holocaust. Well that's the end. That's it. If that's the kind of God that he is.

If he's going to let them suffer again a second time within a century. And that he was not able to preserve their state. Then that's it. I'm pulling out. And indeed what does Paul say? In the last days there will be a great falling away.