K-036 the Holocaust and Christian Conscience — Art Katz

This is tape K -036, entitled The Holocaust, spoken by Arthur Katz.

Truth, Love, and the Call to Repentance

One of my intense passions is for the truth. But it's only more recently that the Lord has been reminding me that that apostle of truth who speaks most of the truth, both in the gospel and in his epistles, John, is the one also who had his head on the bosom of the Lord.

That the apostle of truth is also the apostle of love, and that the two are never to be separated. If I can just ask you please to withhold applause. I don't know if you're going to want to applaud at the end, but if you feel that's a response, fine, but just for time's sake.

I have a message before me which I have never spoken before. And unusual in my experience, the Lord sat me down in the hotel room here in Kansas City and I did not get up for eight hours. And I have that writing before me.

It's not that lengthy. In fact, I stared at the notes and the materials that I've been accumulating. This theme has been on my heart for many years. I stretched it out on the desk and I despaired of finding a way of putting it together.

And I'm not sure that it's together yet. It's going to be awkward and groping and choked. But I believe that the Lord wants it expressed. Among my burdens is the burden for repentance. And I have been grieved at the absence of this great theme in modern evangelism.

And I've oftentimes in my talks commented about the egocentric Christianity that seeks to induce men to accept Christ, if you will, on the basis of the benefits that will accrue to them for so doing. This spoke not the apostles and is wholly out of keeping with the whole tenor and the power and the magnitude and the glory of the apostolic time set forth in the book of Acts.

And I am that kind of Jew that has a heart only for that glory. And so I'm going to ask you to pray with me as we try to speak the truth in love, taking as a theme something that Paul says in the 20th chapter of the book of Acts when he reviews his service for God of how he strove and sacrificed and witnessed, testifying both to Jews and also to the Greeks.

Repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. May I suggest that there's no faith toward Jesus Christ until there is first repentance toward God. And that you can assemble however long the list you want of messianic scripture and bring the Jew to read them and to draw a line at the bottom and to sum them up correctly.

But that will not in itself engender either repentance nor faith. And that there have been numbers of Jewish casualties in the messianic movement and undoubtedly greater numbers of non-Jewish casualties who never repented unto true faith and had some kind of show of faith which was not sufficient to sustain them.

We are called as a final generation for a cataclysmic conclusion to a conflict which has ever been brewing between light and darkness and only those who live by faith shall be sustained in such a trial as that and be able to give testimony to the glory of God.

So I'm concerned both for true faith which grows out of true repentance. Repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Will you bow with me now in prayer that we might hear from the Spirit of Truth in love.

Precious God, Heavenly Father, I tremble, Lord, to find myself at this place. You know what's in my heart, Lord, and the condition of my own trembling to have such a word as this to speak. And Lord, I just ask that I might be made so transparent that very God himself, even the Lord Yeshua, by the Spirit might speak to the hearts of this people what is in his own true heart.

Lord, you've been preparing us. You've been bringing us to a place of increasing maturity. You have winked in times past as you have waited, as we have frolicked and have had our charismatic fun, Lord God, and you've allowed us to enjoy it for a season.

But there's a spirit, a sense in the air of solemnity, of deep things, of preparation. We thank you, Lord God, that you've prepared us and now we ask to speak and enable us to receive it, mighty God. And we'll thank you and praise you for this in Jesus' name.

The Apostolic Message in Acts: Repentance for Those Who Crucified Christ

I'm going to quote a series of scriptures out of the book of Acts that characterizes and typifies the ministry of the apostles to the Jews in that first generation. Acts 2 .36 -38. Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts and said unto Peter and the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? Then said Peter unto them, Repent. I'm not concluding the statement, I'm ending on the word that I want to emphasize.

Acts 3 .13 -15 -19. The God of Abraham, and I of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his son Jesus, whom you delivered up and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go.

But you denied the Holy One and the just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince of Life. Repent ye therefore, and be converted. Acts 4 .8 -10. Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified.

We know that they suffered terrible delusion and reproach for such speakings. They were told and strictly commanded that they should not teach in his name. Behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man's blood upon us.

But it says that when they prayed, that they might speak with all boldness the word, that the rim shook where they prayed by the power of the Spirit. Great power and great grace was upon them all. And on another occasion, when the angel had to bring them out of imprisonment, he said, he brought them forth and said, Go stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life.

I want to suggest that our modern evangelism has lacked the power of the boldness which is imparted by the Holy Spirit, because we have not brought the totality of the same message that was brought in that first generation.

It's much easier to induce men to believe for benefits than to let them to know that they are participant and are responsible and stand guilty before God for the death of the Holy One of Israel. Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.

The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom he slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a prince and a savior, for to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.

And we are his witnesses of these things. And so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him. I think if there's an honest charismatic among the forty or fifty thousand who are in this city at this time, they may acknowledge that though they have had a baptism in the Holy Spirit and speak with tongues and have been the instrument of the expression of other gifts of the Spirit, there has been a notable, and if I may say it, a lamentable absence, a corresponding absence of the power of God, both in their life and their ministry.

We have been like children, thinking that if we received this gift alone, that that is the sufficient qualification for the fullness of the power that ought to attend it. But may I suggest that the power will be there in exact proportion to the unpleasantness and the difficulty and the reproach and the ungainliness and the difficulty of hearing of the message that we shall be impelled to bring.

If we shall bring a patsy message, we shall have a patsy attendance of God. And if we shall bring the bold and full message of God unto repentance to men, that shall strike them in their hearts, till they shall again say, Men and Brethren, what shall we do?

That we might again answer, Repent. We shall experience the fullness and the operation of that Spirit unto boldness. It says that when they heard that, they were cut to the heart. And Peter and the apostles departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.

I don't know how to say this, and I'm not an artful man, and I'm clumsy, and it's brought reproach on my head, but I can't help but survey my charismatic experience, which has been rather extensive in these fourteen years, having once initially been a kind of Jewish darling to the movement, growing less popular as I go on, and I see the dove of God everywhere celebrated, sometimes peering at it and squinting, wondering exactly what manner of bird it is, maybe some other kind of pigeon.

But I have to note the absence of the cross of Christ Jesus in our charismatic conferences. I think it's Basil Lierzschlink who said that the great calamity of the Church has been its failure to prepare God's people for suffering.

We don't have a stomach for suffering, folks, and that might well explain why it is that we have shrunk consciously or unconsciously and inadvertently from bringing that message alone that cuts men to the heart.

It'll either bring them to repentance, or it shall bring them to gnash upon us with their teeth. And rather than suffer the prospect of the last, we are unwilling to contemplate the prospect of the first.

The Holy Spirit, Suffering, and Faithful Witness

God did not give us His Spirit just to jazz up our denominational life. He gave it to us to equip us at the end of the age to stand and to serve God in hard places for those who are willing as these men and to rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.

We look at men who are nothing in the natural, men who are not in any way impressive, who had no kind of credential that they should ever have been noteworthy. A man by the name of Stephen was no more than a busboy, but by the operation of this Spirit, he stopped the mouths of his adversaries and demonstrated a wisdom that far exceeded theirs.

I want to quote a portion of the message that culminated in his own death. He reviewed for them the history of Israel, and I think that it may be incumbent upon us to review for our own Jewish people the history of Israel because it is amazing, as has been mentioned in this morning's session, how great is our biblical illiteracy, though we are sophisticated in many other areas.

I wonder which modern Jew it is who has ever sat down to ask himself the question why it is that he was born in Kansas City or as myself in Brooklyn, New York, or Moscow, or as I've had occasion to meet Jews even in Tokyo and just about every remote corner of the earth.

How is it that we were born in such places as that? And how is it that our history has been marked by such suffering and unspeakable calamity? Maybe our function is before we mention the name of Jesus to Jews is to bring them to the place where they ask us the right question before we provide an unwanted answer.

Stephen’s History of Israel and the Sin of Rejecting God’s Messengers

In his review he said, For I suppose his brethren, speaking of Moses, would have understood how God by his hand would deliver them, but they understood not. This Moses whom they refused, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a judge?

The same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer. He brought them out. This is he who received the lively oracles to God, oracles to be given unto us, to whom our fathers would not obey, but thrust him from them, in their hearts turned back again unto Egypt.

Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost, as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the just one, of whom you have been now, the betrayers and the murderers.

It's evident that this apostolic generation did not mince words. They spoke a necessary truth, and I don't believe that it has again been spoken since the eclipse of that generation and in modern times.

When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart and gnashed on him with their teeth, but he being full of the Holy Ghost. There's a pattern here, folks, and it behooves us to see it. Now, it's not like me to read from a prepared manuscript, but this is so important that I'm going to do it with such liberty as the Lord will be pleased to give me, having spoken these initial things.

Psalm 51 and the Absence of a Sense of Sin

While indeed salvation is of the Jews, yet do they least of all seem to know what salvation is. For the sense of sin is conspicuously absent in their estimation of themselves, and without the sense of sin, there can be no deliverance from it.

To this do the Scriptures attest, for can we expect to hear a Jewish cry from Psalm 51, as I heard it spoken a week or so ago, and my own spirit was crying out, O, that the Jewish people might cry this repentant psalm of David to the God of their fathers, even as David before them.

That the whole nation Israel might cry out, Have mercy upon me, O God, and blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and guilt, so I acknowledge my transgression, and my sin is ever before me.

I think if anyone has any familiarity with modern Jewish life, there is no element, on the contrary, more conspicuous from it than the sense of sin. We are a people who are given to self-exaltation, and to self-congratulation.

It is in our religious services, it is in our Jewish cultural life, it is in our periodicals, and in our literature. We are a proud and puffed up people. If you scratch us deeply, we'll tell you that we believe that we gave the world nano-theism as part of our Jewish culture, that we gave the world the Bible, and as a matter of fact, we have just about taken upon ourselves all the things which God has given, and see it as the expression of our own Jewish genius and brilliance.

What is there in the corporate experience and history of the Jewish people sufficient to stir such consciousness of sin and the acknowledgment of transgression that would lead to repentance and to conversion?

The Death of Jesus, the Holocaust, and Collective Guilt

The first event, I think, in Jewish history is their participation in the death of the Savior, and the second one like unto it, and growing out of it as a consequence of it, is the more recent crucifixion of world Jewry itself, the Holocaust.

These two events, in my opinion, have got to be the two greatest events, single events in Jewish history, both of which are grossly neglected in Jewish understanding. One is wholly put aside, it's not even worthy of our consideration, and if it is so much as mentioned, the one who has the gumption to mention it shall be immediately accused of anti-Semitism.

The second, the Holocaust, is only trotted out on ceremonial occasions, on annual commemorations, in a sentimental way by which Jews again have occasion to congratulate themselves for having died for being Jews.

May I say with a broken heart, in truth and in love, that contrary to their having died for being Jews, the greater truth is this, they died for not having been Jews enough. Where is there a man who will say that to their face?

There is little accident, I think, that both these events, the enormity of which is incalculable as well as inexpressible, have been slighted and glibly dismissed in present Jewish understanding for the first, the mere cry of anti-Semitism, with references to the absurdity of deicide.

That's an actual quote from a Jewish spiritual leader that has come to my hand. Or the instrumentality of a pilot. All of this is just piled upon the Gentiles, the Romans, this was a Roman punishment, and Jews are absolved of responsibility.

All this they think sufficient to absolve them of implication, notwithstanding the cry, the oath of their fathers, His blood be upon us and our children. The magnitude of the horror of contemplating the Holocaust as a fulfillment of these words is so great, even for us who believe and who are even called to be ministers of God's salvation to them, that we have shrunk from its consideration.

This did not Peter, Paul, Stephen, and the Apostles. And have been carried, therefore, by that same logic to what is, in my opinion, a lesser evangelism with a lesser result. If you want to know why I did not applaud this morning in the presentation of some of my brethren, when they explained how Jews have had their resistance melted and have come to a place of hearing through their messianic synagogues, and they've seen 10, 20, so many of these saved, it's because there's something in my Jewish heart that harkens back to an hour when 3 ,000 were saved, and the hour is short and the numbers are great.

And we can make all kinds of accommodations and condescensions to men, but I believe that it will not be until we preach this message and the power and the boldness of the Holy Spirit that men shall again be stricken in their hearts, cut in their hearts, and cry out, men and brethren, what must we do?

And we can give the answer that has not been sounded in oh so long. Repent! Rather than bring to the consciousness of Jewry the shame of the banishment from God through transgression, we ourselves get giddy and exult in and seek to win them by a promise to keep them in the exilic ghetto culture that sprang from it.

I wonder how many of you who squealed with delight at the various aspects of Jewish culture that was either mentioned or demonstrated realize that much of it, if not all, is the more recent expression of Jewish culture since the dispersion, since the diaspora.

It is ghetto culture, folks, and it harkens back to what should be a remembrance of our shame having been banished from God and from the land. And I don't know what my spirit is saying in me that we are again seeking to revive it and to use it as a vehicle of drawing Jews to a place where they might condescend to accept Jesus.

The culture which we so exult in is a testimony to our shame and not our glory. As one commentator puts it, quote, one is appalled and saddened by the continual crying up of Jews of the virtues attributed to their beloved Jewishness, not seeing that the very starting point of the faith of God is that of humility of mind and of humbling as to what all are in the flesh, even down to self-abhorrence and deep repentance before God.

For what is not only our sad inheritance through Adam, but especially for our own actual sinfulness. This is, in my opinion, or there is, in my opinion, an unbroken continuum of sin for which no Jew is absolved merely by the fortuitous circumstances of birth and time which needs desperately to be pressed upon his consciousness.

I'll tell you how foolish a man I am. I think that every individual in every generation shall stand before God for the decision of choosing Barabbas over Jesus, though they were not there in the actual moment of time.

Stephen said, As your fathers did, so do ye. And there's a principle in here that I want to express. Here it is. The failure to acknowledge the sins of the fathers as sin and to repent of them as our own in our own unwillingness or ignorance or silence implicates us and makes us run with them in the sin.

Catholic and Jewish Confession, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation

A woman came up to me at the end of this morning's session, a Gentile woman of Polish extraction, a Catholic. And as she spoke to me, the Spirit of God just touched me in the way that he has. And what she expressed to me was that she needed an opportunity to be absolved from the responsibility of guilt of what Catholics have inflicted on Jews through the centuries.

And I do not lightly ignore such a desire. As a matter of fact, if you're going to bear with me, I believe that God is going to lead me at the conclusion of this message to a most unusual altar call, which has been generations in waiting.

Something is going to be released that has hovered in our ancestral darkness of crimes that we have inflicted one upon the other as Jews and Gentiles, which we have never acknowledged in having part nor sought each other's forgiveness.

I think such an act needs to be performed. And if God will so lead me, it will be performed here in this theater today. Martin Rosen said in one of his first presentations he feels no mandate to stand in the place of the Jewish people and to accept the forgiveness of Gentiles.

I'd like to say that I feel that I have such a mandate and I might offer other Jewish believers who are in this room who also want to stand in the place of the Jewish people, perhaps to come on the platform at the conclusion of the message, that we might receive from the non-Jewish believers in this audience the expression of their forgiveness as we stand in the place of our people and receive ours for what we have inflicted upon you, both in our unbelief, in our atheism, in our cynicism, and all of the adverse things we have done as manipulators of culture in breaking down the faith of many.

It needs to go both ways. Here's the illustration from the Scriptures of the principle that I'm suggesting, that there's an unbroken continuum of sin that stretches from father to son, which unless we consciously sever it, even infects our own spirit and life.

Jesus’ Warning About the Sins of the Fathers

Jesus said in Matthew 23, the 27 through 36 verses, Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness.

And say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore you be witnesses unto yourselves that you are the children of them which killed the prophets.

Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you shall kill and crucify, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.

Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. What was Jesus saying? Whom ye slew, when they were not anywhere near the time and the circumstance of that slaying. What he's saying is this. If you do not see yourself as implicated with your fathers, if you do not acknowledge the craven condition of your heart, that if you had been with them, you would have assuredly participated in the blood of the martyrs, then, most assuredly, you shall participate in the blood of the martyrs of your own generation.

Acknowledgements that our fathers have sinned, and that we do not want to be in some unspoken continuation with that sin, that stand to separate ourselves from it. There's a lot of talk about save, save, save.

But I love the word converted. And I don't believe there shall be any Jew converted who will not stand and suffer the reproach of the Jewish community when he shall say, I refuse to accept the verdict of my fathers.

Choose ye Barabbas. I choose Jesus. Which Jew is there, which if he had not been present with his fathers at the trial of Jesus, would not have chosen Barabbas. How ironically did the prosecuting attorney for the State of Israel against Eichmann, Gideon Hausner, touch upon the same principle in his memoirs.

It's interesting how God will put a book in a man's hand at the appropriate time. If there's been a cry rolling up in my heart in recent months, it's this. Oh God, that we might see as you see. Our viewpoint is so temporal, so limited, so human.

Bring us into the dimension where you are. Independent of time. In God's sight, children, there is an unbroken continuum from the day of the death of Jesus to this present day. And all men are implicated in that most heinous crime except those who have by confession absolved themselves from it and avail themselves of the very blood that was shed in that act.

God requires that which is passed. This inherent truth was ironically stated by Gideon Hausner about Eichmann. One must hear it as the divine prosecutor and judge, as though this were the judge speaking and not this man, speaking of Israel and not of a German criminal.

He says, It may well take some time before a criminal is brought to justice. In Eichmann's case, it took 15 years since he had gone into hiding. But he was ultimately found, exposed to the obloquy of mankind and executed.

Then comes this punchline, Neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum saved him. These facts are worth bearing in mind. Indeed, neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum shall save our people.

And if you want a little foretaste of a kind of hellishness that shall not be eternally relieved, you need only turn to Zechariah 12, which describes the response of Jews when they shall see him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for one's only begotten son and be in bitterness as one is in bitterness for one's firstborn.

Their mourning shall be relieved. But what of the mourning of those who shall see him whom they have pierced after they have passed into an eternity in which no correction can be made? There needs to be a message spoken to the Jewish people in this final generation.

And if it shall not be spoken by the people of the Holy Spirit, by whom then shall it be brought? Neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum saved him. Micah 6 .2, Hosea 12 .2,. The Lord hath a controversy with his people Israel.

And who is there among modern Jews today who has even an iota of awareness that God has such a controversy? And who will ever know it from the swagger and esteem by which the Jewish community continues to hold itself?

How much do we in our own well-meaning efforts confirm them in their self-sufficient and present alienation from God by flattering their present Judaism by imitating or emulating it? Is not our most serious mistake revealed in reference to quote and unquote completed Jews?

As if our only one omission omission was the failure to acknowledge the Messianic credentials of Jesus. You forgot a little something. Look, here's what it says in the Scriptures. Jesus is the Messiah of Israel.

Oh, hey, that's right. Friends, this is not conversion. This is biblical bookkeeping. And the result is sadly to be seen. Merely to establish the link of seeing the fulfillment of prophecy is not necessarily accepting Christ or coming to Him as a sinner needing a Savior.

The sob, Father, I have sinned against Thee, is that alone which is answered by the Father's kiss. And many of us who have not received that kiss because we have not cried that cry reveal it in our own impoverished and loveless Christian lives.

Such shallow conversions leaves us resembling the Pharisee who thought himself a big sport to condescend to have Jesus to dinner. Isn't that the spirit by which most men accept Jesus? Not having experienced much forgiveness, he was incapable of loving much and even murmured about the great sinner who lavished Jesus' feet with her tears and filled the room with the fragrance of her outpoured love.

Our impatience with each other, the short shrift we give each other, even as Jewish believers and Messianic leaders, belies the lovelessness which is concealed in the guise of being busy about the Lord's business.

Reconciliation Through the Cross of Christ

But there's much more that hangs on this great question than the Jewish acknowledgement of their chronic, ages-old rejection of God. More than their own redemption is involved in this great question, glorious enough as their redemption is, seeing that it will be life brought back from the dead.

There's a scripture that says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. And the final revelation of God's glory to unbelieving mankind will be in the reconciliation of those who have had the longest and bitterest history of enmity between themselves.

I can't think of a greater demonstration of the glory of Christ in earth than that an Israeli and an Arab shall clutch each other.

In the love of the Messiah. I prophesy, and this is no radical utterance, a fool will tell you,.

That blood shall flow in the streets of this city and every major city in America and in the world as we come to the final explosion of what has been building a crescendo of hatred and bitterness in third world groups in the colored peoples of the earth, the downtrodden, the deprived, we had a little preview in the shutting out of the lights in New York City when that particular segment of the population went berserk to smash windows and to loot and to steal.

Only a foretaste of what shall be experienced wholesale unless this bitterness is reconciled at the cross of Christ Jesus. Some of you may know that though my book Ben Israel begins with the chapter describing my experience in Dachau a quarter of a century ago I was a Jewish GI going to this terrible concentration camp hating a people that I thought I could never look in the face, the Germans, that God has given me as a converted Jew a great passion and love for the same people.

Much of our activity is in Germany preaching a message of reconciliation as a Jew who has been reconciled to his God now enjoining Lutherans and nominal religionists also so to be reconciled both to their brothers in a broken fragmented body of Christ and also to our God.

The reconciliation of German and Jew I think is one of the profoundest themes of God for the end of the age. But how shall the Jew forgive the German until he first sees that he crucified the Son of God even as he was himself crucified and thereby reaped what he has sown having therefore no basis whatsoever for any presumed moral superiority or presumed innocence.

No Jew will ever be reconciled to a German in his heart until he finds himself broken and sobbing for the magnitude of his own guilt and implication in the death of the Holy One of Israel whom you slew and hung on a tree.

When the magnitude of that shall break upon the Jewish soul that we have killed God also shall the magnitude of the Holocaust and the crimes of men against us also find a basis for forgiveness for he who has been forgiven much loves much.

How shall we understand and the Jew understand the enormity of that until he has first acknowledged the dispersion to the Holocaust as the fit judgment of God for unspeakable transgression. We don't have to slap ourselves on the back that we're Brooklyn Jews who know how to play stickball and love pastrami.

It's a statement unto our shame that we have been cast out of the land of our fathers and have become a curse a byword, a hiss, and a proverb to all the places to which we have been driven. God has a controversy with his people.

Leviticus, Confession, and Divine Judgment

For thus saith the Lord if they shall confess their iniquity I'm reading from Leviticus the 26th chapter 40th through 43rd verses. If they shall confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers and that they also have walked contrary unto me if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled as they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity and acknowledge it as just and righteous altogether and can speak what David spoke in the Psalms against you and you only have I sinned and done that which is evil in your sight so that you are justified in your sentence and faultless in your judgment.

Dear friends my Jewish people need to know that they died not because they were Jews but because they were not Jewish enough. Though God be fulfilling the purposes of his own counsel and will this does not absolve men from the responsibility they have as willing instruments in evil.

Here's what many of us are telling Jewish people. Listen, you didn't kill Jesus. He was foreordained of the Father to die for our sins. So listen, don't let this bother you. You were just an instrumentality.

It's really the Roman pilot. He had to die, so cool it. Listen to these words, children. Though God be fulfilling the purposes of his own counsel and will this does not absolve men from the responsibility they have as willing instruments in evil.

That's true for the Jews as it pertains to the death of their Messiah as it is for the Germans as it pertains to the Holocaust of the Jews. God says it needs be that there be evil in the world but woe unto him by whom it comes.

The Jews are just as culpable in the atrocity against God as the Germans in his atrocity against him. One writer puts it this way. Is man's responsibility to be nullified and evaded because God's eternal counsels are inviolable.

Although on the surface they may appear to align with man's atrocious wickedness. Is his responsibility to be ignored or thrown back on God because his insupportably wicked act can be viewed as in accordance with and even of assistance to God's eternal purposes.

God's eternal purposes were fulfilled in the shedding of the Messiah's blood. But it is yet needful for Jewish people to acknowledge as a people their implication and their guilt in being the willing instrument in performing it.

All hands were implicated in the Savior's blood and on all hands it lies unless shelter be sought under it. Matthew the 27th chapter 24 through 26 verses. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing but that rather a tumult was made he took water and washed his hands before the multitude saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just man.

Sing ye to it. Then answered all the people and said His blood be on us and on our children. Then released he Barabbas unto them and when he had scourged Jesus he delivered him to be crucified. John the 19th chapter 10 through 11 verses.

Then said Pilate unto him Speakest thou not unto me? Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee and have power to release thee? Jesus answered Here are the words of the Lord himself. Thou couldst have no power at all except it were given thee from above.