The Gospel to the Jew First — Art Katz

So, we just bow, my God, before you at the commencement of our opening of this great book. It's not for the casual. It deserves, my God, the deepest, most earnest attention and respect, and we trust we come, my God, with that attitude that is fitting in your sight.

And look to your spirit, my God, to exposit and to open the unsearchable riches, my God, of the glory of this book. Lay foundations through it, my God, that are overdue in our own consideration and that will affect our present and our future, and through us and beyond us, my God, to touch the lives of many.

So, thank you, Lord, for this privileged time, your presence, your spirit with us, Lord, to teach us all things. Thank you, Lord. We bow in respect and admiration and reverence for yourself, for your book, for the great apostle, my God, for the rich inheritance which is ours as saints.

Come now, my God, and instruct our souls and our understanding. Require of us what you will, for to whom much is given, much is required. We're asking that much be given, and we're willing that much be required.

So come, my God, in an unstinting way, and draw forth what you will, and receive now our gratitude yet again in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, the Lord did not allow me to open the book in advance today. We've looked at this earlier.

It began with some sessions with Ben Israel, but sensing that this was the subject, the Lord did not allow me to open it until now. Why that is, I don't know. Maybe just that there will be a sense of fresh discovery together with you.

Paul's Salutation and the Gospel's Central Declaration

I wish we had all kinds of time. We would start right from verse 1. We're actually going to start from verse 16, because the initial verses are Paul's salutation and introduction, which we did examine here at Ben Israel together, and it was rich in the way in which Paul even expresses himself to the Roman congregation, explaining his necessary neglect of them, that we had hoped to visit, and his affection and esteem, his desire again to come to Rome.

And then, having finished that salutation, he leaps in in verse 16 with that remarkable statement like the great theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who has faith or who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith, for faith, as it is written, the one who is righteous will live by faith.

The Gospel Against Rome's Glory and Human Wisdom

That's a remarkable blast in one statement that we need to examine. So I've already suggested in the prayer time this morning, what a strategic thing to sound to a church at Rome, inhabiting the city that glorifies those things that pertain to man, because Rome is the adoption of Greece, Roman civilization is the assimilation and the translation of Greek civilization, they were the inheritors, they were not original in themselves, something like the Japanese today, but taking what was original, they marketed it so that all roads lead to Rome, and Roman civilization is the high watermark of all that men could admire in that generation, so when you live in the shadow of it, as the church, you're continually intimidated by its evidences, and the gospel is more foolish to you than it would be to those who are in the boondocks and are not intimidated by the signs and the presence of this overarching civilization.

What then must it have been in Rome for the church at Rome in the shadow of the great architecture, the Colosseum, the culture, the literature of Rome, the Senate, the Caesars, their military exploits, marching through the arch of Titus, have you seen where they carry the menorah and the other loot that they got from the Temple in Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 AD, marching triumphantly into Rome, bringing captives and the loot from a devastated and defeated Israel, is inscribed right on the arch of Titus, to this day, the ruins of it yet remain, and the Romans were privy to all of this great spectacular chariot races and athletic events and great pomp and ceremony, so when Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, he's making a remarkable statement, and I'll tell you what you dear saints, you'll never know how foolish the message of the gospel is until you have first to bring it to a Jew, because the Jew is the epitome of that which is revered by men as civilization, the epitome of what is rational, what is cerebral, what is cultural, what is ethical, what is moral, and the gospel is a piece of foolishness, think on that, what is its essential message?

God lay aside his deity and took upon himself the form of a man, by being conceived and born out of the womb of a virgin, in a little nothing place of a little nothing nation, living an obscure life for 30 years, and then after a brief 3 year period of message and ministry, suffering the death of a criminal, the most disgraceful form of death which every Roman knew, Paul was not crucified, he was beheaded, why?

Because crucifixion was reserved exclusively for criminals or for people in rebellion, but if you had any kind of status as a human being, the dignified way for you to pay the capital punishment was beheading, Paul was beheaded, Peter was crucified upside down at his own request, so that this Jesus whom you are proclaiming has suffered the greatest indignity known to Rome through his death at the cross, and you are saying that this was very God, the son of God and very God, and that in fact his death was necessary and voluntary, and that his blood shed in that suffering and death has an efficacy to remove sin, and that by calling on his name a salvation is obtained which is valid eternally, have you ever thought how foolish that message is?

Yet Paul says I'm not ashamed of the gospel, it is the power of God unto salvation, the message itself is the power of God, because God chooses the things that are foolish to confound the things that are wise, the message is the statement of the genius of God who could have conceived and have obtained eternal salvation in perhaps other ways that would have commended itself as a message with which we would have had greater comfort to present, but this message is contrary to all that is reasonable, rational, that commends itself to man's intellect, it's a piece of foolishness and weakness by design, and yet God honors it to those who proclaim it by faith as being the very power of God unto salvation.

So that's how Paul begins his great statement, and the reason is to encourage the church in the Rome that is the seat of civilization, that this message however foolish is God's power, and not to be ashamed, but rather to rejoice and to exult because you yourself are the recipients of that word and therefore constitute the assembly of God that the church has saved.

So God saves through the message of the gospel, that it's power is operative unto salvation and it's through the gospel alone, it is the gospel that is God's power unto salvation, and that this word of God is powerful and living, though foolish.

The Divine Priority of the Jew First

So I'm saying, and he says to the Jew first and also to the Greek, why that priority and why that order? Any thought that this is not some arbitrary thing on God's part, that there's a divine logic to the Jew first?

The Greek would not be as intimidating as the Jew, and nothing makes you more conscious of yourself as a Gentile than to stand before the Jew who is the epitome of those things that are cerebral, mental, intellectual, formidable, and opposed to the message of the gospel itself, and that their history insulates them against receiving it, because the very name of Jesus, the word gospel, is like waving the proverbial red flag in a bull's face.

So God is saying, if you're going to see the power, you're going to see it in the place where it must be demonstrated because the forces against its receiving by Jews are most adverse. For the Jew to receive this is totally uncommon.

Everything militates against the Jew's consideration, his history, Satan's misuse of the word of the name Jesus, the church's conduct, which is a stink throughout history toward the Jew. Everything militates against the Jew's consideration, but you're not absolved from your responsibility because of that.

You still have an obligation to observe the priority of God to the Jew first, though it will mean your death. You'll taste death. You'll have a door slammed in your face. You'll be mocked. You'll be shredded by their superior intellect and their power.

You'll never feel yourself more weak and frail and shallow than to stand before so imposing and intimidating a people, but for those reasons, you're not absolved. In fact, it's for those reasons that you're called because if you're not faced this test at the very inception of your obedience, what then can be expected from you thereafter?

Personal Witness and the Cost of Preaching to Jews

I won't ask how many have actually confronted a Jew with the message of the gospel, but I can tell you as a Jew confronting Jews, I am intimidated right through to my boots, my bootstraps. I've had doors slammed in my face and shredded with the absurdity.

Who do you think you are to dare have the impudence to bring that name to our consideration and to come on the Shabbat with a Gentile Bible under your arm to my door where the mezuzah is hanging. You know what the mezuzah is?

That Jews kiss before they go in when they come out and in it is a scroll from Deuteronomy that thou shalt love the Lord to God with all thy heart and you're going to pass through that and bring this Goyesha, Gentile message is the height of impudence and arrogance, but only a son will bring it because it's a death to face this backlash.

So if I'm experiencing that as a Jew with Jews, what would you experience as a Gentile with Jews and yet you're called to experience it? And have you noticed that there's a sufficient proliferation of Jews in virtually every community so that we are without excuse.

There were Jews in Rome at the time of which Paul spoke that and there are Jews everywhere in the world. I have found them in Asia, in Yugoslavia, in places where you would think that there would not be again any presence.

There's always a minimal presence as if to maintain attention by which this cannot be dismissed as academic, but actual and still being required. We went to the synagogue in the capital city of Bulgaria, which is Sofia and in a corner room is the congregation.

The Jewish population of Bulgaria has been so reduced that their service is conducted in a side room, but we went into that room and sat in the back. I was with a few brothers and my eye surveys the room and fell on one man who is especially dark and prominent.

And when we left about a half hour later, he follows us out onto the sidewalk wanting to know who we are and why we are in his synagogue in this capital city. And so as I could explain, he invites us the next day to visit his new building, his Jewish community center.

He's a Lubavitcher Hasid, 25 years old, sent from Jerusalem to establish an outreach in Bulgaria. We went the next day. He had refreshments on the table. He gave us a complete tour of the building. And then we sat with him at the end.

We spent hours with this dear man in which he confessed that for the first time in his Jewish life, he has experienced antisemitism. He grew up in Israel, a Jewish nation, but when he came to Europe and Bulgaria and was walking by one of the schoolyards when the kids spotted him with his black hat, his black coat and his black beard, they began to chase him and pelt him with stones and call out names.

And so he's sharing with us this new experience by which we could say you're only at the beginning. There's going to be woe for the Jews of Bulgaria and all over the world in the time of Jacob's trouble.

And we bear that message to alert you and the believing church to anticipate it. And would you receive our prayer? Yes. And so we prayed for this dear man. And so there's a relationship that has been occasioned that's waiting on the shelf for the believers in Sophia to follow up with this dear man who was so receptive with us.

Witness in Hasidic Jewish Communities

So I'm taking Brian to that same movement in Brooklyn. It's headquarters, 777 Eastern Parkway. And we came down to a thousand men with their talism, their prayer shawls on, bowing, facing the ark where the Torah is and taking it out and walking around the room, men kissing it, touching it with their tzitzits, with their prayer shawls.

And here we stand like two conspicuous lumps. I'm dressed in black, but I don't have a beard and I'm wearing the hat that I've got in Yugoslavia, which is close enough to what they wear, but a much cheaper edition.

And there's a man who's looking at us and he comes over. Brian will remember an older man. Can I help you? We're evidently strangers. And we said, yes, do you have the service in English that we can follow what is being expressed?

And he found us a Hebrew English book and we were trying to follow. And then from time to time he would come and explain to us what's going on. So as we came to the end, he said, and where are you men eating at the conclusion of this service?

I said, we have no plans. He said, I would be delighted if you would be my guest. And we came across the street where he has his apartment and had the midday meal, the Shabbat meal at his home with 20 others at his table, three of whom were rabbis, young rabbis.

And it was a remarkable time of fellowship and of sharing. Of course, he's asking Brian, you a Gentile, what are you doing here? And he's trying to explain with me. So right away questions are raised on a Jewish man brings a Gentile.

And so as much as we could, it was our initial visit. The man is a teacher in that movement. His name is Greenberg. Do you remember his first name? And then I left him my phone number. I don't know what I did.

I wrote him a little note. I couldn't give him my phone number. How come? Because you can't write on the Shabbat. Writing is work. Didn't you know that? There are things you need to know. Elementary things.

I could not write my phone number, but I sent him a little card expressing our gratitude for taking us in as strangers, how grateful we were and how blessed we were. And leaving my phone number in the event that you would again like to extend fellowship, we would love to see you again and bring the book that I promised you of my initial experience in God without telling him what it was about.

And sure enough, a couple of months later, I got a phone call after the longest silence in which I thought we had been dismissed, inviting me again to be at his table. And this time I brought the book Ben Israel and shared my testimony.

And he was hearing and his wife, fewer people than the first time, but it was an extraordinary opportunity for witness. And he wouldn't take the book. I had to carry it out with me because he said, is there any reference to the New Testament in your book?

I said, of course, my first revelation was in the reading of the Gospel of John and that book records that episode. I cannot receive it then. Anything that alludes to, let alone the New Testament itself, I cannot have in my possession or in my house.

I didn't know that. So there's a remarkable, what's the word? Not just an antipathy, but a principle in their movement, maybe without the, throughout the whole of orthodoxy that is opposed even to so much as looking in that book or having it in their possession.

It is for them more reprehensible than for us, the Book of Mormon or some new age kind of thing that we know is satanic. For them, that's what the New Testament represents. Why? Because it's the account of a deceiver, a magician, there's another word they use, a sorcerer, who learned from us his practices and performed them so as to turn Jews away from the law and to follow himself.

So there could be nothing more reprehensible than a man bringing people in devoted attention to himself and away from the law and for that reason he is detestable and he's an enemy to this day of Jewish people, Judaism and the God of our fathers himself.

The man is a sorcerer and I was attending a Saturday morning discussion of one of the principal books of the Hasidic movement called Tanya and I was, one day as I came up into the floor where the room, one of the two teachers who was a financier, two men taught, financier and a doctor and is brilliant the way they relate one to the other and I enjoyed thoroughly those sessions and never once opened my mouth.

I never even so much as asked the question, I never took opportunity to say, well yes but the New Testament says nothing like that, but I was met at the door and forbidden to enter because they had discussed it among themselves that though this man has not utilized an opportunity to in any way bring his dissension, he's still too dangerous to be allowed to remain because he believes in a sorcerer and is deceived and therefore will be an instrument for the deception of others.

So sorry Mr. Katz but we will not allow you to continue to attend. I'm being asked what recent episode, these are the recent episodes, very instructive for me because I did not understand how deep is the enmity and hostility toward Jesus that yet remains.

Hostility at Vassar and the Witness of Stephen

Though I should have remembered that when I spoke at that college in upstate New York, the girls school begins with a V, Vassar, that that day as I'm walking through the building some Jew, now as co-ed, some Jewish student looks up at me and says, you'll get yours tonight.

I thought whatever does he mean and that night I'm speaking before a Christian congregation, Christian students and those who have come from the outlying communities and the doors burst open and in came a dozen Hasidim, Lubavitcher Hasidim, black suited, black beard, black eyed, black fedoras, the Jewish Mafia and they came into that building with a bang and people stopped breathing, they were terrifying.

Talk about intimidation, they never sat down, they placed themselves strategically around the building and people were overwhelmed and overcome by the fright and one guy was as close to me as our sister here and looking at me with deadly eyes, if looks could kill, that this Jewish man, this traitor, he's got to be a traitor, what is he being paid for this because what reasonable Jew would ever subscribe to this noxious Greek pagan religion and seek to persuade Jews that it's true, so he must be a flunky, he's got to be paid, well for what other reason would a man do this and he's using a Greek pagan Gentile Bible to convey and my message was about Abraham and circumcision, I'll always remember that and I had to finish my message with this man standing right in my face, try that sometime, it prepares you to speak to Christian congregations that are a little bit hostile, I finished that message and my practice was to open for questions and the moment I opened, these guys took over and they just, they rioted and I'll always remember this man, how dare you come with this Gentile Bible, you ignoramus, you who do not even speak Hebrew and seek to persuade Jews to subscribe to your noxious pseudo religion and went on like that and then he said, if your Jesus was alive today, we would do to him what our fathers did, but he said, we know that you love us cats and that's the last thing I remember because when he said, we know that you love us cats, I said, what?

I never told you that, I never knew it myself, where did you get that? So that was a remarkable episode that again shows this deep-grained hostility that indeed is capable of doing again to Jesus what it did before and if it can't get its hands on Jesus, it will get its hands on those who represent him, so it may well be that the thing that will conclude the age and will communicate Jesus to those who will not be able to kick against the pricks, will be the persecution of Jews themselves against believers as it came against Stephen unto the death of Martyrdom, alone by which Paul, then Saul, was pricked at the observation of a man dying with such tranquility and such magnanimity as to forgive his murderers and to see the heavens opened and Jesus as a man standing at the right hand of the power of the Father, it may take again the same demonstration because Paul could not swallow that down, there's something released in suffering and death as witness for which there's no substitute, it's one thing to say are you saved brother and have you received the blood of Jesus, it's another thing to be a witness with your blood, in fact the word martyr means witness, ultimate witness is ultimate death, so when Michael said to come before a Jew to bring the gospel is a death, no question about it, it's a form of martyrdom of a willing and voluntary kind, you know you're not going to survive the occasion if not physically at least spiritually and emotionally, but it may take a very literal martyrdom again at the hands of outraged Jews and the way in which we received that suffering from them because they opposed themselves in their ignorance as they did with Stephen, though he had demonstrated the power of miracles, though his face shone like an angel, though he was able to confound the darkness of the law with a greater wisdom, it still did not dissuade them from stoning him to death, but it was in the way in which his death was received that Saul obtained a witness from which he could not turn and he could not kick against the pricks and he was prepared by that for the revelation of the who confronted him on the road to Damascus, that may be a paradigm, that may be a pattern of the final last days witness to the Jew, when nothing less than the sacrificial death of martyrs will persuade those to believe who have been hostile to the last moment as Saul himself was, because they laid their garments at his feet who took Stephen as their first victim.

Isaiah 53 and the Suppression of Messianic Prophecy

So we have to know the depth of the intransigence of Jewish hostility to the gospel. When I read Isaiah 53 to my mother here some years ago, she had never heard it, she said, where are you reading in the New Testament?

I said I'm not reading from the New Testament at all, I'm reading from the greatest of the prophets of Israel, Isaiah. She said, I've never heard that, of course it speaks so clearly about a suffering servant who was marred more than any man that he had no beauty that we should desire him.

She knew of whom it was speaking. She said, I've never heard that. I said, you never will. She said, I've never heard it in the synagogue. Do you guys know that every Shabbat morning, not only is the selection from the books of Moses read, but a selection from the prophets, that in one year's reading, all five books of Moses have been chanted, rather than read.

The speed of it is remarkable, because how can a one hour reading one day of the week, one morning of the week, cover all five books? So they read large, they chant large segments. Of course, those who are bobbing and weaving with the reading are familiar with the text, and they have read it themselves at their own leisure and have studied it.

But what is being rehearsed now is more ceremonial than instructive. But what follows the reading from the Torah is the reading from the Haftorah. This is what we Jewish kids do when we're bar mitzvahed.

We read or we chant that portion from the prophets appropriate to the day of our bar mitzvah. I wish I could know what my portion was that I chanted in my ignorance, so that my mother could cry because she had seen her son through Hebrew school and through bar mitzvah, who was himself a pagan, and never again darkened the doorway of a synagogue.

It did my duty. But in these selections from the prophets, Isaiah 53 is omitted. So they'll come to a certain reading 52 -12, and the next week they continue from 54 and completely omit that section. It's hard for me to believe that more modern day rabbis, post-Christian rabbis, have not consciously seen to it that that segment would be omitted if it was not already omitted because of its clear Christological emphasis.

You need to know that the councils of the rabbis carries the same weight and authority as Moses himself. In fact, even a greater authority that can actually controvert anything that Moses may have spoken, and in fact even God himself.

That the council of the rabbis is the supreme statement of God himself, even to supersede scripture. And so by that means, Jews are denied a hearing and a consideration of the most profound statement of Messiah and the shedding of blood by which salvation is to be obtained.

The Gospel Must Be Embodied in the Messenger

The promulgators of the gospel themselves have to be the demonstrators, the living actualization of their own message, as Paul himself was. But for us, for the gospel being reduced to a formula, and our own lifestyle and character is not in keeping with it, that word falls to the ground.

It loses its cogency, its authority, and its power. So there's an obligation for character and life in keeping with the word that we're called to exposit. Of course, for Paul, the New Testament was not even available to him.

So what did he employ when he says that, he sums up the gospel as being, someone help me in Corinthians, died and was raised on the third day according to the scriptures. According to what scriptures?

Old Testament scriptures. So he was able to glean from the repository of the Psalms, the prophets, and the books of Moses sufficient testimony to establish the case for Jesus and his witness to Jews. And we ought also to have that same ability.

So it requires of us to do our homework and find what he found by which he presented the case for the Lord. So in fact, after my own first encounter with Jesus and the revelation that came in the first reading of a New Testament, I went from Greece to Egypt, where I contracted hepatitis and was twice in the hospital with that and an ear infection.

But in the hospital, I'm reading for the first time, the five books of Moses that came into my hands with the Jewish community of Cairo, where I was living and relating. In fact, they paid my hospital bills.

And so I'm seeing for the first time how Christological the five books of Moses are and how in the commentary by Rabbi Hertz in that first edition, how careful he is to alert the reader to avoid the Christological implications to be found in the Old Testament readings.

So we have our work cut out for us, but there is a basis for an appeal to Jews. The thing is that most Jews are as ignorant of Old Testament scripture as they are of new. In fact, their secular mentality is opposed to scripture itself.

And that perhaps the most begrudging thing they can allow is that the Bible is a piece of culture. It's something written by men over a span of time that may have curiosity and interest, but no way is it to be understood the word of God, because that would offend their rational categories that God can inspire a word and to be conveyed through men and so registered that its veracity can continue uninterruptedly throughout the generations without loss.

That the Bible itself is a mind boggling contradiction to the secularly minded men, which is of the kind that I myself was until that day on that Greek ship in route from Italy to Athens, which was for me homage, because I was more Greek than I was a Jew and had up at the blackboard of my classroom in California, go Greek, because Greek was the celebration of man.

Know thyself, man is the measure of all things, all came from Greece, which Rome then adopted. And so I'm reading a Greek book on a Greek ship, on my way to a Greek capital destination, which was for me homage, because I'm a Jew by birth, but I'm a Greek by conviction.

I'm rational, I'm cerebral. And then the Lord reveals himself in the gospel of John. And then gives me the opportunity in the subsequent weeks in Egypt to ponder how this revelation could come from a God who is the only God.

And yet in a figure and name that has been made reprehensible for Jewish consideration through history. I'm wrestling, how could God ask me, a Jew to subscribe to that name and become a Christian with those who have historically opposed us and been our murderers throughout the ages.

So this is a great travail and struggle, which Jews will face in the last days. So we need to know that they're not only hostile to the New Testament, they are callous against all scripture because their categories, their cerebral categories, their empirical categories do not permit for anything supernatural.

That even when I find myself engaged with an Orthodox Jew, not the Lubavitcher Hasidic, the more modern Orthodox with their Van Dycks and their Yarmulkes, I find out that in the exchange that they themselves do not believe that God parted the Red Seas.

That it was a confluence of tides. That they have to find a naturalistic explanation even for supernatural events. Though they are fastidious in their practices, in their orthopraxy, they are not as careful in their orthodoxy.

Resurrection and the Absurdity of the Gospel

Because their secular minds cannot permit them to believe in the supernaturalness of God. You see why it is that he had to send his only begotten son to be that very demonstration and to raise him from death and why the issue of his resurrection is contested to this day.

And remember that when the report came from those soldiers who were posted to see to the security of that tomb and told the authorities what had happened supernaturally, they were bribed to say that his disciples had stole his body away and that that story is believed to this day.

So that we are responsible for what we believe. And secular Jews would prefer to believe that the body was stolen than that the body was raised. Because the issue of resurrection is the issue. If Jesus is a prosumer and a man himself deceived and suffering from a megalomania of some absurd thing that he is not only the Messiah but very God, then the issue of whether he is resurrected is the issue of the truth of those claims.

So where is his body? Well the disciples stole it away. What else are you to believe? That the power of God broke through a sealed tomb and raised a dead body and ascended it up on high and imbued it with a newness of life that continues still and is imparted to believers by the Holy Spirit poured out from the throne of heaven when he hasn't ascended?

You guys need to know just how absurd this whole gospel is if you are going to make peace with it and make it your own and communicate it as the very truth of God and the nub and nexus of very reality itself that makes everything that purports to be true false and gives us a prism of seeing by which everything that is celebrated by man in the world is rendered in ipso facto in one fell swoop as false in view of this greater truth.

Got that? You have to be nearly insane to subscribe to this and make this the buttress and principle of your own life and being, which of course most of Christendom has not done. It does not understand the gospel, it does not proclaim the gospel, but they use the word gospel as if they have a familiarity with it but they have never pondered or understood what in fact it is and I'm saying that they never will understand what in fact it is until they are required to bring it to the world in its most intimidating expression, the Jew.

The Jew First as a Spiritual Confrontation

When you touch the Jew, you touch the world. You touch the world in its wisdom, its mentality, its categories, its pride, and its power. That's why there's a fierce reaction that is more than just human.

There's a rage. Wherever you see rage and fury, you know that this is more than man. This is the powers of darkness themselves who have taken this people captive and employ them because who are the foremost architects of the modern world?

Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Steven Spielberg, the guy who was the head of Time Warner Corporation, Jerry, got his last name, Jewish. They're all Jews prominent in industry, in commerce, in advertising, in culture, in publications.

The New York Times was founded by a Jew, Ochs, O-C-H-S, a German Jew and German Jewish civilization is the predominant form and authority and power of what yet prevails in world Judaism today. It is formidable, formidable.

You have no idea but you need to have an idea because you're called to this very confrontation and very conflict because to communicate this to the Jew and to break through with the Jew is to pierce the world at the very crossroads of world civilization, power and prestige by which millions are held captive.

The world, let's put it this way, the modern world is essentially Jewish. New York City is essentially Jewish and its influence is global. To break into that and to reveal that as being false and predicated on false assumptions and lies given by the father of lies by the power of truth is a remarkable penetration that can only come in the power of God, in the power of the word, in the power of the spirit by those who believe it and will obey God as sons to the father who says go ye into all the world and preach this gospel to every creature beginning at Jerusalem to the Jew first and if we will not obey that first command and that first priority what are we signaling to the principalities and powers of the air but that we are a disobedient people and we take our own liberty about which of God's requirements we will observe and which we will shuck off as not being serviceable or out for whatever reason.

See what I mean? If we miss God at this point we miss God and that's why the powers of the air hold the church in contempt and can say Jesus we know and Paul we know but who are you? You presumer? Just because you have you've adopted the vocabulary and do this or that we are totally unimpressed, we yawn in your face.

You have no persuasion that makes us to fear because you yourself say Lord but you do not acknowledge him in truth in the first call to which he's given you to the Jew first. You got that? That's how critical disobedience is and who explicated and demonstrated that more than Paul himself in whatever community he came he went to the Jew first and even after saying after he was beaten and left for dead or whipped or rejected I go now to the Gentiles.

No you have refused so now I go to the lowest of the low but what did he do when he came to his next destination? He went again to the Jew first. He preached in the synagogues and what did he do in his last days in Rome in the place that he was given to occupy?

He received Jews. He received the Jews in Rome and spoke to them of the things pertaining to the kingdom with virtually his last breath. From his first breath to his last breath he exemplifies exactly what he's exhorting the church to do because that's what an apostle is.

He doesn't just give a series of injunctions that others are required to hear and observe. He himself explicates and is the demonstration of that very thing in the reality of his own life. Though it cost him greatly.

How many times was he stoned, left for dead, beaten with rods? All because of his obedience to the Lord, to the Jew first and the reasons need to be examined not only because Jews will be the essential promulgators but because to them was given the covenants, the promises, the oaths.