Dvd 14 the Core of Prophetic and Apostolic Reality — Art Katz

The Church as an End-Time People and Israel’s Final Trouble

And see their intensity, and their passion, and their character, and their nature. And our hearts call upon them for the kingdom of God, that they might be an end-time people of God, proclaiming His salvation throughout the earth.

The issue of history, which is the issue of the nations, is the issue of the church. ...catalogical mindedness, which includes an apocalyptic mindedness, where, of course, the things of the end have to do with final judgments, with devastation, with fire, with ruin, with explosion, with flight, all the kinds of things...

But before it's glorious, it's painful. And particularly for the people of Israel. So for those of us who are at a level of sentimentality, and want to see these people to succeed at last, it is unbearably painful to consider that there's yet a final apocalyptic dealing of God, called the time of Jacob's trouble, through which they must pass, wherever Jacob is, not only the nation there in the Middle East, but Jews in Wellington, and everywhere, and in America, especially in flight from persecution in North America.

You know, it's a remarkable thing to be called to an obedience like that in the coldest part of the North American continent, where our temperatures are always consistently below that of Alaska. I don't know why it is there's a draft that comes down out from the north that brings a severe chill, and sometimes goes on monotonously, day after day, week after week, 30 below zero, 20 below zero, with the windchill fact that John and Jane can tell you stories.

I just shared one episode where we plugged the car in, because we had a sister pregnant about to give birth, and wanted to make sure that if there was an emergency, we could take her to the hospital. So we plugged the car in, all of our cars have plugs, so that the oil in the, whatchamacallit, you know, will be fluid.

The next morning, there was crisis. I don't know what the windchill factor was with the cold. It was severe. Well, the engine started, but the transmission was frozen stiff, and the gears could not be shifted, and finally we got a doctor from the Indian reservation to come and save her life.

So we lived in a place of peril, trial, struggle, that magnifies every issue, and saves us from dreamlike fancy of what we are, so long as our life only consists of succession of Sundays. But when it includes Monday, and every day of the week with the same people, in a severe environment, living beneath the standard of poverty established by the United States government, then you have a formula in which the deep and true issues of life are going to be expressed, and are going to require.

So that a year in that environment is more conducive to true maturity than ten or more years in the happiest and best of charismatic fellowships, if they're confined only to Sundays and midweek services.

That was our environment, our formative life. So the powers of the air know whom to fear. They know whom to respect. And maybe of all the prophecies that have been spoken to me over the years, the one that I perhaps cherish more than many, is that the powers of the air will fear you.

They will be in dread at the sound of your voice. Your presence will terrify them. I'd like to see that fulfillment. And I gave an invitation to ministers in the Philippines. What would you rather do, impress men or terrify the powers of the air?

These precious Brown brothers, all of whom have come out of poverty and are enjoying free peace suits and a salary, food on the table, even a secretary in some instances, were faced with a question of, do you want to advance in that religious system and defer to men and find favor with men and advancement and continuation in that religious security?

Or would you prefer to be a terror to the powers of the air? In order to be the latter, you have to forsake the desire for the approval of men and the promotion that comes from it, and risk even the measure of security that you're enjoying now with the prospect of going back to the frightful conditions of poverty out of which you've come.

I've never seen men rise to an invitation with more trembling than that invitation in the Philippines. My Lord, they knew exactly what was being required because so long as they are deferential to men and concerned with success and escalation in a system, the powers of the air will only yawn in their face.

But when they declare a death sentence on self-interest and an end to poverty and want to be this kind of threat to those powers that brood over every city of their land, it's going to take a rejection of the one to obtain the other.

And they rose with a real appropriation of death and of the cross. It was a historic occasion. I'll never forget it. I came out sweating because the place itself was hot. I had poured out my soul, bringing them to this climax of choice, which was not in my thought when the message began, but it was the logic of the message to give such a call.

We stood on the sidewalk, the brother with me from Ben Israel, sweating. I said, Lord, what I would love right now is just to be on my back in a pool. Where do you think we were within an hour? I was on my back in a pool in one of the most lush private clubs in a hotel in that city because the Filipino woman who was chauffeuring us about was a member.

All you have to do is just breathe for the Lord and intimate, and there it is. I'm calling men to lay down their lives in utter consecration, and there I am on my back. Such are the paradoxes of the faith that if they knew, they would say, cats, thou hypocrite.

But you know, when you've paid your dues, you can speak like that to men, and you can be in Egypt, and you can be in third-world countries, and they don't have to know that you've lived for 30 years in a standard that is lower than their own.

You don't have to announce it, but something is conveyed of the reality that has settled as a spiritual residue in your inmost being that somehow touches every word that proceeds from you with a quality of reality that it would not have if you were the typical American holiday inn specialist flitting from hotel to hotel and meeting to meeting.

And so I esteem that reality because reality is the name of the game, and we need to be able to come to people who are living under difficult and perhaps in the future even grim conditions and be able to speak to them words of life and things that would beggar even their imagination, and convey that with a conviction and an authority that is not the mere escalation of your voice.

I'm saying all that to say this, what I must need to be in myself is what you need to be in yourself corporately as the church. That resonance, that authority, that depth, that reality. And I know that you don't have sub-zero climates to which to run, but when you open yourself to the Lord to be such a people, he has ways to temper the soul and to fit you to be part of something that can be rightly called apostolic and prophetic, which includes this radical, not just an acknowledgement, a radical anticipation of the end where it would not be exaggeration to say it's going to be marked by suffering.

There's going to be conflict. In fact, I have never been more ravaged spiritually in my history in service to the Lord than here in Wilmington. The brother is here in whose place I stayed that night in which I don't think I slept a wink because all through the night I was being run over by massive Mack trucks and bludgeoned and bloodied and beaten, and that is not a word for it.

It had just happened to me in Manila. All through the night, up. And there's my brother from Ben Israel no longer with us, left in indignation and a huff. The brother with whom I went to the house of the Lord has lifted up his heel, but at that time he was with me in Manila and here, and I turned my flashlight on him in hope that maybe I might wake him, that he might not allow me to suffer this by myself because it was agonizing.

No, he slept right through. Never lost a beat. Snored right through the night with wonderful rest while I myself was groaning with a beating. I don't know how to express this. To feel it as if it were in fact physical, where you're almost left for dead, you're pounded, your mind, your thought, your heart, your feelings, your emotions, your body.

It's an anguish. I experienced that in Manila, I came here, and I experienced it the first night in Wellington. And then it occurred to me, both are capital cities. And that's where the powers of the air are most pronounced.

And somehow, why did they run me over? Because little thing that I am in myself, I represent something of a kind that constitutes a threat that they recognize. You take the end seriously. You're being prepared for a consummation that shall make its requirement.

And that it will not be romantic to suggest that not all of us will survive. That there will be martyrs again. There will be cracked skulls and blood running into eyes and the kinds of things that we think happen to people in distant places, we need to consider will happen to people in places like this.

That there will be people who kill us and claim they're doing God a service. That we will constitute some threat. Although we think ourselves and are harmless as doves, yet to them, what we represent, our unwillingness to be fitted into the ecumenical design, our insistence on this narrow gospel and its promulgation, especially to the Jew, a community that they don't want to see stirred, perhaps.

Whatever it is, there will be factors that if we determine on being an end time people, eschatologically minded, moving toward conscious conclusion, which means that our every service and activity has got to be something provided toward that end.

There's no such thing as just a message in itself. Everything, our activity, our fellowship, our services, our elements in the formation of a people who are apprehending the end and know that there will be ultimate requirement for which every present service and Bible study and so on is provision.

Got the picature? I love my wife's use of that word. She's Danish. She always adds a syllable. Picature. I'm asking the church everywhere. You got the picature? You must get the picature. Consciously and willfully.

Spiritual Warfare and the Corporate Church

When you do, the powers of the air recognize something has happened. Something has shifted. And you who have been up till now an object of indifference, which they say, Jesus we know, Paul we know, who are you?

All of a sudden know you and take you seriously and give you a new kind of regard and opposition that was not your experience before. And who wants that? Who wants to experience the harassments and the machinations of these powers?

I just gave you a taste of what it means and how they can work a man over in his sleep. Rob him of it and crunch him and leave him almost for dead. They're not a light thing. So I can almost say the church that is the church understands the subject of the principalities and the powers of the air.

It's not a little cutesy stuff. It's not the issue of individual deliverance to which it has been reduced in our generation. It's the issue of ultimate conflict with those powers who, if they had known, might not have crucified the Lord of Glory.

They crucified the Lord of Glory. The instrument was Rome and the willing condescension of Jewish leadership, but they were the architects of that death. And the cruelty of that death, the savage, brutal treatment, was not just the expression of Roman civilization who devised crucifixion, but the powers of darkness that had full sway through that civilization to give expression to its essential character through cruelty.

There's a war on ultimate conflict in which we can only employ spiritual weapons. And what does Paul say? We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, the rulers of this world's darkness.

This present world, they're rulers of this world's darkness. You know it, don't you? Why do my pants keep coming off? I should have had more fish. Okay. So some of you have heard these things and you've read them, the book Apostolic Foundations.

If you don't have that book, sell your shirt, sell whatever it takes. You must have a classic. It's the summation of 30, 40 years of groaning over these realities and seeking to live them out. But in it I take up the remarkable scripture.

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but we wrestle against principalities and powers, rulers of this world. We wrestle. So what is the distinction of an apostolic prophetic body? It's a corporate entity that can wrestle and knows against whom it's wrestling and knows that something has got to come out of its deepest gut in order to win in this combat that will require sacrifice, fasting, prayer, discipline.

Because wrestling, and I am not in the natural a wrestler, I like boxing, but why does Paul use wrestling? Because wrestling is the summation not just of a man's skill and strength, but his grit, his moral determination that he cannot conceive of losing.

And whatever it takes in preparation, in investment, in sacrifice to be part of a corporate entity that can wrestle, because it's a we that wrestles. It's not an individual virtue also. We wrestle. And unless we are a we, there's no wrestling at all.

But to be that we means to go from our privatistic assemblage of individualities into an entity that is corporate and is the church that can wrestle. Because wrestling is not polite. You snot all over yourself and your sweat runs into your eyes and you're gasping for air and who knows what.

So you'll not be disposed to perform it if you're self-conscious or tidy or polite or respectable, which is characteristic of the atmosphere of our church setting. This is combat. This is struggle. And it requires the people who are not embarrassed to be on their floor and stretched out in agonizing intercessions and groanings.

Why? Because they've been through it together. They've been revealed long before. They've struggled with one another. They've had their embarrassments, their humiliations. There's nothing now that needs to be concealed or hidden.

It's all hanging out. And that itself is a suffering. That's more than embarrassment. That's humiliation. That's the cross. That's pain. To come to a body that is a we who can wrestle is already a statement of the cross.

And you'll not have any stomach. You'll not be disposed to leave your privacy. And it's safety, unless you know that you're moving toward a consummation, a conclusion, and you don't want to be found eternally embarrassed by learning then, at the end of the age, that you've lived beneath the glory of God and fallen short of the intention of God in a kind of a safe, predictive Christianity that did not make any ultimate requirement of you.

If you hear me long enough, it's only a matter of time before I use the word ultimate. We're going to face ultimate last days requirement to be to the Jew what we must in their hour of unbelievable severity that will eclipse any previous trouble that they've known.

It will make ultimate requirement of us because we'll be required to extend mercy, that they might obtain mercy. But how shall we extend it if we don't in fact have it? Well, we have it, Art, yeah. You have it, phragologically, you have it.

Technically, you have it as a doctrine, as an article of faith. But that's not going to do Jews a bit of good. They don't want your statement of mercy. They want palpable mercy. They'll need palpable mercy, the kind that saves them out of death because they'll be marred and battered more than any man.

Who should even look upon them if they have no beauty? They'll be despised the world over and harried and pursued by demonic powers that will not be satisfied with anything but their annihilation. And you're going to take them in, stinking, mean-spirited, and be caught in the process of doing so?

Hey, that might mean for you concentration camp or a death for yourself. Jews have never seen this. Could it well mean that God means that we ought to move them to jealousy? We'll be given in that final hour?

When they see from us an extension of mercy and unconditional love coming at risk and cost, they'll know that they'll know because we Jews have an uncanny ability to see through and know what is false and true, the phony and the real, and what we'll be seeing and receiving, we know, cannot be a posture.

It's not an affectation. It's not a display. Something deeply authentic, which is very God, is coming to us through Gentiles at risk of their lives while we're hated. Well, why don't they hate us? There's something unusual about this people.

They're so in God, and it's his mercy they're extending because these are the least of his brethren. How do we come to that condition? And ought we not to be preparing for it now? To be conscious of the end is not merely to have a theological disposition, but a practical recognition that that end is going to require something that is not presently available in practicality or in our character.

We're not there spiritually or morally, and we'll never get there independent of our brethren. We'll get there only with those of like mind and heart who are being formed together to be such a body. By its nature, it requires more than Sunday services.

So how much are we willing to be required of and how far are we willing to go? Am I just spitting out my final breath in vain that there's no real intention to be an apostolic and prophetic entity in this nation?

You don't mind talking about it and reading it and letting it infuse your coffee table conversation, but the reality that has got to be such that Jews will recognize very God in what you're able to extend because you have a mercy to extend, and not just the principle of it or the thought of it as an article of faith.

How did you obtain that mercy? Through your own struggle. I'll tell you what, dear saints, to go from this privatistic and anonymous thing called church today, where nothing is required of us but the dollar in the collection plate and the singing of the hymns, into the kind of facticity that I'm putting before you is clearly an ultimate challenge, ultimate requirement, multiple deaths.

I've suffered more at Ben Israel than I have suffered anywhere in the world against Jews who are hostile against me or any factor in the world. My greatest suffering has come in the body, which is the church.

Misunderstanding, spitting your guts out, being called an enemy of the gospel after you've sacrificed everything, or the humiliation of your wife yelling out for everyone to hear, go tell them what a great saint you are.

All of the embarrassments and things that could have been concealed if we had lived privately now come out in abundance in the reality that community is. It's a suffering, saints, and the only way to get through it, to achieve its purpose, is to receive mercy.

We need mercy. How long did it take us to realize that being nice guys before we came to community lasts only a week, 10 days in community. We're not nice guys enough. And the communion, the plastic little thing with a wafer that we had to tolerate once a month, it was grim and mechanical.

And we were glad when it was over. I thought, well, we'll come to community. Enough of that nonsense. You know what the strange thing was? We couldn't wait, not just once a month, once a week. And then it became every day.

And we couldn't afford wine. We had water. But for us, it was water turned to wine because we needed the substance and spirit and essence and power of the life of God merely to be to each other what we ought.

Communion, Mercy, and the Jealousy for God’s Glory

So this is going to mean a whole renaissance and review and fresh esteem for the sacraments of God, which have fallen into disuse or into trivial employment because our life has not been earnest enough.

Get earnest. Determined to be this. You'll rush to the communion table, and you'll be like me. Beside the occasions when you take it together with your brethren, you'll be taking it every morning by yourself in your necessary morning and devotional time.

Sometimes I take it before my devotional time because I know that I need a fresh implementation of his life even to go through the issues of communion, of devotion. I can't do Oswald Chambers' Justice and Spurgeon and my other readings and the psalm for the day and the chapter out of Proverbs.

It'll just be mechanical hash unless I'm coming to it with an intensity and seeking its application and being moved to references in Scripture in which before you know it, two hours are gone. It's an exertion.

I need even communion just for the process of devotion, let alone it's outworking. So you'll know that you're on the right track when you can't wait for the next occasion to take the Lord's body and the Lord's blood, and you'll no longer ever be satisfied to call either of those emblems.

The words will jam in your throat. This is substance, this is spirit, this is life, and we need it for we live through him and by him and for him and unto him, as Paul has said. For of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever.

Do you know what I'd say to this body that I'm describing for you, hypothetical body, that has this end-time view and is able to wrestle? It is also insanely jealous for the glory of God. Figure that one out.

So much so they're willing for every sacrifice. So much so they can bear the humility of community. They can bear the being misunderstood and all of the struggles and whatsoever is required because they don't want to fall short of his glory.

This is the distinctive of Paul. Take the jealousy of God's glory out from Paul and you no longer have Paul. This is the wellspring, this is the animus for his apostolic life, the jealousy for God's glory, not the success of the denomination or our ministry or whatever other lesser thing occupies us and we think sufficient motivation.

Only the jealousy for God's glory will enable you to be his fool. Only the jealousy for his glory will enable you to be for Israel, for the Jew, what you must because Paul's identification with Israel and his brilliant statement of the mystery of Israel in the church was not because of his own human and natural identification with his kinsmen as a Jew.

When he begins chapter 9 with, I would wish myself a curse on my brethren's sake, it's not a man speaking out of his racial ethnic identification. It's a man speaking out of his apostolicity because he wants their redemption, not from the level of a Jew as a Jew, but as an apostle for the glory of God.

So the whole great statement ends with, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. If I could do any last thing for the Church of New Zealand, if I had the means, I would give you a shot.

I would give you an injection of the jealousy for the glory of God. If I had any one thing that I could dispense, I would give you that because if you have that, everything else follows. We'll not get it by any means except being infused by the life of God, which by its nature is a jealousy for his glory.

That's an apostolic distinctive that we need to query, search, pray for, obtain, or we will fall short of the kind of life of sacrifice that true church will require. Only his jealousy for glory will enable us to bear Jews in their mean-spirited ingratitude when we encounter them or they encounter us in the last days.

If you're easy to be brought to a huff and a puff and you're not receiving appreciation for your sacrifice, and if that's the way they're going to be, we'll tough on them. You will have missed the historic moment for which all things have been moving from the beginning to the end.

Israel, the Wilderness of the Nations, and Christian Antisemitism

Because we read of Ezekiel in chapter 20, I will meet with you, God says to Israel, with a fury poured out, twice it's spoken, in the wilderness of the nations. And I'm the author of that statement that some previous visit to New Zealand, that the whole of New Zealand will be the wilderness of the nation for Jews.

Not just a corridor, not just some rural area, the whole of New Zealand will be the wilderness of nations for Jews who will fly through it, coming from God knows where, from the Philippines, from Bangkok, from San Francisco, because the stratagem of God will not be the shortest distance between two points.

But uprooting, sophisticated, urban Jews who have never cried to God, you'll get this morning's tape, will find themselves in such places of remoteness and obscurity and hiddenness and fear that they need to be encountered by those who in their mercy extended will see the face of God and not mere religious obligation.

If they see only your dutiful, obligatory, evangelical face, we have missed the historic moment. They've got to see a strange people who can take their abuse, take their mean-spirited attitude, their anger, because they're going to interpret this last uprooting, this anti-Semitism as another expression of the bankruptcy of Christianity, just as they have interpreted the Nazi Holocaust, and which to some degree is true.

Something like my experience and encounter with my Jewish kinsmen when I speak at university campuses as an ex-Marxist, and they see the name Katz, and I come into collision with them, and the anger sometimes is vitriolic.

You know how Jews look at a man like me? He's a traitor. Why else would a Jew in his right mind become a Christian and promulgate that Christianity to Jews? And dissuade them from their Judaism to adopt some kind of pagan hocus-pocus of some myth of death and resurrection and virgin birth, and dissuade us from our historic truth.

That man has got to be a traitor. He's in it for something. It can't be in his right mind. So there you stand, and they hold you accountable for the Holocaust, for the pogroms, for the persecutions, for the crusaders and the wholesale obliteration of Jewish communities as they travel through Europe and looted and pillaged and raped.

I'm just reading a book right now. David Barron. Before I fell asleep this afternoon, as long as I could keep my eyes open, I was reading about the treatment of the Jews in the Middle Ages. God. Germany, France, England.

The expulsions. The looting of them by their removal because they were in the banking business, which a Christian could not require usury. So they were functioning in a role that would bring envy, resentment, and bitterness to those who have to pay interest to Jews and watch them prosper.

And the way in which you can be saved from having to pay back is to kill them. Take their possessions and appropriate and loot their possessions. It's a bloodbath, you dear saints. Do your homework for God's sake and read what these people have suffered at the hands of ostensible Christians.

The Pope, the bishops, they ran into the castles for protection. They could not obtain it. The doors burst down and it was be baptized or die. And they died, sanctifying the name of the Lord, killing their own wives, killing their own children, and appointing someone who killed them and then leaped to his own destruction.

Women waded down their clothing with stones and jumped into rivers and streams holding their children, who would rather perish than face the prospect of baptism. That's the history. And every Jew knows it.

Without studying, he's intuited. He's taken it up with his mother's milk. It's in the air. Christianity has been our undoing. Of course, they can't distinguish between born again. It's all Christian. My mother wondered how I could ever go to Germany who would not set her foot in the Volkswagen.

The cards are stacked against us. When these people will come to us out of their last extremity, and what we are to them will be the issue of their survival, their redemption, and their return to Zion, that there might be everlasting joy upon their heads, mourning and sighing, fleeing away.

You cannot have a view of the end and omit God's final dealings with Israel. Through a time of Jacob's trouble and universal sifting through all nations, as we're told in Amos 9, I will sift you through all nations.

Better to believe that, anticipate that, and prepare for that, even if it does not come. Then it should come and find you unprepared, overwhelmed, because when it does come, I'll tell you this, it will come suddenly.

I'm still on the first paragraph. Well, we can stay up together until 3 o 'clock this morning, and you can see me off. Why should I suffer alone? Okay. When the powers of the air see us with this disposition, this willingness, this embrace, this mentality, we're mocked.

We're a threat to be opposed, upon whom their vicious spite will be ventilated, because such a body will find itself in felt disjuncture and enmity with the world. One of the greatest compliments I ever got from the Sons of God pastor hearing me speak to a college group, he said, I never heard a man who more hates the world than this Auschwitz.

We will be in disjuncture with the world. We will be increasingly ill at ease and not at home. This world is spiraling downward, and its moral character will become increasingly offensive. We cannot give ourselves to it or remain in silence about it.

Something will be required from us. We will be in increasing disjuncture with the world, and the friction will be evident with our kids in school, society, the things that are taking place, and that is a necessary character, characteristic of such a church.

Discernment, Moral Witness, and Perilous Times

It's conscious of the evil that is in the world and knows its origin from below. Its values, its systems, its false values will be more and more acutely discerned and repudiated. You know when I had the TV set removed from my house years ago?

When I came in one evening and all of the kids from the community were glued to this TV set and they were watching something about the Olympics and the love affair between a Russian woman athlete and an American, there was no sex, there was no foul language, there was nothing in it that was visibly vile, and when I saw what they were watching, something rose up in me in such indignation that I did not even have a moment to explain myself.

I went, I didn't just shut the cotton-picking thing off, I pulled out the plug, and that thing was out of the house the next day because there's nothing more vile, more dangerous, more evil, than that which purports to be good.

Romantic love. It was out of the world and the wisdom of the world and the values of the world, and here are the children of the community sucking it up as if it were going out of style. They would have been less affected if they had watched pure pornography than to see something that is ostensibly good and romantic but utterly false and the values of which are vile if you can but see it.

And you need to see it. I don't know of a church in any other nation, perhaps Switzerland, that has as much requirement to see through the things that are apparent to the things that are real than the church in New Zealand.

I myself would be a goner if I lived here. I'd be seduced by the environment, the beauty of it, the clear skies, the sun, the whole thing needs to be contended against and seen through. You have to develop a faculty to see through the things that are apparent to the things that are real.

In a word, you have to become like Paul. Seeing the things that are invisible and eternal and the eternal weight of glory will give you a proper seeing toward the things that are visible while the powers of the world want to suck you in and draw you in to say that what is visible constitutes what is real.

Are you guys following me? I'll tell you what, if you persist in this and it won't be easy and you'll be a mocked person because you'll be looked upon as sour or disgruntled or what's wrong with this?

All the other kids are doing it. My friend's mother lets him do it. Why are you so upset over something that does not seem to be apparently evil? That's why it's evil. What does it say in the last days?

Perilous times shall come. Men shall become lovers of self, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. Why doesn't the scripture say in the last days dangerous times will come? That's a word we're more familiar with.

Perilous? What's the difference between perilous and dangerous? And if you're not asking questions like that, you're not the biblical exegete that you must become. Theology is not for theologians only.

It's our inheritance, our legacy. We need to be reading these giants and studying them, Karl Barth and Romans and John Stopp and various other commentators and the treasury of David and Spurgeon and being able to draw out and compare word for word.

When we come to perilous, we need to stop and hold that word in suspension and dwell upon it. What's the difference between peril and danger? Danger is evident. There's the sign, danger. But peril is hidden, unseen, disguised, clothed, made to appear as something other than what it in fact is.

The church of the last days will be a discerning body that sees through the appearances of things that purport to be good and for which the world desires our subscription and to recognize it as the deepest evil that has its origin from below and not only to avoid it but to blow the whistle on it and reveal it for what it is to those who are naive and have not the advantage of our discernment.

Got the picture? Then you're in trouble. When was it that Paul and Silas were publicly stripped? What an embarrassment for Orthodox Jews. Beaten to a pulp with the cat and nine tails, 39 strokes, that left the flesh open and went right to the bone because on each of those nine strands was a piece of bone, a piece of glass, a piece of metal, something that would cut.

Why? Because they delivered a single woman who made her masses much profit by her soothsaying, by her occultic, demonic ability to read fortunes. And when she was delivered by one word from Paul, being grieved, not just annoyed.

And this did she many days. Well, why didn't he take care of the situation from the beginning? Because the Kairos had not yet come. Because he's not just looking for the elimination of inconvenience or annoyance.

He's a man in God. And there came a moment in God when the Lord had him to turn and say, come out of her. And it came out that very hour. And when her masters saw that their hope of profit was gone, when they had touched a profit motive, when they had put their finger on the pulse of the world and the heart of its system, they were dragged before the authorities, out into the marketplace where the action really is.