Israel, the Death of a Nation — Art Katz

Precious God, man of sorrows, Lord be the Lord of my mood, as well as my speaking, and bring forth, Lord, something precious, something abiding, something foundational for these whom you've gathered before yourself tonight, Lord.

Make this a once and for all occasion. Make it compact. Make it full. Let it touch, Lord, all of the categories of our faith. May we be willing to submit to reconsideration things that we've held, my God, unwisely, or not well, or romantically, or sentimentally, that needs to be adjusted, Lord, to things as you see them.

But take possession, Lord, of this vessel. Let me not err against you, and bless this people tonight in a signal way, an appointed way, my God. We thank and give you praise in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I'm covering myself right from the beginning because I am in a strange mood.

I trust it's the Lord. I had to ask my personal physician, who gave me antibiotics today for a bunged up foot, whether that had affected my mood, or robbed me of some rest I wanted to have before coming, but he says no.

Israel's Imminent Catastrophe

So it's either the enemy, or I do have a very sober subject. It's Israel's imminent catastrophe, the apocalyptic end of the present state of Israel. How would you speak that? How would you speak it to people who have a sympathetic disposition and want by every means to see present Israel succeed?

And along comes a Jewish speaker, and says, no, you're barking up the wrong tree. This nation is not scheduled to succeed, but to die. So I don't know how to speak these things. It's not that I've not spoken them before, and even written of them, but it's not a pleasant subject, but it ends in glory.

So I almost feel like praying, can the Lord guide me, direct me? You know, I looked over some of the ponderous scriptures that seem to clearly testify that I'm not walking out on some limb, and need to scratch for a scripture or two to support an unusual thesis.

The remarkable thing is that there's a surfeit, there's an overwhelming abundance of scripture that speak of this cataclysmic and imminent disaster. And the remarkable thing is that nobody seems to have seen it.

Even the believers living in Israel seem not to have seen it, or they have prematurely taken scriptures that speak of the millennial blessedness and invoke them prematurely. Either way, either I'm strangely out of it and have missed it and deserve to be put on the shelf or worse, or I'm a lone voice speaking a necessary word to save even God's people from outside of Israel, from a fatal, perhaps fatal disillusionment and even a forfeiture of faith.

If the hope for expectancy does not materialize, and it would seem as if every expectation has been contradicted, and God is not the God we thought, and his word is not reliable. See what I mean? Paul speaks of a great falling away in the last days, and I'm already assured that not the least reason for it will be a naive and mistaken expectation of Israel's immediate future.

Because if I have a proper understanding of what is the immediate future of Israel, there will be another such catastrophe, another Holocaust. It will not be confined to Europe. It will be global. You'll not be exempt.

The consequences will resonate through every nation, including South Africa. After all, you have 80 ,000 Jews here. And God says it's the time of Jacob's trouble. Jesus said, unless that time were cut short, no flesh would survive.

But for the elect's sake, that small surviving remnant, that time will be cut short. And I believe that he's speaking about an event that is yet future. Part of my controversy with other men of a prophetic kind who totally disagree with me say that the time of Jacob's trouble has passed.

It was the Nazi Holocaust. Oh, is that right? Well, how then does it have its inception in Jerusalem? How then does Jesus warn that they wish it, that those that are there should flee to the mountains of Judea and pray that it not come on the Sabbath.

All of these admonitions only make sense in the context of a people upon whom a fury of devastation falls within the land and not in Germany, not in Europe. I mean, it's so elementary. How is it that these, these men could miss a logic of that kind, but you know what I'm sensing leadership, maybe especially Messianic.

Reading Prophecy Without an Agenda

Oh, let me put it in another way. If you have an agenda, you have a view that is dear to you and you want by all means to see fulfilled and succeed. Like for example, the establishment of the present state, you will read scripture in such a way as to strengthen, fortify, validate that view.

But you know that such a practice is ipso facto non-prophetic. It flies in the face of what is prophetic for prophetic. If it means anything is allowing the scriptures to speak to us. We don't come with an agenda.

We don't come with an already determined perspective. We simply come, we submit, we bow before the word of God and we don't impose our will or intention upon it. So I'm learning some remarkable things just being at the center of a bit of controversy that was especially raised by the conference we conducted in Israel.

I was saved in Jerusalem 35 years ago and we have been going back virtually every year to minister to the body of Christ. They used to say that when art comes, the word of the Lord comes with them. They don't say it anymore because this word that I now bring is frightening, apocalyptic, full of impending terror, judgment, devastation, ruin, desolation.

And of course, if you're living in the land, that's the last thing you want to hear. And as so many of my brothers said, but art, how can it be true? What about our ministries? It's not so much that the land is going to be devastated, but then how can our ministries continue?

Can you understand why men like me border on insanity? And so we had to conduct the conference in our own hotel. And the title of the conference was the coming calamity of Israel. Not one single soul came whom I had known over the past quarter of a century, but one woman who came to heckle, what do you call it?

Interfere, to sound off and mock me and so on. And then when we got home, there was a letter waiting for us signed by 13 of the most eminent leaders in the body of Christ in Jerusalem or Israel. Many, many messianic ministries, men whom I've known for years, condemning me as a false prophet and harassing the church and giving aid to the enemy.

And so we took exceeding great pain to answer them in a sound exegetical way, which is not my prophetic suit. The prophetic proclamation is a gush, but what these men needed was a reason answer to their judgment.

And we took four to six weeks to draft it. And if you're on internet, you can read it. It's on our website and our websites. The address is printed on our newsletter. Our newsletter is on the table. If we run out, it's www .benisrael .org organization.

Moses and the Burning Bush

And up we'll come to burning bush. Why the burning bush? It's for as many as we'll turn aside to see. And that remarkable that the critical issue of God's employment of Moses as the deliverer of Israel was waiting to see if he would turn aside to see this strange sight of a bush that burned, but was not consumed.

Fire, fire is always the emblem and the symbol of judgment. And there are not many who want to look into it. We would rather circumvent it and pass it by. It's not pleasant. It jostles us. It affects our categories, but Moses not only turned to see, but to understand why that's apostolic, that's pleasing in God's sight.

And with the God that we had a church that would turn aside to see the Lord, quicken those verses for me. Some years ago, I was on a plane. I'm always on planes. And sure enough, I'm always sitting next to a Jewish passenger.

And sure enough, they don't have to wear a star of David for me to know that all my vibes go loose and the plane was crowded. And, uh, I turned to this precious young lady in the middle, in the three seats, I was on the aisle seat.

I had my Bible on my lap. I was reading Exodus chapter three, Moses in the burning bush. Usually I read sport illustrated or other magazines that I'm too stingy to buy. And, uh, the plane, the plane is not a place for serious Bible reading, but there at that time, I was reading that text.

And this woman, of course, was looking at me. Here's a modern man with a Bible on his lap. And I turned to her and I said, when do you think you'll see again, another Jew on a plane reading his Bible instead of saying, Oh, she turned the other way.

And so I didn't say anything. And we were coming in for a landing. I said one more time, when do you think, again, you'll have another occasion to meet a Jewish man who has met God and has been transformed by him in the name and the discovery of the Messiah, the Holy one of Israel, something like that.

She turned the other way and the plane landed. We plotted never to see each other again. She missed a once in full location. If she had, but ask one question, what you believe in that insane glayish Gentile Greek myth, or any way that she would have in any way turn to inquire, to ask, it would have been setting in motion, the kinds of things that would have devastated every security, every expectation for the future.

And she knew it. She had a nice, sound Jewish instinct not to expose herself by turning, because as the rabbi say, and one of the rare commentaries that I so appreciate the reason that God said, called Moses twice when he saw him turn and to look was that anyone who turns aside to see need not have any assurance.

He can have a turn back. Once you turn aside, you're putting in jeopardy, all that you understand, all that constitutes the security of your religious and spiritual life, all of your neat categories that you've taken so long to frame.

Once you turn to look at a strange apparition, fire judgment, there's no assurance you'll ever come back to where you were before. And in fact, it's my hope that that will be true for you tonight. Not that where you are is in any way, what's the word unappreciated, but there's a deeper apprehension of truth and reality that waits for the knowledge of God that is given exclusively in judgment.

The Severity and Goodness of God

You know what I've noticed in 35 years as a believer, that there's a strange aversion on the part of God's people to consider God as judge. There's something about judgment that somehow does not appeal to us because after all, how do you reconcile a God who judges a God of wrath?

Wasn't that the old Testament God, praise God that he's retired. And the new Testament God who has replaced him is full of mercy and, and love. And I am, I am the Lord. I change not. And we say the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The God of wrath is the God of mercy. Wrath is his mercy. If you could understand and to shun his, his wrath is to shun God, read out any attribute of God, which is indivisible. You can't separate his attributes is to lose God.

And judgment is at the heart of God. When, when the world will, when, when God will bring judgments in the earth, the world will learn righteousness. What's the scripture that gave you today in chapter nine of the book of Psalms, something on judgment, major on judgment saints.

It will not be depressing.

Psalm nine, verse 16. The Lord is known by the judgment, which he executed.

Did you hear that? The Lord is known by the judgments, which he executes. So the Nazi Holocaust, what was it? A peculiarity of history, a little aberration, an unfortunate dint of circumstance because of the man, man called Hitler or his God sovereign.

And if that was his judgment, is it could be known by it in a way that he would not otherwise be known and known in full. God has appointed Israel to be a witness to the nations. And it's remarkable and ironic that Israel succeeds more profoundly in being that witness in her apostasy and in her failure and in her separation from God than ever in her success, which is a witness still.

That's why Paul says in Romans 11, behold the severity and goodness of God. When have you beheld it less? Come on, get honest. We don't want to behold the severity of God. We have a natural propensity to behold his goodness.

But I'll tell you, dear saints, if you take the one at the expense of the other, you have an inadequate God. I don't care that you put the label on and call him Jesus. We do not know him as we ought if we are in flight from his judgment and from his wrath, which is the heart of his righteousness.

And in fact, the one Holocaust that revealed God as no other that preceded the Nazi Holocaust was the one that came upon upon Jesus himself. The crucifixion of Jesus was a Holocaust. It was a, it was a devastation.

He was marred more than any man. He had no beauty that we should desire him. He was a wreck. All the powers of hell, the fury of, of everything inimical opposed to God came upon him in such severity that left him a shambles.

The Crucifixion as God's Judgment and Mercy

Have you ever seen that Holy Ghost masterpiece, the crucified Christ that hangs in Colmar, France? Somebody helped me. Who's the artist? The sisters of Mary celebrate that painting. Who's the sisters of Mary?

That's a real shrink. Anybody does that ring a bell anywhere? That movement in Darmstadt, Germany celebrates that painting. I went out of my way as an atheist 36 years ago, hitchhiking through Europe, looking for philosophical answers to a distraught ex Marxist left wing radical life to see that painting because someone had picked me up off the side of the road who was an art teacher and said, art, you mustn't miss seeing this one painting.

Oh, I'd seen, I was in the Prado. Is that the museum in Madrid? One of the great art museums of the world. And I couldn't get over it. Every floor was loaded with paintings on Jesus, whether the Lord was just conditioning my Jewish atheistic heart to see that this was the preeminent theme of past times up until modernity.

And then we got sloppy. Then men flung paint at canvas and every kind of abstract nonsense. But in those previous generations, when art was a significant activity, Jesus was a preeminent thing. Crucified on the cross, being taken down into one form or another.

Jesus with his disciples. I was just overwhelmed, but I'd seen too many depictions of Jesus as a Jew on velvet with sequins and pillows, or Jesus on the cross looking more like a ballet dancer than a suffering servant.

I had to stand before this painting at Coma and I was transfixed. I was stupefied. I gasped. It is a holy ghost masterpiece of a man who's a piece of wreckage. So devastated that you wonder if you're looking at a man or some kind of gnarled animal whose jaw is a gaping death and the lips are white and the flesh has pieces of wood and other kinds of things that were imparted with the flagellation, gangrenous, the color of the skin and hung over in total death and devastation and defeat.

It's a hypnotizing picture. You can't stand before it and not come undone. And here was an atheist looking at this. That was a holocaust. But when you walk around the back of the same painting is the resurrection site.

And every place where the first site showed the perforations and the wounds, the resurrection site shows the beams of glory coming through the same perforations and wounds. I commend it to you. Make a trip to coma, France.

And if not inquire where you can get copies of that print and hang it in a conspicuous place, it will temper your whole Christian life. Because think of this saints, what would happen? What would be the character of our faith?

What would be our witness in a troubled world and in a crisis ridden South Africa? If the crucifixion of Jesus becomes shabby, sentimentalized, glossed over familiar. What if it loses its sharp edge and it's breaking in?

What if it doesn't stupefy us in the way that it ought to confront us? What does this mean? I want to tell you what it means or enough to tease you to look to seek out what it means. It means the most profound statement of God ever presented to men in point of time.

The crucified Christ is the statement of God in judgment. Jesus suffered the sin of mankind. He was judged. He bore that judgment in all of its terrible cruelty and devastation. So it was a statement of God's righteousness that God alone can pay.

But it was a statement of God's mercy. It was a statement of God's trinitarian composite Godhead because the son who is bearing this cries out by the spirit and yields up his spirit to the father. My God, why has thou forsaken me?

In one historic moment is the most profound statement of God as God as has ever been put before men. Have you taken the content out of that? Have you sucked the marrow out of that bone? I would say probably the single reason for the prevalent shallowness of God's people, particularly in the charismatic realm is the absence of this consideration.

We don't want to look into that burning bush. And the Holocaust of the Jew is related to the Holocaust of Jesus. I can almost say, in fact, my book does say that the lack of the consideration of the first by my people made their own crucifixion ultimate and unavoidable because we pride ourselves in our monotheistic view of God.

And we think we're doing God's service by defending monotheism and that the Christians somehow have three gods. Well, the monotheistic view of God is not God. It's a construct of a humankind that has all kinds of implications.

There are reasons why men prefer this kind of simplification of God, but God in his triunity, God in his fullness has other implications for our own present walk in relationship. So our theology and our doctrine is altogether related to our comfort zone.

And that's more than I can say tonight, but so we Jews have paid for a, what do they call the, the dismissal of the Holocaust, because this is now a Jewish complaint in the world. There's a word for that.

People deny that the Holocaust ever took place, or they say that was greatly exaggerated. Revisionism. Oh, praise the Lord, Doug. That God sent you. Here's a brother joining us on the trip. I had never seen till we met at the airport.

First time I've ever done that. Revisionism is the dismissal of the Holocaust in its historicity and Jews, the Jewish community and its agencies just foam at the mouth in anger at the dismissal of one of the most brute facts of modern times and rightly so.

But to what degree are we reaping what we have sown? We have been revisionistic in dismissing the crucifixion of Jesus as the mere unhappy and melancholy end of a political misfit who got the authorities all riled up because people might have followed him as King.

Now that's all that it means. It means much more. It means ultimately more. And Jesus wept because he knew that there would be a tragic consequence for people that dismissed the most profound revelation of God as God that has got to have consequence in time.

And it has and it will yet again. I'll praise the Lord for a comprehending brother. If I had time and the Lord so led and you had the interest and I just commend this to you because I don't think I'm going to take that time.

Israel's Future Sifting and Restoration

Try reading Isaiah 53, not only as the suffering of Jesus, but the suffering of a nation that is yet to follow him in a road to Calvary because I believe and we are preparing practically for a mass movement of Jews throughout the world being uprooted in every country and forced march in flight from persecution to all nations.

That sifting is yet future. And I would say the majority of Jews alive in the world today will not survive it. In fact, it says in that same text, those that transgress the rebels that transgress against me, I will bring them out of the nations where they have sojourned, but I will not bring them into the land.

The same thing is repeated in Ezekiel 20 that this final uprooting in time of Jacob's trouble in the sifting of Jews through the nations and nations where they are not necessarily presently resident, but are brought by the providence of God in remote wilderness places is the last opportunity to bring through ultimate trial a people for his name.

You know, the chorus that we sing and so the redeemed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall, they shall obtain gladness and joy and mourning and sighing shall flee away.

You want to know how pathetic is the condition of the church, how usurping we are in our mindlessness and taking to ourselves that which does not belong to us, but is descriptive and intended for Israel is the way that we sing that chorus, thinking that we're singing about ourselves.

When have we had morning and sign and when shall we have what they will have? What will it mean for the Jewish people to see their present state extinguished and their hope of a national homeland? You know, even if we American Jews don't have a disposition to go there and it's not a place that I would want to live, having lived there and having been kicked out of there as a believer, it's a tough place and it's going to become horrendous in the issue there.

And I'm, of course, at odds with those who want to send Jews to Israel. I said, well, go ahead. But you're sending them from the frying pan to the fire. Israel will be the vortex of unbelievable violence.

They are safer in the nations than they will be in the land. But whether we go to Israel or not, there's a certain sense of security that Jews would have anywhere in the world, that there is a place that they could have gone should they desire to be safe within a Jewish nation.

And if that nation is removed, it will bring a sorrowing and a sighing that cannot be explained by any other event. So I have to groan and gasp my way through a subject like this. There are so many scriptures.

I was looking today at Ezekiel 36, make a note of these references that upon their return, when I will return them to the places where they had been scattered, which is not a statement of present Israel's constituency today, they will rebuild the cities that had been laid waste and made desolate and left in ruins.

That's not a reference to the cities of antiquity. That's a reference to present day Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, and all of the other cities of Israel. There'll be, there's a cry in Isaiah. The land has become our destruction, but imminent.

And so we can see all of the forces that are at play, bringing this fulfillment in Israel's untenable condition, both with ringed about by nations intent upon her destruction. And now within her own borders, a Palestinian presence armed to the teeth with the very same intention and no amount of negotiation will save her.

The very negotiation shows a mentality that is so human, so rationalistic, that assumes that if you present to your enemies a scheme by which they will share in the prosperity that will come to the region, if they will lay down their vendetta and their desire for vengeance in their arms, that they will subscribe to that.

And if you meet them and accommodate them, then we'll all share in the prosperity of the Middle East and luxuriate in the Israel that becomes the Hong Kong of the Middle East. And that man's self-interest that he will enjoy a prosperity and a betterment will be the factor that even takes recalcitrant Arabs and those of that Islamic demoniacal hatred and allow them to be pacified and to accommodate and make peace with Israel.

That's what I'm saying. It's based on a premise that man will act in his own best interest. That's a piece of humanistic presumption that is going to come apart in the face of Israel because their enemies are not concerned with self-interest.

They're concerned with vengeance and devastation and retribution. So Israel is going to suffer for faulty premises because they have an incorrect view of man predicated on their own assumptions about themselves because we Jews act in self-interest.

So surely all enlightened men must. Had they not been, what's the word about putting away the had they not been revisionist and looked at the crucifixion of Jesus they would have had a statement about man's nature and condition that would have saved them from this presumption now that will mean their death.

Am I getting too complicated? Can you follow some of the things that I'm trying to suggest? You know what's wrong with us among other things and why it is we have shallow saccharine sentimental expectations that are not biblically grounded.

It's because we want a happy ending. We want to see that work out nicely and don't they deserve it after all having been knocked about and suffered through the ages. Don't you think that even though they're having present problems that they can work it out?

Can't they progressively come to a place of improvement and finally be a blessing to all the families of the earth? This is a deep theological question whether there is such a thing as progressive improvement that a nation can be ameliorated and improved and come to that condition that will fulfill God's statement about Abraham and his descendants to bless all the families of the earth.

The reason that we have erred in a shallow expectation for present Israel is that we have had no understanding of Israel's ultimate destiny and glory and calling. It's because Israel has the call to bless all the families of the earth.

It's because God has chosen her as the locus of his theocratic rule over all nations. It's because Jerusalem is God's intention for his sanctuary and dwelling. It's because the holy hill of Zion will be the seat of his divine government that the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of God out of Jerusalem that Israel must be so dealt with.

And we have erred in hopeful expectation because we project upon that nation something of the same kind of shallow considerations we have for ourselves. We have not understood the issue of God's glory as being greater than the issue of mere national survival or success.

The fact that we have a success mentality rather than a glory mentality is enough to assure that we're going to miss the significance of Israel in the last days. And if we miss it and we're not psychologically spiritually and practically prepared for the uprooting of this people and the tremendous sifting of this time of Jacob's trouble there'll not be any survivors at all.

The church has the mandate to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy. And if we don't anticipate that their devastation and be prepared for it realistically there's not a soul in the world that will extend themselves to take them in in the time of their final devastation.

Mercy Toward Israel and the Judgment of the Nations

The first judgment of Jesus as king after the smoke clears from these final apocalyptic events and the remnant of Israel is restored is a judgment on the Gentiles in the world over one question. What did you do with the least of these my brethren and those who say Lord Lord when did we see you hungry thirsty naked and in prison his answer is as you did not see them and do for them as you did not do it for me and your failure to be to them what you ought brings a judgment of a radical ultimate kind that those who did not extend themselves are cast into the lake of fire reserved for the devil and for his angels though they said Lord Lord it may well be that the issue of the Jew and Israel in the last days is the very sifting that will not only sift Israel but will sift the nations will sift the churches and identify who in fact God's people really are.

God's people who have his heart and his identification for that people even in their apostasy even in their sin even in their judgment will be revealed by their ability to extend mercy that they might obtain mercy at a time when extending it will be like the World War II time for Corrie ten Boom and other of the Dutch people who risked their lives to extend help to the Jews in their midst.

That was a dress rehearsal that was a minuscule faint intimation of the magnitude of what will face us in a soon coming time. I'm speaking not only from a prophetic understanding of prophecy but also from the practicalities and the realities of my own life.

We left Minnesota to come here to South Africa at a community where that has been established for 25 years in one of the most remote wilderness locations in North America. I'm a New Yorker by birth I'm a city slicker I'm an urbane man and the Lord 25 years ago by a word of God directed to me unmistakably when my foot came over a chain across the entrance to a bankrupt boys camp for sale where I was taken by some believers just to the curiosity of seeing the property in a place in the country Minnesota where is that I came.

My foot came down on the property and the Lord said Dominion the name that the property now has born for 25 years end time teaching center community refuge. That's all he said. But that was enough to give up a 17 room house in New Jersey nine bedrooms and five baths and two volvos and a whole charismatic lifestyle to come out to that remote place and to begin without any knowledge of even what community is.

And we've been there for 25 years with the exception of three years when God required the entire enterprise to be brought into death and the property abandoned and not one soul allowed to remain. And the one elder who would not take my view that God was wanting the whole thing brought into death.

Not because of some internal implosion of things going wrong in community. Ironically they were beginning to go right. It didn't end because of some failure it ended as a requirement of God to bring something into death without explanation because if something is explained where is the death.

It's death. Because you don't know and yet are required. But it was so implicit and so clear to me. But one elder said no I don't see that I like living in the country. In fact he was already in my house.

I had already moved and we had one last showdown and again I pleaded with him God is wanting a complete abandonment of this property. 55 souls were living there. It was a 10 a flourishing community for 10 years.

And he wanted everything brought into death. Not only the property but the ministry that was recognized by the federal government. My marriage was brought into death. Everything you know when you're a man approaching 60 and you're no longer in community no longer in ministry and God puts you on a sabbatical silence.

I was forbidden even to speak publicly and the Lord did not say how long this would go on. But there was a death of not being able to minister. There was a death of the abandonment of the property. There was a death of a wife threatening divorce and suicide and children leaving and everything just coming apart without explanation.

This brother refused to leave. We had one final showdown. He still refused. I said okay well it's your baby. He came to the breakfast table the next morning before we departed and the moment I laid eyes on him I said what happened to you.

He was as white as a sheet. He said well he said. I prayed last night before I went to bed and said Lord if I'm in error you know correct me. He's not the kind of man that he would think he could be in error because everything was according to principles and the Lord said to him.

And I remember every syllable even with my dull capacity for memory. The Lord said to him if you will not leave I will kill you. There was a necessity for death saints. I'm not trying to intrigue you uh give you a little anecdotal uh information.

I'm trying to underline the enormous significance of the subject that God is wanting to bring to you in one night that required a death of a very palpable kind that in the three years in which we were in death and away from that property on the one or two occasion I had to come back for something.

Especially in the winter when the roads were not plowed out and the snow was up and there were the doors were creaking in the wind and there was not a soul a voice a laugh or a shout of a thing that had been alive to 55 people.

I can't tell you how eerie that is that. I drove my car up as far as I could open the door and my dog went out of the car took 10 steps and came back with his tail between his legs. The death was experienced it was tasted.

We had to realize and experience the death. And what did God do with me in that period of time. He sends me to a Lutheran seminary of all things a liberal Lutheran seminary. 65 percent of the students were women and they were all feminist witches and they were out for my blood.

And every day when I went into these classes there was such friction such anger such bitterness such threats. Because I dared call God he I dared use the male pronoun for God. And these women called that sexist language.

I can't begin to tell you I came home where I was living battered and bloody daily from the the remarkable encounter with these these women who were not just out to modify Christianity but to radically transform it in a feminist way that was part of the three years.

The Mystery of Israel and the Church

But in the course of those seminary days not because of any course that I took or instructor the Lord was beginning to open a revelation of the mystery of Israel that I had never seen before for me Israel was a country like any other.

I went there to minister to the body of Christ. But I did not know nor did I want to consider that the nation itself has a destiny. Because I was so jealous for the glory of the church. I didn't want this to see that glory shared with some nation in a dubious condition.

But the Lord made quite clear that the mystery of Israel is the issue of his glory. Read that in Romans. As Paul comes to the end of his brilliant statement in Romans chapters 9 through 11 he concludes with a an outburst of remarkable praise.

Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God who's been his counselor. Where did this come from this scheme of God of this mystery of Israel and the church this reciprocal relationship between two bodies that are so antithetical so opposed by nature Jews and Gentiles.