What has been too long confused is that the Church is not the kingdom, per se, but an interim provision in Israel’s restoration, and it is time now to restore the kingdom of David to that literal people on David’s throne, on the holy hill of Zion. The kingdom of God will either go forth from that place, or it will not go forth at all. Until that kingdom comes, no true divine law will go forth to the nations. Wars, suffering, death, incest and every kind of vile mayhem will continue to prevail over the world until the law of God can go forth from the one place specifically designated. Only one redeemed nation has the honor of expressing it, and whose redemption has come through a Zion (the Church of the Last Days) out of which, alone, their Deliverer comes (Rom. 11:25-27).
There is something foundationally wrong when we desire to enjoy a semblance of the Spirit, and its ‘excitement,’ without the Cross. We want the reality of God without the suffering that precedes that glory. Church, as every earnest believer knows, is a place of suffering, before it is a glory. The Church is a means, not an end in itself, but by being that means, it obtains, at the consummation of the age, something more glorious than that of the redeemed millennial Israel herself, namely, a ruling and reigning with Christ in the heavenly places. We, who are a “no people” as the Church, have become the “people of God” to move to envy a nation, Israel, that has lost that very identity. In the final frenzy, which is even now brewing, Jews will likely regard us, the Church, as enemies and a threat to their Jewishness in the anti-Semitic furor of the Last Days’ persecution. In the failure to recognize that ours is a heart of love toward them, we may possibly have to suffer martyrdom even at their hands, as Stephen did, as a critical necessity, a sacrifice, to bring by it, if that alone is the final requirement, the revelation of the Lord that turned Saul from persecutor to apostle, and will bring that nation from opposing God to its own apostolate in blessing all the families of the earth.
Our coming under these purposes of God for Israel’s redemption, this first-born among the nations, is calculated for our humility. We must not expect Jewish understanding, let alone gratitude for our sacrifice on their behalf, and, like Christ dying for us as sinners when we were dead in our transgressions, we also must ‘suffer’ for them while they are yet in their transgressions. In that mutuality and in that willingness to suffer for them as He suffered for us, we show forth the essential character of their God. The crisis that the Jew of the Last Days brings to a Church called to their redemption will reveal the truth of our condition in its depths, a condition calculated by God to bring us to the need for a full sanctification, which would not otherwise have been recognized, nor sought.

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Lars Widerberg