This sermon delves deep into the significance of Jesus' crucifixion, highlighting the parallel between the suffering of Jesus and the future suffering of the Jewish people. It emphasizes the need for nations to recognize the suffering of Israel as a means of understanding the depth of God's glory and redemption. The message calls for a profound revelation of God through the suffering of His people and the importance of extending mercy to Israel, even at the risk of one's own life, as a determinant of one's eternal destiny.

Jesus, our God, we see the beauty of their lives, and their character, and their integrity, and we hear them speak their many languages, 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 dimensions, by the grace of God, to bring us to an appreciation of where the vectors of history and time cross, that if we go from the origin of creation to the whole eschatological future, and want to draw together like a crosshair of a target, the vectors of time and history, in that one episode that has taken place in time, that is the heart of all reality, what is that one thing? Boy, if this was a quiz, how many of you would fail? That one thing, in my opinion, is the crucifixion of Jesus. It's the single most profound episode given of God, which is the issue of reality itself, and yet remarkably slighted, sentimentalized, catholicized, which is sentimentalized, made an object of pity, or a provocation of fury against the Christ killers, as if the victim need not have suffered that. I don't know, well you can well imagine, if God intended this to be the focal point of history and reality, in point of time for all generations, how would the spirit of the world work to traverse and to render it a non-event, by sentimentalizing it, by dramatizing it, by ignoring it. So part of our prophetic function is to restore the attention of the world and the church first, to this single most powerful episode given of God for the revelation of himself, as well as the giving of the atonement by which mankind, as many as will, shall be saved. It's the issue of eternity, it's the issue of God as God. And now for question number two. In all scripture, where would we find that one text that most prophetically deals with that episode in history, and gives us the most incisive understanding of what it means and how it is to be perceived? Isaiah 53. Question number three. How many of you Christians know that every Shabbat service, every synagogue service, on a Saturday morning, on a Shabbat morning, has a selection from Moses, from the five books? Because it's plotted so that in a year of Shabbats, all five books have been read. Isn't that remarkable? The better word is chanted. Certainly not read for comprehension in the speed with which these texts must necessarily be attended if five books ought to be gone through in a year of Saturdays. And then there's a selection called the Haftorah, which is a selection from the prophets determined by rabbinical councils as to be appropriate companion piece to the selection from the Torah. How many people knew that? Okay, not too many of you. How many of you know that in the synagogue readings worldwide, Isaiah 53 is never mentioned? Did you know that? They'll come to Isaiah 52.12 as the Haftorah selection for that given Shabbat, and the next week they'll go on to Isaiah 54 and completely omit that one text. That is the most divinely intended prophetic statement of that locus of that central event that is the nub of all history and meaning and salvation. Quite a significant omission, wouldn't you say? And so if it's the issue of salvation and the issue of Jewish salvation in the last days, which is to say the issue of the salvation of the nations, because we've got to see Israel in the context of nations. Israel is not for itself. So I'll give you a little scripture to dote on, which I've never heard either read, quoted, or exposited in 40 years of the faith, but it's a locus classicus, excuse my Latin, which means, again, another, how shall I say it, single statement of a holy kind that is a hinge, a nub, a pivot of all understanding of the mystery of Israel. And it's found in Deuteronomy 32, verse 8. You know, God has only to say something once. It doesn't require repetition in order to make the point. And it says here, verse 8 of Deuteronomy 32, when the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of man, he set the boundaries of the people according to the number of the sons of Israel. I don't know how your version reads. Sometimes it says sons of Israel, and other times there's another kind of mystic reference. But I think what God is saying is this. The issue of Israel is the issue of the nations. Israel is not for itself. It is to be central and the hub of God's redemptive intention for all mankind. It's not the tail but the head. And that's why the law must go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. When that Davidic kingdom comes, that God promised David and is reiterated by the prophets and was the biblical expectancy of a believing Israel throughout its history until it fell into its present apostasy. Are you guys following me? Unless you understand this, you'll never rightly appropriate the way in which the nation and the subject of Israel needs itself to be apprehended. Israel can never be understood apart from God's divine intention of its place relative to all nations. We're made for the nations. We're to be a nation of priests and light unto the world. And as the one tribe out of the twelve was the priestly tribe and its function was not commerce, merchandise or anything else but to be a priestly tribe, a Levitical people for the other eleven. In that same manner and by that same logic, the nation Israel itself is to be separated out from all nations for the nations as a priestly entity. And that's why you're living beneath the intention of God now. Because it's the priest that shall teach the people, the goyim, the nations, the difference between the sacred and the profane. And if we are not functioning in that calling and capacity, profanity will prevail. The world will lose its sense of sanctity, the sense of holy unless it's communicated and jealously guarded by a nation whose whole function and purpose and call it is. But look at the lamentable present condition of that nation and its conduct and mentality even now in Israel is the antithesis of anything that could be understood as being priestly. That is why you dear saints, the nation has got to go through the ringer. That's why suffering and sifting and travail and devastation and expulsion and uprooting and being exiled and cast out again into the nations is a requisite for the attainment and the fulfillment of this initial call. So Lord, thank you for the time of prayer with Mike, precious, before coming out tonight. And now again, Lord, I ask you, I punctuate, I underline that prayer. I know better than these children the difficulty, the human impossibility of the communication, Lord, of this theme, of this kind of suffering which Jesus himself had to pass and was astonished that his disciples did not understand it. O fools and slow of heart, not to believe all that the prophets have written? Ought not the Messiah to suffer and to die before he ascends to his glory? Why don't you understand it, you dum-dums? Why do you project your human desire upon me as if I'm to be spared? And Peter, that hot shot with his foot in his mouth, Lord, let this be far from you. And Jesus had to turn and rebuke him with one of the most severe rebukes he's ever addressed to anyone. Get thee behind me, Satan, for you savor, you stink of the thing which is of man and not of God. For what is of man is sentimental. What is of man is to diffuse harsh things, to take the sharp edge off, not to offend, it's to make nice, it's to coddle, it's to placate, it's to make smooth. But the way of God is suffering, death, resurrection, redemption, glory. So if the Lord himself could not be saved or absolved from the necessity for the suffering that precedes the glory, for the being abased before he should be exalted, how shall this nation be absolved and saved that has a destiny to be exalted above all nations and that it shall be the locus of the divine and eternal millennium and the millennial kingdom out of its Zion and out of its Jerusalem, shall go forth the word of the Lord and the law of God out of Zion? So knowing Jews as we do, and being one, what's to keep us from that exaltation of pride for which even Paul himself was susceptible and for which he needed to goad, what is it called? Lord, how long must I suffer this? The thorn, thank you. And the Lord would not relieve it, but my grace is sufficient. Why did the great apostle need a thorn? Because great though he is, chief of sinners though he was and understood himself to be, there's something about the nature of exaltation and the use of God that invariably and inexorably rises up in our humanity that makes us become inflated, vain, egoistic, proud, heavy-handed. And that has characterized us Jews. We've always been religiously superior, even now think ourselves ethically and morally superior, and the Gentiles shrink from that sense of inferiority that Jewish presence implies if it does not state. Following me? What shall save us when God shall exalt us after our abasement, if not the depth of the abasement itself to leave a permanent mark upon our national character that brings the quotient of humility and humbling that enables us to be a priestly people not just to the Goyim in general, but to Saudi Arabians and the Iraqis and Iranians and Palestinians and Arabs. In particular, Jesus himself could not be exempted from the remarkable, Lord, what's the word? Divine logic that makes exaltation to be preceded by abasement. There's a suffering that precedes the glory. And the reason that you guys don't know it and have not wanted to know it and are hoping for ministerial success without it is the measure of your being American all too American and shallow all too shallow. There's a suffering, dear saints, for which you're receiving the benefit even tonight that I'm not at liberty to disclose that men like myself must pass so little wonder that we're more occupied with success than we are with glory. Success does not require it. Whether it's the success of the state of Israel or the success of our ministries or our churches, our fellowship, but the issue of God's glory makes suffering invariable and inevitable. You've got to make your peace with this or you'll miss the whole key of God. So, Lord, much is at stake and we're asking such a divine assist. More than that, Lord, that's to the degree that for me to live is Christ, that you're in me to will and to do of your good pleasure, that you yourself are both the high priest and the apostle of our confession, prophet, priest, king. You yourself, you communicate, Lord, your jealousy over this text, Isaiah 53. You communicate why it is that your people are elected and must pass through such suffering, why they must be abased before they will be exalted as the head of all nations. And being that head, that they will not rise to some kind of pride by which the goyim, the nations, will cringe, but gladly come on every feast of tabernacles to honor that nation that God has exalted, not because they deserve it, not because they merit it, but because God bestows it. It's not the statement of Israel. It's the statement of God in his mercy to exalt a nation who have no deserving. They deserve their abasement in proportion to their sins, but to exalt them and give them a place that is very high and above all nations to be the hub and center of all nations. That is pure gift and calling, which needs to be demonstrated to the world because the world does not know God. They think that he's some kind of a deity who takes the wings off of flies and tortures at will and is hard and demanding and even ruthless because they've seen his severity and judgments, especially as they've been pronounced upon Israel. But to see that the same God who judges is the same God who exalts, that his mercies endure forever, is to reveal God as God, which is Israel's function as witness to the nations. Got the picture? Okay. So, Lord, therefore do we need your blessing. And bless these people. Stretch them. Let them not fade. And they can't keep up and they get clogged up, but give them a divine assist to follow my God, the unfolding of this kind of statement that has got to be more birthed than it is spoken. Can you understand that, you dear saints? I'm travailing and you need to travail with me in prayer and intercession because this is not just a service. This is not just a passing curiosity. This is a once and for all time that shall not be given again. I don't know how many art cats there are around to whom this kind of insight has been given and they're gifting and calling to make it known. And that the word of this is not just for your edification and benefit, but to go beyond you and through you out to many and out into the world. Only the Lord knows what he intends by the promulgation of this kind of statement, which by its nature is offensive to human sensibility. It is calculated to be that offense because man wants it nice. And there's something in us that wants to avoid pain and suffering and yet to commend the cross as the necessity and the statement of divine wisdom and requirement as the very nub of all reality itself is to cut across the whole grain of that which is humanistic and contrary in its temper and its disposition. Got that? I'll see you later sis, you're dull. You need to understand that God is at war with humanism. In every form, in idealism, in romanticism, in cross avoidance, in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, which is the primal principle upon which our present civilization is predicated. As I learned when I had a shattered kneecap and having baptized a dozen Lutherans in the YMCA pool and on my way to the locker with my Bible in my hand, slipped on a little puddle and there was this 200-pound fellow, topsy-turvy, upside down in the air doing a tailspin as if a frozen moment of time and I thought, Lord, what am I doing here? I don't have accidents. And no sooner had the thought passed that I came down on that knee, crash, on a tile floor and that night it was blown up like a balloon. I was a man of faith and power waiting for God to heal. It never did heal. I had to be taken the next day to the hospital where a Jewish orthopedic surgeon, Lord, remind me of his name, showed me the x-rays and said, Mr. Katz, you have not suffered a fracture. You have shattered your kneecap and it requires an operation to be wired. I said, okay, well, when can you do it? He said, I think Wednesday, the day after. I said, no, I've got to be up in northern Minnesota. The Lord is giving us a property. He said, the who? As he had his hand on my knee, something was taking place like click, click, click. He said, the pieces are falling into place. If I put you in a cast tonight, you'll not need an operation. And so he did. And so there I was that night with my foot in a cast elongated in the bed, a picture of absurdity, and the nurse came in with the hypo to give me a shot for pain. I said, you dear lady, I don't need any shot. I'm not in pain. I'm only mildly affected. Oh, you must have it, she said. Oh, no, I said, I will not. I don't want any deadening drug on me. I can bear this minor affliction. Paul said all of his afflictions were minor in the light of the eternal weight of glory. And she just ran out of the room with a huff of having to deal with an obstreperous patient like me and came back with pills. I said, you dear saint, you dear lady, don't you understand? I'm not afraid of needles. Hey, I was in the U.S. Army, and there was a corridor of men on both sides poised with needles that injected us like pincushions. And I watched men with medals fall over into dead faint just at the sight of those needles. I'm not afraid of having my skin pricked, sister. I don't want drugs. And the last thing I remember, two doctors and two nurses in the doorway foaming at the mouth at my refusal to have pain subdued. Because don't you understand, mister, that the unspoken premise of this civilization is the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure by whatever means? Not only do I not understand, I'm unwilling to understand and unwilling to surrender to that premise because I believe, on the contrary, that there's a suffering that precedes a glory and that we are well able, by the grace of God, to bear whatever afflictions are our due by the grace that will be given. And I will not be put on a culture or on a track contrary to the genius of God, which, by the way, is the expression of Jewish wisdom. We, as Jewish physicians, the Jewish medical fraternity, subscribe completely if they have not articulated such doctrines of the avoidance of pain. And yet, ironically, what people have borne more pain than ourselves. But to bear the pain without the redemptive understanding of it and its purpose is to lose its value. Suffering is not some kind of dum-dum thing by which you grit your teeth and merely bear it. There is a redemptive purpose in bearing affliction that needs to be understood and received as not being happenstance but coming even from the hand of God, who is sovereign and enthroned in the heavens and has always been enthroned in the heavens. So it's not just our present circumstance in which we can be confident in the sovereignty of God, but even the past. He was enthroned in the heavens during the Nazi Holocaust and he will be enthroned in the heavens in the future Holocaust of the Jews. And in your own suffering, that will inevitably be your portion to the degree that you will not waver and press on to the glory through fidelity to the apostolic and prophetic call which is yours. You can go home now, cats, you've said it. If you recognize that call and unswervingly give yourself to it and not become merely charismatic. I wrote here, to misinterpret God's wrath as expressed in his judgment is perhaps the ultimate sin of man. If we should know God, then we've got to know him in his judgments. If we want to see his judgments, then look at the Holocaust of the Jew and the Holocaust of our Messiah. That is God judging. And if we do not see God there, we do not see. And if we have complaint about seeing God there, then our complaint itself is testimony that what he says of our condition is true. It's critically important for the nation Israel that is to be the nub and hub of God's theocratic rule over his creation out of Zion, to know it's God. Not Talmudically or religiously, rabbinically, but to know this God in the depth of what he is as God in which the greatest revelation is in his judgments. I don't know why that it is. To see God in judgment and to understand the wisdom of God and the necessity of judgment and the severity of God as well as the goodness of God and that judgment itself is a mercy is to see and to understand God as God. But if we are unwilling and dismiss calamity as historical accident or the aberration of history or if it were not for that madman Hitler, we would not have suffered this, is to miss God. To dismiss Jesus at the cross as the unhappy melancholy fate of a man who rubbed the Roman authorities the wrong way and had he played his cards right, he need not have suffered that unhappy fate. But it means no more than that, is to miss God. For nothing as I said earlier today, more reveals the triune God than a son at the cross suffering by the eternal spirit without spot and blemish and sacrifice unto the Father whose presence, whose absence he notes in the cry, my God, why have you forsaken me? The whole triune nature of God is explicated and set forth in one historic episode the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection. For they said that if the disciple should steal his body, the end will be worse than the beginning because this deceiver said he would rise again on the third day. So set a guard about his tomb lest his body be stolen and they would noise about that he had been resurrected and then the calamity that this man represents will really break loose. And so they set a guard. Nevertheless, no sealed tomb and no amount of human guarding is going to keep the father from raising the son. For the raising of the crucified Christ by the glory of God the father is the testimony to the existence and the reality of that father who approves the sacrifice by the benevolence of raising that son from the dead and ascending him on high to his own right hand at the throne of heaven. Got the picture? I don't think you got it. That's why you dear saints, Stephen and the first martyrdom was occasioned by one comment. Though he gives the whole history of Israel's apostasy that in the last moment when they began to stone him, he said, I see the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of power. And when they heard that, they gnashed upon him with their teeth and stoned him to death with a howl and a shriek because the doctors of the law and the guardians of supposed religious righteousness could not swallow that this culprit, this mischievous Jesus who was leading people astray was in his humanity at the throne of heaven and a man whose face shone like an angel and had an open heaven of revelation because of the purity of his life saw that Jesus ascended because the throne is the place of authority. He was exalted on high and given the name above every name by the father himself even above the father's own dignity. The father elevates the son. So the issue of the death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus is the issue and the issue of Israel is to make that God known as God. How can that be possible if it circumvents that single greatest historic demonstration, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, that when they brought the report that he had risen, the gods, of course they were all executed and they were told and bribed but tell them that his body was stolen at night by his disciples and the scripture says and that report is believed to this day. See we Jews will stand one day before the judge for what we allow ourselves to believe. Why is it easier to believe that a bunch of fearful disciples who locked themselves in behind closed doors with trembling could defeat a band of Roman gods and steal a body that was kept and safeguarded exactly against that eventuality? Because they prefer to believe it. Because to allow for the truth of resurrection is to acknowledge that Jesus was who he said he was and was sent of the father and fulfilled the purpose of the father through his suffering and death and was raised by the father on high as the testimony of divine acceptance for his fidelity to that call which constitutes the redemption of Israel and all mankind once and for all. It's the wrath of God that fell on Jesus. Did you know that? He was judged that the righteous judge had to fall upon someone who could bear it in righteousness that he who knew no sin became sin. That's why the father had to avert his gaze because Jesus had become loathsome in actually becoming sin. And part of his suffering, maybe the greatest part, was not the physical torment but the absence of the sense of the father's presence that had to be removed because he had become loathsome in the eyes of one who was too holy to look upon it. He got there. So the judgment of God fell upon him in wrath of God with a terrible stroke. Because he was bearing the sin of all mankind and for all time. And that's why he was wounded in his hands, his feet, his head, his brow, the thoughts of men, the vile thoughts, the places where we have used our hands, the places where our feet have carried us, and every place where sin is enacted, he had to bear, in that very place, wounds. So it's a holocaust that came upon Jesus and it's ironic that the Jewish community today complains of a revisionism on the part of certain people who will not acknowledge the historicity of the holocaust, which for us is the most stubborn fact of modern times with testimonies by the hundreds of thousands and millions of those who were cremated. And there are people who will deny the historicity or say that it was exaggerated, there was not six million, or that it was provoked by the Jews in order to justify the establishment of a state. You know how whatsoever man sows, that too shall he reap? Because we have been revisionist in annulling the crucifixion of Jesus as a non-event in history because we have been unwilling to see it. It is full historic import and have relegated it to the dustbin as a minor event. And so are men now also doing to us what we have done with regard to Jesus. If we turn away from it and refuse to look into the fire of that burning bush and dismiss the crucifixion of Jesus as irrelevancy, then we also miss the enormous grace that was extended in that sacrifice and the blood that would have washed our sins away and restored us to the Father. It's a costly omission. And we have, as Jews, not had the covering of the blood. We have not a true Yom Kippur covering. Kippurah is covering. Therefore we have been assailed and have been vulnerable to every evil thing for we have forfeited the protection and covering of the blood of Messiah in relegating his crucifixion to a mere unhappy episode of no particular consequence. Understand that? We have forfeited the blood. So death has not passed over but has come upon us and continues to come upon us for when I see the blood I will pass over you. It's costly, dear saints. I'm at my limit. This needs not to be spoken. This needs to be wrung out. This is not exposition. This is too holy, too complex, too rich for human commentary. This needs to be apprehended, not taught. And if we'll not receive that judgment and its intention and its atonement and are divorced from the protection that that blood would have provided, what future calamity then is before us? Because if calamity alone, judgment alone is the most profound revelation of God and we have refused that revelation through Christ, what future revelation must be the necessary experience of a nation called to be a nation of priests and a light unto the world? Can we be it without the knowledge of God as God? And if we have not received that knowledge in his earlier demonstration of Jesus at the cross, by what demonstration then will we receive it? And that is an introduction to the future coming calamity of Israel for which they cannot be spared. And you'll not pray it away because the issue of that revelation and their salvation is the issue of the nations who are now wallowing in corruption and profane things because no nation has come to them to show them the difference between the sacred and the profane. Can you understand that it's not a priestly adumbration by which nations shall be instructed. The priest not only articulates, he demonstrates. He is the thing in himself of what is sacred and that's God's intention for this people. How remarkable to fall short of it and only to produce a Yasha Heifetz or an Albert Einstein or a Karl Marx or a Sigmund Freud or any of the spate of geniuses that we have brought into the world and yet fall short of this glory and this calling. And the condition of the world reveals it. Why aren't you aching for Israel's restoration as being something more than the establishment of a state? The issue of Jesus crucified is the issue of God. Catastrophe as judgment fulfilled God's penultimate provision to bring an awareness unto repentance to those who would otherwise have no consciousness of that need. Judgment reveals sin, you dear saints. Sin will never reveal itself as sin. It will always disguise itself. The only way that we can understand the enormity and magnitude of sin as terror is by seeing what it required of God to expiate. The judgment indicates the nature of sin but not sin itself as sin which is deceptive by its very nature. Got the idea? If we want to understand our transgression we need to ask what was it about us that required this stroke from God that took six million of us? Can it be that we have a national guilt and a sin of such magnitude that it can only be revealed by the judgment required that fell upon us in the Holocaust? What was the nature of sin that required God's own son to suffer its penalty? It's the judgment itself that reveals the issue of sin as sin and the issue of righteousness as righteousness and the issue of mercy as mercy. So we Jews have no sin consciousness because we missed the great revelation given both at the cross of Jesus and even the recent Holocaust. Aren't there other explanations in the evil of men to explain why the Holocaust? There may well be other explanations of a corollary or complementary kind but to be prophetically minded is always first to raise the question to what degree is calamity the statement of God's judgment? Whether it's a hurricane or a Holocaust of any kind or the collapse of an economy or the breakdown of a church a split or a failed marriage or children going askew the first question prophetically always to be raised is what measure is that a statement of God's judgment? We need first to examine is there error in us and fault in us that made that kind of act of God a judgment intended for our repentant awareness of our condition and not to be dismissed as mere happenstance. That's the prophetic mentality dear saints by which this book was compiled and is such an offense to Jews who have read it until they shall suffer again a future calamity they'll read it with new eyes. If we want to know the exact proportion to our sins and the magnitude of our judgments indicate the magnitude of our sin then we need to be awakened to something of which we are not personally and subjectively aware. That is to say human subjectivity will never acknowledge or recognize sin as sin. It will always obviate it will always explain it away it will always call it love however men as I know from my own experience 40 years in the world 35 years before I was saved how men justify their conduct and never see it as sin. It's the judgment that reveals its nature and is calculated to bring us to a place of repentance and acknowledgement of that thing which we would not otherwise be personally and subjectively aware. And that's why when we'll read Isaiah 53 I never dreamed that I would go on so long before even turning to the text something happens to Jewish consciousness when it finds itself on the road to Calvary and is suffering in a new kind of way and is marred more than any man. Let's take a look at that text and indulge me in the liberty that I'm going to take in interpreting it in a novel way. I know that it speaks exquisitely of Jesus and his sufferings and its redemptive meaning but if my supposition is correct that there's another road to Calvary that is future for the nation itself that it must traverse as the Lord before it and only in the traversing of that same road and in that identification and understanding of the suffering of Jesus itself be revealed because of the mutuality of suffering. Something happens when you have an experience comparable to that which Jesus himself bore. Isaiah 53 begins in Isaiah 52 13 and I have in italics over that break in the text in italics the suffering servant. Jesus is the suffering servant but the nation Israel is called also to be a suffering servant nation. See my servant shall prosper. He shall be exalted and lifted up. He shall be very high. He'll be enthroned in the heavens and exalted in resurrection and ascension but so shall Israel itself be when it has first passed through the humiliation and abasement of a road to Calvary it will then become the head of nations and that nation that refuses to come up on the day of on the feast of tabernacles God will curse it and deny it reign. That's how arrogant mankind is that even after the redemption of Israel after its suffering after its exaltation after Zion shall be the locus of God's theocratic rule nations will still refuse to come up because they refuse to concede to what God has chosen. They refuse to acknowledge what God has elected because I will choose what I will choose and I will elect what I will elect and I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. So eat your heart out you nations. I have chosen the holy hill of Zion not because it's an impressive peak but all the more because it's not. Don't you understand you dum-dums that I reverse human expectation and I'm at war with a whole value system that springs out of the principalities and powers that exalts power prestige, wealth I choose the thing that is lowly. Don't you know why I have chosen Israel? Not for their excellence but for their lousy track record because they were the least of nations that I choose them not because they were the greatest because the object is not to exalt them but to exalt me and so stubborn is human what's the word transigence and it's unwillingness to acknowledge what God has chosen that even after the nation shall be exalted and made very high as Jesus himself in a comparable way they will still refuse to come up on the feast of tabernacles and condescend to honor the nation that God has honored because to honor that nation is to honor the God who honored them got the picture? so your shabby little sentimental tweak on the cheek affinity for Israel is so beneath the mark your little sentimental affinity and liking Jews etc hey, can you make it through me? so shallow so short of the kind of esteem and affection that really should be the measure of your recognition of what God has chosen and that you choose what he has chosen and love what he loves not because they are cute but because they're chosen because they are the revelation and the reflection of a God who chooses and a God who honors you need to honor what God honors even now presently in their fallenness as I hope to speak again before we finish in these days so verse 14 just as there were many who were astonished at them see the liberty I'm taking with pronouns? the text says of him and it's true but now I'm extending I'm taking prophetic liberty to make the text apply not to Jesus which we know that it does of course and that is its primary purpose but now I'm using it in a secondary way to show that the same issue of the road to Calvary is Israel's future experience and that there will be many that will be astonished at them because they will be marred in their appearance beyond all human semblance and their form beyond that of mortals Steven Spielberg and all these hotshots and Barbara Streisand and all of these glamour kings, queens will be stripped and battered and bruised and in flight if they survive at all the Islamic pursuit that is bent upon their destruction and will not be satisfied with anything less than their annihilation it's the fury of hell that will be unleashed that will not be placated by merely slapping Jews on their wrists but extirpating and rooting them out from creation lest they return to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads and be the reason for which the king who is contained in the heavens is now free to come down and to assume his kingship in a nation that has restored and will say blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord Are you guys getting fatigued? Can you understand the powers of darkness know better than you that the issue of the Jews the issue of theocracy it's the issue of divine rule going forth out of Zion out of a holy hill that God has chosen and that the nation itself must be supportive and in keeping an agreement with that call and the king will not come until that people will receive him in their own restoration and then the rule of God the law of God goes forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem by a nation that is in agreement with and supportive of that king who will be ruling from the same city where he was crucified and humiliated that on the cross in three languages over his head was the statement in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Jesus of Nazareth king of the Jews ha ha ha it was put there to ostracize and to demean and to add to his his suffering by humiliating him as king that's why they put that false crown and the robe that this is a king this broken battered figure more marred more than any man is the king of Israel well in the same place where he bore that humiliation he will reign in glory so in that form in that battered shape Israel their form battered more than that of mortals so in that condition shall they startle many nations and king shall shut their mouths because of them for that which they had not been told them shall they see and that which they had not heard shall they contemplate and observe so what prophetic liberty am I taking here that it's going to take an Israel devastated demolished beat up bruised marred more than any man that will reveal to nations what they had not heard they shall see and what had not been told them they shall now contemplate what do you mean art everybody knows about Jesus oh yeah I never knew and I lived in a Christian country for my first 35 years the world does not know and no one nowhere in the world are nations more guilty than those who presume to be Christian and have sentimentalized or demeaned or shallowly trivialized the issue of Christ and his death they need to see they need to be reminded they need to contemplate they need to see the reiteration of the suffering of Jesus now enacted before them through the suffering of his nation that's what I'm saying that's why they need to be marred more than any man because in that the nations will have reason to contemplate their suffering as it is enacted and depicted before them because they're going to be uprooted and sifted through all nations where do you see that art? in Amos chapter 9 Ezekiel 20 and many places in scripture I will sift them through all nations because the issue of Israel is the issue of nations and even in their final trial on the road to Calvary which they are involuntarily walking they have not chosen this it's required of them Jesus voluntarily but they under compulsion but nevertheless in that suffering there's something about suffering that reveals and nations will have cause as they see this battered people moving through them to be reminded of one who was battered 2000 years before and whose suffering and death was not rightly understood nor apprehended which is to say it's the last opportunity for nations to understand and be saved at the expense of Jewish suffering I have never anywhere before taken such pains you can ask Alex in the front row from Kenya if he's ever heard from me such deliberation and such attention and detail to what I'm now expressing tonight now to give a wrap how long it takes to communicate this we are at the heart of the matter you dear saints and if you will not understand why Jewish suffering is inexorable and must take place of a kind comparable to the suffering of Jesus himself you will be offended by it against God and you'll say where is God and why did he allow the nation to be crushed and fallen and expelled and cast out and suffer as it's passing through the nations and being pursued unto death where is God in a second time in modern times to allow such a devastation to fall upon his own people when we had thought that now at last the state of Israel was the place of return and a home and all of our expectation collapses and God acts in a way that we think contrary to his character as God when ironically he's nowhere more profoundly revealing that character than in their sufferings that's why Paul said one of the signs of the last days is a great falling away by those who will be disappointed at God's failure to establish the state of Israel and to allow Jews again to be uprooted and passed to the nations in an unbelievable suffering in which the majority of present Jews alive today will not survive only a remnant of the redeemed of the Lord will return to Zion after mourning and sighing will flee away all of that to demonstrate to nations that have trivialized the cross and the God of the cross because Jesus crucified is God crucified put that in your spiritual pipe and smoke it and gag on it and choke and splutter and freak out and blow your fuses or you're worthless to the purposes of God in the last days if you could accommodate this and factor this in as cutesy little information to your already established views the Lord didn't bring me for that you need to stagger at the magnitude of what is represented by his suffering and his death and will be replicated again by their suffering and their death from which they will be raised and exalted unto a newness of life as the guardians of a theocratic rule that issues from their restored Zion so that when we say thy kingdom come we're not using a little cutesy inflection we're talking about a clear political theocratic rule of God that has a locus intended by him in a place called Zion that is not to be spiritualized away but is a piece of geography in the city of Jerusalem in the land of Israel and he'll either rule from that place or he'll not rule at all and the devil knows it better than you and wants to prevent it by exterminating that people so there'll be no return to Zion with everlasting joy in their heads and no fulfillment for which the king waits who is contained in the heavens in Acts 3.21 waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began so who has believed this report that we've heard and to thank you and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed this is a second revelation coming unwittingly and without being voluntary as was the death of Jesus by a nation compelled to walk that path that road for they will have no form in verse two or majesty that we should look at them nothing in their appearance that we should desire them they will be despised and rejected by all men a nation of suffering acquainted with affirmity and as a people from whom others will hide their faces and be despised and we and the nations and the world will hold them of no account that's why Matthew 25 is the issue of the church's eternal destiny predicated on one thing only what did you do for the least of these my brethren but Lord when did we see you thirsty, naked, hungry and in prison if you did not do this for the least of these my brethren you did it not for me therefore be cast out into the lake of fire reserved for the devil and his angels though you said Lord, Lord you missed the opportunity to test whether in fact I was Lord and your ability to discern and recognize me in the suffering of my nation people Israel because you could not because you turned your face from them and hid your face and counted them of no value and no regard you shunned me you just as as effectually shunned me on the cross as you are shunning them presently because they're bloodied, battered and ill-spirited and mean-spirited and you have no heart no compassion for them and you're not identified with them because after all they're only Jews and they're getting what they deserve and the world is loving it and rubbing their hands with glee but that people who say Lord and will extend mercy to Jews in that condition globally that's why Jesus is shifting sheep from goats over the world because all the world will have opportunity both to observe and see and respond to this people on their road to Calvary isn't there a Catholic tradition that was caught up in in the film The Passion where some woman comes and puts a handkerchief on the face of Jesus and watches and his image comes off pure legend but yet it was precious for someone to come and to try in some way to alleviate the suffering of this victim by wiping his face or giving him a cup of water which is exactly what Matthew 25 says they were naked and thirsty and you refuse to acknowledge them and see them as being the least of these my brethren even in their fallen apostate condition because you never understood that they were your brethren because you never understood really that you were grafted into their tree that you were one with this people both in their suffering as well as in their exaltation because you had become an institution separate from and other than the people Israel as the church even in the form of replacing them no wonder you could not recognize them and see in them myself and extend mercy because even at that time to extend it will be at your peril it will not be a little gracious thing that you can do at your convenience for to extend mercy and to accommodate Jews in their last days suffering in time of Jacob's trouble is to risk your own neck and suffer their fate and be thrown into their concentration camps and go up with them as smoke no wonder you chose to turn away and look the other way and not see but those who do Jesus says ascend to the kingdom which has been prepared for you you righteous can you see how great an issue the last day suffering of Jews is it will actually identify who in fact the church is it will actually give to nations a final opportunity to understand who Jesus is and it's all explicated and wrought out in the suffering of an entire nation for the sake of nations and you knew it not to know this is to be transformed even now something sober is coming into your being of a kind that waited on this this last day scenario this apocalyptic view of those things that are even now being prepared and shaped by the growing cloud of anti-semitism that is coming like a pole over the world brings a sobriety a depth of of something into our being that saves us from being only Kansas City Americans praise God that there's something that will save us from that dire fate you're American all too American shallow all too shallow charismatic all too charismatic you're missing the apostolic prophetic glory to the degree that you do not understand and anticipate and yield to and participate in this last day saga of the sifting of Israel through the nations as they walk a road to Calvary of the kind of the Lord before them in the which they themselves will come to the recognition of the Lord as the text itself indicates because they're going to say in verse 3 he was despised and rejected he was a man of suffering acquainted with infirmity and as one from whom we held we hid our faces he was despised and we held him with no account but surely now we see that he has borne our infirmities his suffering was not mindless there was something redemptive in it now we understand it to the degree that we ourselves are going through a comparable suffering we involuntarily but he voluntarily who knew no sin has suffered this for our transgressions he carried our infirmities our diseases we had accounted him as stricken struck down by God and afflicted but now we realize he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities and upon him was the punishment that made us whole and by his stripes we're healed hey that's called revelation saints and there's no revelation more profound that comes out of suffering and the mutuality of suffering of that which Jesus himself bore and I'm just supposing there's a prophetic supposition that not the least of God's strategic intent in uprooting the people Israel not just from the state but from Kansas City and Toronto and Oshkosh and everywhere to move them through the nations in flight from being battered and bruised more than any man not the least of the purposes that in the course of flight how did I get saved in the course of flight in the course of moving through the nations being stripped of my categories uprooted and sent out from my values and opened up to new considerations I could for the first time hear the still small voice of God in the New Testament that was given me that I would never before have deigned even so much as to look at and had refused 10 years earlier or so when I waited for my Coast Guard papers to become a merchant seaman at the age of 16 and some sheepy-eyed guy teary-eyed as I'm waiting online for my papers offered me New Testament and I spurned him I said listen guy go down to the Museum of Natural History and you'll see all the evidence for evolution that shows God to be a fiction and a myth that you'll need I don't need your little book too bad of what I inflicted on people and women and wives because of my refusal of that book that came into my hand subsequently aboard the deck of a tramp steamer on my way from Italy to Greece in the first opening of which came a revelation out of the mouth of Him who said if you see me you see the Father I am the Father of One and who said to the woman who was taken in the act of adultery and to those who were ready to stone her let Him who is without sin cast the first stone and when I read that you dear saints something came up into my eyes and brain and went through me like a sword I was cleaved in two I was a shaking trembling hulk into one statement out of the mouth of Jesus that was beyond human wisdom in a predicament beyond human resolution of a man who said He came to fulfill the Lord not to destroy it and the Lord says death by stoning what could He say I was going to think of an answer for Him out of my own Jewish brightness and exhausted my perspicacity to finally realize there is no human answer when a man says He's come to fulfill the law and the law requires stoning and yet something out of the cry of your own heart was for something more than judgment but what could it be and I myself am guilty with her as a fornicator and adulterer and deserve that same judgment so this is not a little academic thing for which I need a clever answer my life is at stake I put my finger in the book and opened it up tentatively tremulously what could this new discovery say is there going to be another Freud another Marx another collapsed Jewish hero culture hero that will also fail and I read on Jesus bent over the earth poking His finger that He looks up at these men who are out for His blood because He's threatening to their righteousness and speaks that one line let Him who is without sin cast the first stone that line came up off the page through my eyes into my brain into my heart I knew that I knew that I knew in one fell moment there's a living God I'm reading His word came out of the mouth of Jesus I'm stuck I'm hooked I can't spit this out it'll kill my mother but what can I say the fact of the matter is it saved her in her 96th year 10 days before her death the woman who could not pronounce the name of Jesus called upon the name of the Lord because they woke me at 3 a.m. I was actually up Art, your mother is delirious with fear she's had a vision of hell come down right away I came down right away my mother was panicked and the Lord poured out of my mouth scriptures I did not know that I knew a volume of the word of God like the washing of the water of the word of prophecies of the Messiah the Lord the King of Israel that thou Bethlehem afraid of thou you be the least of all the cities of Judah yet out of thee shall he come forth who is to be the ruler of all Israel whose goings forth are from old and from everlasting until she could take my hand and follow me in a prayer word for word to call upon the name of the Lord and pass from death to life because she had been prayed for all over the world and was the epitome of Jewish stubbornness who could not so much as pronounce the name of Jesus civilly but spit it out until that moment and after she had prayed that prayer she said God if I've done anything wrong please forgive me but she had not done anything wrong she had done something right and she changed the last 10 days of her life the women of the community said your mother is another woman she was a shrew she was bitchy and demanding and tough as these Jews are she strained our patience but now she's agreeable and pleasant and she said to me the next day but Arthur she said the way is narrow and not many will find it and the next day she said if you only knew how much God loves you and the next day she said when she heard that I had to go on a trip I'm sending you a blessing I'm not complaining that why did you bring me from West Palm Beach in January to Northern Minnesota now I understand it was the mercy of God that set me up for this salvation and you know what dear saints she's in the cloud of witnesses overhead tonight and enjoying every moment who could not understand what her son was about who had disappointed her who should have been a doctor or a lawyer my son the lawyer not my son the evangelist let alone my son the prophet but she's there and looking down and she's felling you know that Yiddish word her cup is running over that's my boy he's serving the purposes of God and communicating the reality that I had resisted but by the mercy of God was able to acknowledge ten days before my death so now I'm not in hell in Psalm 49 in Sheol I'm with the God of Israel in heaven and the saints of every generation Jesus saves to the uttermost all who come unto God through him so what am I saying here these Jews are coming to a recognition of a new kind all we like sheep have gone astray what? a Jew is going to acknowledge that he's gone astray and not just this one or that one but all we like sheep have gone astray we're all guilty we're nationally culpable no matter what we have achieved in culture and civilization and have brought Salk vaccine and Heifetz violin concertos we have all gone astray but we did not recognize it until now but now in this suffering that so corresponds to that through which he passed we see that we have all like sheep gone astray we have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all to see that is to be saved to see that is to return to Zion with everlasting joy on your heads he was oppressed he was afflicted he did not open his mouth unlike us we were complaining griping how come again we have to suffer this he went silently to the slaughter what a contrast like a lamb that is led to the slaughter like a sheep that before its shearer's son that he did not open his mouth had he opened it but once in complaint as we are complaining we Jews we cantankerous Jews why must we suffer this he would have been nullified in his qualification as the suffering servant and as the Messiah of God there'd be no atonement but he did not open his mouth and by a perversion of justice he was taken away who could have imagined he was cut off from the land of the living he was stricken for the transgression of my people this sounds like God speaking you see the change of voice there's the narration of the prophet then there's the statement of Israel itself in a new acknowledgement and God himself now inserts himself into the text by the phrase my people they made his grave with the wicked a tomb with the rich though he had done no violence there was no deceit in his mouth yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him and when you shall make his life an offering for sin his soul he shall see his offspring shall prolong his days and through him the will of the Lord shall prosper for out of his anguish he shall see light in verse 11 he shall find satisfaction through this knowledge the righteous one my servant shall make many righteous shall bear their iniquities therefore I will allot him a portion of the great well this requires such explication every verse in the way in which I'm submitting it tonight has an application of a unique kind when we consider Israel now coming to this recognition out of their anguish they shall see light suffering reveals and the reason why we have so shallow a gospel and have reduced it to nomenclature and step one step two and do this and repeat after me and make a decision is because we have not seen the light of the depth of the glory of God as revealed in the face of Jesus when he was marred more than any man but we'll have opportunity to be renewed and deepened in that seeing when their face shall be marred as they explicate and demonstrate before the nations the suffering of the Lord 2000 years before them by the which they themselves shall be saved and by the which nations shall see and contemplate what they had not been told and they had not heard all the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God who has been his counselor that Israel in her apostasy and in her judgment in her expulsion in her exile in her last day suffering serves more the purposes of God in the revelation of himself than ever was fulfilled when Israel was at its virtue and at its best their suffering will reveal more the glory of God and the nature of God which was their call to be a witness unto me so this is the great scenario of the last days and how we will respond to it as they pass through whether we will extend mercy that they may obtain mercy even at the risk of our own life will determine our eternal destiny whether there will be a place prepared for us in the kingdom of God as the righteous because only the righteous are willing to suffer for another people while they are yet in the place of sin and degradation because however the least they are they are the least of these my brethren and they are also your brethren if you could but understand can you see how many purposes are served by the suffering of Israel in the last days that will identify who in fact the true church is and reveal to the nations who the true God is and reveal to Israel the Messiah whose sacrifice they had previously spurned and now receive with gratitude for he was wounded for our transgressions and with his stripes we are healed we need to pray saints Lord a post message blessing we are asking that this long dissertation will not fall on deaf ears either here or through here to the many places in which these tapes or videos will be communicated that there will be an apprehension of a new kind of the depth of the meaning of God through judgment of Jesus at the cross of the holocaust of the Jew and the holocaust yet to come that the issues of eternity and the issues of the rule of God out of Zion which is righteousness in the earth is of such a kind such a nature that it deserves and justifies every expenditure required to obtain it even in the suffering of your people Israel as in the suffering of your son before them for they are also your son and cannot be exonerated or absolved from the road to Calvary that he himself trod and if it's required of that Israel to what degree shall it be required of us is there a road for us is there a Calvary for us is there a suffering for us probably to the degree in which we identify with that people and join with them and are caught in the act of it will suffer with them and for them and because of them for those who hate that people of God will hate this people and we're willing for those last days sufferings by which we also shall be exalted they to their place in the earth and we to our place in the heavenlies rising and ascending and descending upon the son of man ruling over five cities and some over ten and the theocratic rule in which we participate from the heavenly locus as they from the earthly whew what are you saying cats much learning has made you mad Lord thank you for recording that little tidbit and let your church dwell upon it it's own eternal as well as millennial destiny in keeping with the theocratic rule for which we ourselves are being prepared as they are being prepared from the earthly plateau and we from the heavenly and the entrance into which is suffering that is received with gratitude as coming from the hand of God in his great sovereignty and wisdom and necessity that proceeds the glory bless the church Lord this is the kind of word that not only wakes it up but makes it up and brings it in a hearing into a place of maturity by the very word that only you can convey and perform so save us my God from being human all to human American all to human shallow all to shallow bring us my God into that continuum with the great saints that have preceded us who are not complete without us and in our obedience and suffering even unto death the whole remarkable redemptive Heil's Geschichte of God the German word for the salvation history shall be completed to the eternal praise of your glory from one shore to the other throughout all nations and over the face of this earth what a calling to make that calling a predictable church of Sunday services or programs for our enjoyment is a caricature of the intention of God in those things that pertain to his glory which we reduce and and fit to our purpose in keeping with our Kansas City culture and its requirement God forbid that travesty my God raise us up to apostolic and prophetic stature who receive a calling with joy and for the God who will give us every enablement so to fulfill it for Israel's sake and your sake in Jesus name we pray Amen