In this sermon, the speaker focuses on Romans 11, which is a significant passage in Paul's apostolic theology. The speaker emphasizes that Romans 9-11 is the heart of Paul's systematic statement on the mystery of Israel and the church. The speaker warns against ignorance of this mystery, as it can lead to arrogance and deception within the church. The central message of the passage is that blindness has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles, but ultimately, all Israel will be saved through the deliverer who will turn away ungodliness from Jacob.

If I have understood you are right in what you have been quickening in Romans 11 as the point and beginning for these three nights, then give now precious unction to that word, open the understanding of your people and give us even something more than memorable, even something more than significant. Give us an historic occasion, an event that will be consequential, my God, in the very things that you are describing. And for that we thank and give you praise in Jesus' name, God's people said, Amen. Turn to Romans 11, verse 26, this is jumping in feet first. Everybody understands the significance of Romans 11? Romans 9 through 11 is the statement of Paul on the great mystery of which he was steward among the other mysteries of the church given to him as the least of all saints. And it's the heart of Paul's most systematic statement of his apostolic theology. He's not a systematic theologian. Paul writes in mysteries himself as even Peter said that he's difficult to be understood which scriptures some men rest in advantage to themselves as they do also the scriptures. Paul is not easy. But in Romans we have the clearest, most systematic statement of Paul's apostolic mind on the subject of Israel and the church, which he calls a mystery, rightly so. And some scholars have said that Romans chapter 1 through 8 is the preparation for the introduction of this great theme and 12 through 16 is the outworking of the remarkable statement made in those three central chapters 9 through 11. So 11 is the climax to Paul's whole dissertation. As I have looked to the Lord today, this scripture about Zion kind of found a place in my spirit. Let's start from verse 25. For are not, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own conceits? That blindness in part is happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles become in. And so all Israel shall be saved, as it is written, there shall come out of Zion the deliverer and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob. For this is my covenant with them when I shall take away their sins. What thinkest thou of a statement like that? That is so remarkably compact, that says so much, that entire volumes could be written in the commentary of these few words and that generations of believers have either read through it, read around it, or ignored it. And I would say in my own 40 years as a believer and all around the world in every aspect of the church, there is a profound ignorance of this mystery. And yet Paul said, I would not have you to be ignorant of this mystery. And in that he suggests that there will be a penalty. Of all the mysteries, to forfeit this one is to make yourself a candidate for conceit, which is to say deception. You'll become inflated and pompous and arrogant and self-assured. Well, you might even go so far as to think that the church is itself the kingdom of God, that it need not even wait for the king to make his appearance. Or equally as rambunctious and vain is to think that God is finished with Israel and that now you have yourself become the Israel of God and that they had their opportunity and blew it and now God has passed the baton on to you. So that Paul begins by answering the question of the church at Rome, is God finished with the Jew? They give every appearance of being finished. They've slain their Messiah as they did the prophets that were sent unto them. Are we now the Israel of God? And Paul, in the most emphatic language in Greek, and I don't understand Greek, but I'm told that when he says, God forbid that you should believe that, it is as strenuous and as vehement a statement as the apostle could have made. God forbid that you should think that God is finished with Israel. They are only temporarily set aside. They have stumbled. And then he even gives an explanation that they have stumbled, that through their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles. Well, that's nice, but then in the way that he does, he completes the statement in a way that blows your mind. That salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. What are you saying, Paul? That there's a divine stratagem for our salvation as Gentiles that has a purpose beyond the benefit that we receive in being saved? Exactly. And if you don't see it and take it to your heart as mandate, as the very purpose central for your being as church, you disfigure church itself. You lose the identification of church as church, which cannot be seen or understood except in its relationship with this people out of whose salvation you have received. For salvation is of the Jews. How did you guys get into the act? Because God in his mercy, seeing that you were without God and without hope in the world and drinking blood out of skulls and fornicating like jackrabbits and full of violence and terror, has made known to you the so great salvation of God that was reserved and unique only to Jews. So much so that Peter required a vision, a trance of a sheet coming down with unclean animals and God saying, Peter, take and eat. But, Lord, I have never eaten anything unclean. What I have called clean, what I have made clean, call down that unclean. And no sooner did he wake from that vision than there were Gentiles at the door calling him to come and to share the faith with Cornelius and his Roman house. And as he was sharing, the Holy Spirit fell. You know, dear saints, we need to recapture this. You need to recapture this. Because you don't sufficiently appreciate the salvation that has come to you that was exclusively the property of Jews. You don't sufficiently appreciate that you were grafted into a tree other than your own. And if you don't acknowledge that, and you're only, just what shall I say, technically grafted in, but not existentially and appreciatively grafted in, you'll not enjoy the benefit of the sap. You'll not produce fruit. You'll still be, as you were, a wild branch. Even though you're grafted in, you're not receiving the benefit of that engrafting unless you acknowledge with gratitude the so great mercy of God to give you a place in their tree. I don't blame you for wanting to shun that knowledge, seeing that the tree is not eye appealing and gnarled and twisted with such a contortion of history that you almost want to avert your gaze. And for the same reason, we're not quick to acknowledge that the God who is our God is also the God of Jacob. You have to live in my shoes. You have to be with me in Germany. A couple of years ago when I was with Klaus, and we went to a Jewish cemetery. It's not that I'm morbid, but somehow if there's a Jewish cemetery, I'll find it. If there's a Jewish soul, I'll find it. And we went to this cemetery, a few miles from where I was to be speaking that night, and the tombstones were so heavy from the 14th century and so eroded by time and wind that you could barely make out the Hebrew inscriptions. They were so monumental in size that the Nazis could not knock them over. Do you know what it means for Judah, whose name is Katz, to walk in and through such a place and to get the sense of the Jewish existence in Germany for 2,000 years? So profound that you can't tell where the word German ends and Jewish begins. That many of the things that we enjoy, like lox and bagels, is actually lox is a German word, meaning spoke salmon, which I fed these children when they were with me in Brooklyn on a bagel, which was almost as important as my counsel. So there's a sense of melancholy when you see the evidence of the long presence in Germany of Jewish people and what their end was in that land, which they celebrated so much and admired culturally so profoundly that they thought, this cannot come upon us. This dark thing that is having its origin in the basement of beer halls through the punk scum, the lowest expressions of German civilization, culture, and now coming to the place of political power, that can't last. Because this is the land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, the great philosopher, the great ethicist, and Jews, if anything, are ethical. And so what happened? German identification collapsed. They went up in smoke. And so it's something to walk through Germany and ponder these things and also to know that there's a big monument to the Holocaust now being laid in Berlin, right by the Reichstag, right by the central government that occupies two, three, or four football fields of immense granite blocks, I think a thousand or more, to indicate something of the loss of Jewish life. It's the Jew rubbing the face of the German into the grit of his own history. Why are we like that, overkill? Isn't it enough just to have a simple monument and to touch both German and Jewish consideration to the tragedy, the mutual aspects of the tragedy which we have had part and for which we are both guilty? No, we have to lay out concrete blocks and football fields, and we'll show them. And so what are we doing? We're provoking a new anti-Semitism by our own overt overreaction to the past. You can't win unless you know the Lord. So I'll be in Berlin in just a few weeks and other places in Germany. So I came to that meeting that night, charismatic. I know they were excited, Jewish speaker novelty. And I looked out on their precious German faces and my first question was, I've just visited the Jewish cemetery showing a presence of Jews going back into the 14th century. How is it that my kinsmen lived in the midst of you and your Christian nation and perished without any knowledge that the God whom you ostensibly celebrate is the God of Jacob? Dead silence, jaws dropping because these dear charismatic saints had never once reflected that the God whom they worship is the God of Jacob. And God is not ashamed to designate that title in his relationship to this Jacob people. Only we are ashamed, we're embarrassed. We don't want that association, that identification. And yet if we avoid it, we'll have missed the mystery for which we were saved and the great concluding redemptive drama by which human history is itself concluded and the King of Israel comes and establishes rule in guess what place, no other than the physical, literal Jerusalem, now such a bone of contention among nations and will become increasingly so. Why? Because Isaiah said, the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem and nations shall study war no more. Believest thou this? Well, you're unusual then because there's very little expectation of an actual kingdom to be found in Christendom in my experience. Somehow we've lost the sense of it and it has become diminished into some kind of subjective inward thing. The kingdom of God within, or the principles of the kingdom as they function in the church but there's no political, there's no theocratic expectation of an actual rule of God over his creation out of a literal place of his choosing called Zion and to lose that dear saints is to lose everything and so we have lost it, the expectation of a kingdom with that nexus and that center in exact proportion as we have lost or not known the mystery of Israel itself. That's why it's so central to Paul's whole consideration and it needs to become central to us or we'll continue to be mere charismatics forever. You understand I'm speaking symbolically. What I'm saying is there's something more and above charismatica but we will be fixed at that lesser level until we come into the recognition and the appreciation and the participation of the fulfillment of this mystery which compels us by necessity being so remarkable in its dimensions to become saints and to become it corporately. That's the Zion that this scripture speaks of. The deliverer shall come out of Zion and if he'll not come out of Zion, he'll not come and Zion, as I hope to show you tonight or in these nights is a key word, a mystery word that is suggestive of the completion of God's purposes through the church coming of age when the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. That fullness is something more than numerical. It's not God waiting only for the completion of a number, although the number is significant. Why is that, Art? Because we're going to replace fallen angels. Don't you know? The present principalities and powers of the air who have followed that usurper the prince of this world will be displaced from their governmental location in the heavenlies. They're the principalities and powers of the air that oppose the purposes of God that alienate men from God that foster identifications with idolatry and sport and music, jazz not jazz, I love jazz cheap stuff to turn men from God to themselves. That's why that chapter on the principalities and powers is so remarkably significant. They're to be displaced and God intended them as a governmental how shall I say it accompaniment to order and creation so that men in the order established through the influence of these powers over nations would be free and undistracted in the pursuit of the knowledge of him. For Paul tells us in Acts 17 that God has of one blood made all nations of men that they might seek after God if happily they might be found of him. Here's an apostolic mentality that blows the philosophers right out of the picture who everyday wanting to hear some new thing, some novelty and here's this Hebrew this lower piece of apostolic scum bearing already his wounds telling them that the whole purpose of life the whole purpose of creation, the whole purpose of nations the whole purpose of race is to seek after God that you might be found of him which the powers of darkness seek to pervert and to prevent and will be displaced by things taking place in the earth in proportion as the church itself comes of age and defeats the powers in the same way that they suffered their initial defeat by the testimony of Jesus at the cross. Well you've got to be sophisticated saints to keep up with what I'm rattling on. What are you saying God? I'm saying that the initial defeat by Jesus of the powers of the air who made of them an open spectacle and disarmed them by something that he demonstrated in his suffering unto death at the cross for had they known they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory they did not know that having him at their hand and in their mercy and applying their satanic wisdom of destruction and violence they were producing and giving opportunity for the display of the character of God himself most profoundly revealed in suffering for suffering reveals and ultimate suffering reveals ultimately what does it reveal? It reveals the benign nature of God who says lay not this into their charge who receives the suffering as being from the sovereign hand of God and serving the redemptive purposes of the Father and can receive it with equanimity and grace and not rail again at those who are railing at him there's another wisdom, there's a conflict of wisdoms and when the church at the end of the age in its suffering occasioned by its identification with the Jews as was true of those who did so in the Nazi time like Corrie ten Boom who went to the concentration camp with her father, with her sister being caught in suckering Jews will be exactly again in much larger proportion the scenario of the last days that will occasion our suffering for their sake and somehow in the remarkable way in which this buckshot is being scattered I'm assuming that the Lord's purposes are being served I would much prefer aesthetically a more ordered presentation which the Lord sometimes gives but this is not that time and it's not for me to order or command just to allow him to do his thing okay, let's look look closely at this centerpiece of Paul's remarkable dissertation on a mystery in which he says that we should not be ignorant lest we would suffer a very particular consequence which is in evidence today in the church everywhere and that it's a mystery and a mystery requires a revelation you cannot adduce a mystery by the exercise of one's mind, mystery must be revealed how is it then that we could be ignorant because we have not been conducive to the receiving of revelation there's something in our hearts an attitude against Jews that we don't relish the fact that God yet has a purpose for them and we like to see them replaced or shunted to the sidelines that keeps us from the recognition of the mystery and so with my own experience over the years in contact with some of the leading spokesmen in the charismatic realm men whose names you would know if I mentioned almost invariably confess and say Art, I've never understood Romans 11 or Romans 9-11 and it's always remained to me a mystery and finally after years of hearing things like that I thought well okay brother I can understand that though you're a gifted speaker and the Lord has opened to you realms of revelation of other things of significance but that he has omitted this is a remarkable consideration not that it has been omitted but that you have not repented for the failure to have received the revelation and put before God the fact that you may be disqualified by some attitude for which repentance he's waiting and that you've not either recognized or given are you following me? that the mystery has been denied to you is a statement of judgment for attitudes that you're carrying that in God's sight are reprehensible and negate any possibility of receiving the very revelation I'll give you an instance I won't even mention it because I can't remember it but you would know it if I could a well-known speaker who subsequently has divorced his wife and married his secretary maybe he's done it again since, I don't know but he came to speak at our Plainfield, New Jersey assembly when I was a very young believer and he was English and it's with the English I've had my greatest difficulty you explain that to me I've been treated rudely in Great Britain by some of the most prominent and advanced expressions of the church calling themselves apostolic have walked out of a meeting where I spoke before them on Romans 11 because I came late to the meeting excuse these personal reminiscences and I had diarrhea and they had to find me a place to go potty before I could get to the meeting and so I got there late and out of breath and the meeting was in progress and I barely sat down and it was time to be called up to speak and I said, Lord, I'm out of breath and I'm not prepared Romans 11, Lord that's basic stuff Romans 11, okay I got up and spoke on Romans 11 in such a way as I had never before nor since heard myself speak it was a treat with humor, it was literary but the faces were aghast I couldn't understand why they were looking that way they were pained as if I was speaking about public orgies or some other totally disagreeable thing and yet I went on and finished even looking at that inhospitable sea of faces especially from their leadership and when I finished and sat down they got up and left the building there was no thank you, but no thank you no concluding prayer, no debate they left the building I'd never ever experienced such rudeness but one guy had to remain to serve tea being English, of course tea must go on and so I'm dangling a cup and I'm saying to this elder you know, my dear brother I'm not expecting that your leadership or congregation is necessarily obliged to agree with my perspective but I will say that it is a sound biblical perspective and held by giants of the faith historically and I can't understand this untaught and impolite conduct that you would not even expect from the elks and the lions and world's fraternal orders I'm getting from a church that calls itself apostolic I said, tell your leaders they're flirting with judgment in the rude way in which the word and its minister was dismissed why am I telling you that about English resistance there's something about Great Britain and they say Japan has the highest production of anti-Semitic literature in the world what contact have they with Jews except both Japan and Great Britain were former empires and there may be some vestigial hangover and even hope for a future day in the sun where the issue of Israel becoming the center point of all nations is the most disagreeable consideration I don't know if you know it at your leisure, look at Deuteronomy 32.8 where it says that when God determined the number of the nations, he did so in proportion to the sons of Israel I've never heard anyone preach on that verse suggesting that there's a mystery in the election of God and the issue of his world rule by which this despised nation with its terrible track record and apostasy is to be central to all nations and that out of its sign and its Jerusalem shall go forth the word of the Lord to nations and those nations that will refuse to acknowledge God's election and choice, not predicated on their successful track record or their virtue but simply on the basis of his choosing because I will be whom I will be and I will choose whom I will choose and I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy go eat your heart out, I know it's not your choice you would have preferred mount something in California rather than that little pimple of a hill in Zion but that's exactly why I have chosen it to show you your gentile arrogance and your predominance and wanting to assert your geography over my choosing I've chosen them not because they're the greatest but because they are least to demonstrate that I'm the sovereign God and my choosing is not predicated on the merit of any man or any nation but simply on the basis that I am God and I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy and if that bothers you, you have an argument with me and your anti-Semitism at its heart that rankles you against the Jew is really your controversy with me and so all Israel shall be saved as it is written listen saints, what kind of a church are we that is not concerned to see the fulfillment of what is written according to the covenant that I have made with them that is not concerned for the fulfillment of covenants that God will make how is God God if what he writes is not fulfilled how is God God if his covenants are not secure and he cannot fulfill them even over and against the unwillingness of the people of whom he has covenanted he says the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable they are without repentance, where did he say that, Romans 11 it's not based on their willingness even and that's why we wrote the book with chosen for what because most Jews don't want to be chosen we want to be the Hong Kong of the Middle East we want commercial success, we want careers we don't want to be a people central to the purposes of God whom we don't know but he's saying despite your unwillingness I must fulfill my intention that has been declared out of my mouth, or how then am I God so we're the church and we're not jealous for his name, his honor, his reputation his ability to fulfill his word all the more dramatic and all the more glorious when it's fulfilled to an unwilling nation and a nation whose track record gives no promise of fulfillment or deserving of choice then we have missed the issue of God and yet we're singing our choruses so I would not brethren have you to be ignorant repent if you are for it's already a statement of judgment that there's something uncomely in your own heart and attitude against those whom I've chosen which is the statement of your attitude against me and therefore you cannot receive my revelation why then have you not repented and been broken before me at the failure to understand and to commend that central mandate and call that is not just the issue of Israel, it's the issue of the church as the church and if the church fails to be apprehended by this mystery and to be the agent of it's fulfillment how then is it the church how does it come to the place by which it shall be a bride for the bridegroom if it's not prepared for the trial and the demand of an ultimate kind that comes in the mystery of their relationship with my Jewish people to forsake them is to forsake the church's own identity and it's own fulfillment and to disqualify it for it's own eternal inheritance and it's place in the heavenly is ruling and reigning with Christ from heavenly places can you understand that so blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles come in here's where you have to become prophetic and intuitive and to become prophetic and intuitive offends people in the church the place from which I just came in the East Bay, the brother was offended when I said I have a certain understanding that has been given to me by virtue of my office and call prophetically and that I'm given a way to intuit and understand the significance of prophetic scripture that is not given to others that's why the church waits on the foundations laid by the apostles and the prophets that a teacher cannot himself perform he was a teacher offended at my assertion that there are yet prophets and apostles in the earth who are foundational to the church and that the fullness of the Gentiles is not only the numeric quantity but the quality of a kind for which God waits that when it's obtained, the Gentiles are no longer Gentiles they have come to a place of transcendence and for the want of a better word, they have become Hebraic, they have become Davidic they're like the psalmists they're like the prophets they have transcended the limitations of their own national cultures and ethnic origins and have come to become the people of God as a bride adorned for the bridegroom that means you have to rise out of your African skin and out of your white bourgeois middle class California skin to come into something of so transcendent of the kind that God waits for eternally and until his bridegroom has such a bride he'll not have dominion over the earth because dominion is given to them he must have a vice-regent he must have a wife suitable for the majesty of his call being adorned for the bridegroom having the same quality of life, of integrity of character, as is in the bridegroom himself which is far more than what we presently know or even desire or are willing to sacrifice to obtain and what I'm saying is this and I'll close with it for now this is the mystery the mystery is that God has locked us in a reciprocal relationship with the people Israel the Jacob nation, the Jews worldwide even in their present condition who look upon us not only with suspicion but with contempt, the church how icky can you get, how fundamental how crude, how reactionary how lacking the two most antithetical bodies in the earth is contemporary Jewry and the contemporary church and God is saying I've called you to a reciprocal relationship with this people that will make of you an ultimate demand not made by any other people or any other ministry this is not just another ethnic group that needs to be saved like gypsies or Puerto Ricans or Filipinos this is the people of God in their historic apostasy of whom Paul says in the same 11th chapter they are the enemies of the gospel talk about apostolic candor C-A-N-D-O-R he's not fudging, he's not mincing words they are the enemies of the gospel for your sake who needs them? hey listen you guys, come visit me in New York and I'll take you to the Lubavitcher Hasidim where I've been thrown out of the classroom and other places and my rabbi with whom I've been meeting weekly who finally shut me down and said we can't go on Aaron because you're deceived and you need to be delivered because you subscribe to the deceiver, the sorcerer and the men who shut me out of the Hasidic classroom because I believe in Jesus said you believe in a sorcerer, a magician who learned from us these tricks and how to walk on water in order to distract Jews from the law to follow him you cannot believe how poisonous the attitude is in Jewish orthodoxy and the references in the Talmud to the illegitimate birth of Jesus ascribed to an affair between Mary and a Roman soldier and many other disgraceful references which historically they had to remove because the nations in which the Talmud was published would not permit it, but they kept it in their secret archives and now they're saying we are putting it back in there's an open, deep-seated hostility against the Lord and against his people everything is stacked against us you can't understand how we are perceived and yet, except through us they will not see the glory of God except through our mercy that Paul says that by your mercy they may obtain mercy and historically when have they needed it and when will they need it more than the coming cataclysm of which Jesus spoke will exceed anything that the nation has previously known or will again know, its coming saints it will make an ultimate requirement of us even unto threat and risk of our peril of our own safety and our own lives and when Jews will see that from Gentiles it transcends religion they'll see God, and that's what he says in Ezekiel 20 I will meet with you face to face in the wilderness of California, and Kenya and Uganda, and all the nations where I will uproot and sift my people for I will sift them through all nations not only for the Jews sake, but for the nations themselves and the church within the nations that will be to them the least of these my brethren what they ought as I said to these Africans, you'll do that in that day you'll extend mercy in that day to the least of these his brethren, Steven Spielberg and the head, the CEO of Walt Disney Corporation, and Wall Street and all these men of affluence and means who will find themselves stripped and stinking not having bathed or showered how long with rotting with sores and cancers and wounds, and coming to you in that bloody and filthy condition, that you'll be able to extend mercy as if they were the least of these his brethren, that they're Jews and they're white and they'll be your brethren, then what about the blacks right now who are poor and stinking and without employment you'll be able to extend mercy to Jews then and not to your black kinsmen now the light was breaking and they have to be righteous now to their own if they'll be righteous to the least of his brethren then see the tension, see the reality see the mystery, see the wisdom of God lost to the church, which explains in one fell swoop our lamentable condition let's pray Lord, we're not willing to remain in this condition the issue of the church is not our enjoyment but the fulfillment of your glory as Paul even ends Romans 11 for of him and through him and to him be glory forever he had his apostolic head screwed on right the issue of faith is your glory forever and it will come by the remarkable thing that you will perform at the end of the age when all Israel shall be saved as it is written because of the covenant that you have made with them for the deliverer will come out of Zion and Zion will be the nexus of the church that has come of age out of which you can come to be their deliverer so Lord, continue on to give us understanding and perception of what our calling is and our heart, my God to fulfill it only as the church not as virtuoso art cats individuals but as the church in its corporate makeup, in the truth of its corporateness to take upon itself these burdens that have this heart and be capable of extending this mercy because they have received mercy bless us tonight, Lord, you've troubled us you've set new thoughts into our consideration and you've left them dangling, you haven't dotted the I's and crossed the T's because you're treating us as sons and daughters that don't have to get it all in one night and we can be allowed to go out in a place yet of of incompletion and agitation and that it will keep us up perhaps in part of the night or bring us to our knees or into the text so we thank you Lord, come precious God and pour out your soul in these days follow this up my God, this breaking in this setting, this blade into this hard earth, turn it over and break it up and give us my God such a depth of understanding, comprehension of the mystery to which we will give ourselves freely that you might receive glory both now and forever in Jesus' name we pray and God's people said Amen