In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of community and the strength it provides in facing backlash. They mention that they have previously spoken on this theme and share a similar message they delivered in Germany. The speaker emphasizes the need to evaluate and assess our experiences for future application. They also mention the significance of Germany in relation to Israel's demise and the unique focus of this end-time school in preparing for what is to come. The speaker acknowledges the inner struggles and challenges faced by the students, highlighting the preparation and separation they have undergone. They express the desire for a deeper examination of this topic in light of scripture and the neglect it has received in society.

The cool thing is that the couple of times that it has been aired, the consequences have been stunning. I have never seen a greater response or reaction to the spoken word, as took place in the first speaking of this message in Kansas City in 1977 at the charismatic convention or conference there, where I was one of the low echelon speakers, and spoke this on a Saturday morning to an audience of 2,000, the Lord having put me on a fast for five days, from the time of my arrival in Kansas City to the time of the delivery of this message, that I myself did not know how momentous a thing I had. And there was a deadly silence after the message was spoken, virtually in a monotone, almost red from an outline that the Lord never allowed me in those five days to develop. He gave me the message on the first day of my arrival. I arrived with scraps and notes and collections of things that I had been accumulating for many years, because the subject of the Holocaust had been central to my whole formation as a modern man, my whole preoccupation with life, with reality, with truth and meaning, as an atheist. And no accident that the first chapter of the book, Ben Israel, which is the description of my conversion, begins at Dachau, the concentration camp in Germany, just outside of Munich, which I visited as a GI in Germany in the early 1950s. And that experience was so devastating for me, that it deepened what I knew was central to the whole issue of the meaning of the human condition. How can I say that? I sensed that there's something about the magnitude of the Holocaust that has something to do with the whole mystery of human existence, the predicament of life. And I just have to trust that these words have some meaning. My whole life from adolescence on to the time of my conversion was an existential cry for reality and for meaning. As a modern Jew growing up in the city of 8 million in New York, coming to manhood or early manhood in the World War II time, learning of the statistics of the Holocaust, which were an absolute devastation to me and to many modern Jews. We're now talking about an event that is 50 years old, and the Jewish community's greatest fear now that it is slipping away from the consciousness and the memory of mankind. And they are furiously seeking to do all in their power to retain the memory of the Holocaust. Sometime at your leisure today, you can look for some materials that have just recently come to me about a Holocaust Memorial Museum being established at the cost of many millions of dollars in Washington, D.C., where there'll be a permanent exhibit. And that exhibits like that are being established elsewhere in the world, even in Tokyo, because interestingly, there's been a great spurt of anti-Semitic literature coming out of Japan. And so the Jewish community is running scared. And the whole issue of Israel and Israel's birth flows directly out of the Holocaust. And it's interesting that when the peace conference was first established in Madrid through Baker as Secretary of State, that when Shamir gave his first message, the first thing of that message was a reference to the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the indigestible lump. It is the most significant factor of modern Jewish life. And in fact, it ought to be the great factor of modern life, period, because of the magnitude of what took place. I'm just going to stop and pray, because unless the Lord gives you grace, there's no way even to verbally sketch a sense of what that was if you didn't live through that time. And it's only come to you now, many years after the event, as a word, or you've caught some glimpse of it, or read a little bit, or seen something in the movies. The Holocaust is the single most devastating event of modern times, not just for the Jew, but for the whole of the modern world. And what we are now reaping in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and in other places where there's ethnic conflict, Cambodia in more recent history, the elimination, the genocidal extermination of millions on the basis of race has its precedent in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a critical turning point in the whole history of mankind. And if we don't understand the magnitude of that event, so much will be lost to us. And the remarkable thing is this. I'll put it this way. The two great events of modern times are the ones that have been most disparaged, most neglected, and least instructive for those for whom it was intended. One is the Holocaust, the systematic annihilation of the Jewish people of Europe, and the second like unto it, that precedes it, and that is connected with it, is the crucifixion of Jesus. There have been two great holocausts in modern history. The crucifixion of Jesus, the devastation or the extermination of the Son of Man, and the like event for the Jewish nation itself 50 years ago. And I believe that there's a direct link and connection and correspondence between these events and the failure to properly assess and understand their meaning as to the incalculable loss of mankind and to the Jewish nation and to the church. So I just want to pray. You can look at this at your leisure and realize what this means to the Jewish community. The millions that are being invested in this, the donations. Jewish philanthropy is famous. And people have little brass plaques. You go to any synagogue and there'll be on the back wall brass plaques with the names of the donors who donated the pews and the Torah and the speaking stands and the decoration, the building itself. Millions of philanthropic contributions have gone into these museums to keep the memory of the holocaust alive, but not in the sense that I believe that God intends. Because the people who have been its victim have least understood its meaning. The church does not understand it. And as I tried to suggest a few times in the course of these weeks, the failure to properly assess the meaning of this devastation in the way that God, I believe, intends for us to see it has the most devastating consequence for the faith. Where was God when his covenantal people were being systematically annihilated? The failure of God to intervene implies either he had not the power or he had not the ability to know of it. He was not omniscient nor omnipotent. And that means that God, as we have traditionally, which is to say, biblically understood him, is not the God who is God. Let that sink in. That the greatest victim of an improper understanding of the holocaust is God himself, who has been not only shunted to the sidelines, but discredited. And the faith of many has been devastated, both of Jews and of Christians, because of their failure to answer the question, where was God? And I don't know of any event in history that has prompted more writing, more research, more literature. It's voluminous. It would take libraries of libraries to contain the exhaustive works that have sifted through the holocaust. The casualties, the numbers, how they developed the gas, the systematic annihilation, the rise of Nazism, the history of anti-Semitism that had its culmination in it. So many things that the historians have pondered and weighed. But there's no literature at all on the question of why. They can say how, but they can't say why. And we need to know that there's a great difference between those two questions. You can give an answer to the question how, and the historians have sifted through the bones and have made the most exhaustive studies to show how it was done. And they can even answer why, in the sense of the rise of Nazism, Hitler, that madman, his anti-Semitic hatred of that people, going back to being slighted as a young man in his autistic career that was not recognized, and the competition that came from other Jews. I mean, that does not answer the great question. And on that great question, there's no literature, to my knowledge. And that question is, where was God? And raises the question, is there a God? And maybe what the Holocaust reveals is that we have naively and romantically subscribed to traditional notions about God. But when the rubber hits the road and God should reveal himself as God in power and ability to intervene, he was silent. And it raises the question of either a God who has a moral defect of indifference to suffering, particularly of his own people, or a God who is powerless to affect any change, or simply a God who is not. So many books have come out by disillusioned writers. Richard Rubinstein wrote a book called After Auschwitz. A rabbi who is now a professor of religion at a university in Florida, and whose whole argument is a return to paganism, and that we can no longer consider God as we had traditionally understood him since the Holocaust. The Holocaust is the great event. It's the dividing line. It's the Seizura. I'm going to talk about that. There's another book that I'll be bringing in these days by a Jewish philosopher, that nothing can be the same afterwards, and everything that had been previously recognized and respected as traditional is dead. We're on new ground, and there are moral and religious and social implications that will forever change the world. That's how great a single event can be. And a lot of what I'm saying about the Holocaust is equally true about the crucifixion of Jesus. That is a momentous single event that should have had enormous ramifications for all time, and has not, because it has been sentimentalized, or it has been ignored, or has been incorporated into a kind of a liturgy, or a convenient little framework of atonement. But the magnitude, the power, the devastation, the implications of the crucifixion of Jesus, the Holocaust of the Son of Man, has been lost to us. And equally now, this is being lost. And I'm saying there's a conjunction, and we'll have to search for it and find it. But when the message was spoken, when God put me on that fast on that first day, and I arrived at that hotel in Kansas City as one of the speakers, and I was given a room, there was a desk from one wall to the other, and I took out my papers, my back of envelopes, my notes, my newspaper clippings and articles that I'd been collecting for years, and I strew them out, and it went from one wall to the other wall, and I looked at it, and I despaired that any kind of message could come out of that. And I just sat down, I rolled up my sleeves, and I never got up for eight hours. And when I finished, I had a few pages of an outline on a yellow legal pad. And I thought, and I had missed lunch, and by supper time I realized I was not to eat at all, and I didn't until after the message was spoken five days later. Now I come back from that charismatic conference, which was simply a drag, and pick up my outline, waiting for the Lord to put flesh on its bones, and it never happened. I picked it up, it was dead. I couldn't touch it. I just put it down again. Every night I would come back and pick it up, thinking that the Lord was now going to amplify and flesh out that skeleton. No. Dead. I put it down again, until finally the Saturday came that it was to be delivered. And I was to share that morning's time with another brother, speaking on the same subject, but from a vastly different perspective. My perspective was the Holocaust as judgment. His perspective was the Holocaust as the failure of Christianity, the victimization of the Jewish people, the need to guard against future anti-Semitism, you know, the conventional way in which that's... But strangely, his wife had a baby four o'clock that morning, and he had to fly out. So I was left with the total time all to myself, and took it. And I picked up my yellow pad before 2,000 people, and the Lord did not give me any liberty so much as to raise my voice, to add any schmaltz, to raise my hands to make any gesture. It was the most monotonous, literally something given in monotone, calculated to be dismal. And when I finished, there was a deadly silence. The persuasive evidence of the failure of a message, not only before 2,000 people, but 200 Jewish believers, who looked to me with a certain kind of respect for my prominence, which I had to eat and suffer. And while I was in that terrible suspension of the silence, up the central aisle came two men walking toward the platform from which I had just spoken, one of whom I recognized as Ern Baxter's young man, and the other I did not know. And they beckoned me to the apron of the platform, and this brother said, Artie said, this brother is a Jew and a prophet, and he has a word for you from the Lord. I looked at him and I said, yes. He said something like, the Lord would have me to say to you that you have done incalculable damage to the body of Christ, that you have missed the mind of the Lord, and that you need instantly to go back to the microphone and recant your message. How would you like to be greeted with a word like that? After you have unburdened your soul in the first public speaking of a subject that you have been secretly nurturing for many years and fasted five days to present. Maybe we'll talk about this in the last week when we'll be speaking about the prophetic ministry itself. The only thing that saved me from the knife going right up into the heart to the hilt was that I had heard exactly that same statement once before in the first public message of any prominence that I had ever given as a very young believer at a full gospel regional conference before 5,000 in Washington, D.C., where the Lord had me to speak on a eunuch for Christ's sake. And the moment that I had finished that in that same stunned silence, and later on we went upstairs in the hotel there in Washington, D.C., with all the speakers, the suite, and I was treated like a turd. I mean, people just shunned it, poor Inga, what she's had to suffer because of her relationship with me. And when that message was finished, two lines of people were waiting to meet me, one to thank me that that word was life and the other to take my life. They were burning with anger and indignation for that word that would condemn their sons and so on to being eunuchs, but that was never my intent. It was a powerful word. It also came in a fast. And shortly thereafter, a man came up to the platform. He said, he's a Jew. He's a prophet and he had a word for me from the Lord that I had missed the mind of Christ, that I had done incalculable damage to the body of Christ, and that I needed instantly to go to the microphone and to recant the message. And in came the sword or the dagger right up to the hilt and turned. Not only that I had at that moment missed the Lord and done incalculable damage, but what about previous moments and what about all future moments? If I could miss the Lord at a critical point then, having sought him with prayers and fastings, at what point ever in the future could I be assured that I would not be missing him again? I'm not doing this justice. Only the word Schmerz, the German word for pain, gets at the anguish of these kinds of questions that are raised in the moment of delivery. It's something like a baptism of fire through which I believe God's messengers have to come who bring the oracles of God. It's not cheap. And the greatest devastation is the fear that indeed they might be right and that you did miss the mind of the Lord and there's no guarantee. I went from there to a virtual exile in the Washington D.C. days to Denmark where it was a wilderness experience for me. The same guy, the prophet so-called, sent me long-distance telegrams on Jewish feast days still calling for my repentance and that I should have a retraction printed in the Voice magazine, the full gospel periodical, and phone calls and harassment and atonement with the question that he might be right. And God was silent until many months after licking my wounds and refusing to accept any speaking invitations. I finally accepted them in Denmark and spoke from Watchman Nee's trilogy on a spiritual man where I accidentally came across a reference to a eunuch for Christ's sake using exactly the same scriptures that I had spoken from those many months before in Washington D.C. and Watchman Nee saying, if you don't get this word by the Spirit you'll be profoundly offended. And then the Lord just lifted the heavy burden I'd been bearing all those many months. So when this guy in 1977 said the same thing it didn't have quite the power to torment as had been my experience many years before but the words were identical and maybe I've not heard them for the last time. And so as I'm looking at this guy who's telling me I need to recant that silence was broken by a shriek and a howl like nothing I have ever heard. Reggie, you were there, right? Yes. You can talk to Reggie privately. I've got witnesses. I've got even photographs of people washing one another's feet. Moish Rosen, Jews for Jesus and Michael Evans and a number of Jewish believers and celebrities washing one another's feet. Cries came out. People fell out of their seats with such racking shrieks of repentance like nothing I've ever seen because of the devastating import of that word. And we went on for hours and it was in the many hours that followed that it finally culminated with the Jewish believers standing up and asking forgiveness of those in the audience who had European origins for the mischief that we had done in sowing seeds of doubt over the faith by our very unbelieving presence in Europe through the ages and they getting up and asking our forgiveness for what their ancestors had inflicted on our Jewish kin in violence and in murder and mayhem. It was a remarkable reconciliation of God of a symbolic and significant kind. I came home with that cassette in my hand knowing that God wanted a book from it 1977, this is 1992 and that book has not yet come. Fragments have been developed. The Lord has added other papers but this is a monumental task that no single man can perform. If ever there's a corporate undertaking this will be it. And when it ever is published and to find a publisher who will publish it will be to find one with a remarkable courage. It will exceed the backlash that came by this Rashi, what's his name who the Muslims vowed to murder? Solomon Rashi. Okay, this will exceed that. And the outrage that will come with a thesis that the Holocaust is the statement of the magnitude of Jewish sin. That the magnitude of the suffering is relative to the magnitude of our sin. And not only will the Jewish community howl but the liberal church that is identified with them and wants to placate and mollify and find ecumenical relationship with them will also shriek. So I realized why I was in community. That it would take more than one to bring forth such a work but it would take the corporate strength of a community to bear the backlash that would come. So all of that by introduction to the importance of this theme. I've got the original tape and a transcript of it. I've got another expression of that same message that came in Germany. When on a New Year's Eve annual conference of the sisters of Mary Bessel Schlink I was invited to speak and the Lord had me to share that same theme with a little different focus and emphasis. So you're going to hear portions of it and it will really test us as students and probe it and to see what God is wanting us to understand by this. And if I'm off base here's a supreme opportunity to obtain correction. So let's pray. Thank you Lord precious God. Lord we stand at a threshold of an enormous kind and we can say I think without exaggeration that the three weeks that have preceded this moment in a very great sense are a preparation for it. In fact it would not be too much to say that everything that has preceded this moment may well have been a preparation for it. And if you give us the grace my God to open this up and to make the implications of it clear everything that will follow from this moment shall be altered in the light my God that will come from this examination of this subject. And we ask that. Lord we just know that there has been a grotesque indifference and neglect of an examination of this epical event in the light of scripture. That man in his own humanity and sociological bent has found explanation that completely omits reference to you as if you were not there and as if you were not God. And not a God who had written and a God who had prophesied such devastations for Israel. And Lord we ask that as you lead us through this material by your spirit that our own appreciation of you for the God that you in fact are as the God who judges as the God who is faithful to his word as the God who is severe and is also merciful will break upon our hearts in a depth and magnitude that we have not before understood. Lord this requires a grace of all graces and I ask it of you now. Bless this Lord. Give us hearing ears. Open our hearts as we attend to the word that is spoken. We thank you and give you the praise. In Jesus name, Amen. Fred, could you be so kind as to get a glass of water out of the kitchen? A brother who has designed a book jacket for the new book, The Spirit of Truth has already designed a book jacket for this book. Everything is waiting but the book itself. And then the publisher will have the courage to publish it. And we came up with a working subtitle Thinking the Unthinkable. The Holocaust. Thinking the Unthinkable. Where was God? And I think I may have already cited and if you read Reality it's described in the book how I had an opportunity at one moment some years ago to speak to Elie Wiesel E-L-I-E W-I-E-S-E-L who has since won the Nobel Prize for Peace and is an outstanding writer and the supreme authority on the Holocaust as a Jewish writer. And the sole survivor himself of the Holocaust. His entire family was exterminated I believe, thank you, at Auschwitz. He himself miraculously survived and has become the outstanding Jewish spokesman on this subject. And so he gave a talk in New Jersey where I was then living and he mentioned in the course of it how he was a renaissance of interest in the Bible what was taking place in his life. He was meeting with a rabbi twice a week in the study of Old Testament Scripture. And though there was a question and answer period the Lord did not give me the liberty to ask him this question publicly. But afterwards, privately, I went up to him and I said to him this To what degree are you willing to consider that the Holocaust as well as all Jewish calamity and suffering is the fulfillment of what has been spoken in Scripture in the concluding chapters of Leviticus and Deuteronomy as judgment for our sin? And his answer was after a stunned moment of hearing a question like that I refuse to consider that. And that's why this is called thinking the unthinkable. It's unthinkable that an unbelievable atrocity and a horror of the kind that the Holocaust was could be from the hand of God. In modern times. It's unthinkable. But here's what I want to say, saints. It's unthinkable that we should say anything that is from God is unthinkable. Because, you know what? If you can see by the eye of God that one statement of the most auspicious, prominent, and celebrated spokesman on the Holocaust completely explains the Holocaust. And I'll give you an A for the day if you could develop that statement. His answer to my question actually explains the Holocaust. How do you say that, Art? Because when man comes to an arrogance of supremacy over God where he determines what is thinkable and what is not thinkable though God himself has spoken that hubris H-U-B-R-I-S that human pride is the whole issue of what God himself is judging. That it could be made after the Holocaust by the man who is supposed to be the spokesman of the Holocaust who knows better than any other the human and other costs of the Holocaust what that devastation had meant not only in life but in culture the entire wreckage of the Jewish religious community it's interesting that the greatest number of victims were not secular Jews but religious Jews. The whole Hasidic orthodox community of Poland was almost totally decimated. Only a fragment of it has survived and now has its location principally in England and to some smaller degree in Israel. And the great question, the consternation that if it was God's judgment why didn't it fall on American Jews or Western Jews who are totally secular in their mentality why were the greatest number of them orthodox and pious Jews? How then could that be the statement of God for the sin of Israel? Can you answer that? That may be one way to look at it which of course Jews would never consider is that what we have as Jews celebrated as being religious and the finest expression of Jewish piety is not the way God views it. Because it's the same piety that crucified Christ. What is orthodoxy today however celebrated has a direct lineage and connection with that pharisaical and rabbinical class that undertook the crucifixion of Christ and have kept Jewish people for centuries from the consideration of that act and continue to hold the same ground as their fathers. So even to raise the question that God might not be pleased or endorse Jewish orthodoxy is another shattering consideration that that community could not imagine. There's so much guys, forgive me if I gasp and spurt my way through this because just as I said that I know what the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement is doing today. You know what they think? What do they call those vans, anybody know where they ride through the streets of Brooklyn and New York and they'll pick up a Jew off the street and bring him into their van and get him to wind the phylacteries around his arm and repeat a prayer after them and if they can get enough Jews to do that the Messiah will come. Do you know that? Do you know what a cry, shriek, pound your head or what? The highest, deepest, most respected expression of Jewish religious life is that movement. The Hasidic Lubavitcher movement that has this notion that if enough Jews will do that the Messiah comes and the end of the age and the commencement of the Messianic era. And when you say to them why do you have difficulty in considering that God may have been the author of the devastation of the Holocaust when you acknowledge that he was the author of the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D.? And you know what the answer is? That God was judging a religious failure to keep the Sabbath and other kinds of ceremonial observances as they would define them. You understand how they're assessing what that judgment was? It has nothing to do with the crucifixion of Israel's Messiah or the historic apostasy and the turning from the word of God but a failure to maintain certain external religious practices that God judged by the devastation of the temple and the expulsion of the Jewish people into the diaspora and exile into the nations. So there really is a failure even to properly interpret and understand previous judgments let alone this last one. And what is the consequence of the failure to rightly understand judgments that have come? Inevitable need to have it come again? That's right. And that's why we need to gear ourselves for a final holocaust that will take place globally that will eclipse the holocaust of half century ago. We're not talking about some light academic thing that we're sifting to get our understanding. The failure to properly apprehend the meaning of past judgments invites a future and a greater judgment. Reggie had your hand up? Lubavitcher L-U-B-O V-I-T S-C-H-E-R That distinguishes that movement from other ultra-orthodox movements. And it has its rabbi, Rabbi Schneerson who is now being increasingly promoted or celebrated and recognized as the Messiah though he's 90 years old and has had a recent heart attack or some heart failure that has very much crippled his speech if not rendered him silent and brought some paralysis. So it shows a stunted ridiculous messianic expectation more on the basis of tradition and human desire than the word of God which is altogether relative to the way in which they have also perceived the judgments of God humanly and traditionally in the light of the way that they would want it seen that sets their purposes in a better light rather than in accordance with the word of God. A keeping of the Sabbath by a sufficient number of Jews or the winding on of the phylacteries and repeating a prayer after them doesn't matter whether you believe or not just a mechanical recitation performed by a certain number of Jews brings the messianic era. No biblical precedent for that at all entirely an arbitrary thing but you cannot believe with what vehemence and passion they pursue that. Would to God that the Evangelical Church would conduct its outreaches with a like amount of intensity and passion as they perform theirs because they have hundreds of these vans at a cost of how many thousands of dollars each touring the streets of Brooklyn and other neighborhoods in New York City for this one purpose to spot Jews on the street and bring them up into the van and to get that recitation from them in the simplistic way in which they view a role that they're playing that actually brings the messianic era. No. We'll talk about that. Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust I prefer to save that. That will be the final test of whether we have been prepared in the weeks preceding this. It's a paper that I wrote at the seminary Jewish Interpretations of the Holocaust in which I quote Elie Wiesel and a number of theologians philosophers and commentators and come to such an astonishing conclusion that the Catholic nun who was the teacher of that class and herself a leading exponent of ecumenical relationship with the Jewish community if she had a gun she would have killed me on the spot when I submitted that paper and made an oral report of it. We were supposed to get the papers back I never got my paper back it was a horror to her my thesis that the Holocaust was a judgment and that what was revealed in examining Jewish evaluations of that Holocaust was more astonishing still of an anti-Christ kind that staggered me when I finally came to see it. So we are on to something here there's something here I cannot tell you the power of what adheres in this. The same thing would be true of our lives personally if something of a traumatic kind takes place in our life of a devastation and we fail properly to understand its meaning as God would intend for us to see it and lightly disguise it or swallow it down or cover it up it is only a matter of time before the truth of that thing must finally have its expression in a devastation that perhaps was greater than the thing in its inception. How long can the crucifixion of Jesus be concealed or ignored? Remember that we talked about how they bribed the Roman guards around the tomb to spread the story that his disciples had stolen his body away. How absurd is that? That these broken disciples were themselves fearful and hiding behind locked doors can come through a cordon of Roman guards and steal the body away and they paid them and bribed them to tell that story and then it says, and this story is believed to this day. Well, we can believe a lie about something but you cannot suppress the truth indefinitely. In fact, if God would give me the grace I think I can show you a direct linkage between the failure to receive the statement of God in the death and resurrection of Jesus and every subsequent suffering that has come to the Jewish people historically including the Holocaust. I'll just give you a quick thumbnail sketch. Remember Jesus wept over Jerusalem? Don't pray for me, pray for yourselves. You missed the day of your visitation. How oft would I have taken you under my wing as a hen does her chicks, but you would not. Now he said, not one stone shall be left standing upon the other. And indeed, every prophetic word that he spoke about a devastation that would come to Israel in fact came. A devastation to the temple, to the city, to the nation and an expulsion into the nations where we remained as unbelieving communities of Jews in the midst of Christian cultures of an unregenerate kind that was like an exacerbating sore. We were like something that could not be during the Easter season. If there's ever a season in which Jews feared through every year of their lives in exile, it was Easter. Because then would come again the statements about the Christ killer. Not only, and if you were a Christ killer once, what would stop you from being a Christ killer now? And some of the myths that circulated were that Jews were killing Gentile children to take their blood and employ them in the making of Passover matzahs and other kinds of practices which they performed. Medieval old wives tales for which Jews were victimized. Entire communities were devastated, murdered, looting, pillaged in spurts of violence incited by talk like this, by an ungainly Jewish community that simply could not be Christianized and whose continuing rejection of Christ invited this kind of retaliation. Something was set in motion historically by the failure to properly understand the Holocaust of Jesus that finally eventuated in their own. Every instance of inexplicable suffering raises the issue of God. How much more the calamity of the Holocaust? How could a God who is by definition just and righteous, all-seeing and all-powerful countenance a horror of such magnitude? For many, the concept of the traditional God has suffered irremediable damage if not total eclipse. You cannot assess what the Holocaust has meant in terms of conventional religious belief or faith not only for Jews, but also for Christians. A kind of religious shallow nominalism that has gone on for so long could not survive the impact of the questions raised by the Holocaust, which is good. It invites the Holocaust. It's something of the statement of why God is not happy with Jewish piety. You have to have a sense of how man has sublimated God to his own ends and purposes and fashioned something less of the faith than God intends and found a way to accommodate the issues of God as a religious thing that is acceptable to a lifestyle that does not threaten the real interests of man. Nominal religion is a study in itself. It constitutes a virtual rejection of God while ostensibly at the same time seeming to celebrate God. And that is a stink in the face of God that he must judge. So that one of the consequences of a Holocaust is that it cuts right through and devastates the kinds of nominal believism that can suffice and survive in ordinary times. But it cannot stand in the face of calamity. Can you understand why calamity has got to come again? Why Jews will have to be uprooted, their conventional categories devastated, if a remnant of them are to be fitted for their millennial destiny? Faith as we have understood it is no longer viable since the Holocaust and needs to be discarded as extraneous or perhaps there needs to be a substitution. This guy Richard Rubenstein, maybe you'll have a chance to look for his book, After Auschwitz. He says one can no longer believe in God as he has been traditionally understood before the Holocaust. But he said I'm not saying that you should forfeit religion. You don't need God for religion. Because religion has a certain efficacy of bringing to mankind certain benevolences and toning effect and gives man an emotional and other kinds of lofty and ethical and moral inspirations that are good. But you don't need to have a God for that. So let's acknowledge that God is not. But let's also agree to establish religious practices to which we can all agree because of their benefit. Whether it's Christian or Jewish. He's speaking not only to Jews, he's speaking to the church and saying listen, you don't have any reason to continue your pretext for believing either. If your God were God and your Christ were Christ, this would not have happened. Therefore, let's all of us face the fact that there is no God and let's agree on some kind of religious body of practice that serves the purposes of mankind and will even be a factor for our unity and that will prevent future such devastations that comes from enmity between peoples. What's ominous about that? Can you hear what's being expressed in that that came out of the Holocaust? It's a siren sound. It's the first sounding of a logic that will bring mankind to a global kind of religious agreement. It has every kind of anti-Christ disposition in the name of good because the things that have divided mankind when men have been intense over their religious differences about God need no longer be a factor if God himself is not. I wish I had a dollar for every arrogant Christian theologian who was saying amen and is in agreement. The offense of the cross is removed but that offense was not only an offense for Jews, it was an offense even for Christians. I don't have a word, saints, to tell you what is going on behind the scenes. Somewhere in the early morning hours the Lord was reminding me of my attending a conference at St. Thomas College in St. Paul, a Catholic institution in one of the ecumenical things where my teacher that run also was present and a certain Protestant theologian by the name of Van Buren was on the platform speaking things that made my hackles go up. It was a complete desecration of the apostolic faith and an accommodation to this whole ecumenical spirit that when they had their coffee break I went right to that man like a... right to the jugular vein. I said something like you'll pay for this. I said you have betrayed the historical faith and you'll pay for this. For every false word I couldn't contain myself. You have no idea what's going on. Underground the foundations of the historic apostolic faith are being eroded and worn away and are being brought down and the single event that has set this whole process in motion has been the Holocaust. The first thing I recognized when I came to the Lutheran Seminary and I took a class on Judaism and Christianity was that we're no longer to witness to Jews since the Holocaust. It's an embarrassment to say that you need to accept our Christ and that we have to move from an evangelical posture toward the Jews to a dialogical one in which we recognize the validity of Judaism that we ourselves are not superior to their religion and that their religion is equally as valid as ours and that the purpose of dialogue is mutual benefit and that we are as much to learn from them as they are to learn from us and that this is the spirit that is to prevail because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the statement of Christianity's bankruptcy and failure. All the more that it had its origins from Lutheran Germany and the land of the Reformation and that is an indictment that Jews had been making for many generations and now saying this is the final proof of the pudding. This Holocaust emanating, originating from, engineered by a German Lutheran Catholic nation is ipso facto the final evidence of the bankruptcy of Christianity and even in these materials as I was looking through them last night or yesterday someone makes the wise crack that those who performed the Holocaust were baptized. They were among the baptized. That they went right from the gas ovens to their Sunday services without a twitch so therefore it's Christianity that is on the dock. It's Christianity that faces the accusation and the failure so the reverberations of this are going on in a powerful way. I'm writing perhaps it needs to be asked whether such faith ever was viable from God's point of view however much it may have served the purposes of men that this faith that has been wrecked is a faith that deserves to be wrecked because it was not a faith at all. It was just a body of tradition that might have taken to its mouth the name of Jesus and made reference to Scripture but it was never a true believing and it could never stand up under the devastating questions raised by the Holocaust. Yeah. The Christian services stipulations on well that's a complicated question and the whole rise of Nazism and the antisemitic heart of Nazism the Jew hatred the church did not escape that spirit there were requirements made that forced it away from its use of and acknowledgement of the Old Testament the centrality of the Jew in God's eternal purpose they could not preach with the freedom that they might have had prior to the rise of Hitler Hitler's portrait was on the wall of the church he soon became celebrated as the messianic figure of Germany he began to employ even biblical terminology about a thousand year rule that the new order brought in by Nazism was the messianic era and even Jewish Christians were required to be spurned by the churches in which they had found their homes and not to be identified with so there was a pressure on the church and finally a complete collapse I've got a book that I haven't had yet the time to read called The Theologians Under Hitler one of them was Kittel K-I-T-T-E-L one of the outstanding authorities on New Testament and as there was a collapse in the legal and the court system a collapse in the academic world the very things for which Germany was most noted intellectually and brilliantly were the things that came down like a deck of cards with hardly any resistance so that the judges of Germany instituted followed without exception the anti-semitic laws sent gypsies and homosexuals and other retarded people to their deaths the Nuremberg laws and all the kinds of things that saw these minority groups as being defunct and a lesser kind of mankind were completely honored by judges who would have respected the law doctors who would respect life were the ones who performed experiments on concentration camp internees of the most cruel kind and assisted in the whole process of the annihilation this is important to note that if the professionals would collapse in their respective professions despite the fact that they had moral codes and what's the word the oaths medical the responsibility as a teacher, the respect for truth or as a jurist for respectful law, they all went down like a deck of cards, including the church so that when the smoke cleared, there was a German national church that subscribed to the total anti-semitic view of the state and there was a kind of an underground church symbolized by Dietrich Bonhoeffer that was called the confessing church and some of those paid for that confession of the apostolic faith with their lives and found themselves in the same concentration camp with Jews but they were a very small minority it would be an extremely valuable study to examine the collapse of the church in Germany under the anti-Christ pressure of Nazism, why? because we are on a course right now that will bring again the very same issue to view only this time it will not be confined to a single nation, it will be a global phenomenon and when I preach often to the church I say what would you have done had you been a Christian in Germany at that time would you have stood for the truth of the faith at the cost of your own persecution or would you have found yourself in the German National Church because you need to consider such questions now, because the time will not be too distant when you'll have to answer it in this country when the Bible says that all nations shall come against Jerusalem to destroy it, that there's a final global hatred of Israel and the Jew, what would be the condition of the church in those nations at that time do we subscribe to the national mentality and ethos or do we stand against it and by so standing make ourselves visible and candidates for the same kind of treatment that will come against them it's going to be costly to be a true believer in the last days and the study of the collapse of the church in Germany will be very rewarding to prepare us for what is to come it was a collapse in the academic world, the professional world, the legal world and the religious world until the whole nation was taken captive I was going to ask that question apart from knowing the history as far as preparing what else is essential in preparing because I feel that there is a real dichotomy between the understanding and the knowing and something else that I believe that these five weeks should be beginning to birth in us and that question still looms supreme in my mind it's not a knowing that as if the knowledge of it is going to save us but the knowledge of it will show us what kind of character will be required of us in order to stand and therefore to open ourselves before God and welcome now the kinds of devastation and dealings that will fit us at that time to stand rather than it should come upon us as unawares and we find ourselves totally unfitted to bear the brunt of it yeah see it's not required of us now there's no penalty for being a Christian to speak of but it will and we need to anticipate that and welcome whatever preparation God would give us now for that day think of Sissy's dream this morning two classes of Christians one that mocked those and sought to keep them from going into that wilderness desert place and going down into a place that turned them into a skeleton of dry bones and yet the people that did go down went down without fear and could not be dissuaded they had already made a determination in their hearts that made them candidates for God's secret purpose and also particular use and glorification after they were brought up I think that that dream spoke volumes and there's a process going on right now and I say it again and again there's a centrifugal thing taking place presently that is moving us toward one extreme or the other apostolicity or apostasy we're either going to be increasingly radical in our faith or more and more compromised until we will find ourselves either among those who dwell in the earth or those who dwell in heaven and the one persecutes the other in the earth that's the whole if there's anything that distinguishes this school, so called from other kinds of bible schools it's this it's an last days end time kind of coming together to view the things that shall shortly come to pass and to open ourselves at the same time to the dealing works of God that will prepare us in character and in life and how many of us are going through something like that in these weeks there's an assault on our minds and spirits for the things that God is wanting us to take in and to consider and at the same time some of us are being dealt with in the inner man, the issues of our life the very coming here was a dealing can we stand the separation from our families? the loss of the warmth and the benevolence and enjoyment that comes from being with one's family and wife and children how about sexual denial? I don't know if anyone is being affected by that five weeks of abstinence is for some men a crushing burden when I tell I make mention, I came back from Europe how long were you away Art? two and a half months, three months I'm that Jewish that if I'm going to have to pay for overseas travel the Lord is going to get his money's worth and they look at me in rapt amazement what? two and a half months, three months I know what they're thinking how do you stand it? we just need to be gratified so at many levels we're being tested and sifted just by virtue of coming let alone the content let alone the issues that are being raised in the interaction between ourselves and the program of God and it ain't over yet and this is just a little five week what can I say, a microcosm a little glimpse of what God is after and I'm wanting to understand and to sift and to assess and evaluate our experience for a further application in the future is five weeks the mode maybe we need five months have we gone too slow? we need to intensify it lots of questions but this is an end time school in anticipation of things that will come that when they come we shall be able to stand and not buckle somebody had a hand up back there, when? already? ok let's take it some question during the break time was raised about the significance of Germany as being the nation and the people that were the instrument of God and Israel's demise and this deserves whole books by itself maybe Reggie can help me he made some comment in the break time you need to know that Germany had become for modern Jews the messianic fulfillment that of all of the varieties of world Jewry the German Jew was looked upon as being the superior because they reflected German civilization and to some very great extent contributors to German civilization it's interesting that the three great giants of the 20th century who have so much affected the whole shape of the modern world Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein are all German speaking Jews so you need to know something about the significance of Germany as a civilization that Jews who were German so celebrated that civilization so esteemed it that it became a substitute for the biblical messianic expectation that if the whole world could be Germanized so to speak and share the philosophical ethical, moral poetic, cultural qualities of German civilization the world would be a messianic world so God had every right so to speak to in his ironic sense of bringing retribution for a false hope to destroy it at the hands of the people who were being celebrated to the point of idolatry that not only were they effectual being Germans in working out the systematic annihilation of the Jews as only Germans seemed to have the capacity to do in their systematic attention to detail the same thing that distinguishes them for their scholarship and for their theology if you've ever read a German theologian my God, you need a remarkable stamina just to read the footnotes it takes a remarkable stamina to compile them there's something distinctive about German scholarship it's exacting attention to scrupulous detail and that same German genius affected the systematic annihilation of the Jew no slipshod country could have gotten away with it could have performed it in the same efficiency as the Germans were able to perform you know, it's no small thing to eliminate six million people and so that's a whole subject in itself you need to understand that reform Judaism you know that there are three principal branches of Judaism, reform, conservative and orthodox that the reform is the one that is most stripped of supernatural reference the one form that is most rational in its essential makeup that movement significantly was born in Germany because Germany became a center of rationalism and the celebration of mind and precept and natural law and even the defense of God not so much on the testimony the biblical testimony or the experience of God but by virtue of reason and Jews were foremost in being contributors to that kind of rationalism that was very suspicious of supernatural reference or encouraged others to take that direction the man who became the father of German theology and was the chaplain of the where did Bismarck come from in Germany come on Prussia he was the chaplain of the Prussian military a man by the name was helped in his career by Jewish patrons of the arts the Jews when they came out of the ghettos of Germany through the influence of Napoleon did not take long to come into the mainstream of German cultural life Moses Mendelssohn who later, whose grandson became a great composer and I believe was also a believer was a forerunner of this kind of rational rationalistic development that moved Jewry away from its biblical orientation and into a view that promoted a flight from Christian orthodoxy Schleiermacher became an influence in German theology away from its orthodox origins and promoted a kind of Christianity that left such a void in German life that gave the enemy opportunity to fill in a satanic and demonic way I have a book in my library on the occultic influences in Nazi Germany and the thesis of the author who happens to be Jewish and a survivor of the Holocaust Fritz Stern now a professor at Columbia University is that the leading Nazi figures were every one of them disappointed religionists whose spiritual needs could not be met by a desiccated which is to say dried out German Lutheranism or Catholicism and found it in occultism that had its expression in bringing that influence into the whole German Nazi state whose genius was destruction and annihilation so Germany I can't remember the title I'll look it up and tell you I found it at the Cast Lake library for five cents it was on sale, books that nobody wanted I have since tracked Fritz Stern down and have written him letters but I have yet to meet him he was away on vacation, I left a copy of Ben Israel and you can pray that one day maybe we'll get a chance to meet this man precious and insightful thing written by a secular Jew showing that at the heart of the whole Nazi system was a spiritual void filled by some of the romantic and occultic and mysterious elements that constituted Nazism if you know anything about Nazism it put great stress on on demonstrations of a very impressive kind their meetings at Nuremberg marches and torchlight ceremonies and almost like pagan practices that filled a void for emotion and intensity you know, Germans are like Jews that we're bored by the failure of civilization we can't take middle class success and that's why our young kids are in movements and occultism and lesbianism and pro-life movements and every kind of thing that answers for a void that needs fulfillment, excitement, engagement and so what German bourgeois, middle class Lutheran life could not fulfill in that void came an occultic and demonic answer that resulted not only in the destruction of 6 million Jews, but almost the annihilation of Western civilization itself and we've not seen the end of that Judy this is a really serious question if we do not have a valid apostolic reality in our spiritual life that void will be filled by other contenders who are only waiting their opportunity and if we move into the realm of something false and synthetic that is humanly contrived and is not the operation of the spirit we can move very easily from something charismatic to something occultic in fact it's a valid question to ask if that has not already taken place and I won't name the names of those who are celebrated today for being men of the spirit whose practices are extremely suspicious and whose books are best sellers so we are on a very dangerous ground not unlike that of Germany prior to the Nazification of that nation the analogy with the modern church is what's true is divided into various types of criticism they saw that as their salvation prayer in school humanistic had led the way with all the other nations saw their salvation as a thing of a people what has culminated in the god is dead theology of the 1960s and prevalent still had its origin in anti-orthodoxy that was greatly encouraged and inspired by rationalistic Jewish influence in German theology and civilization so it came back to haunt us we ourselves were effective in removing any kind of viable Christianity in a nation therefore that was opened to the demonic influences that later took our lives and took our lives not only systematically but beastially you need to recognize that that not only was it the horror of a systematic annihilation but performed with such grotesque vicious vile tortures experiments and degradations and humiliations as could not have been imagined coming from a nation reputed to be the most brilliantly civilized of all nations part of the lingering hurt of the Jewish people over the Holocaust is not so much the annihilation of the six million but the death of the hope that Germany had represented to us it's like Frankenstein who made his experiment and formed a monster that later turned upon him to destroy him we made a Frankensteinian thing German civilization which we touted and celebrated and finally in the ironic justice of God became the very instrument of our destruction I'm not sure whether you would impart me an answer what could God have been after this time that probably wasn't answered in the way he desired that would have occasioned such mass destruction ok, we're going to spend considerable time on that and I'll just to wet your interest W.H.E.T. it's not only the sins of the generation that died in the camps and went up through the ovens that was at issue but the sins of the fathers in which they were also implicated there's an unbroken continuum of sin that goes all the way back through our history with God that is called for in a moment of his choosing because God does not see as we see our whole view of justice, our whole view of culpability, our whole view of responsibility is very different from his and we're going to speak about that because the issue of the Holocaust brings up the issue of responsibility the issues of judgment, the issues of seeing and the issue of reality itself Paul Volk who took the tape that I brought back and began to work on a book on the Holocaust and collapsed in the doing of it virtually came close to a nervous breakdown because he could not handle the issues of judgment I was sharing this with somebody during the break it's one thing to speak of this academically but to get into it and to realize we're talking about our Jewish kinsmen and when he had to deal with the fact that Jewish babies were tossed in the air and caught on German bayonets it was more than he could handle and he just he broke he couldn't go on with it he did write a first chapter and I remember that we were in a van together on our way to some meetings in Michigan I was at the wheel he was reading to me the first chapter I went off the road three times the power of it what was opened by it merely as an introduction to the book was so devastating in its categories it opened up not just the issue of the Holocaust the issue of what is reality what is truth because there's something about suffering that opens up the issues of truth as nothing else will and that's why that centurion when he saw Jesus on the cross something exhibited something revealed in the magnitude of the suffering in the magnitude of what was put upon him the devastation and yet what was revealed through it was nothing less than truly this is the Son of God by a man totally untutored had no basis in his background or his history to make a recognition of that kind but suffering reveals and ultimate suffering reveals ultimately the only thing that can be tragic is to have suffered ultimately and still not to have seen and that's what I believe is the present condition of my own people for the failure to properly have understood what that suffering means in the intention of God because they could not bring themselves to believe that God was its author they had no biblical appreciation for God nor an historical appreciation of previous judgments that had come to even understand that to be a Jew born in Germany is already a judgment no more than I understood it being born in Brooklyn that we were just born where we were and became acclimated to our environments grew up in it, became successful in it, and never understood that there was something wrong, something out of joint, that we were born as Jews outside the land of covenantal promise I went to Hebrew school from the age of six or seven to the age of my bar mitzvah which is to say six or seven years every day after public school and never once heard any discussion of questions of this kind we did not even understand that being born in exile that being diasporic Jews was already a statement of God's judgment and we attributed to men what we should have understood as coming from the hand of God whether it's a Nebuchadnezzar or a Hitler because it takes a certain degree of faith to believe that God intervenes in history that God will actually penetrate time and place and work His will either through appointed instruments or through His own person and because we could not recognize the activity of God in history we could not recognize the activity of God in Christ our faith could not conceive that God could come down and we missed the day of our visitation and the price for that has been indescribable nothing of this will make sense in the way that it should if we do not see it in the context of God's eternal perspective the fire of the camps of extermination those ovens can only have a redeeming significance in the light of an eternal fire that cannot be extinguished if the one will teach us and save us from the other it makes an eternal sense if it's just judged within the context of time itself it does not give a full meaning so what am I saying by that? that not the least of things that the holocaust does is open up the whole issue of eternity to a people and a nation and even a church that has not been sufficiently eternally minded something of the magnitude of the holocaust its devastation can only be understood and points to a larger meaning that of eternity and it's something that would have been ignored had not the devastation come how far would God go to bring man into an appropriate awareness one can ask if our past calamities were not already his attempt to gain our attention to turn us from the complacency of religious or philosophical self-satisfaction and arrest us from a course that would have issued in an inestimable eternal loss if there had not been these catastrophes and this last what would have arrested us from a course of religious and philosophical self-satisfaction that would have resulted in an inestimable eternal loss that God views the issue of eternity as being of such worth that it is not too extravagant to pass a people through the fires of the holocaust if it will save them from the eternal loss of fires that shall not be extinguished and we will not understand the holocaust nor be in a position to make it known except we see it in that eternal context and this is what I think Paul meant when he said knowing the terror of God he didn't mean some momentary fright, he meant an eternal anguish without remedy. Knowing that I persuade men but if you don't know that, what is your persuasion? And when I gave this message in Kansas City in 77 I think I even quoted Charles Finney who said something like this that when the day comes that the church itself will lose its knowledge of hell it will have lost its effectual basis for evangelism in the world I want to say that that day is already here we have no more comprehension of hell than we do of heaven the world has done a number on us and we have been robbed of the eternal perspective which is one of the reasons why we are so quick to accept Jewish explanations for the holocaust set in a secular timed way because we have not the capacity ourselves to see it in the eternal perspective and if we have not seen it after the holocaust, how much more intense then will calamities be required to be if historical time is running out. We are at the end of the age and once that age ends, there is no further redress