In this sermon, the speaker recounts a story of a community who ignored the warning of a Jewish man who had escaped from a concentration camp. The man tried to warn them about the impending destruction and torment that would come, but they dismissed him. Eventually, the community experienced the very thing the man had warned them about. The speaker emphasizes the importance of heeding God's warnings and not relying on our own plans or visions. He encourages listeners to come to God in humility and obedience, trusting Him to guide their lives.

In which we will meet, the anointing of the Lord is upon us. And then he closed the book and sat down, but he never finished the Scriptures. What part did he leave out? And the day of the vengeance of our God. That will be for us something that was not for him. It was not then to be stated, but it will be stated by us. We're going to announce the day of the vengeance of our Lord. The solution of ancient days took the liturgic form, and he quotes, for thy sake are we slain all the day. Isn't that interesting? That the prevalent mode of explanation, historically for Jewish calamities, is that for his sake we are slain all the day. In a certain sense it's true, but in a certain sense we're being slain for our own sin at the same time. But he says that, however that had interpreted national disaster in the past, such doctrine now is an eloquent archaism at best. Do you know what it means to be archaic? Old-fashioned. It's obsolete. It no longer has a present validity. You can say that we were slain, but you can't say that about the Holocaust. It doesn't make that sense. It has no sensible reflection in reasonable theology. See what this guy's doing? He's examining every kind of thing by which we were able to understand previous predicament and calamity. But he's saying that this tremendum has introduced a new data that eclipses all past experience. Its devastation defies explanation, and therefore we cannot employ past explanation. But whatever explanation is there? The tremendum is more than historical. It is an elaboration of the most terrible of Jewish fears that the eternal people is not eternal, that the chosen people is rejected, that the Jewish people is mortal. If there is one incontestable article of the Jewish consciousness, it has been the mythos of indestructibility and the moral obligation of tenacity. You know, this is so well written that it's hard to understand. This man is so deft, D-E-F-T, he has such a facility. He uses words like a razor. Every one, I mean, it's lean, there's no flab in this. And if you're not attuned to writing of that kind, you can miss it. So he's citing yet another factor to explain the devastation of the Holocaust, that what it has done is to do in something that Jews have all along thought about themselves as an eternal people, an indestructible people. Look how we have survived. Where is Nebuchadnezzar today, and where are the enemies? Where are the people who had formerly afflicted us? They're gone historically. There's nothing to be seen but the ruins. But we continue. Now when the Holocaust came, and we came close to not continuing, and six million of the best of us were radically wiped out, that introduced a new consideration that had never been part before of our historic thought. You know, it's a wonderful confidence to think that you're indestructible, that you will always be. That's what makes an earthquake so remarkably traumatic, because you have believed and had a confidence in the security of the earth. That you are terra firma. But when terra firma begins to sway and weave like a snake, and your high towers and skyscrapers begin to bend and groan and collapse, there is a fear that comes with that that cannot be described. The thing in which you had some kind of foundational confidence, some framework for reality and life, when that's taken from you, where are you and who are you and what are you? That's what he's saying about this. That the eternal people is not eternal. Are we rejected? We're mortal. If there was one incontestable article of the Jewish consciousness, it has been the mythos of indestructibility, a myth. But it's a myth that was believed. And the moral obligation of tenacity to hang in there, no matter what comes, to hang in there. The Holocaust is surely ours. Against this background, we can verify no other event of comparable magnitude. There is no doubt that for classic Judaism, it was a shattering and defining event that marked off a Judaism of the beforehand and the after, determined the end of a cult of silent acts and the beginning of synagogue of prayer and study. Now, here's what he's saying now. He's comparing previous calamities that have come to Judaism by which Judaism still came out smelling like a rose. How many of you know that present day rabbinical Judaism came out of the destruction of the temple of 70 A.D.? What God intended as a tremendum was turned by our artful men into a new program of reconstruction of Jewish life on another model other than what was biblical. Why? What had happened to the possibility of continuing biblically? You couldn't. Why? No sacrifice. No temple. No altar. No priesthood. Dispersion. You would think that that would have been a trauma, that that would have been a tremendum. But what is he saying? That tenacity pulled us out of it and gave us occasion to elaborate a new kind of Judaism which has today become normative so that Jews today think that that kind of Judaism had always prevailed. Today's Judaism has little or no correspondence to the biblical faith of the sons of Abraham. In the darkness they made sparks of their own fire and what's the rest of that verse? And they shall lie down in torment. Boy, thank you for that, Anne. Mamma mia. That's right. Instead of allowing the darkness to bring a revelation of God who would have met them in that darkness and in that adversity, think of the implications for ourselves and our own lives. How quick we are to strike a spark and where God is wanting to meet us in the deep calling unto deep. We avoid that confrontation that would have been life transforming and come out of it by striking our own sparks and making some new adjustment to our situation that enables us to go on unscathed and that is what rabbinical Judaism is. It was the beginning of a synagogue of prayer and study by the insistence of the rabbis and the eternal wife of Torah planted in the midst neutralized caesura. Here's the way he spells it. C-A-E-S-U-R-A that the incisive act of God calculated to bring us to a repentance and return based on the fulfillment of the prophecy made by the Christ who was to be crucified that not one stone will be left on the other. They say that the blood, the slaughter in Jerusalem on that day of battle was so great that it was up to the bridles of the horses. Hundreds of thousands over a million may have been killed in Jerusalem alone. The Romans when they got their final God bless them vengeance took it in full. You need to read Josephus and the final days of the destruction of Jerusalem. It is an awesome commentary of loss of life, of tragic disappointment because they still believed that God was going to come at that final moment. Talk about false hope and piety. Talk about a hope that is not predicated on biblical understanding. Talk about a failure to recognize previous judgments that a people who were so wanting in their spiritual condition as not only to not recognize the Messiah but to slay him still hoped that God was going to intervene against the Romans not recognizing in the Romans his judgment. And when that judgment came it was fearful. Next to the Holocaust there is no other greater calamity in the history of Jews than the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersion into the nations throughout the whole Roman Empire. How do we Jews come into Germany? At that time. There has been a continuous existence of Jews in the Rhineland and in Germany for two thousand years since the expulsion that came from the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. and the final defeat that came about 135 A.D. with the Masada suicide. Anyone who has gone to Israel? How many people have gone to Israel? Raise your hand. Did you visit Masada? And did you hear the talk given by your guide? And how Masada is described? Do you know that the what do they call the Israeli shock troops? The commando type troops? No, that's like the secret service. They are sworn in at Masada. There is a ceremony of dedication for the finest of Israel's fighting men on the same ground where the last of the defenders of Israel perished before the Roman defeat by committing suicide. That when the Romans finally broke through the battlements of Masada they found every single man, woman and child slain at their own hand. Can you imagine fathers killing their own children, killing their wives and slashing their own throats? The only ones who survived were one or two, a woman and a child who hid themselves and were able to give the account. Because they could not count the men being taken by Romans. Imagine what would have been their fate. Rabbi Akiva who sponsored the false messiah what's his name? Bar Kochba, the Bar Kochba revolt whose name means the star of Israel and was touted to be the messiah. Can you imagine this? That the leading rabbi celebrates a man who has no biblical qualification but was a military leader as being the one who was the messiah. And of course it ended in the most tragic defeat as I'm describing. And he himself had his flesh, his skin flayed from his body in the most cruel and exquisite torture that the Romans knew well how to perform. Remember that crucifixion was a Roman invention and Jews were not wanting their women to fall into their hands nor themselves. So the last melancholy statement of Jewish attempt at rebellion and breaking the power of Rome which was the judgment of God that needed to come in final fullness was the suicide at their own hand. But when you go to that place now 2,000 years later it is celebrated as a place of heroism. The troops are sworn in in that place under the title never again. What shall we do? Shall we laugh or shall we cry? Shall we fall under these tables? Shall we cry out to God, Lord, what? What does it take, my God? And I was leading one of our Ben Israel tour groups to the Yad Vashem Holocaust exhibit and pointing out certain things in the context of judgment. And don't you think that somebody overheard me and called up the Ministry of Interior and Tourism and reported me for my anti-Semitic statements? No. They just came out with their hands and their fingers literally bobbed at the Romans which were God had made up and he literally looked as a post-desolation division as something yet strange but to look under God's current face and deliverance that final remnant would be pulled up so that he could really hold in the process that they were stunned, stunned. They didn't recognize that they were replaced for reasons so that the instrument of Israel would be dismissed. They were taken by their agents and they despised it and it was a scandal to them so they left them with a hope of Israel but out of context. I'll bet you a dollar to donuts that there must have been false prophets among them that said this shall not come upon you and said peace, peace and that the Lord is going to come and deliver you and that these prophets received a very responsive hearing but if there was a voice that said this is judgment from which there'll be no escape repent and turn to the God of your fathers that man was probably thrown over the brow of the hill and we're going to see that same scenario played out yet again. It's being played out now that Inge wants us to make a trip in October I'm going with trepidation because of the violent reaction that came to my last message that prepare yourself for devastation that's going to come that there must be a death and resurrection of Israel and the shouts and the screams that followed the Lord was there what will it be now? False prophets are very welcome who are soothing and assuring and this too shall pass and God is with you don't worry you'll never again have to suffer that. How many times has Israel suffered because it has given its hearing to those who give it a false comfort rather than a true and I'm thinking about Elijah and the false prophets do you remember how they made their sacrifice and they called upon their God and they danced and they performed and they cut themselves and cried out and it went on for hours they really and literally expected that they had a God who was going to answer but no answer came it was a final moment of encounter and extremity but there was no God to hear and to answer and it may be something like that in the final day too people really believe that they're going to be saved out of distress and what is God saying in Ezekiel 20 for the rebels that shall be purged out who have transgressed against him who are they? Those who do not believe that this is going to come upon them so the rabbis established a rabbinical Judaism they recast the whole devastation as an instructive historical eruption and therefore the destruction of the temple in 70 CE common era Jews do not want to use the word any reference to Christ Anno Domini being the year of the Lord so that the destruction was no cesura because the tradition took up the frayed ends of time and knotted them the tradition the rabbinical tradition took up the frayed ends and knotted them I remember when Paul Volck raised the question what ever happened to the veil that was rent from top to bottom when Jesus was crucified because they went on for another 40 years of conducting their temple worship until the end came well what happened to the torn rent veil that no man could have torn they say it was like 6 inches thick and torn from top to bottom not bottom to top and Paul went on to say the only thing they could have done was to have knotted it together and gone on talk about making how did Adam and Eve cover themselves isn't there something about man there's God's statement writ large in the rent veil and there's man knotting it up and tying it up to do business as usual and go on as if a caesura had not taken place yeah that's what I'm saying there are so many applications we do the same thing business as usual we go on God brings the devastation He brings the dealing we find some way to interpret it that makes us come out in the best light we knot up the frayed ends and we go on and miss the whole point and what do we invite a yet greater devastation forty years later or however long it takes if we're going to speak these things to an unwilling people we ourselves have to be totally free from all deception all imagined things that as we would like to see them our eye has to be so clear we ourselves have had to be the recipients of the judgments of God and as Gary shared with us the other night be brought into the places of the darkness of God the deepest places and to remain there and abide there and not strike our own sparks because people are going to be brought into such a darkness and we have to come to them out of the knowledge of the God whom we ourselves have met in that place in order to be a comfort to them what's the difference between a false prophet and the true? a false prophet has no stomach for the darkness a false prophet will tie up the loose ends and go on with business as usual his melody land his recreation center down there in North Carolina that Jimmy Baker had and polish it up and brush it up and put it up for business as usual again not wanting to learn from the judgment or suffer the stigma of the judgment but tidy it up and go on as I described to you the Dachau that I visited in 1952 or 53 that was a place of horror it had the stench of death the ashes were still in the ovens prisoners, refugees were still living in that camp the reality of it broke through my categories I could no longer go on with the naive Jewish self-righteous view of good guys and bad guys I had touched a horror that eclipsed those categories for me thereafter it was only all bad guys and I was one of them what is read as judgment and received as the passion of the Jewish people is transmuted and made into something other than what God intended it if the tremendum interrupts everything the entire past lies under its mark here's one of the most honest statements in this book nothing of the past can be omitted neither suppressed nor described in such a way as to blunt its evidence he does not support what the Jewish community has done with the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. and made into it a new form of Judaism and came out smelling like a rose he's saying we missed it and he's saying now about this tremendum that everything of the entire past lies under its mark what he's saying is that which is past is now there's some kind of continuum even as a secular philosophical man he's sensing something of the truth that God has shown us even in the scripture nothing of the past can be omitted neither suppressed nor described in such a way as to blunt its evidence the whole of the past constitutes the environment of the modern Jew as the tremendum marks its center so he's really calling for something that I honor and trust that a voice like that will be heard I can't imagine that this book received any kind of acceptance in the Jewish community well those are the things that I've marked I don't doubt it that he was too radical a voice too disruptive too irritating he was calling for something that men don't want to perform and yet when I came to the end of this book I almost fell off my seat I don't know that I should share that with you I'll look to the Lord because he finally came to some conclusion he had to find it and the question was what could conceivably justify such a magnitude of Jewish suffering and you know what his final answer was? that through the suffering the Jewish people themselves would become deified and be an answer to the world that the suffering was a provision for our deification and we are the answer to mankind what about the antichrist who comes into the temple and takes the place of God and says that he is God there's that antichrist spirit of the self-exaltation of man that finds a way to interpret even his catastrophes that finally in the last analysis makes him to come out not only smelling as a rose but to be even very God you can imagine my report when I submitted it on Jewish responses to the Holocaust and I began to share those things you know what the remarkable thing is? Elie Wiesel holds the same view Rabbi Berkovitz virtually every prominent source when you read them through to the last page in one form or another suggest and imply that this is the meaning of Jewish suffering because what is the other alternative? there can only be one other meaning to Jewish suffering the judgments of God by a people who have forsaken the true knowledge of him not walked in his covenants nor fulfilled their obligation to be his witness people and have suffered the judgments that he had forewarned that would come upon us in the latter days in complete accordance with our sin or double for our sin or seven times more and if you do not accept that biblical statement for your suffering you will in the last analysis come up with another that shows why it is you suffered from the beginning because when I made my report I said these articulate men who finally express this subversive thought about the deification of the Jewish people are only the audible statement but how long have we secretly entertained that in our bosom as a nation that God himself sees and knows and is judging which explains why it is that we have had to suffer the devastations that we have for we have exalted and elevated ourselves above God just like the Nazis did just like the Germans did they chose to construe that as suffering for their virtue rather than suffering for their sin and this is an enormously important point for us how much of our suffering is for our sin and how much of our suffering is for our redemptive character a lot of our suffering we have brought upon ourselves by our own foolishness and sin that has no redemptive value whatever it's pure chastisement and punishment and the consequence of that sin that invites it the other kind of suffering that is redemptive is what we freely receive in an obedience in a walk toward sonship and we must not confuse the one with the other as Israel has done because of that self-celebration and if this has been an underlying motif in a kind of national pride and exaltation of a people that thought that they are the answer to the world and you know what the ironic thing is God intended them to be an answer to the world a nation of priests and a light unto the world what an ironic thing that if they had only submitted to God they would have been that but in their rebellion and independence from God seeking to establish their call in the light of their own sparks they not only have not become that but given the world a false messianism from Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud to Steven Spielberg and E.T. and movies and every kind of harebrained kind of thing that has affected millions but not for the eternal good and yet at the end what despite that track record God because he has made a promise and a covenant and given a call to be a nation of priests and a light to the world says that the gift and callings of God are irrevocable he will fulfill it and this nation despite its historic apostasy and opposition and presumption against God will be that blessing to all the families of the earth but not in the chutzpah and the arrogance and self-sufficiency that have characterized us but in a brokenness and humiliation that comes from the final last days dealings of God where the point will finally be brought home that even the holocaust failed to establish that out of that brokenness and the return on the back of mules and litters comes this people that God himself will restore out of the nations to which they had been flung and will suffer such last day trials that the redeemed of the Lord will return and mourning and sighing will flee away and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads what a saga, what a drama what a redemptive epic that God has established from the whole of historic time and is going to conclude in our generation we need to appreciate that all the more as we are his principal agent in the fulfillment Reggie? I was back in St. Patrick's River there came this big address we had assembled in St. Bartholomew after that meeting and I first began in St. Patrick's Valley and I like Mr. Hurstley he may have not forgotten but I suggest to you that he was two great people and I especially regard him for ensuring the unity of St. Patrick's River and his brother the most prominent and there is an obscure passage in Daniel chapter 11 verse 14 that I don't believe answers to what's been proposed of a third century Syrian ruler the brother is the description of the German race and their persecution of the Jewish people from just those days they anticipate the rise of the final antichrist and in those times there so many stand up against the king of the south also the robbers of thy people and if you look at Isaiah 42 that happens to be quoted yesterday about the robbers of thy people this is not an issue of renegades from the Jewish nation but of a people who have been responsible for the peeling and stripping of national history someone who answers to the description of the robbers of the people who put them in prison and made them spoiled the robbers of thy people shall adopt themselves to establish division but they shall fall and the division that Hitler proposed was a third reich a thousand year reign of a super reich and the division of Daniel is the kingdom becoming the possession of the saints by the cloud-comer who would bring to an end and shatter all the usurping gentile powers so the fact of the kingdom being established but anything short of life from the dead the interdiction of the supernatural has been the chronic propensity of humans people who seek to establish division and are established into the false so there's that reciprocal I wasn't going to state that until when the same thing true of the Jewish nation in their propensity to adopt themselves was just the truth of the German nation so we're there there's an echo of that that came up in our discussion of community where ironically the German theologian Bonhoeffer says anyone who comes to community with the vision for community brings the seeds of destruction with him that anything that's holy, that's of God must be entirely outworked by the impartation of his life given to the people who are called and respond in obedience in the daily outworking of that life together you cannot come with your own game plan you simply come in obedience it was the same call to Abraham to follow me into the land that I will show you there's something about vision even when it might be correct to an extent, that is our vision that has yet the element of pride human imagining fancy idealism that leads itself not only to disappointment with those who fail to live up to your hope for it but to a contempt for those who fail and therefore we have to come and just simply come as the broken people of God who have no strength in themselves and look to him for the unfolding of the life day by day as he's pleased to meet it out that's a tremendous point about vision so this is remarkably instructive in every way and really gives us a backdrop for what the final episodes will be and must be seeing that it has so to speak fallen on deaf ears and if we still have the copies of what I circulated yesterday in the Holocaust Museum the donors with the million dollar donations and Dr. and Mrs. So-and-so and the honorific titles and all the things that oh you want to gasp and bend over that there's a people who have merchandised in the bones of the victims are making hay are finding distinction in society in recognition because they're endowing a museum and so missing the point of God and thinking that by a museum or a program of education that a future catastrophe can be averted as if it could be bought by money and not understanding that God is still waiting for people to acknowledge him I don't know if I'll share with you my most recent experience at the University of Washington in Seattle where I went to a Holocaust conference it was a terrible disappointment I was finally forbidden to speak in fact I was cut off in my third public statement each one was a crime, an attempt to turn the people toward the consideration of God though it was attended by rabbis and Christian clergymen and scholars God was shuffled to a backseat or not considered at all but what I saw was a whole class of men that have grown up who have made careers out of the Holocaust professional men who sift through the bones and are statisticians over the spectacle of death but have not once sought its deepest explanation or are yet even now willing to consider God and that I, in my little, weak, pathetic way trying somehow in the midst of that to sound the theme of God had finally to be shut down and to be told you need to recognize Dr. Katz I was awarded the title that this is not an evangelical function this is a conference of scholars and I thought to myself that's exactly why we need holocausts we invite them and bring them upon ourselves because we have determined what is secular and what is sacred and we will not allow the sacred to penetrate our secular we have our vested academic interests we have our careers to pursue and our PhDs to obtain and our conferences to establish and we're not going to let any echo or sound of God disrupt our proceedings and it's that very hubris, that humanistic defiance of God and the elevation of men and their interest above God and will not hear God that finally invites and makes necessary the devastations that must come and I left that place so bowed over so... Could you have written something afterwards to their little pamphlet that they might have ... I doubt if I'll ever be invited back I was an embarrassment, I was a stink very much like a character that is described in Elie Wiesel's first and greatest book called The Night, which established his fame of his own holocaust reminiscence, that he was a member of a community in Transylvania which is today Romania in the Carpathian Mountains way out and every Jewish community it was the latter part of the war and every Jewish community had already been victimized but they had somehow been able to survive and thought this shall not come upon us, there's that optimism, there's that human hope until finally one day there was the rumbling of the tanks and the heavy equipment and the dust on the horizon until it came closer and closer and the Nazis came into town and set in motion the things that resulted in the devastation of that community also the most pathetic scene of the night before they were called to be 6am at the train station and the marketplace they were working all through the night to bury their heirlooms thinking that somehow they'll come back and be able to rescue them and go on doing business as usual, but he describes that sometime before the Germans arrived a man had escaped somehow from a concentration camp, a Jewish man and came to their community and cried out to them a warning he was some kind of, he looked to them like some stunted and perverted freak speaking some bizarre thing about fire and torment and destruction and smoke and they didn't want to hear it and they shuffled him off from place to place to get rid of that ugly and painful presence until finally the day came when they experienced the very thing for which he came to forewarn them so it's another picture of God's mercy sending some kind of cry of reality that men don't want to hear business as usual so yeah whether it's hurt or not we have an obligation their blood is upon our hands the spirit of God is upon me for he hath anointed me if the son of man required an anointing to fulfill his messianic task what will we require so let's just I don't know what conclude with yeah we want to pray for Arthur Arthur A. Cohen there's a picture of him in the back of the book if anybody wants to see it you can come by I just looked at it again this morning somewhere between 5 and 7 a.m and I thought there's a man there's a pain in that face there's such a cry the eyes are almost like somebody help me I'm the most erudite sophisticated PhD going my language, my knowledge my insight, there's none that can compare and yet I'm without answer I recognize that something has happened in history and time that has completely devastated our categories but what's an answer to it who proudly describes himself as being anti-Christian and has publicly written books against Christendom and Christianity so to what shall he turn he thinks he has seen a Christianity that he can repudiate but the unhappy and melancholy thing is he's never seen an apostolic reality I have a feeling that a man like this no matter what his Jewish thinking and categories if he would once glimpse the undeniable reality of the presence of God the God who is a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel he would fall down before it and be saved so wherever he is God knows he may be suffering AIDS or some other kind of thing, maybe unto death certainly he's a man who is despairing and he's a statement of maybe a remnant of the people of Israel for whom God intends salvation and return let's pray for this people as we center in for this man and hear his cry, a real lover of truth in a way that would make many of us ashamed who are Christians and have not his passion and his insistence Cohen by the way means priest as some of you may know hallelujah, Lord we raise up Arthur A. Cohen we're so glad that you know him and you know him from his mother's womb you know his whole history you know his academic career you know his struggles, you've seen his agonizings, you've seen his cry, you've heard his cry in the night hours my God, you know when he's banged his fist into walls, you know when he's broken his head, trying to find some philosophical theological answer and has exhausted all of his categories that are so commendable and numerous Lord there's a cry of despair there's a search, there's a man trying to understand where is the God of his fathers and how could this have happened and what does it mean and senses that ominously it might come again and that education is not going to save us Lord we pray your mercy that your arm will be stretched out to him still we pray my God that not the least of the purposes for which you have convened this school is that there are people who could have heard a heart cry out of this and raised up their own heart cry for his salvation that you needed and waited for that to be released my God to save him out of death and that we will have the eternal joy of finding him my God somewhere near and around the throne of the Lamb we pray for the Arthur Cohen's my God of your people Israel Oh God hear their cry, they may be so called enemies of the faith, they may despise Christianity, they may have every reason my God in their experience to do so and have not understood and have been turned from you, your name might be anathema in their mouths but we pray your mercy come precious God by dream, by revelation, by witness, by something foolish by some Hubert Humphrey on the campus, some buck-toothed guy with a broken nose and freckles who's grammar is atrocious and who's preaching save Paul Volk, come also and save such a man as this Lord we love him our hearts Lord go out for him and we ask my God salvation come precious God and a people who are deluded still a people who have turned back again to their liberalism, back again to their hope in man, back again to their foolish categories, back to their hope that education is the answer my God Lord warn bring a warning my God sound a voice, send your anointed messengers into their midst precious God we pray for this people that you'll bring a remnant out from the place of deception my God into the most glorious light of your son even their own Messiah Yeshua HaMashiach Jesus their Christ in whose name we pray