In this sermon, the speaker shares a powerful testimony of a Jewish hobo who displayed ingratitude towards a fellow Jew who had shown him kindness. This story serves as a warning to the audience about the severity of the tests that will come in their lives. The speaker emphasizes the need for character and spiritual preparation to withstand these tests, as they will only come once and not be given again. The sermon also references Revelation 12, which speaks about a woman fleeing to the wilderness and being protected by God during a time of great tribulation. The speaker highlights the importance of a strong and tested community to bear the load of these trials, emphasizing that mere Sunday Saints will not be sufficient.

Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful, and pray for us, too, that God may open the door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in shame. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders. Make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with thought, so that you may know how to answer everyone. Paul said, I have that commission. I think we need that commission, we need that commission, so that we might speak the gospel of God with clarity. Hallelujah. In my prayer, is that our brother, who is so very capable of speaking a clear word of the Lord, would have great liberty in Jesus' name. Art Katz. Good evening, saints. This is not a microphone, right? Just for the recording. Well, I want to take note of Harry's statement in prayer, and make my own. Lord, let it be that utterance should be granted, that we might hear, precious God, your heart, the voice of your speaking, the urgency of it, the now word, the appointed word, my God, for which everything till now has been preparation. Come and galvanize, my God, your people, set them in order and in motion for the things that are at hand, for which we are called. May we hear you tonight in a way, my God, that brings together the faith and the perspective that has waited for this moment. We thank you for the preciousness of every moment that has preceded this, and this one also, all that shall follow to the eternal praise of your glory. Come, my God, let the earth hear your voice. We thank you and praise you for the occasion that you have ordained and given, fill it full of all your heavenly and divine intention and will, in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, on this little table are my two books and a little booklet. Don't let anyone leave without taking note and availing yourself of remarkably anointed and appointed words. Precious books. It's embarrassing. I don't know how to say it. I know them best and I know what a loss to have missed it. And so there they are. If you have it for yourself, take it for others. And the Lord is already putting these in other languages. Spirit of Truth is now in a Finnish edition, a Russian edition, a French edition. When the Lord begins to do that, you know that he's circulating something that is of himself. This little booklet, dynamite. The anatomy of conversion, whatever that is, so few ever attain to it, though God would have all men everywhere to be converted. So I commend this to you also. And then our newsletter, a few copies. I don't have more. But if you are touched with what you hear and feel the need to be in continuing contact of some form, there's a little slip of paper where you can legibly write or print your name and address and zip code and hopefully you'll receive it four times a year. Some people have to apply three and four times because of the ineptness of our machinery to get the addresses registered and labeled and sent out. We are a fumbling, bumbling, shoestring operation, but entrusted with holy things. Well, I love to preach and I love to preach the word, but I don't often get that opportunity these days. It's more a nuts and bolts operation. I'm just required to lay out something of God's agenda and events that will take place that require the participation of a church in the world. And I don't know who else is bearing this message, but I've not met him yet. And so in the absence of any other clear leading of God, I invariably speak of the last days dealing of Israel, the restoration of the nation through the denominations, seeing that the church is largely ignorant of this remarkable and final concluding work of God. And there'll not be a place that will be absolved or free from implication and responsibility. And I believe that the more remote the location, the more away from urban centers, the more likely to be the locus of God's intention, a highway of holiness, a network of places of flight and escape in the last days for Jews who, as we speak, are totally unsuspecting of what shall come upon them suddenly and for which most of them shall not survive. How do you talk about that as a sermon? So Jim and I sitting here in the second row are members of a community in northern Minnesota, where I have been for 22 years, talk about remote and out of the way. And I'm there for the reasons that I'm going to state to you tonight, to establish a place of refuge for Jews in flight in their last day's extremity. Hard to think that such requirements should come in this nation, but do not be a nation exempt from the anti-Semitic fury that shall be poured out over all nations, which is already now brewing and on the stove and frothing over and will erupt with unsuspecting violence that will make even the past Holocaust and the Nazi persecution of Jews a kind of Boy Scout preliminary. Can you believe that? So I'm entrusted with an unbelievable message. I'm calling God's people to think the unthinkable, not only think it, but to prepare for it. I almost feel like praying again. And so where shall we leap in? I think the thing that's most in my heart and spirit, I usually end with it, but I'd like tonight to begin with Isaiah chapter 35. All of the great prophets are full of this last day's saga. And the remarkable thing and astonishment is the veil that is over the understanding of the church with regard to it, which is equal, I believe, in magnitude to the veil that is over Israel with regard to the gospel. And maybe the remedy for the veil being removed for us is exactly the remedy for the veil being removed for them. When it shall turn to the Lord, when the heart shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be removed. When the church will come to the apostolic absoluteness that is normative in God's intention for all the church and be free from its fun and games and froth and slight and light things, the veil will be removed. And maybe even in the hearing of these solemn things, there'll be a heart turning toward the Lord. So in Isaiah 35, well, I've opened to Jeremiah. Let's just stay there just for a moment. And I invite you to go back at your leisure to Jeremiah 30 and 31. Anybody have a clue as to what those chapters address? One phrase, the time of Jacob's trouble. That time, in my opinion, is future. The holocaust of the past does not fulfill it. And there are biblical reasons that can be given to show what are the descriptions of Israel's past devastations and what are the indications of that which is yet future. You can put this in connection with Jesus' statement in Matthew 24 and Luke 21 when he was asked for the signs of the end of the age and of his coming. He speaks there about a time of trouble of such severity and magnitude that it will eclipse all former times. So great and so extensive will it be that if we're not cut short, no flesh would survive. But for the elect's sake, he's speaking there about Jews, it will be cut short. That is yet future. And I believe it is a time that we as the church will live through. I'm sorry I don't subscribe to a pre-tribulation rapture because if we were absent, no Jew would survive that time. If any of Israel survive, it is for one reason only, the mercies that will be extended by those who have previously obtained mercy. So there's a reason for our being in the earth and I don't want to get into that chapter, look at it yourself, about the trembling, the fear, the appearance of travail, a man with his hands on his loins in verse 6, all faces are turned into paleness, alas, for that day is great in verse 7, so that none is like it. It is even the time of Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it. Jacob means not only those Jews that reside in the land of Israel in the Middle East, but wherever Jacob is to be found. And Jacob is proliferated throughout the earth and in all nations. I don't know if I'll speak from Amos 9, but just as it comes to me, again, take note of these texts that I'm citing. In Amos 9, the Lord speaks of, I will sift you through all nations. And I will sift you as corn is sifted in a sieve and not so much as one kernel shall fall to the ground. It's a remarkable text, the Lord will direct them before our time ends, we'll go back to it with greater attention and detail, because I can't think of a single prophetic text that more telescopes and brings together the whole pattern of this last day's tribulation, sifting through the nations, restoration, and millennial glory, all in one final chapter, chapter 9. You know, my problem is not scrounging to find scriptures to support my outlandish theme, but to select from the overwhelming abundance of scripture that supports it. That the church has not been inundated and overwhelmed and convinced of something yet future that requires the church to be the church, as no other single requirement can, is itself an astonishing statement of the blindness that pervades the earth and of the enemy's ability to keep from the church's consideration the thing for which it itself is appointed. The enemy does not want a single Jew to survive. It's a program of total annihilation, and I am under obligation to explain to you why. It's not any of the sociological reasons that are advanced for antisemitism, although there's a certain validity to all of them. It's something much deeper. It is a dark, demonic, powers of the air, stratagem to prevent the loss of its usurping governmental place over the nations. Here I go choking and spluttering and fumbling and getting frustrated already because I know that you don't know what the principalities and powers of the air are about. I know you've heard of individual deliverance and the church so-called taking cities through worship, but all of that, believe me, is kid stuff. I'm all for individual deliverance, but one of the cruelest delusions is to think that that is the full statement of understanding relative to the principalities and powers of the air. What I am putting forth tonight, dear saints, is a theocratic statement of Israel's centrality in the establishment of divine rule over creation, which will not take place until Israel is restored to God. The present Zionist state is not that restoration, but a necessary preliminary scheduled for death out of the resurrection of which will come the enduring prophetic and millennial people, state, and glory. What do you mean theocratic, cats? What I mean is what is spoken in Isaiah chapter 2 and Micah 4.1 and many other places, that the law of the Lord shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. Now you know what the church has historically done with these explicit literal statements of the divine intention of God for his rule through the nation Israel? It has spiritualized these references away. Zion becomes a kind of metaphor, a symbolic word referring to the church and not Israel or to some kind of lofty and exalted spiritual state and condition, which I also believe and occasionally preach, but not at the expense of nullifying God's first and literal intention in his word. We have done violence to the word of God because we were too anti-Semitic even to desire that Israel should find such a place of prominence millennially or lack the faith to believe that a nation that has been so long apostate, alienated from God and away from his purposes and the enemies of the gospel for our sake could find such a celebrated place in God's purposes. But you need to understand what the schema is, what the broad outlines are, for which we would really need at least a three-day seminar, but I'm giving it to you in one night if you'll do your homework. The issue of Israel's restoration is not some kind of compassion on the part of the Lord to give that people a break after all they've suffered so long, they deserve a land of their own that they can go home and from which they will not again be expelled. That is not it at all. The issue of Israel is the issue of their king sitting on their throne and the holy hill of Zion on the throne of David and out of which the governmental rule of God will issue to all nations. You don't have to be a great exegete of scripture, that means to draw out its meaning, to determine whether Isaiah 2 is intended to be poetic or literal when it says that when the law of the Lord goes forth out of Zion, nations study war no more, beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, indicates that something of so formidable a kind issues forth out of Israel's restored center that it affects the conduct of nations. The church does not expect this. It doesn't even know what the kingdom of God is. It has a kind of a soppy, vague sense of some kind of spiritual condition, the kingdom of God is within us and there's a sense in which all those things are true. I'm not denigrating that, but we miss the truest sense, the hard political fact of God's actual rule over his creation, over and against those powers of the air that have jerked and manipulated nations time immemorial and want to continue doing so, and know better than the church that their time will be up and they will be evicted from their heavenly place over the earth when Israel is restored and the church comes to its fullness, is the end of their false, usurping rule. And as I think you can know from the political history of your own state, that a man once in power wants always to retain it. How much more the powers of the air. And so in the wisdom of these powers to avert the tragedy of their loss of rule and influence, their answer would be annihilate that nation whose restoration brings the king as their ruler in their city on the holy hill of Zion and on the throne of David, out of which the rule to all nations issues. No restored Israel, no coming king, no coming king, no kingdom. Got the picture? Now you would say world Jewry and present Israel is at a far remove from the condition and quality required to be the locus of God's theocratic rule over his creation. And that's exactly right. Paul says in Romans 11 that the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable, but we're hardly presently fitted to fulfill them. Something has got to happen to us in our present condition to fit us for the millennial destiny and glory, which is ours. And that something is what we call in Yiddish, sores, trouble, affliction of a devastating kind. And that's what we need to brace ourselves to anticipate because we're going to see it enacted globally and nationally, and there'll not be a place that will be exempt from it because not only will God sift Jacob through the nations, he will sift the nations through Jacob and the church in the nations so that when their king comes, the first operation of his judgment is over the issue that separates the sheep from the goats of what did you do with the least of these my brethren. And many of us will ask, when did we see you naked? When did we see you thirsty? When did we see you hungry? When did we see you in prison? I want to say in all authority tonight, Steven Spielberg and the heads of the Time Warner Corporation and every other prestigious, powerful financial institution of culture and entertainment in which Jews are well established and prominent will find themselves naked, hungry, thirsty and in prison. They will be uprooted from the places of their present security and affluence and altogether cast out and into the nations in a program of sifting by which the great majority will not survive. Can you see why I don't have the luxury of sermons? In chapter 31 of Jeremiah, after all of this is being described, at the same time, saith the Lord God, I will be the God of all the families of Israel and they shall be my people. So how do we know we're discussing some devastation of the past or future? Because the result and the end of this devastation is this knowledge. Israel comes to the knowledge of its God. It must or how else shall it bless all the families of the earth? I've got a feeling that there are some people here that are not exactly enjoying the prospect of Israel's future glory and that's true. And not only is Israel sifted, your heart is sifted and your heart is revealed for the sullenness of it and the lack of magnanimity and graciousness to welcome the erring brother back. Afraid that you're going to lose what little place of vested interest you have when I can assure you that God's glory is great for both a restored Israel and a glorified church. The fact of the matter is there'll be no glorified church at all except through the requirement made upon us in the process of Israel's restoration because look at our present condition now. It would have gone unseen and concealed had the Lord not raised up for us that one litmus test that has always revealed the deepest secret heart of the church, Israel and the Jew. By which test the church has failed miserably historically, even the best of the church. There's something about the Jew in the way that God has constituted this people and the historic enmity, resentment and jealousy and suspicion between these two peoples that were it not for God they would have kept a wide sway from each other's influence. But in the mystery of God we are irrevocably called into a destiny with them which if we seek to sidestep and to omit it will redound to our own detriment eternally. Israel is the church's finishing school. It brings us and requires us to come to a place of sanctification of such depth and such authenticity that we would not otherwise have attained or even known that it would be required. Because when we shall meet them in the extremity of the time of Jacob's trouble, what a sore test they will constitute for our supposed sanctity. That if you have any trouble with me tonight spirit-filled Jewish believer, what will you have with them who are deranged, uprooted with such brutal suddenness and in such a temper and fit of being stripped suddenly of all that they have accumulated and have built not only in their substance but in their hope and in their ideology. Altogether in a rude sudden moment of uprooting they're not going to be in their finest condition. And you who think you're being great sport to offer them a place in the attic and to warm up an English muffin and have not a bagel in the freezer, how will you respond to their lack of gratitude? How you will respond is not just the issue of showing your lousy disposition but the missing of an historical moment that will not be given again. What they see in you in the crisis of their extremity will make them or break them eternally, will account for why they shall return as the redeemed of the Lord to Zion with mourning and sighing passing away and everlasting joy upon their heads or not returning at all. Either you will confirm their worst stereotypes of Gentile Christendom for which they will perish and without hope or you will give them a glimpse of the face of very God himself in so incontrovertible a way that they cannot gainsay the evidence and the testimony of his reality through your Gentile face. Because the extending of hospitality and saviorhood to them is not going to come at your convenience. We're talking about an anti-Christ time. We're not talking about the hour as it presently is in the best of all possible worlds. We're talking about a Nazi anti-Jewish hatred of such vehemence that they would not be safe in any city in America or else why are they in flight except that they are pursued relentlessly unto death by all of the mechanism of society and state as was exactly the case in Nazi Germany a half century ago. You say but that can't happen here brother. This is USA and apple pie and mother. Well, I want to say dear saints next to the Germany of the 20th century which Jews adulated for the depth of its culture and civilization. We are a bunch of Johnny-come-lately paper thin culture. We will collapse like the proverbial deck of cards because we have not a Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Mozart, Wagner. What are we? We're a bunch of guitar strumming Nashville entertainers that will go when the demonic fury comes. Don't think that we will stand against it and no nation will. That's why Jesus said this will eclipse all previous trouble. Why? Because it will be global and must be global for the intention is the annihilation of Jews worldwide. So the enemy's most bitter stratagem is employed by God in the sifting and the finding of a remnant that shall return as the redeemed of the Lord to Zion though they did not leave it in that condition. Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads indicates that this is the last of their historic experience in the earth and one that they shall carry millennially and eternally as everlasting joy. This episode with Israel and the nations ends history and brings the millennium. It's the end of the age and the beginning of the ages to come. You know what the heck of it is? Where are the saints with a millennial anticipation? Looking for and hasting the appearing of the Lord. We are much too content with this age and love for it to continue. So I have to battle against all kinds of things to communicate this most rudimentary understanding because there is a deep layered resistance to the Jew, to an apocalyptic scenario that is violent and devastating, and to the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness that requires the obliteration of this present earth and of the heavens except for any part in this earth that is already in the kingdom of God as I believe this place is and our own location in northern Minnesota and wheresoever laboring for the kingdom has been established. I don't know how the Lord will so curtail the fires that will devour the earth, but he'll preserve that which is already in the realm of his eternal kingdom. Okay, so I will be the God of all the families of Israel and they shall be my people, thus saith the Lord God, the people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness, even Israel, when I went to cause him to rest. And I want to talk to you about the grace in the wilderness because that's where I find myself almost invariably in these days in every nation and including this. The wilderness is the out of the way place. It's the place where Jews would not be as easily identified and apprehended as would be the case in the major urban centers. They will be rooted up out of those places and God will provide and is presently establishing a network of places of refuge and flight, maybe a day's journey by foot or whatever that means. The employment as I was saying earlier today, old canals that are extinct in present use, waterways, obscure kinds of things will be places to which urbane and modern Jews will pass an enormous bewilderment that somehow they're coming to destinations prepared for them in the out of the way wilderness places of the nations where we ourselves are in northern Minnesota. So this is very little, literal verse 2 chapter 31, thus sayeth the Lord, not outcasts, the people which were left of the sword and they will be a remnant of the people. Found grace in the wilderness, even Israel, the elect, not every Jew, when I went to cause him to rest. Now we can look at Isaiah 35, Ezekiel 20, if we have time, to show how many references there are to a wilderness flight, to a highway of holiness in the wilderness that is not to be poetically considered but realistically understood, an actual line of flight in places now being prepared. And so Isaiah 35, the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them. The rest of the world will not. But dumb and innate nature will be glad for them. The wilderness, the solitary place and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it. The excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the Lord and the excellency of our God. They are secular Jews in flight, unbelieving, skeptical, having an aversion to anything that is supernatural, which is so in keeping with the mentality of the modern Jew, which is why they have to be thrust into places where they will see a demonstration of God and supernaturalness that will open them to a whole perception of a reality that is not theirs presently and must come to them if they are to be the redeemed of the Lord and to bless all the families of the earth. We are the most secular, anti-supernatural, empirically minded people on the earth. We are the ultimate humanists. And the Lord had even to show me in a debate with an Orthodox Jew with a Van Dyke beard and a yarmulke on his head that as we were thrashing it out in a high school in the hallway after the bell rang and we had come out of the class to which I had been invited to speak about Jews believing in Christ, all of a sudden I squinted my eyes at this man and I said, excuse me, I said, do you believe that the Red Sea was parted and that Israel went over as dry ground? And a dead silence and a choke and a splutter and the clearing of his throat and finally finding his voice he said, well he said, I think it was a confluence of the tides. An Orthodox Jew in his practices, fastidious in the details, but in terms of belief, utterly God rejecting in the sense of God as supernatural. That's why so demonstrable an exhibit must come of the power of God in the wilderness place. Now I don't know if you've ever been in a wilderness place. I think we need to be and I think that the best saints fitted to receive them will have already passed through their own wilderness. And I'm not talking about out under the starry skies. Right where you are, God knows how to produce wilderness conditions. What does that mean? A stripping of our assumptions, even our religious and our spiritual ones which we hold too lightly, however correct and not correct enough in the authenticity of our belief and what God will put us through in strippings and dealings in places not seen by others. That cannot be described as anything other than wilderness because wilderness strips man of his vain assumptions, of his categories and brings him in a place of grit between his bad soul and that of God. That's where Israel must be brought and will be brought, literally and spiritually. And the wilderness will be glad for them and the solitary place will be glad for them. Nature itself more attuned to understanding the works of God and knowing that its own redemption is nigh. Trees will clap their hands and hills will skip as lambs when they see the process taking place even through them in the remote areas that will assure the theocratic rule of God and his benevolence over all creation. Are you following me? I'm being as simple, as clear and as unfancy as I know. And I'm a guy that despises melodrama. I have even run from this scenario and the Lord has had to rub my face into the truth of it by bringing me again and again and again inescapably to actual places being prepared in this earth and in the nations and in this nation. That I can only just throw my hands up and say, okay Lord. However melodramatic this is, flight and escape, subterfuge, at night and this and that, it's true. Because this is a Moravian area, I'm saving this little anecdote because it touches the Moravian church, that in France, Switzerland, French speaking Switzerland, I was invited by a band of saints whom I've known over the years and who have been interested in community because I believe that community is the necessary condition for the reception of Jews in this untoward condition. Mere individuals, however virtuoso in their spirituality, cannot absorb and take the impact that will come in the onslaught of Jews in their condition. It will take the corporate strength of tested peoples who have gone through the mill prior to the Jews being thrust upon them in their own relationship with each other in the intensity and demand that community is. Mere Sunday saints will not be able to bear the load. The Lord called us to northern Minnesota with these words, I came out of a car to see a property just out of curiosity living in New Jersey in a 17 room Gothic masterpiece and I stepped over a chain to the entrance of this camp and the Lord said Dominion, the name which it now bears, end time teaching center, our activity, community refuge. These are the exact words. I thought refuge meant Christians in persecution in the last days and I put that last word on the shelf but I want to say in the last 7, 10 years the Lord has taken it off and made explicitly clear that the refuge is intended for Jews in flight and that only a community established in end time understanding can be the recipient and bear the impact and the weight of what these Jews will represent in their coming and in the suddenness of it. This is everything from which we shrink as privatistic Christians who want to maintain their distance and don't mind coming out for Sunday service. It calls us in the word to be the church for in my opinion community is not an alternative but the statement of and the synonym for church. We must be that. So the wilderness shall blossom abundantly and rejoice even with joy and singing. They shall see the glory of the Lord as Israel itself and the excellency of our God and then all of a sudden the text breaks and the Lord is addressing now someone other than Israel and saying to them strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart be strong, fear not behold your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense, he will come and save you. Listen dear saints not the least of the virtues of the calamity that is coming for Israel is the requirement for us to become finally exegetes of the word of God to take seriously the word of God and to ponder and to weigh it and to understand it. So for example in a text like this to who is now being addressed say to them who is the them who are of the feeble knees and are blind and demoralized and are about to collapse because they are incapacitated. Their comfortable Jewish lifestyle has not fitted them for the suddenness of wilderness trek and the loss of everything in which they have invested their lives. They're not only physically strung out, they're morally strung out and they're ready to die of it and the Holocaust of the Hitler past has shown that those who have perished in the concentration camps were not necessarily the physically weakest but those who were demoralized and without a vestige of hope. Israel is going to be brought and must be brought to that condition. Oh if you only knew what Jews are you would nod your head in agreement and say yes nothing less than that because we are, what's the word, we are the supremely self-confident people of the earth. We are the ones who bring ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We are, here's the word, indomitable. I-N-D-O-M-I-T-A-B-L-E that means however adverse the circumstances we have learned to overcome and to succeed in them. What will it take to bring us down who have won more Pulitzer Prizes and Nobel Awards than any people out of their proportion to their number in the population? To bring us to a place where we can have no longer any confidence in ourselves or any hope in our own rectitude or our own ability even to save ourselves in our ultimate plight. If you understood Israel's eternal destiny you would understand equally why God must go this far to bring a people all the way down that he might bring them all the way up as the nation that will be exalted and respected and honored by all nations. In fact if nations will not honor the restored Israel and come up to their Jerusalem on their feast days in the Feast of Tabernacles God promises a curse. He will withhold rain. The fact that he has to threaten this in Zechariah 14 shows the enormous depth of Gentile hostility toward the Jew and toward Israel that yet remains even after Israel's restoration. God wants to save you from taking that residue of ingrained prejudice and distaste against that people into eternity where it will forever embarrass you. And in fact I want to advance a theory showing you your secret heart. By the confrontation with the Jew to save you knocking on your door in the midnight hours and that after you had extended yourself at peril to find that they expressed themselves in ingratitude where involuntarily something would rise up out of your deepest gut of anger and resentment unless God had gotten there first with his deepest sanctifying work. In Ezekiel 20 it says I will meet you in the wilderness of the nations face to face. And I give that this interpretation. That means if you only show these Jews a face of religious responsibility and obligation you have missed it. Is there anything more sour and more chilling than the face of mere religious obligation? But to see the face of the Lord means unconditional love that cannot be offended against. No matter what they say. No matter what they do. You have no expectation. You're not evaluating them. They don't have to pass any test. They cannot pass any test. But you have for them the love that God has which is unconditional that makes no requirement because the spirit of requirement in you, that pharisaical thing has long before been crucified. The spirit of requirement. Why they? What's in it for them? How come? Why should God spare them? Because he'll have mercy on whom he will have mercy. That's why. But they don't deserve it. Is what your deepest gut is saying which shows however much you subscribe overtly to the doctrines of grace deep down you are as pharisaical and measure things by merit and performance as any Jew ever did in the time of Jesus. Your outward thing is your doctrinal statement but the inward resentment and the how come and they don't deserve it is where in fact you actually live. And it's that that will be eternally revealed to your unremitting anguish of soul and embarrassment without remedy. Praise the Lord. He's found a way not only to restore Israel but to deal with the church and bring it to its final sanctification to fit it for its own millennial destiny in the same single stroke. And that's who it is who's being addressed in this verse. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, the fearful heart of the Jews, demoralized, broken, hopeless and say to them be strong and fear not. Behold your God will come with vengeance against whom? Against those who are oppressing you ruthlessly and pursuing you unto death. Your God will come. He has not yet come and there's no prospect of appearing that he will come and you have not been trained up in a faith to expect that he will come. But you've got to hear a word in your wilderness desperation that says that he will come. And it's more than just a hopeful hunch and a little slap on the back. It is the prophetic creative word in the hearing of which the lame leap and the blind see or they will not survive until the Lord comes. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as a hawk and the tongue of the dumb sing for in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert and the parched ground shall become a pool and the thirsty land springs of water and the habitation of dragons where each lay shall be grass with breeds and rushes and a highway shall be there in a way and it shall be called the way of holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it but it shall be for those the wayfaring men, the fools shall not err therein. No lion shall be there nor any ravenous beast of the Nazi kind, not the four-legged but the two, shall go up thereon. It shall not be found there but the redeemed shall walk there and the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. The sorrow and sighing is something yet future for Israel that even the Holocaust did not evoke. Sorrow and sighing was not what undergirded the present establishment of the state of Israel, rather a more defiant never again attitude than a ultimate brokenness that comes from the removal of a last hope. The sighing and the mourning is the statement of the devastation of modern Jewry's present hope, the continuation of present Israel. That's why it must go, because this people must come to a place without a false hope that is rooted not in God but in nation and state and the security of the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the every kind of thing that Jews have come to see as being the basis of their security and their continuation. There's something about the word of God that is so terse, just a few carefully chosen, divinely chosen words, that it takes holy ghost imagination and prophetic proclamation to paint a picture that God is not giving in great details but sufficient to alert us to what the scenario is and to fit us that we might say to them in the wilderness place where they would otherwise have perished, except a word of creative prophetic weight and power comes, your God will come. He will save you. That cannot be spoken merely as a hint or a wishful hope. It has got to be spoken with full prophetic weight by a people who know God who comes and saves out of ultimate extremity and distress, out of their own experience, before the advent of Israel's distress. Can you imagine the irony of speaking so well and so clearly that one is not understood? I'm so happy what was on Harry's heart. Clarity of utterance and that's what you're getting but I don't know what it is. It beggars the imagination. It's in conflict with what we have thought. These things cannot be and yet there it is. If this redeemed of the Lord do not return to Zion, the Lord himself does not come to Zion because it says in Acts 3.21 he is contained in the heavens waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets like Isaiah and like Joel and Amos since the world was established. The Lord has imposed upon himself a restriction that keeps him from his sovereign place on his own throne because he waits for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets, namely the return of Israel that he might be their king and out of their capital and the holy hill of Zion shall go forth the law of God. The issue of Israel's deliverance in the last days, the remnant of them that will account for the restored nation is the final obligation of the church in the earth and what kind of a church it is is indicated by the reward that comes by those who extend mercy, food, clothing, shelter, water. For the least of these my brethren are told come you righteous and inherit the kingdom prepared for you. Does it mean that one becomes righteous by a last days work of extending oneself to a hated and despised people? I don't think so. What it means is that faced with the crisis of a despised people from which everything in our flesh wants to shrink and retreat, those who cannot help themselves and are constrained by the love of God and their place in God to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy is the evidence of being already righteous. Righteousness requires the extension of ourselves regardless of the consequence to our own bodily life. The merely religious will be unable to pass that test. They cannot be performed as principle and those who are presently identified with Israel from the sentimental level will find themselves curiously incapable. Sentiment will not cut it. Only the righteousness of God, the life of God that compels. There is no other alternative. You must. No matter what there is something more important than the perpetuation of your bodily existence and you cannot see a people reduced and driven and naked and hungry pass you by and you shall not extend to them mercy. And by this God identifies who in fact the true church is and the righteous and who have the reward who inherit the kingdom which is not to say sitting on a cloud with a harp but having active place in the establishment of that kingdom and ruling and reigning with them as overcomers. That people who overcome the last days oppressor by the blood of the lamb, the word of their testimony and love not their life unto the death. The Jew will measure that and evoke the truth of our condition. That's why God is speaking now. We are Sunday saints and we have a too high sense of our own spirituality because it has not ever been sorely tested. It's a mercy of God to give us a preview in a sense of what is to come and when the Lord gives the grace for me to speak it as he did in New Zealand in three nights of meetings in the very first night people are already falling out of their seats and on their faces when the seriousness of what is being depicted strikes their soul and cry out Lord who is sufficient for these things. I want to tell you that our being Jewish is not a necessary sufficiency because already we've had a preview of the testing that will come when a hobo, a helpless stinking piece of human refuse was picked up in northern Minnesota and brought to us. I was away on a trip and he was taken in by Paul Volk the co-author of Spirit of Truth, very mild mannered man who never raises his voice, imperturbable, never seen him excited and he showed this bum a place to put his carcass to sleep and got him some food and before he could turn and leave him the man was already complaining. It's not good enough. Is this the best you have? And Paul said when he heard the ingratitude of this Jewish hobo something rose up from his gut that entirely astounded him. It was nothing less than murder. If that's the reaction of one Jew to another, what will be your reaction when the test will come of an equally severe kind? And I want to say that the mercy of God is to put us on alert and to open ourselves for the preparation of character and life that when that test comes we shall not fail it for it will come only once and not be given again. Revelation 12 speaks about a woman fleeing to the wilderness and given wings to escape in the wilderness from the dragon that seeks to devour her where a place has been prepared for her where she is fed for three and a half years is the statement of the exact scenario that I'm speaking to you out of the prophets. It's not that there will be one place but there will be moved on from place to place in a three and a half year trek that culminates in their return to Zion as the redeemed of the Lord. I would be astonished if God is going to omit this section of North Carolina from that last day's scenario. And I've been waiting on the Lord all the day. I would have been much more delighted to preach something out of the word of a great message and I've had no alternative. I've been constrained to speak the nuts and bolts of this last day's thing that you might understand it and put yourself in a place of preparation both spiritually and practically to not miss it. Can we say now your God will come in a way more than merely a wishful suggestion? Can we say it prophetically with such convicting power and such creative authority that the blind see and the lame leap in the hearing of that word or they will not have survived when the Lord does come. It makes the church the critical factor in Jewish survival which is perfectly in keeping with everything that Paul sums up in Romans chapter 11 that by your mercy they might obtain mercy. This is a final opportunity to fulfill the drama of the mystery of Israel and the church, the reciprocal relationship between these two bodies for which reason we ourselves were saved. Have they stumbled that they should fall? Paul asks in Romans 11.11 God forbid. But through their fall salvation has come to the Gentiles so as to move them to jealousy. There's a purpose for your salvation beyond yourself. The fact that you have not found it is revealed in the callow and carnal condition of the life of the church today. It is coming into the recognition of the mystery of the reciprocal relationship with Israel that makes the church the church and brings the dynamic and the vitality that saves us from the great condition that makes us candidates to run somewhere for blessing. Maybe we can take a look at scriptures I've been referring to in Ezekiel chapter 20 from verse 33. As I live say to the Lord God surely with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out I will rule over you. I will bring you out from the people or the nations and will gather you out of the countries where in you are scattered with a mighty arm and with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out. When the Lord repeats himself twice with the phrase with fury poured out you know what it is that will be the factor that brings them out of the nations where they have found their success, their fame, their fortune, their prosperity. It will be with a fury poured out, a demonic antichrist rage against them of the kind that was expressed through Nazi Germany in the depth of that German culture and civilization that within a decade brought that great nation down to so bestial a level as to systematically annihilate six million Jewish people. That's the spirit that will prevail in yet greater intensity in all nations. That's the fury poured out. Why fury? Because the powers of the air cannot countenance that they should lose their governing influence over nations and will do everything that they can to remove that prospect by the annihilation of that nation whose return means their end. And I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples or the nations and there I will plead with you face to face. Just as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so will I plead with you, saith the Lord God, and I will cause you to pass under the rod and will bring you into the bond of the covenant. That's the salvation of those who will come to it. And those who refuse the evidence and the testimony of God in his mercy expressed through the church, they will be eliminated. You know that the mercy of God is the statement of God. When Moses asked to see the glory of God, God showed him his mercy. This is the final demonstration of God's mercy expressed face to face through the church that somehow rejoices for the privilege of being identified and participating in the last day's rescue of a remnant of God's people Israel out of their time of Jacob's trouble and counted all privilege, even if it means not only their peril but the loss of their life. What a strange church. It's got to be one that is assured that whatever the present suffering and loss, there will be an eternal reward that will be enduring and that they will wear a crown and they will have the eternal joy for the privilege of having been participant in the conclusion of the age through the mercy extended through them. I preached that in a place and a woman cried out of the congregation. But Archie said we don't even have mercy for each other. Exactly. And that's the condition in which we will remain and languish unless we understand that there's a greater test for our sanctification than we have presently known and we have got to get our spiritual act together. I will purge out from among you in verse 38 the rebels and them that transgress against me. I will bring them forth out of the country wherein they sojourn and they shall not enter into the land of Israel and you shall know that I am the Lord. How do we know that this is past or future? Because it ends with the surviving remnant knowing that I am is the Lord, which the return to present political Israel has not brought. And you will know that I am the Lord. Really know in a depth of knowledge and understanding that makes that people the agent of blessing all the families of the earth. Verse 41 I will accept you with your sweet savor when I bring you out from the people and gather you out of the countries wherein you have been scattered and I will be sanctified in you before the heathen. Elsewhere it says and I will not do this in the corner but before the face of all nations. This is not some hidden thing. This is going to be a final testimony of the reality and the power of God both to judge and to restore to bring severity and kindness that no nation will have excuse that they have not seen the testimony of God in the earth. I will be sanctified in you before the heathen. That is to say even in your apostate condition I will be sanctified as you will be a witness nation to me not because of your virtue but because of your loss. When the nations will see my mercy toward you in your complete undeservedness. What is mercy if it is deserved? It is only mercy because it is undeserved and because it is extended. The nations will know that there is one God and that he is the I am and that he is the God of Jacob and the God of Israel. He is the God who judges and the God who restores and he is doing it before the face of all nations. I will be sanctified in you. You will be performing something in my dealings with you and having cast you out and brought you back. That makes me known to the nations and you shall know in verse 42 that I am the Lord when I shall bring you into the land of Israel into the country for which I lifted up my hand to give it to your fathers and there you shall remember your ways and your doings wherein you have been defiled and you shall loathe yourself in your own sight for all your evils that you have committed and you shall know that I am the Lord when I have wrought with you for my namesake. So this is repeated again and again. Ezekiel 36 talks about their lament and their repentance. Zechariah chapter 13 talks about every family apart mourning and lamenting at the appearing of the Lord whom we have pierced. The surviving remnant is in for the deepest cry of repentance that has ever been heard in the earth nationally. This is the first restoration of a nation. God has moved from individual salvation to the restoration of nations as nations by first dealing with and restoring Israel for Israel is central to all nations and henceforth and thereafter God's dealing is with nations per se as nations through the nation that has been restored in this last days process of sifting and return. Well maybe just one quick look at Amos chapter 9 again summing up all that we have been saying and I'm not scratching to find texts. I have to find which of the texts to employ for they are prolific in saying the same thing in all the prophets. In the last chapter of Amos in verse 8 behold the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth except that it will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob saith the Lord. God's devastation of Israel is not some arbitrary cruelty. It is a judgment for Israel's sins past and present and an exact proportion to those sins which it says in the prophets that your sins will be worse than that of your fathers. Present Israel is daily moving toward that condition. In gambling casinos, prostitution, in the torture of prisoners, in the absconding and taking of off the streets suspected terrorists, in jail without charge and every kind of increasing moral collapse including the sanction of torture to obtain information that might avert another bus explosion. Can you see how God has boxed them in? This is not just some outworking of caprice. This is the device of God to bring a people to the recognition that there is no man good no not one. When Jews are required to sanction torture to obtain information that would avert another tragic bus explosion, even if peace would finally be obtained with Arabs which never will, even if the damage is already so done that is irretrievable, they've passed the point of return. Israel could never be the nation that they had hoped to establish that would exhibit to the Gentile nations the uniqueness of that which is a Jewish nation in our so-called moral and ethical superiority. We are daily demonstrating that we are no more ethical, no more moral than any other nation and when we are constrained by the necessity for survival and the perpetuation of ourselves as a nation, we'll employ every needful thing that any Gentile nation has ever employed and must see this in our own experience because we have rejected the word of testimony of God that there is no man good no not one. We need to understand not to berate Israel for their failure but to understand the inevitability of failure. It must come. They cannot succeed on the basis of some supposed Jewish virtue. There is none and out of the death of our vain hopes and false estimations of ourselves does come a redeemed restored and resurrected nation in the character of God himself and in his own meekness for only in that condition can we as Jews bless all the families of the earth. We're going to see the first reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus now in the nation that also is intended as a servant people to all peoples, a nation of priests and a light unto the world and the light that is his light when he restores us at the end of our final extremity and suffering. For I will command and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations when God says all that includes us just as corn is sifted in a sieve yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth all the sinners of my people shall die by the sword and I suspect that that accounts for the majority of us which say the evil shall not overtake nor confront us. Something like the attitude of German Jews at the inception of the Nazi time, this too shall pass. But it doesn't. In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen and close up the breaches thereof and I will raise up its ruins and will build it as in the days of old is not a reference to Hebraic forms of worship. I'm sorry about that. The tabernacle of David is not a form of charismatic song service. It is the statement symbolically of the Davidic government of God from the throne of David on the holy hill of Zion where God says I have planted my son, I have established my king on the holy hill of Zion and says to the nations in Psalm 2, eat your heart out. Let the heathen rage and foam at the mouth for I have established my king on the holy hill of Zion. That's the center of my rule and he is appointed for it and it's not you and your nation who is grander and more impressive than my little Israel. I choose the thing that is little. I choose the thing that is only a hill and that they may possess the remnant of Edom is a figurative and prophetic language that doesn't mean possess in some overbearing way but extend the rule over Edom which is symbolic not just of Palestinian people but all Gentile nations. And of all the heathen which are called by my name, save the Lord God. The days shall come, save the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper. Here is now the millennium being described and the treader of grapes, him that sows seed, and the mountains shall drop sweet wine and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and they shall build the waste cities, Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, Ashkelon. There is going to be such devastation and ruin that it says in Isaiah 49, Israel has become the land of our destruction. Get in while you can. See it while you can. It's not going to long remain. It is scheduled for disaster. And I've argued and debated with some of the most eminent voices in the land who call themselves prophetic and I said, I showed them in Jeremiah 30 and 31 that Jerusalem shall be built again on its own heaps. And the brother whom I've known for over 20 years or a quarter of a century, he says, but taking place right now. And he shows me the earth moving equipment. I said, but dear man, will you please pay attention to the text? It says it will be built again upon its own heaps as unto the Lord. This building is not unto the Lord and it will constitute the heaps upon which that ultimate and millennial building will take place. You know what he did? He threw me out of his office in a fury and a rage because of an unwillingness to face an apocalyptic scenario and a Gentile heart that wishes the best for Israel and refuses to see as God sees and doesn't understand the centrality and the necessity for death and resurrection in anything that pertains to the glory of God. That's a statement of the church's failure to recognize the centrality of death and resurrection for itself and projects that limited view of amelioration and progress and improvement that it wants for itself on the nation Israel. And God says, no way. Anything that has to do with my glory forever must pass through death and resurrection. For Paul ends the great dissertation on the mystery of Israel and the church with these words, for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever. The issue of Israel is not Israel. It's the glory of God forever and nothing less than his ability to raise up those dry bones out of the death of hopelessness when they themselves say, we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones, will eventuate in God's glory. And it's interesting when that national cry comes, which has historically not yet appeared, it's not God who speaks to the bones. It's the son of man who is commanded to prophesy to these bones in a faith that will believe for their restoration who has said only briefly before when was asked, can these bones live? Well, thou sayest, not only must the son of man believe for those bones to live out of the word that proceeds from his mouth, that it has to be a faith that works by love and not a begrudging compliance with the will of God that desires those bones to live and then live they will to become an exceeding great army for God and the nation that will bless all nations and be central to the purpose of God for all nations as restored out of death. Who is that son of man? Who has that prophetic ability to address dry bones with a faith that is beyond that which is charismatic that has believed only for Cadillacs? For a love that exceeds our affinity for Israel because they're cute and we like to pinch their cheek or we have some romantic, idealized vision.