In this sermon, the preacher reflects on the absence of God in the face of death and devastation. He emphasizes the refusal of people to come to the end of themselves and instead rely on their own resources. The preacher cites a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, highlighting the idea that what has happened in the past will happen again and God requires accountability for past actions. He also mentions the composition of corpses found in gas ovens during a historical event, emphasizing the consequences of sin and the need for revelation and understanding.

to bring us to that eternal awareness as we come to the end of historical time. This is not a little hypothetical question. This helps to understand the brutality and the severities that we are going to see in our lifetime, globally, in God's dealing with dead people. It only makes sense in the light of eternity. So we need to really contend for the faith once and for all, given the saints. Where the day of judgment and the eternal consequence, the gnashing of teeth, the despair, the wailing, the being cast into outer darkness, was very real. And somehow it has been diffused and domesticated. It's an offense to think in those terms. You don't want to say to people that you have to consider the issue of hell. And when I said to my mother, in the few little opportunities I had to get a word in, edgewise, and when she complimented you and she was so blessed by you, I said, With whom would you rather spend eternity? The people that have so impressed you? Or your Jewish friends in West Palm Beach, who are in quite another place? Oh, she said, well, they're nice too. I said, the issue is not nice. The issue is two different kingdoms. And a decision is required in this life that will absolutely determine with whom we eternally spend ourselves. Years ago, the Lord woke me in the middle of the night to write my mother a letter. And the gist of it was this. I think I still have a copy somewhere. I said, Mom, you know that I grew up without a father. My mother worked in the garment industry, $12 a week in sweatshops that were not unionized, in order to support two sons. But the most important thing to her, more than clothing and food, was that we should live in a nice Jewish neighborhood. I said, Mom, have you ever given consideration in what neighborhood you will spend eternity? Are you going to spend it with the scoffers, the blasphemers, with the God despisers, or with the godly? If you were that concerned in all of the struggles through our lifetime that we should live in a good neighborhood, what consideration are you giving to the neighborhood in which you will spend all eternity? So may God bring back to the church the issue of eternity. And the Holocaust does, in fact, have that effect. It's interesting that there's very little thought on the part of those Jewish thinkers who have examined the meaning of the Holocaust to see it in the context of Israel's prophetic past. How about previous calamities, previous judgments, previous expulsions from the land, previous devastations? Not much consideration is given to that, because our first disposition as moderns is to seek a secular, sociological, or political explanation, rather than to find it in God. It's to turn to human analysis rather than divine revelation, to suspect the defects of men and of nations, than to seek the cause in our own sin. The whole way in which we view a phenomenon is quite revealing about our whole mind cast. What's the phrase that Gary uses? A frame of reference. Our Jewish frame of reference, which is to say the world's frame of reference, is to look first for a secular, political, sociological explanation than to seek it in the scripture. To look first to see it in the failure of men and institutions than to see it in our own sin. So we're talking about whole mindsets, whole frameworks of perceiving reality that God is getting at. Are you following me? This is foundational. And this propensity to look for answers sociologically and politically, rather than to seek it in God, is not only the mind cast of the modern world, it has affected the church itself. That's what I was going to say. It seems to me that what you're describing is the church. It's the same thing I see all the time in the church, in the church I go to. I'm not talking about the other church, I'm talking about people that attend my church have that same view. So it's always a bad guy, it's a Hitler, it's a Arafat, it's a Saddam Hussein, and if only we could have gotten rid of them, we would not have suffered this. Rather than to see in these men the very instrumentalities of God to affect his purposes, and if not them, he could find others. Everything depends on a frame of reference and a perspective. It shows the triumph of the secular mind over the spiritual. I remember giving five talks on the Christian versus the secular mind, taking up these profound differences of ways of perceiving and seeing that have so much corrupted the view of the church. Because in our own personal life, whether we suffer loss of job or breakdown of a marriage, or the failure of our bodies or our health, our first thought in finding explanation is secular, horizontal, and earthly rather than spiritual or godly. And therefore we run to a doctor for a remedy, or try to find the solution at that level, rather than to seek both the cause and the resolution in God. And so long as that's our frame of reference, how shall we be able to instruct Israel? We ourselves have been defrauded of a perspective that is central to the faith. Does not our very marginal knowledge of scripture and the nominal character of our religion itself testify as being the very cause for which this and perhaps every adversity has been our experience? Isn't this why we're suffering calamity? And why the calamities have to worsen? Because the previous ones were yet not powerful enough to break us out of that secular mindset. And what's the evidence of the Holocaust? What came out of the Holocaust? Never again. Why? Because it implies that we suffered as Jews because we were defenseless, because we were a ghetto people, because we stroked our beards and occupied ourselves with the Talmud, and we were defenseless against the forces that came against us. But that'll be the last time that we'll be found defenseless. We found the explanation in our circumstances rather than in God. And think that by altering our circumstances, we will need not suffer such calamity again. What therefore is God required to do? But to bring yet greater calamity. If this is our disposition and mindset after the Holocaust, what was it likely to have been before the Holocaust? And what will we likely again be victim of should that disposition remain? Am I going too fast? Did you get that flow of thought? Yeah. If what I'm describing was our disposition and mindset after the Holocaust, if we had a never again mentality after the Holocaust, what was it before the Holocaust? And if we remain in that mentality, what future judgments can we likely expect? We will likely again be the victim of future judgments should that disposition remain. And despite the orthodoxy or piety that we have celebrated, why was it not sufficient to warn of the impending disaster? You want to know the validity of your religion? And the Jewish commentators cannot understand why it was religious Jews that died in such number rather than secular. But the question needs to be asked, what was the character of their religion? What was the truth of their piety? If it was not sufficient to alert and to forewarn them of the disaster that was approaching. Because they did not have a biblical frame of reference that is clearly laid out in scripture of what would befall us in the last days. If we turned away from God and from his covenants and from being his witness people to the nations. Deuteronomy 32 is called the Song of Moses. You can read it at your leisure, maybe we'll read some portions of it together. There are portions in Deuteronomy 32 that to me are as graphic a description of the Holocaust as anything that could be found in scripture. Why is it called the Song of Moses? Because it was to be learned by memory and to be recited to our children. And then our children were to recite it to their children as a song. As a recitation. Why? That we would be forewarned. Look at, oh there's so much here. Verse 20, verse 18. Of the rock that begot thee thou art unmindful and hast forgotten God that formed thee. And when the Lord saw it he abhorred them because of the provoking of his sons and of his daughters. And he said, I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end shall be. For they are a very forward generation, children in whom is no faith. They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God. They have provoked me to anger with their vanities. And I will move them to a jealousy with those which are not a people. And I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. One rare commentator said that this is a description of Nazi Germany. That Nazi Germany so disfigured Germany that it was not a nation in the sense of a civilization, but a people who had become dehumanized and bestial without natural affection that could systematically torture and annihilate without a twinge of conscience. That this is the foolish nation that God was speaking of in Deuteronomy 32. Foolish in the sense that they in no way resemble a nation in terms of an ethic, a morality, a decency even. God raised up and allowed to be formed an abomination, a hideous perversion of a nation because it was a judgment. Because they had moved him to jealousy and to anger, he would move them and provoke them to anger with a foolish nation. For a fire is kindled in my anger and shall burn unto the lowest hell and shall consume the earth with her increase and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. It's very interesting that still today military historians cannot understand, I mentioned this before, to the very last day of the war, the German military machine was diverting material manpower and resources to the extermination of the Jews away from the things needed for their own defense or the prosecution of the war. It does not make any sense. And the answer is the same answer to the question of why were the ships turned back when Jewish refugees sought to find access to the United States or Cuba or Latin America and safety from the gas elements were sent back to Germany and they perished. Jews are blaming those nations today and condemning them. But the answer is, I believe, that God's judgment had to have its full expression. I will hide my face from them. It means that my anger is kindled and it will burn to the bottoms of hell and no man can deter it. If you want, you can say that the nations failed to take you in. But they failed because I would not have them to take you in for my fire must burn to the lowest hell. Do you think it's possible to look at the process of bestialization of the Germans? In other words, what were the factors and processes that led up to the removal? Beautiful, beautiful statement, question. Because if that's what happened to a Germany of the land of Schubert, Beethoven, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Kant, the great philosophers, the great poets, the great musicians, Bach. What will happen to nations that don't have an inheritance of that kind, whose culture is paper thin and skin deep when the restraint is removed? And we're seeing all of the eerie and ominous formation already taking place in our own nation, skinheads, neo-Nazis, riots in L.A., middle class people with their shopping carts looting appliance stores, things in Yugoslavia today, torture, most inhumane things that have not been known since World War II when the restraint is being lifted. If that's the picture of what happened in Germany with restraint lifted, what can we expect elsewhere in the world? The vilest men are killed. Right, and that's true. The echelon of Nazi leadership came from the gutter. Homosexuals, most perverse men, Hitler himself a case in point, men without refinement, without culture, without background, without discipline, ventilating their hatreds, their frustrations and their bitternesses under a satanic anointing of such brilliance that absolutely swept the day and mesmerized men and an entire nation with a culture that was as deep as that was. Well, this whole thing is a remarkable foreshadowing of the last days. We need to, you know, we're reading and studying something at many levels, but we should not let this escape us. This whole Nazi phenomenon, the systematic annihilation, the persecution of Jews, the hatred of the true church and its persecution, the rise of antichrist power and mesmerizing anointing are all foreshadowings and torture and cruelty and inhumanity of what will be in the last days. In the last days, perilous times will come. Men will be lovers of pleasure and lovers of self more than lovers of God, disobedient, unruly, unthankful, disobedient to parents, cruel without natural affection. That means they can perform the most vicious things as we see it now. Dismembering their victims, rapes and murders, experiments, delighting in the goriness of death, kids out of middle class homes. We can brace ourselves. Let's just read this quickly. I will heap mischief upon them, verse 23, spend mine hours upon them. Notice the I will, I will. The instrumentality might be men or nations, but the cause is God. I will, I will. They shall be burnt with hunger and devoured with burning heat and with bitter destruction. I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them with the poison of serpents of the dust. May well be a biblical allusion to the poison by which millions of Jews died in their gas chambers. The sword without and terror within shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs. Notice the sequence and the order. When they opened up the gas ovens, this was always the composition of the corpses to be found. On the bottom, the suckling and the man of gray hairs. They had the least strength to fight their way through the maze of bodies for whatever air was left before their end came. On the top, the young man and the virgin. The youngest and the most virile were always found on the top, the oldest and the youngest at the bottom. A graphic picture of what our end would be in that last day. Were it not that I feared the wrath of the enemy, lest their adversaries should behave themselves strangely, lest they should say, Our hand is high, and the Lord hath not done this, for they are a nation void of counsel. What is that saying? That lest the nations boast that they had done this, God bring some limitation to their devastation, that they should not take the credit for it. Oh, that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end. This is the song of Moses. It's not the one when they came out of the Red Sea, where the horse and rider tossed into the sea. This is a song, as I've said, as a kind of recitation to be memorized, to identify and to forestall, and to avoid the very destructions that are spoken here. So what kind of a religion was it that men so celebrated as being pious that did not provide this kind of biblical awareness? There's a question that can be raised against the statement that, How can it be God? Because those who died in the ovens were religious and pious, but not a religion that was biblical. They did not live lives in the context of scriptural understanding so as to have been forewarned of the impending disaster. It raises the whole question of orthodoxy as true religion. So all of this is an introduction now into the examination of the Holocaust itself and its meaning. First thing that we need to consider is the consensus that the Holocaust cannot be understood, that it cannot be examined, that it lies beyond interpretation. I attended a lecture at St. John University there outside of St. Cloud by a professor from a university in Minneapolis, and his statement, he quotes Elie Wiesel as saying, There is no meaning to be discovered in the imponderables of faith and destiny. One cannot conceive of the Holocaust except as a mystery. The Holocaust lies beyond interpretation. It is unthinkable. So don't even begin to think that you can derive some understanding of its cause. It's just one of those inexplicable tragedies that come in human history, and all you can do is try to prevent it from coming again through education. And that's the whole purpose of this Holocaust Museum and whole departments in virtually every American university of Jewish studies and Holocaust courses being taught in high schools because in the secular mindset that cannot find an ultimate explanation, the value that we can gain from it is to educate people so as to avoid religious and racial hatred so to prevent any future Holocaust. See how again we're setting ourselves up for a tragedy and putting a faith in education rather than in God when the irony is that the Holocaust came through the most educated nation in the world. And if education was not sufficient to prevent them from having been the agents of the Holocaust, what can we hope for in education now when we're racing up a whole nation of dum-dums with a literacy level that is an embarrassment that even those who enter colleges and universities today have to take the most preliminary remedial courses in reading and in writing. They have not learned the most fundamental skills. So do we think that education is going to suffice now to prevent what came from a Germany that was the most brilliantly educated nation at that time? This thing about beyond interpretation is a real kind of cop-out. It says that something is unthinkable and is the rupture of thought itself which means that we are robbing God of an opportunity to make clear to us what he thinks that we should understand by that calamity. It's drawing the line and saying this far, no further. This is unthinkable. When God would have us to think and have us to understand and I write here that we might have some sympathy for a view because of the magnitude of the horror that is unthinkable but we insist that however painful the task the respect for the sufferers demands an attempt to understand to interpret and to assess. The pain of that is so much more compounded by those who attempted within the framework of God as existent. It's one thing to find an explanation in a world without God but how much more painful for us to find an explanation in a world that we believe in which God is. It raises very painful questions. Where is God? Where is his justice? Where is his mercy and where is his love that allows or even where it says I will, I will is even the fact in bringing such calamity into the world. Can we still believe in God as we have thought him to be or does this require some re-examination and an understanding of him in yet a deeper way. And this question is not unlike the issue of the burning bush and that the whole key to Moses' apostolic sending to be an agent of God's deliverance from Israel from bondage was his attention being arrested at a burning bush. And when God saw that he did not turn away but looked into the burning bush and asked the ultimate question of why this bush burns and is not consumed that the call of God came to him that gave him the mandate to be Israel's deliverer out of Egypt and out of bondage. And I see that as a picture of the last days that there's a world still in bondage waiting for someone to come to it sent of God in his authority not just to kill an occasional Egyptian as the Moses 40 years before had done and had to flee in exile but to be sent in the authority of God to the Pharaoh which is the picture of very Satan himself the principalities and the powers of the air for only an apostolic confrontation with that power will release the captives. But it waits. You're asking too many questions and making too many responses. It waits on someone who will turn aside to see the burning thing and demand to know why it burns and is not consumed. This is contrary to the flesh that the tendency ought to be humanly to pass on by and not to look. And the way that the Lord gave me this message on the burning bush maybe I'll preach it one of these days I'm just now just reviewing the highlight is finding myself on an airplane coming back from a ministry trip reading Exodus 3 and the call of Moses at the burning bush. It's very rare for me to do something like that on an airplane. Usually the airplane is the time to read Sports Illustrated or Newsweek or something. But there I was in a crowd, every seat taken and I'm reading that the rabbis say that the key was when Moses turned aside to see. God waited for this free voluntary response to conflagration, to holocaust. And when he got that, then he called Moses, Moses and called that holy ground. And I'm reading all this and I'm looking up for a moment like that I'm thinking and I notice my neighbor here Hey, this woman's Jewish. There wasn't a thing on her to identify her. No Star of David, I knew instantly she's Jewish. And I turned to her and I said in my unthinking way I said, when's the last time that you've seen a Jew on an airplane with a Bible on his lap? She just jerked like that. I said, you need to know that I'm one of ten thousands of modern Jewish men and women who have been brought to the knowledge of our God through the revelation of the Messiah, Jesus. She went gulp. And instead of looking at me she turned away the other side and began a conversation with her neighbor on the right of a trivial kind. And I went back to reading. And then about a half hour later the announcement over the loudspeaker put your seatbelt on, adjust your seats be prepared to land. I turned to her and I said again when do you think you'll have another occasion to encounter a man like me? I said, you know, if you have no real respect and love for the truth how then are you Jewish? She said, bing, right in the gut. And again, she turned away. Had she asked one question she would have put herself on the path to an eternal salvation. She had only to ask how is it that a man like you could believe something like that? And that would have been the key to giving her an answer that would have had the potential to bring her to the knowledge of God. But she never asked one question. Instead of looking at the burning bush that I represented full of enigma and seeming contradiction yet there it was, what are you going to do? She turned the other way. And that's how the Lord impressed me of the significance of not turning aside but turning aside to see. Not out of a curiosity that's casual but one that will leave no stone unturned. However painful the seeing is to look into the Holocaust is painful. It raises questions that tear your very guts out. Paul Volck had a virtual nervous collapse a breakdown in looking into that bush. How many of us have the stamina the heart, the stomach to look in and to see what its meaning is? And yet when he saw that he turned aside to see the call to his apostolic sending came. And we are not a people like that. We look over things rather than into them. We don't want to examine why our marriages are failing or our fellowships collapsing or our personal lives this or that. It's too painful, it's too demanding. And we just rather look the other way or take an easy explanation than get into the very grit of it. And the Holocaust gives us an opportunity for an examination of a kind that far eclipses merely the issue, however painful and important of Jewish annihilation. It's the deepest glimpse into God himself. God as judge. I would have been happy, if you'll understand it if they had come to God. Because Paul said that he went from house to house and from public place bringing the whole council of God and preaching both to Jew and to Greek repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And I believe that we have missed a real key both to the Jew and to the Greek. Namely this. There is no true believing till there is first a true repenting. There is something erroneous about pushing the issue of Jesus on people who have not yet understood their need. And that the revelation of the gospel and of Christ so patently absurd for human consideration so offensive to human intellect so contrary to all of our categories has to be revealed. But revelation is altogether consequent to repentance. Repentance takes the roadblock away. Repentance takes the unbelieving spirit away. Repentance opens the chamber for the incoming revelation of God. What world Jewry needs before the issue of Jesus is a repentance toward God. He has a controversy with us before the advent of Jesus. The crucifixion of Jesus as I go through these pages is not the sin in itself it's only the capstone. It's only the more visible manifestation of an earlier and longer apostasy from God and the rejection of his word whether it came to us in the scripture came to us in the prophets whom we stoned or it came to us as the word made flesh. Once you reject the word which is to say kill it you're quite capable finally of killing him who is the word when he appears to us in the flesh. Our first requirement is a repentance toward God. And that's why the holocaust is a statement of a long-standing condition so long ignored and by its delay and its indifference and rejection so much compounded that when the retribution of God comes it is a devastation that exhausts our ability to understand it. Something had been building up building up, building up that could have maybe been attended earlier if we had repented for the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. If we had occasion to have thought hey maybe this presumer who said he was the Messiah was indeed the Messiah for he himself prophesied that not one stone would be left standing on the other. And his apostolic church witnessed to us again and again that he had said that. And yet when the destruction came we did not consider it. And then when we were flung into the exile of the nations he said I will send a sword after you at night you will wish it were day and at day you will wish it were night. And when we experienced those things and the various nations into which we were cast why did we not ask then and see then the application to the scripture and that maybe we had made an historic mistake that needed to be repentantly rectified but we did not. And then came the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and then came the pogroms of the 18th century and 19th century in Eastern Europe and in Russia and then came the holocaust itself. But at no point did we turn and in fact there is a scripture maybe Reggie knows it, I've got it somewhere in these notes where it says you failed even to be instructed by my chastisements. You did not take it to heart. You didn't allow it to raise the question that it was calculated to bring. And alack and alas therefore you'll have to experience yet future devastation. Were these pogroms continually getting worse? Well I think that's why my father, I mean many of us are Russian Jews that fled Russia and Eastern Europe because of the frequency what do they call the Cossacks who the cavalry on their horses slashing, raping, burning, looting having a field day of Jewish massacre and the threat of that always hung over the heads of Jews living in those nations which God warned us at night you would think it would day I will send the sword after you, I'll fish for you I'll hunt for you but why didn't we understand our calamity in the light of the scripture? Because we had rejected the word of God and that rejection always will be costly the stoning of the prophets is the rejection of the word and the crucifixion of Jesus is the killing of the word made flesh has our condition altered since? have we become more disposed to see the scripture now? I wish I could say that it is so maybe it is for a few but what will be the whole purpose of a book on the holocaust? to encourage the Jewish reader to begin to consider the issue of our historic calamity and the holocaust and the prospect of future ones in the light of what is written we are a brilliant people we are the writers of books we are called the people of the book but the great anomaly is we don't know that book even when we are religious we don't know it as we ought and have more occupied ourselves as was said yesterday with the rabbinical commentaries about it than the book itself not able to come to a place to believe that the God who inspired it is able also to interpret it for our proper understanding we stagger in unbelief because that which is not of faith is sin if we had repented for our sin and the release from sin could come with it the faith to believe the scripture itself and the messiah of whom the scriptures speak we have that passage out if you want to refer to it Isaiah chapter 42 verse 23 can you read it? who among you will give ear to this who will hearken and hear for the time to come who gave Jacob for a spoil and Israel for the robbers did not the Lord be against him when he had sinned for they would not walk in his ways neither would they obey him to his law therefore he had poured upon him Israel, Jacob the purity of his anger and the strength of battle and it had set him on fire round about yet he knew not and it burned him yet he laid it not to heart yet he laid it not to heart that's such a painful statement of a condition of a people Fred did you have a hand? what's really being illuminated is the different types of sorrow which Paul speaks of 2 Corinthians 7 verse 10 for the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret leading to salvation but the sorrow of the world produces death and it's quite evident that the sorrow produced for a Jewish people with all these calamities has simply been a human sorrow which has just led to death rather than a godly repentance leading to life, producing salvation absolutely I've attended so many holocaust discussions and I've heard ringing this thing dry but it's at a schmaltzy, sentimental self-pitying level seeing themselves as the victims at the hands of men rather than a godly sorrow that would have been broken knowing that it had come at the hand of God one of the most recent experiences Reggie was with me we were at the University of North Carolina at, where is that campus? Chapel Hill and we had a Sunday service on resurrection and our host wanted to show us a tapestry in the local synagogue that was really a work of art and we went in to see it indeed it was, and as we were leaving we see these flyers about a holocaust conference at the university and the last day was Sunday which was that day, and off we went with a bang, and came in toward the end of it and a speaker from a prominent Jewish organization, a PhD in political science was talking about revisionism which is a movement that is denying the historicity of the holocaust isn't it ironic that we have come full circle that we Jews, who by our silence have denied the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus two thousand years later are having people denying the actuality of the holocaust through which we have passed whatsoever a man soweth that too shall he reap be not deceived Gary quoted that scripture last night and so he was going on like that and he said, you need to recognize that what revisionism is, is denial and he went on so finally the question and answer period I raised my hand and I said there is only one thing worse than the denial of the holocaust and that is the unwillingness or the rejection to seek its meaning really to acknowledge it as an historic event and not to seek its ultimate meaning particularly in the light of the scriptures as the people who are called the people of the book is yet a worse offense than to merely deny it historically there was something else, do you remember that Reggie? it was a blast from God and I just trust that it was the Lord you spoke of it in the context of the burning bush if the Jewish people refused to turn aside and look into this phenomenon they are condemned to commit the holocaust right it was an invitation to look into the burning bush the guy went red in his face and then he said something like well we've heard something like that some rabbis think that the malat massacre that took place some years ago in Israel was because they didn't have the right kind of mezuzah on the door you know what a mezuzah is? that thing that holds a little parchment and it wasn't placed right or at the right angle and therefore they suffered the judgment of terrorists coming and shooting up the kids he said but that's absurd and then he went on he chose an absurdity to denigrate a view that was being implied that we had suffered as a judgment for our sin and then he brushed it over and they went on he refused to look into the burning bush of the question that was raised by the anointing of God and therefore make themselves candidates now how are they trying to avoid a future holocaust? by teaching and by educating and by fighting against the revisionists and coming to the university campuses and speaking to the gentile students and thinking about that program to avert a catastrophe through education it is a mindset that predicates everything upon the mind and education and the programs that can be performed through Jewish organizations and completely eliminates any consideration of God and if a people remain in that condition after their holocaust what is reasonable to expect when historical time is running out and God is constrained more and more to do what he must in order to save some I've had something stirring a little bit of a chapter in a book that I read a few years ago a Jewish psychologist it was called The Survivor and it was an anatomy of the mentality of those that were suffering and especially what kind of a mentality might survive some of those things of all the various kinds of suffering that were described it seemed that one particular kind stood out to me and it wasn't so much the physical annihilation but the real destroying of human dignity and what was described there was how men and women were forced to exist together unclothed for months in their own excrement and vomit and how that so shamed them and that the natural response he attributed to just the exaltation of the human spirit void of God where someone would reach out beyond themselves and extend some simple form of kindness to another and in the whole summation of it it was just completely void of God even in that great extremity still grasping for every shred of human dignity and it seems that in the face of death and absolute devastation still a refusal to do anything a refusal to come to the end of themself but to just maintain their own resource an underlining it builds up the sorrow of God as opposed to the sorrow of the world it says that if you will not for all this hearken to me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sin and I will break the pride of your talent and that anticipates a long litany of chastisement but it here's the end of the process this is Leviticus 26 verse 41 if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity and I think one of the most staggering passages in all the Bible in context of what we're talking about today when an entire nation will look and own that event as something of their own implication in it, that the Jews of two millenniums removed will own themselves the piercing of their own Messiah two millenniums before and take that and the scripture says that because they will have received double for their sin their blessing will be double but to take that that imponderable enigma of their own holocaust, the whole history of the holocaust to come to the place where they would actually own it, and here's the point I said all I had to say, and to not consider their history and that the severity disproportionate to their sin that's imponderable that's a remarkable acknowledgement for a people that I said yesterday have very little or any sin consciousness in fact on the contrary there's such a celebration of Jewishness and such a implicit and believed superiority morally and ethically which is the reason why the great author Elie Wiesel when I asked him to what degree would he see these devastations in the light of scripture I refused to consider that what was the basis of his refusal I cannot conceive of it in any relationship to ourselves as Jews I mean we are exemplary there's such a self-exaltedness in our Jewish life that has to do with the human level of accomplishment and brilliance and so on and virtue that is one of the reasons why the lid has got to be lifted on our condition as man in what is happening now in our relationship with the Arabs and the Palestinians we never could have conceived that we could have been a people to have brought violence against another and that we could be so ruthless with a minority that threatens our safety and existence as once we were considered a threat in other nations and were dealt with severely God has got to exhibit this to break the power of a deception about our own supposed virtue which is an illusion and a lie and can bring us to a biblical basis of God's statement of our condition that there's not a man upon the earth who doeth good and sinneth not none good no not one and what will it take for us the people of the book to fall and surrender to the statement of the word of God about our condition contrary to our own subjective view of ourselves you can have the most self-exalting view because you've never had an occasion to rape or to loot or to murder, your life has been protected you've been kept from such requirement and in the safety of your middle class life and the culture that you're allowed to enjoy you can never have conceived of yourself doing those things you can go a whole lifetime in that deception but God does not judge because you're saved from the necessity of doing such things you're judged on the basis of your heart you're a murderer in your heart already you see what I mean and our unwillingness to yield to the word of God is the statement of the very pride that requires him to bring such judgments upon us shouldn't we say then that morality from our sin how intractable and how deep it goes that makes the mystery of our sufferings that causes us to be mysticized of our sufferings and isn't it true that the thing the church needs might wear and be clothed upon with God's righteousness and I think that this has something to do with the kind of sickly affinity that many Christians have for Israel and for the Jew that there's an unspoken admiration for the human level of accomplishment and impressiveness of which Jews and Israelis are so capable that subscribes to that righteousness more than to being established and accepted in the beloved on the basis of having no qualification ourselves there's something sickly in this identification that I have always suspected I can't quite nail because we may have subscribed to the credo and the doctrinal statements of grace but in our secret hearts we admire a people who are making it on the basis of their own accomplishment and their own righteousness and this is why we're collapsing at the theological level because there's nothing that more lifts a man's vanity than to be approved of Jewish scholars than to be invited into their fellowship that they might recognize their academic excellence there's something about Jewish approval that has seduced many and I think it's because of the thing that Reggie is now fingering so we're talking about something that has devitalized the church factors that have robbed it of its apostolic singularity and have compromised what it purports to believe and a lot of that influence has come to it through a Jewish community that has not been confronted by the absoluteness of that gospel but we have been more influenced by their persuasion than they ours and we need to recognize that Before you go on the issue of conviction of sin say you talk to people and they have no knowledge of sin, they're not convicted of sin there's no convincing and I think about then what is the Lord's principle I know the church is the instrument by which this conviction and this convincing comes through the Holy Spirit by a church that would pray the Lord say if my people which are called by my name would humble themselves and pray then I will heal the land there's something about that that has to do with the church coming to some particular place where not only the Jew or the Black or the Spanish or whoever has to come into that knowledge I mean how can they come then I mean how can they have the knowledge of God how can they have the conviction or the convincing and you talk to your loved ones too and they have no knowledge of sin and you say well look how helpless we are and we are the church then what condition do we have to come to in order to bring them to that I would say something not too unlike what Job had to come to namely a conclusion by which he said I've heard of you with a hearing of my ear but now my eye seeth and I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes that's a picture of burial that dust on your head is a statement of going under in other words when I see God as he is it's not the issue of how good I have been or what virtues I have performed God as he is shows me that there's no basis in myself for any presumption at all the only thing I deserve is to go six feet under and God says through Job's comforters who are very eloquent in their spiritual comfort to him you have not spoken as my servant Job has spoken my anger is kindled against you you've made the loftiest spiritual statements but you have not spoken as my servant Job has spoken namely you have not acknowledged what he has acknowledged there's only one place for man even man at its best six feet under in the sight of God we're all his dead men we have no virtue in us whatsoever and it may take something of the devastations that came to Job to come to us to bring us to that ground the church is conditioned unquestionably in other words it has to come to a place where it can go out and break this conviction not just something to do with it everything to do with it for the church is the ground and pillar of truth it is the witness people of God as he in fact is and if it is not that then what foundation does the world have against what can the world measure itself what is the standard of truth if the church itself does not bear it so you guys are forcing me to consider a principle text that I was hoping to save for tomorrow but I think we need not get into it about the whole issue of sin and of judgment of indictment as God himself sees it independent of what we in fact do but what we in fact are and that's to be found in a very powerful way in Matthew chapter 23 which was one of the principle texts that the Lord gave me in that first holocaust message which completely contradicts every present contemporary view of culpability, responsibility and guilt it's totally a divine view but it is God's view and it is by God's view that men shall be required of and eternally judged you getting that however offensive that view is however contrary that view is to our popular and human view of character of guilt of judgment it is God's view and it is that view that will prevail and by which men will be judged what is our prophetic task? to bring the view of God to bear to the consideration of men however contrary that view is to all their categories that's why prophets are stoned they don't want to hear God's view Jesus expresses this in chapter 23 with the most severe statements against the scribes and Pharisees who were they? they were the par excellence highest statement of Jewish religious life and it's to them that he brings the most scathing condemnatory words verse 23 warn to you scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for you pay tithe of mint and anise and come and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment mercy and faith I don't want to get into this now but I have to say that I deeply respect the very order in which those words are cited faith is the last and maybe comes out of the proper consideration of law judgment and mercy law is the absolute requirement of God predicated upon his righteousness judgment is his just retribution for the failure to keep it and mercy is the expression of his character to those who acknowledge the rightness of his judgments that brings the brokenness and the repentance for it is the goodness of God that leadeth men unto repentance it's a mercy to repent and out of that is born the capacity to believe that is eternally saving these ought you to have done and not to leave the other undone you blind guides which strain at a gnat and swallow at a camel and when I attend these holocaust conferences as I did at the University of Washington and Seattle some months ago my kishkas were tied in knots, I was crunched day in and day out because they were dealing with trivialities and statistics and how many victims and what kind of gas was used and how did they do it and who was responsible and what happened at the 1C conference it's a major and minor when the great questions are left unanswered not even asked and that's the same thing you deal with gnats you swallow camels you occupy yourself with trivia and you leave unspoken and unasked the great questions woe unto you scribes and pharisees hypocrites for you may clean the outside of the cup and of the platter but within they are full of extortion and excess thou blind pharisee cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter and the outside of them may be clean also woe unto you scribes and pharisees and hypocrites for you are like unto whited sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness even so you also outwardly appear righteous unto men even unto yourself but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity I challenge you to look through these things and look at the photographs of the people who are endowing this museum on the holocaust and the wealthy contributors and philanthropists and have some sense by looking at their faces of what is the actual condition of their inward life you know it's a wonderful thing to be able to give a million dollar contribution to build a holocaust museum what a wonderful relief for your conscience while inwardly how did you obtain that million and your other millions you know what I mean it's so much the world to give men an opportunity for a psychological emotional relief by giving and leave attended the offense before God for which they will have to stand before him in the day of judgment look at these faces this is so much the spirit of the world and these are the men that will skin us alive for bringing the kind of view that we're attempting to consider in these days we will be a stink, a scandal a reproach, an offense contrary to all this stuff with buildings and exhibits and stuff like that to raise a question that no one wants to hear they'll put their fingers in their ears and they'll run upon us and gnash upon us with their teeth and say these men are not fit to live they're desecrating the sacrifice of the millions who died nobly as martyrs and raising such ugly questions and so on and so forth it's a conflict of realities and this is what Jesus was identifying and nothing has changed since woe unto you verse 29 scribes and pharisees hypocrites because you build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous and say, here's the punchline if we had been in the day of our fathers we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets wherefore you be witnesses unto yourselves that you are the children of them which killed the prophets fill you up then the measure of your fathers you serpents you generation of vipers how can you escape the damnation of hell wherefore behold I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes and some of them you shall kill and crucify and some of them shall you scourge in your synagogues and persecute them from city to city that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias and Barakias whom you slew between the temple and the altar verily I send to you all these things shall come upon this generation O Jerusalem Jerusalem thou that killest the prophets stonest them which are sent unto thee how often I have gathered thy children together even as the hen gathereth her chickens and underwings you would not behold your house is left unto you desolate this is a remarkable statement about an identification of a people with sin that took place before their birth whom you slew how could Jesus say that of murder that took place generations before the men were born whom he is addressing he sees and we need to see an unbroken continuum of sin that we are not absolved from the responsibility of because we were born after the event because you say that you would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets therefore you be witnesses unto yourselves that you are the children of them who killed the prophets because you say because you absolve yourself because you see yourself as innocent because you see yourself as unimplicated having had the happy accident of being born after the event that is your indictment in other words what would have saved you from being implicated in the sin that you would have said there but for the grace of God go I had I been born in that generation I too would have stoned the prophets I see that what my fathers have done is sin and I disassociate myself with that sin by an act of repentance as having been guilty with them though I was born afterwards and I ask you forgiveness for myself and for the sins of my fathers God has not heard that statement from his nation this is the heart of the whole indictment and God may allow the thing to go on and on it's unacknowledged we continue to suffer for it because the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children the consequences of those sins still will affect us and we still will not learn from it we still will not be chastised there comes a historical moment boom in the providence of God he unleashes what has been accumulated and we get the full impact to the point of a holocaust that takes millions that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth what actually took place with this class to whom he's addressing and I'll send them to you prophets and you'll stone them and you'll scourge them in your synagogues and you'll crucify them what in fact did they do with him by his own crucifixion at their hands though they employed the Roman instrumentality that was available they gave truth and final corroboration to what he's saying if you'll not disassociate yourself from the sins of your fathers you'll assuredly be repeating them even more horribly they only stoned the prophets you crucified the son of glory because you did not see that you were implicated with them and said that if we had been at that time we would not have because you've seen yourself a virtue greater than what they had what do you have that your fathers did not have and don't think I didn't speak this in Tübingen University in Germany to a whole generation of Germans born after the holocaust that are ripping up their fathers for having been Nazis and having persecuted the Jews and think themselves virtuous and not understanding that had they lived in the time of their fathers would they have acted differently how do you dare condemn your fathers you need to be repentant with them and for them for your human condition is exactly as theirs and to have saved your own skin you would have murdered any number of Jews don't deceive yourself to think that you have a virtue greater than your fathers because you say that you would not have done what they did in God's sight you are totally implicated in their guilt you know what I'm just saying now this is God's message for Germany you know what I think if it doesn't come and does not bring about a brokenness in that nation there is no nation in the world today the more likely platform for the rise of antichrist and a forthreich and another persecution of Jews than that very nation already exhibiting its anti-Jewish hatred its hatred of races and of ethnic groups and becoming the most formidable power of Europe and might well be the locus of antichrist power in the world unless repentance comes to that church and to that nation by someone who will bring them this message about the meaning of the holocaust for them I think you have right here you fill up the blood of the righteous or whatever you have right here the very in her was found to see that that flesh continuity here that persecutes the woman its a trans-historical thing you can keep your finger in Matthew and turn to Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which is the other principle scripture that the Lord gave me if I can find it myself where is it after? after Proverbs ok very rarely cited or quoted but here is a scripture that God ignited for me in that 8 hours at the hotel that day when I stood intimidated by the volume of data and was looking for some statement from God about it verse 15 chapter 3 Ecclesiastes chapter 3 verse 15 that which hath been is now and that which is to be hath already been and God requires that which is past you know the way we are? we swallow something down we allow it to come to a place of forgetfulness it clunks around somewhere in the inner man and we think that we can forget it or avoid it but its only a matter of time before its got to surface sin must have its consequence however long the denial of it as sin there has got to come a moment when that which is hidden will be revealed and will require its consequence blessed is the man who does not cover his own sin we think that we have forgotten the issue of American slavery and the mistreatment of blacks that we have hoisted like wholesale merchandise from one continent to another and put them in ships and 80% of them 70% died in the passage and were thrown overboard like so many carcasses and dead pieces of meat and were chained body to body through the whole voyage in the most inhuman conditions that we merchandised in men you think that because it took place a few centuries ago and that its forgotten that there will not be a requirement and a consequence because God requires that which is past is there a nation represented in this room that does not have something working in its gut that might be presently sublimated that goes back to earlier injustices violations of the righteousness of God against what is made in His image that have been forgotten and ignored or pacified that will not have a day of requirement God requires that which is past there is something about our human forgetfulness that is almost willful we have to fight for historic memory because time obscures it or obliterates it but with God it remains because He sees all things as present He doesn't see past and present future everything is an eternal now He sees an unbroken continuum of sin we're implicated and I gave a message once at a college in London that the Lord gave me virtually on the spot while they were coming to the conclusion of the choruses on choosing Jesus or Barabbas and it was something like that don't think that you're absolved from choice because you were born 2000 years later than a generation who had to make that choice you choose a murderer and a criminal or you choose the Son of Man but they said we will not have Him to rule over us they chose the way of murder and of death and I said don't think you're absolved from the choice because you had the convenience of being born after the event that event is timeless that choice is required of all men everywhere and at every age and I'm asking you to make it right now and I gave an invitation in the foolishness of it 2000 years later to choose Barabbas or Christ some hands went up there were some fluttery things and no sooner did I finish the invitation than a Jewish woman burst out of the audience and came up and nose to nose with me and she said I know an actor when I see one and you're a phony and you're this and you're that and you expect us to believe and I'm listening to her very silently and I'm looking past her and there in the corner room, a man trembling like a leaf who had raised his hand and I said bring this guy over so they bring this guy over, a Gentile saved to the uttermost because he chose Jesus rather than Barabbas in that moment it's as if time had stood still the issues are the same, they're unchanged we're not absolved from time and birth and circumstance we're in a continuum of something, the questions are always alive and we need to have this framework of reference and of seeing this is prophetic seeing because God requires on the basis of this seeing and I said to this man in the hearing of this woman what happened to you? he could hardly talk, he was so overcome he said, Mr. Kass I don't know when you gave that invitation I chose Jesus and something instantly happened I was flooded with God I said to the woman, look here are you two you both heard the same thing you both had the same opportunity you chose to be indignant and to oppose me and to contradict he chose to believe and to obey and now you leave this place muttering under your breath with anger and irritation and he'll leave rejoicing and eternally saved so God did something for me that day to show me time does not obscure the issue the issues are timeless we have entered into modernity and it's just convenient to think of God as a Sunday addendum to our busy modern lives that has not changed the issue of God as God we have invented the categories secular and sacred and kept him reserved for Sunday, but that hasn't changed him he's God over all he requires to be acknowledged his view is the truth he understands the hearts of men and their God rejection especially those who celebrate themselves as being religious and spiritual, and garnish and decorate the tombs of the prophets and seem to celebrate them and deny that they could never have been implicated in the guilt of their death because you say that you give witness to yourself that which has been is now you ever get that sense you ever squint your eyes a little bit and shut out the accoutrements of modern civilization and its appearances and it's as if the clock has been turned back or nothing has ever changed when you get into a confrontation over the issue of the gospel with the Jewish community, as we talked about yesterday morning you'll realize in that moment nothing has changed the same anger, the same reaction the same issues, the same requirement for apostolic faith, for anointing for courage, as was the requirement of the first church, nothing has changed men have different vocabularies they're wearing different clothing the external things have been superficially altered the issues remain the same that which is past is now we need profoundly to see that and we'll look like fools to proclaim that come on the world has changed we're modern, we're this, we're that we're philosophical, we have other views we're rational in primitive times they celebrated animal sacrifice and the shedding of blood, I've heard rabbis say this, this was primitive Judaism but we have progressed time has shown us the error of our primitive views and we have come to a more humane view that we can obtain the favor of God by good deeds, by mitzvot by Israel bonds, by fasting what saith the scripture without the shedding of blood there is no remission for sin, there's a timeless statement of God who changeth not the same yesterday, today and forever and the same God who judged Israel through Nebuchadnezzar through Titus, through the destruction of two temples through flight, through exile is the same God who judges now and will again in the same severity and if not greater by which he has judged previously because we have not acknowledged his hand in those judgments so far the Jews just the operation Solomon brought all the black bringing them into Israel showed how much they still cling to the Jews no matter whether they're black or whatever when they went in there and brought in thousands of black out of Ethiopia they were dying there, there was war and it really says it really is a statement of how they regardless of even if a Jew that made all kinds of things he's still a Jew and so here they bring in these Jews, it was a big operation Jewish boys had a tape on it and it's a statement of something but the name Operation Solomon, it goes deeper and I know that it makes an implication about Solomon and them and I'm trying to put it all together but I really see something else in that the bottom of it there's a lot there that needs to be seen well just to end for this morning at your leisure you can read the whole of Deuteronomy 32 because the chapter begins with certain statements about the timeless character of God 32 for he is righteous and upright a God of truth and without injustice all his ways are just he is eternal it says there in verse 40 for I lift up my hand to heaven and say I live forever remember this is the song of Moses that is to be inscribed in the consciousness of this nation for the last days and so if I live forever does it mean that God was living through 1939 through 1945 absolutely he was there, he may have hidden his face he did not act to avert or to save because it was something that his own righteousness and word required and it says that he is utterly sovereign see now that I, even I, am he and there is no God with me I kill and I make alive I wound and I heal neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand and one of the most pathetic and melancholy things of that seven hour film called Shoah S-H-O-A-H which is the Hebrew word for holocaust was the testimony of a Greek Jew who survived the concentration camps and I mentioned this before and he was being asked by the filmmaker well how did they get you from the island where you Jews were living to the mainland and to the concentration camps, well he said the order came under Nazi occupation that the Jews of our community were to be at the public square by the train station at the break of day 6am at a particular morning and we were all there with our children and only what we could carry and he said well what happened then, we were put on trains, we were brought to the coast and we had to go by boats to the mainland of the continent and from there by train to Auschwitz and to extermination and he said well how many German guards were there to have, were in that boat, how many were in that boat and we said two to four hundred of us how many guards guarded you he said well one or two and the guy said well why didn't you overcome them and the man looked and blinked his eyes and said I don't know it's the same question as how was it when the refugees came to the coast of Cuba or the United States or Latin America and asked to be taken in they were sent back to Germany and to the camps and to the ovens, neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand so this is going to be a painful thing to consider that a god who was able did not act and saw to a full prosecution of his word and not the least of the things I hope that we'll consider before we finish is that the great hope for the restoration of Israel in the last days after the final calamities that are yet to come is to believe for that restoration that we have a message to proclaim comfort ye, comfort ye my people, for you have suffered double for your sins but your warfare is ended and that the same god who has brought you devastation and desolation is the same god who will restore you people who will be broken without hope, totally dejected, totally demolished and there's only one basis for the hope that will animate them for their return and their restoration namely it's the word of god that says I will restore you why should they believe it? because the same god who said I will judge you and that you will suffer double for your sins has fulfilled his word to the letter and who shall stay my hand what did we just read there? neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand and when we will believe god according to his word for the fulfillment of his judgment we will also be able to believe him for the fulfillment of his restoration believing the word of god is the key to the last days restoration of Israel predicated upon seeing how careful he is to fulfill his word and judgment we can then also believe with hope for his restoration but if we have not believed that what we have suffered is his judgment according to his word we are robbed of any basis for hope for our restoration and our return and that's why this message of the holocaust is not merely an explanation of your past judgments but of your future hope predicated on a god who speaks and will fulfill his word and who should know it better than the people who have experienced his word as judgment to know therefore that the same god who has spoken that has spoken comfort ye, comfort ye my people and will restore us not because of our virtue but because of himself and bring us back from the places of our devastation to rebuild the waste cities that he might be glorified thereby this is the great drama that predicates on the word of god so it's really critical to make a people know that their past judgments and their future are according to that word that the god that has also spoken desolation speaks also restoration and he who has fulfilled the one will fulfill the other and that's our hope that's our message to them that will also instruct the nations that observe that that they will know that the god who speaks is god the same yesterday today and forever so let's just commit this portion to the lord may something be working in our own deeps who have treated him in a casual way who have allowed the world and its secular view to very much corrupt a pure and biblical perception and to recognize in our own lives the judgments of god when they have come and not to have dismissed them as accident or to explain them away on some lesser plane that has robbed us of a view of god for which they were intended because we will not see god as judge in our own lives how should we make him known as judge to the nations so lord we're only at a beginning and we ask my god that you would set your plow deep to break up the hardened clods my god and to turn over deep deep levels of soil precious god of things that have not been cracked and not been broken into we ourselves are guilty of shallow and nominal religious views that would not have saved us from a devastation and we ask you lord to what degree we are called to be the bearers of your word to a world that has no notion of a final judgment to come the day of the lord that we will be instructed by this day that has already come that some may be saved out of the terror of it help us to be a people who when we see this burning bush will not turn away but turn aside to see and lord we ask a full seeing that in the depths of the heat and the horror of these terrible judgments is a view of god that is not to be found in any lesser place