In this sermon, the speaker shares his burden for repentance and the absence of this message in modern evangelism. He emphasizes the need for Christians to understand their responsibility and guilt before God for the death of Jesus. The speaker also highlights the importance of reviewing the history of Israel and the biblical illiteracy among modern Jews. He concludes by discussing his own experience of reconciliation as a Jewish believer and the need for reconciliation between Germans and Jews.

This is tape K-036, entitled The Holocaust, spoken by Arthur Katz. One of my intense passions is for the truth. But it's only more recently that the Lord has been reminding me that that apostle of truth who speaks most of the truth, both in the gospel and in his epistles, John, is the one also who had his head on the bosom of the Lord. That the apostle of truth is also the apostle of love, and that the two are never to be separated. If I can just ask you please to withhold applause. I don't know if you're going to want to applaud at the end, but if you feel that's a response, fine, but just for time's sake. I have a message before me which I have never spoken before, and unusually in my experience, the Lord sat me down in the hotel room here in Kansas City, and I did not get up for eight hours. And I have that writing before me. It's not that lengthy. In fact, I stared at the notes and the materials that I've been accumulating. This theme has been on my heart for many years. I stretched it out on the desk, and I despaired of finding a way of putting it together. And I'm not sure that it's together yet. It's going to be awkward and groping and choked. But I believe that the Lord wants it expressed. Among my burdens is the burden for repentance, and I have been grieved at the absence of this great theme in modern evangelism. And I've oftentimes in my talks commented about the egocentric Christianity that seeks to induce men to accept Christ, if you will, on the basis of the benefits that will accrue to them for so doing. This spoke not the apostles, and is wholly out of keeping with the whole tenor and the power and the magnitude and the glory of the apostolic time set forth in the book of Acts. And I am that kind of view that has a heart only for that glory. And so I'm going to ask you to pray with me as we try to speak the truth in love, taking as a theme something that Paul says in the 20th chapter of the book of Acts when he reviews his service for God, of how he strove and sacrificed and witnessed, testifying both to Jews and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. May I suggest that there's no faith toward Jesus Christ until there is first repentance toward God. And that you can assemble however long the list you want of messianic scripture and bring the Jew to read them and to draw a line at the bottom and to sum them up correctly, but that will not in itself engender either repentance nor faith. That there have been numbers of Jewish casualties in the messianic movement and undoubtedly greater numbers of non-Jewish casualties who never repented unto true faith and had some kind of show of faith which was not sufficient to sustain them. We are called as a final generation for a cataclysmic conclusion to a conflict which has ever been brewing between light and darkness and only those who live by faith shall be sustained in such a trial as that and be able to give testimony to the glory of God. So I'm concerned both for true faith which grows out of true repentance, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Will you bow with me now in prayer that we might hear from the Spirit of truth in love. Precious God, Heavenly Father, I tremble, Lord, to find myself at this place. You know what's in my heart, Lord, and the condition of my own tremblings to have such a word as this to speak. And Lord, I just ask that I might be made so transparent that very God himself, even the Lord Yeshua, by the Spirit, might speak to the hearts of this people what is in his own true heart. Lord, you've been preparing us. You've been bringing us to a place of increasing maturity. You have winced in times past as you have waited, as we have frolicked and have had our charismatic fun, Lord God, and you've allowed us to enjoy it for a season. But there's a spirit, a sense in the air of solemnity, of deep things, of preparation. We thank you, Lord God, that you've prepared us, and now we ask to speak truly and enable us to receive it, mighty God. And we'll thank you and praise you for this in Jesus' name. I'm going to quote a series of scriptures out of the book of Acts that characterizes and typifies the ministry of the apostles to the Jews in that first generation. Acts 2.36-38, Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts and said unto Peter and the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? Then said Peter unto them, Repent. I'm not concluding the statement. I'm ending on the word that I want to emphasize. Acts 3.13-15-19, The God of Abraham and Isaac and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his son Jesus, whom ye delivered up and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go. But you denied the Holy One and the just and desired a murderer to be granted unto you and killed the Prince of Life. Repent ye therefore and be converted. Acts 4.8-10, Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people and elders of Israel, be it known unto all and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified. We know that they suffered terrible delusion and reproach for such speakings. They were told and strictly commanded that they should not teach in his name. Behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine and intend to bring this man's blood upon us. But it says that when they prayed that they might speak with all boldness the word that the rim shook where they prayed by the power of the Spirit. Great power and great grace was upon them all. And on another occasion when the angel had to bring them out of imprisonment he said, he brought them forth and said Go stand and speak in the temple to the people all the words of this life. I want to suggest that our modern evangelism has lacked the power of the boldness which is imparted by the Holy Spirit because we have not brought the totality of the same message that was brought in that first generation. It's much easier to induce men to believe for benefits than to let them to know that they are participant and are responsible and stand guilty before God for the death of the Holy One of Israel. Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said we ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom he slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a prince and a savior for to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are his witnesses of these things and so is also the Holy Ghost whom God hath given to them that obey him. I think if there is an honest charismatic among the forty or fifty thousand who are in this city at this time they may acknowledge that though they have had a baptism in the Holy Spirit and speak with tongues and have been the instrument of the expression of other gifts of the Spirit there has been a notable and if I may say it a lamentable absence, a corresponding absence of the power of God both in their life and their ministry. We have been like children thinking that if we received this gift alone that that is the sufficient qualification for the fullness of the power that ought to attend it. But may I suggest that the power will be there in exact proportion to the unpleasantness and the difficulty and the reproach and the ungainliness and the difficulty of hearing of the message that we shall be impelled to bring. If we shall bring a patsy message we shall have a patsy attendance of God and if we shall bring the bold and full message of God unto repentance to men that shall strike them in the heart till they shall again say men and brethren what shall we do that we might again answer repent we shall experience the fullness and the operation of that Spirit unto boldness. It says that when they heard that they were cut to the heart and Peter and the apostles departed from the presence of the council rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name. I don't know how to say this and I'm not an artful man and I'm clumsy and it's brought reproach on my head but I can't help but survey my charismatic experience which has been rather extensive in these fourteen years having once initially been a kind of Jewish darling to the movement growing less popular as I go on and I see the dove of God everywhere celebrated sometimes peering at it and squinting wondering exactly what manner of bird it is maybe some other kind of pigeon but I have to note the absence of the cross of Christ Jesus in our charismatic conferences. I think it's Dr. Leo Schlink who said that the great calamity of the church has been its failure to prepare God's people for suffering. We don't have a stomach for suffering, folks and that might well explain why it is that we have shrunk consciously or unconsciously and inadvertently from bringing that message alone that cuts men to the heart. It will either bring them to repentance or it shall bring them to latch upon us with their teeth and rather than suffer the prospect of the last we are unwilling to contemplate the prospect of the first. God did not give us his spirit just to jazz up our denominational life. He gave it to us to equip us at the end of the age to stand and to serve God in hard places for those who are willing as these men and to rejoice that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name. We look at men who are nothing in the natural men who are not in any way impressive who had no kind of credential that they should ever have been noteworthy. A man by the name of Stephen was no more than a busboy but by the operation of this spirit he stopped the mouths of his adversaries and demonstrated a wisdom that far exceeded theirs. I want to quote a portion of the message that culminated in his own death. He reviewed for them the history of Israel and I think that it may be incumbent upon us to review for our own Jewish people the history of Israel because it is amazing as was mentioned in this morning session how great is our biblical illiteracy though we are sophisticated in many other areas. I wonder which modern Jew it is who has ever sat down to ask himself the question why it is that he was born in Kansas City or as myself in Brooklyn, New York or Moscow or as I've had occasion to meet Jews even in Tokyo in just about every remote corner of the earth. How is it that we were born in such places as that and how is it that our history has been marked by such suffering and unspeakable calamity. Maybe our function before we mention the name of Jesus to Jews is to bring them to the place where they ask us the right question before we provide an unwanted answer. In his review he said for he supposed his brethren speaking of Moses would have understood how God by his hand would deliver them but they understood not. This Moses whom they refused saying who made thee a ruler and a judge the same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer he brought them out this is he who received the lively oracles to God oracles to be given unto us to whom our fathers would not obey but thrust him from them in their hearts turned back again into Egypt. You stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears you do always resist the Holy Ghost as your fathers did so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted and they have slain them of the coming of the just one of whom you have been now the betrayers and the murderers. It's evident that this apostolic generation did not mince words they spoke a necessary truth and I don't believe that it has again been spoken since the eclipse of that generation and in modern times. When they heard these things they were cut to the heart and gnashed on him with their teeth but he being full of the Holy Ghost. There's a pattern here folks and it behooves us to see it. Now it's not like me to read from a prepared manuscript but this is so important that I'm going to do it with such liberty as the Lord will be pleased to give me having spoken these initial things. While indeed salvation is of the Jews yet do they least of all seem to know what salvation is for the sense of sin is conspicuously absent in their estimation of themselves and without the sense of sin there can be no deliverance from it. To this do the scriptures attest for can we expect to hear a Jewish cry from Psalm 51 as I heard it spoken a week or so ago and my own spirit was crying out oh that the Jewish people might cry this repentant psalm of David to the God of their fathers even as David before them that the whole nation Israel might cry out have mercy upon me oh God and blot out my transgressions wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and guilt for I acknowledge my transgression and my sin is ever before me. I think if anyone has any familiarity with modern Jewish life there is no element on the contrary more conspicuous from it than the sense of sin. We are a people who are given to self-exaltation and to self-congratulation. It is in our religious services it is in our Jewish cultural life it is in our periodicals and in our literature. We are a proud and puffed up people if you scratch us deeply we'll tell you that we believe that we gave the world monotheism as part of our Jewish culture that we gave the world the Bible and as a matter of fact we have just about taken upon ourselves all the things which God has given and see it as the expression of our own Jewish genius and brilliance. What is there in the corporate experience and history of the Jewish people sufficient to stir such consciousness of sin and acknowledgement of transgression that would lead to repentance and to conversion? The first event I think in Jewish history is their participation in the death of the Savior and the second one like unto it and growing out of it as a consequence of it is the more recent crucifixion of world Jewry itself the Holocaust. These two events in my opinion have got to be the two greatest events single events in Jewish history both of which are grossly neglected in Jewish understanding. One is wholly put aside it's not even worthy of our consideration and if it is so much as mentioned the one who has the gumption to mention it shall be immediately accused of anti-Semitism. The second, the Holocaust is only trotted out on ceremonial occasions on annual commemorations in a sentimental way by which Jews again have occasion to congratulate themselves for having died for being Jews. May I say with a broken heart in truth and in love that contrary to their having died for being Jews the greater truth is this they died for not having been Jews enough and where is there a man who will say that to their face? There is little action as I think that both these events the enormity of which is incalculable as well as inexpressible have been slighted and glibly dismissed in present Jewish understanding for the first the mere cry of anti-Semitism with references to the absurdity of deicide that's an actual quote from a Jewish spiritual leader that has come to my hand or the instrumentality of a pilot all of this is just piled upon the Gentiles the Romans this was a Roman punishment and Jews are absolved of responsibility all this I think sufficient to absolve them of implication notwithstanding the cry the oath of their fathers His blood be upon us and our children the magnitude of the horror of contemplating the Holocaust as a fulfillment of these words is so great even for us who believe and who are even called to be ministers of God's salvation to them that we have shrunk from its consideration this did not Peter, Paul, Stephen and the apostles and have been carried therefore by that same logic to what is in my opinion a lesser evangelism with a lesser result if you want to know why it did not applaud this morning in the presentation of some of my brethren when they explained how Jews have had their resistance melted and have come to a place of healing through their messianic synagogues and they've seen ten, twenty, so many of these saved it's because there's something in my Jewish heart that hearkens back to an hour when three thousand were saved and the hour is short and the numbers are great and we can make all kinds of accommodations and condescensions to men but I believe that it will not be until we preach this message and the power and the boldness of the Holy Spirit that men shall again be stricken in their hearts cut in their hearts and cry out men and brethren what must we do and we can give the answer that has not been sounded in oh so long repent rather than bring to the consciousness of Jewry the shame of the banishment from God through transgression we ourselves get giddy and exult in and seek to win them by a promise to keep them in the exilic ghetto culture that sprang from it I wonder how many of you who squealed with delight at the various aspects of Jewish culture that was either mentioned or demonstrated realize that much of it if not all is the more recent expression of Jewish culture since the dispersion since the diaspora it is ghetto culture folks and it harkens back to what should be a remembrance of our shame having been banished from God and from the land and I don't know what my spirit is saying in me that we are again seeking to revive it and to use it as a vehicle of drawing Jews to a place where they might condescend to accept Jesus this culture which we so exult in is a testimony to our shame and not our glory as one commentator puts it quote one is appalled and saddened by the continual crying up of Jews of the virtues attributed to their beloved Jewishness not seeing that the very starting point of the faith of God is that of humility of mind and of humbling as to what all are in the flesh even down to self-abhorrence and deep repentance before God for what is not only our sad inheritance through Adam but especially for our own actual sinfulness this is in my opinion or there is in my opinion an unbroken continuum of sin for which no Jew is absolved merely by the fortuitous circumstances of birth and time which needs desperately to be pressed upon his consciousness I'll tell you how foolish a man I am I think that every individual in every generation shall stand before God for the decision of choosing Barabbas over Jesus though they were not there in the actual moment of time Stephen said as your fathers did so do ye and there is a principle in here that I want to express here it is the failure to acknowledge the sins of the fathers as sin and to repent of them as our own in our own unwillingness or ignorance or silence implicates us and makes us one with them in the sin now a woman came up to me at the end of this morning's session a Gentile woman of Polish extraction a Catholic and as she spoke to me the spirit of God just touched me in the way that he has and what she expressed to me was that she needed an opportunity to be absolved from the responsibility of guilt of what Catholics have inflicted on Jews through the centuries and I do not lightly ignore such a desire as a matter of fact if you're going to bear with me I believe that God is going to lead me at the conclusion of this message to a most unusual alter call which has been histories has been generations in waiting something is going to be released that has hovered in our ancestral darkness of crimes that we have inflicted one upon the other as Jews and Gentiles which we have never acknowledged in having part nor sought each other's forgiveness I think such an act needs to be performed and if God will so lead me it will be performed here in this theater today Martin Rosen said in one of his first presentations he feels no mandate to stand in the place of the Jewish people and to accept the forgiveness of Gentiles I'd like to say that I feel that I have such a mandate and I might offer other Jewish believers who are in this room who also want to stand in the place of the Jewish people perhaps to come on the platform at the conclusion of the message that we might receive from the non-Jewish believers in this audience the expression of their forgiveness as we stand in the place of our people and receive ours for what we have inflicted upon you both in our unbelief in our atheism, in our cynicism in all of the adverse things we have done as manipulators of culture in breaking down the faith of many it needs to go both ways here's the illustration from the scriptures of the principle that I'm suggesting that there's an unbroken continuum of sin that stretches from father to son, which unless we consciously sever it even infects our own spirit and life Jesus said in Matthew 23 the 27 through 36 verses Woe unto you scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness and say if we had been in the days 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 wherefore behold I send unto you prophets and wise men and scribes and some of them you shall kill and crucify that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, whom you slew between the temple and the altar fill ye up then the measure of your fathers what was Jesus saying, whom ye slew when they were not anywhere near the time and the circumstance of that slaying what he is saying is this if you do not see yourself as implicated with your fathers if you do not acknowledge the craven condition of your heart that if you had been with them you would have assuredly participated in the blood of the martyrs then most assuredly you shall participate in the blood of the martyrs of your own generation acknowledgements that our fathers have sinned and that we do not want to be in some unspoken continuation with that sin but stand to separate ourselves from it there's a lot of talk about save, save, save but I love the word converted and I don't believe there shall be any Jew converted who will not stand and suffer the reproach of the Jewish community when he shall say I refuse to accept the verdict of my fathers, choose ye Barabbas I choose Jesus, which Jew is there which if he had not been present with his fathers at the trial of Jesus would not have chosen Barabbas how ironically did the prosecuting attorney for the state of Israel against Eichmann, Gideon Hausner touch upon the same principle in his memoirs it's interesting how God will put a book in a man's hand at the appropriate time if there's been a cry rolling up in my heart in recent months it's this, oh God that we might see as you see our viewpoint is so temporal, so limited so human, bring us into the dimension where you are independent of time in God's sight children there is an unbroken continuum from the day of the death of Jesus to this present day and all men are implicated in that most heinous crime except those who have by confession absolved themselves from it and avail themselves of the very blood that was shed in that act God requires that which is past this inherent truth was ironically stated by Gideon Hausner about Eichmann one must hear it as the divine prosecutor and judge as though this were the judge speaking and not this man speaking of Israel and not of a German criminal he says it may well take some time before a criminal is brought to justice in Eichmann's case it took 15 years since he had gone into hiding when he was ultimately found exposed to the obloquy of mankind and executed then comes this punchline neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum saved him these facts are worth bearing in mind indeed neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum shall save our people and if you want a little foretaste of a kind of hellishness that shall not be eternally relieved you need only turn to Zechariah in the 12th chapter which describes the response of Jews when they shall see him whom they have pierced and mourn for him as one mourns for one's only begotten son and be in bitterness as one is in bitterness for one's firstborn their mourning shall be relieved but what of the mourning of those who shall see him whom they have pierced after they have passed into an eternity in which no correction can be made there needs to be a message spoken to the Jewish people in this final generation and if it shall not be spoken by the people of the Holy Spirit by whom then shall it be brought neither the passage of time nor the distance of asylum saved him Micah 6-2 Hosea 12-2 the Lord hath a controversy with his people Israel and who is there among modern Jews today who has even an iota of awareness that God has such a controversy and who will ever know it from the swagger and esteem by which the Jewish community continues to hold itself how much do we in our own well-meaning efforts confirm them in their self-sufficient and present alienation from God by flattering their present Judaism by imitating or emulating it is not our most serious mistake revealed in reference to quote and unquote completed Jews as if our only one omission omission was the failure to acknowledge the messianic credentials of Jesus you forgot a little something look here's what it says in the scriptures Jesus is the Messiah of Israel oh hey that's right friends this is not conversion this is biblical bookkeeping and the result is sadly to be seen merely to establish the link of seeing the fulfillment of prophecy is not necessarily accepting Christ or coming to him as a sinner needing a savior the sob father I have sinned against thee is that alone which is answered by the father's kiss and many of us who have not received that kiss because we have not cried that cry reveal it in our own impoverished and loveless Christian lives such shallow conversions leaves us resembling the Pharisee who thought himself a big sport to condescend to have Jesus to dinner isn't that the spirit by which most men accept Jesus not having experienced much forgiveness he was incapable of loving much and even murmured about the great sinner who lavished Jesus' feet with her tears and filled the room with the fragrance of her outpoured love our impatience with each other the short shrift we give each other even as Jewish believers and messianic leaders belies the lovelessness which is concealed in the guise of being busy about the Lord's business but there's much more that hangs on this great question than the Jewish acknowledgement of their chronic ages old rejection of God more than their own redemption is involved in this great question glorious enough as their redemption is seeing that it will be life brought back from the dead there's a scripture that says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and the final revelation of God's glory to unbelieving mankind will be in the reconciliation of those who have had the longest and bitterest history of enmity between themselves I can't think of a greater demonstration of the glory of Christ in earth than that an Israeli and an Arab shall clutch each other in the love of the Messiah I prophesize and this is no radical utterance a fool will tell you that blood shall flow in the streets of this city and every major city in America and in the world as we come to the final explosion of what has been building a crescendo of hatred and bitterness and third world groups in the colored peoples of the earth the downtrodden, the deprived we had a little preview in the shutting out of the lights in New York City when that particular segment of the population went berserk to smash windows and to loot and to steal only a foretaste of what shall be experienced wholesale unless this bitterness is reconciled at the cross of Christ Jesus some of you may know that though my book Ben Israel begins with the chapter describing my experience in Dachau a quarter of a century ago as a Jewish GI going to this terrible concentration camp hating a people that I thought I could never look in the face the Germans that God has given me as a converted Jew a great passion and love for the same people much of our activity is in Germany preaching a message of reconciliation as a Jew who has been reconciled to his God now enjoining Lutherans and nominal religionists also so to be reconciled both to their brothers in a broken fragmented body of Christ and also to our God the reconciliation of German and Jew I think is one of the profoundest themes of God for the end of the age but how shall the Jew forgive the German until he first sees that he crucified the son of God even as he was himself crucified and thereby reap what he has sown having therefore no basis whatsoever for any presumed moral superiority or presumed innocence no Jew will ever be reconciled to a German in his heart until he finds himself broken and sobbing for the magnitude of his own guilt and implication in the death of the Holy One of Israel whom you slew and hung on a tree when the magnitude of that shall break upon the Jewish soul that we have killed God so also shall the magnitude of the Holocaust and the crimes against men the crimes of men against us also find a basis for forgiveness for he who has been forgiven much, loves much how shall we understand and the Jew understand the enormity of that until he has first acknowledged the dispersion to the Holocaust as the fifth judgment of God for unspeakable transgression we don't have to slap ourselves on the back that we're Brooklyn Jews who know how to play stickball and love pastrami, it's a statement unto our shame that we have been cast out of the land of our fathers and have become a curse, a byword a hiss and a proverb to all the places to which we have been driven God has a controversy with his people for thus saith the Lord if they shall confess their iniquity I'm reading from Leviticus the 26th chapter 40th through 43rd verses if they shall confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers and that they also have walked contrary unto me if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled as they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity and acknowledge it as just and righteous altogether and can speak what David spoke in the Psalms against you and you only have I sinned and done that which is evil in your sight so that you are justified in your sentence and faultless in your judgment. Dear friends my Jewish people need to know that they died not because that they were Jews but because they were not Jewish enough. Though God be fulfilling the purposes of his own counsel and will this does not absolve men from the responsibility they have as willing instruments in evil here's what many of us are telling Jewish people listen you didn't kill Jesus he was foreordained of the father to die for our sins so listen don't let this bother you you were just an instrumentality it's really the Romans pilot he had to die so cool it. Listen to these words children though God be fulfilling the purposes of his own counsel and will this does not absolve men from the responsibility they have as willing instruments in evil that's true for the Jews as it pertains to the death of their Messiah as it is for the Germans as it pertains to the Holocaust of the Jews. God says it needs be that there be evil in the world but woe unto him by whom it comes. The Jews are just as culpable in the atrocity against God as the German in his atrocity against him. One writer puts it this way. Is man's responsibility to be nullified and evaded because God's eternal counsels are inviolable although on the surface they may appear to align with man's atrocious wickedness is his responsibility to be ignored or thrown back on God because his insupportably wicked act can be viewed as in accordance with and even of assistance to God's eternal purposes God's eternal purposes were fulfilled in the shedding of the Messiah's blood but it is yet needful for Jewish people to acknowledge as a people their implication and their guilt in being the willing instrument in performing it. All hands were implicated in the Savior's blood and on all hands it lies unless shelter be sought under it. Matthew 27 24-26 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just man. See ye to it. Then answered all the people and said His blood be on us and on our children Then released he Barabbas unto them and when he had scourged Jesus he delivered him to be crucified John 19 10-11 Then said Pilate unto him Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee and have power to release thee? Jesus answered Hear the words of the Lord himself Thou couldst have no power at all except it were given thee from above therefore he that delivereth me unto thee hath the greater sin We've held up our Bibles from time to time in the course of these meetings and reaffirmed again and again how much devoted we are to the word of God Are you still as devoted? Tell me, has the controversy been settled? Or is it possible that the same evil heart in their fathers which gave up Jehovah for idols slew their own prophets rejected the Messiah as well as the Gospel through his blood is in them still? Why is it that man's obdurate and proud heart will never face up to the record as it really stands and as it inevitably one day will face us Revelations 6 16-17 Hide us from the wrath of the Lamb for the great day of his wrath is come and who shall be able to stand He came as the Lamb of God meek and lowly but the world and my people have yet to experience the wrath of the Lamb. There's a book that I often quote in my messages written by the greatest Jewish writer on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel in which he described the history of his own Jewish community in Central Europe which somehow by dint of circumstance was saved the horror that had come on the Jews of the great cities of Germany, Austria, and Poland and they thought that somehow they would be spared the terrible horror and that this too shall pass I don't know what it is about us Jews we are so such inveterate optimists always this too shall pass until one day they heard the peculiar rumbling the strange shaking of the earth and their faces grew stricken and sure enough on the horizon great clouds of dust and as they came closer they began to see the iron crosses and the swastikas as a group of German soldiers and equipment came and took over their town day by day new edicts were put up on the walls and Jews were required to leave their dwelling places and move to a certain walled up ghetto and there they hoped that somehow they would survive to the end of the war but one day there was a new edict put up on the wall, tomorrow morning at sunrise every Jew is required to be at the marketplace by the train station with only such things as they can personally carry well what a furious activity that night as they dug holes in the basement and the backyards and buried their heirlooms thinking that they would return one day to regain them and how pitiful was the scene described as they stood out there in the early morning sun the children clutching the legs of the parents with trembling as they looked at the great open cattle cars waiting to receive them into which they were systematically herded and shut in for days on end without water, without food and asphyxiating blackness rumbling to their deaths they knew not what he describes how these teenage kids fornicated in the darkness having a sense that this might well be a last opportunity what a symbolic picture that is even of stricken mankind even now fornicating in dark places as they go to their doom without any knowledge of eternal burnings. Wiesel describes how the train came finally to a shutter and a stop but not before a certain woman had fallen into a coma and grown hysterical and would wake up from this condition and shriek, fire, she said, I see fire and they so got infuriated at the hearing of the word that they punched her into unconsciousness and she would recover again and cry out, fire, I see fire and they again would beat her but when the train finally came to a halt, the first thing that they sensed before the doors were even opened they smelled a strange acrid smell that even penetrated the filth of their own excrement and sure enough when the doors burst open the flickering light of a gas, of a trough of gasoline of fire was waiting to receive the infants that were plucked half dead out of the arms of their mothers and immediately thrown into the fire and the men were sent off in one direction and the women in the other into the oven I mention this not to touch your sentiment but because Wiesel relates how a man had come to that community only some months before who had escaped from a concentration camp and had tried to warn them and how they beat this man from them that he was an ungainly character, they didn't want to hear what he had to say his words were frightening, they pushed him from him, mankind doesn't want to face truth there's a son that needs to complete the messianic task that had been left undone by the first son and I tell you that the spirit of God has best be upon him God has best anoint him to open the eyes of the blind and to heal the broken hearted and set the captives free and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord that's when Jesus rolled up the scriptures and gave it back to the minister because he did not finish the verse which is left for us to finish the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of his soon coming vengeance, no wonder that Phineas said that in the day that the church loses its sense of the power of hell in that day it will have condemned itself to be a weak and flabby defective instrument of God if we're going to save a Jewish people from fire it shall be only because our own hearts have been inflamed by God to preach to them words which are not pleasant to hear but needful to understand if we could say that the volumes of shed Jewish blood could equal the quality of the divine blood that was poured out if we could say that their human suffering and wretchedness could equal the anguish and torment that he had to suffer then perhaps could they have purchased in their ignorance and unreconciledness a salvation independent of his own if and you're going to hear increasing numbers of men say that Jews have no need of Jesus because they already have a covenantal relationship with God which saves them you watch as this heresy becomes more and more manifest but there's an apostle Paul who said that this gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Gentile but there's no believing to their first repenting because believing is not the function of intellect, believing is the function of repenting because repentance opens to God that accessibility to man by which the foolishness of the gospel can be breathed by the spirit of God into his soul I did not come to God by intellectual deduction but in my sleep the spirit of God penetrating a heart that was broken put the understanding there there is nothing for us Jewish people but to own the death of the Messiah and by that acknowledgement making it our salvation but if we plead exemption in any measure we are lost without hope we are as Jews unwilling to face the implications of it as Germans are to face the implications of the Holocaust and the reason is the same a concealed lie hidden and ignored mounts and becomes too hideous to examine if we but once acknowledge that what about the rest of our lies and our deceptions the whole foundation of our false life topples all is vain we are undone you know what I say to that I'm concluding God is waiting for the false foundations of the lives of modern men to topple and collapse and when they shall fall to their first acknowledgement all that is vain and false shall fall with it a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart broken down with sorrow for sin humbly penitent he will not despise repent and believe ye the gospel repentance toward God faith toward Jesus Christ is possible at last then will I teach transgressors your ways and sinners shall be converted unto thee, David said and how our hearts cry for the day when the Jewish people intended to be a nation of priests and a light in the world will no longer be the fabricators of pornography and modern culture and all of its filth and defilement but will instead be the promulgators of the word of God then will I teach transgressors your ways and sinners shall be converted unto thee after I myself have been deeply converted after the woe is me I am undone, comes the cry of God who will go for me and send us he will in the name of the Lord in the way of brokenness and humility without the characteristic arrogance and disdain that marks our Jewish attitude toward Gentiles whose feet we are now ready to wash for he who has been forgiven much loves much when our people shall no more deceive themselves nor be deceived and this is my conclusion attributing to men and to circumstances what must be attributed only to God as judgment when they shall acknowledge that his judgments are just and righteous all together when they will have glimpsed the magnitude of their sins in the magnitude of their suffering when they will have glimpsed the magnitude of their sins in the magnitude of their suffering then shall their warfare be accomplished then shall we speak comfortably to Jerusalem comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished that her iniquity is pardoned for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins then the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads and they shall obtain joy and gladness for sorrow and sighing shall flee away I have been a critic of the charismatic technique and manipulation of feigning a similitude of joy by repeated choruses children, joy is the spontaneous overflow of the truly redeemed heart that has recognized its terrible transgressions of God against God and has received total forgiveness and release I wanted to just take a minute to conclude this with a very special invitation how many people are there in this dark audience and I can't see very many of you who are of Catholic backgrounds Polish, German, European who have been wearing and bearing and have a sense of a heaviness in their heart they have not been able to articulate it perhaps it has been toward the Jewish people and because of it, it may have resulted in some kind of a sentimental response to Jews rather than that which is truly spiritual how many would like once and for all to experience a kind of relief and to break the connection with the sins of the fathers I'm going to ask you to stand right where you're sitting my second invitation is to my Jewish brothers who are in this audience who would like just to stand where they are at the front of this auditorium, would you come forward or stand if you're on the platform and face our non-Jewish brothers and sisters there's a reason why God waked me at 3 o'clock in the morning in Germany to tell me that we were to conduct a communion service before the 400 Germans before whom we had been ministering that first there was to be confession before there could be communion and I planted a Jewish brother on both aisles and Germans came out of their seats with men who could not understand each other's languages and embraced each other as an act of forgiveness both extended and received both ways then they came up and received communion served by myself as a Jew and by a German brother with me I want you to extend your hands toward each other and say amen to a prayer that I'm going to pray to lift the weight of the centuries the filthy gloom and darkness in which dire spirits have had opportunity to corrupt and to pollute in the name of Jesus and in the power of your blood we sever ourselves we set ourselves free from the adverse inheritance of our fathers we are absolved of guilt and implication in the crimes of our fathers against the Jewish people and maybe for our Jewish brethren who are here though they be believers and who have never acknowledged for themselves the sins of their fathers precious God in Jesus name forgive us Lord the sins mighty God of our fathers Lord who have rejected your word in every manner that you sent it through the prophets through Moses the written word and the word made flesh we have been rejecters and slayers and persecutors of all that you have sought to send us as the message of your salvation Lord we ask you to forgive us for our cowardly hearts that would have chosen Barabbas rather than Jesus and now we choose you again Lord and affirm our standing with you and willing by that also to suffer all reproach in calling men to a true reckoning to a true repentance to a true conversion we release our brothers and sisters precious God from every weight of guilt of historic and ancestral sin we are reconciled mighty God in your blood at the cross of Christ Jesus we all acknowledge that we are sinners saved by your grace and freshly put our hands again under your outpoured blood mighty God wash us mighty God and make us such instruments going forth in the boldness of God by the Spirit to speak to this final generation the end time message that shall bring again the cry what must we do that we might again say repent