In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of preaching the gospel and not "beating the sheep." He shares a personal experience of giving a sermon and feeling pressured to finish quickly, but ultimately seeing people respond to the invitation and come to the altar. However, he also recounts a negative encounter with a man who criticized him and questioned his inner life. The speaker criticizes religious ceremonies that are more about performance and obligation rather than true instruction. He also discusses the need for prophetic individuals to see things clearly and without distortion, as God sees them. The sermon touches on the hardness of the current generation and the increasing issue of missing children. The speaker calls for preparation and reliance on God in these challenging times.

Instruct us by your spirit. Break our hearts over it, my God, we pray. Thank you for the privilege again that is before us. Be the Lord of it all, in Jesus' name. The grace this morning to review some experts' excerpts. I see what I mean by we need a particular grace. Some excerpts from a most remarkable book. If there was any one man who could subsume and take to himself the best of all that is Jewish, I would make this man a candidate. His name is Arthur Cohen. He's a philosopher-theologian, and he taught at Brown University. He's written several books, but this is the only one that I've glimpsed at. It's called The Tremendum, a theological interpretation of the Holocaust. And it's ruthlessly honest and searching. Very courageous man, but an intellect so keen that it takes everything to keep up with him. And he's coined the word Tremendum to find a vocabulary appropriate to the event. If there's anything that will bring us with a crash into the sense of the trauma that the Holocaust has meant for the Jewish people, it's turning through this book. The trauma was so great that there was no commentary at all until about perhaps 20 years after the conclusion of World War II. There's no substantial writing or discussion of the Holocaust or of its meaning until at least the 20-year period following the Holocaust itself. Because the shock was so great that it was simply not a time for reflection. There was not the emotional ability to consider something that so devastated the Jewish community. It was so totally unthinkable that something of that magnitude could take place in modern times, coming at the hands of a nation and civilization so dear to Jews, was more than could be presently considered. So it's really interesting that from that time to this, there's been a real spate of literature. And I have to say that this book is about the finest that has come to my attention. But it took a remarkable requirement to read it. And you'll get a sense of that as I quote him from place to place. So I'm just going to pick at things that the Lord has quickened for me this morning to give you the sense of quandary. Q-U-A-N-D-R-Y The utter perplexity that this event has brought to the Jewish community and not only to the Jewish community but to Christian consideration as well. And you see something of the anguish that this man experiences groaning and trying to find his way as a theologian philosopher to sift and to understand what this horrendous experience means for the Jewish community in the light of its past and in the light of its future. And he feels that this systematic annihilation of six million Jews was so brutal and of such a character and kind such an unmitigated evil that it doesn't even bear comparison with past calamities in Jewish experience. It requires a totally new vocabulary even to be employed in it. So he talks about the past of the people and the assumptions of the people about the nature of its God and its experience of him which in past times was clear and unmuddled. It is not so now. Any formulation which makes the terms of God's relation to the Holocaust comparable to the formulations which were used in the past would be for us a scandal. Now I'm not expecting you to take down quotations. Probably better if you just try to listen and catch the heart of this man and his ruminations, his reflections and I'll go over it and try and express it in my own words. In fact I'm taking great liberty even as I quote. I'm not quoting him exactly but I'm substituting simpler words rather than his own or we would be really confused. You're confused already. So let me just get at this thought. What is he saying? Past categories no longer avail. The past ways of understanding God or speaking about God are no longer valid. To try and compare the Holocaust to previous calamities in Jewish experience would be now for us a scandal. The Holocaust is so utterly unique that it is not a mere calamity in the progression of calamities that have preceded it. It introduces something entirely new into history. In fact he uses another word caesura. I don't know if I can spell it. I find it c-a-e-s-u-r-e-a something like that from the same word as a cesarean operation that evidently means a cutting, something of such an incisive kind that everything following it from that time is altogether qualitatively changed and can never go back to what it was before. And I believe that in that assessment he is absolutely right that God intended the Holocaust to be that. A plumb line has fallen into the earth, into time and into history as incisive an event for the Jewish people and for the church and for the world as was a previous caesura before it which was nothing other nor less than the crucifixion of Jesus himself. It's a remarkable thing but that we are dull to both. And just as it took less than a half century to eclipse the significance of this event that concluded in 1945, how long did it take 2,000 years ago for the crucifixion of Jesus to become eclipsed, to become a commonplace, to become dissolved in human forgetfulness and lost to history and to understanding and be passed over. It's a remarkable thing and it's a tragic thing if that should be so because both events have cost greatly, cost God greatly. Remember the scripture that says in all of our afflictions he was afflicted. It's not that he was some passive observer looking down on the excruciating sufferings of the Jewish people. He was in the midst of that suffering. It has cost him greatly as much as it has cost the father to look upon his son impaled on a cross and not just talking about physical suffering but moral, existential. Likewise, this suffering is equally as expensive. What a tragedy that God intended something to break in to human consciousness that would compel it to come out of its categories, of the way that we have as men to modify and finally to gloss over things that are so desperately necessary for our understanding. For the whole, the issues of eternity are involved. So this is what he's struggling with. Any formation which makes the terms of God's relation to the Holocaust comparable to the formulations which were used in the past would be for us a scandal. But did we involve God in the event of the Tremendum in the same way as we involved him in the mighty events, say, for example, of the massacres of the Crusades? How many people know anything about that? Did you know that the knights who went to the Holy Land financed their expedition by looting and pillaging Jewish communities throughout Europe? That the very community where I was stationed in Germany, Oh boy, I must be tired. Doesn't matter the name of it, not far from Stuttgart, that I had the most remarkable haunting sense of familiarity with this little German village and town, the cobblestone streets of which remain going all the way back to the Middle Ages and the time of the Crusaders, worn smooth by the passage of feet for centuries. I felt so strangely familiar with this town more than I ever had felt with Brooklyn. Isn't it a remarkable thing? A Brooklyn boy always feeling out of place in America and yet feeling a strange kinship to this place in Germany. Esslingen. And to learn that after I got out of the army and by virtue of the GI Bill started a college career as an ex-high school dropout, that I accidentally one day came across a reference of Esslingen in an encyclopedia that in the town of Esslingen, as in so many other German villages and cities, the Jews of that community were looted, pillaged, and robbed to finance the Crusaders passing through en route to the Holy Land. In fact, they were so terrorized that they locked themselves up into their synagogue for safety, which synagogue was then put to the torch and the entire community went up in one puff, a kind of forerunner and glimpse of the ovens themselves. And what is he saying? However horrible those sufferings were, the Holocaust in its immensity that requires a word to describe it, which is the tremendum, the tremendum, implies there was nothing like it ever before, eclipses all previous Jewish suffering and therefore requires another way of perceiving it and another way of understanding about God in it. And in a sense, he's right. The conclusion he comes to is not the one that God desires, because he is also violently anti-Christian. But he's right that God is wanting a new perception of God. The former one made that tragedy necessary. The former perception of God was the God of convenience, the nominal kind of religious thing that men have done with God and that fit into their worldly purposes and which they would have gone on completely undisturbed because it fulfills their purposes but does not touch God's. And so it goes for a length of time until God brings that caesura, that cutting in, that incisive breaking in and says, so to speak, this far no further. We talked about it yesterday, that the Jewish community cannot understand that the preponderance of victims of the Holocaust were not secular Jews but religious. So where is God? That those that were the most religious and therefore they assume the most God-honoring were the ones who were the greatest victims can only be answered by the question was their religion something that was pleasing to God or was it the very thing that he was judging in the Holocaust? And if he judged it among the Jews, will he not judge it also among us? If we allow it to take place without Christianity, what had happened to the Judaism, namely to become some kind of nominal, man-serving tradition or institution, we can expect a severe judgment as well. We know enough to say in our hearts that neither are we like them, previous Jews, nor is our faith the same as theirs. And if not, then different is our God. And if not different, then no God of ours. And if different, which God and who is our God? This is the kind of philosophical musing that finally when you come to the end of the contorted logic of the man, the question is raised, who is our God? Everything has been demolished. All of our concepts, all of our traditional views of God, of life, of reality, and of value. Beyond all these considerations, then we must return again and again to break our head upon the tremendum of the abyss, a phenomenon without analog, that is to say, without any comparison. Discontinuous from all that has been, we must create a new language in which to speak of this in order to destroy the old language which in its decreptitude and decline made facile and easy the demonic descent. This is so rich for me, I don't know what it is for you. But isn't it remarkable? Here's an unbelieving Jew from our definition, and yet he has a greater perception, a perspicacity, I love that word, a grasping, a sensing of the magnitude of something that has completely escaped us. If I myself had not introduced this subject into these five weeks, would you have requested it? It's not part of your consideration. Just a trifle. In fact, what high school student today knows anything about it? But I can tell you that a generation ago, every kid heard the name Anne Frank. We who grew up with this and saw the statistics and the early photographs of the discovery of these camps, you know, in the last days of the war, where the bodies were piled high like piles of sticks and skeletons and ashes and whipping posts and all of the nomenclature of these camps of horror, it was an astonishment we were struck. I feel like I'm one of the few representatives left of a world that no longer is. Born in 1929, I can still remember coming out of my house in Brooklyn on a Saturday morning and breathing clear air, still remembering that you can walk through your neighborhoods at night, that you never needed to lock your door, that violence was unheard of, nobody ever heard of murder or suicide or rape or incest or any of those kinds of things. It was a veritable age of innocence. But something has come into history in time, not long after, that has so disfigured the world, it'll never go back again to what it was. And the greatest and most brutal shock of it was not just the war that took 40 million lives, because we expect attrition and carnage in wartime, but the systematic annihilation of civilian communities was entirely new. And the annihilation of the Jewish community. See, maybe you have to understand, there's something about us that thinks that we will always go on. We are the people of survival. We have overcome so much historically and go on, thinking that it's our virtue that has preserved us, not knowing it's very God who has preserved us for purposes that must yet be fulfilled for his glory. But in one fell swoop, when an entire Jewish community is systematically exterminated, that strikes a note of a kind that has not occurred before, that eclipses all of your categories, all of your notions, all of your truth, and brings a kind of shock that leaves nothing untouched and everything completely demolished and up for grabs. And as I think I've already said somewhere along the line, everything that has happened since, Cambodia, Vietnam, the widespread slaughters in Romania, how many, I don't know what, victims in many nations and nationalities, and what is even taking place now in Yugoslavia with almost a genocidal program against Muslims and Croatians by Serbian power could not be explained and probably would not have taken place if this had not come first. Something has been introduced into the world that will affect everything that follows. But that it happened with Jews, God's chosen people, has an added significance. So he talks of it as an abyss, the tremendum of the abyss, a phenomenon without analog, discontinuous from all that has been, a new beginning for the human race that knew not of what it was capable, willing to destroy and to be destroyed. We must create a new language in which to speak of this in order to destroy the old language which in its decrepitude and decline made facile and easy the demonic descent. Of course, when you talk about a new language implying that the old language is no longer valid, what he's talking about is biblical language. Biblical views, biblical categories, ways of understanding God are no longer valid. We need a totally new way of apprehending both reality and God. The God who emerges as possible to thought beyond the tremendum is no longer the God of traditional theology. This has so lent itself to a God is dead mentality that you cannot really assess the enormous impact that it's had not only in Jewish life but also in Christian. The God who emerges as possible to thought, you can't think in the terms in which we thought before, that God is no longer the God of traditional theology, no longer the biblical God. And then he says, no God is worth a single child's life, how much more untold numbers of children. This is where Paul Volck freaked out in trying to work on the subject of the Holocaust. When you have to take the abstract words like judgment and think of them in their particular expression as infants being caught up on the end of Nazi bayonets, something freaks out. What do you call it when your electric thing goes? Your fuses blow. And he's expressing something here of the same kind. It's one thing to talk in abstract and general terms, but if it's your child that is being talked about, all of a sudden the issue of judgment takes on another view. Where was that God to allow your child to be a victim? And of the six million that were systematically annihilated, one and a half million were children. And here he's saying no God is worth a single child's life. What do you think of that? Is that true? He just does that. Right. What about the Messianic Jews, the Jews now that have come to Christ and in the light of the cross and all, and the Holocaust, writing about now the Holocaust and things of the Holocaust. You see what I mean there? There has to be now, I don't know how many Messianic Jews, but there was an article in Jewish Voice, the prophetic magazine, which is a widely publicized one. And does he ever see anything coming up that he would publicize about the Holocaust now? You know what I mean? That would sort of put it out there in front. I don't see anything like that. In fact, if we had time and you were interested, I could read you an exchange of letters between myself and a Messianic leader who some months ago sent me a copy of a tape. In fact, it was one of the first tapes on the mystery of Israel where I speak about the diaspora dilemma and what we have suffered in being exiles and cast into the nations including the Holocaust. And he said, Artie said, do you still believe what you said then? So I listened to it in part and I wrote him back a note and I said, yeah, I think substantially I do. I may express it a little differently now. And then there was a silence and then some weeks later I got like a five, six or seven page letter roasting me over the coals for my view on the Holocaust and defending the Jewish community from any aspersion that what they suffered is in any way relative to their sin. So even for this Messianic leader, it was a scandal that the question should be raised that the Holocaust was a statement or an indictment of our sin. He sees it entirely as a failure of the church. It's anti-Semitism and so on and so forth. He's looking at it from a horizontal, earthly, sociological, political level. And so I answered him yet back again. And that might be an interesting thing if we had the time for it just to hear the confrontation and the discussion among men who do believe and are spirit filled and yet who see it differently. You know, because they would still have to know God in order to relate the Holocaust and everything that has happened. Yeah. What a leap though to have Isaiah, the passages we were reviewing and those were just a sparse few. I'm going to come to that this morning. And then to remove ourselves out of those categories to interpret it. Okay, you're beating me to the punch. Massive denial, I just think it's massive. This is one of the reasons I want to read you this because this is the highest quality of Jewish reflection or speculation on the most devastating tragedy of Jewish experience in modern times. And yet it is totally exempt from any reflection on Scripture. Isn't it remarkable? There's not one citation, one attempt to find explanation or any reference to Scripture at all. Arthur Cohen and he is a theologian. Now, what kind of a statement is that? It's a statement that makes more of an explanation for the Holocaust than the book itself. In other words, what is it saying? That the finest of the Jewish community under the compulsion of trying to understand the most devastating tragedy of our national experience still does not have recourse to Scripture. It is a biblically alienated people. And if there's any, what is that to say? That our relationship to the Word of God is the statement of our relationship to God. The absence of the Word of God from our consideration is a statement of the absence of God. You can still reflect about God philosophically and theologically as he does, but it's very much the God of your own making, the God of your own view, the God of your own tradition. And what is being demolished by the Holocaust is that God. And he acknowledges that it's a crisis that requires a new way of seeing and perceiving, but he will not look for it in the Scripture. And I was going to come to that later after you had a chance to hear his reflections, which are deep from a kind of a humanistic, philosophical perception, but that they are exempt from all Scripture is itself a statement that we need to recognize. Well, I think we've also talked about that. It's not so much that you hear the Scripture read as you hear the Scripture chanted, which is quite a different thing. The Scripture in synagogue is analogous to Latin in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a ceremonial and liturgical language that you read in order to finish the designated portion, but it's not read in the sense that we're reading in order to obtain comprehension, or you could not go through the five books of Moses in one year as you're required religiously to do. I mean, it's an irony. And isn't it remarkable that that could go on unhindered after the Holocaust as well as before it, that you would not have known that there was a Seizur, that there was a Tremendum, in the sense of a Jewish community is going on with business as usual, as if nothing had happened. These particular passages about judgment and the Scriptures, they read or seem so fast, you know, they go through it so you can't understand the word. Particularly Scriptures, they run it through. There's a difference between presenting the Scriptures and seeing it of service. It's massive deception. Religion. Well, I can tell you about my own Bar Mitzvah, and I think it's typical of every Jewish boy's Bar Mitzvah. I went to Hebrew school for six or seven years every day after school. The Gentile kids used to feel sorry for us that we couldn't go out and play ball as they did. We had to go to Hebrew school for one thing only, to prepare ourselves for the Bar Mitzvah. And what was the Bar Mitzvah? A ceremony that took an hour or two, in which we had to chant a portion of the Prophets based on our birthday. My 13th birthday fell at a certain time that corresponded to a portion of Scripture that was appropriate to that time. And the whole of what we studied essentially was learning how to chant that portion. ... It went to raise and lower your voice. And it was a performance. And if you performed well, the rabbi was pleased, and you got a smack on the back, and you made your little speech, and you said, today I am a fountain pen, which is a joke from the kind of gift that most Bar Mitzvah boys received in those days. I mean, the whole thing is a calculated farce. It's a ceremonial thing that placates the requirement of men to feel that they have discharged an obligation of a certain religious kind, but it is not calculated to instruct. And what does God say? My people perish for the want of knowledge. What does He say in Ezekiel? That He's going to hold the false shepherds responsible because they have fleeced the sheep and fattened themselves from the sheep, but they have not fed them nor protected them from the wolves and from devastation. This is the Judaism, essentially, that God is condemning and has condemned violently by what fell upon the religious Jewish community in the Holocaust. I'm just going to add, I know in San Antonio the canters don't even... That's right. And if you want an aesthetic religious experience, I mean, you can hardly find anything better. If you want something calculated to affect emotion and so on and so forth, there's something about the plaintiff melodies of Jewish liturgical worship that is very winsome, rising and falling. It actually has its origin from the lament of the destruction of Jerusalem, of previous judgment, but its origin has been so lost to memory that what has come down to us is the tradition of it. And what makes a canter a canter, C-A-N-T-O-R, is his ability to sing these pleasant and familiar melodies better than another, but the meaning of them is lost. So, I mean, I'm not saying this to mimic or ridicule. If there's any value in describing this, and we have to be very careful because we could lapse into that, is to break our hearts over this. I can't tell you what it means for me to have visited my mother in West Palm Beach and go with her to the synagogue in the Jewish retirement community where she is. It's a wrench. What did it mean when I had to attend her husband's funeral and listen to a rabbi, a German Jew who himself was a survivor of the Holocaust, begin his funeral oration by saying, this man was born without sin, came into the world without sin, and left the world without sin. And I almost keeled over because I knew that man to be not only an atheist, but a vicious and a blasphemous atheist, although he was at one time the vice president of the synagogue and the president of many philanthropic, Jewish, and religious organizations. You can be all those things and yet be an atheist at the same time without contradiction, but let you be a believer in Jesus and you've had it. You're no longer Jewish. I mean, the ironies, I think somewhere it says, they that reproached you will one day fall at your feet and acknowledge that you were with God. Something like that may well be a specific reference to a time when we Jewish believers who have been drummed out of the Jewish community and called Mishumadim, traitors, will one day be acknowledged as having been of God. So, we need to have some sense of this because this remarkable people are so insinuated in civilization, in places of influence, beyond their numbers, beyond any other class or race of people that I know. They are the filmmakers. They are the leaders of opinion. They're the most erudite commentators. You'll see some of the magazines I get. I mean, they're thoroughly intimidating and yet they come out of a religious context like this that has almost calculated that they should not know God. I have to say, if I look back on my own Hebrew school experience, I don't recall that God was ever discussed. He was never a subject of discussion. It was not considered as something to discuss. You went there to learn how to prepare yourself for a ceremony and I was a single parent child. We never had a father and my mother worked like a dog to support us and the two sons and she felt a responsibility as a Jewish mother to see that her boys were bar mitzvahed. The day after was the last day we ever crossed the threshold of a synagogue again. We couldn't get out fast enough because it was phony baloney and it kept us from the things that really counted like playing stickball in the streets. You know, and just to compound the tragedy, I was the kind of kid who was really a seeker after truth and it wasn't long after that. I was bar mitzvahed at 13. I was a cut-up in school and finally a high school dropout at 16 and a merchant seaman at 17 in a quest for truth that had never been raised either in the secular school or in the religious school. So how many victims have there been that might have been candidates for God if there had been a teacher, an example, a model, someone who had a heart for God who implied or in any way suggested that there's a God who can be found. But it was not part of our Jewish experience at that time. Now what's happening now may be a little different, I don't know. Because now we have the state of Israel. There's a heightened sense of Jewish identification since the birth of Israel. The Holocaust itself has brought an awareness of Jewishness, of the defensiveness to maintain a Jewish identity. There's more study now about Jewish culture. As I mentioned yesterday, there's hardly a college or university that does not have a department of Jewish studies even though the great majority of students would be Gentile in those schools. So this whole thing has been brought to a certain intensive focus. Nevertheless, is the issue of God being raised? Or is it Jewish culture, Jewish identity, Jewish values, Judaism itself? And somewhere in this book, I don't know if I can put my hand on it, he himself acknowledges that Judaism is not the issue of religion or faith or God so much as it is a mode of life, a culture that is entirely separated from those considerations. Maybe I can even find it. They have religious education in Britain and they do things like rites of passage and that type of thing across all the religions. And unfortunately, Christianity is the rite of passage. I'm glad you're saying that because we need to take these remarks about Judaism and see them inserted in the context of, quote, the three great faiths. There's a massive global deception going on that accommodates the great religions of monotheism that I think makes God want to puke. It does me. And in arguments and confrontations I've had with people who support that, I say the three great faiths are not any faith at all. They're religious persuasions. They are establishments and institutions but they have nothing to do with faith at all. There's only one great faith. It's the faith of Abraham. And this whole religious and social and cultural thing is a smokescreen against it. Somebody needs to blow the whistle. But who is that somebody? And what will it cost him for blowing it? What will come on that person's head is such a backlash of vehemence and anger and bitterness as if you have challenged the most sacred thing and that you're anti-Semitic when the fact of the matter is it's born out of the deepest and truest heart of love for people who are blind and are hurtling to their eternal doom for the want of shepherds and for the want of teaching. But you'll not be understood as that. You'll hear the accusation that I have had to hear on several occasions. You're worse than Hitler. Hitler sought only to destroy our bodies. You're seeking to destroy our souls. They see the propagation of the gospel to them as a calculated attack upon their Jewishness. And everything rises up in defense and the most remarkable thing is that among the most bitter adversaries against the gospel are not religious Jews so much as secular because they are the least secure in their Jewishness and feel that any question threatens what little thing that they have. And if they lose their Jewish identity what are they? Who are they? You cannot understand how powerful the fact is of Jewish identification in the Jewish community. What does it say in the New Testament? Many believed on Jesus but were afraid to profess him openly for fear of being cast out of the synagogue. And that's a powerful fear to this day. In fact, I would say that this is the single greatest fear for my mother. 87 years old, on the threshold of death and eternity but more afraid of the loss of the esteem of men than the esteem of God. The power of this synagogue identification, the Jewish identification. So everything again is stacked against us, which puts the whole premium on the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Which you're not going to experience before you go. Before you go you'll be a bundle of tremblings. If you'll experience it at all, it'll be in the obedience and in the speaking. But there are not many Christians like that who have that trust and confidence that God will be there in power when they have to face this kind of formidable opposition. Would you agree, I want to test you, I don't see you correctly. Did you say that there's a greater hostility from the religious Jews of the Gospel than from the atheistic Jews? No. The other way around. Because there's nothing for them to... It's not to say that there's not great hostility from religious Jews who are defensive of their faith. But the man who has less basis for Jewish identity because he's secular is all the more defensive of the little that he has. And something rises up in him. This gives him an opportunity to assert himself as a Jew. One thing that comes to mind right now is when I was a missionary to the Jews in Kansas City. I was trained for six months in New York City and they sent me to Kansas City to represent this organization in the Midwest and I didn't know how to begin. I arrived, I had my credential and a place to live and what do you do next? Smack dab in the middle of a Jewish community of about 25,000 people. How do you proceed? So I had to take the diapers to the laundromat and because I'm so mechanically gifted, I had to ask a woman there how to operate the machine. And she happened to be Jewish. And one word led to another and that was the beginning of my missionary activity to the Jews in Kansas City. Well, I really had something with that woman, a relationship but her husband was Orthodox and she said you better watch out for my husband. He's learned of you. Well, one day I just felt prompted to go visit this man. I went on the Shabbat. I drove up to his house. I think I had told his wife that I would be visiting. He was waiting for me and I walked up, if you can picture that, anything more pathetic, with my Bible under my arm and I got to the door and I rang the bell or knocked and the door burst open and there was this man quivering with rage. And he said, how dare you come and speak these things on the Sabbath? Something like that. I can't remember now what my answer was. Something like, since when is it a violation to speak about the things of God on his day? And the next thing I remember is, crash! And the door came right up to my Jewish nose. But the outrage and the offense, you need to understand and he acknowledges that he's anti-Christian. He's written books about it. yet there's something about the magnitude of the Holocaust that even eclipses conventional anti-Christian bias. It's something like what I experienced as a Jewish atheist coming to Germany, where I never wanted to go. I'd rather have gone to Korea at that time. But because of the fluke and the caprice of life they drew from that company of GIs, the middle of the alphabet maybe a dozen men out of a whole company went to Germany, the rest went to Korea and because my name began with K I was among those who were sent to Germany and I went bucking. I hated Germans. I was going to dig my heels into the ground. But once I got there, Esslingen, the beauty of the country, the language, something about the culture, antiquity, the identification, I understood their Jewish soul and you understand that the Germany of 1952 is not the Germany of today. In Munich today, they have a place where the kids go skiing and I've seen them on the U-Bahn, the subways with their beautiful ski outfits and handsome ski poles and all the equipment, wealthy kids that make our lifestyle look like third country poor cousins and they're going to ski on the Teufelbergen Devil's Mountain You know what that was when I was there in 1952? It was the rubble of the devastation and the bombings of Munich that were so heaped up that it's today called Teufelberger the mountains, the devil's mountains, and they ski on it. But when I was there in 1952, out of the depths and the darkness of it came prostitutes, servicing the G.I.s in Germany in ways that I would be embarrassed to describe to you, that the German nation doesn't even want to remember when a chocolate bar could get you anything. There were forms of sex taking place through the iron mesh gate of our barracks and onto the street for an exchange of a chocolate bar or a stick of chewing gum by nice middle class German girls who today are mothers of children and have blotted out from their memory those painful times. What I'm saying is this I saw a Germany that was broken that was reduced to rubble and what an opportunity then if someone had come preaching the gospel of repentance and showing them that in the light of the holocaust what that thing meant for their own nation. Let me share this the reason that the holocaust the holocaustal tremendum has and will continue to have for generations to come a decisive place in Jewish experience and thought is that it ended once and for all the terrestrial expectations of social assimilation and cultural accommodation. There is Jews hope that they would be integrated into general society. All dreams of the project of enlightenment and emancipation the surge of moralist progressivism which dominated the liberal strain of European Judaism that the holocaust has devastated all that. Beyond the holocaust the only liberalism possible is one script of all religious and theological content optimism which is not hope progressivism which is not realistic and liberalism which is not realism are attitudinal doctrines which conceal an ideology that has made frequent pretense to being a metaphysic an ideology invested with piety liberalism and its radicalization Marxism may well be the fallen messianism of the Jews this is a remarkable statement I can't imagine that you could understand it being read to you but it's as honest and as searching an appraisal of what the holocaust has meant for traditional Jewish thought as anything I have ever read. The only thing that makes it doubly tragic is that he's wrong Humpty Dumpty had a great fall and somehow the king's men put Humpty Dumpty back together again all the kings thank you for the complete statement could not well what the king's men could not do, we Jews have done namely that we're back again on the old trolley car we're still back again on liberalism still believing in the innate perfectibility of man and progressive hope for mankind I mean it's remarkable, what does it take? I don't know when this book was published 1970 he gave this as a series of lectures but here we are 1992 and as if nothing has happened Jews are back again saying the same things, believing the same things and entertaining the same false hopes as existed before the tremendum. The thing that God calculated has now lost its import and I can't think of anything as tragic as that he says that overturning thereby all the metaphysical structures including God the familiar secular inversion of Jewish utopian hope liberalism is predicated upon assumptions regarding the nature of man his educable potentiality which the tremendum destroyed remember we talked about education yesterday there's a belief of Jews about education you know who are like that? the Asians it's remarkable how when I went to the UCLA campus, my old alma mater or Berkeley, visibly there are as many or more Asian students than there are Caucasian and they're taking all the honors there's an intensity of effort in their scholarship that makes the American student look like a lazy, shiftless get-by and that's true but that has always been true of Jewish life. Education that whatever it is you struggle, that your children should have an education and indeed many of the women and widows that are related to my mother there in West Palm Beach told me how they struggled to get their sons through school who today are doctors, lawyers, teachers and educators themselves so he's saying that the Holocaust has destroyed these assumptions regarding the nature of man and his educable potentiality before the Tremendum Jews could not have imagined that a people could produce that a people could produce high cultural achievement and surrender to a politics of monstrosity they could not have imagined it and that's why still there's such a hurt against Germany such a feeling toward the German not only because you did us in physically but you destroyed our hope we thought you were a picture and a model of what would be the answer in civilization you were the supremely educated one and now you became the monstrous one and if that's true of you in what then can we hope maybe we're quicker to forgive someone who murders us than someone who murders our hope because if a man is deprived of his hope, where then is he a man so there's such remarkable undertones and currents in all this that exist still to this time and I'm sure that he's churned up, he himself is a Jew of that kind who is groomed to respect civilization, the world of ideas, the hope of mankind education, liberalism change in politics the world would get better and better until it would be the messianic age brought by the effort of men now what happens when his foundations collapse and it came down with great suddenness had the holocaust taken place in Africa or some other unbenighted place in the world there would not have been the trauma but that it took place in and with and through Germany is a staggering statement that Jews have not been able to live down it's interesting what you brought out about that expectation of the messianic age that you brought in with that mentality is almost identical to the mentality of much of the church today how do you mean, Jim? well in the sense that we're going to bring in we're going to present this lovely kingdom to the Lord when it returns we've got to wait a straight society out it's this fatalistic optimism which is totally an exception to how much the church is affected with its whole kingdom now, theology and reconstruction and the whole thing good I just got a flash of how the Lord is setting us up, even now for what's going to come later because somewhere before this time ends we're going to talk about the prophetic calling and I'm going to review with you an article that I've written and one of the things I say about the function of a prophet is to destroy false hope and what was God's statement to Jeremiah pluck up, root out, tear down and destroy and then plant and build our first function is to eradicate the things that are false and whoo there'll be a screech and a holler isn't it remarkable how people will clutch their rags rather than to receive the free gift of the righteousness of God in Christ how they will continue in their illusions can you understand what the issue is for my mother eighty-seven years old who has passed through five husbands and whose entire life I would say with all respect is essentially a lie a mirage a self-deception a persuading of herself of things that are not true that enables her to reconcile herself to her daily existence that the issue of Jesus is not just the issue of Jesus it's the issue of truth in most parts and it brings such a colossal confrontation in one fell swoop with all that is false that you have to say my whole life till now has been a lie that everything to which I have given myself has been a false pursuit who has the courage to make that kind of acknowledgement that even when God's appointed believers see him as he is, they cry out I'm undone I'm a man of unclean lips and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips the same one who has been saying woe unto you who have built house to house and have done this and done that when he sees the Lord he says woe unto me so that's the prince of the prophets Isaiah, what will it be for Mrs. Esther Cullen and other typical Jewish people whose life has been a colossal lie and every Friday confirms it and deepens it it's another visit to the synagogue it's another religious cultural exposure it's another false elevation of something that is only skin deep that doesn't even purport to use the scripture or really examine it and make an application to one's life what is the great lie? the crucifixion of Jesus himself the holocaust against the son of man which we ourselves have invoked because we preferred Barabbas and we have swallowed that lie down you know once you insert a lie at the foundation of your life somewhere it's got to surface and erupt and take its toll I'll give you an example out of my experience should I tell you where it took place? well I'll just describe it and I'll leave it to you to name it in California very close to Disneyland a very widely known charismatic work and I had been invited in a previous visit to California I met the pastor in the parking lot who very much bore the resemblance to Katherine Kuhlman and in fact I think he probably saw himself as her successor and began very much to imitate and emulate her. Have you been waiting for me? and that kind of thing people were falling under the spirit well he accosted me in the parking lot and said we would have you to speak for us cats and I'll assure you of a $500 honorarium when I heard that I turned around and I ran the other way and I didn't want to go anywhere near that place. Well as it happened I was coming back from an overseas trip and was invited to be a guest at the 700 club and he was on the same program and there we were in the dressing room being made up for the television appearance and we got into a conversation again and he said when are you coming to California? I said well the fact of the matter is I'll be on my way to California from here and I said well praise God I've got my whole schedule is filled there's no way that I can he said do you have any free day? I said no I'm thoroughly booked. I said the only day I have off is Thursday. Oh he said we have a special meeting I went and as I prepared myself that day the Lord gave me a message on truth and I spoke at that night and I remember saying this there comes a moment of truth for every minister and every congregation and if we miss that moment and do not defer to truth that point will haunt us all of the subsequent days that are ours. I had hardly finished the statement when he cried out from the platform don't harass the sheep don't beat the sheep he said preach the gospel and I turned like huh I thought that's what I was doing and finally I was allowed to finish under pressure and then I gave an invitation and the remarkable thing is people came to the altar like flies broken and weeping and after all that was a man came across the room and he gave me his card he said I'm from South Africa Artie said I want to let you know I'm standing with you in this moment no sooner had he said that than this man began to say to the congregation let's pray for this man meaning me poor pitiable object he's evidently missed it and there's something wrong with him and his inner life that has taken this turn and went on like that. Afterwards I was invited into his office and sat before him and three of his colleagues and was roasted and up one side and down the other. How did I dare speak like that knowing that that congregation had people that were newly saved or young in the faith I said my dear brother I don't know that and I don't want to know that and I don't need to know that. My remarks are not predicated on what I see I don't tailor my remarks to be appropriate I speak the word that I believe that God has given me when I sought him and I believe that that word was the issue of truth you know what happened to that congregation not long after fornication had been going on embezzlement of funds. Interestingly on his door was a man of the year award given by the B'nai B'rith this almost sounds like a movie scenario. Did somebody write this or did it actually take place what made me share that something about truth what was the point? prophetic the first function of a prophet before he builds or plants is to uproot, to pull down and to destroy and often it takes place merely in his fidelity to God and he's not even aware of the destruction that he's bringing so brace yourself because we can see if this is what is going on in Judaism what about those that are playing footsie with this Jewish establishment in the liberal Christian camp and in fact increasingly in the charismatic camp. I've got a little sneaky suspicion that when the smoke clears this ecumenical religious world order will include this kind of Judaism and charismatic Christianity as well as liberal Christianity because they're already talking about let's omit the kinds of issues that have up till now historically divided us and let's find a basis for consensus and agreement that we can cooperate together because the world needs God and we all believe in the one God and we all share the monotheistic faith blah blah blah blah it's taking place but I tell you I have more hope for a man like this who's gutty, honest and will say what needs to be said but has not yet been brought to the right conclusion but he has experienced the devastation to his categories that God intended the liberalism of the Jews that analogical rendering of the message of the prophets undid their judgment of the real for having mellowed their theology into social optimism whoo brother I have not read an acknowledgement like that from anyone what is he saying that we have been guilty as Jews of misreading the prophets I'll give you an example excuse me for all these anecdotal insertions but I think this is one of the reasons why we're having this school there's a wealth in me that God has implanted and seen to my experience that would be a pity to confine to me and not share with others right here in Minneapolis St. Paul there was a ecumenical conference of Jews and Christians that took place while I was a student at the seminary so by virtue of that I sat in it and I was astonished by one of the talks given by an orthodox Jew with a yarmulke on his head and bearded the classic orthodox Jew on the prophets and I really leaned forward to hear this one and when I heard what came I almost fell out of my seat Karl Marx you said was a prophet Sigmund Freud was a prophet and that they were in the finest tradition of the prophetic stream because the prophets have always campaigned for social justice and righteousness at the social political level and I puked and the first opportunity I got hold of him, I got hold of him by the scruff of the neck I said my dear brother how can you equate Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the substance of their concern was not some picayune political social level it was the issue of relationship with God and it was the failure of that relationship that was reflected in the injustice that men perpetrated to their brothers you have a complete misreading and you're orthodox what a statement that was and Arthur Cohen is not letting them get away with it the liberalism of the Jews the analogical rendering of the message of the prophets as an analogy undid their judgment of the real it left us naive and unprepared to recognize the reality of evil because our liberal ideology compelled us to see all men as good and perfectible instead of saying there's no man good no not one, we would have said every man is good, yes everyone even Hitler maybe until such evil came from those whom we applauded as the most commendable culture and civilization that we were not prepared for the shock of it or rightly to be able to interpret it or to flee from it in time one of the things that's going to be a key to the escape of many Jews in the last days holocaust that is coming is the experience of their fathers in Germany before them who when the dark clouds of demonic Nazism came over that nation and these gutter snipes and homosexuals and scum at the lowest what's the word the lowest strata of society became elevated to become the leaders of society they thought this is too ridiculous these guys won't last a day they lasted long enough to bring the nation to destruction and almost the whole world with them they could not recognize in the dark clouds the evil that would soon make them to go up as smoke because they said this shall not come upon us and this too shall pass why? because that's the optimism that he's talking about optimism is a form of humanism that is not predicated upon reality it's a wishful thinking that has at its heart an egoistic self-validation of yourself that you can't be a victim you're too good this can't come against you I mean after all your father Heinrich served the Kaiser and his grandfather before him Frederick the Great and we wrote this book and composed this and we're related to the Mendelssohn family and we've been in Jewish banking and finance and art and culture and patrons of the arts for centuries this can't come upon us but when it came it didn't matter whether you were distinguished or you were nobody in fact if you were 164th Jew you went up in the smokestack if you had a great grandfather that was Jewish you were a goner they made no distinction whatever they were utterly ruthless because there was a judgment to be fulfilled and God knew who to finger to perform it so you would think that having gone through that that we would be devastated in our optimism and that our frail categories and naivete about human perfectibility and the significance of education would be dealt a death blow but what did I hand out yesterday about building this Holocaust museum the same hokey confidence again that somehow by programs of education and conferences and museums and telling the Gentile world what we suffered will keep us from a repeat performance through education because it's unwilling to recognize the root evil in the world namely the deceitfulness of the human heart itself the corruption the Adamic corruption of all mankind until we have to realize it not only in being the victim of it but are you ready for this the perpetrators of this if being the victim of evil was not enough to bring us awake to reality and to God maybe being the perpetrator of evil will did you get that and that's why God has set a stage coming out of the Holocaust the adoption of the state of Israel which would never have taken place without the Holocaust as a homeland for Jews who had been cast out of their European places and then by virtue of the Arab presence within that nation being a slow boil an antagonism a burr under the saddle from the first and finally breaking out after 40 years into an intifada and an explosion of unrest that needs to be contained and suppressed by threat intimidation and violence I know because Inger and I go to the West Bank and Arab Christian orphanages and the Episcopal pastor there who himself has been harassed and interrogated and threatened he said you know he said the Israeli troops combined we have percussion bombs I said what he says things that explode merely to shake the buildings it's not used to bring fragments or to injure but to terrify that there's a program not only of suppression but even one calculated to encourage Arabs to leave Israel and that Jews who have always been a minority and a stranger in other lands and have an explicit statement of how to treat the stranger in your midst that goes back to the time of Moses find themselves in the necessity of defense and the perpetuation of their state acting in a way contrary to the requirement of God and in a way like the nations before them and finally maybe before the thing ends like the Nazi nation before them it's interesting that a lot of the cartoons of a political kind that have described Israel in its harsh treatment of Arabs show them with swastikas and cracking the whips very much in the shadow of what they had experienced themselves so let me just sum that statement up if we'll not learn as being the victims of evil that our categories are defunct and imaginary false, pretentious and God rejecting maybe we'll learn by being the perpetrators how many of us are saved because of that it took that to bring us to the place of God when we found him in prison or in broken marriage or in other failures when we've done things that we could never have imagined ourselves capable and only by that recognized how greatly we need God and maybe that's why we're having our present failings because we don't know him as we ought just to consider what God has done historically and will yet do in order to achieve that what is the depth and the power of these lofty speculations that are raised up against the knowledge of God and you know what makes them all the more powerful? they're raised up ostensibly in the name of God it's called religion it's called conventional wisdom it's called humanitarianism it has every kind of honorific designation that purportedly advances the purposes of mankind but it's raised up against God Reggie mentioned that this is not the final tremendum however devastating that was, there's yet one to come, Reggie you want to quote that scripture about the world has that day is great so that none is like it it is even the type of death of trouble which shall be saved out of it if he was not saved out of this none like it what Fred was bringing out I thought was appropriate was that here a word had been coined such a rare word for an event that a real tremendum being future and then to consider what is really a tremendum for us is that something else so great as to eclipse what we're now discussing will be required what does it take why has God surrendered this people to such an intractable another even greater that for us is the tremendous and if these days had not been shortened no flesh would survive and if it were not for the elect's sake these days would not be shortened which implies that the elect implying the church I think as well as those that will be saved out of Israel will be in the earth and in fact when Reggie reminded me of this I said I wonder how many believers we are scheduled to be alive at that time how many of the church will be able to bear such an hour have the moral stamina and the understanding to bear it to know that it's coming from God's hand because they see it in the context of what has already historically preceded it and realize even from what we're discussing today that it did not succeed in it's intention that men have put Humpty Dumpty back together again they're still talking humanistically they're still being optimistic they still have their liberal pretensions, they still have their lofty imaginations they still believe in the power of education and human perfectibility and that prejudice can be met by education and classes and teaching while ominously and increasingly the rumbling from the underground of the skinheads and the neo-nazis and the vicious ethnic hatreds billing up and becoming more and more vicious until one day it will be the class that is in charge of society even as it was true of the Nazi time, that the dregs of society became it's leaders I think I mentioned somewhere, maybe not to you that I'm frightened when I look at 9, 10 and 11 year old kids today there's no innocence there's a hardness, they've already seen 20,000 murders and how many rapes and other kinds of vicious things there's a calculated hardness about them they're being groomed to be that generation that is without natural affection so may God give us a preparation and brace us for those days oh, thank you yeah I mentioned this yesterday to Peter everybody knows that one of the strange phenomena of our time are the children that are missing off the streets abducted children we never heard of this we never heard of having milk cartons where the faces and data of missing children are listed and this is increasing and not long ago our pastor in St. Cloud went to the local supermarket and there he found leaflets and flyers that had been left behind and were circulating about with big bold words at the top where are our missing children? or where have our missing children gone? who is abducting our children? and then the answer goes on to say Jews who are again using gentile children to take their blood and to employ that in the making of matzah and other ceremonial purposes really? right three hours south of here so there's such an ominous sense of forces already working brewing to bring about the kind of thing that scripture says will take place just last year one of the major denominational churches in Bemidji a man came and held a bible seminar at the end of his seminar he went into a tirade against the Jewish people that they are the cause of the same Nazi mentality that existed 50 years ago through this supposedly evangelical Christian brother and he took it and they sucked it in and no one protested against it they just went right into the whole congregation a congregation of about 1200 people remarkable so we're talking about false dreams, ideologies optimistic hopes for mankind that are not rooted in reality, in fact because they're entirely outside the scriptural context it refuses to yield and to submit to what the word of God says is the human condition and therefore it leaves itself wide open not only to disappointment but to devastation that come from men from whom we had hoped better things before the tremendous Jews could not have imagined that a people could produce high cultural achievement and surrender to a politics of monstrosity and maybe they can't imagine that and that has happened once that the world could have not been instructed by it and could do it again it's not from our dreams and nightmares that our optimistic fantasies of the world derive but rather from our daylight wishes that we misconstrue history and its course I can't help but admire this guy and love him and in fact before we conclude today we need to pray for him, I don't know where he is he's no longer at that university I hope he's still alive but that the Lord will reach out to this man it's a real anguish tortured soul deeply struggling over the issues of truth turned off against Christianity and maybe for good reason in the kind of forms of it that he had known or seen and yet a candidate for God because of his earnestness for truth I like to say that about Saul of Tarsus that there's more hope for a man breathing murderings against the church and persecuting it who is vehement in his opposition because of a misconstrued sense of truth than there is for those who are bland and passive and nonchalant and have not that passion and are supposedly in the truth more hope for such enemies than there are for those who purport to be God's friends more hope for men like this than that countless tens of thousands that sit in pews and nod and say amen and have never disturbed themselves to really lay hold of a faith that will cost them anything so I like that last line so daylight wishes by which we misconstrue history and its course is a willful deception like my brother with that Joe Lewis fight in that one fleeting moment where Lewis poured at his opponent just like a pathetic straw doll that was being ravaged by Rocky Marciano my brother leaped to his feet and he said that's it, he's got him, he's got him what? got what? he wanted so much to see his ancient hero save the day that the faintest little effort at self-defense was misconstrued by him as being the turning around of the fight it actually distorted and warped the reality that was seen and that's we who have prophetic calling need to be utterly free from such warp utterly free from wishful thinking of how we would like it to be but we must see something steady we must see it clear and we must see it as it is, which is to say as God himself sees it and that takes a moral stamina that is no small thing and when we talked about Ezekiel 37 it doesn't begin with the prophet prophesying, it begins with him going down coming out and down by the hand of God into the place of depression, the valley and being moved around to see the bones exactly as God sees it and only from that place can any prophetic speaking take place so what does it mean when, again when we have to confront the dreamers the wishful thinkers who want to perpetuate their establishments their institutions, their Judaism their Christianity, their vested interests there's nothing more threatening than the prophetic personality and that's why we're not invited we're not welcomed and if we get in, we get in through a back door I don't know how many times I've gotten in because I'm Jewish and they thought, oh how cute a Jewish speaker oh this will be a ball he'll tell us about Christ in the Passover instead what God does is flay them alive too late, I snuck in so the Lord will get us where he wants us okay here's a beautiful statement of why the Holocaust was so traumatic in its impact beyond even the issue of the loss of life the crushing of these false hopes and so much that was centered in the brilliance of German civilization he talks about previous disasters in Jewish life Babylon the murderous enmity of Babylon or Imperial Rome the paranoid vulnerability of Christian princes the Cossacks of Russia from all these exterior authorities to whom Jews had no loyalty or obligation it was no surprise that terror would arise there have always been persecutions but usually mobs out of control rarely if ever something actually organized by the state this is what makes the Holocaust so distinctively different hence the incredible willingness with which Jewry assimilated the disaster of its depredations and interpreted it as being the statement of its sin but he says the Holocaust is altogether different, it can no longer be that kind of interpretation because this is a category all by itself but that the tremendous should derive its power and authentication from the secular state, from societies of high culture and reputed civilization from the descendants of the era of its own emancipation namely in Germany, the German Jews were among the first to come out of the ghetto in whom Jewry had reposed trust and faith is and remains astonishing we can't get over it it's one thing to have suffered under the Cossacks and mobs that have risen up as they did in Strasbourg and there was a massacre of Jews in that city in the 17th century the 18th century whenever it was but they were never state engineered they were always mobs out of control or inflamed by one thing or another but that the tremendous should derive its power and authentication from the secular state from societies of high culture and reputed civilization from the descendants of the era of its own emancipation in whom Jewry had reposed trust and faith is and remains astonishing the tremendous is ultimate we need to have this sense of why it is so great a devastation not physically only but morally philosophically and ideologically the destruction of hope he says it produces a world stripped of divinity it is not only ultimate but final despair transforming pessimism into a normative decree you guys ever hear the word nihilism nihilism made its appearance with nazism nazism rose out of nihilism and nihilism I think has a latin root but it derives from the word of negation that when all hope is gone when a man knows nothing but despair he becomes a candidate for horror, brutality and violence in no other way we need to recognize as the world moves increasingly to hopelessness and nihilism is again coming forth is a kind of a desperation born out of despair that makes a man capable of acts that are so bestial, so barbaric so bereft of any humane consideration that will be a key to the understanding of why the last days will eclipse every previous time that nothing like it has ever gone on in the world before N-I-H I-L-I-S-M nihilism from a world stripped of divinity, does it mean that God is gone? God is the same yesterday, today, forever but the thought of God as men were pleased to hold it as it served their purposes is gone, that God can no longer be, that God has to be dead but if no other God has come along to replace him, where then is hope? You see the kind of crisis that mankind is in since the Holocaust? Either we're going to break through as he himself is sensing to another new perception that's what he's crying for, a new vocabulary a new reality, or we're going to sink into a despair that unleashes in the world such unbelievable hatred that shows the ugliest side of mankind that history has ever known the issue of God and I'm grateful for this is becoming in the last days the issue front center, right on the stage no longer a Sunday matter it's life or death, the issue of God is crisis and if the church does not know him as he is and has only a truncated modified, socially acceptable definition where the words are sawdust in its mouth and goes through the emotions of amen and hallelujah and cannot persuade itself, let alone anyone else for what can the world hope? There's a great crying need for a world that is moving toward despair as everything breaks down and collapses is the knowledge that there is a God and that he's a God who is coming and that we need to make our peace with him as he in fact is and that he wants to be known so desperately that he does not think it extravagant to demolish our every category by shaking everything that can be shaken that only that which can remain will remain and this is the context of our life in the last days he's not slack concerning his promises that the day of the Lord will come but he would not that any should perish, perish does not mean dying perish means eternal separation from God I went to God that I had lived in an earlier time an age of innocence and I could have listened to Brahms and Beethoven and read my books and preached a little bit now and then but that's what I'm temperamentally suited for but that's not what I'm called for that's not what we are called for we're called to live out our life in a last days context that is going to be the shaking and the breaking of everything that cannot remain painful and how did Jesus introduce his messianic ministry quoting from Isaiah the spirit of the Lord is upon me for he hath anointed me to heal the broken hearted the very first statement of the messianic call to heal to heal the broken hearted to give sight to the blind to open prison doors to set the captives free and then he closed the book and sat down and he said and this day these scriptures are fulfilled in your hearing that was the advent of the messianic ministry and that will be its conclusion and our first function is to heal the broken hearted Jews who are going to be absolutely devastated their world has collapsed they've been totally uprooted they've been shaken everything that they have saved and collected and the steam ripped from them they're going to watch their relatives and their children shot down and cut down right before their eyes if that's what happened in the first holocaust what will be in the last if the last one is