In this sermon, the speaker addresses the presence of prominent Jewish figures like Spielberg, Katzenberg, and the head of Time Warner Corporation in South Carolina districts. The speaker suggests that their presence is a result of God's fury being poured out, leading them to come to these rural areas. The speaker emphasizes that in the wilderness of the nations, God will meet with them and reason with them, bringing them into the bond of their covenant. The sermon also highlights the importance of responding to the least of God's brethren in their time of need, as it reveals our true identity in God. The speaker concludes by stating that if Israel is required to drink again, it will indicate that the described events are yet to come in the future.

Not to be able to get out of my spirit is Isaiah 53, and I have been among the most jealous to defend it from the supposition that this does not speak of Jesus so much as it speaks of Israel itself, that the nation has suffered and has been a suffering servant and is God's atoning servant people. And I used to say, well, that's Jews unwilling to see the Christological, the clear reference to Jesus because it's not spoken in the synagogue. Do you know that? There's a Torah selection every Shabbat and a Haftorah selection. Haftorah is that selection from the prophets that is devised by rabbinical councils to be appropriate to the five books of Moses. And so there's a point in the calendar year in which they will come to Isaiah 52, 12. And the next week they pick up again with Isaiah 54. My mother was astonished to stumble. Pray for her. I'm going to her after Savannah, Georgia, 94 year old Jewish mother, classic, stubborn, unbelieving fingers in her ears, 35 years of son transformed before her eyes. It's not enough. But when she stumbled on this first, she said, where is this in the New Testament? And when I showed her where it is, then she said, I've never heard this in the synagogue. I said, you never will. It's omitted because the Christological evidence is so apparent of a suffering servant without sin. But I want to share this with you this morning in the way that the Jewish community likes to consider it in order to exclude Jesus and to see themselves historically as a suffering servant nation. And I want to say that there's a validity to that, but not so much for what we have already experienced in the past as a nation that has suffered, but what we are yet to experience, that this is indeed the climax of our history before the Lord's coming and our own redemption, that Israel is going to suffer and have to walk a road to Calvary akin to that by which its Lord suffered before them. And in the walking of it, not the least of the things that will be affected is the revelation and the recognition of the Jesus who has been rejected because it takes one to know one. Something happens when you are brought to an approximation of the same conditions by which Jesus suffered to begin to realize that him whom we have rejected for the very reasons that we are now being rejected opens up a way of perceiving him that we have up till now discarded. You know that the Jewish community is very incensed about what it calls revisionism and that is that school of thought that relegates the Holocaust as non-event, that it did not take place in history or that the Jewish estimation of six million is greatly exaggerated or at the worst it was something that Jews even promoted in order to facilitate the acquisition of the state of Israel. This is called revisionism. Revisionism is reading something out of history as a non-event. You know what the irony is? That is exactly what we have done with Jesus and his crucifixion. We have made it a non-event and I can't tell you what we have lost by that or what we have suffered for the rejection of the event of the crucifixion, the death, the resurrection and the ascension of Jesus is the foremost penetration of God in time and place in history. To see that only as a moment's historical mishap that this was some kind of a guy who ran afoul of the political authorities and he got caught at it and had to suffer a criminal's death is to miss something of uttermost significance. I don't have the time to develop this but just to make this statement that there is no greater revelation of God as God than Jesus crucified because that statement is the statement of God's hatred of sin, it's the statement of God's righteous answer to sin, it's the statement of God's mercy willing to be a sin bearer. To omit Christ crucified is to omit and to forfeit the greatest single revelation of God as God and that's what we have suffered for. It's not only a revelation of God as God, it's a revelation of man as man. Jesus suffered as a man on the cross for the sin of man and when we see that debacle, that holocaust of Jesus, there are two great holocausts, Jesus on the cross and Jewry in the Nazi time and there's a remarkable tandem of connection of the two events which my book develops and you need to see and understand. You can almost say that because of the forfeiture of the holocaust of Jesus at Calvary, the holocaust of the Nazi time was made an inevitability. When Jesus wept, that's what he wept about. He knew that the rejection of himself and of himself crucified was going to set in motion a series of consequences for a world Jewry through judgment, through exile, through diasporic being cast into the nations and the anti-Semitism that would necessarily follow and the final consequence in modern times, a holocaust after many other serious times of judgment and devastation before. The rejection of Christ crucified is the most significant loss to the world and to Jewry that can be cited. All the more when it's not just a man on the cross, but it's God crucified. Well, more than can be talked about here, but if you want to get into this, there's a book by that title, The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann, German theologian. I first discovered it in the pastor's office in Germany. I don't know how many years ago, 25, when my pants were ripped and his German mother-in-law was sewing up my pants and I was sitting in my DVDs in his office looking at his bookcase. If you invite me to your home, that's the first place I go is to your bookcase that has more to say than anything else. And as I'm surveying the titles, my eye rested on The Crucified God. When I saw that title, I said in my heart, I'm not leaving this house without that book. Whatever it takes, I am not leaving without that book. If I've got to trample and stamp over this man, break through the windows, I'm not leaving without that book. And I didn't. I later on supplied him another copy. That book is devastating and it needs to come into our deepest consciousness. Jesus crucified is God crucified. It's an ultimate statement of God, both in judgment and in mercy. And Israel is scheduled for its own crucifixion. It will itself have to tread the same road to Calvary. Its death will not be an atonement for mankind, but it will have consequence both for itself as a nation and for the nations. The issue of Israel redeemed is the issue of the nations. So my problem is time. I'm just getting warmed up to my task. But at your own leisure, will you look at Isaiah 51, 52 and see the apocalyptic depth, devastating things that are described there. For example, in 51, verse 17, rouse yourself, rouse yourself, stand up O Jerusalem, you who have drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs the bowl of staggering. This is future saints, but it's not distant. What is going to fall upon the nation Israel and Jews worldwide is going to be calamitous, but it's not some inadvertent thing that happens of itself. It is explicitly and clearly the wrath and judgment of God. God is not arbitrary. He doesn't pull the wings from flies. His judgments, the devastations are judgment and wrath for sin. Not only for our present sin, but the sin that remains throughout all ages, which we have never acknowledged, which are the sins of our fathers, which are our own until we repent of their failure and their mistake. We inherit that sin. God is very patient, but there comes a time when his patience is exhausted and he calls for a judgment in proportion to our sins. This is, we need seminars of seminars to begin to develop all this. A lot of it is in the Holocaust book. What the meaning is of covenant, even for contemporary Jews who have no covenantal consciousness does not absolve them of covenantal obligation. We're under curse or blessing as Jews who have covenanted with God for all generations and our ignorance or our indifference to covenant does not absolve us from its conditions and its requirement. There's a sort of Damocles that hangs over the head of world Jewry in the judgment that God can perpetrate at any time and the scene is being set, the scenario with our present enemies that encircle us and the present enemies that are within us will have their day in which they will not only be able to defeat Israel, but to rub our faces in the humiliation of their defeat because God has seen to it that there's something unique about the Arab Islamic mentality that delights in solochis, that's the Yiddish word for spite. It's not enough to defeat, but defeat requires a humiliation. So listen to this in Isaiah 51 where God already tells us that we're going to drink at the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath and that these two things will befall us in verse 19, devastation and destruction, famine and sword, who will comfort you? Your children have fainted, they lie at the head of every street like an antelope in a net, they are full of the wrath of the Lord, the rebuke of your God. I guess you know that though something is spoken in the past tense prophetically does not mean that it's something being described that has taken place because the prophets have the unique ability to see something so vividly as if it's already enacted. They're writing of it in the past tense, but it's yet something future. So think of it in that way and you'll not be grieving God or being in error. Can you picture this? Your sons have fainted and lie at the head of every street like an antelope in a net. The vaunted IDF, what is that? Israel Defense Force, the number one military power of the Middle East is going to lie like an antelope in a net in frustration and defeat in the sudden and overwhelming devastation that will come to it through its enemies. And it's the wrath of the Lord and the rebuke of your God because your army cannot save you. The flesh of your arm cannot save you. Your military prowess cannot save you. Your atomic arsenal cannot save you. Your technical genius cannot save you. Only one can save you. It's the same God who brings the judgment. And when you acknowledge that what you're experiencing is the hand of God and is the cup of his wrath and is judgment that is deserved not only for past but for present sin, you're halfway home. To dismiss it as aberration or Hitler or the PLO or Arafat is to miss God. It's as if to say God is not God. God is not sovereign. It's as if to say that we cannot distinguish between the rod of his chastisement and the God himself who chastises. Understand that? The PLO and Arafat and the Arab nations are not the cause of the judgment, they are only the instrumentality. And Israel will not be to the nations the blessing that it must and ought in the fulfillment of God's word to Abraham until it can recognize God as God who is sovereign in his judgment if we are then also to experience his mercy. Why does Israel have to go through this more so than any other? Because we're chosen. We're appointed to bless the families of the earth and not just to cajole the families of the earth or to make nice but to instruct them in the knowledge of God in severity and in goodness because there's no knowledge that can be communicated that is not first experience. Israel is on a collision course because of its millennial destiny and calling. If it were like any other nation, it would be spared. But because of its calling and in proportion to its calling and the covenant of God who has elected this nation over all nations and made them peculiar and special to himself and calls them his inheritance and his treasure, they are therefore required to receive at the hand of God his chastisement and his wrath and his fury. That's why they're coming to you. In Ezekiel 20, with a fury poured out, God says, I will rule over you. Remember the last official statement of the nation? We will not have this man to rule over us. Oh yeah? See what that's going to cost you for 2,000 years. But if I don't rule over you, neither shall I rule over the nations because you are central to all nations. And with a fury poured out, I will rule over you because it's a fury that will be required in order for me to do so. That fury called the time of Jacob's trouble will compel Jews to be rooted up and out of their present places of affluence, comfort, security that they have obtained in the world and even in this nation. Brace yourselves. Spielberg, Steven and Katzenberg and the Dream Factory, the multimillion dollar film agency and the head of Time Warner Corporation. What's his name? I mean, Jews of prominence will be coming down the back roads of your South Carolina districts because God's fury has been poured out. I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations face to face with a fury poured out because how else would you have come to these back road rural districts of America and the nations except you were compelled by a fury poured out to do so. But there I will meet with you and reason with you and plead with you and there you will come into the bond of your covenant and under the rod of my authority that the redeemed of the Lord shall return to Zion with everlasting joy upon their heads and mourning and sighing fleeing away. You know how often we have some of this charismatic, oh wake up Israel, and we sing it about ourselves as if we're the ones. I thought, well what mourning or sighing are we experiencing or will we experience? It's Israel's distinctive future. It's a mourning and a sighing that precedes an everlasting glory. Their last historical experience is judgment, turbulence, catastrophe, uprooting throughout the nations and in the world, the time of Jacob's trouble and it's at the door. Not one Jew will survive it, though the majority of Jews will not survive it and only a remnant will be saved out of it. But there would not even be a remnant saved except for your sake because by your mercy they shall obtain mercy or there will be no mercy at all. How central the church is, but a church of what kind? A church capable of extending mercy that they might obtain mercy at a time when to extend it will imperil your own life. You know what I feel like? I feel like some kind of freak who might have come to Germany in say 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, and began to warn the church that circumstances are already afoot, already being released that will eventuate in the systematic annihilation of European Jewry through your nation and that you're called as a church to stand for and be an identification with this hated and despised people. You imagine how such a word would have gone over to a people who have believed that this was the best of all possible worlds, who had no sense of judgment or the imminence of devastation or of anything that has to do with end times? It's a church without an eschatology. And to be a church without an eschatology, without an expectation of an end, is not to be the church. It's only a society that has predictable services on a regular schedule and mediates some modicum of blessing to those who come. A church without an eschatology is not apostolic. It's an oxymoron, it's a contradiction in terms. The church that's the church knows that there's an end, and that we are presently moving toward that end, and that that end makes radical requirement of us as the church that only can be fulfilled as a church and not as the collection of individualities who gather together for a service. That is the church as a real corporate and integral body to understand its call and give themselves to it as the foremost purpose for their being. Does that describe you today? It better describe you or you're going to find yourself apostate. And why will you come to that? Not because you would have freely chosen it, because it's full of sacrifice, it's full of the cross, it's full of suffering, just to become a church like that. But you have no alternative for Israel's sake. The crisis of Israel will compel the church to become the church or to be apostate, and there'll be no neutral ground. So God says, I'll take from your hand a cup of staggering and verse 22, you shall drink no more from the bowl of my wrath. How can we tell if this is not some description of something past? All we need to have is more violence for Israel, because here it says no more. You'll no more drink. If Israel shall yet be required to drink, then we'll know that what's being described here is that which is of its yet future and imminent experience. But if we're giving Israel a false confidence that says, all this is past, this will not come again, you have finally been established in your land, and though you have some problems, they will be resolved, you need not fear any drastic future, is in my opinion false comfort, contrary to the word of God. I will put it in the hand of your tormentors. Isn't that a juicy word? These are not arbitrary words, these are explicitly chosen words that imply that those who defeat you are not going to be satisfied merely with your defeat, but with your torment. We could not have understood these scriptures 10 or 15 years ago. You know how there needs to be a conjunction between events in the world and the prophetic scripture to quicken them, oh now I understand, now I can see this thing that is frothing and ready to boil over on the part of the Palestinians and the Arabs, this hatred against the Jew and against Israel, that will not be satisfied, will not be requited, unless they not only defeat Israel and push it out into the sea, which they've never removed from their PLO plank of, what do they call it, this was part of the Oslo Agreement, that they would take this out of their plank, out of their PLO code, the statement of pushing Israel out into the sea, they've never removed it, but they'll not be content with that, unless there's also a humiliation and a torment. Just in the same way that Jesus was not just executed, he was tormented, he was humiliated, he was dashed and broken to pieces, he was marred more than any man, there was something ventilated upon him that was more than just a requirement of the end of his life, it was the spite, the malicious, malevolent hatred of the powers of darkness against the Son of God, and it's exactly that same spite that will come upon Israel even in its unbelief. Why? Because it has a destiny that has to do with the theocratic rule of God over creation and over the nations, that only out of Jerusalem and out of Zion can come the word of the Lord and the rule of God. Isaiah chapter 2, out of Zion shall go forth the law and out of Jerusalem the word of the Lord to all nations. I don't know if I'm going to get into my text again, but these are foundational things that need to be expressed. You need to understand the issue of Israel, not in some sentimental way as a people who are finally given an opportunity for homeland after 2,000 years of diaspora, but Israel in the context of God's theocratic intention for the nations. Jews are not hated because they're unpleasant, though we certainly contribute. We're hated because we're appointed to be that nation restored to God out of whose capital city and holy hill of Zion the law of God will go forth to the nations that will establish the rule of God against the principalities and powers of the air who are presently the gods of this world. Do you understand that? I wouldn't blame you if you don't understand it. I'm just saying it by faith and we're putting it on tape that you can consider it the context of the last days. You'll not be able to understand the diabolical hatred and fury visited upon Jews unless you understand that the genius of the powers of darkness who are threatened by their restoration have only one answer for it out of their wisdom and that is annihilation. And the only thing that will save them from completing with it what began 50 years ago is you. In your identification with them, in the opening up of your attics and your basements, in the finding of rural properties, in your establishment of yourself as a community that can bear the influx and the weight of these deranged Jews who overnight have been stripped of everything and uprooted and cast out into the nations and have arrived at your doorstep. What a demand upon you. And if you're only going to say well I guess I've got to, I have a religious obligation, you will have missed a historic moment. They've got to see something in you more than religious obligation. They've got to see a joy that you count it all privilege despite the risk entailed in taking them in, in a nation that has become Nazi in its anti-Christ spirit against the Jew. Can you believe that could happen in America? Come on, this is apple pie and mama and the University of South Carolina and football. We don't go in for that stuff. We're not Germans. Would to God you weren't. At least they had Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant. What have you got? Springsteen and I don't know who your culture idols there are? Fluff. You're celebrating non-entities. You have no culture. You have no depth. You have no history to speak of. And if not, if Germany could be toppled in a decade to become the systematic annihilators of God's ancient people, what do you think you're capable of? Don't get romantic. We need to brace ourselves for the anti-Christ spirit that will pervade all nations in the last days of which this nation shall not be an exception. You're going to have to make the same searing choice as the German church before you. Will you identify with the state and its program or oppose it as God's believing remnant people, though it put you in jeopardy for resisting the tenor to which all will subscribe as Jews being a threat to civilization and that their annihilation is justified? What? You are among those who love the Jews, who are identified with the Jews? That's not going to be a cheap identification. You're not. And it's far more than a mere sentimental identification. The only thing that will make it real is that you have the same heart toward this people as God himself and that you'll not be offended by them in the untoward condition in which they will come to you. They're not going to be on their best behavior. And after you extend yourself to them and they're not grateful and are bitchy and complaining and insulting, are you going to draw yourself up to your full stature and say, well, if that's the way you're going to be, then you deserve what you're getting. What a statement about you. Or you believed in grace ideologically, but at the root of your being, you are very much predicated upon good works, merit deserving and they don't deserve, and they don't deserve the mercy of God. It will be a statement of where you are and the truth of your condition as only the Jew will reveal it in that day. They have always revealed us. They have always found us out. They reveal Luther, Chrysostom and the church of all generations has been unmasked in its pretension by the presence of Jews in their midst. Who do you guys think you are? You're Goyim, you're Gentiles. They've got to find the people who can love them and bear with them in magnanimity and patience despite their unloveliness, despite their ingratitude, or all they will be seen is what they have already understood the church to be and has not impressed them. We're moving toward a climax of the age of Israel and the church, the mystery that Paul understood and saw apostolically in Romans 9-11. That by your mercy you might obtain mercy. I will put it to the hands of your tementors who have said to you, bow down that we may walk over you and you have made your back like the ground and like the street for them to walk on. Can you picture that? Proud and arrogant Israelis with their face in the dirt and allowing the Palestinians or the Arab conquerors to walk over them. I'm saying that this is a description of something future that must come and will come. What will you say in that day if Israel goes down as a state and Jews have to suffer this kind of travesty and abuse where was God? A second time to allow such devastation after the hope that we thought Israel would be? It may well be that a failure to understand God's ultimate end time dealings with Israel will fulfill what Paul said would be a sign of the last days, a great falling away. The rapture doesn't take place, we're still here in a time of tribulation and we hope to be relieved from it through convenience of escape and we're still here and catching the brunt now of persecution in our identification with Jews and that Jews themselves are suffering this again within the same century? Unless you understand that there's a necessary death that precedes a resurrection that Israel is intended not just for the success of a political state but for the glory of God, you will be offended with God. And if you thought that present Israel was prophetic fulfillment and it fails, then what credibility has the scripture for the God of scripture? There will be a falling away of disillusionment for those who have only been shallowly inducted and have only a superficial and sentimental overlay in their relationship with Israel and the Jew. As much, perhaps, as the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who were disillusioned and disappointed that that one in whom they thought was Israel's hope was alack and alas crucified and left hanging as a corpse, gangrenous and we had thought it had been he who would have restored the glory of Israel. Oh fools and slow of heart, not to understand all that the prophets have spoken? Ought not the Messiah and the messianic nation equally suffer before it ascends to its glory? What's with you guys? Come on, don't you understand the centrality of the cross? Don't you understand that before there's a glory there's a necessary suffering? Don't you understand that Messiah must die? Don't you understand that Israel must die in its pretension and aspirations rooted in their own self-sufficiency? And that out of that death comes the restored nation, comes the reality of resurrection, comes a people with a new name, a servant people for all the nations of the earth who can then go to Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the same people whom they offended bow and prostrate themselves before them and serve them as Paul served the Gentile church. Why do you think God made Paul the apostle to the Gentiles who had that exquisite rabbinical background? He said I'm a man out of time and out of chain, I'm before the time. What was he saying? What you see in me is a picture of Israel's future in its own apostolate to the nations. That this Jewish nation who's looked upon the goyim with contempt and disdain and disgust will serve them as a servant nation, a nation of priests and a light unto the world because they will be so transfigured by the last day's extremity of God in judgment and in mercy. So, Isaiah 52, 13, My servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up and shall be very high after he shall be abased. After he shall have gone down like Jesus into death, he shall be exalted and made very high as the head of all nations, no longer the tail but the head. Nations who will go up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles and those proud Gentiles who will not go up, I'm not going to, look at their history. God says curse on you, you'll be without reign. You've got to honor those whom I have honored. I've raised them up out of the dust of death. I've given them a new name. They are a tiara, they are a jewel in my hands. They are the recipients of my mercy and my grace and you have to acknowledge them. Nations will come up. Nations will bring on litters and on wills those who were broken, disfigured and crippled in the course of God's final judgment. They'll bring them from all the places in the nations where they have been cast in that judgment, they will bring them back to Zion. A lot of the root of hatred for the Jew and anti-Semitism is a displeasure with the fact that God has chosen them. They don't deserve to be chosen. Look at their track record, it stinks. But I have chosen what I have chosen and I have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. The gifts and callings of God are irrevocable and without repentance. I'm going to establish Israel as the centerpiece of all nations despite itself. You know why? Because I have chosen them. Because I put my name upon them. Because I've made covenant with them that I'm obliged to honor because my word is at stake and my name is at stake, which they have blessed me and all the nations where I've driven them. But their restoration is not any consequence of their virtue but of my mercy. And both in revealing my judgment and in their restoration, I will have exhibited myself as God before the face of all nations. This last day's drama, mamma mia, is for the nations. They'll no longer have excuse to boast in their foreign gods and their own deities. There's only one God. It's the God of Israel and the God of Jacob, who is also the creator of the world and of the nations. He's established their bounds and their habitations. And he has exhibited himself in judgment and in mercy that all who yet continue to refuse him and bow before him and the nation which he has chosen and will exalt after he has evased it will suffer judgment. So verse 14, there are many who were astonished at them. So marred was their appearance, and you see the liberty I'm taking here, beyond human resemblance and their form beyond that of men, of mortals. So shall they startle many nations and kings shall shut their mouths because of them for that which had not been told them they shall see and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate. This makes more sense when we see this as being descriptive of God's dealing with Israel than it was with his dealing with his first begotten son. Because what nations then understood and saw and contemplated? What's being required at the end of the age is the reiteration of the cross, the demonstration again of what had been visited upon Jesus now visited upon the nation that the nations might see and kings be startled and be astonished that they might believe. What they had rejected they will see, explicated and demonstrated in a nation that will pass through all nations on its road to Calvary. Kings shall shut their mouths because of them for that which had not been told them they shall see, it'll be demonstrable before their eyes, they shall see the nation Israel dispersed through the nations on its road to Calvary, marred more than any man without any appearance of communists that they should be desired, despised and rejected of all men. And how the nations will respond to this despised people in their midst is the issue of God's judgment for those nations when he comes as king. I'm sorry to lay all this on you guys, but just let's end with this. Turn to Matthew 25. You can go back to Isaiah 53 and read it in that way at your leisure. But here's the first judgment of the now established king whose coming is directly the result of Israel's restoration. Jesus is not coming except as Israel's deliverer and to be established as its Davidic king upon the throne of David. He's the only one that can occupy it and rule from it forever. The issue here is theocracy, rule, kingship, and God waits. In Acts 3.21 he's bound up, he's restricted himself, waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began. Which prophets? Isaiah chapter 51, 52, 53, Jeremiah chapter 30, 31, Ezekiel chapter 26, 36, 37. The minor prophets, the major prophets spoke of one thing only, the restoration of Israel in the last days after a long history of apostasy that would release the king and establish the kingdom from the locusts of their own capital city and the holyhood of Zion. Didn't you know that? I read Isaiah chapter 2 that the law shall go forth out of Zion the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. But that's poetry, that God has exalted his hill and his mountain over all other mountains. I know that that's symbolic of rule, but that's figurative language art. Don't get so literal. Oh yeah? That's why the church is in its crummy condition. It has not been literal enough. How dare we take the liberty that we have with scripture to make it figurative and metaphorical and an illusion and spiritualize it when God intended it to be literally understood. The reason that we have found our cunning interpretations is we have no stomach for what the literal truth would be of Israel's restoration. We didn't desire it. We wanted to be number one. We were the elder brother who had no stomach for the younger brothers we had and were jealous that God would make a feast for him and give him a robe and a ring. After all, he squandered his inheritance while we were faithful. Church is more anti-Semitic than it knows, even in the way in which it has viewed scripture. The interpretive way of dismissing the literal intent of God in prophecy relating to Israel is the rejection of God's literal intention for the future of that nation, which we had no stomach to desire and no faith to believe. Once we take that liberty with prophetic scripture for Israel, we have traduced all the scripture. We have put eleven in the lump that is corrective. So that the restoration of the place of Israel in God's redemptive purposes is the resurrection of scripture itself in the way in which God would have it to be understood. So the Lord is contained in the heavens, Acts 3.21, awaiting the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets. And when he comes, Matthew 25, is the first judgment that he performs over the Gentiles of the nations when he comes in his glory in verse 31 and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory and all the nations, the Gentiles, will be gathered before him and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. You put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left, then the king, notice that, the king will say to those at his right hand, come, you that are blessed by my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world for, here's the reason for your receiving now this inheritance, this is the truth of your righteousness, this was the evidence of your blessedness, that when I was hungry you gave me food and I was thirsty you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed and took me in, I was naked you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me, then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry gave you food and thirsty gave you something to drink, when was it that we saw you a stranger welcomed you when naked and gave you clothing, when was it that we saw you sick and were in prison and visited you, and the king will answer them, truly I tell you, just as you did it to the one of the least of these, my brethren, here my version says, who are members of my family, you did it to me, then he will say to those at the left hand, you are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, for I was hungry you gave me no food, thirsty you gave me nothing, I was a stranger you did not welcome me, I was naked, so and so forth, you did not visit me, then they will answer, Lord, notice that they use the language of the faith, Lord, but we know elsewhere that he says, depart from you workers of iniquity, saying Lord, Lord, was a deception, I never knew you, you never were really submitted to me in authentic lordship, you were independent, you employed the vocabulary, but you made your own decisions and called your own shots, you were self-serving and self-seeking, you withheld yourself, I was not your lord, because lord is a total statement of a total relationship, where it is totally invalidated, got that? So they say Lord, but they are going to be sent into the same place eternally as the angels, the fallen angels and satan, a lake of fire, are we to take this literally? Well, I don't see any reason why not, speaking of eternal judgment of heaven or hell, predicated on one thing only, what did you do with the least of these, my brethren? When did we see you? Your failure to identify me with my brethren is already a condemnation of your supposedly surrender to my lordship, it shows how facetious and shallow your whole Christian posture was, that you did not see the least of these brethren, myself, that you did not recognize their road to Calvary, my road, that you didn't understand the necessity for them also to be despised and rejected of men, and you had not the courage to extend yourself and to extend mercy, because your own self-life and its preservation was more important to you than the extending of mercy. You don't deserve the kingdom of God, you are not a candidate for the kingdom, you are not really righteous, you are not blessed, got the picture? That one thing in the last days will unfailingly reveal who in fact we are in God, it's our response to the least of these his brethren in their hour of extremity. I would say there's only one people who can be candidates that would succeed, it's those who do not count their lives as, how does it go, as not important unto themselves, as not important to them, precious, who can lay down their lives, are the only ones who can be to the least of his brethren what they ought in that last day. So, let me pray for you, there's too much at stake here, and I have to say, we're not going to find some miracle of ability to be to them what we ought in that day, as if magically it's going to come and supply what we have not all along been. It's only going to measure the truth of what we have all along been. The righteous cannot do other but extend themselves, even if it means their own life, for righteousness will not permit anyone to pass us by who is hungry, thirsty, naked, and persecuted, and that we're in a position to succor them, and give them refuge and help, and withhold it. We cannot. Righteousness compels a certain response, and when the Jews see that coming from Gentiles, they'll believe it's beyond religion, it's very God himself who alone is righteous. So, Lord, my God, how on this earth are we these people to make sense of all of this in one speaking, except that we experience a mercy now. We need a mercy now even to comprehend the dimensions of this last day's drama toward which we are rapidly coming, and I ask that mercy, Lord, that you would stir these saints to look into the scriptures that we have not had time to develop, and that you would give them, my God, revelation and understanding as they do so. And I'm praying even right now that something is going to come into this body because of this morning that was not there before, a spirit of seriousness, of sobriety, a depth of something coming into its corporate life that was not there before, that makes them to understand this fellowship that church, ourselves as an expression, a remnant, has a purpose for itself beyond itself. It's not the issue of our enjoyment of our fellowship or we're receiving good instruction or we're restoring Hebraic roots. There's a destiny, there's a call, there's something ahead for us as a body that only can be performed as a people who are a people, who are corporate, who can extend mercy together, who are a community of God's people, who prepare themselves and are bracing for that which is to come, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, practically. And we thank you, Lord, that we're on such a collision course or else we would have been satisfied with much less. We would have measured our success by our enjoyment, by the increase of our numbers, by all of the shallow indexes that an apostate church employs to congratulate itself. We're happy that there's a crisis coming that calls us to sonship, to maturity, to reality, to authenticity, to being a church that's the church, to being a people of the spirit that is more than just a little adornment of an occasional operation of a gift. I bless this people, Lord. I didn't ask for this and they didn't ask for it either. You have a point to make.