In this sermon, the speaker reflects on the changing role of children in society and the impact of World War I. They emphasize the destructive nature of war and the failure of attempts to restore peace through democracy. The speaker calls for a deeper consecration to God and a recognition of His triune nature. They also emphasize the importance of embracing God's judgment and discipline, as well as the need for a change in the church's perspective on historical events such as the Holocaust.

What basis ought we to be appealing, not only to unbelieving and unregenerate Jews, but to Gentiles? Repentance toward God must precede faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is the consequence of repenting. See that? Faith is released through repentance, but repentance is occasioned by our patent failure before God. And I therefore believe that the message of the Holocaust, as being the judgment of God, may well be a principal key in last day's outreach to Jews. That the very issue which the Church has sidestepped, unlike Moses, because it itself is unwilling to look into the burning bush, is the very key to taking the bull by the horns and confronting Jews with our historic sin of a continuing rejection that had its inception 2,000 years ago and continues still in our silence, and invites yet the consequence of that rejection as judgment. What kind of a church could bring that message? What an effect is saying is that the historic call against you in Christkiller that has precipitated waves of anti-Semitic persecution is true, but it has to be spoken in a way that they have never before heard it. Maybe with the same weeping and brokenness as Jesus when he looked out over Jerusalem and said, and wept and said, you've missed the day of your visitation. In a word, the salvation of Israel is waiting on a church that can bring the word of judgment in the mercy of God and in the fear of God because it knows that God in truth, because it itself has turned aside to sin. Not just the Holocaust, but every issue of judgment which has the same intrinsic elements. Why did my marriage fail? Why did my fellowship go down the tube? Why was my body afflicted? And I'm not saying that every instance is judgment, but what I am saying is it behooves us always to ask that as a first question. Where have we been deaf to the word of God and have not responded that God had no alternative with us, but to afflict us in a physical way or to bring something down, like our marriage or our family or our children going haywire. How many instances of our children that have gone berserk is not the issue of the child himself, but the issue of the parents. And we've not seen it as a judgment and we're blaming our kids. So the Holocaust has been turned instead into a self-serving, though vain attempt to educate the masses that somehow the Holocaust was the failure of man. Other men, not ourselves. What to sentimentalize it, what to capitalize upon it politically. There are those who are reacting against this and say that the Holocaust never took place. It's called revisionism because the Jewish community has used the Holocaust politically, even to justify the state of Israel. And when the first peace accords talks before Oslo took place in Madrid, the then president of Israel, not the president, the prime minister who preceded Rabin... Shamir. His statement at the opening address was a statement on the Holocaust and Jewish suffering and that the Israel was an answer to that devastation and appealing to the sympathy of those opposed to Israel to be condescending for that basis. So again, the Holocaust is always trotted out as a kind of a political expedient, but it's not seen in the way in which God would have meant to understand it. Its significance and potential for repentance and return to him who smote us remains unknown. You might want to look up Jeremiah chapter 5, verses 3 and 4. They refused to turn to him who smote them and instead were hardened in their rejection and failed to recognize the judgment of God. Somebody help me out here. What can you say? Judgment. There's something about the nature of judgment, whether it's a Holocaust, whether it's a divorce, whether it's some other consequence in the life of men or of nations or the Jewish people, that has such an intrinsic thing that it cannot be gainsaid. It has to have a certain outworking and if it's not seen as judgment that will promote a turning to him who smote us and a bringing of us to a place of repentance, the consequence is a rejection of him that is yet more severe and a rejection of the God of judgment, which in turn invites yet greater consequence, which we'll see in the time of Jacob's struggle. Or maybe we can say this, World War II is the consequence of World War I. Maybe World War III will be the consequence of the failure to have recognized in World War II a judgment of God on the premises of men, on their humanistic understandings, on their failure to admit God into the counsels of men and the consideration of the issue of men and of nations and to seek to find solution on the basis of their own humanistic presumptions. I love the remark of the French minister who sat in at the conference of Versailles in France where Wilson came as the messianic figure to bring a solution to world conflict and make the world safe for democracy with Wilson's 14 points. And this French cynic turned and said, God himself only had 10. The thing is, if we needed God's 10 points, we would not have needed Wilson's 14. But it's not only his 10 points that were rejected, it's God himself. To reject his commandments is to reject him. To reject his judgments is to reject him. And to invite further judgment and consequence. You dear saints, 60 million lives lost in World War II. I don't know how many millions in World War I. The world can never again return to the pristine innocence that existed before the advent of 1914, August 1914. It was another world. Men still had some sense of value. There was a residue of Christian morality even in relatively unbelieving nations. There were things that men would not do because it was not right. Legitimacy was still an exalted state and condition for women. Marriage was considered holy matrimony. Children obeyed their parents. Children were to be seen but not heard. Look at them today. I mean, there's such a reversal. You cannot understand what the world was before August 1914. And when you see what set in motion the conflict, the imperialistic impulse of nations, the formation of armies and navies wanting an actual opportunity to play out their power, to move from a table with ten soldiers to real battlefields, not knowing that when real bullets hit and bombs go off and shells explode, it's an unbelievable agony of hell. And after that, to think that you can patch it up with 14 points and make the world safe for democracy, when democracy is itself a disaster. You know what our problem is? We ourselves have been brainwashed and have unconsciously at least taken in the world's wisdom that we ourselves believe that there should be a distinction between secular and sacred, that somehow God should stay out of it, and that governments and councils of men should be predicated on the basis of secular consideration, and that God has no place in the council and the affairs of men. Well, you know what I said when I got to Tanzania? You know where Tanzania is in Africa. And they had me out there on a field that was just complete dust. I mean, it was one of the most barren spots. And across on the other end, they were playing rock and roll on loudspeakers, and on our end, an evangelistic servant was invited to preach. The most rickety platform with a little tinny sound equipment. I went up that tottering framework. I thought, I dare not even hit the pulpit. The whole thing would come crashing down. And there was a sea of black faces out there before me. And I think I preached the Ethiopian eunuch and Paul, the back-to-back events of the deep conversion of a black man and a Jew as the paradigm of the conversion of all men, even now in the last days. And it was a great word. When I came off the platform, they had no lights. It was getting dark. You could still hear the blaring noise of the rock and roll on the other side. And people were coming in and shaking my hand and hugging. And one man said, Do you think that you could come and talk to my employer? I said, Sure, who's your employer? She's the head of the Supreme Court and of the Department of Justice of our nation. Gulp. Yeah, I said I would like to come and talk to her. Next day, I was in her home. Palatial. A black woman. I tell you, talk about stature. Formidable. Formidab, as the French say. Resonant with authority. You know what the word the Lord gave me for her? Righteousness exalts a nation. And iniquity or sin is a shame for any people. And I said, just because you have become your own black nation and have shucked off white colonialism does not give you the prerogative and the right to confiscate private property and to do legally what in God's sight is nothing less than thievery and usurpation. I said that. And I said, that's why you're suffering drought. That's why you have criminality and what do you call it under the table? Graf. Your whole nation is shot through with corruption and your answer is a return to the righteousness of God that he will exalt the nation and bring rain. I'm not asking you to become a believer. But God will exalt righteousness not only in a nation but in a business. He will. He'll honor it. He will honor right things and they'll prosper even irrespective of whether the person or the nation knows him. It'll be a step toward knowing him. You know what that woman did? She repented. She called down every member of her family and had me go and pray for every single one. Pray for her. I came back to the nation the next time she had given over her post and had come out of public life because they would not heed that word and she herself could not continue in a nation that was bent on corruption. God is not a Sunday commodity to be shucked off on the sidelines and to be employed for our purposes and to get our measure of blessing. God has called us to a mode of living that requires his real participation and enablement. It's beyond our ability. We need the grace of God because he's called us to live in a heavenly way while we're yet on the earth. And the Church has not pressed this issue upon the nations because we ourselves do not exhibit and do not live and walk in that reality. And we're being judged for it. Someone has said, and may well be true, that what men are celebrating as the Toronto blessing may well be God's judgment. That men and women given over to historical and compulsive laughter that they cannot stop is not a blessing but a judgment. A statement of a vacuity and emptiness that makes us susceptible to even seeking such things and needing such things. I don't want to say that I agree but I wouldn't dismiss that statement as having truth. So the holocaust as judgment and judgment itself is not susceptible or explicable to our conventional frames of reference. What the Lord brought to that black woman was another frame of reference. And are you guys free? Can you handle another statement or two? It may well be that in the mercy of God that not the least of the purposes of judgments is to judge and to devastate our categories, our frames of reference, our constructs, our ways of perceiving not only God but reality. That there's something about judgment that's clean and righteous altogether. It gets right to the root of something. And for the want of judgment there's a distortion and a warp in everything. Our thought, our consideration, the way we view God, the way we practice our faith, the way we relate with each other. Judgment is clean, it says in Psalm 19. And you know what the greatest love of God is? It's to love his judgments. Not just to grit your teeth and bear it or I guess if I have to but actually to welcome the righteous judgments of God. To welcome the clean, cutting work of God's judgment as being benevolent and merciful by its very nature. That nothing else will do what it can do. Anything else is a gloss and a superficiality and an adornment. His judgments are clean and they cut right through and we need them. And those who love God and will stand in the last days against every opposition are the lovers of God in his judgment. And God waits for judgment and mercy to meet and to kiss, to release something from heaven to make the land abundant and flowing. There needs to be a change in us saints. And the greatest opportunity to have seen it and to come to it was the great event of the 20th century which we have missed as the church as grievously as our Jewish people had missed the Holocaust of Jesus 2,000 years before. We have done to the Holocaust what they did to his devastation. We have glossed it over. We have sentimentalized it. We have clucked our tongues. We have not turned aside to see. There's a God waiting. A God in three persons. The angel of the Lord in the midst of that fire waiting to see even now who will turn. And I can tell you that it's not pleasant to look into that fire. To the unrequited yet unresolved issues of judgment. It takes a stamina. It takes a grit. It takes a spiritual strength. Those that are strong in the spirit. And maybe even the willingness to consider and to embrace the righteousness of God in judgment even produces spiritual strength. Maybe we're mamby-pambys and we can't take being corrected or disciplined because we've not had the iron that comes into our soul with the fear of God through the recognition of the subject of judgment. So I'm making a plea that we need to turn aside to see wherever we have not wanted to and have passed on and gone on to a second marriage and in some cases to a third. And the root of the matter has never been recognized nor seen. There's a God who's waiting for us in that burning place. There's a revelation of himself that waits of a particular kind that will not be given elsewhere. And there's a call and a mandate and ascending once you have turned aside because it's holy ground. And there's an Israel still waiting to be delivered that can only be delivered by people of a church of an apostolic authority who are sent out of that place of call and out of that place of armor. Moses is a paradigm. He's a pattern. And we need to recognize that. A mamby-pamby church that has shrunk from the issues of judgment for itself that cannot see it in history cannot deliver Israel. Only a mosaic church, an apostolic church, a synch church out of that holy ground that turns aside to see. And the whole issue of why God waited for that turning aside as I've mentioned on the tape and others have heard it is what the rabbis have said that anyone who turns aside to see can never be assured that they'll turn back again to where they were before that turning. Your every category, however presently correct, charismatically and evangelically speaking, cannot be returned to. You'll not go back to the faith as you knew it, God as you knew him, yourself as you see yourself or your situation. And if something qualitative turns in that turning that you can never go back to before, your security, things as you've understood them, your view of the faith, you had it nicely lined out and it was comfortable and now it's forever shattered by that turning. And now the only alternative is a deeper consecration and the finding of God and the threatening of everything that had been built up and established, that you enjoyed and was approved and applauded by him. But a call and ascending, that is the key to not only Israel's deliverance but all those that are in the Jewish mindset today that is secular and humanistic and is bound for the judgment of hell unless an intervention comes. So that's enough for tonight. And that if we'll not recognize God in his triune makeup according to his word, will we recognize God in his triune makeup according to his acts? The son at the cross, the father in heaven and the son giving himself through the enablement of the eternal spirit. His acts revealed his Godhead. And to reject the act is to reject the revelation and suffer the ongoing consequence still.