In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes that the gospel is contrary to human understanding and intelligence, and can only be received through revelation. He shares his experience of attending a conference on prayer for Israel that lacked repentance and was focused on self-serving motives. The speaker highlights the importance of proclaiming the good news and being passionate for Jesus, rather than seeking personal blessings. He also discusses the root cause of the Holocaust from a biblical perspective, referencing the covenantal obligations and consequences described in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Shalom, Mishpochah. Shalom, family. Mishpochah is a Hebrew word, it means family. And we're in the Mishpochah, the family with the Jewish heart. Made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand new creations in the Messiah. Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest show far. Oh, the grandest trumpet in Zion. We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good news. We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot for Jesus. And I have on the telephone a man that has never been accused of not being red-hot for Jesus. He's prophetic teacher Art Katz. I'm speaking to him at his commune, so to speak, at the Ben Israel Fellowship in northern Minnesota. They've been there, what, 25 years, Art? That's right, Sid. That's a long time. In fact, I've not lived any place longer. Even Brooklyn, New York, my origin. Well, for those that aren't familiar with you, I go back with you, because when I was a brand new believer, if anyone heard of someone Jewish believing in Jesus, the one they heard of was Arthur Katz. Art, I remember you were a history teacher in New York, a high school history teacher, and you were a real left-wing radical. Tell me a bit about your life and how you became a believer in the Messiah. Well, I'm a summation of so much that is characteristically Jewish in the diaspora, brought up in Brooklyn, and a high school dropout, all the more because I was a visionary and an idealist and I couldn't find any fulfillment for that in school. I was not interested in career or success. And drafted. I fell into left-wing causes and Marxist institutes in my search for truth. I was quite taken up with Marxism and then a process of disillusionment, being drafted into the army during the Korean War, sent to Germany, where I found myself a German wife and was fascinated and loved the whole German culture and civilization, which has always been a strong propensity for us Jews. And then coming out of the service and being trained to be a teacher at UCLA and Berkeley and being married to a German woman who was crushed by her own upbringing in the Hitler years and was schizophrenic. All of these elements conspired together to bring me to an end of my humanistic assumptions in my 34th year and to require me to leave the teaching profession and put a pack on my back as my marriage failed and to seek philosophical answers. And in the course of that 14 months of travel in that fashion, which became my first book, Ben Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew, the Lord apprehended me and called me by name in Jerusalem and brought me to himself. I returned to California. Excuse me, that's too powerful to leave alone. He called you by name in Jerusalem. That's right. Was this a pretty startling thing for a Jewish atheist? A preliminary supernatural experience in the first reading of the New Testament aboard the deck of a trap steamer on my way from Italy to Greece. You have to understand that as a modern man I was more Greek than Hebrew. In fact, in my classroom I had a sign up at the top of the board that said, Go Greek. Philosophical and humanistic. So it was significant that en route to Greece and the reading of a Hebrew book called the New Testament, in fact I had never read either Old or New Testaments up till that moment, I received in the very first reading a revelation out of the mouth of Jesus that was indisputable and terrifying that cut me in two and left me trembling aboard the deck of that ship. I knew in a single moment of time, having been an atheist all my adult life long, that there is indeed a living God. I'm reading his book and the Jesus of that book is who he claims to be. So you can imagine the depth of my astonishment at that revelation that came in a first reading. So when the Lord finished me off some months later in Jerusalem calling me by name, I was in a certain sense prepared for this consummation by the whole process of revelation that came through being picked up off the side of the road by born-again believers and being given hospitality and witness to and in every way being prepared for the greatest revelation of my life coming in my 34, 35th year. And you say the Lord called you by name? Yes. What did he call you? I had been staying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was being guided by a young man training to be a rabbi and not to forsake my ancestral faith and the last aspect was to visit an ultra-Orthodox community. He put me on a bus but he put me on the wrong bus. I found myself lost and going in circles in Jerusalem and got out of the bus and walked into the first store that I could find which was a bookstore and asked the woman for directions. She was very gracious, gave me a little sketch, a map and I was about to leave and I observed I was in a bookstore and I looked a little more closely and I saw Bibles, commentaries, New Testaments I looked again at this woman's Jewish face clearly Jewish, I said what is this place? She said this is our bookstore adjoining our chapel we are a congregation of Jewish believers and the Messiah Jesus and at that point something clicked in my heart and then an inward voice called me and said you're not to leave I was commanded not to leave and so I stayed four days and nights with this Pentecostal congregation and saw a demonstration of the reality of God that I had never glimpsed in any synagogue or church in America and people praying for me and trying to answer my questions and I in the most bewildered state imaginable trying to put all this together going to sleep the last night in a state of bewilderment confusion, unable by the power of my intellect to understand how God could ask me, a Jew, to become, quote, a Christian and in my sleep that night the Lord just gave me an understanding, transcending my mind, and I woke up believing on May 26, 1964 came to the breakfast table and said to this woman, Rina with whom I'm still in correspondence 35 years later, Rina I believe I understand and the poor dear fell out of her seat weeping because her final prayer that night was, Lord we've done everything for this stubborn man, you make him to understand, and on that basis she encouraged me to pray my first prayer in 35 years to call upon the name of the Lord to take the word Jesus, the name to my lips which was excruciatingly difficult and put me in a press of thousands of years of history, of abominations that we have suffered in that name, and despicable violences and how could I call upon that name and join myself with the enemies of the Jewish people but within all of that tumult there was an inward sense that I will in no wise cast out any man who comes unto me, and the Lord actually gave me the grace to speak his name, it was not a vocalization it was a grace that allowed me to stutter and finally get that word out of my mouth and the moment I did I was born again by the Spirit of God Art, the two hardest questions in the traditional Jewish community, one you've dealt with, how you as a Jew became a fervent red-hot believer in Yeshua Jesus the Messiah but the second question is just as penetrating and just as heavy in the Jewish psyche, and that is the Holocaust why didn't God stop it why did God allow it and many traditional Jews are closer to atheists even going to traditional synagogues because of the Holocaust I want to take you back to the early 1950s and this was before you had a revelation of Jesus and you were visiting one of the worst of Hitler's concentration camps Dachau, tell me about it well as a GI in Germany and my first young kipper instead of going to a synagogue being an atheist I chose to visit Dachau a notorious concentration camp and I had all my categories fully in hand the good guys and the bad guys and I was going to have my hatred for the Germans confirmed but as I walked through that camp which by the way Sid, is different now than it was then now it has been nicely cleaned up and landscaped, at that time it was the crude, ugly place of death that still lingered from the late 1940s and the stink of death and the whipping posts and the gas chambers and bones and ashes were still in place and so the totality of that horror so affected my soul that I realized that this is beyond good guys and bad guys that somehow we are all implicated I had always wrestled over the issue of the Holocaust because like most modern and American Jews there was something about German civilization that we found very compelling and endearing and how could this people the land of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel Wagner, Schopenhauer and so on be the land of our destruction this was the culture and civilization that we most touted and wanted so much to emulate even as a messianic alternative and so the conundrum of how Germany could have been the agency of our undoing not just our death but a bestial death was a paralyzing question that had always occupied me even as an atheist and so the going to Dachau that day was a tremendously traumatic experience After the Holocaust the Jewish community really tried to evaluate it or interpret it but you point out in your book that it took 20 years before they even put in writing what they thought were the reasons for the Holocaust I think that that's understandable because the trauma of the Holocaust the systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews the elimination virtually of continental European Jewry was so staggering that it was beyond even the categories of thought so after the Holocaust there was virtually no significant literature of interpretation and it took about two decades before we began to get some kinds of comment and analysis and attempt to understand that remarkable phenomenon All this week we will be discussing your book titled The Holocaust subtitled Where Was God Why did you write this book? Well I would say it was the culmination of many years of agonizing reflection and I had been speaking on this subject One of my major addresses came in 1974 at a Kansas City conference before 2000 people that brought the most profound response to the word of God I had ever heard or seen since and I knew that I had stumbled on something or been prepared for something and that God wanted a book from that initial statement and it took virtually a quarter of a century from that time of public speaking before we found it in print but I believe that it's on time not only because it attempts to understand the Holocaust past but speaks also of a Holocaust yet to come Now Art this is maybe I better repeat that line in case people missed it a Holocaust yet to come Shalom Mishpochah Shalom family Mishpochah is a Hebrew word Mishpochah means family and we're the Mishpochah the family with the Jewish heart made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand new creations in the Messiah Get it ready Mishpochah to blow the grandest shofar blow the grandest trumpet in Zion we want everyone everywhere to hear the good news we want everyone everywhere to be red hot for Jesus and just listen to my guest long enough and you'll realize he is red hot for Jesus his name is Art Katz he's a prophetic teacher I'm speaking to him at his community called the Ben Israel Fellowship in northern Minnesota in particular we're talking about his book The Holocaust, Where Was God? and on yesterday's broadcast Art you mentioned some pretty unpopular views that you espouse in this book one in particular is the next Holocaust that's coming and of course a lot of people say oh I'll pray and feel sorry for the Jewish people not realizing that the whole fate of the world and individual countries and cities are dependent on what happens to the Jew but let's go back to you told me you were visiting for 20 years you've been going back and forth in Jerusalem but some of these views were so unpopular you could not find anyone that would offer you a pulpit for them back then and you actually spoke about it in the lobby of a hotel what happened? well in the lobby we were given meeting rooms that had to be expanded every night for the increase of the crowd but not one of those whom I had known over the years came I was totally boycotted and the only one who came was the wife of a brother to harass me publicly but when I came back from that series of meetings there was a letter signed by 13 of the most eminent and known of the messianic and other leaders of the ministries in Israel condemning me as a false prophet that's harassing the church and giving aid to the enemy and so that opened up an opportunity for me to respond by a letter that we took weeks to compose which gave the most comprehensive and biblical exegetic overview of our consideration of Israel's future and destiny and that letter is to be found on our website www.benisrael.org called the burning bush and it's called letters to a friend and in that you can have a view of how we perceive the whole situation of Israel and her future and that the time of Jacob's trouble is not past it was not the Nazi Holocaust. It's not possible to assert that in light of Scripture, and that it's yet a future event, and that there's calamity for the Jewish people not only in Israel, but worldwide, seeing that it's the time of Jacob's trouble, and Jacob is dispersed in many nations, and that we ourselves are here in northern Minnesota, not the least for the reason of preparing a place of refuge in North America for that soon-coming time. So both my own experience, the call of God, and my understanding of Scripture from a prophetic side constitutes our understanding, and we're putting our life on the line. We so much believe in what we're saying, and the Lord is now giving me quite a liberty to speak this publicly and freely everywhere I go, and I find that where I go often proves to be the actual white line of flight and refuge that the Lord is establishing, and people invariably come up to me and say, I've been waiting years to hear this word. I felt that I was a freak, that God had called me to prepare something like this, but it seemed outlandish and unthinkable, and now that I've heard you with it, I feel that it's credible and that it was the leading of God. And so everywhere I travel, Sid, both in this nation and in the world, I'm seeing God preparing places of refuge with Jews in flight in that soon-coming time. Let's go back just a little bit to the premise of the book, The Holocaust. Where was God? Many Jewish people ask, where was God? Why was he so silent? Maybe there isn't a God. Respond. Well, I think that not the least of the reasons for the Holocaust is that God is not happy with our inadequate view of him, that there's something about ultimate tragedy and calamity that necessarily is going to bring an end to inadequate views of God. We're compelled either to see him afresh more deeply than we knew him, or to altogether cast away our notions of God and God himself as somehow being a fiction. And there have been books of this kind. Richard Rubinstein, who's a professor, former rabbi from University of Florida, wrote a book called After Auschwitz, in which he forsook the traditional views of God and became essentially an atheist. He did not call for an end to Judaism nor Christianity, but that it should go on without any sense that there is a God, and serve social and moral purposes. So there has been a great disillusionment with God as people thought him to be. But the issue is, is that the God who is? Because the aspect of God that was omitted, the one that even Christians are least likely to consider, is the issue of God in judgment. And my contention is that nothing more reveals God in his depth than his severity and his judgments. And that without that consideration, we don't understand either his mercy or his love. And so if any serious consideration of the Holocaust will require a radical re-examination of our understanding of God, and are bringing us back to the biblical sources for that knowledge, the most profound of which is God's historic dealings with Israel, which have always been judgment for our sins. My question is, why should the Holocaust be exempt from that principle of interpretation that even rabbis have employed historically to understand the Jewish disasters of the past? It has always been examined from the perspective of Deuteronomy, of blessings and of curses, and that what we experience comes from the hand of God, though he will use nations and men as the rod of his chastisement, but that he himself is its author. And that's the theme of my book, and I try to sustain it biblically, and I can't understand why any serious person who has a biblical framework of understanding would not consider first that we need to look at our calamities in the light of our sins. And then if that does not serve, then we can consider other possibilities. But the thing is that there has been no answer for the Holocaust, and even Jewish sources say that this is beyond consideration. It's not for us to understand nor to probe. You talked about a chance meeting that you had with the Jewish winner of the Nobel Peace Prize that many are familiar with, Eli Wiesel. Tell me about that. Well, this was some years ago, he spoke publicly, and a fascinating speaker, and an eloquent and impressive man, and in the course of it, he said that he's now studying the Hebrew Scriptures with a rabbi twice a week. The Lord didn't allow me to ask the question publicly, but afterwards I went up to him, and I said, insomuch that you're studying the Scriptures twice a week, to what degree would you acknowledge that our history of disaster, calamity, and including the recent Holocaust, is itself the fulfillment of promises made in Scripture of what would befall us in the latter days for our sin. And he, it was as if he had been dashed with a bucket of cold water. He froze, and he looked at me, and he finally said, I refuse to consider that. And I quote that episode in my book, and go on to interpret what it means when a foremost authority on the Holocaust refuses to consider that. What he, in fact, is saying is, I exalt my human judgment over and against the Word of God. It's not a question of whether God has said that in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or in the Prophets or the Psalms. I refuse to consider that. It's outside of my category. I will not factor it in. And so it's a statement, in my opinion, of supreme human exaltation over God. And I write in my book, if this is a foremost authority who lost all of the members of his family in the Holocaust, was himself a survivor, what then is the condition of the Jewish community itself, if he is the voice of it, and that we are still guilty of this kind of presumption and self-assertion over and against the Word of God, which is to say, over and against God himself. Art, one of my concerns is, as you know, there's an anti-Semitic lie that unfortunately has floated around that the Jews killed Jesus. We know by the Word of God that Jesus laid down his own life for the sins of the whole world. But it's been used for anti-Semitic purposes. Your theory, your teaching on the Holocaust of where was God, in effect will cause some of these anti-Semitic, quote, Christians that, you know, the two words should never be put together, but they're religious people, they're not really one of the Messiah, let's call them religious Christians, to point at a Jew and say, well, you didn't believe in Jesus, that's why you had the I can't think of anything harder to say to a Jewish person. It's, what shall I say, it's a situation and a question of an extreme kind, but I don't think that we can evade the truth. Peter, in his first message after Pentecost, clearly confronts his hearers with their culpability and guilt in the death of the Messiah, who was slain with wicked hands, though was predetermined by God. They were still culpable in their involvement, and so the pity is that the enemies of God's people have played upon that, seized upon that with the cry of deicide, but we need to recognize that the truth of it is undeniable, but we need not bring it to them as accusation in that sense, but with a broken heart and say that our implication in the death of the Messiah is the ultimate statement of what had been a long-standing sin, and it reached its apogee, it reached its final expression in our inability to recognize him when he came, in our opposition to him, to his word, and to the testimony of his miracles, and finally our agreement to his death is the summation of all of the sin that characterized us as a nation to that point. The fact that successive generations have not opposed that decision for his death makes them culpable in it, and until we repent of the error of our fathers or the sin of our fathers in their willing consent to his death, we ourselves are implicated in that decision. But I must balance it by saying, so is every non-Jew on the face of this earth, because he died for our sins. Right. I mean, his death was a necessity, but the fact that we were involved in that death willingly implicates us all the more as Jews. He came to his own, his own received him not. So we need to own up to our part in that, though it served the redemptive purposes of God for all mankind, and all mankind's sins were placed upon him as the sin-bearer, nevertheless we need to recognize what our sin was, and as willing participants in his death, and in our continuing attitude that endorses the decision of our fathers, implicates us in that choice. Art, you're stirring up a lot, as you always do. Shalom Mishpochah. Shalom, family. Mishpochah is a Hebrew word, and that's what it means, family. We're the Mishpochah, the family with the Jewish heart, made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand new creations in the Messiah. Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest show far, all the grandest trumpet in Zion. We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good news. We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot for Jesus. And a lot of teaching today, throughout the body, is, for lack of better words, bless me club. But you know something? To whom much is given, much is required, and we are living in, as the Orthodox Jewish community says, the footsteps of the Messiah. And I believe that my guest, Art Katz, who's a prophetic teacher, I'm speaking to him at his place where he's lived for over 25 years, the Ben Israel Fellowship, his commune in northern Minnesota, and God has recently given him a release on a lifetime study that he's done. We're talking to him about his book, The Holocaust, Where Was God? Art, I'd like you to get a little more specific, rather than we've been talking in generalities up till now. What is, biblically, the root cause of the Holocaust? And perhaps read a scripture on that. Yeah, I speak about a Deuteronomic view, that is to say that Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the Mosaic Covenant, speak of blessings and curse, that there's a covenantal obligation to walk in the way with God, and a very serious consequence for the rejection of that way. And there's an actual, actually a vivid description of something of which we are warned in Deuteronomy chapter 32, which is called the Song of Moses. It's not a song in the sense of something of elation or victory, but rather something to be memorized and passed on from father to son and through the generations, of what we are warned would befall us in the latter days. And in chapter 32 are descriptions that are so vivid and reminiscent of the Holocaust that it gives you a chill to read them. So for example, I'm looking at the Amplified and also the New Revised Standard Version in that chapter. Verse 24 says, "...they shall be wasted with hunger and devoured with burning heat, and poisonous pestilence in the teeth of beasts will I send against them, with the poison of calling things of the dust." And then the next verse, verse 25, "...from without or outside the sword shall bereave, and in the chambers shall be terror, destroying both young man and virgin, the suckling child with the man of gray hairs." And it's interesting that in the examination of the process of extermination through the use of gas chambers, which is a place of terror and asphyxiation, that when the doors were opened after the work of gas, the composition of the bodies always remained the same. At the bottom were the oldest and the weakest, namely the gray hairs and the sucklings, and at the top were the young men and women who had the strength to climb to the top for the last vestiges of air that remained. So in a remarkable way, God foreshadows and speaks prophetically in Deuteronomy of what would befall us in the last days as a warning to be faithful to covenant. In that same chapter, other questions that have confused and stirred us are touched. For example, how could that have taken place, that we could have been herded like sheep to our death, and that we could not have overcome in many instances the few German gods, and that nations were closed to us for escape? And in that chapter, it says, how could one have chased a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their rock had sold them, and the Lord had delivered them up? So here's a biblical explanation for a phenomenon that takes place in modern times. Art, what about the innocent children? What about the very religious Jews that were sincerely wrong, but sincere in their faith, and definitely loved God to the best of their ability? How could God allow this to happen to those two people groups? Well, that's the argument that's put forward by a Jewish philosopher, now living in Israel from Canada, and I answer that question at the end of my book, or I attempt to answer it, and I say this, that does God approve of that kind of orthodoxy? Is he as impressed with it as we are? Why do we assume that they would not be subject to the same judgment, merely because they practice a form of Judaism that is pious, because the derivative of that piety goes back to the pharisaical, its pharisaical origin, that had much to do with the rejection and the death of Messiah himself? And so, whatever their practices carried on at the modern times, it has not been divorced from its root, and God may have all the more the greater contention for a people who purport to be religious, and yet have been Scripture-rejecting as well as Christ-rejecting, and have not had even opportunity, given through the calamities that have pursued us in Europe and in exile through these last 2,000 years, to ask if, indeed, our fathers had not made a mistake? And do we need to reconsider, and in the light of Scripture, is there a basis that can be examined about this rejected Messiah? But having had 2,000 years, not only to consider the question, but to ask why do we continue to suffer pogroms, persecutions, exiles, and death? Is this a continuing statement from God, seeking to arrest our opinion? And have we come finally to a time in history when God just chose to allow our sin to have its consequence? In fact, in Deuteronomy 32 verse 34, he asks, is not this laid up in store with me, sealed up in my treasuries? That is to say, I can bring this judgment whensoever I choose. I am not under obligation for there to be a direct cause and effect action in you through them, to give you cause to repent and to consider your ways. But the fact that we have passed through that Holocaust without a remorse and without a repentance, without a broken consideration of our past and its failures and our judgments, and come out with a statement, never again implies that what we suffered has nothing to do with God, but our own weakness as a people and the viciousness of those who are our enemies. In a letter of condemnation that I got from the head of a Bible Society in Israel who read my Holocaust book or at least portions of it, he says, I'm not interested in this God-judgment stuff. The issue is man's inhumanity to man. Well, is he speaking from the vantage point of Scripture or from the vantage point of humanism? I think that the issue is not man's inhumanity to man, but the God who allows his judgments to be wrought through man's inhumanity, but that he himself is the author who he cuts and slays, he heals and he makes alive. And that statement is in Deuteronomy 32 as well. I lift up my hand to heaven and I live forever. I wet my lightning sword. My hand takes hold on judgment. I will wreak vengeance on my foes and recompense to those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood and my sword shall devour flesh with the blood of the slain. And so... Art, I must ask the question. I posed of the pious Jews, you gave me your answer. What about the innocent children? Well, I try to address that too. You know, what makes judgment judgment is that others suffer for our sins and especially our children. And for that reason, judgment all the more needs to be feared, and it's an incentive to keep in covenant fidelity, knowing that failure would bring upon our heads not only the judgment of God, but the heads of our children as well. How shall they be exempt? That they have to... the sins of the fathers fall upon their children, and that would be an incentive to keep us in the way. And that's what makes judgment judgment, and judgment to be feared. And what would you say to someone that says, if God is that way, I am not going to serve a God like that? Well, I would say that that's the kind of arrogance and self-exaltation that makes sin sin and invites that kind of very judgment upon us. God is righteous. That's a given. We know that. He does all things well. He's perfect in all his ways. He's holy. And though we may not understand or let alone approve of the of the painful things that come to us in our experience in history, we have to fall before the fact that God is God as the indisputable factum. That's the given truth, and hope to understand our calamity in the light of it, and go back to Scripture and search it. And in fact, God says to this man, I will look. He who is of a contrite and broken spirit and trembles at my word. And so these judgments ought to occasion a trembling by which that word will be opened and revealed to us. But if we harden ourselves, which is the option of how we can respond to judgment, and choose to reject the God who inflicts it, then we invite upon our own heads and that of our children the consequence. I've heard many say, well, the Holocaust certainly could not have been as bad as it was if true Christians had taken their stand. How would you respond? Certainly, the church is indicted in its failure, but that doesn't obviate or lessen the issue of the Holocaust for ourselves as Jews. It does bring the church under an indictment as well, and there are reasons and things that need to be understood in that way. But I don't think that anything could have happened to have dissuaded God from bringing to pass that which he speaks in his word will necessarily come to pass, and that there's been no repentance on our part as Jews. We have not acknowledged the sins of our fathers, which makes us one and culpable with them in it. And in my answer to this doctor in Jerusalem who condemns me and my book, I just wrote this last night, I said, how is it that you could be a leader in a Bible association and not understand yourself the Deuteronomic principle by which rabbis have always understood the calamities that have befallen Israel? What has changed? Why should we not continue to understand and seek an explanation on the basis of the Word of God and the judgments that God said would befall us in the latter days? What has happened, what has changed in us or in God that removes that as a fulcrum, as a principle of seeking explanation? Art, we're out of time. Shalom Mishpochah. Shalom family. Mishpochah is a Hebrew word. It means family, and we're the Mishpochah, the family with the Jewish heart, made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand new creations in the Messiah. Getting ready, Mishpochah, to blow the grandest shofar, blow the grandest trumpet in Zion. We want everyone, everywhere, to hear the good news. We want everyone, everywhere, to be red-hot for Jesus. I have on the telephone, a friend of mine, I've known him, gee, I don't know, hardcats, I don't know how long I've known you. Probably as long as I've been a believer in the Messiah, which is well over 25 years. He's a prophetic teacher. He is a founder of the Ben Israel Fellowship. It's a community in northern Minnesota. And, Art, we're talking about your book, The Holocaust, Where Was God? I must say, you use Scripture to support your case, but it is not what most people think of when we think about the Holocaust. Historically, besides the Holocaust, why do you feel that Jewish people, the traditional Jewish people, were not obedient to God as a people group throughout history? Well, we have been the authors of counter-Messianic alternatives, but probably the most prominent and devastating example would be communism itself and Marxism. Marx himself being an apostate Jew, and according to Richard Wurmbrandt and others, one who has dabbled in Satanism and offers mankind an alternative to God's plan for the redemption of mankind and the nations, and the reconciliation of men through a social system, the end of which has been rivers of blood, tyranny, and devastation in nations of the world, and one of the greatest threats even to our present civilization. Paul in Romans says that we are the enemies of the gospel. Yes, but I have to balance with what you're saying by the fact that some of the greatest finds in science that has blessed humanity has also come from Jewish people that did not know their Messiah. That's true, and of course I'm grateful, and mankind is grateful for that genius and that contribution, but we're asking what is it in our life that would be a cause for God's anger, wrath, condemnation, and judgment, and I would say that we have been in the forefront of many causes that oppose God and present an alternative to his own redemptive purposes for mankind. And what would you say to the anti-Semite who takes that type of information and uses it and says, see, Jews are eternally cursed by God, and we should rid the world of the Jew. That's the Hitler theology. Well, they will stand before God in judgment for their misuse, but you know, if they want, they have plenty of ammunition right within the Scriptures themselves, and even quoting Paul, even quoting Isaiah. I mean, there's an indictment against us and all the prophets that they can employ. The issue is their heart and their intention toward us is evil, and they'll be judged for that. So how does God look at a so-called Christian that hates the Jew and wants to persecute the Jew in the name of God? Yeah, well, they'll still suffer for that, because we are still his chosen people and the apple of his eye, and he's jealous over us, and they will bring upon their own heads and eternally the consequence of that hatred. But I think one thing that we need to consider is that anti-Semitism itself is part of the judgment that has haunted us and followed us throughout the ages and in every nation where we have been cast, and that when Jesus wept over Jerusalem, maybe not the least of that weeping was when we missed the day of our visitation, is that he foresaw prophetically what would befall us as being a people cast out in the nations and conspicuous for our differences, and that there would be necessarily and inevitably friction, resentment, irritation, hatred, all the kinds of things that would be generated by the way that we would stand out as the square peg in the round hole. We could not fit in to Gentile society or Christian society, and the suspicion about us, the wells being poisoned in the Middle Ages, our own attitude toward the goyim would make us candidates for the kind of irritation, resentment that could find its expression in anti-Semitism, but this is also judgment. But if it's part of the judgment of God, why should a Christian even share the gospel with the Jew? I'm sorry? If it's part of the judgment of God, why should a Christian even share the gospel with the Jew? Well, God would have as many as will to be saved. There's still a remnant that needs to be sought, and it's the first obligation and mandate of the church to promulgate the gospel to the Jewish people. So both things are active congruently, you know, at the same time. There's the hatred against us, there's the church that seeks our salvation, and that even that activity will be misconstrued and looked upon as being anti-Semitic, as the recent determination of the Southern Baptists to witness the Jews has been understood. So, but we need to... I found it pretty interesting, I heard the head of the Southern Baptist Organization on a secular talk show on that subject, with a debate with the rabbi, and I heard him say, the rabbi said, oh, you feel our religion, this traditional Judaism, you feel our religion is defective. And so the head of the Southern Baptist said, oh, absolutely not, it's wonderful, we just want you to add Jesus to it. What would you say to the head of the Southern Baptist? It's a cheapy answer. I would have agreed with the rabbi, yes, your religion is defective. It's intrinsically defective. You've rejected your very God. In the name of the defense of Judaism, you have formulated a rabbinical alternative to a biblical faith, and rejected the Messiah promised in that, by those scriptures. Yes, and if that were not so, Paul would not have wished himself a curse for his brethren's sake. If all you need is a little bookkeeping, a little... Well, listen, the Southern Baptist will not be endeared with the traditional Jewish community by anything short of an answer like that. Well, I don't know if being endeared is the issue. The issue is that time is running out, eternity is at stake. Men need to be confronted with truth that will affect their eternal destiny. It's not going to be pleasant to hear. It has to reverse the prejudice and the misjudgment of the ages, and only one who loves a Jew would be willing to be misunderstood, and suffer even the indignation and the anger of a Jew to whom this kind of testimony is given. But isn't it easier to reach a Jewish person with the gospel by not saying, as a result of sins, these judgments are coming? Say that again? Isn't it easier to reach a Jewish person with the gospel without confronting them about the Holocaust as God's judgment? I mean, that is going to make a Jewish person so upset they're not going to hear the good news. They might become upset unto salvation, because it's repent and believe the gospel. The tenor of our modern gospel has been an appeal to man's self-consideration. Accept Jesus and that these are the benefits that you will receive is not a basis of repentance and believing. See, the gospel is patently antithetical to man. It is hostile to his understanding and to his intelligence. It is a calamity. It is a scandal. And the only way it could be understood and received unto salvation is through revelation. And revelation comes through repentance. And God tells us, don't hesitate, don't hold back. Tell Jacob their sins and Israel their transgressions. I just gave a message like that in Germany. I had to sit for four days for a painful conference on prayer for Israel that was the most wishy-washy and sentimental and pointless, self-serving thing that I'd ever heard, that was concluded with a final night of repentance that was absolutely cathartic, that these Germans wanted to be rid of the sense of guilt. But it had no blessing for them. It'll have to be repeated and certainly will not affect the Jewish community. And I went on from there to Nuremberg, having written something that night when I came home, so chafed over that, on what would constitute a true repentance of the German nation, the German Christians toward the Jew. And the Lord had me to speak on the final night and brought the house down, that the evidence of a real repentance on Germany's part would be such a change as the willingness to confront Israel with their transgressions and Jacob with their sins, knowing that that message is calculated to rub Jews the wrong way, and that they would not be appreciated for that, and they would be willing and love to be misunderstood in order to speak a truth that will occasion a repentance unto believing and faith unto salvation. You speak of the Jewish community and the hope of being endeared to them is a dead end. You speak in your book about what will happen in the future to the Jew, Israel, and the nations, and Christians. And this also is a teaching that very few people have ever heard, and is also, I might add, very unpopular. For those who are familiar with it, in just a minute would you basically tell me what the premise is? The premise is the time of Jacob's trouble. And the issue is, is that time past? Has that already been fulfilled? Was that the Holocaust? And that the Jewish community can now rest safely, that they need not fear any future devastation? My conviction, based on examination of Scripture, is that the Holocaust was not that fulfillment, that the time of Jacob's trouble is future, that it will be worldwide, and that Jesus himself warned of it, and that it would exceed any trouble that we had previously known in our history, and that if that time were cut short, no Jewish flesh would survive. Do you see an invasion of Israel of the magnitude described in this description by Jeremiah of Jacob's trouble? An invasion? Yes. Well, I see a devastation of Israel and its cities. Ezekiel is full of it, Isaiah is full of it, Jeremiah is full of it. It talks about the destruction of Jerusalem that would subsequently be rebuilt upon its own heaps as unto the Lord. I think that that's future. In Ezekiel 36 it talks of Israel being returned from being cast out in exile again, and that its first function is to rebuild by the grace of God the cities that had been left waste and made desolate. That there's a plethora, an abundance of Scripture that speaks of a devastation so severe that I believe is future for the present nation of Israel, and that will leave its modern cities in ruins and require an expulsion of flight or captivity from which God himself will return them in the last days and in the millennial time himself, that the Jewish community that survives it will experience both the severity of God and the goodness of God, the severity in their expulsion and then the devastation of their hope for the state of Israel, and the mercy in the return that he himself will affect by his own power. Art, the thing I want you to deal with on tomorrow's broadcast is the effect that this is going to have on the world. When God deals with Israel he's not just dealing with Israel. He's dealing with the entire earth, and I believe that this is important for our Mishpochah to understand. Shalom, Mishpochah. Shalom, family. Mishpochah is a Hebrew word. It means family, and we're the Mishpochah, the family with a Jewish heart, made up of Jewish and non-Jewish people that are brand new creations in the Messiah, getting ready Mishpochah to blow the grandest shofar, all that grandest trumpet in Zion. We want everyone everywhere to hear the good news. We want everyone everywhere to be red hot for Jesus. I'm talking to a friend of mine, a Messianic Jew by the name of Art Katz. We in northern Minnesota called Ben Israel Fellowship. I'm speaking to him by telephone there. We're talking about his very controversial book, The Holocaust, Where Was God? And Art, I promised our Mishpochah that we would deal with the fate of the nations based on what the judgment of God on the Jew in Israel, but I have to ask you this question. It's kind of personal. Another good friend of mine by the name of David Stern in Jerusalem, Israel, stated that a Jewish believer in Jesus today does not need a call from God to make Aliyah, to return to Israel. You need a call from God not to return to Israel. How would you respond? I would disagree completely. The steps of the righteous are ordered by the Lord, and I believe that this is the kind of presumption that we will later rue with great misgiving that we have invited Jews from the frying pan to the fire. If my anticipations are correct, and Israel is going to be at the vortex of devastating violence, to invite Jews to come to it now is to invite them to their death. But on the other side of the coin, if a Jewish believer in Jesus is called by God to go there right now, there's no better place on the face of this earth for them. No better place if it's going to be the vortex of violence. If God calls them there. If God calls them. But they need to know that they're going into that vortex, and they're being called to be a salvific agent in the deliverance of Jews who would otherwise perish except for their help. That they're not going to the safest place in the world, but the most dangerous. Okay, you're posing so many questions. The take of the well-meaning Zionists is to invite Jews to a return that is premature, that there's a judgment and a dispersion that must first take place. And I agree with my brother Arnold Fuchtenbaum that present Israel is established as a crucible for judgment, and is not the final restoration yet, but a preliminary toward that end. Art, I must ask you another question. You talked about six million Jews died because of judgment, for violating the laws of God, and accumulated judgment, and you stated scriptural references for that. But what about the five million Christians that lost their life during the Holocaust? Well, I don't have enough to occupy myself with it. No, no, no, no. I mean, why would Christians be judged? Well, maybe because they're not Christian enough. Maybe they were Christian only in name. In fact, the message that I gave in Germany that brought the house down was that the sin of Germany is comparable and exactly the same as the sin of the Jew, and that in fact it's not an accident that Reformed Judaism had its advent in Germany, reflecting the rationalistic temper of German civilization that was embarrassed by the supernatural references in Scripture, and that the God-is-dead theology issued out of Germany, that there's a band of connection between German liberalism in Christianity and Jewish flight from scriptural orthodoxy that indicts both before God, and they're both subject to judgment, and will yet experience it. And what brought the Germans down on their face in repentance, in the acknowledgment of their sins as being exactly comparable and the same as of a God-rejecting Israel that established its own religious alternatives in a flight from Scripture and the requirement of God's lordship, because they wanted a religion that would be comfortable and compatible with German culture, German civilization, on the Jewish part, a Saturday exercise, and the liberal German, and even German orthodoxy, wanted a bourgeois, middle-class kind of Christianity that was not in any way apostolic or threatening to their own middle-class aspiration. All right, I'm sorry, because of time, I've got to ask you this question. What about the church in America? And when I'm talking about the church, I'm talking about the lukewarm church in America. What effect will this devastation on little Israel have on us here in America? I think it ought to be profound and cause us to re-examine our whole understanding, and to see the shallowness of our faith, to recognize that we have dismissed from our deepest consideration the issue of Israel as central to the church's own understanding of itself and of its mandate and role. I think at what a occasion the deepest repentance on a church that has itself been in flight from reality, because the issue of Israel is central to the church's own perception of itself, and it's not only by the way of rejecting Israel from consideration, but even sentimentally to consider Israel is still a rejection. That is to say, Paul's statement in Romans 9 through 11 is central to his whole apostolic understanding of the faith and the role of the church. It's not an appendix, it's not a side note, and to the degree that the church in America or in the world has not taken up Paul's apostolic view of the centrality of Israel and their restoration in the last days as being the establishment of God's theocratic kingdom, that kind of Christianity that has taken place with that absence is substandard and defunct, and has become only a kind of Sunday culture that gives rise to the Littleton Colorado shootings and a whole generation of youth going progressively berserk, because they have been robbed of the vitality and the reality of God that would have been theirs had they been in the environment of a church that is apostolic, that understands that these are the last days, that God has called us to more than a Sunday religious or Saturday religious culture, and that the issue of Israel would have opened all of these perspectives had it been rightly understood and received. What is your prognosis for that, what you've just described to me, if a church does not understand the obligation to the Jew, the destiny of Israel, the obligation to reach the Jew first, what is your prognosis for the country that is loaded with churches like this? It's in root to apostasy and to judgment, and indeed there'll be a great falling away as Paul said, and two of the reasons I think will be most prominent, one will be the failure of Israel to be established as the state that we have shallowly desired and expected, without any real depth of understanding of the chastisement that was first come for Israel before it ascends to its millennial glory, and the second will be the failure to experience a rapture out from a time of tribulation in which I believe the church will yet be in the earth. And these two failures and disappointments of a shallow faith will mean the end of that faith for many who will fall into apostasy and God rejection. Others through repentance will be required and led to re-examine their inadequate faith and come to the apostolic and prophetic quality of believing that I think God waits. Now, 25 years ago you started the Ben Israel Fellowship in northern Minnesota. Tell me why. Why has God told you to start this? I was living in a 17-room house in New Jersey, 20 miles from New York City, and half a million Jews in my birthplace. I was invited to this area in Minnesota as a speaker, and while I was here I was told that there was a property for sale but I care to see it. I said, well why not, let's go for a ride. They drove me to this bankrupt boys camp bordering on a lake, and there was a chain across the road, no trespassing. When I stepped over that chain and my foot came down on the property itself, the Lord who spoke to me explicitly and called me by name of Jerusalem in 1964, spoke to me and gave me the name Dominion, and these exact words, End Time Teaching Center, Community Refuge. And we are here by the mandate of God and his word to establish a refuge for Jews in flight in North America in the soon coming time of Jacob's trouble. I know you can't answer it, but I've got to ask you, how far off is this Holocaust in Israel? How far off is this persecution of Jews even in the United States of America? You can see what's happening, that the noose is tightening and that the anti-semitic episodes are increasing in number and in the fearfulness, the shootings in Los Angeles at that Jewish day school and the man boasting in it. I think and on university campuses an increase of anti-semitism. The Jewish community is rightly alarmed at this increase, and so we're moving toward these fulfillments. How long it will take, I don't know. It's the hand of God's restraint that keeps it from breaking out right now, and I think that the thing that restrains us the most is that the church is not yet ready either to understand or to participate as being a saving agent from God for Jews in their time of ultimate distress. The woman is going to be fleeing into the wilderness, and there needs to be a place prepared for her there, and few churches and few Christians have any cognizance of this at all. They're unwilling to be inconvenienced, let alone to extend themselves for Jews at a time when Jews will be globally hated, and that in extending yourself you put your own self and family in peril. And so my labor is to bring the church to this kind of consciousness prophetically, and Matthew 25, the first judgment that Jesus renders as the now-seated king, is what the Gentiles have done with the least of these his brethren, and whom do they recognize as being his brethren, and naked, thirsty, and sick, and in prison. And the response of Gentiles to Jews in that plight determines their eternal destiny, and I think we're moving toward that consummation, that the issue of Israel in the last days is the issue of the nations themselves. And therefore the Trump has got to be sounded to wake the church from its sleep and its programs, its attempts at revival, and every other kind of thing to offset its gray and dispirited condition, not realizing that it's in that condition, because it has forfeited an apostolic and prophetic recognition of the centrality of Israel. I'm sorry, we're out of time. Say that again, please. Well, Sid, I was just sharing with you that the key interpretive principle for me, that is at the depth of my whole being and understanding of God and his way, is the cross and resurrection. And I believe that every issue that faces the church, the world, and Jewry, is cross avoidance. And it's this understanding of a certain necessity that is implicit in God's wisdom, that was demonstrated by his own son, of a necessity for the suffering and the death that precedes the glory, is the key to understanding the prophetic scriptures as it pertains to Israel. And so this has been the key of interpretation for me, and in my conversation with those who have opposed my views, I sense in them either a shallow understanding of the cross, or really a flight from it. To embrace the cross and to understand its unavoidable necessity as being that which precedes, that anything that pertains to God's glory will open up the scriptures, and particularly the issues of Israel, in a remarkable new way and depth.