In this sermon, the speaker discusses the importance of understanding the word of God in relation to judgment and promise. He emphasizes the need to consider both aspects and not shy away from difficult topics. The speaker also highlights the role of the prophetic church in addressing hard truths and the significance of the Holocaust in the context of eternal judgment. He concludes by mentioning the necessity of grasping the concept of eternal judgment as a foundational doctrine in order to delve into deeper biblical teachings.

So we bless you Lord, we don't know whether to review what has been spoken or just to break into this whole subject area, but you know, and we look to you, who has been so exceedingly faithful because you can't help yourself, it's what you are in yourself. And we pray that we might be that way also, because we can't help ourselves, it's what we are in God. So Lord bless us together precious God and we just bow before you with such gratitude for the privilege to consider things that are so rarely examined and ask for a grace Lord in it, a grace to consider the things that are in your heart as you see them and that as men must be brought to see them or suffer the consequence of their ignorance, which is woeful. Bless us and sober us and bring us more to the status of sons and daughters by considering the Father's heart. We thank you and give you the praise for this privileged time in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, anybody feel about reviewing material of the last time, about the subject of judgment and maybe one thing that is not to be missed, the issue of the triune God, which is to say the issue of God, it's knowing God as God, as he in fact is, and not to know him as he is and as he has desire to be known, is not to know him. And we're not talking about an idle knowledge. We're talking about the substitution for God in the name of God, even by those who purport to believe only to find in the day of calamity that there's no God who answers. That might well be the explanation for the tragic silence in the Holocaust, that those who thought themselves to be calling upon God were calling more upon the God of their own projection than the God in fact who is God. It's costly to reject the revelation of God as he himself presents himself and to insist on some other view that is more compatible with our self-interest. I'm not clever enough, maybe you can help, why men would prefer the inadequate view of God, why they would insist on a monotheistic view and not only insist but see themselves as the heroic defenders of the faith when that is not God, it never was God, and we have now after the revelation at the cross of the triune God, the son at the cross crying to the father in heaven and suffering unto death by the eternal spirit, to continue to insist upon an erroneous view after that costly revelation has got to bring consequence, it's got to bring judgment, and we're suffering that judgment still. It may well be that not the least of the reasons why Israel still has the day of Jacob's trouble before it is that in its own road to Calvary that inexplicable suffering that Jesus himself said eclipses every previous suffering because since the world was there never was before and there never will be again a time of a suffering as yet future, that not the least reason is the very resemblance of Jesus's own path to the cross. Rejection, despised of men, suffering outside the city, which is to say Jews in the wilderness of the nations rejected, repulsed, bearing a cross of which they're not conscious, the cross of suffering, that in their own experience they would come to recognize that which they have rejected in his experience only by virtue of the revelation that comes by walking it out themselves. I'm only surmising, but I wouldn't put it past God, that the only way to apprehend that kind of knowledge is the experience of it, or the proximity to that experience, not that they are like him, voluntary and willing servant people to bear a cross in a redemptive way, but just the judgment which he bore, they'll bear for their own sin and the resemblance to his suffering, his path to Calvary will give them a glimpse of his, they'll see the parallel. So don't think that we've covered this material, that's just a bit of an afterthought, but that this issue of God as he himself is, and that if we will not realize it in the Word, in God's own testimony, in references to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the Word, if we'll not recognize it in the demonstration of the Christ at Calvary, if we'll not see it in the Word, will we see it in the event that the triune God is revealed, not only in his Word, but in his acts, and that if we have rejected the act as we have rejected the Word, we have rejected the last opportunity to see God as he in fact is. So the view that reconciles the God of mercy with the God of judgment, the God in his acts is the revelation of God in his persons, is the revelation of God as he himself is, is God's provision against error and against deception, not only for the Jew, but also for the Church. So that I wrote here that it may guard the Church itself against the last day's deception, as well as being the key to the revelation of the triune God for the Jew. It may well be that we are candidates for deception as the Church, because although we give credence to the doctrine of a triune God, we're living monotheistically. So the fact that we have labeled something Jesus doesn't in fact make him that, see what I mean? And that it may well be that if we have that warp in our view and have not a correct view of God, then we're susceptible and open for every other warp and every other deception. The view of God as God himself is, is God's greatest provision and antidote against deception in any area. And that's God's cry, the knowledge, all that they might know me is God's cry. And of course, what he means is that they might know me as I in fact am, and not as they thought me to be. Of course, in the scriptures, there's several references where God rebukes Israel, you thought I was such a one as yourself. And we are continually in the process of making God in our image. We project upon God, our image of the kind of patsy God we would like him to be, who serves our purposes. We are continually elevating ourselves above God, even unconsciously. And we began this whole discussion by the statement of Elie Wiesel, the great commentator on the Holocaust, who, when I asked him to what degree he would acknowledge Jewish suffering historically in the Holocaust in particular as being the fulfillment of prophetic scriptures in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, his answer was, I refuse to consider that. So the exaltation of man and his opinion, even over against the clear stated word of God is, in my opinion, enough grounds for the Holocaust itself, because it's the nub of the problem of man's exaltation over God. It invites judgment, even after the judgment. And when a man says that, who was the victim of the judgment and saw his entire family wiped out at Auschwitz, and he himself is the sole survivor, and still clings tenaciously to this exaltation, I refuse to consider that. It's not whether it's true or not, it's whether it's convenient or not. Because to consider that is to open yourself for a complete devastation in every area of your thought, of your view of God, of man, of purpose, of history, of life, of future, of value, and of yourself. That's why my mother is running scared. That's why a 90-year-old woman has her ears in her fingers and her hands over her eyes and wants to make it to the finish line without any distraction over the issue of Jesus, because that issue is every issue. The issue of Jesus is the issue of God. The issue of God is the issue of truth. And once you open yourself, then every category that you have so carefully maintained for 90 years, that puts you in a self-justifying light, is devastated. And who can bear it? The only thing that would enable you to bear it in this life is the awareness that if you don't suffer that measure here, you'll suffer it eternally, and that without remedy. It's the eternal shriek. Here it's a shriek, but it ends in joy. There it's a shriek without relief. So that's the issue of truth. And what can we say but mankind has been so resistant to the truth of God, despite all of his entreaties from the time of Jesus and before, the testimony of the prophets and the apostles and the history of the church, that in the last analysis, coming to the end of the age, and the issue of the day of eternity before us, that God has no recourse but to bring the most devastating preliminary judgments into the experience of men, in the hope yet that they will serve the redemptive purpose of saving them from the ultimate judgments, which are without remedy. That's why I could say at a minister's conference in Japan, if you think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only military decisions of an expedient time, and not understand that it was God bringing raining fire and death on Japan to save you from an ultimate fire, and that without remedy, then you don't understand. And a man shot up out of his seat and cried out, God, he said, make me a prophet for my nation. In other words, enable me to explain to my nation the meaning of its own disasters, to save them from the future disaster that is eternal and without remedy. And that's why the whole issue of the holocaust and the judgments of God must be set in the context of eternity. If you remove eternity, if you try to consider the holocaust only in temporal terms, there's no way to fathom it. It only makes sense in the light of eternal judgment. So these are penultimate judgments, preliminary judgments in the light of one that is final, irremediable, and eternal, without recall, or we don't understand it. And the fact of the matter is that we don't understand it. The church has not this sense of eternity and eternal judgment. Which is one of the four or five basic doctrines that Paul speaks about in Hebrews 6, before you can go on to the deep things of the word. This is the milk of the word, the laying on of hands, the eternal judgment, salvation, but it has escaped the church. We have not had a stomach for it. So divine judgment becomes a hermeneutical key for the revealing of the mystery of the Godhead himself. Hermeneutical means principle of interpretation of the scripture of God and of God himself. So to reject that revelation condemns Jews to a view of God, which is not God, and therefore one who could not save out of calamity. I can't think of anything more horrendous than to think that you know God, and in a day when you need to call upon God desperately to find out that you're just talking to the air. You're calling to a projection of your own making. It's the last cruel idol of your own deception. Better to be safe from that before the day of calamity. So the greatest calamity is that which is eternal and irremediable. Is it not for this which every lesser calamity rightly interpreted was calculated to save us? Can you see why it is that when I present a paper like this before even a group of scholars and men who are called to the Jews, you can't hear this. I went through what, 13 pages? I didn't even go through it. I just spot read it as the Lord led, and they grumbled that I took too much time. I mean just this little bit here would deserve hours of consideration. So Israel's first deliverance was initiated by a man who turned aside to see a burning bush. He looked into the issues of judgment, which is still burning. Why does the bush burn and is not consumed? Because the issues have not yet been met. They're unresolved, and whether it'll be today or some other time, somewhere in one of the back pages I talk about the prophetic cry of God to the Israel through its history, and I raise the question not when have we responded to the cry, when have we even heard it? From that perspective, what ought to be the foundational basis for our approach to Jews now? But Moses and the prophets, of which Jews are profoundly ignorant. As I read to my mother out of the book of Isaiah, and she said where in the New Testament is that found? Mosh Rosen of Jews for Jesus is defending the faith against the charge that the New Testament is anti-semitic. I don't know if you know that this is a profound complaint of world Jewry, that there'll never be a settlement of the issue of anti-semitism which resulted in the Holocaust. This is their view, except that the root of it, the references in the New Testament against Jews be excised out. So that when I was in the Phoenix area and they had a weekly talk in the synagogues by local rabbis, this rabbi came and gave a talk on the prophets, and after all of the innocuous questions that were asked that were nothing, I stood up and I said, can you tell me sir, when it is that we as a nation have ever acknowledged the controversy, the complaint of God, the indictment against us through the prophets? When have we ever answered it? And I forgot what you answered, but I drew a little dream answer. The question is, when have we ever heard it? Because tragically and ironically, modern Jews are biblical illiterates. They couldn't tell you where to find the prophets. If they stumbled over it, they wouldn't recognize it. We have not only read every other book, we have written them. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, we are the dispensers, the Talmud, but the word of God we know not. And even in the deepest Jewish orthodoxy, the word of God is only the pretext for rabbinical commentary. So when you look at a page of the Talmud, you may have at the center the verse, but then around it is Rabbi Jonathan's commentary, then Rabbi Akiva's, then Rabbi so-and-so's. It goes out from there, and what they really are discussing is not the word, but the rabbinical interpretations that take you farther and farther from it, until you're occupied with such profound questions as, would the Sabbath be violated if you move this from there rather than from there to there? And what do you do when you're outside? I mean, this is a remarkable thing. But the word of God they know not, because the attitude to the word of God and the attention to the word of God is the issue of God himself, whether it's the Jew or the Christian. Our knowledge of God and our love of God is most safely measured by our knowledge and love of the word, not just the consideration of it, but the obedience to it. So it's not an accident that Jesus is called the word made flesh, and as we had rejected the oral word, the written word, we rejected that word also. So if Israel's first deliverance came by a man who turned aside to see, by what means will Israel's final deliverance come? That is to say, everything in the end is corporate. There was the singular Christ, now the body of Christ. There was the single Moses, now maybe in the last days a mosaic company of an apostolic kind called, commissioned, mandated, and sent to bring last days Jews out of the Egypt of the nations and into the land of promise, but only on the basis of ascending, only on the basis of I will be with you, only on the basis of who am I that you should send me? Total sense of ineptitude and inability and our own failures, and yet the one distinguishing thing that was the criterion for his call and ours is he turned aside to see. I don't know if we'll ever have the occasion together, but I wrote a paper in the seminary on Isaiah about comfort ye, comfort ye my people, and the nub of the paper is that the thing that will preserve a remnant of Jews in the last days is the word of comfort, the prophetic word that your God will come and save you in the midst of their disaster, and before there's any possible view of seeing him come to people who are not habituated to that seeing, but are able to go on by the power of the word that comes to them prophetically that says your God will come and comfort you, and that that word can only be spoken in prophetic integrity in a life-giving way by those who did not withhold themselves from speaking previously the word of necessary judgment, though those who not only turned aside to see judgment, but could speak the word of judgment and even the future judgment yet to come, and so the whole nub of that paper in Isaiah was this, that Jews have one basis for believing the word of comfort that will save them even before that coming, because they have come to a place where they have learned to esteem the word of God prophetically as being true, which is to say that they receive the word of judgment as true because it was confirmed by their experience, and therefore they can hear and receive the word of comfort, because to know that the God who spoke judgment and did it is the God who now speaks comfort and will do it, that's the so the issue of judgment and the ability to communicate it and to show our suffering people that what they're going to suffer in the time of Jacob's trouble and maybe to speak to them in the midst of that time is the word of God, and that God always fulfills what he speaks, that's the God that he is, and because you're now experiencing that fulfillment, you see how important it is to say I refuse to consider that, if you refuse to consider that, what will you do when you're hanging on the ropes and are about to expire and the prophetic word comes, hang in there, your God is coming, he will deliver you, and you say well I can't consider that because I didn't consider this, and the consideration of the word of judgment is the condition is the condition with the consideration of the word of promise, and the one who speaks it is the one who first spoke it as judgment and will now speak it as comfort, namely the prophetic church of the last days who does not balk from looking at hard things and even speaking them, maybe one of the reasons that I got shut out at Las Vegas when I presented this paper to men who are in ministry to the Jews is they don't want to speak it, they would rather speak four spiritual laws, notice how four spiritual laws begins, by the way there's a fifth one for Jews, literally, this is a Bill Bright publication of Campus Crusade, it begins with God has a plan for you, the beginning is an appeal to the benefit that you will receive, there's not a reference so far as I know to judgment and being saved out of it, it's positivistic in keeping with the spirit of our contemporary world, but where are the people who will come to the Jews and speak hard words, but speak them with a love that they would recognize, as I was confronted at, where's the famous girl's school that begins with a V in upstate New York, Vassar College and the the meeting was broken into by a dozen black fedora-hatted Hasidic Jews out of Brooklyn who came to terrify and succeeded, I've never seen Christians more terrified when they broke in through those doors and never sat down and stood around the room and everybody stopped breathing and as close to me as these ladies and I'm trying to finish a message on Abraham and circumcision, to try preaching under adverse circumstances while they're glowering at you, seeing you as public enemy number one, Hitler only destroyed our bodies, you're seeking to destroy our souls, and then when I finished and was open for questions and answers and boom, all hell literally broke loose, they were under an anointing from below, you should have heard the cries that came out of the Christians who thought to love Jews until their ox was gored, until Jews came in a way that was not cute, but terrifying, a hit squad, you know, how do you react then is where you are, that's why God's preparing us, he goes we're going to be hit, the doors are going to burst open and they're going to come in and God knows what condition and they don't like this, they don't like that and you're a traitor and they're calling you names and you're extending your life for them, but I'll never forget this moment, this guy was glowering at me, he said if you're, how do you say it, your messiah was here now, he said we would do to him what our fathers did 2,000 years ago, and then he said and I know that you love us cats and he went on to say something else but I never followed it, I never told you that, how do you know that, I don't know it myself, how do you know it, we know that you love us cats, I don't know how they know it, we know you have a spirit they said but we don't know that it's God, I said you know, in the regular prophetic school we take that time to examine true and false prophetic ministry because that is the issue of the end, not only for the church but for the Jew, that's why I'm so jealous over the integrity and the truth of that prophetic call which is now being made into a hamburger by people who are much more casual about it and the whole popularity of sudden prophets that have come upon the scene and the casual shallow content of their prophetic ministries, mostly the gift of prophecy or the gift of knowledge, if indeed it's that, if it's not clairvoyance, it has nothing to do with the prophetic call from an oracular question on the word oracle, if it's not the prophetic oracles, what God is saying, what's on God's own heart which I believe this is and with the resonance of God and the authority of God, how then is it prophetic, so this question of what is prophetic is the great issue of the church and it's the issue of Israel's survival because in Ezekiel 37 which is the classic text, the paradigm of the end, when Israel is finally down and out and we're all going to see that, Israel is going to be without hope and bereft of anything, they must come to that place because they are the exemplars of human self-sufficiency, prowess and ability, the only thing that makes Jews, Jews is that they are man, everything that is in man is what we Jews are but brought to its ultimate expression, so when God deals with us, he's dealing with man and man's hope in himself and man's confidence in himself, so Israel is suffering for the whole of mankind that are attached with it in their hopes in themselves and independent of God, I mean even now in the crisis of Israel, if anybody pays any attention to the whole thing with Arafat, the PLO and the remarkable outworking of men who thought to make an Oslo agreement that has given their severest enemies who have vowed their destruction, the whole principle of the foundation of PLO is Israel's destruction, they'll not be satisfied with anything else and to negotiate with enemies who have never altered that determination and now not only give them a foothold but a whole place within the nation and of course they have to have a police force and so they arrange for 9,000 it's up to 20,000 and they have more than pistols, they've got the most up-to-date armaments that is much more than just keeping the law in the Gaza Strip, so they've got now within as well as without an armed enemy waiting for the moment in which God will release the most diabolical hatred upon them, so Israel is in for an unbelievable in my opinion devastation and that's why in Ezekiel 37 which I believe is a future statement, in verse 11 it says, and they themselves say we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones, for Jews to acknowledge that is an unbelievable admission which even this holocaust did not obtain, what came out of this holocaust was not a broken defeated people that said we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones, when literally they were dry bones but the cry never again, the proud defiant assertion never again and think of the implications of that which says in profound ways left unspoken that the holocaust was not the dealing of God but the dealings of men which we suffered in our defenselessness, that's why they got away with it but now they will never do it again because we're the third greatest military power, we're the number one air force, nuclear deterrent, shows a complete misconstruction of the meaning of their last tragedy and makes them therefore the candidates but that next will come and that devastation will be yet more severe than the holocaust of World War II which took six million Jews, how much will this take? Only a remnant will survive of present world Jewry, somewhere like 13 to 15 million people, you know what my question is? Cats, you're going to live through that without going haywire? What's going to preserve your sanity if you're shredded by one Anne Frank, what are you going to do when you see the tens of thousands of Anne Franks going up in smoke? I don't know how we're going to bear their suffering, no, it's going to take a certain, I don't know what, and maybe that's part of the answer of what the prophetic church of the last days is, it has the grit, the moral grit and the spiritual stamina to bear hard words and the hard reality, so if we're a bunch of pansies now and we fall apart at the seams, someone looks at us cockeyed or we don't like what this one said or this was wrong, how are we going to stand that? And that's why I think the Lord is being extremely gracious with us in the light of what is future and very close at hand and at the door, so the issue of what is prophetic is a life and death matter because when Israel comes to the condition where they acknowledge that we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones, God turns to another and says now prophesy to these bones that they might live. The God who spoke himself out over creation in the chaos of Genesis does not speak over the chaos of Israel, he turns to another, a son of man, a prophetic son of man and said you prophesy to these bones. Now what if we choke and splutter and say well that's over my head, they're so stone cold dead, I mean their bones are turned to powder, I can't believe for this, to prophesy without an appropriate faith is not to prophesy, right? Have you ever felt the virtue go out of you? Like it's one, you have tremendous stamina in prayer to pray for a sniffle, but when someone comes in with a wheelchair and foaming at the mouth and jerks and splutters and for that deliverance you just feel the virtue go out of you just to look at them. Remember what happened when they came down from the mount of transfiguration, they had seen the Lord transfigured in glory with Moses, with Elijah, what a blinding sight, but the moment they came down the thing that met them was a kid rolling over in his own puke and drool who was a habitual paralytic, what do you call it, epileptic and they could not deliver him and that if there's any false spirituality that makes us to defer from that command of obedience to address God, Israel remains in her grave and so whatever vestige that is falsely spiritual, falsely religious, falsely deferring that would keep us from an obedience will in that day be the fatal thing. So much must we be in God that we can even command him and yet honor him at the same time. It's not out of arrogance, it's out of a remarkable humility that will obey God even when he commands us to command him. Who can come to that? Where are we now with in terms of such a relationship with him and how will we get from where we are presently to a relationship of that kind except by the dealings of God. While Israel waits on the sidelines, they have nothing to do with their own destiny, they are out of it and they must be so they shall never boast that was by any virtue of ourselves that we became an answer to the nations that how does it say you shall bless all the families of the earth not by any virtue in us whatsoever. We were rebellious, we were apostate, we blasphemed your name in every nation where we were driven, we have no distinction in ourselves. If we ever become a blessing to nations it's because you blessed us out of death, you raised us up out of death, we have no qualification. Israel cannot be a factor in their own eternal destiny by the very nature of the thing. So the whole premium rests on the church who speaks to the dry bones both in faith and in love and wants to see them raised up out of that death when actually there'll be an impulse to say let them lie. Listen who needs them and besides I am the prized and esteemed son of the living God and I don't want to see this upstart restored again that would in a way threaten my place of prominence with God. So we have to be divested even of any jealousy about our own esteemed place with God which the older son could not bring himself to do when the prodigal returned. So the issue is the church. So if Israel is going to require such severities of dealings what will the church require to come to its prophetic place as the son who can be commanded to prophesy and can prophesy as God, to come back to your statement, in his authority and even in commanding him. And that's why we have to examine every present-day phenomenon in that light. Is what is happening moving God's people toward this maturity and this relationship as sons to the father or is it telling them to lighten up? You've been too serious as we said over the breakfast. Lighten up from what? We've been light all along. So if anybody wants to hear further discussion on the subject of what is prophetic and what is false and how is that to be assessed you can see Simon for the tapes of last year's school where we spent substantial time on that very important question. One thing I'll just say in passing you can be assured that that which is prophetically true is exactly that which will be called false. And that which is false is going to be celebrated as true. And that's been the history of God's true prophets since time immemorial. So you'll know you'll be a candidate for rejection, reproach, rebuke and even death. And I talk about true and false prophets somewhere here about the shallow grace of false prophecy is no grace at all but rather a deception that leads to unpreparedness and collapse when the unanticipated calamity falls. Men want to hear false assurances and comforting words. What happens when the predicted calamity falls and they are not prepared having rejected the word of it for the reality? In fact it might be a real factor in what Paul says will take place in the last days namely a great falling away. That a disillusionment. Well we thought that God had restored Israel and that this was the return and the state had been established and we had encouraged Jews to come and now look at this devastation the land is a shambles its cities are ruined and the people have been dispersed so where's God? So this is an enormous thing and practically speaking if you don't know about it pray for a tentative invitation that has come to me from a man representing the leadership of the body of Christ in Israel to come and share with them my apocalyptic scenario which they have rejected over the last three or four years and men who used to say that when art comes the word of war comes with him have now come to say that that last word was an error and the man might himself even be false. But as I said to them you know if even if that's true how about the 20 years that preceded that where it was the word of God shouldn't you have at least at your own expense brought me back and shown me my error and corrected me rather than to leave me in that state in a place of silence and cut off. What a statement of where the body of Christ is in terms of its own maturity to allow a man to languish in error rather than to correct him. But now they're talking well maybe we need to hear you again but I've not heard further from them so you can make that a matter of prayer. A false prophecy is not a grace not even a shallow grace and leads to deception and unpreparedness and collapse when the unanticipated calamity falls. So this is a critical question of what is true and false in terms of prophetic. Okay can we go on now to some other considerations. The first thing I want to bring up is the issue of national culpability. We have a mindset as modern people of individual responsibility. In fact there are not many that even have that but few of us have any sense of collective or corporate or national culpability. Because God is going to be judging an entire nation and I'm quoting from a Old Testament scholar that secular law has no precedent for God bringing his whole people under accusation. A different framework is needed to understand that and only where an obligation exists can an accusation be raised. Traditional views and the concepts of law make no place for a sense of collective sin or guilt. National culpability and so the scholar is raising the question if a whole people are to be seen under indictment what's the basis for that? How is that to be understood? It requires a different framework of understanding than the framework of individual responsibility. Only where an obligation exists can an accusation be raised. So the question is what is the obligation for the nation by which now they can understand that they have a national responsibility before God? And I'll give my famous A for the day to anyone who can answer that. What is the framework that puts Israel different from all other nations in a place not only of individual responsibility but national culpability? They have a covenantal obligation so that this obligation presumed by the prophets is defined through the covenant relationship between Jehovah and Israel and that this view is lost to contemporary Jews and even to the church. I mean how can we communicate this to Jews if we don't have it ourselves? What would you say is the most visible evidence of the loss of covenantal reality or obligation even in the church? Divorce. Divorce. The frequency of divorce. I mean the statistics are as atrocious for the church as they are in the world. Indicates that we don't have a sense of covenantal responsibility. I hear this again and again and again where a wife is bent out of shape and rightly so and the guy's been unbearable and why do I have to suffer this? And the next thought is divorce. Where is the covenant of sticking with it and believing God to bring you through it? He's a third fold cord and he will. But instead we want relief from the tension and the unhappiness of the moment and after all we're still young and attractive and there are other options and alternatives and try, try again. Which is the mentality of the world that is completely disrespectful if not ignorant of the meaning of the word covenant. Covenant is not a word devised in the world. It did not rise up from the earth. It came down from heaven. It is God's own view. It's God's own mentality. He's the covenantal making and covenantal keeping God. He's the God of covenant or he's not God at all. I mean it's intrinsic to God. It's a concept that we would never have had except that God himself gave it. Where would marriage be? Where would relationship be if God had not given the concept and it's more than a concept. It's a reality in which he promises to be a third part. A three-fold cord cannot be broken. Two cords in tension against one another will snap. But the addition of that third cord prevents the two from rubbing and from breaking. So what does that require? His participation in with people who are married on the basis of covenant and honor covenant and he will honor them who honor him and be in that relationship what he has promised. What's God's great lament with Israel through the prophets and the whole testimony of scripture? You can't have a covenant. But I made with you though. You're a covenant breaker and that's why the end of the age begins a new age with an everlasting covenant spoken in Jeremiah 31. I'll make a new covenant with you. An everlasting covenant. Why everlasting? It'll never ever again be broken. I'll make a new covenant. Not new in its terms or content. It's the same one spoken to Abraham, to David, that God has reiterated in all of his covenants or is essentially the same. What makes it everlasting, what makes it new is I'll keep it. I'll write it in your heart. I'll put it in your inmost part and in your spirit. It's no more externally doing this and doing that. You flubbed that. I'll do it. It'll be unbroken and it'll be everlasting. So we call the new covenant is that covenant. The covenant is the name of the game and so we need to ask this question for a generation that has not this mentality and has a non-generational mentality. Does not see itself related to previous generations. It sees itself as autonomous but that's not the way God sees. Part of the prophetic task and what defines the true prophet is communicating to men things as God sees them. However much they are in opposition and tension with things as men choose to see them in the world or even religious world. It's another seeing that's radically different and radically other and the test of the truth of prophetic anointing and ability and call is not just to communicate that but to communicate it in such a way as to displace what is ever opposed to it and to establish it as authentic in the hearing and the life of those who receive it. Knowing that to receive that means to put themselves in opposition to the world and open to the world's reproaches and its opposition. So it's an anointing that must be powerful because it's a complete controverting of men in the way in which they think and see. It changes their values, their perceptions as a brother shared last night. He's another man. He has another heart. He sees everything is different. The ability to break in and through against every obstruction and opposition to God's view which the powers of the air have continually immersed mankind in their conventional wisdom is the prophetic call. And what a painful thing. What a warfare. What an opposition. And to succeed in the communicating of that where people will not only be able to hear it despite the contradiction of their own categories and the cost of it but surrender to the truth of it because it has come with such authority and such an anointing and such a power as if God himself had spoken it because the prophet is the mouthpiece of God. So if we know that much we have a criteria by which we can assess those who today bring the plot of his prophets. I have never been so completely unimpressed by the great oracles of the hour as I'm now being really jealously to pray for the restoration of the authentic and how abysmal is the discernment of the church that they wouldn't know one from the other. They would trample on the one center of God and dismiss him as false and those that are feathering their nests and stuffing their prophet's pockets and the whole them they run after. You know you could almost say that the condition of the church is as abysmal as the condition of Israel. So we have a two-fold call with the abysmal church and the abysmal Israel. If one were not enough and it's essentially the same thing which is why at the end God concludes both in his mercy. The church will never be able to raise its head with any sense that we have served you. Our failure will be as tragic and as abysmal as Israel before us and only by the same mercy that comes to them that all equally comes to us will we have any place with them. So we need to pray for the restoration of true prophetic ministry or the church will never come off that ground that it's presently in. And where do such men come from? How are they to be produced? Even if they have the calling you don't come full bore into a hostile religious environment that is out to kill you. Where do men come? To the place of maturity and strength and the ability to to see and communicate God's word. It has to be out of a prophetic community and it may be that what was called the school of the prophets in the Old Testament was that kind of a reality. School not so much as, what's that Latin word? Collegium. A collegium, a collective group of people who were prophetically disposed. They were not all prophets necessarily but they were supportive of and related to and joined with the prophetic men of their generation. Okay so I'm asking the question whether covenant is still in force and its stipulations binding even when it is lost to the consciousness of subsequent generations and even to their desire. Is covenant still covenant when men are ignorant of it or as the world says there's no excuse about ignorance of the law is no excuse. The law is the law whether you're ignorant of it or not. If you violate it in your ignorance you suffer the consequence. The same thing is exactly true of covenant. So I'm raising a really profound question. Modern Jews have no covenantal sense at all. Does that mean that that absolves them from covenantal obligation? And if covenantal obligation requires and brings covenantal penalty for violation of covenant, are modern Jews exempt or are they on a thin line of soon coming disaster that will be the fulfillment of the covenantal penalty? Remember when the first covenant was made at Sinai? Maybe somebody can find this when I'm talking. It says something like and not only with you do we make this agreement but those generations that will follow us they are also implicated and stand with us in this agreement today. In other words Jews of all generations to this present hour were subsumed in the agreement at Sinai whether or not they were there. How do you like them apples? So you see this is conceptually radically different from the way that men think. So we have a whole world Jewry that is totally oblivious that they have any kind of connectedness with other Jews or a national destiny or fate or judgment but they will not be exempt because of their ignorance. Covenantal ignorance does not protect against covenantal obligation and covenantal penalty but we have a task to communicate to those who are ignorant these very things and we've not been doing it. My people perish for the want of knowledge very likely it seems totally that it's knowledge of this kind. We talked about Deuteronomy 32 which is called the song of Moses not the song that we sing about the liars and their horses being thrown into the sea but a song of remembrance of what would be the consequence of the calamity of the latter days if we forget God and our covenantal agreement and the reason it's called the song is that it was to be memorized and that the fathers would have teach it to their children and they to their own children and then subsequently through every generation that we would be prepared against a latter day's judgment for that failure. Which of us who are Jews at this table ever so much has heard a word about it? Which of us ever grew up in a home in which we knew what the book of Deuteronomy was or where it could be found and even if we could find it could believe that God is the author of it? See what I mean? We're totally outside not only of the covenantal understanding but of the biblical understanding. So abysmal is the condition of modern day Jerusalem. We are alienated from the word of God and the God of the word and the covenant of that God but none of that ignorance saves us from the penalty as the victims of the holocaust demonstrated.