In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of God's people reaching out to the Jewish people during a time of trouble and affliction. He warns that if the Jews are not taken in and protected, they could face the same fate as they did in Nazi Germany. The speaker also discusses the resurrection of an entire nation, which he believes will be brought about by a prophet who will speak to the dry bones of that nation. He calls for the church to come together in perfect agreement and speak the word of God as one voice in order to raise the dead.

This morning I think we're going to have it, because it is given. So, I'm jealous for your sake. My reputation has been so long on the dung heap that I don't even bother to consider it. But I want you to receive the full and ample blessing. And I know that you're going to be extremely stretched this morning, spiritually, intellectually, and in every way. And I'm very fond of speaking about life and death issues. Every man likes to heighten the value of his own message by commending to the people who are hearing them that it's not just a message. Life and death hangs in the balance. And that, in fact, is true. In a tangible, very real way, the issue of life and death of many will be affected by you and your ability to hear and to receive this word this morning that will affect, if it's understood and received, all of your subsequent future and walk. It's the kind of word that brings you of age in the very hearing, because it has got to do with the ponderous, last days work of God through the Church, that we can almost say that everything till now has been preparation. So, the fact that it has to do with Jews and with Israel should not prejudice you. And you should not think that it's a subject that I'm fond of because I myself am Jewish. Just a coincidence. The fact is that it's what God has chosen, and if we are his people and share his heart, we will choose what he chooses and love what he loves. And something has got to be done with that little boy. God bless him. Whether it's execution or at the stake or exile, I don't know, but the world is not big enough for the two of us. He'll understand at a later time. That's how important I think that what the Lord is about this morning, that we can't even brook that kind of distraction. So, Lord, having said all these things, puts the premium on you to deliver. And if I'm not exaggerating, and I have not overstated the importance of this word and this perception of ourselves as the Church in your last day's call, then I'm asking my God for that revelatory power that breaks into the consciousness of your people and gives an understanding by impartation and not by celebration, not by the analytical work of our mind, which may come later. But, Lord, I'm asking that divine work, that thing that is sent and finds entry in your people, because this mystery is of you and it must be through you in order that it might be to you as glory forever. And I know enough to know that you'll not allow any man to touch it, that it'll not be communicated or fulfilled either by human eloquence and ability or religious desire. It's altogether a supernatural thing because, as Paul says, it's unto you as glory forever. There will not be another issue. At the end of the age, given by you, by which your glory will be obtained in this earth and will reverberate eternally. So we just thank you, Lord, and ask your blessing now, the blessing of your Spirit and your anointing for speaking and hearing. May we just sense, my God, the historic occasion, the weight of it, and be open to receive it. We thank you and give you the praise in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, there's any number of texts that can be chosen from the prophets. In fact, the prophets are loaded with references to the last days' dealings of God with the nation Israel. But this morning, the Lord has just kind of stirred me in the book of Amos, in the very last chapter, one of the minor prophets, not because his message is insignificant, but because it's not as voluminous, it's not as large as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but altogether related to everything that the major prophets understood about the issue of Israel in the last days. And this is an extremely compact statement, which means that we have to unpack it. It says so much in a few words, and that is the genius of Scripture itself. And that's why if you've been groomed on Gone with the Wind or Tarzan of the Apes or something like that, and then you come to the Bible, you're altogether on another ground. Have you learned to realize the genius of the Word of God, the Scripture, and the way that God has to compact and to intensify meaning in just a few words? And not the least of his purposes is that he's calling us to draw out his heart, and that it's a holy and spiritual phenomenon to read and understand and probe and extract the meaning of God's Word. The theologians call it exegesis, the Greek word meaning to draw out. The Latin word education is from the root educare, which also means to draw out. So to draw out the Lord's meaning and to have it in ourselves is his intention. And when you have it in that way, it's transforming. And God wants us transformed. He wants the young people to come of age, to come into a maturity and a grasp and a high seriousness about the things of God that could not be expected, naturally speaking, with regards chronologically to their years. And those of us who have been shallow, silly, and casual and just knockabouts and filling space and getting by, he wants us to come awake and come alive in God. There's an enormous, ponderous responsibility that can only be performed by the Church, the whole Church, in all of its corporateness. That means every cell, every member is going to be required to be participant. You know, this is more than religion. And I praise God for that, that he has called us to more than services. And I cherish services and an opportunity in services to worship the Lord as we have this morning. My spirit is just refreshed. And I know it's going to affect the transmission of the Word. Already it is. And then the proclamation of the Word itself, coming into the house of God. What a privilege. And we delight in it and we enjoy it and it benefits us and blesses us. But he has a purpose for himself in it. Everything pertains to the ends of God and his ultimate and eternal purposes. The issue of his glory forever, that's our calling. So if we have jobs and careers, don't get too occupied with that. Praise God that it's his mercy that clothes our kids and puts food on our table and a roof over our heads. But that's not the purpose for our being. The issue of God's glory is our purpose. And it cannot be obtained by single virtuosos. There are not enough outcasts around to do it. It requires the entire church. The gray heads, the younger, the older, the kids. Everything has to do with the atmosphere and the thing in which is the outworking of God's purpose. You notice, by the way, that the world is coming apart at the seams. It's in the process of collapse and final disintegration. There's only one institution in the earth, excuse the language, institution, that bodes any hope. It's the church of Jesus Christ in the earth. And we are called to it and we constitute it. Wow, what privilege. Well, there's a people who are central to God's last day's purpose who don't know beans. They don't have the faintest notion of anything that I've already said. They don't even know their own prophets. My mother, who has just visited us, stumbled on Isaiah 53 and some references in a book that I've given her of the testimony of rabbis who were converted. She said, where's this Isaiah 53? Is it in the New Testament? This is not an unintelligent woman, but a typically Jewish woman who is a biblical illiterate. And that's the condition of my people. Now, that was my condition before the grace of God came. So you really are the lightbearers to a people in darkness and it's going to be the issue of their life and death. I'm going to describe to you a scenario out of these scriptures and repeat it in many other places that pictures world Jewry coming to a condition of final extremity that will eclipse the holocaust of the Hitler time. And it's not going to be confined to Germany or to the European nations. It's going to be experienced in every nation, including this nation. No nation will be exempt in witnessing the drama of the last day's extremity of the Jewish people. God is going to allow these terrible things to come upon them. It is a very severe judgment. And I think I can say with some confidence that the majority of Jews now alive in the world will not survive it. Only a remnant will. But it's interesting that when the smoke clears, it's only a remnant with which God is concerned in any matter. It's only the true remnant of the church that will stand in that last day because we know there's going to be a great falling away and a great apostasy. So God is not interested in numbers. He shocks off the sinners and the indifferent, the rejecters. And when the final light breaks at the end of the age and the introduction to the millennial glory, there are two remnants that stand for God, a redeemed Israel and the true remnant people of God who were the instruments of Israel's redemption. Let's look at that in this great text in chapter 9 of Amos, beginning with verse 8. Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth, except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. Shall we just, a verse at a time and speak a little bit on each verse? Like, for example, the sinful kingdom. You know what I love about the Word of God? It doesn't mince words. It doesn't disguise things. It doesn't put its best foot forward. I mean, when Jesus said to Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan. And the rebuke that the Lord had for his own disciples, let alone Pharisees, O ye of little faith, and why are you afraid? And how long must I bear you? And Peter's painful betrayal before the cock crowed. And, you know, the Lord tells it like it is. When he says sinful nation, he means sinful nation. And that's the remarkable glory of it, that God is going to redeem the remnants of a sinful nation. That is to say, it's not because they have any qualification in themselves, or any deserving that commends them to God's mercy. Because mercy, by its very definition, in its very nature, is something that issues out of God toward an object totally undeserving or would not be merciful. Like, for example, the mercy that has come to us who believe. What virtue did we have to commend God's mercy to us? Zero. Zilch. Nothing. It's just, it's what he is in himself. And the greatest demonstration of what he is will be directed to a people totally undeserving of it, the sinful nation. And I don't know, are you guys reading the newspapers beside the sports section? Have you noticed what's happening in Israel? Talk about a deterioration in the world. Look at the deterioration of that nation. Just take one episode that a Jewish doctor by the name of Baruch Goldstein, nice Jewish boy like me from New York, and the nicest of the nice, because he's a doctor. My son, the doctor, is the proudest thing which a Jewish mother can boast. And on top of that, he's an Orthodox Jew, not an atheist of the kind that I was. And having all of these virtues, he went into a Muslim mosque in Hebron on one of their high Islamic holy days and shot up the works and killed at a minimum of 39 people and wounded many others before he himself was stomped to death. It has never been heard in modern Jewish history that a Jew should be violent. We have been the objects of violence. It has been visited upon us. But it's something, what shall I say, contrary to our nature as a people. We're usually quiet, unobtrusive, although I have to say there were Jewish boxers out of the Depression years when men had to make a living somehow. Benny Leonard and Slapsy Maxy Rosenblum and guys like that. And he was Slapsy Maxy. But as a rule, Jews are not famous for violence until the State of Israel. In fact, it's violence that preserves the State. It's the nation's ability to be violent and to threaten violence that has kept it from the onslaught of its enemies. Necessity has forced violence upon us as a way of life. But you remember what God said, cursed is that man who trusts in the arm of his own flesh and blessed is that man whose hope is the Lord. Israel is not blessed. It does not know the Lord, does not trust in the Lord. It hopes in itself in its own strength and is a painful daily revelation of something that Jews have needed to see for millennia. That we have no special thing going for us. We may have thought that we had some distinctives and we wanted to prove it by having our own nation and show the world what a Jewish nation is like. You goyim, you gentiles, of course you're going to be corrupt. Of course you're going to employ violence. Of course you're going to have scandals. But if we Jews ever had a nation, we'd show you what it's like. It would be moral, ethical, everything that we have been unable to demonstrate in 45 years and especially now and it will get worse. And the finest of us is now killing people in innocent blood in some self-appointed mission to blot out the Arabs and to ensure Israel's safety. And you know what the heck of it is? People are going to his tomb as almost a worship. He's become a national religious hero and even his mother and his wife tout him as some kind of great hero of the nation who shot that number of people in cold blood, put on his ear sound protectors and just blasted away at people who were in a posture of prayer. I'm not a defender of Islam, but I think that that is a symbolic episode that we Jews will pay for it. It's a sinful nation. It's a sinful kingdom. But it one day will be, listen to this, the residence and the locus of the kingdom of God in the earth. It's not unlike God taking the murder of Paul, whose name was then Saul, and making him the chief apostle of the church. God just is God like that. He takes the worst and he makes of it the best. And he's going to do the same thing with this entire nation. This nation will be the Paul of the millennial age. They will have an apostolate to the nation. And right now what we're suffering from in pornography, filth, and corruption and defilement will be no more when Jews who are bearing the light of God and the way of God and will be the mouthpieces of God will bring to the nation their priestly ministry that was their calling from the first. Believe us on this? Not only must you believe it, but if you're going to be the church that will be used to obtain this, you've got to believe it with joy. You've got to identify with this drama and understand the mystery of it. Paul calls it a mystery. And that somehow this glorifies God. He would not have had as much glory, as much honor, as much credit if he had taken the people who show themselves to have attributes and distinctions of a spiritual kind that he could employ. He is much more glorified when he takes beggars off the dung keep and he makes them to sit with princes. See? The issue is God's glory forever and he's going to take the least likely candidate, a sinful nation, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth. How do you like that phrase? I don't know if we'll get beyond this one verse, but you've got to get beyond it. That is to say, how are you equipped to understand a God who will destroy? We had a little breakfast conversation about the severity of God and how the church is lacking in the understanding of a God who can be severe. That's crippling for the church. If you don't know God as judge, as Paul knew him as judge, you're going to live a slipshod life. You're going to live a lackluster, slack life because what's lacking in you, that is God's intention, is his fear. And the greatest thing that God has given to inculcate the knowledge of his fear has been the testimony of his judgment for Israel. Some people, I can tell you right now, are going to lose their faith. They're going to become apostates because they're going to become offended when they see God destroy this sinful nation. They are not prepared for that in modern times. It sounds inimical, opposed to what we understand God's nature to be. But who's in error here? It's we who have projected upon him, capital H, a soft, sappy, sentimental view that is not God at all and we call it Jesus. That's called deception. The way in which God guards us and keeps us from deception is showing us the fulfillment of his word even when he chooses to be a judge who will destroy. But the precious thing about God is that he not only kills but he makes alive. He slays but he resurrects. Are you ready for this? There's going to be a resurrection of an entire nation. Will somebody please choke and splutter and fall out of their seat and cry out in opposition that this can't be, this is too much, I can't believe this, this has got to be metaphor, this is some spiritualizing, you surely do not mean literal resurrection from the dead. Why? Why should you stagger over that? Is it so great a thing for God to raise the dead? Aren't we exactly here as believers because he has? And aren't we encouraged to believe that because he has raised Jesus he will raise us also? The greatest event that concludes the age is the resurrection of an entire nation out of the death of God's last day's judgment upon them. Now here's the catch. How is that performed? Not by God in some mystical way speaking to that nation, but by employing a son of man who is a prophet and commanding him to prophesy to the dry bones of that nation who are destitute and without hope and cut off and see themselves as being very dry. And unless there's a prophet who can speak to those bones they remain dry. Are you guys following me? Tell me when I reach the end of your, what do they call it, your capacity, your... Yeah. It's supposed to be like 20, 30 minutes, something like that. I'm asking a miracle this morning. If I'm right in what I'm suggesting, now you're ready for me to pull the string. Do you know who the son of man is whom God will command to speak to those dry bones in a historic moment of time calculated that is the future and toward which we are sending? Who is that prophetic son of man who has the authority, the creative power, the union and identification with God himself that he can speak for him as him so as to raise an entire nation by the word, come forth. Who is he? Is he anywhere in the audience this morning who doesn't even know that he has this calling and will be shocked to learn it because he's just an average Joe. You know, he's just a nice guy who's a believer and keeps his nose clean and I'm no prophet. Everybody who's in the audience this morning is that son of man. Put that in your spiritual pipe and smoke it. Everybody. It's either going to come out of a corporate son of man, a church that has come to its full prophetic constituency and stature, the word that was used about me this morning in introduction, because only that word corporately spoken as one voice in perfect and total agreement as the church of older of one heart and one mind and one soul. And Paul says, say the same things, speak the same things, not because you're automatons or punched off the assembly line. You're distinct individuals, but in the individual dealing of God with your life and in the process and the formation of your own growth and maturity, you're in agreement with God and so is everyone else with you in the moment that has come that you can speak the word of God as one voice that raises the dead. Now, if you've got anything up here in any kind of sense, you know what your next question has got to be? You tell me what the next question is. If this is the destiny of the church, to be the prophetic voice of God to a dead nation who will be eternally indebted to the church, made up essentially of Gentiles, that that church whom they have disdained and have been contemptuous of all their history long was their saving grace and they'll just bow at your feet and hug you and embrace you eternally, that you were the instrument of their deliverance and salvation. You Gentiles, you guys who barely have made it through high school and have nothing that Jews would ever look upon with, in any way to be impressed, were the instrument of God's use for their eternal deliverance. I'll stake my life on what I'm saying this morning, guys. I'll stake everything that what I'm speaking to you is the eternal truth of God and I'm one of the few men who know it and proclaim it freely. And even those who are sympathetic to Israel are opposed to my view because they do not want to consider the necessary death that precedes the resurrection. I'm the only one who's got the gut and understands the way of God because of his own dealings with my own life and even with then Israel that I recognize and know that I know that death must precede resurrection. Whether it's individual or a community or a ministry or a marriage or a nation, anything that pertains to God's glory can only issue out of resurrection. But there must be a first death and Israel is tending toward that death. But are you tending toward the prophetic place to save them from the death? That's the question. That's why we're here in Williams Bay. What do you think? I need speaking engagements? That's why I just came back from Russia and Ukraine and Warsaw and Romania and little dinky nothing places. Why? Because until we all come, until we all come. I wish the Lord had said until most of us or some of us come or just a few out who can speak for God prophetically. No? Until we all come into the fullness and stature of Jesus Christ unto the perfect man. If this does not come to Williams Bay, I despair for my entire nation. If every cell and every member of the body constitutes the corporateness and the fullness of Christ, then any segment of the body, whether it's Warsaw, Poland or dinkyville, Romania or some place in the Ukraine or Williams Bay, cannot be exempted. We're in this together. And it's this very recognition of our call to be the agent of Israel's deliverance that is God's unifying theme, principle and revelation. Any other basis for unity is political, false, ecumenical and a hoax. And the only reason why men are working to obtain it through denominational and religious structures rather than the organism which is the body is because they have not this revelation and don't want to have it. Because it centers in a people's heart. whom they despise and do not want to see resurrected unto glory. Oh, I'm giving you something to think about and chew on. And in fact, if the principle of resurrection from the dead is not working today, I would despair of the entire process. Today, now, this morning, in this message, this word has got to be something that raises you up out of the grave of indifference, of ignorance, of distraction, of all the kinds of things that keep you from your own prophetic fulfillment. And if this will not work by the word, it will not work. Even right here, it will shut down. So, can you believe for a God who will destroy, who is yet the God of love? Some of us are going to be offended by such a God because we've never allowed his judgments into our life. Or when they have come, we have not rightly understood them and have attributed them to men or factors or the economy or some other thing or to a lousy marriage or this wife or that and have not understood and made the principle of God's judgment a first basis for explaining adversity, crisis and death. Except I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord, for I will command and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations, just as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. Put a box right around that verse, a neon box. Let the light blink on and off. God's last days dealing with world jewelry is a sifting through the nations. So does that include the USA? All the nations. There will not be a nation exempt on the face of the earth through which Jews will pass in their last days extremity in the process of God's sifting. See, we have to even catch the language that's being used. What do we sift today? When have you sifted last? We're a modern technological civilization. It's all done for us by Pillsbury and General Mills. It comes to us sifted. But I have enough recollection to remember my Jewish mother sifting flour to get the lumps out that she was making something. And it's like a fine strainer that you just shake back and forth and the coarse lumps cannot come through but only the fine grains can. God is going to do that with entire nations. And he's going to do it through the nations and in the nations. And not one kernel will fall to the ground. He'll know every speck that comes through because he says the sinners of my people will not be sifted out. They're going to perish in the process. They shall die by the sword in verse 10 who say this evil shall not overtake us nor confront us. I'm afraid that that describes the majority of Jewish people in the last days. Because my time is limited I just am required to make one or two statements and pass on. They're going to be sifted through the nations and God is going to bring them into contact with his people because it's only his people who will reach out to them and extend mercy in their time of Jacob's trouble and national affliction in the world. Basements, their barns, their properties to take in Jews because if they're not taken in and they're detected and apprehended right here in River City. Can you believe that? That that could happen in America as it happened in Nazi Germany? And the fact that we have Michael Jordan and Apple Pie and the World Series does not absolve us from the demonic outpouring of the last days that will bring a global hatred against that people by every government and every people? That the only semblance of mankind that will have any compassion for this utterly degraded and despicable nothing people. Jesus calls them the least of these my brethren will be his church and as a matter of fact that will identify who the true church is because listen, why should you have any concern for Jews? Come on, any one of you. Why? You have nothing in your experience except maybe distasteful things or negative things. Why should you extend yourself for a people whom the world will then come to despise and blame for everything, for collapsed economies, for war, for the last days collapse of the world, their comfort, their security? Jews have always been the scapegoat for the failures in nations. Why should you have an attitude other than what the world has? And why should you have a concern? And why should you have a compassion? And why should you be willing to extend yourself when it means that you're putting your neck on the line? It's going to be a risk to identify with that people at that time, a risk of your own life. So it will take a few miracles. One is your deep identification with God and his love for that despised people. Because no matter how much their conduct stinks, his love is not measured by our goodness against. It's something that just flows out of him in an unconditional way. It cannot be offended against. And so the issue of the people of the last days who will rescue them are those who are so in union with that God that his love is their love. His seeing is their seeing. His compassion is their compassion. What basic question am I prompting here? I have yet to get the answer from you when I said that there's going to be a prophetic people whose word will be the issue of life or death for Israel. Now I'm saying in the very same way there's going to be a compassionate people who will extend themselves even at the risk of their own life or that of their own children to take in a despised people because if they don't take them in they'll perish in their wilderness. And the wilderness does not mean a jungle. It just means any location outside of principle urban centers where they can be sifted and brought and moved from place to place without being recognized and detected which is the very reason we've been 20 years in Minnesota. That's why God takes a Brooklyn boy, a big city boy and brings him up to the boondocks in nowheresville because it's there that God has intended, a place of refuge and flight. You know what the great question is that all of this raises? If this is true art and we are presently nowhere near the condition that this kind of scenario requires, we don't have that kind of compassion even for each other let alone for Jews. We don't have prophetic authority. We can't speak a word that raises the dead. We have trouble even mustering the faith to pray for someone's cold and sniffle. So the question is, the great question, how do we get from where we presently are to the ultimate condition in which we need to be if this is going to be fulfilled? And there's a one-word answer and I'll give an A for the day to anyone who can suggest it. It begins with an S, suffering. Church is a place of suffering before it's a place of glory. Church is a place of glory. We're going to have to be a community that can bear the weight of the assault that will come to us physically and morally and spiritually by Jews that are completely deranged and uprooted and in a condition of panic. And their mouths will be full of blabber and they'll be full of hatred against what has happened to them by Gentiles and what are you? And you're going to have to take their onslaught and it has to be like water off the duck's back. You can't be offended. And right now if I said one word more you would raise up like huh. That means there's got to be a deep sanctifying work in the people of God and that means it needs to begin now. It's not going to be obtained in that moment. This is the time of preparation and that's why I have the liberty to speak this word to put you on alert. The only one thing that is lacking and will probably come by the end of the message is an invitation to say yes to God for whatever in his sight would be required to establish you as that people. And supposing what I'm saying doesn't take place what have you lost in allowing him that preparation with you? And I want to tell you it's not compulsory. You don't have to. You can be an average saint and you can be an average saint and get by. You'll be eternally embarrassed if that's what you do. But this is an opportunity for your eternal joy and not your eternal embarrassment. By saying yes to the Lord in whatever it takes to prepare us as a people and to be prepared together. You watch things change when you say yes to the Lord for that. In that day here's what's at stake folks. In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen and close up the breaches thereof and I will raise up its ruins and I will build it as in the days of old. All of this just to restore Davidic worship and tambourine banging and Israeli melodies and boy it's very expensive if it's just that. Are you guys following me? The tabernacle of David has come to mean in the charismatic movement Davidic worship. Talk about a faulty exegesis. God is not going to go through all of this elaborate life and death agony of an entire nation being bled and his greatest numbers dying by the sword being hunted and pursued in a Nazi terror that will come to it in demonic onslaught just so that there could be the restoration of Davidic worship. I mean we've got that now. The tabernacle of David has not a cotton picking thing to do with worship. The very fact that we think it does is a statement of our inanity and immaturity and triumphalist attitude of elevating the church over Israel and not understanding God's literal intent for that nation. The tabernacle of David is the theocratic government of God. His rule and reign over his creation. But why is it called the tabernacle of David? Because that's where his rule must center. I didn't make this up, folks. There's got to be someone descended from David to sit on the throne of David or there will be no Davidic theocratic kingdom. I don't know how anxious you are for that government. I can't wait myself. For a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. I'm sick to the teeth with Clintons and human government and administrations and Jezebel influences and monolithic government with programs that are going to not only end poverty but change the moral condition of the nation. What a bunch of hokum and farce and defeat. There's a certain corollary between Clinton and Baruch Goldstein. They are the best of their kind and the best ain't good enough. And God's showing us that. If we had any hope in man, we're watching now a man so frustrated, so tied and not so stupefied by the issues of power and not knowing how to employ it and just a contradiction in himself morally and ethically and intellectually. He can't govern himself. How is he going to govern a nation and a nation that should be an influence in the world? There's only one answer. There ever was only one answer. It's the theocratic rule of God. Theo meaning what? God. Theology is the study of God. Theophilus was the lover of God for whom Luke wrote the book of Acts. Theo, theology, is God. And so what is a theocracy? It's the government of God. Perfect, righteous, holy, and true. Now here's the catch. It will not come except this nation is restored. It's got to be the tabernacle of David that has fallen down. God will restore it as he restores them because the law of the Lord will go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem to all nations. Isaiah chapter two. Don't get poetic and don't spiritualize that. It's a literal statement. How literal? Nations when they hear it beat their swords into plowshares and study war no more. That means the unspeakable billions of dollars expended in armaments. One of the principal industries of the United States, one of our principal exports, I think it's $91 billion a year and many other nations are in the rat race with us in the production of armaments. What will it mean to mankind if that expenditure is no longer required and that the fruit of the earth and of men's labors can be directed to the benefit of mankind and not to its destruction? Nations will study war no more when the law of the Lord goes forth out of Zion but there's got to be a Zion out of which it goes forth. And that's what happens when these people are sifted through the nations so that the redeemed of the Lord shall return unto Zion. And mourning and sighing flee away. What's the mourning and sighing? The painful process of this sifting and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. What does that mean? That's the end of their tribulation forever. It's their final suffering, their final sifting, their final refining. Their government comes, their kingdom comes, and the king comes who alone is a descendant of the son of David. I can occupy that throne. In that day I'll raise up the tabernacle that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the heathens which are called by my name, saith the Lord that doeth this. I don't have the time to develop this. That does not just mean Edom or Arabic nations. It means all Gentile nations will be affected and come under the government of God when that tabernacle is restored with the restoration of that nation. And then how does the chapter end? Total millennial statement. The days come, saith the Lord, the plowman shall overtake the reaper, the trader of grapes, him that sows seed. The mountains shall drop sweet wine and all the hills will melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people, Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them. What made them waste? The same destruction and satanic fury poured out upon them in their physical place as will pursue them throughout all nations in the last days. Cities today, Haifa, Jerusalem, Tiberias, will be made waste. And the first act in their return is the rebuilding of it. Because it says, they will never again be forced out in the last verse. I will plant them upon their land, they shall no more be pulled up out of the land which I have given them, saith the Lord. Note the tragic thing is, many are citing this verse now about present Israel who have neglected what precedes it. First the suffering, then the glory. First the dispersion, then the return. It has not yet happened. What we call present Israel is only the set up for the devastation that must come and is about to break at any moment. So, I need to pray. We're just at the limit. One more word and the fuse will go. I want to plead with you to bring some new things into your consciousness, as for example, the millennium. The rule and reign of Christ over the nations through a restored nation from a particular specific locus called Jerusalem. Out of Zion, the law will go forth. And read Psalm 2 and see how the heathen rage and the rulers and the kings take thought against God and against his anointed and want to break to his yoke asunder, for they will not have him to sit on the holy hill of Zion. But God holds them in disdain and he said, I have set my king on the holy hill of Zion. Eat your heart out. You wanted to have it in New York City or Geneva? No. I choose the hill, that little pimple in Jerusalem called Zion. That shall be the place of my government. And God means it saints, literally. It's a controversy. It's a scandal that God should be that specific, either about a nation or about a physical location. And some of the dumb-dumbs are saying, he's not interested in geography. He's interested in that geography because his name and his word and his promise and his covenants are not fixed with that geography and with that people and with their fathers. He's got to honor what he has said to them or he's not God. And what kind of church are we that is indifferent, that doesn't give a rap, that his name shall be honored and his word fulfilled by bringing his people back and restoring them and establishing that tabernacle of David that his word can go forth over the nations. In fact, the nation that will not come up to that place to celebrate and worship him on the Feast of Tabernacles will suffer a curse. That's how specific he is. And our unwillingness to surrender to the specificity of God and our offense at the scandal of what he has chosen shows where we are. We have not surrendered to his sovereignty and to his choice. We have thoughts of our own. We would not have chosen Israel. We would not have chosen Jerusalem. But the people of the last days who are his remnant will choose what he chooses and rejoice in it. If you want to understand God, you would know why he chooses a stinking hill. For the same reason he has chosen the basement of this church. For the same reason he has got us up in the boondocks of Minnesota. For the same reason he had David in a cave. For the same reason he was born in a stable. For the same reason he died outside the camp in the dunk heap. Because he chooses what the world despises, what the world exalts and honors, he condemns. He will always choose the foolish thing. That is why he has chosen us. And through the foolish thing that we are, he is going to fulfill his millennial destiny. Both for the church and for Israel. And when you graduate from this school, not only have you obtained for yourself eternal honor, but also the very qualification by which you shall rule and reign with him from heavenly places. Israel is our finishing school. It completes us to be what we have always ought to have been and have never had the stimulus or provocation in our conventional church life to be. The crisis of Israel compels us to be larger than life, to be prophetic, to be fulfilling. That's why Paul said, oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, who has been his counselor? Paul was staggered when he saw this. And until you see it and cry out, oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, you've not yet seen it. It's got to come by revelation. And all I can do is pray now that in this scant opportunity, having to give such a concentrated statement that introduces whole new categories of understanding, that the word itself will be triumphant in its revelatory power, issuing from the office that is mine and the moment that God has appointed by which to express this power. This historic moment that I don't know will come again. So, Lord, if I'm not just speaking out of my hat, if I'm not some kind of raving lunatic, if I'm not off on some tangent peculiar to me, if I have been faithful, as my brothers have said in the 20 years that they have known me and have never heard a message like this from me before, I was not never into it for the revelation had not come. But now it has come for the time is short and the fulfillment of these things is nigh. And I'm asking my God a miracle of resurrection power to take this word and to implant it in the corporate body to whom it was addressed. I'm praying especially for Larry and for Ed and other people who are here in places of responsibility in the church that they would be especially targeted by you. That the word will be like a shaft to sink deep into their spirits. They'll not be able to shake it. It will challenge them. It will search them. It will sift them before Israel itself has sifted. Lord, let your word not come back to your void, but accomplish something significant that will mean life or death for Jews from Chicago and nearby communities. When they will be fleeing for their lives and just happen to bump into Williams Bay en route to Minnesota and find that somehow there were people here who anticipated their coming. Who were prepared to receive them. Who have the grace of character and union with God that their faces are radiant in his life. And who do not think it a big thing that they might suffer loss even of their lives if they should be apprehended in the process of befriending and extending mercy to these people and would count it even a privilege knowing that it would earn them a modest crown. And that the Jews would be staggered. That Gentiles whom they wouldn't have given the time of day have anticipated all this, knew it, prepared for it, and are willing to take the risks of it. And would be moved to jealousy like nothing has ever moved them in anything that has ever come from the church even at its charismatic best. Lord, either on I'm a false prophet or I'm a true. And if I'm false, I want to be blotted out today. Not to raise issues for the church that are non-issues. But if I'm true, and this is a true word, I'm pleading with you, you'll not allow it to fall to the floor. You'll stretch this people, the young ones as well as the old. You'll enlarge their hearts and their understanding. They'll seek you for this. They'll burrow into the scriptures. They'll search them. They'll examine what the prophets have said, knowing that Jesus is contained and held up in the heavens, waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began. Lord, I'm asking you to implant something this morning, a jealousy for the glory of God and those who have not had it. I'm asking you to implant a love for the people of Israel and for those who have not had it. Not this shabby sentimental sham because they're cute or we like them or we're impressed with their entebbe exploits, but your love for a people who will be increasingly despised. No matter what they do, even if they offend us, a love that cannot be offended against. And let the first expression of it be to each other before it is to them. Thank you, my God. Lord, bless us. Enlarge us. Grow us up unto this. That you might have your glory forever. We thank you and give you the praise for the privilege of this high calling in Christ Jesus. That you have elected us as you have elected them. But unlike them, may we choose to be chosen. We thank you and give you the praise for our privilege. In Jesus' name, I want to give this invitation, and it's holy, and it's not compulsory. God will not compel anyone to participate in this. This has got to be a sacrificial first fruits offering unto the Lord of anyone who will stand or kneel, make some physical gesture that says to the Lord, I want part in this. I want to be part of that prophetic company, that last day's entity of the church. that can be to Israel everything that has been described this morning. I know I'm nowhere near approaching that. I'm selfish. I'm vain. I'm fearful. I want my comfort. I don't want my privacy disrupted. I don't want to take any risks for anyone, let alone for a Jew. I'm nowhere near being able to show love of that kind, even for my own fellow believers, even my own family. But I'm asking you Lord, whatever it takes to change me and to make me from what I am now to what I must be for the fulfillment of this great scheme, to your eternal praise and glory, I'm willing whatever it takes. I know it's going to there'll be a suffering. You're going to knock me from pillar to post. You're going to finger my soft spots. You have my lusts that are hidden under the sanctity of marriage. Every kind of defense that I have raised up to just get by, you're going to bring down. You're going to require. You're going to compel me to be a student of the word and a serious believer. A man of prayer that can agonize and travail for the fulfillment of these things. And to be in the church what I ought and not just a pew sitter. This is sacrifice and that's what my what his house is built of. Don't miss a moment. There's precious potential in this room. There's something that hasn't even been scratched yet. This brother in particular. So Lord I'm praying a blessing on every daughter and son of God who are standing, kneeling, and indicating to you whatever it takes. I'm going to take down my Jordan posters. I'm going to strip that idolatry off my walls. Even I've got to look at bare walls down with this distraction that is the seduction of the age. I'm going to strip. Whatever it takes Lord. I'm willing to be stripped and be formed at your hand to be a formidable son and daughter of the living God for the fulfillment of this holy last days task reserved only for the church. But a church of an ultimate kind. I want to be in that number. Lord I'm blessing these children and asking your holy seal upon their heads. Give them every requisite thing my God that will shape them for this. May they be to each other what they ought for. We're not going to make it without each other. We'll need the encouragement, the strength, the reproach, the corrections. We thank you Lord that that's what church is. Finally. I bless this congregation. I bless this fellowship. I bless this expression of your life. Seal this word my God to them. May it sink into their very foundations that affects all of their perception of the faith. The role of the Holy Spirit. The issue of the church government. The purposes of the church. Relationship. Family. Faith. The scriptures. Everything seen in a new hue and a new view because you have reinserted what has been historically lost to us. The centrality of Israel. In the mystery of God. Thank you Jesus. For this morning. This grace. This sense of your presence. This unction to proclaim and set forth before your people. What is totally opposed to our flesh. Our minds are understanding. Be glorified my God. May we have occasion in eternity. Remember this morning. The day of your visitation. For which they will be eternally rejoicing by us and those who have been saved by it. For we thank you and give you the praise for it. Saying amen to the holy call of God in Christ Jesus. In his precious name. And God's people said amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.