In this sermon, the preacher discusses the concept of God's goodness and justice, even in the face of events that seem contradictory. The sermon also explores the idea of a "generation" not just referring to a specific time period, but also to a certain type of people found throughout history. The preacher emphasizes that this message is not only for the people of Moses' time, but for all subsequent generations. The sermon concludes with a reflection on the importance of avoiding sin for the sake of future generations, as the consequences of judgment can affect innocent children.

His statement is at the very nub of sin and our evidently continuing condition. Then I write that the unhappy fact is that interpreting catastrophe as the consequence and judgment for sin is totally incompatible with Jewish self-assessment. I don't know if you guys know this, but as a people there is no sense of sin in Jewish life and consideration. The word is rarely if ever employed and it doesn't mean when it is employed what we mean by it. It's just outside of Jewish consciousness. I think the Japanese are in a very similar place. It's a sense of innate self-righteousness and goodness and we're philanthropists and we do good and we've never hurt anybody. The concept of sin is alien to Jewish consideration and that's why to suggest that the holocaust could be the judgment for sin is as wild a statement as can be made. I want to get to the root of that. The fault lies I think in the Jewish rejection of a previous tremendum, that of the crucifixion of Jesus. The word tremendum is employed as the title of a book by a Jewish philosopher in writing about the holocaust. He couldn't find a word adequate and sufficient for so great a phenomenon. He used it from a Christian writer writing about God and called God the tremendum. What does the holocaust of Jesus or the crucifixion of Jesus have to do with the issue of Jewish awareness of sin? Because among the other things that were intended by that crucifixion is the revelation of what the crucifixion was given to expiate, namely the sins of mankind. God's judgment on sin was the revelation of sin as sin. We cannot recognize the exceeding sinfulness of sin by itself because the nature of sin is to disguise itself as sin. What reveals sin as sin is the judgment that issues from sin and that God pronounces upon sin and fulfilled in the sending of his own son. So if we will not recognize our sinfulness by any way that we can see it in our own conduct, we can recognize it by what God had to do in order to propitiate it. You see what I mean? And if we will not read that and understand it as that, we have no other index by which we can understand our own sin. Therefore we are condemned thereafter to being perennial optimists, givers of false hope, and having an elevated notion of mankind, and of course ourselves as the epitome of mankind, which takes another holocaust to bring down. Can you follow that? The thing that left Jews unprepared for their own holocaust, especially coming from Germans, is as I said the other day, the celebration of German civilization that celebrated man and his thought, his capacity to be ethical and moral and philosophical and cultured, because they refused the statement of God about man's intrinsic sin and essential depravity as it was revealed only in one place, at the cross of Jesus. The rejection of that revelation condemned Jews, and as many as reject that revelation today, to a view of man which is profoundly in error. That is to say, it sees man as being righteous, because it has not understood the sin that was judged in the death of Jesus. The suffering and death of Jesus is God's statement on the sin of man, and if we reject that as being an historical accident, or a political death, or the Romans did when he was a threat to their political rule, we miss the whole purpose of God's revelation, and we have no other guide, and therefore we enter into a deception about ourselves, and the ultimate consequence of that is the next holocaust. So the crucifixion of Jesus was not only the statement of a righteous God's judgment for sin, but the profoundest revelation of our own human condition, of the exceeding sinfulness of sin in what was required to expiate it. The sacrifice of a righteous God himself as the only suitable substitute. Sin does not disclose itself as sin, only the contrasting revelation of God's righteousness can reveal it. The cross is everything, I just can't say it enough. To miss the cross is to miss everything, and of course that cross is still being missed. So let's look at a warning given Israel in Deuteronomy, where Moses is told in verse 20 of chapter 31, in the last part of that verse, that they will turn to other gods and serve them, they will provoke me and break my covenant. This is described as the Lord, in verse 15, appearing at the tabernacle in a pillar of cloud, and verse 16, and the Lord said to Moses, this is a statement coming from God to Moses about Israel's future condition, they will provoke me and break my covenant. Verse 21, then it shall be when many evils and troubles have come upon them, that this song will testify against them as a witness, for it will not be forgotten in the mouths of their descendants, for I know the inclination of their behavior today, even before I have brought them to the land which I swore to them. So the word song is not in the sense that we understand it as something that you sing for your own enjoyment. It's a form given by which something is to be memorized, learned, and transmitted from generation to generation, father to son, so that when the calamities come, we will have a witness for them. Interesting, I never heard this song as a kid from my own father, and I don't know that there's one in 10 million who has. Therefore Moses wrote this song the same day and taught it to the children of Israel. So let's take a look at that, and verse 29, for I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you. Evil will befall you in the latter days, because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and provoke him to anger through the of your hands. Again, I have to ask the question, why in a seeking for an understanding of the holocaust were the scriptures not consulted that make explicit reference to what will come to us in the latter days? So here's the song in chapter 32. So the first verses of this song have to do with God's goodness and about himself and his own nature. His work is perfect in verse 4. All his ways are justice, a God of truth and without injustice, righteousness and uprightness. It's good to be reminded of that when things take place that seem to contradict that. Then the statement about Israel in verse 5, they have corrupted themselves, they are not his children because of their blemish, a perverse and crooked generation. By the way, the word generation doesn't always allude to a certain chronological period of time, but a kind of people that are to be found in all periods of time. Say again. Oh yeah, this is very important. We think when we hear the word generation, that means a 40 year span referring to something chronological, but the word generation has another meaning. I think that's what's implied here, a certain type or kind of people, a generation to be found in all periods of time. Can you follow that? This generation, this kind of people who are perverse and crooked, a foolish, unwise people being reminded that God is their father who has made and established you. Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations. You see that this is something not being addressed just to the people who stood in that time of Moses, but every subsequent generation right up to and including those in the latter days. That's why this is to be communicated as a song. And then verse eight talks about Israel's destiny, their inheritance, their relationship to the nations, their relationship to God as his inheritance in verse nine, how he found Israel as a nothing people and kept him as the apple of his eye and how God exalted that nation, verse 13, and provided for it and prospered it. But all the more because of the prospering of that nation, verse 15, Yeshurun grew fat and kicked, you grew thick, you are obese. And he forsook God who made him and scornfully esteemed the rock of his salvation. They provoked him to jealousy with foreign gods, with abominations, they provoked him to anger, they sacrificed the demons, not to God, to gods they did not know, to new gods, new rivals that your fathers did not hear. Of the rock who forgot you, you are unmindful and have forgotten the God who fathered you. And when the Lord saw it, he spurned them. I raised this question and later on in my paper, to which of these indictments have we ever responded as a people? Because these indictments are repeated again and again through the prophets. In fact, the book of Isaiah begins with it, hear O heavens, hear O earth, for I raised other people that have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, the ass has smashed his crib, but my people do not know, they do not consider. And in the Cleveland talk, I shared that I attended a rabbi's discussion on the prophets in Phoenix on one visit. And the question and answer period, people asked him nothing questions. I raised my hand like you, Charlie. And I said, Can you tell me when historically we as a nation have ever acknowledged the indictment addressed to us as his people, let alone answered it? And I don't know what he said, but he just bumbled and mumbled. This is the continual statement of God, but it has never been acknowledged by us. In fact, the church is reiterating Israel's sin. And when the Lord saw it, he spurned them, spurning us because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters. I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be. So the question is, has that end yet come? For they are a perverse generation. Here again, it means more than people fixed in a certain time period, but a character and a kind of people in many periods of time, a children in whom is no faith. They have provoked me to jealousy by what is not God. They've moved me to anger by their foolish idols. I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation. Some even say that that's a description of Nazi Germany that went beyond civilized nationhood to be the organization of the scummiest elements of society and put them in the place of government. So it's not a nation in the legitimate sense, but the offscouring of the scum, the refuse all the more to humiliate Israel and to fulfill God's word. I will move them to anger by a foolish nation. Does anybody have another word for the word foolish? I think it's not foolish in the sense that we use it, but I think it's foolish in the sense that I'm suggesting an absurd nation, a nation that has turned all values upside down and inside out, a nation that celebrates death, the scummiest and the worst, the most degraded, occultic, anti-Semitic. Hitler was scum. These guys were the worst bums, the high school dropouts. I mean, I can't tell you the most derogatory ways. Became the seat of power in a great nation and the engine of Israel's destruction in fulfillment of this word. And then reference to fire, which is kindled in my anger, it shall burn to the lowest hell. It shall consume the earth with her increase and set on fire the foundations of the mountains. Though it's very poetic and powerful in its imagery, the Holocaust could be included in that description. And those fires were not banked until the very last day of the war, until the very last motions where they, Pete mentioned this, they took the final survivors of Auschwitz and moved them into a forced march. But until that day, the fires never ceased. And those fires were operated by oil burning ovens or other fuel heated ovens, which was a tremendous expense. And what do you call it? The word for moving equipment and material. Logistics, an enormous logistical problem to fuel those crematoria in the last days of the war. And the great controversial issue for the allies was to bomb the rail junctions that they could not get those supplies and they were never bombed. And it's still a controversy to this day. They say that's the anti-Semitic Western nations that could have alleviated Jewish suffering and cut it short by cutting off the flow of supplies that made the extermination possible. There's strategic reasons given by those who chose not to bomb it, which are in dispute. My explanation would be God's judgment is irrevocable. God's judgment is final. God's judgment is total. And he will fulfill his word to the last letter, independent even of the instrumentalities employed to that end, contrary to their own self-interest. See what I mean? But Jews reviewing that now see this as man's failure. Roosevelt refused to take in the shipload of refugees and they sent them to Cuba and they sent them to Latin America and no nation would receive them. They finally came back to Germany and they died in the ovens. And so the indictment is against the nations, against the failure of men. And what do we read earlier in Isaiah? They refuse to consider the work of my hand. They refuse to see this as my judgment, but attribute to men what comes from me. So verse 22 is really vivid about fire and consuming. I will heap disasters on them. In verse 23, I will spend my hours on them. They shall be wasted with hunger, devoured by pestilence with bitter destruction. I will also send against them the teeth of beasts, not necessarily wild animals, but wild men with the poison of the serpents of the dust. The sword shall destroy outside. There shall be terror within for the young man and virgin, the nursing child with the man of gray hairs. In one translation, I wish I could find it again. It talks about the sword from without and terror in the chamber from within. And the gas chambers, I mean a haunting word, though it's not here in the New King James, but the order found in the gas chambers is described here. The young man and the virgin were always at the top of those that were gassed. When those chambers were opened, they were stacked like the dead. The men, the virile men and women on the top and on the bottom, the infants and the gray hairs, because the strongest clamored over the weakest to reach the highest portion where there's some vestige of air left before they expired. So here's something predicted thousands of years before the event and fulfilled through the letter when the event itself comes. I would have said, I will dash them in pieces. I will make the memory of them to cease from among men. Had I not feared the wrath of the enemy, lest their adversaries should misunderstand, lest they should say, our hand is high and it is not the Lord who has done all this. In other words, if there's any remnant that survives, one of the reasons that God allows it is that the enemy should not say, I have done all this. That is God operating through them and not they themselves. Oh, that they were wise that they should understand this in verse 29, that they would consider their latter end. How could one chase a thousand and two put 10,000 to flight unless their rock had sold them and the Lord had surrendered them? Can you think of some corollary to those verses in the Holocaust experience? Have you ever seen the program, The Shoah, seven hours of a TV documentary on the Holocaust. In one scene, a Greek Jewish survivor is being interviewed by the filmmaker. How was this done that you guys were in the island of Cyprus or Crete? How did you end in Auschwitz? Well, we had at 6am to be at the train station with whatever we could wear or carry. We were all there exactly at that time. Then they had to put us on trains. Then we had to cross from Greece and we went by boat. He said, how many Nazis were there guarding you? Well, we were about 200 in that boat and there was one man with a weapon. The interviewer said, well, why didn't you just rise up against him and mob him? He said, we couldn't consider that. We were just too weak. We were like sheep. We had not the thought or the ability. I'll tell you why they didn't. Because God said that they wouldn't. Because their judgment of the word had to be fulfilled that one would chase a thousand and two put 10,000 to flight because their rock had sold them. This is a great unanswered question to this day. How could 6 million Jews submit themselves to a process of annihilation where at any moment they could have broken out of it just by the weight of their numbers? Except for the outstanding instance of the Warsaw Ghetto, which was utterly futile and ended in their devastation, although it held back the German war machine for a few weeks. There's no recorded instance of Jewish uprising or resistance, despite the character of Jews who opposed Rome and kept Rome at bay for years. And the Masada is the testimony of the final defense of the Jews, a fortress that it took the Romans almost years to overcome. They had to build ramparts up there and they all committed suicide. So, I mean, Jewish resistance, rebellion is well known. And yet here, like supine, s-u-p-i-n-e, spineless and resistent-less people, they just went like lambs to the slaughter because their rock had abandoned them. And it may well be the pattern of the future if there's going to be an annihilation of Jews now not confined to Europe, but worldwide. Because this is the latter days and it did not end. In the end, you will consider, the end is not yet, but we've had a portion of it in the Holocaust. There's a foreshadowing of that end and yet have not been instructed by it. There is a remarkable corollary of Israel's last day suffering and crucifixion and that of the Lord who went as a lamb to the slaughter. He, for reasons other than their own, his silence was a testimony also to the word of God that as he should die that way, there's also a testimony that to their judgment, his to his glory. But there is such a remarkable resemblance of the path that both Israels have to tread. That in fact, mankind, Gentile mankind that has not recognized nor understood the Lamb of God who has gone to his slaughter silently, will have the last opportunity to consider that theme as they see it explicated by the nation itself in its path to Calvary in the last days. Can you follow that? And here's a further thought. Israel itself will be educated out of their own experience. In other words, out of their own suffering, out of their own rejection, out of their own silent going to the death as lambs to the slaughter, they might catch a glimmer of recognition of him who preceded them and whom they have scorned and not understood. But the corroboration of their own sufferings, the resemblance of the character of their suffering and their rejection and their road to Calvary will remind them of his and by such a means come into the meaning which has been forfeited and now embraced. That may be another reason why there's an enactment of a parallel kind. And Israel is called the son of God in Exodus 4. And so these two sons, the Lamb of God and the nation as the son are required to face very much the same experience. It's for that reason that Isaiah 53 is interpreted even now by the rabbis as not being the statement of Jesus, but the statement of the nation suffering for the sins of other nations. Although it's an exegesis that can't be supported, but sufficient resonance in the experience of Israel as rejected and despised, marred more than any nation to make them think that they are the fulfillment. So close is it that in fact one can even suspect that the resentment against Jesus by Israel is an envy against him because we have wanted to be what he is. Can you see that? Yeah, I think there's one place in the Gospels it says for the envy against him. Well, he sent his servants, now he's sending his son to the vineyard. Let's kill him and now we can inherit. See what I mean? There's a tension of wanting to be the son. And who's this guy? Well, this guy is the one who fulfills the obedience to the covenant and the requirements of God that the nation missed. And ironically in the last days the nation will again be forced to move through those circumstances that he by obedience chose and they by circumstance will be required to experience. So verse 36, for the Lord will judge his people and have compassion in his servants when he sees that their power is gone and that there's no one remaining bond or free. Verse 39, I even I am he, there's no God beside me. I will kill, I make alive, I wound and I heal, nor is there any who can deliver from my hand. That certainly has been demonstrated in our Jewish history in modern times. None can deliver from his hand. When he determines a judgment, it is going to be fulfilled. And part of my premise for Israel's restoration and deliverance is to believe the word of God that speaks of their recovery. When it says in Isaiah 40, comfort ye, comfort ye my people. That's a word to Israel. Isaiah 40, comfort ye, comfort ye my people. Speak comfort to Jerusalem and cry out to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquities pardoned for she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins. There's a word of comfort that needs to be spoken that comes to her in the middle of her discomfort. That if it is not spoken, they'll not survive the discomfort. They'll not survive their last judgment. And to believe that there's a highway made by their God through the desert and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed in it for the amount the Lord has spoken it. That word of comfort has got to come to them before the comfort in fact comes. And if it's not a word that they can believe, they'll not make it. The word is going to sustain them before the event of their recovery and their restoration. And here's my point. The only way in which they can believe for a word that comes to them from God is the realization that the God who has spoken judgment and fulfilled it in their experience is the God who now speaks comfort and will fulfill it in their experience. Because the God who speaks to judge and fulfills it is the God who now also fulfilled the word of comfort and return. That's why it's critical that Israel learn that its judgments are from God and that he has fulfilled them to the last degree. Because if they do not believe that, they'll not believe the word that speaks of their restoration. And our task is to acquaint Israel with the recognition that God kills and makes alive and wounds and heals and that there is no one who can deliver from my hand. My hand takes hold on judgment. I will render vengeance to my enemies. I repay those who hate me. And then the chapter ends with a hopeful note. He will provide atonement for his land and his people. That the same God who has judged and destroyed is also the God who will restore and return and atone for his people. He will provide. It's like call bought. Everything is of God, from God, and through God. Both judgment, restoration, forgiveness, and atonement. And that's the song that should have been sung to Israel. That should have sustained us. That should have saved us out of the thing that it predicted. But we rejected the word. We refused to consider that. If you don't receive the word of God where he describes himself as the agent of our judgments and destruction and fulfills them, then of necessity you're going to blame men. You'll find fault with the Germans, with Hitler. That's not to say that they're blameless, but you're stopping short of seeing the whole truth. And then the last analysis, those who blame men blame God. Something is wrong with his creation. Something is wrong in the way in which he made man. And so in the end, if you're not, see yourself as the factor for your, the judgments that have come, you come to the place where God himself becomes the evil one. God is in the dark. He's judged and found wanting. A famous book that has come out in the 1970s, I think it was, is called After Auschwitz by a rabbi who has come to this place. He could not believe that the Holocaust was a statement of God's judgment on Jewish sin. And therefore of necessity came to the place where he judged God. God is no longer credible. The God of tradition has got to be forfeited. He's not, he can't be a God of righteousness because he has permitted this tragedy. It's God in the, if man would not accept himself as being the root cause of his own judgments, ironically, God is the one who ends up being condemned. That's the end of page two here. The failure to interpret it that way as God's judgment necessarily must result in the condemnation of other men and of God, of God himself for inherent defect in his creation and his apparent inability to intervene in preserving Jewry from that calamity. Now listen to this, you guys, and maybe we'll stop after this because it would take just so much. In the seminary, I wrote a paper in a class on Deuteronomy 32. The professor was a former Lutheran charismatic leader who subsequently and significantly abandoned the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and charismatic movement as being too risky, threatening his career. And as he said to me, he chose to go with the big shift, institutional Christendom. And I submitted an interpretation of Deuteronomy 32 in a way that I've suggested over this table as being the foreshadowing in particular of the judgments that came by fire and by gas and terror from without, the sword from without terror within in the chamber, the infants and the sucklings and the virgins and the young men. And so he appended a little paper to my article when he handed it back to me. He said, you're dangerous, but I choose to see this in another way. And he gave me a quotation from a new age writer, Scott Peck. Ever hear of him? And he quotes this man and says, God looks down from heaven and he sees the evil that men perpetrate one upon another, but he's helpless to intervene and can only look away in sorrow. What would you say is so bad about that interpretation? Because it's one or the other. Either God is the causative agent, as Deuteronomy 32 says, I will, I kill, I slay, I make a life, I wound, I heal. I wet my sword, glittering, I draw blood, I heal, I restore, I make a life. Or he looks down and he's sorry about this, but that's man for you. And he turns away. What about such a view? So I want to say all that to say this, that the Holocaust, more than any event in modern history, is for modern men, not just Jews, the issue of God. Because of their inability or unwillingness to recognize God's judgment on such a scale, they're necessarily compelled to revise their view of God as being somehow maybe able to see, but not able to intervene or to alter, which is to say, not a God who is omnipotent, but powerless. And when you admit that, God is no longer God. So that the issue of the Holocaust becomes not only the death of Israel, but the death of God. Unless you recognize him as the God of judgment in the fulfillment of the word that was spoken. And in fact, the God is dead thing is a post-Holocaust development and has opened the door to just an abandonment, not only of God, but of morality. There's no God to judge. Anything goes. There's no standard. God is dead. And the proof of it is the Holocaust. And that's why the issue of the Holocaust is enormous. And we have surrendered the ground. We have not been valiant to stand for God's own word and God's own statements. Because look what happens when somebody just mildly says something about Jewish sin. What if they heard this? They'd be mobbing our door. We'd be targeted for destruction. We would be considered an enemy of a Jew, more than anti-Semitic. We, such men are not fit to live. But this is the great issue. And so there's been an enormous erosion of God since that time. And he was defective in his creation that he made man in such a way that man can perpetrate such evil. The fault is with God. He becomes a no God, as against Karl Barth, of the God who will reveal himself as he is on his own conditions and terms. I mean, we just need to see what the whole Holocaust thing is. The whole cosmic thing is the issue of God. Who is God? And the God of his word and the God who fulfills his word to the letter. We're just at the beginning of something still. And I'll give you some questions to consider for next time. How can God allow innocent victims, thousands of years after his judgments were predicted, to experience them who were not of the generation that rejected him? Of the six million victims of the Holocaust, one and a half million were infants and children. Why should they have to suffer for the failures of their forebears? Is that righteous? Is that just? This raises great questions. And this paper will come into this, but I want you to begin to chew on that because we have to wrestle this through. If we don't fight it out, if we just condescend to an easy view, if our souls are not stirred, we will not appreciate deeply the revelation of God that it first seems to be offensive before it becomes glorious. Truth is like that. It's first offensive and painful before it becomes glorious. The church is like that. It's first offensive before it becomes glorious. And very often in our own relationships, the first thing is offense and disappointment and failure before it becomes glorious. So we need to get through that veil. This is why Moses had to turn. The knowledge of God in truth and in full is the apostolic requirement. The issue of Israel's survival is the issue of the church. But a church of what kind? Charismatic doesn't make it. See what I mean? People who know their God in his judgments and in his mercies, in his impeccable word, have received the revelation and the knowledge of himself according to his own terms when he chooses to give it in the fullness that he prepares us to receive, knowing that to whom much has been given, much is required. The one who is the ablest expositor of the cross, watchman knee, in the normal Christian life, no one has written more brilliantly on Romans 6 than he is the one who for 25 years or so has to suffer the anguish of a communist prison camp and unspeakable torture. So we're not just being academic. We're being fitted for the end that comes in the latter days. I can't resist just saying this now. We can chew on it later. The thing that makes judgment judgment and gives us every reason to avoid judgment by obedience to the truth is that what makes judgment judgment in its most painful expression is what falls upon the innocent and the children. That the sins of the fathers fall upon the children ought to be the greatest reason why the fathers avoid sin, knowing that the judgment of necessity will fall also upon their children as upon themselves. If we're not walk with God for our own sake, let's walk with God for their sake, knowing that that's what makes judgment judgment. That's what makes judgment so painful that the children of necessity cannot be excluded and must be taken up with the older generation and suffer the consequence of their sin. Well let's, I don't know how to pray to conclude for today, but some way that the Lord will sift this into our spirit. I don't think it's calculated that we should be depressed, but to be edified, to deepen, to gain dimensions of respect for God who is judged and to bring the attribute of judgment into the consideration that it has not had, because we've not had stomach for it and therefore have suffered an impoverished God. Any removal of any aspect of God is the removal of God. He's a seamless garment and it's God in his totality or not at all. So the knowledge of God, we end with what we began is everything and the church needs most and foremost to come into this, but how shall it be communicated to those who are bereft of the spirit of God and alienated from the word and are yet calculated to be the victims of its fulfillment unless someone can cry out and give them warning who knows God in this way. Thank you Lord, precious God. Lord I'm asking for a value to today as a work in us beyond what we are able with our own minds to comprehend and to understand, that what we have discussed and and recited and quoted from the scripture will go in to our spirits and deep into our inner man my God. Something like what happened when we began the book of Ephesians, something happened to us, something came into us Lord, just by reviewing what your word says and we're asking that even now and we just confess Lord that we do not know as we ought to know. Yes Lord. We have a shallow understanding my God, even those of us who acknowledge your judgments as being righteous and we're just asking my God that you would fit us as Carbot says with a readiness to understand that which is revealed precious God that you you who are God are pleased to bestow and that if we are privileged my God to receive it it's in order my God to perform something by it that might be life-saving for others in the latter days. We ask it of you Lord and all we can do is ask and trust that it shall please you to give it and we just thank you Lord for your mercy even the mercy of your word to understand the times in Jesus name.