In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of choosing righteousness and truth over sentiment and personal loyalty. He shares a personal example of giving up property for the sake of justice and righteousness for the church and the kingdom. The speaker warns against the danger of being swayed by sentimental considerations, especially when it comes to our own children. He contrasts the Hebrew Christian vision rooted in the revelation of Israel's God with the worldly concepts of beauty, virtue, truth, justice, and humanity. The speaker concludes with a prayer for God's guidance and the ability to follow His teachings.

...my God, in your heart and significant. Let it become that for us because of the power of your Spirit. And give us, my God, the ability to follow you, to retain what you're speaking, to assimilate, to take it in, to affect, my God, our conduct, our walk, our service. We thank and give you praise for all of these days and this concluding day. In Jesus' holy name, Amen. Well, I was up to close midnight reading a number of things last night and reviewing and considering possibilities. And then this morning my eye fell on a book by my chair and it became a bit alive for me. I want to begin with that. It's the issue of paganism, not in other lands but our own. And paganism not in other religions but our own. That is to say, the growing threat of paganism in contemporary Western Christendom. More in the liberal or mainline denominations than perhaps in the wave that we represent. But if it's not presently with us, it will be knocking on our door also. Not announcing itself as paganism but containing its essential elements that would contradict and bring the true faith down and lessen the reality of the church. So I just want to read a book that contains papers that were brought at a conference on this subject of church concern edited by Carl Brattain, B-R-A-A-T-T-E-N, who is a very well-known Lutheran theologian. And in his introduction he writes, The so-called Christian nations of the West are in fact the new mission fields, which the churches cannot evangelize because they have not faced the renewed paganism that is the actual religion of those to whom the gospel must there be spoken or to whom the gospel has already been spoken or some form of the gospel has already been spoken are the people who at least suspect that they are the candidates for paganism or that paganism is already insinuating itself and moving through traditional Christianity and threatening it. So there is a mission field right here about the purity of the faith or the authentic apostolic character of the faith. It talks about a conference of women in Minneapolis, actually of witches who prayed at their Sunday morning service to our Maker Sophia we are women in your image with the hot blood of our wombs who will give form to a new life and it goes on, it sounds like pagan revelry and very sensual, so the element of sensuality, sex is a predominant strand and theme in pagan things and perhaps answers the question in part, why would people forsake or be indifferent or reject authentic faith in God to embrace something counterfeit because it panders to the gratification of their more face lusts which the true faith calls to be renounced or crucified those who have crucified the affections, how does it say, and the lusts by the flesh and the lusts thereof, those are the lords so the true faith calls for the crucifixion, the false faiths provide gratification but they provide it in a way that ostensibly seems religious and God celebrating and so that you have the best of all worlds you have a seeming spirituality while at the same time a justification for your lust and Broughton says whatever else is to be said of such, quote, worship, unquote is of course the opposite of biblical faith an amateurish but more explicit reinvention of the fertility worship of Ashtoreth and Baal against which the faith of Israel defined itself so it sounds like it's an ages old battle and it's not over, it's not just the curiosity of antiquity and Canaanite religion that we can look on with a kind of disinterested interest it's a vital contemporary concern now and to the end of the age is the same vying for truth about God before men and the issue is life and death and the issue is eternal salvation or eternal hell and time has not lessened the issue but in fact the end of the age would make it yet even more fierce and more difficult because yet now more subtle the ancient idolatries could be easily identified by the visible images of actual idols the contemporary paganism is more subtle it doesn't have visible objects I say it doesn't, it may have and it has been released even among Christians when they have taken mementos or souvenirs off their walls masks that have come from Africa or other exotic looking objects that they think are quaint and experience an actual relief something lifts off and out when those things are taken away or destroyed because they contain the spirit valence of demonic powers culture is not neutral there is a culture that has its origin from below and there is a divine culture and we need to be fearful and sensitive to the one and willing and open for the other that's why Abraham had to come out of nation, kindred and father's house lest he bring with him into the land of promise where the Lord would leave him any of the valences and spirit dimensions of the Babylonian thing from which he came of the Ur of the Coldies it required a radical and surgical separation get thee out you can't find a word less uncompromising than the word out get thee out out of what? those things that have the greatest pull and soul bondedness that are familiar well look what we are praying about with the Hutterites these are things that are familiar and dear and hallowed by time and to let go of that what did my mother say for virtually the day of her conversion? I was born a Jew, I'll die a Jew it was more important for her to retain the idolatry of Jewishness than to know God in truth that's how powerful these forces are because lest you miss the point or think that Abraham was made of better stuff than ourselves he never did get out right away when Genesis 12 says so Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken you might think that God spoke, Abraham acted but what happened between the initial speaking and Abraham acting is a long season of delay where he leaves with his father he leaves with his neshpocha with his relative Lot and his family and instead of crossing the river goes alongside the river a little further south to another place called Haran and there he remains and Haran means delay and there he accumulated servants and possessions and evidently it was a delay of quite a lengthy time and what finally released him? his father died so when his father died he was released maybe it is something of a companion piece to Isaiah 6 in the year that King died I saw also the Lord high and lifted up something had to go in order for that revelation something had to die of soul bondedness and attachment to release the prophet to it the more erstwhile and complete and total dedication to the purposes of God so the question for us is, is there something waiting to die? do we wait just for longevity to take its toll? or can we bring something to a death that hinders a complete separation because we have not yet come up so the church, needless to say is in a mixed bag condition he writes, it was and is foolishness to the Greeks to believe that God would choose to embody himself in one individual human being it was and is an insult to human dignity and pride to teach that the word of salvation must come charismatically from the outside the proclamation of the body of truth that constitutes salvation so our salvation is predicated on a statement of God rooted in history and event the birth of a single individual in an unusual way through divine conception and called to be king and his very name means salvation is from God it was and is an insult to human dignity and pride to teach that the word of salvation must come to us from the outside through a message that message, the foolishness of the gospel and that the objective saving history of God in Jesus Christ becomes gospel only through the apostolic proclamation the curriculum this particularity, this insistence this message, this man, this name, this birth this salvation is offensive to men they like to believe many paths to truth of course they never arrive there but it gives a certain aura of spiritual concern and dignity that saves them from the actual discovery and communion with the God who is God and brings them into a relationship of requirement according to his word this is the way, walking in it so that's the way the faith will always be at issue and why it's in contention still with paganism and other alternatives so the issue of the faith is the issue of Christ the issue of Christ is called Christology anyology is the study of what the prefix is biology is the study of life and you can think of other ologies theology is the study of God Christology is the study or the examination of Christ the centrality of Christ his person, his office, his history, his proclamation, his acts the rejection of Christology is characteristic of the whole of present day American theology what a statement, what a sweeping statement Christianity basically amounts to religion and ethics in American theology this is, he's quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer who lived in America for a season of time studied or attended the Jungian Theological Seminary in New York and this is the observation of this keen German theologian about American Christianity the question is, to what degree is it still true even 50 years or more after that observation that American Christianity is not insistent upon its dogma, upon Christianity upon Christology, upon its truths it's more easy come easy go wishy-washy, using right words and phrases but not as insistent upon the content of the faith which is the dogma D-O-G-M-A what's the definition for that? because the insult that springs from that word is dogmatic to be dogmatic, well you're narrow minded, you're dogmatic you're insisting on one statement there are many ways of perceiving this our faith is dogmatic and when we lose that connection we lose the faith even while we retain the words that pertain to it we have lost its core and its reality and before we leave this morning I'm going to just read a few things of that description in Germany the German faith was effectually lost and the first instances of that loss take place in the realm of theology and what takes place in the ivory tower among men who are at that level but it's not long before it filters down to the grassroots and affects the church itself so there's a flight away the search for the historical Christ the new quest to higher criticism where they were going to bring down to the bible a thorough examination and not just by faith receive everything that's said there incredulously but see whether it passes the test of severe scholarship and rigid examination of the kind that we would bring to other disciplines why not bring it to this? what is this so sacrosanct that it can't bear examination? who says that it's all correct? it might be scribal errors or worse and there are contradictions in scripture it began a whole wave of things that led to the breakdown of the detriment of the most holy faith one rabbi said there are things that are not for us to examine it's holy, holy, holy it's like man touching the ark to come to the things of God with the same irreverence by which he would come to Shakespeare or to theory of evolution you can't bring that kind of mentality to God first of all he's not going to honor an investigation of himself in that spirit and he'll allow you to come to a place of confusion and even of loss of faith and my thesis is that Nazism and the destruction of western civilization think of if the Germans had won the war what this world would be today even in their loss think of what was devastated and destroyed not to speak of course of the six million Jews the whole eradication of European Jewry because of the failure for Germany to maintain a viable Christian faith it had lost it's at the start if ever it knew it certainly by the time of the 20th century it was so weak and so infable it had lost it's dogmatic character and the question is why because the issue of Christology what is Christ? what is the word? anointed king Jesus came preaching the gospel of the kingdom repent for the kingdom of God is at hand is it time now to restore the kingdom the whole issue of Christ as king goes back to the first angelic pronouncement to Mary and you shall give birth to a son whose name shall be called Jesus and his father shall give to him the throne of David that he might rule over the house of Israel forever you know that we have lost that connection? we ourselves, the church even the charismatic or the New Testament forms have lost this root of the faith that Christ means anointed king that is a kingdom at stake not just a religious alternative or the improvement of our life or salvation from eternal hell that the fundamental issue is king and one of the great scholarly breakthroughs in modern times is a book called Christus Victus Christ the victor the triumph over the powers of the air came with the crucifixion of this king who defeated death by death and that this was the great thing that was apprehended and understood by the early church that they had obtained a victory over those things that had tyrannized mankind since time immemorial the king had come and had broken into the powers of darkness in a way from which they would never recover and set in motion their ultimate defeat by the sacrifice of himself and that over his head in three languages Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews is not just an intended insult but a more profound statement of this drama, the glory of it than his malefactors knew to lose this is to lose the faith so why has it been lost? because it's the kingdom of David because it's the kingdom promised to Israel because it has its inception in Israel because its rule and its law goes forth out of Zion and its word out of Jerusalem and the instinctive and intrinsic, deep anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic thing that is latent in Gentiles who are only thinly Christianized and not deeply converted shuns and dislikes and wants to throw off these courts from us and have a kind of Christianity amenable to our own culture, our own nationality and so on and that kind of Christianity must fail failed in Germany, failed in Japan it will fail here unless we have resuscitated the heart and the core of the matter the issue of Christ as king, that's Christology king of what? the promise of God made to his father David of a kingdom to come to Israel but not for its own enjoyment but so as to bless all the families of the earth the issue of Israel's kingdom is the issue of the nations coming under the sovereignty of God who established their number in terms of the sons of Israel there can be no real Christology, he writes without the eschatological prophet from Nazareth think of the stubborn specificity of God not just a Christ, you know why? because these filthy pagan mangas and new age characters use the word Christ will come, Christ has come Christ this, Christ that that everyone is Christ the gurus, the men of wisdom are the Christ but the Jesus of Nazareth this Jewish kid who was bar mitzvahed I don't think he was thoroughly Jewish, son of David, son of Abraham born in Nazareth dwelt in Nazareth, born in Bethlehem Hebrew of the Hebrews the poor could make their claim, what of Jesus? this is the Messiah to lose that stubborn and tenacious identification is to lose the ball game there's Jesus in Nazareth and what do we hear in white supremacist groups in America that call themselves Christians Jesus was not a Jew they cannot bring themselves to that acknowledgement they stumble over the stumbling stone in Zion and want to frame a kind of Christianity with a Jesus who is not that Jew not born in Nazareth or somehow that's not the proof that did not come out of Nazareth but what Jesus in fact then do they have? though they use the word what Christ do they have? because if it's not the Christ who is King as the Jesus born in Nazareth there's no salvation because that's what his name means Yeshua Jehovah is the Savior and any other play on that name that points to another deity of our own composition and choosing though we use the name leaves us without the benefit and the power of that salvation and when the false prophets of Baal were contending against Elijah and they made their own sacrifice and cut up their own ox they fully expected fire to fall because not only are they deceivers of men they are themselves deceived and deceived to believe that they somehow knew God they called him Lord because the word was Baal and they danced and leaped and jumped and cut themselves and still there was no answer nor could there be an answer for there was no God that could conform to their expectation they were barking up the wrong tree it was a pagan alternative to the God who was a lone God celebrated by the lonely prophet Elijah got the idea? men are going to be disappointed in the last days and maybe they are disappointed now why isn't God with us and how come he doesn't do that and I pray and he doesn't hear and I'm disappointed look what's happening in Israel the church is a mess what's being disappointed is their human conception of a God of their own making who was an erring boy and will placate and bring to them the kinds of things that they desired at their will as they pray but that God is not going to be an answer because he's not God the very first miracle at the gate beautiful was performed in the name of the child Jesus and several times it comes up in the early apostolic proclamation of the child Jesus I said why are they celebrating the child he didn't die as a child but why do they keep making that reference maybe because the issue of child is the issue of birth as a son of David and that brings the vital linkage with the Christ who is Christ that God honors by his presence and his power in the miracle that's obtained so this needs to come back into our own consciousness because to lose this is to lose everything as this writer says who is not himself Jewish there can be no real Christology or no real Christianity really without the eschatological prophet from Nazareth his own relationship to the Jewish people and to their God we can't get away from the stubborn thing of the Jewishness of the faith his teaching, his miracles and his attitude to others cannot be understood except in this context that these things are embedded in the culture of ancient Greece and in their system of values humanity is at the center, man is the measure of all things what will we say of Christianity today where the measure of all things is not the glory of God but the benefit that accrues to man did you get that question? oh don't miss this what would we say of our Christianity today I'll even go further of our best Christianity today of the most advanced and charismatic Christianity where man is the measure of all things rather than the glory of God and that the issue that underlies the whole premise of the church and its activity and function is what benefit accrues to men is that not the ultimate triumph of humanism that has come to the church is this not the deepest root of paganism that has affected the church and is its cancer and there is only one thing that is powerful enough to count them in this incessant and intrinsic putting of ourselves at the center which is the root of paganism and that is an abiding passionate jealousy for the glory of God and what is Paul but the greatest exemplar of that glory as were the prophets before him for when Paul ends his great statement on the mystery of Israel and the church, Romans 9-11 with the great blast of profuse praise all the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God who has been his counsel for of him and through him are all things to whom be glory forever the greatest issue for Paul was not Israel's restoration and it was not the church brought to its ultimate maturity of apostolic constituency that would affect it the greatest issue for Paul exceeded both Israel and the church it was the glory of God forever and paganism is a direct attack at that core and wanting to substitute for God's glory man's satisfaction religious satisfaction but man's satisfaction nevertheless and if we make that our conscious purpose we are already opening the door to these nefarious and paganistic influences is that to say that there is no benefit my God I am so benefited I can't contain it but we don't make the benefit the premise of the faith we don't make the benefit that accrues the first purpose we don't make the experience of what we enjoy the reason for our quest that still has man and his gratification at the center and it's a false center and opens the doors to that which brings down the faith as much as there is to love and admire in this vision of man at the center, the concepts of beauty virtue, truth, justice humanity at ideal levels, it stands in polar opposition to the Hebrew Christian vision rooted in the revelation of Israel's God they're nice they're humane they're nice considerations and I want to give me the grace to say this why am I an enemy of sentiment why do I glance and cringe at people expressing sentiment for ostensibly nice things as I said to my dear wife last night wanting to improve the plumbing in the house of someone in one of the villages in the West Bank is nice but there are considerations that are greater than nice but our warfare is not the evil versus the perfect but the good versus the perfect the nice things, the commendable things that the world and even the church applauds and sanctions because it's shot through with human consideration and sentiment the first thought that came to me when the Lord revealed Himself in the first reading of the Gospel of John aboard the deck of that tram steamer on my way to Athens was what will your mother think about this how will this affect your mother the very first issue I had to face as a candidate for the faith was sentimental loyalty or the truth of God and I shared with someone about the property here how we gave up our interest in this camp we were the founders the Lord spoke to me the vision for this place I then subsequently invited other brothers to participate not having the means myself and then there was a falling out over the issue of sin and we had to make a decision as done Israel do we stand with the brother in loyalty and affection having a personal history with him over the years or do we stand with the issue of righteousness and those that were bringing judgment that this brother was seeking at that time we thought to avoid we stood with what we thought was righteousness cut ourselves off from the camp gave over our interest in the property stayed on our side of the road and lost everything in which we had invested financed money, our life and our energy for I don't know 8 or 10 years we have this building now and this six acres only as a grace that has come back to us from God we gave it up for righteousness sake when we had to choose between sentiment and personal human loyalty and affection as over against an issue of justice and righteousness for the church and for the kingdom so watch this deadly thing that continually sucks at us and nowhere more effectively than in the realm of our own children are you beating your children and knowing that it will not kill them that's the word, beat them with rods it will not kill them because if you hate their souls you'll abstain from bringing the kind of discipline that they need that only you can perform and I'm persuaded that a lot of what we call youth rebellion and turning away from parents and their culture and what they represent is an unconscious expression and a cry for the failure of parents to show ultimate expression of love which can only be shown in chastisement because the word says so but what have we done? we've put the word aside for sentiment and tender feelings and humane things have taken higher priority a book came to us a few years ago in community on rearing children christianly and I gave it to a brother who was a young child an erudite, skilled brother in the word, the book was perfectly biblical and he gave it back to me to say it's too hard and that's how the door is open saints to the deterioration of the faith through sentiment, through deference to man and feelings, not so much our children but our own feelings because we cannot bear the pain of inflicting pain and therefore we avoid it but I'm very fond of quoting Shakespeare's Hamlet where, if you've not heard this before it's worth hearing and if you've not read the play, I commend it one of the great masterpieces of literature where Hamlet learns that his father was murdered by his own brother and that his mother has married the murderer and it breaks upon him through revelation he cannot believe it, he's astonished his father was a giant and this brother was a coarse, vile philanderer and opportunist and got into the castle by marrying the wife of the man whom he killed and so there's a scene in which Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude and he grabs the locket from around her neck and opens it and in the locket is the picture of the deceased husband and of the present husband and he shoves it right into her face and he says something like you've chosen this bum for the one who was a giant, a man of stature and it breaks upon her soul she was deceived and seduced and it comes like a stopping realization of what she has done and he says you're lying betwixt incestuous sheets and she cries out with a hot piercing cry that I'm sure everyone watching the play would just be muffling their tears Hamlet, no more cool it back off I can't take it, the realization and Hamlet says this classic line sometimes one must be cruel in order to be kind this is what Paul was with Peter, when Peter was compromising and doing one thing with the Jewish believers and another thing with the Gentiles and Paul would not for an hour allow that dissimulation, for Barnabas was already being affected and the cancerous deception was already, he had to stop it right now, to his face not for an hour would he allow the thing to continue it's going to take that kind of jealousy that kind of insistence and this kind of, even though your kids are howling or your mother is howling you've got to stand for God even if it's cruel and it will be considered cruel rather than humane but the kind of humaneness that the world will celebrate and for which even Christians will applaud you is the opening of the door to the deception and to the loss of the faith which in the end affects entire nations and therefore in their wake is corruption and death incalculable unless the Lord himself by his spirit underlines this in your heart words will have to fail to communicate what happens in the failure of the faith in the lessening of the faith is not only a consequence to those who have allowed this erosion but what comes into the nation of which they ought to be the statement and standard of God is so horrible that well, if we have not learned from Germany and Japan, we have not learned so in this last session that we've talked a little bit about Japan I just wanted to say a few things about the collapse of the church or of the faith in Germany and this is a classic study by a Jewish historian at Columbia University this was his PhD dissertation at Berkeley and I picked it up at the Cass Lake Library for five cents at a book sale thank you Lord for that providential day the politics of cultural despair a study in the rise of Germanic ideology in which he shows that the greatest of the ideologies, those who shape Nazi doctrine were almost invariably the disillusioned or disappointed sons of Protestant ministers or out of pious Catholic families without exception they were all the victims of their failed Christianity questing and looking for some alternative to the God who had failed very few historians secular historians ever take this perspective they look at Nazism as the breakdown of the Weimar Republic and the failure of liberal institutions and the kind of inflation the harsh requirement of the Versailles Treaty against Germany that made the nation a poor nation and all those factors are true but that some total of them cannot give the deepest understanding of the rise of this demonic phenomenon that led to the loss of European Jewry and almost to the collapse of Western civilization itself let alone the cost in bringing that demonic thing down at least the physical expression of it, because as one has wisely said, those spirits that came upon Germany though Germany was defeated in war, the spirits remain and await their next opportunity so if the conditions by which they had opportunity to come in and to penetrate and to pollute German Christianity and to leave an enormous void that even the sons of ministers were disillusioned and without hope and without a deep engagement with God and looking for some kind of alternative and that when Hitler came upon the scene, they grabbed him as Messiah, Führer means leader and he was celebrated with as worshipful a devotion as ever the church gave to Christ in the generations that preceded Hitler's coming so we need to gain just a few insights out of that collapse and he talks, the book is about certain of the principal ideologists who fashioned the Nazi mindset who cast their discontent into political visions which were as divorced from reality as their creators were from society and because of this longing they made the leap from cultural criticism to politics assuming that cultural evil could be dissolved by the establishment of the right kind of faith and community it's interesting that almost invariably they were looking for a kind of corporate life there's a cry there's something in man that knows that to be isolated and to lack meaningful significant relationship is to become stultified and to die Germany has a much deeper sense of this than we Americans were so individualistic because long before Hitler there were nature youth groups pioneers and fireside singing and looking back at the German culture and even now closer to Hitler time into pagan origins of Germany to find something that would bind them all together in the absence of God they had to find an alternative that would be a basis for the kind of comradeship, the word comrade was a fixed word in German vocabulary and even in Russian communist vocabulary seeking the same thing outside of God the failure of the church to be community and to meet the vital and organic need of men for authentic relationship as comrades, as brothers with shared destiny and significant purpose for being was not provided by German Christianity and therefore the void was filled by its demonic alternative called Nazism. The question is has that void been filled today? Our own Christianity is so totally individualistic and again and again when I speak in Bible colleges and places like that I say you guys who have the greatest prospect for community are not employing it you're just a bunch of individuals who of necessity are required to share the same facilities so that you can each receive your credential for your personal ministry but you're not related to each other's community you're just using the same facility and what is a Sunday service? They're coming together of isolated individualities for the purpose of paying personal benefit listening to the man who's bringing it forth or the worship thing and leaving that to go back again into the privacy and isolation of their own homes. We keep that up our kids are going to be looking for what is instinctively a need that God himself has created and they'll find it in ways that will more than embarrass us but bring their shame. It's interesting that the two guys that blew up that school in Colorado and those kids were neo-Nazis they idolized Hitler they wore trench coats, they had military garb, they fantasized they wanted something heroic even if it meant their own death let alone the death of others and the parents were absolutely astounded that their children could be capable of this kind of bloodletting without conscience like in an American narrative called Christian Home because the question is how Christian was the Christian if it is not vital in leading man in the deepest engagement that he has being made in God's image because God himself is a sweet company he's not a solo deity he's a father and a son and a holy spirit and they are in a remarkable relationship together one without the other is inconceivable to themselves one defers to the other they enjoy their fellowship the son was a delight to the father long before he ever made his appearance on the earth and we're called to demonstrate the mystery of the Godhead that when we will be one as they are one the world will know that the father has sent them there's a father who sends there's a holy spirit who testifies the three this is not my phrase but the God I had coined it I would have retired God himself is a sweet company so what I'm saying is only that Christianity which is apostolic, that Christianity which is the dogmatic faith of a Christ born at Nazareth called to be king in a kingdom that he is already advancing by his coming that will come to Israel and benefit all nations, this is the faith and we don't apprehend the faith that way and lay hold of it because it has expectancy for a future there's a hope with that, we have part in that kingdom, we shall rule and reign with him in that kingdom, this life whatever its difficulties is preparation and discipline for that role if we lose that we lose the incentive for this life and we have no hope for the life to come and therefore we while we're yet Christians we're copping up we're fornicating, we're taking liberties we're reading pornography we're slipping a bottle whatever form it takes it's the evidence that we have not been fully engaged in God, we've lost the Jewish kingdom root so they sought to destroy the present in order to usher in a future life R-E-I-C-H, do you know this German word? what does it mean? third life the driven life life is kingdom they did not know or they rejected the kingdom of God which is the kingdom of Israel because they were too damn proud to allow Jews to have such a promise for their future and so they found their own German alternative a king, a third life a kingdom, but it was a kingdom of death praise God that the Lord did not allow it to succeed or I cannot even speak of the misery that would have been projected over all mankind, we would be having Auschwitz in Minneapolis we would have death camps throughout America we would be systematically annihilating American Jews as they systematically annihilated them in Europe and in fact it's this very spirit that will seek again that annihilation at the end of the age and in the time of Jacob's trouble and I think it was John weren't we together in Auschwitz in Birkenau? as we were walking huh? was it Simon? we were walking over these vast ruins of the barracks where these skeletons were contained and it's breathtaking in a long way to see German what's the word? efficiency and order set up as a process of annihilation, only the Germans could have killed and annihilated 6 million in the short period of time that they did anyone else would have made a mess of it just the logistical problem of killing and annihilating was itself staggering and Simon said Art, if you believe that the time of Jacob's trouble, correct me if I'm misstating this, is going to exceed the horror of the Nazi time and that it will be greater in its magnitude and there will be more lives lost, how could that take place in the short three and a half year period that we expect it to be, except that the decants of this kind set up elsewhere in the world wherever centers of Jewish population are wow I never thought of that yes, I was expecting great attrition Jews not being knocked off here and there but that's true if we're talking about the decimation of 10 million Jews, that cannot be obtained in three and a half years, except through some systematic system ha, I put out apology of annihilation and not in Germany though it may well be there again but in our nation and in other nations that have allowed the same spirit that came into Germany to come into us and for the same reason that we have not a formidable and apostolic reality in the church that could identify and resist it but we have a lesser kind of self-seeking experience oriented Christianity that does not fit us for the onrush of these last day evils, and we will collapse before it I have never taken the time, and the Lord has never called it that we should speak so as we are now in these days or has never called it that we should speak so as we are now in these days all of the subjects that we could have had for this prophetical school, what was the Lord's insistence the nations, the powers Christ, the powers of the nations this is the last days drama and the Nazi thing and the Japanese collapse was a preview that we must not miss or in it are all the lessons for ourselves and somehow the union of this insistence on the authentic dogmas of the faith in the spirit, in the apostolic and the prophetic spirit, even in the Hebraic spirit, would save it from becoming a kind of an arid and offensive I know the truth and you don't kind of mentality you understand what I'm saying? There's something about a fundamentalist that is icky and offensive, but the truth of fundamentalism is critical, but how to hold that truth and how to demonstrate that truth by the spirit and in community and the reality of that faith is the issue. Maybe the problem with the fundamentalists of Germany however they were, was that they lacked a corresponding reality to their life and were satisfied only with creedal correctness and had not the accompanying existential reality. What we're reading about these ideologues who were starved for a reality that was not to be made, that was not available to them even through fundamentalists let alone through the liberalists that whatever was Christian was failed so they could not realize on this earth some of the bliss that had once been promised for the hereafter there was no sense of a future or an eternal reward worth waiting for or seeking they were artists without talents of creative expressions, prophets without a God. This is a Jewish historian writing this having a religious faith, that is to having discounted and thrown it over they could not fall back on the promise of divine deliverance. Why do men entrust their destiny to a Fuhrer a guy with a little mustache who's not even German but Austrian and a failed artist and just out of the punk elements of German society from the bottom that meet in beer bowl basements how could a great nation of Goebbels Schiller, Fichte, Hegel entrust their destiny to a questionable character like that because they were desperate and because nothing else had been provided them as alternative and as model. They had nothing to fall back on in the promise of divine deliverance and therefore they had to seize a human or a demonic alternative having abjured a given over reason they could not expect a natural human evolution toward the community they sought the goal consequently was a mystique and the means the means the leftist Fuhrer suggested violence and coercion. This you're not going to get this just hearing this the end of it is violence it's looking for something as God cannot provide it, men cannot provide it and so they take the demonic alternative but in the end it requires somehow the expression of the employment of violence. God's way is peace but the way that seems right into a man is death and description was so these men who have become a complex instance of the search for salvation. Who has ever examined Nazism as somehow a failed search for salvation that these men could not find salvation within the context of the nation of the Reformation has got to be one of the astounding statements of modern times that is never ever fingered in examining the phenomenon of Nazism, Hitler, Germany the Holocaust that the root of it is spiritual that the root of it is a failed salvation and a God that could not be experienced or a faith that would be experienced as community and that these men are deeply questing for something of this kind and therefore they found it in the place that Satan had prepared the compromise of German Christianity the loss of its apostolic character the making of it a religion that was amenable to German national purposes and imperialism or business is exactly what the Jews did with their Judaism in Germany. Reform Judaism the forfeiting of the supernatural content of the faith, a domestication of Jewish faith to make it amenable to business and cultural pursuit that would make them a companion to their Christian compatriots in Germany both the German and the Jew were guilty of the actual renunciation of God and the turning of their true faith for their own personal purposes it's a paganism, even in the name of God, which is the worst offense to God it's interesting that the Jewish patrons of the arts and of intellect very much encouraged these directions in German Christianity they were the first ones to recognize and to aid a German young theologian who subsequently became the father of German theology whose name is Schleiermacher he was first discovered and helped by Jewish patrons who recognized him as an innovative German thinker but what was his innovation? away from the dogmatic faith and its insistence on a Jesus and a Christ and into a faith obtained as experience that did not require this narrow dogmatic insistence and therefore was amenable and available to middle class Germans who wanted some spirituality without the loss of their lifestyles it was a perfect provision for Germans who wanted to accommodate the Christian faith to their lifestyles that could not have had lifestyles like that if Christ is Christ because the true faith requires discipleship, the true faith requires sacrifice, the true faith requires the putting of the interest of God before oneself but this was the people who wanted success in business the world of commerce, trade, culture and in periods of expansion, colonialism and they wanted a religion that would lend itself to that and not that would threaten that so isn't it ironic that the monster raised up by Jewish participation and encouragement came back in the end to bite them, the Frankenstein that they created destroyed them because the Germany that grew up in the loss of its dogmatic faith and retained only the husk was able to put them through concentration camps in gas ovens without the blinking of an eyelash and without any recognition that what they were destroying were the descendants of the ancient faith of the God of Israel which was their faith you understand what I mean? so they gave rise to that which subsequently killed them the loss of an authentic German Christianity was the undoing of the Jews as it was almost the undoing of the civilized world and Jewish participation and encouraging that Christianity away from dogmatic insistence to a more naturalistic religion that would make it more amenable and not narrow and threatening to Jews actually became their death. They did not recognize that a true Christianity would have been their salvation because they had not seen a true Christianity, all they had seen was a stunted kind that was for them anti-Semitic so it's a deep tragedy their greatest fear is the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the insistence on the narrowness of this gospel which means that they themselves must subscribe to it to be saved well they don't want to be saved by it, they want to retain Jewish life, Jewish institutions Jewish religion, Jewish culture Christians, they don't want to be threatened that this is the only alternative, a monowave when there are many past pluralistic ways to truth, so again we have history repeating itself they are at the forefront and they are powerful places of influence to come against the very faith that needs to be established in its dogmatic insistence that this is the way, walk ye in it and there is no other name given in heaven and earth whereby men may be saved, and not only are they involved in the ACLU and places like that, but in the places of TV movies, culture, books, articles where without actually and expressly and explicitly stating these things the whole tenor of it is to come against fundamentalist religious conviction and to hold it in division or bring it into question as being somehow narrow, well look what's happened in our culture, the worst thing you can be called is to be called dogmatic when Jesus came full of grace and truth, and we come full of truth with right doctrine and dogma but without grace it's a painful contradiction, because it is the truth all the more does it require a grace amenable and comparable and equal to that truth, that means that our character and our life is as important as the body of convictions that we carry and communicate if we just have the one without the other we're either empty bags or we have a right content but not a right person so we've got to become the thing in itself, that's what Jesus was and that's what we are called otherwise we're just fundamentalists with the right moniker the right categories but not the right life you shall be a witness unto me not just the correct purveyor of the dogma, that's a much greater requirement than just being correct and I'm saying we cannot obtain that and be that independent of church as community we cannot come to that fullness in reality as isolated individuals however well meaning we need the grace, the grace is perfected and inculcated in our life in the dealings and requirements that come in those that are living together sincerely so my God sting the church where humanism has pervaded it, where experience is more important than dogma and dogma is even an offense and the whole ecumenism that is taking place now charismatically and institutionally is to put dogmatic doctrinal differences aside in the name of unity and agreement which is sentimental humanism pervading the church and because they think that that represents progress and the reconciliation of mankind at last, that we who insist on a narrow dogma are more than a fly in the ointment, we are a dangerous impediment to the very progress of mankind which is now within our grasp, if you would not be so stubborn in your insistence on this dogma this faith, this word, but just put aside those petty distinctions and go along that we might have unity build the tower higher than God so my God, alert the church, wake it up, shake it up my God, history is knocking into doors, haunting us, we can't sweep it under the carpet look what it has cost my God, will Germany ever recover unless their wholesale repentance of the failure of their Christianity before God would still exist and nothing has been altered even since the Holocaust, still man serving man pleasing so Lord restore the faith that is the faith we pray, for it's the only alternative to darkness and to death whatever it costs us to be the promulgators of that faith, the oracles bearing the oracular message of God and not some light equivalent that makes us fascinating that people should run after us, whatever it requires Lord to bring your oracular voice to the church and to the nation we welcome it, and we thank you for the privilege of that call, may we die my God, in it whether we succeed or not rather than lapsing my God into the alternatives, we thank you and give you praise, in Yeshua's name