In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the importance of the message of obligation, particularly in relation to Israel. The speaker acknowledges that there are varying levels of understanding and affinity for Israel among believers. The nation of Israel is seen as deserving of blessings and freedom from their enemies. The speaker highlights the need for God to break the self-confidence of the nation through drastic calamities, leading them to recognize that only God can save them. The sermon references Ezekiel 20:34-37, where God promises to gather the scattered Israelites with a mighty hand and plead with them face to face in the wilderness. The purpose of this gathering is to bring them into the bond of the covenant.

Under obligation, it seems to be the principal message of these days, and in fact, it is so important that if the Lord would not give me any other message but this until the fulfillment of it, it would still be a privilege to hear myself atoning the same thing again and again. It has to do with Israel, and I know that we're in different places of understanding with regard to that people. Even those of us who have an affinity for Israel usually have it from a basis of sentiment and kindly disposition for people who have suffered long and deserve some blessing, you know, in this last day, and the nation should be established at last, and they should be freed from the vexation of enemies and neighbors who seek their extinction. But I have a totally different view. And it's a jarring view, especially hard to understand and to receive by those who do have this affinity. But I don't have all kinds of time, so in the one short time that we have, I just need to make a few blunt statements that the issue of Israel is not the issue of a people who deserve a break after the long history of suffering. It's the issue of a conclusion, a finale, a consummation of a remarkable purpose of God in having chosen that people from the first that will not be consummated without their restoration and return from their present apostasy and unbelief, of which their present political existence is not yet the fulfillment, but a preliminary, and that in fact this people's millennial destiny is so great that it cannot be fulfilled except on the basis of resurrection. There's no prospect of their improving or any amelioration from their present low condition. It will become worse, I believe, more degraded and more embarrassing for themselves until finally, by force of the fury that shall be poured out against them, not only in the land politically, but everywhere in the world, a global hatred described in Jeremiah chapter 30 as the time of Jacob's trouble, a final sifting of God of that nation in which the greater number will not survive, but the remnant that will survive will constitute a restored nation and be a resurrected and transfigured people, totally different from their present character, and by which means God's promise to Abraham that out of his seed shall come a blessing to all the nations of the earth will be fulfilled. It's a whole tremendous overview for which there's not a word in English that I'm required to employ a German word. Germans being so theologically minded and I think their language lends itself to such an awesome and historic prospect that they use the word heilsgeschichte, the saving history, the redemptive history of God, in which this nation is select, not because of its virtue, but because God is God and he will choose whom he will choose. Even the people who have forfeited their calling and have no regard for it even now and are concerned only for their political and national security and God will not allow them that luxury. He will fulfill their destiny, even despite themselves, because his word and his honor and his name is at stake. So I'm expecting an anti-Semitism of such a kind as to eclipse what had taken place in the Nazi time, which for us would be a kind of a preview of yet more vile things to come, that a Jew will not be safe in any nation in the world and that even in our own nation they're going to be hunted and pursued. And you need to understand the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Although it can be explained sociologically and politically and long-standing enmity between Gentiles and Jews, the kind of economic position that Jews hold that excite the envy of non-Jews, that is always an inadequate understanding. Those things can be played upon, but the real nexus, the source of anti-Jewish hate is Satan himself. There's a demonic fury opposed to this people for reasons that we don't even suspect. But just to give it to you very briefly, it's because of their election. It's because their restoration is the key to the Lord's return and the establishment of this theocratic rule. And I'm throwing out one statement after another, each one of which deserves a whole exposition. And because many of us, the lovely Christians that we are, have no theocratic anticipation. We talk about the Lord's coming or his kingdom, but these are fuzzy, vague words. But for me they're very explicit. I'm expecting an actual political rule of God over the nations. And the collapse of human government today is the prelude and the necessary preliminary to his coming and to his reign. Psalm 2 will help you to orient yourself, where it says something like, Why do the heathen rage and imagine a vain thing? That the rulers, the kings and the rulers, take thought against God and against his anointed and seek to break his bonds asunder. But the Lord holds them in disdain. He's contemptuous of them. For he has set his king on the holy hill of Zion. And in this remarkable messianic psalm, yet to be fulfilled, we can understand the rage of the kings and the rulers. The kings, by the way, are the immediate, physical, visible level of government in the nations. But the rulers are invisible. They are the principalities and powers of the air who have had undiminished and uncontested sway throughout history to influence and jerk nations according to their will through visible and physical rulers. But both together are opposed to God's design, namely that his king should be established on his holy hill of Zion. That's not poetry. That's absolutely God's literal intention. And one of the reasons that we have missed it historically as the church is that we have spiritualized and made God's literal statements to be metaphors that have warm, evocative, and suggestive spiritual meanings but have caused us to miss God's very literal intention. So though you may not be so oriented, I'm asking you just for the sake of my giving you an overview before I get down to the brass tacks to understand the context for which reason Jews will be relentlessly pursued. Every former persecution of Jews, nigh unto their extinction, like the Nazi time itself, the genocidal determination of the Nazis to exterminate is the most graphic and recent expression of this demonic drive to remove these people from the face of the earth. Why? Because if they don't exist, there's no prospect of the fulfillment of what the prophets have spoken, that there will be a last day's restoration and a return to the land and an establishment with them again of the kingdom of God. And so if that cannot be practically performed because of their extinction from the earth, then the powers of darkness will go on in their undiminished sway. You see what a demand this makes upon us who have been knocking about spiritually or have satisfied ourselves charismatically and have not an apostolic view of the faith, which is something of our calling or a prophetic view, a foundational view of the faith, for which reason God has brought us to northern Minnesota and has given us the privilege of developing these views at length and in greater detail by those whom he brings to us in summer schools and other occasions. I hope we'll have you visit at some future time. So this is not a view that's familiar to the church and it shows the kingdom now or that we are the kingdom, the presumption of the church even to displace Israel, that we are the Israel of God are all symptoms of a condition about which Paul warns in Romans 11 that he would not have us to be ignorant of this mystery lest we would become wise in our own conceit. Something happens to the church that disfigures it and renders it non-church in any apostolic sense of the word to the degree that this mystery has not been understood or received. It's not just a conceit that displaces Israel but a conceit that inflates the whole texture of the church and changes its very character and demeanor and therefore cannot be employed by God in the fulfillment of these last days things. And that brings me to really the heart of the matter. The great mystery that Paul speaks of is not just Israel's restoration but the means by which Israel is restored after millennia long apostasy and rejection of their own God. The chronicle of their sin and their rejection is stupefying. Very few modern Jews have any awareness of it at all. Don't even understand why it is that they were born in places like myself, Brooklyn, New York or Moscow or Argentina or wherever there are Jewish communities in the world, Russia, Moscow. These are all statements of exile, statements of judgment and our rabbis have not instructed us. Maybe they themselves don't know or they have so construed it as to make us to come out smelling like a rose that we have been propelled into the world to bring a certain measure of blessing and the fact of the matter is, as our history shows we've not been a blessed people ourselves. So, as they themselves don't understand their own destiny nor do they anticipate something as unthinkable as a yet future holocaust. Now no longer confined to Europe but something that is to be experienced globally because Israel has been dispersed among the nations and the greater number of us are in the nations more so than in the land. So that calamity will come to both those that are in the land and those that are in the nations. In Ezekiel 20, is a classic text that shows something of the design of God for the restoration of this people in the last days. It's chapter 20, verse 33 As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out, will I rule over you. You have only to ask whether this speaks of the past or the future knowing that he's not presently ruling over them they have not even an awareness and the last official statement by ourselves as a nation is we will not have this man to rule over us and if the issue is theocratic, the issue of God's rule over his creation it must first begin with his own people, his own nation before it can commence with the nations. In fact, it is Israel as a restored nation that then undertakes God's program for the nations. What we have been busy about as the church till now is not the redemption of nations but a people for his name from among the nations namely, to fill up the body of Christ and to complete the church but the actual task of the nations per se as nations is Israel's task after their own restoration but their restoration begins with calamity. That's how my restoration began. I became a believer out of distress of a final kind, not physically violent distress but one sufficient to bring me up out of my orbit in California as a teacher, university graduate Marxist-oriented, absolutely atheistic and church and Jesus-despising and I was rooted up by the depth of the calamity of my own life personally and took a year's leave of absence and just began to knock around Europe and the world looking for philosophical answers but in the course of traipsing through the nations I began to receive a witness people picking me up off the side of the road or native people or whatever and speaking to me in such a way as to prick my heart and to make me aware that there's something with these people and I was prepared for revelation through them of the Lord himself in the first reading of the New Testament which came to me aboard a deck of a ship en route to Greece and then the final conclusion of the matter of the actual supernatural call of God in Jerusalem and there's a certain corollary to what I've experienced personally as to what my people will experience in a soon coming time they will of necessity have to be propelled out of their places of security, affluence and comfort and it's only in that distress you're not only uprooted physically but all of your categories are uprooted and the things in which you had placed your confidence even if that's the United States or our culture or our pluralism and tolerance the kind of thing that we Jews have enjoyed that must go and we're going to find ourselves again despised, rejected and pushed out into the earth and except that a certain grace come to us in that place of extremity we would all perish I'm going to show you from this text I hope that the grace that does come and comes to a remnant will be through the church itself and that this is our appointment and our mandate the thing that distinguishes us as the church both our ability to extend rescue and aid to our people in such an hour of distress and all the more at a cost that might imperil our own lives and our own families because if they're driven and relentlessly pursued then the whole of the nation its political, its governmental, social disposition will be violently in hatred against them and anyone who will lend them aid will put themselves in the place of suffering their fate and it may well be the discovery of Gentiles willing so to do that fulfills what Paul speaks of in Romans 11 that they might be moved to jealousy by some demonstration that has not yet historically come to them through the church that this willingness to be sacrificial in their stead while all the world hates them though you're yet Gentile has got to be for them a stunning revelation of their very living God and the fact that you're not only willing but that you anticipated this hour of distress and had made preparation for it that they can come into a place of refuge is itself a demonstration that you had some advance notice and how could that conceivably have been because when this comes it says it comes with suddenness with a fury poured out and yet you had anticipated it both biblically and spiritually they will have to recognize that man could not have programmed this this is not something that could ever be humanly organized because they're going to go from a people to people who may not even have met each other face to face or it will be evident to them that this is demonstrably the work of God by his Spirit and this is a last days drama when the Lord first inducted me into this I wanted to run the other way because this runs so against the grain of my own makeup personally it is so melodramatic it sounds like some grade B black and white old movie that is so far fetched and so inconceivable that it violates your taste and yet I want to say for whatever it's worth and for whatever authority I have and whatever history I have and thirty years of God and traveling the world over and bearing his word I trust faithfully that I would stake my life on the truth of everything that I'm saying to you now in fact I could wish that I were a false prophet and that this is some imagining that is really just my own vain subjectivity that will never come to pass I would rather suffer that and the disgrace of it than to know that my people are going to pass for this and the issue of their survival which is to say the issue of their restoration which is to say the issue of the Lord's coming because he says I'm pent up in the heavens he has voluntarily restricted himself waiting for the restoration of all things spoken by the prophets since the world began I hope God will forgive me for every time I have misused that verse and I've automatically reacted at the word restoration thinking it meant the church because at that time the Lord had not lifted the veil over my own understanding that I'm a Jew that the restoration means the restoration of Israel in the last days though albeit through an apocalyptic scenario of violence and extreme devastation both within the land and outside of it so with fury poured out means the anti-semitic deluge that I have described remember in Revelation 12 which speaks about a woman and how Satan, the dragon seeks to devour her and what is birthed by her the man-child who is taken up to heaven I'm not sure exactly what that means but what follows is that God's saving provision for that woman who is evidently Israel is that a place has been prepared for her in the wilderness where she's fed for three and a half years is all provision for that eventuality which I do not think is too distant because even as we're speaking now the pot is on the stove boiling and ready to froth over anti-semitic hatred the changing climate of nations that have previously been sympathetic to Israel is growing more and more cold if not hostile the scriptures tell us that the day will come when all nations will come against Jerusalem to destroy it the untenable condition of Israel in the land now the vexation that is going on in that country their attempt to establish some kind of peace with their fiercest enemies cannot have any hope of success and the disappointment in those who might have hoped for it might actually trigger a greater devastation than they sought to avert by the kind of peace treaty with Arafat and the PLO they are in a precarious position someone was just reading me today was it Jim? where a woman from the Israeli government herself says Lord, she doesn't even know him but she's crying out as my mother uses that word also unless something happens our position seems hopeless we've had it and this is beginning to break upon the consciousness of the nation that has always been perennially optimistic not in God but in themselves such a self-confident people which is why God has got to break them through the drastic calamities that will come to them where they cannot save themselves and where he says I will remove the enemies that transgress against me which unhappily I think will constitute the greater majority so verse 34 I will bring you out from the people that is the nations I will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered with a mighty hand and with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out if we're any kind of students of the word just from its face value and apparent reading we can see clearly this cannot mean what has happened from 1948 to this day the establishment of the political state of Israel is not this that is being described and if I had more time I would give you my view of what I think present Israel represents and that it is not yet the prophetic fulfillment but is a preliminary to that fulfillment and must itself be brought into death Israel must have one opportunity out of its own human strength to establish itself and fail colossally and I wonder why we would stagger at such a scenario hasn't that been God's dealing with us haven't many of us come in just such a way where the Lord has allowed us enough rope so to speak to hang ourselves enough demonstration to see the futility of even our best and well-meaning endeavor and who comes to God except by such collapse who comes in fact truly and so what was true for us personally is the paradigm or the pattern of his own dealing with this nation because they are the epitome of self-confidence anyone who knows Jews knows that there's something about us Jews that is so confident in ourselves and how can we then bless all the families of the earth out of such a mentality out of such a spirit there's got to come such a devastating brokenness such a demonstration of the reality of God to us out of our deep-seated atheism that can only come unhappily out of an extremity of the kind that I'm hoping to describe to you today and God is very terse with his words a fury poured out my God if we knew what that meant and to hit the time should give us a little indication of what that meant and will yet mean more fiercely in the coming hour it's brewing the hatred is brewing and it only waits for the Lord to release it because something has got to evict Jews out of their present places okay and bring them through the nations and if we had time and you could bear the word not just mentally but the emotional weight of this I would show you from a text in Amos where God says I will sift them among the nations as one sifts wheat in a sieve and not one kernel shall fall to the ground the purpose of bringing them through the nations where the greater number of Jews yet reside is for the purpose of their sifting that they might return as the redeemed of the Lord though they were not cast out of Israel or out of Winnipeg or Chicago or wherever in that condition and mourning and sighing shall flee away it says what mourning and sighing of the calamities that I'm describing to you and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads which means it's a final calamity and that it is the it is the contraction of death the spasms and final travail of a nation before its resurrection and rebirth as a nation that can bless the families of the earth and be the locus the location of God's theocratic rule and kingdom for it must be on the holy hill of Zion in the city of Jerusalem on the throne of David who established it henceforth and forever that's God's economy that's his promise to their fathers that's his promise to David and if he's not a God who will keep his promise in such specificity he's not God the whole issue of God's success in this is the issue of God not only demonstrably to the nation itself but to all nations it's God's final mercy to all nations that he's not going to do this in the corner but it is going to be so open to the sight of all that anyone who yet then stubbornly resists God both in the demonstration of his judgment and his mercy invites his judgment upon themselves so I will bring you out from the people and will gather you out of the countries wherein you are scattered with a mighty hand with a stretched out arm and with fury poured out that's the second time in two verses that phrase is used any elementary student of scripture knows that if God repeats himself twice oy vey there's going to be tsouris or trouble and I will bring you into the wilderness of the people here's where you guys come in where we come in where we all come in who are God's remnant people and who recognize that the purpose of our salvation is to fulfill his grand and final consummating purposes in the earth I will bring you into the wilderness of the people and there will I plead with you face to face like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt so will I plead with you so hath the Lord God and I will cause you to pass under the rod and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant that is to say you're going to get saved in the process because a revelation will come to you in the height of your perplexity and distress you will see my face and there will I plead with you face to face like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt so will I plead with you so hath the Lord God and I will cause you to pass under the rod and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant that is to say you're going to get saved in the process because a revelation will come to you in the height of your perplexity and distress you will see my face and here's the interpretation I give that in which I'm absolutely confident that it's not going to be some vision of God or some miraculous showing of his face but the revealing of himself and his character that's what his face means what he is intimately in himself in the faces and the demeanor the self-sacrificial grace of Gentiles will extend themselves to that people at that time that by your mercy they might obtain mercy in other words if we do this only on a sense of religious obligation gritting our teeth waiting for the unhappy moment to pass and to get these nuisances out of our hair who are dirtying our rug and jamming our bathrooms and pressing us for space we will have failed in the one historic moment that is ours they've got to see something more than Christian politeness which is about as far as we've been able to stretch ourselves till now we've got to come into a dimension of such grace that not only are we not inconvenienced by them but count it all privilege to be stretched by them not just to the issue of our convenience but to the issue of our lives can you imagine what that would require in terms of our authentic spirituality because historically nothing has been more of a test for the church than the Jew and the church has historically failed that test because there's something exacerbating about Jews even when they get saved how about in their unsafe condition how about in their vexed condition when they have been suddenly uprooted by a fury poured out they're not going to come to you on their best behavior and it's amazing how they might not even like your hospitality or what you don't have bagels and is this the best you can do and here you're extending yourself at risk and you have to listen to those complaints I know this people and I often relate how one such Jew came to us when we were more of a Jewish community than we presently are and a Jewish hobo picked up off the side of the road and brought to us because we're Ben Israel and he said and I wasn't there I heard the story later that he was taken in by the co-author of my last book which is on the table behind you I'll talk about that later Spirit of Truth Paul Volk and he received this man Paul was a very quiet and laid back believer and he showed this man to a place to stay and got him some food and was about to leave him and the guy started to complain a man in stinking rags complained it wasn't good enough he didn't like it how about what and Paul said that when I saw his patent ingratitude something grows up out of my gut that shocked me that I was capable of that reaction that it was nigh unto murder there's something about hospitality spurned or questioned that brings up the deepest levels I don't have a word for it but I know it's there and this is a Jew with a Jew how much less likely will a Gentile who has had a history of anti-Semitic overtone or latent resentments going back to your childhood when the Jewish kid in the class was getting his straight A's and you were sweating just to pass that every Gentile has that latent disposition and is not even aware of it but the crisis of a Jewish presence coming out of in a moment with suddenness will reveal it unless the sanctifying work of God in power and in truth has reached you in the depths of that place before their coming now in saying that you ought to understand why Paul concluded Romans 11 his remarkable statement of this mystery with an ecstatic doxology that just doesn't beggars all language all the depths of the riches Paul cries out Romans 11 33 through 36 all the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God who has been his counselor who has given to him and shall be given again for of him and through him and to him are all things to whom be glory forever Paul's freaking out he just can't contain himself he's seen something so majestic so stunning so replete with the wisdom of God much more than just the issue of Israel's restoration what he sees is the church's transfiguration in the very requirement of being the agent of God's saving grace to Israel just think of it what other requirement is there in our Christian life now that would compel us to be so sifted and searched of God and yield ourselves to his refining fire what is there about our present church life that makes any demand anything approaching that nothing but the issue of not only the physical survival with you but the revelation of his God through you in mercy and unconditional love no matter how vexed and provoked you are by them is the issue of the church in the last days in every place that's why God is going to sift them through the nations not just for their sake but for our sake that the church in the nations will receive this final test and I believe that Matthew 25 that shows the very first act that the king performs in assuming his power and authority over the nations is to separate the sheep from the goats from among the nations and condemn them either to an eternal hellfire with the devil and his angels or to eternal blessedness to a kingdom prepared for them on the basis of one thing only what did you do with the least of these so I'm just trusting the lord that in fact I know that except that his spirit is with us you'll shock this office some kind of harebrained wild eyed thing and go back to life and business as usual but I believe that the whole drama is having its origin in settings just like this in fact it's what we've been doing the whole weekend in Wisconsin and Illinois Rockford Illinois I can tell you such stories I don't know how much patience you have how utterly supernatural this is just cut me off when you reach the breaking point you can't take more I'll tell you one incidence in America and the west coast another one in Europe but they're both of the same kind I just happened to stumble on an announcement that there was a scholars conference on the holocaust I didn't even know there was such a thing it was the 22nd annual meeting of scholars on the holocaust I started to drool my god lord I want to go I quickly sent off I don't know what a fax a telephone call I got an application I was accepted it was being conducted at the university of Washington and Seattle and it began I forgot what on a Friday Saturday Thursday Friday Saturday knowing I was coming to that area I said to my brothers I said why don't you guys make some arrangements for me on Sunday I'm sure there are some churches that would like to have me back they were going to take care of that I got a phone call the next day from Alaska from Juneau when are you coming I said as a matter of fact I'll never be closer to you than I will be in March I'm going to Seattle the only two free days I would have would be Thursday and Friday she said those are the days of our Bible school so I went after Juneau God confirming and I came back after the conference for the services not a single door had opened it's uncanny not one church you mean to spin my wheels on a Sunday what is this you're not redeeming the time meanwhile I had written a letter to she had made a trip there and I noticed her postmark on the envelope Washington some little town I never heard of I wrote her a quick note I'm going to be in Washington Seattle I don't know how close you are here's the phone number of the brothers arranging my meetings if you can come come she calls up and finds out there's no meetings arranged at all she said you think God will come to us we're about three hours south of Seattle and we're just in the boondocks we're just the most insignificant little band of souls that's where I came because no other door had opened and as I'm being driven there I learned that the pastor is a man who received this call had a message I gave in California years before and now the man's beside himself and so I arrive and the first thing they show me is an 80 acre property that they're just about to buy which they think God wants to use to prepare a retreat for tired ministers which I can appreciate and it's near the sea coast the west coast and I'm walking around this property I don't say a word to them everything in the property is not a retreat center for ministers it may begin as that it may give the appearance of that even as our property is being used now for retreats and schools and things of that kind in fact almost invariably every property I know intended by God to be a place of refuge has now as its present function a retreat center or things where Christians will come in and out and the neighbors around them will be accustomed to seeing the traffic and when God changes the cast of journeys south of them is another community in Oregon that's equidistant from the coast as they and I'm carrying in my address book I have it with me now if anybody wants to see it a photograph of a painting painted by a woman by the spirit who has never been on the property and I have been on that property as I've been on many of these properties and it shows a stream of beaten up dejected pitiful looking people just bedraggled coming not through the road but somehow through the woods where the big barrack type buildings which are now built on that property that woman has never seen it she saw it by the spirit and painted it I've been there it's exactly what it looks like if I told you the story of the man whom God had appointed for that work it's another remarkable saga that how God brought him from the Bahamas he was with the mafia a backslidden Christian and God stripped him and brought him and he didn't know why he was on that farm raising cattle and three years after God chose him the purpose refuge for Jews walking distance from the place I'm now describing to you and so it goes if I had not gone to the Holocaust conference if God had not closed every other door I would not have been there and this is happening to me continually so why should I believe that this is an accident that I'm here now or any place where we've been this weekend Europe my second book came out Reality and it went into a French edition and I began to have a correspondence with a couple who were blessed by the book and then several visits over the course of the years and speaking to them about community because I want to say this as long as I mention that word there will be no refuge for Jews except by the virtue of community isolated Christians I don't care what kind of prima donnas of the faith they are virtuosos of the faith will not be able to bear the enormous weight spiritually and practically that the imposition of Jewish life will bring in their crisis condition it will take the concerted strength the corporate strength of a people who are community believers that's how critical this is and that's what God said to me end time teaching community refuge the community must proceed to refuge and most of us are too private for this for community Sunday Christianity is fine a little mid-week Bible study good but community means the end of privacy it means a whole intrusion into your life and in fact if we will not welcome the intrusion into our lives of each other how shall we welcome their intrusion when that time comes notice the only people who will be fitted for this are people whose lives are not their own and who know that they'd be called for a purpose and that God's grace and prosperity and affluence and anything that is given is only to bring you to a place for this something like Elijah like everything from now until the end of time and and the end of time and the end of time and the end of time end of and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and that about Jews fleeing through Switzerland, but why should I have not thought it? God says to the nations, there's none exempt, there are Christians that need to be sifted and tested and tried there. And so when we finally were able to regain our breath, God look at it, you have that intention here, of course the place physically lends itself, it's out of Neuchatel, that is to say it's out of an urban center, it's out in a distant countryside so to speak where Jews could come perhaps at night by whatever means and pass detection and be moved out from there again. They said, Art, you've got to go in and speak to the director of the school lest they sell this property and be lost to the purposes of God. Are you kidding? You know the way these French speaking people look at us Americans? Who am I that anyone could believe anything as incredible as this? Art, you've got to do it. They finally persuaded me and so in we walked into this guy's office. There he was behind a massive desk and the first thing my eye falls upon, my two books in French right on his desk. He had just finished reading them with his wife and in walks the author and he was so blessed and I said, my dear brother, and I told him what the Lord had just spoken. He didn't say, he got right on the phone. He said, let me call the pastor who's the head of the committee to sell that property. I couldn't have obtained that if I had paid a million dollars and he gets this man on the phone and I'm speaking to that man whom I've seen again now on my most recent trip only a month or two ago in Switzerland and I share with him a brief. He said, well, we need to sit down over this and speak about this face to face. I said, I quite agree. When could we meet? He said, well, I'm going to be in Basel on Monday. I said, you are? My program was just changed. I'm going to be in Basel on Monday and so I shared with him and in the sharing that took two to three hours, I said, my dear brother, your movement is a curio like the Mennonites and Hutterites and various other descendants of radical reformation groups that today are mere curiosity Amish and they're so quaint they drive buggies. You're on the shelf. You don't begin to resemble that movement which in its inception had a hundred years of prayer around the clock in an unbroken way. There's old lithographs of people stretched out in their faces of prayer. Today's descendants bear no correspondence to that. I said, but God has given you a final opportunity. His word says, I'll bless them that bless thee. And if you'll reserve this property for this use for the Jewish people, I suspect that God will give you a movement, a last chance and you'll not be permanently shelved of having any significance. And so I left him with that. What's happened now is that instead of it's being sold, it has been rented with the prospect of sale to a German speaking group from Basel whom I went to see on my last trip here. George Schubert, you can pray for him. I sat down with this man with his wife and shared these things. The man was taking notes. He said, Artie said, we knew before you came that we were not here for ourselves. We didn't know why, but we knew that we were not here for ourselves. And we're going to pray and consider very seriously all that you have shared with us. And so it goes on this last trip with Simon in Denmark, another place in Poland, another place, a man that's almost single-handedly built the house. My God, it eclipses anything that we have on our property. What for an anticipation of Jews coming in the Danish place? They have the whole upstairs lot of clothing and people say, well, why don't you send it to Israel? And I said, no, the Lord has explicitly told me to keep it here. So I will bring you into the wilderness of the nations and there will I plead with you face to face as I pleaded with your fathers. I'll cause you to pass under the rod. And in verse 38, I will purge out from among you, the rebels have done their transgress against me. In the book of Amos, it's God defines what a rebel is. Those who say this shall not come upon us or never again, that mentality, refusing to see in their distress the hand of God. And, um, and I think that will account for the greater number. They shall, I shall take them out of the country where they sojourn, but they shall not enter into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord. How do we know that this is distinguished from any previous attempt or issue of restoration that Israel has experienced from Babylonian captivity? Because the end of it is you shall know that I am the Lord. No previous return has eventuated in the national recognition of Israel's God. This one will, it will be so dramatic, such a work, such a spirit work, such a sovereign work and such a demonstration of God and those who extend mercy that they will know that I am is the Lord. So you can read the rest of that text at your own convenience. You could read Amos chapter nine that speaks about the sifting of them through the nations. You can read it in conjunction with Romans nine through 11, where Paul sees the mystery of the conjunction of the relationship between the church and Israel, that by your mercy, they might obtain mercy, God's final resolution that he might have mercy upon all. It's the conclusion of all things. And we in extending ourselves in the sacrificial way that will be transfiguring for us, will be fitted as much for our eternal destiny to rule and reign with them as a holy and blessed people who are priests, as they will have been fitted by their return for their millennial destiny to be the location of God's kingdom in the earth and their city and the Zion of that city, the very locus of God's rule, that the law shall go forth out of Zion and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem. I believe that literally we have lost a great deal of this for the failure to consider God's word as being literal. And so the whole issue of Israel brings us to a whole re-examination of the word and even the way in which we have approached it till now, you can make wonderful allegories and give spiritual meanings and say that Zion stands for this or for that. And it has a kind of application, but don't do so at the expense of nullifying God's very specific and literal intent. Because when the scriptures are taken in that way, the remarkable thing is that it brings a measure of challenge and demand and requirement that spiritualizing the word never brings. That may have been the reason why consciously or unconsciously these kinds of methods of interpreting have historically taken place in the church. To read God's word literally makes it very clear that there's a requirement of a sacrificial kind, that there really is a cross and that there really is an issue of reward of a heavenly kind or an eternal embarrassment for failure to be what God has saved us to be. The instrument of his use in the restoration of his people and the release of his coming, the establishment of his kingdom and glory. We are at the end and this is not a scenario. So I just want to seal this up in a prayer. So Lord, we ask the spirit of truth. You said that your spirit would teach us all things. It would convict us of the things that are true. And Lord, if I have been sharing that which is true and not only true, but coming shortly to pass, I'm asking that your spirit would witness to their spirit that indeed this is God's way and that an hour has come, a historic hour, a moment in which we're being called and a requirement is being made of all of the investment that God has poured into our lives that might require our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, and yet the privilege to be instruments, my God, and to