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The Mystery of Israel and the Church

by Art Katz

Chapter 5b

To Him be Glory in the Church
We have been brainwashed and have consciously or unconsciously accepted the world's definition of Church, for which we receive their tax-deductible accommodation.  They give it because they want us to agree that the Church is only a social institution serving human need.  This is an absolutely perverse definition of what the Church is.  Serving human need is incidental.  Its whole purpose is to serve Divine need and to glorify God, and there is no other agency given in the earth whereby that glory is to be obtained than the Church:
To Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen (Eph. 3:21).
A fellowship that has lost the meaning of the word 'glory' has voided itself as church.  If the purpose of church is that God might be glorified throughout all generations forever and ever, and if we ourselves have lost the sense of what that glory is, then what are we about?  Glory is not just a fanciful word.  God intended His glory to be normative, a radiance to permeate His creation.  There is a whole world that does not know what glory is, but God has so calculated it that there is only one means by which His glory is to find entry into the earth and be made known, namely, through the Church.  A fellowship that has already opted for programs and for things that will only serve the needs of its congregation has, by that very means, disqualified itself from being the agency through which God's purposes can be fulfilled.   And if we miss the glory, we resign ourselves to becoming merely institutional.  We will find ourselves accommodating to men and their human need, but we will have missed their greatest need, namely, to make the glory of God known.  We shall never come to kingdom righteousness so long as our need is the predicate of our lives, the hub and pivot around which all things turn.  We will never come to sanity and wholeness, nor will we ever come to the end of all our deliverance and inner-healing ministries so long as our real sickness is our self-centeredness.
To come into the eternal purpose of God will ruin us for church programs and the various other kinds of things we think we need in order to pacify those in the pew.  Even to have programs is a statement that the fellowship has lost this apostolic view, and like the world, it has got to make available services and benefits to hold the attention of its congregants.
This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord (Eph. 3:11).
What kind of a fellowship can there be that does not make as its first priority the taking to itself God's eternal purpose?  A fellowship that does not live for the eternal purpose of God is not living. It is hardly more than a succession of services. It has lost, if indeed it ever had, this vital perspective as the reason for its being.  A congregation that has been gripped or apprehended by this understanding cannot possibly have boring services.   In fact, are we truly saved unless we have been fully apprehended by the purposes for our salvation?  We are in an unbroken continuum with those who have embraced the purposes of God, for which reason they were hacked to death, tortured, murdered and butchered in a kind of satanic fury that seeks to nullify this ultimate intention of God through the Church.  That is why there are so few who want to hear the call of God, because God calls us, not to our own purposes, but to His costly ones.

The Two Wisdoms
Wisdom does not mean what we would ordinarily think it to mean.  It is not wise sayings, but more like a value system.  As noted, the wisdom of the gods of this world is a system predicated on force, violence, threat, fear, ambition, lust, intimidation and the terror of men to preserve themselves and to make their own survival the first law of life.  It is the unchallenged premise by which the world lives its life, namely, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure.  The world makes that the foremost principle of being.  The ability to lay down one's life and not to consider one's life as dear to oneself is the wisdom of God and is predicated on contemptible weakness and foolishness.  The one wisdom lives for itself, its own preservation and its own advantages, while Gods wisdom lives for another; it is selfless.  It is the wisdom of the Son of God who never initiated anything in Himself, or for Himself, but lived entirely for the gratification of His Father.
This is contrary to human nature and how we think we have to live.  Anything that is resolved through violence is the wisdom of this world.  That is the way the world has lived its life throughout history.  God's wisdom is to relinquish, to give up, to yield and to believe that there is something greater than death and, by that, not to fear death.  It is a wisdom that is centered in the Cross of Christ Jesus, namely, to serve and glorify Him.  We will know that we have aligned ourselves with God when we constitute a threat to the realm of spirit Powers that brood over us.  The overcomers of the end of the age are not those who avoid pain and pursue pleasure, but who overcome,
...because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even to death (Rev. 12:11b).
The world cannot bear this kind of wisdom.  The only one who can live like that truly is one who does not think that this life is the whole story, and who realizes that there is a life beyond this life for which this life is preparation.  There is an eternity, and it is the true appreciation of that reality that enables us to be fearless in this life.  If we suffer the loss of our life, we are fully persuaded that it is not mere happenstance or accident, but ordained of God, and that there will be eternal reward for that sacrifice and suffering. 

Defeating the Powers
If we ourselves are insecure, fearful, jealously guarding our lives, afraid to take the risks of faith, playing it safe, then the Powers of the air are not required to acknowledge us at all.  They are only impressed with the same thing they saw in both Jesus and Paul, namely, apostolic authenticity.  They have only one incumbent requirement, and that is to recognize that which is authentic, namely, of God and like God, as authentic as He Himself is.  God is wanting authenticity (a synonym for apostolic) in His people: heavenliness, truth, unfeigned love and all the gritty things that are so painful to obtain.  We all are the products of a devious civilization that majors in appearances and outward things, but where the Powers see the truth of God in the life of His people, they will retreat.  They know whom to fear and whom to acknowledge.
We cannot defeat them by turning up the amplifiers in our worship, or by shouting them down.  It is not noise that impresses them, but character.  It is the truth of life where we really live, not the brave show that we put on when we think we 'have it all together.'  They have got to see in our conduct and character the visible evidence of our freedom from the influence of the Powers.
The wisdom of God was superbly demonstrated at the Cross when the supreme Son of God relinquished the right to His own life and gave it up by the Eternal Spirit, the Spirit of sacrifice, without spot and without blemish unto God, without complaint and without answering His mockers back.  He was as a lamb who went silently to the slaughter.  He was goaded by His own people to come down from the Cross before they would believe Him.  He suffered that anguish for others while at the same time hearing their taunts and mocks, when anything that is left in a person that has to do with self-justification and self-vindication would rise up and say, "You fools!  I am doing this for you!  Don't you understand?"  But, instead, He says, "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing."  Another wisdom was expressed, contrary to the logic that the agonizing moment would have justified. 
It was at the Cross that two systems of wisdom collided.  God's wisdom does not seek for itself, but does the Father's bidding, even unto death.  Jesus would not speak His own words, or do His own thing, though He was supremely capable in Himself of doing anything He pleased.  He fully absorbed the fury of the Powers of darkness, who wanted to utterly destroy Him, and thought that by doing so, they would obliterate the threat that He represented to their kingdom.
When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him (Col. 2:15).
At the Cross, Jesus disarmed and brought a foundational and devastating setback to the Powers of the air by demonstrating the self-sacrificing wisdom of God.  The Powers of the air exhibited their wisdom: threat, intimidation, and the use of force and violence, in order to get Jesus to react in kind, and to rail against those who were railing against Him, but Jesus demonstrated something consistently unto death by voluntarily bearing the worst that they could inflict.  Wisdom is not something that is only vocally expressed; it has got to be demonstrated in life.  Ultimate malignity met ultimate magnanimity, the ultimate graciousness of God, the forbearance of God, the humility of God and the forgiveness of God.  Meekness triumphed over viciousness.  It is the same demonstration that will again make God eternally vindicated, but this time through the Church, for which reason He has created all things.
The Powers thought they had won because they had brought Jesus into death, but Jesus bore that death in a way that revealed the wisdom of God, and that defeated them.  If force cannot compel a man to react in kind, what else can they use?  If they cannot manipulate us to be like them and to protect our carnal and bodily lives, and cry out and compromise and do anything to stay alive, then they have no more power over us.  We have defeated them, because the worst that they can do has come upon us, and we have stood and remained faithful to God, and exhibited the character of God in that very suffering.
If the Powers of this world had only known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8).  They did not realize that by imposing their full wisdom, which is predicated upon force and destruction, they were releasing a resurrection and a Life that would billow out over mankind throughout all generations, and would bring the final triumph of God and the raising of the dead.  It set in motion the very things that would establish His throne, in the very city where He was put to death.  Through His death, and out of His rent side, would be birthed a Church.  The Holy Spirit would be poured out from the Throne of God that would give an enablement to the Church to fulfill its mandate and commission of ushering in His millennial glory and Kingdom upon the throne of David.  The Powers suffered a severe setback with the crucifixion of Jesus when He made an open spoil of them and took the keys of death and of Hell.  He disarmed them, but He did not inflict the final defeat.  Their final defeat remains to be fulfilled by the Church in the mystery of God.

A Corporate Demonstration
We are coming to the end of the age, and the magnitude of this eternal purpose and demonstration is of such a kind that it cannot be made by mere individuals alone.  It is for the Church in its entirety, because the Church is the Church only in its corporate make up and in all of the diversity of what constitutes it.  We are in something together, both the minister and the housewife, and we need to be consciously aware of that, and to prepare ourselves for the final conclusion of this mystery.  It requires a people freed from the influence of the Powers of the air; a people who are not insecure, fearful, and living for themselves, who are gloriously freed from mammon, who are indifferent to shopping malls, who can have their car crunched in an accident and walk away smiling, who can suffer affliction and inexplicable things without becoming undone.  They are those who can receive the stripping of their earthly goods with joy, knowing that they have in heaven a more enduring substance (Heb. 10:34).
In fact, the only people who can fulfill this mystery are those who would be strangers, pilgrims and sojourners in the earth.  They have risen above and beyond their national culture.  They are not fearful, but gloriously free from intimidation and threat.  They know that their security is not from the Government or from their employer, but from God.  And if that should dry up, the Lord has alternative sources, and if it pleases Him not to provide for them, then they will prefer to die in faith rather than that they should subsist and prolong their bodily life by initiating some course of action out of themselves.
When Elijah was at the brook Cherith, being fed by ravens in a drought that had been occasioned by his own word of judgment, you have a man submitted to the wisdom of God.  It says that he watched the brook dry up, but he did not allow the visibly decreasing water supply, which is life, to affect or determine his next move.  He was not moved by things external or seen, but by the word of God only.  Imagine an entire fellowship like that!  Jews will be coming to us in their most ungainly condition, frothing at the mouth, having been suddenly uprooted from their places of security and affluence, and find themselves in threat of death, pushed, prodded and driven through places they never would have chosen.  It will be an ultimate test for the Church.  There must be a people on the earth in the Last Days that are not moved by circumstances, or by dwindling streams of supply, but only by the word of God, for that is the greater wisdom.  It is a people who are free from fear, who, like Job, will yet trust God, though He may allow them to be slain (Job 13:15).
Let the Church become an apostolic entity and a forerunner to a kingdom that will displace the Powers of this world, and you will see the world take off its mask and come at it with gnashing teeth.  Unless we get this into our spirits and understand the cosmic proportion of the Last Days' struggle between kingdoms and wisdoms, we will not understand how Israel has a place in this and why the Powers of darkness are intent upon Israel's destruction.  So long as Israel exists on the face of the earth, they are a statement of God's intention to establish His rule over His own creation, which rule has come under the influence of the Powers since Adam's fall.
If there shall ever be a kingdom of God upon this earth, then it must of necessity be the kingdom promised to Israel upon the throne of David.  God is a God who keeps His promises.  The Powers of darkness know better than the Church what God's scheme is.  They see the restoration of Jews to their God and to their Land as a threat.  They will seek, therefore, to eliminate that threat through the instrument of death, their wisdom.  That is why we are going to see a relentless pursuit of the Jew in the Last Days: hatred, prejudice, escalating anti-Semitic fury, skinheads and neo-Nazis.  As in the Nazi era, this phenomenon will become increasingly prominent.  Having its origin amongst the gutter elements of Germany, it was not long before it took possession of the whole nation, and if it could happen in Germany, how then shall any nation be able to withstand it when that demonic power shall be released and allowed by God, with a fury poured out (Ezek. 20:33-34)?
This is the final showdown.  The Powers of darkness are not going to give up and let go of the vested interests they have enjoyed undisputed since time immemorial.  They intimidated and manipulated the German people in a space of less than a decade.  Who will be able to stand in opposition to a system of government when it becomes totally captive to the demonic, and makes anti-Semitism a principle of its rule?  It will be the Beast system prevailing over the world.  How else can we understand that all nations shall come against Jerusalem to destroy it?  The only reason that any of Israel will survive that Last Days' bitter fury is because of the mercy shown to them by Gentiles, who have received their covenant mercies, or those same Jews would have perished.