MXp

The Mystery of Israel and the Church
by Art Katz

Chapter 14 - The Anatomy of Resurrection

Of all the doctrines of the faith, resurrection is the most offensive to human sensibility and reason, and the most difficult to consider.  So deep-seated in man is the innate resistance to resurrection that the disciples themselves were disbelieving (Luke 24:41), even though the resurrected Christ was standing before them.  We need to understand the profundity of resurrection, and the equally great resistance to the truth of it, and how central it is to the whole purpose of God.
Let us examine the genius and the anatomy of resurrection itself.  What is it in resurrection that is so commendable and dear in God's own sight?  It took a power to raise a dead man, Jesus Himself, from the grave, but now we are going to be talking about the power that it takes to raise an entire nation.
The day of Jesus Christ is the day of resurrection.  That is to say, it is an event which cannot take place gradually and which leaves no room for realization in steps.  There are no transitions, no approximation, between the two.  There is a sharp line of demarcation and all continuity from one to the other by successive states of realization is excluded. This event is one which comes exclusively from God's side and not from ours (Emil Brunner - Source Unknown).
This Swiss-German theologian is striking at the very heart of the liberal mind, which predicates everything on gradual evolutionary process, or by a process of change.  Resurrection, however, is completely opposed to that; it is absolute, sudden, and a once-and-for-all event from God.  It has nothing to do with process of change.  Process implies the involvement of man through his ever-developing understanding.  Resurrection has to do with man, dead and incapable of effecting anything, in any way, in and of himself.  Therefore, anything that quickens him must be exclusively the operation of God that comes as 'event' in the moment of God's own choosing.  There is something in the evolutionary mindset that includes man as a necessary component in the process, but resurrection is absolutely God's doing, and in it, there is no room for man at all.
When all basis for hope was gone, Abraham hoped in God and believed, and he became the father of many nations according to what was spoken, "So shall your descendants be."  His descendants would be exactly like him.  When every basis for their hope was gone, they also would be resurrected to a new hope on the same basis of the word of God as it had come to Abraham.  The final demonstration to Israel of the sovereignty and the omnipotence of God will be due to the fact that He is the God whose very speaking constitutes their life.  Abraham had to see that there was no basis whatsoever for life in himself, and God must bring His restored Abrahamic nation to that place as well.  It is not a pleasant process, but it is of eternal consequence, and therefore, worth it all.

The issue of whether Israel is going to come into her millennial destiny and glory by process of change, or by resurrection, is a very great question.  You wonder how Israel, having the destiny that it does, could be exempted from the subject of resurrection.  God will not allow her to come into His glory in any other way but by resurrection, for anything that pertains to the glory of God must come by virtue of resurrection alone.  The whole tenor of Scripture reveals the implicit wisdom of resurrection as the theme that runs through the whole of God's ways.
There is something in man that wants to 'get in on the act.'  Do we realize that the language we use betrays the depth of our understanding of God?  For example, we say, "If God will help me, then I will walk in the way."  This implies that there are two independent entities: God and I.  And whether we say it or not, this is often our mentality, because we do not see ourselves as dead men wholly thrust in dependency upon the totality of His Life.  There is a world of difference between saying, "If God will help me" and Paul's statement, "For to me, to live is Christ."  Paul does not ask God to help him.  Paul asks God to be him.  Paul's whole sufficiency was Christ and "knowing Him and the power of His resurrection," for which reason he could count all things as rubbish, which does not mean just the questionable, murky things, but the best things: Paul's intelligence, his Jewish learning, his wisdom, his understanding, his own character, his own gifts.
Very few have really understood and appropriated the power of resurrection because of the failure to recognize the totality of it, its being exclusively and entirely of God.  We sin thereby, and fall short of the glory of God.  His glory is not something He will share with flesh, or with any other, but only when it is exclusively Himself.  As long as we feel that we can 'get by' in any measure with our puny, religious wisdom and understanding, we fall short of His glory.  That is why we do not see the glory of God.  We are not so much concerned with the glory of God as we are concerned with avoiding the embarrassment of failure, and we often see the fruit of this every Sunday from the majority of church pulpits.  That is why we have so little resurrection event in that preaching.  That is why apostolic preaching is different from conventional preaching.  Conventional preaching can be biblical, doctrinally sound, interesting, informative and even inspiring, but it is not an 'event' in God.29

The Law of Life
Death, i.e., death to all confidence in the flesh, is God's inexorably fixed law of Life.  The thing that pertains to His glory is the life that arises out of death.
For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah [i.e., the whole of God's Israel].  I, even I, [not Arafat, not terrorism, not the hordes of Islam] will tear to pieces and go away, I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver (Hosea 5:14).
This is not a lion who is going to lick, but one that is going to tear.  How do we comprehend God in using such an analogy for Himself in being to Judah and Ephraim a lion who tears?  Israel certainly was ravaged and torn in the Hitler time, yet the Nazi horror was not the final statement of the scriptures that we are now considering.
I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek My face: in their affliction they will seek me early (Hosea 5:15 KJV).
This verse has not yet been fulfilled, for there is not one Jew in a ten thousand who thinks that there is any offense that needs to be brought before God, or that God needs to be sought concerning our offenses as Jews.  God has a great, unanswered controversy with Israel, which goes all the way back to the sins of our fathers, of which we have hardly any cognizance at all.  And yet God says that until we acknowledge the sins of our fathers and our own sins, He will not remember His covenant toward us (Lev. 26:40).  Our God is such a lover of our souls and so jealous over us in truth, that He will not allow us to languish in our deception about our own condition.  He will go so far as to even give us the state of Israel, not as something that is going to be established in success, but to reveal to us what nothing else would have revealed, namely, that merely having our own nation has not exhibited to the world a unique nation displaying an ethical and moral sensitivity unknown to nations.  God, rather, wants us to see that we are equally as capable as any other nation, of every depravity and every kind of crime, brutality and use of force employed by nations everywhere historically, and to this day, to preserve their own existence.

Come, let us return to the Lord (Hosea 6:1a).
This is now Israel speaking, who are now seeking God out of an affliction, which is yet future, because there has never yet been this acknowledgment historically: "For He has torn us..."  World Jewry and Israel have not acknowledged that "He has torn us."  Circumstances have, and Hitler has, but not "He."  It is a remarkable acknowledgement that the causative factor in Israel's distress is not Arafat and the terror, but God Himself, who employs nations and men as the rod of His chastisement.
...but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before Him (Hosea 6:1b-2).
There is no more eloquent a statement than this, of Israel's death and resurrection "on the third day," which day we are approaching.  Preceding the glory of resurrection is the necessary falling into death from which only a resurrection can raise us.  Can we, like the Son of God before us, wait two days longer where we are, though we know that our friend Lazarus, whom we love, is sick unto death (John 11:1-45)?  Are we able to remain under the will of God and not seek to alleviate or alter the sickness that God Himself has imposed?  A word that is before its time, and is not "on the third day," but is calculated for comfort, is a false word.  It will not bring release for that nation, but on the contrary, it will inhibit us from being the prophetic voice that raises that nation from the dead.  Our motive must always be the glory of God the Father, not the alleviation of sickness and human ill.  The greatest statement of the love of God is His allowing suffering to run its full course because it eventuates, not just in the recovery of the suffering one, but in the glory of God forever.
We need to realistically understand God's stratagem; we need to die to those kinds of hopes and expectations that are not founded upon the Word of God, but upon our own humanistic assumption and projection for Israel, of the kind that we hoped for ourselves, namely, improvement and change for the better, not understanding that everything that pertains to the glory of God must issue from a resurrection out from death.
So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.  His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth (Hosea 6:3).
Only then will Israel be a blessed people that can bless all the families of the earth.  It is the event that is exclusively from God's side and exclusively in God's time, "on the third day."  We cannot order it sooner; we cannot be relieved of our death when we want to be, but only when He wants to do it.  We are "dead and hidden with Christ in God, until His life is revealed" (Col. 3:3 paraphrased).
The Intifada, the terrorism, the opposition of the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states, and the growing world sentiment against Israel, are all part of God's program to bring Israel into death.  There is something here that is more than just a momentary political upset.  This is death working in the long run, and it will have its full work.  It should more rightly be understood as the death of disillusionment, of despair and of a growing sense that, "We are not going to succeed as the kind of nation that we had hoped to establish.  This is forcing us to realize that we are acting like every other nation. We are using so much force, intimidation, threat and terror, that even if somehow, miraculously, this Arab-Palestinian opposition would cease, and we could placate them, and give them what they want, so much moral damage has already been done to our national character that we can never recover.  We can never be the kind of state that we hoped to be."  Israel still thinks that they can extricate themselves from, or somehow resolve these terrible dilemmas, and find the basis for security, peace and national coherence, even to the point where they are willing to negotiate now again with their own avowed enemy.

Patient Love
God is not rushing to Israel's side.  The purpose of their sickness is to reveal the glory of God when He will raise them from the dead by His sovereign resurrection power "on the third day."  As we have seen from Ezekiel 37, God does not do it directly Himself, but through a 'son of man,' and as we have said, this is where the Gentile Church comes in.  However well-meaning we are, and yearn to see Israel established, and however much we want to say all the right things, there will not be a stirring in Israel's grave unless we ourselves are on the resurrection ground, because it is the word spoken from that side that opens that grave.
1 Corinthians 15 is the classic chapter on the theme of resurrection, and it would not be doing the scriptures an injustice to read Israel into these verses, particularly with regard to its present condition, and what it will increasingly become, until death has its full work.
But someone will say, 'How are the dead raised?  And with what kind of body do they come?'  You fool!  That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies (1 Cor. 15:35).
It is hard to understand how anyone who sees this, and understands it in his own experience as a believer, can have a moment's hesitation before recognizing that it must be true for Israel as well.  You can only be 'made alive' from the place of death.
So also is the resurrection of the dead.  Israel is sown a perishable body, Israel is raised an imperishable body; Israel is sown in dishonor, Israel is raised in glory; Israel is sown in weakness, Israel is raised in power; Israel is sown a natural body [a political, Zionist state]; Israel is raised a spiritual body [the millennial glory of Israel].  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.  So also it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living soul.'  The last Adam became a life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:42-45).30
Israel will also be, as it were, a "life-giving spirit" but this time to the nations, and that is why her return will be "life from the dead" (Rom. 11:15).
However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural [Zionist state]; then the spiritual [the millennial glory].  The first man [Zionist state] is from the earth, earthy; the second man [the millennial glory] is from heaven.  As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly.  And just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.  Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable (1 Cor. 15:46-50).
Those who resist the message of the necessary death and resurrection of Israel need to take particular heed to these verses.  Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, not even Jewish flesh and blood, as impressive as that may be.  Flesh is flesh,31 earthy and natural, and therefore, cannot bless all the families of the earth.  Only God, working through a resurrection, life-imbued people, can bless all the families of the earth.
Our mistake is in thinking that present-day Israel is that final fulfillment, or can yet obtain it progressively.  It is only the preliminary, natural entity that must precede the spiritual, the Ishmael before the Isaac.  There is a corollary between those who celebrate present Israel as the final fulfillment of scriptures as those who believe that they will be raptured before the final tribulation.  On the other hand, those who see Israel as the natural thing that precedes the spiritual, and see that there is equally a necessary death scheduled, are a people who, themselves, are ready to bear, for their sake, a measure of that dying in Last Days' opposition and tribulation of an antichrist kind.  Someone who sees the Church going through a tribulation time, as we believe the scriptures indicate, will be more disposed also, to believe that Israel must equally go through a tribulation, a suffering and death.  Those who see a rapture as being saved out of suffering want to see Israel also saved out of suffering and to succeed on her present, earthy and natural basis.
We can become sympathetic for Israel and have a very high regard for Israel, but is that born out of a union with Christ in resurrection, or out of some measure of Christian guilt especially for the 'Christian' crimes that were inflicted on Jews through the ages?  Guilt may be sufficient to engender sympathy and many good works, but it cannot enable one to stand by Israel's tomb and say, "Come forth!"  One can only go so far with guilt and sentimentality, which in the absence of anything else may be quite impressive, but what the Last Days require are not something impressive, but rather, something unspeakably formidable, namely, to the raising of the dead itself!  We prevent ourselves from both seeing and participating in Israel's restoration, except from the more limited place of guilt and sentiment, which puts us strangely in opposition to those who do see the necessity of the death that precedes the resurrection.
Our inability to see this reveals something very deep about the issue of resurrection.  Is it a mercy of God to reveal our shortcoming now, rather than that we should die and learn on the other side of eternity that we had fallen short of the glory of God, and that our supposed well-meaning intentions and heartfelt sympathies were not enough.  Even in Israel's apostasy and unbelief, she fulfills a function with regard to the Church that is priceless, namely, she reveals us.  We would have preferred and been satisfied with sentimentality, and therefore, we would not have been aware that there was anything lacking until it is made clear that sentiment cannot raise Israel from the grave.

Lazarus - The Ultimate Test for the Church
How far will God go to perfect the Church for His purposes, especially in the Last Days?  Our sense of things is that God will bring the Church, or at least a remnant of it, to a place of existential crisis, thus compelling it to break through into a place of ultimate abandonment and consecration.  We prophetically believe, as already stated, that God will bring Israel into a death (Ezek. 37); analogous to the episode of Lazarus, in order to obtain something in the Church that evidently could not have been obtained in any lesser way. 
Are we are satisfied with the Church in its present condition?  How we view present Israel is very much a projection of how we see ourselves.  How we view ourselves is altogether related to how we view God.  What does it take to see God and to see as He sees?  A faulty view of God will show itself in our contentment with flourishing meetings, enjoyable conferences, and seeing present Israel successfully established.
For those who lay claim to being believers and related to God, there is going to be a choice to be made.  In fact the choice is so profound that not every one will be in the 'son of man' company so vividly portrayed in Ezekiel 37.  Not everyone will be that corporate expression of His Life that will be called to prophesy.  Many will fall away because the requirement is too great.  But if we have any intent with God of a glorious kind, we need to understand God's Last Days' workings, and give ourselves to them.  Israel's imminent predicament is going to place a requirement on the Church beyond all expectation, one that cannot be met on the basis of our unaided human or religious ability.  There is clearly only one basis for the fulfilling of His purposes: it must be on the basis of the power of His Life by that which has died to its own.  The death and resurrection of Israel implies the death and resurrection of the Church, or at least that part of the Church willing for it. 
As the ultimate Son of God, and as a son of obedience, Jesus was tested again and again in His humanity, but especially on hearing that His friend, Lazarus, was sick and nigh unto death. 
Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  And it was the Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. The sisters therefore sent to Him, saying, "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick."  But when Jesus heard it, He said, "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified by it."  Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When therefore He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days longer in the place where He was (John 11:1-6).
Jesus would not allow Himself to be distracted away from the place where He was to remain.  He would not be appealed to on the basis of His humanity to go and deliver His friend, whom He loved, from sickness.  It was His obedience to remain another two days, contrary to His every human impulse to go to His friend, which is the key to the prophetic power in finally raising Lazarus from his grave.  Jesus heard the words: "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick," but He chose to remain where He was, itself a death.  God will test us to the point of breaking.  Our every impulse is to go now, or to speak now, or to do now.  Everything demands and cries for it: the man is sick, he is soaking in his sweat, writhing and turning in his bed, waiting for his friend, who had healed untold thousands, to come and do the same for him.  But no, Jesus did not appear.  He knew only too well what His failure to appear would mean, especially considering He did not offer an explanation.  Any explanation would have relieved the anxieties and tensions of men, and with it, the possibility of death as death, thereby nullifying any prospect for the resurrection that followed.
Jesus was forsaking his friend Lazarus for the greater glory.  God's glory is inexorably and always beyond the issue of what relieves us, but only what glorifies Him.  To come to the place where there is no vested self-interest or any self-satisfaction, where it is all the same to you whether you speak or not, whether you are seen or not, whether you are used or not, is to come to the place of obedience, and only then can you be prophetically used.  The prophet Balaam was not yet separated from himself.  He had the gift to employ, but he employed it for his own end and gain, and therefore was a false prophet.  Though his prophecy may have been true, the man was himself false. 
For Jesus to wait for Lazarus' death was a form of ultimate suffering.  It was an excruciating death to every corpuscle that cried out for an immediate alleviation of a present distress.  Everything that is human, in the best sense, wants naturally now to alleviate the distress, but Jesus remained two days longer where He was.  He was able to restrain Himself, the spirit of the prophet being subject to the prophet.  In His humanity, He must necessarily agonize over the suffering of His friend.  But God's purposes are never the alleviation of tension, only the revelation of His glory.  As long as we remain need-oriented, we forfeit being used to bring life from the dead. 
A son of God is not at liberty to address need, merely because he sees it.  Any true servant is not moved by his or her perception of the need.  We live in an age and a world that does not know how to contain itself.  If something comes up, we want it attended to; we have a question, we want it answered; we have a need, we want it met.  Everything is predicated upon our immediate interest.  The fact that it is a spiritual interest does not alter the fact that it is still self-interest.  God wants us at a place beyond where our self-interest dominates us; it is the place that Jesus was called to when he heard that his friend Lazarus was sick.  It was an extraordinary moment of testing. 
The fact of the matter is that this one act of Lazarus' resurrection set in motion the things that determined Jesus' own death: "So from that day on they [the chief priests and Pharisees] planned together to kill Him [Jesus]" (John 11:53).  It was the final offense, the straw that broke the camel's back, which really infuriated the religious establishment against Him, and infuriates it still.  The demonstration of resurrection power is always invariably the dividing line.  Either we have to fall before a Man capable of performing that by His word, or we have to reject Him, and put Him death.  There is no middle ground.  We do not want Israel to pass through what we ourselves are unwilling to pay the cost to obtain, but God is not going to allow us that luxury.  The 'son of man' company that is qualified to raise Israel from her death must of necessity also have passed through its own death and resurrection.  Only a word from such a place will raise the dead. 
It is interesting that the one sister, who was considered spiritual, and the other, who doted in the kitchen, both said exactly the same thing to Jesus, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."  However spiritual we think we are, when the crisis comes of this kind, we reveal that we are just like Mary and Martha, and that we have certain expectancies we think ought to be fulfilled.  And so, we become disappointed when they are not fulfilled, and it is reflected in an accusatory tone, even against God.
There is a conjunction between the willingness and the ability to be unseen and unheard and to wait, and which has everything to do with the power, the glory, the authority that is exhibited when one is finally called to be employed.  One never knows when that calling will come, or even if it will come at all.  We have got to come to a priestly place where it makes no difference.  To wait on God, silently, is as much to render Him priestly service as to go.  The waiting precedes the going, the silence precedes the speaking, the death precedes the resurrection.
If we find ourselves too prolific in our speaking, or too verbal, and that we are trying to make up by volume of words what could have been expressed by few, there will be a dissipation of the value; our words will lose their cogency and authority, their life and power.  There is so much unnecessary noise, and verbiage that have no lasting value.  How much of our speaking is really for ourselves to be heard, to be observed, to be acknowledged, to be accepted?  What is our motive?  The value of speaking is relative to esteeming silence, patiently holding and containing it.  The act of waiting as a discipline is central to the whole priestly posture, and priestliness precedes and validates propheticness.
As long as we feel ourselves superior and above the condition of other men, we cannot be in the priestly 'son of man' company, or, for that matter, in any true ministry.  We need to identify with the world, not at its best, but at its worst.  Only then can we minister and be a blessing.  Our tendency is to lapse into a kind of religious superiority.  We need to realize, however, that we are capable of anything and everything, and the only reason we have not fallen is not by any virtue of ours, but the God who has kept us.32  We must not presume to think ourselves better than those to whom we are ministering.  The greater our spirituality the more true our understanding that "the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jer.17:9 KJV).  We have no virtue in ourselves.  If we have not condescended to the worst depths of depravity, it is only because God's grace has kept us, and not we ourselves.  Unless we really know that as shared identification, how then can we speak the word of resurrection to those who are in such depths as Israel will inescapably be?
Israel's true death is the acknowledgement that "Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished.  We are completely cut off" (Ezek. 37:11).  Israel, as well as much of the Church, is still fighting against that acknowledgment.  And the truth of that is revealed in the way Israel arms herself with the latest military technology and nuclear deterrents, while the Church arms herself with the comparable 'spiritual' weapons of some new fad or program to relieve the boredom, monotony and predictability of conventional church life.  God is bringing both to the necessary revelation of our own wicked heart.  Israel and the Church have not been willing to surrender to the radical truth of the word of God about the human condition, but more especially its own, and have elevated its own subjectivity over the word of God.  That is sin, and sin brings death and judgment. 
When Israel's repentance does come, it will exceed anything previously known.  It will be of such a depth of wailing, of gasps of contrition, the crying out of the ravaged soul as will take place in this people when the revelation, through His mercy, of the depth of their sin breaks through.  As we read, it will be every family apart and every husband and wife apart (Zech. 12:10-14).  It will be so agonizing that they will not even bear to be in the presence of each other.  It is oneself, alone before God in utter prostration.  This kind of convulsive gasp and sob is death itself, and the one who can come out of that will not be the same person that went into it.  This is how Israel comes into the newness of life, to become an entirely other people, out of the death of the convulsive repentance of the deepest kind, nationally, that has ever been historically experienced.  The redeemed of the Lord will return to Zion, but only after the mourning and sighing has fled away.