MXp

***

The Mystery of Israel and the Church
Art Katz

Chapter 11 - Israel in Flight

Though an intelligent people, secular Jews are, for the most part, biblically illiterate.  That is our sad condition.  We have little or no idea of what the prophets say about us as a nation, or our call as a nation, or even our centrality in God's whole salvation history.
There is, however, a portion of scripture in the book of Amos, repeated in many other places, that describes world Jewry coming to a condition of final extremity.  It will, from that account, be a crisis of such proportions as to eclipse the Holocaust of Nazi-Germany. It is not, this time, going to be confined to Europe; every nation will experience it and be implicated.  There will not be a single nation exempt from witnessing the drama of this Last Days' extremity of the Jewish people.  God is going to allow horrendous calamity to fall upon us as Jews.  It will be a judgment of such a severity that the majority of Jews now alive in the world will not survive. When the smoke clears, as it will, God will have for Himself a surviving remnant as an Israel for His name.  We know that God is not interested in numbers; He shucks off the indifferent and the God-rejecters, and at the end of the age, which also marks the introduction of His millennial glory, there will be two remnants that stand for God before the nations, namely, a redeemed Israel and a true, overcoming remnant people of God, predominantly Gentiles, who were also the instruments toward Israel's final and enduring redemption.

The Prophetic Testimony
The prophetic scriptures are difficult insofar as they do not follow on from each other in a linear fashion.  In the wisdom of God, there are no systematic line-upon-line statements to make it easy for us to understand them.  We need, therefore, to be apprehended by the implicit pattern rather than by a methodical, chronological approach.  When read in a certain light, the prophets, both minor and major, all speak of this one theme: Israel's Last Days' judgment, dispersal into the nations, wilderness wandering, restoration, return and exaltation.  God has been prolific concerning this testimony and making clear, contextually, that it is yet future and will conclude the age.  Paradoxically, we as the Church have so little awareness or knowledge of this coming drama that it is just not part of our present consciousness.  Our view of the place of Israel in the end-time scenario is lacking in direct proportion to our knowledge of God and His ways, because the two things go hand-in-hand.
The prophet Amos is known as a Minor Prophet, not because his message is less significant, but because it is not as voluminous as that of the Major Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah.  But all that is in Amos' writings is altogether related to everything that the Major Prophets understood and stated about the issue of Israel in the Last Days.
Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the face of the earth; Nevertheless, I will not totally destroy the house of Jacob, declares the Lord (Amos 9:8a).
God does not mince words as we do.  There is no disguising the intent of His heart and purpose.  When He uses the terminology sinful kingdom, He means it in its literal sense, but despite this, God is going to redeem the remnant of this sinful nation.  It is not because we have any qualification in ourselves, or any deserving that commends us to God's mercy.  Mercy, by its very definition and nature, is something that issues out of God Himself towards an object that is totally undeserving, or it would not be mercy.  Mercy is what God is in Himself, and the greatest demonstration of who He is will be directed to a people totally undeserving of it, namely, a sinful nation.

Israel's Predicament
Something of present-day Israel's predicament must come into the Church's spirit and understanding.  Israel's moral condition is deteriorating daily.  Has it ever been heard of in modern Jewish history that Jews should be violent towards themselves or others?  Historically, we have been the objects of violence; it has been visited upon us, but it has been contrary to our nature as a people to visit violence upon others.  Jews in the Diaspora are usually quiet and unobtrusive, but certainly not violent.  That all changed with the events leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.  In fact, is it not the use or threat of violence that preserves the state today and keeps her from the onslaught of its enemies?  Tragically, a 'Never Again' mentality compels the necessity of violence as a justified means of self-preservation. 
But God's pronouncement is eternally binding, 
Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength… Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord (Jer.17:5,7).
Present-day Israel cannot be called a blessed nation.  How can it be when she does not know her God or trust in Him?  She hopes in herself and in her own strength.  And there is a painful, daily revelation of something that Jews ought to have seen historically, namely, that we have no special distinctive in ourselves.  We may have thought we had some distinctive, and wanted to demonstrate it to everyone by having our own nation, and thereby show the Gentile world what a Jewish nation is like.  It would not be corrupt and violent like the Gentile nations; rather, it would be a nation distinguished by its elevated morals and ethics.  In fact, it would be everything we have been unable to demonstrate in the past half century.
And yet, Israel has a unique call to be the blessed nation that one day will be the very locus of the kingdom of God in the earth.  It is not unlike God taking the murderer Paul, whose name was then Saul, and making him the chief apostle of the Church.  God takes the worst and makes of it the best, and He is going to do the same thing with an entire nation.  This nation will be the 'Paul' of the millennial age.  They will have an apostolate to the nations.  It is critical that we begin to elevate our understanding from merely personal salvation to that of a national salvation.  Whatever the world is suffering in pornography, filth, corruption and defilement will be no more when Jews, bearing the Life and holiness of God, will be the moral mouthpieces of God.  They will bring to the nations that priestly ministry that was Israel's calling from the first.
If we are going to be the remnant Church that will be used to obtain this on Israel's behalf, then we must identify with this drama and understand the mystery of it as being the essential logic of our faith.  Paul calls it a 'mystery,' and that mystery is the chosen means by which God is glorified.  In other words, God would not have had as much glory, as much honor and as much credit if He had taken a people who showed themselves to have attributes and distinctions of a spiritual kind that He could employ.  He is much more glorified when "He takes beggars off the dung heaps and makes them to sit with princes" (Psalm 113:7-8).  The issue is the glory of God forever, and it is evidently going to take the least likely candidate: a sinful kingdom.
...and I will destroy it from the face of the earth (Amos 9:8b).
How are we equipped to understand a God who will utterly destroy it in His judgment?  Do we know or even want to know a God who is that severe?  If we do not know God as Judge, as Paul knew Him as Judge, then our lives will show it through a tendency toward indulgence and a generally slack attitude.  Our lives will be commonplace and predictable, because what is lacking is His fear.  One of the greatest provisions God has given to instill in us the knowledge of His fear has been the testimony of His judgments towards Israel.  How are we going to respond when we see God destroy this sinful nation, especially when we have an inadequate understanding of what we think God's nature to be?  We are going to witness tremendous fatalities, but God will save a remnant that He will elect and appoint unto salvation, because He is the God who will elect.  It will be a demonstration of His mercy; for He will elect whom He will elect.

The God Who Makes Alive
At the heart of the redemptive nature of God is His unerring propensity to allow His creation to be brought into death in order that He may raise it up into a newness of life.  He slays, but He makes alive.  This most especially glorifies Him.  Have we made our peace with that?  Why should we stagger over it?  Is it so great a thing for God to raise the dead?  Are we not here as believers precisely because He has?  Since He has raised Jesus, are we not encouraged to believe that He will raise us also?  After the Lord's return, we believe, therefore, that that which concludes the age is the resurrection of the survivors of an entire nation out of the 'death' of God's Last Days' judgment upon them, as we shall later be seeing in our examination of Ezekiel 37.

The reason many are opposed to the view that present Israel must come into death in order to be raised up, is because it is a reflection of our own unwillingness to see, for ourselves, the same necessity for death and resurrection in our own Christian lives.  We have only subscribed to resurrection as doctrine.  In the deeps of our hearts, where we really live our lives, we believe more in progressive improvement than we know, for ourselves as the Church, and for Israel; we are more humanistic than we would recognize or admit.  Those who want to see present Israel made better and improved will accuse us of being anti-Semitic and opposed to Israel.  Will we be able to bear the reproach of that?  It is ironic that those who have the greatest love and prophetic burden for Israel, waiting for the true fulfillment, will have this accusation come against them!  To patiently bear this accusation is, in itself, a suffering unto death.
Israel will not be adopted, so to speak, as the holy nation where the kingdom of God will have its location and its expression, except out of a transformed and transfigured resurrection Life.  Only in that condition can it bless all the families of the earth.  It is the whole, final logic and outworking of what was put into time and history with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ Himself.

Israel's Afflictions
Can we believe in a God who will destroy, yet, who is also the God of love?  Many of us are going to be offended by such a God because we have never allowed for His judgments in our own lives.  Or, when those judgments have come, we have not rightly understood them.  We have, instead, attributed them to men or other factors like the economy, but we have not understood the principle of God's judgment to be the underlying basis of adversity, crisis and death.
...Nevertheless, I will not totally destroy the house of Jacob, declares the Lord. For behold, I am commanding, and I will shake the house of Israel among all nations, as grain is shaken in a sieve, but not a kernel shall fall to the ground (Amos 9:8f-9).

God's Last Days' dealing with world Jewry is a final extremity of sifting through all the nations.  In our opinion, there will not be a nation on the face of the earth exempt from this process.  In fact, one peculiarity about the Jewish people is that there is hardly a nation in which Jews are not to be found now.  We have been cast out into the nations as judgment, and just as flour is sifted to get the impurities out, God will do that with an entire nation.  He is going to do it through the nations and in the nations, and "not a kernel [of the remnant] shall fall to the ground" (Amos 9:9f).
We need to grasp something of the depth and tenacity against believing that resides in Jewish hearts, and how far God has to go with cynical and God-rejecting men to bring them to a place of understanding and faith.  That is why it is going to take an enormous display, particularly in a time of affliction, to demonstrate that God is in the midst of our calamity and that nothing less than calamity and uprooting is sufficient to bring us to the true knowledge of Him.  The failure to rightly interpret the past Holocaust as judgment has robbed us of that knowledge, and needs, therefore, to be repeated again.
All the sinners of My people will die by the sword, those who say, "The calamity will not overtake or confront us" (Amos 9:10).
The determining factor that will identify those who are opposed to God, and who refuse His salvation, will be these words coming from their lips: "The calamity will not overtake or confront us."  Unfortunately, that is likely a description of the majority of present world Jewry.  Refusing in past calamities to recognize the hand of God, we will continue to refuse to recognize it in our present calamity, thinking that somehow we can avoid what will be coming upon us.  This sifting through the nations, as the judgment and wisdom of God, is going, at the same time, to bring us into contact with a people prepared to receive us.  Only such a Church will be equipped to explain the prophetic understanding, while, at the same time, extending mercy in our time of calamity.
No nation will be exempt from the demonic outpouring of the Last Days.  It will bring a global hatred into every government and people against the Jew.  The only portion of mankind that will have any compassion for this people, utterly degraded and made despicable, will be His Church.  This compassion will, in turn, itself identify who, in fact, the true Church is.  But why, then, should we extend ourselves for a people whom the world will then come to despise and blame for everything?  Jews have always been the scapegoat for the failures in the nations.  Why should we, as the Church, have an attitude other than what the world has?  Why should we have a concern and compassion?  Why should we be willing to extend ourselves, especially when it means we would be putting our own necks on the line?  Is it not because we have obtained mercy?  This would certainly require the grace of God, expressed in our deep identification with Him in His love for that despised nation, no matter how abhorrent their condition might be (Zeph. 2:1).  The mark of God's Last Days' Church is that they will be so in union with their God that His love is their love, His seeing is their seeing and His compassion is their compassion.

The Witness of the Church
It is little wonder that Jews have historically been untouched by the Church's witness.  To what charismatic conference could we have invited them where they would have done anything more than yawn?  In the Lord's wisdom, Jews are tough critics, and they are not going to be impressed as easily as we are impressed.  There is something in the Jew, despite their unbelief, that is uncanny when it comes to the thing that is authentic.  They see right through our Christian phoniness.  They will not be impressed by any demonstration less and other than the reality of Jesus Himself, manifest in His people.
We have to be ruthlessly honest and admit that we are presently nowhere near the condition that this kind of scenario requires.  We do not have that kind of compassion for each other, let alone for Jews.  We cannot presently speak a word that raises the dead.  We have trouble even mustering the faith to pray for someone's cold and sniffles.  We are going to have to become a people that can bear the weight of the assault that will come to us physically, morally and spiritually.  Jews will be in a completely upturned and uprooted condition.  Their mouths will be full of invective and hatred against what has happened to them at the hands of Gentiles construed as 'Christian.'  We are going to have to take that onslaught, but it will have to be like 'water off the proverbial duck's back.'  That means there needs to be a deep, sanctifying work in the people of God, the Church, which needs to begin now because it is not likely to be obtained hastily in that final moment.

The Tabernacle of David
Here is what is at stake:
In that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, and wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins, and rebuild it as in the days of old (Amos 9:11).
The phrase, in that day, does not mean a twenty-four hour period of time; rather, it is better understood as the period of time that encompasses the final dealing of God in the Last Days.  Here, we have God bringing us into the whole theocratic context of the faith and His purposes.
To begin with, the raising up of the Booth or Tabernacle of David has absolutely nothing to do with the restoring of 'Davidic worship,' tambourine banging or Israeli melodies, though it has come to mean that in some expressions of contemporary church life.  This is a faulty exegesis, because the context is clearly a reference to millennial government. God is not going to go through all of this elaborate life and death agony of an entire nation, its greatest numbers dying by the sword, having been hunted and pursued in a Nazi-like terror, in order to introduce Jewish dancing to our church services!  The very fact that we think along these lines is a statement of our immaturity and triumphalistic attitude, elevating the Church over Israel, not understanding God's literal intent for that nation.  This is the conceit about which Paul warned us in Romans 11.  Rather, we contend, the Tabernacle of David is the theocratic government of God, His rule and reign over His creation.  It is the statement of the house of God, the government of God, and the authority of God that will come again to this people in the day that He sifts them, restores them and establishes with them His rule. It is called the Tabernacle of David because it is where His rule and its character must center.  There needs be someone descended from David to sit eternally on the throne of David, or there will be no 'Davidic' theocracy.
When God establishes His sanctuary in Jerusalem, His dwelling place, His Tabernacle and His residence, it will also be the seat of His government.  How anxious are we for that government?  Are we longing for a "new heaven and a new earth, wherein righteousness dwells"?  Are we satisfied with human governments, administrations and programs that are supposedly going to not only end poverty, but also change the moral condition of the nations?  What a frail expectation that is!  There is only one answer to any hope we might have had for peace and stability, and there always was only one answer: the theocratic rule of God Himself.  'Theo' means God.  Theology is the study of God.  Theocracy is the government of God, perfect, righteous, holy and true, and it will not come until the nation of Israel is itself first restored.  God will restore Israel because these prophetic scriptures must be fulfilled:
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever (Dan. 2:44).
The law will go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.  And He will judge between the nations, and will render decisions for many peoples; and they will hammer their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war. (Isaiah 2:3f-4).
We must not spiritualize the clear and literal statements of God.  Nations will hammer their swords into plowshares and never again will they learn war.  That means the unspeakable billions of dollars expended in armaments, one of the principal industries of the United States, as also other nations, will no longer be required, and the fruit of the earth and of men's labors can be directed to the benefit of mankind and not to its destruction.  Nations will never again learn war, but only when the law of the Lord goes forth from Zion.  But there has got to be a Zion out of which it goes forth.

The Restoration of Israel
And the ransomed of the Lord will return and come with joyful shouting to Zion, with everlasting joy upon their heads.  They will find gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing will flee away (Isaiah 35:10).
The sorrow and sighing is the painful process of this sifting.  The everlasting joy upon their heads is the end of their tribulation forever.  It is their final suffering, their final sifting and their final refining.  Their government comes, their kingdom comes and the King comes who alone is a descendant of the son of David and who can occupy that throne,
That they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations who are called by My name, declares the Lord who does this (Amos 9:12).
Not just Edom or the Arab nations; all Gentile nations will be affected and come under the government of God, when that Tabernacle is restored with the restoration of the nation.  The word possess is better understood as meaning to influence and govern.  God's promises and covenants that were made to the patriarchs to "bless all the families of the earth" are at stake; but it rests on God's ability to first restore Israel to Himself and to their Land in the Last Days.  God will magnify His purposes in grace, all the more with a nation that does not know nor desire to see the fulfillment of the things that are spoken of it, and, as a secular nation, are even ignorant of the promises that God has made.  The chapter ends with a totally millennial statement:
Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when the plowman will overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him that sows seed; when the mountains will drip sweet wine, and all the hills will be dissolved. Also I will restore the captivity of My people Israel, and they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them (Amos 9:13-14).
The ruined cities will have come through the destruction and satanic fury poured out upon them in the literal land of Israel.  The cities of today: Haifa, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Tiberias, etc, will be made waste.  That means that there is a history or an experience of destruction, devastation and calamity right up to the inauguration of the millennial age.  The last thing in the experience of Israel is devastation and ruined cities, for the first thing that is to be rebuilt and restored in the Millennium are those same devastated places.  The first act in their return is the rebuilding of them, and they will never again be forced out.
I will also plant them on their land, and they will not again be rooted out of their land which I have given them, says the Lord your God (Amos 9:15).
The tragedy is that many are citing this verse now about present Israel.  They have ignorantly neglected what must precede it.  First the suffering, then the glory.  First the dispersion, then the return.  It has not yet happened.  What we call present Israel is only the preliminary for the desolations that must immediately precede the advent of the kingdom.
The restoration of Israel will usher in the millennial kingdom, and with it, the millennial blessing.  Before the harvest is gathered, seed is planted; abundance and blessedness will abound in the earth.  The millennial blessing is not merely the continuation of things as we now know them; "the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth…waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons" (Rom. 8:21,23), the millennial age, the blessedness and abundance which God intended.  We have lost, or never had, as the contemporary Church, a millennial expectation.  We are not even eternally-minded and therefore living in a substandard Christian way.  Living in the very anticipation of the eschatological expectation must affect our present life and walk now.  It is intended to give us a different kind of incentive and a different kind of hope.  It is a hope that has a particular power that affects practical things; it animated the first church and the saints of that generation.  It has ever been this blessed hope set in the context of this coming, this kingdom and this millennial glory, Israel's restoration. 
Our indifference and disinterest in Israel, as the Church, reveals how little we do, in fact, honor His name and His Word, and how little we look for it to be fulfilled by His bringing this people back to Himself and to the Land.  How jealous are we for the Word going forth to the nations?  In fact, in the millennial age, the nation that will not come up to that place to celebrate and worship Him on the Feast of Tabernacles will suffer a curse (Zech. 14:17-19).  That is how specific God is, and our unwillingness to surrender to the specificity of God, and our offense at the scandal of what He has chosen reveals our true condition.  Have we really surrendered to God's sovereignty and choice?  We have thoughts and opinions of our own, but the Church of the Last Days, who are His remnant, will choose what He chooses and rejoice in it.  If we understood God, we would know why He chooses an insignificant hill like Mt. Zion.  It is for the same reason He was born in a stable, and for the same reason that He died outside the camp on the dung heap.  He chooses what the world despises, and what the world exalts and honors, He condemns.  He will always choose the foolish things.  That is why He has chosen us!  Through the foolish thing that we are as the Church, He is going to fulfill His millennial destiny, both for the Church and for Israel.
Israel is our finishing school; she compels us to be what we always ought to have been and have never had the stimulus or provocation in our conventional church life to be.  That is why Paul could say at the end of Romans chapter 11, "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God.  Who has been His counselor?"  Paul was staggered when he saw this.  And until we see it as Paul did, and cry out joyously in the same way, have we yet seen it?