Hello Reggie, hope and pray that all of you are fine while preparing for your Event!
Reggie, I was reading your article ” Recommended reading ……, well done. But I want to ask you one important question, is it NOT Time now to explain to the readers about the destruction of ” Israel ” and the horrible things that are going to come BEFORE the restoration will come? There is such a great Confusion amonst Christianity about this Issue. Art Katz had taught this clearly and had not many friends for this message… ((BUT for the TRUTH we need to tell the people outside, that what we see now in and with Israelg is NOT the promised “Restoration”, as all the Israel organisations throughout the nations are teaching! THis is a great danger for the Church as well as for Israel! It is such a stronghold here in my country that it is almost impossible to tell the Truth!
BUT we would not be born again Christians and followers of the LORD if we bring Jews and Christians into SLUMBER and SLEEP and fail to warn them of the coming desaster ! PLS be a help and bring this clear out so that many will understand what they dont do now?!
It is great to have you as a brother in CHRIST!
May HE give you the boldness you need to speak out!
Yours in HIM))
——
Good and timely exhortation. Please make this appeal a prayer of intercession. A true word is something that does not come through study and preparation, it must be birthed. Pray this grace for all the brothers that will speak and for those that come, not as mere attendants of another prophecy conference, but as lively stones participating together as one man in the bringing forth of something that can serve the church and reach beyond its humble character and setting.
None of the speakers are from the professional or so-called “trained” ministry. They are just brothers among brothers in whom a word has been prepared and formed for this time. It is more of a meeting of minds and hearts than the kinds of conferences that you had there with Art and others. But, as the old song says, “little is much if God is in it!”
You may rest assured that I intend to take up this great urgency that you mention. When you think about, it is amazing. The large part of the church that believes the scripture concerning the great tribulation loses the value of that knowledge by its adoption of the pre trib rapture, so that Jacob’s trouble is only ‘Jacob’s’ problem. When you really think about it, you wonder at such a masterful job that Satan has done in covering over what God has revealed. Only in this way could something so transparent in scripture be robbed from the church. Surely, such disarming fictions are a judgment on our dependency on man, but it is also true that God has made it so that without his special help we would all stumble, as there are many things concerning Israel and the church that are, by divine design, not easy. Some problems are difficult, and that is no accident.
It lets us see why the scripture says that right up to the time of the mid night call, “they all (even the wise) slumbered and slept” (Mt 25:5). I believe that mid night call is about to be sounded throughout the earth. It is time for the meat in due season (Mt 24:45 with Isa 28:9: 2Cor 3:2; Heb 5:12-13; 1Pet 2:2).
That all ten were found sleeping should strike us all with great sobriety. It is as though the very air has been drugged. But it is more than general wickedness and worldliness; there is also great doctrinal error that further disarms the church’s vigilance.
I believe we are being tested through the same essential mystery that tested Israel in the person of Jesus. Though once and for all revealed by the Spirit, the inward reality of the mystery remains imperceptible and hidden from the pride of this age (1Cor 2:12, 14).
Even when the mystery is basically understood by the intellect, it is not really apprehended unless it is ‘quickened’ by the Spirit to the inner man of the heart (Dan 12:10). So though the mystery has been finally revealed to the church, its inward essence is incompatible with ‘confidence in the flesh’. That is how it can be at once revealed and still hidden from the wisdom of this age. God has made it this way for His purpose for both judgment and to show that only by mercy and grace can anyone hope to escape deception.
The mystery of Israel and the church has been a test for the church, since the time of Paul’s grave warning in Ro 11:25, but it will become much more intensely so in the last day’s crisis of Israel, which is the further embodiment of the same mystery of the two stages of Christ’s advent and kingdom that was divinely hidden until the time of its appointed revelation after the cross (Mk 8:30; 9:9; 1Cor 2:8; Ro 16:25-26; Eph 6:19 with Isa 8:16; 28:9-10, 12, 16; 29:11; Dan 12:9).
Throughout the history of the church, the “Jew in the midst” has always constituted a test for the church, so that when the so-called church has not been the direct instrument, it has stood in silence while the nations ‘man handled’ the nation that was blinded for our sake. Not knowing that this spiritually dead people were yet the ‘apple of God’s eye’, His prodigal ‘son’ and estranged wife, set down in the midst of the nations as a warning and a witness, albeit still beloved, and the abiding object of His covenant determination. This is what the nations were responsible to respect, but the church didn’t tell them. Thus the nations were many times over tested and found wanting in their treatment and attitude towards “the Jew in the midst”. There are more ways than the crucifixion of Christ that men lay wicked hands on God and pierce Him.
I am increasingly convinced that the mystery in its final phase will come in the form of a world crisis over the question of Jerusalem (Isa 34:8; Zech 12:2-3). As the Jew in his blindness laid hands on God and pierced Him in the person of the incarnate Son, so the nations will lay cruel and arrogant hands on the Jew in their effort to extricate themselves from the crisis that will pull all nations unavoidably into its vortex in a final provocation of divine wrath. The prophets depict the gentile assault on Jerusalem as a final presumption against the holy covenant (Isa 24:5; Dan 11:28, 30), particularly over the issue of the Land (Ezek 38:8; Dan 11:39; Joel 3:2). It is this presumption that makes God’s fury to come up into His face (Ezek 38:18).
It is my view that the ‘strong delusion’ that will come with the great falling away will be of the same essence, though in a different form, of the same hidden work of God that stumbled Israel when Jesus came in a way so unexpected by those who knew the scriptures inside out (1Cor 2:7-8; “my strange act;” Isa 28:21). In the same way, the crisis of Israel is set of God to push many hidden things of the heart into the open.
A moralistic view of the nature of divine favor will expose the heart, as the Jew and the issue of an everlasting covenant will be employed by God as a stumbling block to the pride of both secular and religious humanism. The nations and apostate Christendom will find their hands bloody with turning away from the afflicted, as God sends the test in a form they were not prepared to expect. Failure to discern what God is doing through Israel in His multi-faceted judgment on Israel, the nations, and the church, will expose many to the ‘strong delusion’. I am suggesting that the mystery of Israel will take a form that will ensnare pride in the same way that Messiah took a form that was not expected (Isa 8:14).
Unable to get their hands so directly on God, the nations have no less ‘pierced’ Him many times over through their own crucifixion of the Jew in their midst. Israel’s blindness concerning the gospel is all the shield that has ever been needed in to justify any presumed expedience, and the so-called church was conveniently silent. The self-righteous moralists did not suspect that this “enemy” was no less ‘beloved’ and part of an elect corporate entity, the nation that God calls His son (Ex 4:22; Deut 4:37;Jer 31:9) even as prodigal under sever discipline (Deut 32:6; Isa 49:15; 63:16; 64:8; Jer 3:14, 19). In this sense, the natural branches are still regarded by God as holy, in the sense of ‘set apart’ (Ro 11:16). The mystery of Israel’s momentary displacement is part of the mystery that has been ordained to level all pride (Ro 11:25, 32).
Ignorance and indifference towards this mystery has not only robbed the church of the greater the vision of glory that it contains (Ro 11:33-36); it has muted the church from being the prophetic conscience that might have restrained the high hand of the nations against the Jew in their midst. It is particularly the Jew in his enmity towards the gospel that is the divinely ordained test for the church and the nations, since the attitude towards the Jew is an index of how the church sees its own grace. Despite generations of abysmal failure, the church was the responsible agent to make “this mystery” known (Ro 11:25), and to be the prophet’s (martyr’s) voice of conscience to check the nations in their arrogance against the “beloved enemy” (Ro 11:28).
The historic tendency of the nations to always find the self-involved Jew behind most of the world’s ills is soon to be repeated with a vengeance. As Christ could be ‘safely’ dismissed, because He did not fit the presumed description of Messiah (Isa 53:2), so will Israel become a convenient target for the same self assurance, which is found just as deeply rooted in the religious heart of Christian, Muslim, and Jew, as ever it was in the heart of a first century Pharisee. The Jew in his unbelief exposes the same moralistic pride in the church that was found in Israel, all the more when the ungodliness of “Jacob” has not yet been turned away (Ro 11:26). It is more than possible that will even point to the very truth that it is God who has smitten Jacob in order to justify a safer distance from his plague (Ps 38:11).
Will Jacob be surrendered to the will of the nations under Antichrist (Isa 52:14), as Jesus was delivered over to the gentiles? I believe this is how the election of Israel will come to see Him whom the nation abhorred (Isa 49:7; 53:3). His reflection will be seen in the sufferings of ‘Jacob’s trouble’ (Zech 12:10). As the nation turned its face away from the disfigured and despised Son (Isa 52:14; 53:3), so will the face of God be once more hidden for a moment from the nation (compare Deut 32:20 with Isa 54:8), so that very soon, His face will never be hidden from the again forever (Ezek 39:24, 29). It is an exquisite irony that is deep calling to deep.
So the issue of so-called, “Zionism” is destined to become much “hotter” than many have ever imagined. Even now, there are few questions more charged with emotion, with many close and nuanced questions that defy easy solution. It is not too unlike the tremendous mystery that confronted Israel.
Will first century Israel be so deeply sifted by a formidable mystery, hidden for judgment, while the church, spoon fed by its creeds, go safely on its way? Or may we expect that God has framed a test of like kind to ensnare and expose the church’s tendency in the same direction? Little do the nations consider that God is moving the pieces into place for the final expression of what God calls, “the quarrel of My covenant (Lev 26:25; Isa 24:5; 34:8; Zech 12:2-3).
This is why we must not only establish that Israel’s greatest judgment and the church’s greatest suffering (in terms of scale) is yet ahead. We need to see the wisdom and strategy of God’s purpose in these things. It is not only THAT certain events are at hand; it is WHY they must come, and what is being accomplished through this mystery for the full display of God’s glory and the full equipping of every believer to overcome in the evil day. What a faith we need! (1Jn 5:4).
Yours in the Beloved, Reggie
