Katz, Israel and the Church 01

The Mystery of Israel and the Church Art KatzChapter 1 - An Overview of the Mystery The apostle Paul is the principal author of the great letters to the Churches, and there is something about his letter to the believers in Rome that is distinctively different from his other letters. In general, they are corrective and practical, and have to do with questions and situations that were peculiar to each individual Church. Consequently, they are full of divine wisdom and illumination. In complementary fashion to them, his letter to the Church in Rome is distinguished by the fact that it is the most comprehensive, systematic statement of his apostolic theology and view of the faith. And the subject most central and dear to Paul, and that to which he gives the most specific attention, is found in chapters nine through eleven—the mystery of Israel and the Church. We need to see how enormously significant these chapters are, the eleventh of which is the concluding, authoritative and definitive statement. The material is remarkably rich, yet sadly the Church as a whole virtually ignores these chapters in their entirety. Untold numbers of ministers have gone their whole lifetime never having preached from these particular texts. This is omitting the most critical, apostolic statement of the faith concerning God’s purpose for both Israel and the Church. A revelation of the knowledge of God and an understanding of His way is uncovered in this mystery, so much so, that Paul is compelled to break forth into a pæan of praise that concludes Romans chapter 11:Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again?For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen (Rom. 11:33 - 36).In the wisdom and mystery of God, there is a reciprocal relationship and connection between the two that is so profound, so inextricable, that neither the Church nor Israel will ever come to their ultimate fulfillment independent of the other. God has locked us in, the one with the other. In fact, the issue of Israel, rightly apprehended, becomes a vital hermeneutic or interpretative key to all the faith. The issue of Israel requires a radical ecclesiology (a view of the Church); it requires a radical eschatology (a view of the Last Days); it requires a radical pneumatology (a view of the Holy Spirit), all of which, in the absence of the mystery, have been reduced, denigrated and cheapened in our superficially charismatic generation.The scriptures in Romans chapters 9-11 are terse, compact and intense, and put a great demand upon us to draw out the meaning of them, which is not the least of God’s purposes for giving them in the first place. God wants us to be students of the Word; He wants us to draw out His intended meaning by the operation of His Spirit and by our dependency upon Him. So much, if not everything in God, is the issue of revelation, and revelation is the issue of the Spirit, and God is not going to give revelation to independent, arrogant personalities, to those who want knowledge for the purpose of flaunting or exhibiting it. The revelations of God are precious, but they are requiring, therefore, we need to approach these chapters in Paul’s letter to the Romans with humility, a right disposition of heart.

Paul’s Pæan of PraiseAs mentioned, chapter 11 of Romans is the conclusion of Paul’s enormous statement on Israel and the Church, and it ends with a remarkable flow of praise. Paul’s words bear such weight and content that he does not have to look for any kind of rhetorical device to make his communication more impressive. The words speak for themselves. When Paul becomes profuse, we need to know that something has burst in his understanding, for which reason he cannot contain himself.What is Paul celebrating and what he is so rapturous about? Evidently, Paul, in reviewing this great mystery, cannot contain himself any longer. He breaks out, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” Something has broken upon his consciousness that even language strains to express. We need to ask ourselves, “Why have we not become equally as rapturous?” Until we break forth in this kind of exclamation, we have not yet seen what Paul has seen. Until we do, we can assure you, our perception of ourselves as the Church will be transfigured. Paul has caught a glimpse of the wisdom of God, not only with regard to Israel, but even more so with regard to the Church’s relationship to Israel, which is the only way to see the Church in its deepest and fullest identity. The identity of the Church, we believe, cannot be known in any deeply authentic way except in conjunction with its relationship to Israel. The same thing is equally true for Israel; her identity cannot be realized independent of that of the Church! The issue, however, is much more than Israel’s deliverance and restoration to the Land after millennia of apostasy and alienation from God. As great an event as that will be, more importantly, Israel’s return or acceptance will be, as Paul says in this very chapter, life from the dead (Rom. 11:15). Can you conceive of a phrase that is more potent than that? As an essential aspect of the Second Advent, it is as great a miracle in its historical significance as the very resurrection of the Lord Jesus Himself! That is why Paul uses the language of death and resurrection. He is not a man to merely adopt the language of resurrection as a metaphor to make a point. The restoration of Israel will be just as great an event in magnitude as the resurrection of the Lord Himself, and it will come about by exactly the same power. Present-day Israel, therefore, and unbeknownst to herself, is on her way unto ‘death.’ This is not by accident. God’s very design is that the nation, or as we shall see, a surviving remnant of that nation, be raised from the ‘dead’ in a quite literal way, in order that their return might be openly displayed as ‘life from the dead.’

To Him be the GloryWhen Paul ends his great doxology with, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36), we need to pause, because it is a divinely inspired pronouncement that speaks volumes. It gives us an entry and glimpse into the genius of what the apostolic distinctive itself is. We need to desire, to seek and to rescue this distinctive, or we will have no Church worthy of that word.Until that word glory has a place in us in the same measure as it had in Paul, there will be no possibility of our walking in apostolic understanding. The hallmark of a true apostle is this issue of the glory of God. If we had to just pick one thing from all that we could say about Paul: his remarkable erudition, his deep knowledge of the mysteries of God, his selfless service, his labors, his fasting, his counsel or his writing, it would, of necessity, have to be his profound and intense jealousy for the glory of God. The apostolic genius, or mindset, is Christ fully formed in a man whose whole life has been given over, who has counted all things as dung, including his own Jewish brilliance and natural abilities, that he may gain Christ. Even this phrase, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things,” is an accurate statement of Paul’s own life. In other words, Paul’s fascination and preoccupation with the subject of Israel is not due to his being Jewish, but due to his profound apostolic jealousy for the glory of God. God has revealed to him that the issue of Israel is designed to reveal that glory. Paul chooses Israel because God desires to be known as the God of Israel. The question at the end of the age is, “Will we be willing to choose what God chooses, though all the world be offended at God’s choice?”

To Him be the GloryWhen Paul ends his great doxology with, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36), we need to pause, because it is a divinely inspired pronouncement that speaks volumes. It gives us an entry and glimpse into the genius of what the apostolic distinctive itself is. We need to desire, to seek and to rescue this distinctive, or we will have no Church worthy of that word.Until that word glory has a place in us in the same measure as it had in Paul, there will be no possibility of our walking in apostolic understanding. The hallmark of a true apostle is this issue of the glory of God. If we had to just pick one thing from all that we could say about Paul: his remarkable erudition, his deep knowledge of the mysteries of God, his selfless service, his labors, his fasting, his counsel or his writing, it would, of necessity, have to be his profound and intense jealousy for the glory of God. The apostolic genius, or mindset, is Christ fully formed in a man whose whole life has been given over, who has counted all things as dung, including his own Jewish brilliance and natural abilities, that he may gain Christ. Even this phrase, “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things,” is an accurate statement of Paul’s own life. In other words, Paul’s fascination and preoccupation with the subject of Israel is not due to his being Jewish, but due to his profound apostolic jealousy for the glory of God. God has revealed to him that the issue of Israel is designed to reveal that glory. Paul chooses Israel because God desires to be known as the God of Israel. The question at the end of the age is, “Will we be willing to choose what God chooses, though all the world be offended at God’s choice?”

The Wisdom of God as MysteryA mystery can only be understood by being revealed, but will God reveal His mysteries to Gentile hearts that are contemptuous of Israel or who have no delight in seeing her future restoration? What would one say of a Church that is indifferent to the subject of Israel? Would that indifference not constitute the very conceit of which Paul warned? Can a Church that is conceited yet be the Church in any true way? Or, if the Church is the Body of Christ, of which He is the Head, and therefore shows forth the character of Him who is the Head, namely, the humility of God, can it be the Church and be conceited at the same time? It can conduct services and be known as, and called a church, but can it be authentically the Church, especially at the consummation of this age? Conceit is a deadly thing, and a synonym for conceit is pretension. In fact, could there be any greater pretension than for the Church to think that it itself is Israel, and see itself as replacing Israel, because it believes that Israel is finished? Once it takes to itself the identity of Israel, it is not too far from taking on another identity and presumption, namely, that it is the Kingdom. Then, it does not have to wait for the coming of the King, because it sees itself, as the Church, as being already ‘the Kingdom come.’ If we allow the leaven of conceit to blind us to this one mystery, then we set in motion a series of things that actually disfigures us to the degree that we are not the Church anymore, and puts us, ironically, in opposition to the very purposes of God Himself, even ostensibly in God’s own name! We become so conceited that we are blinded to our error and condition.In His great wisdom, God takes the most foolish, the most despicable and the most distasteful thing to the Church, which is the unsaved Jew, and makes him a major key to the Church’s sanity and character. And the Church, composed essentially of Gentiles, likewise the most foolish, the most despicable and the most distasteful thing to an unsaved Jew, is the instrumentality and the chosen agency of God for Israel’s deliverance and restoration in the Last Days. This is at the heart of the mystery, namely, that God must choose, and has chosen, the foolish and least likely thing, humanly speaking. From the Jewish perspective, Gentiles are to be despised and looked upon with contempt, as being morally less than what Jews are, and historically, they have every reason to harbor this attitude. Through the ages, it has been Gentiles who have inflicted suffering of every kind upon them, even in the name of Christ: the Crusaders with the white crosses on their tunics, the Spanish Inquisition, the forced conversions under Catholicism, the expulsions, the pogroms, the Holocaust. We have no idea how horrendous the Christian Church’s relationship with the Jew has been through the ages. There is nothing more repelling and more repugnant to the Jew than the name of Christ, because it was in that name that they have been historically persecuted, driven out, hunted down and burned at the stake. With that history of violence and bloodshed, however, it is still the Church whom God has chosen to be the agent of Israel’s earthly deliverance in her final time of chastisement known as the Time of Jacob’s Trouble (Jeremiah 30 & 31). But as we shall see, it is a Church, then, of a particular and peculiar kind.

The issue of Israel, and the need for the Church to identify with that people, itself brings the whole issue of the Last Days before the Church. What kind of a Church will we choose to be? Do we want to succeed on the denominational, institutional model, or do we go for the heavenly and authentic thing? Will we stand for God and His purposes, even though it brings hostility against us? If we are neutral, or worse, indifferent to God’s purposes for Israel, we nullify ourselves as the Church toward the Jew. It is much more than the issue of an ethnic nation; it is rightly the issue of the faith which, in turn, is the issue of God! This is how important the subject of Israel is. It is just as wrong, however, to regard Israel from a sentimental view as from a view that totally rejects it. Both views are wrong. There is only one view that is right, namely, the apostolic view of the mystery as Paul saw it, and which needs again to be communicated, understood and received. The strains and the pressures of the Last Days, as they will come upon the Church with regard to Israel, cannot be sustained on the basis of human sentiment. No natural affinity for Jews, or Israel, will have the strength to carry the weight that God will ask us to bear; therefore, no other attitude towards Israel will suffice than that which is apostolic.Somehow, as we have said, the failure to understand this mystery opens us to a particular conceit. It has been our observation that the Church at large, particularly in its charismatic forms, is largely conceited, puffed up, inflated and more or less views the faith in a self-centered, self-aggrandizing way, for the benefit that can be derived out of it for oneself. Such a disposition condemns us to conceit over this mystery as well as conceit over all the mysteries of the faith. Ignorance of this one comprehensive mystery is a guarantee for the Church to become inflated in its estimation of itself. Conceit is antithetical to the Kingdom and to the character of God. God’s counter-provision as antidote is the mystery of Israel. Mystery is something that has to be given to those who will receive it, who are contrite and broken in spirit. Only a heart with such a disposition can apprehend and be apprehended by this mystery.In the wisdom of God, the Church will never be the Church in the apostolic and prophetic stature and fullness of God’s intention, independent of the mandate that God has exclusively reserved for it with regard to His people Israel. God chose an obdurate and resistant people, the Jew, who is symbolically a statement of all mankind. In fact, Paul calls them “the enemies of the gospel” and then he adds, for your sake (Rom. 11:28). The Church needs to hear that. Have you witnessed to a Jew lately? They are unsparingly sharp and critical. They can see right through our shallow and comical tele-evangelists while we continue to dote and palpitate over them, even sending our contributions in to support them. The Jewish apostle Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles, to communicate this mystery, because in the process of taking up its mandate of being Israel’s earthly ‘deliverer,’ the Church attains its eschatological fullness as the Church. And it attains that fullness because the mandate is so ultimately requiring, so extraordinarily sacrificial, and makes such an ultimate demand. Jews are tough and resistant, but in the very act of being faithful to God’s requirement toward Israel, the Church demonstrates what has always been its calling. But the Church cannot fulfill its mandate and requirement except it comes to full apostolic and prophetic stature in itself, which is to say, authentic, through and through.

Moving Israel to JealousyEvery card is stacked against the Church if we are to move the Jew to jealousy in the Last Days. Every historical thing is against us, yet Paul tells us that “salvation has come to the Gentiles, [so as] to make them jealous (Romans 11:11).” What kind of a Church can conceivably move Israel to jealousy? You will have to be an extraordinary saint not to join the increasing chorus of anti-Semitic hatred that already is becoming global in a soon-coming time. And, except that we are extraordinary saints that can love a people who are unlovely and antagonistic, we will be swept up together with the world in its opposition to this people. We are moving, clearly, toward a radical conclusion of the age. Centrifugal factors and forces are tirelessly working to polarize and to radicalize, and we are daily allowing ourselves to be brought to the one ground or the other. There are decisions being made, of which we might not even be aware, that are fraught with significance in that they are either moving us more radically toward God or more radically away from God. We will either end up apostate or apostolic, for there will be no neutral ground. The word ‘apostate’ is not limited to men with fists clenched in anger at God, but includes the countless millions found in church pews, mindlessly singing choruses and hymns.

Paul continues with the mystery, ...that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in; and thus all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:25-26a).This ‘fullness of the Gentiles’ is not so much the designation of a time frame, but the fulfillment of an event, or the consummation of the Church’s missionary objective in the world. God is waiting for a certain number of believers from all nations of both a qualitative and quantitative kind. To believe that the Church has the responsibility to save nations, per se, is naive and conceited. The Church’s mission task is no more than to “save from among the Gentiles a people for His name” (Acts 15:14). The evangelization of the nations, per se, will become Israel’s task when she becomes the first nation saved and restored to a relationship with God. Israel’s restoration, therefore, waits on something outside of herself, namely, a certain fullness of Gentiles from among the nations. How many of us in our missionary endeavors link the two things together? “When the fullness of the Gentiles comes in,” something is released that has been held in abeyance that means deliverance for Israel. Israel is not itself the agent of her own deliverance and restoration, nor can she be. Something has to happen to effect her restoration, and which must come from outside of her. We are suggesting that it comes when a certain requirement has been met by a Church come of age, releasing the Deliverer who comes out of Zion.…whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time (Acts 3:21).And thus all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob’ (Romans 11:26).This phrase, ‘just as it is written,’ brings in a whole new issue, namely, the fulfillment of God’s Word. As remarkable as Israel’s restoration back to God will be, it is not the primary issue. A God who has given a word and a promise, and cannot, or will not fulfill it, is no longer God as God. God’s name and character, therefore, are at stake! When the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, God is released, and Jacob is acted upon.God is going to restore to Himself, and to their Land, a people who have been thousands of years in apostasy. They stoned the prophets that were sent to them; they crucified the Lord of Glory. They have supplied the world with the likes of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and have given us a present-day Israel that is utterly secular, and who trusts wholly in the arm of her own flesh. Can such a nation be restored? Can God pull it off? Yes, He is going to pull it off, not in a corner, but before the face of all nations. That means there will no longer be the option of Islam or Hinduism, or whatever other deception one chooses to embrace. God will have revealed Himself exclusively as the God of Israel, the God of the patriarchs, and the God of His Word, and He will save His ancient people out of ‘death’ and extremity supernaturally. The nations that observe both the ‘death’ of Israel and her restoration unto life will be without excuse as to who God, in fact, really is. After that, anyone who still insists on worshipping Allah, or another, will have judged themselves eternally.God is letting this one issue be the eternal factor. Everything comes to a head in a point of time, exposing who, in fact, we are, and where we are in God, as revealed in our response, of all things, to world Jewry in that moment of historical extremity. It is one thing to think ourselves spiritual, but when the ‘fat is in the fire,’ what is revealed, in that hour, is the statement of where we are in God. The Church has a responsibility not to miss its mandate, for if they will not extend mercy to the Jews in the time of Jacob’s trouble, neither will the Jews obtain it.