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  THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE CROSS
  by Art Katz
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Summary: This sermon emphasizes the profound significance of the
sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, highlighting the need for a deep
understanding of sin, redemption, and the glory of God revealed through
the crucifixion. It calls for a reenactment of the cross, not only by
Israel but by the church, to fully grasp the depth of God's mercy and
salvation. The message underscores the importance of experiencing God's
mercy and extending it to others, leading to a restoration of nations
and a universal proclamation of the gospel.

Topics: "Sacrifice of Jesus", "Mercy and Redemption"
Scripture References: Isaiah 53:5, Isaiah 54:2, Amos 9:11, Romans 9:15, 1 Corinthians 15:19, Psalm 145:3, Hebrews 13:15, Psalm 96:3

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This sermon emphasizes the profound significance of the sacrifice of
Jesus on the cross, highlighting the need for a deep understanding of
sin, redemption, and the glory of God revealed through the crucifixion.
It calls for a reenactment of the cross, not only by Israel but by the
church, to fully grasp the depth of God's mercy and salvation. The
message underscores the importance of experiencing God's mercy and
extending it to others, leading to a restoration of nations and a
universal proclamation of the gospel.

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CONTENT
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And the same grace by which we can hear today is the grace by which we
shall fulfill tomorrow, for it must be grace if you are to be glorified.
And more than these people can know, it's grace, my God, that enables me
to share and speak. Or else I'm as a dead man.

Who could approach these subjects and convey them except by the grace of
God? Lord, continue that grace now, we pray. The clock is ticking away.
We have but few sessions left, and we desire the full statement of your
heart in these days, for we know it will not be given again.

So we thank you, Lord. Come, precious God, and be as precious now as you
were already this morning. For how can you be otherwise? You're so
consistent.

You're faithful in yourself. It's what you are. And we thank and give
you praise in Jesus' name.

Amen. I understand that in the different films made of Jesus over the
years, that oftentimes the actors playing that role are themselves
converted. You can't play the role of Jesus and be unaffected.

Something has got to give. Something has got to happen. And so what of a
nation that is called to play that role, which is exactly what I'm
anticipating, we need to understand, again, nothing more reveals God
than the cross.

The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate demonstration of who God is in
himself. And to miss that is to miss all. And so I'm saying, if nations
have not heard, there needs yet to be one more speaking, as it were, one
more enactment of that great redemptive drama of Christ crucified, as it
will now be exemplified and demonstrated by an entire nation, who in the
process of walking out something that they can't even understand but
will be required, they themselves will glimpse the Lord through the
mutuality of their suffering.

Let me read a little bit from the book God Crucified, which I commend to
you highly. I believe the author is an Englishman again. I don't
understand why time and time again Spurgeon and Forsyth and Chambers and
Whitfield, Wesley, one after another, are all great Englishmen, in which
this writer says the sacrificial death of Christ belongs to the divine
identity as truly as his enthronement and his parousia, his second
coming.

And that his divine sovereignty is not fully understood until it is seen
to be exercised by the one who witnessed to the truth of God, even to
the point of death. They shall, it shall be real to them what they have
not seen, what they have not heard, they shall understand. So it's to be
exercised in order to be seen.

It's not enough just to have the statement about. The actuality of the
event needs again to be seen by ones through whom it is exercised. Now,
when he wrote this, he has no thought of mine.

But I'm bringing to his statement the particular things given to me to
form a new synthesis of understanding beyond even the author's
intention. Only as the slaughtered lamb is the Christ of revelation,
also the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, once again, the
inclusion of the earthly Jesus and his death in the identity of God
means that the cross reveals who God is. And how shall Israel be a
nation of priests and a light unto the world unless it knows that it
knows that it knows who God is.

They'll not know it religiously, they'll not know it rabbinically,
they'll know it existentially by walking the road to Calvary. The
revelation of the cross will come to them through their own
appropriation of that experience and measure. It will not constitute
another redemption.

It's not their blood, but it will quicken for the world the redemption
that is and bring it into the consciousness of the world and to its
appropriation, where it has lain too long in neglect, even with the
church. Follow that? So I'm showing you how to even prophetically read a
book and bring what you are and your own experience to it, and bring it
into a new synthesis, a new measure of understanding. So just as Moses
lifted up the serpent and the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be
lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

The Son of Man must be lifted up, but he will be lifted up this time in
the suffering of his nation as they walk again the road to Calvary which
he trod. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed as we read in
Isaiah 40 verse 3, and all flesh shall see it together. This final
enactment or demonstration will be universal and global.

And that's the word the Lord gave me in this morning's prayer time, and
I said to this brother, he's written it on his hand, when I start again
in the teaching session, remind me of the word universal. The enormity
of Christ's sacrifice as the revelation of God as God, as well as the
atonement of all mankind, deserves a universal proclamation or
demonstration. It is not to be kept hidden on a hill.

It's not just for a locality or for a time. It has got to be universal.
And if it had not become that in the enactment of Christ's death, how
will it become that before his second coming and his judgment upon the
nations? There's got to be a further and universal exposition,
demonstration of that single central act by which God is revealed as
God.

And who of all people are called for that demonstration but hapless
Israel? So it's judgment for their own sin as his suffering was
judgment. We mustn't forget that. Jesus bore the judgment for sin upon
himself.

The father did not lessen or obviate or minimize the necessary
expression of his righteous wrath and judgment against sin, for sin is
death and it had to be met through death. It was not in any way
lessened. He bore the judgment, so much so that there was a point where
the father had to turn his face away from him.

And that was this morning selection in Spurgeon. Where Spurgeon gets it
is remarkable, but listen to this. April 15th, morning selection.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? He'll always give a verse and
then he'll give a statement. We hear behold the Savior in the depth of
his sorrows. No other place so well shows the griefs of Christ as
Calvary and no other moment at Calvary is so full of agony as that in
which his cry rends the air.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? How is it we've not
understood that? Why is it that we thought the greatest anguish that
Jesus bore was the physical torment, which is not the greater, but the
lesser. The greater anguish, the greater agony is the absence of his
father's presence. You know why we didn't understand that? Because that
presence is not as dear to us as it is to him.

And because we are much more conscious of our bodily comfort and
enjoyment than we are of the issue of God as presence. At this moment,
physical weakness was united with acute mental torture from the shame
and ignominy through which he had to pass and to make his grief
culminate with emphasis. He suffered spiritual agony, surpassing all
expression, resulting from the departure of his father's presence.

This was the black midnight of his horror. Then it was that he descended
the abyss of suffering. No man can enter into the full meaning of these
words.

Some of us think at times that we could cry, my God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me? There are seasons when the brightness of our father's
smile is eclipsed by clouds and darkness. But let us remember that God
never does really forsake us. It is only a seeming forsaking with us.

But in Christ's case, it was a real forsaking because he had become sin.
And a holy father had no alternative. He could not look upon it.

He had to turn his face away. And in turning his face away, he removed
the presence in which Jesus had lived all eternity long in heaven with
him. And it was to him as natural as breathing.

He could not for a moment consider himself outside the sense of the
presence of God. Now at the cross, in the depths of the excruciating
torment, when that comfort was most required, it was most absent. And I
believe he suffered it for reasons we can't begin to plumb.

But not the least of the reasons is that we are also on a collision
course with a destiny of that kind for ourselves. We also, in the crisis
of our service, the greatest requirement and the moment of it, we're
going not to feel the presence of God but his absence. And you know how
I know? Because I'm faced with that prospect continually.

Every time, almost without exception, when I'm called to speak, when the
message is the issue of life and death, time and eternity, when I want
most the sense of God's presence and comfort, it's most absent. And yet,
I'm still required to act. There's something in the mystery of God.

Maybe this is the ultimate definition of what true faith is. The ability
to be faithful in the absence of what our soul most craves as
encouragement to faithfulness, the presence of God. But to give him the
same quality of faithfulness and service in his absence as we would give
him in his presence is the statement of a son.

In fact, maybe the epitome of what it means to be a son. And that's what
Jesus bore and exhibited in his suffering and in that cry, �My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?� And it's a cry that Israel must, yes,
express. But if Israel will say, �My God, my God,� they're already
halfway home.

Because when have they last even acknowledged their God? But even to cry
out to God in his forsakenness is already a step toward God. Can you
follow that? I've never before seen that. I've never before said that.

It's a first. No man can enter into the full meaning of these words. It
is only a seeming forsaken with us in Christ's case real.

We grieve a little withdrawing of our Father's love, but the real
meaning, the real turning away of God's face from his Son, who shall
calculate how deep the agony which it caused him? Suffering, I don't
know what it is, suffering central to the whole dynamic of God. Maybe
because the whole world is at enmity with God, that there's no way to
bring forth a redemption against evil in all of its depth except through
the necessity of a suffering. It cannot be a light matter.

It has got to be born. Who can calculate how deep the agony? And our cry
is often dictated by unbelief. In his case, it was the utterance of a
dreadful fact, for God had really turned away from him for a season.

O thou poor distressed soul who once lived in the sunturn of God's face,
but art now in darkness, remember that he has not really forsaken thee.
God in the clouds is as much our God as when he shines forth in the
luster of his grace. But since even the thought that he has forsaken us
gives us agony, what must be the woe of the Savior have been when he
exclaimed, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If the thought of
forsakenness is already a source of distress, what of the actuality of
the actual forsakenness that was the dip of Jesus's cup to drink when he
sweated drops of blood in the garden, this is what he knew his suffering
would entail.

The physical agony he would bear, but the absence of his father in which
he had lived since time immemorial, that was the dreg that he had to
drink, which he did. That we could enjoy the presence of God both in
this life and in all the ages to come. The divine identity is revealed
in the paradox of Jesus's death, his humiliation, which is in divine
reality, his exaltation, his shame, which is his honor.

The king in humility, who God is, what it means to be God, God's
identity, we say is not simply revealed, but enacted in the event of
salvation for the world. God didn't just give us a prescription of
Isaiah 53, if you read it and believe it and call upon the name of the
Lord, you're saved. He gave it in order to foretell the actual enactment
and fulfillment.

It's the enactment that saves, it's the enactment that reveals, and that
enactment is yet future a second time, because it has not yet been
universally circulated, and even in those areas where it has in some
measure been known, it has become depreciated, sentimentalized,
trivialized, distorted, and essentially lost. It wouldn't hurt New
Zealand, again, to have a reenactment in its own midst of the mystery
and power of the cross, demonstrated and enacted before their eyes
through the suffering of a nation driven through their land, Israel,
that it might come again to the cross, which it has essentially forsaken
in the character of its dissolute present Christianity, and that's
exactly what I believe will come. A revival must come to the church in
New Zealand in order for it to be the people who can say into the
wilderness, your God will come, but in one fell swoop, the judgment of
Israel is New Zealand's revival.

The sight before them of the enactment of the cross is the renewing of
the cross, which is the deepest meaning of revival. So in the economy of
God, Israel's judgment is your blessing, and your blessing is their
redemption. Who's sufficient for these things? What a God.

And he's not adored for all that. He is exalted above all, only as the
one who is also with the lowest of the low. The unique act of God's
self-giving in which he demonstrates his deity to the world,
accomplishes salvation for the world.

Israel's purpose is for the nations and not for itself. My house shall
be a house of prayer for all nations. The law shall go forth out of Zion
unto the nations.

He will turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning
hooks, and they, the nations, will study war no more. For the word of
the Lord will go forth out of Jerusalem and the law of the Lord out of
Zion. Israel's restoration is not for itself.

It's for the nations. It's salvation for the world. This divine self-
giving occurred in full reality.

In this way, the glory of God, whom no one has ever seen, was revealed.
And except it be revealed, through the cross, it's not revealed at all.
We can only approximate.

But the deepest revelation of the glory of God, remember Jesus said,
when he's about to go to the cross, he said, now I'm going to glorify
the Father. How? By dying. So that some dumb-dumb of a centurion, at the
base of the cross, who had seen any number of men impaled and crucified
and shouting and crying out and spitting and being venomous against
those who were torturing them, looked at this man, who went as a lamb to
the slaughter and spoke not a word in retaliation or expressed anger or
indignation or spat at his enemies, but prayed only that God forgive
them, for they know not what they do.

When he saw the tranquility of the Son of God, the bearing of suffering
with unspeakable magnanimity and grace, though it was suffering indeed,
he knew that he was watching and seeing something more than mere men.
And he, dumb-dumb Gentile centurion, who never had a single advantage or
ever read scripture or Isaiah, had the cry issued out of him that he
could not contain, truly, this is the Son of God. To say that and to see
that is to be saved.

It took the demonstration of a suffering Christ to expel this
acknowledgment, ironically, to which the nation Israel could not bring
itself to come, a Gentile at the cross came. And now we're going to come
full circle. And now when you will be on the cross, in the paroxysms of
your suffering, in the things required of the church of the last days,
the Jew will observe in you the Son of God.

Truly, this is the Son of God. This is the revelation of our God,
because nothing reveals Him as God but the cross. And to be out there in
the wilderness with them, and to be able to speak prophetically to them,
is the very evidence of the cross in your life.

For nothing could have fitted you or prepared you for a final prophetic
destiny that is authentic and efficacious and saves than the cross in
your life. To be prophetic is to know the cross. It's to be expelled
from your property without explanation.

It's to languish in the wilderness for three years until the Lord
Himself restores you. And to give up everything, not only the property,
the ministry, your marriage, your children, vowing never to return, your
wife threatening not only divorce but suicide. It's down, down, down.

It's death and multiple deaths. But in that time and in that interim of
death, where the Lord sends me to a Lutheran seminary for two years for
master's degree in theology, does He begin to open to me the mystery
that I am now expressing. I received this in a season of death.

And every time I speak it, it's an experience of death. You don't even
know, whether we're Singapore or here, how I am assailed after the
message of before, that you've misdemeanored the Lord. And this fell and
this failed and we're continually buttressed and beaten and bearing a
opposition, which is a form of the cross.

Because death, the cross, has a power. And so if the Lord was pleased to
give the revelation of the mystery of Israel in the last days in a
season of death, and requires a measure of death in its expression,
because Paul says it's death that works in me, but life in you, how
shall you fulfill your destiny as the church in this mystery except
through the process of death and resurrection? So we mustn't shrink from
the cross, but embrace it. Let the Lord perform His work, by which alone
we're moved from charismatica to the things that are apostolic and
prophetic.

And who wants to give up charismatic good times, fun and good times, and
having the kinds of things that we've enjoyed? But I'll tell you, unless
we give it up, unless we forfeit, unless we allow something to be
brought into death, which has served its purpose and must not be flayed
and kept alive and whipped and beaten, how shall we receive the greater?
There's got to be a relinquishing, a letting go, a bringing into death
of that which has served its purpose. And for those of us who have had
an affinity for Israel, but predicated more along sentimental lines than
prophetic, that must perish. And you have a vested interest in
maintaining it.

It gives you a warm feeling, fuzzies, to be so identified with Israel.
But unless you die to that, how shall He give you His greater burden and
His greater love? There's always a process of death and resurrection
that should be understandable, familiar to us, and quick to be received.
God's identity, we can say, I'm back to the book, is not simply
revealed, but enacted.

And I would say in view of what I'm suggesting to you, re-enacted. The
road to Calvary for Israel is a re-enactment of Calvary itself. Because
they shall have no form, no beauty that any shall desire them.

And they will be marred more than any man. But it's the event of
salvation for the world, which the self-humiliation of the Son has
accomplished, and is now made more universally known through this re-
enactment. So, the unique act of God's self-giving, in which He
demonstrates His deity to the world by accomplishing salvation for the
world, is in the words of John, through Jesus Christ, grace and truth
happened.

The divine self-giving occurred in full reality. Or else it's almost
lost in a kind of mist. Did it really happen? Was it a Mel Gibson
production? Or did it actually, in fact, take place in history and time?
And what have we learned from history in general, but the propensity of
men to sweep it under the carpet? History is lost.

So, when I came to Germany recently, because some students had found us
on the website and sent us an email letter, you seem to be the real
thing, they said. And so we inserted three days on our way from Holland
to Bad Nauheim for a conference, where because I came, two-thirds of the
audience didn't come, and that pastors in Germany sent out circular
letters discouraging people from attending if this man was to speak. And
one of the other speakers from Australia said, Art, I've never seen
anything like this.

I have received a barrage of email letters from Germany and from Israel,
saying that if I attend this conference and be a speaker with you, I
will be cut off. But I could not allow that to discourage me. I'm here.

But I don't understand why. For the first time, I have received such an
onslaught that if I dare participate with you, you despicable man, in
this conference, I will be cut off. There'll be no future invitations.

There's got to be a reason for opposition of this magnitude. So that so
many were discouraged that the conference was two-thirds empty. And this
dear woman, it's always a woman, to be at the inception of something, to
take the risk and reach out and believe for God, was stuck with such
momentous hotel bills, that she's struggling even now.

We need to pray. The Lord will requite and give answer. And the one
message that was the message in that conference, though there were other
speakers from Israel, who used to joke about me at the table, not when I
was pressing to my face, but a precious believer whom we know, a Dutch
girl married to a Frenchman, was seated at that table.

She just visited me in New York. She said, Art, I was astonished what
these men were saying about you behind your back. They were laughing and
tittering.

Oh, Art. She said, I couldn't believe it. But the only message that was
the message was one.

The message that the Church of Germany has the obligation to proclaim
the gospel to the Jew in its midst. That there are now one to three
hundred thousand Jews in Germany. This is not an abstract academic
question.

There is a formidable presence of Jews in Germany. It's ironic. Who
could ever expect that after the Holocaust, Germany would be such a
place for Jews? Well, why? They get free housing, they get entitlements,
they get benefits, they get financial giftings.

Germany is leaning backwards to accommodate Jews and these Russians know
it. It's better than going to Israel, better than going to America. Go
to Germany.

Hundreds of thousands now in principal cities in Germany. But what is
the church speaking to those Jews? And what will it take for a German
Christian to bring the most offensive message for Jewish consideration
to the Jew in their midst in Germany and say, except you receive this
Christ, you shall eternally perish. Didn't we do enough damage, Art,
with the Holocaust? We want now only to placate and make nice.

Why do you charge us with this obligation, which we know will be hateful
to those who hear it? Because the issue of the gospel is the issue of
the church. If you fail in this, the church will suffer its own meaning
and its own identity and there will be in its place a spiritual void,
which the powers of darkness will be quick enough to fill now as they
did in the Nazi time. The issue of the gospel to the Jew is the issue of
the church, it's the issue of Germany.

However painful, for you it will be the cross. For you to have the
courage and the audacity to tell a Jew that he needs to be saved. And
who's telling him? The engineer and the architect of their recent
Holocaust.

What a message. Mamma mia. But it was spoken.

So on our way to this message, we stopped to see these university
students at Bielefeld. Precious. And I came from Holland by car,
crumpled in the back seat, in one of those little things and tired and
stretched out, having already spent myself in Holland.

No time to think and you know the way you are in that condition and
you've arrived and you're late and the meeting has already begun. And
you're rushed up into the university room and there they are, 60 or 70
bright, shiny, charismatic Christians and expecting blessing and singing
their choruses. And I'm waiting to be called on.

And with every chorus, my heart sinks more. While they were having a
good time, my heart sinks for their choruses. What a strange man you
are.

And I got up and I looked at them, unprepared, and I said, I perceive
that you have no sense of tragedy. I perceive you lack a tragic sense of
life. And they went, huh? Reggie, who's with me, went, huh? My
interpreter went, huh? I went, huh? Where did that come from? What did
that mean? It was the beginning of the Alpha, who is also the Omega.

Three days later, that group of facile charismatics were changed. They'd
just met me at the Frankfurt Airport. I hadn't heard from them for those
many months.

And just before leaving New York I get an email letter. They found my
email address. Art, when are you coming back? This year? I said no.

Maybe 2006, I don't know. And then it occurred to me, I've got a 12 hour
layover in Frankfurt en route to Singapore. And I wrote them a little
note, if you're able, I'll meet you at the airport.

And they came, the two principal brothers, and said, our lives have been
transformed by your word. We are now sons of the resurrection, and we're
catching it. Not just in the world, but from Christians.

They're offended by our word, our attitude, and what we have become
through what we have received from you. But they're the people of
Germany. And it began with, you lack a tragic sense of life.

And you have all the more reason to have it, being German. And if you
don't have it, it's unbelievably tragic that such suffering and such
cost of life and Jewish devastation took place through your nation, and
one generation later you conduct yourself as if it had never occurred.
That the history has no value for you, has not permeated your being and
your consciousness, has not given your soul a certain disposition of
depth by which everything will be affected.

That you're just as shallow as if you were in New Zealand, or America,
or any other place, and had not had the value of your history. And I'm a
former teacher of history, and I know this only too well. There's
something in mankind that shovels its history under the carpet.

It doesn't want to remember. It wants to bury it. It doesn't want the
living remembrance that would affect their present, or rob them of their
present happiness if the origins of their history are solemn, or sad, or
tragic.

It behooves us to receive our history, to be conscious of it, and to
live in memory of it. Not only our national history, but our personal
histories. Our divorces, our failed marriage, our unhappiness or that,
which we want to forget.

But there's a value in its remembering. There is a redemptive value in
memory. So let's not spurn the value of the past, and maybe even more
valuable if it was unhappy, and yet more valuable if it was tragic.

I've never before said these things publicly. So something has to occur
in full reality, and in this way the glory of God, whom no one has ever
really seen be revealed. In this act of final, renewed enactment of the
cross, the self-giving of God, in which he is most truly himself,
defines himself for the world.

Amen. Now let's look at the thing in itself, Isaiah 53, which has to be
read and seen in a new way, which does not one whit take away the value
of the Jesus whose sufferings are depicted in these verses, while at the
same time serving a secondary but profound purpose in revealing a future
suffering of a like kind, necessary for the reenactment of the gospel,
for the salvation of the world, universal. Now I know what those
Pentecostal preachers say.

Amen? They need to hear an amen. Okay. So who has believed our report?
To whom is the honor of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before
him as a tender plant and as a root of a dry ground.

He has no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there's no
beauty that we should desire him. That could not be the description of
the pre-crucified Christ, because I believe he was beautiful. I believe
that his humanity was handsome.

I believe he was a specimen of all specimens, this God man. So what is
being described here is someone who is already, has suffered the loss of
that beauty through being pummeled and beaten. He has no form, no
comeliness.

How devastating then must be the abuse that fell upon him, that when we
shall see him, there's no beauty that we should desire him. In fact,
he's despised and rejected of men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him.

He was despised, we esteemed him not. Now in the context that I'm
putting before you of Israel passing through this, we need to read this
text in another way. They are despised and rejected of men.

They are a people of sorrow and acquainted with grief, and we, the
world, hid our faces from them. They were despised, and we esteemed them
not. Can you see that? But surely he hath borne our griefs.

Now, who's speaking here? Surely he hath borne our griefs. This is now
the nation speaking, before it was the narrator, it was the prophet. Now
the voice has shifted, someone else is speaking, and I'm saying that
this someone else is future.

Israel presently and historically has not seen, has not understood, has
not received the sacrifice of its own Messiah. They think Jesus was just
a misfit who fell unhappily into the hands of Romans, but of no greater
consequence than that. They need to see because the issue of the
crucified Christ is the issue of God, the revelation of God as he is,
and he will not be seen in that depth and in that reality in any other
way.

They've got to see. So what's being said here? Here's a people coming to
this new recognition. Oh, surely he hath borne our griefs and carried
our sorrows.

We didn't realize that until we were struck with grief and sorrow, that
what he did that we had not considered and buried historically was for
our sake. We're only experiencing a measure of sorrow and grief, but he
experienced it in full for our sake, surely. Oh, you dear saints, what
will it take for the nation to come to this recognition, and what can
the nation ever be in the purposes of God until it comes exactly to
this? And if that's true, what will it take for them to come to this
surely? And I'm saying it's going to take the mutuality of their
suffering, that approximation by which when you experience sorrow and
grief, all of a sudden a vista is open for the consideration of a much
greater sorrow and grief that preceded yours, but is in like kind.

Now you're opened. Oh, surely. And what was the purpose of that grief
and sorrow? It was not some mindless thing required of the Father.

We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, but he was
wounded for our transgressions. Why wouldn't even know that we weren't
transgressors until we considered his wounds? Because sin does not
reveal itself as sin. It's the judgment for sin that reveals sin as sin.

When we see the wounds, then all of a sudden it opens our thought that,
for what reason? For our transgressions. We didn't even know we were
transgressors until we saw his wounds. We both recognize the nature of
sin and remedy in one fell swoop by perceiving what fell upon him who
bore our griefs and sorrows.

That's why Jesus is so necessary, why the cross is such a revelation. We
do not know we are sinners until we see what it costs God to expiate and
propitiate that sin through that suffering. Not to see it there is to
diminish the sense of sin, which is to cheat us of the full amplitude of
salvation.

We limp along in a kind of quasi-faith, never really seeing our sin, nor
really obtaining our atonement. We've got to see sin as sin. That's why
I began in Singapore with Psalm 51, the cry of David, to blot out my
transgressions.

I can't bear them a moment more. I can't breathe. I can't eat.

The thing haunts me. I'm rotting on the inside from my sin and my
corruption. And I said to the Chinese, that psalm would be as profound
from David and as Davidic in its beauty and power if he had never
committed adultery, if he had never murdered.

The psalm would be equally as appropriate because being man and bearing
the Adamic curse, he would be capable of that and any and every sin. And
that's what we need to see. And until we see it, we're not saved to the
uttermost.

We've not received the benefit of the sacrifice and of the blood. I
think I'm going to speak this to these prisoners. Yes, they know that
they've met God and he saved them from their penalties, for their
crimes, but their crime is only the peak.

It's only the visible and outward manifestation of a much deeper abiding
reality of the eternal corruption that is in man by his very nature.
That has got to be blotted out. A new heart has got to be created, a
spirit renewed.

And that's what David is crying out for. It took his sin to reveal it as
the sweet singer of Israel and the king of Israel was himself capable of
the most atrocious sin. Dear saints, we've got to know our sin, our
nature.

Even though we have lived palpably, reasonably good lives, that's
deceptive. It's just that the occasion has never arisen to reveal to you
what is the truth of your reality as man. That's why the Holocaust is as
much a gift from God to Germany as it is a judgment of God for Israel,
because Germany thinks that it is superior.

Germany, who has given to the world philosophers and poets and Heinrich
Heiner, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, great philosophers, great spokesmen, do
not recognize the depth of their depravity and the condition of their
sin as the Holocaust itself revealed it. It was not a boo-boo. It was
not a mistake.

It was not a momentary error. It was the revelation of what they are,
not so much only as Germans, but what they are in fact as man. Here
Israel is being treated to the revelation of the truth of its condition,
because being Jewish for 76 years, I know that I know, we Jews lack a
sense of sin.

We're deceived. The master deceiver has done a number on us. We think
that we're hotshots.

We think that we're morally superior to Gentiles. We're ethically
minded. We don't know the truth of our condition, and we never will by
consulting it, by viewing it subjectively, or looking at the events of
it, for we'll always justify ourselves.

Our adultery will always be love, or some fleeting moment that has to be
grasped, because it's once and for all. And how will it ever be given
again? God knows it's poetic. It's not sin.

See what I mean? How then do we come to an objective realization of the
truth of our condition as God sees it, when we recognize what he has
sent in order to address it? His own son being turned, shredded, into no
man but a worm. He has no beauty, no form that we should desire him.
He's a twisted cadaver, broken and jolted, and when that cross was set
in its hole, in its socket, the jarring, jarred every bone and every
nerve in his body, that weight on the cross coming down as it went sank
into the earth, that the shockwave shot through the earth and initiated
an earthquake.

What he bore is the statement of sin. We'll not know it in any other
way, and Israel will be condemned to being a self-justifying,
egoistic—we have a piece of it in our midst here. It will continue to be
in that condition until it sees the truth of its condition in what it
required God to expiate it.

The death, the excruciating death of his own son that required even the
father forsaking him. We've got to come to that surely. He hath borne
our griefs, carried our sorrows.

He was wounded for our transgressions. We didn't know we had any. We
thought we were the victors.

We didn't realize that what came upon us was the consequence of our sin,
even spoken in Deuteronomy, Leviticus, of what would befall us in the
latter days. Hitler's not the cause. He's only the instrument.

He's the rod of God's judgment. He's not the cause. We are the cause.

Our transgressions, our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace
was upon him, because God chastises whom he loves. He chastises his
sons, and he chastised that son in our place, but with his stripes we
are healed. Healed of our ages-long iniquity, our apostasy, our
idolatries, our whoredoms, because all we like sheep have gone astray,
all without exception.

We have turned everyone to his own way, even Norman Port Horace. The
best of us has gone his own way, an indifference to the way of God, and
the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. We need to yearn for
the day in which the Father will hear this cry and this statement of
acknowledgment from his ancient people.

I'll tell you the angels in heaven will rejoice. There'll be such a
rejoicing in heaven. If they rejoice so much for one soul who repents,
what will they do when a nation comes to the realization of the truth of
its long-standing historic condition to this very hour, and the only one
way that they can, when they see what was required for the expiation of
their sin, will they know their transgressions and admit them? All we
have gone our own way like sheep, we have gone astray, all we without
exception.

And we had such a calling. We're not just another nation. We were chosen
to show you forth to represent you, to make you known to the nations, to
bring the blessing of God of covenant who had revealed himself at Sinai,
given us the law, called us to righteousness, given us priesthood and
sacrifice.

That was our calling. And we have forfeited it. We have betrayed it.

And we have abandoned the nations to whom we should have come. And look
what has come as a result. The nations themselves are fallen and are
seeped in sin and corruption because there's not been a priesthood that
has come to them to teach them the difference between the profane and
the sacred, because we ourselves are profaned.

My God, the earth has got to shake when this acclamation, this
acknowledgement takes place in history and in time. God has waited for
it long. And now we're coming to the climax when Israel will at long
last acknowledge its transgressions and its iniquity.

In that day, he said, I'll remember my covenant with you. But what will
bring them to that acknowledgement? But the mutuality of the sufferings
of their Lord, when they themselves will be on the road to Calvary and
be marred more than any man and despised and rejected. And they'll have
no beauty that any should desire them, except you.

Because if you don't desire them and you don't need their beauty,
because you can see through their present ugliness and marred condition,
what will be their eventual millennial and eternal condition. We need to
see that presently in our unbelieving and hostile wives. See the beauty
of the Lord that shall be theirs and that enable us to bear them while
they're presently ugly and hostile toward us.

No one shall desire them but you. Because you're strange taste. Because
you can embrace the Lord on the cross and love him in that marred
condition.

All the more because you can be wedded to that bloody bridegroom. You
can also be a brethren to the least of his brethren. Because if you will
not, they will perish.

They'll not survive this experience. So he was oppressed. This is Israel
recognizing at long last, he was not just a misfit who rubbed Rome the
wrong way.

He was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. How
much do we appreciate that? Because in our bearing even just a small
measure of what he suffered, we're full of complaint. We're howling and
we're crying out and shrieking, how come me and why, why? And I didn't
do anything, I always... He went as a lamb to the slaughter.

Now we appreciate his silence because we are incapable of the
magnanimity that he expressed. And we see the contrast by our bellowing
and howling when we deserve what we're getting and he was innocent. And
yet he opened not his mouth.

He's brought as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before his
shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison
and from judgment. Who shall declare his generation for he was cut off
out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people was he
stricken.

You dear Bible students, who is speaking now? All of a sudden in one
verse we've moved from the acknowledgement of Israel to the statement of
very God. It's as if God could not restrain himself, that the majesty
and the profundity of what is being touched here is so great that he's
got to leap in, he's got to make his own statement, he's got to go past
Israel and say my people. This is now God speaking.

So we've had Isaiah, we've had Israel and now God himself saying he was
taken from prison and from judgment. Who shall declare his generation?
He was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my
people was he stricken. He made his grave with the wicked and with the
rich in his death because he had done no violence, neither was any
deceit in his mouth, yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.

Maybe Israel now is taking it up again for he hath put him to grief.
This was the father's work. God was in Christ reconciling the world to
himself.

The father was bearing the suffering in and with his son. This is a
statement not just of the son but of the entire triune Godhead because
Jesus by the spirit gave himself without spot unto God as sacrifice. The
spirit was involved, the father was involved, the son was involved, the
whole complex triunity of God was involved in the heart of the greatest
moment in history and time.

And if we're only narrow monotheists until now as most Jews are and
think they're doing God's service by defending monotheism, they're
missing the glory of God and the remarkable triumphal majesty of a God
in three persons who is yet one and altogether in harmony and agreement
in the operation of this sacrifice. It reveals the triune God. For not
to know the triune God as triune is not to know God.

To continue to cling to some monotheistic abbreviated version is not to
have God as God. And that's what we Jews have suffered. And yet in our
pride think we're doing God's service because you goyim have gone off in
some pagan direction or some multiplicity of gods in three persons.

They don't understand the mystery of the Godhead and nowhere is it more
explicated and stated than at the cross. My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me? There's someone up there to whom Jesus is crying who's
giving himself as a son in sacrifice as the Lamb of God without blemish
by the Holy Spirit not by human courage. All of the triune God is
explicit and involved in this remarkable climactic episode of all
episodes pivotal to all reality.

To miss it is to miss all. It must be reenacted. It must be seen.

It must be received. Not only by Israel but by the sleeping church. By
those who have seen and not seen, have heard and not heard.

Kings have not yet shut their mouths of him. That which they had not
been told of him shall they observe. When? When they see it reenacted.

In every nation as Israel passes through in a marred and broken
condition. Their judgment is the world's revival. They're fulfilling
their destiny as a witness to the nations through their involuntary
suffering.

Maybe it's the greatest witness of Israel in its entire history comes in
their final apostasy and judgment. But the end of it is the recognition,
oh he was wounded for our transgressions. To know that and to receive
that is to be saved.

The redeemed shall return to Zion with everlasting joy on their heads.
He shall see the travail of his soul. When thou shalt make his soul an
offering for sin he shall see his seed.

He shall prolong his days. So the one who dies is also resurrected to
see and to enjoy the very progeny and the fruit of his sacrifice and the
pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. That's us.

He shall see the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied by his
knowledge or the knowledge of him shall my righteous servant justify
many for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I, Father God,
divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoiled with
the strong because he hath poured out his soul unto death and he was
numbered with the transgressors and he bore the sin of many and made
intercession for the transgressors. Israel will not allow this text in
their sabbatical readings, I told you the other day, it will never be
heard in the prescribed portions of the Haftorah, the prophets, to be
read in the years reading through the Torah.

It's omitted. Too Christological, too controversial. Where in the New
Testament, my mother said, are you reading? I'm not reading the New
Testament.

This is old. This is the prophets. This is your Isaiah.

I've never heard this. I said, you never will. But more than hear this,
you need to experience this.

You need to receive its reality, its salvation. And if you not receive
it as the word, you'll have to receive it as the experience. Painful but
necessary.

But it culminates in the salvation of the nation while at the same time
reviving the world. While at the same time renewing the revelation of
Christ because nothing more reveals from them the cross as it's now
glimpsed through his kinsmen. That the universality of God's salvation
might go out from one coast to the other and one end of the earth to the
other.

That every knee shall bow and every mouth confess that Jesus is Lord to
the glory of God the Father. So enlarge the place of thy tent, Isaiah 54
verse 2. Let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitation. Spare
not lengthen thy courts, strengthen thy stakes.

For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left and thy
seed shall inherit the Gentiles and make the desolate cities to be
inhabited. All of the devastation that marks the time of Jacob's trouble
will be compensated, will be renewed, will be restored, will be the
desolation will be made a glory. Fear not for thou shalt not be ashamed.

You have been till now, neither be thou confounded. Thou shalt not be
put to shame. Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth.

Thou shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood anymore. For thy
maker is thine husband, verse 5 of Isaiah 54. The Lord of hosts is his
name and thy Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.

The God of the whole earth shall he be called. Because for a small
moment he had forsaken you, verse 7, but with great mercies will I
gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but
with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord, thy
Redeemer.

I shall not again afflict thee, nor shall my peace be removed, in verse
10, saith the Lord that has mercy upon you. Oh, you afflicted, tossed
with tempest, not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair
colors and lay the foundations with sapphires. I will make thy windows
of agates and thy gates of carbuncles and all thy borders of pleasant
stones and all thy children shall be taught of the Lord and great shall
be the place, the peace of thy children.

In righteousness shalt thou be established. Thou shalt be far from
oppression, for thou shalt not fear, and from terror for it shall not
come near thee. Those whom God abases, he exalts.

They will be extolled and may very high, his servant people, having been
stricken. They will be the centerpiece of the nations and all nations
will come up, in its representatives, to Jerusalem, in the feast of
tabernacles, to acknowledge the nation whom God has favored and brought
up out of the deepest abyss of suffering unto death and exalted above
all nations, millennially and eternally. Zion will be his throne and his
law will go out from it and his people will be his missionaries and his
priests into all the world and we will know peace.

Millennial blessedness, so that in Amos chapter 9 it says that the sower
of seed will be treading, will be coming up against the heels of those
who are treading out the harvest, that the abundance of millennial
blessedness where the harvest runs into the new planting, the new
planting into the harvesting and the remarkable overflowing abundance of
the blessedness of this nation whom God has exalted, having first
allowed it to be abased. Believest thou this? Anticipateth thou this?
There will be a hope and encouragement for the reasons for which your
sacrifice will presently be required. This is the end.

The millennial and eternal glory of a kingdom come, that is Davidic, and
can only be fulfilled at the throne of David on the holy hill of Zion by
a son of David to a restored nation brought through a final wilderness
of affliction the time of Jacob, so that everlasting joy shall be upon
their heads, not only because they know they'll not again suffer such
troubles, but everlasting joy for the office and dignity and honor to
which they shall now be held in all the nations, that nations the
Gentiles will bring their treasure to them, and their sons and daughters
that have been cast out in the remotest corners of the earth shall be
returned on the shoulders of kings, and their queens shall suckle them
and mother them and bring them back, and those who hated and despised
them will kiss and lick the dust from their feet, for they are the
exalted and the honored and the extolled of God, having suffered with
his son. The remarkable thing through which they must needs pass before
they enter their glory is a suffering that precedes the glory. Lord,
this is holy, holy, holy.

What you did 2,000 years ago has not yet had its fullest and universal
expression, and even we who are Christians don't know as we ought to
know. The cross has suffered loss, it has been diminished, it has been
trivialized, sentimentalized, and we're in the season when people will
soon be going out for their chocolate bunnies and easter eggs. We've
made a pagan travesty of the holiest event in the history of creation,
and it needs to be restored, needs to be seen, needs to be received
again afresh, that its full import and work might have its value for us
and all the world, and so you've elected that there's a people through
whom that final demonstration shall come, the reenactment.

Bless them, my God, they don't know what they're heading for. Poor
Norman Port Horace in his condominium in Manhattan and his ivory tower
and his publishing venture and world in the earthly wisdom has the
faintest notion of what is at the door, and the despicable servant that
you sent to him to convey it is utterly rejected as being of no
consequence. Lord, mercy for this people.

Mercy, Lord, for this people. Fit them and prepare them for the ordeal
that is yet before them, the time of Jacob's trouble, wherever Jacob is,
and they will surely perish, Lord, unless there's someone who recognizes
in their broken and despoiled countenances the brethren of the Lord and
extend mercy that they might obtain mercy. A church that has mercy to
extend because it has experienced mercy, and mercy is not merely a
category of its catechism, but its experience, and Lord, more than we
know, we have experienced mercy in these days.

It took mercy to communicate. I have never heard myself in the way I'm
hearing myself at this time and in these days, though I despaired at the
beginning. It was mercy, Lord, I know it better than anyone, that we
would take a break and come back for what? I didn't know what, but we
have received mercy, palpable mercy, or there's no way that we can
understand or appreciate this, and because you have extended mercy, we
will be able to extend it.

Because we've received it, we will be able to extend it. Our whole life
is a mercy, Lord. Anything that we have, anything that we are, is your
grace, is your mercy.

We have nothing of ourselves. We're capable of nothing. It's you.

You're full of mercies. Your mercies are new every morning. We received
it this morning, even to bring Art out of bed late, just to pray the few
things that he did, was to bring a quotient of the dimension that was
mercy, the mercy of communion.

You're full of mercy, and you'll be extending it to your people, or else
they perish. Thank you, Lord. Seal up every word that you've given, not
only for ourselves, but to those diverse places in the earth where these
tapes will circulate and be made known, that they will receive as much
benefit from the videos and the audio tapes as we have received being
present in the speaking.

Come, my God, get full mileage out of these days, for the time is short,
the need is great. Come, Lord, and bring your word into the earth. Salt
the earth with this word.

Let it be a vent for all who hear. And we thank you and give you praise
for the privilege that was ours, to be the living audience and
congregation who drew out your very heart and were with your spokesmen
in bringing forth such statements, my God, as ears have not had
privilege to hear in our generation. Receive our gratitude, Lord, our
love, our worship, our adoration.

You're a very great God. In Yeshua's holy name we pray, and God's people
said, amen, amen, amen. Today and in these days has got to be for you as
meaningful and as significant, as creative as your word will be to
Israel in that future time in the remote wilderness when you shall say
to them, your God will come.

And you'll be able to say to them, because God has said to you. It's a
remarkable mystery in which we're caught up. We need to recognize the
event of God as being something more than a little weekend in the
country.

See his sovereign hand and the mystery and the glory of it that is once
and for all and will not be given again. How do you rate? You don't rate
well? How are you qualified that you should be here and be part in this,
but by his choosing? Not because of our qualification. I will elect whom
I will elect.

I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy. I will choose whom I will
choose because I am that I am. And I will be what I will be.

And I will do what I will do for I alone am God. And nowhere is that
more apparent when I choose that which is least qualified to show that
the choice is not compelled from me by what they are, but is altogether
out of my freedom as God. I am that I am.

I can hear what you're saying, but it concerns me. Am I going to be able
to do this? You'll not be able to except God be God. If there's no
resurrection, we of all men are most to be pitied.

But be encouraged because this speaking was itself a resurrection
phenomenon. You think this is a man? You think this is some kind of
superlative ability that this guy has as a talent? The speaking itself
was a resurrection phenomenon so that we prophetic men are called not
only to exposit, but to demonstrate the very means by which you are to
fulfill what you hear. I have spoken it by the grace of God, by the
enablement of the risen life, and you're to fulfill the mandate and
calling exactly on the same basis.

So that you too can say, look my no hands. It can't be our hands. He's
only glorified in resurrection.

But if God was able to perform that through me, who is only dust, will
he not be equally able through you? Or are you more of a difficulty for
him that is greater than his ability, greater than his resurrection?
Don't limit the Holy One of Israel. I spoke on... Do it. No, I don't.

I really, it's lost. I don't remember what I said yesterday, last night,
let alone the first message. Or else my head would explode.

I can't contain both Singapore and New Zealand, and then to add
Australia, don't think that they'll receive less than you. And four
nations in Africa, and what preceded it in Germany and Holland, and all
the places, and Mexico, and Panama, and San Salvador, El Salvador. I
can't contain it.

I don't want to contain it. It's recorded in the archives. I can't
remember.

It's a grace that I have not a capacity to remember. But don't you
forget. Thank you, Lord.

Thank you, Lord. Shall we give God praise? Shall we give him glory?
Shall we give him honor? Shall we give him expression of gratitude? Come
on. We've got a few minutes.

Let's let him hear how grateful, how privileged we are that he has
addressed us as sons and daughters. He's not minced words. He's not
restricted or reduced himself because of our limitation.

He has spoken expansively and fully. And the remarkable thing is we've
grown just by the hearing of those words. We're larger than we were
because of them.

Give him thanks. Give him gratitude. Give him praise.

Thank you, Lord. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. Thank you,
my God.

Oh, hallelujah.

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Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/0H0la3UBLZY.mp4
Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/art-katz/the-universality-of-the-cross/
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