As part of a school requirement while attending the Lutheran Seminary, Art was to write a paper advising a local church what recommendations should be implemented in their fellowship’s structure that would facilitate their mission’s outreach. Knowing that ‘methodology’ and ‘programs’ per se would fall short of the glory of God, Art shares a brief apostolic perspective that would be as timely for any fellowship or religious institution.
My professor at the Lutheran Seminary was strenuously opposed to the thesis in my book, "The Holocaust as Judgment." His opposition was not the book itself, but that I was taking the Scriptures concerning Israel literally. This was the thing that offended him. In essence, he had written off the prophetic scriptures, in the name of God, as if there was not yet a fulfillment to take place in what the prophets have spoken. In fact, two-thirds of Old Testament prophecy has not been fulfilled, and there are the clearest references to the church’s place in this whole and final Last Days drama that eventuates in glory unspeakable.
I felt to tell him to his face that I was not at the Seminary for the sake of obtaining a Master’s Degree, but that my attendance may well have been for his sake. I said that he was going to stand before God with an eternal embarrassment and shame for falling short of the glory of God because he had so structured his thought so as to block out the whole weight of prophecy and its implication for the church. I added that in order to safeguard his tenure by which he could continue to play his games as a professor and think that he was doing God a service, he was in fact ‘short changing’ the church by communicating his own anti-biblical attitude.
It is the issue of the Jew and God’s final dealing with this people that revealed this. This call of obedience to the Jew first is no small thing. It is the actual issue of the Lordship of Christ for the church. Have we not forfeited something to the Greeks in our failure to honor this priority of God? What have we communicated to the principalities and powers of the air by this failure to honor Jesus as Lord in historically circumventing His clear Word? The powers of the air look down and laugh at that. Are we guilty of adjusting our Christianity for our own convenience and comfort? Had we obeyed that clear command, the crisis of it would have of necessity led us to the true appropriation and meaning of the Cross.
The German publisher of our Holocaust book was agonizing over this book. He was having difficulty bringing himself to publish it as a German and a Gentile living in Germany. Not only would the Jews rise up against him, but a segment of the church would say, "Why don’t you leave them alone? Haven’t they suffered enough already?"
It would be anti-Semitic to imply that Jewry was under judgment and that they are going to face a future judgment. It would have been contrary to the whole ecumenical tone of the liberal church and the man knew it.
To what degree has our failure traduced our capacity for all the Word of God? If we miss the Lord in this, then where do we pick up? Where then do we meet the Lord elsewhere? Once we have surrendered this ground, do we pick up that ground elsewhere? Or do we cross a divide in this disobedience that compromises all the Word thereafter? The Word can never again be as it was at the first when we were given this command. In the failure to take that command to heart so as to do it, all of the rest of the Word will suffer.
The issue of the Jew for the church is, therefore, beyond all comprehending. That is why I have been an enemy to all this placating, sentimentalizing, ‘plant a tree in Israel’ stuff that effects nothing. It misses the point completely. Even if the issue of the Jew is not practical in terms of one’s relationship with them, we are called to take the mandate to heart. "Have they stumbled that they should fall," Paul asks. "God forbid! But through their fall, salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to move them to jealousy." In other words, the very purpose for our salvation beyond our own release from sin and death is for them. To miss that is to miss our call as the church. It puts the church in an inferior place, and that is why Paul could say, "Brethren, I would not have you ignorant of this mystery, lest you become wise in your own conceit."
That is why the preached word in so many churches is no more than a mere sermon. It may be interesting and nice, but it is not the word of God as ‘event’. It is not the word of God as requirement. It does not have the power to affect and to change. It has become something less and other because we have not honored the Word of God as the Word of God and the commandment of God toward this people.
Do we in this, as in all our departure from apostolic reality, render the church anemic and unable to engage our youth for a want of our own seriousness? We create a void and lax environment that makes the High School murders a possibility and even an inevitability. I am saying that by voiding the apostolic realities of which I am speaking and make the Word something less than the Word, we are creating the very environment that makes the Littleton, Colorado massacre an inevitability.
Why were those ‘killer kids’ not engaged with God? Where was their fear of God that they could destroy life made in His image? It was done with total abandon and merriment, thinking they were having a sport as if they were playing a video game with real lives. Where was their sensitivity? These were classmates and kids whom they knew. They had no capacity for compassion. No natural affection. It is the statement of the church’s failure to be the church.
What is needed? The church needs to perceive itself in the context of the cosmic drama outlined in Ephesians 3:9-11 as being normative for all the church regardless of its locality. “God has created all things in order that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be demonstrated to the principalities and powers of the air, and this is the eternal purpose of God in Christ Jesus.” (Paraphrased)
I am saying that this is the mandate of the church in every locality.
The very wisdom of God is the church in its freely chosen, cruciform character. The church that freely chooses the Cross will open itself for this reality. The church that will freely embrace the eternal purpose of God is what makes the church the church because it takes as its first priority, not its own desire or its own purpose or its own well being, but His purpose. God’s eternal purposes are more important than our purposes. Until the church comes to that ground and makes it its foremost priority over and against the security and desire of its own life, it is not the church.
The wisdom of God is the value system of God. It is a people who exhibit what God is—selfless, sacrificing and having no life unto itself or for itself. That is God’s wisdom, and when the powers of the air see that they are stupefied. They cannot intimidate a people who do not hold their lives as dear unto themselves. The Lord brought His life to the Cross. That is the cruciform life and the wisdom of God that has to be freely chosen as the church’s foremost priority over and against the security and desire of its own life. Every corpuscle in us pulsates and palpitates for its own life. It has to! Otherwise we would be putting our hands in a fire or walk in front of cars. There is something in our very nature that seeks its own preservation. That is the law of life, but when you arise above and through that in the power of the Cross to exceed that and take a purpose that has a greater priority than the preservation of your own life, you are demonstrating another wisdom. You are demonstrating God, and when the church demonstrates that, then the powers of the air are finished.
When an entire fellowship will do it, we will be formidable before the powers of darkness. When the powers see a people with that determination, then it marks them as an object of their attack. "Who wants to be attacked?! Let sleeping dogs lie! Don’t wake them by indicating to them that you have an intention to be for God of an ultimate kind!" A much lesser walk would be safe, honorable and you would have a nice, happy fellowship. But when you ‘go for broke’ you are open for what the enemy will bring. And the Lord allows it because the very opposition of the enemy is the refining fire of God to bring us into a yet greater place of communion and reality in Him. We should realistically anticipate this opposition and not be terrified by it. On the contrary, we are driven by that very opposition to a higher spirituality and count it all privilege to suffer for Christ’s sake, and to be prepared thereby to the promised rule and reign with Him from the heavenly places (Rev 2:26-29). Those who overcome will rule and reign with Him. I have not once heard anything like this at the Seminary as an incentive for overcoming. In fact, the word ‘overcoming’ has never been mentioned.
This is part of the whole apostolic mindset that looks to the reward and therefore makes our suffering a small thing. We can count our being stripped as a joy because we have a much greater reward in heaven. If I would speak like that in those classes, they would drum me out as a madman. I would then be ‘fanatical’. This capacity to bear pain also opens the church to seek healing and reconciliation from the wounds of its past which otherwise remain unattended and give the enemy his opportunity and mischief. When we settle the issue with the Cross, and the issue of pain and suffering, then we can deal with questions that are painful to consider—relational questions, dealings with one another, confrontations, failures and disappointments. Church is a suffering before it’s a glory, and we ourselves bring suffering to one another, not intentionally, but inadvertently. But we’re willing to bear them because we’ve made our agreement with the Cross. Suffering is not for us some strange thing; it’s the name of the game, and it precedes the glory. Most churches avoid that very thing with a dread. And they have so calculated their programs to see to it that such realities will not arise and have not the opportunity on a Sunday basis. And so it is not only a phraseological Christianity, but also one that is based on false relationship where we never get past the stage of the ‘mask’. We never get to the hurt; we never get to the reality, to the gut thing. It’s too painful.
So the capacity to bear pain also opens the church to seek healing and reconciliation for the wounds of the past, which, if they’re not attended, give the enemy opportunity to play upon that unresolved thing. An apostolic congregation of this kind is one that can say with Paul, "for me, to live is Christ." It has crossed the divide from sincere religionists into the very Christ-life itself. It has found the ‘happy exchange’ of Luther—the ‘happy exchange’ is your life of rags for the glory of God. He took your sin that you might obtain His righteousness. It’s a ‘happy exchange’. For it has entered a realm of reality that cannot be fulfilled except on that basis.
The only way we’re going to succeed in this is in the power of the resurrected life. True church and the requirement of it should compel us to the ground of resurrection, presently so outside the mentality of the modern church. That’s why they’ve got to talk about methods. Resurrection for them is only a theological term, not a reality. And it may well be that they’ve been robbed of that reality because it was never theirs in infant sprinkling. It’s only when you enter into His death and burial, that you can be raised with and into a newness of life. So it may be, in the last analysis, that we are talking about the friction between that which is religious, i.e., lived out of the cleverness of men and their own human, religious life and determination, as opposed to the fool who has no life unto himself. His life is the life of Christ, in the measure and quality and character that God gives. It’s a weak, foolish dependency on the truth of resurrection, moment by moment. My professors were not only reacting against the content, they were reacting against the Source, because they themselves are not in it and are offended by it. This is the deepest ground of what we will face in opposition when we will stand for the reality of the resurrection life, where we will not condescend to fall back on our own humanity and trust God, that we might say with Paul, "for me, to live is Christ. In Him we live and move and have our being."
There is no way for the church to be the church except as a resurrection phenomenon. Anything else is a farce! It’s play-acting; it’s a religiosity; it uses the right terminology, but it can never enter into the reality, for the reality requires the resurrection life. Not just the approval of the doctrine, but the life itself, consistently and corporately. Out of that can come a ‘sending’ community, like Antioch, from which that heavenly reality, expressed in the whole body, can be sent both into the local community and all the world, fulfilling its mission and hastening the Day of the Lord. No method could ever achieve this—it’s beyond method. It’s the life of God. Resurrection is the answer. On the basis of this life the church fulfills its mission, hastening the Day of the Lord, His Kingdom and His coming.
Israel’s restoration waits upon the church’s fulfillment of its missional task, and its missional task, both locally and globally, waits upon the resurrection power—not some methodology. These are my primary theological convictions. My only dread is that the church would fail to be the church in the apostolic sense of the word. That it should degenerate and become itself only a religious culture, providing room for self-serving and religious careerists (whether they are professors or ministers), constituting a ‘yawn’ for the powers of darkness and a harmless option among other religious alternatives.
Only a reckless abandon to the glory of God, beyond any and every other consideration, can save us from so melancholy and tragic an end. Paul concludes, therefore, his statement in Ephesians 3:20- 21:
Now to Him, who by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to Him be glory in the Church, and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
The thing that distinguishes the apostolic genius is this single insistence on the glory of God. Paul, the great Jew that he was and great lover of his own people, had as his greatest incentive the glory of God forever. And this has got to be the heart, the pivot and the center of any apostolic reality. If it’s not that, it’s only a religious culture that makes room for its careerists, in order that they can play their games and pander with their vocabularies and produce their graduating classes and fill their pulpits and perpetuate their system.
Amen.
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