We: Who Wrestled with God!

He was no longer known as Jacob. He was known as the word name, the name Israel means we wrestle with God. When you hear about Israel under attack, they’re the people who wrestle with God. That wrestling match that went on out there in what I would refer to maybe as a wilderness area, that was not necessarily a happy thing.

They weren’t tickling each other, they were wrestling. It could have been a fight to the death if somebody was watching it. God was trying to get a hold of this man’s heart and his life, and Jacob was resisting. And the result of that wrestling that he experienced with God, he walked with a limp the rest of his life. He needed hip surgery. He was in trouble. And Israel, we who wrestle with God, is still to this very hour wrestling with God, and they have yet to yield. They have yet to yield.

But they’re still called the chosen people. They are the chosen people. But I come across these scriptures that say, he came to his own, and his own rejected him. They did not receive him. He’s the one that said, how oft I would have gathered you like a hen would gather her little chicks. He was offering them protection, but they’d have none of it. Matthew 23, he says, wherefore you being witnesses unto yourselves, you didn’t need somebody else to be a You know you were there, that you are the children of them who killed the prophets. You filled up the measure of your father.

Your fathers didn’t complete the job, but you’re continuing to to complete the task. You who wrestle with God, you the chosen people of God, are resisting God, and God sent you his personal messengers, these prophets, and what did you do with them? You killed prophets. 

You starved them. You threw Jeremiah into a latrine, into a horrible stinking pit. This is what you did to God’s spokesman who came and said, come unto me all you who weary and heavy laden. I’ll give you rest, but what did you do? He said, you filled up the measure of your fathers.

You serpents, you generations of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of hell? These are the chosen people he’s speaking to. How did this moment come? How did this, how did this whole thing unravel from the very beginning in the Word of God? We have the Lord speaking to Abram in Genesis 12 and saying, I want you to leave your country. I want you to leave your people. I want you to leave your father’s household, your relatives, and go to a land that I will show you. I’ll make you a great nation, and I will bless you.

I’ll make your name great. You’ll be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse, and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. His son Jacob wrestled with God and was renamed we who wrestle with God. It all really began in the book of Genesis, didn’t it? Genesis 3, when the woman saw the fruit and it was pleasant to the eye, it looked like it would be good to eat, and she knew because of what the Lord had said through Adam to her, this will make you know. You’ll know the difference between good and evil. You will experience the ability to know evil and to know good, and she desired to have that kind of knowledge.

Knowledge without wisdom is very, very dangerous, and the Lord said to the serpent, I’m gonna put war between you and this woman, and I’m gonna cause great distress between you, between you and her, and between her seed and your seed. There’s going to be a war that’s going on, and it’s going on till this day. I’m gonna cause trouble between you. You will hurt his heel, but he will crush your head. And so the journey began from the garden of Eden, as they were thrust out into the harsh world, and the Lord was saying, I’m gonna bless you. I’m going to increase your seed, but there’s going to be war between the woman, her seed, and the devil, and it’s going to be ongoing, but there will be a time of victory coming. He, a descendant of Eve, will crush the head of the serpent. So then you have, after Abram, you have a time when Abram’s children moved down into Egypt.

You know the story of Joseph, and when they ended up down there, it was a happy day. It was a wonderful time, and it seemed like God is leading us. This is good. We had to leave the land of promise to come to a place where there was food and plenty, but after hundreds of years, 400 years in fact, a new Pharaoh who did not know the old Pharaoh, a new Pharaoh who did not know the original Joseph, he turned all of these people chosen of God, wrestlers with God, he turned them into slaves. But God sends a Moses, a deliverer, and by miraculous deliverance, the children of Israel, the children of Jacob, we who wrestle with God, are now taken out into the wilderness, and the story was to Pharaoh, let my people go so that they can worship me. God was pursuing these people. He wanted them to wrestle with him. He wanted them to know him, and so we read of when they’re out there in the wilderness, and they’re going through very difficult times, God says to them, I want to dwell among you so that you’re comforted, so that you’ll know I’m with you, and so they were instructed to build a mobile temple called the tabernacle.

God dwelt among them. They saw his glory. They experienced the glory that came down in that tabernacle when there were sacrifices made for their sin. They saw the majesty of his presence. They witnessed his power as they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, and they cried out to Moses, tell God not to talk to us anymore. The very sound of his voice terrorizes us, but God wanted to live among them, so he lowered his voice, and he spoke to Moses, who then would speak to others, and the message would go out to the people. The Lord dwelt among them, the chosen people. A 40-day journey took 40 years.

Why? Because of the hardness of their heart. They would have gladly gone back to Egypt. They said, we miss the onions, we miss the squash, we miss the fresh corn, we miss all of those things. Yes, we were slaves, but at least we didn’t have to worry about where we’re going to get our next meal. God sent them heavenly manna, but then they complained and said, well, we want flesh, so he sent enough birds to bury them. Birds were falling out of the sky, can you imagine? This every day, the birds were coming.

I’ve read up on this, and there’s actually a natural explanation. That part of the world, right where they were out there in their wilderness, every year there’s this flock of birds that come through. I forget what they’re called, it doesn’t matter, probably Alice and George, I don’t know. Thousands of these birds come through, and they get tired, they get weary of dealing with the winds that at times oppose them. You see, they’re migrating, and so they become weary with the flight, and so they land on the ground. So there’s a natural explanation. You say, Pastor, you’re trying to take away from the miraculous supply of God. God often uses natural things.

He uses doctors to help us to restore ourselves. He uses all kinds of things that he provides for us, and so God provided those quail. There, I remember the name of them. And as they came amongst their men, it was the right time, it was the right time, and God fed them flesh. Till they had it coming out of their ears. They were continuously complaining to God. They who wrestled with God. They who saw God’s deliverance.

All of those miraculous things that happened in Egypt when Pharaoh finally said, get out, get out, you’re driving me crazy, get out! They had witnessed that. They witnessed the power and the presence of God, Mount Sinai. They saw a rock smitten by a rod, and it gushed with water, and it fed them all of the years that they were out there. Wherever they went, the water flowed from that rock and fed them as they went. Incredible. Some studies were made of what, if we were to try and look after the millions of people, the historians, archaeologists have figured out how many people were out there. It was in the millions that were out there in the desert, and the question would be, how would you feed and how would you water such a group of people?

And so some people were clever with computers, and also gained knowledge of, you know, how much meat, how much bread, how much water, whatever. And they discovered that every day it would take a train something like a hundred miles long to arrive each day to feed all of these people. Can God, the question is asked, can God prepare a banquet in the desert for his people? Well he did for 40 years. The chosen people, they who wrestle with God. All of these marvelous things that God did for them, and you would have thought the result of miracles. You think about this. Miracles, miracles.

And still they complained. And there were those in the church today would say, you know, all we need is a wonderful spiritual revival to flow through the church. If people were getting healed, healed, healed, that would bring worldwide revival. Forget about that, because we are human, and we fail on so many fronts. A whole bunch of demonstrations of the power of people being raised from the dead, if you would, and eventually we would still turn our backs on God. Without the dynamics and the presence and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and unless we stay close to the Word of God. I had a teacher in college. His name is on this pulpit.

The first man who preached at this pulpit was the man who built this pulpit. There’s a note down here, handwritten. This pulpit, built by Tom Johnstone sometime during 1920, was used until 1952, and an additional piece was added on to accommodate the Reverend G. F. Adder. It’s written right, this is a handmade pulpit. There’s a fancy one downstairs, I like this old one. Those old preachers pounded on this thing.

It’s still standing. That G. F. Adder taught me in that college, endlessly. He was an incredible communicator. Blind as a bat, but boy did he have a mouth on him. It was good, it was good. Sometimes he’d tell us a story, and he’d have us laughing, and another day he would tell us the same story, he’d have us crying, telling us the same story, depending on how he presented it.

But I remember him one morning, if it wasn’t once, it was several times, he waved his finger like this. He said, there were churches in different parts of this country that got excited about what they perceived as the move of God. And he said, I ran into one of these pastors on an occasion, and he said, I’ve heard some very extraordinary things that are going on in your church. Oh, the pastor said, yes. He said, we can go on for weeks on end, and I don’t even get to preach the Word of God. The powerful presence, and the people are shaking, and singing, and dancing. And G. F.

Adder said, so these people were so enamored with the miraculous, if you would, that they forsook the preaching of the Word of God. He said, if you have fire in the house of the Lord without the Word, he said, it’ll turn into strange fire and wildfire. The answer is not pheasants in the morning and bread at night being delivered. The answer is listening to God and walking with God. The chosen people who wrestled with God are still wrestling, and they’re still not accepting his ways. They’ve won every war that they’ve been in. You think about that. They keep on being attacked, and attacked, and attacked, and they continuously win.

And miraculously so, because God’s being patient with them. God’s being patient with them. That ought to be a lesson for you and I as well, that because we are having a good day, because it seems like God is providing so many things, he must be really excited about us. No, it may be that he’s just being extra patient with us. His patience could run out. Be sure your sins will find you out. I wish you were either hot or cold, but no, he said, you’re tepid. You’re kind of in the middle. He said, make up your mind. You’ll want to serve me, or you’ll want to be rich and famous, and have all the pleasures the world can give you. Make up your mind today. So when they got into Israel, they forsook the tabernacle, and they replaced it with a temple, a beautiful temple. And the Lord’s glory was there.

He was present among them, and the sense of the presence of God, think about it, was so powerful that the priests ran for their lives. Well, that ought to set us up for at least a thousand years, or we could tell our grandchildren about sensing the power in the presence of God. It was so real, so powerful, that the priests had to run for their lives.

David did pretty good. David, who was the one who experienced the power of God when he slew the lion, and then the bear, and then the giant, and having slain the giant, the whole world war was turned upside down. The Philistines ran for their lives, and all of Israel’s army were shouting and singing about David. I could see them, like you’ve seen these football teams, whatever, and at the conclusion, this team won, and they lift up the quarterback on their shoulders, and they’re dancing, and they’re yelling. Can’t you imagine? David single-handedly dropped that Philistine and cut off his head. The sound must have been deafening as they’re yelling, he did it, he did it, David did it. And that same David took it upon himself to take another man’s wife, and he got caught.

Thou art the man. So a man that experienced the power in the presence of God, he, David, who knew how to wrestle with God, he, David, who taught us from the Psalms how to worship the Lord, he also failed God. His son, Solomon, truly did not follow in his footsteps properly, and Solomon’s own sons, who would have fallen in his reign, right, descendants, they divided up Israel. They couldn’t get along, and so then now you had a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, and they were fighting each other. The Jews turned on each other, and Nineveh got in on it, and Nineveh became responsible for the destruction of the southern kingdom. That’s an important notice, just write that down in your little mind right now. Nineveh got involved and became part of the destructive force that brought down the southern kingdom. And those kings that were the descendants of David, some of them were as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Some of them taxed the people beyond measure. They hurt the people, they destroyed the country, they were living for themselves, living totally for themselves. We who wrestle with God, we who wrestle with God. So the temple was never intended by the Lord to be something that people could visit, and you know, if a temple was standing today, people would be going over to Israel and, oh, make sure you stop off at the Pentecostal Pontiff’s house, you know, stop off at the temple. It’ll cost you $50 to get in, you get to touch the rocks, you get to touch this, you’ll see the Ark of the Covenant. We would turn that thing into a circus. We would. We would mess it up.

How come there’s nothing left of it? Because we tend to worship things like that. I dare to tell you this story, that I was pastoring a church in Toronto called Crossroads Cathedral at the time. This was in the very midst of a time when PTL became disgraced, and Jim Baker and his wife Tammy became a huge disgrace, and I had a fellow on my staff at the time. I never told the church this. Pastors don’t tell everybody you could start a war, but I had a pastoral staff. I’m walking down the hall and this group are around the coffee pot, literally, and they’re drinking coffee, and this guy is tearing down Jimmy Baker to, you know, just, I knew he was a fake from the beginning. I thought he was rotten to the car. I don’t know why anybody ever believed him, blah, blah, blah. I walked in, I said, stop it right now. I said, I will not have this kind of chat going on in this building. He said, are you a supporter of Jimmy Baker?

I said, that has nothing to do with it. I said, do you know who crafted and built Jimmy Baker? The Church of Jesus Christ of North America. They sent him millions of dollars, and of course the money went to his head, but I said, we love to worship people who become famous.

I said, we made him. We made Jimmy Baker. Without us, he would have been a total failure. This, this is a strange story. Remember, Jacob arrives in the land of his mother, Rebecca. Rebecca had a brother called Laban, so Jacob lands in that. Remember, he’s running from home. He’s running from Esau.

He lands in the country of Laban, and he arrives at a well, and this well is being guarded and looked after by some people. He thinks, I think these are my relatives, and in short order, it was true. It turned out it was true that this was his family. Now, I had the page open. I think it’s still here. The wind is blowing my pages all over the place, but I’d rather have the wind than the heat, right? And so, yeah, it did throw my pages all over the place here, so I’ll tell you the story. I wanted to read it to you.

Here we go. So now he’s met, he’s met Rachel, and he falls in love with her on the moment, based on what he could see. He didn’t know her well enough to truly love her, but he liked what he saw, and so he starts to work for Laban, who’s actually his uncle, and the uncle says, because you are my relative, you shouldn’t have to work here for nothing. Tell me, what should your wages be? Now, Laban and his two daughters, the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Now, Leah’s eyes were delicate. King James throws us off. Delicate eyes, what are delicate eyes?

So I did a little bit of digging, and it means that maybe she didn’t have perfect eyes for sight. She might have been nearsighted, farsighted, or we don’t know, but she was not overly beautiful to look at. Ah, but Rachel, she was of beautiful form and in appearance. So Jacob loved Rachel, and he said, I will serve you seven years for Rachel, your younger daughter, and Laban is going to play the Jacob role now upon Jacob. Jacob, remember, was the trickster back home. He saw the message of pottage, and so on. So Laban is going to turn the tables, and he’s going to give Jacob some of his own medicine. He said, okay, it’s better that I give you my daughter instead of some other wasted guy.

So Jacob served seven years for Rachel. Rachel was his choice. Then Jacob says at the end of seven years, give me my wife. Now this is so contrary to everything that we know. Those were the days of arranged marriages. It still goes on in many countries of the world. So this was the dowry. Remember, Jacob fled home.

He ended up there without an American nickel or a Canadian dime. He ended up broken, empty-handed, poverty-stricken, running for his life. He couldn’t pay a dowry. He wanted Rachel so bad, he couldn’t pay for her. You’ve got to put up your dowry. In Kenya, if you want a good wife, it’s going to cost you at least three cows. Oh, she can work in the fields from day till night and can outwork the horses. You might pay as many as ten cows.

I’m telling you the truth. If you’ll work for me, this is what you’ll get my daughter. Give me my wife, he says at the end of seven years, so I can go in unto her. Laban gathered together all the men of the place and made a feast. It was a trick. He’s going to make such a big to-do about Jacob getting his daughter, but he’s going to send in Leah, the one with runny eyes. It’s a trick. So he throws this huge banquet.

I dare say that the banquet might have lasted seven days, as many as ten. That’s how long a marriage ceremony celebration would last. However long it lasted, the day came when, okay, you can have my daughter, and he delivers his daughter. How come Jacob never caught on? Because it was tradition. She would wear a veil, and he didn’t get to see who she was until morning, and it’s Leah. I didn’t want her. I wanted Rachel.

Oh, too bad. We’ve been celebrating. We’ve been drinking wine for ten days. You can’t deny. You can’t turn the clock back, buddy. I want Rachel. I want Rachel. And so the deal was, you worked seven years for Leah.

Now you’re gonna, now, yeah, yeah, and now I’m not giving up my young daughter. The older daughter has to go first. That’s another piece that we don’t understand. I was in India doing a series of meetings, and I met this fellow by the name of Manoah. He wanted to get married so bad. He had figured, he said to his daddy, I want that girl. I want that girl. And the daddy said, you can’t marry her until your older brother gets married first.

You know you can’t get married ahead of your older brother. So you see, these cultures work. So old Laban played the game. And so another seven years, total of fourteen years. Now here’s what I, here’s what I’ve come to wrestle with my own self. Jesus is coming into the world. The angels are singing. Three Gentile kings come to greet, to greet this child, and they bring gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.

They were the only Gentiles who showed up. Joy to the world. The Lord has come. We like to sing the hymns at Christmas. So here’s, I’m gonna bend your thoughts just a little bit. Who did Jesus come for? Who did Jesus come for? His message was not to the Greeks.

His message was not to the Koreans. Jesus pretty well stayed in what we known as the land of Israel. He came to receive joy, praise. He came to be the Messiah, the deliverer of the Jewish people. So the Jews of that time were the Rachels. Are you seeing the imagery? When you look at the story of Jacob wanted, he wanted Rachel. Rachel in that story is depicting for us the Jewish people.

And Leah, Leah is a depiction of the church. When Jesus came, he came to his own. He came to receive his Rachel, and Rachel was denied. You can’t have Rachel. And the church is Leah. Is this making sense to you? Are you saying pastor that Jesus wasn’t interested in a Gentile? He was interested.

And he had a glorious plan. We’re part of that. But he came first of all to the Jew. And when you read the Apostle Paul, you’ll read him consistently talking to the Jews. He’s always, always, always out there talking about the Jews. To the Jews first. The book of Romans, all of it, it’s about the Jews. He came for the Jewish people.

And you and I, we are the grafted in. We’re the privileged people from another wild tree, us wild Gentiles. We’re being grafted in to the Jewish tree. But the fruit is what God produces. The fruit is what God produces from we the wild branches being grafted into the Jewish branches. And when we get to heaven, we won’t be neither Jew nor Gentile. We’ll be singing glorious songs and praising the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. So then we come back to when, when did the Lord Jesus switch over in his heart, in his spirit?

When was he starting to now focus, not so much on the Jewish people, because Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered you, but you’d have nothing to do with me. And so where, where did that, where did that point come? Mark 3, truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven, the children of man, and whatever blasphemies even that they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. For they were saying, because the people he’s addressing, they were saying, he is being empowered right now by demons. Jesus, Jesus, he was dealing with a man that was deaf-mute. Now when the Jews were dealing with somebody who had a problem with, with, with deafness, they would get this person to speak out loud, and that was the mode of their deliverance. They would try and, and this was common in Egypt and other places too, that if they could get the demons to speak, they could deal with it. But if the, if the person could not speak as well as not hear, it was a washout, nothing can be done.

But this Jesus takes a deaf-mute, and he heals him completely, and the Jews conclude, only one power, only one power can change the life of a deaf-mute, and that’s the devil himself. This man Jesus is demon-possessed. At that moment, they crossed the line. You say, David, all Israel wasn’t there. The leadership was there, and the leadership were responsible for all the people. God holds the leaders responsible. God holds the pastors responsible. God holds the prime ministers, God holds the kings and the rulers of this world as responsible.

When the leadership of any nation, including ours, starts blessing immorality and declares it just fine, the whole nation comes under the judgment of God. Hello? And so what you see when these leaders, these Pharisees and these scribes, the leaders of the country, the religious powerful people, they were in charge of politics, they were in charge of everything, but under the Roman rule. They were in charge of their own people. When they said, this man, this Jesus, is filthy to the core, he’s empowered by the devil himself, he needs to die. That was the turning point. We who wrestle with God, he came unto us and we received him not. We were his people.

He came for his people, and his people rejected him. Not only did they say, we don’t want him, but they said, you’re the devil himself. Wow. Wow. Now here’s an incredible moment in my mind. Jesus said, remember what I said earlier, you have to go back into in the book of Nahum. There the Lord is judging Nineveh because he said, you did dirty tricks on the southern kingdom of my people. You’re foul, you’re wicked, you’re terrible.

And here’s what, and all the people of Nineveh were considered by the scribes and the Pharisees of being the dogs of the dogs, and here’s what Jesus says in Matthew 12 and 41. Listen close. The men of Nineveh will stand at the judgment with this generation. When you are judged, you who today claim that I am demon-possessed and that I’m doing this by the power of the devil, when you are judged before God, Nineveh’s men will stand beside you, and they, the men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. Nineveh is going to accuse you, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. You see, when they said he’s demon-possessed, they had crossed the line of eternal judgment. We who wrestled with God did not surrender. They’re dying on the battlefield.

I’ve told several people recently as I’ve been spending some time with Jewish scholars, both in the written word and now I’m starting to rub shoulders with with the Jewish leaders themselves, that the Lord is opening some doors, and I’m excited about it. I have an appointment in August, and I’ll tell you more about it when that comes about. That date still has to come. But I’m learning things, and I’m gonna close with this. I love to close. Why can the Jewish people not even think about accepting this Jesus? What’s the wall? Why?

Why can’t you even. . . It’s easier for a Hindu, for any other nation in the world, anything that you want. I preached in India. I saw thousands come forward and give their lives to Christ. They never hesitated for a moment. They already had a million gods, and they were hungry for the real one, and they came forward.

Miracles took place. The faith that rose among those people was nothing short of incredible. What a journey I had as I watched people reaching out and accepting Christ. But the Jews? No, no, no, and why? And this is what I’ve learned. You and I, because of what this book teaches us, words like, I and the Father are one, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son, and the Jews are saying about us here today, you have put another God up in front of Jehovah. You’ve made a fuss over this Jesus, and you’ve turned him into a little God, and you’ve put him between you and Jehovah.

They see Jesus as a fake and as a phony. Why? Because we hold him up as God, and they’re saying, there’s only one God. And you and I, of course, we’ve read our Bibles, and we say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about Genesis chapter 1, the word Elohim? That’s plural. They’re not going to deal with that, and you can’t corner them with that one. And by the way, they don’t know what to do with Isaiah 53. They don’t read Isaiah 53 ever, ever, ever in the synagogue because somebody’s gonna ask a question, and they can’t deal with it.

There’s certain parts of the Bible just totally ignored because they cannot deal with it. They get into the Scripture. They know the Scriptures better than you and I, that they can turn me into a pretzel. They know the Old Testament incredibly so, but as soon as I say Jesus, thou shalt have no other gods before me. They live with the commandments. They live with that. So who’s going to convince them? It says, every eye will see him.

There’s going to be such a revival of Jewish people getting saved. It’s going to bewilder the entire world. It’s going to be glorious. You say, I can’t wait. You’ll have to wait. We’re not going to be here. The revival that’s going to hit the Jew, by the way, it’s already beginning. There’s already, you know, this is the former reign.

There’s people getting saved in Israel. I just heard about another person just this week, forgive me, I can’t remember who told me, I can’t remember all the detail, but somebody’s going over there right now to start another church right in Israel. And this person, wait a minute, wait a minute, this person already has a church in Israel and they’re about to start another one. And one of my very good friends, Wayne Hilson, went in to establish a church in the city of Jerusalem. He’s personal friends with Nia Nahu. His church is called the King of Kings Church. It’s in the heart of Jerusalem. People are getting saved all over Israel, but it’s a smattering.

It’s just a little bit. And those who did give their heart to Jesus can, at the hand of the strong ultra-conservatives, experience very, very difficult days. They’ll come and smash your windows. They’ll carry on like idiots. I mean, get out of our country. We don’t even want you here. But it’s happening in Israel. They still are the chosen people of God.

And in my heart, I celebrate them. I celebrate them. And if there was a Jewish person here right today, I probably would have, he probably could have corrected me ten times on some of my facts. I don’t know. But I love them and I stand with them. And the day is coming, this fall, when I’m going to go across the street to this store and I’m going to be telling that lady face to face, you need to know we stand with Israel in this whole fracas that’s going on on the other side. Why am I waiting until then? Because it’s going to be a noisy thing that’s going to happen from coast to coast in Canada.

We’re going to be a part of it. I already told you, I’m going to supply every one of you with a flag of Israel. I’m going to invite you to put it on your front yard. I dare you. And I’m going to give you ten. Each one of you can have ten flags. I’m going to go up and down this street right here. I’m going to go over onto Simon.

I’m going to go everywhere and say, would you dare to put a flag in your ground? Are you a Christian? You believe in the Word of God? Yeah. Well, then you know that the chosen people, those who bless Abraham, that the Lord will bless them. So put this flag into the ground on the front. And I’d like to see flags up and down these streets. I’d like to, it won’t happen, of course, but I’d like everybody to put a flag, a flag, a flag, a flag.

And I’ll tell you what I’m, I’ll tell you what I’m threatening to do. I’m threatening, I’m threatening to go and buy some kind of a rigging that I can put on the front wall of this church. And when that week comes and I’m giving you a flag, I’d like to buy the biggest Israel flag and plant it on the front of this building. And it’s a message to the whole world. We stand with God-chosen people. They’re wrestling with God. They’re tormented. They’re trying to fight.

They don’t know what to do with us. We say to them, we love you. If we said we hate you, they could handle that. But if we say we love you, they, they don’t know what to do with that. I’m excited about God’s chosen people. Israel, we are the ones who wrestle with God. Hallelujah. I counted three amens.

Thank you. Hallelujah. Heavenly Father, we pray right now for the peace of Jerusalem. Lord, the whole world is turning against them like I’ve never seen in my lifetime. This is an unbelievable thing that’s happening. And Lord, for all the people who can’t stand Mr. Trump, I thank you, Lord, you’re using him. He’s the one that’s coming up against these terrorists.

He’s joined hands with the, with the Jewish people. He’s wept over that, that horrible thing that happened back in October the 7th, the most horrendous thing maybe that happened in our lifetime. As Americans and Canadians rejoice and said, good, kill them all. I thank you for this man, Trump. You deal with him, Lord. You deal with them however you choose, but I thank God for that man and what he has managed to do thus far. Thank you, Lord God, for the preachers that God led people who go to the White House. They pray with him.

They have Bible studies with him. Lord God, if it’s political trickery, I don’t have to deal with that. I thank you that the word of God is being read in the White House seven days a week. I thank you that prayers are offered in the White House seven days a week. Such a thing is never happening in the city of Ottawa. Thank you, Lord God, for leadership who knows how to say, in God we trust. God bless America. Lord, I cry out, God bless Canada.

I believe we’re under judgment right now. I believe we’re on a horrendous dark course, lest Jesus steps in and turns the Lord send a revival to our country. Not a lot of mass healings, but a mass time of weeping and wailing at the altar and saying, dear Jesus, forgive us as a country. We have failed you miserably.

We pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

We pray for those people who live in bomb shelters.

We pray for those little children who are afraid to walk out on the street.

We pray for Canadian Jews who are afraid to go to the synagogue because hatred is surrounding in a synagogue.

Lord God, I pray for those people.

Use them, and thank you for the blessing that they’ve been to this old preacher.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.