Articles by Theme
Articles by Art Katz available online and in PDF download format.
Godly Critiquing of our Church Life
The scriptures encourage us to “examine ourselves.” Critiquing would be a synonym for examining. We need to examine our lives, and events in our lives, in order to get their fullest meaning. If our lives were examined in the biblical sense, we would end up with fewer divorces, more sustained marriages, a richer quality of fellowship, and more […]
Holiness – The High Calling of God in Christ Jesus
I have never heard anyone else equate perfect holiness as being the mark of the high calling of God. Usually ‘high calling’ would be some final and ultimate expression of ministry in the bringing of the Word, but in Spurgeon’s view, which we need to soberly consider, the issue of high calling is the issue of holiness.
Hosea and Gomer – God’s Endtime Strategy
God gives us the prophet Hosea and his relationship with his adulterous wife as being a perfect parallel of His relationship with an adulterous Israel. The prophet has to experience God’s grief for His nation. If Hosea is going to be the mouthpiece of God, he is going to proclaim some hard things, and therefore needs to share God’s grief for the people he is addressing.
Identifying with God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
Modern Jewry misconstrues the gospel to be an invitation to forsake their intrinsic identity and culture as a distinct people in order to become “Christianized” into an assimilation in the mainstream culture. For the most part, Jews cherish their traditions, and sense in them, however diminished, a vitality and spirituality often more than that which ironically purports to “save” them.
In the Year of King Uzziah’s Death
The present state of Israel, like the “prophet mighty in word and deed,” like King Uzziah himself, is God-given, but given in order to be taken away!
Is Death the End? – The Reality of Hell
The reality of Hell needs to be anguished over, and to be understood as a terrible and eternal calamity. Once your life ends, there is no turning back; there is no second chance; there is no way to make amends when you realize that what you have spurned all your living days in those who […]
Israel and the Apocalypse: A Key of Interpretation
With the message of Israel, my inmost being is called into participation of a radical kind as it brings a corrective against soulish counterfeits and lesser alternatives in the earnestness of what is at stake.
Israel and the Outpouring of the Spirit
The outpouring of the Spirit needs to be restored to the context of God’s intention, centering in the restoration of a people who have not even the faintest notion of their eternal destiny, or a desire for it, and want only to be as other nations. Nevertheless, God’s word toward them will be fulfilled; His gifts and callings are irrevocable, or God voids Himself as God.
Israel’s Restoration:
The eternal wisdom of God, demonstrated through the Church, as the necessary prelude to the Messiah’s coming
Jeremiah – Prophet of the Last Days
Jeremiah – Prophet of the Last Days The absence of persecution in the church is a statement to our shame. There is something wrong in the character of the church when it does not evoke any opposition to itself. It means that the church has been found quite acceptable in the same world that is […]
Judaism and the Resurrected Life
Any believer who lives presently unto the Lord, and for the Lord, out of the abundance of Life in Christ Jesus, demonstrates to the yet unbelieving Jew [or Gentile], like the Apostle Paul, the millennial mode of life of a future, restored Israel.
Lying Signs and Wonders: Deceptions of the Last Days
I would appreciate your sympathy as I try to address a subject that is already dividing many of God’s people into defensive and opposing camps. One is put into the uncomfortable, if not dangerous, even in raising elementary cautions, of seeming to oppose to what in the eyes of many is holy and of the Spirit of God.
Message to a Secular University Audience
You may think that Christianity is derived from a Jewish foundation in religion, and that it is some narrow faith restricted to those who are Jews or Westerners, but that is not true. There is only one God, one faith, and one way for all men and for all nations. Let’s begin in the Gospel […]
Messianic Conference Report: The Morning After
Again, I had the strange sense of being entirely “out of it” in the midst of a whole congregation, mostly women, greatly moved to dance in the aisles and on the platform. They were playing loud, recorded Israeli-type music whose lyrics were shown overhead. Meanwhile the kippur and tallis-wearing ‘rabbi’ intones appropriate solemnities and incitements […]
Messianic or Hebraic?
A Critique of the Messianic Movement There are large segments of the essentially Gentile church that are a little mystified by the Messianic movement. They do not know quite how to assess it, how it fits in, and how it relates to what they are about. This message is more of an exploratory word, and […]
Moses at the Burning Bush
This is more than just an episode out of the life of Moses. There is something here for our deepest consideration, and I hope it will be for some as much a confrontation as it was for Moses. We have as much a requirement to be met by the God of the burning bush and be sent by Him to deliver a people out of bondage.
Mt. Sinai versus the Cross of Christ
God’s revelation of Himself and the giving of the Law at Sinai was a history-shaping occurrence. However, in our insistence upon confining Him to Sinai, are we not again guilty of limiting the Holy One of Israel? Should our well-meaning defending of His Name and interests be founded solely on this revelation? Why refuse to think of Him other than in images that are convenient or congruent to our life-style? This would be the ultimate idolatry, ironically, in the name of rejecting idolatry!
Naïveté: The Tragic Beheading of Nicholas Berg
In essence, what cost an individual his head and life, a naïve idealism totally unrelated to the historic realities of the Arab-Islamic world, may corporately cost the USA the same. If we continue to reject the truth of God and of man as revealed in Scripture, and in God crucified, our every consideration is warped and awry
Nathaniel – A Key to Breaking the Power of our Predictable Christianity
In the gospel of John, there is a strange statement that Jesus makes to a man by the name of Nathaniel. I sense that Nathaniel is typical of a disillusioned man both then and now. Perhaps he could be likened to someone who desires something beyond an inadequate, conventional Judaism or conventional Christianity, with things […]
Nightclub Disaster: A Parable of Hell
In a moment, suddenly, the very plastic and synthetic trappings that encouraged a false gaiety, a pseudo excitement, are turned by a pyrotechnic spark into an inferno of relentless and devastating flames.