Not to a Wall,
But to the King

Section IA Conversation I Want to Finish Well

This week, in the nights before Yom Kippur, a great crowd filled the plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. A sister in the Lord, a woman who has given thirty years of her life to the people of Israel, wrote about it with joy. She called it the Great Awakening. She said God is taking out the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh, just as He promised, and that anyone who has watched as long as she has can see it happening.

I answered her in public, and I answered plainly. I do not take back what I said. But a few paragraphs on a screen are a poor place to say something this important, and I have been a teacher long enough to know that a true word spoken too quickly can sound like a door closing. So I want to sit down with you, the way I would in my own living room with a Bible open between us, and walk through it carefully.

I want to say first what I honor. Anyone who spends three decades praying for a people, who weeps when they weep and rejoices when they turn toward God, has a heart I respect. I am not writing to take anything away from her. I am writing because I believe the Scriptures ask us to lift our eyes in two directions: wider than one people, and higher than one wall.

Section III Do Not Doubt the Zeal

The crowds are real. They come every year in the nights before Yom Kippur to pray the prayers of repentance, and I have no doubt that many of those prayers are sincere. The Apostle Paul looked at the same kind of devotion in his own day, among his own kinsmen, and he neither mocked it nor mistook it.

Notice what Paul holds together. He loves them enough to plead for them, and he loves them enough to tell the truth about where they stand. He says they are "beloved on account of the fathers" (Romans 11:28), and in the same letter he says their zeal has not yet found its object. Sentiment would have picked one of those and dropped the other. Love holds both.

That is the posture I want for myself and for you. We do not sneer at a man who is praying. We also do not tell him he has arrived when the Scriptures say he has not.

Section IIIThe Promise Was Made to Two Houses

Here is the first place I ask you to look wider. The promise of the new heart is one of the most beloved passages in the prophets, and most of us have never noticed who it is addressed to.

A little history helps. After Solomon died, the kingdom split in two (1st Kings 12). The southern kingdom was the house of Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. The northern kingdom, ten tribes, was called the house of Israel, and the prophets often call it Joseph or Ephraim after its leading tribe. About seven centuries before Christ, Assyria carried the northern house away and scattered it among the nations (2nd Kings 17). Judah went to Babylon later and came home. The house of Israel never did. It is still out there among the nations, known to God and lost to everyone else.

Now read the promise again. In the Hebrew Scriptures the personal Name of God is written with four letters, often rendered Yahweh, and I will use that Name here because the prophets did. When Yahweh promises the heart of flesh in Ezekiel 36, He says, "Therefore say to the house of Israel" (36:22). And in the very next chapter He tells us exactly who He means. He has Ezekiel take two sticks. On one he writes the name of Judah. On the other he writes the name of Joseph.

Jeremiah says the same thing when he announces the New Covenant, and the writer of Hebrews repeats it word for word so that no Christian would miss it (Hebrews 8:8).

There are two houses in that sentence, and they are joined by the word "and." There is also a third company the prophets refuse to leave out: the Sojourner, the stranger from the nations who joins himself to the Lord. "I will yet gather others to him, besides his gathered ones" (Isaiah 56:8). Paul tells that stranger, "you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the holy ones" (Ephesians 2:19).

This is what Scripture calls the Bride: the one people God is gathering, made up of the believing remnant of Judah, the scattered house of Israel coming home, and every Gentile brought near in Christ. It is one people with one Bridegroom.

So here is my gentle correction, and I offer it to myself as much as to anyone. When we intercede for the Jewish people alone as a way of life, we are praying for half of what God swore to gather. We have taken a promise made to two houses and handed it to one. I am not asking anyone to pray less for Judah. I am asking us to pray for Joseph as well, and for the Sojourner, because God wrote all of them into the same covenant.

Section IVThe Sign the Prophets Gave Us

The second thing I ask is that we measure by the right mark. A crowd is a wonderful sight, but the prophets never told us to count heads. They gave us two tests, and both of them are plain.

The first test is whose work it is. The true ingathering is God's own act, done on His timetable and by His hand. "Behold, I am taking the sons of Israel from among the nations where they have gone, and I will gather them from every side and bring them to their own ground" (Ezekiel 37:21). Isaiah says the Lord "will add His hand a second time" and gather the scattered "from the four wings of the earth" (Isaiah 11:11-12). No program, no movement, and no season of religious enthusiasm brings that about. When He does it, no one will need to ask whether it happened.

John shows us the day. When the sixth seal is opened, he hears the sealed people of God named as twelve tribes, a list arranged like no tribal roll in the Old Testament, because it is a covenant name and not a census. Then he turns and sees who they are: "a great multitude which no one could number, from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9). God has known where His scattered ones were all along. He names them, He seals them, and He gathers them to His Son. "The Lamb in the midst of the throne will shepherd them" (Revelation 7:17), which is exactly what He swore through Ezekiel: "they will all have one shepherd" (Ezekiel 37:24).

The second test is the one I most want you to remember. God told Zechariah exactly what the turning point would look like for the house of David and the people of Jerusalem.

That is the sign. The awakening the prophets promised is a looking, and the One they look to has wounds. His mother called Him Yeshua, a name that means "Yahweh saves," and we know Him as Jesus. There is no heart of flesh apart from Him, because He is the Mediator of the very covenant that promises it (Hebrews 9:15). A turning toward God that has not yet turned toward the pierced One is a real stirring, and I thank God for every stirring. It is not yet Zechariah 12:10, and we should not give it that name.

Section VThe Temple That Is Alive

This brings me to the wall itself, and I want to speak carefully here, because I know how much those stones mean to people I love.

The Western Wall is a retaining wall. It held up the platform on which the temple once stood. The house itself has been gone since the Romans tore it down in AD 70, and Jesus had told His disciples it would happen (Matthew 24:2). But something more important happened forty years before the Romans came. At the moment Jesus died, "the veil of the sanctuary was split in two, from above to below" (Matthew 27:51). It tore from the top, from heaven's side. God Himself opened the way, and He did not sew it back.

Jesus had already told us where the true sanctuary was.

The word John uses is naos. It does not mean the courts or the grounds. It means the inner house, the place where God dwells. Jesus stood in the courts of Herod's temple and said that the real dwelling place of God was standing there in sandals. Then He did what no building could ever do. "By one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being made holy" (Hebrews 10:14).

And then the wonder goes one step further. Paul writes to ordinary believers, fishermen and tentmakers and former idol worshipers, and asks them, "Do you not know that you are the sanctuary of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you?" (1st Corinthians 3:16). Peter calls us "living stones" being built into a spiritual house (1st Peter 2:5). The temple of stone is gone, and the temple that is alive has been standing since the day the Holy Spirit was poured out.

There is nothing left at those stones to return to. Everything God once placed there, He has placed in His Son.

That is why I cannot call a gathering at the wall the Great Awakening. I do not say that because the people are insincere. I say it because the wall is not where God is waiting. He is waiting in the One they pierced.

Section VIOne Rule for Every Branch

Before any of us in the church grows comfortable, we need to hear how Paul finishes this teaching. He pictures the people of God as the Olive Tree of Romans 11, the cultivated tree of Israel, rooted in the patriarchs, into which believers from the nations are grafted. Some of the natural branches were broken off because of unbelief. We who were wild branches were grafted in by faith. Then Paul turns and aims his warning at us first.

There is one rule for every branch on that tree. No branch stands by birth, and no branch stands by presumption. Unbelief breaks off, and faith grafts in. A Jewish man who remains in unbelief remains cut off, and a churchgoer who trades living faith for pride will be cut off in exactly the same way. No bloodline changes that, and no church membership changes it either.

The same passage holds out the hope that keeps me praying. "And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again" (Romans 11:23). The door is open to them. It has the same shape it had for me, and the same Name is written over it.

Section VIIHow I Am Praying

I will not call this week the Great Awakening. I am praying for the real one, and I would be glad for you to pray with me.

That day is coming. When it comes, it will not be a gathering to a wall. It will be a gathering to the King.