I was raised in a reformed Jewish home. My father grew up in Germany under Hitler. Then came Kristallnacht, the night of broken glasses. He can remember his father taking him through the rubble and seeing all this, and his father said, we have to get you out.
Something came to pass called the Kindertransport. They put them on trains, ultimately going to England, and his father, when he was saying goodbye to his mother, his mother's crying, You may never see her again. And you may never see us again. And he never did. His father stayed behind getting other Jews out, and then he escaped, miraculously.
A Jewish family sponsored him to get him out, and even to go to college, and he studied chemistry, and then to get his PhD he came down to America, where my mother was also studying for her PhD in chemistry. They fell in love and they decided to get married.
The house wasn't religious, it was secular, kind of normal American Jewish home. I remember being in Hebrew school and watching the film strips of David and Isaiah and Elijah, and the reality of God, God was so real in what they told us of the Bible.
He spoke to people, He moved on their lives. Whether it was Moses and the burning bush, or Abraham being called by God, there was a big gap between what I saw of the living, breathing God of Israel, the God of the Bible, and what I saw in the synagogue.
In the synagogue, I never saw anybody saying, wow, God, He changed my life. It never happened. The rabbi never said, hey, the Lord just led me today ... Never happened. It was more liturgy and more rituals. It was kind of like the echos of what once was. It was that there once was a glory but the glory wasn't there, the presence wasn't there. It was more a cultural thing, people went to synagogue 'cause they were Jewish. This is what we do because of tradition.
We went to Yom Kippur and at the end of it, people didn't come out saying, wow, my sins are cleansed, There was none of that. There was no sense of the reality of God or the assurance of God, or the presence of God, or the life-changing power that's in the Bible.
Therefore, I'm questioning the whole thing. How do I know there's a God? I don't see the evidence, How do I know he exists? How do I know we were the first ones to find there was one God, which is what we were taught? Tradition isn't God. It may be nice, but that's not God and what people have told me is not God, either, and even if they're religious, that's not it either.
I have to find God for myself. I have to find the truth for itself. I started seeking to get books on anything I could, on every subject, on science, on religion, on UFOs, on the occult, on every religion, every ideology, everything I could.
And one day I picked up a book and it was The Late, Great Planet Earth, that from ancient times, the prophesies of Israel that Jewish people are going to be scattered to the ends of the earth, and they were, and then in the end times they'd be gathered back to the land of Israel, and they were, and that the world would focus on the controversy of Israel and the Middle East and Jerusalem.
I had never heard anything like that, it just blew me away. I had no idea the Bible said that, that it was there, and as someone who was of a scientific outlook, I could not argue against it. There's no way I could disprove it, because I knew that even with all our computers and super computers, we could not foretell history.
Then as I'm doing that, I started reading the prophesy of the Jewish Messiah. In Micah, it says, he'll be born in Bethlehem. And I'm thinking, Bethlehem, that's Catholic, how did that get into our Bible?
And then, I'm reading about the Messiah in Zachariah, that he's gonna come to Jerusalem riding a donkey. I said, well I heard about that. Something like Palm Sunday, but what's that doing here? It said that he would be a light to the gentiles. And he'll even be rejected by my own people for a time.
And then I read in Isaiah 53 that it said that the Messiah, our Messiah is going to die for our sins. I always thought, that's Catholic, that's not Jewish, but it was there, clearly. And I'm trying not to connect it, but it's connecting. I didn't wanna accept it, but I couldn't argue against it.
If I'm seeing this one, this Yeshua in the Hebrew scriptures, I will have to see something Jewish in the New Testament or New Covenant scriptures.
So finally I get to the point where I'm gonna open up what I know as the New Testament, and this is a forbidden book. I'm expecting something Catholic. I'm expecting something so foreign. Nevertheless, I open it up and I read the genealogy of Yeshua, Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. And then it goes down all these Hebrew names and all the Jewish names.
And then as I'm reading it, he's quoting from the Hebrew scriptures again. That's just what I would expect the Messiah to do. And it clearly upholds Israel. It says in the New Testament, you have to bless the Jewish people, love the Jewish people. That's what I found. Surprise.
I knew ultimately, listen, it's not enough to be telling people about the prophesies. Ultimately it's me and God. But I'm not following God, and I didn't want to follow God because I thought if I follow God, I have to join a monastery, become a monk.
I thought you have to give up everything good or everything you enjoy to follow God. And so I fought God on this and I knew I had to do something. So finally I made a deal with God. And the deal I made with him was, listen, I said, "I know I should follow you, but I don't want to.
So here's the deal, I will accept you when I'm on my deathbed." I'm driving in this Pinto, this Ford Pinto, at night, and I'm heading to a train track. It's dark. It was just after a snowstorm. Came at an angle, the road was bumpy. You didn't even know where you were. Then I see a light to my left, but the other cars are crossing, and I was on the track. It was coming head on. The train comes, it plows, smashes into the Ford Pinto. The car goes up like aluminum foil, and the only thing I could do at that point was call out to God. And the car was destroyed, and it made headlines. And I didn't get a scratch. I said, Lord, I said, that was so close. I realize that my life was so close, within inches of eternity.
I said, I gotta get right with God. And I didn't know how to do it. I remember from Hebrew school that Moses met God on a mountain and Elijah met God on a mountain. And I said, so let me find a mountain.
So here, it was night, and I drove my car up this mountain. I had never been there before. And there I found a rock. I kneeled down on the rock and I said, Lord, I'm yours in the name of Messiah. I know he is the Messiah. Come into my life. Cleanse me, forgive me, make me new, and lead me on. From this moment, I'm gonna follow you as your disciple.
I remember that first week I felt something different. It was very gentle, but it was real. I was working, I was going to college and I was working as a security guard and this cleaning man at this factory, and he looks at me and he says, what happened to you?
He says, you got that glow. You're glowing. And I was glowing. I was born again, when you follow him, Messiah, you life becomes what it was meant to be from the beginning. Because my parents were raised traditionally in many ways, that whatever you do, you can't believe in Jesus and be Jewish, and so one day I spoke to them and I said, here, I'm gonna read to you these scriptures.
So I read. I read the Messiah, being born in Bethlehem. They said oh, that's obviously Jesus. It's the New Testament, I'm sure of it. Dying for our sins. That's the New Testament. Light to the gentiles, New Testament. Riding on a donkey, New Testament. I said, everything I read to you was from the Hebrew scriptures. It was simply speaking of the Messiah to come. And there was dead silence, and then my father kinda said, well, that doesn't mean anything.
What you're reading about in the New Testament is a rabbi. A rabbi can say, this is kosher and this is not kosher, but the mega rabbi, the grand rabbi, is the one who can make those who are not kosher become kosher.
He can take those who are born of the nations and make them spiritually children of Israel. He can even take us in our uncleanness and in our sins and make us clean. What is the ultimate hope of Israel? The ultimate hope of the Tanakh, the Hebrew scriptures is that God and man will become joined together forever.
It's about the covenant, that's what Israel's about. The covenant, God and man. Well what is the ultimate of that? It's the ultimate is that the Lord God comes and becomes one with us. That He can know our sorrows, know our pain, know our sins and still be one with us. That is what the Messiah is.
He's the joining of God and man. It's not just that Jesus and believing in him, Messiah, Yeshua, is Jewish, but it's the most Jewish thing that you could ever do, whether you're Jewish or not. It's the most Jewish thing, and it's the best thing. listen, I'm the least likely person in the world to be telling you what I'm telling you seek for yourself I was raised with a scientific outlook to research, see whether something is true or not.
It's not about religion, it's not about tradition, it's not about what people told you. In the end it's only gonna be about you and God. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and it will be given. God is there to show Himself to you. Seek Him and you will find.
Source:
--- Thus Testimony From Jonathan Cahn ...
- Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. - (John 14:6).
- Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. - (2 Corinthians 5:17).
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