Sid: I have on the telephone Lance Lambert who has lived in Israel since 1973, and I see Lance as one of my favorite prophetic teachers. I got a hold of some of his teaching called Middle East Update, and just the most amazing things. On the last couple of days we have been talking about the misjudgment of Great Britain and the repercussion that occurred in reference to them coming against the Jew in Israel. They literally went from leading the world to being on the bottom of the pack. Lance and I both believer according to the word of God, he quoted from Joel 3 that said “In the last days God will judge nations based on one major sin, and that is” and says specifically “dividing up the land.” There could be people listening to us right now, but that’s Old Covenant, of course you have to understand what is called the Old Covenant, or the Jewish Scriptures was the ONLY Bible the first church had. The New Covenant hadn’t been put into a nice book like we have it today. What did Jesus have to say about this? Well He said the same thing in the 25^th chapter of Matthew Jesus said “That nations would either be goat nations or sheep nations based on one sin” and it says “as you have done unto the least of these My brethren.” In the Greek the brethren means “from the womb” in other words, physical brethren. Jesus hadn’t died and rose from the dead, He wasn’t talking about believers He was talking about physical Jews. “…as you have done unto the least of the physical Jews, you have done unto Me.” That’s what’s going to make the difference between a goat nation or a sheep nation. Again, a goat nation has a mind of its own against God, and a sheep nation follows the shepherd. Now Lance I would you to paint me a picture if the United States continues on its Haman course, and that’s the word I have to use, and continues to force Israel to give up more and more land because they want the land. Pain me a picture of what might happen shortly to the United States of America.

Lance: Well I can only say Sid that when the Lord spoke to me in the Philippines I was at the International Intercessors Leaders Conference there. I had a very troubled night, and I knew the Lord was going to say something. Finally I uttered a word but in it the Lord said “I have risen with fury. Don’t ask me now to stop because I’m going to judge nation after nation because of what they are doing to Israel.” Then the Lord said “I will judge them by fire, by flood, by eruptions, by earthquakes,” then He went on to say “I will touch them where it hurts the most, I will destroy their economies.” Now my feeling is, that’s only part of what that prophecy was, my feeling Sid is that things cannot go on like they are with these hurricanes, and floods, and fires. We used to think of the fire recently in California as national disaster, now it’s almost taken place on the back burner because of things like Katrina, and things like Rita and so on. Now if that’s just a picture of what’s going to happen I don’t think economically things can get any better because of the amount of money that’s going to have to flow out trying to restore and rebuild like everything else. I feel that once the Lord becomes an enemy of a nation it’s the end.

Sid: I want you talk just a little bit to those that love God, are born again Christians, but feel that the church gets all the blessings that were promised to Israel and the Jewish people, and Israel and the Jewish people get all the curses under the New Covenant.  What would you say to them?

Lance: I think it’s nonsense. I think you cannot take the blessings for one and leave the curses to the other. The thing is that the blessings and the curses belong to both. I mean if the church misbehaves, and she is, I mean when I know of one evangelical leader in the states recently saying “That God is torturer, if He really had His son crucified for our sins then He’s a torturer.” Then there’s another one in Britain just recently said, we’re talking about evangelicals, said “If Jesus died for the punishment of our sins, then God is a child abuser.” I think this is absolutely shocking, this can only bring judgment upon those churches, assemblies, or whatever who say such things. The word of God is very clear, of course they probably look upon the Old Testament as inferior, but Isaiah 53 says “That it pleased God to bruise Him.” Now in the Hebrew that word bruise is actually crush or shatter Him. That’s how much God loved you and me Sid, and how much Jesus loved us that He was prepared to die in our place.

Sid: You know Lance you mentioned this on an earlier broadcast, but I feel like I have to bring this out again. In Psalm 105 is pretty much a summary of God’s position on who should be in the land of Israel. It talks about His covenant with the Jewish people and it describes it in 3 different fashions. It uses the word: forever, then it uses the word everlasting, and then it says a thousand generations. Now I’ve always been told if God says something 2 times you better pay attention. This is 3 times in one Psalm that He is giving the land forever, everlasting, a thousand generations to the physical Jewish people. I mean how can anyone anywhere say “That’s not what God meant.”

Lance: Well a thousand generations, if we take the Jewish reckoning of 40 years it’s 40, 000 years, it’s ridiculous. It just means God is using human language to say that something is eternal and everlasting. [Laughing] Then there’s something else too, people are always coming to me and saying “Yes but the children of Ishmael are also the children of Abraham, the seed of Abraham,” but if God made a pact with Ishmael that he had absolutely kept precisely to this very day they would have become great nations, they would have become wealthy, and many other things. It’s not a mistake that they have so much of the oil and with it the wealth of the world in their hands. It’s God keeping a covenant that He made with Ishmael. Now the interesting thing is that when God made this covenant with the land it was through Abraham’s seed through Isaac not Ishmael, and through Jacob and not Esau. That’s what comes out of that Psalm 105, He says He confirmed it to Isaac, and confirmed it to Jacob. So that put’s very clearly that this is a pact that God made with our forefathers and which we feel thousands of years ago, and therefore think of it as antique. God doesn’t think of it as antique, as far as God is concerned He made it just now. So any president of the United… it sounds very mean of me to put it this way, but it doesn’t matter if he’s a believer and he reads his Bible, but if he thinks that he can contradict God almighty in a pact that He has made, he is on a collision course and the nation he leads is on a collision course with God.

Sid: Use your prophetic sanctified imagination right now, if we do not back down from a two-state solution paint me a picture of what could shortly happen to the United States of America.

Lance: Well I’m pretty sure that if the disasters that have overtaken her with increasing… just following one after the other. I think it’s going to get worse and worse till it’s catastrophic. You know it’s very interesting we all think of poor old Pharaoh and God hardening his heart, we think of him as an utterly evil man, he was highly educated, highly sophisticated man leading one of the superpowers of the day. He couldn’t let the Jews go because there were a million at least of slaves…

Sid: It’s almost the vice that the United States of America is, “We can’t support Israel and a one-state solution because we need the oil.”

Lance: Well yes and it’s not just the oil it’s just the whole approval of the world, and the money of the world as well. I mean it’s a big thing. Your State Department see’s it purely only from a human point of view they obviously don’t see it in Biblical terms.

Sid: Lance we’re out of time…

Sid: I’ll tell you what we’re seeing this happen more and more; as a matter of fact I have never lived in a lime in my entire walk in the Lord which has been over 40 years now in which I’ve seen so many Bible signs coming into place. But top it off with a dream I had recently in which Jesus said He’s coming back soon.  And I want you to know that if He’s coming back soon if He says that He is.  Now Paul McGuire is a man that God has handpicked from an intellectual viewpoint to understand the last days but from a prophetic view point to understand the last days. On yesterday’s broadcast we found out that he’s trying to get away from crazy Christians but they prophesy over him they said “Well the people that pick you up they’re are going to be Christian.”  Well, he’s in the middle of nowhere this isn’t going to happen, so what’s the first ride he catches a Pentecostal Minister. And then the second ride he catches a Bible salesman filled with big thick Black Bibles throughout his entire car.  So he asked you if you want to be born again you’re afraid you’re from New York you’re afraid you’re in the middle of cornfields and what’s this guy going to do to you. So what did you say when he says “Do you want to receive Jesus?”

Paul: So Sid what happen is I thought “Oh, he’s going to chop… literally thought he’s going to chop my head off bury me in the bushes and pray a prayer over me.”

Sid: At least you’ll have a Bible go ahead. (Laughing)

Paul: Yeah right and so we pull off on the side of the road and it’s a real short prayer. He says “Repeat after me,” I do it.   And the prayer was simply “Lord Jesus Christ,” which I said out loud “I come to You now I ask that You forgive me of my sins; I confess that I’m a sinner God.  And Jesus I invite You into my life to make me born again.”  And that was the prayer.  And I felt nothing, okay absolutely nothing. So he drives me back to the campus I go out and get drunk which is my normal habit at the evening at the campus.  And then the next morning really early these Christian’s who were witnessing to me rang the doorbell especially the girl that I thought was cute.  So we end up in the center of the campus with these giant Roman columns, and I share what happened to me hitchhiking and as I’m talking to my Christian friends a girl that I had never seen before was sitting there over listening to our conversation.  She walks up to us and then looks at me; we didn’t know who she was and she looks at me and she says “You know I was sitting here listening to you talk asking me myself the question “Is God real, does He exist.”  And then she looks at me and said “I’m a ministers daughter but I don’t know if I believe in God.”  And then she says to me and she looks at me pointblank in the eyes and she says “Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”  For some strange reason I blurted out the words that I’ve never said in my entire life I said “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”  When I said that it was literally as if the sky cracked open and I saw God, not in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  In that moment it was a revolutionary overwhelming experience; in that moment I knew that all the New Age stuff, astral-states, altered states of conscientiousness; communicating with spirit guides, seeing the great white light, astral-projection, all the studies and gurus and meditation at that moment I knew that it was all false and only Christ was God.  And that revolutionized my life and set me on the journey that I’m on today.

Sid: You know Paul there’s some that can’t comprehend that, but I can comprehend that because the same thing happened to me.  Instantly I knew everything about Jesus was true.  I knew the Bible was true, and as a Jew an Orthodox Jew for that matter there’s no way and I never understood how did I know all this stuff?  But now I understand; I want to fast forward a little bit you’re at a Christian coffee house in Time Square in New York called “The Lambs Club,” and you have another encounter that’s preparing you for your future.

Paul: Yeah, well for all these years I was in the New Age movement and communicating with spirit guides I didn’t realize when I started this stuff that I was opening doors in another dimension, or the invisible realm, or spiritual realm or whatever you want to call it, to demonic beings and entities.  I didn’t understand that I was ignorant back then but I was through these occult practices; so even though I was saved I was still being harassed by spirits. And you know not Casper the friendly ghost or anything like that, but these presences that would attack me.  I mean on one hand I was very sane and rational but these where things that were going on privately in my mind.  So the minister of this church on Times Square ask me if I would like to be baptize in the Holy Spirit? And then he told me to meet him in the church library in about four days and told me to fast and pray and meditate on some scriptures which I did.  Then I meet him in the library and he places his hand on my head and he begins to pray for me.  The next thing I know I fell the power of God flooding through my being with such force that I’ve never felt this before in my entire life. And it was as if the room disappeared and I saw myself, in the spiritual realm, I saw the feet of Jesus Christ wearing sandals. And I briefly looked into His eyes and I saw the most pure being that I’d ever seen in my life before the Messiah.  But I didn’t know what to do and so I wasn’t trying to be religious all I could do was start to sob and cry, and my tears fell at His feet. And as that happened I felt this indescribable love flood my being and the power of God and the love of God supernaturally flowed through me with such power and force that I began to sob.  Then I opened my eyes and I looked into the minister’s eyes and he said “Paul did God baptize you in the Holy Spirit?” And I said “Yes He did.”  At that moment the Lord, Yeshua, set my heart on fire with the flame and that flame over 35 years ago has never ceased to burn Sid even to this day.

Sid: Well, speaking of a flame God his made you a prophet you know things that are going to happen in the future and you’ve actually been called by God to warn believer’s about what you see.  Tell me some of the things you’ve seen.

Paul:   Well the Lord has lead me to go into areas of research supernaturally by the Holy Spirit. In other words, He’ll lead me to go and read extensively and study extensively things that I wouldn’t necessarily normally want to pursue. One example would be based on the book I’ve written called “The Day the Dollar Died.”  It’s also one of the topics in the three DVD series your offering “Are You Ready for the “One World Government, One World Religion, One World Economic System?”  And the Lord spoke to me after my research on economics and the history of economics, the Federal Reserve and the dollar and so on and so forth. He prophetically spoke to me and said “The time has coming very soon when the US dollar will be devalued and we will merge into a One World Economic System and the dollar will be gone and we will go into a cashless society where we’ll receive a microchip or a biochip implant if we choose to reject Jesus and accept the anti-Christ as Lord.  So as I do all this research I’m watching George Soros the super-billionaire on the BBC. He’s talking before like 20 million people in Europe on television and he’s coming out openly and saying that the goal is to value the dollar.  And the reason they want to devalue the dollar is you can’t have a world currency if the dollar is strong.  So he said “By weakening the dollar and transferring the wealth of the middleclass into third world nations.”  Which some people sounds Christian but it’s going to end up in the hands of dictators.  Then he says “We will equalize the playing field and people will be ready to accept a one world currency.”  Now they’ve announced that this world currency will be called “A Phoenix” and it will be available by 2018. Whether or not they achieve that date I don’t know but they’re planning for a world currency to be established in 2018.

Sid: Well you know in going to your research and you have spent 30 years Paul McGuire researching the microchip and the mark of the beast but I couldn’t believe the quote you had from such credible people because you not only seeing things from a prophetic viewpoint in dreams and visions, but then you’re doing true intellectual research and matching things.  What did Ralph Nader say recently?

Paul:  Well, Ralph Nader and he’s a consumer advocate and a liberal, and he said that he has seen, he’s been in the factories where they’re manufacturing the technology for the mark of the beast.  And this is not a fanatic by any means and he claims that the technology and the mark of the beast is there and their making now and that he’s seen it.

Sid: Tell me one thing you’ve seen that would happen in the future that happened.

Paul:  God has given me like a supernatural sense of warning and deep urgency of a coming crisis and it’s like a burden; it’s more than a feeling it’s a sense of knowing before it happens.

Sid: It’s sort of like a 1929 thing?

Paul:  This is more along the lines of a cataclysmic event which will shake our nation to its core, and it will be so upsetting and physiologically traumatizing that people are going to be forced to choose between serving government like god or continually on in the Bible traditions.

Sid: So it’s a separation between the true Christian’s and the false. We’re out of time Paul.

Sid: We are learning so much truth; you see God says in His word “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.”  And we’re coming into not just the information age as far as natural things but the information explosion of supernatural understanding.  And I have Pastor Henry Wright on the telephone I was speaking to him all last week about the brand new addition of his book “A More Excellant Way – The Spiritual Roots of Disease – Pathways to Wholeness.”  Where he has traced just about every major disease and explained what are the spiritual roots, how to close them there’s excellent teaching in this book. And then examples of people that had similar diseases to you and how God has healed them.  Now Henry before we went on the air you were telling me a staggering fact that you put on conferences for Christians and then you poll Christians about the diseases that they have and what have you found out?

Henry:  Well, the average audience say of about 250 to 300 people in a conference that we do. When we poll the diseases from A to Z we find the average audience has over 250 different diseases in that room.  And over 5 to 600 total that means one person has more than one disease. There’s not an audience I speak to even of quote Christians that are not plagued with all manner of disease.

Sid: Well, what’s the answer?

Henry:  Well, the answer is to find out why they have the disease. Of course healing is still the children’s bread, but we talk about healing as if God were required to heal us or something. Because we see healing as part of the atonement, and that’s a debatable subject in many quarters today Sid.  There are denominations that teach that healing past away 2000 years ago with the apostles.

Sid: But what I’m concerned about is those that understand that healing is today but aren’t getting their healing.

Henry:  Well I suppose the first place to look for the answer to that is in the entire 1^st Chapter of the book of Isaiah because it’s addressed to God’s people it’s addressed to covenant people and if you read the entire 1^st chapter of the book of Isaiah it’s all about the connection between God’s people serving sin and all manner of disease.  I guess we don’t understand what serving sin is all about that’s such a horrible word isn’t it sin.  I suppose we should probably follow the newest modern profile and just call it negative emotion or psychological defect.

Sid: Or unfortunately as many people in many congregations do just ignore it.

Henry:  Well we ignore it become so one; I guess you say “Well it’s just human nature.”  I want to talk about human nature.  When God created Adam he was called a son of God; human nature is not evil but something has joined human nature which has changed our image into something different than what who God is.  If God is love and the Bible says He is love and we allow bitterness and hatred and division and schism and anger and rage to be part of our life that’s overthrowing who God is in creation.  And we don’t think that we think being angry with our brother is normal; we think hating ourself is just normal. He do like “Well, that’s just the way I am.”  I have people tell me when I come to them with a disease and I say “Are you dealing with this issue in your life?”  “Yeah, well that’s just the way I am pastor if you don’t like it get over it.”  I said “Well, what about the scripture that says from glory to glory we are being changed into His image.”  Sid I want to tell you looking down at Christianity around the world between salvation and Heaven there’s a huge gap of a wilderness of problems.  And yet in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus in teaching the disciples to pray He said “Thy will be done in Earth as it is in Heaven.” I think it’s time to bring a little bit of Heaven to Earth, what do you think?

Sid: I agree. Tell me in these audiences that have so many diseases what are the types of defects that are really behind these diseases.

Henry:  When we finished looking at the profiles of the diseases in these audiences it’s really amazing. It’s broken down, there’s always exceptions, but basically the bulk of them about 80% of them are broken down in three spirit spiritual battlegrounds. First is fear, anxiety and stress.  Those are things people are worrying about; but we always think about worrying about fear of terrorists or fear of not paying our bills.  But we sometimes are afraid of our own mother-in-laws, oh boy that’s a whole different subject.  The other area behind fear, anxiety and stress is the battleground when people have with themselves about themselves. A lot of people don’t like themselves, they feel inadequate they feel like nobody loves them. They feel like “Why were they born?”  And there’s a whole big battleground.

Sid: I’m too fat, I’m too tall, I’m too short, no one likes the way they are.

Henry:  Nobody likes the way they are; I even had people that were male that wished they were females and females that wished they were males.  I’m a male, thank God for that, if you’re a female thank God for that; that’s what God created you to be.  But we have such a battle; I have this saying “Who you are is not what you do but what you do is who you are.”  I went across so many people, so many diseases for example “Chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and diabetes II for example that people are dressed up, they have what we call fabricated personalities.  We spend all of our lives conforming to the image of somebody else what they thought about us; what they said about us until we don’t even know who we are anymore.  And this is foundational to disease.  The third area that we see…

Sid: I’ll tell you what I have to go back to that “What about someone that says “You know that’s me; what do I do about it?”

Henry:  Well, first of all you can change (Laughing) I suppose what you can do about it is to go back to God in your prayer time and say “God who did You see from the foundations of the world, who am I?”  If you are unhappy in your life what you’re doing you probably made a wrong turn.  You say well, I’m too old, I want to tell you something, you can tell that to Colonel Sanders and he’ll laugh you I’m too old. You can tell that to Moses who wasted 40 years the prime of his life hiding in the backside of the desert and God called him at age 80 and he pastured the largest church in the history of mankind 3 ½ million.  You can tell him that you are too old.

Sid: You know that people speak a big game but then they look at themselves in the mirror and they forget that God says “All things are possible.”

Henry:  That’s correct, the thing about God is that you’re not stuck in your day; you’re not even stuck with who you are because God is a God of change Sid. Thank God for that, I wouldn’t want to be the old Henry for many years how about you?

Sid: Nay.

Henry: Throwing up.

Sid: For sure; let’s talk about something that’s really plaguing society let’s talk about Alzheimer’s I’m hearing more and more talk about this.

Henry:  Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease of the brain, we’ve been studying it for quite some time. The key to Alzheimer’s is not healing it’s prevention; now I know people don’t want to hear that it is one of the fastest growing diseases in America it’s going to increase over 400% this year alone.

Sid: Four hundred percent!

Henry:  That’s correct.

Sid: Wow.

Henry:  It is a plague and coming out of our conversation we just had a moment ago is keys to understanding Alzheimer’s you hear it being helped.  We have known that Alzheimer’s was an autoimmune disease of the brain for many years.  About 3 or 4 years ago the medical community finally defined it out of dementia and guess what they said.

Sid: What’s that.

Henry:  An autoimmune disease of the brain.

Sid: (Laughing)

Henry:  We knew that and how does it work?  Here’s how it works; what happens in Alzheimer’s is the immune system begins to form a plaque buildup of white corpuscles or eat the neurological pathways of memory recall.  A person who gets Alzheimer’s has not lost their memory; there is not a thing wrong with their soul, there is not a thing wrong with their mind.  But the pathways of memory recall are interfered with either by a eating of the pathway by the white corpuscles or a building up of the plaque which acts as an interrupter of neurological pathway flow like electricity would be and they’re not in touch with their memory. Now let’s talk about autoimmune it doesn’t make any difference say that it’s Crones or it’s multiple scoliosis or it’s whatever autoimmune disease you want to talk about.  Whenever you hear the word autoimmune it is always self versus self-conflict.  And as a person is not at peace with themselves about themselves there is a spirit of infirmity comes at the human body that causes the immune system the white corpuscles and killer cells to actually go an attack and eat.  When they eat it’s called a sclerosis of the eat the body part.  If they form a plaque it’s called nonbacterial inflammation. Now let’s talk about Alzheimer’s we call the people who get Alzheimer’s actors and actresses because these are people that have spent their entire life becoming and pleasing others.  Becoming ….you’ll find them in society, you’ll find them in churches; they’re the best servants, I mean to tell you they’ll serve you with a smile but they’ve never taken time for themselves.  They don’t even know who they are in their own personalities because their entire life has been built on others. I want to say this to you and anyone listening. He who receives the message is not greater than he who brings it; and nobody not one person even listing to this program is expendable to the welfare of another. You are as important as another person because of one scripture.  God is no respecter of persons.

Sid: So someone identifies with what you’re saying and they say “Hey, I am setting myself up for Alzheimer’s I really see it now; what can they do?”

Henry:  First of all, they’re going to have to understand it; you quoted the scripture “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” that’s in Hosea 4:6. Isaiah 5:13 says “My people have gone into captivity because they have no knowledge.”  The issue is this the Bible says this Psalm 139 “Before our body parts continue in its fashion from the dust God knew us and we are fearfully and wonderfully made and the hand of God is upon us.”  I don’t understand all this because I’m not God but God saw every person from the foundation of the world.

Sid: He also saw that we were running out of time we’ll pick up right here on tomorrow’s broadcast.

Sid: Red hot is an understatement; I had a traditional Jewish rabbi, not just any rabbi, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. He’s host of the national TV show “Shalom in the Home” on The Learning Chanel. He was named by Talker’s Magazine as one of the hundred most important radio hosts of America. I mean he has credentials like you wouldn’t believe. He’s described by many publications as arguably the most famous traditional rabbi in America; he’s been profiled in many of the world’s leading publications including Time Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, London Times, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post; he has twice weekly columns in Jerusalem Post, the New Sun. He had a debate, if I was to pick one Jewish believer in Jesus of everyone I know throughout the world it would be Dr. Michael Brown who I’ve known for many years. You see Dr. Brown has got a PhD in near eastern languages and literature from New York University. He is president and founder of Fire School of Ministry in Concord, North Carolina which is right outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Mike you either read, write, or speak about 15 Semitic languages. How did you happen to learn so many languages?

Michael: What happened was, this is not my fault this the fault of the rabbis, you say how’s that? Well here’s the deal, I got saved in 1971 I was not literate at that point in Hebrew or Jewish sources. I was raised in a kind of a wishy-washy Conservative home on Long Island Conservative Jewish home. I had been a heavy drug user shooting heroine, using LSD, playing drums in a rock band. God radically turned me around at the age of 16 ½ in 1971. My dad was thrilled with the change in my life, but said “Okay great you’re off drugs that’s wonderful, but you need to come back to our traditions.” So he brought me to meet the local rabbi who was fresh out of Jewish Theological Seminary, a great young man; took a real interest in me. We began to have lengthy dialogs by phone, of course I wanted to win him to the Lord the same way, and he wanted to win me back to Judaism. He began to challenge me “Mike you don’t even know Hebrew. Mike how can you tell me what to believe I’ve been studying this since I was a boy.” Then he brought me to meet some ultra-Orthodox rabbis, very religious rabbis in Brooklyn a couple of years later. I had memorized thousands of verses at that point out of the King James Bible, and I was praying hours every day and I was ready for anybody. I went to me with these rabbis and they seemed like very God fearing men, much more religious than the men in the synagogue where I grew up. Boy I mean they knew the languages and they knew the background, and it seemed like everything I threw at them they seemed to have an answer for even if some of the answers were far-fetched at least they had an answer. That really provoked me, I felt “Look I know my experience in the Lord is real, I know I’ve been transformed, I know the word seems so absolutely clear to me, but…”

Sid: Yet, I have to tell you Mike, and a Jewish person, or a Gentile person that believes in Jesus; when they first hear the apologetics or the arguments that traditional rabbis have had 2000 years to develop, it’s very overwhelming if someone has not had a personal encounter with God.

Michael: It is, look the fact is you have some very sincere people who are studying the same Bible, but they’re reading it in Hebrew, and you’re average believer is not able to read it in Hebrew. They’ve had like you said 2000 years of not believing what we believe, and have a whole system of faith and practice and many of them study for hours and hours a day. At that time I didn’t realize, but some specialize in dealing with people like me. That’s only increased, there’s a great increase in what we call counter-missionary…

Sid: But just out of curiosity how old were you when you first were taken to the rabbi?

Michael: Well the local rabbi, the Conservative rabbi I was not yet 17. I was a brand new believer…

Sid: I have to be candid with you, I don’t know how you held your own. I don’t know why he didn’t overpower you because you didn’t know Hebrew. If you were like me, you were bar-mitzvah and you read beautiful Hebrew, but you didn’t understand a word of what you read.

Michael: Listen I didn’t even know what the content of the passage was. In other words, no one ever bothered to tell me that when I was bar mitzvah’d I read from 1 Kings 18 where Elijah calls down fire from heaven [Laughing], that’s quite a passage. Nobody told me that you just went through the motions, that’s not Judaism as a whole that’s the Judaism I grew up with which was very superficial. Leonard Ravenhill, an old man of God who is with the Lord now, he used to say “A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument,” this much I knew. God had radically changed my life; Jesus in a moment of time delivered me from drugs; God brought deep conviction of sin into my own life and made me to realize how far from Him I was, and how deeply He loved me. I was transformed, He changed me; He was working in my life; He had become my Father and my Best-Friend. So if someone hit me with an argument I knew there was an answer somewhere, in point and fact I spent hours alone with God. Not immediately, but after several months in the Lord I started to get hungrier and thirstier. I remember saying to myself “I could live a clean but empty life, or I could give myself to God the way I gave myself to drugs and rock music,” which meant whole heartedly.  I began to pursue the Lord with all my heart, so by the time I had met the ultra-Orthodox rabbis when I was 18, I had been spending 5, 6, 7 hours with the Lord alone every day. I was reading the Bible 2 hours a day; I was memorizing scriptures 1 hour a day; I used to memorize 20 verses every day, that’s how hungry for God I was. I was experiencing the reality of God, so when I met with these men yes they challenged me, yes they raised good questions, yes their lifestyle also challenged me, not that it was different than mine in terms of devotion, but the fact that they were very serious religious Jews, and I grew up thinking all Judaism was superficial the way I knew it. So I was challenged by all that and I thought “Okay, when I start college I’m gonna start studying Hebrew.” When I started studying Hebrew I thought “You know I need to learn more languages to learn more background so I don’t even need to rely on the dictionaries, or commentaries; I want to be able to dig and understand on my own. The interesting thing is, that along the whole journey, even though I knew the reality of my faith, I was always wondering “What am I going to study, what I going to learn, what am I going to be confronted with that is going to cause me to question what I believe, what am I going to be hit that I don’t have an answer for? To my delight, and even surprise, the more I studied the stronger my faith became. I didn’t have to shut off my mind ever. To this day Sid, after 34 years in the Lord and writing 1,300 pages of apologetic material and having many debates with rabbis; to this day I can tell you, the more I study the more excited I get about the foundations of our faith.

Sid: Okay, we did two television shows with Dr. Michael Brown, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, that I have literally, I mean so many credentials I don’t have time to even list all of them; so we had as good a professional traditional rabbi as possible, and as good a Messianic Jewish scholar as possible debating on the subject “Who is Jesus?” Mike why is it 2000 years ago so many people missed Jesus being the Messiah? I mean here He was in the flesh performing miracles everyone in Jerusalem knew about this rabbi from Galilee that walked in signs and wonders, and people said He was the Messiah. Why did a group of Jews follow Him, and a group of Jews, a larger group, not follow Him at that time?

Michael: Well the fact is that’s the way it’s been in our history Sid. Picture this we come out of Egypt with the greatest display of national miracles, public national display in world history. God demonstrates that He alone is God; He brings us out of Egypt, He brings us through the sea; He speaks from Mt. Sinai in such a way that the whole nation can hear, and the whole nation says “Whatever He said we’re gonna do.” Within 40 days many of them, the majority are breaking the very first commandment and worshipping an idol. Out of that generation only 2 make it into the promise land, and the rest die because of unbelief and…

Sid: Yes, but most of them were not as knowledgeable as say a traditional rabbi 2000 years that from age 3 or 4 starts memorizing and studying the Jewish scriptures.

Michael: Some of those people did come to follow Yeshua, some were believers, but many times He is more than we are asking for. In other words, we want a Messiah who will come according to our plan and make the world a better place and make us all happy and take away trouble and war. On a certain level in the Messianic age we’ll experience a lot of that when it is fully realized on the earth. Jesus came and upset the religious apple cart; He is a threat to our authority systems; He is a threat to our religious tradition, and what happened was despite the tremendous sincerity of so many of these men, and rabbinic Judaism was really in its formative stages then, but despite the sincerity of so many of these men they had made the mistake of replacing the living word of God with human traditions. In their zeal to construct something in which the Jewish people could live on a national level without the presence and the prophetic word of God, they constructed an endless stream of traditions. Jesus came into conflict with those traditions, He did not come the way they were expecting Him to come, He did not come and build up their system, He came and confronted what was wrong in their system and because of that many turned against Him.