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"If I hear one 'Praise the Lord' I'm outta here!" "If I hear one 'Praise the Lord',
I'm out of here!" Such was the threat I leveled at my wife of 10 years,
after it became apparent she'd accepted Jesus Christ into her life. Oy! Being
Jewish had predisposed me to distrust Christians and their 'false God'. Being a
husband predisposed me to use the only weapon available against this Jesus who
came uninvited (as far as I was concerned) into my marriage. It hadn't always been this way. In fact, my catholic born wife, Jo, and I appeared to be perfectly compatible in our lack of spirituality for the first 9 years of our marriage. We both put the religions of our childhood on the shelf, dusting them off only occasionally as it suited our desire to enjoy certain traditions (Passover, Easter, Hanukkah and Christmas). God was relegated to 'the man upstairs', and aside from an occasional prayer, He wasn't a part of our lives. Time passed, and when my wife's twin sister got 'religion' we both thought she'd lost it. My family was particularly nervous because Jesus was getting too close. We'd all tell 'Jesus jokes' in hope of keeping Him and my sister-in-law at a distance. But God has an even better sense of humor. After several years moving around the western United States and working for a regional airline, I finally landed a job with a major airline. The job, however, required us to move from the West, which we loved, to the Southeast, which we feared. "Better watch out for those Baptists", an atheist friend warned, "they won't leave you alone!" We moved to North Carolina prepared for the Baptists but unprepared for the spiritual stirring in my wife. We had become parents just prior to the move which touched us in many ways. My wife says our daughter's birth caused her to consider the spiritual side of existence. We coincidentally moved into a house that bordered an evangelical church where my wife met the pastor's wife on a walk one day. She was invited to attend a service and because it was so convenient, she went….often. Within a year she came to believe the gospel. No one beat on our door. No one handed her tracts. The faith we'd come to fear came right into the house upon her invitation. This left me very hostile to say the least. I threatened to leave and thought the marriage we'd enjoyed for ten years was over. It seemed that someone else was living in the house with us due to my wife's enthusiasm for this….Jesus (it was even hard to say). Jo and I were close friends and so she wanted to share every new revelation with me. I tolerated it for just so long, usually until I got a good backrub that night. Then I'd shut her up. It didn't take long for me to realize I couldn't adequately refute the gospel. So I vowed to look more closely into Judaism in hopes of proving her new faith the deception 'I knew it to be'. From my Jewish family's perspective, that was a bad move. Being content to practice tradition keeps a lot of Jewish people going through the motions of Judaism. However, when you take a long, hard look at the prophecies in the Scriptures, you come to see there's a gaping hole in the thinking behind 'traditional' Judaism. For instance, I wondered why Isaiah 52 and 54 were read at Shabbat services, but not chapter 53. Close examination reveals a very specific description of a person who would suffer for the Jews as penalty for their sins. "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." Surely the Christians had sneaked a chapter about Jesus into the Jewish scriptures! But even the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include this same text, date the book of Isaiah to hundreds of years before Jesus was ever born. The prophet Jeremiah also foretold in chapter 31 of a "New Covenant", one in which God declares, "I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." (v. 31-34) All this talk about the remission of sin in the Jewish scriptures? I had many questions but as I investigated them I had even more. Could Jesus, the focal point of a religion that had persecuted Jews for centuries, actually be the Messiah to the Jews? Why didn't every Jew see the same inconsistencies and why didn't every 'Christian' know the Jesus of the scriptures? As I read the Bible for myself, a sinking reality came upon me. I fought it for as long as possible. And then one day during a service at the local synagogue, my oldest daughter sensed my discomfort and asked, "Daddy, are we in the right place?" Her question went straight to my heart. There were tears in my eyes as I acknowledged to her and myself that we were not in the right place. It was a bittersweet moment - sad, in that I realized my people did not know the good news about God's provision - the Messiah of Israel - but joyful, in that now I did. Shortly thereafter I surrendered my stubborn pride to the obvious truth and invited Messiah into my heart. And He came in. I know firsthand that one of the reasons Jews - and anyone for that matter - avoid even considering Jesus is because they've seen so much evidence that the search ultimately leads to Him! And this threatens their very identity. Fortunately, I did not have to surrender my Jewish identity when I became a believer in Yeshua because a new Messianic fellowship was starting up in my town. Through messianic worship and teaching, my wife, children, and I have grown in the truth of the Messiah from a Jewish perspective. We have come to understand why so many 'Christians' seem ignorant of their own faith. Having cut off the Jewish roots of Christianity, many don't understand just how faithful God has been. He is faithful to the Jews through whom he brought the Messiah and he is faithful to the Gentiles whom he grafted onto 'the family tree'. I count myself blessed to understand this and although I threatened to leave my wife when she first believed, now I don't hesitate to thank the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in an appropriate manner. "Praise the Lord". |
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