Lesson 41
The Doctrine of War II – 20:10-20
This book is basically divided in half, and this last half is loving the
Lord God in the details of life and we said that this consisted of several
sections. The section we’re on right now
runs from part of 16 on through chapter 21.
This section deals with the policies that were to be true for the nation
First, holy war is the Lord’s war, not
Furthermore, there was another principle involved in this means of
recruiting; it got rid of the mice and kept the men so that when they out to
war they weren’t plagued with the Mickey Mouse crowd, and when they went out
there these people were ready to go to work.
And there were no ifs, ands, or buts, no conscientious objectors, none
of that; these men went out there and they were convinced of the righteousness
of the cause, they were convinced that it was the Lord’s will for them to be
there and therefore they moved.
In Deut.
Now here is a distinction in their foreign policy regarding military
operations. They had two categories of
conflict. Category one is outlined in
verses 10-15 and deals with the problem of the cities outside of the land to
whom they would go; there would be a conflict or something, and in verse 10
they would come to this city and they would give them an opportunity of
submission. Now when it says in verse
11, that everyone that is “found therein shall be tributaries unto thee” it
meant in that time, in that stage of history, that they would submit to the God
of the nation that conquered them. So
this was an invitation, will you submit to Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Lord, will
you submit to Him or not, that’s the issue.
And if you don’t, then we conquer you; if you do, fine. But that was the issue. In other words it would be analogous in one
sense to the gospel proclamation today.
For a very similar tactic turn to Luke 10, for the Lord Jesus Christ
almost copied this exact same format when He sent the apostles throughout the
nation. There are various things that
are not parallel, of course, these are not cities outside or afar off, but
nevertheless, look at the analogies when the Lord sent His apostles out to
preach the gospel of the kingdom. “After
these things the Lord appointed other seventy also, and sent them out two by
two before His face into every city and place, where He himself would come. [2]
Therefore said He unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are
few; pray ye, therefore the Lord of the harvest,” and you’ve all heard that but
watch what happens. Verse 3, “Go your
ways; behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves, [4] Carry neither purse,
nor bag, nor shoes; and greet no man by the way. [5] And into whatever house ye
enter, first say, Peace be to the house. [6] And if the son of peace by there,
your peace shall rest upon it; if not, it shall turn to you again. [7] And in
the same house remain, eating and drinking things as they give; for the laborer
is worthy of his hire. Go not from house to house. [8] And into whatsoever city
ye enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you. [9] And
heal the sick that are there,” etc.
Verse 10, “But into whatever city ye enter, and the receive you not, go
your ways out into the streets of the same, and say, [11] Even the very dust of
your city, which cleaves on us, we do wipe off against you’ notwithstanding, be
ye sure of this, that the kingdom of God has come near unto you. [12] But I say unto you, that it shall be
more tolerable in that day for
Back to Deuteronomy, verse 12, “if it will make no peace with you, but
will make war against thee, then you shalt besiege it. And here you have information of the fact
that the issue of the gospel is an either/or issue; no neutrality here. Intellectuals today like to hold to what we
call suspended judgment on issues. There is no suspended judgment on the gospel
of Christ. You either accept it or you
reject it; John 3:18, John 3:36, the wrath of God abides on those who have not
received the Lord Jesus Christ. So this
is an either/or issue and it was true here and those cities that would reject,
we do not want to be servants of Yahweh, we do not want to be incorporated into
the kingdom, fine, judgment falls up on
you.
But this judgment was a very select kind of judgment, and here we find a
very interesting principle in Scripture, a principle that God never judges or
holds people who have not had the right of choice, for here in verse 13 it says
something very interesting about limiting judgment to those who have chosen,
those who have exercised volition, always positive or negative but the volition
is exercised. Verse 13, “And when the
LORD thy God has delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male
thereof with the edge of the sword.” And
this means adult male, because verse14 says “the women and the little ones, and
the cattle,” etc. and this would refer to and include male children. So really the people that got the ax when
this sort of thing happened were the males, the older males. How old were these males? By analogy with Deut. 1 and Num. 1 we find
out basically they held an age of responsibility at 20 and so apparently in
these cities any adult male they considered responsible for this choice of the
city, so went the city, so went the males.
So the males were held responsible, the women and the children were not
held responsible because evidently they did not consider these people as
participants in the decision to resist or to submit. So in the decision of this particular city,
when
Here’s a principle you always want to remember, that God is a gentleman
in the way He works. He will never twist
arms, He always appeals to volition, giving people the right of choice. And people who are lined up in hell are
there, not because someone neglected them, they are there because they have
rejected what they have known of the grace of God, it has been a knowledgeable
decision on their part. God holds you
responsible for your decision. He holds
me responsible for decisions. For
example, he holds the pastor responsible to study during the week and if the
pastor is running around sipping tea with all the clubs in town, visiting the
city council two/three times a week, going around to the clubs and activities
of the town. I discovered in this town
they have an emergency first-aid station for ministers; they have a little
operation downtown where a bunch of psychiatrists have got together and you can
come there and tell them all of your problems and this fellow sits behind this
screen and you have the all the clergy in Lubbock that are cracking up and they
come and they sit in front of this screen and tell this psychiatrist all their
problems. We have this operation going
and it’s just a sign that the clergy are not following the will of God, they
are not following what God has outlined, namely that the pastor’s job is to
study and teach. Pastors aren’t doing
that so the result is something called morons.
Here’s why Biblical Christianity has such a little impact.
God is going to hold the clergy responsible; He’s going to hold me
responsible and that is why I insist that I have the right to study and
teach. I have to answer to the Lord for
that. You all have a spiritual gift so
don’t think you’re off the hook, you’re going to answer to God too because God
has invested in your life a spiritual gift and the New Testament tells you what
some of these gifts are. For example, we have the gift of teaching; some of you
should be teaching, not right away because some of you may need some doctrine,
you may need some work on your gift a little bit, but the Bible says in 1 Cor.
12, it says this in Rom. 12, it says this in Eph. 4 that at the moment of
salvation God has given every one of you a spiritual gift and you’re going to
held accountable for it like I’m going to be held accountable for mine. So some
of you should be interested in this.
Some of you should be saying do I have the spiritual gift of teaching;
some of you should be saying do I have the spiritual gift of exhortation. I see one or two people in this congregation
that I believe have this. I see some
people that I believe have been given the word of wisdom, as the New Testament
calls it, or the gift of counseling.
These are just some of the little responsibilities that God gives us and
He evaluates us as to how we respond to this.
So you see God is in the judgment or the evaluating business and back in
Deut. 20 we have the same principle operating.
God is holding these people responsible for their decisions. That is a
very unpopular thing to say today. For
example, we have people by the thousands flocking to the altar to get married,
and they make this big pronouncement, I will love you for better or worse, and
they go through this mumbo jumbo and they come out and they are married, and
then all of a sudden some problem comes up in the marriage and they say oh, oh,
incompatible, got to get divorced.
That’s wrong for two reasons, first of all, you have made a decision
before the Lord and that included for better for worse, and secondly, every
person has an old sin nature, the man has an old sin nature, the woman has an
old sin nature and they’re going to clash.
[Can’t understand word] two people in the human race this side of Eden
that have been compatible, you can’t find any, we live on this side of
Eden. Therefore this is a complete
ignorance of Bible doctrine and it disrespects the principle of holding people
responsible for their decision. This is
something that you find in the Word of God but do not find often times in our
contemporary Christian scenes.
Verse 15 is a summary statement of this first category, “Thus thou shalt
do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the
cities of these nations.” Now the policy
[can’t understand word] and you begin to develop what is called category number
two. And category number two is the
Lord’s judgment on the cities of Canaan.
Now watch this because this is a different kind of policy that God has
and you want to understand this because you will have this preached to you from
the pulpits of America, you will have it if you are a student in some religious
course. The largest morons on campus are
religious professors, they usually are men who have studied 2000 books about
the Bible but never have read the Bible themselves and they proceed to expound
on this and they always say the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath and
the God of the New Testament is a God of love.
Now isn’t that sweet. And they
always go back to this holy war concept and say oh, look at this, isn’t this
horrible, just read verse 16.
Verse 16, “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God
doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breaths,
[17] But you shalt utterly destroy them; the Hittites, and the Amorites, the
Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the LORD thy
God hath commanded thee. [18] That they teach you not to go after their abominations,
which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your
God.” And they say, oh, isn’t this
horrible, how can a God of love judge this, how can they walk in and
exterminate men, women and children. You
have to picture this thing, this is not just something in the Bible; you can
imagine an army going into a city and systematically annihilating every living
thing. You think of the cries and the
screams and the soldiers going from house to house, yank everyone out and kill
them. That’s what God told them, and we
might as well face it. How do we explain
this with a holy, righteous God? Well,
that’s the answer; we have a holy, righteous God, a God who is absolute
righteousness, and who is just.
If we look at God’s attributes, we see He’s sovereign, He’s righteous,
He’s just and He’s love. We’ll just take those four. The liberals love to point this one out, but
what about these attributes of righteousness and justice. Here you have them. Now you say does God have a case against
these people. He surely does, because as
we have found in previous evenings, that back down to around 2000 BC, at the
time of Abraham we have God making an announcement to the fathers. He says look Abraham, you and your sons and
your seed are going to spend a little time in the cooler down in Egypt, but
while they are down in Egypt I have got to allow these Amorites up here, and
these heathen, and these Canaanites to go on negative, negative, negative. Negative volition until their whole culture becomes
a culture that is structured from top to bottom on negative volition, and God
says I’m going to allow these people to stand as a memorial in history to My
holiness. I am going to allow this
culture, I am going to remove My common grace in this culture and let it sink
to the depths to which a culture can sink.
And these people are going to go on negative, and by the way, one of the
expressions of negative volition is always religion. A very religious people are usually the most
profoundly negative toward God’s grace.
And so you have the Amorites going negative, negative, negative, you
have the Canaanites and so on developing their abominable religions, and it is
this people that is mentioned here in verse 17-18. It is this people that bring down the wrath
of God. God says I’ve given you these
people and they are going to be systematically annihilated, for the reason of
verse 18, “That they teach you to do after all their abominations, which they
have done unto their gods,” in other words religion is contagious, so get rid
of it. Therefore they are going to go in
and their job was to eliminate these.
And if you are trouble with this my suggestion to you is that you do not
understand the righteousness and justice of God. And if you do not, the fastest way to come to
an understanding of the righteousness and justice of God is take a long hard
look at the cross of Jesus Christ and ask yourself, wasn’t God a little unfair
to allow His Son to die on the cross when He might have forgiven our sins some
other way. You see, we’ve got a
problem. If God did not require a life
for a life, and did not require expiation for sin, then you’ve got the
tremendous theological problem of why is it then, why is it that God gave His
only Son. The only way you can defend
against it is there to be, it had to be because God loved us enough to provide
this salvation for us. We see that
demonstrated in many places.
Verses 19-20 give us some admonitions on the limitations of this
destruction. “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against
it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe
against them; for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down
(for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege. [20]
Only the trees which you know that they are not trees for food, thou shalt
destroy and cut them down,” now the point here is that God is allowing
conversation of various elements of nature that support man’s life. We would have the corresponding principle
today that certain kinds of military weapons are dangerous in this sense, that
they are uncontrollable. For example,
biological warfare, chemical warfare, things that would destroy the life
support systems of man. For example we
have gotten to such a point technologically in our society, that a man I know
when I was studying meteorology computed that if you take three tankers, these
large oil tankers, fill them with herbicide and sink them in the Pacific Ocean,
within three years the world would suffocate because the herbicide has an
action on the sea water that kills the algae that form O2 and projects O2 into
the atmosphere. So you’ve got the
horrible situation, it just three tankers down in the Pacific Ocean, that’s all
it takes, and spread herbicide around the oceans of the world and the whole
world would suffocate, oxygen would be used up in two or three years. That’s what a thin thread of life the earth
system, life support systems are on.
Therefore God is saying in verse 19 in a small way in this time in
history that I want you to leave these systems alone. It’s true, sometimes when you are involved in
warfare you have to destroy some of these systems but I want to minimize this.
So in verse 19 God gave them the principle, it’s true I want you to destroy the
life but don’t destroy the things that are going to support life later on. It’s the type of even in holy war God has
limits.
Now because we have a special guest I have decided to shorten the sermon
and not develop the principles of military conflict and warfare as I will next
week, to answer some of the problems I know the servicemen have on Christian
warfare. I’m going to ask Mr. Arnold
Fruchtenbaum to come to the pulpit and fill us in, maybe, if he wants to on the
Seven Day War, or a testimony, it’s his choice.
Arnold Fruchtenbaum:
It’s not the Seven Day War, it’s the Six Day War. When the church first started out it was
predominately, in fact was completely Jewish but I think that changed since
then, the church is predominately Gentile; it’s gotten so where it don’t even
bother making pulpits for Jewish speakers any more.
I think I’ll give my testimony.
Usually when a person stands up to give his testimony he will go back to
his birth and maybe to his childhood.
But when a Jewish Christian gets up for his testimony, he gives some of
the events as to how he found Christ as Messiah, I think he needs to go back a
great deal further than his birth or his childhood because some of the events
that bring a Jewish person to face the issue of Jesus Christ go back a great
deal further. And I think I have to go
back to Luke 19:41, the words of Christ as He approached the city of Jerusalem for
the last time. “And when He was come
near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, [42] Saying, If thou had known even
thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now
they are hidden from thine eyes. [43] For the days shall come upon thee, that
thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep
thee in on every side, [44] And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy
children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another;
because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.”
Go over to chapter 21:24, “And they shall fall by the edge of the sword,
and shall be led away captive into all nations; and Jerusalem shall be trodden
down by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” Forty years passed after Christ spoke these
words when the Roman army came to besiege for two years and finally destroyed
it. From that point on, via 70 AD,
Jewish historians call what we call the dispersion, the Diaspora, the world
wide scattering of the Jewish people, and they were scattered worldwide. You may not realize this but there’s not a
single nation in the world today that did not have some Jewish people living
behind their borders sometime in their history.
I once heard a man say that in this day and age you will find Jewish
people on all seven continents except for the continent of the Antarctica. I have a Hebrew Christian acquaintance and
when he heard this man say this phrase that you will find a Jew on all seven continents
of the world except for the continent of the Antarctica began smirking a little
and he began laughing a little and finally he said, surely you will find a Jew
even in the Antarctica for surely you’re heard about the Eisbergs. You were just a little slow on that one.
Now I think this little joke pretty well pictures what was meant by it,
the worldwide dispersion of the Jewish people.
And in their worldwide scattered state no people have been as persecuted
as the Jewish nation has been. Mostly
when a Jewish community moves into one section of Europe sooner or later some
anti-Semitic leader would get control of that section and begin persecuting the
Jewish people behind their borders. And
so Jewish people would have to pack up their belongings and move again. So what Moses saw finally came into complete
fulfillment, “You shall be scattered to and fro among all the kingdoms of the
earth.” Soon after World War I thousands
of Jewish people began immigrating into Poland until the Polish Jewish community
was the largest Jewish community in the entire world and numbered three million
strong. Among these, this large Jewish
community, a small sect began growing until it permeated the entire communities
of world Jewry. And this little orthodox
sect called themselves the Hasidim, they claimed to be descendants of the
Pharisees [can’t hear words] of the Law of Moses. They are the ones you see pictured, the long
black coats and big beards and so on, the long silly hats as well.
Soon after World War I the leadership of this ultra orthodox group fell
to the hands of the Fruchtenbaum family.
My grandfather, his father before him, and so on down the line were
leaders of this ultra orthodox sect. To
illustrate what my grandfather had to go through to become leader, this was how
well he had to know his Scripture. By
the age of 13 he had the entire five books in Hebrew memorized word for
word. By the age of 18 he had the entire
Old Testament memorized word for word.
At the age of 21 he had his final exam.
He was given a Hebrew Bible which is thicker than the Bible I’m holding
up, and other Jewish men came along, picked a spot in the Bible and drove a
nail right on through. My grandfather
had to tell from memory every single word on every single page that that nail
penetrated in correct page by page order.
That’s Bible memory and the BMA hasn’t equaled that program since.
This was the basis of his education.
Why? Because no child of that
group, knowing the Bible was merely a base and you have know this cold by the
age of 21 so you can spend the rest of your life studying the mass of Jewish
traditions, called the Talmud and other source books and so on; you were to
spend your entire life in these other books, and the Bible was your base, and
merely your base. When he died my father
was being groomed for the leadership but then Hitler attacked Poland. By the time the war ended over half my family
were killed in the gas chambers of Treblinka and the Warsaw ghetto. But my father managed to escape into the
Soviet Union, but there he met with the Russians who were not showing the Jews
any more mercy than the Germans were, arrested my father, and in spite of the
fact that he was Jewish, they accused him of being a Nazi spy and shipped him
out to a concentration camp in Siberia.
And there he remained the next two years.
In 1941 Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Russia wanting the support
of the Polish government in exile asked for it and Poland said okay on one
condition, that condition being that you release all Polish citizens out of
your concentration camps. So my father
was released. He then crossed back into
European Russia since the Germans were [can’t understand words] and remained in
Siberia for the remainder of the war. It
was for this reason that I was born in Siberia during the Second World War in
1943 and this will explain a portion of the accent with which I am speaking.
When the war ended in 1945 all Polish citizens inside Russia were given
permission to return to Poland. Since
both my parents were Polish citizens they decided to go back. Being at the ripe young age of only three
years old, too young to make my own living, I thought it best to tag along with
them for the time being. And so I went
with them, we crossed European Russia, heading for Poland but then we entered a
territory called the Ukraine, which lies between Poland and Russia. And there my mother caught typhus fever and
was placed in a hospital. Under the
communist system my father had to go to work immediately so to the factory he
went and there was nothing left to do with me but put me in one of the Russian
orphanages. The orphanage into which I
was placed was a very [can’t understand words] of the Second World War, no food
was coming in, disease was spreading throughout the orphanage so bad an average
of ten children were dying off per day.
About every day I would see about ten children being taken out for
burial. The only food I had during those
weeks in the orphanage was that every night after work my father would come
with two slices of Russian black bread and some water; that was my meal for
that day. I grew weaker and weaker until
I also caught that same disease killing off the others and they gave me up for
dead. I think by the grace of God my
father managed to find an older woman who took me out of the orphanage and
nursed me back to health, and then my mother recovered, we finally left Russian
and moved into a small Jewish ghetto in Poland, sponsored predominately by the
Roman Catholic Church.
We lived in Poland for a year and that was responsible for another
portion of the accent in which I am using, and there’s more to come, we lived
there for about a year. After a few
months in Poland the Jewish Passover came along. As you learned this morning, for eight days
we are only permitted to eat unleavened bread and no other type of bread. So naturally our mothers began baking the
special Passover bread for the celebration of the Passover. Now this Passover was to be a very special
Passover for us for this Passover, 1947, we were not only going to celebrate
our redemption from the Egyptians but also our redemption from the Germans as
well. So we were looking forward to this
Passover in a very special way. At the
same time that the bread was being baked, a small Roman Catholic boy
disappeared, and soon the Polish Catholic hierarchy began spreading the rumor,
that in order for the Jews to make unleavened bread we have to have the blood
of a Christian. They accused us of
kidnapping this boy using his blood to make unleavened bread. You might have heard about a movie called The Fixer, if it comes around go see it
because it will show a Jewish person who is accused of that same crime, killing
a Christian person, using his blood to make unleavened bread. If you want to see why Jews have a natural
antagonism against anything Christian, that movie brings it out very well.
Now when the Passover came this rumor began spreading all over Poland
and spread out of [can’t understand words.]
That first night as we sat around the table, at our Jewish ghetto,
Polish mobs were formed with the help of the Polish police, the leadership of
the Polish Catholic hierarchy and they began to raid the Jewish ghettoes all
over Poland slaughtering Jewish mothers and kids in the streets of Poland. This was my first introduction to Jesus
Christ but not as my Savior, not as my Messiah, not as someone who came to die
for me, quite the reverse, someone that I almost had to die for because as the
Catholic priests led the mobs in they wore big huge crosses. And before they would kill individual Jewish
person they would call out a line Polish which went like this: “You killed
Christ so we’ll kill you.” That’s when I
first heard the name Jesus Christ, “You killed Christ so we’ll kill you.” And that night was a great slaughter,
Passover 1947.
And so I too grew up with that natural prejudice against anything to do
with Christian. The rabbis tell us that
should we ever pronounce the name Christ upon our lips we’ll receive a curse
from God. When we walk down the streets
of Poland and passed by a church with a cross on top of it we always turned our
backs to it for the cross never meant a way of salvation to us but a way of
death. Even to this day Hebrew
Christians never wear crosses. You will
not find a cross on any of our Hebrew Christian centers because it is a sign of
antagonism against Jewish people.
But one good thing did result from the Polish life and that was the
workings of the Israeli underground. And
they began to work with the Polish border police and managed to bribe them on
one condition, that for a period of thirty days they would allow any Jewish
person to cross the border into no-man’s land unmolested. And soon word got thru to us from the
underground that we have thirty days to cross that border for those who wanted
to take their chances. My father decided
to take his chances, took my mother and myself, we got ourselves into a group
of Polish and Russian Jews and began walking on foot the many, many miles to
the Polish border. When we approached
the border we were stopped by the Polish Border Police. There we identified ourselves as Jews, upon
which the Polish Border Police took their guns, put them behind their backs and
look skyward. As they looked upward,
ignoring everything, our party of Polish and Russian Jews crossed to no-man’s
land between Poland and Czechoslovakia.
Now it did not take a whole lot to bribe these Polish Border Police; all
it took was a carton of American cigarettes, one carton for one Jewish life;
because American cigarettes came very high priced in the days following the
Second World War and you can purchase the life of Jews for cartons of
cigarettes. So cigarette smoking may be
hazardous to your health, but it saved mine.
Excuse the pun, that was one day I did walk a mile for a Camel.
We were quite a disorganized lot when we crossed the border but the
underground got us organized into a unified group and began marching us again
on foot thru the Czechoslovak forest, heading for the Czech Austrian border
where a similar arrangement had been worked out with the Czech guards as
well. So after many weeks for the
underground crossing Czechoslovakia, the day before we approached the
Czech-Austrian border, the government of Czechoslovakia fell and communism took
over. The Czech guards were removed and
the Russian guards came in and these Russians were given strict orders to allow
no one through but Greeks, Greeks returning home from concentration camps. Now like I said, our party was made up
strictly of Russian and Polish Jews, not a single Greek among us. So once again the Israeli underground
provides a plan and ordered us to burn anything and everything that had our
names on it and so that night in the bonfires of the Czechoslovak forest all
birth certificates, all marriage licenses, and everything else that had our
name on it got burned in the fire. The
next day we were told to pose as Greeks and posing as Greeks we approached the
Russians at the border. Let me repeat,
not one of us was a Greek. Not one of us
could speak Greek, but neither could the Russians. So posing as Greeks we fooled the Russian
guards, then crossed the border into Austria posing as Greeks. So I was Jew first but I was also a Greek.
And then the American MP’s took over, got us into Austria, crossed into
West Germany, where they handed us over to the British which we didn’t
appreciate, and the next five years the British Displaced Person’s camp was my
home. Five years, and that was frankly
another portion of the accent in which I am speaking. Now these were days that the Palestinian Jews
were fighting the British for independence and so the British would not allow
any Jews to enter Palestine but kept us in their Displaced Person’s camps and
moved us from one camp to another for the next five years.
After one event occurred in these DP camps that would eventually lead me
to face the question of Jesus Christ. Then the DP camps had a representative of
the American Board of Missions to the Jews whose main job was to supply food
and clothes to immigrant Jews escaping from behind the iron curtain. So naturally we came in contact with him. And
in the month of October, 1948 he had that month’s issue of the Chosen People
magazine, and on the cover was the New York headquarters of the American Board
of Missions to the Jews. He tore that
cover up, October, 1948, gave it to my mother and told her that should we come
to the United States to look up these people, they’ll be able to help us. Well mother folded that piece of paper and
put it in her purse and kept it in that purse for three solid years. Now I’ve been married a little more than a
year, and in that lovely year of marriage I watched my wife go through
elaborate ceremony of changing her purse; some things go out, some things go
in, usually a lot more goes in than ever comes out. So for me to see and watch my mother keep
that same piece of paper for those three years in that same purse has done more
to convince me of the doctrine of predestination than the book of Ephesians has
been able to.
In 1951 receiving my basic [can’t understand word] education at DP camps
we came to the United States, visited Brooklyn, New York and that’s where all
of the rest of the accent came from in which I am speaking. Soon after we settled in Brooklyn, which is a
Jewish colony, basically, and my mother took that slip of paper out and went to
visit New York headquarters. There she
talked to one of the workers who witnessed to her, took our name and address
down, and told us that if and when they opened up a branch near us, we would be
contacted. That was 1951. We did not hear from them until six years
later, 1957. During that time I lived in
a Jewish neighborhood, all my friends were Jewish, I went to public schools but
they were 95% Jewish. So I came into
almost no contact with Gentiles and definitely no contact with Christians. In my mind Gentiles and Christians were one
and the same thing.
In 1957 the American Board opened their East New York branch in
Brooklyn, one mile from our home. So they
took out all the addresses they had of contacts within the area and sent out
their workers for visitation, invitations and meetings. And [can’t understand name] was one of their
workers and she invited us over to their Hebrew Christian meetings. Now when I first heard that term to me that
was a rank contradiction in terms—Hebrew Christian. As far as I was concerned, you have to be one
or the other, you couldn’t possibly be both.
For someone to call themselves a Hebrew Christian he’d have to be schizophrenic,
thinking he has two personalities in one body.
But I was challenged to find out what this unique little sect was all
about, and so when the first meeting came I went. And there I received my second introduction
to Jesus Christ, that was a far cry from the first one I heard back in
Poland. And to make a long story short,
after much mental struggle and so on, and patience on their part, eventually in
Brooklyn in 1957 I received Christ as my personal Savior and Messiah and joined
the ranks of schizophrenics with the others.
A year after my experience with Christ I moved out to Los Angeles
California where another part of my accent was added, and I spent my high
school career in LA. But in my four
years of LA high schooling my father began to more and more bitterly oppose the
things that I held, the things that I believed, until the summer of the
beginning of my final year of high school he completely quit speaking to
me. I lived at home for the entire year
of my senior year in high school but he never said a single word to me for the
entire year; not a word passed from him to me.
About two months before graduation he sent me a message which simply
said upon graduation I would have to leave home for we can’t have a Jewish
believer in Christ in this household. So
I graduated high school in June of 1962 and now I have to learn how to trust
God in a very new way. Three years
earlier I accepted Him for my salvation; there was no doubt in my mind that
should I expire I would immediately come into the presence of God. But now three years later I began to learn
something else about this God of mine, that He still works today as He worked
many years before, that I have to trust Him not only for my salvation but simply
for my day to day daily needs.
When I left home I had a total of $120.00 in my pocket and God was
leading me to return to New York. Honest, to New York, if you find it hard to
believe God would lead anyone there, he led me there. It took me two weeks to go from California to
New York City; two weeks! By the time I
got to New York I was only $14.00 poorer than when I started out. All along the road there was always somebody
there to supply my needs, whether it was a ride, a meal or a bed. So I spent the summer in New York. That fall I had already been accepted to
begin training in a Christian college.
But that was a private school which was about $2,000 a year; all I had
in my pocket at that point was $20.00, so much for all Jews being rich. And, for $20.00 I told God, look Lord, I’m
going to work a year first, save up some money, after saving some money I’ll
start college a year later. But God did
not give me any peace whatsoever about that decision and … [blank spot]
…wanting to go around the country which I consider to this day to be my
homeland [Israel]. But the program that
I was signed up under was one $2,400, but about a month before it was time to
leave all I had saved up was $800. I was
$1,600 short, but a month before departure came I received a letter from the
United States government which simply said that they were giving me a U.S.
government grant for $1,624 to be used for study from Israel. That was $24.00 more than I needed which was
good for the U.S. government; usually they take more than they give. But then you can see it has to be the work of
the grace of God and nothing else. And
it was a grant which means I don’t have to pay a penny of this back, it was
simply a gift to be used for studying in Israel. So I spent a year there, saw the biggest
thing of my life, having spent five years teaching and preaching the Jews would
retake the old city of Jerusalem, of course the Scripture, but I was exactly
four blocks away when the Jordanian forces surrendered the old city of
Jerusalem to the Jewish forces. More detail
maybe some other time and next time I may bring my slides of the Six Day War to
show you.
I left Israel two months after the war, began my personal studies at
Dallas Seminary and working for Dallas Branch of the American Board of Missions
to the Jews. One thing that is missing
from my testimony, so in closing let me summarize it. Eight years ago I met a girl; eight years ago
I began courting this girl but she was a stubborn little female and I had to
court her a solid seven years… seven years before she finally said yes to marry
me. Now I spent a lot of time figuring
out why she was so stubborn and I finally think I got it. Number one, she’s of German descent; number
two, she’s a Presbyterian, put those two together you’ve got one stubborn
Gentile on your hands. So I worked just
as hard for her as Jacob, our father, worked for his wife. But just as sort of ceremony, that scared me
to death, it really did, because my wife has two sisters. Before the Jewish wedding is finalized, there
is a wine glass which is put on the floor, and the bridegroom smashes that
glass and this officially makes you man and wife in a Jewish wedding. So the glass was put down, before I cracked
it I took a peek under the veil to make sure it was the right one and then I smashed
the glass. We Jews learn by
experience.
So I stand before you testifying of two things. Number one, the grace of God is still working
among the Jewish people. God has not
cast off His people whom He foreknew, for I too am an Israelite. And you have heard one Hebrew Christian’s
testimony but this can be multiplied in the thousands. There is a Hebrew Christian standing before
you right now, there’s another Hebrew Christian in the audience; the grace of
God is working among the Jewish people. And secondly I am testifying to you
about the work of the American Board of Missions to the Jews. The first touching, the first time we had
contact with them was way back in