- You believe in Jesus and you're Jewish?
If you knew biblical Hebrew,
if you only knew the Hebrew Bible,
if you could read it and the original language,
then you would know that Jesus can't be the Messiah
and that was something I took as a deep challenge.
And then my investigation went from a Bachelor's degree
to a Master's degree to a PhD
to the beginning of a second PhD.
And the more that I studied the Hebrew Bible,
the more I studied how the New Testament
is reading the Old Testament,
the more I realized that Jesus is the Messiah.
I grew up in New Jersey,
very well aware of our Jewish identity.
I do remember that whenever my dad was really, really angry,
the worst thing he could ever say was "Jesus Christ!"
My mom started to become more and more spiritual
and she started to read the Bible.
She started to read the Old Testament,
what we called it or the Hebrew Bible.
She became more and more curious
intellectually with Jesus.
She came home with "the very good news" to tell my father,
"Murray, I've been searching the scriptures.
I've been reading.
I've been studying and Jesus is the Messiah."
My father started to cry.
He said, "I thought I married a Jew.
How could you betray our people?
How could you do this?
Please tell me, why do you believe in Jesus?
But please don't show me the New Testament."
Because, of course, we knew Christians hate Jews.
Christians believe in the New Testament.
The New Testament must be anti-Semitic!
As she read to him Isaiah 53 my father got very angry
and he stopped her and he said, "I told you, Lorraine,
I don't wanna hear the New Testament!!"
And she stopped and she said, "Well, Murray,
this is our side of the book.
This is not the New Testament.
This is a prophecy from 700 years before Jesus was born."
Well, my father was in shock.
Over the next several months, something very strange
had happened in our family.
So suddenly, up until that point, my mom and dad
felt very insistent upon sending me to Hebrew school.
They were very clear about our Jewish identity
and now, suddenly, they start to talk to me about Jesus
and it was very confusing to me.
I didn't understand.
I thought that my mom and dad had an identity crisis.
Something definitely was wrong with them.
And I remember them bringing me to a service.
My mom and dad decided to go back to the house.
I was with my mom's friend, Linda, in her car.
It was a blue Mercedes and we're driving home
and she says to me, "So Seth,
when are you going to accept Yahshua as your Messiah?"
I didn't know quite what to say,
but I said, "Linda", I said, "give me a break.
I'm young.
I want to live a little.
I want to experience life.
I want to enjoy."
And she looked at me, she said, "Seth, did you know
that Jesus could come back at any moment now?"
I said, "okay".
Now, we're on the highway. We're driving.
She's like, "he could come back at any moment!"
And I said, "okay, so what?"
She said, "well, you know what happened
if he came back right now?"
I said, "no."
"I would be taken up and I'd be with Jesus forever
and you would be in the passenger seat of my car
going 55 miles per hour all alone without a driver
and you would crash, die, and go to hell!"
This is true.
"Jesus, don't come back."
"Jesus, don't come back!"
"Jesus, don't come back!!"
I was pleading, don't come back.
And so that was when my prayer life began.
I had very, very serious childhood asthma.
I was on heavy medications and one of the medications
I was on was called 'Prednisone'
and prednisone was something that deeply affected my moods.
It also affected my shape.
I remember looking in the mirror and I was fat.
My face was swollen up.
It was red.
I already believed in my heart of hearts
that I was an ugly kid.
I was the ugliest kid in my class
and so I grew up seeing myself as ugly.
And then with the prednisone,
I just remember detesting myself.
There's nothing worse in the world
than to look at the mirror and see yourself as ugly.
And again, it wasn't just an ugliness
of my physical appearance.
It was the ugliness of my inability to overcome
my own weaknesses, my inability to free myself from sin.
I was convinced that God hated me, too,
and I started to see that I was ugly in God's eyes.
And so I went through this never-ending cycle of praying.
And so it was as if I would be born again
and then born again-again, and then born again-again-again
and born again-again-again.
And no matter what I did, no matter how do I prayed,
this tread sense of terror
that I was a dirty, rotten sinner, ugly in God's eyes,
that God hated me, and that the first chance,
he was gonna send me to hell
and it really scared me and I had no hope.
Several years later, I found myself in this service
and the speaker, he was a pastor.
And for whatever reason, he kept looking my way
and it was odd because he didn't know me
and there were a couple hundred people there.
And he kept looking at me and it felt like he was exposing
all the things I hope nobody else would see around me,
all the things I hated about myself,
all the things I believed God hated about me.
And so I'm sitting there and I'm very uncomfortable.
And at the end of the service,
I just remember him just inviting people to stand up.
I stood up and I looked forward
and it's as if I saw Yeshua (Jesus) waiting for me
and his arms were stretched out and up until that moment,
his arms were always stretched out in anger.
He wanted to strike me down, but this time,
for the first time, his arms were open
and all he wanted to do is to hug me.
All he wanted to do is embrace me.
And it was as if I heard, "I did this for you.
The scars are for you.
These wounds are for you.
Of course, I love you.
Of course, I accept you.
I came for sinners."
And I guess it was the first time
that I recognized that Jesus loves sinners
and I think for the first time in my life,
I no longer saw myself as ugly.
I no longer believe that lie that I was ugly in God's eyes.
And for the first time,
I actually truly felt loved from the inside out
and I knew that God loved me.
The chains broke.
I was new. I was free.
Well, as I started to get more and more excited
about the fact that I was a new creation,
that it was something that God did supernaturally,
I wanted to share.
And one of the things that started happening
as I shared with my family, "wait a minute,
you believe in Jesus and you're Jewish?
This just can't be, and in fact,
you're saying that Jesus is the Messiah
based on the Old Testament.
Who do you think you are?
Do you know better than the rabbis?
In fact, if you really could read Hebrew,
you would know that you're misreading the text,
that Jesus couldn't be the Messiah.
You're trusting on a Christian translation."
I remember thinking to myself, you know what?
I have to know biblical Hebrew
and I have to know it really, really well.
After I finished my first PhD,
I started another PhD in Hebrew Bible here in Israel.
I can put all of my intellectual weight on the text itself
and the more that I studied the Hebrew Bible,
the more I studied how the New Testament
is reading the Old Testament,
the more I realized that Jesus is the Messiah.
This is true, not just on a heart level.
Not just because I know that God has redeemed me
from my sin.
Not just because I know that he's given me a new life
and hope and that I know that I'm beautiful in His eyes.
Not because of me, but because of Him,
but there's the other side of it,
and it's the head side of it.
That God calls us as a people to search,
to search the scriptures, to study to see if in fact,
Jesus is the Messiah, and I'm convinced with all my heart
to the extent that I've studied all these years
that to understand Moses, to understand the prophets,
to understand the writings, is in fact, to see Yeshua (Jesus),
the greatest Jew who ever lived,
the Savior of our people and the Savior of the world.