A Voice from Heaven: A Messianic Rabbi’s Journey Back to Faith, with Rabbi Marty Waldman

*This transcript was generated by AI, and may contain transcription errors. Please refer to the video, or contact us with any questions or discrepancies.*

While I’m weeping, I hear this voice, I can tell you now looking back, that in Jewish terms or Hebraic terms, there’s a term called ko. It means literally the daughter of the voice, but it means a voice from heaven. And in the New Testament, you read about Jesus getting baptized and there’s a bot Cole that comes out of heaven. This is my son in whom I’m well pleased. And that that’s what happened to me. I heard this bought coal. Was it real? Was it just in my mind, in my heart? I couldn’t tell you, but I heard it. It’s plain as day. Say, Marty, you have come back to the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Welcome back to another episode of the Covenant and Conflict Podcast. We have a very special episode today because with us is Rabbi Marty Waldman, who is the founding rabbi at Baruch Hashem, which is a congregation that is in Dallas. We’ve had great relationship with them for years. And Marty is also the founder of TJC two towards Jerusalem Council too, which is an organization that seeks for unity in the body of Messiah. So Rabbi Marty, thank you for being here.
Oh, love to be here with you.
That was a good intro, right? We hit the two big blocks.
Yeah, that’s good.
I’m sure there’s many other blocks that we didn’t hit, but I’d love for you to just talk a little bit about your journey, planting em and then starting TJC two and where that vision comes from.
Yes. Well, for me, the starting point can’t be planting T em because I have to go back just a little ways to the starting point where actually the Lord touched my heart and I got saved and I turned to him.
It’s a great place to start,
Which was in itself a supernatural event. And I won’t stay here long, but I feel like it’s important to go back. No,
Please.
So those sorts of things were happening. And now I look back and I say, okay, those were actually supernatural events that I didn’t recognize as such, and I just ignored them until a supreme event came, which was preceded by the birth of our first child, my oldest daughter, Sabra. And so Marlene and I were living way up in Washington state, and we were two free people, kind of hippies and musicians, artists. And the Lord really touched my heart through some very supernatural events. And I’m not going to go into all that right now, but just to say or suffice it to say that the Lord’s supernaturally came to me, I had never been to church in my life. I just never, I wasn’t reading any scripture. I never saw the New Testament. I mean, I wasn’t drawn to any of it, but some supernatural things happened to me. I read a few chapters of the New Testament and was invited to a Bible study, which I didn’t want to go to, but I did read some books about Jesus, which I had never read before.
And were you culturally Jewish high holidays or were you observant? Oh, I was
Brought up as a traditional Jew. I mean, I went to synagogue every Shabbat, every Saturday. We had Shabbat dinner every Friday night, we celebrated all the holidays. I was not orthodox, but we traversed between going to conservative synagogue and orthodox synagogue depending on where we lived at the time. Both of my parents are Holocaust survivors. They were, I mean they are, and they both are with the Lord now. And by the way, they both came to the Lord towards the end of their lives and which was a blessing for me to know. So I grew up with this background of being the Son of Holocaust survivors. And for me, believing in Jesus was more than just hard. I mean for me, if I knew in my mind and in my heart, if I believed in Jesus, if I ever even dared to consider Jesus, it was a betrayal to my Holocaust family. It was a betrayal to the greater Jewish community that I was part of, and I just couldn’t do it. So that’s why I’m saying these supernatural events, the Lord intervened and started touching my heart and drawing me supernaturally without going through that whole story. I just wanted to say that I was by myself on New Year’s morning. The Lord had already been drawing me during 1974, kind of the tail end of the Jesus movement
In California. But I was not in California. I lived in California for a while, but now I was up in Washington state. And so on New Year’s day of 1975, new Year’s morning, Marlene and I lived a fairly rustic lifestyle. So we heated our house with wood, we cooked on a wood cook stove, and I got up early to heat up the house, start the wood cook stove, wood-burning cook stove. And I sat there reading, I had read several books now, and I’m reading this last of these books about Jesus. I would not recommend it to anyone. So anyway, I finished this one book out of the others. I’ve read the last book and I shut it up. And I thought, well, I was starting to envision Jesus with long hair, kind of like a hippie, really into the arts of healing. Not supernaturally,
I
Wasn’t there, didn’t believe in the supernatural healing thing, but I believed that Jesus learned the art of healing from some masters.
And
That’s where I was sort of new age. And so I thought, you know what? Jesus was a cool guy. If I lived 2000 years ago, I might’ve even been one of his followers. But it was all not supernatural. It was just natural because here’s, I’m also a guy with long hair and was into the healing kind of things and herbs. And anyway, all of a sudden, and I didn’t know where this came from, but the Holy Spirit fell on me. I didn’t know it was the Holy Spirit at the time. Of course, just a power fell on me at the time and I was by myself in the living room, and I just began to weep. I couldn’t control myself. I didn’t know why. I just began to weep. I was weeping so much. I put my hands over my face and put my head on my knees, just weeping and weeping, and I’m going, wow, Jesus is for real. All I could say Jesus is for real. I had no theological background. I had no clue. I didn’t know Jesus was the son of the living God, the Messiah. Jesus is for real. And then while I’m weeping, I hear this voice, I can tell you now looking back that in Jewish terms or Hebraic terms, there’s a term called bot Cole.
It means literally the daughter of the voice, but it means a voice from heaven. And in the New Testament, you read about Jesus getting baptized and there’s a bot Cole that comes out of heaven. This is my son whom I’m well pleased. And that’s what happened to me. I heard this bot Cole, was it real? Was it just in my mind, in my heart? I couldn’t tell you, but I heard it. It’s plain as day. Say, Marty, you have come back to the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And I knew what that meant. So I knew that Jesus, from that moment on, I knew that he was the promised Messiah, not just for me, but for our people. I had no clue how that related to the Gentile world, how that related to the Christian
World.
I had no clue about Christians. The closest thing I ever got to was I heard a couple of people singing hymns, which I didn’t care for, just wasn’t my culture. So I wanted to start there because that started me on a journey. I went to friend’s bible study. My friend who invited us went to his Bible study and he wasn’t the teacher. He was a hippie like me. We were really good friends. And I got into this house where this Bible study was taking place, and almost everyone in the room, I’d say 95% of the people in this house, in this giant living room were either hippies or ex-convicts who mostly were not allowed into the church, but we were there. And I felt quite at home because everybody looked like we did.
And the guy after he finished doing his Bible study, I didn’t know it, but he was an elder at a local church. There was a family, the husband of the family in the group lost his job. And the guy gets a gallon jar, a gallon jar, like a pickle jar, puts it on top of the piano and says, okay, everybody, this family, they need funds. He lost his job. They’re really in need, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean everybody in that place stood up, reached in their pockets, pulled out their wallets, opened up their purses, and took all the money they had out and stuffed that jar full. I don’t know how much was in there, but it was a lot of money. And I had never seen anything like that before. I thought, wow, whatever I’m involved in here seems real. And I went to church the next day to this guy’s church and walked in. We were late. It must have been that church must have been considered a mega church back then. They had about 3000 people in the building.
Geez.
And this is back in 1975. Wow. In January. And so my first real church experience, I walked in, there’s not a seat open in the place. We had to go up to the balcony. We finally found a couple of seats and listened to the message that the pastor gave. And I got convicted by what he said he was teaching out of Matthew four, which interestingly enough is Jesus Yeshua quoting Deuteronomy and quoting the Torah. So it rang a bell in my heart, in my psyche, and it was, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And I thought, wow, this is really striking a note in me. And so when the pastors asked everybody to pray, he was given an altar call afterwards, everybody bow your heads. He goes downstairs first. Anybody who wants to receive Jesus, just raise your hand. Then he goes up to the balcony. Anybody who wants to receive Jesus, just raise your hand. Remember, this is my first real church experience. So I didn’t know what, my eyes were closed. Everyone else went in Rome. And so I wasn’t looking. I didn’t see, I thought there must be 35 people around me raising their hands.
I raised mine. And he says, okay, thank you. You can open your eyes. And he looks up at the balcony and he says, come down here. I’m looking around to see who’s getting up. No one gets up. No one in the entire church. So I’m not getting up either. Yeah, I’m scared to death. This is a foreign environment.
I knew I should open my eyes.
This is a foreign environment to me. And with my Holocaust background, the church was pretty cruel at times, totally to the Jewish people. And so here I am in the midst of a church and I’m thinking, wow, what’s going on here? And my heart is pounding out of my chest. And I look at Marlene and she says, you want me to go with you? And I said, yeah.
And so this preacher says, I know it’s a long way to go pointing right at me, but it’s not as far as Jesus had to carry the cross. And it’s like scaring me now. But I got up, I went down all the way down the balcony to the front. My friends who invited us to the Bible study to begin with, the night before they met me down at the front, this elder who taught the Bible study walked down to the front and whispered something to the pastor who was a Pentecostal church. And I don’t know what he whispered, but afterwards, the pastor stands up in front of these 3000 people, raises his hands and he says, praise God. I think they talk like that in the Pentecostal church back then. And he said, today, a son of Abraham has come to his Messiah. And I thought, oh, okay, not so bad. So my whole life was changed. I went back to another Bible study. A couple of weeks later, that same elder called me up, laid hands on me, and I experienced true deliverance from darkness and evil and demonic stuff because I was a new age. I mean, I was in all kinds of weird things and I experienced some real deliverance, and I’ve had a real in feeling of the Holy Spirit. So I got up and all I could do is feel like I just love everybody.
I’m just now loving everybody. And so someone prophesied over me at that point, and I can’t remember who it was, maybe it was that elder saying that I was going to dance with my own people in the sun and bring Yeshua. So after that, I had an insatiable desire and a burning to bring Yeshua back to my own Jewish community. And lo and behold, I was young, naive, didn’t know a thing. So who did I decide to talk to first? My family, my parents. So I drove all the way down. My wife and I drove all the way down to California where my parents lived, and I at least knew enough to divide and conquer, which is not necessarily true.
And your parents at this time, I know that your son we’ve had on the show before, and he said basically you came out the Holocaust one of two ways, either an atheist because there’s no way God could let that happen or super religious. That’s right. Because there’s no way that we were still be
Here. And I had, both of my parents were like that in my family. My father was an atheist. He ran into his rabbi in the camp where he was, and his rabbi said, Herschel, my dad’s name was Herschel Hirsch. There cannot be a God who would allow this to happen to our people. So my dad was young and impressionable, of course, trying to figure everything out in his young twenties. And
For a spiritual leader to say that,
And for a spiritual leader to say that my dad lost his faith right there and didn’t regain it until he was an old man and had come to visit our congregation multiple times. And this wonderful couple in our congregation who came to visit him almost every single day, just to sit with him and talk with him, bring him his favorite foods, et cetera, et cetera. And after six months, the man of the couple said, my dad’s English name was Harry, says, Harry, can I pray with you? And my dad said, okay, but you need a kippah. A yamaka. My dad said, a yamaka. And so he goes out to his car and brings two in, one for himself, one for my dad. And he sees this, this is a moment, and he says, Harry, do you know who Yeshua is? And my dad says Yes, because he’s been coming to our services every day, every Saturday for two years by this point.
But listen, I have to tell you, this is a caveat. Every Saturday after service, I would say, dad, what do you think about Yeshua? He said, there is no God, but if you like it, it’s okay. He just stuck with there is no God. But now the Lord had primed his heart as the Holy Spirit does. And he says, Harry, would you like to receive Yeshua into your heart as the Messiah? As your Messiah? And my dad said yes. So he prayed with my dad, and my dad prayed. And for the last few months of my dad’s life, his whole life changed. It’s sort of an amazing story. Same thing, similar. Something similar happened to my mom in the last part of her life. Wow. So
Anyway, so you’re saying you drove back after you found Yeshua?
I drove back
And your dad’s
And I took my dad out first separately, and I said, dad, I believe that Jesus is the Messiah, our Messiah. He says, oh, he says, Marty, he says, you’re going to go to the church. They’re going to just pass a plate. Take your money. It’s all a racket. And I said, oh, okay. Well, so he just brushed me off.
So I took my mom out later and my mom, who was much more religious, I took her for a drive and I stopped some random street pulled over. I said, mom, I need to tell you something. She said, okay. She says, mom, I said, mom, I believe that Jesus is our messiah. My mother’s reaction was hysteria. She said she didn’t say anything. She just began to scream. She literally went hysterical. And for I don’t know how long, it seemed like an internal at the time, she just was hysterical. I’m guessing it was probably lasted 15 minutes or more, 20 minutes. I don’t know if it seemed like that. Anyway, when she calmed down enough out of her hysteria, she says, Marty, you’ve gone over to Hitler’s side. How can you do this to our people? Of course, that was like, woo.
Yeah,
That just about knocked me off my horse. But I knew what had happened to me supernaturally how I turned to the Lord, and otherwise I would’ve totally given up Jesus at that moment. So neither one of my parents were ready to hear anything about Yeshua, but it was years later that certain things happened in their lives that opened their hearts. So anyway, we sold our house in Washington state. We moved to Texas by an invitation by Marlene’s family, Marlene’s parents who welcomed me into the family. And I ended up going to a Bible college in Dallas and spent turned a four year program into five years. But it was interesting because when I believed in Yeshua, believed in Jesus, it gave me an insatiable appetite to know who I am in Yeshua, who I am in Jesus, and where I fit in the body. I did not feel comfort at all in the church. I just didn’t feel comfortable. It is not that I didn’t love the people, I loved the people, just the culture was so different. I just couldn’t get used to it. And plus all these other background issues from the Holocaust and how Jews were treated during the Holocaust by Christians, it was hard for me to get over it.
Yeah, totally.
So it’s not that I didn’t go to church, I did, but it was very difficult for me. And Marlene recognized that Marlene did not grow up Jewish, and she recognized it was hard on her because our children were in the church and her parents were in the church. So there were like three generations of us in her family, on her side of the family that were in church together. So it became a very emotional decision,
But
She could recognize, she saw that it was difficult for me, and the Lord had put on my heart to start a congregation. Why did I want to start a congregation? Because not only because I’m Jewish, but I wanted other Jewish people to know Yeshua
In
A more Jewish environment. And I wanted other Jewish believers, other followers of Jesus who were Jewish, to be able to worship God from a Jewish perspective. Of course, magnifying Jesus New Testament and have that kind of a congregation. Well, so we set off and did that, and we started em.
Was there any playbook, because I see you as one of the founding fathers of the
Modern
Messianic
Movement. The playbook was make mistakes and learn from your mistakes.
Yeah. I know from the seventies there was a lot of Jewish people that I think found Yeshua and then started really questioning what it means to be Jewish and maintain Jewish identity. So what did that look like for you? Did you just take what you knew of the synagogue and merge it to now finding Yeshua
Or It was trial and error? It really was. And because, let me see if I can tell it by telling the story of it. So we started getting together, a small group started praying together, and we formed a congregation, which we then called Bro Hashem. And it started to grow, I don’t know, it was a year, maybe two years into this endeavor when we got our first Torah. And let me just share with you how important that was and whether Jewish people would admit it or not admit it. That kind of element of Jewish life and Jewish life itself is quite important. We’ve got the Torah and we dedicated the Torah to the Lord and our congregation one Saturday morning at our service. And as we walk the Torah around the congregation, which is traditional, the Holy Spirit just fell on the whole congregation. Everybody just began to weep. People who were sick were healed. Nobody said anything. We were walking the Torah. I mean, there was some music in the background. We walked the Torah around the congregation and people were weeping, praising God, getting healed. I know that all sounds kind of, wow, where’d that come from?
And it was new to me too to see that. But it was when I realized that God was moving supernaturally within a Jewish context. And we began to grow not only in scripture, but also in Jewish understanding and tradition. And it’s not that we decided to do everything at once, but this was still a growth process, still a process. But yes, we adopted some of the Jewish traditions that I grew up with. Most synagogues don’t have a worship band and the whole congregation singing, but we did that too. So we adopted some things that we felt were really right in the church. And the combination of those two things in balance, it just made a huge difference. And I think I’m sharing all this with you because I didn’t realize till some years later how much I actually still resented the church and held the church itself at bay because of my background and my mistrust. But when we started TJC two tour Jerusalem Council too, and that was also another kind of supernatural event for me. We started tour Jerusalem council too, some years after we started Ham. I realized through the beginning process of that, excuse me, pardon me, that I had this resentment, this current resentment.
Here I am in a reconciliation ministry between Jews and Gentiles and realizing, wait a minute, I’m teaching other people how to find unity between Jews and Gentiles, and I’m teaching it and preaching it. And here I still have this resentment in my own heart. And the pinnacle of discovering this, it was when I was invited to be a speaker at one of the Big Promise Keepers events back in the,
Yeah,
Can’t remember when that was. No, late nineties. I think it was 97.
Yeah,
1997. I was on the board of directors for Promise Keepers at that point.
Huge men’s ministry, right?
Huge men’s ministry. And at that point, I was the president of the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, which was a wonderful organization back then. And we had about 130 or 40 Messianic synagogues
Under the umbrella.
Under this umbrella.
Yeah.
Anyway, so Promise Keepers invited me to be a board member. They invited me to be a speaker and help plan this big event in Washington DC where they were calling men from all over the country together to pray and humble before the Lord. It was called Stand in the Gap, and it was supposed to be a million men. People were hoping that a million would show up, but people thought it was pretty farfetched in the end, it turned out it was almost a million and a half. And so I was on stay backstage. In the meantime, they called and they said, we already have too many speakers. We need you to pray instead of speak, just pray or pray over repentance on behalf of the Jewish community. And my friend John Dawson and I were on the same phone call. And after we hung up, I said, John, I can’t do this. Nobody’s appointed me to repent on the behalf of the Jewish community. I just can’t do it.
What do they bring? Repent for? Or just rep,
Right? They didn’t tell me what to repent for. And that was part of the problem. Yeah. So I said, what am I don’t represent the Jewish community. I can’t go up there and repent on behalf of the Jewish community.
He says, so I’m going to have to just drop out. And John says, no, don’t drop out. Just trust the Lord here. Just stick with it. Just trust me. And I said, okay. And John is still a dear brother to this day, but I trusted him at that moment. And I said, okay. So it came to the day of the thing, and I still had nothing to pray. I was there as part of the stage people in front of a million and a half guys, and I had nothing to pray. I was part of a little prayer team of about five or six guys, and John was the head of that group, John Dawson, and I’m backstage and everybody, we can all see them, but they can’t see us. These men are pouring in by the tens of thousands onto the Washington DC Mall. And I’m back there and everybody is just awed by the Lord and what God is doing. And all of a sudden they break and I’m sitting there going, it’s another meeting.
And all of a sudden they break out in joy and they start praising God. And I’m in my little bubble. I am alone in the midst of all these super well-known leaders of the Church of North America, and I’m alone. Even though I’m sitting right in the middle of him, I’m alone. I got this bubble saying, Lord, why am I here? I don’t even know why I’m here. I don’t have anything to pray. What do you want me to do? And all of a sudden, again, I don’t want to sound like I’m hearing the voice of the Lord all the time, but all of a sudden I hear the voice of the Lord in my heart. Marty, look up. I look up. And I said, okay, Lord. He said, what do you see? I said, I see all these men coming from the church. He said, how do you think these men got here? I said, I don’t know, Lord. He says, you’re fathers, you’re forefathers sacrificed their lives to share the good news with the Gentiles so these men could be here today.
And by now I’m just weeping. And I’m, again, I got my head down and I hear the voice again. He says, Marty, look up. And I said, okay, Lord. I look up again through tears. He says, what do you see? And I said, I see all these men. He says, all these Gentile men, they should be Jewish men. They should be your community of men. And I’m now, by now, I’m undone. I’m undone. I realize now that we rejected the Lord in such a way that our community completely holds Jesus in disdain and won’t even say the name, let alone believe. And I’m just completely undone. I’m weeping. Everybody else around me is rejoicing. I’m weeping. When it came time during the time of prayer, I mean for the time of prayer, they called us up. I went up there. Everybody else got behind the microphone. They had written their prayers out, and they read their prayers, and they were all good prayers. I had nothing until this moment now I knew what to pray. And it just turns out that I was the last one up. And so I get up to the microphone, and I am so overwhelmed by the presence of the Lord that I get down on a knee, and I mean, not even, I don’t even see these million and a half guys out there.
I’m down. And now I’m humbled before the Lord, and I’m just praying to the Lord, forgive us. Lord, forgive us for missing Yeshua and for rejecting our Messiah. And I’m not sure what my words were. I don’t know if those were the words or not, but something along that line. Little did I know, they told me later, little did I know that these million and a half guys who were out there when I got down, and John Dawson said, and he could be overheard by the microphone, said, guys, get down. This is what God is doing. And everybody, I mean, these million guys out there on the Washington DC Mall outdoors are all down on their faces. And that’s when I had a breakthrough. I had a breakthrough and realized that my resentment was now broken and a new appreciation for the church and for my own forefathers who sacrificed to spread, the word came over me in an overwhelming fashion. And so now unity, I realize that unity is not only at the center of God’s heart, unity for unity’s sake is not what I’m talking about. Unity for yeshua’s sake, unity for God’s sake
Is what I’m talking about. Because the unity that God gives through our Messiah, especially between Jews and Gentiles, I’m happy to see Christians unify
With
Other Christians, Catholics and Protestants, for instance. That’s wonderful. But when the scripture talks about one new man, it’s very specific. It’s between Jews and Gentiles. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this before, but there are only two kinds of people described in the scriptures. Jews and Gentiles. Christians became a category later.
Yeah, yeah. Retroactively,
Retroactively. But even in the book of Romans, in Romans 11, Paul says, speaking, I’m an apostle to the Christians, and I’m speaking, I’m apostle to the Gentiles. He says, not to the Christians. He says, I’m an apostle to the Gentiles and I’m speaking to you at Rome. And they were Christians. But yes, Gentiles and Christians had a very different connotation and still do today. I think Gentiles back then were Pagans Christians now had turned their hearts to the Lord.
And
I think there’s something similar to that today too, if a person’s a real
Christian.
But the issue back then, and the issue today is still real unity between Jews and Gentiles. And so TJC two for me is very focused. It’s a very focused vision on restoring the unity that God intended at first when read Acts 15, God intended for Jews and Gentiles to be unified in the faith that Jesus is not only the God of the Jews, not only the Messiah for the Jews, but for the gentiles, also
For
The world. That’s why I’m involved in unity. And unity is not only a calling, not only an imperative in God’s heart, but it has an anointing with it. It carries an anointing. Just like we’re reading the Psalm 1 33, how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.
It’s
Like the oil of anointing that’s on Aaron’s head that runs down his beard all the way down him, he said, and it brings the blessing. And so I always keep that in mind because we want that blessing, and the blessing comes with the anointed unity that God has anointed. We read that in scripture all the time, don’t we? Yeah. I mean in Ephesians, Paul says, just do me a favor of all the things. Just do me this favor be one with one another, just unified with each
Other
And unified with in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is not something I’m just into. I’m driven by it. I think it’s that important for the body of Messiah to be healed from its divisive disunity. And I believe that the disunity and the division, the first, the grandfather, I mean the first big division in the church was between Jews and Gentiles. Yeah, a hundred percent.
We’ve been splitting ever since,
And we’ve been splitting ever since because it’s like having an orphan spirit. We leave kids alone without parents. They fight and they don’t know how to resolve their issues.
So what would you say practically? I know it’s a lifetime calling, and it’s not something that we might ever see come to fruition in our lifetime, but what does it look like practically? Because you have the church, which is predominantly Gentile. If there are Jewish people there, they might not even value their Jewish identity or know that they can embrace Jewish identity. And then you have the traditional synagogue, which is predominantly all Jewish, and then you have this Messianic synagogue, which is kind of Jews and Gentiles, but there’s a Jewish understanding. So what does unity look like? Is it unity within our own expressions, or is there a hard line of, no, Gentiles remain Gentiles and Jewish people remain Jewish. What does that look like for you?
Well, I’m glad you said for you, because I can only speak from my perspective. So a microcosm of unity, you’ll find at our congregation, we have Jews and Gentiles who worship the Lord together in great shalom, great peace, and it brings a great anointing. Okay, that’s a Messianic synagogue like Baruch Hashem.
Not
Every Messianic synagogue is like that, but it is at our congregation. That’s a microcosm of it. But when you look at the greater picture, you look at the greater picture. What I have seen is that when there is this understanding that comes upon the church, church leaders in particular, people who are influencers in the church in particular, when this understanding comes upon them, everything changes.
Meaning the Jewish understanding of
The Jewish understanding of the church, the need for Jewish Gentile within the body, reconciliation within the body like that. Let me give you a couple of stories. I’m a storyteller, but a few years back, I was invited to be a speaker at a conference in Georgia, and it was a conference of leaders. They came from all over the world, Christian leaders, and I think maybe there were maybe one or two other Jewish people there, but mostly, predominantly it was all Christian leaders. So they asked me to speak. I spoke and being led by the spirit of God, I spoke off topic, the topic they gave me. I spoke off topic and shared my testimony a little bit of what I shared with you. And so during my speaking time, I shared my testimony and it was exactly what God wanted because if I had just shared the message prepared to share, and I had already prepared a message, if I had only shared the message that I had come prepared to share, it would maybe be received by a few people. But because the Lord led me to share my testimony first and make myself vulnerable, it broke everybody’s heart down. And any resistance they may have had or confusion that they may have experienced, because here’s a Jew who’s among us
That they’re not used to. They were completely open. Their hearts were completely open to that. The leader of the conference, the whole thing was scheduled out by minute, hour by hour, minute by minute, the whole thing was scheduled out. And so he came and he says, Marty, we’re changing our schedule and want you to come back this afternoon and share your message, which was a message of unity
About,
Partly about TJC two, but mostly just about the unity that’s found in the Lord between Jews and Gentiles. And I mean, people caught it because of my testimony. People caught it. I had one Presbyterian pastor leader from South America who was there, come up to me after my talk, my second talk, and Presbyterians mostly run in circles of what I call covenant theology or replacement theology or supersessionism. And the church is now Israel, et cetera.
Yeah, spiritual Israel.
Yeah. So he came and he came up and started to weep. He got down on his face in front of me, which was embarrassing, but he was weeping and asked my forgiveness. His whole life changed. His whole heart changed. And because the Lord opened his eyes about what God wants to do with the Jewish people, he’s not through yet with his covenant people, not through yet with Israel as a nation. In fact, he’s just beginning. And so this is just one example of, but I’ve seen this many, many times. There was a guy like this from Africa who just came down and wept at my feet and actually washed my feet, washed my feet. Well, my shoes were on. So he washed my shoes with his tears. And I mean, because of the same sort of thing happened. But these things happen all the time. And I have found that because Jews and Gentiles are together with toward Jerusalem council too, our leadership is made up of Jews and Gentile leaders in the body that when we go to a place, for instance, we went to Spain, and in Spain there was so much bloodshed in Spain, Catholics killing Protestants
In Spain in earlier centuries that they don’t get together. Catholics and Protestants, they don’t get together. They kind of hate each other even though they believe in the same Jesus, at least I think. So we were invited to come to Spain. We got permission to meet in this building, and we invited both Catholic leaders and Protestant leaders to come.
Well, before then, you’d be hard pressed to find a Catholic and a Protestant in the same building. Now they’re in the same room. We didn’t even say anything. Our TJ C two leadership came in with our intercessor, with our intercessors who were praying for this meeting. And we didn’t even say anything besides, glad to see you, glad you’re here. And the Holy Spirit just fell on these guys, and you could see these Catholic and Protestant leaders just begin to weep and go towards each other, falling on each other’s necks and repenting for their history in Spain toward one another. It was just remarkable. But that’s the anointing of the Lord that falls upon this kind of unity between Jews and Gentiles. And I believe that the Lord has called towards Jerusalem council too, to be a healing element in the church. We’re not trying to become institutionalized. We’re trying to remain grassroots. We do have an organization. We are trying to be a little organized, but mainly it’s just grassroots and God uses it. We don’t want to be out there if God is not in it. So we’re not trying to sustain anything.
Yeah, I hear you saying really, it’s the understanding of the Jew Gentile identity in Yeshua. The unity is kind of that linchpin that can then create unity in any division. It’s
Not foundational. It’s not only a linchpin, it’s a missing link. It’s a missing link. So seminaries, bible colleges, they primarily, 99% of the seminaries in Bible colleges teach from a perspective that is completely devoid of Jewish understanding. And Gateway Church. And the King Seminary started with Jack Hayford. Jack Hayford was with us at the beginning of TJC two, but Jack Hayford started the seminary that’s now called the King’s University, and he instilled in that seminary some level of Jewish understanding. It progressed over the years. And so the King’s University now has an entire Messianic Jewish
Program
Program, one of the few in the country. But if you go to most seminaries, they are clueless about Jewish
Understanding.
And so most pastors who graduate from those seminaries, most leaders even lay people who went to seminary and have become influential or teachers, most of them are devoid of that understanding.
There’s not even a grid for that,
But it’s the missing link, but it’s being reintroduced, I believe, by the Holy Spirit, David. I call this moment that we’re living in right now. I call it the quiet great awakening. The quiet great awakening, because it’s not making a huge splash. Most people don’t even know it’s happening. But there are Jewish people who are coming to the Lord. There was a survey done, I don’t know if you know about this survey, but there was a survey done, it’s well known in certain communities. It was a combination of Joel Rosenberg and Chosen People ministries, Joel Rosenberg, famous author and news podcaster who lives in Israel. Anyway, they did a survey in North America, that’s the United States primarily, and in primarily evangelical churches asking, the basic question was, are you Jewish? They wanted to know how many Jewish people are in evangelical churches.
Yeah,
So do you have a guess in North America?
I’ve heard it’s a million.
Well, it’s not quite a million, about 850 or 870,000. So it was close to a million. Pretty close to a
Million. Is this in the entire church, Catholic church, or is this just
Only Evangelical
Churches is only Evangelical. Oh, wow.
Only churches like Gateway Church churches. Only Baptist churches only evangelical.
So if you were to add Presbyterian and
Catholic, if you were to add other churches outside the Evangelical church, it would be well into a million, well over a million. And if you went outside of North America, then you’ve got some big numbers. So get this. When I became a believer, you could almost count the number of Jewish believers on your fingers and your toes. Now, 50 years later, well over a million in Israel. When I became a believer in Israel in January of 1975, there were probably three or four Messianic congregations there. I don’t know how many, if that many.
Yeah,
Very few. There are now over 300 Messianic congregations in Israel. Now, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to give you a little bit more information in terms of Israel. In 1917, Lord Balfour of England penned something that was passed by the parliament, approved by the parliament called, became known as the Balfour Declaration, giving the Jewish people this huge piece of land in Israel, way more than Jewish people have right now, way more. It took in Jordan part of Syria.
I
Mean, it was huge piece of land. But of course that changed, and we don’t have time for all that history. However, in Israel, at that time in 1917, there were probably somewhere around 20, 30,000 Jewish people in Israel. So let me put it in this way, in a hundred years, okay, this is not 2017, but we’re close.
It’s
2024 in a little more than a hundred years. Just a hundred years. We went from 20 to 30,000 to 7 million Jewish people who live in the land of Israel. If you can just grasp that in terms of God’s prophetic word, saying he was going to bring the Jewish people back, eco 36, Jeremiah, all the prophets, and I’m going to bring the Jewish people back from the four corners of the Earth. If you go to Israel now, you can see a community that comes from the four corners of the earth. Yeah, totally. You have white Jews, you have black Jews,
You
Have Asian Jews, you have South American Jews, you have Mexican Jews. I mean, every kind of, you think about a reconciled community. You have to think about Israel, because Israel has every color from every different ethnic background, but they’re all Jewish.
Yeah, totally.
That’s so good. We’re in a moment in history right now that I consider God’s moment. That’s why I call it a quiet, great awakening.
It’s so good.
People are missing it, but it’s happening whether people see it or not. And we are because of this war in Israel over the last year and a half. Yeah,
Year and a couple months, yeah,
Yeah. Year and a couple months because of this war, God has brought into focus what I have been teaching for decades, that to the church and to the Gentiles, Israel is a watershed. And it depends on how the rain falls. Whether you fall on this side of the shed or that side of the shed, you either are going to see the importance of Israel in history or in God’s plan, or you’re not going to see it and you’ll come against Israel, which we see today. But for the Jewish community, Yeshua is the watershed.
Totally.
And he’s becoming more and more the watershed in the Jewish community. I see it all the time. We just, this is exciting story. But in our congregation, we just baptized my son, Ari and I, rabbi Ari and I baptized an orthodox.
I saw that picture
Jewish guy who grew up in the most religious, the most strict of the ultra-orthodox communities in Israel. And he has come to the Lord and he is fervently on fire for Yeshua.
It’s really such a great principle. I know we have to wrap up now, but that principle, and I’ve heard you talk about it before, you can’t maintain neutrality on Israel or Jesus. And when you talk to a Gentile about Israel, it’s like they’re forced to decide. You can’t. I’m just going to leave it suspended. We’ve tried to for a long time, but it’s almost like the Lord is really pressing it down. No, you have to decide. And for the Jewish community, it’s Yeshua and it’s that same decision, and it’s almost a stumbling block. Israel is a stumbling block to the church,
And Yeshua is a stumbling block. One of the prophets, and I can’t remember which one now said we are at some point we will be in the valley of decision. And I can’t remember who said that maybe it was Ezekiel or someone. We’re in the valley of decision. We have entered the valley of decision and the whole world. And so if people feel like the world is kind of rocky right now and people are getting nervous and afraid in some ways, I would say you have to trust in Yeshua. You have to trust in what the Lord has provided. You have to trust in the Word of God, trust in what God has done up until this point, and he is going to be faithful for the future. We are in the valley of decision and we have to clinging. We have to clinging. We have to hold onto the Lord at this moment. Hold onto Yeshua. Yeah.
Well, I appreciate you so much coming and sharing with us. We are going to solidify that there is going to be a part two to this, because I have lots of questions. Oh, okay. Sorry about how this practically comes out because I know that you’ve had a lot of conversations with the Catholics and the Catholic Church, and that’s an issue with the evangelical church. It feels like that’s a border you can’t cross. And yet here with this gentile revelation, we’re seeing unity happen
In
Places like you mentioned in Spain, that you would never have guessed unity to come before.
Exactly.
So we’re going to have a part two to talk through all of those. I’m signing you up for it. I’m going to confirm. We’ll
Confirm later. I’ve been volunteered for worse.
Good. Well, thank you guys so much for listening. Definitely check out TJC two and what they’re doing there. Some amazing things are happening. And stay tuned for part two with Rabbi Marty Walman. Thanks, David.