True Life

I listened to a young man’s testimony tonight.

He is Jewish and he believes in Jesus as his Messiah, and through Him he has forgiveness for sins, and eternal life..

God answers when you pray.

God revealed himself to this young man in the Word, in visions and through people - 

Both he and his wife were seeking truth about life, and they ventured into Orthodox Judaism for some time. One day he was challenged by a believer in Jesus to read the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible. For, as he said, Orthodox Jews do not read the Bible. They are studying the Talmud. Even when the Bible texts are read in the synagogue, the deliberations are not necessarily related to the bible texts.

I knew this. Of course I did.

So, he was challenged to read the Bible, and he and his wife made it a race to see who could finish first. But when he came to Isaiah 53, he was full of questions. What was this really about?  He went to his friend and asked. And this friend had impatiently waited for 9 months to tell about it; so they talked, read, talked some more about Jesus, and how he is a fulfillment of Isaiah 53. They read in the New Testament…and sometime during that evening, he prayed Jesus to reveal himself to him, and he did. He became a believer in Jesus, just like his friend.

But how should he tell his wife?

He pondered it – and he did tell – but she was unimpressed. She found him overly exited, and figured it would pass. When you go from death to life, it does not pass.  He gave her a new testament to read for herself. At the time he was in the military service in Israel, and he was away for a couple of weeks.

He came home, and found her in the living room, in tears. She had just read the Gospel according to Matthew. What is wrong, he wondered, and she said: “This is such a beautiful man: why has nobody told me about him before?”