Sid Roth: We want everyone everywhere to get excited because the Messiah is about ready to return. And this is God’s set moment I believe, His set time to favor Zion. There is scriptures that talk about the fullness of the Gentile age and there are two in particular that you should look at. One is Luke 21:24, it says that fullness of the Gentile age will occur when Jerusalem is in Jewish hands. Well, Jerusalem is in Jewish hands and then Roman’s 11:25 says partial blindness has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentile age has come in. And based on what I have been observing and just what God’s been using me for, I have never seen such openness among Jewish people. Whatever this fullness the Gentile age means, were in it right now and I have on the telephone someone that was handpicked by God to be front and center stage at the fullness of the Gentile age. I’m reading from the new addition of my book, “They Though for Themselves.” Now this book literally God came to me, He did in a dream and He said, more Jewish people would come to know Him through this book than anything I had ever done. And over 850,000 of these books are in print right now and we’re printing them even as we’re speaking right now; it’s being mailed to areas of Siberia in the Russian language where people read books they read. I mean we’re getting reports of people as a matter of fact I have Dr. Michael Brown on the telephone and he’s one of the ten testimonies in here of Jewish people that believe Yeshua, Jesus is the Messiah of Israel. And I recently spoke to a Jewish believer in the Messiah from the former Soviet Union and Mike this man said to me that his mother and his sister, his family because of my book and in particular because of your testimony they became believer’s in the Messiah.
Michael: Praise God that’s amazing to hear.
Sid Roth: Let me read a page from the book of “They Thought for Themselves” it’s the chapter that Dr. Michael Brown has written called “Tradition or Truth” subtitled “What I learned about Rabbinic Judaism.” You don’t even know Hebrew, how can you tell me what the Bible says? It’s true Rabbi, I don’t know Hebrew, but I’ll learn; in the meantime I can use the dictionary in the back of Strong’s concordance. Meantime, shmeentime, if you don’t know Hebrew it doesn’t mean a thing. I will never forget those words spoken to me in 1972; I was a brand new believer in Jesus just seventeen years old and I had been dramatically change. I mean dramatically only months before I was shooting heroin, using massive quantities of LSD and speed and living in total reckless abandon, my nickname was Drug Bear. Well I have someone whose former nickname was Drug Bear on the telephone, Dr. Michael Brown, sound familiar that story?
Michael: Yeah, I’m sitting here with a big smile just listening to it; it is still quite vivid in my mind.
Its Supernatural: I can just picture you and the Rabbi’s Study giving you the business, but as a result of that challenge that was a God’s challenge. What did you do with your life as a result of that challenge from that Rabbi?
Michael: Well, my life had been dramatically transformed at the end of 1971, I had gone to a little gospel preaching church to pull my best friends out and in fact I had such a reputation for wickedness that when I first went there a girl who knew me from high school wrote down on her diary antichrist comes to church. That was me, God dramatically turned my life around in a moment to time really with God dealing with me detail, I was free of drugs, free of those addictions. I was living a brand new life, I just could wait to spend time reading God’s Word and praying and telling other people about Jesus. The problem was I was just reading in English, I had been Bar Mitzvah a few years earlier, but I just learned enough Hebrew to read the words, I didn’t even understand what it meant. So now I had forgotten what little that I knew and these Rabbi’s were challenging me. I got to meet more Rabbis’, Ultra Orthodox Rabbis, very religious men, very nice, but they sat there with their Hebrew Bible and I felt like a little child. I mean I had all these verses memorized in English, thousand of them now by 1973 I’m telling them about Jesus how He’s changed my life and I can’t even read the Hebrew. So I just decided okay, when I start college I have got to take Hebrew classes. The college where I’m studying only had Modern Hebrew, so I asked the Rabbi about a good book on Biblical Hebrew, he recommended one. I went through it, I taught myself Biblical Hebrew and then I thought when I was finishing college I was taking a bunch of other elated languages and I thought I need to go further to really do the study adequately I need to go further; I don’t want to rely on someone else’s commentary. I don’t want to rely on someone else’s dictionary; I don’t want any Rabbi to be able to look me in the eye and tell me that there is something I don’t know about the Hebrew or their background. So I continued at New York University getting a Masters and then a PHD in Near Eastern Languages and Literature and had actually written scholarly articles that correct some of the entries in the dictionaries because I had just had to dig and know for myself. And the interesting thing is my posture was, whatever objections there are I have got to take them on full force, from the secular professors at the University, from the religious Jews that I’m talking to, I’ve got to take on all the objections. I know my experience with God is real, but it it’s really from God then it’s got to line up with truth.
Sid Roth: And let me ask you a question, were you at a point where you were more interested in truth then being right or wrong and you would have renounced Yeshua as Messiah if you found out that you were deceived?
Michael: God is my witness Sid, I got to a point before God on my face alone with Him, I said, “God, I just want to follow you and your truth, I don’t care what the consequences are. If it means ultimately that my faith in Yeshua is wrong and I have to take the shame of that and the rejection of all these people I’ve come to know, and be a traditional Jew, then I’ll do it, but if what I believe about Yeshua is true then I don’t care the reproach, the opposition from the traditional Jewish Community, I will follow you.” And the thing that’s amazing is the more that I studied and the more that I sought God earnestly the clearer it was that my faith in Yeshua, in Jesus was absolutely real and true. Sid we have nothing to be ashamed of; nothing to hide, the word of God stands with us.
Sid: Today, I understand you read, write or speak over a dozen Semitic languages?
Michael: Yeah, well you know along the way of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures you pick up a lot of different languages, dialects, different things and some of them I remain really fluent and some of them I still work with. You know it hasn’t been my only focus, but I still love to dig and here’s the Arabic relationship to the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the Acadian and this and that and just dig and understand. And you know what’s amazing is that when you look at the New Testament authors, some people think, Matthew didn’t know anything, oh Matthew is misinterpreting the Hebrew, oh Matthew pulled this out of context. No, no, no that’s just superficial level, it’s like if I don’t know anything about physics or science and I hear that science has got this great discovery, e = mc squared I would think, that that’s stupid that proves nothing; well no that proves my ignorance. The same way that people that says Matthew pulls this out of contexts and this one doesn’t know this. No, no, no study deeper go deeper the insights of these New Testament authors of Matthew, of Paul when you see how they really understood the text and a larger context, and the insights from the Holy Spirit, it boggles your mind to see how much is hidden there in the Word.
Sid: You know what I also love about you Mike, is that you have a great deal of the Jewish scriptures memorized in Hebrew. I love it when you start quoting the Hebrew by memory, but wasn’t that almost natural of the Jews in the first century?
Michael: Oh yeah, I mean the society that we live in Sid is pretty much not a literate society; we are kind of an instant society we’ve got everything stored on our computers excreta. We don’t store a lot of it in our heart and in our minds. But in the ancient world, especially when you didn’t have ready access to books, people memorized, memorization was part of the culture. And the thing that’s interesting is here, my mind had been fried with drugs, I had no interest in school in my earlier years, now that I got saved, 1971 – 1972 I started to get really hungry for the Word and would read the Word over and over, read the scriptures and I got to the point where for six straight months I memorized twenty verses a day without missing a single day. Of course it was in English back then, but that laid a foundation for the rest of my spiritual life and it really is. It’s just part of the Jewish method of studies, you say it, you repeat it, you recite it. The smart Rabbis that are really into rabbinic tradition, when you deal with them, they’ll just quote the stuff right back at you. And it’s just kind of a method of Jewish learning.
Sid: You know Mike, one of the things that you do in your chapter that no one else did and as a matter of fact we have such diverse Jews in this book; we have a holocaust survivor, we have a multi-millionaire, we have yourself, a PHD, we have a concert pianist, someone in the New Age, that’s me, I was in the New Age and I got set free. And we have Jews from atheistic Jews to Orthodox Jews, Israeli Jews. So someone can take this book and can read it cover to cover and get the whole picture. I mean, I have talked to brand new Jewish believers in Jesus that knew nothing like you knew nothing except Jesus was Messiah and that was enough but could have gotten talked out of their faith. They said, for the first time they were able to put everything together and although God told me to write this book for unsaved Jewish people I believe that when Gentiles who do not know Jesus read this book, it will kind of sneak up on them. They’ll think that it’s for someone else, but they’ll end up becoming believers in Jesus and Christians will have nothing but their faith solidified more than ever before. On tomorrow’s broadcast few Christians understand the origins and the content of what is known as Rabbinic Judaism today and how it differs from the Judaism of the Torah. And it’s about time that they not get so mixed up, but you have some quotes from your studies to explain this. I have to tell me it concerns me, it’s wonderful that Christians love our people and we’re both Jewish, I love our people and that’s right and that’s from God, but I almost feel like many Christians have a greater love for the Judaism which was created by the Rabbis which is so far away from Torah than for the Jewish people. Do you understand what I’m saying Mike?
Michael: Oh there is a fascination with traditional Judaism that’s come in the church at large and in the Messianic Jewish Community and I’m thrilled that there’s love for Jewish things and love for Jewish people instead of hating Rabbis. We respect the Rabbis, I think that that is wonderful but there is an almost idolatress fascination with Rabbinic Judaism and as beautiful as it is it is another religion.
Sid: Okay, tomorrow’s broadcast we will talk about it.
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