Salvation Message — Jacob Prasch

Isaiah's Message to the People of Every Age

Once upon a time, there was a person called Isaiahu Hanavi, Isaiahu Hanavi, Isaiah the prophet. He was the prophet of Israel. He was the prophet of Judah. And he lived before the Babylonian captivity.

He lived hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus was born. And I want to read three things that this prophet Isaiah said, because the three things he said, he was not saying simply to the people of his own time, but he was saying to the people of our time as well.

You see, there's two different things, two opposite things, two mutually exclusive things. You can't be male and female, you're either a male or a female. You're either black or you're white person, right?

You're either a South African citizen or you're not a South African citizen. Things which are mutually exclusive. There are two things that are mutually exclusive that people don't think are mutually exclusive.

You can't have both. One is called religion. The other is called the gospel of Jesus. The gospel of Jesus is one thing. Religion is another. Now, unfortunately, the two have become convoluted. They've become confused in people's thinking.

People think the gospel Christianity, Jesus Christ, that's a religion like Islam, like Judaism, like Hinduism. The second way people become confused is they think Christianity is something for non-Jews, for Gentiles.

When, in fact, Jesus himself said, I came for the lost sheep of the house of Israel. When, in fact, every writer of the New Testament was a Jew except for Luke and he had been a convert to Judaism. Every writer of the New Testament was Jewish.

When, in fact, the only reason people who are not Jews believe in Jesus is because Jews believed in him first. When, in fact, by the second century, probably 25 of the Jews in Jerusalem believed he was the Messiah.

Christianity is not a different religion. Jesus never came to begin a new faith. He simply came to fulfill the Torah, the faith of the Jews. Christianity is not separate from Judaism. It's the fulfillment of it.

People are confused. Religion is one thing. Religion is one thing. The gospel is another. But it's become confused. I don't have a high view of religion. I never did. And I was astounded when I began to read Jesus and what he actually said.

He didn't have a high view of religion either. I was shocked to discover the difference between the real Jesus of the gospel and the one I had in my mind, the little plastic one on the dashboard that people pray to.

The real Jesus of the gospel was quite different than the one of organized religion. He was quite different than the Roman Catholic Jesus or the Jehovah's Witness Jesus or the Mormon Jesus or for the most part even the Protestant Jesus or the historical Jesus of intellectuals.

He was quite different in a number of ways. As I pointed out the other night, to begin with, there was never any such person as Jesus Christ. Never. There has never been such a person as Jesus Christ.

His name was Rabbi Yeshua Bar Yosef Minas Zedek. That's his name. His name was Yeshua Hamashiach. Gentiles called him Jesus. That was not his name. Secondly, the things he said about religious people and religious leaders.

He said that they were by and large hypocrites, vipers, parasites who put condemnation on people and manipulated people to get money out of them. And now there are people coming in the name of Jesus as he predicted there would be, who are just as hypocritical and just as corrupt as the religious leaders of his day.

Only now, of course, they say they're Christian. I never thought much of religion. You want to ask me about religion, I'll tell you about religion. Religion is the war between Iran and Iraq over one million Muslims killed by other Muslims.

That's religion. Religion was an orthodox Jew with a kippah, a yarmulke on his head, putting a bullet in the back of his own prime minister in Israel last year. That's religion. Religion is Northern Ireland.

Catholics murdering Protestants and Protestants murdering Catholics. Hatred, bigotry, that's religion. That's religion. Religion is some con man preacher on television telling you God wants you rich and if you send him this much money, God's going to make you rich.

Put your hand up. That's religion. It doesn't take a lot of brains to realize more people have probably been murdered in the name of religion than anything else. It doesn't take a lot of brains to realize religion is a financial con job.

You need something to deal with your fear of death. You need something to cope with your fear of the unknown. You're going to be dead someday. You're at the family funeral. You need something to comfort you when your mother is dead or your father is dead.

So buy my product. Be a Muslim. Be a Catholic. Be an Orthodox Jew. Be a Hindu. Religion is good business. Not honest business, but good business. If you want religion, you're wasting your time. Religion has never done anybody a bit of good and it won't do you any good either.

Religion is like somebody with a lot of problems. So he goes out and hits the bar. He begins drinking heavily and he gets drunk and all of a sudden he feels better. And he gets more drunk and then he's self-obliterated.

He feels wonderful. Till he wakes up the next morning, his problems are still there. His business is still going to the wall. His wife is still leaving him. On top of it all, he's got a hangover. That's religion.

It'll take your money. It'll disillusion you. It'll give you a false sense of security. But it's not going to solve your problems in this world, let alone in the world to come. Having read the gospel, having read it very carefully many times, I'm absolutely convinced, absolutely convinced that there's more people in hell because of religion than there are from all the alcohol abuse, all the drug abuse, all the sexual immorality, all the corruption in business and politics put together.

There's more people in hell because of religion. See, when Jesus came, criminals, they knew there was something wrong with them. Prostitutes, they knew there was something wrong with them. Who came to Jesus?

Who believed in him? Tax gatherers? Criminals? Prostitutes? They believed in him. Who crucified him? The Sadducees? The Pharisees? The Jesuits? The Imams? The Popes? That's who crucified Jesus. And that's who's still crucifying Jesus.

Religion is a con. If you're religious, I don't care what it is, you have been taken for a ride. Now, I don't say, I don't say to become a follower of Jesus, you have to be a criminal, or a prostitute, or a junk, but it helps.

Neither do I say, if you want to be eternally separated from God, you have to be a member of a church, or the denomination, or the synagogue. You don't have to go to the novena. You don't have to go to shul.

You don't have to go to the mosque. You don't have to be an upstanding member of the community, a member of the chamber of commerce. You don't have to have your name on the social register. You don't have to be a fine religious upstanding member of the citizenry of your community to be eternally separated from God and go to hell.

You don't have to be religious to go to hell, but it helps. Let's understand the difference. Let's look at this Jew named Isaiah, Isaiahu Hanavi. Now, in fairness, we must point out something. There was, in fact, one religion which was bona fide.

Torah, Sacrifice, and the Promise of the Messiah

One religion which God did give. That religion was called Torah, meaning the way. It was the original covenant God gave to the Jews. However, that covenant was, by its own procession, only temporary. God told Moses in chapter 18, I will raise up a prophet like you and put my words in his mouth.

And the rabbis tell us, Deuteronomy 18, 18 is about the Messiah. And anyone who does not listen to him, I will require of him. And they will be under the curse of the Torah. If you want to understand the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people, read Leviticus 26.

Read Deuteronomy 28, it's the curse of the law. Why the Holocaust? Why the Inquisition? Why the Pogroms? It's the curse of the Torah. The Torah was given to prepare the people for the Messiah. The Torah was given to teach people about their separation from God and that they couldn't save themselves.

In fact, the biggest section of the Torah, the biggest section of the Torah of the Jews was given for a sacrificial system, to try to make atonement for their sins, to make up for the fact that they couldn't keep the Torah.

We call it in Hebrew, kaphora. If the people really had faith in God and really repented and turned from their sin the best they could, and they kept the Torah and the sacrifices, the blood of the animals would make kaphora.

It would cover the sins of the people, until the Messiah came and removed them. But the temple was destroyed in 70 AD. As the prophet Daniel said, the Messiah would come and die before it would be destroyed.

And the Talmud, as I pointed out the other night, agrees. So even the one religion that was authentic, of a temporary value, to prepare the Jewish people for the coming of the Messiah, so they could bring God's message of salvation to everybody, that religion doesn't exist anymore.

After the temple was destroyed, as the prophets predicted, they had a council at a place called Yavne. And they decided instead of the Kohen, the high priest, we'll have a rabbi. And instead of the temple being the center of our faith and worship, we'll have a synagogue.

And instead of keeping the Torah, which we can't keep anymore without a temple, we'll just make our own religion. And when the prophet named Jeremiah predicted they would do just that, and that's just what they did.

Hence, Judaism today is not the Judaism of the Torah, it's just another religion. Now all these religions have some truth. I've never found a single religion, African tribal religion, Hinduism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, Rabbinic Judaism, I haven't found a single religion that doesn't have some truth.

Marxism has some truth. There's always real cheese in a rat shop. Because you're trusting in religion. You're being conned. You're being conned by who's ever selling it to you. You're being conned by yourself.

You're being conned by the world. And ultimately you're being conned by the devil. You are being conned. What are the differences between Jesus and religion? If you want religion, you can have religion.

If you want God, you need Jesus. You can have religion. The world can have religion. The world can keep its religion. I don't want religion. I don't need religion. I've got Jesus. What about you? Let's understand the difference.

Blind Faith Versus Reasoned Trust in God

First of all, every religion teaches a blind faith. Blind faith. Just believe. Come on, just believe it. Believe it. Experience it. Once you experience it, you'll know it's true. The Mormons say, I had a burn in my bosom when I knew the church a lot of the signs were true.

Other people say, well it was good enough for my parents, so it's good enough for me. My mother and father were Catholic. My mother and father were Muslim. My mother and father were whatever. I was born a Jew.

I'll die a Jew. So your only relationship with God and what you believe is determined by what somebody else thinks you should believe. If God exists and you stand before him one day, as the Bible says you will, we all shall, what your parents believe and what your grandparents believe is not going to be the issue.

It's going to be what you believe. So let's continue. Blind faith. I'm something of an evidentialist. There's two ways of thinking. The Hebrew way of thinking and the Greek way of thinking. They both have their place.

The Hebrew way of thinking says, first trust God, then you'll understand. The Greek way of thinking says, first understand, then trust God. The Hebrew way of thinking is for Hebrews, two Hebrews, people with a relationship with God.

Once you have the relationship with him and you know you can trust him, then he expects you to act, which you might call a blind faith, based on his proven record. But he never expected anybody, never, to come to believe in him based on blind faith.

What did he tell Moses? Let the people all see what's going to happen when you go up this mountain. Let them see how I'm going to deliver them from Egypt. Let them watch and see what I'm going to do. I'll give them a reason to trust me.

I'll give them a reason to believe in me. Now once I gave them the reason, then I expect them to trust me. But I don't expect them to trust me without a reason. He never did. So let's look at this nice Jewish boy, Isaiahu Hanavi, Isaiah chapter 1, verse 18.

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool. Let's begin with the first phrase of that verse.

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. The New Testament says the real Christian faith, not the Catholic one, the Protestant one, the Jehovah's Witness one, the real one of the Bible, our faith is reasonable.

It's not just believe in the guru, just believe in the institution, just believe in some man, just believe in some God, nothing like that. Let us reason together. The scriptures tell us God made us a Maggio Dei in his image and likeness.

He's a God of reason. And because we are made in his image and likeness, he made us intelligent beings capable of reason. You have to be a moron. You have to be one idiot to believe something you can't prove.

You're going to build your whole life on something you cannot logically demonstrate to your satisfaction? If it's people, do it. My parents went to Mass, my parents went to shul, my parents went to the mosque, so that's what I'm going to do.

Good luck, you're sure going to need it. If your parents went to hell, you want to go there with them? Let us reason together. I was an agnostic when I was a student in university. I studied science. As a teenager in the 1960s, I was very much a part of my own generation and era.

I had some ideas which seem peculiar to many people today, but at that time of the civil rights movement in America before the anti-apartheid got going in your country, it was already in America in the 60s, and the anti-war movement and the anti-draft movement in Vietnam and all this, I was very much in that era.

And I had no faith in anything, particularly not politics or politicians and particularly even more so in organized religion. Essentially, my orientation had been somewhat Marxist, up to a point at least.

The Search for Meaning Through Political Ideologies

Something happened to me. When I was 13 years old, I read a book called Animal Farm by a writer named George Orwell, where the animals overthrew the oppressive tyrant farmers. And the revolution was led by the pigs, which is what we used to call policemen when I was a teenager.

The only problem was, we have a term in Hebrew, Ebed Kimloach, when a poor person becomes a new master, he becomes a worse oppressor than the old master. In the book Animal Farm, the pigs became the new power elite.

There was a book by a Jewish author, Arthur Kessler, called Darkness at Noon, and he explained how communism began with high hopes and just became a regime more oppressive than what it sought to replace.

I realized there was something wrong. Even if we got rid of white honky pigs, which is how I define the establishment, and even if we overthrew the power structure and gave civil rights to the black people and ended the Vietnam War and all this and redistributed the wealth, the same kinds of people who had the wealth under a capitalist system would wind up with it under a communist system, or even worse.

Today's hero is tomorrow's oppressor. Why? Why is it that no political economic system improves man's plight? There must be something wrong with man. Something wrong with man? So even if we overthrow the system and have a revolution, which is what I believe in, I believed in revolutions as a teenager, instead we need another revolution.

In fact, Mao Tse-Tung in his Red Book wrote this, the continual revolution. He understood that every revolutionary government, provisional government would become institutionalized and we'd need another one, and another one even noted it, even admitted it.

There'd be no way out of this. Even the founders of communism, they admitted there was no way out of this. The vicious circle of human history. I was later shocked when I read that the Book of Ecclesiastes said the same thing, long before Mao Tse-Tung.

The Book of Proverbs said the same thing, long before Karl Marx, long before dialectic materialism. We were going to change the world. We were the hippies. We were the ones who were going to bring love and peace.

What was love? I'll tell you what love was. Venereal disease. Peace? Yeah, a lot of peace. People ripping each other off in drug deals? A lot of peace. And so it went. Come let us reason together. Why is it like this?

Why is it that it never gets better? Why is it that when you get rid of apartheid, what used to be called political violence is now just crime, the same people doing the same stuff? What is wrong with us?

Why is there no simple political or economic solution? What's the problem? Let's reason. More than that, what about that? There must be some reason we're here. So I began to try to find the meaning of existence through examining, through investigating the occult, through mind expanding drugs like LSDs and through studying science.

I was trying to find meaning. Sounds crazy to you? I was desperate. So I began looking into this. The occult. Eastern religion. Let's look at Eastern religion. I remember when the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to England and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones went to see him.

Now my religious thinking or spiritual thinking or metaphysical thinking was something like this at the time. Well, okay, Mohammed was God's teacher for his time and his culture and Jesus was the enlightened one for his time and his culture.

Right? And Zoroaster was the enlightened one for his time and his culture. And Buddha was the enlightened one for his time and his culture. And as everybody knows, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan are the ones for now.

Crazy to you, but I believed it and most of my friends believed it was something like this. So look at the Eastern religion. Yes, the Beatles, they went to India to meditate with the Maharishi. Has it been to India?

You ever see what the Hindu religion is? Here in South Africa, if you had a Judeo-Christian influence in the social fabric, it was at least a sense of moral indignation that apartheid was not right, that it was somehow morally unacceptable.

At least it was that sense. But there's a system of social injustice endemic to India far worse than apartheid called the caste system. We've got the Guru and the Brahmin priest at the top and the peasants are on the ground.

And there's no sense it's wrong. There's no sense of the poverty, that unspeakable poverty beyond the township, much worse than the township, much worse. There's no sense that it's wrong. It's supposed to be that way.

It's their karma. It's the divine order. People drinking cow urine. People taking a little baby and giving it water from the Ganges to drink if they believe it's sacred and the baby dies of cholera. But that's okay.

It's the baby's karma. Next time it comes back as a baboon. Rats spreading filthy disease in the slums of Bombay and Calcutta? It was the Hindu caste that worshipped rats. You know, when you're living in a castle with a mansion in England and you're a multi-millionaire pop star, it's easy to believe in Eastern religion.

But look what it's done for the people who live in the slums of Bombay and Calcutta. Come, let us reason together. But let's look further. There must be something. I was never an atheist. I believed there had to be some kind of an intelligence designed for the universe.

The fool says in his heart there's no God. I didn't know what this God was. I sort of believed the way Einstein did. At least that's what he would have said. Some kind of a collective or corporate intelligence on back of the celestial eminence.

Maybe the goddess Spinoza in philosophical ideas. Something like this. Einstein said they asked could it all be chance when they were dealing with the ideas of non-mortality in physics and so on. And Einstein said God does not play dice with the universe.

It can't be chance. The probabilities were too much. When I went to university, began studying science, a protein was a very, very long molecule. And the probability of getting the right combination of amino acids together in the right configuration under the right circumstances, to make a protein, to make one enzyme, let alone a polypeptide chain, it was ridiculous.

I was taught entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Things go from a state of order to disorder, not disorder to order. So even if this stuff didn't evolve, something had to make it happen contrary to entropy.

And the same professors that were teaching me this themselves were still believing presuppositions that there was no God. Even though the mathematical probability said this is unthinkable. They were just caught up in the system.

I knew there had to be a God. For who? Prove it. Come let us reason. So I looked further into the occult. There was a witch in New Jersey near New York. And she used to read my tarot cards. And she was quite good at tarot cards.

She had a familiar spirit, she was a diviner. And one day she was doing my tarot reading and she began to freak out with the tarot cards. And she saw in the tarot cards I was going to become a believer in Jesus.

Which to me was a bit bad. And she began freaking out with the cards, don't come back and burn me when this happens. I said what? She said don't come back and burn me when this happens. I said but what happens?

And she told me. I said would you calm down, here roll the joints, relax, reshuffle the cards and we'll begin again. And I'll tell you, to this day, if you want to talk about a track record, she wasn't always right.

But if I took the amount of predictions that she gave me and how often they came true, if you could outperform Paul Chain, Mike Bickle, John Winberg and the rest of them, I could work the percentages.

Come let us reason together. So I looked. Pick up a book like Nostradamus. This guy seemed to know the future. So I was told. The only problem with Nostradamus was it was a matter of vague interpretation.

Well you could say he meant Hitler here or you could say he meant the Kennedys over there. But it's a matter of interpretation. It's no proof. Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bhagavad Gita, all this stuff, Scientology, what a con job that is.

I looked into all these things, including things claiming to be Christian like the Jehovah's Witnesses. Prove it. Where's the proof? You want me to follow it and stake my life on it? Where's the proof?

I understand there must be a God. I understand that there must be something wrong with mankind. But where's the proof? I believe that the occult had to be scientifically researched. So I began to experiment with LSD when I was in my mid-teens or so.

And then the experimentation turned into an extensive research project, which without doubt accounts for much of what you're looking at today. And I came into contact with a demonic whose mind-altering drugs I already mentioned and so on.

And I was later astounded to find in the Book of Revelation, the Greek word phosphori, which is pharmacia in Greek, which is drugs. Through psychedelic drugs you can definitely enter the spiritual realm through another door other than Jesus.

You ask people to say that, but that's kind of the background. And I saw things, not just hallucinogenically. I also had an out-of-body experience, which I thought was an astral projection, but it was not.

My spirit left my body at astronomical speeds, and I couldn't get back into it. It was not an ordinary astral projection. It was terrifying. Whether I was clinically dead, I don't know. But I know somehow I came into the presence of Jesus, and he sent me back, and I didn't understand it.

And I thought, well, that's far out, you know. I'm one of those people, you know, when I got saved, all I could say was, thank you, Jesus, and praise the Lord, which doubled my previous vocabulary of wow and far out.

A lot of people are like that. So anyway, I went through all this stuff with the occult and the acid and studying science. And one day, in Greenwich Village in New York, I went up to somebody on the street, and I had a cigarette, and I was looking to buy some marijuana or something, and I was studying in university, but I didn't have any classes the next day.

So on the weekends, when I had no exams and stuff, we'd go to Greenwich Village and get high. And I took a cigarette, and I went up to this guy on McDougall Street in New York. This was like towards the end of the hippie era, 1971, 72.

And I said to him, hey, man, you got a light? And I took the cigarette and went out. Well, as it so happened, he didn't have any matches, but he certainly had the light. And he began to show me things I never considered.

The law of conservation of matter and energy in the Bible, before anybody knew about it, that the earth was round long before Columbus. And this caught my fancy. I had a problem. I always knew there was acid freaks and speed freaks.

Now I met a Jesus freak. That's what we called him. And something else happened. These guys coming back from Vietnam totally strung out on shiny tether and very powerful. And they began getting saved, becoming Christians, with no withdrawal, no cold turkey.

Not one or two, thousands of them. So I began to investigate the Bible. It was clear the youth culture, the hippie movement wasn't going anywhere, except it was becoming part of an establishment. Now the nerds even have long hair.

Communism, just another system. The occult, you always find the gypsies reading the crystal ball, just money. There's got to be some way out of this. There's got to be some way. And at this period I was having problems in university.

Lysergic acid is soluble in fats, lipids. And when your body requires energy, the first thing that gets metabolized is lipids to release the energy. And I was using cocaine very heavily on top of it. And I told my genetics professor, well there was something in physics called Brownian movement, that all matter is in constant motion, but the particles are held together by electromagnetic force.

In other words, this podium, this is moving. This Bible is moving, but its stability is only relative to our perception because of the electromagnetic force holding the atoms together. And I told my genetics professor that I could see Brownian movement with the naked eye.

I recall trying to memorize Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle. ATP, adenine triphosphate reacted in Krebs cycle would yield adenine diphosphate plus energy plus inorganic phosphate, TI. And Krebs cycle, oxalocyclic, malic and all this stuff.

And they were giving me a psychotropic drug called borazine to try to stop the hallucination. I was messed up. And I was having a difficult time trying to memorize all this physiology and biochemistry when I was strung out.

I wanted to be a scientist, work in biomedical research, but there were three problems. Dope and sex and rock and roll. As a result, I never did get the Nobel Prize, but I found something better. I began reading the Bible with the aim of disproving it.

I wasn't trying to prove it, I was trying to disprove it. I wanted to prove it was just another con, just another religion, just another ism. That's all. I was not trying to prove it, I was trying to disprove it.

Biblical Prophecy and the Evidence for Jesus

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. My first problem was this. I could document, I could prove with archaeology that the Tanakh, the Old Testament, was written centuries before Jesus Christ was born.

You could go to the British museums, they would verify it. It was written centuries. The second problem I had was that unlike Mastodonus, the predictions in the Old Testament were literal. They weren't vague.

They weren't how you interpret it or what you want to make out of it. It said too many direct things. Eight hundred years, nearly a thousand years before Jesus was born, there was someone called King David.

And in the 22nd Psalm, which any rabbi could tell me was written long before Jesus was born, he says, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Okay, but Jesus could have said that. Then it begins describing the crucifixion.

Verse 7, All who see me, sneer at me. They separate the lip, they wag their heads. Commit yourself to the Lord, let the Lord rescue him if he delights in him. Verse 14, All my bones are out of joint. When the Turin trial was investigated, they crucified Shababra's dead bodies in France.

And that's what happens in a crucifixion. The bones pop out of joint. But then it went on to say, Swords have surrounded me. Abandoned evildoers encompass me. They pierce my hands and feet. I've torn all my bones.

They divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots. Now I should prove that was written over 600 years before this was written. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabatani, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And when they crucified him, they divided up his garments among themselves, casting lots. They pierced my hands and feet and gambled for my clothes. It wasn't like Master Dominus. This was literal. Then it goes on to say here, They gave me gall to drink.

When he was hanging on the cross, they gave him vinegar and gall to drink. In Matthew 27, verse 34. But King David said that too. In Psalm 62. That's what he said. King David said, They gave me gall to drink.

But they gave him. So I had a problem. So I said, Well, that was written by people after the time of Jesus trying to make it seem like he fulfilled his prediction. It was staged like the Passover plots.

It was staged. It was put on. How come his own people rejected it? So I read further. Max DeMoss, the Jewish historian, not a Christian, said that his own people were accepting him in huge numbers well into the second century.

And the founders of Christianity were Jews. The two biggest opponents of early Christianity were the Roman government and the Jewish rabbis. So I read what the Roman government wrote, at least pagan Roman historians, Plutonians, Tacitus, Josephus, who was a Jew who converted to paganism.

These people admitted it was common knowledge throughout the Roman Empire that this man rose from the dead. Hundreds of people. Hundreds of Jews in different places at different times. Some in Palestine, some in Turkey, some in Greece, some in Italy, some in North Africa.

Willing to die the cruelest of deaths, even seeing their families murdered. Willing to be martyred this way, saying, We saw this man alive after he was dead. And he rose. He can raise us. We're willing to die for this.

He can get a crazy group of people in Waco, Texas. You've got to go to Waco anyway, to shoot it out with the FBI and die, as I pointed out the other night. He can force feed people Kool-Aid down in the jungle in Vienna, like that guy Jim Jones did.

But to get hundreds of people in different places at different times, Jewish people willing to die this way, facing this terrible death, even seeing their children murdered, I had a problem. But not as big of a problem as when I read what the rabbis wrote about Jesus.

As I quoted from the other night, there was something called the Avodah Zerah, written by the rabbis, trying to discourage Jews from believing he was a Jewish Messiah. This was not written by Messianic Jews, not by Hebrew Christians, not by Jews who believed in him.

It was written by rabbis trying to persuade other Jews not to believe in him. The Avodah Zerah, it said, Yeshua Nosri, Jesus, did miracles as no other rabbi. He healed the sick, he even raised the dead.

And his disciples did miracles in his name. And when he was crucified on Passover, like the New Testament says, when he was crucified, he then ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives, after raising from the dead.

That was not written by Jews who believed in him. That was written by Jews who rejected him and were trying to persuade others to reject him. It's one thing when your followers say these things. It's another thing when your enemies say it.

It's one thing when those who are trying to persuade people to believe in you say it. It's another thing when those who are trying to persuade people not to believe in you say it. I had a big problem.

The prophet Micah chapter 5 verse 2 says, someone who was pre-existent from eternity would be born in Bethlehem. He would be the Messiah. That was 500 years nearly before Jesus was born. Who his ancestors would be?

That he would be from the house of David, a descendant of King David. Prophet Zechariah chapter 11 says he would be betrayed by his friends. Not only that, it says the price his friend would betray him for, 30 pieces of silver.

No fewer than seven prices. No fewer than seven prices the prophet Isaiah alone said that this person would cause the Gentiles, the Gentile nations, non-Jews, to believe in the Jewish God. This little nation?

Israel was never anything. Even to this day there's only 13, 14 million Jews in the world. They're nothing. Yet how come the God of this little country compared to China is a billion people? People in China believe in this God of the Jews by the tens of millions despite persecution under the communists.