Sid: Now I have been so looking forward to this interview this week because you know it says in scripture “He that touches Israel touches the actual pupil of God’s eye.” And one translation says “He that touches Israel pokes their finger in God’s eye.” So the operative question that I want to ask you is “Why care about Israel?” The book and the author that I have on the telephone; the author is a Messianic Jew by the name of Sandy Teplinsky; I’m speaking to her to her at her home at Anaheim, California. The title of the book is “Why Care About Israel? Let me ask you some questions that we’ll be discussing this week. What is the tiny nation of Israel about? Why does it even exist? As a Christian how should I understand the Arab Palestinian Israeli Conflict and respond in love towards all involved? Is there a Biblical solution to the conflict? How is the Holy Spirit working in the lives of Jews and Muslims today? What does Israel have to do with my personal relationship with God? And I love the subject title of the book “How the Jewish Nation Is Key to Unleashing God’s Blessings in the 21st Century.” Sandy Teplinsky we have met on a number of occasions. You’re a Jewish believer in the Messiah. I always ask this question because I know that this is a God book therefore there’s a God circumstance that had you write the book. Why did you write the book “Why Care About Israel?
Sandra: Sid this book really has… this book was not written as a theological treatise although we certainly do include numerous biblical references and all things need to be tested by the word of God. But this book was written fundamentally out of my personal journey with the Lord Yeshua over the past decade. And my goal in writing this book is to take the readers on the same sort of experiential journey into the very love chambers of God’s heart for all His people. The kind of journey that He took me on over the years which primarily is the result of a very unusual background that I had stemming from my childhood. I did not come into this thing through a Messianic Jewish Congregation; they didn’t exist when I came to the Lord. I came to the Lord actually out of a very violently anti-Jewish setting even though I’m a baby boomer I was born in the United States. I grew up in a really rough neck kind of neighborhood not very far from a local Nazi headquarters. I had to learn to physically fight as just a primary grade kid for the many times I was called “Dirty Jew” and “Christ killer” and “Go back to Israel” and all sorts of things. And so you can imagine that by the time I came to a saving knowledge of Yeshua there were lots of issues that needed to be addressed. And God used those issues to bring me not only to a place of forgiveness but to a place of really entering into the love chambers of His heart for His Church. You know the nations, the Gentiles of some who may or may not have been Christians I don’t know you know the very ones that would beat me up in the school yard on the playground you know and I end up kind of schlepped or dragged off to the Principal’s office and kind of rebuke time after time for attempting to defend myself and causing a playground scuffle. Those very incidents were the soil that came through non-Jews could only have been healed through non-Jews. And so shortly after I came to the Lord He graciously surrounded me with Christian believers who ministered deep healing to me. And of course the Lord is never satisfied just with healing; you know He likes to replace it with something even bigger than the wound that was there. So He began providing what was supernatural revelation of His heart for Jews and Gentile believers, Jewish believers and Gentile believers to come together as one new humanity or one new man as your book is entitled. So that became a springboard for a rather unique journey into God’s heart for Israel, as well as God’s heart for the Gentiles. And so along with that I was going to synagogue; I grew up in a pretty Orthodox type of upbringing, and at the same time the rabbis were showing us kids just 5-6-7 year olds unedited footage of the holocaust. And we would sit there as you know just primary graders and watch what looked like heap upon heaps of skeleton like bodies just plopped into like mass graves. And we’d see these bazaar macabre like Nazi like medical experiments conducted on kids of our own age. And we were told “This is what the world will do to you. This is what Christians will do to you if you let them and you must never again allow that to happen.”
Sid: And you know what, I don’t want to digress too much, but I have a Jewish Aunt because I’m a Jewish believer in Messiah also. I was talking to her recently and she’s in her 80’s and she loves me; and she respects my belief. She isn’t a believer herself and she asked me a question the other day. She says “Why is it when I hear the Name Jesus I feel so repulsed; I feel so awful why is it?” And you know there’s answer’s to that I said to her it’s almost like a chess game and the devil has caused people who call themselves Christians and wear the biggest crosses to have done the most horrible anti-Jewish deeds in history. And even though you don’t know yourself of how horrible that past is its past is a Jew can believe in anything. A Jew can be an atheist; a Jew can be a Buddhist; a Jew can be active in the New Age all things that are abominations according to the Word of God. But the only thing that a Jew can’t do is believe that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and then they’re ostracized from the community. And it’s such a stronghold among our people; how could you Sandy like a Jew that was beaten and persecuted for being a Jew become a believer in Jesus?
Sandra: Well, it wasn’t easy; well I felt obligated spit when I hear the name Jesus. Certainly not the only one of our people that reacts that way. I vowed, I vowed that I would never allow Jesus Christ or his people who calls themselves Christians to do those sorts of things to the Jewish people again. I thought Jesus wanted me dead and hated me. I truly grew up with that understanding because the people who said that they followed Him communicated that to me by their words and their deeds. Now I came to the Lord in trying to disprove the gospel. In college I went on a search for truth; I remember Sid being in the Hillel Synagogue at the campus that I was attending my freshman year of college and I left the service in the middle of the High Holiday Prayers in tears crying because I did not see authentic expression of spirituality there and it broke my heart. Because along with all this anti-Semitism I was growing up with going to the Synagogue 5 days a week and the fundamental prayer of Judaism the Shema which calls upon us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, our mind and soul and strength; I did not see full-filled in my life nor in anybody else’s around me. And so I left the synagogue in tears as a freshman in college and decided I needed to find God in some other way but obviously neither I or anyone else I could see was truly loving Him with all our heart as our for Fathers Abraham and Jacob Moses and David did. So I embarked on all kinds of eastern mystical things; you know we call them New Age now but they’re really not new. (Laughing) And the Christian evangelist on campus spotted me as ripe for the pickings and they attempted to witness to me. Which of course I viewed as another form of anti-Semitism. In witnessing I thought that they wanted me to convert from Judaism to give up being Jewish and to become a Christian. Which naturally infuriated me and naturally I determined to fight fire with fire. I went to the bookstore bought a King James Bible and began to read the New Testament from Matthew through to Revelation specifically to disprove it once and for all. Sid I literally could not get through the first page of Matthew without being profoundly struck that this book was entirely Jewish. That it was extraordinarily different from all the other books I have read and I had gone through the Tibetan book of the Dead, the Bhagavad Gita, I mean all of these other eastern types of writings. But the scriptures, the book of Matthew, the first book in the New Covenant the very words to me contained a power and a love that I knew was supernatural.
Sid: Sandy I hate to do it we’re out of time Mishpochah we’ll pick up right here on tomorrow’s broadcast. There is a history of the Palestinians and the Jews that few Christians understand and there is a blessing wrapped up in understanding what God is up to right now…
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth