00:00You know, our ministry, the Joshua Fund, my wife and I started 18 and a half years ago to do what?
00:05To bless Israel and her neighbors in the name of Jesus.
00:10Most ministries, even if they have a full biblical view, yes, God loves Israel.
00:14He loves the Jewish people. He has a special, unique plan for us.
00:18But he also loves the whole world.
00:20And he certainly loves the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Syrians and the Jordanians,
00:23the Iraqis and the Egyptians and so forth.
00:26All true.
00:26So, but most ministries don't try to do both simultaneously.
00:31But that's what God has called us to do.
00:33Over the last 18 and a half years, God has given us the mercy to invest $100 million, more actually,
00:40than to strengthen the church in the Middle East, in Israel, starting with, and all those Arab countries,
00:46humanitarian relief and pastor support and training and so forth.
00:50Why? Because he loves the people of the epicenter.
00:53He's praying about God is moving, but you're not getting that on CNN.
00:57You're not getting that on MSNBC or the New York Times.
01:01You really have to turn to TVN to go, what is really happening?
01:05God, under the darkness, and there's a lot of darkness.
01:08God is moving.
01:09The light of Christ, the Messiah is actually starting to shine.
01:15And it's a really interesting time.
01:17Challenging, exhausting, but actually kind of exciting.
01:20Yeah, and you're in the middle of it, and the harshest, obviously, Joel, of all wake-up calls, October 7th.
01:26But you've been living in Israel for a while.
01:28You've been following it for years.
01:29Do you sense now a greater openness among the Jewish people, and the people in Israel in particular,
01:35towards Jesus, towards Yeshua, than ever before?
01:37Ever before.
01:39That's true of Jews worldwide.
01:41We've done a lot of research, and the Joshua Fund has funded a lot of research.
01:45And we've found that since I was born in 1967, at that time, there were only 2,000 Jewish people on planet Earth
01:53that believed that Jesus is the Messiah.
01:56Wow.
01:56Less than 2,000 or fewer.
01:59Today, we're at about a million.
02:01Now, most of those, close to 900,000, are here in the United States.
02:05Then you've got about 30,000 in Israel, and then Europe and Brazil and other places around the world.
02:10But we're at about a million right now.
02:13Now, when you think of going from 2,000 to a million in 57, in almost 58 years, wow,
02:19that is tremendous growth that even much of the church isn't aware of.
02:22Even Jews for Jesus and Chosen People Ministries and others were shocked when that research began to emerge
02:30because a lot of people didn't believe it.
02:32I didn't believe it.
02:33I believe that there were many more Jews in the kingdom than most people thought.
02:37But Jewish ministries were shocked because they were looking at Messianic congregations in the United States
02:45and around the world and thinking, there's not that many.
02:48And how many Jews worldwide, by the way, non-believers?
02:50Right, right.
02:50So there's about 15 or 16 million Jews total.
02:53So now we're talking about a million out of 15 or 16 million.
02:57This is the highest number in sheer numbers in 2,000 years.
03:01It's the highest percentage of Jews who believe in Jesus as Messiah.
03:06When my father came to faith in Jesus as an Orthodox Jew from an Orthodox Jewish background,
03:11he came to faith in 1973.
03:13He thought he was the first Jew since the Apostle Paul who believed this.
03:17He never met a Jew who believed in Jesus.
03:19He never heard of a Jew who believed in Jesus.
03:21And in 1973, there weren't that many.
03:23But now we're at about a million.
03:24The reason most of the Messianic ministries didn't see it
03:27is because most Jews who believe in Jesus don't go to Messianic congregations.
03:31They just go to regular Bible churches or evangelical churches of different denominations.
03:38And so they sort of blend into the rest of the evangelical culture.
03:43They don't distinguish themselves as Hebrew Christians or Messianic per se.
03:47Now, in Israel, it's certainly much fewer than in America.
03:51Well, why would that be?
03:53Well, it's because here in America, there's so many evangelicals
03:55who are loving on their neighbors and praying for their neighbors.
03:59Jews in America have much more contact with people who love Jesus here than they do in Israel.
04:05But that body is growing.
04:07In 1948, our research shows that there were only 23 Jewish followers of Jesus, of Yeshua,
04:15in Israel in 1948 when the country was prophetically reborn.
04:1923.
04:20Now we're at about 30,000 or so.
04:23Okay, that's positive.
04:27But you're talking about a country of 10 million people, probably 8 million Jews.
04:32So you're thinking, well, that's not enough.
04:34No, it's not.
04:35But the question, so right now you're not seeing in Israel a mass harvest.
04:39If you're looking for people coming to faith in Jesus, go to communist China, right?
04:43They've gone from a million to 100 million in the last 40 years.
04:46Or go to Iran, where they had 500 Shia converts to Jesus in 1979.
04:52Now they're at several million.
04:55Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa.
04:57These are where the greatest spiritual awakenings are going on.
04:59But there is a great spiritual awakening going on among the Jewish people,
05:03but most of it's in the States.
05:05So the question is, when are we going to start seeing people come to faith in Yeshua in Israel?
05:11And I think what we're watching now, but it hasn't really been reported,
05:14it's not getting noticed in the midst of all this horror of this war,
05:18is people are really processing it in Israel like never before.
05:23So that's encouraging.
05:25I can't predict when open ears and open hearts will turn to decisions.
05:32We've got to keep praying for that.
05:34Do you see a deeper prophetic meaning behind it, behind this move of the Jewish people?
05:38Well, gradually, it's not all at once, obviously, as you laid out, Joel,
05:41but gradually more and more Jews are coming to know Yeshua, Jesus, as their Messiah.
05:46Do you see a deeper prophetic significance in it,
05:49especially considering the prophetic time we're living in right now?
05:52Absolutely.
05:53First of all, there's only one country where God says,
05:57when the end of the end comes, right before Jesus comes back,
06:01I'm going to save that whole nation.
06:03That's Israel.
06:04Romans 11, 26.
06:06All Israel will be saved.
06:07Now, I don't believe that from this moment all the way to the end of the tribulation
06:11that every single Jewish person gets saved.
06:14I think that is talking about a very specific moment that is connected to Zechariah 12
06:19and to other prophecies that say that God's going to save every single Jew
06:23that survives through the tribulation.
06:26And just before Jesus comes back,
06:29he's going to open up the fount of grace and a blessing that Zechariah speaks of.
06:33He's going to pour out his grace on everybody that's left,
06:36and he's going to save all of them for his glory, for their good,
06:40but not that they've been really listening that much through.
06:44But my point is, however a viewer looks at what does Romans 11, 26 exactly mean,
06:53how do we get to all Israel being saved?
06:55Well, 50 years ago, there was almost no Jews saved.
06:58So you'd think, well, I don't even know how that's,
07:00I mean, maybe that doesn't, maybe that doesn't mean what it says.
07:03Maybe that's, I don't know what that means, right?
07:05People were like, there have barely been any Jews in all of 2,000 years
07:09who got saved since the first century.
07:12Now that we know that there are a million,
07:15that is telling us that the scales are coming off our eyes.
07:20The block of ice around our hearts as Jews is melting,
07:25that the curtain of Jewish awakening is going up.
07:30And this should encourage us.
07:32Yes, we have the rest of the world to reach as well.
07:35But Romans 1, 16, right?
07:38God is really serious about, don't be ashamed.
07:41Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.
07:44Why?
07:44Because it's the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes.
07:48To the Jew first, also for the Gentiles.
07:51This season that we're in, the last 50 years,
07:54but definitely the last 10, more Jews are open.
07:58They see the love of the Christians.
08:00Even Christians who aren't sharing with them,
08:02they at least feel the love, the affection, the support, the identification.
08:07You're not alone in the world.
08:09Yeah, the world may hate you.
08:10Radical Islam may hate you.
08:11We don't hate you.
08:12We love you.
08:12But that's prompting our team, the Jewish team, to say, okay, why?
08:18Why do the people who love Jesus, why do you who love Jesus, why do you love us?
08:22We need an answer.
08:24We have an answer, but we need to be ready to share that answer with everyone who asks.
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