Hearing Messianic prophecy is a key turning point for many Jewish people who believe in Jesus. God’s Word is powerful, and through it, they come to realize that only Yeshua fits what the prophets wrote about the Messiah.

In this episode, we listen to the testimonies of three Jewish believers in Yeshua whose lives were changed as they read Messianic prophecy. Jacques was amazed at the specificity of passages such as Isaiah 53. Hylan did not think Jewish people could believe in Jesus . . . until he discovered Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. When Ronit considered the prophet like Moses mentioned in Deuteronomy, she realized that He could only be Jesus. Listen to find out how each person’s life changed after their incredible discoveries about the Messiah.

(soft lively music)

- Welcome to Our Hope,

a production of Chosen People Ministries.

On this podcast, you will hear inspiring testimonies,

learn about Messianic apologetics

and discover God's plan for Israel and you.

Whoever you're listening,

we hope you lean in, listen closely and be blessed.

(soft lively music)

Reading what the Hebrew scriptures say about the Messiah

was a turning point for many Jewish believers in Jesus.

They were shocked to find that their own Bibles

speak about Yeshua.

In recent episodes,

we have explored several Messianic prophecies.

Each one highlights a specific aspect of who the Messiah is

and what He would do.

His prophecies said that He would

deliver Israel from its enemies, teach righteousness,

die to atone for sin, rise from the dead

and rule over the earth.

Today, we will hear testimonies

from three Messianic Jewish believers.

Each one of them caught a glimpse

of the prophetic portrait of the Messiah in the Tanakh

and realized that

it could only be describing one person, Yeshua.

First, we will hear from Jacques, a rabbi's son.

When he saw a friend turned to

the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus,

he began to wonder about prophets in his own Jewish faith.

As he read biblical prophecies,

he was amazed at the detail of what scripture said

about the Messiah.

There was one prophecy in particular

that made him realize that Jesus is that promised Messiah,

take a listen.

- Are we going to bet our own eternal future

on a false prophet?

The silence spoke volumes to me.

I knew I was into something really deep.

(tense music)

I grew up in Morocco,

I come from a religious family.

My grandfather was a rabbi,

so was his father and grandfather.

It was less and less comfortable

for Jews to live in Muslim countries,

going to school and coming out.

And there were some young Muslims

waiting for us with sticks

and we had to fight our way home.

I remember my father used to say,

if you forget you're a Jew, they will remind you.

I was 13 years old when we moved to Montreal

and it was when I was in college.

Then my friends had a special interest

in Eastern religion I remember

and also in prophecies.

And I remember one of my friends

was going through Nostradamus prophecies

and I said, don't do that.

Why would you go to Eastern religion?

We have Daniel, Ezekiel,

why should we go to see other prophets?

And they said, okay, fine.

So what did they say?

And I said, well, I don't know,

I'll find out.

For the sake of my friends,

I went to inquire.

I went to see my father and I said,

"Do you know about a prophecy,

they say anything about our times?"

My father said,

"No, I don't know."

I said, "Did your father leave anything?

Did he ever tell you something?

Did he leave any books?"

And my father said, "Yes."

And so he brought me three beautiful books.

Great, but they were Cedars, you know, nothing there.

About a week later,

there were people who came to the college

and they setup a book table.

I picked up the first book and I turned it around

and it said,

What the Hebrew Prophets Say About the End-time Prophecies.

I looked at the table and it was a Christian table,

they were evangelists

and I saw the name of Christ, I saw crosses.

If I'd seen this before,

maybe I wouldn't have gone there.

How can they know about my own book better than me,

better than my father?

So I took the book.

I would see, from the corner of my eyes,

the name of Jesus, I would skip over it.

I associated the name of Jesus to antisemitism

and I was dumbfounded about the preciseness

and the importance of prophecies in the scriptures.

We have the prophecy of Moses in the Torah,

we have the prophecies of David in the Ketuvim.

This is when the writer spoke about the Messiah.

He mentioned Isaiah 53.

Ah, that did it.

How, I was so touched

by the clearness of the words in there.

I couldn't believe it.

It is so concise, so descriptive, the hero dies.

And not only that,

the hero was led as a lamb to the slaughter

and he didn't open his mouth, that was him.

One who comes, perfect with no sins to come and die for us.

And this is what Isaiah 53 says,

I recognize them.

This is when I accepted the Lord, Yeshua,

as my personal savior, I saw him there.

I met my God, I've never felt as Jewish as I did then.

My brother brought me to see

one of the chief rabbi in Montreal

and right away, he says to me,

"You know, the Messiah doesn't die."

I said to him, "But I just read in the Tanakh

that the Messiah dies, in Sanhedrin 98B."

He went and he opened up his book and he saw it.

And he went around the table once and he came back

and he said to me, he says,

"This is one opinion,

but we go as Sephardims, we go with what Maimonides,

the Rambam says."

And the Rambam says very clearly that

Jesus is not the Messiah and that the Messiah doesn't die.

So I said to him, I said,

"Do you consider the Rambam a prophet?"

And he says, "Yes, from Moses to Moses,

Moses Maimonides and Moses from the scriptures."

And I said, "But you know Maimonides gave a prophecy

that didn't come about.

Are we going to bet our own eternal future

on a false prophet?"

It didn't go well,

he got very angry of course he banged on the table

and he said, "You're lying," he says, "He never said that."

I found a book in French where

Maimonides writes to rabbi Alfuhami in Yemen

and where he gives that prophecy and I brought it to him.

And he said to me, he says,

"There are mysteries that I don't understand,"

and he gave me back the book.

I knew I was into something really deep, really great,

you know, in rabbinical Judaism,

the idea of Messiah are so broad.

Depending who you ask, you'll get a different answer.

We know, you know that when you take two Jews,

you get three opinions,

when you get into the Messiah, you get maybe 10 opinions.

The reason why they came up with two Messiahs,

Messiah ben David and Messiah ben Joseph is because

they couldn't put the two comings of the Messiah together.

They do not go by what the scripture says.

When you go to the Torah, when you go to the Tanakh,

the idea, the concept of the Messiah is clear.

You know, Yeshua said it.

In Yohana 5:46, he says,

"If they knew Moses, they would know me.

If you stay within the scriptures,

and if you stay within the Torah,

within the Neviʾim, the Ketuvim, you will find Yeshua,

he is right there, he's waiting for you in the scriptures.

(melancholic music)

- Once Jack read messianic prophecy for himself,

the Messiah's identity became clear.

His story is a marvelous example of the power of God's word,

which does not return empty.

We'll be right back.

(upbeat music)

- There are many passages in the Bible

that speak about the Messiah,

but how can we understand them?

Isaiah 53 explained written by

Chosen People Ministry's president Dr. Mitch Glazer,

is a great resource

for those who are searching for truth

and looking to have a relationship with God.

This book contains testimonies,

a list of messianic prophecies

and an in-depth look at how

we can receive atonement for our sins.

Download the ebook for free at isaiah53.com today.

(upbeat music)

- Shalom, as the year draws to a close

and the advent season approaches,

many of us will reflect on the Messiah's first coming

and celebrate his birth.

This year, experienced advent in a whole new way

when you attend our free online conference,

Advent Through Jewish Eyes.

We will hear from three Jewish believers in Jesus

on what the Hebrew scripture say about the Messiah's coming.

Our speakers are Moody Bible Institute professor

Dr. Michael Rydelnik, president of

Chosen People Ministries Dr. Mitch Glaser

and radio host, Dr. Michael Brown.

This free event is on

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

at 7:30 PM Eastern standard time.

Register at chosenpeople.com/advent today.

And now back to our program.

(upbeat music)

(soft melancholic music)

- Jacques is not the only Jewish person

who thought believing in Jesus is anti-Jewish,

Hylan Slobodkin also felt the same way.

He grew up in a traditional Jewish family, but in the 1960s,

he took drugs, practiced transcendental meditation

and turned to Eastern religions.

When he saw the darkness he was in,

he embarked on a quest for truth.

Listen to his story.

- I started going into this dark place

that was like vibrating.

And it got darker and darker.

I'm never going to come back from this place.

My family is the Fiddler on the roof story,

where the pilgrims were growing against the Jews

and the Zahra was, they were attacking villages

and they left with what they could carry.

I grew up in what we affectionately called the borscht belt.

My parents actually spoke Yiddish in the house,

it was their secret language.

I was raised a Zionist, we revolved around Israel.

We went to synagogue on the holidays

I remember the shuka in our backyard.

Some of the fondest memories were going to camp

and we'd sing

(sings in foreign language)

We'd sing,

(sings in foreign language)

Growing up in the sixties,

I was influenced by what we called the love generation.

I was doing LSD, cocaine, psilocybin, Mescalin,

methadrine, nembutal, seconal, tetrahydrocannabinol

and a few other things.

If everybody in the world got stoned,

the world would be a better place.

Now that was a lie, we didn't know it at the time.

I met my wife in 1967,

we got initiated into transcendental meditation

with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

And then we joined anashram.

I wore a turban, wrapped it every morning or all the way,

we called it our yoga whites.

We had to bring fruit or flowers

and lay them at the alter.

Later I found out we were bringing offerings to a Hindu God.

And really what had happened is,

I had rejected my Judaism.

And one day I was meditating, my eyes were closed

and I started going into this

kind of like a dark place.

And it got darker and darker

and I remember my whole body began to shake,

I was like vibrating.

I thought for a moment,

I'm never going to come back from this place,

I've got to get out of here.

We sold our cars and our goods and bought backpacks

and my wife and I set out on a quest to find truth.

We went to London and we got lost.

So some man comes out of the side street,

tall guy with a beard,

he starts talking to us about Jesus.

Jesus is in for Jews so he can talk all he wants.

He leaves, he comes back about 20 minutes later with a book.

And the book is a book called the God Who Is There

by a man named Francis Shaffer.

We go down to the isle of Wight,

which is in the English channel

and there's a big rock concert there.

It's bigger than Woodstock.

And we ended up camping next to two guys.

They said, we found the guru of the west.

And I said, well, who's that?

And he said, well, his name is Francis Shaffer.

And I said, wait a minute.

I went into my backpack and I pulled out this book

and this guy right here?

And sure enough,

it was the same guy we'd heard about

two weeks before in London.

Cool, coincidence, everything was groovy back then.

And so we ended up hitchhiking, Belgium, France,

Denmark, Holland and we go into a bookstore

and the book right in the middle of

the religious section said L'Abri,

which was the name of the community

where Francis Shaffer lived.

And there was a map, How To Get to L'Abri.

We started hitchhiking and some guy picks us up

and he takes us two hours out of his way, all the way,

and dropped us off at the front yard of L'Abri,

and we ended up staying.

They start telling us about Jesus

and like the guy in London, I said,

"Look, Jesus is not for Jews and we're Jewish."

And they said, "Yeah, but he was a Jew."

Another guy was there, great.

An expert on prophecy

and he starts reading scriptures to us about

the prophets prophesying about a Messiah

that would one day come.

And they're telling us about the Messiah,

the Jewish Messiah.

If you're Jewish, you probably have a Bible.

You have a Tanakh somewhere or a Torah, open up your Bible.

Look at Isaiah 53, open to Psalm 22,

open to Micah chapter five, look it up yourself,

tell me what it says to you.

We had a wonderful meal for Thanksgiving

and Dr. Francis Shaffer is serving

what they called communion.

I didn't know what communion was, what is this?

And he starts talking about Jesus dying on a cross.

My eyes are closed, I'm sitting on the floor

and I see this picture of Jesus on a cross.

I'm looking straight up and there he is,

He's crucified and he's bleeding.

And when I looked up a drop of his blood comes down

and hits my forehead and splatters on my forehead.

I jumped, I flinched, it startled me.

Every time I look up, a drop of blood comes down

and splatters on my forehead.

Pretty soon, my forehead began to be covered with blood

and all the discussion and all the debates

about theology and anthropology and geology.

We talked about the flood and of all kinds of things,

it became personal and I realized that Jesus died for me.

The people came out of, Israelites out of Egypt,

and God gave them a system of how to come to Him,

how to approach Him.

And part of that system was sacrifice.

The shedding of blood was necessary

for the forgiveness of sin.

When Yeshua came,

he was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

I realized that what he did on that Slav on the cross was

he forgave my sin.

I mean, that's that new covenant that Jeremiah prophesied.

I was a slave to sin and now I am no longer slave to sin.

My Jewishness is now more meaningful than ever before.

When a Jewish person accepts the Messiah,

we don't change our religion.

I feel more Jewish than ever before.

We were Jewish, we drifted and now we've come back again.

We just accept our Messiah.

(slow melancholic music)

- Through messianic prophecy,

Hylan realized that Yeshua died for him,

to atone for his sin.

God revealed himself to Hylan through His word

and through a vision confirming that

only the sacrifice of Jesus can save us.

Like Jacques and Hylan,

Ronit grew up in a fairly observant Jewish family.

When her cousin came to faith in Yeshua,

Ronit decided to become Orthodox,

a stricter form of Judaism than she was raised with.

In studying the Hebrew scriptures,

Ronit realized that they were talking about Jesus.

However, she knew that her family would reject her

if they found out she believed Jesus was the Messiah.

Listen to find out what she chose to do.

(soft melancholic music)

- Absolutely not. Do not look into this.

Are you crazy? I got the message loud and clear.

This Yeshua was not for us.

I grew up in a family that was,

I would say like conservadox.

My mom grew up Orthodox, my dad grew up reformed

and they kind of switched places.

My dad became more Orthodox and my mom became less.

We kept kosher, we did, you know, place for milk,

place for meat, it was always there,

always present, we're Jewish.

And I was very happy to be Jewish

and I never wanted to be anything else.

I used to go to shore

and we'd sit there and we would pray along with everybody.

And I'd keep up with English

because I didn't always understand the Hebrew.

And a lot of the time I could feel God's presence there.

I just felt like God is here

but then I would go and I would pray

and I wouldn't hear back.

You know, I liked synagogue.

I loved the liturgy, I loved the tradition,

I liked even keeping Shabbat,

which, you know, isn't always popular, but I liked it.

But there's a certain emptiness that was there.

It's like, you know, there wasn't power.

We always talked about God theoretically,

but not personally.

And I was so hungry for that because

that's what you see in the Tanakh.

There came a point after my bat mitzvah,

where it was just so clear that

I kept praying all the prayers and I wasn't hearing.

And I started to ask God, why, why is that?

And that summer a cousin of mine came to visit.

She'd just become a believer in Yeshua.

And then she started talking to us about,

you know, Yeshua, could he actually be the Messiah?

Really? I mean, what?

Jesus is Yeshua?

Jesus could possibly be the Messiah?

It just seemed so, what?

Something went off in my brain like,

well, we're waiting for the Messiah, what if he is?

How can I find out if he is?

I went to church with her once just because I was curious.

And it was crazy,

I was surrounded by people that were running around,

that were worshiping God, they had their hands up,

they were jumping, there were some people my age,

there were some people older

and I thought they were all insane.

And I was not at all interested in what was going on,

but I felt something different.

And then my dad found out where we had been,

all hell broke loose.

My dad freaked out and nearly kicked my cousin

out of the house and she was staying with us.

He did not speak to us for two weeks.

I talked with my sister and my brother because

we were had all been together, you know, what do you think?

Could he be the Messiah?

And my sister was horrified.

It was like, I just asked the most horrible thing ever.

And I could feel this like wall come up.

Like absolutely not, do not look into this, are you crazy?

She said to me, "Go and look into our own religion.

You don't even know enough yet to even think about this."

So I started on a path to become Orthodox because I figured

that was the way to know God.

So I started to look into the prophecies.

I wanted to find out, who is the Messiah?

What is the Messiah's supposed to do?

What do people say about the Messiah?

As I read, the one that stood out to me the most

was a prophet like Moses,

a prophet like Moshe and that everything that he spoke,

we would be responsible for doing.

And I just kept thinking like, who is a prophet like Moshe?

Who did miracles like that, somebody on that level?

And there never been anyone like that really

except for Yeshua.

So my sister went away for a year to kind of find herself.

And when she got back,

I knew that something had changed inside of her.

I noticed such a difference in my sister.

And when you grow up with somebody,

you can really tell when they're faking it

or when they're not.

And I could see that something so significant

happened in her life.

She had a deep anchor and I needed it.

She ended up becoming a believer in Yeshua.

I wanted that dream, I wanted that vision,

I wanted that lightning experience

for God to prove that he's real to me.

And finally I heard a clear voice in my heart saying,

you've heard enough, you've seen enough,

it's time to just believe.

I couldn't deny that Yeshua was real.

But I was faced with this dilemma of my dad,

my friends, what's going to happen.

It was such a big struggle.

My heart, you know, do you go with the truth

or do you go with what's comfortable?

But you know, at the end, I just, I couldn't say no.

I knew he was real.

I knew he was true and it was like,

okay, I'm doing it, it's happening.

My dad was like Mount Vesuvius, erupting.

He was so hurt, he took it very personally.

Like, why are you betraying me?

Why are you, what did I do wrong?

Your grandparents would be rolling over in their graves

if they could hear this.

It would have been better if I was a drug addict,

than believe in Yeshua.

Anything, anything except Yeshua.

Whatever the cost was, I figured it's worth it.

I love my family more than anything

and I want them to accept me.

But sometimes when you say, or you choose a side,

you have to choose it and you stand on it.

I mean, to have a close relationship with God,

the truth is worth it.

Life with Yeshua would be worth it.

(soft melancholic music)

- Ronit's testimony is not unusual.

Many Jewish believers in Yeshua have faced pressure

and persecution from friends and family.

However, they agree that life with Yeshua is worth it.

Amazingly, we have also heard stories of

the same family members

later coming to faith in Yeshua themselves.

We hope these stories have encouraged you

and increased your confidence in the power of God's word.

The Lord reveals Himself to people in all kinds of ways.

He uses each person's story and knows

just how to reach them where they are.

For many Jewish believers encountering messianic prophecies

was one of the key ways Yeshua drew them to Himself.

We leave you with Luke 24:4 and verse 46-47

in which Jesus says that

the entire Hebrew Bible testifies about Him.

All things which are written about me in the law of Moses

and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

It is written that the Messiah would

suffer and rise again from the dead the third day.

And that repentance for forgiveness of sins

would be proclaimed in His name

to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Our Hope.

This episode was produced by Nicole Vacca and Grace Swee,

written by Rachel Larsen and edited by Grace Swee.

This episode was also created thanks to Dr. Mitch Glaser,

Kieran Bautista, Abraham Vazquez and Ifoundshalom.com

in partnership with One for Israel.

I'm Nicole Vacca until next time.

(slow melancholic music)

Thanks for listening to Our Hope.

If you like our show and want to know more,

check out ourhopepodcast.com or chosenpeople.com.

You can also support our podcast

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See you next time.