Apples of Gold Jul/Aug 2024
Many elderly people in Israel go door to door collecting money for blind children. Recently, I heard a knock on my door. When I opened it, two kind, elderly, ultra-Orthodox men stood before me asking for money for children. I asked them if they were only collecting money for Orthodox Jewish children.
“No,” one answered. “This money is for all blind children.”
I was happy to hear this. So I asked them, “Have you ever heard the song ‘Amazing Grace’?”
“Never,” one man said. “Why do you ask?”
I shared the lyrics of the song with them:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see.
“You see,” I said, “Even TVs in Israel play the nice words of this song. You can hear the song in churches. Christians believe they were blind and could not see. But when they came to know the Lord, their eyes were opened and their souls received the Word. They sing this song with great joy.”
The men started to suspect me. So one asked, “Who are you? Are you one of us?”
I showed them my Bible and said, “All those who believe in the Lord read His Word and try to do His will.”
Then I showed them pictures of myself and my sons in the army. “Do you have pictures of yourselves in the army? Are you Jewish?” I asked them.
“Don’t you see our beards and black clothes?” one said.
“God does not look at your clothes. He wants you to come before Him with your whole heart,” I said. “You pray the Shema, the words of Deuteronomy 6, three times a day; but you pray as fast as a machine gun, so fast you do not know what you are saying. These prayers do not come from the depths of your heart.”
They did not like what I said, so one asked me, “How do you pray? What prayer book do you use?”
“I am not a robot,” I said. “I do not pray from prayer books. I pray what is on my heart before the Lord. I do not read prayers from pages like you.”
They realized then that I was not like them. So one asked, “Will you come to pray in the synagogue on the Sabbath?”
“I will come to the house of prayer according to Scripture, as Isaiah 56:7 says, ‘For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations,’” I said. “Our God is one. You know this because you pray this four times a day, as Deuteronomy 6:4 says, ‘The LORD our God, the LORD is one.’”
They started to ask me many questions, but I could not yet tell them I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. I pointed them toward Him slowly but surely until I spoke to them of Isaiah 53:6: “The LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”
“Who is the One on whom is laid the iniquity of us all?” I asked.
They wanted to see this verse in my Bible to make sure it was not a fictitious story. I opened my Bible to Isaiah 53 and invited them to read. They were afraid to even touch my Bible. But slowly they realized it was kosher, so they started to read and went over verse 6 many times.
“Who is this written about?” one asked.
“You have listened to your rabbis preach to you for so long, yet you have never heard this verse?” I asked them.
“Never,” one answered.
“Do you know why?” I asked. “Because they do not want you to know the full truth. That is why you must read from the Holy Bible, not from the old, fictitious rabbinical stories. Then you will be headed in the right direction to understand the truth.”
I pray these men will continue seeking truth until they come to know the Messiah.
From The Friends of Israel archives
