Sid: What we call “church” is so far removed from what God intended that what we call church needs to the breath of God. Just in Ezekiel “Son of Man can these dry bones live?” And God said “I’m going to breathe on them. And when the Jewish people are grafted back into the Body of Messiah become that One New Man it’ll bring life from the dead to what we call the “church.” And when the life from the dead comes to what we call “The Church” because I rather call the “assembly” because every time I hear the word church I think of a building. And the true definition of the word is a gather, an assembling of believers; when that life from the dead comes to that Assembly then that life will go to the four corners of the earth. And let everyone, everywhere hear the good news. I have on the telephone temporarily in Richmond, Virginia. His home is Israel, Stan Goodenough. Stan was a correspondent for many years from South Africa, a newspaper reporter. And Stan what in the world would cause you to immigrate to Israel, raise a family, five children, have your children in school in a war zone. How could you do something so outrageous?
Stan: Yeah Sid, it’s a good question I guess. I would be asked question of that kind by many Israeli’s especially when the situation in Israel has resembled a full scale warzone, and certainly a place that was preparing for a full scale war. For example when Saddam Hussein was threatening last year to send missiles over to Israel again. My answer to ….
Sid: By the way you must be as an Israeli you must be very, very grateful to the United States for taking that threat away.
Stan: Well I’m not an Israeli I’m a Gentile I’m only in Israel on a journalist visa so I’m not an Israeli.
Sid: How long have you been there?
Stan: I’ve been there 15 years.
Sid: I’m calling you an Israeli; I have the right I’m sorry I’m making you an honorary Israeli but go ahead. I’m an Israeli so go ahead. (Laughing)
Stan: Well, the reality is that I was called there very clearly by the Lord out of the newsroom which I was working in South Africa in the last years of the apartheid there was coming to an end. The Lord very clearly directed me to go to Israel and to report on events taking place there, specifically for the believing world, for the church or the believing world. To offer an alternative to the normally biased quite often unfair and sometimes just downright untrue reporting that the secular world media puts out from Jerusalem, from Israel.
Sid: Yes, but with 5 children, and I know as a fact that there have been horrific things that have happened even in your children’s school. Just quickly tell me one thing that happened to some of the people there.
Stan: Well this year both there were 2 bus bombings in Jerusalem in which two members of the school mates of the 2 oldest school mate were killed and others were wounded. And so yes there are those realities.
Sid: Do you feel a supernatural protection from God for you and your family?
Stan: I do believe Sid that if we are in God’s will for our lives then it doesn’t matter where we are we’re quite safe. Because no hair on our body can be touched or harmed without the Lord’s permission. And so we don’t live in any kind of fear; we live in perfect peace because we know that we’re where He wants us to be.
Sid: Now you weren’t always this way; you were raised as a believer, however, very quickly you wanted the things of the world. But there was a particular meeting in which the Old Testament scriptures were opened up to you and I might add previous to that you had a love for Jewish music, for anything Jewish. But you were backslidden, worldly and tell me about that that you heard the scriptures revealed to you for the first time from the Old Covenant.
Stan: I was still a teenager I was in the military; I went into uniform in South Africa at the age of 16 and I was in until my 19th year. And during that period of time as you say I was not walking with the Lord; I had chosen to go on my own quest for my own faith. And it took awhile for me to return to God but thankfully His graciousness was extended to me and I was able to return and He welcomed me back. But the actually event that you are referring to happened during a church service. When I accompanied my mother to hear a speaker from Jerusalem and he was a believer. And he began to expound on God’s ongoing purposes for Israel. And because of my upbringing and my knowledge of the Bible in my head a whole lot of… things just started to fall into place. And the Old Testament which I basically now refuse to call it the Old Testament anymore for reasons that I could explain later. The Hebrew Scriptures suddenly became alive. They took on a dimension that took on reality because they were not just the history of Israel past. They were also the history of the prophesied future of Israel today and Israel to come.
Sid: You know I am amazed the number of people that call themselves born again Christians that do not know the most exciting predictions in the Bible that have all come 100% true. And talk about what’s about ready to happen next involving the Jew in Israel; I’m amazed.
Stan: It’s actually shocking; Sid it’s an indictment of all of us as Christians that we’re… often I’ll be speaking to a congregation and I will be tempted to ask the number of people who have read the Bible from cover to cover in that congregation. And almost always as I do ask the question it’s in a small minority; a few people read. We don’t know the Bible Sid. And what we do know we tend to focus on New Testament and there are even new believer’s that call themselves New Testament Believer’s; the New Testament Church…
Sid: It’s a good thing the first church were not New Testament Believer’s or they would have had no Bible.
Stan: Exactly. (Laughing)
Sid: Because for those that don’t understand the New Testament they didn’t have a nice book that we have. They were circular letters written over years. And so when the New Testament refers to the scriptures it’s referring to what… I’ll go along with what you said Stan what is called the Old Covenant.
Stan: Yeah. I don’t know if you have ever realized where that title for the Hebrew Scriptures came from Sid I did some research into that. And it comes out of a Priest, a Christian Priest a Bishop. He started in Sardis, Italy, his name escapes me right now it may come back to me, but he wrote one of the first sermon’s blaming the Jews; accusing the Jews of democide and it took… his sermon blaming the Jews for killing God underwrote a lot of the anti-Semitism from the so called Christian world that followed down the centuries. And it was the same man that decided to relegate the Hebrew Scriptures to Old Testament.
Sid: So the natural implication is who wants the Old when you can have the New.
Stan: Exactly and we send that message not only to our new converts to Christianity to new Christians. But we also send that message to Israel to the unbelieving Jew. We tell you the Jew that your Bible is Old ours is New. And so yours is kind of there if we want it; ours is really where it’s at. And that is really so wrong and of course the Bible does not begin in Matthew it begins in Genesis.
Sid: Well let me tell you something I’ve been doing lately Stan. The word Torah technically is the first 5 Books of the Jewish scriptures.
Stan: Hmm, hm.
Sid: However I found that Rabbis refer to the entire Tenach, or the entire Old Covenant many times as Torah. So I call it the Torah and the Brit ha-chadashah, the New Covenant. And I call the whole Old Testament the Torah.
Stan: Hmm.
Sid: And I like it that way, I’ll go along with the Rabbis on that particular point. But again how do your children feel about living in a land where they see such violence?
Stan: Well first of all you know we don’t cut our children off from reality on one hand. On the other hand we don’t let them sit in front of the news. They don’t watch news; they’re all under the age of 10 so they don’t really need to be watching political news right now. They know what happens when members of their school have been lost. Memorial days, they know what happens, they go through the Israeli calendar and the Jewish calendar and that’s how they live their lives. So they have Holocaust Memorial Day. And they hear about the murder of the 6 million Jews of Europe; Adolph Hitler. They learn about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. They learn about the peace process and they learn according to what’s relative to their age and I suppose what they can deal with relatively. And then of course they’re open to asking questions.
Sid: Stan we’re out of time; we’ll pick up right here. I’m glad you chose to eavesdrop in our conversation between myself and Stand Goodenough.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth