From the Conflict in Ukraine to the Shroud of Turin

The following program is recorded content created by Truth Network. Joining us today on the Line of Fire, it is Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. There are world events taking place that are so critical that we are going to focus on them today and then a little later in the broadcast something very important having to do with the Shroud of Turin exhibit coming to Washington DC, the Museum of the Bible.

We'll talk about that. We've got some expert guests joining us but there is a connection between Ukraine and the Jewish people. It was in Babi Yar in 1941, a ravine in Ukraine that roughly 34,000 Jews were slaughtered in cold blood, rounded up there slaughtered in cold blood in one of the worst massacres of the Holocaust, in particular outside of Germany or outside of the camps. This was in a one-week period and anti-semitism remained strong in many ways in Ukraine and yet the current president is Jewish. President Zelensky who was known as a foul-mouthed teacher, a comedian and and his act on TV was being a foul-mouthed teacher and anyway he's the president the Jewish president so it does tie in with Thirdly Jewish Thursday.

I got this email today from my assistant. His brother is married to Ukrainian wife and her parents live in, I'm not going to mention the city, they now have Russian flags planted in their city. Roads and bridges and some airports have been blown up. There's no access to fuel. The grocery stores have no food and then they were saying that they're Russian neighbors here in America saying hey this is not our heart. We don't want this. Most of the citizens of Russia don't want this but they can't speak up.

So I am anything but an expert on European geopolitics. So I've asked to join me today on short notice Dr. Fred Markert who is the international director for Youth With a Mission. He was converted out of atheist communism in Berlin in 73, began his missions ministry by smuggling bibles into the communist countries of Eastern Europe. He served in missions for the past 48 years, has ministered in over 150 countries. There's much more I could say about him but I want to bring Fred right on. Hey thanks so much for joining us on short notice today.

It's great to be with you Michael. So Fred first the the big picture. Why has Russia invaded Ukraine from your perspective?

Well there's there's actually a lot to talk about here. We there's actually two competing priorities that are at the core of this conflict. Number one we in America don't understand how Russia thinks. Russia has no natural barriers on their borders from Russia all the way to the west into Europe. It's one big plane and Russia has been invaded six times in in the past few hundred years as armies come right across the plains and decimate Russia. So Russia feels like it needs buffer countries because there are no mountains or rivers or any natural barriers.

In America we don't have that same insecurity. We have the two largest moats in the world. We have the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean on either side that protects us. Plus we have Canada and Mexico two friendly countries to the north and south.

So we have never felt that same insecurity that Russia feels. So it absolutely feels it needs boundaries and that's really their perspective is they want boundaries to prevent being invaded. Of course the western countries our concern is the spread of democracy and we want to preserve and help promulgate democracy in countries that want to become more free and democratic.

And so these two competing values are what we're facing here. Russia's need for security and our desire to see democracy spread. So let me just jump in the fact that that countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or served as a buffer against other potential forces now most all those countries have become NATO aligned and therefore would be considered as potentially hostile to Russia in a time of conflict. Ukraine would be the one country that hasn't. So is that part of the issue here that that adds to this desire to have a buffer?

Absolutely. At the end of the Cold War we actually committed NATO committed that it would not expand into the eastern bloc countries and then it violated that commitment by embracing countries in the eastern bloc which made Russia incredibly nervous because NATO essentially they saw as their enemy though we saw it as defensive they saw it as offensive and so we broke that commitment. But we also broke some other commitments Michael and Budapest's memorandum in 1994 we told Ukraine if you give up your nuclear weapons US England and Russia will protect you and so we've broken that security assurance and that's that's a big problem we've broken a number of assurance we've broken a number of assurances we've given over the years. Then in April of 2008 at the NATO Bucharest summit NATO declared we will bring both the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. That was a shot across the bow of Russia and so that was another thing that got Russia up in arms is name my enemies coming right to my doorstep in the Ukraine and in Georgia it would be like China or Iran or Russia putting an army in Mexico on our border or Canada on our border or it's very similar to the Cuban missile crisis. So that also caused Russia to be insecure. Then in August 2008, April 2008 NATO said we'll bring these two countries in.

In August Russia said no way and invaded Georgia to prevent it. Then in 2014 as Ukraine was making noises to move closer to NATO, Putin was again feeling insecure and invaded the Crimea and took that and then the most recent thing that provoked this is that Ukraine declared in September of 2020 that they intend to join NATO and were actively pursuing that and so I agree with those desires for democracy. At the same time Russia saw that as an offensive threat. All right so is there truth to the idea that Putin who has been serving as the leader of Russia for many many years now it's hardly just a free democracy as we'd be used to here in the West. Is there any truth to the idea that he has goals to reconstitute a Soviet Union and that this is a lot about his own megalomaniacal desires?

That's absolutely true. That the collapse of communism, well shortly after the collapse of communism, he made a statement Michael, he said the greatest geopolitical disaster of the last 100 years was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Again because they feel they need all the buffer countries, all the stands of Central Asia to protect them from Iran and other countries, India, Pakistan, etc. and the buffer countries in Eastern Europe to protect them from the West. So it is his goal to re-establish that empire once again which is problematic because those former republics of the Soviet Union want to remain independent. One of the difficult things is that Stalin mixed up all the nationalities on purpose Michael. He took Russians and put them in Azerbaijan and took Turkmen and put them in Ukraine.

The reason is is it would produce racial tension which then forced the people to look to a strong central government to keep the peace. So there are Russians in all of these former republics and that's the pretext that Putin is using to go into these countries. He's saying I must protect the Russian nationals in these countries. So we have a really challenging situation but it has greater implications actually for the global order and the growth of the global church. This is really a dramatic thing that's happening.

All right so before we get the Christian perspective in terms of how we should look at this and the implications regarding the Gospel, and that's ultimately your great focus Fred, we've got a couple minutes before the break. What's the worst case scenario simply on a political global level of what could happen right now? Well Michael we can talk about this in the next segment is what the sloppy withdrawal from Afghanistan and now Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrates is that America is no longer the world's sole superpower. Since 1992 America has been the world's sole superpower and that has ensured that there's no great power war what we call world war. But this demonstrates that now there are three great powers that have arisen and that's us in America, Russia, and China. And this is probably, this is one of the most critical events of this century. In fact Michael, no century has been without a world war and the 21st century will not be any different and this is a harbinger of that world war, World War III, which has picked up. And so this is not a minor thing, this is a major hinge of history, a pivotal moment, and how the West responds right now is going to determine the next hundred years or so. And is there in your view a right or wrong response from the West? We are between a rock and a hard place, you know, there are no there are no solutions. In America we often think there's got to be a win-win scenario in any given situation, but there isn't. We are in a lose-lose scenario with this. If the West engages militarily it could easily escalate into World War III. If we don't engage it also emboldens both Russia and China as well as Iran and North Korea and others to rise up and take similar action.

China wants Taiwan. I tell you what, let me just jump in here. We'll talk in the other side of the break about the potential falling of the dominoes here and then from a Christian viewpoint, a global Christian viewpoint, what are the implications, how we should be praying.

We'll be right back with Fred Markey. That music reminds us it is Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. We are shifting our normal Israel Jewish focus over to the conflict in Ukraine right now.

It is massive. My guest Fred Markey, who is the International Director of Youth with a Mission, has explained that this could well be the harbinger of World War III and that there is no easy solution. If America gets involved militarily it could trigger this next global war. If we don't get involved militarily then it just sets a signal, hey go in take over these countries. We're not going to stop you.

866-34-TRUTH. So Fred I don't want to be pessimistic or alarmist and I want to step back in a moment and just get a larger global Christian perspective. But what might be the falling of the dominoes if America and Europe get involved militarily to tell Russia you can't just do this? Then how might the dominoes fall with Russia and some of these other players that you mentioned, North Korea, Iran, China? Well in international relations that really deals with how how countries go to war and how they use their power, we are now in a season called testing. It's like when a little kid you know is testing his mom and dad to see what he can get away with, right?

And so that's what's been happening the past few years. That's what going into Crimea was and many other situations like that. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea are testing to see what they can get away with. What we're showing under the current administration is that they can get away with a lot.

We won't stop them. So that means it clears the way for China to take Taiwan and to take to be more domineering even in Hong Kong. And it gives the signal to other regional powers like Iran who are deadly enemies with Saudi Arabia that they can continue their proxy war in Yemen and actually try to. So there are many far reaching implications of this Michael. And the core root of it though is America is in the process of civilizational collapse, which we can stop and turn around, but it's due to our immorality. In Daniel 2 21 God says, I changed the times and seasons.

I removed kings and I set up kings, right? So God is the one who raises up nations and tears them down, right? Raises them up to global power and tears them down.

And why does he do that? Proverbs 14 34, righteousness exalts the nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. And we are far from righteousness. And that's why since our morality has decreased, our global power is decreasing, and we're in the process of God tearing us down. But the great hope is Jeremiah 18 7 to 8, where God says, If at any time a nation or kingdom on whom I pronounce judgment repents of its evil ways, then I will relent of the evil I had planned for it.

So I do believe there's hope. This is happening because America's become immoral. God says you no longer have the right to be the global superpower because you are damaging the world through pornography, immorality through the movies you export, the music you export.

And so I must let you decline. But if we return to morality, I believe we can see this turned around. Yeah. And friends, I encourage you to visit gap movement dot com as in Great Awakening Project movement dot com gap movement dot com. There are strategies there. Great Commission strategies, strategies for awakening in America that could then enhance the fulfilling of the Great Commission.

So, Fred, you sound at the alarm. You've made us to understand how critical and dire this situation is. One of the most critical moments we faced in the world in many years. From from your perspective, you've ministered in over 150 countries. You are in touch with Christians and a global globally as much as anyone I know in terms of knowing other leaders.

What? And maybe get the short answer to this. But was there a general consensus of how Trump was viewed as as a president the last four years and how Biden is viewed? Or is that too general a question? Well, very generally, I can tell you people did not like President Trump. They didn't like him as a person, but they liked his policy because his policies protected the world. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea had no idea what he's going to do next with bodies capable of anything. So that kept them suppressed from doing things like invading Ukraine or taking Taiwan. So they didn't like him as a person. They did appreciate his policy on the currently they see the current administration as weak and they understand that that's why we're seeing the rise of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. And so that's that would be a very general statement around the world right now. And something that makes a lot of sense, even as to why many of us voted for Trump, not liking his person and not finding his character, what we wanted it to be and knowing there were negative implications, but seeing the policies as important nationally and globally.

In any case, in your bio mentions, your focus is on the three point two billion unreached Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists and the seventeen hundred plus languages, many of them small dialects, which still have no Bible. So just looking at this as as believers, you know, in America, we know almost nothing about Ukraine, generally speaking, but Russia bad, Putin bad, invasion bad. So it's just the good guy versus the innocent Ukraine. It's kind of looked at maybe naively in that way.

And I don't know in no way minimizing what Putin is doing and the horror of this invasion. But as far as the gospel is concerned, obviously, we don't want people slaughtered. We don't want people killed.

We want them to to live and have the opportunity to know about the Lord. But what are some of the possible implications of this for the gospel, both good and bad? OK, so, Michael, very briefly, brief international relations lesson. The world goes through three stages that have repeated now twenty seven times in five thousand years of recorded history. There's what we call a multipolar world where there's three or more great powers which which fight it out for control of the world.

Then it moves to bipolar. Some of those powers lose their power in the wars and two powers fight for control of the world. Then it moves to unipolar when there's one superpower. To just go back two cycles, it was the colonial period when the European powers multipolar, that it went bipolar, England and France, that it went unipolar with the British Empire for 100 years. When that their power collapsed in 1914, we went multipolar again. And you had the great powers Germany, Russia, Japan, America, England fighting World War One and two. Then we went bipolar at the end of World War Two, America, USSR, and then unipolar again at the collapse of communism at the end of 1991. And what history shows, Michael, is that when we have a unipolar polar world, when there's one superpower, the kingdom globally rapidly advances. But as soon as that global power loses its power and we cross over into a multipolar world, then the kingdom globally declines dramatically. And I've proven this.

I'm writing a book that documents all this. I've proven this through history. And so the greatest implication of this is that as we've now entered a multipolar world, and when you cross that boundary from unipolar to multipolar, we get great power wars soon after, or what we call world war. So that's how we can tell it's coming. But the implication is that we will not get the gospel to the remaining 3.2 billion unreached Muslim Hindus or Buddhists, nor get the Bible into the 1,700 remaining languages. What analysts say, if America doesn't turn around, then we could have 100 to 300 years of a multipolar world full of war. And it will be after that that we'll have the ability to complete the Great Commission.

So it really is morality in America is the whole issue here. Because we're immoral, we've lost our power. God is letting us lose our power. If we return to him, Jeremiah 18, he will restore that power. And once again, we can hopefully, without war, suppress the bad boy countries or the countries that resist the gospel. That's a better way to say it. We can suppress them, which will allow the gospel to go forward with great speed.

Fred, that's a brilliant analysis, 100 times better than I could give on that subject, and done it with an incredibly concise way. It reminds me of being at one of our missions conferences with our organization FIRE. And I was overwhelmed during one of the songs singing about the nations. And I fell to my knees weeping and said, God, I'll go anywhere.

Send me anywhere. I'm your servant. And then the thought hit me, well, why am I so focused on a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution in America? And immediately I heard the words, as America goes, the world goes.

So this is about the nations. Fred, keep up the great work. Friends, visit GAP Movement, gapmovement.com. Thanks for this analysis. I'll write it up, Fred, and get this out as widely as I can. And from here, we focus on what we must, Jesus himself.

Yeah. Stay right here. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on The Line of Fire by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on this Thoroughly Jewish Thursday broadcast. We are changing gears today because of world events and because we're a major event in Washington, DC. And getting away from our normal focus on Jewish events, Israel, et cetera, but what could be more Jewish than focusing on what is purported to be a relic, the shroud in which Jesus, the Jewish Messiah himself, was wrapped with marks of his resurrection.

I was invited to an event, a media event yesterday, was unable to be in DC for it. But everyone, Museum of the Bible, beginning February 26th, has a brand new exhibit. It is a high-tech, interactive exhibit about the Shroud of Turin. And my guest today from the Museum of the Bible, Dr. Jeffrey Cloha, chief curatorial officer at Museum of the Bible, and Brian Hyland, who specializes in curating medieval materials. Jeff, Brian, thanks so much for joining us on the Line of Fire. Thank you so much for having us on.

Great to have you. So, Jeff, first the big picture. What is the Shroud of Turin? Why is it so famous worldwide? The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot-long linen cloth that has a gripping image of a crucified man with the crown of thorns and the bloody stains, the spear mark in the side, and it has been an object of intense interest and devotion for over 700 years, and is probably the most familiar image of any person from the Bible.

It's been known in pop culture, it's been on magazine covers, it's been the subject of scientific interest, and so the Shroud of Turin is an object that points people to the crucifixion in a very unique way. All right, so Brian, when Jeff mentions the image, was the image painted on? How did the image get there?

Well, to be honest, nobody knows. When you look at the image, it's an image that shows both the front and the back of a man who had been crucified, and before that had been scourged and crowned with, you know, crowned in the head. You've got all these piercings on the head, and then stabbed in the side.

The blood actually soaks through the entire cloth, but the image itself of the face and the body, the limbs of the man, that's just on the top layer of the fiber, so it's something like two or three microns in. When this image was studied in 1978, the people who studied it were called the STERP tests, a group of scientists from places like JPL and Los Alamos. They studied the STERP for five days around the clock, and they concluded that after studying it that there was no evidence at all that this was painted, so they said they couldn't explain it. The radiocarbon dating 10 years later suggested it was a medieval artifact, but at the same time, really no one has been able to explain how it got there because there are no visible brush strokes or anything like that.

And Brian, when you describe what it looks like, you mentioned the crucifixion. Where were the nail marks? Were they in the palms? Were they in the wrists?

That's another thing. This is a relic that has been well-known and documented since the 14th century, and it shows for the hands that the nail marks are actually in the wrists. And then in the feet, it looks like that they've both been pierced. But the thing about it being in the wrists is that the typical ancient and medieval iconography of the crucifixion shows the nail in the palms of the hands. What was done in the 19th century and 20th century, people doing tests, they discovered that nails in the palms of the hands would not be able to support the weight. They would tear out between the finger bones. But if you put it through the carpels of your wrist, it gets much more support, and it also causes the thumbs to lock over in a position. And if you look at the hands, there are no thumbs shown there. So it's a very interesting thing that this image shows that.

Right, so at one point people dated it based on carbon-14 dating back to medieval times, but then in medieval times, if someone was trying to make this as some elaborate forgery, some type of proof of the resurrection, they would have thought that the nails would go through the hands rather than through the wrists. So again, that's a curiosity. Okay, so Jeff, I remember following this. If I'd been of Catholic background, I would have been more familiar with the shroud as an evangelical messianic hue. I knew about it, but I didn't know about it in detail.

I thought, well, this would be amazing. And a very scientific medical doctor friend of mine had told me back then, yeah, I think it's real. I've looked at this. But then the carbon-14 dating came out, it's like, oh, I guess not.

Well, what's happened since then? And was there anything in terms of what part of the cloth was actually examined? Yeah, people still pour over the data from the testing, both in 1978 and 1988, and make comments about where the sample was taken for the carbon testing, for example, which was up in the upper, very upper left-hand corner, which is an area of the cloth that was regularly handled, and we have numerous depictions of people holding the shroud in exactly that area. We know that there were repairs in various ways to the shroud, and particularly in that area. So for some people, the carbon-14 testing is not conclusive because it didn't take multiple locations, samples from multiple locations. And so there's not new testing. The shroud itself is actually owned by the papacy, and they have not permitted testing to scientific tests to be carried out since 1988.

But there are enough questions about the way the tests were done, both in 78 and 88, that they're still unanswered questions. And what would point back to a first century date? We just have the anecdote about the positioning of the thumbs and the nails through the wrists would have been unknown or not widely known at the time that the shroud was allegedly created in medieval times. Are there more indicators that point back to the first century?

Well, that's kind of the problem. Apart from the image itself and some, you know, unique, very unique features of the image and the way it's, you know, it is impressed upon the cloth or however it was put there on the cloth, there isn't much that will put it back to the first century. So for example, there's no documentation of the shroud of this particular object, I should say specifically. Prior to the 14th century, there's some questions about the cloth itself and the nature of the weave as to whether it goes back to the first century. But on the other hand, there are pollen samples and some characteristics of the materials left behind on the cloth itself that do put it back into the first century and into a Judean context. So, you know, there's, like any historical question, there's just tiny shards of data, and then these have to be pieced together to try to put a picture together. And it is an intriguingly incomplete picture.

Right. And friends, just so you know, my guest today, Jeff Chloe, Brian Hyland, are not apologists for the shroud. So they are giving you as dispassionate an account that you can get just information here, information there. There are many who give very, very passionate, lengthy arguments for the authenticity of the shroud on many, many different levels.

So you're not getting that today. You're getting, hey, scientific evidence this way, this way, we're looking at it. Brian, let me ask you these last two questions. When you had the media event yesterday, what was the effect on the people there, and what are you hoping to accomplish with this exhibit? You know, how is it high-tech interactive? Well, as people went through the exhibit, there's a lot of wow factor to the way in which we've put the exhibition together. The most important thing within the space, actually, is we have this incredible facsimile of the shroud that was made for us by Lino Valgandino near Bergamo, Italy. And what they did is they took an heirloom strain of flax.

They raised it traditional ways in a field with no chemicals, harvested it by hand, spun it in an ancient way so it was a thinner thread, and then they wove it into the characteristic herringbone pattern. And then there's this incredibly detailed laser-printed image on it, so that when you have the whole thing there in the space, you're looking at something as closely as you can, that resembles as much as possible the actual shroud. But the big difference is that you can actually stand there and stare at it. If you were there in Turin for one of the public expositions of the shroud, you are in a line, you get to go by it and spend maybe a minute or two minutes in front of it, and you can't get as close as we allow people to get here.

So I think that that was a thing. And you know, with debates about authenticity versus medieval manufacture, honestly, one of the ways in which we put the exhibit together is we looked at what Pope John Paul II had said about the shroud. He called it a mirror of the Gospel. And Pope Benedict XVI said that it's an icon, and that it's something that's best viewed with the eyes of faith. So if you look at it through the eyes of faith, you know, it's six of one, a half dozen of the other, whether it's real or it's a medieval artifact, the image is still there.

And what the image represents is the passion and death of Jesus, and it does so in an extraordinarily moving way. And when does the exhibit run? It runs until July 31st. Alright friends, I plan to get there February 26th to the end of July.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see virtually the shroud up close. Gentlemen, thank you so much for what you're doing and for joining us today. Appreciate it. Thanks once again to our great team in Winston-Salem for their transitioning from skillet the resistance into our thoroughly Jewish Thursday music, and they got it down to a science now.

Alright, I do have a few minutes for random Jewish-related calls 866-348-7884. I do need to make a correction, just heard back from Fred Markert. He was International Director of Youth with a mission up to five or six years ago when they changed a lot of the titles involved, etc. So he is still in his world Christian leadership capacity, but he is the founder and lead catalyst of the Great Awakening Project, which works to unite the body of Christ in a coordinated effort to birth revival in America, which will result in the completion of the Great Commission in the whole world. And again, for more info there, go to gapmovement.com. So I wanted to make that correction.

He has served in that position, but that is no longer his title. Okay, let me go back to something and tie this all in together with Thoroughly Jewish Thursday. There is a perception often that when Jewish people look at world events, their big question is how does it affect us? How does it affect the Jews?

And it's natural to think like that because Jewish people until 1948 did not have a homeland for almost 2,000 years. We're scattered all around the world, and we just want to know what's the bottom line for us? Are we going to have safety? Are we going to have to flee to another country? Are we going to have freedom, etc.? And even in America, we're looking at the conflict in Ukraine, and some are wondering, well, how's this going to affect gas prices? Or how's this going to affect the economy? So yeah, we don't want to be a blood bath, and we're concerned about the implications of this, but many are thinking in that way, well, how does all this affect Israel?

I can't answer that because I do not have the expertise. I have to dig in and research and consult experts to explain how the Russia conflict would affect Israel. The obvious, I could say, is to the extent Russia is able to flex its muscles, and because Russia made clear it has desires for the Middle East in terms of control, and that's how Russia got so involved in the conflict in Syria, and to the extent that Russia and Iran work together.

So that's bad news for Israel in that regard, but the larger implications for potential global war, I can't comment on that. However, what I want to back it down to is this. We have three Rs that we focus on in our ministry. The first is revival in the church. That's our first R, seeing believers awakened around the globe as we're based in America, seeing revival in America, the church coming alive, the church getting healthy, the people of God being all that God called us to be, thriving, shining for him. The second R is revolution, meaning gospel-based moral and cultural revolution, radical transformation in the society, but it's gospel-based. That will not and cannot happen without a revived church. We heard Fred saying in the first half of the show that for the Great Commission to be fulfilled, there needs to be, right now, a revived church in America and a more healthy America, and then with that there can be a positive ripple effect.

So, and again, he got into it in more detail than that. So in order to see the second R, namely gospel-based moral and cultural revolution in society, we need to see the first R. The third R is redemption in Israel. The third R is seeing the lost sheep of the house of Israel come to faith, and it is only Romans 11 25 that is the fullness of the Gentiles comes in that in this way or subsequent to that all Israel will be saved, Romans 11 26, that the Jewish people worldwide will turn to the Messiah en masse. So in order for the second two Rs to come to pass, the first R has to come to pass.

It is only a revived ekklesia, a revived kahal in Hebrew. It is only a revived and energized and holy and passionate and spirit-filled and evangelizing and missionizing church that will turn society around. It's not gonna be totally Christian before Jesus returns, we understand that, but we'll push back against the moral decay and we'll provoke Israel to envy.

So we're not waiting to see the first part happen before we get to the second part and the third part. We stand for what's right in the society, period, that we do all the time. We contend for the salvation of individual Jews all the time. We continue to do that while we also seek to stir hearts and create hunger and desire for revival.

So here's how it works out. My last book that came out in October, Revival or We Die, A Great Awakening, Is There Only Hope, that book will be relevant I believe for many many years to come. My newest book that comes out next week, The Silencing of the Lambs, The Ominous Rise of Cancel Culture and How We Can Overcome It, that comes out more. We have to address this anyway.

It comes out March 1st. We have to address this anyway. We have to address the issue of the silencing the lambs either way.

We can't get away from that. It remains critically important speaking up freely and openly here in America and helping to turn the moral tide. But to see everything in its fullness we need to see the church revived. And friends, it's my hope and my prayer that if you listen regularly, if you turn into this broadcast regularly, that your heart will be stirred, that spiritual hunger will grow in you, that your desire for God will grow, your desire to see God move in your life, your family, your church community, your neighborhood, your city, your state, your country, that your desire to see God visit will grow and that you yourself will be used to make a difference.

We're here to see you healthy and strong and thriving in the Lord. Alright, I do have time for some calls but for all those that would have called but we weren't taking calls until right at the end of the show. Good news, in 20 minutes we're gonna be back on YouTube. So head over there as soon as the show's over if you're if you're over there already watching and just stay there. We're going to be on the Ask Dr. Brown YouTube channel ASKDRBrown. If you're not a subscriber, when you go first thing subscribe and hit the bell so you'll be notified when a new video is posted, okay? And then I'll just be taking questions for 45 minutes or an hour over on YouTube, that is ASKDRBrown.

Alright, with that we go to the phones. Troy in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, welcome to the Line of Fire. God bless you Dr. Brown in Line of Fire. I did have a question that we are celebrating the cultural and African-American people in this month and I was wondering your thoughts on the Lost Tribes of Israel and our role in supporting, identifying, and helping to do ministry to this group of people. Right, so there there are three levels of understanding when it comes to the Lost Tribes of the House of Israel, the Ten Lost Tribes. First there is the myth that they are completely lost and are living on the other side of some mythical river and will one day be discovered.

That's found in some older Jewish texts but it's complete mythology that the ten were completely lost and will all be rediscovered one day and some people believe it in that popularized way. The second thing is that within the Jewish people today, so those of us who are recognized as Jews regardless of our skin color or other ethnic background, that among us are all the 12 tribes. In other words, what happened when you had the separation of kingdoms that you still had people from different tribes who lived in in other regions but then you had some from the north fleeing to the south. Either they wanted to be by the temple in Jerusalem or there was warfare. So this happens over periods of time and you even have Hezekiah reaching out to them and Josiah reaching out to them and you do have some response. So among the people that we refer to as the Jewish people today, I do believe there is a representation of all 12 tribes even though the largest representation among us would be Judah, Benjamin and Levi. The third thing is really what you're asking about and that's the remnants of these 10 tribes that were scattered around the world beginning with the Assyrian destruction of Jerusalem in 722-721 BC and the exiling of many of the people and then the scattering to different parts of the world since then as they traveled from country to country etc. So while in continents like Africa some of these lost tribes intermarried and they intermarried out so they're lost to history but in other cases people intermarried in so they now convert it they intermarried in so that's why you have the Ethiopian Jews still maintaining and preserving a Jewish identity or or others the Lemba tribe in Zimbabwe with with proven DNA connections and and some you know observe the seventh day sabbath practice circumcision things like that but how widespread is this the idea that America or Israel or excuse me England or actually lost tribes that that's bogus the idea that that all blacks are some of the lost tribes are all Africans is is obviously bogus you know the black Hebrew Israelite ideology and that kind of thing but for sure there are legitimate remnants of these 12 tribes or 10 tribes excuse me keep saying 12 of these 10 tribes in China in India different parts of Africa Latin America different parts of the world and I believe this is a work of God that that little by little he's he's bringing back this consciousness and it's not to me it's not a priority that we should be focusing on it is for God to gather there are Jewish organizations that do focus on this but it we could pray Lord regather regather but ultimately we want people to be gathered to Yeshua that's the key that we want these these people these remnants of the lost tribes to come to faith there's some who even argue that that some of the Taliban and Afghanistan posturing people that their origins actually go back to lost tribes and then many of the Palestinians in Israel today can trace their lineage back all the way back to Israel so it'll be fascinating as God brings this all to light all right 15 minutes from now join us on youtube ask dior brown another program powered by the truth network