Welcome to the Horns of Light Chronicles. Peter Berbalis chronicles his family story, prophecy, and testimony. God's story unfolds, from his grandfather in Lithuania, Nazi Germany, the Russian Revolution, to Ronald Reagan in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the gospel spreading across Eastern Europe, how God called Peter to Petra, Jordan, and so much more as prophecy and testimonies unfold. And now, the Horns of Light Chronicles. Oh, we've got another wonderful episode of Horns of Light today, and Pete recently coming back from his adventures in Kansas, and it wasn't quite over the rainbow, but it might have been something like that. But anyway, so Pete, where do we go next? Well, I guess just kind of give a quick overview of the stuff that kind of came out of that, and then maybe dive into this with you.
So going there, Madaba Map is years ago. Fran really wants me to go see this. When we're in Petra, we go see it. Before we go to this place, I get a quick vision of a teacher calling, you know, just calling me Indiana Jones as I sit down in her class, and I can't even remember the name of the class in college. Then, when we get to the place where we see supposedly the manger that Christ was born in, the first thing the guy mentions is Psalm 119 related to all of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, which is, you know, kind of one of the things you mentioned, Psalm 119 was where the Lord led you. And then I look behind me, and we get to this place where the manger, this exhibit that they built, and oh, before that, he brings up Bethlehem Ephrata, which is the next verse, which is Micah 5-4, and we'll get into that a little bit. Then we look at the manger supposedly, and the one who has these artifacts, he requested that Song of Songs 214 in kind of a metal arc be displayed over this exhibit, and that verse is kind of significant to you. From there, we go into this guy's office, and he has John 21-11, which John 21 is significant to me because of Peter, and the three times that Christ asked him if he loves him, and Peter, you know, three times in the Book of Acts, he goes to jail and then doesn't deny Christ, but stands boldly for Christ. And this is the third time that Christ appeared to the disciples. It mentions in that Chapter 2, and also then supposedly this guy feels that the number related to the number of fish caught, which is in John 21-11.
There's a writing all over his board assigning letters to the characters, and it's something like, I am Yahweh, basically, so that's why the disciples in that following verse, I think it says something along the lines, didn't question him anymore. So that whole experience happens, then I go into my week. I send the numbers to you because that's kind of boggling to me. I just want to make sure that this could be accurate, and you respond that it possibly could. I'm walking into my dad's house.
A dove's wing hits me in the face, which is very strange as it flies by. And then finally, I tell the experience to one of the higher-ups at work, my boss's boss, and he's, you know, just maybe three or four tiers removed from the governor. I tell him the story, and he's kind of a Catholic who's exploring his faith, reading the Bible. He's got a one-year study Bible.
He sends me a picture the next morning. John 21 was his devotion that day, according to the date of June, whatever June date that was in his one-year study Bible. That was one of the readings that came up. So I guess that's kind of a quick summary of all the poetry that happened and maybe kind of going back to break it down. To me, what's interesting to me also is just like Micah, Micah 2, 12, and 13 refers to the sheepfold that Arnold Fruchtenbaum believes is that end-time sheepfold. So that's Micah 2, 12, and 13, which is what led me to Petra Jordan. And then there's Bethlehem Ephrata, which is the sheepfold that Christ was born into. And what's really interesting to me is the way that after that, in verse 5, it says, Therefore he will give them up until the time when she who is labor is born a child. And if you take that as a time period, that's when Christ is born. And this is all referring to Bethlehem Ephrata. And then it goes into another time period. Then the remainder of his brethren will return to the sons of Israel. So if this is interpreted correctly, then it could be the return of Israel that's going on right now, the return of the Jewish people to the land possibly.
And then verse 4, And he will arise and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, and the majesty of the name of the Lord is God, and they will remain, because at that time he will be great to the ends of the earth, and this one will bear our peace. Before you go on, Pete, I wanted to jump in for a minute. Maybe I've told you this story or maybe I haven't, but I'll never forget it. I had this dear friend, you know, actually when I was just a baby, baby Christian. And he was an Israel nationalist. He'd grown up in Israel. He was Jewish. And he actually was one of the very few ever Congressional Medal of Honor winners of Israel. In other words, Israel has an award for somebody that's given outstanding bravery, you know, in war.
And believe me, as brave as those people are, to get that award, they'd only given out three or four. And there was literally a book written about him. And so he was a fairly famous war hero in the war, not this current one at all, but the one back when, you know, in the late 60s.
Right. And so essentially he was in a boat that was like just a regular-sized boat. You know, like we would cruise around in a lake, but the Arabs had these giant battleships and stuff.
And he took one of these little just regular baby boats and essentially took out one of these battleships while he had been shot and given himself morphine and all sorts of stuff so that he could just keep the boat on track to crash into this, you know, Arab whatever it was, battleship and sink it and that kind of thing. So he's a fairly remarkable man. But anyway, he told me this story, just to give you the idea that, you know, he looked very European, although, you know, if you meet most people in Israel that are Jewish, they look very, you know, like they're from the Middle East.
But he didn't. He looked very European. And his name's Nadav Sherer. And I said, Nadav, you know, so how is it that you don't look like the other people I've met from Israel?
Well, my family was, if I remember correctly, they were from Yugoslavia. And he said, you know, back in the way he described it, it's kind of funny, and I did not know about it at the time. He goes, you know, back around the turn of the century, they started to have a call to go back to Israel. It was called the Zionist movement.
Maybe you're familiar with it. And he said, you know, my grandfather, they kept on calling him, calling him in the 20s and 30s to come to Israel. Well, in the 30s, he finally, finally decides that he's going to go come to Israel. Because Nadav's parents had come and had settled in one of the kaputzes that was there.
And so they finally got the grandfather, you know, after all sorts of begging and whatever, he comes, he arrives in Israel. And as soon as he gets off the boat or the plane or however he arrived, he was like, you know, I need to buy some cigarettes. Well, they did not have his brand of cigarettes.
They didn't sell his brand of cigarettes in Israel. And so he was like, I can't live like this. I've got to go back to Yugoslavia. And so he gets back, goes back to Yugoslavia. When he's getting off the train to come into Yugoslavia, the Nazis are taking all the Jews and putting them into trains and sending them off to the concentration camp. And so as I was listening to this, and of course that happened in the 30s, I realized, and of course your grandfather, if you think about it, it was experiencing similar persecution up there.
But think about how many Jews did not answer the call of the Zionists and as a result ended up in Nazi concentration camps. I'm not saying that it's necessarily, you know, was punishment. But what I am saying, because they weren't doing what God had told them, you know, which was to return to Zion, it seems pretty obvious that the timing of this is not unrelated. And you can see it if you study those stories, like it's like man. And all these pieces being put into place for what you're talking about in all these scriptures, right? That these things, what we have lived in historical events in our lifetime are completely correlating to what God is doing, you know, regardless of whether it happens 10 years or for an hour or 20 years. One thing's for certain, you know, the hand of God is at work and he's doing amazing things.
And based on your story, you know, clearly through prayer and through obedience, we can take part in whatever God has in that for us. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
Fully, fully agree with you. That's amazing. Did you have any more? No, I just wanted, that was, you know, when you were talking about that, I was like, yeah, I had a first-hand experience. It was a real eye-opening thing, because again, I didn't know anything about Habakkuk or Micah or anything at this point in my life. I was just, you know, John 3.16, I got that much. Yeah.
I'm coming from that same background. I didn't, you know, I was just thinking about Psalm 119. I never knew, you know, I can't say I ever heard a sermon about it. It's all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And although it says that, you know, in my study Bible, it's just something you never paid attention to. Well, if I can say a lot about that too, I guess I'll say a little bit of something, that the 119 Psalm is actually like a decoder ring, right? That what you have there is eight verses on every single Hebrew letter.
And so what you're hearing when you read them is, here's King David to an extent, when you look at every single letter, he's giving you some understanding of that letter in all eight verses on that letter. And so by totally grasping those verses and what's drawing them together, like when you look at the letter Zion, which is the seventh letter in the Hebrew alphabet, notice how many times the word remember is used in those verses, because the main idea of Zion is the idea of remember. And you might remember, Jesus said, right, when he was giving the communion, the Last Supper, right?
Remember, do this in remembrance of me. And again, it wasn't hours later, and the thief on the cross was saying what? Remember me when you come into your kingdom. This idea of the Zion is in that expression and the energy that's in that idea. And so the 119th Psalm is loaded, loaded with that kind of information, which unravels the curse that really most of us live under, which is the curse of Babylon. In other words, God confused the language so we wouldn't hurt each other. And that when we decode the actual human language, which is Hebrew, okay, there's no doubt in my mind, when we're in heaven, we're not going to be speaking English. But there was a language, and the reason why all languages are, and if you really look at this, there's a reason that the A is an A, and an alpha is in Greek, and the aleph bet is literally the first letter in Hebrew is an aleph.
All languages are a confusion of the original language. Interesting. Wow. Wow.
And so when you begin to realize that the reason that we really don't communicate that well is because we really don't have a common language. Wow. Or an understandable language, because Hebrew is not only inspired, but it's a picture language, and most of us are picture learners. So when you look at each of those letters in Hebrew, they're a picture of something.
Very, very interesting stuff here. Yeah, so I didn't mean to just go on and on, but all those things are very, very connected to what I see God is trying to instruct us in, which so much has to do with just his truth, his expression, his voice, his language. And hoping that you'll go on and on more. So the Lord first led you to Psalm 119, then he led you to Psalm 214, which was the second kind of thing outside of Micah 4, but related to you, that was above the manger. And, you know, clefts of the rock appears in this, which to me relates back to Obadiah, which is that place which references Edom, which is that place where Christ will return according to Fruchtenbaum, Petra, Jordan. But how, I guess, how did you jump from Psalm 119 to Song of Songs, or why do you feel the Lord, so it sounds like the decoder.
God gave you a decoder in Psalm 119, but then he brought you into Song of Songs. So what's the significance of that to you, or what thoughts are coming up in your mind related to that? Okay, so when I, again, when I get up every morning and begin to pray, like, God, where are we going today, I don't hang on to that, okay, I've been in Habakkuk for the last three months, I'm expecting to go to Habakkuk 3-4 since I did 3-3 yesterday. If he chooses to send me somewhere, that's where I go.
Gotcha. And so I'm listening to his voice to say, where are we going? Well, as I've studied the 119th Psalm, I know that God knew that my heart was, what is the word statue? Okay, because it was clear through studying the Psalm that King David himself, obviously at the time, probably the master of the Torah at the time, and the Scriptures and the language. You know, he'd studied it, he'd prayed about it, he'd done all these things, but when you really read it, you'll see how many times the cry of King David's heart was, teach me your statutes. Teach me your— Which is different than laws.
Pardon me? It's different than laws. Right, right, there are several expressions, there's commandments that are out there, there's precepts, you know, there's the word, all these things he's asking for, but statutes in Hebrew is a very specific idea. And it's only two letters, which are the letter, it's a letter kuf, and the letter het, c-h-e-t, het. So a kuf and a het makes that idea of statutes. Or maybe it's het kuf, excuse me, I said it backwards, it's het kuf, because you know, Hebrew reads backwards, and so I'm always getting things mixed up.
So it's hukum. So the idea of a hukum, the idea of a statute, is this idea of being united, just so close to God that it's unbelievable. And it was obvious to me that even in the last verses of the 119 Psalm, he is still saying, you haven't taught me my statutes yet, I need to know what that means. And so one of the last things is, I will run, or I will praise you with upright hearts when you teach me your statutes.
In other words, that hasn't taken place yet. And so clearly, if that was David's heart to understand statutes, that became my heart to understand statutes. And so the first letter being in the statutes is a het, which is the number eight, okay, in Hebrew numbers are letters, which we've already experienced that. And there are eight chapters in the Song of Solomon.
Interesting. And see, since the idea of that het is a union, and there's no bigger union in the Bible from my perspective than the Song of Solomon. And so in order to see if I could begin to teach me their statutes through studying and memorizing the Song of Solomon, that was what led me to the Song of Solomon and of course all the verses that you're talking about. Certainly, you know, my dove in the cleft of the rocks, you know, let me hear your voice and let me see your face and those things because again, he loves it so intensely that that's that idea of the union, which is the beginning of the idea of statutes. Well, the reason why I went from Song of Solomon to Habakkuk, again, he told me to go to Habakkuk, but when you look at the word Habakkuk, guess what it's loaded with? Hets and kuffs. You can hear it.
You can hear the H sound and you can hear the Q sound. In fact, it's like a statute on steroids. Interesting. So that was my correlation to how I went from 119 Psalm to the Song of Solomon to Habakkuk, but actually I didn't know why in the world I was going to Habakkuk until I looked at the word Habakkuk and I went, oh, you knew I was wanting to know what statutes are and here you are with Habakkuk being, you know, a primer on the whole idea. And literally his name means like clinger or something. Right.
It's like a giant hug. Right. Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. And all these have had eschatology type of implications for me, and I guess the cry of my heart is, you know, come Lord Jesus. I really want to have this final veil. I mean, there's the veil that was removed at, you know, when the temple curtain was torn and that gives us access into the Holy Holies. Now we're the dwelling place of the Lord. We are the temple, the walking Holy of Holies, I guess, desiring to represent Christ on the earth. But, you know, I just long for that final veil to be removed to where kind of what policies we see dimly now, but we'll get to see face to face.
So it's I don't I just don't know. It's just it's just interesting to me. And really in reading in Micah, what struck me out of that last verse when I was going through it this morning. And he will arise and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord and the majesty of the name of the Lord is God. And they will remain because at that time he will be great to the ends of the earth. And this one will be our peace, which to me seems to go beyond, you know, just what he did at dying on the cross for us.
But that seems to go to that place where the governments don't have the solution of watching the presidential debate. Oh, my goodness. I don't even know. We digress hugely. But no, no, no, no. I love this. And unfortunately, we're out of time.
And I'm a kind of say that you couldn't be more right. That, of course, the longing of our heart and relationship is for that day. And I love the idea. I love the idea that it's going to be more than the temple curtain has been separated, that he literally will be our shepherd. In other words, to literally have him right there, to be able to speak to him, love on him and those kind of things is what our hearts were made for. They don't just long for it.
They were made for that. And of course, we have this great emptiness. But I would just say, as you can see from Pete and clearly in my own story, as we seek him in the Scriptures, as we go after his heart, it's all through those 66 books and what an opportunity we all have, right, to enjoy that deep fellowship that really you can only get. And I'm sure you agree with me, Pete.
You can only get it by going deep. Oh, yes, I fully agree. And I mean, I just look at the word and just think, you know, and just wish I could have the understanding of it all. And I know that there's an eternity just in his word of getting to know him and how it all relates and just, boy, the interconnectedness of it all.
Because it's him, it reveals him from beginning to end and his desire for a relationship with us. And that's just my goal. Well, thank you, my friend. And we will have another episode coming up soon. Thanks for listening.
