Schmoozing with Some Messianic Jews

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. We're going to have a great time today talking with, oh, some Messianic Jewish friends, scholars.

It's going to be a blast. It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Michael Brown is the director of the Coalition of Conscience and president of Fire School of Ministry. Get into The Line of Fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH. That's 866-34-TRUTH. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown.

Welcome, welcome, friends, to The Line of Fire. This is a special show today. I know it's Tuesday. I know it's not Thursday.

Thursday, still thoroughly Jewish Thursday. But I just got off a Zoom conference call with students, Talbot Theological Seminary, the Feinberg School, Feinberg Center for Jewish Studies. And we just did a joint call, Eitan Barr from One for Israel, Brian Crawford, who you'll meet in a moment, Mitch Glaser, answering some of the questions from students in the Jewish apologetics class. And because we're just literally finished, I mean, I went a minute ago from my office over here to our studio, just there adjoining, and it was just on with some of these gentlemen.

So as they're getting off their Zoom call, they're going to be joining me because we're doing this. Well, let's let's continue the conversation. So I've got a bunch of cutting edge, politically, culturally related things that we need to talk about on the broadcast tomorrow.

Check my latest articles for some controversies we've been addressing at askdrbrown.org, askdrbrown.org, or over at the stream. But we're not going to do that right now. We're going to shift gears. And Friday is a special day celebrating 50 years for the day I surrender to the Lord and said, Lord, I'll never put a needle in my arm again, transformed from that moment on. So we're gonna have a special celebration with some special Q&A on Friday. But right now, I want to introduce to you a younger colleague, a Gentile Christian with a call and burden to reach our Jewish people, and with a Doctor of Ministry in apologetics. So let's get on the air with us now, Brian Crawford. Hey, Brian, welcome to The Line of Fire. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much, Dr. Brown. Great to be with you. Well, great, great to connect with you, Brian.

We just were face-to-face via Zoom a moment ago. So how do you, as a Gentile Christian, get burdened in this specific way to reach Jewish people to the point of really diving into the sources and really getting educated in rabbinic understanding and philosophy? What brought you in?

Yeah, it's definitely a story. I did not choose becoming a minister to Jewish people. That was not my plan for my life.

I was going to be an engineer for the rest of my life. I was studying structural engineering in college, and then I went on a two-week-long trip to Israel with my church, and I got to interact with Israelis on the ground. And the Bible just came alive, my faith was growing, I was underlining all these places in the Bible that I had been to and seen with my eyes, and it wasn't just imaginary, it was real. And so my faith is growing, but then I'm talking to these Israelis who live around these holy sites, some of them their entire lives, and they didn't care about Jesus, about Yeshua.

They didn't care that he walked there or taught there or that the New Testament seems to be archaeologically reliable based on that dig over there, and I didn't know how to deal with that. I'd always been taught that the Jewish people are God's chosen people, and yet I didn't understand how is it that the majority of Jewish people have not accepted Jesus as the Messiah. So I came back from Israel back in 2005 with this burden, first to learn why is it that most Jewish people don't accept Jesus as the Messiah, and then secondly, how can I be an effective evangelist to them today? And God has given me a laser-like focus on getting the gospel to the Jewish people ever since then, and he has made the way for me to join staff with Chosen People Ministries, and I lived in the middle of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn for nine years, and God has totally paved the way for me to be able to share the good news with my Jewish friends.

Awesome. So I want to probe with a few more questions in a little while and even how you intersect it with me and our work, but I want to bring on your boss and my longtime friend, Mitch Glaser, Dr. Mitch Glaser. Mitch, I was just mentioning to your students moments ago at the Feinberg Center that I was speaking at a conference with you years ago. It was on Isaiah 53, and each speaker was delivering an academic paper on Isaiah 53 that was going to be part of a book, but you asked us first to share a little of our testimony. So I've got a catchy way of doing it from LSD to PhD, but I noticed that just about everybody else getting up at the same testimony from LSD to PhD because we all got saved out of similar backgrounds, so to give mine a little bit more distinctiveness, I titled it From Shooting Smack to Semitic Studies. But Mitch, just give us a quick overview of your testimony. I mean, you've been involved as a leader in Jewish outreach for decades, but how'd you come to faith?

Yeah, Mike. I was a 19-year-old, a fairly successful businessman. I was a unregistered pharmacist, and I was doing sales in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I was raised in the borough of Queens, New York City, bar mitzvah. I went to the Young Israel of Kew Garden Hills, which was a Modern Orthodox synagogue. Fabian Schoenfeld did my bar mitzvah.

He was the president of the Union Association of Hebrew Congregations, the Modern Orthodox quote-unquote denomination. And so I was supposed to be a good Jewish boy, went to Hebrew school probably four days a week, and I really liked all the history and everything, but honestly, the religion never took. And so even though we did everything, we celebrated every holiday, and I went to synagogue at times, I just never really, really believed at all. By the time I was 14, I was doing drugs, went to college, dropped out of college, went west with all the other hippies, and in November of 1970, my two best friends shared the gospel with me. They had just become believers, and I asked God if he would show me the truth. And that night, I was reading the Old Testament in English, not Hebrew, because I only understood about one out of every 15 or 20 words in Hebrew, and that night I found a copy of the New Testament in a phone booth in the Redwood Forest.

Actually, it was the only phone booth there. It was glowing in the moonlight too much, but a lot of things were glowing at that point. And so I picked up the New Testament, actually stole it, began reading it, came to two quick conclusions, because I read it all in two or three days, nights, actually. Number one, Jesus was the Messiah, and he was Jewish. And then number two, and we were just talking about this, we've got some more questions about it, and that is I literally believe that he was God in the flesh.

I thought to myself, if anybody was like God, it would be him. And this, you know, raised all the Jewish religion I knew was Orthodox. I jumped right in there, and I guess that was, how many years ago, 1970, 2021? Boy, I should know more than I do. Anyway, it's about 50 years, and I know you're gonna celebrate your 50th too.

Yeah, yeah. So Mitch, over the years, we came to faith early 70s, called the Jesus people movement, late 60s, early 70s, large number of Jewish people came to faith in a short period of time. You've tracked things historically and found good numbers of Jewish believers in Europe before the Holocaust and different things like that. Are you seeing anything different today, or I know chosen people, ministries around the world, and of course Strong in New York Strong in Israel, other countries, but are you seeing anything new with Jewish ministry, with people coming to faith?

I think two things. Let's leave the ultra-Orthodox out for a moment, because I do see some openness among the ultra-Orthodox in Brooklyn and New York and maybe Israel too. But let's just stick to the general Jewish population. I think that there is a change in the Jewish community when it comes to Jesus, and it makes such common sense. Number one, we're getting further from the Holocaust, and so that horrible memory of the quintessential Christian persecution of Jewish people is in our culture, but it's not as raw as it has been for the last few decades.

That's number one. So I believe that has caused some degree of relaxing the antipathy Jewish people have towards Christianity. Secondly, I think that we have a ton of intermarriage. Not that there wasn't a ton of intermarriage in Europe before the Holocaust and so on, there was, actually, among non-Orthodox Jews. But we see it really all-pervasive right now, and I see that Jewish people are just becoming less disturbed about Jesus. You know, there was a Pew Foundation survey in 2013 that tracked about 1.7 million out of the 15 and a half million Jewish people who were raised in non-Jewish homes but identified as Jews, and the majority of them were raised in Christian homes. Now, does that mean that they were all Christians? Not necessarily. But what it does mean is that there was a lot of intermarriage, people were not converting to Judaism in the same way Jews who married Gentiles converted to Judaism years before, that there was more religious freedom in the home. I know that sounds strange, but I do believe that's true.

And so I think that that's a really big part of it. And I think the third thing that I've seen is the fall of the Soviet Union, and with the fall of the Soviet Union you had the destruction of an atheistic worldview that was already imposed upon a lot of Jewish people, and I find that the Russian Jews, who make up over 60% of the Jewish believers in Israel today, that's been proven by a number of really good surveys. And so I see that there's been a tremendous movement among Russian Jews as well, and as they integrate into Israeli society, I think that's now beginning to have enough critical mass to have impact on young Israelis. So I would say that all of this is going in a good direction. So we've done some other studies, and it might take a little bit more explanation, but there's probably far more Jewish people, at least those who have some Jewish lineage, one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent.

There's probably probably hundreds of thousands of those folks who identify as followers of Jesus, and most of them are in evangelical churches spread throughout North America and other places. Got it. All right, friends, we got a break coming up. I've got a bunch of questions for my guests here, and I know they've got some questions. We're going to talk about some objections, answering some common objections. I know it's not Thoroughly Jewish Thursday, but we're having a special Tuesday here with my friends, Mitch Glaser and Brian Crawford.

Yeah, it's going to get even more interesting on the other side of the break. Stay right here. Change the world.

Change the world. It's the line of fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get into the line of fire now by calling 866-34-TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. I am joined today by two dear friends, colleagues, Dr. Mitch Glaser, Dr. Brian Crawford, Mitch leading Chosen People Ministries, Brian Crawford being one of the key apologists working in Chosen People Ministries. They are my special guests today. Mitch, before we talk about some objections, common things that come up, and how we approach them, Brian, what was it like for you living in the midst of an Orthodox or even ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn? What did you learn about the people? What did you see about their devotion? What did you see about their their need? You know, there's nothing like being in the middle of a neighborhood, an entire community, where the rhythms of the traditional Jewish life are not just theories that you read on some Wikipedia article, but you actually see and experience and live in, and you know, you see all the shops just totally closed on Shabbat, on the Sabbath, starting on Friday nights, and so the whole neighborhood is just quiet, and then you you see whole families walking together for a Sabbath day stroll, or you know, you see how the the Russian Jewish community interacts with the Orthodox Jewish community, and how there's different strains there, and different languages, and different cultures, and backgrounds, and getting to know them, and talking with them on the street.

There was just nothing that I could have learned about those things without living in the midst of that community, and Brooklyn is like, it's like the old world come back to the new world. It's where all these, the old traditions from Europe and elsewhere, they are still thriving and alive, and I was able to be in the middle of that, and that was incredibly important for me to grow in respect, and knowledge, and familiarity with the Jewish people that I'm called to serve. And as far as a spiritual need, so here you have deeply devout people, human beings like everyone else, but deeply devout people, the brothers of the weather, whatever is going on faithfully in the synagogue, the men praying, gathering early in the morning, young men studying all day, the mothers devoted to their children, and honoring Sabbath, and so on.

But as you're able to interact or study more in the literature, is there a void? Is there a need? Do these people need Yeshua like everybody else?

Amen to that. They need Yeshua like everybody else. The gospel is the power of salvation to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile. These these people, they are yearning, but they're yearning in different ways. So like for instance, Brooklyn has a lot of Russian Jewish people, and they came from the former Soviet Union, and they had this void in their lives where they had the atheism beat into them for generations in the Soviet Union, and then they come here to the States, and they're just spiritually hungry, and they're searching, and they're dealing with drug problems, and they're having a hard time getting involved in American society, and they don't know English, and they don't know how to the function. Where's God and all their suffering, and they're in poverty, and they're searching for answers that they were never given in their life in the former Soviet Union. So the Russian Jewish people in New York are searching in that way. You've got Orthodox Jewish people who tend to have a much thicker worldview. They've got more answers at their disposal, they've got a community, they've got a rich traditional lifestyle, they've got rabbis that they can ask questions to, and so the needs there, the spiritual needs there, are more hidden, perhaps, because many of them find contentment in their Orthodox Judaism. But even so, on the fringes of these Orthodox communities, you've got these men and women who are living double lives, who don't actually believe in their Judaism anymore, they're struggling with what Judaism teaches about certain things, and so they're going through the motions and living a part of the community, but they're actually searching for a way out, and they want something more than what they've been given in their traditional upbringing. And we would find people like that when we do street evangelism, and definitely in our online campaigns.

And so different Jewish people have different spiritual yearnings, but all of them can be met in Yeshua the Messiah. Got it. And I'm with you, of course, on that entrench in terms of what you're saying. So Mitch, let's take a few minutes, and let's unpack some of the common objections that we hear and see the different ways to respond to them, so you can throw them out and we'll have some discussion around them.

Go ahead. Okay, so one of our students, we're teaching a class at the Charles Feinberg Center in Brooklyn, and Mike was very involved in helping with our curriculum. We're training missionaries to the Jews and Messianic pastors and missionaries, etc. So one of the folks in the class said, Jesus can't be the Messiah because God is totally other than man. This is an objection. God can only be described by what he is not.

He's nothing like us. So if somebody says that, how can I respond? Yes, so my first response would be, who says God can only be defined by what he's not? For example, when the seraphim in Isaiah 6, so using our own Scriptures, were proclaiming who he is, they didn't say, you're not unclean, you're not filthy, you're not dirty, you're not worldly. They said, kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, holy, holy, holy. So throughout Scripture, he's defined as being good, as being compassionate, being kind, long-suffering, holy, just.

So I would challenge that first. Then I'd say, second, he made us in his image. He made us to be able to love and hate. He made us in such a way that we can make moral choices, and it's his goal that we're in relationship with him.

So that's everything. He wants to be in relationship with him. If he was totally other, we couldn't relate to him. We wouldn't call him father, and yet the Hebrew Bible speaks from being our father, and as religious Jews pray, Avinu is part of our praying, you know, he's our father, and he wants to have relationship with us, and the Scriptures even talk about how we can grieve his spirit because of his love for us and his desire for us. He expresses his ardent desire that we would be with him forever, and he even has Moses tell the people of Israel to build a tabernacle, a mishkan, or a holy place, a mikdash, so that he can dwell in our midst. So that's always been his heart.

That's always been his desire. Why would we make him so other? And Brian, maybe you could add something in terms of how maybe Maimonidean philosophy, Moses Maimonides 11.35, 12.04, and one of the most influential thinkers in Judaism, how some of his philosophical thinking kind of changed some of our views of God?

Yeah, for sure. Maimonides definitely is the key player in defining God in the way that Mitch just brought up, that we cannot describe God using any kind of positive language. We can only describe him by what he's not, and so we can't actually have any idea of who God is in our mind.

If we have words in our mind to describe him like good and powerful and holy and mighty, those words do not actually describe God. God is something other than those words, and yes, Maimonides really is the key player in this. He got this idea, not from Scripture, because you can go to passages like Exodus chapter 34, where God describes himself positively using words like merciful and long-suffering and whatnot. Maimonides didn't get his theology directly from Scripture. He got it really from his Greek philosophical studies that came from his Islamic culture that he was a part of, and as one of the greatest intellectuals of his day in the Middle Ages, he was surrounded by Muslims who also believed that God was totally undescribable, that you could not know him. And Maimonides, frankly, was kind of embarrassed that there were many Jewish people who read Scripture, and they thought that God actually has arms and feet and a nose and hands, and of course those are actually things that the Bible uses to describe God, and we would say that those are metaphor. But Maimonides wanted to make sure that no one would ever allow God to ever have any kind of relationship with physical presence or space, so any theophanies in the Old Testament, we can't read those directly as actually God coming to earth in any kind of way. And so, yeah, Maimonides really shifted the conversation here, which is why if we're going to really respond to this objection, we got to get into Maimonides' theology, and we can't just cite chapter and verse from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Got it. So it's an interesting thing, Mitch, I remember at a certain point as a follower of Jesus in church and thinking about certain aspects of the reality of God and his presence and personality, I thought, you know, in the back of my head, even though I wasn't a religious Jew, I still had this thinking, this God is so incorporeal and so somehow like impersonal, to think of his real power and his presence and that that was kind of far, and I thought, well, where'd that come from? It came from philosophy.

Hey Mitch, we've got a minute before the break, but I'll throw it back to you. What are your thoughts? I think that probably this is a more of a Kabbalistic kind of question also, because Ein Sof is the unknowable core of who God is, and so there are probably the students been interacting with some Hasidic Jewish people who are Kabbalistic, and so this unknowability, certainly Maimonides touched on it, but it's pretty big among Kabbalistic Jewish people, mystical Jewish people, and so I think that I think it's a beautiful background for the incarnation, so I think, you know, God wanted to be knowable so much that he tried in so many ways throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, he finally just did it himself. Yeah, and think of this, John 1 18, no one has seen God at any time. The one and only God is in the bosom of the Father, he's made him known, or as Yeshua says, Jesus says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

Yeah, God comes right down into our world, makes himself known. Okay, we'll be right back. It's the Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on a special broadcast. I just feel like life is incredibly special right now. I know all around the world there's pain, there's suffering. We had the horrific tornadoes over the weekend and so much loss of life, and many of you right now are in difficult life situations.

You're hurting. Life is anything but happy, good, positive for you. I just want to encourage you that in the Lord there's always hope, and the fact that Jesus rose, that's all you need to know if you're in right relationship with God. The fact that he rose from the dead is everything, because it means there is an answer beyond death. It means that no matter how final something is in this world, God says there is more, and there is the possibility of redemption. And as I come to the end of this week, we've got a special broadcast prepared for you on Friday, special Q&A broadcast celebrating 50 years in the Lord as I was seeking him in prayer this past weekend.

I was overflowing with joy, actually to the point of tears and of laughter, with excitement about what is yet to come and what is ahead of us. And one of the great things that I believe is we will continue to see more and more Jewish people coming to faith in Jesus until the great climax of Romans 11 26 when there'll be a national turning of the Messiah to the Lord. I'm with dear friends and colleagues Mitch Glaser, Brian Crawford with Chosen People. It's not through the Jewish Thursday in case you're looking at your calendar, but we're taking a special Tuesday to talk about Jewish ministry. Mitch, I want you to raise some more objections for Brian and me to respond to, but really quick, in a nutshell, you've been at this a long time, and Jewish ministry is not often the easiest ministry, especially in light of church history and other things. Are you fighting discouragement and depression a lot because it's so rare that we see Jewish people saved, or are you encouraged because of what you are seeing? Well, Mike, my wife tells me I should be a lemonade salesman, you know, because I tend to look on the brighter side of things.

I have a future in mind. I have Romans 11 25 and 26 in mind. God says there'll be a remnant of Jewish people all the way through until that great day of national turning, and I keep meeting more and more people who are part of the remnant. I haven't been, honestly, I'm not discouraged, but personality-wise, you know, I'm a bit of a plotter, so I just keep going no matter what's going on, but I have seen chosen people growing all over the place, and for example, we just, you know, with all the, you know, all the discouragement that's come as a result of COVID, and I know that a lot of people feel very discouraged by all of this, and it's hard knowing what to do, what you can't do, but we had a, just a couple weeks ago, we were able to take 40 young Israelis into the desert for a day-long prayer and worship retreat. So, you know, so in the midst of all this, and they brought a bunch of their unsafe Israeli friends, some soldiers, you know, dressed as soldiers, and they went out into the desert, they sang, and they ate, and the gospel was shared, and you know, I get reports like this, and I see what's going on here in our own congregations, in our own work, and how could you not be encouraged? My God is, there's no way to lock down the Spirit of God, and God's always working in power, and this is one of the neat things about being the president of a 127-year-old mission to the Jewish people, you know? We've been been through World War I, we've been through World War II, we've been through the Holocaust, we've been through the Depression, we've been through the forming of the State of Israel and all the wars that came up, we've been, we've been through, we've been through so much, and yet we're still here, and because God is not finished with the Jewish people yet, he has a plan and purpose for Israel, and that all involves Jesus, and so I'm encouraged.

Yeah, and Niche, I could sell lemonade right along with you as well, and there is that. Better than what we used to sell, Mike. Yeah, yeah, really, very true, very true, although that quite is immediately impacting on the brain and etc., but thank God he saved us out of that, but you know, Romans 11 26 is such reality to me, and the goodness and faithfulness of God, like I said a few minutes ago, it all goes back to the resurrection of Yeshua, and just knowing that, knowing, then it's okay, it's good. As he rose, everything else is gonna fall into place, and one last quick question for Brian. Brian, getting into Jewish apologetics, how did you intersect with my work, and how was it helpful to you? I asked this because when I came to faith, I didn't have any of this, and it was, there were challenges as a Jewish believer, challenged by the rabbis, and that's why I felt it's so important that I can provide these for others, so as someone that's called to apologetics in an academic way as a life calling, how have those, how did you intersect with those, how have they helped you? They have been priceless to me. Funny story, true story, I was given several of your volumes of answering Jewish objections to Jesus as a wedding present by one of my good college friends.

No joke. That's how much, that's how much he knew that this was going to be something that would not only be important for my future, but even for the future of my marriage, because he knew that that my wife and I were in this together, that we were called to be ministers and missionaries to the Jewish people, and that eventually moved into apologetics, and your work is bar none for this generation, just, just absolutely amazing. You have to go back a hundred years, 150 years, to get any other comparable apologetics work, and of course those are out of date, and they don't have good up-to-date scholarship, and some of them are a little harsh with Jewish people, and so there's, there's nothing like your work that we have today, and so I am so immensely thankful for your work.

And, you know, just, just as looking back at 50 years ago, and I used to huff diesel gas to get high, and stole money from my own father, broke into a doctor's office with a friend just for fun, and then stole drugs, and then tried mainstreaming adrenaline, literally shot adrenaline, killed ourselves. You realize any good that's come out of my life is a testimony to the goodness of the Lord. It's God saying, hey, I love using the foolish things and the weak things, and the neat thing for me in apologetics now is to see how people like you and others are forging your own path, and getting, digging into areas I haven't dug into, or building on things, so it's, I'm just thrilled, and I believe that what we're doing is only going to strengthen and grow over the years. So in that light, Mitch, back to you for another objection or question from one of the students. Okay, one of the students has asked what I would call an oldie, but a really tough one. How did the Holocaust happen if God existed?

This is the question I want to ask. So how could God allow the Holocaust, and how do you handle that when a Jewish person says, I can't believe that there's a good God, I can't believe in Jesus because of what his followers did? How do you, how do you respond to that? So of course this is not a specific Jesus question, but a general God question, and of course many Jews... Well, it's a Jesus question in that... Yes, yes, of course. Jesus' followers perpetrated it, yeah.

Right, right. So that, the, the first part, in terms of the existence of God, I remember a rabbi that first befriended me as a new believer said to me, I can't explain the Holocaust without God, but I can't explain the Holocaust with God, because it's just so dreadfully evil, almost massively, supernaturally evil, and yet so targeting this one people doesn't make any sense if God doesn't exist, but if God does exist, how could he let it happen? So of course that's an agonizing question that, that Jewish people have, have asked, and, and many have lost faith because of that. As far as, so I answer at the moment, as far as the Christian participation, what we have to do is say that this is so completely contrary to anything having to do with Jesus, and that the true followers of Jesus were the people like Corrie ten Boone and, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer trying to fight for Jewish freedom or, or rescue Jews, and, and you have to utterly repudiate that other form that, that opened the door to it or led to it. You can also point out how anti-Christian Nazism was, and then say, look at these evangelical Christians who love Israel, stand with Israel, help, you know, elderly victims of the Holocaust and stuff, that, that's an expression of Christianity. The other is a horrible aberration, but when I was writing volume one of answering Jewish objections to Jesus, I had laid out all the objections I was going to cover in that first volume, general and historical, and I saved the Holocaust one for the last, because I thought, what can you say, what can you say? What can you possibly say?

How can you, and what gives me the right to say anything? I wasn't there, I didn't lose immediate family members there, but what I felt overwhelmingly was to say, look, the, the mystery of our suffering, and, and so many Jews suffering innocently, children, I don't have an answer, but what God did is he came right into our world and suffered with us, and that, you know, there's a story of Elie Wiesel, and there was a boy that, that got hung by the Nazis, just gonna make an example of him, and he was so light that, that he couldn't die, they hung him, but he just kept twitching, and his, and his neck wouldn't break, and, and when someone said, where's God, the answer was, there he is, hanging from the gallows, and I said, well, take it further, where is God, there he is hanging on the cross, there he is suffering in the midst, but suffering absolutely innocently, and he didn't have to, so I don't, I don't have an answer for the why or the how, but I have a God who comes in our midst, and actually suffers right alongside of us, a God that we can relate to, that's our Messiah, the one that came and suffered with us and for us, and that offers us hope in the midst of it, and just as the agonies of the Holocaust, the, the, and the ashes of the Holocaust, the modern state of Israel was born, somehow our God brings life out of death, and even resurrection out of crucifixion, and, and that's what I wrote in that, in the, in the section on there, and that's what I try to point to, to the suffering Savior in our midst, that's the kind of Messiah that we need, that's how I approach it, but obviously with great sensitivity. Yeah, it's, it's, it's such a hard one, no matter, no matter what happens, and I think it's powerful, and we've got some of these on our website, on, I found shalom.com, just a few of Jewish believers who went through the Holocaust, and were able to say that they did find God faithful, they did become believers in Jesus, they could tell the difference between German nominalism and national Christianity, and, and that it wasn't really faith, they could tell that, they could tell the difference, and, you know, I mean, I was, Mike, you and I were raised in a post-Holocaust generation, and my grandparents were the only ones left from their family, they all died in Belarus, you know, and so I was raised that way, so it was very difficult for me to believe in Jesus, if his followers had done so.

Yeah, and that's why we have to, we have to know our history, you have to know Church history. Hey friends, we come back, I've got a few more minutes, with my dear friends and colleagues, Mitch Glaser, Brian Crawford. I want to ask Brian a question about Millennial Jews, when we come back. It's the Line of Fire, with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution. Get into the Line of Fire now by calling 866-342.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks for joining us friends on the Line of Fire. Remember, as we come to the end of this year, it would be a great help, those that can stand with us, those that have been helped by the broadcast, those that want to, similar to our Jewish outreach ministry, your year-end taxable gift helps us reach more people, helps us take this message to more and more people. If you've been helped, you can help us help others. Go to askdrbrown.org, click donate. Again, one time, year-end gift, greatly appreciated, or you can become a monthly supporter. We pour back into you many different ways.

It's at askdrbrown.org, click on donate. Okay, back to Brian Crawford and Mitch Glaser. Mitch, the head of Chosen People Ministries.

Brian, a key apologist in the ministry. Brian, generally speaking, I know it's a broad category, and outside of very, very religious Jews, what are you seeing that may be different in the thinking of millennial or even Gen Z Jews than older Jews that are not believers in Yeshua? Yeah, there's definitely a difference in the different generations, and how they approach questions of faith, and how they come to read about and know about things of faith. And so with millennials and Gen Z, they're getting a lot of their input through digital means. They're digital natives. They spend time on their devices, on the internet. They're cord cutters.

They don't have cable TV. They have streaming platforms, and they're asking questions to Google that they would never ask their rabbi, or perhaps they don't even go to synagogues, and they don't even have a rabbi to ask questions to, but they know that they're Jewish, and so then they're going, and they're asking questions online, and they're trying to figure out their own sense of spirituality and who God is quietly and oftentimes individually without anybody looking over their shoulder, and that means that Millennials and Gen Z, they oftentimes are more open to spiritual things because they are searching for answers, and they see so much available online. And like Mitch was talking about before, there's definitely been a lot of intermarriage in the Jewish community, and so many of the Millennials and Gen Z, they've got perhaps a Jewish mom and a Christian dad, but maybe they're more nominal, and they don't really know much about their faith, and so many of these younger Jewish people, they're searching for their identity. Who am I?

Who is God? What does it mean that I'm Jewish or that I'm half Jewish? I have a Jewish dad, and so there's a lot of confusion, and many of them are, yes, going online to try to make sense of who they are. And of course our presence online has to be all the more strong and accessible for those reasons. All right, Mitch, you want to throw a few more objections our way?

Sure, I've got a good one. So one of our very bright students asks, let's see, right here, hold on. So you have a zealous Orthodox man I've interacted with, and who asserts that even if Yeshua, who he calls Yeshu, you can comment on that, is a Messiah, so what? Judaism has had and will have many Messiahs throughout history and at different locations.

How can I answer him? Right, so when a traditional Jew says Yeshu, it may be different than your typical Israeli. When an Israeli says Yeshu, that's just how they learn the name, and it has no significance to them, and there are some scholars that claim in the first century with the final iron that would have been lost, so Yeshua became Yeshu, and that's an actual original pronunciation.

I don't agree with that, but that's one theory. When a traditional Jew says it, it could well be that he means it in a derogatory way because it's an acronym for Yimach Shemov, Yisro, may his name and memory perish. So that's the first thing, but your average Israeli says it, they don't mean anything by it, that's just how they learn the name. What I would say is, you know, it's interesting within your own tradition that Maimonides makes it a tenant of faith that every day you have to say you believe in the coming of the Messiah. So if the Messiah came and we rejected him, that's big stuff. If the Messiah came and he was God's prophet, God's spokesman, God is very much against those who do not listen to his spokesman, and if in fact we believe is true that Messiah brings atonement for our sins, if we reject him, we don't have atonement, we certainly don't have a temple standing, so I would just push right back on that on the face of it and say I reject that idea, that it's just one of many Messiahs, and even Jewish tradition is against it. And ask, Mr. Jude, do you pray for the coming of the Messiah every day? If there are many Messiahs, why do you even bother doing that? So then push back, isn't the real question who is the Messiah?

And if we need to discuss, and we always do as Jewish believers, we come back to the ultimate question, who is he? Let's focus there. All right, go ahead Mitch, let's keep going. Yeah, okay, another one. You still there, Mitch? Did we lose Mitch? Did we lose Brian? Did we lose everyone?

Well, not sure what happened here. Let's see if anybody knows what's... All right, you're still there? Mitch, you're still there? We're not hearing you.

That's odd. Brian? Still here. What's going on, guys? Can you hear me again? I can hear you now.

I didn't know if there was alien abduction or something. I can hear you. Are you there? Well, I'm here, but I could have been abducted temporarily.

Brian's there now. Okay. All right. Okay. Good, good. You ready? Yeah, still here.

We'll do them real quick. Okay, so someone says you're a convert, you're a convert. I don't want to be brainwashed and convert to your religion. So, how can you answer that?

Seek God. Let's just, let's ignore anything outside of the Hebrew Bible. Let's only look at the Hebrew Bible and let's search that. And if you raised a religious home, how do you know you weren't brainwashed?

Maybe the traditions you were taught from day one. So, let's just, can we agree on the Hebrew Bible's authority? Can we start there? If so, then let's just see what that says, and let's ask God. How's that?

Is that fair? Brian, how would you respond, soundbite, to that? Well, the idea of convert, convert, convert is that you're going from Judaism to something that's not Judaism, but you read the New Testament and the New Testament portrays Jews coming to faith in the Jewish Messiah as the fulfillment and the culmination of God's plan for Judaism. And so, we need to recontextualize and talk about how you're not actually converting to something that's non-Jewish. And we come right back to the question, isn't that the real issue, then?

Who is the Messiah and who is Yeshua? Come back to that. All right, a couple more, we'll soundbite them. Go ahead, Mitch.

Okay, you ready? Yeah. So, no matter what I say, my Israeli friend says that becoming a Christian, that she would become a Christian if she believed in Jesus, just like she would become a Muslim if she followed Muhammad. I would say, find another friend.

No, no, I'm just kidding. That would be, that's a difficult one. So, she would become a Christian if she believed in Jesus, just like she would become a Muslim if she followed Muhammad. You have an answer to that one?

I'm not sure. Yeah, well, you know, look, if you're in Israel and a Jewish follower of Yeshua, you don't call yourself a Christian because a Christian to them means Greek Orthodox, Catholics, something like that. So, Jewish believers are known as Messianic Jews. So, I would just say, okay, what does a Christian mean originally, right? A Christian is the follower of the Messiah or a Messianic, you know, I mean, in terms of its proper definition. So, I'll just forget about that. Who is the Messiah?

And just come back to it. So, ask a question. If Yeshua is the Messiah of Israel, what does it make you if you follow Him? And isn't that the big issue?

How do you respond, Brian? Yeah, this is just a nomenclature thing. People get hung up on titles—Christian, Messianic, Jew—it really comes down to who is Yeshua, who is Jesus, and whatever you want to call yourself after you acknowledge Him as Messiah and Lord, it's not that important.

It really matters who is He. You know, I think that this is the season of the year where this question really comes up to the surface, you know, the challenge of, do you celebrate Hanukkah or do you celebrate Christmas? Because it's so visible, you know, you can see the Hanukkah lights, you can see the Christmas lights, and you know which homes are Jewish and which homes are, quote-unquote, Christian, or maybe real Christian, you just don't know. And so, I think that we tend, particularly in the Jewish community, we tend to label people by the holidays they keep. And that's a deeper issue, because there's so much culture and history attached to becoming a Christian. And I actually think that the real answer to this question is, and it's a principle in evangelism, that we have to separate between Jesus and the religion of Christianity. I don't know how to speak to the Muslim side of it, but I think it's really important that we are trying to help people have a relationship with God through a person, not through a religion, and not through a philosophy. We're not trying to change their culture. We're trying to bring them into a relationship with God.

And I'll just say these two last things as time runs out. One, if you become a Muslim, the Bible is not the Word of God to the Torahs, it's the Word of God. The Quran is, and you are not connecting to the promises God gave to Israel. You're saying, no, actually God gave them to the descendants of Ishmael, and it comes through Muhammad, etc.

So you are making a break. If you follow Yeshua, you're now praying the same scriptures, looking to the same promises, praying to the same God they pray to. The other thing is, when someone really encounters the Lord and is really born again, as we know, if you call me a Christian, if you call me a messianic Jew, if you call me whatever, it doesn't matter because I've really come to know the Lord, and I want to give Him the rest of my life and serve Him.

So there is a lot of baggage, and we have to overcome that, but your average Jewish person, when they really meet the Lord, receive forgiveness, new life, and the Messiah, that's what matters. And with that, guys, we are out of time. Thanks so much for the great conversation. Look forward to working together face-to-face in the days ahead. Thank you. Thank you. God bless. All right, friends, hope you enjoy today's broadcast. A pre-Thoroughly Jewish Thursday on a Tuesday. Another program powered by the Truth Network.