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Route 60: The Biblical Highway

Linda and I had the privilege to preview the movie Route 60: The Biblical Highway and were so excited to see how this movie brings to life our Judeo Christian history and heritage. Mike Pompeo and David Friedman host this wonderful documentary taking us along the highway in Israel, Route 60 which runs through the middle of the country from north to south.

Linda and I spent about 12 days there a few years ago and loved it however we never heard one word about Route 60 and the remarkable historic sites along this route. After watching the movie we felt like we needed to return to Israel and see it first hand but both of us replied that this movie was almost as good as being there in person.

Mike Pompeo and David Friedman walk through history showing the actual locations where Abraham walked and lived, where Joshua made a great altar, where Jesus walked was born and buried, plus much much more.

The movie brings to life the ancient Hebrew lifestyle and that this was how Jesus lived. It demonstrated the importance of Christians understanding our Jewish roots and ultimately what it means to be grafted in as Paul wrote. It was beautiful to see David Friedman an Orthodox Jew and Mike Pompeo an Evangelical Christian walking together discussing the history and the relationship of these two great religions.

Many people forget that Jesus was a Jew and he actually said to his disciples to reach out to the Jews first with his gospel message. He never said to leave and ignore them. He said to love them and share the good news.

This movie explains and shows where and how to start and that is with relationships! Until you understand your own heritage and history as a Christian, it is very hard to have an honest loving conversation with our Jewish friends and neighbors.

We loved this movie because it takes us right to where Christianity started, Bethlehem in Judea. Route 60, explains so much of the history of Israel before Christ that is essential to understanding Christ as a Jew and some of his teachings. Traveling back in time down Route 60 you actually feel like you are there and a part of something much bigger than you can imagine.

This movie brought a lot of the Old and New Testaments together very clearly and made people and locations real! I would suggest that every Pastor make plans to see this movie and to take the time to teach on the history and relationship of Jews and Christians. Teach on what is happening in Israel today and why the entire world is watching this tiny little country!

Finally, I would suggest if I may, take a group to see Route 60, The Biblical Highway and utilized the study materials that will be made available. Israel is the most watched and contested country on the planet. Jerusalem is the most coveted city on earth. Take the tour with Mike and David and see and hear for yourself why this is still true today. As they were both part of the making of the historic Abraham Accord a few years ago, they cover a lot more in what they say than any tour guide.

Finally, Linda and I pray you will be encouraged to pray for Israel and the Jewish people, and if possible take your own trip down Route 60! It will change your life forever!

Pastors and leaders watch this trailer to get a taste of what you will experience: Route 60

 

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Next Year (in Heavenly) Jerusalem

The message of Passover is not simply one about God delivering His people Israel thousands of years ago. It is also about God delivering His people today. The Passover Seder begins looking back (in time) to Pharoah and the pyramids. It begins by celebrating what God did in the past, but after dinner it changes direction.
A person opens the door to see if Elijah is there waiting to join their Seder. If he’s not there, the person calls out, “Come out, come out wherever you are. Elijah you are our special guest of honor. We want you to join us tonight. Look, we’ve made a special cup and your name is written on it. It’s the prettiest cup on the table. We have some horse radish, charoset and matzah waiting for you. We also have a glass of Manischewitz Wine poured for you.” People have always known that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
Why do we invite Elijah to our Passover Seder? Elijah was not in Egypt during the time of slavery. He didn’t grow up with Moses. Elijah and Moses did not graduate from Pharoah High School together. What’s so special about Elijah?
As I thought about it, it’s not really Elijah people want. It’s what Elijah will do for us. It’s about who Elijah will bring with him. Elijah never died; he was physically taken up to heaven. People want Elijah to come because he will come back to earth, and when he does, he will bring the Messiah.
Once we invite Elijah to our Seder we are no longer looking back in history, but ahead to the future. Then we drink more cups of wine. The cups of wine were added to the Seder to remind us of the promises of God found in Exodus 6.
The fourth of cup reminds us of God’s promise: “I will take you for My people.” The 3rd cup reminded us that God will redeem or purchase us. When He does, we are His possession and belong to Him; He is Adonai our Lord and Master. This is important, but God wants more out of our relationship with Him. He wants to take us to be His bride. God purchased or redeemed Israel so He could marry them at Mt. Sinai.
Then Exodus 6 contains one more promise. This means we need to drink 5 cups (not 4). God’s 5th promise is: “I will bring you into the land.” God did not simply bring Israel out of Egypt. He did not just marry them at Mt. Sinai. God did not have their honeymoon last forever. After “enjoying” a 40-year honeymoon in the wilderness, God brought His bride home to Israel.
Israel was passing through Sinai on their way home. We too are passing through earth on our way home to heaven. We are foreigners and strangers on earth so don’t get too comfortable here. Yeshua is preparing our eternal home. Once it is ready, He will get us to bring us home. We end the Seder declaring, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It’s not just earthly Jerusalem we’re longing for, but the heavenly Jerusalem. Thank God for what He did in the past and look forward to what He promises to do in the near future. May we all be together next year in (the heavenly) Jerusalem!

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Sons of the Titans!

Scholar Amar Annus has linked the name Sheth/Seth, found in the prophecy of Balaam
recorded in Numbers 24:17, to an infamous Amorite tribe well known in the ancient
Near East, the Suteans.
He notes that the Egyptian term for the Suteans, Šwtw, a form of the Akkadian Shutu,
appears in one of the Execration Texts from the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries B.C.,
about the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The Ruler of Shutu, Ayyabum, and all the retainers who are with him; the Ruler
of Shutu, Kushar, and all the retainers who are with him; the Ruler of Shutu,
Zabulanu, and all the retainers who are with him. 1

Man Praying Sunset

The Execration Texts were like ancient Egyptian voodoo dolls. The names of enemies
were inscribed on pottery, which were ritually cursed and then smashed. In a nutshell,
“Sheth,” “Shutu,” and “Sutean” are the same name processed through different
languages and types of writing. 2   Other Egyptian texts place the Shutu/Sheth in the
central and northern Transjordan, which, significantly, includes Bashan—Rephaim
territory. 3
Other fascinating tidbits from the Execration Texts: The Shutu leaders were listed just
after the “Rulers of Iy-‘anaq”—the Anakim tribes that Joshua and the Israelites would
fight for control of Canaan about four hundred years later. Also, the Shutu leader named
Ayyabum bears the same name as the biblical Job. Now, this was probably not the Job
of the Old Testament, but the Egyptian curse does locate him in the Transjordan, the
same general area that was home to the long-suffering Job 4   and exactly where the Bible
places the Rephaim tribes. And because you’ve read your Old Testament, you’ve
noticed that the other Shutu leader, Zabulanu, has a name that Jacob would later give
to one of his sons, Zebulon.
Here’s the key link: Annus points to an Akkadian lexical list (that’s like an ancient clay
tablet version of Google Translate) that specifically equates ti-id-nu and su-tu-u—Tidanu
and Sutean. 5   Citing Michael Heltzer’s 1981 book The Suteans, Annus continues:
In Ugaritic literature Suteans are mentioned in the epic of Aqhatu, where the
antagonist of the mt rpi Dnil [“man of the Rephaim, Daniel”] is a nomadic Ytpn,
mhr št—“warrior of the Sutû, Sutean warrior.” …In the epic of Keret Suteans are
mentioned as dtn, spelled also as ddn, and it “must be understood as the
Di/Tidânu tribe, a part of common Amorite stock. It is even likely that this term
was used in Mesopotamia at the end of the 3rd millennium to designate tribes
later known as Suteans.” 6
Highlight that! The Ugaritic Epic of Keret links the Amorite Sutean tribe, the Egyptian
Shutu and the biblical sons of Sheth, with the Ditanu—the Titans!
Here’s one more bit of historical evidence for your consideration: The Shutu are also
identified in later Egyptian texts as the Shasu, 7   probably as language and pronunciation
changed over the centuries. About two hundred years after the Exodus, Ramesses II
(“the Great”) fought an epic battle against the Hittites at Qadesh, a city on the Orontes
River near the modern border between Syria and Lebanon. According to the Egyptian
2 Ibid.
3 Amar Annus, “Are There Greek Rephaim? On the Etymology of Greek Meropes and Titanes.”
Ugarit-Forschungen 31 (1999), p. 18.
4 Most Bible commentaries place the land of Uz in the Transjordan, usually near Edom.
5 Annus, op. cit.
6 Michael Heltzer & Shoshana Arbeli-Raveh, The Suteans (Naples: Istituto Universitario
Orientale, 1981). Cited in Annus, op. cit., p. 19.
7 “Biblical Archaeology: Evidence of the Exodus from Egypt.” Institute for Biblical and Scientific
Studies. https://www.bibleandscience.com/archaeology/exodus.htm, retrieved 3/3/18.

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God vs The gods of Egypt

By the time Moses arrived on the scene, around 1500 B.C., the Hebrews had been in Egypt for more than a hundred years. The days of Joseph serving as vizier to the pharaoh were long gone. The Hebrews had grown from an extended family of about six dozen to a couple million, but they were suffering under the rule of a nation that no longer valued their presence except as forced labor.

So Yahweh set the next phase of His plan in motion. After guiding the life of Moses from infancy to adulthood (you don’t think he survived that trip in the reed boat by accident, do you?), Yahweh appeared to Moses in his exile and tasked him with bringing Israel out of Egypt. And the way God had him do it was a clear message to the gods of Egypt.

Moses’ first encounter with Yahweh was in Midian. That was at Horeb in the northern Sinai, later part of Edom (contrary to long tradition that puts the mountain in southern Sinai), the har elohim, or mountain of God. Get this:  The burning bush incident was the first time since Eden that a human had come face to face with Yahweh on His holy mountain. There is no question that the bene elohim, the Fallen “sons of God,” the seventy rebel angels God allotted to the nations after Babel, knew about this meeting. It was a very clear message from Yahweh to the rebels:  I have reestablished my mount of assembly on the earth.

The time had finally come. God called Moses back to Egypt to bring His people, Israel, to the place He’d claimed as His own—Canaan.

Yahweh chose to convince pharaoh and the Egyptians to not only let Israel leave, but to encourage them to go. He did it by hardening pharaoh’s heart through a series of increasingly severe trials until the people of Egypt must have been begging pharaoh to let His people go.

There are several studies you can find online that draw links between the ten plagues Yahweh inflicted on Egypt and specific Egyptian gods. For example, the first plague turned the Nile River to blood. This is said to have been directed at Hapi, the god of the annual Nile flood. Plague number two, frogs, was aimed at Heqet, a fertility goddess worshipped since the early dynastic period—the time of Narmer and the first kings of Egypt, about 1,500 or 1,600 years before Moses.

Those match up well enough, but when we get to the third and fourth plagues, the connections are iffy at best. The plague of lice or gnats, depending on the translation you read, doesn’t match up well with any known Egyptian god. The plague of flies is paired by some with Khepri, a god of creation. But Khepri had a scarab beetle for a head, so that’s not a good match, either.

Some of the pastors and teachers who’ve published these studies are very intelligent people whom I respect. However, and with all due respect to those pastor-teachers, they’ve overlooked an even bigger supernatural conflict, and understanding that confrontation will show you why trying to link the ten plagues to specific Egyptian gods is looking in the wrong direction.

More accurately, it’s looking at the wrong pantheon.

Yes, Yahweh demonstrated with the ten plagues that His power was superior to that of the gods the Egyptians trusted to keep the Nile flowing and the crops growing. And we know for a fact that Yahweh put a hurt on the gods of Egypt the night He took the lives of Egypt’s first-born.

How do we know? He told Moses.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord.

Exodus 12:12 (ESV), emphasis added

How likely is it that Yahweh told Moses that He was about to punish imaginary beings? What would be the point? How would that demonstrate His power and glory?

No, something happened in the spirit realm on the night of the Passover. When Yahweh passed through the land of Egypt, taking the lives of firstborn humans and animals, He simultaneously carried out His sentence on the bene elohim, the entities who’d rebelled and made themselves gods in Egypt.

Here’s a fascinating detail we never hear about in church:  It appears there was a very old tradition in Egypt, an ancient myth dating back centuries before the Exodus, that a day was coming when the first-born of Egypt would die. The pyramids of the 5th Dynasty king Unas, c. 2350 B.C., and the 6th Dynasty king Teti, c. 2320 B.C., are inscribed with this line from a well-known inscription called the “Cannibal Hymn”:

It is the king who will be judged with Him-whose-name-is-hidden on this day of the slaying of the first-born.⁠

Similar phrases are found on other coffins from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, including a variant that reads “this night of the slaying of the first-born.” Some scholars believe the context of the Coffin Texts and the Cannibal Hymn points to the first-born belonging to the gods, although that’s not a view shared by all Egyptologists.

What does it mean? Scholars aren’t sure. But it seems that by the time of the Exodus, there was a very old tradition in Egypt of a future nightmare event when the first-born would be killed.

Consider this possibility: Maybe the Coffin Texts and the “Cannibal Hymn” were an ancient warning to Egypt of that coming day of judgment. And forty years earlier on Mount Sinai, Yahweh revealed to Moses that He was Him-whose-name-is-hidden, I AM WHO I AM—the One who would someday fulfill the prophecy of the slaying of the first-born.

That’s speculation, of course, but fascinating. And we’re not at the best part yet.

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Scholars today, 3,500 years later, still argue about where the Red Sea crossing occurred. We won’t get into it here. If it hasn’t been settled by now, we’re not going to put the question to bed in a couple of paragraphs. Besides, that’s not important right now. What matters is what Yahweh told Moses to do next.

Then the Lord said to Moses,

“Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.

Exodus 14:1-2 (ESV, emphasis added)

Okay, this begs some questions:  Why did God tell Moses to turn back? Why did He command Moses to camp facing Baal-zephon? What is Baal-zephon? And mostly, what was Ba`al doing in Egypt?

You know Ba`al was the Canaanite storm-god and the king of their pantheon. He’s mentioned in the Bible from the Book of Exodus through the gospels. Ba`al, which is properly pronounced bah-awl with a glottal stop like, “Uh-oh,” was the main thorn in the side of the followers of Yahweh for about the next 1,500 years, all the way down to the time of Jesus.

But during the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt, roughly 1750 to 1550 B.C. (give or take a hundred years), foreigners from Canaan called the Hyksos ruled northern Egypt. Their capital was at Avaris in the Nile delta, and they worshipped the gods of the Canaanite pantheon headed by Ba`al.

Why is that relevant? Stay tuned. We’ll get to that next month.

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Messianic Pastors Luncheon a Blessing to All!

Thursday June 21st was our first ever Pastors luncheon at the Tampa Florida Shoresh David Messianic Church. Pastors from many different cultures and denominations came from all over the Bay area and Polk county to share in this special event. It was one of the rare times that we invited our host to share. We heard a great word on Israel and the importance of supporting the homeland we as Christians call “Holy”.

Rabbi Steve shared a great word and we also were blessed by some of the most beautiful singing we have ever heard. In a time that many are calling the “endtimes”, it would certainly make sense that we give Israel our full support. As Christians we have been grafted into the chosen family of God by the blood of Jesus! It was great to see the body again joining together under the banner of Jesus Christ the Messiah and King!

We are blessed that All Pro Pastors ministry now has one or more messianic pastors connecting with other Pastors in Champion Tables. Praise God!!

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America’s Sheriff “Grady Judd” Challenges Pastors

On May17th Sheriff Grady Judd from Polk County Florida gave a very compelling word of wake up Christians in America to the seriousness of terrorism in the world and the threat we face in our homeland. He was one of 14 law enforcement officials invited by Israel to learn how they deal with this threat every day! He spoke in a rare opportunity at our Pastors luncheon that was hosted by Hope Now Transition Center in Bartow, Florida. Sheriff Judd said that we had better wake-up that Islam is a religion that is committed to reaching the world and some have an extreme passion.

He explained that while he was a guest in Israel he learned much about how they identify extremists who may be terrorists.

As Christians we better take a pro-active attitude when it comes to attacks on our freedoms and if we do not we could one day wake up with no freedom at all. Pastors need to exercise the freedom that still exists in America today and share the gospel of Jesus and His love with a renewed determination and boldness.

We want to thank “Hope Now Center” in Bartow for hosting this standing room only luncheon. If you are a Pastor who lives in the area near Bartow you should contact them about the services they have that could benefit you and relieve you of many time consuming challenges. Their counseling and transition experience meets a vital need that Pastors find themselves facing.

We also want to thank Sheriff Grady Judd, for taking his vital time to share a word with many Pastors. It is very easy to see why he has been labeled by some as “America’s Sheriff!” He blessed us and encouraged us!

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