From the Desk of Jeff King

Will you trust Me?

In 2003 I heard the LORD whisper those words to me in a hospital waiting room. I had just been informed that my wife was being rushed back to surgery. A complication had flared up after her cancer-related operation earlier that day. With little strength I answered softly, "Yes."

In 2006 I was startled to hear the same dialogue – almost word for word – in the ABC miniseries "The Ten Commandments." Facing the Red Sea, Moses (Dougray Scott) looks panicked as he hears the roar of Egyptian chariots behind him. God speaks to Moses in a still small voice and Moses responds softly in this brief exchange:

"You know who I AM"
"Yes"
"Do you trust Me?"
"Yes."

The divine encounters at Seattle's Virginia Mason Hospital and the Red Sea had similar outcomes: God showed up. My wife survived breast cancer, and the Israelites the exodus. I believe God still would have drawn close and comforted us had He chosen not to heal Alisa. We were safe in His hands, regardless of the outcome.

Overall I was not impressed with the miniseries; the script often strayed from Scripture. But in this brief scene a secular network revealed what a genuine relationship with the LORD should look and sound like. Here is the YouTube clip:

Some of you might be facing a trial or crisis. It could be sickness, unemployment, a broken relationship. But don't despair. Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth is near. He hears the groaning of your spirit. He sees your tears. Today He might be asking you the same question He did me as my wife was being prepared for surgery several floors away, "Will you trust Me?"

What is His Son's name?

Who has ascended into heaven, or descended?
Who has gathered the wind in His fists?
Who has bound the waters in a garment?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is His name, and what is His Son's name,
If you know?
Proverbs 30:4

John Boylan is a Hebrew word detective. Without the aid of a computer, he "letter wraps" text to mine hidden gems from the Old Testament. His most significant discovery is the name of Messiah embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures.In Boylan's copyrighted diagram above, the words "HaShem" and "Yeshua" form the shape of a cross, which resembles the ancient Hebrew letter tav. The bottom of the symbol touches the horizontal text in Proverbs 30:4, "and what is His Son's Name?" HaShem is Hebrew for "The Name," a term used by Jews to refer to God. Yeshua means salvation in Hebrew and is the real name of Jesus Christ. Four times in the book of Revelation Yeshua identifies Himself as the Aleph and Tav, the beginning and end. God answers His own question in Proverbs 30:4 by embedding the names of His Son in the shape of an ancient tav symbol. The tav has significant meaning in the Old Testament. In Ezekiel 9:4, Jews who reject idolatry are sealed with a tav symbol on their forehead, protecting them from God's judgment. In the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947, 11 tav symbols appear in margins next to Messianic passages.

The position of the tav in Boylan's diagram is also a picture of the crucifixion scene. The cross symbol touches the middle Hebrew letter of the highlighted text. The tav is flanked by six letters to the right and left. Six is recognized biblically as the number of man. Yeshua was nailed to a crossbar with thieves on his right and left (Mark 15:27-28), fulfilling Isaiah 53:12, "He was numbered with the transgressors."

Jewish scholars have been mining embedded nuggets from Scripture by hand for centuries. Boylan, a Gentile, says his research is a "non-interactive method wherein God Himself is the revealer and the reader becomes nothing more than a passive observer. . . . Our study is about God and is not some fanciful attempt to predict the future. These are teachings about God alone, His Nature, His Being and His Will as regarding His creation and our human understanding about Who He is and What He wants us to know about Him and His Messiah."

Resting in Him

Blessed is the man whom You instruct, O LORD, and teach out of your Torah, that You may give him rest from the days of adversity (Psalm 94:12-13)

Most of us would agree we live in a period of adversity. We are ruled by ungodly men and women. Justice and righteousness have all but vanished. Our economy is in shambles. Yet in Messiah Yeshua, the living Torah, we still can find rest amid calamity. But what does that word really mean? Strong's renders the Hebrew word for "rest," shaqat, as idleness, stillness or quietness. In our western mindset those words are abstract thoughts. They can mean a lot of things. But look at the picture that unfolds when we translate the word shaqat from the ancient Hebrew pictographic language (Hebrew is read right to left):

Not only does the LORD call us blessed when he receive instruction from Him, we can rest knowing we have divine protection from our adversary.

Aaronic blessing

This is a beautiful translation by Jeff Benner of the Aaronic blessing from the ancient Hebrew pictograph language:

Most are familiar with the beginning of the Aaronic blessing: "May the LORD bless you and keep you (Numbers 6:24)." We often read or say these words without really knowing what they mean. The words "bless" and "keep" are abstract words which we are familiar with in English. But the ancient Hebrews were concrete thinkers who related all things to concrete ideas.

The Hebrew word for "bless" is "barak" which literally means "to kneel." A berakah is a "blessing" but more literally, the bringing of a gift to another on a bended "knee." When we bless God or others we are in essence bringing a gift on bended "knee." A true king is one who serves his people, one who will humble himself and come to his people on a bended knee.

The Hebrew word for "keep" is "shamar" which literally means "to guard." A related word is "shamiyr" which means "thorn." When the shepherd was out in the wilderness with his flock, he would construct a corral of thorn bushes to protect the sheep from predators, a guarding over of the sheep.

With this more Hebraic concept of Hebrew words we can now read the beginning of the Aaronic blessing as, "Yahweh will kneel before you presenting gifts and will guard you with a hedge of protection." The remaining portions of the Aaronic blessing can also be examined for its original Hebraic meaning revealing the following:

Yahweh will kneel before you presenting gifts and will guard you with a hedge of protection, Yahweh will illuminate the wholeness of his being toward you bringing order and he will beautify you, Yahweh will lift up his wholeness of being and look upon you and he will set in place all you need to be whole and complete.

Here comes the sun

A solar anomaly on the Hebrew calendar will coincide with Passover this week. Talmudic rabbis teach that every 28 years the sun returns to the exact point in the sky it occupied when the universe was created. The sun will be in that position Wednesday, which is Passover eve. Jews around the world will rise early to recite the Birkat Hachama, a Hebrew blessing of the sun. This is not sun worship or idolatry, but rather a tribute to the wonders of God's creation.

This is only the 11th time in history, among 206 solar cycles, that the sun blessing has fallen on Erev Pesach (eve of Passover). According to the Orthodox Union, this convergence last occurred in 1925 and before that in 1309. Meir Yechiel HaLevi, a respected Hasidic rabbi, claimed that the Exodus from Egypt and the events behind Purim – great redemptions in Jewish history – occurred after a Birkat Hachama on Passover eve. A greater redemption will be celebrated Wednesday. Passover eve is 14 Nissan, the day Yeshua of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem, granting us a pardon from sin and death.

The terminal

Flight 245 from Los Angeles to Seattle was streaking somewhere over the Oregon Cascades. I sat in the back row with my stepson Darrick, irritated that I had botched our travel plans. We missed our flight out of Orange County because I forgot to open a lousy email weeks earlier. The message, which I missed, announced that we had been bumped to an earlier flight.

A ticket agent at John Wayne Airport broke the bad news. Our only option to get home that night was flying out of LAX. Alaska Airlines graciously re-booked us and we rushed outside to catch a taxi. With our flight leaving in less than two hours, our driver took us on a harrowing ride on LA's freeway system, traveling at speeds up to 90 mph. Traffic was unusually light and Speed Racer got us to the airport in about an hour. Relieved of $120 cab fare, we checked our bags, found our gate and exhaled. As our plane lifted from the runway I silently thanked the LORD for His protection and provision, and asked His forgiveness for my costly oversight.

Little did I know God still was working behind the scenes. My wife Alisa and daughter Brianne were sitting several rows in front of me. A stranger sat in the aisle seat next to my wife and I looked up several times to see them chatting. My wife introduced me to the passenger – a college tennis player named Joe – as I got off the plane. The student, a Christian who had converted from Mormonism five years earlier, was trying to return to school in Hawaii after participating in a Southwest tournament. Flying standby, he got as far as LAX, where he spent 24 hours waiting for a seat to open. Faced with spending a second night in the terminal, he caved in and booked a flight for Honolulu via Seattle. He purchased a ticket for Flight 245 about the time we arrived at LAX.

Joe shared his travel saga with my wife on the flight to Seattle, as well as the moving testimony of his Christian conversion. This young man loves the LORD. We landed at Sea-Tac around 11 p.m. but Joe's connecting flight wouldn't leave for another nine hours. Not eager to spend another night on the floor of a terminal, Joe gladly accepted our invitation to sleep at our house. Joe is a serious student of the Word and we had a wonderful time of fellowship on the drive home. Our visit had several layers of ministry. Joe shared how his mother, whom his Mormon father divorced after she converted to Christianity, was struggling with abandonment and isolation. Joe asked Alisa is she would send his mother an email of encouragement, which Alisa did the next day. The last leg of Joe's journey was seamless. In the morning he hitched a ride with Alisa, who already had plans to drive our next-door neighbor to the airport. We received an email that Joe reached his destination safely.

Looking back, I marvel how God turned my blunder into a blessing. As our taxi screamed toward LAX the LORD was preparing a divine appointment. All for His glory.

Spinning words

The word cloud above was created with an application called Wordle, using text found on my blog's front page. It's free and easy to use. You enter a bunch of words or a website URL, click a button and within seconds you have a piece of art. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts and color schemes. Wordle was created by Jonathan Feinberg. The cloud below is Isaiah 53, perhaps the most famous Messianic text in the Old Testament.

Private Galione

A foul odor drifted into the camp of the American 104th Infantry Division. Private John Galione, resting with his unit on the front lines in Germany, told his sergeant the smell gave him a "bad feeling." Informed that Russian soldiers had spotted a labor camp in the area, Galione concluded the odor was linked somehow to prisoners.

Galione wanted to respond but found little support. The sergeant refused him permission to scout the area, and only one soldier, a friend, would even discuss with him the merits of a rescue attempt. The 104th had fought bravely in Europe but many of its men, knowing the war would end soon, were tired of taking risks.

Galione was not one of them. About 9 p.m. on April 5, 1945, he slipped out of camp on foot and into the blackness of night. With a gut feeling to follow the trains, he found railroad tracks and began walking. His plan was to search for prisoners and return to camp before morning roll call. Galione nearly aborted the mission after several hours because of fatigue, hunger and a nagging leg wound. But a supernatural encounter kept him moving. Just as he was thinking of quitting and turning back he felt a nudge from behind. Assuming his buddy had decided to join him, Galione turned around but saw no one. Then the force grabbed his elbows and pushed him forward.

"My legs were tired but something was making me walk, telling me to keep following the trains," Galione is quoted in a book authored by daughter Mary Nahas. "Somehow it gave me the strength to keep going." Reflecting on his journey years later, Galione believed the force was either God or an angel sent by Him.

Five days later the tracks led Galione to the mouth of a tunnel carved in Germany's Harz Mountains. Hidden inside was the Nazi's top-secret V1 and V2 missile factory. Next to the tunnel stood a cluster of buildings surrounded by a fence and locked gate. It was the Mittelbau Dora Concentration Camp, which supplied slave labor to the underground Mittelwerk factory. Its discovery led to the liberation of prisoner camps across Europe and the seizing of Germany's prized rocket technology. Galione impacted world history although his participation was kept secret for more than 50 years.

The V2 was the world's first ballistic missile and the V1 a cruise missile launched from ground ramps and airborne bombers. Seattle's Museum of Flight recently added a restored V1 to its grand hall, which houses historic aircraft. Visitors are informed that parts of this missile were salvaged from the Mittelwerk factory. More than 20,000 Dora laborers died in harsh, degrading conditions. Jewish and non-Jewish workers who were caught sabotaging missiles during production were hanged. The V1 and V2 are the only weapons in history to have killed more people during assembly than in combat.

Galione's name is missing from the Seattle exhibit as well as American history books. Few people outside his family are aware of his discovery, which transferred post-war power to the United States. A History Channel documentary commented that had Russia reached Mittelwerk first, America might have been attacked by nuclear weapons. Galione beat the Russian army to the weapons cache by mere hours.

As he approached the tunnel in 1945 Galione had no clue what he was about to uncover. He inspected a train car filled with corpses, which he learned later was bound for the nearby Buchenwald crematorium. Galione dropped an ammo clip by accident, alerting a German guard. Gunfire was exchanged briefly before the guard ran off. Bullets had whizzed past Galione as he scrambled for cover above the tunnel entrance. He marveled that he was not wounded or killed.

It was not the first time Galione had cheated death. As a boy, he miraculously escaped after falling through the ice while skating the frozen Delaware River. The murky, swift current swept him under the ice and toward certain death. Moments before drowning, Galione found himself lying on top of the ice. He can't explain how he got there. The only footprints in the snow were his own. During the war, he was one of only three men in his group to survive swimming across Holland's Mark River under enemy fire. The weight of Galione's backpack nearly drowned him. "I don't know how I made it across. I never learned how to swim," he said. "We had a strong feeling there was a divine reason we had been spared."

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