From the Desk of Jeff King

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 works like Old Testament like a crossword puzzle. He connects overlapping words in rows and columns of key Hebrew passages to see what God might be revealing about Himself. His most significant discovery is the name of Messiah embedded in Proverbs 30:4.

In Boylan's copyrighted diagram above, the words "HaShem" and "Yeshua" intersect to form the ancient Hebrew letter tav, which resembles two crossed sticks. The bottom of the tav touches the horizontal line "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. The cross symbol touches the middle Hebrew letter of the highlighted text. The tav is flanked by six letters to the right and six to the 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."

The liberator

Mary Galione could not escape the piercing gaze of the missionary. Sitting in the back pew of a crowded Johnsville, Pa., church, the 15-year-old squirmed as the man pointed and called to her, "Young lady, come up here please."

Mary stood and walked forward. "Was your father in the war?" asked the missionary from Guyana.

"Yes."

"God is going to use you greatly," he said.

A second missionary, also from Guyana, walked over and asked his partner, "Who is she?"

"Her father was the liberator."

"Whom did he liberate?" the second missionary asked.

"German concentration camps . . . her father's journey was behind it all, but he hasn't told anyone." He turned to Mary and said, "Your father walked. He took a journey and walked for miles. He hasn't told you yet, but he has a story to tell you and the Lord will use you greatly to touch nations."

Mary rushed home to share the missionaries' words with her father, John Galione. "These guys must be real because there is a war story I've been keeping to myself," he told his daughter, "and I do want to tell you some day."

"Tell me now!" Mary pleaded.

"No. It's not time yet."

It took John 30 years to fully tell his story to Mary, communicated through tears and an anguished heart. In April 1945 he had stumbled upon an unmarked tunnel in Germany's Harz Mountains. The discovery saved the lives of hundreds of European Jews and impacted the course of world history. Mary wrote a tell-all book about her father's war exploits, The Journey of Private Galione. It was released in 2004, five years after his death. Although the book has touched lives, including Holocaust survivors and their families, John remains a forgotten hero. No one named a school or dedicated a ball field after him. The military has never decorated him.

Galione's journey began with little fanfare. The Army private was resting with the U.S. 104th Infantry Division on the front lines near Lippstadt, Germany, when a foul odor drifted into camp. Galione was troubled but didn't know why. He expressed concern to a sergeant, who told him the smell might be linked to a rumored labor camp. Galione asked if he could search the area but was denied permission by the sergeant, who was wary of a German ambush.

Galione couldn't let it go. Something wasn't right. About 9 p.m. on April 5 the private slipped out of camp and headed for the nearest railroad tracks, hoping they would lead to the source of the odor. Galione's plan was to search all night, if necessary, and return before morning roll call. He left camp 18 hours after his sergeant refused him permission, a delay that would haunt him the rest of his life.

Galione disappeared into the darkness alone but he soon had company. After walking for several hours on a gimpy leg, wounded earlier in combat, someone or something came from behind and nudged him in the back. Galione turned but didn't see anyone. Then he felt two hands grab his elbows and push him forward. He was shoved just as he was thinking about quitting because of fatigue and hunger. "My legs were tired but something was making me walk, telling me to keep following the trains," he said. "Somehow it gave me the strength to keep going."

Five days later the tracks led Galione to the mouth of a tunnel. Hidden inside was the Nazi's top-secret V1 and V2 missile factory. Outside 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 plant. More than 20,000 Dora laborers died manufacturing the world's first ballistic missiles in harsh, degrading conditions. Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who were caught sabotaging missiles were tortured and hanged. The V weapons killed more people during production than in launched attacks against Allied targets. He didn't know it then, but Galione had beaten the advancing Russian Army to Germany's prized rocket technology.

As he approached the tunnel he inspected a train car filled with human corpses, which he learned later was bound for the Buchenwald crematorium. While searching for identification on the bodies his ammo clip fell and the noise alerted 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. "I don't know how he missed me," he said.

Galione had survived other close calls. As a boy he fell through ice while skating the frozen Delaware River in his shoes. As the murky, swift current swept him under the ice and toward certain death, Galione thought of his mother, who had already lost a son: "If I die under the ice she won't even know what happened to me. It will kill her." The next thing he remembers is lying on the river bank. He can't explain how he got there. "I looked around trying to find who might have rescued me but there was no one in sight for miles," he said.

During the war, he was one of only three men in his unit to survive a river crossing in Holland while under enemy fire. The weight of Galione's pack 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."

Having survived his skirmish with the German guard, Galione turned his attention to the emaciated Dora laborers who were staring at him from behind the fence. He was unable to break the lock with his rifle but returned later with two American soldiers he'd recruited from another company. In the pre-dawn darkness of April 11 the men smashed through the front gate with a Jeep and drove slowly into the compound, which was an open graveyard. Bodies were strewn everywhere.

A gaunt prisoner approached the Americans, pointed to the infirmary and said, "There are people in there." The driver pulled the Jeep close to the door, stepped inside and witnessed another horror scene: about a hundred living skeletons lying motionless in beds, barely breathing.

"We were so frightened we put the Jeep in reverse and drove backward real fast," Galione said. "We didn't know what was going on and we didn't want to end up like the people we saw. The German guards had abandoned the prisoners but we didn't know that. To be safe we wanted to bring more men."

Galione, who had walked more than 100 miles to reach the tunnel, took a three-hour Jeep ride back to the 104th. He told his sergeant he had located a labor camp with sick and dying prisoners. The next day Galione led an infantry division to liberate Dora. "I was so happy. The people were in such bad shape," he said. "I didn't think they had another day to live." Battle-hardened soldiers, encountering Holocaust victims for the first time, wept and vomited. Galione said the laborers "looked like the walking dead. They were skin and bones. The people were so happy to see us. They were tugging our clothes, feeling our uniforms between their fingers like they were gold."

Before Galione's men reached Dora, tanks from the Third Armored Division raced toward the camp to provide infantry cover. Galione had provided directions but the tanks got lost, bypassed Dora and found another concentration camp, Nordhausen, by accident. It held more than 400 dying prisoners.

The Pentagon ordered the immediate search for other prison camps, motivated largely by the discovery of Nazi weapons. The Americans seized V2 missiles and parts, secret documents and more than 120 scientists, including Wernher von Braun, considered the greatest rocket engineer of the 20th century. The last weapons were removed from Mittelwerk hours before the Russians arrived, a coup that would turn America into a post-war superpower.

Relocated in America, Von Braun and his German team helped develop advanced weaponry and the manned space program. Von Braun, a key figure in the Apollo moon program, was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ford in 1977 and hailed as an American hero. Dora survivors were outraged. They witnessed the fruit of Von Braun's early rocket development: the torture and murder of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish laborers. "Everything that is now in space had its origins here (Dora), not in America or Russia," said French Dora survivor Rene Steenbeke. "This is where science and death met."

Galione never pinpointed the source of the odor. Camp Dora was ruled out because it was too far from Lippstadt, where the 104th had paused to rest. Galione said he encountered the smell on other occasions near train cars.

Behind the scenes, the Army ordered Galione to keep his role in the discovery of Dora and Mittelwerk a secret. Mary suspects it was a political move to promote and decorate other soldiers. Family members say Galione was recognized by a higher authority, the God of Israel. Seven of Galione's offspring – two children, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild – were born on the liberation dates of concentration camps (Nordhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau) that had sent laborers to Dora. One daughter was born without vital signs but was revived by a doctor. It was April 15, the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald and Nordhausen.

Galione believed God had spent a lifetime establishing a Holocaust memorial through the liberation-date births of his offspring. He wanted Jewish survivors to know that the Lord loved them and had sovereignly orchestrated their rescue. Mary calls the Third Armor's miscue – driving past Dora and stumbling upon Norhausen – a miracle. "That's where they (Nazis) had dumped people too weak to make missiles, leaving them to languish and die," she said. "God was trying to save the weakest first."

The book by Mary (Galione) Nahas includes an affidavit signed in 2000 by her father's sergeant, Leonard Puryear, crediting Galione with the discovery. Dora survivors have corroborated her father's testimony. Mary included prisoners' comments in her book to capture the struggle for survival inside the camp, including this prayer by Yves Beon:

"Here believers and atheists meet in the same communion, begging God, even the devil, and all the genius that may come to the hearts of men to inject into the Americans the madness that will make them plunge forward enough for us. Don't lose any time guys, we're here and crying for help, and you should hear us well. You, Harry, even if you have an ache in your side, charge on in spite of it! And you, Joe, even if your tank runs out of gas, push it with every ounce of strength! Even if you're tired, keep on as if nothing happened, without stopping, so long as you arrive here!"

John Galione heard their cries well.

Addendum – As a young girl Mary could see the hand of God upon her father. "There was something about him but I couldn't put my finger on it," she said. "I noticed that everything Dad prayed for he was granted, and he seemed to have a direct line with an angel who always warned him of impending danger." One day she asked him in private, "I don't understand it. Whatever you pray for comes true. God listens to you. He respects you, but why?" John, who hadn't yet revealed his war secret to Mary, answered softly, "I saved people. A lot of people, and some of those people were God's people, the Jews." John began his prisoner search between April 4-5, the same time frame rabbis claim Moses split the Red Sea. Both men were unlikely candidates to lead a Jewish exodus – one from Egypt, the other from Nazi-occupied Europe.

The mark of God

When God introduced the Biblical feast days He wasn't scheduling a potluck. The Hebrew word for "feast," mow'ed, means sign or signal. God was signaling the Israelites a direct, clear message: Watch for Messiah. The spring and fall feasts were dress rehearsals for the first and second coming of Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth.

Passover is the spring feast that not only commemorates the Moses-led exodus from Egypt, but mankind's redemption through the death and resurrection of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb. Two years ago in March, as Christians around the world were preparing for Easter, I received a different signal. God was calling His church to rally around Passover, which fell in April in 2008.

I felt a sense of urgency but didn't know why. Then I heard a teaching by Peter and Christie Michas of Messengers of Messiah, a Hebraic Roots ministry in Southern California. I took notes and searched the Scriptures myself. And I agree with their conclusion: Passover is linked to the sign or mark of God and our eternal security in Him. Here's why:

Passover is the most significant Biblical feast because it points to God's finished work of redemption. God tells Moses in Exodus 13:9 that Passover "shall be a sign to you on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes." What kind of sign or mark would God give those who keep Passover? We believe it is the Hebrew letter "tav," the same mark God placed on the forehead of Jews who rejected idolatry in Ezekiel 9:4.

The tav is the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet. In the ancient pictographic script (see chart) the letter resembles two crossed sticks or a cross. One of the most significant uses of the tav is found in columns of the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. Eleven tav symbols appear in margins next to Messianic passages. In Revelation 22:13 Yeshua calls Himself the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. In Hebrew it is translated Aleph and Tav.

Jews who were sealed with a "tav" in Ezekiel 9 were protected from God's wrath. Ezekiel 8 exposes the offenses that provoked God's anger, including veneration of the sun god Tammuz and an image of jealousy, which scholars identity as the fertility goddess Astarte (also known as Ishtar or Easter). Tammuz was a counterfeit savior born on Dec. 25. Those same abominations flourish in the church today. Tammuz (Christmas) and Astarte (Easter) were assimilated into Christianity in the fourth century. If Christ is our Passover, as the apostle Paul confirms in 1 Corinthians 5:7, why does the church smear His name and character with an idol every spring?

The Bible also speaks of another sign. Revelation 13:16 says followers of the beast will receive a mark on the forehead or right hand. But it is not a barcode, tattoo or implanted chip as many Christians today believe. The mark we receive reflects the belief system we take into our heart and mind, symbolically the forehead and hand. It is unseen by man.

Revelation 13:18 asks those with understanding to calculate the number of the beast. The Greek word for "calculate," psephizo, means to count or vote with pebbles. The ancient Greeks voted by dropping pebbles into urns. In a court of justice a white pebble represented acquittal and a black stone condemnation. Yeshua says in Revelation 2:17 He will give a white stone to those who overcome the beast system. The mark we receive is determined by how we vote with our stone. Our vote reflects what is in our heart and mind.

Peter Michas believes the Greek letter chi, which looks like an "X," represents the mark of the beast. The chi and the Hebrew letter tav look almost identical, suggesting that Satan has counterfeited God's mark. The "X" is an ancient symbol linked to sun worship. Tammuz, whom the Greeks called Bacchus, was depicted with chi symbols, or crosses, on his headband. When people violate God's calendar by observing Christmas and Easter they invite the beast's mark. They choose the black stone.

Does that mean God will condemn every Christian who observes Christmas and Easter? No. God knows those who love Him. I believe He extends grace to the believer who participates out of ignorance. But if a Christian learns about the pagan roots of Easter and Christmas and continues to willfully participate, that is dangerous ground spiritually. It is adultery in God's eyes.

Exodus 13:3 will lead a person to good ground. It is a Passover command included in the cube-shaped boxes that Jewish males wear on their forehead and left arm during morning prayer: "Remember this day in which you went out of Eygpt, out of the house of bondage." The word "remember" in Hebrew, zakar, represents a mark that can be recognized. It is used in the infinitive form, meaning the subject should be remembered constantly. Why remember Passover? Not only did God's strong hand free the Israelites from slavery, it delivered us from the bondage of sin through the Passover sacrifice of His Son.

God grants that pardon freely when we place our trust in Yeshua alone, turn from sin and serve Him obediently. To maintain a healthy relationship with Him it is critical that we mature in our faith (1 Pet. 2:2), divide the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15) and worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:24). God will reveal the truth, including the significance of His calendar, to true seekers. But with this knowledge comes accountability. When we are exposed to the truth we must choose between the white and black stone, and Yeshua asks us to count the cost. God will mark us accordingly.

Addendum –Yeshua's death and resurrection fulfilled three of the four spring feasts – Passover, Unleavened Break and First Fruits – to the letter. He was crucified at the very hour priests were slaughtering Passover lambs in Jerusalem. God filled believers with the Holy Spirit on Shavuot (Pentecost), the last of the spring feasts. Messiah will fulfill the fall feasts – Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot – when He returns as Davidic King. Yeshua uses coded language in Matthew 24:36 to reveal the timing of His return. He says no one knows the day or hour, a direct reference to Rosh Hashanah, the only holiday with an undetermined start time. Hebrew months begin with the sighting of the new moon. Rosh Hashanah is the only feast that falls annually on the first day of a Hebrew month. For more information on the fall feasts look here.

Addendum – In preparation for the first Passover in Egypt, God tells Moses in Exodus 12:13 that the blood of sacrificial lambs "shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are." The Hebrew word for "sign," ot (pronounced "oat"), is spelled with the Hebrew letters aleph, vav and tav (modern Hebrew letters displayed). The vav is dropped and inferred only in pronunciation. That leaves the aleph and tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In Greek it is translated alpha and omega. Yeshua identifies Himself as the Alpha and Omega in Rev. 22:13. The sign points to the shed blood of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb.

The LORD was with him

Only God can discern the hearts of men. And here is what He saw in Hezekiah, king of Judah:

He trusted in the LORD God of Israel, so that after him was none like him among all the kings of Judah, nor who were before him. For he held fast to the LORD; he did not depart from following Him, but kept His commandments – 2 Kings 18:5-6.

That is a great relationship model for us today. Hezekiah "held fast," which means in Hebrew to cling, follow closely or pursue hard. How many professing Christians do we see today pursuing the Savior with tenacity? Hezekiah also "kept" God's commandments, which doesn't mean he simply reserved a Torah scroll for the royal library. Hezekiah had the Torah written on His heart, not just parchment. The Hebrew word for "kept" means to hedge about, guard, look narrowly.

In other words, the king took his relationship with YHVH seriously. Obeying God's word wasn't an obligation, but a privilege. And how does God respond to Hezekiah's loyalty? Verse 7 says "the LORD was with him; he prospered wherever he went." The Hebrew rendering for "prospered" denotes understanding and wisdom, not material wealth. LORD, create in us a heart like Hezekiah's, devoted to You. May we pursue hard after You.