Derek Prince - This Scripture Got Derek Out of The Hospital
This is an excerpt from: How I Became Involved in Israel
Just about a week later God baptized me in the Holy Spirit in the same barrack room. I was such a pagan I didn't know you had to go to church to get baptized in the Holy Spirit! And God gave me the gift of tongues. And again, I was so ignorant I didn't know you had to wait six months to get spiritual gifts! So God immediately gave me the gift of interpretation. And every time I spoke in tongues I got the interpretation. Well, one of the things that I kept getting, every time almost I spoke in tongues it was God and He was saying to me, "I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob".
I thought to myself well, you know that's historically true but why is it so important? But gradually, and bear in mind I was very much a Gentile, very unspiritual, Gradually it was borne in upon me that that's important. He is the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. And one of the most astonishing facts in the Bible is the fact that He revealed that name to Moses. I tell people if you've never been surprised by the Bible you've never really read it. Because, it is an astonishing book.
And in this encounter that Moses had with the Lord at the burning bush, Moses said to God, "If you're sending me back to the children of Israel, at least tell me your name. Whom am I to say I've met"? And the Lord answered: "Thus shall you say to the children of Israel, 'The Lord [the sacred name, Yaweh], God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever and this is my memorial to all generations.'"
I became aware of an astonishing fact, that Almighty God, the Creator of the universe, has chosen to be known forever as the God of three men: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. All weak, fallible men. And yet that's His memorial forever. God's ways are so different from ours. We would never have planned that, we would never have thought of it. Especially Jacob. I mean, I could understand the God of Abraham. Even maybe Isaac. But when He says, "I'm the God of Jacob," it's astonishing. But, dear friends, it's true. God impressed upon me that I need to know that. I don't think I would have ever been openly anti-Semitic but I certainly wasn't a friend to the Jewish people.
I had two Jewish friends in all of my college career but they were so assimilated the only way you could know they were Jewish was their name was Kish. My attitude, I think, was like that of a lot of intellectuals. "Well, I wouldn't persecute the Jewish people, I'd give them their just civil rights. But there must be something wrong with them that they're always in trouble". I think a lot of people think like that, really. I'm sorry, Lord, I repent. It was my ignorance, it was my carnality. Well, I was in the army, as I say, and it was the second year of the war, and we were due to go overseas from Britain. At that time because of the danger of U-boats and all sorts of things, they never told you where you were going.
We just knew our unit was going overseas and I had made friends with a wonderful Pentecostal family, the people who took me in when no one else wanted me, and through whom I eventually made my contact with the Lord. I said to them, "It's a funny thing, but everywhere I go the word Palestine is in my mind". You have to bear in mind that in that time, up to 1948, what is now called Israel and Jordan was then called Palestine. So I said, "I don't know, I have this word Palestine in my mind all the time". They said, "Derek, God must be calling you to Palestine".
Well, that kind of language didn't mean anything to me. I didn't know what it was to be called and I didn't understand it. Well, sure enough, our unit was sent to the Middle East. We went there by a round about route because of the U-boats, so we went almost to North America, down the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa and eventually ended up in Suez in the beginning of December, 1941. The first piece of news that greeted us was the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. We thought that was rather good news because it meant now the Americans would be on our side. So, I spent the next three years of my military service in the Middle East in the deserts of North Africa.
If you have never been in a real desert, it's an important part of a person's education. I think I understand why God took Israel through the desert to their inheritance. Because, a lot of us, myself certainly, have a lot of unrealistic expectations, wants and fads. But in the desert you're stripped down to the things that really are necessary. And, very little else is there. Really what you need is water, food, shelter and transportation. Well, by that time I had become a convinced and firm believer in the Bible. I was cut off from any kind of religious life. I never met a British chaplain who knew the Lord, I'm sorry to say.
And although I was seen reading the Bible every day, no chaplain ever came to me and offered to help me. But, I lived with the Bible for three years without any real significant contact with Christians except for one very life changing event. After nine months in the desert when I hadn't seen a paved road, and I hadn't seen water, I was allowed to take a week's leave to Jerusalem. Really, it was just about like going from hell to heaven in one journey. I remember that when I saw water and green foliage I became almost delirious with excitement. Then I got to Jerusalem and I think of the words of Psalm 102 which are so vivid because of that.
Psalm 102 is the Psalm that promises the restoration of Zion. It says about Jerusalem in verse 14 "For your servants take pleasure in her stones, and show favor to her dust". I'd have to say the two most obvious features of the landscape were the stones and the dust. There was plenty of both. But, I met an elderly Christian lady who lived in Jerusalem for many years and she said one thing to me which was very significant. She said, "Derek, you don't choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you". And at that moment I knew Jerusalem had chosen me. That's something I have never doubted from 1942 until this time. Well, during the period I was in the desert I became sick with a skin condition which the doctors couldn't heal and I spent exactly one year in military hospitals in Egypt.
That is not the kind of place where you'd want to be in a military hospital. I did not get out of hospital until God had taught me the secret of divine healing. I lay in bed and said to myself day after day after day, "I know if I had faith God would heal me". But the next thing I always said was, "I don't have faith". When I said that I was in what John Bunyon called the "slough of despond," the dark lonely valley of despair. But in that darkness a brilliant light shone in which was Romans 10: 17 "So then faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God". I latched on to those two words "faith cometh".
I want to leave that thought with every one of you. If you don't have faith, you can get it. It comes by hearing the Word of God. So I made up my mind to read the Bible through once more and I armed myself with a blue pencil, which is not always used for that kind of purpose, and I determined to underline in blue everything that had to do with healing, health, physical strength and long life. And when I'd finished, do you know what I had? A blue Bible! I was convinced it was the will of God to heal. But there was one particular passage of Scripture that actually got me out of hospital.
It was Proverbs 4: 20-22, which says: "My son, [and I realized it was God speaking to me] attend to my words, incline thine ear unto my sayings, let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thy heart, for they are life to those who find them and health to all their flesh". And when I read those last words I said, "Not even a philosopher can make flesh mean anything but the physical body". And the alternative reading in the margin, "for health was medicine".
So I made a decision to take God's Word as my medicine. I happened to be a medical orderly so I was familiar with how people take medicine. I said I'll do the same, three times daily after meals. I did that for three or four months. I was transferred to the most unhealthy climate, I think, in all of Africa which was the Sudan. In that climate, without further medication, the medicine of God's Word completely and permanently healed me. God was putting me through a school. In the Sudan I ended up in a very wild and desolate area in what's called the Red Sea Hills in a small military hospital. I found myself directly exposed to the Sudanese whose language is Arabic, and who are all Muslims.
God gave me a supernatural love for those people. By nature they are not lovable. There's very little that's attractive. Because of the love God gave me I had the privilege of leading to the Lord the first member of the Hadandua tribe who had ever confessed faith in Christ. But I say that because I believe it was a very important part of God's preparation.
He didn't intend me ultimately to minister to those people. His plan was for me to cast in my lot with the Jews. But I think it's very important, no matter how much we may be concerned about Israel, and the Jewish people, that we realize God loves every nation. God loves all people. Actually, if you'll forgive my saying so, one thing that convinces me that a Jew has really been born again is when he has a love for other nations. And so I think God put me through that training.