Sid Roth - The Hidden Rapture Prophecy
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome. Welcome to my world where it's naturally supernatural. I just love the rarified air of Heaven, the supernatural of God, the presence of God. I have a question for you. Why are the Jewish feasts removed from Christianity? Let me pose it a little differently. They are Jewish feasts, but they're not just Jewish feasts. They're biblical feasts. But God says in Leviticus it calls them "my feasts". So they're God's feasts. So why were the Jewish biblical God feasts removed from Christianity? It's a question to ponder. Now there's only person that benefits for these being removed if as you're about ready to find out they clearly show what is going to happen in the End Times, in mystery code, just as the first few feasts that are God's feasts show the whole first coming of Jesus, the last feasts show the return of Jesus. Who benefits by keeping believers ignorant? I have Perry Stone here and Perry, the last time that I interviewed him he brought someone with him, his father, who is now in Heaven. And his father operated in all nine gifts of the spirit, and asked Perry the last time I spoke with him, did your father have a prophetic word just before he died, and you answered?
Perry Stone: He said the Lord spoke to him, and this was about a month before he passed, that in the last days as we come closer to the time of the end, believers were going to come under a stress, a lot of Satanic temptation. And he said, some of this will be temptations that people have never dealt with, he said, godly people, he said some will be sexual temptations with thoughts in their mind to do things that they've never thought of doing. He said, he was crying when he told me this. And he said, "Please tell them that the Lord said they have to pray excessively in the Holy Spirit. They have to use the prayer language of the spirit, and when they're under temptation, don't try to fight it by rebuking it in your natural tongue. Fight it by praying heavy in the Spirit of God to get your mind renewed". That was one of the last things he said.
Sid Roth: I have to tell you, Perry, I feel like I don't want to go out in the world unless I've prayed for about an hour in tongues. And I've been doing this now for the last few years, and I've been urging everyone else.
Perry Stone: Yes.
Sid Roth: But I didn't know that prophetic word. Okay. Perry has spent 80,000, listen to me, 80,000 hours studying the Word of God. Perry is one of the pioneers of what is known as the Jewish roots movement. Perry comes from, is it three generations?
Perry Stone: Four generations.
Sid Roth: Four generations of people in ministry. He has something that you must understand. Tell me how you first got interested in Israel and even the Jewish roots. Because if you come from the background that I think you do, you didn't even hear a lot about the Old Testament.
Perry Stone: The only thing I heard growing up was Pentecost, because that was the background of our group. I didn't know anything about Passover. I didn't know, I probably didn't hear about unleavened bread until I was in my 20s. And the, what triggered me was a trip to Israel, the very first trip I made. And I saw some things that I won't have time to go into detail with, the earthquake fault line on Mt. of Olives, the giant birds that were repopulating up in the Bashan area. And I realized this is all in the Bible, but it wasn't being reported here, you know. It's kind of like they knew it there, but it wasn't being reported here. So I started going to Israel. When I would go, I would take a photographer to take slide pictures and I would come back to the states and begin to show, I call it update inside of Israel. And I would begin to show the pictures along with the teaching that the Lord had given me, and it just absolutely became the most popular teaching of the whole week. The largest group of people to attend would come and they would bring unsaved people. A lot of people came to know the Lord because they realized what's written in the Bible is happening. Number one, that makes God's work real. It makes God real. Number two, it means we're coming into the last days.
Sid Roth: Feasts. Where does that fit into it? When did your eyes open up to why the feasts in the Bible are so important?
Perry Stone: It was probably, you know, I started preaching when I was 17. Probably in my 30s when I really started doing, digging in deep into the Hebraic roots, and I realized that the seven festivals of Israel, the Moedim, the seven festivals of Israel called the feasts, are complications of God, but they are appointed seasons. If you look at some of the wording in Hebrew, but also one of the translations in the English Bible will tell you, "these are my appointed times". Now what really got my interest was that Jesus came as the lamb, but is coming back as the lion of the Jews. So there's two natures here in one man: the suffering Messiah and the ruling Messiah. Now those of you may be watching the program from Israel and you have a rabbi, one of the things the rabbis teach is there is a Messiah coming, but there's two Messiahs: Messiah, son of Joseph, the suffering Messiah and Messiah, son of David. And they even believed that in Jesus' day. But the thing you have to understand is in the scripture he's the Alpha, the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first, the last. The first time he came, he came to fulfill Isaiah 53, the suffering Messiah. But the second time he comes back, he comes back as the son of David to rule on the throne, Mashiach, the son of David. And so if we understand that, then we can better understand that the feasts are divided up into three sections. There's three spring feasts are fulfilled through Yeshua, through his resurrection, death, burial, etc., his appearance to the disciples during .... Pentecost was the birth of the, what we call the New Testament church, the ... the called out ones on Pentecost. But we've not yet quite gotten to the three fall feasts yet. That's Trumpets, Atonement and Tabernacles. And when I started really studying this, I said, wait a minute. They're not preaching to me, they're not sharing with me that these three fall feasts are all in prophecy and have not yet happened. Why are we not studying this? And that's what triggered me into studying, is you realize three of the fall feasts hadn't totally taken place yet.
Sid Roth: Well you know, Perry mentioned a word in Leviticus 23: "convocation". In the Hebrew that could be translated: "rehearsal". Now if you saw the rehearsals for the first coming of the Messiah and they came out to the decimal point, I mean, it's uncanny. God is so magnificent how God could do this. Wouldn't you like to know what the last, the fall feasts are all about, which will show you to the decimal point everything you need to know about the return of the Messiah? I'll be right back.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth here with Perry Stone. And Perry, many Christians say, I don't know about studying those feasts because my Bible says I'm no longer under the Law. What would you say to them?
Perry Stone: You know, we talked about this before, how in the Torah, Five Books of Moses, you know, you have what's called the Law of God: ceremonial, sacrificial and the moral law. Sacrificial law were all the sacrifices, the lambs, the bulls, the rams, the pigeons. That is Christ fulfilled the law. He became the final sacrifice. So there's no more sacrifices as far as animals. So that's what the New Testament is talking about. Now when we talk about the Law of God when it comes to, let's say, the moral law, that's God's character. That's how God wants His people to live and have these laws in the Torah that are also, by the way, found in the New Testament. I can show you in the New Testament, you don't kill, you honor your father and mother, you don't commit adultery and fornication. These scriptures that we call the Commandments are still, but here's the key. In the New Covenant, they operate off of love, meaning that God says to you, if you love your neighbor as yourself you're not going to steal, you're going to commit adultery, you're not going covet. If you love God with all your heart you're going to obey those commandments of worshiping God, keeping the Sabbath day to worship Him and so on, not taking His name in vain. So the fact is the New Covenant, the only change we have is we operate off of love, meaning if you love people who love God, we're going to follow His Word. It's going to be an automatic thing because He's changed our heart to follow His commandments and His Word.
Sid Roth: Now you have found such amazing nuggets in the only book, hear me, the only Bible the first church had was we call the Old Testament, and from that Bible, they were functioning really, really well. But were talking about the blood moon, and it gives us an insight into the timing of what's happening on Planet Earth.
Perry Stone: Well several years ago, that was in the 1990s, I began to study the versus, very complicated in the sense of how you interpret it. "The sun should be dark and the moon to blood before the terrible day of the Lord". In the 1960s, when they had the moon landing, a woman from my dad's church says, that's the prophecy fulfillment. The Russians are going to go to the moon, the American's are going to go to the moon, they're going to kill each other and it's going to be, I don't know if you ever heard that theory. And I thought, how are they going to kill each other? When you swing a sword, you have to swing it so slow, the guy can dodge it. Or if you shoot a bomb, and I was saying to myself, this doesn't make sense. What I did, I studied it from a rabbinical perspective. Now in the rabbinical perspective, lunar eclipses and solar eclipses, the solar eclipse, when the moon looks orange or looks like blood, those are signs. For example, lunar eclipse is not, here's the thing you got to understand. We're not just making this up. Rabbis have actually traced this down for hundreds of years and they've noticed that during certain solar eclipses, things follow in the world. For example, earthquakes often follow, famines often follow, or global wars often follow. With Jews, they discovered that when a moon turns to blood, if it happens on a major feast day, here's the key, it's not just what we call the moon turning into blood or a lunar eclipse, it's when it happens on a feast day, through history, something significant happens somewhere within 12 months to 48 months to the Jewish people. You can, you've had, for example, you've had a series of lunar eclipses that have happened in the spring feasts and the fall feasts on specific feast days about seven times throughout history. And every time it relates either to the city of Jerusalem, it relates to the time Columbus discovered America, it relates to a time, a prophetic time.
Sid Roth: Very significant time.
Perry Stone: Very significant. And I wanted to write this time to get an exact for those of you that are watching. The next ones that are coming up that are feast days will be the first day of Passover, April 15, 2014, the first day of Tabernacles, April 8, 2014. This is a full lunar eclipse. Then the first day of Passover, April 4, 2015, the first day of Tabernacles, September 28, 2015. Now from, again, a rabbinical perspective of all of the Jewish people watching this, have rabbis that can verify this, the blood moons are a bad sign for Israel. They're considered an omen of trouble for Israel. Now you cannot look at these and say what's going to happen because none of know. I can't do that. But we do know that on feast days, as a matter fact, it happens, you know, in January and February. But when it falls specifically on a feast day, something significant happens either with the Jewish people or Israel, and the sad thing is it's not always good. So that is when the Book of Joel and the Book of Acts, Joel 2 and Acts 2 says, "The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great terrible day of the Lord," most scholars interpret the great terrible day of the Lord being the days of tribulation. So these are blood moon events that happened before the tribulation period. And of course, we're not in the tribulation period yet, according to what I see, because you know, prophetically.
Sid Roth: Well I see this 80,000 hours of research understanding the Hebraic roots. You see, it didn't have to be explained in the New Covenant, in the New Testament and in the Old Testament. Everyone understood these things. Perry, would you understand where we are prophetically? What's going on prophetically if you had never studied the Hebraic roots?
Perry Stone: It's totally impossible. It's impossible.
Sid Roth: Okay. Hold that thought. We'll be right back.
Sid Roth: Now we found that these feast days that are called God's feasts are virtually ignored by the church, but they're not ignored by the devil. He picks feast days to attack Israel. Explain, Perry Stone.
Perry Stone: If you go into the New Testament and, you know, this is some research that we did, I found it very intriguing that, for example, when Satan would come after Jesus he would usually come after him with a large crowd of people who didn't like him, on Passover in Jerusalem. In the Book of Acts, for example, during Passover, who was beheaded? James was beheaded. Peter was going to be beheaded after Passover. So then you had one apostle being killed before Passover, another being attempted to being killed right after Passover. And I started realizing, when you look at the New Testament at the Book of Acts, there's probably six to eight examples, you can show where the worst attack to come against Christ or against the apostles happened during the time of the feasts. Now I believe there's several reasons for that. Number one, Jerusalem was the site of redemption. And I'm going to give you a nugget here that's very powerful that the Lord gave me, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper because I saw it yesterday. The reason Satan wants Jerusalem is he wants to own the site of redemption. He wants to own the land where redemption took place and lay hold of it, and claim it for himself. And he's not going to be able to do that. He's going to make an attempt to. And if you would discover, if you would look at these times when he would attack Christ during feast days, it was usually around Jerusalem or it was a time of feasts because, number one, it would be the site of redemption and was the site of redemption in the Book of Acts. Number two, the largest crowds of people were there, which meant that if the Pharisees wanted to start a rumor on Christ, they had more people that could spread the rumor than they had any other time during a feast day. So when you look at this, you come to the conclusion after you study these examples in detail, which I have, that the enemy understands the feast days. Why did Israel get attacked during Yom Kippur years ago? The Yom Kippur War, when the Syrians came into attack Israel, was during the time when all the Jewish men were on a fast and they were in the synagogue. Why Yom Kippur? So in other words, we have to understand that if Satan sees these feasts as significant, surely we'd better understand what they represent.
Sid Roth: Well not only understand what they represent, because God says, "These are my feasts". And in the Hebrew the word for "feast" is "these are my appointments". And many have found that when you worship God on His feasts, there's like a portal, an amazing portal to Heaven where the Glory of God can come upon you and the angels can come up and down the ladder. I mean, the devil knows why he attacks us.
Perry Stone: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: But Christians must know why. Not you have to, you don't have to come into the presence of God. You get to it.
Perry Stone: That's right.
Sid Roth: See the difference? Tell me a little bit about what you claimed on the Second Coming from the feasts?
Perry Stone: Well one of the things that I love to do, first of all, is to show people that in the seven feasts there were three that all men had to attend: Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. Now watch how significant this is. Passover, the emphasis there is the blood of the lamb. That's your redemption. No one can be saved for you. You have to present yourself to the Lord for your salvation. Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit came in Acts, Chapter 2, 1 through 4, and that's the Holy Spirit baptism. So when you're to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, nobody can come on your behalf. You have to present yourself to the Lord. The third is tabernacles, which in the early church was a picture of the resurrection of the dead Christ, the resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah. Nobody can be resurrected for you. You're going to have to appear before the Lord to be resurrected yourself. Now how interesting that out these seven, the Lord chose number one, number four and number seven, each representing something you have to personally do to enjoy the pattern of that celebration: salvation, baptism in the Holy Spirit and the rule and reign of Christ through a resurrected body. And you have to be there. No one can do it for you. You must appear before the Lord and it's you and Him alone during those three.
Sid Roth: What about what's known as the millennium? Give me a little insight in that.
Perry Stone: Well if you remember at the Mount of Transfiguration, you had Christ, you had Moses and Elijah, and they were transfigured before the disciples. You know, Peter was so excited, this appears to have fallen during the Feast of Tabernacles because Peter said, "Let us build three tabernacles," but actually it's let us build three booths. And you know, tabernacles was when the Jews built a booth out of different leaves, you know things, and they live outside. So this, because of what Peter said about, "let us build three tabernacles" or three booths, that transfiguration is a picture of the Kingdom, which is coming in the future. So in the millennium reign, what happens is this. You know, tabernacles is the one feast that Jews and gentiles both come together, even in Israel. It's a huge celebration. They celebrate together almost like one family. And so here's the pattern. Jesus is crucified at Passover, in the grave, in the tomb, unleavened bread, seen alive by his disciples at first fruits. Then the church is born on Pentecost. We are still back in. We are still prophetically living in Pentecost. We're living in the church age. We're living in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit right now. But we're coming to trumpets. Trumpets is a picture of catching away, the gathering together of the saints, the resurrection of Christ. Following the catching away, there comes the tribulation, which is the Day of Atonement, because atonement follows trumpets 10 days later and it's the time when Israel was judged by the Lord. Either they were released or they were judged, depending on their spiritual condition. But after the tribulation ends, we come to the millennial reign in Revelation, Chapter 20. And the millennial reign of Christ is a thousand-year reign and that's pictured by Feast of Tabernacles. When we're with him, and really tabernacles, as you know, Sid, is the seasons of our joy and seasons of rejoicing. It's the last feast to introduce the rain, praying for the coming harvest, praying for the rain season to come.
Sid Roth: The feast of our joy.
Perry Stone: Absolutely.
Sid Roth: How would you like to celebrate an appointment with God with supernatural joy? I mean, you know. One of the things that I find is amazing is many Muslims are having dreams and visions of God, and you said we're at Pentecost right now, which talks about dreams and visions of God.
Perry Stone: Absolutely. And I will confer that to you. We have been contacted by individuals who have been Muslims, who simply got hunger for God, got hungry to say there must be something more. And the odd thing is, if you're a Muslim and you're watching, God will visit you. Jesus will visit you in a dream. It's happened by the thousands. And Sid, it's happening more and more. We get emails constantly from Persians, Iraqis and people in Egypt, and all they do is pray, and they say, "Lord if you're real, show me". And the amazing thing is, I'm telling you, Christ is appearing to them, literally appearing to them and telling them who he is.
Sid Roth: But not just Muslims, but Jews.
Perry Stone: Yes.
Sid Roth: Orthodox Jews having dreams and visions. But Perry, can you picture the training an orthodox Jewish rabbi has, then has a revelation of what the old revelation of, rather than two Messiahs, Messiah ben Joseph and Messiah ben David, one Messiah, two appearances, and then becomes a teacher. Let me ask you this. I want you to ponder this. The Jewish person that has crossed your path is not an accident. You are to love that Jewish person to Jesus. Jews and Muslims, one in Messiah, one in Yeshua, the prayer right now is, God show me the truth about Jesus. I want to experience your presence. Pray that. Because the day that you seek him with all of your heart, in that day, I promise you he will be found right now. Don't even wait until we go off the air. Right now say, show me the truth. If you know God, you have everything. If you have everything and don't know God, you've got nothing.