Sid Roth - The Power of the Hebrew Language
Sid Roth: Hello. Welcome. Welcome to my world where it's naturally supernatural. I have a friend that has a passion to investigate the lost tribes of Israel. And recently he went to Africa, he went to Zimbabwe, and they did a DNA study on this particular tribe in Africa and they find the highest percentage of the priestly families is in this tribe in Africa, of anywhere in the world. Now this is what it says to me. The Bible says the Temple will be rebuilt. But guess what is missing? The authentic priest. Guess what we've just found? The priest of Israel! You know, I have known Rabbi Jonathan Bernis for, you were just out of your teens when we met. But my most exciting memory of you, and it may surprise a lot of you when you hear this, is we were fairly new believers and he was, he had a Messianic Jewish congregation in Rochester, New York, and I used to go up there for days of prayer and fasting, and we used to pray in supernatural languages, tongues, I mean, for hours and hours. And Jonathan, I am...
Jonathan Bernis: They were great days. I remember them.
Sid Roth: They were. I am 100 percent convinced that here God has used you with your own television ministry and he's doing so many things right now with It's Supernatural. We birthed that when we were praying together, and we didn't even know.
Jonathan Bernis: We didn't.
Sid Roth: But better than us not knowing, the devil didn't know.
Jonathan Bernis: Sid, I think God started to birth that whole Russian ministry that we were able to witness together. One of my favorite moments together was when we saw 4000 Russian, mostly Jewish Russian speakers in the Taborsky Concert Hall in Russia during the altar call, running forward with tears streaming down many of their eyes and praying to receive Jesus as the Messiah, over 13,000 that came in that outreach we did for them.
Sid Roth: We never, ever, I mean, one or two would come to the Lord in my congregation or Jonathan's in a year, you know. But thousands running with tears in their eyes, we had never seen anything like that and we knew..
Jonathan Bernis: We birthed it though prayer five years earlier.
Sid Roth: And you started something that I had only seen one other time. It was called travail. What is travail?
Jonathan Bernis: Travail is actually birthing pains. The Bible in Romans 8 talks about the creation groaning, all creation groaning for that which is yet to be revealed. And I really believe that there is a special anointing, Sid, that comes on people, literally birth pains that, and it comes right from here, right from the gut and just beginning to, starts with tongues and then the unction grows, the urgency grows, and it just, I found myself falling flat on my face before God. And I really felt the Lord show me that we are a ministry, we have an abundant blessing of finances but a prayer deficit because God is bringing me in through doors that absolutely incredible, like Zimbabwe. And I had this picture of a water tower. And what God was showing me is that prayer, intercession actually is like a water tower where you store up water. And then I saw this thing that you pulled on and then the water would come pouring down from the water tower. Intercession is something like a water tower where we intercede and we're building, we're storing up prayer like a water tower and then it's released at the time that it needs to be released in God's specific time.
Sid Roth: Now here is the amazing, and God is showing you something about the soon return of Messiah. What is he showing you?
Jonathan Bernis: Absolutely. The time, we are at one minute to 12, Sid. We are in the last of the last days and the spotlight is going back to Israel, back to the Jewish people, and the church needs to realize that they have, that people watching, all of you have a very specific mandate from the Lord to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy, but also to be a coworker with him in the greatest harvest the world has ever seen. We're entering into it now.
Sid Roth: And I have an inkling and I'm going to tell you about, and Jonathan is going to tell you about what is being birthed. And when we come back you're going to find out about an ancient Jewish supernatural way of having a most amazing power of God. When the Messiah said, "You will do the same works I have done and even greater", some of you are ready for the same. I'm ready for the greater. How about you?
Sid Roth: Now many of you had heard about confessing God's Word. As a matter of fact, the major scripture was when Joshua was taking over, God gave Joshua some advice. What did God tell Joshua?
Jonathan Bernis: Well understand that Joshua was now given the responsibility to follow in the footsteps of Moses and lead about three million Jewish people into the Promised Land. And you can imagine that the...
Sid Roth: You could have ten Jewish people and you get 11 opinions. Three million, wow.
Jonathan Bernis: You do. And I think he had a lot of insecurity and God at that time spoke to him and said, "Joshua, you're going to be successful and I'm going to tell you how. The way that you will succeed is by meditating on my Word day and night", and then he said this, "keeping it in your mouth". If you go back to the word "meditate", Christian meditation, Sid, is connected to the Hebrew word, "sekah", which means to reflect, to think, to ponder. But the Hebrew for, the real Hebrew for meditating used in that verse is "hadah". We get the word "Haggadah" from that, to tell. It means to mutter, it means to utter. God was saying to him, not just to keep the laws of God in his heart, but to speak them forth day and night, to constantly keep them in his mouth. It was talking about confession. And God said, "You'll be successful in all you do. You'll prosper if you keep my Word in your mouth, if you keep uttering it, muttering it, confessing it". Why? Because faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And I believe Joshua confessed the Word of God. He kept hearing over and over, hearing here and then hearing in his spirit. And when it got into his spirit, that 19 inches between the head and the heart, all faith is released and that's where we live. That's where the Spirit of God lives in our spirit. And we have to build up our spirit. How? Praying in other tongues and professing the Word of God.
Sid Roth: What you're doing is you're almost rehearsing what God is saying over and over, and over again. And it's becoming a reality, a dynamic reality on the inside.
Jonathan Bernis: It absolutely is. Confessing the Word of God is absolutely biblical. It's powerful, it's life-changing. And I saw this very specifically as a pastor when a woman that had been suffering from depression, acute depression most of her life. And Sid, she carried this as a cloud around her just oozing depression and it, she had been to doctors and psychiatrists, and psychologists. And I was counseling to no avail. And I started praying for her and the Lord just spoke to me about giving her some scriptures to confess. And so I cut the hour short, and I said, "Here's what I want you to do or I'm not meeting with you next week. You look in the mirror and you confess these scriptures". And I had written down some: "Whoever the son sets free is free indeed. Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. Where the Spirit of God is there is liberty". Less than a week later, she came back to my office. She was smiling for the first time I had ever seen her smile. She had been completely delivered, not from counseling appointments, but by confessing the Word of God and it got into her spirit. She was delivered instantly.
Sid Roth: Now you have a little switch on this. You say there is power in the original Hebrew language in confessing God's Word. Explain that.
Jonathan Bernis: Well there's a couple of things with Hebrew. First of all, Hebrew was the language known as the tongue of the prophets. The Old Testament, the original language of the scriptures was Hebrew and some teach, and I'm a believer in this, that when God spoke the world into existence, by the way, the Bible says that the tongue has the power over life and death. There's life and death in the tongue. The tongue is a creative force and what separates us from all of God's creation is articulate speech. I believe that when God spoke the world into existence and said, "Let there be light", it was in the Hebrew language. So I believe that Hebrew itself as a language is a creative force. Maybe it's the tones or whatever, but it's a creative force. But there's something else about Hebrew. It is a super language, Sid. Do you know what I mean by that?
Jonathan Bernis: What do you mean?
Jonathan Bernis: Okay. I saw you drinking some green juice.
Sid Roth: You don't have to tell everything.
Jonathan Bernis: I saw it. It was all, it's got kale and it's got all kinds, it's a superfood.
Sid Roth: Right.
Jonathan Bernis: Because it is all these nutrients pressed into it. There's superfoods that are packed with nutrients and super vitamins, and so on. Well Hebrew is a super language. Example, "shalom". Contained in "shalom", which means peace, we have the English peace, shalom. But "shalom" has 20 other meanings. It's completion, it's welfare, it's wholeness, it's wellbeing, it's security. And then the Hebrew word, "yireh", that word, we say "provide", but the Hebrew word means abundance. The Hebrew words means to bless, to prosper. It means success, it means sustenance, it means fulfillment, protection, shelter, graciousness, enjoyment. It means rain. Literally, God will bring rain, yireh, he'll bring rain in the dryness, revival.
Sid Roth: So what you're saying is that when we proclaim God's promises in Hebrew, you get the full meaning of what God meant rather than that one English word in our translation.
Jonathan Bernis: You get 30 words in one word.
Sid Roth: Okay. But most people can't speak Hebrew. I took bar mitzvah Hebrew. It took me years to learn Hebrew.
Jonathan Bernis: I studied Hebrew from childhood. I hated it. I was a bad student.
Sid Roth: But there was a method developed called transliteration. Why was this developed?
Jonathan Bernis: There is a solution. When the of Europe who were raised in the whole yeshiva program and Hebrew was part of their prayer life and their study life from childhood, moved to America, they began to go through a secularization and they lost the Hebrew language.
Sid Roth: Right.
Jonathan Bernis: Well the way that the rabbis came up was a brilliant way, came up with a way to use Hebrew in the prayer books is called transliteration. It's taking the Hebrew and using phonetic English to actually spell out the Hebrew. So, "Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad", God is one, in Hebrew most of us know that in transliteration, we can actually read along with the rabbi and participate in the service without actually learning Hebrew. It takes five minutes. I knew your question, five minutes.
Sid Roth: Anyone interested in speaking biblical Hebrew in five minutes?
Jonathan Bernis: No studying, no background. Five minutes you're speaking Hebrew.
Sid Roth: That's my kind, now I see all these things selling languages. I like the five minute variety. When I come back, wait until you hear about this tribe that Jonathan found. It's one of the lost tribes of Israel right in Africa that they did a DNA study on. It has, Lemba tribe people have higher high priest or priestly DNA, they're called the Kohens, than any other people anywhere. We'll be right back. God gave Israel Hebrew, a supernatural language. When the prophets spoke in Hebrew, God's promises would come to pass.
Sid Roth: You know, Jonathan and I were talking just before we had a break and even after the break about the names of God and the power that is behind the names of God. For instance, the Lord our Provider, tell me about the origin of that word even.
Jonathan Bernis: I love the names of God. Let me just say that I love the compound names of God because they express his very nature, his very personhood, and he wants us to live in those realities. The Lord our Provider, "Yireh", comes from Genesis 22, and this is so beautiful. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac and he's willing to do it believing that God will even resurrect him from the dead if he lets him go through with it. And he's raising the knife in obedience, and God stops him, and the angel of the Lord stops him and provides a lamb. And that's where it comes from. God himself will provide the ram for the offering, and it's a prophetic picture of Jesus. What does that mean? It means that God our provider has provided his son and all of his blessings. All of his provisions are found in his son, God's atonement. Isn't that beautiful?
Sid Roth: And what is the Hebrew word for God our Provider?
Jonathan Bernis: Adonai yireh vaveh, Jehovah yireh. Yireh, it's not, we say Jehovah Jira. It's Adonai yireh.
Sid Roth: You want to get it right? Everyone in unison: Yireh. Audience: Yireh.
Jonathan Bernis: Yireh.
Sid Roth: My goodness, I didn't know we had a Jewish group.
Jonathan Bernis: Beautiful.
Sid Roth: Okay. Speaking of a Jewish group, I'm taking now to the Lemba tribe.
Jonathan Bernis: Oh my favorite.
Sid Roth: And tell me about these people. Didn't they just intermarry and they're not really Jewish?
Jonathan Bernis: No. They claim that they were the ones that were banished by Ezra after the Babylonian captivity. And there's actually a place called Lemba in Jordan that was part of the Promised Land. According to their oral tradition, they made their way through Yemen and then into Africa, and then down into the bush of Zimbabwe, eventually, and for 800 years they've been living in an isolated community.
Sid Roth: So that means they don't know what is called today as rabbinic Judaism, which was developed after the Temple was destroyed, which really doesn't have a whole lot to do with Judaism.
Jonathan Bernis: No knowledge.
Sid Roth: So they're like a throwback before rabbinic Judaism.
Jonathan Bernis: And they're going on their oral traditions that are directly connected to the Torah. For example, in the middle of the bush of Zimbabwe they have their own kosher butcher, Sid.
Sid Roth: Really?
Jonathan Bernis: They actually don't eat animals strangled. They slit the throat, they drain it and they eat kosher meat, not rabbinic kosher, but biblically kosher. They circumstance their male children, but not on the eighth day on the eighth year. They got that one a little bit wrong.
Sid Roth: After all these thousands of years what do you expect?
Jonathan Bernis: Pretty close. And they don't intermarry. They're an isolated community and they know that they're part of the people of Israel without any rabbinic Judaism.
Sid Roth: Tell me about their DNA.
Jonathan Bernis: Well they were, they claim that they were part of the House of Israel. They were ignored until someone did a DNA study a few years ago. And Sid, the DNA study that brought about this understanding of the Kohen gene, the haplotype that connects to Kohen, the high priest, was a sampling of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi were done, names Kohen, or they knew they were from the priestly line, 50 percent of the Sephardic, of the Ashkenazi, 60 percent of those tested of the Sephardic had this similar gene that they define the Kohen gene. When they did tests on the Lemba, 70 percent of those tested had the same gene.
Sid Roth: Wow. Now here's the exciting part. They're coming to the Lord and they're moving, just as their moving in Judaism before rabbinic Judaism came along, they're now moving in Jesus before religion came along. Are they operating in the supernatural?
Jonathan Bernis: They are operating in the supernatural. We've had over 5000 that have prayed to receive Jesus with us.
Sid Roth: 5000 priests of Israel. You got that?
Jonathan Bernis: Thirty-five congregation and they're young men moving in the supernatural realm. When I was there a few weeks ago, and this is what's so exciting, I began to move back into travail and travail began to spread across the room. Amazing, huh?
Sid Roth: I'll tell you, Jonathan, we just have a couple of minutes. I would like you to pray that those watching have your heart and my heart to reach the lost sheep of the House of Israel at this set time to favor Zion.
Jonathan Bernis: Well God is looking for people that will stand in the gap, and we desperately need prayer warriors, intercessors that will commit themselves to pray for the salvation of Israel. You have been called to provoke the Jewish people to jealousy. And the first thing that you have to do to make that happen is to pray them and to pray those coworkers and those neighbors, and those extended family members that are Jewish. There is a move of God happening among the Jewish people now, but we need your prayer. And I'm going to pray that God moves you to a place of deep intercession in Jesus' name just to agree with me. Lord, I pray for those that are watching that you would raise up intercessors that would move and travail in supplication, in supernatural tongues with unction for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Lord, bring your people into a place of prayer and intercession to stand in the gap for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. In Jesus' name receive it. Receive it right now. There is a burden, unction, coming over some of you right now. Just begin to pray in other tongues and let that anointing be released in your life right now. It's happening. Sid, the anointing is here.
Sid Roth: Not just the anointing, the anointing for travail is here because Jonathan has started to travail again. I tell you, I had a dream and Jesus said, "I'm coming back soon. I'm coming back soon. I'm coming back soon". The question is not when he's coming, the question is, are you ready to make him your Messiah and Lord. The question is, have you confessed your sins before God and believe the blood of Jesus washed it away. The question is, have you made him Lord and told him to live inside of you? Answer that question right now. Do it. Let there be light. And there was light. These words as recorded in Genesis that God spoke when he created the heavens and the earth were in Hebrew.