Carla and Doug McMurry with Brad and Laura Long were on a special “relationship building” trip to Israel, January 31 through February 11, 2017.
The entire trip was an amazing experience with the Holy Spirit opening doors and putting in place our (PRMI and Dunamis Fellowship International’s) engagement in His great waves of the Holy Spirit that are converging back on Jerusalem.
With each day there were a surprising number of doors opening and unexpected encounters with Jesus and His people.
These exciting developments are not yet mature enough to be made public, so please just pray that the seeds sown will be protected and will bear extraordinary fruit for the Kingdom of God.
However, I can share with you some reflections on encountering the reality of Christ’s earthly life and the history of the Jewish people in Jerusalem.
Encounter with Jesus at Caiaphas’ House
Thursday – We went to what is believed to be the location of Caiaphas’ house upon which was built the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu. This was the location where they brought Jesus directly from the Garden of Gethsemane to the High Priest Caiaphas and where Peter denied Jesus. (see Matthew 26: 47-75)
I found two unexpected things deeply moving. One was seeing and standing on the stone steps of the only path from the Garden of Gethsemane to Caiaphas’ house.
Somehow standing on those steep stone steps, over two thousand years old, that Jesus walked up toward before beginning the descent into dying for all humanity really impacted me.
I had the overwhelming realization that all that the Father did through Jesus was real and happened in human time and space and not in the realm of myth.
I then stood in the place where Peter denied His Lord. In the face of the horror of what Jesus was about to suffer I could well understand Peter recoiling in fear and denying Jesus. I found myself dealing with the grief of all the times that I had denied Jesus. It was really incredible.
The Messiah’s Dark Night of the Soul
Then there was the pit that they held Jesus in.
When we went down into the dungeons hewed out of the cold stone under Caiphas’s house, the place was packed with Koreans. They were all praying in unison. Their adoration of Jesus with all the countless prayers of those who had gone down those steps before us was opening a door to heaven.
When they all left Laura and I went down into the “sacred pit”. It was amazing to feel the very same stone walls that Jesus may well have touched during that night when he was held there.
This must have been a true “dark night of the soul” in which for Jesus, and all of us as well, the only comfort was intimacy with the Father. Once again, these places anchor these actions of God in actual time and space. I was deeply moved by the entire experience.
A Trip to the City of David Rooted in History and the Muslim Dome of the Rock Based on Satan’s Deception
The last full day, we walked down to the City of David. There we saw the archaeological digs unearthing the original beginnings of Jerusalem from Zion the City of David.
We looked up at the Temple Mount and sitting on top of the holiest place of Judaism are the Dome of the Rock and the mosque. All based on the fiction–indeed, the lie constructed by Satan–that Mohammad had taken a night journey on a winged horse to the “the furthest-most mosque” and put his foot down on Mount Moriah, the site of the Jewish Temple.
Of course there was not a mosque there at that time – that was a hundred years later – and there is not a single mention of the City of Jerusalem in the Koran. In establishing Islam, Mohammad replaced the City of Jerusalem with the occult City of Mecca.
Yet here we were standing in the 3000 year old City of David. The proof in stone and in God’s Word, the Bible, of the true history of the Jewish People. Seeing all this exposes the terrible evil of what the nations who voted to affirm the UNESCO lie that the Temple Mount and Jerusalem have nothing to do with Judaism and Christianity but only with Islam.
Jews and Christians do not deny that there is Islamic history in Jerusalem – it is everywhere to see! But Islam declares that Judaism and Christianity have no history in Jerusalem even though it is ubiquitously present.
Only those blinded by Satan can seriously believe these lies against God’s redemptive history and way of salvation established through Yeshua, the Jewish Messiah.
All this is confirmation for me of what I wrote in the book Exposing Satan’s plans through Radical Islam. This book serves as an urgent call to prayer to break through Satan’s terrible schemes through Islam of replacement and genocide.
Please Keep Praying:
Well, there is no need to repeat all the endless hours of sitting around and standing in lines, followed by the 12 hours flight back to JFK and the long trips back to North Carolina and to Virginia.
The seeds were sown! We completed the mission and now will be praying that the Lord nurtures the connections to bear much fruit for Jesus’ glory.
We will be keeping you updated about this work with the Jewish Messianic ligament.
Thanks for your prayers and your support!
