Sid: My guest by way of telephone, Dr. Michael Brown is Red Hot for the Messiah.  The reason I’m interviewing him are two reasons, number one, God wants him on right now and wants you, this is a Devine appointment for you.  Number two, we have just come out with a new addition of my book that God told me to write many years ago literally God came to me in a dream and He said, “More Jewish people would come to know him through this book than anything I had ever done.”  Today the book is in over a half a dozen languages, over 850,000 in print, more as we speak being distributed in multiple countries.  One of the top books in Hebrew being distributed in Israel, this is God’s time to reach Jewish people.  And the church is more in enamored with Jewish roots and more enamored with Rabbi’s in fact I was talking to Dr. Michael Brown and his chapter in this book and he actually deals with what we’ll be discussing today.  But Mike we’ve been friends for a long time and I have to tell you, I watch on Christian TV Orthodox Rabbi’s and the hosts of these Christian TV shows say this is my Rabbi.  How could an Orthodox Rabbi be a Rabbi for a Jewish believer in Jesus?  It’s mischugah.  That a Hebrew word for crazy, why are we so enamored with the Judaism rather than the Jewish people in the scriptures?

Michael: You know Sid it really is a very dangerous trend and tendency.  On the one hand in times past in church history there was terrible Anti-Semitism there was Jew hatred in the name of Jesus, there was the rejection of anything Jewish by many that called themselves followers of Jesus.  Well the pendulum swung now right across the middle all the way to the other extreme side where there is almost veneration for Jewish tradition.  There is this fascination, Sid a word that God gave me back in 1984 about the pull over of rabbinic Judaism is simply this, that the whole Jewish temptation is in the soul realm, it will fascinate, stimulate, complicate, suffocate, so be on your guard.  I remember we talked about that…

Sid: But let me add one more thing, where as that is true it is on the soul realm, there is a religious spirit connected with it also.

Michael: Oh, there absolutely is and what happens is instead of Yeshua being preeminent instead of Jesus being the central focus, instead of lifting Him up and living in the Spirit being central, it’s Jewishness that becomes central.  Its Jewish roots and Jewish background, but the problem with that is that it goes beyond recovering the Jewish roots of the faith in a legitimate way and what happens is that it becomes a fascination with Rabbinic tradition.   And Sid Rabbinic tradition by in large has a different origin.  I believe Rabbinic Judaism is the greatest and most beautiful religion ever made by man, but it’s different than the Biblical faith.  It is and the traditions that have developed through the centuries have been developed by those that by in large were the ones that rejected Yeshua or that ignored Yeshua when He came and have built on a different foundation, it really is a very different religion.

Sid: For those that this is brand new to, give us a few facts about this to establish what you are saying.

Michael: Okay, we all know that if you just read the Hebrew Scriptures what Christians call the Old Testament there’s certain questions okay, you had death penalty for things back then and how does that apply now?  So followers of Yeshua through the New Covenant see that He brought about certain changes that He said, “Okay let me bring to fulfillment what’s written and take it to another level.”  Well, what do Rabbinic Jews do?  How come they don’t practice the death penalty for say, breaking the Sabbath?  How come they are not stoning rebellious thirteen and fourteen year olds?  Well, traditional Jews believe this, God gave Moses a written law on Mount Sinai and that’s the five books of Moses that we have, God gave Moses a written law on Mount Sinai, but God also gave Moses a oral law, and unwritten law which Moses then passed on to Joshua, Joshua to the elders and the elders to the prophets, etcetera and it continues to be passed down through the Rabbinic traditions and the rabbinic study to this very day.  And what happens is that according to a Rabbinic Jew you cannot understand the written scriptures, you cannot understand the Word of God without the oral traditions and if the oral traditions interpret the written word differently than that’s how you have to interpret it.  Doesn’t matter if the slant is completely contrary to the clear grammatical meaning of the written text, no the rabbinic authority say that it is; it is.  And if you remember after Jesus finishes teaching on the Sermon on the Mount; the crowds were amazed because he taught with authority not like one of the religious leaders.  In other words, he didn’t say I heard this from so and so, who heard this from so and so who heard it from so and so and went all the way back to Moses.  No, He said, “I tell you, I tell you,” and He said it with Devine authority; there is a contrast in authority in Spirit and attitude and even in terms of how we interpret the text.  And if we are going to go the way of rabbinic tradition we’ve got to go all the way, which means to submitting to the rabbinic authorities and they will tell you that Jesus, Yeshua is not the Messiah.

Sid: Mike, there is a quote in your book, I guess it comes from the Talmud that literally gives authority to the Rabbi’s on earth over the Bible, over God.  Can you quote that to me?

Michael: Surely, there’s a famous account in the Talmud where there is a dispute between one of the Rabbi’s, Rabbi Eliezer and the other Rabbis.  He brings all these miraculous proofs to back up his decision and the other rabbis say we don’t rely on miracles.  Finally a voice from heaven says, “The law is according to Him.”  And then another  rabbi quotes the words, “Well, it’s not in heaven and they deduce from that also taking Exodus 23:2 the last words of it and completely twisting it on its head, giving the opposite meaning that the majority rules.  In other words the majority of the Rabbi’s say this is the interpretation then this is the interpretation.  It would just be like this, the Supreme Court of America may pass an unrighteous law, but that becomes the law of the land.  That is one thing on human terms, but you cannot now overthrow God and His Word based on the majority rule.  Throughout our history the majority rule has often been wrong in Jewish History and typical history and yet it’s laid out plainly in the Talmud that it’s no longer in heaven that you follow the majority where as the texts is actually saying, “Don’t follow the majority to do wrong.”  The words “Follow the majority” are pulled out of context and quoted to actually overthrow the voice of God.  And in the Talmud in the account that God laughs and sons my sons have defeated me.  I don’t think that it’s something to laugh at.

Sid: Wasn’t what we know as Rabbinical Judaism a great deal of it shaped to put a picket fence around Jewish people so we would not know that Jesus is our Messiah?

Michael: Well, basically if you just think of two tracks that are next to each other and then they start going in different directions.  Well the directions are so separate that Jesus doesn’t even come into play anymore; in other words, when people say, “Well, why don’t more religious Jews believe in Jesus?”  Well, it is not an option, He’s not studied, He’s not considered, there is an entirely different system that’s been built outside of Him away from Him.  “What about the prophetic authority of the Messiah?”  No, we have the traditions.  What about the miracles of the Messiah?  No, we have the traditions.  What about the plain sense of the Word of God?  No, we have our traditions and you see that these tracks are in different directions and there is no way to cross from one way to the other without breaking free from the binding rabbinic traditions.

Sid: You know, I see so many things going on because this is the set time to favor Zion, God is once again extending His mercy on Jewish people.  And the people that He has created to share the good news with Jewish people are Gentile Christians because, Roman’s 11:11 says “Salvation has come to the Gentile to provoke the Jew to jealousy.”  And that’s why I believe Satan is throwing all these things down, you know in the path of Christians, especially being more enamored with Jewish roots then sharing the Messiah with Jewish people.  But this is again why this book is out…Read it, you will be fascinated with this and as a matter of fact if you are not a believer in Jesus and you are not Jewish there is enough information in this book that it will kind of sneak up on you, it will make you a believer in Jesus.  And then if you are Jewish everything is there, and if you are Christian you’ll begin to understand Jewish people.  This is the time to understand Jewish people; we have Jewish people from an Orthodox background to Jewish people from atheistic background Israeli’s, Jewish people from other countries, a holocaust survivor, a multi-millionaire, a PHD, a concert pianist.   Mike one fact why Jesus is the Jewish Messiah that comes to mind.

Michael: Oh, one fact out of 10,000 facts, there was certain things that the Messiah had to do before the second temple was destroyed in the year ’70; namely put an end to sin and bring the glory of God to the temple; there bringing everlasting attainment to sin, establishing righteousness and bring the glory of God to that temple.  Messiah did it, Jesus did it before the temple was destroyed in the year ’70; there is no other possibility there is no other candidate of anyone else that can do it after that.  Either He’s the Messiah or we have no Messiah.

Sid: You know, you wrote your PHD on healing and on especially Isaiah 53; one fact about healing from Isaiah 53 that you found out by working on your PHD.

Michael: Well, that the prophets had the holistic view of healing; it was spirit, soul, body and that through the work of the Messiah it was a  havrahtoe narpa lanu, and at the cost of His wounds there was healing for us, healing of the whole person, inside, outside, by the wounds of the Messiah.  Its Holistic it wasn’t just physical, it wasn’t just spiritual it’s a deep provision that the prophets had; the whole man, the wholly healed; that’s what the Messiah came to bring.

Sid: Okay, you have heard Dr. Michael Brown, he is one of ten people in this book, Jewish people from every walk of life that have come to the conclusion that Jesus in fact is our Jewish Messiah.  Now one of the Jewish people in this book is myself and I was involved deeply in the New Age and God is so gracious, He revealed Himself to me an in a spectacular fashion.  And I believe God is revealing Himself to Jewish people in a spectacular fashion all over the world.  And all over the world this book is in demand, but in the United States, it’s just getting started.  Why?  This is God’s moment of mercy on Jewish people in the United States if you just read the headlines of the newspaper, you see the world is getting more and more anti-Semitic, the world is getting just like Zachariah prophesize all nations will turn against Jerusalem to battle in the last days.  The only hope a Jewish person has, the only hope the church has, the only hope for the return of Jesus.  Jesus said, I will not return until the Jewish people say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Sid: I have Bill Morford on the telephone, and you might recall I interviewed him several years ago, and we made available a fresh translation of the New Covenant called the “The Power New Testament.” And it was so successful that Bill and I have discussions that we really need available to our Mishpochah an entire Bible with the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament all together.  And I knew of an approved Jewish Translation that was in the public domain published by the Hebrew Bible society.  And he checked into it and he’s finally put it all together.  Now you might say why does the world need a new translation of the Bible?  We have so many translations, it’s because this one is different.  There are several things that makes it different.  First of all, the power of the Greek New Testament was high jacked?   Now Bill Morford why in your opinion was the power from the translation high jacked in the other Bibles, but not in yours?  Why?

Bill: Because the scholars who are always appointed to do official translation are appointed for their scholarship not because of their relationship with the living God and they simply don’t know and that’s one of the reasons.  They don’t look on God to heal them; they don’t look to the Lord to deliver them from other spirits that are plaguing them and their simply unaware of the power that’s there.  Plus they use tradition, they know how it’s been translated in the past and they make minor changes as they do new translations.

Sid: But let’s go back to the King James that some people think is the language that Jesus spoke in, but was there prejudice there against power?

Bill: Yes, all the way back.

Sid: Because these people were not walking in intimacy with God or all the gifts of the Spirit.  Because you have some of the…. For instance, I don’t know if this is the best example, but in Mark 11:23, 24, “Truly I say to you that whoever would say to this mountain, ‘You must immediately be removed and you must immediately be cast into the sea,’ and would not doubt in his heart but would believe what he is saying is happening, it shall be to him.  Because of this I say to you, you must continually pray for everything, then for whatever you are asking, believe that you have taken it, and it will be there for you.”  Bill, I love it where you say believe that you have taken it.  That’s the type of thing you mean by a restoration of the power of the words of the Messiah and the whole new covenant.

Bill: That’s right and it’s amazing to me how many times the scholars translate the words take they translate as receive.

Sid: So you’ve restored the power that was normally neglected by the translators.  The next thing you did is you restored the Jewish roots. Now when the New Testament was written it was written for Jews by Jews in a Jewish time, and so a lot of things were taken for granted and not necessary to bring out.  As a result because it wasn’t brought out literally the Jewish culture was high jacked and the Christian which, and originally started with a pagan culture was incorporated because everyone needs culture.  And today we think that the culture that was incorporated was what it was when the Bible was originally written, but it wasn’t.  Now in 1984 you went to Israel and that’s when God started giving revelation about what we’re talking about, tell me about that.

Bill: Oh that was exciting. Wherever we went I would see things that, of course we were with a Christian tour looking for Christian things, but I’d see the Jewishness behind them.  And when we came back was when I really started dig deeply into the languages.

Sid: Well, you’ve studied Greek, you’ve studied Hebrew, tell me who you studied Greek under.

Bill: Arnold Goss is his name; he was on the faculty at Columbia Bible College, which is now Columbia International University.  He has a P.H.D. in Greek, and he was a personal tutor for me for well over three years.

Sid: And then who did you study Hebrew under?

Bill: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who is an awesome scholar, he too has a P.H.D.

Sid: Now when I hear his name I don’t think of him, I think of his Grandfather, who is credited as the man that restored the language of Hebrew to Israel, the spoken language.

Bill: That’s right.

Sid: If I was to pick one person on planet earth to be mentored under it would be Rabbi Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Bill: Yeah, it was the Lord that put us in the right place at the right time.  He moved us to Lakeland, Florida in 1993 and we didn’t know a soul there, we just felt that’s where we were supposed to be.  And one month after getting there I was just as usual taking one hour early in the morning to translate Greek so I wouldn’t forget what I had learned and the Lord told me I had to get serious with it.  So I looked around first for a Messianic Rabbi, and there was none. So I went to the only synagogue in town.

Sid: What kind of synagogue was it?

Bill: It was a Conservative Jewish synagogue, and the rabbi there was there was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and he invited me immediately to attend his classes that he was teaching.  And recommended a number of reference books to me, which I got right way, because I knew that there were so many Hebrew idioms and Jewish customs in the Greek that were intact there that I need help to be able to properly translate them.  And the rabbi gave me a huge, list which I got, and then I attended his classes and had a lot of personal time with him.  We met several times a week and it was just amazing, every question I had he could answer.

Sid: Now how many years would you say you have invested of your life for this brand new translation called “The One New Man Bible”, which includes the Power New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures, I might add the approved Hebrew Scriptures, and the Revised Power New Testament, and you call it now the “One New Man Bible.”  How many years did you put into that?

Bill: About twelve years full time work, and the last seven years, it was more than seven years ago that I first got the Jewish translation that I used as base for this.  It’s been a long time and it’s of course restricted my ministry we had a traveling ministry, but I haven’t been able to travel much.  Last year I had a total of three services at different churches.

Sid: Well, let me take you okay, so you actually put in over twenty years, twelve years full time in this project.  Now another thing you deal with that other Bibles don’t deal with and that is idioms, what is an idiom?

Bill: Well, an idiom that we like in this country is that “it’s raining cats and dogs” and we know what it means, or we say “it’s a gully washer.” But somebody who speaks a foreign language and just starting to speak English and hears that “it’s raining cats and dogs” and they look out expecting to see small animals coming out of the sky, but that’s not what it talks about.

Sid: And if you don’t understand the Hebrew idioms when it talks about removing your eye someone’s going to think literally that they are going to remove their eye.  When I read that I wondered what it was because even though I come from an Orthodox Jewish background I didn’t know these idioms because they were from 2,000 years ago.

Bill: Right and what we have to do is interpret the Biblical languages for what the authors of them meant in them.

Sid: Now you also deal with what you call, correcting the tenses, why did the tenses have to be corrected in the Bible?

Bill: That’s a mystery to me why they’re not translated properly.  And one of my favorites is the Aaronic blessing, which is not may the Lord bless, you but it’s the Lord will keep you.

Sid: Well, that’s so much better when the tense is corrected.

Bill: Right.

Sid: We want everyone everywhere to have freedom in God, freedom that God wants you to have a freedom that you want to have.  And I have an individual I interviewed many years ago by the name of Art Mathias on the telephone.  I’m speaking to him at his office in Anchorage, Alaska and we’ll be talking about his book, called “Biblical Foundations of Freedom.”  And Art the subtitle says it all, “Destroying Satan’s Lies with God’s Truth” and I love what you did in the title and you have some of the letters in a different color.  So if you read the ones in the yellow color of the title which says “Bible Foundations of Freedom” you have “I Found Freedom.”  And I am getting so many wonderful reports of people that have read your book and it’s literally transformed their life from overeating to diseases of every kind.  Speaking of diseases you had an accident in 1997 and you did what every good Christian should do and you went to the elders of your congregation, they prayed for you and nothing happened.  And you found out from your sister who had recently been healed of tumors that emotions can literally, toxic emotions can literally block someone from being healed.  We don’t hear much about this, but as you learned about this, you got your healing and then you developed teaching and you’re getting close to 75% success rate in physical healings for other people based on understanding the blockages to healing.  And that’s what it really is there are blockages to healing; we don’t hear much about that.

Art: We don’t in church, but psychology and medicine teaches that all the time.  The whole areas of psychology called Psychoneuroimmunology and Behavioral Psychology teach these connections constantly that certain and they even get very specific; certain specific types of emotions will cause specific kinds of diseases.

Sid: Let’s go back to the accident you had in ’97; tell be briefly what you worse condition was, what the prognosis was and then the good results.

Art: Well, it took several months for me to understand what was happening because my right shoulder had withered nerve cells in my fingers and toes especially on the right side of my body were atrophy, were dying.  And no matter what I ate, no matter it hurt me, my stomach hurt; clothing as I learned would cause nerve pain in my arms, especially anything synthetic.  And as I worked through everything and now in apathetic or western medicine and then got involved in alternative medicine and I did many many different types of treatment with Alatson Alternative Medicine also.

Sid: How many different things were you allergic to?

Art: Over a hundred different allergies and these allergies were causing the atrophies in my fingers in response to the clothing.

Sid: I mean were you going to be like the old story of the boy in the bubble because he’s allergic to everything?

Art: Well, that’s where it leads to, we’ve worked with many that are called universal reactors and they live in a tinfoil lined house in Arizona because their allergic to everything.  And I was down to being able to eat about four different foods even though they hurt.

Sid: And they actually felt your vital organs would just close down and you would die!

Art: Well, they told, the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale told me I had less than two years to live.  As the nerves continue to die, they would progress and to the point to would come to a vital organ and then I would be dead; and they said that that would take two years or less.  Tremendous fear, now what’s happening?  And at the end of that process of going through everything in the medical world, that’s when my sister told me about her healing.  And I thought it was crazy, I thought it was the most outlandish thing I ever heard, but I was desperate I had less than two years to live and I was in constant horrible pain.  And at that stage I would listen and at that stage I would actually do what she taught me to do which I thought was…she taught me to forgive.

Sid: But wait a second, you had been a Christian most of your life, a student of the Bible, that’s just basics, forgiveness.

Art: That is true, but see I was taught a process that once I accepted Jesus all my past, present and future sins are automatically forgiven.  I did not have to do anything; it was all under the blood or under the cross since I accepted Jesus.  And you know the blood of Jesus is there to forgive us for anything, but there is something we have to do; we have to forgive.  The Lord’s Prayer says that we ask God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive others.  Matthew 6:14 & 15 says that “If we don’t forgive others, then the Father’s not going to forgive us;” 1^st John 1:9 says “If we repent He’s faithful and just to cleanse.”  But see, implied in all of that we have to repent, we have to forgive others; we have to actually forgive ourselves.  So those are the things I was never taught to do and then we’ve learned that if there’s an emotional pain in a memory, if a memory hurts, then there’s bitterness in that memory.  And when we’ve truly forgiven that emotional pain is gone and it leaves.  See that emotional pain is what causes what medicine calls a “fight flight response” and that’s, we’re on guard in that response our adrenal glands are squirting out a whole bunch of adrenaline and kartasol.  Our liver is putting out a whole bunch of sugar for that extra strength that “fight flight response” requires.  And in that process over 1400 different chemical and physiological and hormonal responses are happening.  And those chemical and neurological and hormonal responses are killing ourselves as we live underneath that tremendous “feedback loops” as medicine calls it.  And we find that as in medicine and physiology and the Bible all three teach that living in that state of alarm and fear and anxiety and bitterness creates almost all of our diseases.  And God can’t heal us when we are full of anger, resentment or unforgiveness.

Sid: I believe you’re at a tremendous success rate of getting people healed of all types of diseases, 75%.   I believe that as we learn more and get more revelation from God’s word, we are going to reach that 100% success rate.

Art: That’s our goal, but see in that 25% that aren’t healed.

Sid: Yes.

Art: Are those that just won’t apply this, they won’t do the very simple things that God’s word teaches.

Sid: So you think that if you had 100% effort of what you teach, you’d get 100% results?

Art: Not sure, I would go quite that far, but it would be about 95% at least.

Sid: I’ll take it; I’ll take the 95%!

Art: I’m excited about that, once in awhile we come to someone that has applied everything in every way that we know and there not healed, so in those cases were asking the Lord “What else are we missing Lord?” Because we firmly believe that it’s always God’s will to heal.  He promises that in many places in the scriptures.  And so when the healing doesn’t happen, we don’t blame the person, we don’t blame ourselves, we just ask God to teach us more and more and more.

Sid: Okay, so you learned Bible forgiveness and by the way I think most Christians that even understand they’re suppose to forgive, don’t understand Biblical forgiveness.  Your book is brilliant on that, I mean there are things that…I mean I’ve been in this over thirty years as a believer in the Messiah and moving in healing even and I’ve learned some things on forgiveness in your book.  Why is it that that isn’t something that is 101 basic discipleship?

Art: That’s a good question, I have struggled with that question many times Sid, because as you said, it’s basic, it’s the basic principles that are taught in Hebrew’s 6:1 of Christianity, the foundational principles.  But as humans we don’t want to take responsibility for our actions, we want to blame it on somebody else and Satan always tempts us to blame others or to blame God for our problems.  And we find that that’s one of the biggest blocks to healing is to become personally responsible for what’s going on in our lives.

Sid: When you genuinely forgave how long did it take for you to manifest your healing with a prognosis of two years to live and a horrible life?

Art: Oh, I first was exposed to what my sister was teaching me in October of 1998 and as I started working through and applying that and doing the simple things and not understanding how to do it; I had no body teaching me.  I started to forgive and just simple prayers and then there was another verse that kept coming at me during that time, 2^nd Timothy 1:7 says, “I haven’t given you a spirit of fear.”  But I didn’t believe that a Christian could have a spirit, an evil spirit.  I was always taught that the Holy Spirit and an evil spirit can’t be at the same place at the same time, but yet I knew that I was controlled by a fear of the future, a fear of eating anything, a fear of being exposed to over a hundred different things caused pain my body.  And so I was controlled by that fear and on January the 7^th 1999 I prayed another prayer, I said, “Lord, I don’t understand this fear, but I command this spirit of fear to leave me.”  So after forgiving the best I knew how and God honored that and then commanding the spirit to leave me, my healing happened instantly.

Sid: That is so amazing, but the thing that is so amazing to me is that it’s not just forgiveness, it’s every area of toxic emotion and God has given us a way to get on top of this.  Most people are totally ignorant.  “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.