Our Father’s Story to Faith and Messianic Judaism
The son of a traditional Rabbi, Jeremiah was educated at the Hebrew Academy of Washington (DC), and the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore. During his teen years he became restless, seeking meaning and purpose in life, and eventually, at age 18, he left Judaism behind for a season, and went “the way of the world.”
Looking for answers, he became an active spiritual seeker in his early twenties, and eventually purchased a mountain farm in the hills of West Virginia, where he built a log cabin and lived pioneer style – for many years without even running water and electricity. He called his home a spiritual community. Although raised with a deep prejudice against Jesus, he eventually began to accept Him.
Never ceasing in his seeking, Jeremiah’s spiritual experiences over a three year period led him ever closer to a belief, intellectually at least, that Jesus was truly God – although it went against the grain of everything he had been taught as a youth, and would eventually mean lifetime estrangement from his Jewish family.
But Jeremiah was not doing the “picking,” God was doing the revealing. As he was being drawn ever closer and closer toward Jesus, the Word of God became more and more “alive” to him. Then one day, Jeremiah was reading the story of the eunuch from Ethiopia in Acts chapter eight, while sitting in his rocking chair in his log cabin. The disciple Phillip was explaining to the eunuch the portion in Isaiah 53 where it said “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep dumb before his shearers he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation his judgement was taken from him, who shall declare his generation? For his life is taken from the earth.”
When Jeremiah read these words he, like the eunuch, in a split second, had an experience so POWERFUL that he has NEVER doubted since that moment, and never ceased believing, that Jesus, Yeshua, is the son of God, and that the Bible is really true. It was an instantaneous conversion. He felt like scales had fallen from his eyes and now he could see. He was energized mightily. He got out of his chair and went out, and went up and down his “hollow,” stopping at nearly every house, announcing to everyone that God had revealed to him that Jesus really is the Son of God, and the Bible is really true.
Later, after spending the next ten years in local, small appalachian churches, God gave him the “Messianic Vision,” which to him is two-fold. First, if God said that in the End Times Jewish people would come to know the Messiah, then it makes sense that at least some of them would remain visibly, identifiably Jewish as believers, rather than assimilate into other cultures.
Secondly, it is a very powerful witness to our Jewish friends and brethren when we remain identifiably Jewish as believers. Then they can see that we have not changed our religion, but like the Israelite believers in the first century, have received the Messianic fulfilment, Jesus, Yeshua, that is prophesied in Scripture.
To Jeremiah it is a calling. It is not something that everyone should be doing, but rather it is for those who believe that they are being led in this direction. On the other hand, the Church as a whole could still regain a little more respect for her Jewish roots, and recognize, for example, that the Jewish feasts are really BIBLICAL feasts, having spiritual significance for all believers, and pointing continually to the Messiah.
Since then, Jeremiah has remained rooted in the Messianic community, while seeing Jews and non-Jews as equals in the body of Messiah. Receiving the vision for Messianic Liturgical Resources over twenty years ago, he has used his strong traditional Jewish background to produce spiritual, Hebraic liturgical materials.