A testimony of God’s love, faithfulness and healing power and a word concerning the practical consequences of our prayers for Israel.

My Testimony

Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments.

Deuteronomy 7:9

Messiah Yeshua is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Hebrews 13:8

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9 

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.

1 John 5:14-15

My recent physical difficulties and my road of recovery has not only confirmed the Lord’s faithfulness it has also confirmed to me that we cannot put God in a box. For those of you who do not know what has happened to me I will briefly recount what happened.

Some days after returning from an IFI ministry trip to Germany and Scotland my legs gave out with the most intense pain. The doctors I consulted with were concerned with “deep vein thrombosis” as I had just been on an airplane. I knew it wasn’t that as I don’t sit still in my seat on flight but walk about.

As the pain remained and it was difficult to even stand, I did go to the Emergency Room. There I had 30+ X-rays, a CAT scan and an MRI all in the space of a few hours. The diagnosis was that I had “spinal stenosis” which is stuff in the spinal canal that begins to strangle the nerves that are there. That was what was happening to me. The nerves going to my legs were being choked with (as my surgeon said), only a 50% chance of recovery even with surgery. Among the problems with my right leg was a severe case of “drop foot”.

I had my surgery on 6 July, a little more than 4 months ago, and while my rehabilitation still has a long ways to go, I feel like I have already gained back 2 years of deterioration. My drop foot is gone and I am regaining the mobility that I have lost over the years. My stamina/endurance is still an issue.

When the issue of surgery came up, Hanna my wife asked 2 questions: is surgery necessary and how about keyhole (minimal invasive) surgery? My surgeon scoffed at keyhole surgery and said he no longer does that. His way is to cut open the back.

As I asked the Lord for counsel, He told me to have the surgery and to have this surgeon do the operation. The doctor sent me home for a week to get the aspirin out of my system and expedited a date for my surgery. Apparently I didn’t go to sleep easily in the operating room and they had to anesthetize me three times before they could open my back up.

The next day I was pain free and could even get out of bed. However the day after, intense pain was back in my legs. This called for another MRI and the surgeon said that when he looked at the picture all he could see was black in my spine. He said this is a massive hematoma and required immediate surgery to stop the bleeding and clean out the spinal column again.

As he was speaking I was asking the Lord for counsel again and this time He said that He would deal with the hematoma Himself. I asked the surgeon for a day to consider whether to have surgery or not. I told him that I wanted to pray about it and he said that for the bleeding to stop and the hematoma to dissolve by itself would take a miracle. He told me to pray for a big miracle. The next day I was weak but without leg pain and 6 days later I was released to a rehabilitation facility.

Hanna was supposed to travel in July and she postponed the trip because of my surgery. I encouraged her to travel in August and she was concerned that I would be alone, though I was not worried. An American brother offered to come and stay with me but I didn’t have the Lord’s peace about it.

Some time before Hanna traveled we heard that a son of old friends was in the Land and volunteering at a hospital (hospice) in Jerusalem. Upon meeting him I understood that he was God’s provision for me. The opportunity to stay with us rather than at the hospital was God’s provision for him too. He is a German trained and licensed physical therapist and he has been living with us since then. We work out together almost every day and this too is the goodness of God for which I am grateful.

Some months before all of this, as I was praying about the coming ministry trip, I heard from the Lord that “He was not finished with me yet and I still had things to do.” It was an encouraging word as I realized that my physical condition had been deteriorating for some time and the future looked bleak.

I have learned lessons from this experience that I hope will be useful to you all as well:

God has our life in His hands and He is very able to communicate with us if we are willing to hear what He has to say.

God is faithful to us and is able to bring us through any difficulty.

In my case He led me to have the surgery and then led me not to have the second surgery but to trust Him to heal me sovereignly. Same doctor, same hospital, similar problem in the same location. First the Lord used the skill of the surgeon to begin the healing and the second time He did it all by Himself.

God is God and we cannot put Him in a box. Not a box of our making and not a box anyone else makes either.

I am also very grateful to my brothers and sisters throughout the world who were faithfully praying for me, - for my healing and for me to be able to hear the Lord and make the right decisions.

The consequences of our prayers

(These scriptures express some of the characteristics of God which are relevant to this message):

 

Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.

1John 5:14-15 

The Lord is a man of war; The Lord is His name.

Exodus 15:3

 The Lord shall go forth like a mighty man; He shall stir up His zeal like a man of war. He shall cry out, yes, shout aloud; He shall prevail against His enemies.

Isaiah 42:13

I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood. And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

Revelation 6:12-17 

 In the same hour there was a great earthquake, and a tenth of the city fell. In the earthquake seven thousand people were killed, and the rest were afraid and gave glory to the God of heaven.

Revelation 11:13

Those of you who are long time readers of the Sound of the Shofar and IFI’s Friday Prayer Points know that we believe that Iran is an existential threat to Israel and we have been praying accordingly.

One of the strategies we have been using for at least 5 years is suggesting to the Lord that He uses earthquakes to destroy the Iranian nuclear project. This came home to me on Sunday night 12 November when a 7.3-magnitude quake struck the Iraq-Iranian border area that is also the area of the Iranian “Arak” heavy water reactor that produces plutonium – the main component of a nuclear bomb. As of this writing 530 people have been killed and over 6,700 injured with tens of thousands without shelter.

How do we relate to this “act of nature” that is in line with what we have been asking God to do?

We can’t know that this was in answer to our prayers, not until we get to heaven and He tells us. (He might tell us sooner but I have not yet heard from Him about this.) And please remember that when we have prayed like this, we have only been suggesting that God sovereignly intervene this way. We do not tell God what to do and we do not demand in any way that He responds to our intercession.

Suddenly there is a possible answer to our prayers that has killed hundreds. How do we relate to that? Each one of us must get the answer to that question from the Lord but this is my understanding and my position.

We all believe that the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and the restoration of Israel as a nation is the outworking of God’s promises and prophesy found in scripture. The Lord could have chosen to bring Israel back in peace and quiet without bloodshed, yet this is not what has happened.

I think that most of you will agree that Ezekiel 37:1-14 “The Valley of the Dry Bones” speaks of the holocaust and the national and spiritual restoration of Israel that came to pass through that. While these verses speak of a great slaughter of the Jewish people, I do not think that the Lord had 6 million plus dead Jews in mind when Ezekiel penned these verses. We do have free will given to us by God and I believe that at a point (to put it in human terms) God was fed up by the evil slaughter and said “ENOUGH” and it stopped. (There is a tension, not a contradiction between the foreknowledge of God and the free will He has given us.)

And then there was the beginning of the significant return of the Jewish people to the Land in the 1880’s. Did the Arab inhabitants welcome the Jews? They were attracted by the modern medicine and industry, agriculture and education that these European Jews brought with them but they hated those who were bringing modernity to the Land.

Since its establishment in 1948, the State of Israel has fought eight recognized wars, two Palestinian intifadas (uprisings), and a series of armed conflicts in the broader Arab–Israeli conflict and we have not yet come to the end of the fighting. (If you do not already receive IFI’s Friday Prayer Points go to our website, www.ifi.org.il and sign up for them and you will be informed weekly of the status of tensions on the northern, Golan and Gaza borders and the other things we are praying about.)

We live in an unredeemed world and war and bloodshed and “natural” disasters can be instruments of God’s judgement. Certainly that is the Biblical realty down the ages and until the return of the Lord.

I am reminded of Rees Howell’s prayers during the Second World War. He and his prayer group prayed for Germany to invade the Soviet Union because he believed that this was part of the way to defeat Nazi Germany and save Palestine for the return of the Jewish people. Surely he knew that this invasion would result in the death of millions of people! Yet, he was stirred by God because of His prophetic word about the return of the Jews and the return of the Lord to the Land.

In the book “Rees Howell’s Intercessor” when speaking of the danger to Palestine from the German Army that was advancing toward Alexandria, Egypt the writer says: This was really one of the main burdens of prayer at the College because, long before, God had revealed to them that this was not just a European war, but that through it “in the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” the Jews would return to Palestine, the gospel go out to every creature, and the Savior be able to return……”Unless God will intervene on behalf of Palestine,” said Mr. Howells on July 4, 1942, “there will be no safety there for the Jews. These Bible Lands must be protected, because it is to these lands the Savior will come back. If I had the choice today, I would say to God, ‘Take all I have, but preserve Palestine.’”

Reese Howells knew that the Lord will be returning to the Mount of Olives – to Jerusalem. He knew the Jewish People would be coming home and that the nation of Israel would be reborn. He did not rest satisfied in his knowledge of these things, he and his team labored in prayer until he could say their prayers were completed. In the book it does not address how he thought and prayed about the millions who would die in the fulfillment of God’s Word and because of the prayers that he himself would be praying and leading other to pray.

Although I do not believe that Israel will be destroyed again, yet there is no Biblical assurance that she will not be attacked by a nuclear weapon. When Iran’s leaders’ calls out time and time again that Israel will be destroyed, I believe they are expressing their heart’s desire and their military plans. I also believe that if/when Iran gets the bomb we will be one of their first targets. To prevent that from happening I pray for God who created Iran on some of the major earthquake faults in the world, to cause the earth to open up and swallow these demonic nuclear plants.

I also pray that if God does not want to do this sovereignly, Israel would have the timing and the courage and the might to do it militarily. Both ways many innocents will die and I pray for God to have mercy upon them.

We are on “red alert” on the Gaza border right now. Most military thinkers in the world are saying that war with Hezbullah in Lebanon is not a matter of ‘maybe’ but of ‘when’. As the Syrian civil war winds down Iran and Hezbullah are building bases close to Israel’s border on the Golan. This is crossing Israel’s stated red line in Syria and I pray for Israel not to wait to be attacked but to preempt and attack first.

This is the life and death reality of the restoration of Israel, in preparation for the return of the Lord. We must pray faithfully what the Lord puts upon our heart. We need to be mindful of the cost of those prayers to those innocents who will die in the answering of our prayers, but if God gives the burden for prayer, who are we to censor what He is allowed to do in answering it?

We live in critical times and God is calling us to be a radical people who understand the prophetic imperative and also the practical outworking of His Word.

The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, And give you peace.

Numbers 6:24-26

Eliyahu Ben-Haim, Jerusalem, 15 November 2017

P.S. IFI’s 34th annual International Prayer Conference in Jerusalem will be held 22-29 January 2018 with the Prayer Tour following 29 January – 3 February.

Details can be found on the IFI website.