PAGE 3
     About a week later, at home, I was reading the account of Sodom and Gomorrah. Suddenly a light as bright, brilliant and unexpected as a lightning bolt flashed inside of me and illuminated a landscape. I have been once in a storm in the middle of a pitch black night, where I could not even see the hand before my eyes, so dark was that night. But fierce, terrible lightning bolts would flash frequently, and in their brilliant light every detail of the landscape became clearly visible. Just so it was with this inner lightning bolt and landscape. And as I stared at this landscape, I understood  that it represented my life.

    I beheld a terrible wasteland. The ground was stone dry, with cracks running through it from exceeding dryness, like after a long, severe drought. The ground was also strewn with rocks. And there were trees, dead trees. They  looked as if a scourge had gone through and burned them into blackened stumps. Their stalky branches stretched ghostly black fingers into an exceedingly gloomy sky of brooding clouds hanging over that wasteland.
    My heart contracted with fear and horror from that sight, when suddenly the figure of a man appeared in it. He gazed at me silently, his eyes beckoning. His gaze made my heart burn. Immediately I recognized the face --- it was he whom I had always loved!

    Slowly he lifted his arms, stretching them out toward me as a beckoning, loving father does toward his toddler. Then I saw his hands... There were marks in his hands... A deep, long, dark mark, beginning at the height of the thumb ball to the onset of the wrist, disfigured each hand. Instantly unspeakable anguish struck my heart with a blow so painful I have never experienced again, erupting in a long, terrible wail: “J-e-s-u-s!” Now I knew His Name, and where He came from!

    I dropped to the floor like a felled tree. I clutched the floor, seeking His feet and cried, again and again: “Jesus, forgive me!!! Jesus, forgive me!!!”  I wound myself on the floor in torment, creating puddles with my tears, continuously begging forgiveness: I had blasphemed His Name. I had used it for cursing. I had tried to prove to anyone who cared to listen, that He was an impostor.

    My heart almost broke under the impact of the realization, that He Whose Name I had used for cursing was the One I had always loved --- my Messiah, my Redeemer, the Promised One of Israel.

    For three whole days I wept and cried. As my comprehension of Who the Beloved is became denser, the anguish intensified... and expanded. He was OUR Messiah! And yet the Gentiles had transformed Him and made Him unrecognizable for us. For almost two millennia we were cheated out of G-d’s salvation, and instead were counted as sheep for the slaughter8. And my people and I merged, they into me and I into them - as ONE - all the way back into the loins of Abraham, and united we mourned as is written in Zechariah 12:10-14:

    “... when they look on Him Whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for Him as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over Him as one weeps over a firstborn. On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad’rimmon in the plain of Meggiddo. The land shall mourn, each family by itself; the family of the House of David by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Nathan by itself and their wives by themselves; the family of the house of Levi by itself, and their wives by themselves; the family of the Shimeites by itself, and their wives by themselves; and all the families that are left, each by itself, and their wives by themselves.”

    None others than Jews can appreciate the extent of this mourning. For no one has suffered as we have for the sake of Him Whom they (the Roman soldiers) have pierced, at the hands of those who usurped Israel rather than becoming her fellow citizens9.

    But this anguish was not all. Satan repeatedly accused me of having committed too many sins, and that I was too grievous a sinner to be saved. I was beyond all help, even for Jesus. Thus, for three days I fought a mortal battle for my soul. In utter desperation I cried out at last: “Jesus! Help me!”

    Instantly the inner upheaval was hushed like the tossing waves of the sea. A wonderful calm flooded me instead10. I lifted my head. Suddenly someone turned the lights on, because everything got bright.

    Yet no one was there but me.

    I did not realize that He Who is the true Light that enlightens every man11 had entered me, and that I was literally “lighted with the light of life"12, so that all things seemed so much brighter.

    I rose from my knees, when suddenly another sensation so sweet, so unspeakably wonderful flooded me that I was right back on my knees, again tears welling into my eyes. My whole being, every molecule of me it seemed, was being penetrated, or “rinsed”, by a feeling of love unlike any feeling I had ever known. I realized with a jolt that this was the love I had yearned for all my life.

    “It is You, Who is this love!” I exclaimed. “My G-d, why did no one ever tell me?!” Once more I wept and mourned, but of a different kind of sorrow. And again, I did not know the Scriptures which declare: “G-d IS Love!”13

    From that day on I was the Lord’s. I live and move and have my being only in Him14. I rise in the morning and strive and labor only for Him. I was dead in body, He gave me life. I was dead in spirit, He gave me new life in Him. I had no hope, He became my hope. I was in darkness, He became my Light. I was weak, He became my Strength. I had nothing, He became my Everything. He has become all things to me and I know intimately His Name I AM.
     
     

    8Psalm 44:22 12Job 33:30
    9Ephesians 2:19 131 John 4:8
    10  Ps 107:28-29; Mtt 14:39 14 Acts 17:28
    11 John 1:9

     
     

    xx

       

      Copyright © January 1990-2010
      All Rights Reserved.