SID: Now many of you had heard about confessing God’s Word. As a matter of fact, the major scripture was when Joshua was taking over, God gave Joshua some advice. What did God tell Joshua?
JONATHAN: Well understand that Joshua was now given the responsibility to follow in the footsteps of Moses and lead about three million Jewish people into the Promised Land. And you can imagine that the—
SID: You could have ten Jewish people and you get 11 opinions. Three million, wow.
JONATHAN: You do. And I think he had a lot of insecurity and God at that time spoke to him and said, “Joshua, you’re going to be successful and I’m going to tell you how. The way that you will succeed is by meditating on my Word day and night,” and then he said this, “keeping it in your mouth.” If you go back to the word “meditate”, Christian meditation, Sid, is connected to the Hebrew word, “sekah”, which means to reflect, to think, to ponder. But the Hebrew for, the real Hebrew for meditating used in that verse is “hadah”. We get the word “Haggadah” from that, to tell. It means to mutter, it means to utter. God was saying to him, not just to keep the laws of God in his heart, but to speak them forth day and night, to constantly keep them in his mouth. It was talking about confession. And God said, “You’ll be successful in all you do. You’ll prosper if you keep my Word in your mouth, if you keep uttering it, muttering it, confessing it.” Why? Because faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And I believe Joshua confessed the Word of God. He kept hearing over and over, hearing here and then hearing in his spirit. And when it got into his spirit, that 19 inches between the head and the heart, all faith is released and that’s where we live. That’s where the Spirit of God lives in our spirit. And we have to build up our spirit. How? Praying in other tongues and professing the Word of God.
SID: What you’re doing is you’re almost rehearsing what God is saying over and over, and over again. And it’s becoming a reality, a dynamic reality on the inside.
JONATHAN: It absolutely is. Confessing the Word of God is absolutely biblical. It’s powerful, it’s life-changing. And I saw this very specifically as a pastor when a woman that had been suffering from depression, acute depression most of her life. And Sid, she carried this as a cloud around her, just oozing depression and it, she had been to doctors and psychiatrists, and psychologists. And I was counseling to no avail. And I started praying for her and the Lord just spoke to me about giving her some scriptures to confess. And so I cut the hour short, and I said, “Here’s what I want you to do or I’m not meeting with you next week. You look in the mirror and you confess these scriptures.” And I had written down some: “Whoever the son sets free is free indeed. Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. Where the Spirit of God is there is liberty.” Less than a week later, she came back to my office. She was smiling for the first time I had ever seen her smile. She had been completely delivered, not from counseling appointments, but by confessing the Word of God and it got into her spirit. She was delivered instantly.
SID: Now you have a little switch on this. You say there is power in the original Hebrew language in confessing God’s Word. Explain that.
JONATHAN: Well there’s a couple of things with Hebrew. First of all, Hebrew was the language known as the tongue of the prophets. The Old Testament, the original language of the scriptures was Hebrew and some teach, and I’m a believer in this, that when God spoke the world into existence, by the way, the Bible says that the tongue has the power over life and death. There’s life and death in the tongue. The tongue is a creative force and what separates us from all of God’s creation is articulate speech. I believe that when God spoke the world into existence and said, “Let there be light,” it was in the Hebrew language. So I believe that Hebrew itself as a language is a creative force. Maybe it’s the tones or whatever, but it’s a creative force. But there’s something else about Hebrew. It is a super language, Sid. Do you know what I mean by that?
SID: What do you mean?
JONATHAN: Okay. I saw you drinking some green juice.
SID: You don’t have to tell everything.
JONATHAN: I saw it. It was all, it’s got kale and it’s got all kinds, it’s a superfood.
SID: Right.
JONATHAN: Because it is all these nutrients pressed into it. There’s superfoods that are packed with nutrients and super vitamins, and so on. Well Hebrew is a super language. Example, “shalom.” Contained in “shalom,” which means peace, we have the English peace, shalom. But “shalom” has 20 other meanings. It’s completion, it’s welfare, it’s wholeness, it’s wellbeing, it’s security. And then the Hebrew word, “yireh,” that word, we say “provide,” but the Hebrew word means abundance. The Hebrew words means to bless, to prosper. It means success, it means sustenance, it means fulfillment, protection, shelter, graciousness, enjoyment. It means rain.
Literally, God will bring rain, yireh, he’ll bring rain in the dryness, revival.
SID: So what you’re saying is that when we proclaim God’s promises in Hebrew, you get the full meaning of what God meant rather than that one English word in our translation.
JONATHAN: You get 30 words in one word.
SID: Okay. But most people can’t speak Hebrew. I took bar mitzvah Hebrew. It took me years to learn Hebrew.
JONATHAN: I studied Hebrew from childhood. I hated it. I was a bad student.
SID: But there was a method developed called transliteration. Why was this developed?
JONATHAN: There is a solution. When the Jews of Europe who were raised in the whole yeshiva program and Hebrew was part of their prayer life and their study life from childhood, moved to America, they began to go through a secularization and they lost the Hebrew language.
SID: Right.
JONATHAN: Well the way that the rabbis came up was a brilliant way, came up with a way to use Hebrew in the prayer books is called transliteration. It’s taking the Hebrew and using phonetic English to actually spell out the Hebrew. So, “Shema Yisrael Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad”, God is one, in Hebrew most of us know that in transliteration, we can actually read along with the rabbi and participate in the service without actually learning Hebrew. It takes five minutes. I knew your question, five minutes.
SID: Anyone interested in speaking biblical Hebrew in five minutes?
JONATHAN: No studying, no background. Five minutes you’re speaking Hebrew.
SID: That’s my kind, now I see all these things selling languages. I like the five minute variety. When I come back, wait until you hear about this tribe that Jonathan found. It’s one of the lost tribes of Israel right in Africa that they did a DNA study on. It has, Lemba tribe people have higher high priest or priestly DNA, they’re called the Kohens, than any other people anywhere. We’ll be right back.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth