July 9, 2013

Backtracking a little bit, I wanted to add something about the brother that recently passed away from colon cancer. Besides having to forgive his ex-wife, the other battle which he said was so important was the need to forgive his father, even though he had already passed away. He said the Lord asked him, "when in your mind and heart are you going to be ready to bury your father? You can't leave the world without that". He knew it meant he had to forgive and put the enmity to rest. Secondly, which might be the biggest battle, he had to believe that the atonement of Yeshua was enough to forgive himself.

BACK TO MY STORY

By the third day that I was in the hospital, I was already beginning to feel that I was not recovering, I was actually feeling worse. I started to sweat profusely, in a way that I never had sweated before in my life. Then I began to experience pain in my abdomen that was so intense I was rolling and thrashing in my bed. It increased steadily and I reported it to the nurse on duty. She brushed it off and told me, "it's to be expected, you just had an operation, you will feel better later on." She gave me an injection for the pain, but it didn't help. It was already noon when Leah and my son Natan arrived. I began to feel that I was suffocating, and that my abdomen was on fire, and I again told the nurse that I needed oxygen, but she insisted that the monitor read that my oxygen level was 100%! She gave me another injection for the pain, but it didn't make any change at all in the pain level. I sensed that speaking to the nurse was not going to accomplish anything, she was convinced I was fine and I was just experiencing the normal results of the operation. I began to lose focus and I was so weak I couldn't even communicate. Even short conversations exhausted me completely. It was Saturday (Shabbat) and I told Leah to call my doctor at home, to tell him my symptoms. He in turn immediately called the doctor who was on duty who came quickly. As he was examining me, the nurse insisted that I was just exhausted and needed to rest, but when he looked at my eyes, he shouted at her and told her, "stop with your theories, there is really something wrong here, we have to find out what it is". By this time it was 4PM and they rolled me into a different room on the same floor which was a partial intensive care room. They put a Nasogastric intubation tube down my nose and they hooked me up to a heart and oxygen monitor. They rushed my blood and other samples to the lab which was running on a skeleton crew because it was Shabbat. The doctor said that there would be a meeting early the next morning to determine which direction to take with me.

They gave me medication so I could relax and sleep, but that didn't work either. At 7:30 AM the next morning, the head surgeon came in. He checked me for five minutes and after checking my tests which had come back from the lab - he said, "I have to inform you that you need another operation. We have to find out what is happening, your abdomen is not supposed to hurt like this." All of a sudden, the activity level in the room increased. Someone came behind the bed and began rushing me towards the elevators, racing me down a very long hallway into the operating theaters. The first theater I went into, the nurses and technicians said, "this room isn't prepared yet for surgery". They rushed me into the next operating room where the nurses there said the same thing. At that point the surgeon shouted, "If it isn't ready, make it ready, we need it now!". The other surgeons rushed into the room, but they were not even yet in their operating gowns, they had to prepare themselves. It was very distressful seeing the confusion that was ensuing, and I had a feeling like I was thrown into a washing machine; everything began to spin around.

They put the mask over my face and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit. The doctors around me were discussing whether they should take out the breathing tube, and I signaled to them with my hand to take it out. I made signals to them that I could breathe without it. When they took it out, they looked relieved that I was able to breathe on my own.

LEAH

We had received an SMS from David early in the morning saying most probably he was going into surgery again, but no one even called us from the hospital to let us know what was happening. When we called the nurses station they informed us he was already in surgery. We all rushed up to the hospital, I got there first with another son, Ariel, and we went straight to the floor and to the nurses station - they told us where the operation was taking place. When David came out of the recovery room after the operation he was still under sedation. By that time, my daughter Chen was with me, and we followed the bed up to the ICU unit. They rolled him in and told us to wait outside. However, we still hadn't received a full explanation of exactly what had had happened to David, and we lost our patience and demanded to speak to a doctor. The head doctor of the ICU came to speak to us, and told us that an area of the colon that had been operated on had opened up, and the contents of his large intestine had spilled into his abdominal cavity, causing an infection called peritonitis. Later, we read that if untreated this condition is always fatal. They had made a 6.5 inch (16.5 cm.) incision down the middle of his abdomen from the bottom of his sternum to below his navel. They repaired the opening, and cleaned the infection out of his body. A second incision had been made also on his right side which was 3 inches long (7.5 cm.) Whereas in the first operation not only had the tumor been removed, but also the surrounding lymph nodes and 21 cm. of large and small intestine. The valve that connects the small intestine to the large had also been removed. The two intestinal tracts were now directly attached to one another. In the second operation an additional 10 cm. (4 in.) of intestine was removed.

We noticed that the doctors and nurses were trying to avoid us and give as little explanation as possible. It began to dawn on us that a terrible mistake had been made, and we were facing an extremely dangerous situation. A good friend of mine, Mary Jean, who is a highly skilled and extremely experienced nurse later explained to me that the membranes surrounding the organs had been infected. She said it is the same kind of clear, slimy membrane you find under the skin of raw chicken.

DAVID

When I woke up again, Leah and my daughter were by my bedside. I just stared at them, wondering what was going to be. I was flat on my back and unable to move to the left or to the right, totally helpless. As night approached, I felt my spirit being elevated slightly out of my body and the Lord asked me, "what do you want to do? Do you want to stay or do you want to leave?" I told Him, "I will gladly leave, there is not too much on this earth compared to the world awaiting me, but for my childrens' sake I want to stay, they are not stable enough.". Later the Lord shared with me the many blessings He will bestow on them and on my grandchildren, now and in the future.

The Lord told me that He would give me a second chance, but that I would have to stop my complaining and murmuring. He said, "if you are going to serve Me, serve with gladness". I knew if I would be allowed to stay in the game I had to draw closer to the Lord and serve with a willing heart. After that I knew it had been granted to me to live. I was questioning within myself if the operation had taken place in a different hospital with a different doctor, at a different time, would I have had to go through all this? Then I realized that it was all predestined, that the Lord had purposed that I should be brought closer to Him and become more like Him. The verses came into my mind and made more sense to me, or should I say became crystal clear -

Romans 8:28-30

28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. 29 For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory.


I was in the ICU for two days, and most of the time I didn't sleep, as my lungs were full of phlegm. The doctor told me there was nothing that could be done, but he told me "don't give up". Throughout the night, every four hours the nurses would turn me over from my back to my side because I was unable to do it myself. I felt like a pancake being flipped over. Since I wasn't sleeping, I spent most of my time in pain from the operation, cramps in my legs from not moving and back pain, and dealing with the phlegm in my lungs which lasted for the whole two weeks I was in the hospital. In fact, there was not one night that I was able to sleep throughout the night, yet, it catapulted me closer to the Lord. I felt His presence close to me and heard His voice clearly, and I began to understand many things.

While in bed, I was thinking about several visitors who had visited us in the months before the operations who had made negative comments against organizations or individuals that are engaged in direct evangelism to the Jewish people in Israel. They were saying that they refused to associate themselves with such people because it upsets the Jewish community and the way they felt it should be done is without mentioning the cross, (Gal. 6:12; 1Cor. 1:17) They said that reaching out to the Jewish people should be done only through charity, nursing homes, and different projects showing the love of God. They said our purpose shouldn't be to win them over to belief in Yeshua, that God would take care of that because the Jewish people have a special covenant.

I was slightly dumbfounded by those statements, because how could they have a covenant without the fulfillment of the New Covenant? How could they live with the shadows and not the substance? How could they have Moses without Yeshua? (John 5:46; Hebrews 10:1-25; Hebrews 8:5-13; Col. 2:16-17). David Wilkerson once called this a Christ-less Pentecost. He said we were heading towards a Gospel experience , where everything looks OK, the songs, the verses, and the preaching, but without the message of the cross. (2 Cor. 11:3-15) Pastor Cymbala from the Brooklyn Tabernacle said, when talking about the Samaritans and the Israelites who had fallen away into idol worship, that they invoked the name of the true God of Israel, but it was the false worship of the True God (2Kings 17:29-41)

I began to think about the military, and how it is made up of different units, Navy, Air Force, Infantry (ground troops), Intelligence and many more. The Navy can shoot their most sophisticated smart missiles to soften the ground from a relatively safe distance and not even feel the impact of the war. Everyone can be serving on the ship and when their tour of duty is finished, go home. The Air Force sometimes can feel a greater impact of what is taking place on the ground, but still at a relatively safe distance. They also prepare and soften the ground and remove imminent threats but with all the units and with all their technology they can never replace the soldiers whose boots are on the ground. The war can never be won without the ground troops. Once the units in God's army stop working together and begin to criticize and compete against one another, the Good News of the Messiah will never make an inroad into Israeli society. They will never know that Messiah has come and that He has brought a better covenant that has ripped the veil in two, that all might enter.

In light of these things, I was completely conscious of these facts:

1. God is giving me a second chance to live

2. He wants to shape me more into the likeness of Yeshua and

3. out of all the hospitals in the land, the Lord predestined that I should be in this particular hospital at this particular time, to be a part of the ground troops. There were people that I had been sent there to reach out to, but among those people there would be one particular person who was to be reached. So I waited with patience.

Finally I was moved back to the surgical ward where I had been before. There were many Jewish and Arab nurses both male and female, that I was trying to reach out to. One of the doctor's was honest with me and explained what had taken place. He answered some of my questions but he let me know that more time had to pass until they could make a final assessment. He said, "don't think about when you can go home, just think about getting better."

I WAS UNDONE...

One night as I lay in bed, I started listening to Ezekiel chapters 8-10 on my Bible program which is on my phone and I must have fallen asleep. All of a sudden,I saw a great land mass and I saw two groups of people on either side. On one side were religious people, very well groomed and dressed, very articulate in their way of speaking and looking like they had it all organized and together. On the other side were people who were loud and disorganized. They were speaking street language, stealing cars, they were drunk, and were very undisciplined in the way they walked and the way they talked. They weren't the kind of people you would want to meet at night on a dark, desolate street. I saw a ball of fire coming towards the earth and both groups saw it coming.

Then I saw Yeshua on the cross, and I saw how willingly He had allowed Himself to be there and how much pain He voluntarily took for the people. As I looked closer I then had to look away because I felt so ashamed of myself. As I gazed on Him, my faults and who I really was were revealed to me and I was able to see my unfit condition as a person. I was undone. He gave an invitation to everyone to come to Himself but certain people on both sides defiantly said "No!" As the ball of fire was approaching, the people that were religious were happy because they thought the fire was going to hit the other group, the street people. (Amos 5:18-27) They said, "Good, it's about time. They deserve it."

Even though I wasn't rejoicing that they were going to get hit by the fire, and I knew that the Bible says in:

1Peter 4;17-18,

17 The time has come for judgment to begin, and God's own people are the first to be judged. If it starts with us, how will it end with those who do not believe the Good News from God? 18 And if a righteous person is saved with difficulty, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?


It also looked to me that the fire was heading in their direction, but it didn't hit them first. It hit the ones that professed to know Him first, and when it did, everything that was not made of precious metal burned up. I saw that even though many professed to know Him, not everyone had the same motives and purposes for what they had done for the Lord. Some had conducted their charities and their works to be seen by men, to have their names mentioned and to receive applause. Someone once said that the biggest and most powerful ministries for the Lord are not carried out in front of the TV cameras but deep in the Amazons where there is no audience and applause, carried out by people who are wondering if they will ever make it home. I saw so clearly that everything that was not done exclusively and only for God's glory will burn.

1Corinthians 3:10-14

10 Because of God's grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it. But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful. 11For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have-Yeshua the Messiah. 12 Anyone who builds on that foundation may use a variety of materials-gold, silver, jewels, wood, hay, or straw. 13 But on the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person's work has any value. 14 If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward. 15 But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames. (Ecc. 12:14; Matt. 10;26; Romans 2:16; 1Cor. 4:5; 2Cor. 5:10; Rom. 14:10)


I saw very clearly that the reason the fire hit the Body of the Lord first was because the believers held the key of knowledge; they knew better, while the others, no matter how degenerate they were, didn't know their left hand from their right.

At the very end, the fire consumed people from both groups, and it was like a stream of lava. Those who were in the congregation who professed to know God but were not living for Him and were living double lives and a lie,who were living by their own religious philosophies and not the Word of God, and the unbelievers who rejected Him, were both like dry leaves that when a wind came just blew them away. (Psalm 1:4-6; Job 21:18) They were powerless to choose at that point and they were being swept into the red, liquid lava where eternity began for them in the place of hot torment and darkness.

Rev. 20:11-14

11 And I saw a great white throne and the one sitting on it. The earth and sky fled from his presence, but they found no place to hide. 12 I saw the dead, both great and small, standing before God's throne. And the books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. 13 The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead. And all were judged according to their deeds. 14 Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death. 15 And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.

When I woke up I understood the atonement of Yeshua in a way I never had before. I understood how undone I was, and I was filled with more compassion for the unbelievers who have never heard the Good News of the Messiah even though their decadence is so difficult to deal with. I understood how quickly the world is racing towards judgment and how critical it is to pray for them and to declare the Good News to whomsoever will.

I will end here and next week I will write the final chapter on the key people that were witnessed to and how the believers that came to visit me played such a key role in bringing the Good News of the Messiah to them. I will share also about how I was divinely placed near to that one particular person who was to be reached.

Many Blessings,

David

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