It was a Friday night worship service at Beth Israel, the congregation I lead in northern New Jersey. That night, we had a guest speaker, an Indian evangelist named Dr. Job. He spoke of the connection between his land and the apostle Thomas. According to church tradition, Thomas took the gospel from Israel to India. The land, the churches, and the believers of India are thus marked by the name of the apostle to this day.
In the middle of Dr. Job’s address he turned to me and said, “Jonathan, I am inviting you to go to the land of India to walk in the footsteps of the apostle Thomas.” It was for that reason he had come to Beth Israel. It was his burden that since Thomas was a Jewish believer in Jesus, another Jewish believer should go to India, walk in the former’s footsteps, and likewise proclaim the gospel.
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I was to give him an answer before he left. Complicating the decision was the fact that not long before he came to Beth Israel, a new party and government had come to power in India, a radical agent of Hindu nationalism. It was known for championing the worship of Hindu gods and the persecution of non-Hindu religious minorities, prominent among whom were Christians. It was an example of the convergence of the spiritual and physical realms, in this case of the gods and government of India. Under such circumstances, it promised to be a dramatic and potentially dangerous journey. I prayed and was led to say yes.
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The Sound of Entities
After our ascent of the mountain of Thomas, we prepared for the major event of our journey, a series of gatherings in which we would share the gospel with a massive sea of Indian people. The meetings took place at night outdoors.
As darkness began to fall, the grounds began filling with people, an enormous sea of Indians, men in white shirts and women in robes of every color. At the end of the last night, I spoke to the multitude of God’s love, the gospel of Messiah, then led those who were willing in a prayer of salvation. It was estimated that the number of Indian men and women who prayed that night to receive salvation was over seventy thousand. Everything that had taken place from the moment I said yes to that journey, all the obstacles, setbacks, and dangers, was more than worth it for that one night and that one moment.
But something else happened at that gathering that would leave those standing with me on the stage in stunned awe. It happened on the first night. I held up a shofar, the ancient biblical trumpet, the ram’s horn, before the multitude. It is unlikely that anyone at that gathering had ever seen one before. I explained that the sound of the trumpet was the sound of freedom and a representation of the power of God. And we would pray for God’s power to break any bondage in their lives, to bring release and freedom. We would then sound the trumpet that the ancient sound of freedom would go out to them. I set the trumpet to my mouth and blew. We couldn’t, at first, make sense of what happened next.
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Waves of sound came back to the stage from the multitudes as if in response. I sounded the trumpet a second time. Again came the waves of sound. They were waves of bloodcurdling screams. The only thing we could liken it to was what one would imagine one might hear in the exorcism of a demon-possessed man. But the screams weren’t coming from any one person or direction but from the many. It was as if the trumpet blast had triggered a mass deliverance, as if we were witnessing some kind of colossal exorcism.
Prepared by Charisma Media Staff.
