Sacrifice, Savior, Sustainer

Ken Peterson shared a devotion with us this morning. He related the many stones we see everywhere in Israel with three important biblical points: Sacrifice - required a stone altar, Savior -  the cornerstone, Sustainer -  Psalm 18, God our rock and our sustainer.

We headed out to the City of David, an area just south of the Temple Mount where the original city of Jerusalem was built by the Jebusites before Israel conquered the land. David and his army defeated the city and David built his capital here and surrounded it with walls. We were able to view recent archaeological discoveries that have just been uncovered in the past few years. We saw the foundations of what could have been David’s palace, the stone retaining wall next to it and ancient houses on the terraced side of the hill. We then went underground to find the water system and shaft discovered by Sir Charles Warren, the British archaeologist who explored Jerusalem in the 1800s.  It has just recently been discovered that there was a massive stone fortress protecting the Gihon Spring from attack and providing a safe passage to those in the city seeking to draw water from the spring. We saw the entrance to Hezekiah’s tunnel that took water from the spring to the pool of Siloam, and then walked through an even older Canaanite tunnel that was used to take water along the valley to irrigate the trees and produce planted along the hill. We sat on the steps of the Pool of Siloam where Jesus healed the man born blind and saw the water still running through the tunnels built to bring it to the pool. The size of the pool was surprising large even though we could only see one end of it.

Walking across the street and up through the Dung Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem, we entered the Davidson Center where we learned of the digging going on to uncover what was under the debris just below the southern wall of the Temple Mount. Like much of Israel, we learned that several civilizations had built there and that we could still see the remains of Muslim palaces built next to the Al-Aqsa mosque that is still on the Mount.

We saw the 1st century Herodian entrances to the Temple that Jesus would have walked up when approaching the Temple from the south. Around the corner on the western side, we saw Robinson’s arch which provided another entrance to Herod’s Temple and the street below still piled with the huge stones knocked down from the wall above when the Roman armies destroyed the Temple in 70 AD.

After walking up into the Jewish quarter where we saw a portion of a massive wall built by King Hezekiah, we split up for lunch at the many small restaurants in the area. We had the rest of the afternoon off, so people had the opportunity to get some needed rest, to investigate further things they wanted to see, or to just do some last minute shopping. Harold and I (Dan) walked to the Temple Mount platform entrance and found that it was closed, so we walked back through the Old City and made our way through the small stone streets of the Jewish, Muslim and then the Armenian quarters of the Old City before heading back to the hotel.

This evening we had a special time sharing our final dinner together as a group. Jim Showers introduced Josh Reinstein of the Christian Allies Caucus (http://cac.org.il/site/)  who delivered a moving message encouraging us to support Israel as we return home. Our group vocalist gave a wonderful reprise of “Amazing Grace” for us and we were once again blessed to share our meal with Meno and Anat Kalisher, FOI field staff and pastor of the Jerusalem Assembly. Jim presented us with beautiful “Pilgrim Certificates” and we showed our appreciation to our wonderful driver Rueben and our incredible tour guide Miriam.

We head home tomorrow. I hope we can all look back on our time here as a life-changing experience and I pray we never read the BIble the same. Pray for us as we travel back tomorrow. Until next year in Jerusalem!