Israel-in-Depth with Rod VanSolkema

March 1-13, 2019

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Shabbat Shalom

Today marks our seventh day in Israel, eight calendar days since leaving our homes. We have experienced a wealth of history, landscape changes and teaching. We have traveled from east to west, and from the far south desert of Israel to today, when we were in view of the Lebanon and Syria borders in the far north.

Today, Saturday, was Shabbat, or Sabbath here. Our common greeting to people we met on the trails today was “Shabbat Shalom”, wishing them the peace that the Sabbath day itself brings. Shalom in Hebrew also means that everything is right between God and His people – peace, reconciliation and justice.

We started our day on the west bank of the Sea of Galilee and drove to the Golan Heights and the ancient first century ruins of the Jewish Zealot city of Gamla built on a steep hill. We sat in the remnants of the synagogue and learned of the ancient and modern history of the area and of Jesus’s teaching that may have occurred near here.

From Gamla, we drove winding roads through hills covered in rocks and wildly blooming wild flowers to the Hermon Springs flowing out of a huge grotto near the town of Banias located at the foot of the snow-covered Mt Hermon. This site was home to Alexander the Great who created a shrine to the Greek god Pan. Herod Phillip later made this his capital city. Jesus came here with his disciples – to this dark and perverted city to teach then of who He was and what their jobs were to be. Our world in many ways is becoming this place – not good people or bad people, but lost people and found people. We need to work to make the Church today the purest expression of God in this earthly world.

Gamla

Known sometimes as the “Masada of the North,” Gamla is most famous for its strong defense against the Romans in the Jewish Revolt in AD 66. The site is bordered on all sides by deep wadis of the Golan Heights and is approachable by only one footpath from the northeast. The earliest settlement was in the Early Bronze Age and the site was reinhabited by returning exiles from Babylon. Herod the Great settled Jews here to populate his border cities.

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From the rushing waters of the springs, we traveled back south to Susita/Hippos and the archaeological remains of an ancient Greco-Roman city high on a hill overlooking the Sea of Galilee. In Luke 8:26-39, Jesus stepped out of the boat after crossing the stormy Sea of Galilee

and heals the man possessed of demons. Rod’s biggest challenge to us today is to “get out of the boat” and share our faith, reaching out to others – go and tell what Jesus has done for us.

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