The Watchman Episode 127: The Miracles of Jesus in Galilee

this week on the watchman welcome to the Sea of Galilee this is the region that Jesus made the centerpiece of his ministry and today we're walking in the footsteps of the Savior with our good friend Danny the digger Herman we will take you to Nazareth where Jesus grew up on to Cana scene of his first miracle and we will wind up right here on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in the place many called the town of Jesus Capernaum if you're a follower of Jesus get ready to follow him today in the place where it all went down this week on the watchman only with Christians United for Israel and only right here on TBN [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well Danny great to have you back with us on the watchman my friend always a pleasure yeah and today's gonna be very interesting because we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus Danny what better place to start then Nazareth where he grew up the hometown of Jesus is spread right in front of us although today it's a big urban metropolis it's hard to imagine a little tiny first century set of shacks around the spring but this is the site this is where it all started it's a sprawling metropolis today yeah it's about 80,000 residents ironically most of them are Muslims the Christians today are a minority and predominantly Arab by the way this is kind of the Arab capital of Israel in many ways Arabic is the first language here although it's part of the State of Israel they're all Israeli citizens but the focal point from a Christian pilgrimage point of view is a little dot there in the middle of the valley it's actually the biggest Church in Israel probably the biggest in the Middle East the Church of Annunciation the place that claims to be the very spot where the angel Gabriel appears to Mary is recorded in the Gospel of Matthew blessing her and announcing that she has become pregnant yes okay pregnant with a man named Jesus who would go on to become Jesus Jesus of Nazareth Jesus of here so right next to the giant Church of Annunciation there's also a pretty significant church called the Church of st. Joseph which claims to be his home slash carpentry now first of all a carpenter is a Western Christian image of his profession the text doesn't really say that his profession in the Greek language is Tecton tech tongs has a more general meaning of some craftsmen but whatever he was doing that may have been his workshop in his home and inside the church again there's an underground section which has the statement this is where he was disciplined to them meaning this is where Jesus grew up in the first century we go the Gospels where Nathaniel the disciple Nathaniel says he hears about Jesus he says Nazareth can anything good come out of Nazareth yes and especially it was a backwater and especially coming from the words of Nathaniel which was a native of just a nearby village called okay the wedding the the miracle at the wedding took place there later on and he's a neighbor he knows Nazareth and he it's such an unknown tiny little place that that was his response it's hard to imagine that Nazareth today look just how you know urban is this landscape today it was apparently something really really small just a few homes around the spring Josephus a very detailed source of the first century who knew this area very well records many sites and events here he'd never mentions Nazareth them in sweating like Nathaniel Nazareth is nowhere yeah it was insignificant insignificant place but from the fourth century none when Christianity is the religion of the Roman Empire the crowds start coming the pilgrims it becomes a site of pilgrimage to this day bus loads of pilgrims will come on daily basis to visit that spot the Church of Annunciation the Church of st. Joseph this spring the spring named after Mary as well these are all sites that are so important for the Christian believers today now Danny we're gonna move on to Connor which you mentioned which is famous as really the place of the first miracle of Jesus as described in the Gospels but talk a bit more about his time here in Nazareth he was here until he was thirty years old yes when he is about thirty I quote the text he meets one called John the Baptist it didn't happen here it happened in his travels down the Jordan River and after he's returned from that baptism when the Dove appears the voice says this is my son who I've chosen he returns to his hometown he wants to convince his neighbors that he is the one the text tells us he goes into the synagogue he quotes the prophesies of Isaiah but the arrival of a messiah and then he concludes today these prophecies are now finally being fulfilled before your very eyes before your very eyes but the reaction is not that positive they knew him to be very normal mortal you were the Messiah as Jesus said he quoted isaiah a prophet is not without honor except in his own hometown yes as a result of their rejection he makes that famous quote in the vbe law is how isaiah said that in hebrew and he does what i like calling today in the modern high-tech world a relocation he moves from NASA if he'll never come back and he goes to a small fishing village by the Sea of Galilee called Capernaum where we will also visit today real quick Dany before we move on to Cana where we're standing right now this beautiful overlook stunning of the modern city of Nazareth this may have had some significance in Jesus life as well as mentioned in the Gospels yes as they reject his proposal that he is the Messiah they respond no you're not you are the false messiah and false messiah should be stoned today for thrown to their death in the only place where you can throw someone off a cliff and it could be a deadly fall he's right behind us here in Nazareth this would be the place it's on the edge of NASA if it's outside the city but it's on the the edge of this environment and this is a very steep fall so this place is called the least amount of precipice or mount of the leap ok and it and it's still not built up they're still trying to preserve this original environment here what a view you can see the Jezreel Valley you can see the Carmel you can see the Gilboa well it didn't end thankfully on the on this mountain here on this cliff for Jesus we're gonna head now to Cana the site of his first miracle Danny lead the way my friend let's still turning water into wine let's see where it happened let's go [Music] hey everyone Erick Stakelbeck here I want you to join me in Washington DC this July for the premier pro-israel event in the United States the 14th annual Kufa Washington summit will be held on July 7th 8th and 9th at the DC Convention Center and it will be our biggest and best yet thousands of pro-israel Christians will join together and lift their voices in the nation's capital for Zions sake Koufos founder and chairman the one and only Pastor John Hagee will be there he'll be joined by the US ambassador to Israel David Friedman and many other very special guests but most importantly attending Koufos Washington summit gives you the chance to personally deliver a strong pro-israel message to your members of Congress I'll be in DC this summer and I hope you'll be there too to raise your voice for Israel for such a time as this Danny we started this journey today in the footsteps of Jesus in Nazareth where he grew up now we are at the site where he performed his first miracle tell us where we are right now Gospel of John chapter 2 and on the third day there was a wedding in Cana in the Galilee we are in a site that is only a 20-minute drive from Nazareth a site that bears the name to this day kaffir kana in arabic that means the village of Cana and this is kind of known as the Church of the miracle the Church of the wedding the place where Jesus performed a miracle the first miracle turning water into wine now Jesus was here some of his disciples were here the Gospels say his mother Mary was here and they ran out of wine so Mary actually approached him and Jesus actually said woman my time has not come yet not yet a bit surprising but yeah response but he will still perform the miracle yes he did and it was interesting because the folks running the wedding I guess Danny said wow you saved the best wine for last yes and how do we know that this is the place look at the entrance these columns and the Capitals are actually recycled from an ancient public building and inside the church which is really early 20th century we have remains of an ancient synagogue there's an Aramaic inscription there indicating Jews really lived here some 1500 years ago and maybe it's the sequence of synagogues a part of a sequence of synagogues that the earliest goes through his days now the wedding in those days Danny could conceivably have been held inside a synagogue yeah a small farm they didn't have you know big halls for events the synagogue was also the cultural center the place of public events of circumcision for the newborns and for weddings the site was known to be the place of this miracle but in the 19th century it was purchased by the Catholic Church and then built this very European German like a design which is actually clever in its symmetrical order to represent this symmetrical harmony of the marriage but in the work they found evidence of the ancient synagogue and even combined parts of the building in the at least the entrance to the new design it they did some renovations by the way in 1999 as the sign is saying there at the entrance but beneath it you have both an Aramaic ancient inscription and even one giant stone VAT that some say may relate to the miracle because it says that the water was kept in 6 stone jars according to the Pew rules of the Jews and these are the jars whose water were turned into wine perhaps those jars or downstairs still now it's very interesting that this is a majority Arab area now in Israel Nazareth Cana but as you said the Jewish people were here 2,000 years ago Oh big time and we have an inscription from 1500 years ago roughly proving that tell us more about that that's one of the big finds here at this site today the village is clearly an arab village it used to be a Christian majority now the Muslims are the majority but archaeology shows that all of this area was clearly Jewish at least in the days of the Mishnah and the Talmud and also in the time of Jesus we have maybe a hundred ancient synagogues tract traced by archaeological surveys and research in this region that many here in the Galilee region and the two most important Jewish books for the Jewish religion of today the Mishnah and the Talmud were codified here in the Galilee insa forests and in Tiberias a major place especially after the destruction of the Second Temple for the growth of the Jewish people and for the message of the Torah the Tanakh to continue you know it's kind of cool Danny we were here earlier this is obviously the place of the wedding people actually come here still Christian pilgrims to renew their wedding vows it's so moving to see you know couples that have been married for you know 20 30 40 years and they come especially here to make this event renewal of the vows of our weddings at the very place where Jesus attended a wedding tough to beat that okay we started in Nazareth where Jesus was reared where he grew up as a boy came here to Cana where he somewhat relied Bentley performed his first miracle but performed it nonetheless now we move on to Capernaum man and his ministry really started to progress by the time we got there we're gonna be on the shores of the Sea of Galilee with Danny the bigger Herman that's after the break do not move we are in the beautiful gorgeous Galilee walking in the footsteps of Jesus today it's the watchman it's Kofi only right here on TBN from the Galilee the silence of millions of Christian bystanders during Hitler's rise to power in Bolton's and Nazis to carry out their evil extermination plan against the Jewish people today anti-semitism is on the rise again and some are even claiming the Holocaust never happened as Christians we must not be silent in response to these lies this month Kufa is offering a powerful new mini book the sin of silence which documents the first-hand accounts of both the perpetrators and witnesses of the Holocaust as the generation that experienced the Holocaust disappears we must keep the memories of these witnesses alive to ensure that such a horror never happens again all Christians United for kids real at to 100 for 77471 four or kotuku my dogs my silence to receive your copy of the sin of silent you support Levi with a gift of any amount [Music] well Danny it's a hot day here in the Galilee but you know what I love it and I'm excited because we are at a very special place right now we are in the place that many call the town of Jesus not Nazareth where we just were and where he was raised but Capernaum tell us why this place is so important and tell us where we are right now well Capernaum is the the anchor of Jesus activity here around the Sea of Galilee you are now standing in front of a monumental doorway look at the carvings now that is an arch okay and wait till you see the interior look at this this in fact is the biggest synagogue from antiquity ever found in the holy land it was two stories high it could accommodate hundreds of people inside hundreds and this is really spectacular especially when you think that this is the Galilee this is not a very big metropolitan environment like it was Jerusalem or in Judea this is Galilee kind of off the beaten path you would say yes and and its really surprising to have such a big synagogue you said that this was the largest synagogue in all of Israel that's stunning as far as we know maybe there's even a bigger one hiding somewhere but we found over a hundred ancient synagogues this is the most grand one and especially coming from this rather not very densely populated part of the land it's kind of surprising that's true beautiful structure by the way as you said two stories high you can fit hundreds of people in here in its day look at these pillars and pretty well-preserved these are Corinthian pillars this stone itself is white limestone which is not natural to this area they were bought from a quarry which is at least ten miles away this was a big investment big investment big operation and this synagogue dates to here is the problem it actually doesn't date to the first century it's old but after digging in providing also dating material the agreement among all scholars that it dates to a later period to the four fifth or sixth century not the time of Jesus but they call this place the synagogue of Jesus well how does that work yes but not this building this building labeled is the whites God dates with the Byzantine period and when they realize it's from a later time the Franciscans were in charge of this whole property they started tearing the floor they made 24 strips across this building now cement is covering it in most cases this is still original stone tiling but in those parts in some places they did find what they were looking for the first century they did so they found the remains with that first century synagogue underneath this synagogue yes there is another building buried beneath this one rectangular as well a bit of a smaller scale and it dates to the first century unfortunately they did put the cement to cover all the remains except one place this corner let me show you let's do it on this corner you can see two very clear features one the stone is different it's not that imported white limestone but the local black Basel stone which is also not shaped in any special way it's just the local stones put together but they clearly form a building this is its corner and look you see the doorway over here yeah Eric you cannot rule out the possibility that Jesus himself walked through this very doorway when he attended services in the synagogue beneath the white building here who I have to take a deep breath Danny as you share that and really try to process that as a follower of Jesus the very real possibility probability perhaps that Jesus walked through this doorway we are where we are standing right now that's tough to even tough even for me to comprehend amazing that we're standing here right now for a believer this is really mind-boggling yes and it's one of two buildings that with a great sense of certainty we can associate to Jesus I never built here in Capernaum the other building in this site is identified already in ancient time as a site where jesus healed a person the Marvin law of Peter the Gospel of Mark tells us that it was near the synagogue because they went out of the synagogue and immediately entered that house so it must be right across the way exactly and they've dug all around the scene but behind the entrance here they found a building with odd features that lead us to believe that's the spot can you take us there let me show you let's go Danny I would be remiss to not mention the synagogue we're just leaving is a place where Jesus also very likely talked first of all second of all cast out demons from a demon-possessed man this place is kind of a big deal in the history of Jesus ministry yes the Gospel of Mark records an event of a men are approaching him shouting at him and Jesus responds by casting the demon out yes that happened also in the synagogue of Capernaum that's just a tip of the iceberg though right with the miracles of Jesus in this town we had gyruss a leader of a synagogue here in the Galilee he came to Jesus with an urgent plea what did he ask him that his daughter was sick in jesus healed her again another miracle that he performs here he heals the servant of a Centurion yes which is interesting by itself indicating there was also some Roman presence here Danny one of the things I love about the the healing of gyrus is daughter number one she was 12 years old I have an 11 year old daughter so I can relate number 2 she rose from the dead she was in a deep sleep she was dead all of a sudden she was awake we have something kind of similar here in Capernaum right with Peters mother-in-law not dead but in dire straits yes and here archaeology has a saying on that story the Gospel of Mark tells us that they went out of the synagogue and immediately entered the house of the marvel of Peter but she was sick Jesus performs a miracle she's instantly healed and then she serves him she had a fever she was down for the count I mean when you have a bad fever hey you can be down for the count for several days it takes so hot takes a while in the case of Jesus it happened instantly she is cured and she serves him archaeologically the question is where could that have happened and our key ology has found a candidate right next to the synagogue a stone's throw there is a building over here with a very specific layering of it stratigraphy as we call it and the lowest level you have a first-century structure right but 300 years that building is divided by a wall this is repositioning that wall right and another hundred years later an octagonal building you can see very clearly an Okanagan old building is built over it yeah we see a church was actually built over this structure in the in the 1980s a modern Catholic Church was built over it which to me looks more like a spaceship hovering above all of those remains but hey at least at least you can see the remains and this is most likely a court according to many the the place where Peter may have lived Peter may have lived right here the Apostle Peter and the healing of his mother-in-law went down right here where we're standing right now indeed and originally the church was covered with mosaic floors the one in the middle had an interesting design of a peacock there's a replica of it presented right next to the entrance and all of this is associated with one of the most famous miracles healing miracles of Jesus yeah and the Bible says that here in Capernaum again the town of Jesus Dan is so central to Jesus ministry he cast out many demons many people who were sick he healed here I think of the great story of the paralyzed man being lowered through the roof by his friends through the crowd so Jesus could heal them all of them this is this is a road map of the miraculous Ministry of Jesus here in Capernaum you love it up here in Galilee man you were dying to bring me up here for a while you said let's get up the Galilee definitely I'm so happy we finally made it Nassif Cana Capernaum every Christian pilgrims that comes to the Holy Land should also this is part of God the land here and the beauty the landscape the archaeology the history exciting stuff for you Golan Heights is here in the back the Upper Galilee okay this is a beautiful piece of land as well as very very significant Danny thank you so much my friend watchman contributor Danny the digger hermit we couldn't do Gally with anyone else but you my pleasure is usually it was awesome and we'll do it again soon here in the land my friend Danny up next my final thoughts from here and Galilee the center of Jesus ministry that's after the break it's the watchman it's Christians United for Israel only right here on TBN from the town of Jesus Capernaum don't move David Friedman has made history as the first ambassador to serve at the new US Embassy in Jerusalem he plays a pivotal role in the us-israel relationship and he'll be a special guest speaker at Koopas 2019 Washington summit he's gone on to become one of the top voices in the US administration urging the President to move the US Embassy and recognized Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish state Tammy and I welcome you to the opening and dedication of the United States Embassy in Jerusalem Israel Coupe is thrilled to announce that he'll be speaking at our 2019 Kofi Washington summit during the national night to honor Israel you won't want to miss this historic opportunity to hear from ambassador Friedman and our many other special guests in person register now to attend the ku5 Washington summit on July 8th and 9th [Music] and welcome back to the watchman we are wrapping up from here on the shores of the Sea of Galilee not a bad view and what a time to be here folks look the Sun is about to go down and there is just peace here as the waves are crashing against the shore there is Shalom in this place and why wouldn't there be as we showed you today this was the centerpiece this region of the Ministry of Jesus were just a short walk right now from Capernaum which was known as the town of Jesus scene of many of his major miracles and I see the pilgrims walk through they visit all these great sites from Nazareth to Cana to Capernaum and beyond here in the Galilee region I just want to remind them hey folks Jesus was a Jew he was a Jewish man who lived in this region who loved his people and loved this land as a matter of fact jesus said I came first and foremost to the lost sheep of the house of Israel I loved what my savior loved and our team at Christians United for Israel is really a Genesis 12 organization that believes that God will bless those who bless Israel in the Jewish people and he will surely curse those who curse Israel and the Jewish people you see the website you see the phone number there on your screen call us visit the website and join us join this movement of over 4.3 followers of Jesus who were standing boldly and openly with Israel for such a time as this we will continue to bring you to places like this the Sea of Galilee every week right here on the watchman show as we travel throughout the land of Israel for Zions sake well thanks for joining us this week for an amazing walk in the footsteps of Jesus right here in the Galilee region until next time god bless you and remember never hold your peace [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Erick Stakelbeck on TBN

Views: 131,749

Keywords: YAHWEH, JEHOVAH, LORD, GOD, JESUS, HOLY SPIRIT, TRINITY, HOLY, BIBLE, SCRIPTURE, watchman, watchmen, erick, stakelbeck, pastor, jhm, hagee, cufi, christians united for israel, christian, israel, israeli, jerusalem, jew, jewish, middle east, terror, terrorism, terrorist, threat, crisis, palestine, palestinian, iran, hamas, hezbollah, isis, muslim, brotherhood, Trump, Pence, Netanyahu, danny the digger herman, capernaum, bethlehem, nazareth, galilee sea, church of annunciation joseph, cana water wine miracle, archeology history

Id: no498zWKsNc

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 20 2019