He Thought God Was Just History. Then He Met Christians

For years, Jesus was little more than a historical figure to Erez.

Growing up in a Jewish family in Israel, Erez knew the Old Testament well. He had studied it throughout school, from first grade through twelfth grade, learning the Scriptures as the history and wisdom of his people.

But he didn't know them as the Word of God.

Even his own Jewish heritage felt distant from God. His mother occasionally brought him and his brothers to synagogue, but faith was something connected to the past rather than a living relationship with God.

Then, after completing his military service, Erez left Israel to travel the world.

His journey eventually took him through Southeast Asia, where he explored Hindu and Buddhist writings in an attempt to understand different spiritual beliefs. What he encountered convinced him that there was a spiritual reality beyond what he had known, but what he experienced felt dark and frightening.

Then he arrived in Amsterdam.

There, Erez met a group of young Christians who talked about God in a way he had never heard before. They prayed for one another. They spoke to God as though He were a friend. And most surprisingly, they seemed to know the Hebrew Scriptures.

Erez couldn't understand it.

“I'm Jewish,” he told them. “We don't believe in Jesus.”

Their response stopped him.

“Why? Jesus is Jewish.”

For the first time, Erez began asking questions.

The Christians introduced him to passages in the Hebrew Scriptures he had never encountered in school. They showed him what they believed were prophecies about the Messiah and pointed him toward the New Testament.

Erez had grown up in Israel, yet he had never met a Christian, seen a New Testament, or learned much about Jesus of Nazareth.

That realization became difficult to ignore.

He began comparing the prophecies he found in the Hebrew Scriptures with the life of Yeshua, the Hebrew name for Jesus. The more he studied, the more convinced he became that the Scriptures were pointing to Yeshua as the promised Messiah.

Eventually, what began as an intellectual investigation became something much deeper.

Erez says he became convinced first in his head, and then in his heart.

But discovering Yeshua wasn't the end of the story. It was the beginning of a calling.

After becoming a follower of Jesus, Erez felt an overwhelming sense of joy, accompanied by an equally strong sense of urgency. If he had grown up Jewish and never heard this message, he wondered, how many others had never heard it either?

He returned to Israel determined to tell his family and his people what he had discovered.

His family's reaction was less than enthusiastic.

Some believed he had lost his mind. His father's family even arranged for him to meet with a psychiatrist, who ultimately declared him sane. His mother's family arranged a meeting with a rabbi who promised to prove that Yeshua was not the Messiah. The meeting, however, never happened.

Instead, Erez discovered something he didn't know existed: a community of Jewish believers in Yeshua.

He began attending a congregation and quickly developed a hunger to study Scripture more deeply. But there was a problem. He couldn't find a Bible school in Israel where Jewish and Arab believers could study the Word of God in Hebrew.

That need eventually became part of his calling.

After completing his doctoral studies in the United States, Erez returned to Israel with his wife and young children. He knew God had called him to serve, but he didn't yet know exactly what that would look like.

Then he remembered the young man he once was, sitting with the Scriptures and longing to understand them.

Today, Erez has dedicated his life to creating that opportunity for others, helping Israeli believers, both Jewish and Arab, study the Word of God in Hebrew, in the very land where the biblical story unfolded.

What began with one unexpected conversation in Amsterdam became a discovery that changed the direction of his life.

And for Erez, the question that started it all still echoes:

How come nobody told me before?