Israel

This article first ran in the Winter 2005 issue of Enrichment Magazine (3-pages). Months ago, God poured out His Spirit during a Pentecostal Messianic conference in New Jersey. Many Jewish believers were filled with the Holy Spirit, four were born again, and two people were miraculously healed. Pentecostal Jews who knew the voice of the Spirit showed the light of Christ to those in spiritual darkness.

Israel and American Pentecostalism. This paper is for the serious Spirit-filled reader. The dissertation is 481 pages. This is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem dissertation by Dr. Raymond L. Gannon, Ph.D. Abstract: The Shifting Romance with Israel: American Pentecostal Ideology of Zionism and the Jewish State - The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the nativity of fraternal twin movements: Zionism and American Pentecostalism. Both newborns, initially treated as weak and infantile in a religiously hostile world, had a basis of ideological support in three centuries of American myth and motif. The burgeoning Pentecostal movement of the early decades of the century, with its chief distinctive of speaking in tongues as initial evidence of Spirit-baptism, had great difficulty persuading Christian contemporaries of the legitimacy of their idiosyncratic doctrine or of their raison d’être on historical or theological grounds. To assure the perpetuity of the Pentecostal movement, a Latter Rain ideology was quickly created which used the contemporary Zionist revival as corroborating evidence of the concomitant divine undertakings to restore both Israel and the Church. Israel was to be restored to Zion even as the Church was restored to its radical first-century apostolic essence.