Why was Dwight Eisenhower smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and drinking seven cups of coffee in 1944?  He was not only overseeing the planning of history’s greatest amphibious military operation--156,000 soldiers’ lives at stake, portable artificial piers or harbors for the coast of France, trucks, tanks, weapons of every kind, he was also overseeing the largest armada in the history of the world.  Wouldn’t YOU be uptight?

While other Americans got a good night’s sleep, Eisenhower worked round the clock. Across the English Channel lay Nazi Fortress Europe and Hitler presiding  over and militarily insolating his running-round-the-clock Jewish death camps.  I slept two hours only last night.  I was praying for the Jewish “death camps" across the New York City East River Channel, where Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox “shtetls” are insolating their inmates from any real Biblical deliverance from eternal death.  

What do I mean, “shtetls?”  Shtetl (Yiddish: diminutive form of Yiddish shtot שטאָט, "town", pronounced like "Städtle", "little town") was typically a small Jewish town in pre-Holocaust Central and Eastern Europe. After WWII the Yiddish-speaking Rebbes fled to Brooklyn with other Holocaust Survivors.  These hundreds of thousands of unreached people constitute the largest untouched virgin mission field in America.

I was talking to an important Evangelical leader the other day and I told him that the largest unreached people group [without their own NT] in the U.S. is not the Apaches and is not on some reservation out West but is, believe it or not, right here in New York City. Without understanding the details of what God was doing, I have been working on a Hasidic (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish) YIDDISH translation of the Greek NT since I got my doctorate at Fuller over thirty years ago. This necessitated learning Talmudic and Rabbinic literature and languages and many years of study. There is no NT anywhere in the world that I know of specifically appropriate for this endogamous ultra-zealous Yiddish-speaking vast sea of humanity except the one we are now working on and that I have been preparing with all their relevant pious native euphemism ( i.e., "yires Kavod" which means "the fear of the L-rd" etc). Last summer 80,000 copies of the DVD film of the Yiddish translation I worked on of the Warner Brothers screenplay about Moshiach was mass-mailed to Hasidic homes in Brooklyn where over 300,000 of them live (there are also vast numbers of these Yiddish speakers elsewhere in Israel and the world).

When Ananias was dispatched to Saul of Tarsus on the Street called Straight, it was like being an emissary to one of the 144,000 (Revelation 7 and 14) who would turn the world upside-down, because this rabbi Paul the Apostle was no laid-back secularized Jew like Simon Peter the fisherman, but rather Saul of Tarsus was a r-e-v-v-e-d up motorcyle of a chasid who would outwrite and outcongregation plant and outrun Peter to Rome. Believe it or not, some of these Sauls in Boro Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights are starting to come to faith as a result of this 80,000 Yiddish Moshiach film mass-mailing. All they need now is a Shulchan Arukh rabbinically dictioned kosher Yiddish NT, a NT for the 144,000.

Dwight Eisenhower started his assault on the devil’s stronghold by drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.  Moshiach started his assault on the devil’s stronghold by fasting and preaching to the devil.  Read Mt 4 and Lk 4.

Look what our Moshiach did.  We must do the same.  Moshiach fasted. The demonic bonds of iniquity we face can only be exorcised by prayer and fasting. Mark 9:29. Fasting may be abstaining from all foods (Act 9:9) or from only certain foods (Daniel 10:3). Fasting may be public (Lev 23:27) or private (Zech 7:5). It is an act of humility and repentance (Ps 69:10). You are serious enough about your sin to stop eating. You are re-dedicating yourself (Acts 13:3) for a new level of spiritual warfare. You are seeking the L-rd with all your heart (Jer 29:13; Ezra 8:23). You are fasting for three days and three nights in the belly of some whale and you know you haven't been obeying the L-rd as you should, and you want G-d to relent of the chastisement He had planned (Jonah 3:5,10). Fasting is your means of sensitizing yourself to G-d for the purpose of spiritual warfare and prayer against satanic oppression (Isaiah 58:6) or demonic possession (Matthew 17:21) or as a means of seeking G-d's face more sensitively for spiritual guidance or revelation (Daniel 9:2,3, 21, 22). Fasting is how we deal with the devil.

Look at how our fasting Moshiach dealt with the devil. Every thought was wrested away from Satan and taken captive to obey the Father.  Notice that Satan has to be resisted and fended off with Scripture. The Bible is an arsenal of weaponry and sometimes I have to quote the same verse to the devil all day long.  Satan is a meddler who uses his wiles to try to trash the work of the L-rd.  I have 800 pages of Yiddish to format.  Formatting takes me six minutes a page.  Do the arithmetic with me.  That is 4800 minutes to format the entire Yiddish NT, or 60 hours.  Every hour of my life that Satan can waste he will. Every soul that perishes is his delight.  He’s jealous of G-d and has blinded the Jews.

Don’t put this matter aside too casually.  What is going on is not casual.  It is war.  Eisenhower was all business against the enemy.  He did not have one foot in the devil’s camp like some believers.  He had a plan (land on the Normandy Coast and build up the resources needed for decisive battles in the Normandy-Brittany region of France in preparation for the break-out march to Berlin.  FDR had already seen the light: nothing less than the total destruction of the Nazi Fighting Forces would suffice; the mistake of WWI would not be repeated.)  When are we going to see believers getting serious about doing spiritual warfare?  Believers spend thousands of dollars for diversions and peripherals.  We must deliver a Yiddish Brit Chadasha to every Hasid in Boro Park.