Moments after touching down at a North Carolina airport, Sid Roth called with the exciting news about a lecture on the supernatural he gave in Jerusalem. “This was without a doubt the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said the host of It’s Supernatural! “We had 650 Jewish people attend the event, all non-believers, and I would say 98 percent stood up and made a profession of faith. There were so many healings I couldn’t even count them all. This has never happened before in Israel outside of 2,000 years ago.”
Roth, who is featured in our cover story this month, “The Supernatural—As Seen on TV,” has spent nearly four decades investigating the miraculous move of the Spirit. Today, Roth believes the world is on the verge of a massive supernatural revival in which miracles become as “commonplace as they were in the early church.” The key to this phenomenon are the Jews who “require a sign.” Roth believes the end of what the Bible calls the “times of the Gentiles” is underway and a new era is beginning in which God is lifting the veil of spiritual blindness off the Jewish people who are becoming increasingly open to the idea of Yeshua, or Jesus, as the Messiah.
Remarkably, a little-noticed 2014 Pew Research Center report found 34 percent of American Jews say believing Yeshua is the Messiah is compatible with being Jewish. For Roth, this shift has momentous ramifications. In his newsletter, Roth wrote there were 1 million Jewish believers in Jesus by the end of the first century. “These original Jewish believers carried the torch that ignited the great Gentile revival. What will this new generation of Jewish believers do? Paul says it will release resurrection of the dead, miracle power (Rom. 11:15). And Amos 9 says when the Tabernacle (family) of David (the Jewish people) are restored (to God), it will trigger the greatest Gentile revival in history!”
As unlikely as it may seem, Roth believes the world is entering a time when many Jewish people will accept Yeshua as their Messiah and become the “sparkplug for a worldwide revival” accompanied by widespread signs, wonders and miracles. As you’ll read in Ken Walker’s meticuously-researched article—”Modern-Day Resurrections: Are They Real?”—there are literally hundreds of reports of dead people coming back to life. Judge for yourself, but Walker’s story will make you wonder what in the world is really going on. The academic community is even taking notice. Craig Keener, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, has researched this phenomenon and says, “There is considerable evidence that miracles are occurring—and lots and lots of them.” A survey of 1,000 American doctors found 55 percent believe “they have seen treatment results in their patients that they would consider miraculous.” “Now, as for what academics think: The dominant antisupernaturalism of some previous generations has been breaking down,” Keener says. “For the most part, even in the West, Christian scholars from a range of traditions today are increasingly open to the reality of miracles.”
Given this sea change in belief in the miraculous among academics—and among the broader public where belief in the supernatural has gone mainstream—the church should embrace the exciting things God is doing and encourage those with these gifts to use them to spread the good news to the world. Surveys show the supernatural work of the Spirit has played a key role in the great revivals that have taken place in Africa, Asia and Latin America. “One report from China … suggested that this was the cause of half of all conversions in the previous two decades,” Keener says.
God is on the move—raising people from the dead, performing healing miracles worldwide—and amid this supernatural wave millions are becoming believers. If this is truly the end of the age, as famed evangelist Billy Graham told me in a recent interview and as Roth saw in a dream in which Jesus told him three times that He’s “coming back soon,” we should be doing all we can to share the gospel with both Jews and Gentiles.
“Romans 11 does talk about a turning of the Jewish people to faith in Jesus at the time of the end,” Keener says. “The spread of the gospel in Acts is intimately connected with signs and wonders. So I do think that we can expect signs and wonders to play a part of the spreading of the gospel in the end time.”
Troy Anderson is the executive editor of Charisma and a Pulitzer Prize-nominated investigative journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter @TroyMAnderson, Facebook (troyandersonwriter) or online at troyanderson.us.
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