All About Jesus
Despite being impressed by the claims of Christianity at a meeting he attended at school, a
teenage pupil didn’t think it was for him because he was Jewish.
But when the speaker assured him that this was no barrier, Nick Howard committed his life to
Christ, and subsequently discovered that key sections of the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible)
were “all about Jesus”.
The son of former Conservative Party Leader Michael Howard, Nick grew in his faith and is now
an Anglican minister in New York, married to Betsy and pioneering a new church in Manhattan,
where up to 20 per cent of the population is Jewish.
Nick’s background was in liberal Judaism which did not involve regular synagogue attendance or
strict observance of food laws. But he was proud of his Jewish heritage and had his bar-mitzvah
‘coming-of-age’ ceremony when he turned 13.
“I was very conscious of the suffering experienced by my family during the Holocaust – my great-
grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz…,” he recalls.
However, it didn’t give him the answers to life’s biggest questions, particularly the inevitability of
death.
“It seemed to make everything I was doing pointless…Why put so much exertion into living when
death makes all that striving utterly meaningless?”
Then, at 15, he went along to a meeting organised by a Christian group. “I was eager to hear a
new explanation of life that might finally answer my questions.”
The speaker focused on a sentence from the Bible: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the
desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal
life.” (John 3.14f).
“In other words, when Jesus was lifted up on the cross, he made it possible for people to live
forever,” Nick understood. “Moses was addressing the problem of a plague of venomous snakes
during the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites. God provided the remedy of a bronze snake
fixed to a pole so that, whenever someone was bitten, they could simply look at the bronze snake
and live.
“The speaker explained that our rebellion against God was more serious than a lethal snakebite,
but that Jesus was willingly nailed to the cross to solve that problem by taking the punishment for
sin that we deserved. All we have to do is ‘look and live’.
Jesus was Jewish!
“I knew immediately that eternal life would transform everything for me. But one significant matter
still had to be addressed. So I said to the speaker afterwards: ‘I’m Jewish, so I suppose this isn’t
for me’.
“But he replied: ‘Jesus himself was Jewish! He’s the Jewish Messiah – the one the Jews were
waiting for down the centuries. If you follow him, you’ll be following your own Messiah.’ ”
Nick, now 46, was greatly reassured to hear that he could believe in Jesus and still be Jewish. “So
I began following Jesus that evening and gratefully received the gift of eternal life.”
But it was not until his third year of following Jesus that lifestyle changes started to kick in after he
saw the need for Christ to be Lord of his life.
“Jesus said: ‘Whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.’ (Mark 8.35) It meant the
loss of my right to live life my way – like getting drunk with my friends. But if living for Jesus
required major changes to my life, I didn’t want to implement them without being convinced that he
really was the promised Messiah.
“I desperately wanted Christianity to be true, but that wasn’t enough. It had to be the truth before I
was willing to live it out.”
Indecision
“When my indecision was at its height, I suddenly remembered a talk I’d heard at school on the
evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead: the empty tomb with the absent body no-one
could account for, and the appearances Jesus made after his death, which had the effect of
turning devastated followers into joyful standard-bearers for the faith.
“I knew I’d been thoroughly convinced, at the time of hearing that talk, that the evidence
demonstrated Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. And it was this that persuaded me to remain
on ‘the narrow road that leads to life’ (Matthew 7.14) whatever the consequences.”
When Nick read Isaiah chapter 53, he was amazed to discover it was all about Jesus. A friend of
his, who is also a Jewish believer, likes to say that Jesus fits the Old Testament prophecies about
the Messiah like a finger fits its own fingerprint.
“In the light of all this, you might well ask why so few Jews believe in Jesus. One answer is the sad
history of persecution by Christians, and another is because so few have heard that it is possible.”
Isaiah 52.7 says: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news…
who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”
Referring to the speaker who opened his eyes to the truth, Nick concludes: “May God raise up
many others like him to tell Jewish people throughout the world to look with faith at Jesus, their
Messiah, and live forever.”
Much of this narrative is taken, with Nick’s permission, from The Gospel Coalition’s account of his story.
See their website at:
Story by Charles Gardner
Photo: UK Houses of Parliament, public domain photo.
Painting: ‘The Brazen Serpent’ by Benjamin West
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