Jesus Still Appears to People in Dreams, Even God Haters, Christian Apologist Says
Jesus still appears to people in their dreams, even to those who reject the Gospel, according to Christian apologist Barry Leventhal.
Leventhal, professor of church missions and ministries and director of the graduate school of ministry program at Southern Evangelical Seminary, told those gathered at SES' 23rd annual National Conference on Christian apologetics in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Friday that Jesus even appeared to people during the Holocaust.
As an example, Leventhal shared the testimony of a Jewish man named Joseph who during the Holocaust was forced to work in a Nazi labor camp.
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Joseph had sworn vengeance against his Lutheran neighbors who refused to help him and his family.
"He made a vow, a vow of only one thing: He would never stop hating his so-called Christian neighbors. He would always hate their Christian God; their Jesus would be his enemy as long as he lived," said Leventhal.
"His hatred for Christians and their Jesus grew with each passing day until one dark evening in his bunk, a night that would change Joseph's life forever, Jesus appeared to Joseph."
Quoting from Joseph's testimony, Leventhal recounted that on that night: "Jesus appeared to me. In the darkness of my hatred for Christians and their Jesus, Jesus appeared to me. I recognized Him in a split second, I knew who He was and His first words to me were 'Joseph, I love you. I died for you. You will survive.'"
Leventhal then said that just as God appeared to people in the Bible, so Jesus will continue to appear to people today, even God-haters, in their dreams.
"But how could this be? Is it possible that Jesus could actually appear to people today? That He would actually appear to His avowed enemies and turn their lives completely around?" he asked.
Leventhal gave biblical parallels to what Joseph went through, including Saul of Tarsus. According to the book of Acts, Saul had a vision of Jesus and from there became a Christian, and changed his name to Paul.
Leventhal is not the only person to speak of modern day dream miracles. Youth With A Mission, an evangelism group, reported last year that a former Islamic State militant told them that he converted to Christianity because of dreams he had of Jesus.
"He told this YWAM leader that he had begun having dreams of this man in white who came to him and said, 'You are killing my people.' And he started to feel really sick and uneasy about what he was doing," said Gina Fadely, director of Youth With A Mission Frontier Missions, in an interview with Voice of the Martyrs last year.
"So who knows. Perhaps this man will be like Saul in the Bible that persecuted Christians and he turned from that persecution of the early Church to become the Apostle Paul who led it."
Featured speakers at SES' three-day conference — the longest-running and largest apologetics conference in the nation — include Norman Geisler, prolific author and a founder of SES; Dr. Richard Land, SES president and former head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice; and Josh McDowell, author of the best-selling apologetics book, More Than a Carpenter, among others.
