Reading Scripture through Jewish Eyes

Debra: Hi, my name is Debra from Minnesota, and I’m a Revive Our Hearts Monthly Partner. One reason I decided to support this ministry is I recently went to the True Woman conference in Indiana. It had such an impact on my life, as I’m sure it’s had on the other women there. But there were so many more that couldn’t be there, so I felt it was important to support this ministry so that more people can be exposed to her teaching. I hope you enjoy today’s episode of Revive Our Hearts brought to you in part by the Monthly Partner Team.

Dannah Gresh: Curious how to make the gospel attractive to an orthodox Jew? It’s pretty simple. Dr. James Tour says all you have to do is open your Bible and love it.

Dr. James Tour: This is exactly what Paul said. Paul said they will get jealous for the Lord by seeing your love for Him. When we love the Word of God, it makes the Jews really wish “that I had that.” This makes them jealous when we get into the Word of God, and I love it.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe: And the Truth That Sets Them Free,” for March 19, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Before we dive into another fascinating conversation with Dr. Jim Tour, I’ve got an announcement for you. We’ve been reading through the Bible with women around the world this year, and today we begin a new book—one of my favorites!—the book of 1 Samuel. 

This would just be a wonderful time to join us! Not because we’re beginning a fresh book, but because 1 Samuel chapter 1 tells the story of Hannah. It’s such a beautiful passage, a comforting passage for the woman with unfulfilled longings or emotions that she needs to bring to the Lord. If that’s you (and let’s be honest, it’s probably all of us), you’re going to want to grab your Bible and visit ReviveOurHearts.com/Bible2026. Can’t wait to have you along for the journey!

Now, let's get to today’s conversation. I am excited to have yesterday’s guest with us again. Welcome back, Jim, to Revive Our Hearts. We consider you a friend now.

Dr. Tour: Thank you.

Dannah: You gave such a riveting testimony. And, friend, if you didn’t listen to that testimony yesterday of how he came to know Christ as an eighteen-year-old young man, you need to hear that. Go back and listen to it. 

But you told us, Jim, that you had been raised as a secular Jew. As we were sitting there talking, I thought, Wow, I'd really love to ask him . . . And here I'm going to do it now.

How does your history as a Jewish young man, and maybe any studies you've done in Jewish texts, change the way you look at Scripture? How does it help you wonder at the Word of God?

Dr. Tour: Well, I was quite secular, which means I was only in the synagogue a couple of times a year. I’m not proficient in Hebrew. But since coming to the Lord, I’ve read a lot of messianic literature. So, messianic means that these are like the original believers. They’re all Jewish. They come from a Jewish background, but they received Jesus as the Messiah. So that’s what I mean when I say a Messianic Jew.

So all of the apostles would have been Messianic Jews, people who were Jewish, but they received Jesus as the Messiah. There’s about 250,000 Messianic Jews in the world right now, people who are ethnically Jewish but believe Jesus is the Messiah . . . and many, many more coming.

So, we look at Scriptures a little bit differently. We will read the writings of the rabbis and see what their thoughts were on different topics. We read, I would say, through a Jewish lens.

So when people, for example, ask me, “How do you read the New Testament? You’re a Jew. How can you read this?”

I’m, like, “How could you read the New Testament as a Gentile? It’s so Jewish. Everything that Jesus did revolved around these Jewish things that were happening in His life. He was doing things that were so Jewish. You understand it so much better when you look at it through a Jewish lens.”

You go, “Oh, okay. I understand. It makes sense now.”

Dannah: Can you give us an example of that?

Dr. Tour: Sure. So, the rabbis taught . . . Rabbinic literature, even from the first century, is all written down. You have all of this. Rabbis taught that when Messiah comes, only Messiah would be able to heal a leper. From the time that the law was finished, that the law was complete, when Moses finished writing the law, no Jewish leper had ever been healed.

Naaman was a Syrian. He was healed of leprosy. Moses’ sister was healed of leprosy, but that was before the law was complete. So they said that only Messiah would be able to do that.

What did Jesus do? He comes on the scene, and He heals a Jewish leper. And what does He do? He sends them back to the priests, specifically. He says, “Let the priests look at this.” This was for a testimony to the priests because they themselves taught that only Messiah would be able to do this.

Then there’s this whole thing from Leviticus, I think chapter 13, that they have to go through (it’s even more than a chapter) when a Jewish leper is healed. There’s a whole protocol.

And then what does Jesus do? He heals ten more, and He sends all ten back. They’re just overwhelmed with this thing. 

The other thing is that they taught that only the Messiah would be able to cast the demon out of a man who is unable to speak. Only the Messiah would be able to do this. And you see that when He does this, the crowds are amazed. They’re like, “Is this the Messiah?”

Why would they say that at this instant? Because they were taught that only Messiah would be able to do this because. In their minds they said, “You had to identify the name of the demon and then cast him out.” If the man can’t speak, how do you identify the name of the demon? 

Sometimes Jesus would say, “What is your name?” 

And he says, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” 

And Jesus would cast them out by name. But then there were other times when the man could not speak. Boom! He’d cast it out.

The other thing they taught is only Messiah would be able to heal a man who was born blind. So what did Jesus do? He heals the man who was born blind. They check with his parents, and they say, “Yes. This is our son. He was born blind.”

Why the inquiry? Because when He does something that only Messiah would be able to do, then you see the Jewish panel doing the inquiry. Why did they go after this man who was born blind and start questioning him? Because they had to do the inquiry, “Is this the Messiah?”

You see this type of thing. 

Another thing, why did Jesus make clay out of spittle, spitting on the ground, making the clay, and apply it to the man’s eyes to heal him? Jesus didn’t need to do that. Jesus healed people’s eyes without that—just speaking the word. Why do you have to make this mud out of spittle and apply it to the guy’s eyes? Why do you have to spit in the man’s ears in order to heal him? Why couldn’t you just speak it?

In the Jewish literature, you understand exactly why. Because the laws of men, which Jesus disdained, the laws of man said the rabbis had written that when you are performing a healing, never put your spittle with it. Jesus did something to go directly against what they said because He said the laws of men have made the Word of God of no effect.

So, He would go exactly against what the human-made laws would suggest to show His actual contempt for their laws. You don’t need to have this. Because what happened is when they came back after the Babylonian diaspora, they came back from Babylon and said, “We really blew it. We really blew it by disobeying God’s laws.”

So around each one of the 613 commandments that were given to Moses, they would surround it with many other commandments so you didn’t get near violating that thing. But what it did was it burdened people with so much that it made their lives miserable—613 commandments. Like the Sabbath has over one thousand human-made commandments around the Sabbath day. That’s what you see today.

You can’t turn on a light switch. You can’t do these things. 

So here’s many examples of how you see this through the Jewish lens. I see this even in my discussions with orthodox Jews. I start talking about the Word, and they start weeping.

This one woman said to me, she’s an orthodox Jewish professor, and she said, “You just get to read the Word of God because you love it. I have to light this candle, say this prayer, do this, do this, do this, do this, just to be able to get into . . .” She said, “Boy I wish I could do it just like you.”

Dannah: Well, let’s stop there. That’s really an important thing you just said. You read the Word of God because you love it. I know so many women who are doing it out of a sense of duty. Their hearts mean well, but they are not experiencing what we read about in the Scriptures, the delight in the law of Word.

How do you love it?

Dr. Tour: Oh, you may start this out of a duty, but then you see what it does in your life, and you just love it. You just love it. I mean, I’ve been exercising since I was thirteen years old. If I don’t get to exercise at least every other day, I feel terrible. I just feel terrible.

It’s the same thing with the Word of God. If I’m not in the Word of God every day, it’s like . . . If for some reason I had to leave my house at three in the morning to catch a flight, the first thing I do is I open up my Bible when I sit on that airplane. I mean, I’m going to get in the Word of God.

It becomes a part of you. You learn to love this. It’s like, I hunger for this. I’ve got to get the Word of God in me. I’ve just got to get it. I mean sometimes if I feel like I need more, I’ll just go to the chapel on campus and just get on my knees and pray. I mean, I just want to spend time in the Word of God and just start reading this, just start meditating on this for a while.

So, yes, I do this because I love it. This is what orthodox Jews see in us. This is exactly what Paul said. Paul said they will get jealous for the Lord by seeing your love for Him.

When we love the Word of God, it makes the Jews really wish “that I had that.” I’ve had orthodox Jewish men say to me, “When I heard you speak, I told my synagogue, ‘I’m not reading the Mishnah anymore.’” That’s their peripheral writings. He said, “I’m going to go back and read the Tanach. Until I’ve read that whole thing through, I’m not going to read any of this because I want to get what this guy has.”

This makes them jealous when we get into the Word of God, and I love it.

Dannah: I love it.

I think what you said is true. If you test it, you’ll see that the Word of the Lord is so good, so tasty, such a rich feast.

When I started my time in the Word in my twenties, I remember setting an alarm clock and thinking, This is going to take forever. What do I do? What do I do with these minutes?

It is hard at the beginning. And then you get to where you’re like, “This isn’t enough time! It’s so good! It’s so wonderful! I can’t possibly have to go to work now! I can’t possibly have to get the kids up for school now!” Because you want more and more of it.

I just want to affirm how true and how good that is.

You seem to know so much about how to look at the New Testament through a Jewish lens, so I want to ask you this, so many of the important things that Jesus said were said during important Jewish festivals. What have you learned about that?

Dr. Tour: You can see the Jewish festivals in the New Testament. That you clearly see. And you see the meaning behind some of these festivals. But Jesus was always looking at the heart. There’s the richness of the festival, but what He was calling people back to was the heart.

They would get going with these festivals, and He was always calling people back to recognize what’s happening in your heart because these things. It’s like with Christians and Christmas. They can get so enamored with the Christmas season that they lose sight of Jesus. They get so busy that they forget about Jesus in all of this.

And I think what I see is He’s always bringing us back. He was always saying things that would get at my heart. Whatever He would say, He would want to get at my heart.

He said, “If you look at this woman with lust, you’ve committed adultery with her already in your heart.” How can I commit adultery in my heart ? Adultery is a physical thing. I knew that. It was one of the ten commandments that I should never do. But how can you do it in your heart? This is what Jesus does. He gets at your heart. In the festivals, He wants our heart. He wants our hearts. It’s a time of remembrance.

That’s why you find in the Scriptures that it never speaks, “Study the history.” It says, “Remember. Remember.” That’s what the Jewish Scriptures would always say, “Remember.” It is a part of your life. It is not just knowing the history. It is remembering. It is making yourself a part of it.

Dannah: Do you have a favorite passage of Scripture, Jim?

Dr. Tour: I’ve probably spent more time meditating on Psalm 119, verses 97–100, more than anything else. It says, “Oh how I love thy law. It is my meditation all the day.”

You think about that. If I love the Word of God and make it my meditation, then it just lists all the blessings that come if I make the Word of God my meditation.

O how I love thy law! 
It is my meditation all the day. 
Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies, 
For they are ever mine.
I have more insight than all my teachers, 
For your testimonies are my meditation. 

I’ve had the great blessing of studying under many great men. My professor got the Nobel prize. His professor got the Nobel prize. I’ve studied under many great men. It says that you will have more insight than all of them if you make this Word of God your meditation. That’s what it says. It doesn’t say than just your Bible teachers. It says than all your teachers. You’ll have more insight than all of them if you make this Word of God your meditation.

And when God’s Word says it, I believe it! So yes, I’ve probably spent more time meditating on that verse than anything else if I’ve really thought about it.

Dannah: Beautiful.

You are a scientist. I know that you have spoken up for a biblical view of the origins of this world. And so, since I see such a beautiful love of God’s Word in your heart, one of the things Scripture tells us in Romans 1:20 is that we’re without excuse, even if we haven’t been exposed to the written Word of God, because creation speaks about God’s power and His character. Talk to us about that Scripture through the lens of being a scientist.

Dr. Tour: Right. So, nobody, no scientist knows where life came from. This silly primordial soup model where there was a pond; some lightning strikes; some small molecules come together and form into a cell. Those cells form multi-cellular organisms, and they come slithering out of the pond. This is where life came from. 

That is a nonsensical view. There is absolutely no basis for that view. None. Actually, that started not even with Darwin. That started with the Babylonians. The Babylonians started that. Their gods came out of that stinky little pond as well.

We have no idea where life came from, from a scientific perspective. We don’t even have any hypothesis that has any validation with any experiment behind that hypothesis on how life could have formed.

So something as fundamental as, “Where do we come from?” from a scientific perspective, we have no idea. The whole materialistic models break down. The models of how one organism changes dramatically into another, into another, again, those models just break down. Body-plant changes.

This whole idea that we’re 99 percent, 98½ percent the same as a chimpanzee at the DNA level. That is all breaking down now. There’s more and more papers coming out. First of all, that’s only of the protein coding DNA, and now we’re finding we have 15 percent, not 1 percent difference, but 15 percent difference on the protein coding DNA.

But then there’s much more DNA in what used to be called “junk DNA,” which is now called “intergenic DNA.” It’s much more than the protein coding side, and that is the regulatory functions. Those are the little traffic cops that turn things on and off in our body. Here we are grossly different than chimpanzees. So all of these things that they threw at us are just beginning to fall apart. We’re seeing that this is not true at all. 

And then what He does with human beings is so unique. He’s filled us with His Spirit; we’ve been made in the image of God, it says. These things are absolute treasures.

And there’s a reason why when we look at robots that are being built, we don’t build them out of molecules. Normally, what we do when we design something is we look at something, and we try to copy it. You have no idea how to build it out of molecules. That’s why we build grownup robots out of plastic and silicone and wires. We don’t build them out of molecules because we have no idea how to construct these sorts of life-like systems out of molecules, in that way, from the bottom up.

So, anyway, there’s so much more that I could tell you here, but I see God’s hand all over this.

Dannah: Take us back to being in the image of God. I think that’s probably one of the things that culture, as well as science, is trying to dismantle—that in the image of God He created us, male and female He created them. Talk to us about that through the lens of a scientist.

Dr. Tour: Yes. He took Adam, and He breathed life into him. This is sort of like CPR. This is where you take one life, and you use it to infuse another life. Life comes from God. We don’t even know how to define life scientifically. We have no idea. We can define the characteristics of life, but we don’t know how to even define life.

The Bible says that God made us in His image. This is an absolute treasure. People are treasures. This is why we value them so much. You see this in God, the value of the human life and the treasure of it.

That’s why He says that there is life eternal. He promises this. Jesus even said, “I go to prepare a place for you. If this weren’t so, I wouldn’t be telling you this.” He says, “I’m preparing a place for you. Where I am, there you shall also be,” He says (see John 14:2–3).

Our lives are a treasure to Him. The Bible makes it very clear, as soon as we die, our spirit is immediately with our Lord. Immediately. He’s not going to let it perish. Our spirit is immediately with Him. And then one day He will reconstruct our bodies as well. There will be a resurrection.

You say, “Well, all the molecules have gone away.” I mean, all the atoms are still here. He constructed it once; He can construct it again.

You say, “It’s not exactly the same atoms.” We’re not the same atoms ever. Our molecules are always turning over in our bodies. They’re changing all the time. Every hydrogen bond in our body is changing thousands of times a second. Every molecule in our body is changing thousands of times a second. It’s not made up of the same atoms. The atoms are constantly exchanging.

So you have a molecule made up of atoms, but there are certain atoms on there that are coming on and off, coming on and off, thousands of times a second. So we are physically different than the people we were when we started this conversation . . . twenty minutes ago! So God shows us that it’s dynamic.

Dannah: Wow! I’m so grateful that the Lord has planted in you such a hunger for His Word and truth. Yesterday we ended by having you pray for us. I’d like to pray for you today and all the other Christian scientists in the field. Tell us how we can pray because I believe this is a call for everyone listening. I am challenging you, that before you lay your head on the pillow tonight, you would lift up a prayer for Christian scientists. It is a mission field. Give us some tips on how we can pray, Jim.

Dr. Tour: Yes. So my philosophy is that if you speak up a little bit about Jesus in the academy, in the university, they’ll give you a hard time. But if you speak up a lot, they leave you alone. They don’t want to get you started.

And so, pray that we would be bold in our faith; that we would speak up; that we wouldn’t keep this thing hidden, because students need to see that there are believers in their midst, that there are believers among their professors. Pray that we would be bold, that we would speak up, that we would not shy away. That’s what I’d love prayer for.

Dannah: What a good word for all of us. Don’t speak up a little. Speak up a lot.

Father God, I thank You so much for Dr. James Tour, for the way that You met him in such a personal, powerful way when he was eighteen years old. Thank You how You redeemed his mind and his life so that he would be a slave to Christ, a man who devours the Word and delights in the Word.

Father, he sounds pretty bold to me, but however it is that You want him to be bolder still, I pray that You would plant courage in his heart for that moment, that day, that time.

And, Father, for every other scientist out there, whether it’s a home-school science teacher and her classroom is three children, or whether it’s a college professor who’s being silenced every day by rules at the university, or other types of scientists, Lord, make them bold. May they hear his words today, not to speak up a little, but to speak up a lot. Help us all to be like that. In the mighty, precious, matchless name of Jesus, who is the Living Word. Amen.

Thank you, Jim, for being with us again today. What a great conversation that was. If you missed any part of our time with Dr. Tour, you can find yesterday’s and today’s episodes at ReviveOurHearts.com. That’s also where you’ll find a link to Dr. Tour’s website in the transcript of today’s program. Again, that’s at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app. 

Before we go, I want to remind you about The Little Red Book of Wisdom, written by Nancy’s brother, Mark DeMoss. It’s an easy-to-read collection of insights designed to bring clarity and perspective to daily life. And as our thank-you for your gift of any amount to Revive Our Hearts this month, we’d love to send you a copy with our gratitude for your support of this ministry. To give, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

If you’ve looked at your life recently and thought, “Lord, what are You doing? I want to trust You, but things are just looking so crazy right now.” Well, if that sounds familiar, I think tomorrow’s episode will encourage your weary heart. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

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