2019 Israel Trip - Day 1

Today started by leaving the Metropolitan Hotel and Tel Aviv. We arrived in Tel Aviv on Monday afternoon after great ten hour flight from Newark. On Monday, we went into Tel Aviv and walked to a period house representative of where Simon the Tanner lived and where he conducted business. To close out the evening, the group went to a Tel Aviv overlook where our guide, Aharon Yahav, gave us a brief history of Tel Aviv and the upcoming days in Israel. Aharon made it clear this was not going to be a vacation but an educational trip. He suggested taking a cruise if that is what we were looking for. 😀

Our first stop of the day was Caesarea, one of the cities built by King Herod the Great. He built a number of cities and they all needed to meet four basic criteria: drinkable water, defensible, access to roads, and areas to grow food. Caesarea had none of these! In spite of that, King Herod moved 20,000 people there and built a city complete with a palace. He made Caesarea a major seaport, fortified it with soldiers, cultivated crops, and built a Roman style aqua-duct to bring in drinking water from six miles away. Pontius Pilate had his base there, Cornelius lived and was baptized there, Paul left for Tarsus from there, and Philip preached in Caesarea.

We left there and drove north to begin the ascent to Mt. Carmel. Mt. Carmel is the site
where the prophet Elijah called down fire from Heaven and later slew the false prophets of Baal in the brook Kishon. At the top of Mt. Carmel there is the Deir Al-Mukhraqa Carmelite Monastary. There we had a view of the Plains of Jezreel. We read in the books of Daniel and Revelation that it is in the Plains of Jezreel where Satan will assemble his army to march on Jerusalem and slay two thirds of the Jews there.

Next was Tel Megiddo where 21 different levels of civilizations have been unearthed. Think of the history, the up and downs on 21 different periods of time where people built, lived, conquered and started over again and again.
The land of YHWH. Thankful to be here. Thankful for you.

​We continued toward the shores of the Sea of Galilee where we stop at the Church of the
Primacy to see where Jesus three times asked Peter “Do you love me?” A fair question we all must answer and then show Jesus how we do. It was there we ended the day as the sun set over the Sea of Galilee.

​The land of YHWH. Thankful to be here. Thankful for you.