Pastors Larry and Tiz Huch believe their mission is to support Israel
“It’s become my No.1 mission to bring the Christian world back to being in love with Israel, and back to being in love with the Jewish people,” says Pastor Larry
By STEVE LINDEPastors Larry and Tiz Huch(photo credit: LARRY HUCHMINSTRIES)Texas-based Pastor Larry Huch has seen his wife, Pastor Tiz, and his baby grandson, Lion, “miraculously” recover over the past year from diseases their doctors had diagnosed as incurable. He is convinced that the good work their ministry does for Israel and the Jewish people – including the donation of top-of-the-line ambulances to Magen David Adom – has been rewarded.“I really believe 1,000% that God drew my heart through the ambulances and other things to help save Jewish lives, and God saved my family’s lives,” he says. “As it says in Genesis 12, God blesses those who bless Israel.”Pastors Larry and Tiz lead an ethnically diverse and faithful flock at the New Beginnings non-denominational church they founded in 2004 in Bedford, a city located between Dallas and Fort Worth. They have dedicated their lives to building bridges between Christians and Jews – and supporting Israel and the Jewish people in every way they can.“It’s become my No.1 mission to bring the Christian world back to being in love with Israel, and back to being in love with the Jewish people,” says Pastor Larry – as he is affectionately known to millions of global television viewers of the New Beginnings media ministry.In an interview with The Jerusalem Report a day before receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus and Keren Hayesod at a gala dinner held at Jerusalem’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on January 29, Huch stresses that his mission is “to restore the Church to its Jewish roots,” which is why he advocates studying, understanding and teaching the Bible from a Jewish perspective.Larry and Tiz are charismatic televangelists – co-pastors, TV co-hosts, best-selling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists whose numerous charitable outreaches and projects in Israel and around the world have blessed, saved and impacted many people. They live by and teach the Jewish concept of tikkun olam – “repairing a broken world” – arguing that “we are each blessed in order to be a blessing.”Larry’s books, Torah Blessing and Unveiling Ancient Biblical Secrets, explain how and why the Church needs to return to the ancient Hebrew understanding of the Scriptures. For her part, Tiz has written No Limits, No Boundaries and co-authored Releasing Family Blessings with Larry to share their insights on raising families.Larry, born in 1950, and Tiz have three children – Anna, Luke, and Katie – who are all active in their ministry, as is Anna’s husband, Brandin Reed, Luke’s wife, Jen, and four grandchildren, Aviva Reed, Judah Reed, Asher Reed and Lion Huch.Their unwavering commitment to stand with Israel has influenced and encouraged people across the world to follow suit. Among other things, they lead annual tour groups to Israel and support the Bnai Zion Hospital in Haifa; they have donated six ambulances that house intensive care mobile units and built 18 bomb shelters for children at the Ahava Children’s Village in Kiryat Bialik; and they have financed hundreds of Holocaust survivors living in the city of Ma’aleh Adumim and a soup kitchen in Jerusalem.Since 2016, Pastor Larry and his church have supported new immigrants to Israel every year who make aliyah through Keren Hayesod’s programs. In 2019, they funded the aliyah of 250 Jews from France, Russia and Ukraine.Through the support of their congregation and television ministry partners, they run charitable projects spanning from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to Zimbabwe and Israel, projects which, in their words, “demonstrate the spiritual and tangible love of God and God’s people.”Like the rest of the Evangelical community in the US – which the Pew Research Center says is more than a quarter of its population – Pastor Larry believes that he and Pastor Tiz are fulfilling Biblical prophecy, as is US President Donald Trump.“I think we all agree that President Trump being elected is a miracle from God, not only for America, not only for Israel, but for the world,” he said at a recent meeting of Evangelical pastors at the White House. “But Israel shouldn’t have to give up one inch of the Holy Land.”What follows is the full interview, conducted in the Waldorf Astoria lounge.You say you have experienced the miracles of healing in your own family, with your wife and grandson, as a result of blessing Israel. Can you explain?Last year, my grandson, Lion, at seven months old, got incurable leukemia. And while we were treating that, my wife, Tiz, got cancer. Both of them were given very little chance to survive. Both of them are now cancer-free. Lion came back, and the doctors said they had never seen a child with this kind of rare leukemia survive. They said no child as young as Lion has ever had this gene. He’s still got four months of oral treatment, but he’s now healthy and happy. The same thing with my wife. They gave her three months to a year. Right before we left for Israel, she had a blood test after her operation, and she’s now cancer-free. They were convinced she also had this gene, and they came back and said, “It’s not there.” When Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who has been my great friend for the last 20 years and who I study with, heard about Tiz, he and his wife flew into Dallas. And he said, “Pastor Tiz, if you were retired, I would be concerned, but because you are on a mission, a holy mission, I know God’s going to give you guys a long, long life.” We look at the miracles of Lion and Tiz, and the fact that this year two of my family got their lives back, and it’s probably the correct way to say it. But when you visit Yad Vashem, before you go into the children’s hall with the candles, there’s that black statue, and it says, “If you save one life, God sees it as though you have saved the whole world.” I really believe 1,000 percent that God drew my heart through the ambulances and other things to help save Jewish lives, and God saved my family’s lives. And that’s why I quote from Genesis 12 about God blessing those who bless Israel. The blessing that we’ve received this year has come from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and what we’ve done for Israel is so small compared to what the God of Israel has done for us.What motivates your support for Israel?It goes back to around 25 years ago. I’d been a successful pastor in the United States, but I was contemplating leaving the ministry. I felt something was missing. To cut a long story short, friends of mine said, “Come to Israel with us!” And I thought, why should I go to Israel? I’d been taught the false doctrine of replacement theology. I had no church background. Before I became a believer and follower of God, I was a drug addict and a drug dealer on the streets. So the only thing I knew about the Bible was what I’d been told, and like so many people who’ve been told wrong, I never questioned it, and thought why would I want to come to Israel? But after these friends invited us, I thought, OK, we’ll go and see it for ourselves.Tell us about your first trip to Israel.In the first part of the trip, we went to Tiberias and Capernaum. As everyone goes in to see the house of Peter, this friend of ours took us aside, and showed us the remnants of an ancient synagogue. And as he was showing us these remnants, I saw this Hebrew writing on what had been the side of a door. Everybody was walking away, and I said to Yosef, “What’s this Hebrew say?” And he said, “Well, those are the names of some of the grandchildren of the Apostles from the New Testament.” I said, “Wait, were they followers of Jesus?” And he said, “Of course.’” I said, “Well, why are they on a synagogue?” And he looked at me like, “You’re a pastor, you should know what the Bible says.” He said, “Larry, Jesus didn’t ever stop being a Jew. He didn’t come to start a new religion. He opened the door for all of us to be grafted into Israel and Torah and his Jewish roots.” And everyone walked away, and I’d heard of this thing called the Jerusalem Syndrome, where people come to Israel and go nuts, you know. And I thought, “It’s happening to me!” Because I felt God speak to my heart and say, “I’m going to teach you to reread the Bible through the eyes of a Jewish Jesus, a Jewish Moses, a Jewish Abraham.” And so I started that journey.When did this journey actually begin?We were at the Leonardo Hotel in Jerusalem, and my wife and I were sitting on the balcony looking at the Old City and watching fireworks going off for Independence Day, and I said, “Listen, I’ve got to tell you something. I really feel like God spoke to my heart, and we’re going to start a new journey.” So I began to study the words of the Bible, the teachings of the Bible, by going back to the original Hebrew – and in that process, I found out that there are a lot of things that we’ve been lied to about. God is not done with the Jewish people, we are not the new Israel, and actually there is a Scripture that everybody uses. In Genesis 12, it says, “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who curse you.” I think it says so much, and we don’t realize that yes, there’s a blessing if we bless Israel, but there’s a curse if we curse Israel. The second part is just as true as the first part of that prophecy. So I started realizing that sadly, so much of what the Jewish people have gone through in the last 2,000 years, they’ve gone through because of the teachings of the Church. I knew that it was my mission to reteach what the word of God says. We talk about tikkun olam, repairing the world. If anything has been broken, it’s the relationship between Christians and Jews.How exactly do you see your mission?I felt my mission was two-fold. One was to bring the Church back to the Bible. How can we understand what the Bible says if we’re not reading it through the eyes of a Jewish Abraham or a Jewish Moses or a Jewish David, and I realized there was so much we were missing. People come to me all the time and say, “Where do you get all this stuff?” And I say, “From the Torah, from the rabbis.”You know I tell people this story: If somebody reads 100 years from now that “Pastor Larry was seen riding all over Dallas on a 1,000-pound hog,”and they’re in Arkansas, they’re reading it as if I’m riding around on a 1,000-pound pig. But if they read it where I’m from – South St. Louis – a hog is a Harley Davidson motorcycle. So that’s the way I teach it to the Christian world. I say, you cannot understand what the Scriptures say if you don’t read them in Hebrew. Jesus didn’t speak Greek or Latin, and neither did Moses. They spoke Hebrew. There is such an amazing revelation in God’s word. Jesus wasn’t a blond-haired, blue-eyed Roman wearing a long white robe. He’s from the lineage of David and he was a rabbi. He was born Jewish, raised Jewish and lived Jewish.People often ask me, “Are you trying to convert the Jews?” And I say, “No, I’m trying to convert the Church. It’s a full-time job. Y’all are on your own.” That’s the No. 1 thing I’m trying to teach the Church.What’s the second thing?The second thing is that in studying the Bible in its original language and meaning, I realized that this replacement theology, which sees the Church as the new Jerusalem, is so wrong. It’s so damaging that whether it’s the pogroms or the Inquisitions or the Holocaust, the platform that all these horrible things had came from the Church, and if we’re not blessing Israel, are we not being cursed? And I think so, I think so. When we started doing this 25 years ago, I was called a heretic. Even my own family called and said, ‘Are you still a Christian?’ It’s become my No. 1 mission to bring the Christian world back to being in love with Israel, and back to being in love with the Jewish people.What about those who aren’t in love with Israel? We have witnessed a rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred around the world. What do you think can be done about that?You know Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel who survived the Holocaust? He writes in one of his books about forgiveness. He made an interesting statement from the Scriptures. He said you cannot be innocent by standing on the sidelines and doing nothing while innocent blood is being shed. You can’t say, “I’m not shedding the blood. I’m just not doing anything.” So that’s what I’m trying to do in rallying Christians all over the world, through our television programs, through our teachings and our books. I think we need a new faith-based BDS movement. No. 1, buy everything you can that comes from Israel. No. 2, defend Israel’s right to exist in every platform you can. And No. 3, stand up and speak up! We have a voice to reeducate the Christian world and the non-Christian on the demonic spirit of antisemitism. I’m writing a book right now, and one of the chapters is on defeating the spirit of Amalek. Amalek is not a race or a people; it can be anybody who hates the Jews. And the only way we can defeat that, in my case, is educating the world to what the Bible really says.Where did antisemitism in the Church come from?It goes back to Constantine, who said at the Council of Nicaea, “Bam, suddenly the whole world is Christian!” (At this moment in the interview, all the hotel lights go out, causing laughter among those watching). Most of the world, from England to Egypt, had never heard of Jesus, so one of the things they came up with was, “How do we get everybody to stop worship towards Jerusalem, and start worship towards Rome? Let’s come up with this line: ‘The Jews killed Jesus.’” You know that for 325 years, up until the Council of Nicaea, nothing was mentioned by the Church about the Jews killing Jesus. Constantine’s idea was to take the blame off the Romans and put it on the Jews. You know if you ask most Christians about Jesus being whipped, every one will say he received 39 stripes. But Jesus wasn’t whipped by the Jews; Jesus was whipped by the Romans. That’s why the Scriptures don’t say anything about the Jews killing Jesus. So it’s my mission to educate people about what the word of God really says about Israel and the Jewish people. We joke all the time that when the Messiah comes, we’ll ask him, “Have you been here before or is this your first trip to Israel?” But one thing we all agree on is that the Messiah’s coming to Israel, to Jerusalem, an undivided Jerusalem in the hands of the Jewish people. We’ve got to stand up, we’ve got to speak up and reeducate the world.Is your message getting across?Yes, it’s working. The world is changing. At first it was a slow process, and now it’s like a snowball that’s gaining momentum. I really believe that we’re in a window for the next five years, hopefully longer, that God is just going to accelerate the process. You see the miracle of Jews and gentiles coming together. I can go down to the Western Wall, and I can stand next to an Orthodox Jew with a fur hat, and he’ll put his arm around me, because we’re all praying to the same God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I believe that Christians need to be converted back to the roots that started with Abraham.Do you think we’re seeing a fulfillment of prophecy under the Trump administration?I absolutely do. I had the privilege a few months ago of being invited to the White House and to meet with Jason Greenblatt (who served as the president’s special adviser at the time). There were about eight or ten pastors there, and he comes in and says, “I just left the president’s office and he said, ‘We’re getting ready to write a peace plan, and we want to know what you all think.’” And so, one of the pastors, a great man of God and lover of Israel, gave all the Biblical reasons why we need a peace plan. And then Mr. Greenblatt looked at me and said, “Pastor Larry, what do you think?”And I said, “I agree that every decision we make is by God’s word. But can I approach it in a little bit of a different direction? I think we all agree that President Trump being elected is a miracle from God, not only for America, not only for Israel, but for the world. It’s a miracle! We need that miracle to happen again. So my suggestion was, and this is my opinion, I wouldn’t bring out a peace policy right now, because if you say anything that hints at a two-state solution or a divided Jerusalem and is not 100% on Israel’s side, the Evangelicals will not vote Democrat, but they will stay home. And if we lose the [2020] election, then it doesn’t matter what you put on paper, because whoever comes in is not going to be as pro-Israel as President Trump.”And so Jason Greenblatt said, “What do you suggest?” And I said, “Well, we’ve already done the Taylor Force Act, we’ve rewritten the settlement agreement, we’ve declared Jerusalem the capital and moved the embassy. My suggestion is that we give Israel sovereign rights over the Golan Heights. And that’s just the start. But Israel shouldn’t have to give up one inch of the Holy Land.”He’s sitting there, and his assistant comes up, and he says, “OK, that’s the president. I gotta go.” And he looks at me and says, “Not one inch?” And I said, “Not one inch. That’s my opinion. Israel should make its own decisions, but my opinion is that it shouldn’t have to give up one inch.”I said, “Look at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. That’s the Arab world. Down in the corner of the Dallas Cowboys stadium is a matchbook. That’s Israel. And the guys up in the top of the 90,000 seats say, ‘Give us half that matchbook, and then we’ll have peace.’ I said, “It’s never happened before, and why should they get half the matchbook? Not one inch.” So he says, “OK, I’ll go and tell the president.”I think we have to do everything we can possibly do to stand with the Jewish people and Israel, and not just the Jewish people in Israel, but the Jewish people around the world, to stand and be counted, and as Rabbi Lau said, not stand on the sidelines and say, ‘I don’t want to say anything. It might cost me something.’ I believe, and I’m praying to God, that President Trump will make the right decisions. This could be an Esther moment, a miracle of Purim. You know, when President Trump walks into the room, I feel it’s like, “Dad’s here!” I feel the same way when I see Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu walk into the room. I don’t know the other guys and they may be just as good, and it’s not my business to get involved in Israeli politics, but it just looks like a great combination right now: President Trump and America, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. It’s a special relationship and a special moment in history.How does it feel to be honored by the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus and Keren Hayesod for your great contribution to the State of Israel?It’s a strange feeling, because – and I mean this from the bottom of my heart – I’m the one who feels honored that God has allowed me and Tiz to play a very small part in the future and the destiny of the nation of Israel. I’ve never done any of this to wave my own flag. It’s very humbling, to be honest with you. To me, Israel’s a nation of heroes. For 2,000 years, the Jews had been praying, “Next year in Jerusalem.” In 1948 and in 1967, that happened. And since then, they have been a people who have dug their heels in and said, “We’re going to keep our land,” while at the same time blessing all the people around them. I say this jokingly, but it’s true: There’s one thing I have against Israel is that they’re terrible at PR, because nobody knows all the good that they do for the world, even for people who don’t like them. I feel very honored that the nation of Israel would honor me and my family and all of our partners, but in reality I feel honored that God would allow me a small part in standing with a nation of heroes who are taking care of the land until the Messiah comes.How do you contribute to Israel?There’s a Scripture in the Bible that says, “Where your treasure is, that’s where your heart will be.” So we do things, without mentioning amounts, like a children’s home down in Haifa for children who have no homes. It’s an amazing place called “Ahava” (Love). We have built them something like 18 bomb shelters. We have also done projects with the Bnai Zion Medical Center; we help Holocaust survivors in Jerusalem, Ma’aleh Adumim and Haifa, where we have a Holocaust survivors’ home. We do the Aliyah Project, giving over a million dollars a year to bringing immigrants to Israel, including from Ethiopia.We are doing a project planting something like 5,000 olive trees in Ma’ale Amos, where they are reclaiming the land and Argan trees in the Negev, where they are making the desert bloom. We have bought six ambulances for Magen David Adom, and they’re not just ambulances – they’re top-of-the-line ICUs that can turn into an emergency room. We were dedicating two of them at Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, and they were doing excavations there, and all these Jewish people are standing around and I see that they’re crying. And I say to Josh Reinstein (Director of the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus), “Why are they crying?” And Josh says, “Can you imagine how it’s felt that for 2,000 years you’ve been on your own, and now all of a sudden you realize that you have friends?” That was a life-changing statement.We have orphanages in Haiti, we feed 50,000 meals a month in Africa and all kinds of other things. There’s a Scripture that says, “Don’t worry where you’re going to live and what you’re going to eat, but look for a place to do an act of righteousness – tzedaka [charity].”On television, when we say “Help us do aliyah, help us build bomb shelters and help us feed these wonderful survivors of the Holocaust,” I have a secret strategy: When they put their treasure into doing something good, their hearts come with it. And all of a sudden it’s just not about finances. You know, the little amount that we give to Israel is a tiny part of a drop in the bucket. But what’s more important than the money is drawing people’s hearts back to the land of Israel and the Jewish people.
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