Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” — Luke 23:42-43
There’s a very beautiful worship song, “We Will Remember The Works of Your Hands” that always reminds us of our two trips to Israel in 2003 and 2009. I know that we all have memories that are blessings and I want to tell you about why these two trips were special to us—and richly connected even though six years apart.
In 2003 we went to the Holy land as tourists. We briefly stopped at different locations but one of them was Nazareth and the other site was the ruins of a first century Roman city called Sepphoris, just three miles away. It had been renamed Zippori National Park and once was the capital city of Galilee. It was an impressive site with some roads still in tact, a well defined water system and various walls and buildings.
In the first century, as we know from Scripture, Nazareth was a very small and inconsequential village (John 1:45-47). Sepphoris, on the other hand was a very large and cosmopolitan Roman city. Many speculate that workers came from Nazareth and other surrounding villages to work in that city. Some even believe that Jesus may very well have been part of the work force as a young man because of his carpentry skills. We don’t know for sure.
One of the most interesting thing to us, however, was that as we were leaving Sepphoris to drive back to Nazareth, we noticed a prominent dirt road that ran parallel to the main highway. When we inquired of our guide about it she said it was actually a walking trail that led over the hill to Nazareth just three miles away and it may have dated back to the first century. If so, Jesus could very well have walked that path.
In 2009 God gave us another incredible and wonderful opportunity to return to Israel—this time as teachers—to share God’s love to Jews, Muslims, nominal believers and Arab evangelical Christians at a Bible Conference in Nazareth. We were invited by Pastor Philip Saa’d, who I had been introduced to on the Internet, after he began to listen to my daily radio program at the time, “Nuggets of Truth.”
Now this next part is really exciting. Our hotel room in Nazareth was faced in the direction of Sepphoris and looking out our window, we could actually see that same dirt trail we had noticed six years earlier, only now we were viewing it from the other side or it’s southern terminus. It had just recently been called, “The Jesus Trail,” because it began in Nazareth and went all the way to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee (see map above).
Oh, how I wish we would have seen it sooner—we would have run down to the lobby, out the door and walked that road, all the way to Sepphoris—but we didn’t. Drats! So I have a request for any of you who have read this far. If you ever go to Israel and visit Nazareth, will you look for and walk that part of “The Jesus Trail” for us? I promise you it will still be there. We’ll root you on—either from here or in heaven! — Maranatha!
