God's Fishermen, Satan's Hunters (1 of 10) - God's Everlasting Covenants

Hello, friends. I'm Chad Wilcurvi, and this is Faithful Performance, where we explore the testimony of the biblical prophets and how they perfectly correlate with the current events of today. Thank you for joining us.

In this episode, we're going to begin our journey through my second book, *God's Fishermen, Satan's Hunters: The Unspoken Biblical Prophecy That Is Terrorizing the World*. We did an introduction to this video series in last week's episode, which you can find on my website or YouTube channel. This week we're going to start the book itself by laying the foundation of why Jeremiah wrote the prophecy in Jeremiah 16 — what I call the prophecy of the fishermen and the hunters.

We are living in a time when the prophecies written by the biblical prophets are coming to fruition before our eyes, and this prophecy in Jeremiah 16 is no different. But Jeremiah wrote it for a specific reason: the everlasting covenants. If you're not familiar with God's everlasting covenants, they are essential to understand — not only for grasping the prophecies concerning the end of the age, the Messiah's second coming, and his millennial reign, but also for our own theology. The path to Yeshua's salvation was a process of covenants that build and extend upon one another, and we're going to walk through all of them.

So we'll be looking at this material from two angles: first, as the foundation for Jeremiah's prophecy of the fishermen and the hunters, which is what this ten-part series is about; and second, for the sake of sound theology. I hope you'll join us for the full series. But before we get into the covenants, I want to read the prophecy itself, and then we'll lay the covenantal foundation and move forward from there.

Jeremiah 16:14–17 says: *"Therefore, behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, that it shall no more be said, 'The Lord lives, who brought up the children of Israel from the land of Egypt,' but, 'The Lord lives, who brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north and from all the lands where he had driven them.' For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall fish them. And afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my face, nor is their iniquity hidden from my eyes."*

The Lord is telling us here that there is going to be a greater exodus — one that draws the children of Israel back from the nations of the world — greater even than the exodus from Egypt. That is the plain meaning of his words: he will no longer be identified as the one who brought them out of Egypt, because a far greater deliverance is coming. We discussed this in last week's introduction and will go deeper into the statistics next week. What's critical to notice here is the sequence Jeremiah gives us: fishermen first, then hunters. The fishermen go out to draw the Jewish people home; afterward, the hunters arise to drive them back through persecution. And the reason all of this unfolds is the everlasting covenants — the eternal promises God Almighty has made to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. That is why Jeremiah wrote the prophecy.

Now, as we turn to the covenants themselves, I want to address something that is unfortunately widespread in the church today: what is called replacement theology. This is the teaching that the Western Gentile church has replaced Israel and inherited her promises. That doctrine comes from the pit of hell — it is demonic and satanic — because it requires God to be a liar. And as we know, God cannot lie. He is a truth-teller and a covenant-keeper. This is why sound theology on the covenants matters so deeply, and why it is a tragedy that these covenants are so rarely preached from our pulpits. Understanding them gives us right theology, enables us to stand with Israel and the Jewish people, and shows us clearly how the Gentiles are grafted into those promises. We'll cover that at the end.

We're going to go through the covenants in biblical order, tying them together both for the prophecy of the fishermen and the hunters and for our own theology. At the core, God's plan of salvation is what these covenants are. He has always had a plan of salvation for both Jew and Gentile — from the very beginning. There is no plan B. God did not change his mind. He has always had one plan for the redemption of all humanity, and it goes all the way back to Genesis 3:15.

In Genesis 3:14–15, after the fall in the Garden of Eden, the Lord God said to the serpent: *"Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."*

This is where God's plan of salvation begins. In the three judgments pronounced upon Adam, Eve, and the serpent, God declared that there would be a seed — a son — who would come to this earth and give his life for our salvation. He announced enmity between God's seed and Satan's seed, two lineages in perpetual conflict. That seed would carry forward through the covenants and manifest upon the earth as Jesus, Yeshua the Messiah. At the end of the age he will crush the serpent's head; and as we know, his heel was bruised at Passover when he died for our sins, as foretold in Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22.

The woman in Genesis 3:15 ultimately points to Israel — as confirmed in Revelation 12, where the woman is Israel — though of course it also applies to Eve literally. The point is that this seed, announced in the very opening chapters of Scripture, is the thread that runs through all the covenants we are about to examine. We will identify both seed lineages more fully as we go through the book, and it will all come into sharper focus.

The three covenants I'm referring to are the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the new covenant. They all work together, building and extending upon one another. The Abrahamic covenant is the foundation — the concrete foundation upon which the Davidic and new covenants rest. Together they form God's complete plan of salvation. We all know that Jesus, Yeshua, is the Messiah, the seed, the Son of God, the Son of the Most High — and we will confirm this at every stage as we move through the covenants.

God chose one man to bring salvation through: Abraham. Most of us know the story. In Strong's Concordance, number 85, the name Abraham means "a great father" or "father of a multitude." The seed of Genesis 3:15 flows forward into the Abrahamic covenant. And it is vital to understand that Abraham was to be a blessing not only to Israel but to the nations as well.

Genesis 12:2–3 records God's word to Abraham: *"I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."*

What an extraordinary blessing Abraham received from the Almighty. The great nation promised here is Israel. The warning that God will bless those who bless Abraham and curse those who curse him is precisely why it matters that we stand with Israel and the Jewish people and support them. And then the phrase "all families of the earth shall be blessed" is the Gentile inclusion written right into the foundation — every family, every nation. We will walk through the scriptures at the end of this series that confirm how Gentiles are grafted in and become part of the commonwealth of Israel. It all begins here in Genesis 12.

Finally, it is essential to understand the nature of the Abrahamic covenant itself. It is everlasting — and everlasting means everlasting. Even more importantly, it is unilateral, unconditional, and irrevocable. Unilateral means only God swore to do this; Abraham did not swear a reciprocal oath. Unconditional means it does not depend on Abraham's obedience — it depends solely on God's sovereign righteousness. And irrevocable means no one — no power, no theology, no nation — can undo it. God will fulfill his Abrahamic covenant. It is eternal, and it has not yet been completed.