God's Fishermen, Satan's Hunters (5 of 10) - The Mystery of Aliyah

Hello, friends. I'm Chadwick Harvey, 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 are continuing our book series — episode five of ten — and we will be discussing the mystery of Aliyah, or the return of the Jewish people to the promised land, which fits perfectly with everything we have covered in our previous four videos.

For those who are joining us for the first time, here is a summary of what we have learned. In the first episode we began with God's everlasting covenants: the Abrahamic, the Davidic, and the New Covenant. These build and extend upon one another. The Abrahamic covenant establishes a seed that will reign over the promised land. The Davidic covenant reveals that same seed — as we see in Matthew 1, the seed of Abraham, the seed of David — which is Jesus, Yeshua, who will rule over the promised land on David's everlasting throne. The New Covenant then promises that when the Jewish people say "Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord," He will be their God and they will be His people, as described in Ezekiel 36 and Jeremiah 31. All of this culminates in His second coming and the millennial kingdom, which will bring the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants to complete fulfillment. Understanding how these covenants build upon one another is foundational to everything that follows.

In the second episode we examined the prophecy itself — the prophecy of the fishermen and the hunters. In it, Jeremiah declares that there will be a greater exodus of the Jewish people from the nations of the world back to the promised land than there was from Egypt. He then tells us how God will accomplish this: first through fishermen, who will fish the people back, and afterward through hunters, who will be released to provoke their return because of the everlasting covenants. In the third episode we identified God's original fishermen: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and ultimately Yeshua, the fulfillment of the New Covenant. In last week's episode we identified the original hunters — those who came against God's fishermen — which gives us a prophetic framework for understanding the regions that will come against the Jewish people at the end of the age, including the final hunter, the Antichrist.

All of this brings us to the mystery of Aliyah. We are connecting the ancient covenants and Jeremiah's prophecy to the present, tracing the thread from biblical history through 1948 and 1967 and forward through the time of Jacob's trouble, all the way to the ultimate fisherman — Jesus — returning for His second coming and reigning throughout the millennial kingdom. It is vital to keep in mind what all of this is for: the return of the Messiah to fulfill the promises of the Father to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and their descendants. Gentiles, too, are part of this story — grafted into the commonwealth of Israel. As we have seen, if you are the seed of Christ, you are a seed of Abraham and an heir according to the promise of the Abrahamic covenant, and we are all partakers of the New Covenant through the blood of Christ.

The word Aliyah itself simply means ascension — a going up back to the promised land. Jerusalem is the city on the hill, so returning there is both a spiritual and a geographical ascent. This is why it is called Aliyah in Hebrew. Interestingly, in the Hebrew ordering of the Old Testament, the final book is Second Chronicles, and the very last word of Second Chronicles 36:23 is a verb derived from the same root as Aliyah — meaning "let him go up to Jerusalem." The last word of the Hebrew Bible is a call to ascend toward Jerusalem, toward the coming King who will reign on David's everlasting throne.

Aliyah as a historical phenomenon truly began in 586 BC, when the first temple was destroyed and the people were exiled. They subsequently made an Aliyah back to the promised land. Then in AD 70 they were exiled again, and it is from that second exile that we are now watching the modern return unfold — driven, as we shall see, by both the fishermen and the hunters.

Critically, both temples were destroyed on the same date on the biblical calendar: the Ninth of Av. The Ninth of Av is the day on which the ten spies brought back the evil report when Israel was on the verge of entering the promised land. Joshua and Caleb alone brought back a good report, and that day of faithlessness became a cursed day on the biblical calendar. That is why understanding God's calendar matters: it reveals these recurring cycles. The destruction of both temples on the very same date is not coincidence — it is pattern. Yet in Zechariah 8, God promises that this day, along with the fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth months, will be turned into feast days when the Messiah returns. If we are going to celebrate those feast days in the millennial kingdom, we ought to understand what they mean now, before the Messiah transforms them from days of mourning into days of joy.

So the timeline stands: 586 BC, exile; Aliyah back; AD 70, exile; and now, in our own generation, the return is underway. This is a clear marker for the end of the age, consistent with a wide range of biblical prophecies, and it is where this mystery of Aliyah meets the fishermen and hunters prophecy.

To understand all of this properly, we must grasp three things the Lord considers supremely important: the feast days of Leviticus 23, which are His divine appointments; the everlasting covenants; and His celestial calendar. When these three things are understood together, biblical prophecy opens up in remarkable ways. God is operating on His own calendar. He is not returning on the Fourth of July or on New Year's Eve — He is returning on the Feast of Trumpets. If you do not know when the Feast of Trumpets falls, you cannot understand the season of His return. That is just one example of why His calendar is so essential.

The foundation for all of this is Genesis 1:14: "Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years.'" God declares the end from the beginning — as He tells us in Isaiah 46:9–10 — and He established His celestial bodies to serve that very purpose. In the Hebrew, the word translated "signs" is *oth*, meaning signals, warnings, and omens of things to come. The word translated "seasons" is *moed*, meaning a divine appointment, an appointed time, a fixed time. So what God is telling us from the very opening pages of Scripture is that the sun and the moon — the basis of the Hebrew calendar — are instruments of divine communication. They signal warnings, they mark appointed times, and they point toward what is to come. We do not worship these celestial bodies; that would be witchcraft and paganism. Rather, we honor what God is showing us through them, because as we shall see, He has called them His faithful witnesses.