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Among the Jewish festivals, Sukkot has a remarkable universal dimension. Although Sukkot is one of the three pilgrimage festivals in which the Jewish people are commanded to appear before God in Jerusalem, the biblical and rabbinic traditions also connect the festival in a special way to the nations of the world. This connection can be seen most clearly in the sacrifices offered in the Temple during Sukkot and in the extraordinary prophecy of Zechariah describing a future in

Sukkot is commonly known as Z’man Simchateinu—Season Of Our Joy. This title was given by the sages of Israel based on Leviticus 23:40 and Deuteronomy 16:14-15, where God commands Israel to rejoice during the Feast of Tabernacles. “For seven days celebrate the festival to the LORD your God at the place the LORD will choose. For the LORD your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and you shall have nothing but joy.” Deut. 16:15 Happiness is o

The Hebrew word mikveh carries far more depth of meaning than a simple ritual bath. The word appears only twelve times across the whole of Scripture. Mikveh is translated as gathering together, pool, abiding, plenty, linen yarn, and hope. The very first time we meet this word is on the third day of creation, when “God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.”Before it meant a bath for purification, it meant the great gathering of

Imagine you are standing in the desert, the sand is blowing, and eleven other tribes are encamped around you in tents that stretch farther than you can see. Somewhere ahead, past the outer court of the Tabernacle, past the linen curtains, a holy room exists that no human being has entered all year except one man, and he is about to walk into it on your behalf. That is Yom Kippur. Leviticus 16 opens with the tragic account of the death of Aaron's own sons, Nadab and Abihu. Th

Turn By Zac Waller My heart aches with longing for you Lord To see Your beauty, to dwell in Your courts To be close to You, I know I must repent Create in me a clean heart and cleanse me from my sin Bring me down to my knees, where I can see That I am nothing, without you Chorus: Lord I turn to You, I turn to you From all my problems and with all my fears From all my failures, my sins and tears Lord I turn to you, I turn to you Lord I turn to you, I turn to you Verse 2: Lord

The biblical Feast of Trumpets/Rosh HaShana is fast approaching. It is customary to greet one another with hana tova u’metuka–-have a good and sweet year. “Sweet” is certainly not the word that comes to mind as we look back over the previous year. “Confusion,” “plague,” and “chaos” more accurately describe recent events. Is this where God wants us to be? How do we recover? Yes, I believe we are currently in a severe famine, but I also believe the Feast we are entering will

We are in the month of Elul, the last stretch of the Hebrew year before Rosh Hashanah, when God is crowned King over the whole earth. Elul is a season of cheshbon nefesh, an accounting of the soul, when the people of Israel turn their hearts back toward their Creator before the Days of Awe arrive. There is an old Jewish parable about this month that I think is especially fitting for this time in history. The rest of the year, the King sits in His palace, and if you want an au

The world’s oldest love story is more romantic than anything you will find in Hollywood or Hallmark. It is riddled with plot twists, villains, seduction, valor, betrayal, and unswerving faithfulness. God woos His beloved Israel, saying, “Yes, I have drawn you with an everlasting love, you are written on the palms of My hands, and I have betrothed you to Me forever.” There is an entire book of the Bible dedicated to depicting this divine love in human terms. The Song of Songs

As I stood on a hillside in Samaria, watching the clouds dance across the mountains and the sun begin to peep its head above the ridgeline, I thought about how faithful God’s covenantal lovingkindness is. These hills have swallowed empires. They have watched Babylon, Greece, Rome, and the Ottomans come and go. But through every single one of those empires, one thing never changed–God's eyes stayed fixed on this Land and People. “I am zealous for Zion with great zeal”–the Cre

When most Christians hear the phrase the kingdom of God, they rarely think of the land of Israel or the people of Israel. On its own, the word kingdom invokes a king and a castle in a mystical far-away land. When people hear the word kingdom and Bible in the same sentence, they tend to think of some ethereal and far-off realm where God dwells and rules on His throne. And it’s true–God does rule in heaven from His throne, ordering the universe. The kingdom of God is spiritual;

The significant uptick in recognizing Yeshua's Jewishness throughout Christendom in the twentieth century led many Christians to question the status quo of Christian-Jewish relationship. Their ponderings took the form of questions like: If I have given my heart to a Jewish messiah, should that have any bearing on my culture? If Yeshua will operate His coming kingdom-government out of Jerusalem and by the Torah, should that affect the way I live every day? What actually is th

It was Friday afternoon. The Sovereignty movement, led by Nadia Matar, was gathering a solidarity drive up to Chavat Gilad to comfort the bereaved family. It had been a very heavy week: devastating fire, and now bloodshed. The weight of it had been sitting on my chest. I did not have to think twice. I fixed our two big Israeli flags to broom poles and strapped them to the sides of the van, jumped in with my two oldest sons, and we drove ten minutes down the road to join the c

Living in Samaria can be intense. The land is beautiful and ancient beyond telling, but it hums with a low and steady vigilance, a watchfulness that settles into your shoulders on the drive home and does not easily let go. And yet there are a handful of places out here where all of that quietly drains away, where the guard comes down, and you can sit and breathe and simply be. For Becca and me, that place was a little restaurant perched on the western edge of Chavat Gilad, an

In a world filled with fast paced media, the ever-changing news, the unceasing clamor of podcasters, the new, interesting, yet unwatched flow of YouTube videos, the never-ending doom scrolling of TikTok, the latest and greatest roasts on X, the piles of unread emails, the ringing of alerts, chimes, alarms, reminders, reminders about reminders–in addition to everything else life throws at a person–it can be hard to see truth through the fog of it all. It used to be said that “

The house was quiet when I woke the children. My four older boys came down the stairs one by one, and my eldest daughter took her place with us as we loaded into the nine-passenger van in the early light. The roads to Jerusalem were nearly empty. No rush of traffic, no noise. It fit the day. It is Tisha B'Av, and we are fasting. None of us were hungry yet, but hunger was coming, and we knew it. No food, no water. A heaviness rode with us in the van, the kind of heaviness that

It was two years ago during the nine days of Av. I had the picture vision in my head and sketched it out. It was a rough sketch–more about getting emotions out than making a pretty picture–but somehow I knew it was a message from God. A truth He had been speaking to my heart. Just a month and a half earlier, I had experienced a late-term miscarriage. I was eighteen weeks along, to be exact. It landed me in the hospital hemorrhaging with dangerously low hemoglobin levels, but

Tisha B’Av (the 9th of Av) arrives like a long, low note of mourning held across the centuries. On this one day, both Temples fell. The fire that consumed the House of God still smolders in the memory of Israel, and every year His people fast, sit low to the ground, dim the lights, and read the Lamentations of Jeremiah, weeping for a Home they have never seen. We from the nations watch them mourn and quietly wonder how we are meant to relate to this day. For many of us, this

We like to pride ourselves on the fact that we live in a “modern era” in which “newest is truest,” and youth culture is celebrated more than age-old wisdom. Technology has amplified what is in the human heart for good and for evil. I am able to write this article thousands of miles away from Israel on a computer. However, the modern age is also a rootless age that prides itself on anonymity and self-image. People in the modern era cry out for the real, the authentic, and the

As I have traveled around the world sharing about the miracle of Israel's rebirth, I have encountered well-meaning Christians who claim that the modern State of Israel is secular, pagan, and against the will of God. They point to the fact that many of the founders of modern Israel were atheists, that the government is secular and not Torah-based, and that many Jewish Israelis returned to Israel because they felt they would have a better chance of security and success, not be

Prophecy can mean different things to different people. Some think of end times. Some think of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Some think of the Old Testament messages. But after my trip to Israel, I...