Sermon Archives (August 25, 2000):

God’s Holy Day Plan

  For those who are new to God’s Holy Days, the seven High Sabbaths of God encapsulize God’s plan of salvation, as a foretaste of God’s coming Kingdom.  Some argue by way of Paul, that Christians are not to keep God’s Holy Days.  By example however, Paul kept them.  Concerning Pentecost, Luke writes Paul told the Ephesians (Acts 20:16) “I must by all means keep this coming feast in Jerusalem.”  It is written of Paul (Acts 20:6) that he “remained at Philippi to celebrate it and the week-long Feast of Unleavened Bread.”  Paul writes (1 Corinthians 11:1-2 NKJV)  “Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ” and to “keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you.”

1.       PASSOVER:  In the Passover (Leviticus 23:4-5), each Israelite family (Exodus 12:3) was to select a male lamb, kill it, and paint the blood upon the entrance to their home.  The blood was to preserve the life of the firstborn or first fruits that the death angel would (Exodus 12:13) “pass over” their home.  Paul writes (1 Corinthians 5:7) “Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.”   Christ extended the Passover to the Gentile when he changed the symbols of Passover to his blood and body and said, (Luke 22:19 NIV) “Do this in remembrance of me."   Paul writes,  (Hebrews 9:11-12 NIV)  “When Christ came as high priest of the good things … not enter by means of the blood of (lambs); but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.” over death, hell, and the grave.   (Isaiah 53:5, 1Peter 2:24)  “By His stripes we are healed.”  His broken body under the Roman lash affords healing.  (Hebrews 10:10)  “And by that (God’s) will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once (and) for all.”

2.        FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD: This week following Passover is defined in our Bibles as the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Leviticus 23:6-8).   For a week, the Bible teaches abstinence from eating Bread that has yeast in it.  Why?   Because yeast puffs you up.   In a spiritual sense this is conceit and sin.  Egypt was portrayed as leaven, so as the children followed Moses, symbolically they were coming out of sin.   In the Christian life, Christ said, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.”  (Matthew 16:6)  There are Pharisees and Sadducees throughout Christianity today even in our own lives.   By abstaining from leavened bread this week, Christ as the God of the Old Testament instructs today’s Christian by example to come out of legalism, hypocrisy, and self-righteousness, which otherwise kills the Spirit of God within us.

3.        PENTECOST:  Fifty weeks later in the scared calendar came the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost (Leviticus 23:15-22).   On this day, God revealed His law to the Children in the wilderness.  The priest would come into the temple waving the wave-sheaf offering before God, representing the first fruits of the Spring harvest; God’s guarantee of an even greater harvest yet future in the Fall.   Today Jesus Christ is for the Christian the “firstborn over all creation”  (1 Corinthians 15:20), the “firstborn from the dead” (Colossians 1:15,18).   But to the Church, Pentecost also speaks of “the firstborn of many brethren.” (1Corinthians 15:20), the birth of the Church within the book of Acts, and your new birth as a Christian today.

4.        TRUMPETS: This High Sabbath was “a sacred assembly commemorated with trumpet blasts”  (Leviticus 23:24 NIV) The “shofar”[1] sound served as both a warning and an announcement.   “When you go to war in your land against the enemy who oppressed you, then you shall sound an alarm with trumpets.” (Numbers 10:9)   Many Biblical historians trace Christ’s births in the Fall as actually occurring on this high Sabbath of Trumpets.  As both a warning and as an announcement, God’s word proclaims to the Christian the prophecy of Christ’s return today, “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God.  And the dead in Christ will rise first.”  (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17)

5.        ATONEMENT:  Atonement (Leviticus 23:26-32) involves a fast to humbly draw us closer to God, Christ as our intermediator and covering before the Father, and the removing of Satan as the true author of all sin.  On Atonement, the priest brought two goats to the altar as a sin offering.  (Leviticus 16:6)  By lot, one goat was slain.   His blood was taken before the mercy seat, as Christ blood covers our sins today.   The second goat is called in the English a scapegoat, but this is a poor translation suggesting undeserved blame.  The Hebrew word was “Azazel”, inferring a wilderness demon.  The second goat thus represented Satan.  The high priest, Christ today, placed the wickedness and rebellion of the people upon it, and drove the second goat into the wilderness abyss.  Revelation describes this future event:  “Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.  He laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years; and he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal on him, so that he should deceive the nations no more.” (Revelation 20:1-3)   The early Church kept the Day of Atonement.   Luke wrote some 30 years after Christ’s death that “sailing was now dangerous because the Fast (representing the Day of Atonement) was already over.”  (Acts 27:9)

6.       TABERNACLES:  Protestants would best understand the Feast of Tabernacles (Leviticus 23:33-36) or the Feast of Ingathering (Exodus 23:16) as a type of religious convention or camp meeting. In this seven-day Fall feast, Israel would leave their homes for temporary dwelling places, or “succah”, a thatched tent or hut.   Today, most would opt for the opulence of a fine hotel in distant cities.  This Fall feast was to emphasize our release from Satan’s slavery (Leviticus 23:34, 41-43) ,  and how temporary our human form is as dwelling place here on Earth when compared to our heavenly form in life eternal with God.   (2 Corinthians 5:1 ASV)  “For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.  (2 Corinthians 5:2 TLB)  How weary we grow of our present bodies. That is why we look forward eagerly to the day when we shall have heavenly bodies that we shall put on like new clothes.”   The Feast of Tabernacles represents the coming 1000-year Millennium reign of Jesus Christ, the great harvest of humanity, where Christ brings “many sons to glory”.  (Hebrews 2:10)   For remaining humanity, the Feast of Tabernacles then foretells of a spiritual change to take place within the people of God:  (Ezekiel 36:26-27 NKJV)  “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.“

7.        THE LAST GREAT DAY:   This last Annual Sabbath (Leveiticus 23:36) is always the next day following the Feast of Tabernacles, mirroring how the Great White Throne Judgment will immediately follow the Millennium. The Bible clearly states, (Revelation 20:11-13 NIV) “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. Earth and sky fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hell gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done.”

One must wonder what will God do with his own Jewish people who died never accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, or for that matter what will God do with the billions who lived and died without ever hearing of the name of Jesus Christ.  What of all the children who have been lost to abortions?  Are these souls to be without any hope, doomed to the Lake of Fire?   Were all these souls doomed, could this God of love indeed be really a monster?   

Looking at our English Bibles we see these words,  (2 Corinthians 6:2 NIV)  “I tell you, now is the time of God's favor, now is the day of salvation.”  If there is but one day, that is during one’s human life-time, then one must conclude that all these souls are lost.   However, were we to go to the original Greek, we find that the Greek word Paul was inspired to use twice in this verse was “hm'era”, which means “a day” and not “the day”.   “The day” could only mean a singular day of salvation, but even a legalist would have to admit that the Greek “hm'era” meaning “a day” leaves room for the possibility of other days of salvation rather than the single day during the human lifetime.

Could Jesus Christ then even save souls on the day of judgment?  “On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water." But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”   (John 7:37-39)   Jesus had been in Jerusalem attending the Feast of Tabernacles.   On the last day, the eighth day of the feast, on the day representing a shadow of the Great White Throne Judgment yet to come, Jesus stood up on this high holy day and cried,  “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.”   Unlike the rich man in Hell seeing Lazarus afar off (Luke 16:22-25) who was denied even a finger touch of water upon his tongue by Abraham, had he come to Jesus would he then have received as Jesus promised “drink … of living water”?   (Matthew 19:26 NIV)  “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”  Jesus saves!