Why do we observe God’s feasts? The first answer most of us give is the obvious one: God instructs us to. Leviticus 23, the calendar, the appointed times. That’s true. But there is a deeper answer in the same passage of Proverbs that begins “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”: …knowledge…
Builds on A Lesson From The Days of Unleavened Bread — what leaven stands for. Mix flour and water into a stiff lump, add nothing else — no yeast, no starter — cover it, and set it on the counter. For a day it does almost nothing. By the second day it has swelled, shot through with…
The common Bible canon has 66 books and 783,137 words in the King James Version. That is a lot of territory. But there is a thread running through all of it, and when you find it, the complexity begins to resolve. That thread is Jesus Christ. The Role of Scripture The writer of Hebrews opens…
Continues from: Was the Passover a Sin Offering? — in Ancient Israel. This asks the same question of the cross that the companion post asked of Egypt. We come to the cross already certain what it’s about: our sin. “Christ died for our sins” sits so deep in us that we read it onto everything the…
Continues from: Review of Some APPARENT Inconsistencies of The Cross We left off holding a conundrum. The feast sequence places Atonement after Pentecost, still ahead of us — yet the cross is saturated with Atonement fulfillments. Both true, and flatly contradictory if we read the timeline as a single line. The trouble is the single line….
The feasts land in sequence, at their appointed times. The pattern holds — Passover, Unleavened Bread, the counting of weeks, Pentecost, each fulfilled when the calendar said it would be. That sequence has always placed Atonement’s fulfillment in the future: after Pentecost, after Christ’s return, still ahead of us. Passover Unleavened Bread Wave Sheaf Feast of…
Continues from: A Lesson From The Days of Unleavened Bread — that post clears away “leaven = sin”; this one clears away something larger. Read the institution of the Passover in Exodus 12 and notice what the lamb is never called. It is the Passover. It is not a sin offering. Not there, not later, not…
For as long as most of us were taught anything about the Days of Unleavened Bread, we were taught one thing: leaven is sin, and the feast is about putting sin out of your life. Clean the leaven from the house, clean the sin from the life. It seemed obvious. Jesus warned about the “leaven…
We never come to the feasts of Leviticus 23 with no lens at all. We always read them through something — and mostly we don’t notice we’re doing it. So before any single feast, it’s worth asking the question underneath all the others: through what lens are we looking? For most of us, the lens…
This follows from A Missing Lesson of The Sabbath — that post shows where the week comes from; this one follows the same cycle outward. We keep time with a grid. A calendar hangs on the wall, days in rows of seven, and we read it without thinking: the week runs its course, the seventh day comes,…