How to Live

by Jeff Treder


“We live by faith, not by sight.” (2Cor.5:7)  This is the NIV version of one of the most succinct and profound statements in the Bible—one bare-bones clause modified by two bare-bones phrases.  As it is both succinct and profound, we need to examine and unpack it pretty thoroughly in order to gain a good understanding of it.

The “we,” in context, is a distinct group of people. This second of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians is addressed “to the church of God in Corinth, together with all the saints throughout Achaia.” (1:1)  His first letter to them spelled it out more fully: “To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours.” (1Cor.1:2)  So the statement in 2Cor.5:7 is addressed to Christian believers, people who have committed themselves to following Jesus and trusted in him for their salvation.

The predicate “live” is, more literally from the Greek, “walk.”  But Paul here is clearly using “walk” in its most general sense:  how we organize, plan and conduct our life in this world.  If the Greek peripateo is translated “live,” then we should understand it to mean, in this case, not simply “to be alive” but, again, to organize, plan and conduct our life in this world.

The two modifiers, “by faith” and “by sight,” are contrasted and opposed to each other.  Their meaning in this sentence depends on what Paul wrote a few sentences before: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2Cor.4:16-18)

These sentences establish a supremely important duality, which Paul expresses in three interconnected pairings: outward vs. inward, seen vs. unseen, and temporal vs. eternal. Arranging them differently, we have what is outward, seen and temporal contrasted with what is inward, unseen and eternal.  At this point we may add in the closely related pairings which Paul develops in 1Cor.15:35-49, where the contrast is natural vs. spiritual and earthly vs. heavenly.  With this many terms to juggle, it may help to list them in a chart:

Outward . . . . . . Inward
Seen . . . . . . . . . Unseen
Temporal . . . . . Eternal
Natural  . . . . . .  Spiritual
Earthly  . . . . . .  Heavenly

Our first birth is our natural birth, which is birth into an earthly, temporal and outwardly seen life.  All human beings share this natural life.  But Jesus said that unless we are “born again” (which may also be translated “born from above”), we can neither see nor enter the kingdom of God (John 3:3-8).  Our regeneration—new or spiritual birth—involves both God’s actions and our own.  God chooses and calls us to salvation (see, for instance, Rom.8:28-39, 9:6-24, 1Cor.1:20-31, Eph.1:3-14), and we receive this salvation by believing the gospel message, trusting in Jesus’ sacrificial death on our behalf, and receiving him as our Lord and Savior (see, for instance, John 1:12-13, 3:16, Acts 16:29-34, Rom.10:8-10).

Our spiritual birth in Christ follows the analogy of our natural birth in that both are followed by a process of gradual growth and development.  We are “born again” as a spiritual infant, but this infant lives in the same old, natural body, including the same old brain and nervous system, with all the same old memories, desires, opinions, passions and prejudices (and even teenage converts have established habits, thought patterns, passions and prejudices).  This “old man” (Rom.6:6, Eph.4:22)—or as the NIV renders it, “old self”—is riddled and addled with sin, suffused with sin.  At this point, however, the teaching of the New Testament presents us with a conceptual difficulty.  On the one hand, our old self is said to have been crucified with Christ and done away with (Rom.6:6, 2Cor.5:17, Gal.2:20), while on the other hand we are exhorted to keep on “putting off” or discarding our old self and all its corruption (Eph.4:22-24, Col.3:5-10).  How can our old self be dead and gone and also be something we have to wrestle off like a sort of poisoned shirt?

To answer this, we need to understand that the term “old man” or “old self” can, in different contexts, refer to two quite distinct things.  My old self which is dead and gone forever is my independent self, the life I lived independent of God before my conversion.  Now that, by the grace of God and through faith in Christ (Eph.2:8), I am alive in Christ, my life—my new self—is completely dependent on him.  (My old, merely natural life was also completely dependent on him, but I didn’t realize or acknowledge it; I thought of myself as independent and gloried in it.)  Now I no longer have any life that is independent of Christ.  He has become my life (Col.3:1-4), and I have become a participant in the great truth that there is no genuine or complete life apart from him.  When I sin—that is, when in thought or action I disobey him—I am simply behaving as though I still had an independent life of my own.  I am being untrue to my truest self.

The “old man” or “old self,” however, can also refer to all the sinful remnants still very much present in my physical body.  This is the old self which Paul also calls “the flesh” in Romans 7 and 8 as well as in other passages.  The NIV translates this less literally and more interpretively as “the sinful nature.”  The literal term “flesh” emphasizes that the moral struggle we undergo as believers is located in our body—our mind, emotions, and physical parts—a struggle which Paul expresses most dramatically in Romans 7:7-25.  The translation “sinful nature” brings out that our body is not sinful in itself, it is simply the vehicle for our old self in the sense of all those old memories, desires, opinions, passions and prejudices—the old self which we are exhorted to “put off.” It’s important to understand in particular that our mind, our conscious thinking process, depends physically on our brain, and our brain needs to be converted as much as any other part of our body.  Indeed, our brain is the most critical battleground in the struggle between the spirit and the flesh, as Paul indicated when he told us, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Rom.12:2)

This struggle between “the flesh” and “the spirit”—or “the mind controlled by the Spirit” (Rom.8:6)—begins when we are born again as a spiritual infant.  Being born spiritually in the same old body means that we have to grow up spiritually in a rough neighborhood.  Just as natural children need good caregivers, so do spiritual children.  We need good spiritual caregivers who will befriend us, pray with us, help us to understand and follow the Scriptures, and lead us into spiritual maturity.  More generally, we need the fellowship of other believers in worship, conversation, and serving together (see 1Cor.12 and 1John 1:3-7).  It is essential to realize that my “new self” is the real me.  The remnants of my old self—bad habits, wrong ideas, sinful passions—are false and outdated versions of who I really am in Christ.  As Paul put it, when he sinned, “it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.” (Rom.7:17)  We are, of course, still responsible when we sin, and we need to confess it and repent of it (1John 1:8-10).  But the sins of our “flesh” are false to our real self and opposed to it, and therefore we need to subdue our sinful flesh and, as it were, colonize it and ultimately convert it into a mind and body gladly obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ.

We can win this struggle—indeed, the New Testament constantly exhorts and urges us to get on with it.  Our spiritual growth in Christ is a process; growth is always a process.  It is enabled and empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, in fulfillment of the promises that God gave through the prophets:  “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” (Ezek.36:26-27)  The indwelling Holy Spirit gives us the desire and motivation and power to obey God, and our responsibility is to actually do it.  Paul scolded the Corinthians for their sluggish spiritual growth:  “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men?” (1Cor.3:1-3; see also Heb.5:11-6:3)

Writing to the Philippians, Paul gave precise expression to God’s role and our role in the process of spiritual growth:  “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” (Php.2:12-13)  God works in us and we work out our salvation; both of these actions happen simultaneously every time I obey God.  If even Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered” (Heb.5:8) during his earthly life, all the more will learning obedience involve, for us, strenuous effort and suffering.  “For this very reason,” Peter wrote, “make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love.  For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (2Peter 1:5-8)  Our struggle to overcome and “colonize” our sinful flesh (mind, emotions, physical passions) brings us into and through the same kinds of suffering that Jesus endured during his temptation in the wilderness; but as Paul said, “Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Rom.5:3-5)

This process of spiritual growth—this struggle, this effort, this suffering—takes time. It takes a lifetime, but it’s a lifetime that gets better and better, and it’s the starting point of our eternal life with Jesus.  “We rejoice”!

It may seem that all this has taken us far away from the simple statement, “We live by faith, not by sight,” but it’s all part of the package.  To recap, the “we” are born-again believers, and how we “live” is how we organize, plan and conduct our life in this world.  “By faith” means by trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we are in a covenant relationship with the triune God.  Jesus is the living Word, the fullest revelation to us of who God is; and the Bible is his written word, giving us information and directions on how to live.  Through God’s self-revelation and our faith, we become aware of that spiritual world which is (recalling the chart of dualities) inward, unseen, eternal, and heavenly.  The problem is that our “flesh”—consisting of all those natural capacities that are still with us as we grow in Christ—evaluates things according to what is outward, seen, temporal, and earthly. To our fleshly, worldly, natural mind—the as yet unconverted parts of our mind—only those things that can be apprehended by our physical senses and comprehended by our natural intelligence can be regarded as having real, solid, certain existence.  The whole spiritual realm—God, heaven, sin, salvation—seems to our natural mind to be a vast work of human imagination, generated from time immemorial by psychological fears and hopes.  As Paul stated of the natural, unconverted man, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1Cor.2:14)  Insofar as we who are in Christ still process our life experience through this fleshly, worldly grid, we will be confused and conflicted.  As the apostle James put it, we will be “double-minded”: “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.” (James 1:5-8)  Our natural intelligence is fine for things like making a lasagne or changing a tire, but if we try to figure out the meaning and purpose of our life on that basis, we will get it wrong every time.  The Bible warned us about this a long time ago:  “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” (Prov.3:5-6)  Making our paths straight has to do with how we understand the big picture, and the choices we need to make to align ourselves with God’s purpose for our life.

All of this stands behind the statement that “we live by faith, not by sight.”  To the extent that we organize, plan and conduct our life according to our natural capacities alone—“by sight”—we are missing out on the main source of information and direction for our real life.  Note carefully:  the created world, the natural universe, is fully real, but it is not the primary reality.  It is finite and temporal, limited in many ways and temporary in duration.  It will eventually be destroyed and be replaced by an entire new creation (see 2Peter 3:10-13, Rev.21:1). When we are born again in Christ, our reborn spirit, residing still in our mortal “tent” (see 2Cor.5:1-5), becomes part of that new creation ahead of time, so to speak.  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2Cor.5:17)  That is to say, the old, independent self has gone; the new me has come, but has been born into the same old body.  The new me is the real me, and I (real me) am attuned to the primary reality, which is the kingdom of God.  As Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36)  No, it’s not of this world, it’s far greater than this world, incomparably greater.  This world is seen outwardly by our natural senses; Christ’s kingdom is perceived and known inwardly, in our spiritual heart, through the indwelling Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ.  This world is passing away (1Cor.7:29-31, 1John 2:17), but the kingdom of God cannot be shaken and will last forever.  In our present state, heaven is unseen, but it is more real than what can be seen because it is eternal.  God himself is the higher, greater, everlasting reality, immeasurably greater than this world which he has created and which he will destroy.  Therefore to live by faith—to organize, plan and conduct our life by trusting in Christ and obeying his word—makes good sense.  It’s much, much better to be in touch with reality than to be out of touch.  Especially when that reality is Jesus Christ.

Winteredge

                                            
This is a poem I wrote a few years after my conversion to Christ in 1966.  The poem is about that conversion as seen from the inside.  I've tinkered with it over the years--minor revisions--but it's still essentially the same.




           WINTEREDGE

“Midwinter spring is its own season . . . .”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


I

No light here
nor vision of silent stars
where wrestle a soul in sludgetrough twisting
ankle through neckbone, forcing a snicker to hide
horror with smart
graffiti on gravestones,
hide in thick loneness cancer crawl from

empty, empty, nothing
swallow and lie deadly,
swallow dread in chaos and dead night.
Endless pointless interstellar void,
no hand, no help,
no go no end no way
bewilder benight be nigh be something

I it is I here
hear me here—aye, eye
see my shuddery self-embracing self-
effacing soil-searching self-entangled
solitude.
Blotchy fevered exiles
need sickbed, water, sleep:  need nurse.


II

I know, my soul, little
of you, see not deep
among your ways and turnings, nor can mind hope,
blundering through wilderness, to grip what, why—
numb ganglion—
yet do I know, my soul,
untethered howling fierce afraid, us.

Galactic billions, eons
whirling, measureless torrent
fixed to still tableaux in the eye that sees
lensed cosmology.  Frantic atomic nebular
being of me:
telescoping inscape
now to one still point beyond all roil, fix.

Fix:  eye, ear, mind
close into one, one sound,
one unformulated, unanalyzed, unasked thought,
one sun seen center to center, now and ever.
Vanishing world,
wheatstalk souls into focus
cry articulate anguish, louder, looking, lone—

poor naked wretches
pitied in the storm, still
and always year by minute not in mouthless
statistical want, but sole, particular, mother-named
soul athirst
for a sip of life,
starve in ribbed famine, starve in rice.

      And I starve, eating
      honey fuels but not feeds
my choice, my harm, my blame, shame, game
lost and life, broken, cannot mend, cannot—
I must pay
and cannot mend,
pay out, pay all, how, who pray, who.

Lonely in throngs,
weary in slack, sick
in surfeit, writhing weeping restless reaching—
each me hanging always on the cross of myself.
Need is known,
longing carved on lips:
you who hung and bled and lost and won, help.


III

Beauty in small things
all lovely in being.
Eyes have wept yet can see, surprised
fingers can touch, ears hear breath come,
housefly whir
water faucet gargle
couch springs, door slam, diesel engine, jay

squawk, aerial carillon,
morning chord and rejoice
in ruddy faces, cataract shouting and chorus
of pines sway held firm in airy arms humming
lullaby—listen:
moon-drawn tempest spume
to tumbling cloud and leaf, all sing:  praise him.

Beauty in all things,
joy of this and that,
fountain of bloodbouncing coasterride youth.
Center here, soul’s heart’s center, home—
infinite
red blood love
held in the center, the core, holds me:  his love.

Still doubt nibbles
margins of a mending heart,
whisper insinuates it’s just a fairy tale
after all.  To the word and to the testimony!
Bulwark ever
      trust (sole bedrock rest)
in Christ our hope and his astounding peace.

Father who sees
     my disease, knows my secrecies,
hears my babble, brag and whimper:  take
my heart, a cracked and blistered wayward seed.
Plant me now
to grow and to belong.
Night and night’s cold silence yield to dawn.

Why Must There Be Sacrifice?

by Jeff Treder

Many Christians, and just about all thinking Christians, have wondered why Jesus had to be crucified.  Why does the Bible say that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Heb.9:22)?  Shouldn’t it be possible for God to forgive repentant sinners without bloodshed?  If not, why not?  How can blood be a cleansing or purifying agent (as in 1John 1:7)?  Why, in fact, is the Bible so bloodsoaked?  These questions, which may puzzle Christians, are often cited by non-Christians as a reason for rejecting faith in Christ.

This issue, I think, needs to be approached from two directions, in order to find out where, if anywhere, they meet.  The starting points are forgiveness and self-sacrifice.

Forgiveness

To begin understanding forgiveness, we must note that it is a transaction between persons.  Trees don’t forgive lightning bolts, and cats don’t forgive dogs.  This might seem too obvious to mention, but it isn’t, because it raises an essential point:  forgiveness is a transaction between persons.  A person is a self-aware being with the ability to reason, and reasoning includes the ability to make choices and to act on them, thereby affecting the course of events in the natural world.  Persons, that is, have “free will,” and their will is not only free but is causative. If you deny this by asserting a rigorous determinism—philosophical, naturalistic, or religious—then you are denying that there are, in any meaningful sense, persons (except possibly God).  If you believe that human beings have free will as just defined, however—if you believe, for instance, that it meant something when your spouse agreed to marry you—then you believe there can be meaningful transactions between people, as persons.  Forgiveness is one such transaction.

Forgiveness presupposes an offense to be forgiven.  Experience teaches us that a person can take offense when little or nothing in the way of offense has actually been given.  Nevertheless, people really can offend one another, and the reason they can is that, as well as cognitive beings, we are moral beings; and the reason we are moral beings is that we were created “in the image of God.” (Gen.1:27)  If human beings were merely a result of purposeless natural evolution, our moral concepts and convictions would be as illusory as the fundamental illusion that we are persons at all.

God is a moral being, and so are we, having been made in his image.  But what does it mean to be “moral”?  To some it suggests being obsessed with behavioral rules, for myself and, especially, for others. Or being pharisaically self-righteous and hypocritical.  Or being joylessly prudish about sensuality in general and sex in particular.  Or all of the above. These ideas, however, misrepresent what morality really is; and the misunderstanding can be shared equally by the prude and the playboy.

To be “moral” is simply (and profoundly) to be in relationship with another person or other persons.  The canons of morality measure the quality of the relationship, either at a given moment or as measured over time. God is a moral being precisely because he exists eternally in three Persons. The relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is revealed in Scripture to be perfect in such moral categories as love, grace, goodness, loyalty, generosity, justice, and mercy.  This revealed perfection is not just a matter of a divine “because I say so,” but it is revealed in God’s actions toward fallen humanity, culminating in the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

God’s motive in creating Adam and Eve in his own image, clearly, was to extend the sphere of loving, joyous moral relationships.  Being omniscient, knowing the end from the beginning (Isa.46:10, Rev.22:13), God knew from the outset how this project would play out, and he decided that the ultimate gain would be worth all the cost.  He knew that Adam and Eve would fall into sin.  But “fall into sin,” or just “the Fall” and “sin,” have become Christian buzzwords with only a vague meaning for most Christians and no meaning for most non-Christians. Nevertheless, our progenitors’ fall into sin has tremendous relevance to all of us, because it started our whole tormented history of moral offenses.  Sin may be an obscure term, but it’s a devastating reality.

Our experience of moral offenses centers around our own personal relationships.  It’s safe to say that you weren’t very old when you first felt offended, or when the objection “It’s not fair!” first blurted from your angry little mouth.  As we mature, we give and receive all sorts of offenses:  insults, snubs, ridicule, gossip, slander, betrayal, belligerence, and so forth.  As our relationships spread into human society, these offenses expand into ethnic and racial conflict, oppression of the weak by the strong, slavery, warfare, sexual abuse, child abuse, and many other forms of personal, moral abuse.  Offenses abound.

The trouble with all these offenses is not that they break some rule but that they tear the moral fabric of our interpersonal relationships.  They break the bonds of love and trust.  They divide us one from another.  Most of us find this condition of social brokenness and hostility so distressing that we search for remedies.  This search has been going on as long as there have been offenses, and in all that time only one remedy has been found that really works:  forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness is associated more closely with Jesus Christ than with any other moral teacher.  Jesus taught his followers that they must forgive everyone who offends them.  This obligation covers both actual offenses and merely perceived ones (“I think she was slighting me ...”); either way, we must forgive.  The sanction, the reason why we must forgive, is sobering:  “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matt.6:14-15)  Clear enough?

To forgive someone is to pardon them, to release them from any penalty or obligation under which their offense may have placed them. It is the rejection of any desire to retaliate or get even, and the surrender of any supposed right to retaliate or get even.  Thus understood, forgiveness always includes an element of sacrifice. When I forgive someone, I give up, or sacrifice, the possibility of evening the score. With minor offenses the sacrifice may seem insignificant, but when the offense is serious, the sacrificial element in forgiveness becomes more palpable.

Extreme Forgiveness

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch woman and devout Christian whose family hid many Jews from the Nazis in their home during World War II.  When that “hiding place” was discovered (her well-known memoir of these events is called The Hiding Place), she and her family were arrested and sent to the death camps, where most of them perished; Corrie survived by what she called a “clerical error.”  In a later book, Tramp for the Lord (1974), she told of an incident in postwar Germany that tested whether she could live what she taught.

She was teaching a class on Christian love and forgiveness.  After the class a big man came up to her and told her how much he appreciated her teaching, since he had recently become a Christian.  He evidently didn’t recognize her, but she recognized him.  He had been one of the cruelest guards at Ravensbrück, the camp where she and her sister Betsie had been imprisoned and where Betsie died from starvation and disease.  Now he was holding out his hand to her.

Corrie recounts how torn she was inside.  She knew she should forgive him.  Could she disobey the teaching of Christ that she herself had just taught?  She knew she must forgive him.  But she thought of Betsie, and she couldn’t bring herself either to feel forgiveness or to give it.  She prayed to God to help her, to enable her.  Then, as she relates, she took his hand.  “For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner.  I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.”

Extreme forgiveness, as in this instance, involves extreme pain.  It is emotional pain, and since our emotions are woven into our physical bodies, it is a kind of physical pain.  It is also unquestionably a kind of sacrifice; Corrie had to sacrifice—to surrender, renounce, release—her wholly human desire for justice or vengeance to be done. (However we label this desire, it is real and potent.)  And yet, even in extreme forgiveness, with all its pain and sacrifice, no sure ground for forgiveness has been established.  Nor has the body of the forgiver been pierced or violated.  No blood has been shed.

But why should blood be shed? How would that establish any grounds for forgiveness? What is the connection between bloodshed and forgiveness?

Self-Sacrifice

Now let’s come at the subject from the other direction, that of self-sacrifice.  Jesus, the Bible tells us, voluntarily sacrificed his life so that those who entrust themselves to him as their Lord and Savior might be released from the penalty of death and be able to enjoy eternal life with him.  That sentence compresses a lot of theology, and we will unpack it as we go along, but let’s begin with a more down-to-earth and easily understandable instance of self-sacrifice:  a soldier throwing himself over a live grenade in order to save his comrades’ lives.  In this case the sacrifice is bodily, bloody, and absolute, and it gives life to others, at least in the sense of protecting and preserving their lives.  The soldier’s action is universally recognized as noble and heroic, without the cynical sneer with which those terms are often regarded. Although his buddies’ lives have been preserved, however, we must also recognize that their deliverance is partial and limited.  They are still subject to death—and in battle, that may come at any time.

Already, though, we can glimpse the link between forgiveness and self-sacrifice. If extreme forgiveness involves extreme pain as well as a form of personal sacrifice, and if life can be preserved through self-sacrificial death, might these two apparently disparate things turn out to be the same thing, in the ultimate case?  Forgiveness, remember, is the remedy for breaches in our personal relationships, and our ultimate personal relationship, as creatures of God, is our relationship with him.  Our relationship with God has been broken by the sin of Adam and Eve, in which sin we all have continued to live ever since.  Theologically this condition is known as “original sin,” a concept that has been maligned by some and misunderstood by many.

“You Only”

Perhaps the most direct approach to original sin is through Psalm 51.  In this psalm, David is seeking forgiveness from God for his sin against Bathsheba and Uriah—that is, for taking advantage of his position as king and commander-in-chief to seduce Bathsheba and arrange for the murder of her husband Uriah.  Here, plainly, we are talking about serious personal offenses.  In one of the more startling statements in the Bible, though, David says to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” (Ps.51:4)  We have plenty of evidence that David wasn’t an idiot, and therefore we can’t just take at face value his statement that he has sinned “only” against God—and not, by implication, against Bathsheba and Uriah.

In fact, the statement reveals the profundity of David’s understanding of his situation.  If God were not in the picture, sin would not be sin.  If we are not God’s creatures, we are merely very clever animals, with no more moral obligation than a baboon or a crocodile.  If our moral values are merely something we have invented, then they are something we can change at our convenience.  But David knew better than that.  He knew that moral standards exist, and are what they are, because our Creator is a moral God, “altogether righteous.” (Ps.19:9)  God defines good and evil simply by virtue of who he is.  David certainly knew he had committed serious offenses against Bathsheba and Uriah, but those offenses constitute “sin” only because every moral offense is primarily an offense against God.  God is always primary.

The next point is extremely important and sometimes overlooked.  If sin is always an offense against God, just what is the nature of the offense?  “How have I offended God?” Joe Average might wonder, “I hardly ever even give him a thought.”  But there are two essential matters that Joe ignores.  First, God is our Creator, and his purpose in creating us “in his image” was so that we might have a relationship with him—give him a thought, to start with.  He is, after all, the one and only source of our life and of all the things that we enjoy in this world.  Second, God is good.  This assertion is so simple and familiar, trite almost, that we can easily miss its tremendous import.  Given that God is sovereign and almighty, his goodness is the best possible news.  And God is good not in our ordinary sense of the word—“better than average”—God is thoroughly good, absolutely good, supremely good.  His nature is entirely good:  benevolent, generous, kind, loving, compassionate.

That being so, our neglect of him is not inconsequential, it is in itself an offense.  It is ingratitude. And, in reality, all of us have offended against God in more ways than neglect.  According to the Bible, we have turned away from him and embraced the whole conglomerate of selfishness: self-centeredness, self-righteousness, self-esteem, self-justification, self-satisfaction.  If this self-enterprise works for us, we become proud—complacent, smug, arrogant, egocentric.  If it fails to work for us, we become depressed, bitter, angry and envious.  In our natural condition, most of us are some mixture of these.  Insofar as we are proud, our contempt extends not only to other people but, even more, to God.  Insofar as we are bitter and angry, God is the ultimate target of our blame.

No matter how much we neglect God or despise or revile him or explain him away, his goodness as our Creator—and, in Jesus Christ, as our Redeemer—remains constant.  That is why human sin is “exceedingly sinful” (Rom.7:13, where the Greek is a phrase that could be translated “super-exceedingly sinful”). God’s goodness (again, as fully revealed in Jesus Christ) is immeasurable; therefore our denial and rejection of him is immeasurably bad. Our separation from him, even eternal separation—death—is not only the direct result of our rejecting him, it is what our actions and attitudes deserve.  It is our just punishment.

What, after all, is justice?  It means an appropriate correlation between a moral offense and its punishment.  As well as being perfectly good, God is perfectly just; and most of us regard justice as a genuine moral value.  If a moral offense is not punished appropriately, justice is not served.  What if a human judge, out of the “goodness of his heart,” pardoned (forgave) a serial rapist and set him free with no punishment?  We may not be comfortable with the idea of punishment; we may think it is too often excessive or prejudiced; but few of us see it as expendable.

God is morally perfect.  His heart’s desire has always been to forgive the humans who have rejected him.  He knew that such forgiveness must involve sacrifice, and he had no problem with that.  Being also perfectly just, however, he has always known that moral rejection both produces and deserves moral separation, which for his creatures means death, since he is the only source of life.  God’s goal and desire is eternal life for his human creatures, but their freely chosen rebellion frustrated both his goal and his desire.  How could he cut through this knot and, in one mighty act, solve both his problem and ours?

The Death that Brings Life

Nothing about human sin, human selfishness, or human history has ever taken God by surprise.  Before he created Adam and Eve, he—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—made an “eternal covenant” (Heb.13:20) with himself, through which he would solve forever the problem of human sin.  Because our sinful separation from God was freely chosen, it was not a problem that he could solve simply by decree, from the outside, without violating human freedom.  On the other hand, because what our sin had violated was God’s infinite goodness, his holiness, nothing we might do (even supposing, contrary to fact, that we were willing to do so) could repair the breach either.  Only God and humanity united in one Person, in the incarnation of the Son, Jesus Christ, could solve the problem. Only God and humanity thus united together could simultaneously, in one freely chosen act on the cross at Calvary, make the sacrifice-of-forgiveness (as God) and suffer the just punishment for sin (as man).  Furthermore, the man suffering the punishment for human sin had himself to be sinless, morally perfect, in order that his sacrifice—not needed for himself—could cover the need of all those people who trust in him as their Substitute.  In Christ, finally and forever, the forgiver has not only suffered the emotional pain of extreme forgiveness, he also has shed his blood and given his life in self-sacrifice.  “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” (2Cor.5:19 KJV)  The soldier who throws himself on the grenade is the perfect God-man whose sacrifice provides both complete forgiveness of sin and eternal life for his comrades in the foxhole.  Deals don’t get any better than that.

There is more to the deal, however.  It gets even better, yet at the same time, for us (I can’t speak for God), it gets more all-consuming.  How can death become a source of life?  Alluding to his own impending death, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)  The answer to how death can become a source of life, of course, is through resurrection.  But there is a difficulty here.  The seeds we plant produce new physical life; the dead human bodies we bury don’t normally do so.  That requires a divine miracle; and the miracle of Christ’s resurrection was a unique, one-of-a-kind event, even a unique miracle. He rose in a “glorified,” perfected human body (see 1Cor.15), and his resurrection and ascension back to heaven (Acts 1:9-11) proclaim the Father’s acceptance of his Son’s sacrifice.  That accepted sacrifice became the ground of all forgiveness, both God’s forgiveness of our sin and our forgiveness of all offenses against us.

This brings us back to the question of how we can forgive, our capacity to forgive, especially when the offense is extreme.  How was Corrie ten Boom able to forgive the former Nazi torturer?  Her testimony is that it was only through the grace and power of God‘s love for her and for all sinners, as manifested in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  She had been born again through faith in Christ; through Christ her spirit had been raised from the dead into a new life; through her faith in Christ she had entered into the New Covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20).

The New Covenant in Christ’s blood is the final outworking of the “eternal covenant” spoken of in Heb.13:20, where it says that God, “through the blood of the eternal covenant,” has “brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus.”  This eternal covenant has been worked out in stages through the course of human history, in separate but linked covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the nation of Israel (mediated by Moses), David, and finally with all the people of God—those who entrust their lives to him—through Jesus Christ.  As God promised through Jeremiah, “I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.” (Jer.32:40)  And again through Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezek.36:26)

We enter the New Covenant and receive all its benefits by surrending our old, independent, self-centered life.  Paul’s confession is the confession of every born-again believer:  “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal.2:20)  Only through the embrace of my own death, in this sense, can I enter the new life of the New Covenant.  Now Jesus is my King and my God, and I am his willing, loyal subject, his obedient servant.  Now my only life is my life in him.  Now his joy is my joy.  As for forgiving, it is the new spiritual heart that God gave me when I was born again which enables me to forgive from the heart, wholeheartedly.  But the new heart presupposes both Christ’s death and my own, which is why the whole Bible is so soaked in blood.  The “blood of Christ” refers specifically to his blood as shed on the cross; it is a graphic way of referring to his sacrificial death on behalf of sinners.  The blood of all those sacrificial animals under the Old Covenant, splattered all over the altar and the sinners (see, for instance, Ex.24:4-8), prefigured the shed blood of Jesus. His blood cleanses because his death enables forgiveness.

And so we have come full circle, back to the summing-up observation in the book of Hebrews that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (9:22)  The only way to life is through death, in Christ.  Without forgiveness, our life remains crippled and blighted by guilt, anger, resentment, self-pity, and division.  In her ministry among victims of Nazi brutality, Corrie ten Boom noted that those who were able to forgive were best able to rebuild their lives.  Jesus Christ has made that possible.  

The Fulfillment of the Feasts of the Lord

Introduction

At the core of the Mosaic Covenant are the seven annual festivals set forth in Leviticus 23, known as the Feasts of the Lord:  Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Weeks (Pentecost), Rosh Hashana (Trumpets), Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), and Tabernacles.  The first three are grouped together in the spring, the fourth is in early summer, and the last three are again grouped together in the autumn.  The timing of these holy days is of crucial significance.  The first four festivals commemorated—to the exact day—the major events of the Exodus.  In fact, one of the Hebrew words translated “feast” or “festival” literally means “appointed time.”  The precise day in the Hebrew lunar calendar was appointed to commemorate the Passover event, with the eating of unleavened bread. Then the miraculous deliverance through the Red Sea, which occurred three days later, was celebrated on the feast of Firstfruits.  Fifty days after Firstfruits, the Lord revealed Himself to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and this event is commemorated in the feast of Weeks.

These annual festivals also served a prophetic purpose: They prophesied, again to the exact day, the crucial events by which the Messiah would accomplish the salvation of His people.  Jesus, the Lamb of God—“our Passover Lamb,” as Paul calls Him (1Cor.5:7)—was crucified on Passover.  He was the Unleavened Bread, the sinless Bread of Life, that experienced no decay in the tomb (Acts 2:31).  And at the “appointed time” of Firstfruits, He was resurrected from the dead, as Paul declares:  “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1Cor.15:20) Fifty days after that fulfillment of Firstfruits occurred the feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, described in Acts 2.  Moses’ encounter with the Lord on Mt. Sinai inaugurated the Old Covenant people of God, amid thunder, fire and smoke.  Likewise, at Pentecost, the New Covenant people of God were empowered by the Holy Spirit, and the church inaugurated, with a noise like a mighty wind and with tongues of fire.

The fulfillment of the first four Feasts gives us assurance that the last three, the autumn feasts of Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles, will be fulfilled just as precisely when the Lord Jesus Christ returns, in royal and irresistible power, to judge the life of every human being.

Part I:  The Fulfillment of the Spring Feasts

1.  From Egypt to Sinai

We begin with the historical events comprising the Exodus.  There is little reason to doubt that these are historical events.  The record of them in the books of Moses is by far the most meticulously preserved and carefully detailed of all records from that period.  Ever since archeologists excavated the site of ancient Troy, there are few who doubt that Homer’s account of the Trojan War, though full of poetic invention, is based on an actual war fought about two centuries after the Hebrew Exodus.  Archeology has similarly corroborated the Biblical account, which, though it includes poetry, is mostly a sober historical narrative.  The only serious reason for doubting its substantial authenticity is that it describes numerous divine miracles.  If we accept that the God of the Bible is real, however, that reason for doubt disappears.  The information I am presenting here concerning the Feasts of the Lord furnishes powerful evidence, atop the mountain of other evidence, that God is real and His word is true.  If we had even a fraction of this kind of evidence showing that the Homeric gods were real, we would (or ought to) read the Iliad and the Odyssey rather differently.

We are commonly taught that God told Moses to demand from Pharaoh the release of the Hebrew people from slavery and from Egypt.  That was the ultimate outcome, but it wasn’t the demand.  This is what the Lord told Moses to say:  “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us.  Let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God.” (Ex.3:18)  And that is exactly what Moses did say at the outset of his long contest with Pharaoh (Ex.5:1-3).  As the Lord had already made clear to Moses, there was no way Pharaoh was going to give a ready consent; but if he had, the Hebrews would have been morally obliged to return after the three days.  That was, or would have been, the deal.  After the fourth plague Pharaoh did consent to the three-day journey but then immediately reneged (8:25-32).  Prior to the final plague, the death of the firstborn, the Lord told Moses:  “After that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely.” (11:1)   So he did (12:31-32), but once again he had second thoughts and went after them with his army (14:5-9).

We know from Ex.12:1-14 that the Passover event occurred on the 14th of Abib (later called Nisan)—that is, the unblemished lambs, having been chosen on the 10th, were slain on the afternoon of the 14th and their blood applied to the doorways.

The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt,
“This month [Abib, later called Nisan, corresponding to March/ April] is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.  Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household.  ...    The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats.  Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the people of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs.


“That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast.  Do not eat the meat raw or cooked in water, but roast it over the fire—head, legs and inner parts.  Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it.  This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the LORD's Passover.


“On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD.  The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.


“This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD—a lasting ordinance.” (Ex.12:1-14)

That same night the Israelites departed.  They first traveled to Succoth to retrieve the bones of Joseph (13:17-20), then encamped at Etham.  The next day they traveled to Pi Hahiroth, by the Red Sea (14:1-2), and it was on the third day after the Passover that Pharaoh’s army caught up with them.  Throughout the night, the cloud and fire of the Lord held the Egyptians at bay as the Israelites passed through the parted waters, and at daybreak Pharoah and his army were drowned (14:19-31) and God’s people were miraculously delivered.

From the Red Sea they journeyed through the deserts of Marah and Sin, and then:  “In the third month after the Israelites left Egypt—on the very day—they came to the Desert of Sinai.”(Ex.19:1)  The Expositor’s Bible Commentary says that this was in the seventh week following the Exodus.  So on the same day of the week as the Passover, seven weeks later, they arrived at Mt. Sinai.  Next there followed a three-day period to consecrate the people (19:10-11), and thus it was seven weeks after the Red Sea deliverance that Moses ascended the mountain to meet with the Lord and receive His commandments.  Counting both Sundays (the Jews counted both first and last items in a series) that makes fifty days.  I believe there is substantial reason to accept the age-old Jewish teaching that the interval between the feasts of Firstfruits and Weeks commemorates, to the exact day, the journey from the Red Sea to Sinai.

2.  The Appointed Times for the Feasts

In Leviticus 23 (see also Ex.12, Num.28, and Deut.16), the Lord gave His people instruction concerning the Sabbath day and the annual feasts.  It begins:  “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the Israelites and say to them:  “These are My appointed feasts, the appointed feasts of the Lord, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies.” (1-2)  “Appointed feasts” here translates the Hebrew word mo’ed, which basically means an appointed and fixed time.  Later the Lord declared expressly, “I choose the appointed time [mo’ed].” (Ps.75:2)  “Assemblies” translates the Hebrew mikrah, meaning a summoned assembly or convocation.  In Scripture, mikrah is almost always preceded by the word qodesh, meaning “holy.”  There were seven of these holy convocations during their religious year, coinciding with the seven Feasts.  Thus mo’ed emphasizes the timing of the Feasts, while mikrah brings out their essential character as sacred assemblies, holy convocations.  A third Hebrew word, chag (noun) or chagag (verb), also meaning “feast” or “keep the feast,” highlights the Feasts as times for rejoicing in the Lord and celebrating His goodness.  Thus the psalmist exults, “When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me:  for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday [chagag].” (Ps.42:4 KJV)  Taken together, these three main Hebrew words for “feast” give us a rounded view of the meaning of the Lord’s Feasts.

Leviticus 23 continues:

These are the Lord’s appointed feasts [mo’ed], the sacred assemblies
          [mikrah] you are to proclaim at their appointed times [mo’ed]:  The
          Lord’s Passover begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first
          month.  On the fifteenth day of that month the Lord’s Feast [chag] of
          Unleavened Bread begins; for seven days you must eat bread made
          without yeast.  On the first day hold a sacred assembly [mikrah] and
          do no regular work. (4-7)

The unleavened bread memorializes the hasty urgency of that original Passover night, and it also symbolizes the purging out of sin.

The instruction for the third Feast, Firstfruits, comes next in Leviticus 23:  “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the Israelites and say to them:  “When you enter the land I am going to give you and you reap its harvest, bring to the priest a sheaf of the first grain you harvest.  He is to wave the sheaf before the Lord so it will be accepted on your behalf; the priest is to wave it on the day after the Sabbath.” (9-11)  The Sabbath here refers to the next weekly Sabbath following Passover (Nisan 14), and not, as the Pharisees later understood it to be, the Nisan 15 mikrah Sabbath which begins the feast of Unleavened Bread.  This is evident from the instructions a few verses later for determining the date of the feast of Weeks:  “From the day after the Sabbath, the day you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, count off seven full weeks.  Count off fifty days up to the day after the seventh Sabbath, and then present an offering of new grain to the Lord.” (15-16)  The interval is seven weeks, and since the feast of Weeks occurs on the day after a weekly Sabbath, the feast of Firstfruits must do likewise. By Biblical reckoning both feasts fall on a Sunday.

By following the Lord’s orders for the original Passover, the Israelites were delivered both from the death of all the firstborn sons and from slavery in Egypt. After their conquest of the Promised Land they began the annual commemorative festivals, and have continued them ever since—even though, during periods of widespread apostasy, only the faithful “remnant” were keeping the Feasts, and even though, ever since the crucifixion of Christ, all the Jews who reject Him as Messiah have been keeping the Feasts in spiritual blindness and ignorance (see Romans 11).

3.  The Appointed Times for the Fulfillment

New Testament Greek has a word, kairos, which is synonymous with the Hebrew mo’ed, “appointed time.” Kairos is used particularly in connection with the Messiah’s mission to save His people from their bondage to sin and death; it emphasizes the sovereignty of God in ordaining and carrying out His plan of salvation.  It was at the appointed time that the Holy Spirit conceived the Son of God in the virgin’s womb:  “But when the time [kairos] had fully come, God sent His son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” (Gal.4:4-5)  At the appointed time, Jesus began His public ministry:  “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.  ‘The time [kairos] has come,’ He said.  ‘The kingdom of God is near.  Repent and believe the good news!’” (Mark 1:15)  At the appointed time, Jesus laid down His life as a voluntary sacrifice for sin:  “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time [kairos].” (1Tim.2:5-6; see also Rom.5:6)  And at the appointed time, the Messiah will come again:  “Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time [kairos]; wait till the Lord comes.” (1Cor.4:5)  In his gospel, John uses hora, the Greek word for “hour,” in much this same sense of an appointed time (see John 2:4, 7:8, 13:1).

As the parable of the fig tree (Matt.24:32-33) indicates, we can discern from the signs of the times when the Lord’s “appointed times” are drawing near, but He has told us definitely that “It is not for you to know the times or dates [kairos] the Father has set by His own authority.” (Acts 1:7)  This means that although Christ’s second coming will fulfill the autumn Feasts as precisely as His first coming has already fulfilled the spring Feasts, we will not be able to pin down the details in advance.  He wants us to be on the watch (see Mark 13:32-37), but still, as always, His ways are going to surprise us.

For many centuries there have been questions and debate about the timing of events during the week of Christ’s crucifixion. The main question has to do with an apparent difference between the first three Gospels and John.  Matthew, Mark and Luke state plainly and repeatedly that the Last Supper was the Passover meal.  That meal, by a law that goes to the heart of the Hebrew religion, had to include a lamb slaughtered in the temple between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m. on Nisan 14, roasted, and eaten that same evening.  The Hebrew word for Passover, pesach, beyond its root meaning of an exempting or “passing over” (see Ex.12:12-14), had come to be used of the Passover lamb itself.  As long as the Israelites were in the land and the temple was still standing—that is, up until 70 A.D.—Passover could not be celebrated without the lamb.  Thus, according to the chronology of these Gospels, Jesus would seem to have been crucified on the day after Passover, that is, on Nisan 15.

According to John, however, during the trial of Jesus, “the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter the palace; they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” (John 18:28)  This seems to indicate that Jesus was crucified on the 14th, on Passover itself, rather than on the 15th.

Can these apparently disagreeing accounts be reconciled?  They can, but there is also another consideration, and a preeminent one.  Jesus died in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy; at the heart of all that prophecy are the feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits.  In the mind of God this is clearly a matter of first importance, since He is the one who ordained the Feasts, with their significant details and exact timing.  He is the one who inspired the writers of Scripture to identify Jesus, repeatedly and positively, as the ultimate Passover lamb, the lamb sacrificed so that those who are “under the blood” will be spared from destruction.  The most profound and explicit of all Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah says that

he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. (Isa.53:5-7)

At the outset of Jesus’ public ministry, John the Baptist identified Him by shouting out, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!” (John 1:29)  Peter declares that we have been redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” (1Peter 1:19)  Paul affirms that “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.” (1Cor.5:7)  In John’s revelatory vision of the heavenly throne room, he says, “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne ....”  Then he hears the worshippers singing to the Lamb:  “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation.” (Rev.5:9)

As the fulfillment of all that the Passover lamb signified, Jesus had to be sacrificed on Nisan 14.  In fulfilling His messianic role, however, it was just as vital that He lead His disciples in celebrating the Passover meal, because He used the main symbolic elements of that meal—specifically the unleavened bread and the wine—to transform the meal into the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, the central rite by which Christians celebrate the New Covenant.  But the Passover meal, of course, has to come after the sacrifice of the lambs, and we are back to the puzzle of the differing Gospel accounts.  Was Jesus crucified on the day after Passover, as the first three Gospels suggest, or was He crucified on Passover itself, as John suggests?  Can both versions be right?

Various solutions to this problem have been proposed. Other commentators, either reluctantly or, if unbelieving, sometimes gleefully, have concluded that there is no solution; the accounts differ, and that is that.  Among the proposed solutions there are two which I believe to be perfectly plausible—and one of them must be right, since the word of God cannot ultimately disagree with itself, and since two paramount truths are at stake:  that Jesus celebrated the Passover meal with His disciples, and that He was sacrificed as “our Passover lamb” on Nisan 14.

Both of the two plausible solutions are based on historical evidence that different ways of reckoning time were in use among the Jews in the first century.  In particular, the two most powerful religious/political parties, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, differed over the religious calendar.  According to the first solution, the disagreement concerned the day on which the year should begin, with the Pharisees starting it one day earlier.  (Nisan was the first month, and ascertaining the first day involved sighting the new moon.)  In the year of Christ’s crucifixion (either A.D. 30 or 33), the Pharisees placed Nisan 14 on Thursday.  Following this reckoning, Jesus’ disciples sacrificed their lamb in the temple on Thursday afternoon and celebrated Passover with their Lord in the Upper Room that evening (as we are told in Matt.26:17-20, Mark 14:12-16, and Luke 22:7-14).  It was the Sadducees whom John referred to as refusing to enter Pilate’s palace on Friday morning because they wished to avoid defilement and thus be able to eat the Passover that evening (John 18:28); for them, Nisan 14 came on Friday.  This solution to the problem assumes an accommodation between the two parties whereby they agreed to the dual Passover dating; but such an accommodation is likely, given the political power of both parties.

The second solution is similar.  It rests on evidence that the difference in time reckoning, for religious purposes, had to do with whether the day begins at sunset or at sunrise.  There is considerable evidence in the Bible that both ways of marking a day had been used in Israel from the earliest times.  (For further information and documentation on this issue, see Harold W. Hoehner’s excellent study, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ.)  Moreover, there is some evidence that both the Pharisees and (regionally) the Galileans counted days from sunrise to sunrise, while the Sadducees and the Judeans counted from sunset to sunset.  Being Galileans, Jesus and His disciples would have regarded Nisan 14 as beginning on Thursday morning and would have sacrificed their lamb that afternoon and had their Passover meal that evening.  For the Sadducees, however, Nisan 14 extended from sunset on Thursday to sunset on Friday, and so they would have sacrificed their lambs on Friday afternoon.  (The same accommodation between the two parties regarding the dual Passover is assumed.)  And since the Sadducees controlled the temple services, the paschal lamb—the one lamb chosen to be sacrificed on behalf of the whole nation—would have been slain at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, the same time at which Jesus died on the cross.

According to either of these two solutions, then, the sequence of events during Holy Week would have been as follows:

1. The instructions for the Passover in Exodus 12 required each family to select an unblemished lamb on Nisan 10 and to take care of it until the 14th, when it was to be slain.  During the time of Christ, on the 10th of Nisan the high priest led a festive procession out of Jerusalem to nearby Bethany, where an unblemished lamb was selected as the Passover sacrifice for the whole nation (each family or group also sacrificed their own lamb or kid).  The priests then led this lamb back into the city along a road lined with thousands waving palm branches and singing Psalm 118:

     The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation.  Shouts of joy and victory resound in the tents of the righteous:  “The LORD's right hand has done mighty things!” . . .
               Open for me the gates of righteousness; I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.  This is the gate of the Lord through which the righteous may enter.  I will give you thanks, for you answered me; you have become my salvation.
          The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.  This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.  O Lord, save us; O Lord, grant us success.
               Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD. From the house of the LORD we bless you.  The LORD is God, and he has made his light shine upon us. With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession up to the horns of the altar. (v.14-27)

For the timing of this ceremony the priests would have followed the Sadducean calendar, where Friday was Nisan 14 and the 10th came on Monday.

John’s testimony informs us that Jesus arrived in Bethany “six days before the Passover” and made His triumphal entry on the next day (12:1,12).  John too appears to reflect the Sadducean calendar (he refers to the Jewish officials planning to eat the Passover on Friday), and so six days before Passover, counting inclusively in the Jewish fashion, would be the previous Sunday. Thus it was on Monday that Jesus entered the city; Palm Sunday and Easter are a later development in Christian tradition and are less accurate historically.  On Nisan 10, then, Jesus left Bethany and entered Jerusalem to the acclaim of the same crowds who had just celebrated the entry of the yearling lamb whose role Jesus was appointed to fulfill.  Some acclaimed Him because they had come to believe He was the Messiah, many because they had seen some of His miracles or heard about them, and many others no doubt were just caught up in the excitement of the moment, as Jesus came riding a donkey in fulfillment (as Matt.21:4-5 tells us) of Zech. 9:9:  “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

2. The paschal lamb was tethered for four days on public display in the temple, so that everyone could confirm that it was indeed without blemish.  After driving out the money changers, Jesus spent those same four days in the temple courts healing and teaching, bearing intense public scrutiny and foiling His adversaries’ efforts to discredit Him.

3. The appointed time came for the Messiah to fulfill His chosen destiny.  On Thursday afternoon (Nisan 14 by Pharisaic/Galilean reckoning) He told the disciples, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The Teacher says:  My appointed time [kairos] is near.  I am going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.’” (Matt.26:18)   Jesus knew the times and seasons; He knew the Feasts most intimately, what they signified, how and exactly when they would be fulfilled.  On that same night, after the Passover meal in the Upper Room, Jesus was arrested, tried, flogged, and sentenced to be crucified.

4. On Friday morning at the third hour (9:00 a.m.), the paschal lamb was bound to the altar.  At the same time (Mark 15:25) Jesus was nailed to the cross outside the city walls.  Then for six hours the lamb and the Lamb approached death.  At noon the sun was shuttered and darkness covered the land (Luke 23:44-45).  At the ninth hour (3:00 p.m.), the high priest ascended the altar, slew the paschal lamb with one swift knife stroke, and pronounced the ritual words “It is finished.”  After uttering the same words (John 19:30) at the same time (Matt.27:46), Jesus gave up His spirit, and “at that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.  The earth shook and the rocks split.” (Matt.27:51)  Imagine the scene in the temple:  With a strange darkness fallen outside, the high priest sheds the lamb’s blood, pronouncing the words of fulfillment, and at that moment the earth itself trembles while the great curtain before the Holy of Holies is supernaturally torn asunder.  As all those in attendance gape in awe or terror, the Lord of the temple, the grieving Father, rends His garment and opens the way for His people to enter into His very presence (Heb.10:19-22).


            In eating the Passover meal with His disciples, Jesus identified Himself with their humanity—He was one of them.  In becoming the Passover Lamb Himself, He manifested His deity: He was the real, though unrecognized, object of His people’s worship.  Thus the prophesied Messiah, the holy Son of God, was rejected and scorned by His people and tortured to death at their behest, at the same time that His sacrifice on their behalf was being unwittingly celebrated in the nearby temple.  The extreme irony that played out on that earthshaking day is beyond expression.

Summing up, the timing of Holy Week is as follows: On Nisan 10, Monday, Jesus entered Jerusalem, offering Himself to Israel as their Messiah.  On Thursday evening He ate the Passover meal with His disciples.  On Friday He was crucified and then entombed before the Sabbath began at sunset, as the Gospels tell us.  For three days and nights—Jewish rabbis taught that any part of a day counts as a whole twenty-four-hour day—He lay in the heart of the earth.  And on Sunday morning, the feast of Firstfruits, He was raised from the dead.

Recall now the three-day journey which God told Moses to ask for.  As it turned out, a three-day journey was the final outcome—three days from when they left Egypt to when they crossed the Red Sea.  Recall the reason for the journey:  so that they might offer sacrifices to the Holy One of Israel.  Now we can see why God specified a three-day period for offering sacrifices—because He knew the end from the beginning.  The Lamb of God “was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.” (1Peter 1:20)  Since the events of Holy Week occurred “by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23), He knew that His Son would be sacrificed at the appointed time—the same time the lambs were slain on the original Passover in Egypt.  He knew that Jesus would be laid in the tomb before the Sabbath began at sunset on Friday.  He knew that the sacrificed Lamb, the Unleavened Bread of Life, would lie dead during the Sabbath (the Hebrew word means “rest”).  And He knew that on the third day, on the feast of Firstfruits, Jesus would be raised from the dead, because that was how He planned it and that was how He did it.

        “I am God, and there is no other;
         I am God, and there is none like me.
I make known the end from the beginning,
From ancient times, what is still to come.
I say:  My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please. . . .
What I have said, that will I bring about;
What I have planned, that will I do.” (Isa.46:9-11)

Since the feasts of Passover and Unleavened Bread are fixed to days of the month, while Firstfruits is fixed to a day of the week (the first), the interval between Passover and Firstfruits varies from year to year.  The fact that the interval was the same—three days—in the year of the Exodus and the year of the Redeemer is yet more testimony to the sovereignty of God in working out His plan of salvation. The coincidence of Firstfruits with the Red Sea crossing might be considered merely fortuitous if it were not for the evident involvement of a purposeful God.

Part II:  What the Fulfillment Means

Now, let’s review what we are looking at here.  First, we have the historical events comprising the Exodus—that is, the Passover, recounted in Exodus 12, the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus 14, and the giving of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 19-20.  These are the events by which the Mosaic Covenant was established, and they are commemorated, to the exact day, in the first four Feasts.  And these first four Feasts, again to the exact day, predict the historical events by which the New Covenant was established fifteen centuries later:  the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus, and the coming of the Holy Spirit in power on the feast of Pentecost (Weeks).  The Feasts extend through history like laser beams, aligning the Passover in Egypt with the crucifixion outside Jerusalem, the Red Sea crossing with the resurrection from the tomb, and the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  The Lord’s “appointed times” are kept with amazing precision.

Just as remarkable as the timing of these events is the profound and precise correspondence of their meaning.  Let’s compare them in their appointed sequence.

Passover

The first of the annual feasts, Passover, connects the historical Passover with the crucifixion of Christ.  The Hebrew people, descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years.  God sent Moses to be the agent of their deliverance from bondage.  To effect this deliverance, an unblemished yearling lamb had to be chosen (one for each household) and slain, and its blood painted on the doorframe.  That night the Lord would kill all the firstborn sons of Egypt, but “the blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.”(Ex.12:13)  The correspondence between this Passover and the crucifixion of Christ has long been understood, in part because the New Testament often refers to it.  All of us, in our natural state, are enslaved to sin.  In order to save us from our doomed condition (and it was the only possible way), God sent His own Son to be the agent of our deliverance from bondage.  The “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), shed His blood on the cross in order to effect that deliverance.  The spiritual cleansing power of Christ’s blood is applied to our heart when we trust in Him as our Savior.  And thus both the Old and the New Covenant express the universal spiritual truth that the heart of love is sacrifice, that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (Heb.9:22)  “This is how we know what love is:  Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”(1John 3:16)

Unleavened Bread

The second of the annual feasts, Unleavened Bread, begins on the day after Passover and continues for seven days.  Historically, it connects the unleavened bread that was baked and eaten on that momentous night in Egypt with Jesus, who is the bread of life, whose body, symbolized by unleavened bread, suffered no decay while it lay dead in the tomb.  Bread is of course a staple food in many societies, just as rice, potatoes, and maize are in others.  It is a basic necessity, a source of bodily life.

In the original instructions for the feast of Unleavened Bread, the Israelites were told:  “For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast.  On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel.” (Ex.12:15)  The severity of the punishment—excommunication and banishment, if not death—underlines the seriousness of what yeast usually symbolizes in Scripture and symbolizes here:  sin.  Sin essentially is our antagonism toward God—our contempt for Him, our desire to live independently of Him, our conceit that we are morally superior to Him.  This attitude has to be ruthlessly purged out because it separates us from the only source of life and thus results in death, both physical and spiritual.  When the word of God declares that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom.6:23), it is talking cause and effect.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the hometown of His ancestor David; its name means “house of bread.”  He said, “I am the bread of life.  He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. ...  I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever.  This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (John 6:35, 51)  Jesus Himself, since He is our Creator and Redeemer, is the only source of life there is.  He went on to hammer the point home:  “Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.  Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.’” (John 6:53-57)

Because this issue is so critical, He brought it to the forefront again at the Last Supper.  Fulfilling the symbolism of the unleavened bread and the cups of wine in the Passover meal, “He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’  In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’” (Luke 22:19-20)  We notice an emphasis, which may seem even a morbid emphasis, on eating.  The lamb slain and roasted on that first Passover had to be eaten.  Centuries later the prophet Jeremiah declared, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, O Lord God Almighty.”(Jer.15:16)  And then the Word Himself came in the flesh and told us we must eat and drink Him.  What is this? It isn’t cannibalism, of course, it’s symbolism. But the symbolism of eating the bread and drinking the wine points to a potent spiritual reality.  Between us and God, through Christ, there is a benign mutual assimilation.  Unless we are in Christ by faith (personal trust) and He in us, we cannot share in His rich, pure, joyous everlasting life.  We are left in our unredeemed sin and its consequence, death.  We remain apart.

            Christ’s life for us and in us is pure because He is the unleavened bread.  He was and remains sinless.  He was “tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”(Heb.4:15)  “Sinless” is a negative term, but its positive counterpart is sheer beauty:  Jesus is full of love, joy, peace, wisdom, goodness, gentleness, generosity, humility, faithfulness, justice and mercy.  Plus, He is King of kings and Lord of lords.  And because He is sinless, His body suffered no corruption while He lay in the tomb (see Acts 2:22-32).  He was as perfect in death as in life.  His perfection shone most gloriously when He was raised from the dead.

Firstfruits

That is what the third feast, the feast of Firstfruits, prefigures.  It commemorates the miraculous passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, and it joins that event, on the calendar and in timeless meaning, with the resurrection of Christ.  On the day of Firstfruits the priest held up a sheaf of the “first fruits” of the spring grain harvest and waved it before the Lord, thanking Him in advance for the whole harvest.  Jesus fulfilled the spiritual promise of the Feast by being the first to be raised into an entirely new order of life.  He spoke of this prophetically when He taught that “a kernel of wheat must be planted in the soil.  Unless it dies, it will be alone—a single seed.  But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.” (John 12:24 NLT)  And as Paul later affirmed, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. ...  But each in his own turn:  Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.” (1Cor.15:20, 23)  When else should Christ, the firstfuits of the eternal resurrection, be raised except on the feast of Firstfruits?  In being so raised, He inaugurated a radical transformation of human life.  We must understand that the spiritual body in which Christ was raised stands in relation to our mortal bodies in much the same way that those bodies stand in relation to their shadows on the floor and wall (see 1Cor.15:35-57).

The crossing of the Red Sea also prefigures the triumph of Christ over all the ravages of sin and death.  Immediately following the crossing comes the exultant Song of Moses:

Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD: “I will sing to the LORD, for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea.
“The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
“The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name.  Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he has hurled into the sea. The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea.  The deep waters have covered them; they sank to the depths like a stone.
“Your right hand, O LORD, was majestic in power. Your right hand, O LORD, shattered the enemy.  In the greatness of your majesty you threw down those who opposed you. You unleashed your burning anger; it consumed them like stubble.  By the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up. The surging waters stood firm like a wall; the deep waters congealed in the heart of the sea.
“The enemy boasted, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake them. I will divide the spoils; I will gorge myself on them. I will draw my sword and my hand will destroy them.’  But you blew with your breath, and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters.
“Who among the gods is like you, O LORD? Who is like you—majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?  You stretched out your right hand and the earth swallowed them.
“In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling.
“The nations will hear and tremble; anguish will grip the people of Philistia.  The chiefs of Edom will be terrified, the leaders of Moab will be seized with trembling, the people of Canaan will melt away; terror and dread will fall upon them. By the power of your arm they will be as still as a stone—until your people pass by, O LORD, until the people you bought pass by.
“You will bring them in and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance—the place, O LORD, you made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, your hands established.  The LORD will reign for ever and ever.” (Ex. 15:1-18)

This is the celebration of a mighty act of God, a miraculous deliverance from certain death, a divine victory over a malign and implacable enemy.  Redeemed by the love and power of their Lord, the Israelites emerged as a reborn nation, free to turn their efforts toward the conquest and occupation of the Promised Land.

Exactly this note of triumph is sounded in the New Testament in reporting and celebrating the resurrection of Christ.  Again and again in the book of Acts the apostles preached the good news: Through the collaboration of human and infernal malice Jesus was tortured to death on the cross, but God, having accepted that perfect sacrifice, has raised Him from the dead.  Jesus has defeated death itself, as Paul exults:

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”
“Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.  But thanks be to God!  He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1Cor.15:54-57)

From Genesis through Revelation, one of the Bible’s main themes is Satan’s obsession with trying to spoil God’s purpose in creating the human race.  It is questionable whether Satan is so self-deluded that he has ever seriously believed that he, a creature dependent for his ongoing existence on his Creator, can actually thwart the Creator’s plans.  Probably he has lied so incessantly, even to himself, that he has come to believe his lies.  Now, if the Creator were Himself in any way tainted with evil, then Satan’s rebellion, even though doomed to failure, might at least merit respect.  Since God is completely good, however, Satan’s rebellion must be regarded not only as absurd foolishness, in attempting to overcome omnipotence, but also as detestable evil.  Whatever increase of misery awaits Satan and his admirers is appropriate.

  The crucifixion of Christ was the apex of Satan’s schemes, and it was also his supreme delusion.  What he thought was his victory was, precisely, his defeat.  And the Resurrection is the glorious confirmation of Christ’s victory.  As Paul explains at length in 1Corinthians 15, Christ has become the “firstfruits” in the emergence of a new, incorruptible, indestructible life, a new people of God, seen in John’s vision as “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language ....” (Rev.7:9)  The risen Lord, witnessed in person, tangibly, by His closest disciples along with hundreds of others, disproved by no one ever, is our guarantee that we who trust in Him will be together with Him in the great harvest at the end of this age.  That will be the day.

The destruction of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea also foreshadows the New Covenant in the theme of death by drowning.  The Song of Moses emphasizes this theme: “The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is his name.  Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he has hurled into the sea. The best of Pharaoh’s officers are drowned in the Red Sea.  The deep waters have covered them; they sank to the depths like a stone.”( Ex.15:3-4)  Our entrance into the New Covenant in Christ is signalled by the rite of baptism.  The New Testament Greek word baptizo means to submerge or immerse in water.  As Paul explains, the rite of baptism symbolizes the believer’s union with Christ specifically in His death and resurrection:

[D]on’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.  If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. (Rom.6:3-5)

Our baptism into Christ was foreshadowed by the baptism of the Israelites into Moses:  “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” (1Cor.10:1-2)

What is symbolized in baptism is more than pictorial, it is a real death for the believer, just as it was for Christ.  “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul states, “and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me ....” (Gal.2:20)  And again, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.  For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”(Col.3:1-3)

Just what is this death which the believer dies when he or she is joined with Christ by trusting in Him?  It has been variously explained, but the best understanding is probably that, as a believer, I no longer have a self-life that is independent of Christ.  In that sense, He has become my life, and I have become a participant in the great truth that there is no genuine or complete life apart from Him.  When I sin—that is, when in thought or action I disobey Him—I am simply behaving as though I still had an independent life of my own.  I am being untrue to my truest self, as Paul expresses so dramatically in the second half of Romans 7.  The drowning symbolized in baptism is the drowning of everything in my life that is separate from Christ and alien to Him, everything that is selfish and corrupt and futile.

At the beginning of the Mosaic Covenant, the enemies of God’s people were drowned—defeated—and the people themselves were “baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.”  They were consecrated to Moses’ leadership under the sovereignty of God (the cloud). The New Covenant completes, permanently, this attainment of life through death.  Through Christ’s sacrificial death and triumphant resurrection, Satan’s power over believers has been overthrown (Col.2:13-15, Heb.2:14-15, 1John 3:8), and we are delivered from a living death into an everlasting life that is completely worth living.

Pentecost

Compare these two descriptions of what occurred on the same day of the year about fifteen centuries apart:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled.  Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain.
Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the LORD descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently, and the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder. Then Moses spoke and the voice of God answered him.  The LORD descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain. So Moses went up. (Ex.19:16-20)

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.  Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.  They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. (Acts 2:1-4)

The physical similarities here are striking, but what really joins these two events together, beyond their occurring on the same calendar day, is their significance in the history of God’s relations with humanity.  On both occasions, God was sealing a covenant with His people, first the Old Covenant mediated by Moses, and then the New Covenant mediated by Christ.  The Old Covenant, inaugurated by the miraculous deliverance from slavery in Egypt, was sealed by the giving of the Law.  The New Covenant, inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Christ, was sealed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the gathered believers.  The Law bound the people of Israel together as the covenant people of God, and the Holy Spirit binds all followers of Jesus together as the body of Christ.  In Old Testament times the feast of Pentecost celebrated the fullness of the annual harvest (as Firstfruits celebrated its beginning), and with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the preaching of the gospel, the New Covenant harvest was in full swing.

In all these ways, God has used the Feasts to tie together His major works in the history of human salvation.  The Feasts join the Old and New Covenants on the calendar and also in their deep, rich significance.  “The LORD has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” (Ps.118:23)

            Part III:  Should Christians Observe

                     the Feasts of the Lord?

Surprisingly, perhaps, there are good reasons why Christians at the start of the third millenium might choose to observe the Feasts of the Lord.  But one question naturally suggests itself at the outset.  Since we haven’t been keeping the feasts for around nineteen centuries, why should we start keeping them now?  This question, however, immediately raises another:  Are there good reasons why we haven’t been keeping the feasts all these centuries?

There are at least four reasons why we haven’t, and in this section I will examine how good they are.  First, nowhere in the New Testament are believers instructed to continue observing the Levitical feasts.  Second, Paul warned us to avoid legalistic observances.  Third, one influential view of the New Covenant in relation to the Old holds that the feasts have been rendered obsolete for Christians.  And fourth, early in church history, Easter was substituted for the primary Levitical feast of Passover, and the church evolved its own religious calendar.  I will consider in order each of these reasons for not keeping the feasts.

1. The Argument from Silence

In regard to the New Testament’s lack of instructions, the argument from silence cuts both ways.  It might mean that the believers were to discontinue the feasts, or it might be taking for granted (approvingly) that they were still keeping them.  And, in fact, the New Testament isn't entirely silent on the subject.  From Acts 21:17-26 it is clear that most Jewish converts were still keeping Torah—not in order to earn salvation or favor with God, but in order to honor their spiritual roots and maintain the connection with them.  The account in Acts indicates that Paul approved of this.  Also, some years earlier Paul had instructed the Corinthians:  “Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are.  For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.” (1Cor.5:7-8)  Notice what this exhortation does and does not do.  Paul does not tell them to keep the feast of Passover/ Unleavened Bread but rather how to keep it, the proper spirit in which to keep it.  That they were in fact keeping it is assumed.  It is highly unlikely that “let us keep the Festival” is meant to be taken spiritually and not literally.  To any Jew, and surely to Paul, “keeping the feast” meant doing something very familiar and tangible.  This instruction is thus parallel to the longer teaching in chapter 11 where Paul admonishes the Corinthian believers about the proper manner and spirit in which to observe the Lord’s Supper.  In both cases their problem was not neglect but worldliness.

Significantly, here we find evidence that the largely Gentile church in Corinth was still keeping Passover a quarter century after Christ rose from the dead.

2. Legalistic Observances

The problem that both Jesus and Paul had with the Judaism of their day was that it was a legalistic perversion of the Old Covenant.  We need to keep clearly in mind the difference between law and legalism.  The law, being an expression of God’s loving will for His people, is good in itself and good for us.  We fall into legalism when we attempt to gain God’s favor (to “earn merit”) by keeping the law, by the “works” of the law.  Due to the sinfulness of the human heart, we cannot even come close to keeping God’s moral law perfectly—and perfection, of course, is the law’s demand.  As this impossibility became evident to legalistically inclined Jews under the Old Covenant, rather than seeking the Lord and trusting in His grace, they gradually devised an externalized form of the law, which we find exemplified in the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.  Paul claimed that, as a Pharisee, he had been legally blameless (Php.3:6).  Obviously he doesn’t mean that he had been blameless in regard to God’s law, but rather in regard to the externalized, ritualized code of the scribes and Pharisees.

   In Col.2:13-17, Paul warned his converts about being swayed by the arguments of those “Judaizers” who wanted to make such things as the Sabbath and the Feasts legally binding on all Christians:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.  And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.  These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.

The pivotal clause here is “Therefore do not let anyone judge you ….”  Paul is emphasizing our freedom in Christ; in the New Covenant we are “not under law, but under grace.” (Rom.6:14)  God’s promise concerning the New Covenant was that “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.” (Jer.31:33)  This is the marvelous transforming power of the New Covenant: Through the power of Christ’s blood and the indwelling Holy Spirit, the law of God—His loving, holy direction for our lives—is written on our hearts, so that we can obey Him not out of legal obligation but out of our heart’s desire to please and bless Him.  In the New Covenant, the shadows have become the reality, and that reality is “full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)  Therefore, as regards the Feasts of the Lord, if we become convinced, through Scripture and plain reasoning, that they are indeed God’s “appointed times” for us to celebrate our Messiah’s mighty works of salvation, then we are free to worship Him wholeheartedly in this way.  And if we are not so convinced, we are equally free to worship Him as our conscience leads (see Romans 14).   This is the freedom of the gospel.

3. The Covenant of Salvation

Our view of whether or not Christians ought to observe the Levitical feasts largely depends on our understanding of how the New Covenant is related to the Old.  Unfortunately, in my view, a lot of poor theology on this subject has generated a lot of misunderstanding.  The crux of the matter is whether, according to the Bible, there is continuity or discontinuity between the Old and New Covenants.  For the reasons I will put forward, I believe the relationship is definitely one of continuity.

First, there is the great covenant promise:  “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”  This promise is first made in connection with the covenant with Abraham (Gen.17:7) and is repeated again and again in both testaments (see, for example, Lev.26:12, Jer.7:23, 31:33, Ezek.36:28, Hos.2:23, Zech.8:8, Heb.8:10).  “My people” is singular:  There is one God and one people of God.

Second, the “new” in New Covenant (Jer.31:31) actually means “renewed” or “renovated.”  The same Hebrew word (chadash) was used for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple (2Chron.24:4).  So the New Covenant is the Old Covenant radically renewed, the imperfect made perfect in the Messiah.  The Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the covenant in Jesus’ blood are all phases in the great covenant of salvation between God and His people.  The covenant with Abraham has never been revoked (Gal.3:17), it has just been enhanced.  The Lord delivered His people out of slavery in Egypt, preparing them to receive His commandments through Moses, because He was mindful of His existing covenant relationship with them (Ex.2:23-25).  The olive tree in Rom.11:16-24 represents the faithful people of God throughout history, from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (the root), to the faithful Jewish remnant (Isa.1:9;10:20-23, Rom.11:1-6), to the believing Gentiles who are grafted in, to the Jews who in future time will believe in their Messiah and be grafted back in.  There is one God and one people of God.

Third, God’s covenant relationship with His people began when Abraham received the promise by faith (Gen.15:6, Rom.4), and it has been sustained by faith ever since.  Moses was a man of faith, and the covenant that he mediated between the Lord and His people was a covenant of faith.  Hebrews 11, of course, is eloquent testimony to this, and it concludes with the affirmation of God’s purpose that the Old Testament saints “should not be made perfect apart from us”—or “only together with us,” as the NIV puts it, ironing out the double negative.  There is one people of God, and they are a people of faith.

Fourth, God’s covenant relationship with His people is and has always been an expression of His grace, empowered by His grace.  John’s statement that “the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17) has been widely misunderstood to mean that God’s law is somehow a bad thing and that the Old Covenant was devoid of grace, if not truth.  It cannot be overemphasized that the law is a good thing.  In truth it is, as David said, more precious than gold and sweeter than honey (Psalm 19:10), and as Paul said, it is “holy, righteous, and good.” (Rom.7:12)  The real culprit is sin, which the law rightly judges and condemns.  Moreover, God’s deliverance of the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land is the foremost manifestation of His grace towards His people prior to the incarnation of Christ. The book of Deuteronomy, explaining the significance of the Exodus experience, resonates with eloquent expressions of the Lord’s gracious love and mercy.

The difference between the Old and New Covenants in regard to God’s grace is that prior to the Messiah’s coming, divine grace was mainly manifested in ways external to the human heart.  The Exodus delivered the people politically and formed the nation as a whole, but, except for a chosen remnant whom the Lord sovereignly regenerated, the Israelites still had little inner resistance to idolatry, unbelief, and sin in general.  As Paul explains in Galatians, the law was given as an interim measure, a tutor/governor for a people still in spiritual childhood (3:24).  It was a necessary measure, a discipline provided by a loving Father (Prov.3:11-12, Heb.12:5-11) and a way of showing unequivocally the need for spiritual salvation.  The law itself, however, never could bring salvation and was never intended to.

Inasmuch as God’s grace had been manifested mainly in external ways, it is easy to understand why the Jews were tempted to regard His law as a matter of externals—but still it was wrong, and they had received sufficient revelation to know better.  The first and greatest commandment was to love the Lord with all your heart (Deut.6:5).  The prophets realized this truth and tried to impart it to the nation, but without success.  A much greater work of God was needed, the work described in the Gospels.  Jesus came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matt.5:17).  He was “the telos of the law” (Rom.10:4), where telos means “end, completion, fulfillment.”  He ended the dispensation of law by fulfilling the law in His own person.  Love is the fulfillment of the law (Rom.13:10), and Jesus is full and perfect love.  He kept the moral law perfectly, completely, even to the laying down of His life—His primary covenant purpose—and in so doing He revealed the true spirit of the law, which is the heart of God.  He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (Gal.3:10-13), and thereby He made the grace of God inward and personal for us.  To be under the law is to bear an insupportable weight, but to have the law written on your heart (Jer.31:33), through the regenerative power of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood, is a miraculous blessing.

Under both the Old and New Covenant, our part is to obey the revealed will of God, and we do so by grace, through faith.  We have greater grace under the New Covenant, thanks to the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  The messianic events that the Old Testament saints could only look forward to hopefully, we can look back on with full assurance.  By God’s eternal design, the Old Covenant systematically foreshadowed, pointed to, and prepared the way for the New.  And among the main pointers were the Feasts of the Lord.

4. Two Calamitous Rejections

In the early church, quite naturally, there were controversies over which elements of the Old Covenant were permanent, assimilated into the New, and which had been made obsolete.  The council at Jerusalem in Acts 15 is one instance of this ongoing discussion.  Some things, like animal sacrifices in the temple, were soon understood to be obsolete (Heb.10:1-18).  Other things, like circumcision, were a more difficult call, but the Jerusalem council determined that it should not be required for Gentile believers.  And still other things, like the moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments, were clearly still in effect under the New Covenant—even more deeply in effect since the law is now written on the believers’ hearts. With regard to the Feasts of the Lord, inasmuch as God’s people are commanded to observe them “throughout your generations as a permanent ordinance” (Ex.12:17 NAS), their continued observance under the New Covenant seems, in the end, a matter of simple obedience.

As time went on, though, partly as a result of the series of Roman wars against Jewish rebellions, and partly due to theological differences over the divinity of Christ and the nature of the Godhead, the predominantly Gentile church came to identify itself more as separate and distinct from the Old Testament people of God than as their descendants in a continuous covenant relationship with the Holy One of Israel.  The sad historical fact is that the most vicious and persistent persecution of the Jews has come at the hands of predominantly Christian societies.

Behind this shame loom two calamitous rejections.  First, the Jews rejected their Messiah, with the prophesied consequence (Luke 21:20-24) that Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the Romans and the survivors sent into slavery and exile.  Second, partly in reaction to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, during the first few centuries A.D. the Christians increasingly rejected their Old Covenant roots and sank into anti-Semitism.  By the fourth century, when the bishops decided to separate Easter from Passover, a virulent strain of anti-Semitism had taken root in Christian thought—they remembered that the Jewish leaders engineered Christ’s crucifixion and forgot that Christ was a Jew.  The pivotal Council of Nicea in 325 prohibited Jewish believers from circumcising their children (a radical switch from the Council of Jerusalem!) and from observing the Feasts of the Lord. “The Jewish believers were forced to cease being Jewish and to become, in every sense of the word, Gentiles.” (Joseph Good, Rosh Hashana, viii)  Christ tore down the dividing wall of hostility between Jews and Gentiles (Eph.2:14), and the Christians, egged on by the Jews, built it back up.

Thus the church descended into “a specifically Christian branch of anti-Semitism which was superimposed on and blended with the ancient … pagan anti-Semitic tradition to form in time a mighty engine of hatred.” (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, 146)  With a few shining exceptions, the subsequent history of Jewry in Europe is mostly a long dreadful litany of discrimination, oppression, ghettoization, expulsion, and massacre. The Holocaust, horrible as it was, was not an anomaly but a culmination.

This long, stiff-necked estrangement between Christians and Jews has produced a major historical irony.  The Jews have kept the Feasts all these centuries without understanding their real significance.  Meanwhile the Christians, who do understand that Jesus is the Messiah, rather than keeping the Lord’s “appointed times” for celebrating the Messiah’s mighty deeds of salvation, have brushed off the Lord’s appointments and substituted a religious calendar derived from paganism—Lent, Easter, Christmas.  Easter was taken over from the old Germanic festival of Eastre, a goddess of spring and fertility who in turn probably derives from Ishtar, the ancient Babylonian goddess of fertility and war.  Christmas is a baptized version of the Roman Saturnalia festival; it was eventually swamped by folklore and is now mainly commercial.  Like the Pharisees, we have “let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” (Mark 7:8)

A day of reckoning is coming for both Jews and Christians, which I believe will be the fulfillment of the Jewish season of Teshuvah (“return, repentance”).   Beginning on Elul 1 and concluding forty days later on Tishri 10, which is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Teshuvah calls us to repent before the Day of the Lord—Judgment Day—comes. When Teshuvah is fulfilled, the judicial blinding of the Jews (Rom.11:7-9, 25) will be lifted, and the Jewish people, individually and en masse, will recognize that the crucified Nazarene is the true Messiah and will repent for having rejected Him.  As Jesus prophesied through Zechariah, “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication.  They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.” (Zech.12:10)

Meanwhile the church, as individual believers and as a whole body, will experience its own Teshuvah.  Broadly speaking, we do not understand real repentance because we have not experienced it.  The church, particularly in America, is immersed in a wealthy, materialistic, self-centered, and in-creasingly pagan society.  Too often we have either gone with the flow and become indistinguishable from them, or else reacted by becoming smugly self-righteous, or even (notably on TV) done both at once.  God calls us to be unified in Christ, but mostly we are fragmented into mutual suspicion, disapproval, competition, and ignorance of one another. The church is alienated from itself almost as much as from its Judaic roots.  But the Lord has a cure for our malady:  Teshuvah, a God-empowered ordeal of repen-tance on a scale and to a depth commensurate with that of the Jews.  As they grieve for having rejected Jesus, so we will grieve for having despised and persecuted them, for cutting ourselves off from our Biblical roots and insulting our gracious Lord.  As one grieves for a firstborn son.


That is how the church will finally reach spiritual maturity. Paul prophesied that Christ would work within His church “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” (Eph.4:13)  From where we are at now, it will require the shock therapy of a Teshuvah repentance to achieve that level of maturity.  The result, however, will fulfill the promise of the Day of Atonement and will be an event unparalleled in human history: Jews and Christians reconciled with God and with one another in a massive outpouring of forgiveness and joy.  Paul describes it in these terms (speaking of God’s rejection of the Jews on account of their rejection of Christ):  “For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?” (Rom.11:15) The colossal exultation of this great reconciliation will be like a megaton spiritual explosion sending wave upon wave of powerful witness throughout the world, witness to the truth that Jesus is indeed the Savior of the world.  This will occur during the seven-year Tribulation period, when the Antichrist is consolidating his totalitarian regime and doing everything in his power to defeat the kingdom of God through propaganda and persecution.  Many of God’s people will be martyred (Rev.6:9-11), but our reconciliation will seal the doom of Antichrist.  Those of us who are still alive at that time will overcome him by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of our testimony, and by our willingness to die in upholding the name of Jesus (Rev.12:11).  The Messiah’s second coming, announced with a supernatural trumpet blast (Matt.24:30-31, 1Thess.4:16-17, Rev.19:11-21), will destroy the Antichrist and all his works, and will inaugurate the Messianic reign in fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles.

Conclusion

The Exodus events—in particular, the Passover, crossing the Red Sea, and the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai—were “a type and shadow” of their New Covenant fulfillment in Christ. The Lord established the seven Feasts as the way we are to celebrate this connection.  They are the means that God has provided for us and the appointed times that God has provided for us to celebrate His great acts of salvation on our behalf.  How remarkably appropriate it is that Christ, the “firstfruits” of the general resurrection (see 1Cor.15:23), should have been resurrected on the very day—the feast of Firstfruits—that commemorates the miraculous deliverance from death to life when the Red Sea was parted.

As historical markers, the Feasts of the Lord (the first four at least) are utterly unparalleled in that they point both ways, commemoratively back to the Exodus and prophetically forward to Christ—and with a degree of precision over the span of many centuries which could only have been achieved by the hand of God.  The Feasts, rightly understood and faithfully observed, reveal to us both our true roots in salvation history and our true destiny as the people of God.  If we, the people of the New Covenant, were “keeping the feasts” as Paul exhorted us to do, we would be celebrating this inviolable, God-ordained connection between past, present, and future.  We would be celebrating the certainty that God has fulfilled His covenant promises foreshadowed by Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, and Pentecost, and that He will fulfill His covenant promises heralded in the feasts of Trumpets, Yom Kippur, and Tabernacles.