The Calendar in Context
From the Hosts
The Hebrew calendar was full of holidays--holy rituals, assemblies, celebrations--events that involved all the families of Israel in the worship and fellowship of God. Today we'll investigate how those rituals speak to us, especially in our celebration of the Lord's Day.
This Episode Features: Calendars And Holy Days; If Your Life Was A Movie...; Why Does Everyone Try To Kill Princesses?; Ritual Treasure Hunts; Really Harvesting Barley; Going Up And Down Mountains; Lots Of Trumpets; All I Know I Learned In Kindergarten; and The Benefits Of Journaling.
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
We’ve been talking about the sacrificial law in the Old Testament. Today we’re shifting gears to talk about the Levitical feasts, but before we do that, I have a very important question to put to the both of you. Every so often I bring up these icebreaker questions/games, and it is time for one of those again.
So here’s the situation. There’s a movie about you and your life. It doesn’t have to be your real life.
It could be the life that you imagine. It could be you when you were a kid playing with your friends on the playground or imaginary friends or whatever. It could be the novel that you’re writing, but it’s about you. What genre of movie is it? That’s Part 1 of the question. Part 2 of the question is what song plays during the closing credits?
Post-apocalyptic? Dystopia like along the lines of Equilibrium or something like that?
I feel like there would be a musical element to your movie. It’s a sci-fi dystopian musical.
More than likely. I want this to be a thing now, honestly. I feel like the best trick I could ever play is rickrolling the audience right at the end.
I would appreciate that. I appreciate a good rickroll. So for Bryan we’ve got a sci-fi action/adventure dystopia that’s a musical.
I am being sardonic and pessimistic when I say dystopia. It’s probably not that.
It would have to be something along the lines of a friendship movie, a buddy film, set in a small town but with elements of fantasy and/or sci-fi, with a mystery. These are all my genres lumped together here. And unlike Bryan’s, mine would have a happy ending because I was raised that way. I grew up in the ‘60s.
I never said anything about my ending. I just said something about the song.
The ‘50s never quite ended for me. I kind of skipped the ‘60s. But I do not have a song. I can tell you the nature of the song. It’s probably a song that someone out there could name. It might be the closing scenes from some old TV sitcom or some old movie. It would be something with nostalgic connections appropriate for a coming-of-age. All of this has ended happily, but the future is ahead of us. I don’t think the closing theme to Star Trek would do it, something a little more old-fashioned. I almost want to say Andy Griffith’s closing theme, but I don’t know. There you go. That’s all I got.
If you think of the specific song and you want to tell us next week, you want to think about it for a week, you can do that.
No, I really don’t. It’s not coming that fast. Emily, we have not heard yours.
I think mine has to be some sort of historical drama, but there’s potential for it to also be a musical, and I’m pretty sure there’s a motorcycle chase in it.
So when you say historical drama, are we talking Great Escape? I guess that has a motorcycle chase and it’s historical.
That is my favorite movie. I think we determined recently that it’s tied with Sound of Music, and then we realized that The Great Escape and The Sound of Music are the same movie. But I think the closing theme – it’s true, I should have given you more heads up, because I actually thought about this for days – the closing theme is O Valencia by The Decemberists.
It’s very upbeat, but I think the lyrics are actually like a Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story kind of thing, but it’s very cheery and I like it, and it’s the right mood for the closing of the movie about my life.
That might work. One or two of my girls have used that for important things before.
But the nature of the calendar in this Christian worldview is a little bit different from the nature of a calendar you might have found in other pagan religions. In other contexts we’ve talked about how the magical worldview sees ritual as affecting something in the world. It’s ontologically serving to shape reality according to man’s wishes and according to his words. How is the Hebrew calendar different? If it’s not ontological, would you say it’s ethical? What function is happening here?
I suppose the overriding biblical category would simply be covenantal. Ethical is okay, except it’s kind of an Aristotelian category and anything that gets me anywhere near Aristotle always makes me nervous. I start breaking out into hives and things like that. But if we understand it properly, I suppose. It’s a matter of covenant obedience.
God in the old covenant laid out this particular pattern for his worship. All of these days were not simply holidays as we conceive of such things, but they were holy days, the original origin of our ‘holiday.’ They were times to worship. They were times where God called his people either locally in their local assemblies, which were not yet called synagogues but functionally were that, or at the tabernacle or later the temple, to come into his presence with the rest of his people and do specific things.
We’ve talked about the sacrificial laws, the various sacrifices, and what they did. The calendar that God mandates what sacrifice for what event. It’s not my intention largely, because I don’t have it memorized, to walk through exactly every sacrifice that transpired on each occasion.
Passover is easy, the blood of the Passover lamb, which was the original peace offering. On the Day of Atonement, you have the sin offering, along with its companion, the scapegoat. With First Fruits there’s the offering of grain and cereal, but there were other blood sacrifices that went with that. The waving of the first sheaf is simply a grain offering resting on the Passover that just transpired.
The point is – and here’s an area for Christians to start meditating on and thinking about because we’ve ignored it for so long – this is something our children should know, so that by the time we get to our age we should say, “Well, of course, obviously…” – no, it’s not obvious, really. We haven’t spent that much time on it, but if we can just plant some seeds here and get people thinking, “These are things? I thought that was in the Old Testament.” Yes, and whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning. They were written for us upon whom the end of the ages has come, that we through scriptures might have confidence and hope, Paul tells us, something along those lines.
There’s a couple angles you could approach this from. This is God’s call to his people to worship. We worship God when he calls us. Traditionally Christian worship begins with a call to worship, usually taken directly from scripture, something like, “Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker,” or any other number of things. The Book of Common Prayer has its share and other traditions have theirs, pieces of scripture we use to tell God’s people, “God summons you to worship. You have his permission. You have his blessing. He’s saying, ‘Come on in.’” Then we find ourselves in the presence of God, and then the liturgy kicks off from there.
What do you do when you’re in the presence of God? First of all, you’re awed at his holiness and confounded by your sin, so that needs to be addressed up front. Then as you understand that you have peace with God through Christ, or in the old covenant through the blood of the sacrifice that points to Christ, then you are joyful and you want to sing and you want to talk to God and you want to hear from God.
Somewhere in there, in many cases, there’s a fellowship meal, at least if it’s a peace offering that’s involved or some other celebration. Most of these festivals were feasts, so God is again involving the whole man, not just the spirit. It’s very non-Gnostic.
It feeds the body as well as the soul. It feeds our need for communion with one another.
Chevy Chase did a whole series of National Lampoons – Summer Vacation, Christmas Vacation, all that. I don’t think I ever saw any of them all the way through, but I think the point of them was that American family vacations have a history of going really bad and being annoying and frustrating, and yet we keep doing them.
There’s something about, “We’re all in this together. It’s just us against the world. We’re going to go see something new” that builds community, builds memories, builds experiences together, changes our perception of the world.
As Israel came together three times – three of the feasts mandated attendance in Jerusalem – the whole family didn’t have to come, but very often they did, at least to one. We see this, for instance, with Samuel’s parents and then with Jesus’ parents. This kind of thing would happen.
That kind of blows my mind, that every family – it must have been a lot of people, right? That’s a big crowd.
There would be a lot of people on the road, and you would expect as you go by this village or that village, “Hey, your friend Teddy from last year, he’s going to be there.”
The men traditionally traveled with men, women with women, children with either side, depending how old they were, but it was a community-building thing. It wasn’t a forced march. It wasn’t military. It was celebratory. Kids would look forward to seeing the friends they met the year before, or the year before that. It’s sort of like going to Christian summer camp for your denomination. You don’t see them any other time, but you see them then and you’re Christians together.
But that also comes with all the practical hardships like walking a long way. Most people did not have mules or donkeys, let alone horses. They might have an ox cart, but ox carts are not terribly comfortable.
Our churches today, we believe – at least those of us here – that God ordained the baptism of babies. You know how bad that can go? God knew that – the crying, the wetting the diapers, everything that could go wrong will go wrong. The baby throws up – God knew that and yet he said, “Do this.” He doesn’t have such an air of sanctity of tradition that he’s not willing to laugh with the little kids in their foibles, and with us with ours.
It’s also a really great illustration of how God’s there for every moment, every kind of moment. God isn’t just the guy you go worship on Sunday, and you get dressed up in your best clothes, and he’s only there really when you’re there looking nice for him. He’ll only help you out when you’re there to look nice for him.
No, he’s there for every moment, including when you’re in sweat pants eating a pint of ice cream and crying over something horrible that’s happened to you, or if you’re even so young that you can’t put into words what is hurting you.
Yeah, and that’s a lot of what this is. Contrast this with the American calendar. We as a nation, as we became a nation and so broke away from Britain, we pretty well scrapped the church calendar because it was perceived as denominational, sectarian. You were Anglican or Lutheran if you observed all that, and it still smacked of a bit of Rome to a lot of people. So very quickly we began to replace the traditional church holidays with patriotic days – Washington’s birthday, later Lincoln’s, 4th of July to celebrate the declaration.
Thanksgiving came and went, until finally it came and stayed, but the reference was more to the origins of the country than to thanksgiving to God. You can throw onto that, Christmas remained, although it’s become increasingly secular, and Easter too was secularized.
Let’s not forget All Saints’ Day or Reformation Day, however you want to perceive it. Either way it’s a church holiday, but we turned it into something that’s fun for kids, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. I’ve watched children come to Reformation Day services over the years and it’s pretty much horrible for them – it’s boring, lectures on the five points of theology in Reformation history. There may be a good way to do that to include kids joyfully, but I haven’t completely seen it yet.
All of these things provide a wide range of experience, from fireworks, to going out at dark in costume, to adorning your house with bright pretty lights and putting packages under the tree, to buying heart-shaped cards for particular loved ones, having turkey and stuffing and watching ball games.
All of these have helped shape the American psyche. We anticipate these things. Our economy anticipates these things. They move us along. And although it’s not self-consciously a religion, there are religious aspects about it. But most certainly whether it was all intended or not at any point, there is a discipline of life that set celebratory days aside for us. They make us think about things.
At Halloween and Christmas, you think about children. Even at Easter you think a little bit about children. Some churches don’t. Some churches don’t want to go there because that’s adding to scripture or introducing pagan elements, but let’s face it, most Americans hide Easter eggs and have Christmas trees and send their children out in the dark, maybe with a responsible adult, to go say “Trick or treat.” I lived through all of that and, in and of itself, it didn’t seem to hurt me any. It gives you something to look forward to and something to look back on and something to remember.
If we can come up with something like that, I think we can conclude that God had much better and bigger ideas, and that they actually worked a lot better than anything we have. So as we look at the festivals we should see that God is instructing his people. He’s communicating truth about the coming Messiah and his kingdom and the age to come. He was teaching Israel some habits of thought and life that would be productive in that direction. Then when Christ comes – yes, all these things were shadows, but the shadows collapse and coalesce in Christ, who is the body, and they pass over into the New Testament’s Lord’s Day.
So we can look at these festivals and say, “We don’t do that anymore, or we don’t have to do that,” but there’s something here that speaks today even to our Lord’s Day celebrations, to going to church on Sunday, so with that in mind, we can I think at least recap what they are.
We’ve talked extensively about the Sabbath and I don’t really want to go there anymore. There’s always the temptation of, “But what can do you?” As a Bible teacher of teenagers, that’s one of the foremost questions. “Is it all right if on Sunday you….”
I think there is a danger when Sunday becomes the most boring day of the week for children. We’ve done something wrong. That I leave for people to sort out in terms of their own tradition, but in Leviticus that’s the first one – Leviticus 23, I believe. That’s the first one that’s mentioned, and it’s called a feast. The Sabbath Day is a feast. You’re supposed to eat good food. You’re supposed to enjoy the good food that you’re eating.
We’ve dealt before with the regulative principle of worship, and I think sometimes it overlooks rather obvious things like you want a clear command for something? It’s a feast. To the Jewish mind that implies two things: good food and wine. And the same thing holds for these others.
When Jesus came, there were cups of wine that were part of the Passover celebration. God never authorized it. He never specified it, and yet Jesus when he was offered these cups, or they were ready for him to present, he didn’t dash it to the floor and say, “How dare you defile my father’s worship?” He picked it up and turned the third cup into a cup of blessing. He instituted the Lord’s Supper with it.
He took what was a logical – I won’t say addition, but extrapolation from what God had said, and used it to ignite the new covenant sacrament, because it’s a festival. It’s a feast. You drink wine. It was that simple. There’s no condemnation from Christ that you’ve read too much into it.
So yes, the scripture regulates our worship most certainly, but sometimes we need to look a little more closely at what God actually asks.
There’s something I love to notice in the traditional Passover liturgy, as well as in all of these cases where all of Israel is gathering and looking at memorials and things, that the children are involved in this process. They have a question to ask. “Why do we do these things?” and the assumption is they’re there, they’re involved, and they’re not left out because they’re too young to understand. They’re supposed to be there, and you’re supposed to be parenting them all the way and showing them where God brought you.
My father in his younger years, if he was a Christian, he was a very weak one and did not take any kind of lead along these lines. I believe he came to Christ in his later years. I believe that for a number of reasons and it’s a good thing to believe of one’s dad, but our family suffered a great deal from secularization because of that.
Christmas, you got up, you got the presents, you tore into them. Make sure mom and dad get theirs too, because you’re nice. That kind of thing. I still see remnants of that when I’m around younger children at Christmas time. They want to skip by the explanation of, “This is why we’re here. This is why we’re doing this.”
There’s a time for teaching, but I think if you wait till the last second and do the teaching it’s frustrating. As a child I was always a strict traditionalist. You open Christmas presents Christmas morning. You don’t do it before then. That’s like some kind of cosmic sacrilege to open them early, until I got older and stopped caring about presents and wanted to sleep in. Dad said, “No, we have to get up at 6:00 and open presents.” I said, “Let’s open them the night before. I no longer care about this.”
I think that you need to do a lot of explaining ahead of time. For instance, the Passover has the standard question. It’s presented in the law as, “Your children will say this,” and Israel generally said, “Okay, where’s the cue card? Hand it to the oldest kid. Okay, read this question so we can answer it.” But presumably there would be a lot of conversation in the days before, especially if the kids and mom are going with them.
Yeah, so this is a great chance to explain things. We can take advantage of this. And this is an area that now that I’m coming up with this right question, I look at how badly I’ve failed in this respect.
“Why does the pastor raise his hands toward us when he says these words? What are those words? What do you think he’s doing there?”
“Why do we stand here and sit here? Why do we use this kind of music and not the kind that you see in Disney movies?”
There are all kinds of things that you can ask, and maybe they’ll start asking their own, but these are wonderful teaching times if we have eyes to see. My wife has always been great about this, about seeing and gently creating, without ever forcing the issue moralistically, to give an opportunity for children to talk about such things.
Speaking of Disney films, one of my best conversations with my oldest daughter, who was about two at the time – everybody else must have been sick that day because we were on the way to church alone, and for some reason she said, “Daddy, why does everyone try to kill princesses?”
It is, and we spent the rest of the time talking about the Church as the bride. Satan wanted to kill the bride. She, as a daughter of God, and thus a princess in God’s family – it was a wonderful conversation. I wish I could remember it all, but memory says it was a wonderful conversation, so it must have been.
One thing that we have here in all of this is that God presents different kinds of circumstances to provoke different sorts of opportunities. What if every holiday on the American calendar we celebrated exactly alike? Let’s say that every holiday was a mini-Christmas. You go out and you get a tree and put lights on it, you put presents, there’s the mistletoe and the eggnog, and every single holiday is like that.
Yeah, it’s a bit same-y, and God doesn’t do that. There were some similarities. They’re all worship services, and three of them required you to go to the tabernacle or temple, but others didn’t. The Day of Atonement didn’t require you to go anywhere. In fact, it told you to stay home and think about your sins.
Think again for children. Between Trumpets – “Hey Bobby, here’s a trumpet. Go blow it!”
“Hank, what did you just do? Do you know what you just released [trumpet sounds] on the world?”
Each of these, there’s something fresh about it. As adults, often what we look for is very simply a day off. And depending on the season, we know more or less what we do with our days off, and often it’s the same thing – sleep in. Maybe for some of us it’s gardening here, going to the snow here, or something else, but God was more thoughtful in what he did.
So we got as far as the yearly festivals. Here’s something we have to talk about first, though, and that’s the whole concept of the year. When God created heaven and earth, it was apparently someplace near or around the autumnal equinox and that day becomes New Year’s Day. The seventh month would begin around the vernal equinox, so it would span those.
When God brought his people out of Egypt, he shifted the calendar by six months so that what had been the seventh month beginning with the vernal equinox now was the first month, and what had been the first month beginning with New Year’s Day was now the seventh month.
Yeah, interesting. But Israel continued to use both calendars. The liturgical or ecclesiastical calendar is the one that we pay attention to when we’re looking at the feasts and such, but for anointing kings and tracking their reign and such, more often the civil calendar is used.
Right, exactly. So just as we have fiscal years and school years and calendar years, they also ran two years side-by-side and it didn’t bother them. They were smart people and could figure out what was going on.
So with this new calendar, the first month is called Abib. Later on in Persian days it was called Nisan. On the 10th day of that they chose the Passover lamb and checked it out for three days or so to make sure it was free from blemish. Then on the 14th day at evening they killed it as a sacrifice, as a peace offering, which they ate together with their families, and possibly neighbors if they had a small family.
This was coincident with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and here again the Jewish fathers turned this into kind of a game for the kids. They would deliberately leave packages of leaven scattered throughout the house, and at night they would go with a candle through the house and find all the packages of leaven – a treasure hunt. It was something that would stick this in the minds of their children. “The leaven of Egypt we have to leave behind. We must get it out of our house.” It was a practical kind of Sunday School thing, but it worked and God blessed it. But we’ve talked about Passover.
There was Passover and then a Sabbath Day, or Passover was the Sabbath Day. The 15th was the Sabbath Day. On the day after, something happened that’s only mentioned once or twice in the whole Bible, which is in itself odd. Passover is dated from the time of barley harvest. I think we talk about this next week but, in addition to all the other complications, Israel was also running a solar year and a lunar year. The lunar year has more like 13 months, or 12-point-something and every couple years you have to add a month. So because of this shifting, they had to keep the lunar calendar tied to what actually was happening, like really harvesting barley.
Once they knew that the barley crops were coming up, then they would watch the horizon very closely for I guess it would be the new moon? Full moon? I don’t even know, whatever the moon does at that point at the beginning of the month. And when they saw that, then they would blow the trumpets and it would echo throughout the land. Every month was announced by the blowing of a trumpet, for a total of seven throughout the agricultural and liturgical year.
It would be hard to see the new moon, so if you’re going to be looking for that, you’re going to be looking a while.
That’s not it, then. So that’s going on. It’s tied to barley harvest. You have to wait for the barley harvest and you have to wait for the moon to be in the right cycle. Then you can have Passover, and that means that the first of the barley is ripe, and on the day after the Passover Sabbath, somebody someplace – again, the details are exceedingly lacking; whether everybody did this locally or representatively, or somebody just went out into the fields near the tabernacle and cut something, or people nearby ran to the tabernacle and had a contest of who gets there first, we don’t know. We’re not told, but they bring the very first sheaf that’s harvested, and they take it and they wave it before God. It’s bloodless.
This is interesting because all the other sacrifices, even First Fruits, require blood offerings. This one by implication has its roots in Passover, the day before yesterday, and it’s waving a sheaf, the first fruits of the whole crop that’s following, before God, in the presence of God. That’s all we’ve got here in Leviticus 23.
It takes Paul to fill this in and say, “Christ, the first fruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.” Christ is the first fruit sheaf and he dies on Passover, spends the Sabbath Day in the grave, and then he comes forth on that first Sunday, and that’s why it’s not bloodless. The blood was shed by the Passover lamb. Now the Passover lamb got better and he’s alive and he’s being waved in the presence of God to signify that, “I’m the first. I’ve got a whole bunch following me.”
On the calendar we point then to the next feast, which is actually called First Fruits or Pentecost or the Feast of Weeks, because it’s seven weeks plus a day or 50 days, thus the pente, when people have got together their own harvest of their own fields. They’ve completed the first round of harvest, so the work’s done. God has given them 50 days to get that first harvest in, and they bring it and present the first of the first crops, barley and whatever comes due at that time, and they present it before God. It’s 50 days after Passover.
This is one of those other things where God expects us to flex our little muscles and say, “Did anything significant happen 50 days after Passover?” Again, it’s not obvious. There’s no place that says, “And lo, it was the 50th day.” What it says is more like, “Okay, we’re now in the second month, and this happens and this happens.”
It gets down to we’re really close to 50 days, and then Moses starts going up and down mountains, which I completely missed as a young person, even as a Bible teacher. I looked at it and in my mind I saw Moses going up up up up, down down down, up up up…”Boy, he went up and down that mountain a lot.”
Now, this is dumb because I’ve climbed Mt. Lassen. You don’t go up and down two or three times in a day. To get to the top of a mountain takes a day and you’re worn out, so rather than say, “Oh, each of these is a whole day and that’s going to get us really near 50,” I just completely missed the point.
If we do the proper calculation, we find out that Pentecost also pointed back to the giving of the Law. What does it point forward to? We know the New Testament, right? We all know about what happened on the Day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is poured out. The Law is written on people’s hearts and we see the harvest of Israel, the first fruits.
In a couple places, the early church is spoken of as the first fruits unto God out of his creation. Particularly in the book of Revelation the expression is used. So that’s the beginning of the harvest – first the Jew and afterward the Greek.
Now we’re looking down the eschatological pipeline to Tabernacles, but first we go through the months. Each month begins with a new moon. Each one is announced by a trumpet, until we come to Rosh Hashana, which is the beginning of the seventh month. Rosh Hashana is New Year’s Day, and we talked about this – the first of Tishrei.
It remembers the day the world was born, but in doing so it celebrates the coming of God. When God comes, he comes with trumpets. Think of Sinai. If God had wanted to, he could have ordained that Israel had gunpowder and fireworks and all that.
Yeah. He chose to skip that. He thought trumpets would do it. That’s the kind of thing we would do. We would have all kinds of special effects and perhaps thereby diminish the majesty of God. But they were to think of God coming. God came in creation. He comes in history to judge his people. He came at Passover. He will come in the person of Messiah, and one day he will come to judge the world.
Each of these comings is a day of the Lord leading up to the great and terrible day of the Lord – terrible in the sense that it is awe-inspiring. It is not a light and trivial thing. Even the holiest of God’s saints must look with wide-open mouth, wide eyes and in awe of the glory of God that’s going to be revealed then. So with that as an introduction to the seventh month, people should begin to think about judgment, and here a word about judgment.
We hear the word judgement, and we think judgment is bad. It means, “You’re judging me. You’re saying nasty things about me. You’re punishing me.”
Yeah, and that’s not at all what the Bible means by that – a judge, judges. Presumably there’s someone who’s been harmed and there’s someone who’s done the harming. He justifies the one and condemns the other. We used to use the expression, “I want to have my day in court,” not hoping he will be punished, but hoping he will be vindicated, and the word is used this way.
Particularly I’m thinking of the book of Revelation. “It’s time for you to judge the dead,” and there the context is not the final judgement. It’s talking about the saints who have been martyred by the Jews and by Rome. “It’s time for you to judge Israel and to judge Rome to vindicate your saints by bringing destruction upon these pagan powers.”
When we come into God’s presence, we step into the presence of a holy God. Judgment is inevitable. God looks at you. He sees you. He sees you down to the core of your being, and God does not put his mind and ethical faculties on hold. He doesn’t wear rosy glasses. What he does wear, of course, is the blood of Christ in front of his eyes, which we’re going to see in the next feast.
For the Christian then to stand before God in Christ’s merits is a sobering thing but a joyful thing. To come into God’s presence in one’s self-righteousness is a very dangerous thing. We can think of Paul in Corinthians when he speaks of, “You need to judge yourself. Because you haven’t been, some are weak and sickly and some sleep.” Coming into God’s presence for worship lightly, particularly to the holy sacrament, can be damning and it can be death.
After Trumpets, the next feast is the Day of Atonement. It’s on the 10th, and I’m going to throw this out so that somebody somewhere notices and I have this for a permanent record. You notice the Passover lamb is chosen on the 10th of Nisan, and the Day of Atonement is on the 10th of Tishrei. I don’t know why. I have a partial guess that I’m not going to share. I don’t see anything in scripture that singles out why in the world the 10th should be important. 7 + 3? Eh. I just thought I’d throw that out there because I haven’t seen anybody mention it anywhere.
We’ve got 10 plagues, 10 commandments, judges judged over groups of 10, so there’s some sort of judgment going on here.
There’s something there, maybe that. Maybe there’s a connection with judgment.
Anyway, scapegoats. First we have to back up and think about sin offerings. The sin offering had reference to the tabernacle. The tabernacle was God’s house, but God’s people are God’s house, so the one reflects the other. When God’s people sin, it’s as if that’s reflected in the tabernacle, as if it’s to God visible as mold in the walls.
Nobody wants to live in a moldy house. God doesn’t, so the sin offerings that applied blood to various parts of the tabernacle were the daily/weekly cleaning of the house, not from real dirt but from sin and its influences, so God would continue to be content to dwell with his people on a day-by-day basis. This is the big spring cleaning of the year, when God in a big way guarantees his people, “I am staying with you.”
A number of things happen, but the ones we’ll focus on are, first, the sin offering, a goat whose blood the high priest would take within the veil. This is the only time during the whole year he would go behind the second veil into the Holy of Holies. He would go both with incense and also with the blood of the goat, and he would sprinkle the blood on the mercy seat. The Shekinah glory, God’s presence, manifested itself above the cherubim, then the mercy seat as a lid on the ark, and then within the ark the tablets of stone, the Ten Commandments.
God looks down upon his law and sees its provisions, its stipulations, and knows that his people have broken it, but once a year the high priest, the mediator, the Messiah is to put blood there so that God will look at his broken law through the blood of the sin offering and be content, be satisfied, be propitiated, the word we don’t use anymore. It means his wrath is turned away and he will be content to dwell with his people for another year.
Now, it’s not magic. If you do it in unbelief, God’s going to call your bluff. You can think here of Hophni and Phinehas and their abominable worship and what they did to corrupt the worship of God, and how God eventually got up and left and turned his sanctuary over to the Philistines.
To a less condemning extent, Zacharias when he got the message from the angel of the Lord and he wasn’t quite looking in faith, and the angel says, “Yeah, nope. You just need to shut up for a few months.”
Yeah. If you come into God’s presence without faith, it’s a questionable business.
We focus on that to a certain extent because of getting into the Holy of Holies, but the other thing that usually grabs our attention is the other goat. There are two goats to begin with, and the priest confesses the sins of Israel on the heads of both. One is sacrificed.
The other, though, is given to a man, and he’s taken out into the wilderness and let go. He escapes, as it were, into the wilderness. He escapes judgment and death, bearing the sins of God’s people. This seems to be an image or a figure that God takes our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. He takes them out of memory, out of sight.
One of the minor prophets speaks of God throwing our sins behind his back into the depths of the sea. It’s that kind of thing – again, another visual preaching of the gospel, another way to think about what God does for us, so that we don’t go on being haunted.
“Yeah, sure are. But you know what? You’ve got a great God and he just dealt with that. Rejoice now.”
The Day of Atonement was not a day where Israel had to come to the temple. It was the one day where they were to stay home and it’s the only fast day on the calendar. They’re to afflict their souls. They’re to think seriously about their sins and their need for forgiveness. And when that day is over, back to normal life and back to normal living.
God doesn’t have us crawling around in guilt and self-pity and fear throughout the year. One day to look God in the face and say, “Yes, Lord, I trust you because I’ve got nothing,” and then you’re back to life and service and dominion and fellowship with God.
That leaves us with Tabernacles, which also has multiple names – Tabernacles, Booths, Ingathering. Ingathering because it was the final feast, where the grapes and wine and wheat were brought in. It lasted a week long. There was a series of sacrifices. Most of the sacrifices were identical day by day, but one thing changed. There were bulls offered, and the pattern of the offering, the numbering of them is odd. It’s like 13, 12, 11, 10, and down.
You look at that and you think, “What? Why?” There’s no explanation, but if we add them all up we get 71 or 70 + 1, and by this point God has used the number 70 on us a number of times. The first time was in the Table of Nations in Genesis 11, where he presents the nations summed up under 70 names. So this is Israel acting as a priest for the nations. 70 sacrifices plus 1 for Israel.
Meanwhile, they’re building their little booths, their tabernacles from tree branches that they find wherever they can, and remembering when they dwelled beneath the glory cloud in little tabernacles of their own. They tabernacled in the shadow of God’s greater tabernacling in their midst.
They celebrate the future ingathering of the Gentiles, which begins with the gospel proclamation to the Gentiles with Saint Paul, and reaches to the end of the world, to the end of time, to the final resurrection. We have hymns that tie this together, that tie the figure of gathering in God’s harvest with the final resurrection and judgment, and I’m not going to even try to sing anything.
This is something I completely missed until 20 minutes ago when I said it, that the liturgical year and the agricultural year were the same, at least as far as harvest is concerned. The harvest season and the liturgical year are the same. We begin with the harvest of barley and we end with the harvest of wheat and grapes.
When you begin to look at all of Christ’s parables and Paul’s analogies, we begin to see a great deal of that piling on top of it. It’s not just because Israel was agricultural, although that helps, but it’s because God had deliberately woven in truths about seeds and growth and harvesting into the Old Testament economy and into their calendar.
So as Israel thought through this, and one would hope meditated upon it, their perception would be changed as to what their function was. “We’re worshiping God and praying for the Gentile nations. There’s going to be a harvest. There’s going to be a first harvest and there’s going to be a later harvest. It all begins with the death of the Passover lamb. Huh…I wonder what that means.” It’s obvious to us, at least it should be.
This was implicit in what we said before about the barley harvest, but let’s go back and make it explicit. Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die – this is a resurrection telling.
Absolutely. So God pointed at the life they knew, the agricultural life around them that they were immersed in, and God had made them by-and-large an agricultural people. He didn’t lead them into New York and Philadelphia. He led them into what was mostly fields and olive yards and things like that. Yeah, there were a few big cities, but most of Israel stayed pretty close to the land. If they brought a sacrifice, they still had to buy a lamb or an ox someplace, so there was more of an interchange there than there is now.
And here’s a pet peeve. It made explaining things in the Bible to children so much easier, because children growing up on a farm will recognize animals mating. It’s a thing that happens. There’s no huge surprise or shock. “Oh, look over there! They’re mating.” But we have so covered it over with a false sanctity and moralism that it becomes almost impossible sometimes to teach sections of scripture to young people, even teenagers, for fear that somebody’s sensibilities are going to be shocked.
Some basic things that every child growing up on a farm would know, they don’t. They’ve grown up in cities and if they haven’t seen it on television it isn’t real. But God deliberately put things out there like animals dying. “That cute little lamb who’s been with us for a few months, he’s going to become a sacrifice to God. We will name him Sacrifice so you don’t get too attached. He has a destiny. It’s to die. You need to understand that, dear.”
I suppose the last thing to say, although I’ve hinted at it, is that these things are not ongoing into the new covenant. There’s no suggestion that we should be observing Passover or Trumpets or any of these other things. We do celebrate New Year’s Day, but January 1 is absolutely meaningless astrologically, culturally, or any other way. So we go out and, guess what? We make loud noises – surprise, surprise. We make New Year’s resolutions.
Yeah, some things are basic. But the underlying principles here do coalesce into the Lord’s Day. Sometimes we need to go back and look at the roots so we can more fully appreciate what the Lord’s Day is all about and what Christian worship and liturgy is all about.
We don’t need to go back and do things the way they did. We don’t need to have the incense. We certainly don’t need to have burnt offerings. But we do need to understand the principles that are at work and why God used such a thing.
This is something that I think is unfortunate in Reformed history. Luther and Calvin, as far as I can see, were both of the opinion that the Lord’s Day was not technically set or required in the New Testament. It was simply a day that the Church chose. For one thing, that’s sort of like handing Rome and then later Seventh Day Adventists all the ammunition they need. “Oh yeah, we in the Church set the day of worship. Aren’t we powerful. See, it’s a Roman Catholic conspiracy!” No, Jesus set the day by rising from the dead and then meeting with his disciples.
In the beginning, God set the seventh day by resting and gave no commandment. He just rested and assumed that his image would know that that’s what you do. It would be a long time, a couple thousand years, before there would be a positive command, because his example was enough for people who loved him.
When Jesus rose from the dead, you learn real fast, especially if you’re Thomas, if you don’t show up on the Lord’s Day with God’s people, you are going to miss cool things – like Jesus. So very early on they learned that that’s what you do.
In the book of Revelation, Chapter 1, it’s the Lord’s Day. It’s the only time in the New Testament we find the expression, and what do we see? There’s Jesus coming, as if it’s the day of the Lord. He’s thundering like the glory cloud. He’s dressed like a high priest.
He’s got a message for the churches. He’s holding their angels, their pastors, their messengers in his hand, and he speaks to his church. Then after all that’s done, John is caught up into heaven and sees the same thing from the other side, from the throne of God. He looks and here’s the church caught up into heaven, symbolized by 24 elders all about the throne singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” with the angels and the cherubim, and singing praises to the Lamb.
Something that I missed for a long time – we’re introduced to seven angels who are pastors. In Chapter 1, those seven angels keep on showing up. They’re not new bunches of seven angels each time. It’s the same pastors all the way through the book. So at the end when John falls down before one of them, he says, “Stop that. I am one of your fellow servants. I’m also a prophet. In other words, I’m not an angelic spirit. I’m a real guy. I share your prophetic ministry in that I too preach the Word of God. Get up off your knees,” which helps us see the whole book of Revelation in that context. It’s a worship service and it pulls out so many elements.
Again, I think this is something we talk about next week, especially about Rosh Hashana, New Year’s Day, that to read Revelation as an outpouring or an analysis of the calendar will help you see things about Revelation that I think you might have missed before, at least things I’ve missed.
Absolutely, because Revelation is entirely dependent upon understanding the Old Testament.
Yeah. When I was young, new converts were expected to read two books of the Bible – John, because it was the simplest and had no particular references to the rest of the Bible (ha ha ha), and the book of Revelation because it was tomorrow’s headlines. Wrong on both counts, in ignorance of the Old Testament.
I still kind of like John for a starter because it is very straightforward in what it tells you, not that the other gospels aren’t also straightforward, but it’s not a bad starting place.
No, I don’t mind that at all. I just laugh at the naivete of saying you don’t have to understand the Old Testament. John points and says, “The Lamb of God.” Honestly, we’re talking to a convert who knows nothing, and today you have to assume that, that converts really know zero, zilch.
There was a time when every kid at least had gone to Sunday School or heard some biblical expressions or maybe had the Bible as literature in a university class or something, or seen Easter movies on TV late at night.
Kate and I were working with a young couple several years ago now. They were just on the verge of being Christians. In fact, they probably were at that point and we just didn’t know – or I didn’t. I wasn’t sensitive enough to get it and say, “Okay, you need to be baptized.”
We said, “What can we do for you?” and Kate said, “My husband has this thing where he teaches the Old Testament in 45 minutes. Would you like to hear that?” and they said, “Oh yeah, that sounds good.” So I used as my outline the Table of Contents of the Old Testament, but the funny thing was I got to Noah’s flood and was like, “Everybody knows Noah’s flood,” and got, “No, no.”
The lady says, “Oh, wait, wait, I think I just saw that. We bought some children’s books for our little girl,” who was two or something. “Yeah, I think there was something about that in there.” That’s all she knew. I got to Samson, you know long hair superman. There were movies back in the ‘50s about Samson. Never heard of him at all, nothing, complete biblical illiteracy.
So when you come to John, it’s a beautiful place to start, absolutely, but don’t think that’s going to get you off explaining, “Who are priests? Tabernacled amongst us? Baptism? Pharisees? Sadducees? The lamb of God?”
Yeah, there’s so much going on here. “Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness.”
So very apt, Bryan. To understand the new, you’ve got to know the old. That’s not to say that you can’t read the new without any profit, but to understand it deeply you are going to have to go back to kindergarten. “All I need to know I learned in kindergarten.” There’s some truth in that.
Do we have any closing recommendations for this week? I have one that’s semi-relevant. It is a children’s book called All of a Kind Family. It’s about a Jewish family in New York. They have four or five daughters. I read it as a kid. It’s been years, but what I remember about it is the liturgy – from the weekly rhythm of their trips to the library, to the Jewish calendar that they kept, and the joy that was in that.
Recommendation: All of a Kind FamilyAnd also the other side of, “Oh, you can hold a grudge until the Day of Atonement, so you don’t have to give that until then.” It’s a nice enjoyable story about this little family, with some added bonuses of insights into the mind shaped by the Jewish calendar.
Well, now that you mention that, I’ve got one. My wife mentioned this just the other day. There is a book by a writer who goes by the pen name of Aliki. I don’t know anything about this person, but the book is titled A Medieval Feast. It’s a children’s book. I don’t know if it even comes in hardback. Our copy was a good solid paperback. The illustrations are beautiful.
Recommendation: A Medieval FeastIt’s simply the story of, “The king is coming for a visit to our castle, to our lord and lady. What must we do to prepare for this? What elements go into making a feast?” So there’s a discussion of the kitchen – actually, first of the hunting, then the pastures and the crops and all that comes in. Then in the kitchen, what do they do with this? Then out in the dining hall, how do they adorn it and set it? Then how do they welcome the king as he comes?
It’s medieval but it’s very well-done. A small child could easily follow this. Again, the artwork is colorful. It’s not realistic but it’s quite well-done and quite beautiful. I think for an introduction to medieval history and to the manners and customs and worldview of another time, I think it’s a very valuable thing and I think people at least who have small children or who like the Middle Ages will really enjoy the book.
For my recommendation, it’s just a more practical habit-forming kind of thing. I have never really kept a journal. I’ve always felt intimidated, and I also just don’t like writing things about myself, but one thing that I started doing – and it’s even possible that I mentioned this at least in passing before – but I found this really great product. It’s from the same company that makes the brand of bullet journal that I use as well, Leuchtturm. They have one called Some Lines a Day, which is a 5-year memory book.
Basically there’s 366 pages, one for each day, including Leap Year, and every day for a year you fill out the top line across the entire book with just a few lines about that day. Then the next year you move down to the next line and there’s blank numbers to fill in the year. It’s a 2 and a 0 and then you fill in 21 like it is for me now.
It’s just a cool starter journal for someone like me who doesn’t feel the need to get super in-depth, but it’s a nice way to start the habit, if that’s something you’re trying to get.
Bryan, let me ask you, because I have never journaled. I tried it once when I was like in seventh grade, and I got through like five days. What do you see as the benefit of journaling?
The immediate practical idea is that there’s a written record of your life, and you could show it to your kids and be like, “This is exactly what I was going through on this day.” And also just the fact that writing things down codifies it in your memory in a different way, in a more concrete way than just the act of having experienced it.
We see this in different ways with other written-down things, like if you write down a task you’re going to remember. “Hang on, I wrote that down. I’m supposed to be doing something today. It had to do with the computer, and there was something with Microsoft Word. Oh, there’s the list,” and it says, “Write an article on XYZ, send Word file to John at the office,” or something.
So it’s one way to just help keep your memory sharp, but also it’s just a practical way to practice things like storytelling, sentence construction, and there’s a third thing I just forgot. I didn’t remember it in time. It actually came to mind first and I thought of the other two things.
It’s a general all-around practical habit to teach yourself your own stories – handwriting was the third thing – and it’s also just more practice with handwriting, which is always good. You keep track of your own memories better and it’s a written record that you can look back on and either cringe at some of the things you said and go, “Wow, I’ve grown a lot as a person. That’s great to know,” or even just go, “Oh man, I remember that day. That was a good day.”
It’s just a general all-around practicality that is worth at least trying to do more consistently.
You know, I take it back. I did journal one other time or on one other occasion. That was my first and second trips to Europe, and maybe my third as well. The first one I was very thorough, and I made a thorough list of everything we ate and how to spell the names of the places we were visiting, especially when they were German.
I brought this along with me on my so far only Europe trip, this little travel diary. I got three days in before we were too busy to really even remember writing anything down.
Because you went with way too many people. When I went it was just David Farschman and me. We were on jet lag so we’d wake up really early in the morning when everyone else was asleep, and we’d do our Bible reading and our prayers and then we would journal. It was kind of built into the system. By the time our clocks were reset it was time to go home.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. I look forward to continuing it with you next week.
Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. Thank you to our financial supporters. If you would like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.
You can send us an email with questions about “Why is it important to study the Old Testament?” or “You totally missed this aspect of that one feast.” Send it to us. [email protected] is our email address.
Big sigh. No, but we found out that Hildegard von Blingin’ – the bardcore mastermind on YouTube – says it’s totally fine to use her music as long as you credit the artist, so we might have to steal that, because Hildegard von Blingin’ is just so von blingin’!