What's Floating Invisible in the Air Around Us?

My mother spent much of my high school years baking homemade bread.  Somewhere along the way, she got a Ziploc bag full of "starter," and after that, our house was an aromatic wonderland....as long as we remembered to feed the starter.

What looked like little more than a glob of flour and water loosely mixed together could rise into a pock-filled mound after being plied with sugar and water. Back then, I didn't understand how it worked.  I just appreciated the end result.  Who knew my world could be rocked just by learning about how that sourdough starter really worked.

Bacteria. fermentation. lactic-acid-producing yeast. When taken to the pages of Scripture, this knowledge reveals even more about our need for a Savior.

Earlier this year, this blog hosted a series on the Jewish Feasts in our quest to learn more about this Jesus we serve.  One celebration we looked at was the seven day Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins the day after Passover.

As part of their preparation for this celebration, the Jewish people obeyed the command in Deuteronomy 16:3-4, which required the entire community to clean their homes of any products containing leaven: "Let no yeast be found in your possession in all your land for seven days." 

Such an action symbolized God's people separating themselves from sin, literally "removing" sin from their homes and, by extension, from their hearts.

In the New Testament, Paul furthers this metaphor wherein leaven/yeast is a symbol of sin.  He writes, "Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Cor. 5:6-8).

In other words, a person's sin in one aspect of his life affects all of his life, makes his entire body unclean before the Lord, makes all his offerings and acts of service unclean before the Lord.  In fact, if sin is left unchecked, it contaminates others, leads others into sin.  Sin is contagious. 

Since the Jewish people understood this symbolic connection between sin and leaven, they wanted to be certain they had removed any and all leaven (and sin) from their lives as part of Passover.  That means any packaged foods in the house containing yeast, baking powder, baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate had to be removed.  Imagine going through all your cabinets, refrigerator, and freezer, and reading all the labels to determine if a leavening agent were in the pre-packaged food.  It's a bit like Spring Cleaning, and we all know how long that can take if done properly.

By the time you sat down for the Passover meal, you may have spent hours, even days, on this task, may have meticulously placed your hand on every food product in the house to ensure there was no leaven remaining within your walls.  In a metaphorical sense, you had "worked" hard to symbolically remove all sin from your life.

Yet, there was a problem with this process.  If it were this easy to work and remove sin from our lives, then why would there be a need for Passover?  Why the need for a sacrificial lamb to be slain for our sin?  Why the need for a Savior?

The truth is that even with all the work, the attention to detail in removing leaven from the home, there is no way we could remove all the leaven out of our houses just as there is no way we can work hard enough to remove all the sin from our lives.

No matter how hard I work to remove it, there will always be leaven in my home.

How?

Although science wasn't advanced enough in Jesus' day to explain it, we now understand that there is wild yeast that floats in the air around us.  Mix a batch of flour and water, leave it exposed to the air for a week or so, and you'll experience firsthand the joys of wild yeast (and some yummy sourdough bread, too!).

This understanding of wild yeast in the very air we breathe further explains why the need for Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.  The image of the wild yeast still in our houses shows that even after all our good works, even after every attempt to rid our lives of sin, there is still sin in our lives.  We still need a Savior to make ourselves acceptable to God.

I don't think I'll ever eat a slice of sourdough without thinking of myself as still being sinful even when I think myself at my most righteous.

The Fourth Day of Creation

Try as I might to ignore it, the calendar shows summer is fast coming to a close.  Only four more weeks until the rigor of autumn sets in with its 8 pm lights out and blaring wake-up alarms before dawn.  No more late nights reading chapter books with a flashlight beneath the covers.  No more turning off the alarm after a late evening's dip in the pool.

Even in the ninety degree south Louisiana heat, there were still a a few days last week when an almost constant breeze whispered of autumn's approach.  Before my eyes, summer will soon turn to autumn before winter's frozen death prepares the world again for spring's rebirth.

It is hard for me to comprehend that back before the beginning of the world, God had these seasons in His mind, and on the fourth day, He set them in motion when he placed the sun, moon, and stars in space.

Scripture says, "Then God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth'; and it was so" (Gen. 1:14-15).

 This passage describes why God created the sun, moon, and stars--first for light and to separate the day and night, and second "for signs and for seasons."  

The Hebrew word in verse 14 for "seasons" is mow`ed, meaning "appointed time, appointed place, meeting."  Of the 223 times this word is used in the Old Testament, 150 of those usages are translated as congregation and 23 are translated as feasts.

Throughout Leviticus 23 (the chapter which succinctly describes the commanded seven Feasts of the Lord), this word for seasons is often translated as feasts.

For instance, the King James version says, "These [are] the feasts of the LORD , [even] holy  convocations , which ye shall proclaim  in their seasons" (Lev. 23:4).  In this verse, the words translated differently as feasts and seasons are the same--mow`ed.  

NASB translates the same verse as: "These are the appointed times of the Lord, holy convocations which you shall proclaim at the times appointed for them," translating mow`ed as merely "appointed times."

In other words, one of the primary reasons God created the sun, moon, and stars was so they would serve as time markers for the seasons as a sign to show his people when to come together to celebrate His holy feasts, festivals, and Sabbaths.  God's people could watch the movement of the heavens and know which Feast of the Lord was to be celebrated when.

Getting the timing right for these feasts of remembrance and thanksgiving was that important to God.

To this day, the Jewish calendar still follows lunar months to ensure the feasts are kept in their correct seasons, exactly as commanded in Scripture.  The Jewish calendar includes "twelve lunar months of 29 or thirty days, which is about ten days short of a solar year, so seven years in every nineteen have an extra month."1

While this calendar that adds an extra month every seven years may seem odd to those of us who use the Gregorian calendar which follows the earth's progression around the sun, the Jewish calendar more accurately keeps the Feasts of the Lord in their proper seasons, especially considering some weren't commanded to be on a specific date each year, as with our Christmas always falling on December 25, but were, instead, counted so many days from the last feast, as is the case with Pentecost, which is held fifty days after Passover.

Over the past few months, we have explored the seven commanded Jewish Feasts of Leviticus 23 and have seen how God intended them all to point to Messiah, our Lord and Savior Jesus, whose march to the cross was set in motion before creation, itself.  His appointed time to be born in a body of flesh and to die a brutal death was already written in His own blood on a holy calendar.

Revelation 13:8 refers to Jesus as "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."  2 Timothy 1:9 says the grace of God "was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began."

Likewise, on the fourth day of creation when God was just beginning to form the world, He was already thinking of His feasts and Sabbaths, which would point to that appointed time when Jesus would come to earth and offer His life as a sacrifice, an atonement to cover all mankind's sin.

Knowing that God was already thinking of the feasts of Leviticus 23 when He was calibrating the heat of the sun and hanging the moon amidst a septillion stars makes the feasts seem that much more important to continue to celebrate today, even for us who are adopted by faith into the family.



1.  "The Jewish Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar." Wildolive.


Other Articles in this Jewish Feasts Series:
God's Annual Camp-out (Part 2)
A Doorway But No Roof: God's Annual Camp-out
When The Books Are Closed: A Look at Yom Kippur
A One Hundred Trumpet Blast Wake-Up Call
Positioning Passover Pronouns
Preparation Day: 'Go to Church' or Worship
Reorienting Our Lives: 50 Days From the Cross
Understanding the Jewish-ness of Jesus
The Truth About Passover

Positioning Passover Pronouns

What amazes me about language is how one simple pronoun can change the meaning in an entire text. 

Imagine if I told my daughter, "Bring a necklace downstairs."  Using that pronoun, I'm likely to get anything from broken Mardi Gras beads to her church-only bling.  However, if I said "bring the necklace," this implies a specific piece we've already discussed.  If I change the pronoun again, saying "bring your necklace," my daughter would know not to raid my jewelry cabinet.

While this is a rather meaningless comparison, sometimes in Scripture, understanding God's true intent seriously comes down to a pronoun, or, rather the pronoun God chose.

Consider His instructions in Exodus to the Israelites concerning how they were to prepare the lamb for that first Passover sacrifice so the death angel passed over their household, leaving their firstborn sons untouched.  God said:

Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, ‘On the tenth of this month they are each one to take a lamb for themselves, according to their fathers’ households, a lamb for each household.  Now if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor nearest to his house are to take one according to the number of persons in them; according to what each man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. Your lamb shall be an unblemished male a year old; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats" (Ex. 12:3-5).

Note the progression of pronouns--"a" to "the" to "your," working from general to specific.  It is a picture of what would have happened in this lamb selection process and, more importantly, a picture of Christ as our sacrificial lamb. 

For the Israelite, the lamb would initially be a lamb, merely one chosen for being without blemish from a thousand or more others in the fleecy flock .  Tradition shows this lamb would have then been brought into the household, living with the family from the tenth until the fourteenth day of the month.

Once selected, a lamb became the lamb the family would sacrifice at Passover.  For those Israelites back in Egypt on that first Passover, it was not a way of salvation from the curse of the firstborn's death but was the only way.  

Then, in five days' time, the lamb became your lamb, one that knew and responded to your voice, one that had come to trust you so that when you led it to slaughter at twilight on the fourteenth day, it went willingly with you.  

Imagine what this must have been like.  Place one hand on that lamb as its lifeblood pours out.  Take this active part in its death.  It is impossible to think of the animal as anything but your lamb since you are the cause of, the reason for, its death.  Its sacrifice saved you and your family.

Compare this symbolic series of actions with Jesus, whom John the Baptist referred to as "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" (Jn. 1:29).

When He began His ministry, many believed Him to be merely a prophet.  Yet, He soon declared Himself not to be a lamb of God but the lamb, the door, the gate--the only way into heaven.

Gentle, meek, and mild, Jesus would have made His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem with thousands of other lambs headed towards their Passover slaughter.  Yet, even in the midst of all those other lambs who would be sacrificed for the various families, He was the once-in-all-time perfect, spotless Lamb to be sacrificed for all mankind.

And in that instant, He became your lamb, dying for your sins, saving your soul with His sacrifice.

His Sacrifice became personal.  It wasn't just for mankind in general.  He died for you and you and you.

Just a few simple pronouns...yet, such a powerful message of what Jesus becomes to each of us who seek His face, repent, and accept His gracious, merciful gift of salvation.  He becomes our lamb.



Other Articles in this Jewish Feasts Series:
Preparation Day: 'Go to Church' or Worship
Reorienting Our Lives: 50 Days From the Cross
Understanding the Jewish-ness of Jesus
The Truth About Passover

Preparation Day: 'Go to Church' Or Worship?

Each Saturday evening while my three children slough off a pound of farm dirt from the day's hard play and labor, I begin my routine of preparation for the following Lord's day.  This night-before gathering to meet the next morning's mad dash started when the twins were infants.  With diapers, burp cloths, blankets, loveys, chew toys, an extra set of clothes, bottles, cheerio puffs, and pacifiers (all times two), I quickly learned this preparation made all the difference in whether our family arrived to worship or merely arrived at church.

Experience taught me it wasn't enough just to wake up early.  No matter how early I set the clock, Sunday morning would always exude a tinge of madness and, usually, more than a little chaos.  If milk is spilled, clothes are soiled before breakfast, or something essential is misplaced--this is the day it will happen.
 
That is why each Saturday before I slip my aching arches beneath the sheets, three sets of small shoes line up across the foot of the treadmill, each with matching shoes and stockings tucked in the toes.  Two crisply ironed shirts, two pairs of pressed dress slacks, and one equally wrinkle-free little lady dress swing back and forth immediately above those foot-covers.

By the back door sit a bag of after-church play clothes for dinner at Grand mama's house as well as a second bag filled with the lesson and necessary craft supplies for my four-year-old Sunday School class.

Without such preparation, I would either arrive at church in a foul mood or would throw up my hands in defeat.

As I've been working through the seven Biblical feasts, I've noticed a similar pattern in what God's chosen people did for many of these annual times of worship.

They prepared.  

In essence, preparation was the key to proper worship.

Consider the seven day Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins the day after Passover.  Before its celebration, the Jewish people obeyed the command in Deuteronomy 16:3-4, which required the community to clean their homes of any products containing leaven: "Let no yeast be found in your possession in all your land for seven days." 

Such an action symbolized God's people separating themselves from sin, literally "removing" sin from their homes and, by extension, from their hearts.  That means any packaged foods in the house containing yeast, baking powder, baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate had to be removed.  Imagine going through all your cabinets, refrigerator, and freezer, and reading all the labels to determine if a leavening agent were in the pre-packaged food.  It's a bit like Spring Cleaning, and we all know how long that can take if done properly.

That's preparation for worship.

Even Jesus, Himself, spoke of the importance of preparation when discussing the Feast of Passover. He instructed Peter to "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover,"  and Peter replied, "Where do you want us to prepare for it?" (Lk. 22:8-9).

Scripture records Jesus giving a series of instructions that concluded with the words, "Make preparations there.”  The disciples then "left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover" (Lk. 22:12-13).

Four times in this short passage, Luke emphasized the preparation necessary for a proper celebration of this Feast of remembrance, this Feast of worship.
 
Another Feast that emphasizes preparation is the Feast of Trumpets, more commonly known in modern terminology as Rosh Hashanah.  This one-day Feast importantly announces the coming of Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement) in ten days.  With the blast of the trumpet, the Jewish community begins to prepare their hearts for God's judgment.

As Rabbi Derek Leman says of this Holy Day, "The sins of the nation would be judged for another year on Yom Kippur.  On that day the high priest would bring blood into the holiest place that no one else entered.  And every year the question was the same: Would God receive Israel's offering?  Would He grant mercy and grace another year?...Traditionally the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur [The Day of Atonement] is called 'The Ten Days of Awe.'  That week and a half is a time for self-reflection, to repair relationships, and to pray in light of one's own standing before God.  These are days of repentance" (p. 57).

Again, the Feast and Holy Day emphasized preparation for worship.

Do you see a pattern here in God's call for His people to worship?

It wasn't just a "Hey, mark your calendar and show up on X day" kind of event.  Instead, each Feast, each Holy Day was about preparing one's heart (and home, by extension) for worship.

Compare this to our generation.  As a general rule, we don't prepare for worship.  Instead, we waltz in on Sunday morning, expecting to receive God's blessing, to receive an enlightened message from His Word, to feel His Spirit move within......and all without really preparing our hearts for worship.

Worship isn't just about showing up at a certain place and time.  True worship should involve us continually preparing our hearts for meeting with God.

He is holy.  He is worthy of such preparation.


Other Articles in this Jewish Feasts Series:
Reorienting Our Lives: 50 Days From the Cross
Understanding the Jewish-ness of Jesus
The Truth About Passover

Source: Leman, Derek. Feast: Finding Yourself at the Table of Tradition. Nashville: Lifeway P, 2008: p.57.

Reorienting Our Lives: 50 Days From the Cross

Last week, I concluded with the thought that "We need to know the Jesus of Scriptures.  However, to understand Him fully, we must not reject His Jewish-ness but must, instead, seek to understand what it has to teach us more about this Savior whom we serve."

In an effort to learn more about Jesus Christ, this blog is working through a series on the seven Feasts the Jews of Moses' day were commanded in Leviticus 23 to observe.  The whole purpose is not to burden anyone with more rules and regulations concerning their walk with the Lord but, instead, to reveal to us the care God took when creating those Feasts and how He was foreshadowing Messiah through the Feasts' symbolism.  

Over the past few weeks, we have looked back to Passover and two Pentecost celebrations in Exodus and Acts.  This week, I want to look at two interesting (and symbolic) commands concerning the celebration of Pentecost. 

First, according to Scripture, The Feast of Weeks (or Pentecost) holds no specific date on the calendar.   In fact, it's the only Feast with no set date.  Instead, God said to Moses, "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" (Lev. 23:15-16).

If one wished to celebrate Pentecost, he had to count forwards fifty days from Passover.  For fifty days, God's people were to be looking back to the sacrifice of the lamb and the ensuing redemption of life through that sacrifice.  

Think of the symbolism!  For those of us who understand Christ to be Messiah, our once and for all sacrificial lamb, God is showing us that our lives literally "begin" with Christ's sacrifice at Passover.  

There can be no Pentecost without Passover--both literally and figuratively.  There can be no Pentecost harvest of souls or gift of the Holy Spirit (as happened at in Acts 2) without Messiah's sacrifice at Passover.

Eternal life begins with death on the cross.  Pentecost begins 50 days earlier with Passover.

In essence, the Passover sacrifice is the very foundation of life, itself as opposed to death found in sin. God's plan in making His people count forward fifty days was for them to "reorient" themselves to Messiah's sacrifice at Passover by looking backwards.

How beautiful a picture of how our lives should be, reoriented to where we are constantly looking back to the cross as the start of our new life in Him.

A second interesting command concerning Pentecost was the sacrifice the people were to bring to God. The people were to "bring two loaves made of two-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour, baked with yeast, as a wave offering of firstfruits to the Lord" (Lev. 23:17).

This seems odd, especially since in Scripture, Leaven (yeast) is typically symbolic of sin.    Jesus  warned His disciples of the Pharisees' sinfulness: "Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees" (Matt. 16:6).  Paul even later uses the image of leaven as sin, warning his readers, "Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Cor. 5:6-8).

Yet, for the wave offering of Pentecost, God called upon His people to give two loaves made with leaven.

Here, too, the symbolism is important.  Through the bread, God is giving a picture of us, as people full of sin despite our best attempts at righteousness.  Just as He asked the people of Israel to bring their leaven-filled loaves to Him, He beckons us to come as we are to Him.  Full of sinful leaven and in a completely hopeless state, He accepts us with our sin...but only because we are looking back to Messiah, only because we are covered by that sacrifice fifty days earlier at Passover.

Additionally, Professor Sam Nadler argues that the required sacrifice of two loaves (versus one) also provide a symbolic picture of us in Christ, as well.  Nadler says the two loaves represent Jew and Gentile together in the body of Christ, both united but still diverse.  Thus, there is unity but not uniformity in Christ.*

I don't know about you, but I find God's attention to detail in these Feasts comforting, humbling, and awe-inspiring, all at the same time.  Seeing His promises fulfilled over and over shows just how much He loves me.  Honestly, it's baffling.  But it makes me love Him all the more.

  

*Feasts of the Bible. Video. Torrance: Rose P, 2011.
Image: Breathtaking "Pentecost" frontal at Wells Cathedral in the U.K.

 

The Truth About Passover

On the rectangular block designated for this upcoming Tuesday, March 26, a ghostly gray font spells the word "Passover."  The word sits there quasi-transparent, hidden at the bottom line, as if the publisher were almost ashamed to put it (and every other holiday) on a wall calendar, choosing to label the holidays in the palest, smallest font so anyone could ignore them if he so chose.

For much of my life, Christians have ignored Passover as something for Jews only.  But the more I study Scripture, the more I'm learning the only way I can understand Jesus is to understand the Jewishness of Jesus.  The more I want to understand God the Father, the more I need to understand His relationship with His promised children in the Old Testament.

And understanding Passover?  It is integral to understanding Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

The first Passover was celebrated in Egypt, where the Israelites were slaves.   God told them "I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn...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. 12:12-13).  Here, the word translated as "pass over" is the Hebrew word pasah from the noun pesah, which is translated as "Passover."  While "these words have no connection with any other Hebrew word,...they do resemble the Egyptian word pesh, which means 'to spread wings over.'"1

As Arthur W. Pink says in his book Gleanings in Exodus, "The word has, consequently, the very meaning of the Egyptian term for 'spreading the wings over and protecting;' and pesach, the Lord's Passover, means such sheltering and protection as is found under the outstretched wings of the Almighty.  Does this not give a new fullness to those words, 'O Jerusalem! Jerusalem!...How often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen does gather her brood under her wings?' (Luke 13:34)...It is not merely that the Lord passed by the houses of Israelites, but that He stood on guard protecting each blood-sprinkled door!"2

Can you see the image here of our "mother hen" of a Savior standing with His protective arms spread in front of each blood-painted door while the death angel canvasses Egypt for firstborn sons? This is an image foreshadowing Christ's own sacrifice covering our sins, thereby protecting us from the curse of sin and death.  Yet, this image is not the image of a passive Savior whose past shedding of blood merely hides our sin, but of one who actively stands in the way at each door to protect His children.  He is our defender.

This story of Passover--it is, at its core, a story and a promise of redemption through such a defender.  

As Messianic Jewish rabbi and author Derek Leman says, "At the first Passover, it was more than just a promise.  There was an actual sacrifice, and an actual firstborn was redeemed....The lamb's blood in Egypt was the means of a mighty act of redemption."3

In other words, God's promise to redeem the firstborn son's life in Egypt was not a forward-reaching promise that would merely require faith now and sight generations later.  Even though this promise did allude to faith in such a future fulfillment found in Christ's sacrifice on the cross, at the very first Passover, the Israelite slave witnessed a fulfillment of the promise--an actual sacrifice of a pure, spotless lamb, an actual redemption of a firstborn son.

Here, though, the blood was mere animal blood, not the blood of the only pure Son of God. Much like with Abraham, the Israelites' salvation came not through the blood of animals but by their faith (see Galatians 3:6 and Hebrews 10).  As Lemen says, "though the option was given to the people for escape, they still needed to choose to exercise that option.  The Israelites needed faith and obedience, to believe God's Word and act on it.  The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world calls for action as well as faith"3

Faith in action was necessary for salvation.

Understanding Passover, then, is important to understanding the very nature of salvation, itself.  Had the Israelites merely hidden behind the doorposts and lentils covered with the lamb's blood yet did so without faith in God, they would not have been redeemed.   The same is true of us.  We cannot really have faith in God if we choose to not obey God's holy Word--all of it.  Faith in action.

For the Jews to celebrate Passover each year was for them to remember God's promise of redemption and His fulfillment of that promise.  Its celebration was intended to give future generations a real, historical example of God's faithfulness, of faith and a pure, blood sacrifice mingling together to redeem a son from the power of sin and death.  This reminder was preparing them for faith in Christ as their Passover lamb, hence John the Baptist's calling Him "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (Jn. 1:29).

Christ's blood shed at Calvary--He is our choice.  We must act in faith, choose His covering of blood by living a life of obedience to Him.

Whether you choose to celebrate a traditional seder meal at Passover or not is a personal conviction, not something I'm trying to force on anyone. Understanding that Christ IS our Passover and living a life of active faith in Him is what is important. 




1 Rosen, Ceil and Moishe Rosen.  Christ in the Passover.  Chicago: Moody, 2006, 27-28.
2 Pink, Arthur.  Gleanings in Exodus.  Chicago: Moody, n.d., 93. 
3 Leman, Derek.  Finding Your Place at the Table of Tradition.  Nashville: Lifeway, 2008, 23-24.