Gooding, David: 1 - The Feasts of the Lord

First of all, thank you for your kindly invitation to me to come along here and share with you the things of God. You have asked me on these th- two, uh, three, sorry, three Tuesdays to talk to you from the feasts of the Lord, and that I propose to do with the Lord's help. It will be a little bit difficult to say what we ought to say in three weeks. Therefore, these talks will be in the nature more of introductions and suggestions than they will be in the nature of full-scale exposition. It will help, therefore, if I can rely upon the fact that you have made yourself very closely acquainted with what the scriptures say about these feasts, and the prime passage that talks about them is to be found in the book of Leviticus and chapter twenty three. We shall read from that in a moment. This, I say, is the prime chapter, and if I could feel that you have acquainted yourself very thoroughly with the details of the chapter, that would make my task the more easy. Feasts of the Lord are seven feasts that came annually by God's appointment for the Israelites. Let us acquaint ourselves with the names, and for that purpose I have, uh, uh, had put here a chart painted by your good fellow Christian, Mr. David Long, painted very clearly and efficiently, to whom we render thanks in absentia. The, uh, feasts are here, their names along this line. Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, or Pen- and Pentecost, or if you will, the Feast of Weeks, otherwise known as Pentecost. Feast of trumpets, feast of day of atonement, feast of tabernacles. The numbers that you see at the top here are the month and the day of the month. That is, Passover happened on the first month and the fourteenth day of the month. It was followed immediately on the fifteenth day of the month by the feast of Unleavened Bread, which lasted a week. At some time later, but an indeterminate time, there took place the Feast of Firstfruits. It was indeterminate because you never could be sure to the day when the harvest would get to the appropriate stage. But it was firstfruits in the sense that when the corn was in the ear but still green, uh, they took a sheaf and presented that sheaf before God as first fruits of the coming harvest. Fifty days, that is seven weeks and one day after that, whenever that one took place. fifty days afterwards, they had another feast called in the Old Testament the feast of Weeks, or in the New Testament, Feast of Pentecost. There's no mystery about the name Pentecost, because, as you know from your knowledge of the Greek tongue, it means fiftieth, the fiftieth day after the Day of First Fruits. So it is called in Greek Pentecost, Feast of Weeks, if you like. On that feast also, they offered an offering of first fruits. And this is a thing that we want to get clear in our minds from the very start, otherwise we could get it confused. This feast too, they offered first fruits, different kind of first fruits. On this feast of first fruits, so-called, the offering of first fruits was a sheaf of green corn. On the feast of Pentecost, the first fruits took the form of a two loaves of bread. The reason for the difference is, of course, that on the Feast of Pentecost, uh, you were celebrating the harvest, the ripened harvest of barley or wheat or some other corn. And so the harvest was cut, the corn thrashed out, the grain then ground and made into flour, and as a first fruits offering to God, you made, uh, two cakes and you offered them before the Lord. These two feasts, therefore, are related together. Now, if we care to look, we shall begin to notice another feature important to grasp. These first two feasts stand together, they went together, they could never be separated. They go together because one happened on the fourteenth and the other began on the fifteenth. There was no gap between them whatsoever. So much was that so that in Israel, in later times, the two feasts combined were often referred to as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. They went together in history because the reason why the Israelites ate unleavened bread when they came out of Egypt was that they were in such a hurry to get out that they hadn't the time to make their normal leavened bread. So they took their dough mixed up in their rags and their kneading troughs, and off they went. And thereafter, during the centuries, they celebrated their fact of their hasty exit out of Egypt by keeping a feast of unbent bread for a whole week. We shall find, as we come on to the lessons that these feasts have for us, that there is also point for us, spiritual point and moral point, as well as historical, why those two feasts stand together and must never be separated. Then there was a small gap here, as I say, of indeterminate thing, and you had these next two feasts, First Fruits of Pentecost. They went together for the simple reason that one happened, they were both, sorry, they were both feasts of the harvest, both of them concerned with the corn harvest. One came when the harvest was green, just before it turned, uh, to, uh, to, um, a golden color. This happened when the corn was ripe, and they began to cut it, and of the new corn made loaves of bread and offered them to God. They went together because the time of this one was determined by this one. This one happened fifty days after this one. Then there was a long gap with no feasts at all. Till in the second part of the year, you got another set of feasts, this time 3 feasts. They are all clustered together. They happened in the seventh month within a fortnight of each other. On the first day of the seventh month, there was a feast of trumpets. When the priests got out their trumpets of various kinds and blew blasts upon their trumpets. On the tenth day of that same month, the great feast of the Day of Atonement, familiar to us nowadays as never before, because just the other year, the Egyptians took the opportunity of the Day of Atonement feast to attack the Jews in their latest round of fighting. The Yom Kippur, as the Hebrews call it, the Day of Atonement feast, happening in the seventh month on the tenth day of the month. Then that same seventh month, from the fifteenth to the twenty second, the final feast of the biblical feasts, the final feast of the Lord, the lovely, happy feast of tabernacles that lasted seven days and was so good that they used to extend it to an eighth day as well. You know the feeling, don't you, when you've been on holiday and you can't make up your mind to go back to work on a Monday, so you take an extra Monday. Well, that's how they felt about that last feast. There were feasts and still are among the Jews not included in the seven, but, uh, because they are not mentioned, uh, in the early parts of the Old Testament, we shall not deal with them. I refer, of course, to the feast of Purim. If you want to know about that, you have to read, um, the book of Esther. It was also the feast of dedication, feast of Hanukkah, as the Jews call it. If you want to read about that, you must either read from the book of First Maccabees, or if you don't like the Apocrypha, you'll read on it in the Gospel of John and chapter ten. We shall confine our remarks to these seven feasts of the Lord mentioned in Leviticus chapter twenty three. We shall finally notice at this stage that these two feasts in the middle go together. They are concerned with the corn harvest. These three feasts go together. They are concerned with the grape harvest. And let me explain to all farmers and others present that, uh, in this part of the world, uh, where we don't grow many grapes, if any, harvest happens moderately late in the year, doesn't it, in autumn? That is not so in Israel. When the corn harvest happens quite early on in the year, uh, May or June-ish time, then there is a big break through the summer, the grape harvest doesn't occur till much later on. It is important for us to see that these two clusters of feasts were each concerned with a harvest. As we shall presently read in the book of Leviticus itself in chapter twenty three, you'll see these two feasts were, in Israel's mind, connected with their deliverance from Egypt, the Passover that delivered them, and the feast of unleavened bread, which was the inevitable and natural consequence. They were concerned with Israel's history coming out of the land. These, the text tells us, were concerned with something else. When you be come into the land and you reap the harvest of it, then you shall have these feet. And these two sets were concerned with reaping the harvest of their inheritance, reaping the harvest of the land. And that wonderful experience turned out to be in two parts, reaping the harvest in the sense of the corn harvest, and then later on reaping the harvest in the sense of the grape harvest. But now tonight shall we begin our study of the passage itself by reading in the book of Leviticus, chapter twenty three. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them, The set feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my set feasts. Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest and holy convocation. Ye shall do no manner of work. It is a Sabbath unto the Lord in all your dwellings. These are the set feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their appointed season. In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even, is the Lord's Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Lord. Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread. In the first day ye shall have an holy convocation, you shall do no servile work, but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord seven days. In the seventh day is an holy convocation, you shall do no servile work. Verse nineteen. and the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When you become into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then shall you bring the sheaf of firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest, and he shall wave the sheaf before the Lord to be accepted for you. On the morrow after the Sabbath shall the priest wave it. Verse fifteen: And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering, seven Sabbaths shall there be complete, even unto the morrow after the seventh Sabbath shall we number fifty days. And ye shall offer a new meal offering unto the Lord. Verse twenty one: And ye shall make proclamation on the self-same day. There shall be an holy convocation unto you. You shall do no servile work. It is a statute forever in all your generations, in all your dwellings throughout your generations. Verse twenty three, and the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, speak unto the children of Israel, saying, in the seventh month, in the first day of the month shall be a solemn rest unto you, a memorial of blowing of trumpets and holy convocation. You shall do no servile work, and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, How be it, on the tenth day of this seventh month is a day of atonement. It shall be in holy convocation unto you, and ye shall afflict your souls, and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord, and ye shall do no manner of work in that same day, for it is a day of atonement to make atonement for you before the Lord. Verse ah thirty three. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, on the fifteenth day of the seventh month is the feast of tabernacles for seven days unto the Lord. On the first day shall be an holy convocation. You shall do no servile work. Seven days ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. On the eighth day shall be an holy convocation unto you, and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the Lord. It is a solemn assembly. Ye shall do no servile work. They then are some of the leading facts concerned with these feasts of the Lord. Let us seek now to put them into their Old Testament context, and if we have time, into the context of our own spiritual experience. The book of Leviticus, it must be confessed, is not everybody's favorite book in the scripture, and very few people, to my knowledge, read the book of Leviticus as their bedside reading. There are reasons for that, of course. On the other hand, the major message of the book of Leviticus is known to everybody that has a claim to being Christian. For the major message of this third book of the Old Testament is simply this: You shall be holy, for I am holy. If we are to understand these feasts of the Lord in their proper setting, we ought first to spend a few moments allowing God's spirit to write again on our hearts this fundamental message to the people of God and all who claim to be the redeemed of the Lord. There is an obligation upon us as people whom God has redeemed that we shall be holy because God is holy. The feasts of the Lord, we shall find, were one of the methods that God used in order to help his people to the development of that holiness without which no man shall see the Lord. Now, if we ask the book of Leviticus, please tell us what is holiness, the book of Leviticus will s- reply by giving, giving us several different component parts of holiness. One of them is concerned with all the rules and the regulations that forbid uncleanliness, forbid physical uncleanliness, that forbid spiritual uncleanliness, that forbid moral uncleanliness. And they are to be heard saying, thou shalt not do this, and thou shalt not do that, and thou shalt not do the other. And if you do any of these things, then you must be cleansed from the uncleanness that they involve. That is what you might call the negative side of holiness. Nowadays, I am aware that it doesn't get everybody hopping for sheer joy, the negative side of Christianity. And you tend to find people half apologizing for it and trying to stress the positive side of Christianity. Well, that's very good, I suppose. But then the negative side of holiness is important. I am glad in my heart that God sets his face against all impurity, just like I'm glad that my, uh, friends who are doctors, um, take a very negative attitude towards germs. Pray God they ever will. Pray God that the permissive age will never inve- in- invade the hospital. You just imagine a doctor about to operate on your appendix. Hm, take just two germs off the hands, you know, we don't, uh, we're more permissive these days. We're not so strict on this matter of germs as our forefathers used to be. You wouldn't care for such to be your surgeon, would you? You would hope, in fact, that they would become more progressive in this negative attitude to germs and all things that are unclean. We must never let the attitude of the present age seep into us individually or into us as churches of Christians. The call from God is, be you holy as I am holy, and God is exceedingly negative, so to speak, when it comes to germs, physical or spiritual. Well, of course, holiness is not only negative against uncleanness, it is positive. Let me remind you of a verse that is found in Leviticus chapter twenty— uh, chapter nineteen. You may care to look at it. Well, some of you may not be willing to believe it comes in Leviticus. Yet it does. It's Leviticus chapter nineteen, And it is verse eighteen. Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The second of the two great commandments of the Old Testament is to be found in the book of Leviticus. It is one of the major concepts of holiness, not just the negative against uncleanliness, but the warm-hearted, deliberate, positive attitude. I am positively to love my neighbor as myself. And if you would inquire what it means to love your neighbor as yourself, it doesn't particularly mean having sort of nice, cozy feelings about him. It means a lot of those things that chapter is, chapter nine is talking about. For instance, verse sixteen: thou shalt not go up and down amongst thy people as a tale bearer. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. That's an end to all the gossip, isn't it? We are to think in all that we do. Would I like somebody to do that to me? Would I like somebody to, um, drive that kind of a bargain with me, tell that kind of a story about me? And if I wouldn't like it, I am to love my neighbor as I love myself. That also is one of the major plans of true holiness. But then Leviticus, or rather the Lord himself in Leviticus, is concerned to give us another picture of what holiness means. Would you care to look in chapter twenty six? Chapter twenty six, verses eleven to thirteen. And I will set my tabernacle among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their bondmen. And I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you go upright. What a lovely, vivid metaphor that is. God found these people slaves in Egypt, their backs broken with their slavery, and he redeemed them, desiring that they should be holy as he is holy. And you say, what will holiness mean? It will mean that a man goes through life, shoulders back and head up, and walks through life a free man. I have broken the yoke of your bondage and made you to go upright, no longer bondmen. By thy grace, we're free. Yes, God will set us free from the bondage to our guilt. Now, but God wants to set us free and make free men and women of us in all the affairs of daily life. He wants to free us from those attitudes to our homes, to our duties, to our business. He wants to free us from those attitudes that would make slaves of us. He wants to set us upright and make us feel confident, not in our own ability, but in his grace and in his power. Wants to make us walk upright. Listen to God saying what holiness is. He says, I will walk among you. How do you imagine God would walk down Finicky High Street if God came walking down Finicky High Street tomorrow, creeping down so folks didn't notice he was going? Not God made the whole show. When God comes a walking down your street, he comes upright. He wants us to walk with him. No longer bondmen, not enslaved neither by the guilt of our past, nor even the responsibilities of our present. But free men and women. That doesn't mean that we shall be lazy, of course not. God isn't lazy. I remind you in all reverence that God doesn't have to work for a living, does he? Therefore, what he does, he does for the sheer joy of doing it, and fills the whole of eternity with his glorious activity, and never makes a slave of it. He will fill our lives too with activity and our eternity with even more, but he wants us to learn the secret of true holy living, which in this regard is not to let life make slaves of us. For that reason, God ordained that Israel, after he had delivered them, should have their year interspersed with seven major holidays. Seven occasions when they may drop their potato peeling knives and spades and forks and tools and pens and rest. God ordered it. Not just holidays where they were going, uh, where they might go and dig, uh, sandcastles with the children on the beach, but holidays in which, uh, primarily they might have time to rest and think about God, and think about life, and think about the past and the present and the future, and think about it with God. So you will find, as you read these feasts, the recurrent phrase that on these feasts you shall do no servile work. And again, before God talks to them about these seven feasts, he interjects a little paragraph reminding them of the weekly day of rest, the Sabbath. Let us fall to thinking then about this idea of a Sabbath. What God was meaning and trying to do and get across to them when he ordained that they should keep a weekly Sabbath, and in addition, seven times in the year they should have extended holidays and do no servile work in them. The Sabbath in Israel was observed, so we are told, for two major reasons. Book of Exodus in chapter twenty reminds them that God made heaven and earth in six days, and he rested on the seventh. And he hallowed it. And for that reason, Israel were to work their six days in each week and rest on the seventh day. What for? Well, to remind them of this glorious fact that God made the world. They didn't. You say, do folks need to be reminded of that? Yes, they do sometimes. You see me going about my work some days, and my brow is clouded, and my face is sad, and I heave and I sigh. You'd think I had the whole responsibility for keeping the whole universe going. Hmm. God needs to get me and say, here, boy, sit down a minute. Just sit down there. Now let's get this straight. Did you make this world? Are you responsible for keeping it going? Did you even make yourself? And the answer is no, of course not. No, says God, I made it. And I made you. Didn't make you so that life should crush out your joy and your gladness, in order that life should burden you with an impossible slavery. Made you to be free. Yes, sin has made slaves of us. But look, says God, I've redeemed you, haven't I? And I've redeemed you that increasingly you might know what it is to be a freeborn son of the God who made everything. If we are wise people, though we are not obliged to keep a Sabbath in the sense of one day in seven by the law required. We shall learn the spirit of this thing, can't we? Allow ourselves time from our daily work and indeed from our spiritual responsibilities to sit back and rest in God and contemplate the fact that it is He that made us. And as he proclaims in the prophet, I have made, I will carry. Oh sure. As we look round at the lives of our fellow believers, we see some who are burdened with burdens that seem to us to be utterly crushing. We shall not criticize them, shall we, and say, my brother, why don't you, why haven't you got a lovely smiling face? What a bad testimony for Christ you are with your long face. We can't do that. That would be a very hurtful thing to do, wouldn't it? How do you know the brother hasn't got arthritis in his feet or something? Or is bearing some crushing sorrow? You don't ha- ha- suppose they're going to be skipping for joy, do you, and beaming all over the face when they just loved, lost a loved partner, or when a child has gone off into gruesome sin, you don't expect them to be laughing all over their faces, do you? Yes, life brings great burden. But even in its burden, God invites us ever and again to pause and remember that he it was that started the whole world going and us in it, and is prepared and longs to carry us. And we shall find true rest of heart when we learn to let God take the heavy end. In the book of Deuteronomy, Sabbath is enjoined upon Israel, not merely that they should remember that God made heaven and earth and then rested. They are invited to share his rest, but that they once upon a time had been, uh, slaves in Egypt, and God delivered them out of the house of bondage. And so they in turn were to be prepared to allow to their servants a day of rest. Yeah. I may not have any servants to control, but if I have been redeemed by God and brought into rest of heart, I am responsible to see that I adopt that same attitude to others. I speak to some employers here, I hope they don't make life a misery for their employees. In Israel, in consequence of the ordinance of Sabbath, the nation for many centuries and still to this present day kept the institution, at least externally. By the time we come to the New Testament, we find that they had made two mistakes in their keeping of Sabbath. The one was this. First of all, they found very often that they couldn't trust God, and therefore they were tempted to work on the Sabbath day, and they broke it. You see, if you were a Jew and you were in competitive business and some old rogue up the road opened his shop on the Sabbath, you were sorely tempted and say, well, I, I, you know, I can't afford to be shut then, can I? And so it was a failure of nerve, a failure to trust God, and they broke the Sabbath. In the end, their failure to trust God ruined their rest and turned life once more into a slavery. At the other extreme, the really religious boys, they turned the Sabbath into a legal enactment that had to be kept with the most minute obsequiousness. They turned the Sabbath of rest into utter bondage and misery, and added all sorts of rules and regulations that God never enjoyed, and they ended by turning the Sabbath again into a day of bondage. What queer creatures human beings are, aren't they? A day designed for rest in one way or another, the Jews turned it into a slavery. It was against that background that our Lord presented himself, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, saying, All things are delivered unto me of my Father. Here is the Creator incarnate, upholder of heaven and earth, heir of all things. And he stands before us still, as he stood then, saying, all things are delivered unto me of my Father. Come unto me, and I will give you rest. Come take my yoke upon you and learn of me, and you shall find rest to your heart. And as we all know, there follows in that gospel of Matthew immediately two examples of what his rest is, two stories of what happened on two consecutive Sabbath days. But into that, of course, we cannot now go. And I must indeed be content just to remind you of this. For as we look at these feasts of the law, we shall be here thinking about the Old Testament equivalent to this offer of the Lord Jesus to give to those who trust him that true Sabbath, that true keeping of rest. Rest from the guilt of our past, rest from our failure, rest from our sin. And true rest in the present, as we go out to work, but with his yoke, his easy yoke, upon our shoulders, and his kindly government controlling our behavior. May God help us to learn the lesson. We live in an age sadly distraught by all sorts of unrest that take their terrible toll upon the mind and the nerves, and hence upon the body. We do need to know, don't we? There's rest of heart that Christ speaks of. We too need to take our spiritual holidays and come apart with God from our ordinary work and even from our spiritual work. We might allow the Lord to refresh our souls, increase within us the sense of his rest, so that we might then go forth again to work, stronger because we are the more secure, more effective because we are the more at peace. Let's think, therefore, first of all, of these feasts at their literal level. We shall find it difficult, as the talks proceed, to maintain the levels distinct, and you all have to forgive me when I dance like a butterfly from one level to another. But of course, they meant a great deal to the original Israelite, didn't they? Most of the men folk in Israel were farmers. They had their three acres and a cow that God had given them when they got into the land, and, uh, you will find that most of these feasts are concerned with agriculture in one way or another. They were to down tools. Let's think of what it meant to them and take some feasts. This Passover, for instance, with which they start. It was, as the years went by, a constant reminder of how God had delivered their forefathers out of Egypt. It bears the farmer, or any Israeli you like, sit down and think about the past. For the past has significance for the present, doesn't it? And farmer Zechariah would be found saying to himself, you know, if God hadn't have delivered my forefathers out of Egypt, I wouldn't have had a farm, would I? Ah. And that would renew in him the sense of gratitude for God, to God for his great redemption, wouldn't it? It would have been an unhappy thing if they had got so involved in their farming that they had forgotten what they owed to their redemption. It speaks its practical lesson in our ears, doesn't it? We do well deliberately to take time to sit down and think. If it hadn't have been for Christ and his redemption, where should I have been now? What did I, what should I have had now? Why, all I have, but all I hope for, I owe to the redeeming work of God. Not for nothing that our Lord himself told us that we should come together as churches, didn't he, to celebrate the Lord's Supper and to remember. You won't, will you, may I speak to my younger brethren, like some gray-haired Solomon. You won't get so busy, not even with spiritual work, that you don't come to the Lord's Supper, will you? You want to be holy? You want to find rest of heart? And the Lord knows best, and he for us Christians has prescribed a weekly, at least, meeting when we may come and think about the past. Then, uh, let's come to this one here, first one. In Israel, the farmers, uh, like I suppose our farmers are now- nowadays. They live very near to nature, didn't they? We townies have got such a long way away, that sometimes we lose one of nature's lovely gifts. The sense of marvel at creation around us. You think of that early, call him primitive if you like, if you feel very sophisticated yourself, call him primitive, farmer Zachariah, and uh, he's planted his uh, uh, uh, his corn, his wheat, or his barley, and now he's wondering to himself, will it come up this year? And then he sees that tiny little blade of grass, a blade of wheat, poking its way through the clods. How does it manage to do it? And then growing, he doesn't know how, and then the great miracle of it all, how that you can put one seed in and get sixty out. Marvelous, isn't it? Do you know if it didn't happen, we should all starve? You ever have thought what would have happened if you put one seed in and you only got one out? Well, the whole world would come to a stop, wouldn't it? It's an amazing miracle that it comes up every year, and one little seed, somehow or other, don't ask me how, uh, produces thirty or sixty or a hundred, and the very life of the community depends on it. What a marvel. So easy, isn't it, in this rush about world in cities, to be such in a hurry, we haven't got time to sit back and reflect upon the wonders of nature. You want rest of mind? Want relief from some of your anxieties and nervous tensions? You can't do yet better than what God did for Israel. That takes some time off. Quietly consider the wonder of nature and learn to wonder at those humble miracles that go on all around, and let your wondering turn to praise and worship of the great God who made it. You find it hard to trust God? Well, look at nature then. The very minute, uh, the very process that gives you your daily bread is a miracle, isn't it? We can't reproduce it. Or there was this, uh, feast of the year, for instance, feast of Tabernacles. That came right at the end of the year when they had gathered in not only the corn harvest, but the subsequent grape harvest. And they went out and made themselves booths, and they lived in these booths for a whole year, for a whole week on end, munched their grapes, the new grapes, mmm, they were glorious. And, uh, of course, it was holiday time, had a chance to put on their new clothes and what have you, and, uh, uh, then they were pretty well stocked out, you see, with this year's corn and whatnot. It was a time of tremendous rejoicing, that holiday season, you know, when you've left the house and you've gone out in the caravan, or I don't know what, your tent perhaps. Uh, they made booze. It was such a joyful time. As they sat there munching all these delights, they were to think back over all the way that God has led them, to the fact that their forefathers had once been slaves in Egypt, and how he had brought them out, and how there had been a period for forty years when they were foot slogging across the Sinai Peninsula. That, on the whole, wasn't very pleasant. And how their faith had been sorely tested in the promises of God that he would bring them into the land. Now, at length, as they sat in their booth, enjoying the harvest and their hearts full of joy with the new wine and the grapes and the figs and everything else, they were to remember the way God had said it, and they were to sense it in their hearts. There has not one good word failed us of all the Lord has spoken. He has proved true. His promises, yes, they have been fulfilled, and aren't they glorious? Passes another grape. Ooh, that bunch of figs over there. Yes, isn't God good? Yeah. And they were to think, uh, well, next year, or perhaps when I get into difficult circumstances next year, but I shall say, yes, you, you didn't trust the Lord last year, did you? But he proved you wrong, and in the end he was as good as his word. Uh, come on now, praise the Lord and trust him till you get to the end. I can't resist to remind you at this hour, one of these days, we too shall have come to the end. And I stand with Christ on high, looking all life's history. Then, Lord, shall I fully know, but till then how much I owe. And I shall look back, when I eat the very grapes of heaven, and see the way the Lord has led me, and how against all Satan's insinuations, he's proved as good as his word and more grand than his word. Oh God grant. But then I shall not have a cause to feel ashamed of myself and have to say, why was it, old chap, that you doubted God so much on the way home? Yes, there was that literal level, and from time to time we shall have occasion to, uh, revert to it. But of course, um, as the years went by, these feasts came to have other meanings. But before the next one comes, I must inquire of your leading elder here. Sir, may I go on to a quarter past? I may. Isn't it bloody good? Your elder has said I may go on to a quarter past. Um, these feasts, even with the Jews themselves, began to get extra interest and meaning. Take this last one, the Feast of Tabernacles. It was glorious, as I say, not to be despised. The yearly harvest by its very, very regularity proclaimed the faithfulness of God. But as the years went by and people began to get gray hairs, they began to ask questions, you know, like you do about Christmas. When they were kids. Who? Tabernacles? Oh, it seemed to be ages and ages before it would come, and the kids counted off the days, you know, and will it never come, and will, um, Emmalina never come, and what about the presents, and when, mum, are we going on, when we're going out into the houses? You know how it is when you're kids. And then when they got turned the fifty mark, well, the Feast of Tabernacles came round like billy-o. It was there before you knew where you were. You hardly got back into the house one year, and you were getting ready for it the next. Yeah. It lost a little bit of its novelty, you know. Folks that have kept Feast of Tabernacles for fifty nine times or even eighty seven, they kind of know what's going to happen, don't they? And you can't come through it with quite the same thrill as you did when you, you kept it for the first time. And there were those in Israel that began to say to themselves, yes, hmm, hmm, hmm, Passover, feast of unleavened bread, first fruits, Pentecost, trumpets, they're determined, Passover. Uh, this is sort of the same old thing going round and round and round and round and round and round again. Is that all life is going to be? Going round in circles? Ditto repeato, never getting anywhere, you know, but always going back to the start and going round again. Is that all life is? You know, Christmas, Easter, Good Friday and Easter Monday, uh, Whitson, bank holiday, the annual holidays, Christmas. Or is life going somewhere? The old farmer who watched his first fruits come up, of course that was important for business, this miracle of resurrection. The farmer soon found out how to make that pay. You know, one grain in, the core of wheat dies, it comes up again. Jolly good. If it didn't, says the farmer to himself, you know, I and my wife and family with kids, we'd starve, wouldn't we? Then he began to think, here, I put the corn into the ground every year, and it dies, comes up again. What happens if I myself die and they put me in the ground? Do I come up again? The Israelites who look forward as they come through the wilderness to entering into the land one day and reaping the harvest of the land, and they came in and they reaped the harvest, and when it was all over, they said, those grapes are nice, they're gone now, but, but is this all? And when they began to ask questions like that, God was ready with an answer, and the answer proved to be no. Certainly not. This is not all. Listen to Isaiah, will you? I'm going to read you some words that God spoke through the prophet Isaiah to Israel as they thought about their great feast of tabernacles at the grape harvest and all those lovely bunches of grapes that they used to eat and the wine, and then began to ask themselves, and is that all? Does reaping the inheritance prove only to be, uh, an agricultural festival? God made answer in these words. They are to be found in Isaiah twenty five. And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined. And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering that is cast over all peoples, and the veil that is spread over all nations. He hath swallowed up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces, and the reproach of his people shall he take away from off all the earth, for the Lord has spoken it, and in that day it shall be said. Though this is our God, we have waited for him, and he will save us. This is the Lord, we have waited for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his service. Oh, they are marvelous words, beyond description. God's emphatic answer, glorious as the great harvest was, the final reaping of the inheritance in Israel, that was not the end of it. That was not all there was to be. Indeed, it was only a faint glimmering in advance at the physical level of a vastly more glorious future that God had waiting, both at the physical and the spiritual level. Oh, I shall bring up my vintage wine one of these days, says God. Ha, you've not tasted wine yet. You not know what joy is yet. One day I shall make this feast of wines well prepared. God shall wipe away tears, and death itself shall be swallowed up in victory, and men shall be so brimful of unutterable joy. They shall say, yes, we always thought there was more to it than this. So has it proved to be. Death itself swallowed up in victory. And oh, how men shall laugh and cry the very joy in their gladness, and their tears be done away forever. Please, that isn't some interpretation I'm putting on it. I didn't write it. And please, will you notice it isn't even the New Testament yet? This is Old Testament. And this is a bona fide Jewish prophet, ha, talking in Old Testament, in terms of the great parable, and he already by inspiration sees it as a prophecy of greater things to come that remain at the end of this age, and indeed at the end of the world. So we shall be thinking of these feasts at the practical level. We shall have to think of them too about on the prophetic level. And therefore, it will not seem strange to us as Christians to take a third step. The Jews themselves began to take some of these. The Jews themselves, even before the time of Christ, felt that that Passover from Egypt... Hmm. As they celebrated it year by year, the Passover that began their nation would one day begin them again. They had an idea that very probably when Messiah came, he would come at Passover. And to this day, an Orthodox Jew as he keeps the Passover will open the door in expectation for Messiah to arrive on the Passover. The fact is, their expectation was true, wasn't it? The Passover came on one famous occasion in Israel, and as it drew near, they trotted down into Jerusalem's street a humble donkey with his long ears and toes, and on its humble back, Zion's king came, lowly and meek of heart, riding upon an ass. To that famous Passover, the Lamb of God. It was not accidental that he came on that occasion, was it? For the God who sent Christ to die was the God who made the world, the God who stands behind its history, and the God who planned Israel's redemption and their year, year of, uh, holy day, and planned this in advance, so that men might know when the real thing came, that it was the real thing. Therefore, now, as we look back as Christians, we may put two and two together. We may look at Israel's ancient feasts. We may then notice how, in the early years of this Christian era, Christ came, and there happened on certain of these feasts remarkable and age-altering events. You may say, yes, well, of course, that's not an accident, is it? Jesus Christ, who died in Jerusalem on a cross at the time of Passover, was delivered by the foreknowledge and determinate counsel of God. We see evidence of it in the marvelous accuracy of this prototype timetable. Christ rose again from the dead. And fifty year- days days after he rose from the dead, on a certain feast of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven on certain folks in Jerusalem. And the effects of that coming are with us still, because it inaugurated a something the like of which had never seen- been seen before, a glorious new reality, a new age dawned on that day of Pentecost. Just as that feast was related to that one, so the Holy Spirit's coming on the day of Pentecost was related to our Lord rising from the dead, wasn't he? For he rose the first fruits of them that slept, and fifty days later, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven. We then, in our study, shall be thinking about that level of things too. One, the practical level in Israel. Two, the prophecy, even as the Jewish prophets saw it. And thirdly, that deeper significance that we as Christians find, when we find that Christ is the reality of which these things were... the poor picture and shadow. And we shall be talking to ourselves like this. If that was the picture... Well, interestingly enough, that's good. But now come. If there is a spiritual reality in the present corresponding to that ancient picture, have I got the reality? In a few months now, the travel agents will be sending out their brochures, trying to attract you to spend your fifty five pounds, uh, for seven days holiday in Istanbul or somewhere like that. And you will have much joy and pleasure. You won't decide too quickly, will you? Shall it be Ibiza or Gibraltar or Malta or the Far East this year? Well, you won't decide too quickly because it's a pleasant way of spending an odd evening, isn't it, looking through the holiday brochure and seeing all the magnificent hotels and the lovely beaches and the palm trees and goodness knows what else, and you'll enjoy looking at the pictures. I'm sure on one of these pictures there'll be the hotel, dazzlingly white, and the beautifully furnished room, apartment for two, and there will be the hotel swimming bath, and there will be the palm trees and the blue, blue sea. And you book up and pay your pounds. Somewhere in June, you'll be taking off. You will eventually arrive at this glorious holiday place. In fact, you'll still have the, um, um, brochure with you. And then, uh, unconsciously, if not deliberately, you'll begin to make comparisons, won't you? Oh yes. There's the palm tree. I suppose you'd call it a palm tree. Hotel not quite so white as on the picture anyway. Hmm. Good, not too bad, but that filthy looking sea and that beach. Or will it be no? Oh, you're no glory. The picture was marvelous, but the reality is even more wonderful. We hope it's that last one. What a funny person you would be, wouldn't you? If you told your friend in February, um, you were going on holiday, one of these package holiday things, you showed him the brochure and you said, isn't it glorious? He said, yeah, marvelous. Hope you enjoy it. And he happens to be visiting your house next June. He said, hello, are you still here? Thought you were going to be on holiday. You say, I am on holiday. You are on holiday? Oh, well, he said, no, but I thought, I, I thought you were going to Majorca on holiday. He says, I am at Majorca. You say you are at Majorca? No, you're finicky. No, he says, I am, I am on holiday. He said, impossible. Well, yes, I am. Look, here it is. There's the hotel, and there's the sea, and there's the swimming bath. The poor man, you need a holiday, to be sure you do. Yeah, who would be so silly as to confuse the picture with the reality? As we shall, by God's grace, in these next two weeks, be thinking of these people. We shall be thinking of one of God's ways of making his people holy. The way of rest. He's longing that they should be at rest in heart. Find true rest. And we shall have to be asking ourselves, as we enjoy the vivid pictures that we shall survey. Yes, lovely, vivid pictures, thank God, but look, have I got the reality? All the reality will be far more wonderful than the picture. Let us just repeat to ourselves, as we close our study, the invitation of our Lord. All things are delivered to me of my Father. No man knoweth the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son is willing to reveal him. Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn of it, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and you shall find rest for your souls. Shall we pray? Thus, blessed Lord Jesus, we turn our hearts in response to thee as we have heard thy invitation. We thank thee for the wonder of thy person, for the fact that thou canst give rest. For the fact that for many of us, perhaps most of us here, thou hast already given rest from the gnawings of a guilty conscience and the fears of the future. But we pray, if it is thy will that we continue with these dialogues, that thou wilt indeed draw near to us by thy spirit. And as we read thy words, so make thyself known to us, we beseech thee, and calm our hearts, and give us rest in thee, that we may in our day be strong to live and to work for thee and to please thee, that we may progress in the holiness of God. Part us with thy blessing, we pray, in thy holy name.