I was so excited to read an article in this morning’s Austin American Statesman that I decided to write this post. I am in the middle of writing the mission trip write-up of my 2007 Israel mission trip. I’ve written about 10 pages of it and soon it will be chopped into bite size blog chunks and go up here. Yesterday, one of the things I wrote was about the 3 Jewish feasts and what they mean to us today in our Christian faith. So I was suprised to see in the paper Susana Fletcher writing about the same thing. So I decided to link her great article here, and post a short excpert that I had written about this one of the 3 Holy days. I have not done any editing yet, so please forgive the roughness, but this final portion will go up too long from now, so here it is…
There are three main Jewish holidays or Feasts. There are more holidays, but these are the 3 main ones that God says to celebrate Him in the Bible… Feat of Unleavened Bread which is tied to and the day after Passover/”Pesach”), the Feast of Weeks “Shavuot”, and the Feast of Tabernacle “Sukkot”. (noticeably absent is Christmas-although that’s a fun time to celebrate too! But God never directed us to.) Let’s look at these three.
The Feast of Unleavened Bread is a celebration of the Passover when although God killed the first born son of every family in Egypt, He spared the sons of Abraham. He did it in a very specific way. He told each family to kill a “perfect” lamb and to spread its blood on their doors. By the blood of this lamb, they were saved. (see Exodus 12:1-20) A millennia later, Jesus was sacrificed on this same Holy day. And by the blood of this lamb, we are saved! Thus the first feast, or Rehearsal as it is also called, which God ordained and is practiced yearly by the Jews in the physical world, was fulfilled in the spiritual world by God. Passover was also celebrated by all Christians (just as the Last Supper celebrated Passover) until Emperor Constantine took over the Church and paganized the holiday by naming it after a pagan fertility goddess and giving us the name “Easter”.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this… What does this mean to you?