Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
So let’s celebrate the feast
with the unleavened bread of honesty and truth,
not with old yeast
or with the yeast of evil and wickedness.
1 Cor. 5:7-8 CEB
Long ago and far away, the Lord published an engagement calendar. It included three feasts. One lasted a day; two of them, an entire week.
The Lord called these feasts – and a few other special days – his “appointed times.”
The people were expected to come
and God promised to meet them there.
God keeps his appointments.– Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament
And the people? In some eras, the Jews, to whom the Mosaic Law was given, have kept God’s appointed times faithfully. In some eras, they have not.
Ah, but the Lord did not designate his appointed times For Israelites Only. In the Mosaic law, God linked the feasts with the offering of sacrifices. Yet even when the Temple was destroyed and the sacrifices stopped, he did not cancel his feasts.
The early church recognized the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice. They didn’t offer bulls and rams, yet they celebrated at God’s appointed times. Over the centuries, that changed. The church developed calendars of its own.
Years ago, the Lord began teaching me that he still honors the engagements he designated so long ago – and something remarkable happens when we honor them too.
Three times to celebrate
These are my appointed times, the Lord’s appointed times, which you will declare to be holy occasions.
So said the Lord to the Israelites as they camped in the wilderness, shortly after he had delivered them from Egypt. For emphasis, he added:
These are the Lord’s appointed times, holy occasions, which you will celebrate at their appointed times. (Lev. 23:2, 4 CEB)
First listed in Leviticus 23, these appointed times are also named in Numbers 28-29 and Deuteronomy 16. They include (but are not limited to) the three pilgrimage feasts.
Establishing these feasts, the Lord God said to his people, in essence, “Here are three times every year I have set aside to celebrate with you.”
Passover: 1 day, plus 7
Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is a feast of firsts.
It’s the first feast the Lord called his people to keep. In fact, he commanded it while the Israelites were still slaves in Egypt, and just before he sent the last of the ten plagues.
Also, Passover occurs in the first Hebrew month. In fact, when God put Passover on the calendar, he re-numbered the months! That is, he said of the seventh Hebrew month:
This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. (Ex. 12:1-2)
Then he told the people to celebrate Passover at twilight on the 14th day of that month. He told them how to do it. He said he would bring great judgment on Egypt that same night, but promised that death would pass over every home where the people observed Passover as he had specified.
He also told them to eat the feast “in haste,” “with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand” (Ex. 12:11).
It may have seemed strange and senseless to the people, to get ready to leave Egypt, and to feast, in haste – when Pharaoh had repeatedly refused to let them leave and instead had made their slavery harder.
But when they kept God’s appointed time, that first Passover meal became their last supper in Egypt, as well as the celebration of their deliverance, before the fact.
And God said:
This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord – a lasting ordinance. (Ex. 12:14)
He also designated that the Passover day be linked with, and followed immediately by, the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread.
Now, the entire eight days are typically called the Feast of Passover. On our calendar, this feast falls sometime in March or April.
In 2024, Passover begins the evening of April 22. It ends the evening of April 30.
Pentecost: 1 day
The feast that lasted one day was originally called the Feast of Weeks, or Shavuot in Hebrew, because God scheduled it to be held 50 days (seven weeks) after Passover. In Scripture, it’s first called Pentecost in Acts 2:1.
When God established this feast, he told a people who had just left Egypt:
Celebrate the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest. (Ex. 34:22)
Celebrate the Festival of Weeks to the Lord your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you. (Deut. 16:10)
And thus, 40 years before the people exited the wilderness and entered the Promised Land, the Lord initiated Shavuot as an early-harvest festival. At the feast, the people were to offer their firstfruits to him, testifying by faith that all their fruitfulness had, and would, come from him.
Also, the Lord scheduled this feast to take place each year on the anniversary of the day, three months after the Exodus, when he came down on Mount Sinai, to make covenant with his people and to give them his law.
So this appointed time was also a day to celebrate God’s Word, and to cry with the psalmist:
Your statutes are my delight; they are my counselors. (Ps. 119:24)
Tabernacles: 7 days, plus 1
Named Sukkot in Hebrew, the Feast of Tabernacles was also called the Feast of Ingathering (Ex. 23:16; 34:22). God designated a date six months after Passover. He called for the feast to last seven days, followed by a “closing special assembly” on the eighth day.
As the different names suggest, God established this feast as a time to celebrate in two ways:
- Ingathering – rejoice after the final harvest in a given year.
- Tabernacles (or Booths) – commemorate the wilderness years, when there were no harvests, but God remained with his people, and protected and provided for them.
And thus, God told them:
After you have gathered the crops of the land, celebrate the festival to the Lord for seven days.
Live in temporary shelters for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in such shelters so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in temporary shelters when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 23:39, 42-43)
On our calendar, Sukkot falls sometime in September or October. In 2024, it begins the evening of October 16 and ends the evening of October 23.
For more about this wonderful feast, see the post, Sukkot: The Feast of Joy.
Two covenants
In Egypt, God gave specific instructions to his first covenant people for observing the first Passover meal. The people obeyed.
At the same time on the same day, each family slaughtered a lamb. Then, they took some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of their houses. Inside each house, they ate the meat – all of it – after roasting it over the fire, along with bitter herbs and bread made without yeast.
In the wilderness, God gave instructions for keeping the other two feasts. In some ways, his instructions were very broad; in other ways, very specific.
All three feasts invited God’s people into the mystery of the not-yet-revealed, for each one pointed toward a time, a Person and a covenant yet to come.
Centuries passed. Generations were born and died. And then, “when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son” (Gal. 4:4).
Jesus’ life and ministry were interwoven with the feasts. His coming revealed and fulfilled their meaning in ways we still haven’t plumbed.
Yet he did not necessarily observe the feasts in the ways the Mosaic law prescribed. And repeatedly, he kept the feasts in ways that challenged the religious system of his day.
Walking this earth in intimacy with his heavenly Father, Jesus knew the right use for the right moment, and he did it. That delighted the Father’s heart.
At age 12, Jesus went to Jerusalem with his parents for Passover, and then stayed when his parents left.
After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. (Luke 2:46-47)
Imagine! Jesus asked those religious leaders questions. He listened carefully to their answers. And then he challenged those answers. Even at 12, the Son had to be about his Father’s business.
The first Passover of his ministry, he expressed profound – and righteous – anger with the religious system.
Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.
He made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (John 2:15-16)
The next Passover, Jesus did not go to Jerusalem for the feast.
Instead, he stayed in Galilee, fed 5,000 people with five small loaves and two fish, and then walked on the water to get to his disciples. When the crowd met him on the other shore, eager for more miracle bread, Jesus told them:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (John 6:51)
At the last Feast of Tabernacles before his crucifixion the next spring, Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem until the feast was half over.
Then, even though “the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him” (John 7:1), he walked into the temple courts and began to teach.
On the last and greatest day of that festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. (John 7:37-39)
And then, at the appointed time, Jesus entered Jerusalem again. That Passover week, he became our Passover lamb – and our risen Lord.
He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. (Acts 8:32)
For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. (1 Cor. 5:7)
The feast that began with excruciating pain for Jesus, and deep grief for his followers, ushered in his new covenant, and turned their mourning into great joy.
Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise! (Rev. 5:12)
Fifty days later, on the feast we know as Pentecost, Jesus poured out the Spirit he had promised to send.
On that day, Peter testified to people from “every nation under heaven” who had gathered for the Feast of Weeks:
God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. (Acts 2:32-33)
One invitation
In the New Testament, the Greek word kairos means “an opportune time,” “the right time,” “the divinely appointed time.” And thus, Ephesians 5:16 calls to you and me:
Make the best use of every appointed time.
The Lord has other appointed times for us, besides those named in Leviticus 23. Some appointments, we are to keep individually; some, collectively. But even in that original list, we see:
- Any time that God sets aside for a certain purpose is holy, even when what he calls us to do does not fit our definition of “holy.”
- Holiness includes celebration.
God designed the three feasts to be times of celebration, times when his people say to the press and the stress of life, “You can wait a minute, while I delight in the Lord.”
Celebrating him looks different every time.
It may mean trusting and obeying our Father,
even when he has called us to do
what seems strange and senseless and hard.
It may mean offering to him
“a sacrifice of praise” (Heb. 13:15)
as we wait in hope for what we haven’t yet seen –
or even as we wait for hope.
It may mean stopping everything else,
even when we think we cannot stop,
and rejoicing with great joy
in the newest evidence of his love.
Such celebrations highly honor our Lord. They build intimacy with him. And they can leave us refreshed and ready, once more, to face the dailiness and the difficulties of life.
Going forward, I encourage you: Find out when the three feasts occur each year. Write the dates on your calendar. Then, as each feast approaches, notice what is happening in your life and in the world.
In the middle of it all, say yes to God’s call to celebrate with him. Ask him how he wants that to look, where he wants it to happen, what he wants it to involve. Consult the Scriptures, as he guides. Listen for him to speak Spirit-to-spirit.
Don’t overthink this, or overplan. When God initiated the Passover, he said, in essence, “I want you to feast with me. This is how. Now, go.”
Today as I publish this post, Passover starts at twilight. The celebration lasts for eight days, and it includes resurrection Sunday. So why not look to the Lord, see where he’s leading – and go?
As you celebrate with God at his appointed times, get ready to be surprised and delighted in him.
I originally published, “Celebrating God at his appointed times,” on September 19, 2018. This is a completely reworked version of that post.
You can find the dates of the feasts for the current year on several websites, including hebcal.com.
Beautiful!