A Year of Celebrating Biblically: walking in the garden with God

 

In the beginning — before the world was marred by sin, pain, and death— God walked with man in the garden. Adam and Eve knew his voice and heard his Word, the Logos. There in the garden he walked with them and taught them the patterns of the universe: days and nights, months and years, all marked by celestial bodies in their orbits. As long as the sun ruled the day and the moon governed the night these patterns would exist.

Yet God established more for man than simple physical re-occurrences. He set in motion—like a drop in the water with rings of enduring importance— a chance to walk with him again, holy dates of spiritual communion. Consider the week; it has no sun or moon to herald its coming, no sun or moon for a benediction. So where did it come from? And why is there need of it?

Who gave the week its definition?

God.

In six days, God created the world. In six days, he filled it. Within six days, he furnished the sky, but on the seventh, he rested. He declared the sabbath a holy day; he set it aside, set it apart. He gave it to man as a gift. It serves as a reminder of redemption from Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:14, 15), and redemption from sin (Hebrews 4:9-11), and an ultimate bodily redemption (Revelation 21). It points to the One who is Greater than the Sabbath. Yes, languages have ceased and governments changed and yet the week remains, and with it a sabbath.

A chance, once more, for God to walk with man in the garden.

God has set these patterns in the beginning, like a drop in water with rings that reach generations. In the beginning, God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse for signs and seasons.” The word “seasons” is the Hebrew word moed, and it can also be translated feast or festival. God created lights in the sky for his appointed times, as Moses in Leviticus writes. And what are the times appointed by the Lord? (Leviticus 23)

These holy days of the Lord meant something in and of themselves in the time and place they occurred— yet, like the Sabbath, they pattern a thing to come.

These physical feasts are spiritual truths— along with prophecies fulfilled and yet to come to pass.

Consider the sabbath, called out in beginning of time: a physical rest, and then a spiritual rest (a salvation by faith, not by works), and then also a complete, eternal, holistic rest— that we may walk again with God in a garden on an earth made new. There was, and is, and will be a sabbath rest for the people of God through Jesus our Better Sabbath.

The correlation between Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Firstfruits and Jesus is easy to recognize. John the Baptizer announced to a crowd that Jesus was the Messiah, the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”— a very clear connection to the passover lamb. The thought that the Last Supper was actually a Passover seder is not a novel thought nowadays. Jesus called himself the Bread of Life and in Him was found no sin, or what Rabbi Paul poetically called leaven. The same is said of First Fruits, as again Rabbi Paul clearly writes to the church in Corinth that “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep.”

The Feast of Weeks, too, finds its first fulfillment during the time of the Christ. Originally it commemorated the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai fifty days after Passover— the day when God met with Moses face-to-face and He wrote his law upon tablets of stone. How incredible, then, for the Jewish disciples who knew and celebrated Shavuot to experience the indwelling of God as he wrote his law upon the tablets of their heart during that same feast (Shavuot) which we call Pentecost— the Holy Spirit: He’s better than the Law.

Think also of the Feast of Tabernacles. First the Israelites “tabernacled” with God in the desert and then — in obedience and reverence to God— set aside a holy time to remember that life in the wilderness. A second and prophetic element of this feast is seen with the incarnate arrival of Jesus— the Word made flesh who “tabernacled” amongst his people once again. Or perhaps the prophecy is two-fold as we await Messiah Jesus’ second coming when he will “tabernacle” with his Jewish and Gentile people on earth.

And on and on and on it goes as I will address in this series; the intricacies and depth of meaning in these, the Lord’s appointed feasts, are there for the mining. Their fulfillment in Christ and their prophetic purposes should not be undervalued. The Lord declared his word to Jacob, his decrees and his rulings to Israel. He did not do so with any other nation. All that God wished to reveal he did in spoken word and physical metaphors. The stories of his people and the messages of his prophets provide the bedrock of our understanding of the Messiah, who came to fulfill— not abolish— the fullness of the Law and the Prophets.

And perhaps through the reading of the written word and the experience of the physical metaphors this year, our schedules might become less of a year celebrated biblically, and more like a time-honored walk with God in a garden.



Please note:

I am not advocating for Gentiles to keep Moses’s law. St. Paul is explicit in his speech in Acts 15 that Torah observance is not required for non-Jews.

That being said, the Lord God created the Hebrew calendar. He created the sun and the moon to keep that calendar on track. And on that calendar He created and organized different dinners and offerings. Why? Why did He do that? The answer is to point to Jesus and foreshadow His plan of redemption and renewal.

And if the reason for the feasts and festivals is Jesus, then there is freedom— freedom to study of them as an academic endeavor and freedom to study them through experience. The important takeaway is that the thoughtful, and balanced study of the Bible should takes us deeper into the Person and work of Jesus.

I want my life to be a life of intimacy with the Lord the whole year through, whether that’s in experiencing the feasts or not.

way of faithEmily Brockhoffsabbath, holy days, appointed timesComment