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INTRODUCTION TO THE FEASTS
Our Bible's are a most incredible resource for picking God's brain, so to speak. There is
no danger or trouble with doing this because the collection of stories and characters we
meet and learn from are all there by design.
While we can read about different characters and their lives and life lessons, none of them
in their own contexts are the main reason for this book. Ultimately this book's theme is
about a progressive unfolding of the greatest plot any story has ever had. Jesus is the
hero of the entire book and we, mankind, are the focus of the hero's efforts.
Now looking at the bible from a distance and considering many of the books, especially in
the Old Testament, that statement may seem like a stretch of the imagination but take it
from someone who dedicates his life to the study of this book, from a religious/historic
perspective, this book is about Jesus and us!
We can only know about God what He chooses to reveal and how He chooses to reveal
things about Himself. This in an incredibly important concept to grasp at this point. God
wants man back, we walked away from Him in the Garden of Eden and He has carefully
plotted the way back. The entire study of the feasts will help you in the simplest way
possible grasp this message, it will start in the Old Testament and end in the New
Testament and it will incorporate every single book of the Bible along the way! Consider
this to be your most basic introduction to the christian science of soteriology1
1 Soteriology is the science or study of the concept of salvation, in other words how we are made acceptable to
God on His terms. It is a God designed system of restoration which simply requires our faith and obedience
for activation.

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In the beginning...

Man in his carnal nature is bound by a number of limitations, some of these are due to sin
entering the world but some aren't, God has for example designed us to interact with the
world around us through certain filters. One such filter is that of measurement.
In order to make sense of the world around us we make use of different forms of
measurement. I would like to focus at this point on the measurement of time. Man is
obsessed with figuring out where, when and how life began. Of course you and I have
settled that sometime ago, finding a simple conclusion in Genesis. So let's take a closer
look at what happened in the first couple of days of creation.
And God said: Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to separate the day from the
night; and let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and years
You may be surprised to discover the meaning behind the concepts of signs and
seasons in the text. Signs is quite straight forward, it simply means a signal. Now it gets
interesting though because you have to ask yourself what is the signal pointing to? A
signal does not exist for itself, it is meant to point to something else. In this case the
something else is seasons.
Although it would seem fitting to assume what looks obvious, namely that seasons
means the literal four seasons we experience in a year, this is not the case because the
word seasons here actually means appointed times. In other words God has since the
creation of the world set up the whole system of creation to work around these appointed
times. This begs the question what are these appointments? To get us closer to the
answer consider what Samson Raphael Hirsch has to say about the Jewish system of
worship and interaction with God:
The Jew's catechism is his calendar
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A catechism is really the substance of what you believe and how you follow it's
requirements. In Christian terms of belief and practice it would kind of be what we call
doctrine. This comment from Hirsch perfectly captures both the heart and importance of
the meaning of the appointed times of Genesis.
Consider what Chuck Missler, a renowned Biblical scholar with a particular passion for
numbers and statistics has to say with regards to the first couple of chapters of Genesis in
relation to this concept of there being hidden treasures in the text. It seems that God wants
us to pay special attention to this idea of the appointed times:
As an Equidistant Letter Sequence, it (appointed times) appears only once in Genesis.
Statistical expectation: 5 times in the78,064 letters of Genesis. It appears only once, at an
interval of 70. And, it is centered on Genesis 1:14! The odds against this happening by
unaided chance have been estimated at greater than 70,000,000 to one!
The concept of EDLS is a cryptic system which unearths meaning within the meaning of
the surface text of scripture. As Chuck points out, statistically the words appointed times
should come up 5 times across the book of Genesis, yet it comes up once and that in
Genesis 1:14 which specifically speaks of man's instruction to meet with God for a
deliberate purpose! You and I may see this as interesting, the Jew calls this a remez. It is
an invitation, a challenge to go deeper and find the meaning behind the meaning. In terms
of a treasure as a kind of X marks the spot concept.
Did you know for example that the Jews at the crucifixion of Jesus were enraged by
Pilate's choice of words for title above Jesus head because in Hebrew, using this EDLS
system, by taking the first letter of every word of the sentence to make a new word, it read
God. They insisted Pilate change the sentence above Jesus head from King of the
Jews to He says He is the King of the Jews because this would remove the cryptic
inclusion of the word God.
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Of course you and I can stand amazed at the prophetic significance of the fact that God
did literally die on the cross that day! We appreciate it, as we should but the point in this
case is the importance of the weight the Jews give to this kind of communication. God was
intentional in using this system, clearly as you can now see, He used this as early as the
book of Genesis!

Divine Appointments
Nobody sets up an appointment for no apparent reason. Appointments are quite
deliberate, and depending on the nature of the appointment there are a number of pre
requisites and conditions put on the recipient of the invitation. Say for example the
invitation is for a wedding there is the question of date, time, dress code and gift choice to
consider. If you plan on attending the wedding you have to be guided by those conditions
or you could miss the bigger picture and purpose. The time of the events of Leviticus puts
the Hebrews safely out of the control of Pharoah. The Hebrews are in the wilderness
under the leadership of Moses their liberator on behalf of God. Did you know that God's
original request for Pharoah was simply for the Hebrews to be able to make an
appointment to worship Him? Pharoah interfered with what was a simple request and so
led to his own demise. The lesson to be learnt here is, do not mess with God and His
appointments!
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, These
are the appointed feasts of the Lord that you shall proclaim as holy convocations; they are
my appointed feasts.
Leviticus 23:1-2

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As the original recipients of these Feasts, the Jews were to proclaim them. Interesting, to
proclaim them would suggest there must be a audience to which the proclamation is
directed. Combine that fact with the location of the Promised Land, later be be known as
Israel and more specifically Jerusalem was considered the crossroads of the major trade
routes and civilizations of the world. There is also the fact that Jerusalem is literally the
highest land mass on the planet and you are able to understand the significance of God's
instruction to the Hebrews to proclaim the Feasts of the Lord to the world.
There is another word we need to understand the meaning of in the Leviticus 23 text and
that is the word convocation the original Hebrew is miqra and it suggests the idea of a
dress rehearsal.
So to recap:
In Genesis God creates the heavenly bodies to denote seasons or appointments to
govern the creation.
In Leviticus, God spells out the purpose of the seasons in Genesis to his bride.
The Jews, as God's first church are called to proclaim the dress rehearsals to the
Gentile nations.

Dress Rehearsals
Since the purpose of a dress rehearsal is to prepare for the main event, we have to
consider what God has planned for these holy convocations which serve as the dress
rehearsals. Once we answer this question we will quickly dispose of this idea that the
Feasts are of Jewish importance only and are a thing of the past. Besides the purely
Jewishly instituted feasts and days of remembrance we have seven, God appointed,
feasts whose significance you will learn, spans the length of the ages of earth and
mankind, ushering us into eternity. These feasts in order are divided into two seasonal
categories, further falling in the course of two specific months on God's calendar.

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SPRING FEASTS:

PASSOVER

UNLEAVENED BREAD

FIRST FRUITS

PENTECOST

FALL/AUTUMN FEASTS:

TRUMPETS

ATONEMENT

TABERNACLES

The first three Spring Feasts fall within the month of Nisan, this generally coincides with
our April/May, it does change from year to year on the Gregorian calendar. Pentecost falls
within the month of Sivan and the Autumn Feasts fall within the month of Tishri coinciding
with our September/October, once again it shifts on our calendar, not on theirs. When
instructing Moses about the time, place and method of keeping or practicing these dress
rehearsals, God was very intentional and specific about the conditions. Most people in
reading the Old Testament and portions of this kind in particular are confused by God's
insistence of keeping to the rules and conditions He lays out. In relation to the feasts in
particular, when we understand their purpose, we
are able to understand God's strict conditions within these feasts.
The short answer and secret of the feasts is that they are shadow pictures of Christ. In
Colossians 2:16 17 Paul suggests that the feasts are shadows of Christ. This is a great
analogy of the connection between the feasts as the shadow and Jesus as the substance.

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For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the
patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope. Now may the God of patience
and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another, according to Christ Jesus.
Romans 15:4-5
The bible is both a historical and prophetic text which is written in light of the story of the
Jewish nation but with a bigger scope in mind. More than the historical component, the
hope of the world hangs on the prophetic claims of the Bible. Understand at this point that
the term prophetic should not only conjure up ideas of predicting the future, while there is
unquestionably this component within the concept of prophecy it is not the sum total of this
phenomenon. The purely Greek mindset thinks of prophecy only in terms of the predictive
nature of prophecy, in fact much of the religion from Greece is geared towards this notion.
The Hebrew mindset needs not only to be considered in terms of it's understanding of
prophecy but actually given primary importance since again, the entire perspective of the
Bible is from this point of view.
Besides considering the future specific idea of prophecy, the Hebrew approach first looks
for patterns, it looks to see confirmation in different places of the same kind. We call this
patterning, types and anti types. Now although the feasts preceded Jesus in terms of
chronological positioning, we understand the feasts to be the anti type or copy of Jesus
and His ministry and not the other way around which would seem logical.
Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our
admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.
1 Corinthians 10:11
Paul suggests here that the history of the Jews is for purpose of pointing to Jesus, woven
into the stories of the ancient Hebrews and their progressive history is the story, the hope
of all mankind. This is what makes the stories of the Old Testament relevant to us.

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Logically the story of creation is not unique to any specific religion because it deals with
humanity, but without question, even within the book of Genesis the story quickly focuses
in on a particular persons which lead us straight into the story of the Jews in particular. We
have to respect that reality and carefully interpret and uncover the different dimensions of
that story so that we find the prophetic usefulness for us, who are not Jewish nationals.
In order to do the text, as well as the story of the Jews and the hope of the world justice we
have to approach the Bible in the right way. We have to make use of the correct lenses in
order to rightly divide the word of truth as Paul instructed Timothy with regards to matters
of hermeneutics, which is the science of careful systematic interpretation of the Biblical
text.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
There will be elements of the teachings at Rabbi Bible School that will come as a surprise,
not because the teachings are foreign to the scriptures but because so much of accepted
church practice is not found in scripture, that is within the framework of the foundations laid
by the apostles, but rather from post apostolic influences. Within the framework of
modules dealing with church history in the Ecclesiology stream of Rabbi Bible School,
much of these issues will be uncovered, allowing you to rightly discern what we have
inherited which is sadly quite contrary to our actual heritage. To this end we have a
dedicated Hermeneutic stream with it's own dedicated modules to assist you in both
approaching and interpreting the text correctly.
As you join us on this exciting journey into the feasts you will quickly find yourself
experiencing a number of thoughts and emotions. You will be shocked to find some
incredible nuggets of truth which you have never before been introduced to in a regular
church context. This will normally lead to a very good question why was I not told this in
church? We know this because it happens so often and is quite logical.

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The short answer is that church leaders can only teach what they themselves have been
taught, this does not soften the blow in reality though because there is inevitably a loss of
valuable information. We do not encourage anyone experiencing this emotion or asking
this question to aggressively approach their church leadership. Instead we encourage you
to first learn what you can through our studies, to process it for yourself. Allow the system
to do what it is designed to do, which is to teach you to absorb and share the richness of
your heritage in Christ. From there you will learn how to properly communicate what you
have learnt and will be able to share within your church context what is possibly missing.
Ideally if your pastor or home group leader was themselves willing to consider joining you
on this journey that would be so much more exciting, however if not, we want to encourage
responsible interaction with our courses as well as responsible and Christ centered and
driven use of it.
It needs to be stated at this point to that although we are unquestionably driven by our love
for our Hebrew heritage, this love is driven only because we understand that Jesus
Himself comes from this culture and we also see the prophet patterns of which we hope to
share with you.
Let us make it clear, we do not suggest you become Jewish to receive Jesus or salvation.
We also do not believe or teach that the Feasts of the Lord, either being acknowledged or
practiced will lead to salvation. Salvation comes through Faith in Jesus alone. To the best
of our knowledge we also do not believe we are of Jewish descent and so this is not a
sinister attempt at pushing a Jewish agenda of any kind.
Our only purpose through the course of our studies is to present to you the student a most
simple, yet comprehensive and understandable picture of Jesus, our only hope of
salvation. We are so excited to journey with you. What we want more than anything is for
you to rediscover and reencounter our beloved saviour and to be equipped with the story
of the full gospel and to then be a light in the darkness.
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