Sermon
Man's Helplessness/Christ's Power - Part 2
March 31-April 1, 2001
Pastor Donald Sheley

Would you take your Bible and join with me, and I want all of you to have Bibles today. There are no notes because we want to go back to the text that we started last Sunday. We're in John chapter 5 and we're at verse 1. And my mind has kind of pitched its tent here for a while because in this one verse there is the background for the story of the healing of the man who had been lame for thirty-eight years. I'll read just one verse. After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

Today I want to talk to you about those ancient feasts and what they mean to us today. You remember when you go back in history that God called this group of people out of Egypt, brought them into a promised land, a land we know today as Palestine. They were nomadic. They traveled for thirty-eight years. When they arrived in the Promised Land God says, now Manasseh you take this place, Gad you take this place, and He divided up the Promised Land amongst the tribes of Jacob. And the result was that then God instituted a procedure, which is divinely unique, of cementing and bringing those tribes together at frequent occasions called festivals or feasts or sacred convocations. Now, there were various reasons for doing this and the benefits were marvelous. First of all, they would come from all over from their various areas, and they would come together, and here it gave them a time of uniting and cementing together as a nation. That's why, even to this day, you find such tenacious loyalty within the Jewish race. God brought that about by, in ancient past time after time throughout the year, bringing them together for these festivals.

Secondly, if there was any animosity or there had built up any dissension between the tribes, when they arrived in Jerusalem they all worshiped together, and they all sang together, and they all bowed their knee before the same Jehovah God. So there was uniting. They had to lay down their arms. They couldn't bring them into Jerusalem. They had to come for worship. So it was a time of healing for these tribes. And thirdly, because they were tribal, in the sense scattered across, they would bring their goods together and it became a place of commerce and they could trade their various assets and their various commodities between the tribes. And so these convocations became great business occasions where people could exchange some of their assets and some of their goods for other goods that would be there. But the great event became very, very, very important to Jewish people, and throughout the centuries they followed these feasts and they gathered.

Know what I want you to do is join with me in your Bible in Leviticus chapter 23, and in your red Bible it's page 85. Here we find the listing of those feast days and the uniqueness of each one, and how it affected the Jewish nation as they came together for worship. But you're going to see something also very, very unique and that is that you'll find that in the chronological or the sequential development of these feasts there is the path from darkness, from bondage, to the eternal Sabbath of rest. It's the picture, the portraiture, of the journey of a believer in Christ. Go with me to Leviticus chapter 23 beginning at verse 1. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'The feasts of the Lord, which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations, these are My feasts. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocations. You shall do no work on it; it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings.'" And so He commences by explaining the importance of the Sabbath, and what you'll find is that each of these feasts start with a Sabbath and end with a Sabbath. And so the Sabbath became a very sacred and a holy day to these Jewish people.

Now our text goes on to say: "'These are the feasts of the Lord, holy convocations which you shall proclaim at their appointed times. On the fourteenth day of the first month at twilight is the Lord's Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Lord; seven days you must eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall have a holy convocations; you shall do no customary work on it. But you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord for seven days. The seventh day shall be a holy convocations; you shall do no customary work on it.'" So the very first feast of celebration is the feast of Passover. Now to get the historical setting for that feast we go back a little further in our Bible to Exodus chapter 12. Here's the explanation for this feast. Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, "This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you." It would be our September.

"Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: 'On the tenth of this month everyman shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household. And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man's need you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it. Then they shall eat the flesh on that night; roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. Do not eat it raw, nor boiled at all with water, but roasted in fire--its head with its legs and its entrails. You shall let none of it remain in until morning, and what remains of it until morning you shall burn with fire. And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So you shall eat in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night, and I will strike all the first born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of the Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the Lord. Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will Passover you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by an everlasting ordnance.'"

What God does in those closing moments as the children of Israel have spent these years in bondage and slavery in Egypt. You remember the plagues, and the last plague to be given to that rebellious nation was the killing of the first born. And what God says is on that night, prior to the moment, that midnight hour, when the death angel shall pass over, you are to take this lamb; and of course the preparation time as we noted there were seven days, you are to take that lamb, slay it, take its blood, put some on both of the doorposts and on the lintel of your home, and when the death angel passes over, when he sees the blood on the doorposts your house will be spared and there will be no death in that house. And thus, God set that as a feast, a memorial, a feast for generations, and they still to this very day the Jewish nation celebrates the Passover. It looks back to that day when they were in bondage, the day that they were set free, and started their pilgrimage to the Promised Land.

Now join with me as we're a new believer or we've just started and we know that we are sinners because the Bible says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, and we began this journey in life as a sinner and we needed salvation. And then Jesus Christ came to us in all of His glory and in all of His mercy and His grace, and we came to that moment when we heard the gospel that we believed that He died on the cross, and there He shed His precious blood as the great sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the whole world. And we by faith said, Lord Jesus, I'm a sinner and cleanse me by Your precious blood, be my personal Savior and my Lord. Our journey to the Promised Land began acknowledging that we're sinners and that we receive Jesus Christ has our Savior, and He by faith, as it were, put His precious blood. I remember the old hymn we used to sing 50 years ago; When I see the blood, when I see the blood, I will pass, I will pass over you. It's that precious blood of Christ that takes away sin's judgment and sin's wrath, and we've been forgiven, and He now sees us as His sons and daughters saved by His grace. So our Passover started when we came out of sin's bondage and we celebrated the Passover feast at the day of conversion.

Now go back with me. You'll notice in verse 6 He says, 'And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread.' And when you calculate that you'll find that the Feast of Unleavened Bread follows immediately the next day at the conclusion of the celebration of the Passover. And oft times in the gospels you'll have these two feasts put together - the feast of Passover and Unleavened Bread - and they're mentioned together because they are just one day apart. But what the instructions were; for one week you are not to eat any leavened bread. It was the flat bread which was unleavened because leaven is always symbolic of moral corruption. And thus, by partaking of unleavened bread it was a time of concentration. What the meaning is You have redeemed us and now we present our lives to You to be lived in holiness and in righteousness. We will not allow moral corruption to touch our lives. We make that concentration to You almighty God.

Is that not what happens to a new Christian once he's enjoyed the precious cleansing of the power of Christ's blood? There comes that moment when we must leave our sin and our life to the past, and as it were we eat that unleavened bread, the bread of concentration, that bread that comes from heaven. And we seek to let Him take our lives and transform us and make us in new creation in Christ Jesus. One of the marvelous things that takes place when I watch people genuinely converted and come to a personal knowledge of Christ, there comes almost immediately that sensitivity to sin - that all of a sudden they realize that what they were doing before was wrong and was ungodly, and now they see their life differently and they see their reactions to life, and they now see the sin that there and they seek God's forgiveness.

Many years ago we were building a building over near where now Seton Hospital is and it was all by volunteer labor. And coming into church one day was a sailor boy and old Bob gave his life to Christ, and he wanted to get in on the volunteer labor and so he and I were up on top of the roof nailing down the plywood. And this old sailor boy's only about two days as a Christian, and we're nailing away and he misses that nail and hits his nail. And like a sailor he talked like a sailor - the explicatives - and then he looked at me and I'm laughing because he's crying. He said, Pastor, please forgive me. He said, I never listened to how I talked before. I said, Bob, the reason why I'm laughing is I'm laughing with joy because you talked like that last week and you didn't realize how awful it sounded, but now that you're a child of God you realize that's not the way Christians talk. The Feast of Unleavened Bread is that feast wherein we consecrated our lives to Jesus Christ. It's a process. We're always in that Feast of Unleavened Bread because week after week, day after day, we come acknowledging that our life is not pleasing in many ways to God. That's what happened in ancient past after the Passover came that time of concentration and asking God to help them live a life of righteousness.

Let's go on. Now we come to the feast of firstfruits. We're at verse 9. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: 'When you come into the land which I give to you, and reap its harvest, then you shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest.'" And "'He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted on your behalf; on the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it. And you shall offer on that day, when you wave the sheaf, a male lamb of the first year, without blemish, as a burnt offering to the Lord. It's grain offering shall be two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil, an offering made by fire to the Lord, for a sweet aroma; and its drink offering shall be of wine, one-fourth of a hin. You shall eat neither bread nor parched grain nor fresh grain until the same day that you have brought an offering to your God; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.'"

Now what happened in that ancient past as an acknowledgment that all that we have comes from God they had this feast of the firstfruits, and they would take that first sheaf from out of their fields, bring it to the priest, and he would wave it before the Lord. And what he was saying on behalf of the offerer, he was saying, this represents the expression that we acknowledge that everything comes from You dear God. Now I must hurry because that takes place also in the life of the Christian. After we've been cleansed by the precious blood of Christ, and that consecration of our lives to holiness and righteousness has been made, you'll find that what comes here is the sense that everything that we have comes from God. We acknowledge Him as the source of our strength, of our health, and all that we are. That's part of this growing in our Christian faith. It's not the selfishness. No longer are we owners. We're simply stewards of all of life, and of its days and of its hours. And thus the offering of the firstfruit is offering ourselves, our substance, our time, our talents, and what we're saying is, God, thank you for everything because I acknowledge that You are the source. It's my festival of firstfruits. You do it when you get up in the morning. You raise your voice and heart to God and say, God, thank you for this wonderful new day! Thank you for breath. Thank you for a mind that can think. Thank you for health. Thank you for strength. Thank you for my job. Thank you for my profession. I acknowledge that all that I have, almighty God, comes from You.

Even when I go down to the coffee shop, I often sit there and say, God, this is wonderful. Now the coffee may not be quite so good, but just the very fact that I can go there and sit. I remember when I was sick and I couldn't. I know that people are living in rest homes that can't go, and I know there are people in hospitals who'll never enjoy again sitting in a restaurant drinking a fine cup of coffee. And I can honestly tell you folks I sit there and say, God, thank you for the health and thank you for the strength just to be able to get in my own car and come down and have a cup of coffee. That's my feast of firstfruits, and I'm in that feast constantly. I think Him for every day, and the older I get the more I thank Him because I realize the journey's getting shorter, and every hour is precious, and every day is a gift from God. So everyday should be my festival of firstfruits when I come to the house of God. I give my tithe. I give my offerings. I give my voice. I give Him my love. That's how I celebrate the feast of firstfruits. He gets first acknowledgment in everything.

Well, let's hurry along here. Now we come to verse 15. We have the Feast of Weeks or the Feast of Pentecost. 'You shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you have brought the sheaf of the wave offering: seven Sabbaths shall be completed. Count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath; then you shall offer a new grain offering to the Lord.' I hurry along. Here we have the Feast of Weeks or the Feast of Pentecost, and you'll notice that there are seven Sabbaths and then the next day which is the year of jubilee. And the feast of Pentecost was a gathering, was a festival, wherein people, the nation of Israel, rejoiced in the sovereign act of God as selecting them as His people. And they rejoiced together as a nation, and they worshiped, and they praised God for His sovereign love. So the Feast of Pentecost was a feast of celebrating their identity as being a part of the family of God. I think of each Sunday as our Feast of Pentecost. When we come together as children of God, and we come from various walks of life and we blend our voices, and we express adoration to God and appreciation for the family of God. I look forward to the Feast of Pentecost here every Sunday morning. Now what I want you to do is next Sunday you say to your family, we're going to the Feast of Pentecost. We're going there to acknowledge our identity to the body of Christ, and our acknowledgment is that of love to one another as the family of God. And those Jewish people gathered - that was a glorious time of thanking God for their identity with Him.

Oh I pray, you know, I spend hours and say, God, Sunday will soon be here and I just pray that this house will be filled with Your glory and with the presence of the Holy Spirit. May there be a melting together of our hearts as a family of believers worshiping You, loving each other and caring for one another, and rejoicing in our identity that we've been saved and set free, and now we're part of God's eternal kingdom. That's the Feast of Pentecost, and we celebrate it constantly.

Back to the text. The next one. I'm at verse 23 - is the Feast of Trumpets. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel, saying: 'In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a Sabbath-rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work on it; and you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord.'" This was the seventh. This was the first month so that would be the month of September. If we were writing we would say not the trumpets but the firecrackers because it's the new year. It celebrating the new year, and for the Jewish people the way they celebrated it, on the day of trumpets everybody in Jerusalem gets out their trumpet or finds something to make a noise. They get up on the housetop and from early morning to late at night the trumpets are blasting.

Just imagine. You've been down at Bethlehem visiting your neighbors, your family, and now you're heading back home and the closer you get to Jerusalem there is filled with the sound of trumpets. I mean the air is just rich with the glorious notes of these trumpets. What are they saying? God, thank you for the year that's just been completed, but thank you for the year that You're going to give to us. We rejoice with anticipation the blessings that You'll flow in the months and the days to come. It was the Feast of Trumpets, and I look at that as the Feast of Trumpets in broadcasting the glorious new dispensation of God's wondrous grace. I become a part of the Feast of Trumpets. My voice becomes a trumpet as I have the joy of telling you that God loves you and that Jesus died for you! And the blasting of the trumpets rings forth the wonderful news of the gospel of Jesus Christ -- the new dispensation. The law has passed. Grace has come and the Feast of Trumpets is rejoicing and telling the world of the wonderful grace of God. You can be a part of the Feast of Trumpets as you go forward this week and let your voice becomes the trumpet call of God's love and God's grace. We celebrate the Feast of Trumpets in sharing the wonderful gospel of Jesus Christ. To them that was a wonderful, wonderful day.

Now were down to the next one, the Day of Atonement. That was the day when the nation was reminded they're sinners, but there was grace in a loving God. That's what we do every Lord's Day. At the communion time we drive the cross. Even though we're making this journey, yet we never allow the cross to get too far from us. We came this morning. We bowed our knees and we said, Jesus, we're sinners, but You died and You shed Your precious blood and You forgave my sins. I have a book that sits in my library, and I have books right in front of me, sets of commentary, and right up here is a blue book. And the title of that book is "On A Hill Too Far Away". You and I sing an old hymn, on a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. The writer of that book, simply, his thesis is we've removed the cross too far, and the cross is too far from most of our lives. My prayer as your pastor is on this journey from slavery to the eternal Sabbath, may we stop frequently at the cross and say, Jesus, thank you for being my Savior.

And now I get to the Feast of Tabernacles. Verse 33, and the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to the children of Israel". The seventh month shall be the Feast of Tabernacles. Down to verse 40, I'm hurrying now. And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of beautiful trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days. Now this is considered to be the most joyous festival of all the feast. Here's what happened. Everybody moved out into the streets, found a tree, cut off its boughs, made temporary shelters, and you had a seven day camping trip right out in front of your house. Now just catch this. Imagine if everybody in San Bruno moved outside, front lawn, into the streets, set up our tents, Coleman lamps, and it turns into a seven day party. Don't go in the house. We're just out here camping having a seven day party. You say, why did they do that? Because those temporary shelters [I've got a blind spot here in my microphone, haven't I] those temporary shelters reminded them of those days when they traveled through the wilderness on their journey to the Promised Land, and all of the temporariness and all of the inconveniences.

I don't like camping. Take me to a Hyatt Regency and that's fine, but don't put me in a tent. Because as soon as you put me in a tent it will rain that night and water will get all; I'm not interested in the inconveniences of tent life, but that was the reason why these children of Israel went out into the streets and for seven days they subjected themselves to weather and to the situations of inconvenience to remind them. And dad would sit around the Coleman lantern and tell the kids about; remember, when God opened up the Red Sea kids? Do you remember how He rained the manna from Heaven? And for seven days it became a time where the family would discuss all the blessings that God had brought them through, and all of the provisions that He had given to them in the wilderness, and it reminded them always we're just here as pilgrims.

We started our journey at the Passover, bowed in consecration, acknowledged His ownership of everything. We've enjoyed those feasts, but there comes that time when so frequently we get so embroiled with life, and we get our feet cemented in the values that are here and all of a sudden (snaps fingers) they're gone. There's this transientness of life that upsets so many. I was in the office of a businessman this week and he opened his heart and in recent days lost large amounts of money. Yesterday he was -- today he is not. That's life, isn't it? It's so transient. Today you may feel good, tomorrow pain. The next day at the doctor's office, and then the news, you have a short time to live. Paul said this old tent, in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, when this old tent is dissolved we have a building not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. You and I live too frequently with our attentions too fixed on this world with little attention on the world to come. We're just pilgrims here folks, just living in a tent suffering from all the inconveniences of being a human being. One of these days God will release the tent ropes and fold the old tent up, and you'll notice at the end of each feast came a Sabbath. And at the end of the Feast of Trumpets comes the Sabbath of eternal rest. Hebrews chapter 4 says there is a rest for the children of God. We started at the feast of the Passover through those times of committing our life to Christ in unleavened bread, the feast of the firstfruits of offering ourselves to Him, the joy of acknowledging our identity as the family of God, the privilege of sharing His love to a world who needs it, always reminded we may not be here tomorrow, we may be there and that's wonderful.

Let's pray. Father we really do thank you for this beautiful Old Testament description of the various feasts and how they represent our life as a pilgrim here on earth. Thank you for Your Word. And if there are some that are sitting here today who are too attached to this world, would You somehow help us to see life from an eternal perspective today. Thank you dear Jesus. And everybody said, amen. God bless you.