foreign how am I saved you must be born again from above do not use the Expression I’m a born-again Christian unless you understand what that is all Christians are born again from above that is the Greek word to be born again from above the second birth the first one is when you came out of the womb so put that down as correct verbiage [Music] [Music] coming to this house As found on YouTubeWatch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!
foreign [Music] that this ministry has a wealth of teaching available online literally there’s so many what I like to call tentacles with their channels or different places you can go on the site with so much teaching on a diversity of subjects that if you came here today you tune in for the first time and you’re hoping that I talk on something that I don’t speak on then please go to the website and do some research there there’s tons of things I’m sure you’re going to find if there was something you were looking for you might find it there so I want to encourage those folks who don’t know and the thing that makes in my mind the thing that makes this ministry very different from I think all other Ministries and I don’t think I’ve ever used this word all others you know some Ministries have a great teaching pastor but they don’t have the resource center some people have the resource center but they don’t have a teaching Pastor there’s all kinds of Dynamics here this is a very unusual situation not only that this is not a Ministry that engages in Antics about money or playing games or playing Church so what you what you’re seeing here is what you get I don’t have any stained glass special voices that I can offer you that are more spiritual we don’t have a row of candles lit here literally what I say to you is you learn here and you try to put into application throughout the week maybe using the tools on Sunday to do a Bible study throughout the week study a passage read a verse get into something that you’re not familiar with and start digging and then suddenly you find out this is the reason this ministry exists it is really for the word lover who wants to dig in the word there’s nothing else so if you came expecting great entertainment sorry to disappoint you and if you came expecting somebody to clasp their hands and sound spiritual right now that’s not me either okay I am what I am and I’m just like you no different okay that’s why you know people say I’m surprised of your humor or whatever it is that you try to accomplish okay it’s not always funny I get it but what I’m trying to say is this is who I am and I’m not going to be different in front of you like I’m different now and I’m what you see me when you see me when I’m doing something else no this is who I am I’m not a hypocrite so I share with you in the exact same manner that I take in my devotionals my studies Etc. [Music] magnify the love lift only hands [Music] coming through this house.$69.⁰⁰ / bottle $49.⁰⁰ / bottle (6) $59.⁰⁰ / bottle (3)As found on YouTubeWatch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!
Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either. How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. ♪ ♪ So, we've been in a study now, I think 17-plus weeks, looking at through the lens by way of the New Testament, looking into the Old Testament.
We started with looking at the tabernacle, its furnishings, we moved on to the offerings, and now we are kind of in the set times. And it all ties together, but I've been trying to say this over and over and over again. And maybe you'll hear me repeat it a few times, even in this message today. You've got repeatedly things that are; they are types of our Lord. They are pictures. They are things that when we read them, let's just put ourselves in the Old Testament saints' shoes for a minute and there is no New Testament, just for a second, we would only be seeing one dimension, what God said to Moses, “These are the directions.” That's all we would see, all we would know; we wouldn't know that there's more.
So not just the practical application, but we, reading the full book can see the prophetical application and fulfillment in many of these things, pointing to Christ. Now if I sound repetitive on this, it's because this is what this book does. A lot of people say, “Well, I don't, I don't bother with the Old Testament because it's the Old Testament.” That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm sorry, but that is. Without this Old Testament, even reading the New Testament doesn't really make sense. You know, if you're reading “Jesus, born of a virgin,” ah, okay, but if, if you're reading the Old Testament and you can see that there were prophecies foretold that our Lord would be born of a virgin, that certain things foretelling, that's why you need the Old Testament. You can't do away with it, and why would you? It's only those people who really don't understand why it's here or they are adherence to the old way.
They are still slaying saber-toothed tigers, even though the saber-toothed tiger doesn't exist anymore. So we, we've been looking at, we started with the Sabbath, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, marking the beginning of Israel's feasts, commemorating the deliverance of Egypt, out of Egypt's bondage and the first harvest of the year. Now the New Year would later be marked out in the fall season, so we have two New Years to deal with eventually, but I'll explain that in a minute. All of these set times, all of them, first and foremost in their practical setting, were to remind the children of Israel that time, as well as attorney; eternity, as well as everything else, belonged to God. Now, see, sometimes I think these people were really fortunate because, well, they were. They had the direct sight of everything that happened.
We are living generations after and we are having to, by faith, take everything that's here. They got to see firsthand. So if you think about it, if you lived in that day, you might be a little bit better off in some respects, unless you were the stiff-necked, rebellious children of Israel, but you might be better off in that there was some type of connection. I mean, imagine if you were in Egypt's bondage and you saw the plagues poured out and you saw the most powerful ruler in the then-known land basically succumb to the words of God, letting the people go.
I mean, something tells me it'd be a little bit different than how we are in today's day and age, very distracted, it's take it or leave it. We're all in this very, “I'm not sure it really happened, did it happen that way?” And so to really assess why God made these set times, which I've said already, the set times have a connection or a correlation to Israel's history or in general the history, for example, the Sabbath takes you right back to creation. But much of these set times as we begin to study them, we see that God is saying, I want you to remember something in perpetuity, your deliverance out of Egypt's bondage. And why is that important? Because you could read this, just reading the Old Testament here and say, “Okay, I got it already; they, God delivered them out of Egypt's bondage.” But what if Egypt's bondage is God delivering you out of a life basically with no God, full of sin? If that's, then it would be remembered. It would be something you'd keep thinking of and you'd be grateful for that God opened your eyes, that He found you.
That's called prevenient grace. So when God says to remember their deliverance over and over again, yes, He's talking about that specific act, but we who are reading this should remember two things. It's a double; it's a double whammy for us. The first one is that God made good on His word to deliver the people. He said they would go in to a land that was not theirs, they'd be strangers in that land. They'd come out of that land, greater in number, richer, etc., which they did. And then you've got the double whammy for us as Christians, understanding God has called many out of the darkness into His light and that is the same as being delivered from Egypt's bondage. Your, your eyes have been opened.
So don't think, don't just read it in a one-dimensional way. Now on the fifteenth of Nisan, which is the equivalent to our April, depending on when it falls, but usually it's equivalent to April, the Feast of Unleavened Bread began. It went for seven days; no leaven could be consumed. And we read often a term, if you've ever seen━how many of you have ever seen a Passover booklet called a Haggadah? Okay, so it's a little booklet and basically it's, we'll call it the synopsis of the deliverance story, okay? But what's interesting is the Haggadah, the name on there, “festival” or “festivity,” we don't tend to think about this, but the Passover was referred to that. And in fact, there's a passage in━let's see if the brain's working good here━in Exodus, I'll read it to you if I can find it. Okay, here. So Moses is talking to Pharaoh and he says━“And afterwards Moses and Aaron went in, told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” Now why is that interesting? Because that word is we'ahogu, which is very much, because it's a Semitic language, it's very much like the Arab word hajj.
They're just pronounced differently. So we have that same concept, a “pilgrimage,” or “wandering,” if you will. And these feasts or set times, don't think that they just happened like God said, “Okay, we're going to have a party now.” They were all to tie back, as I said, either in creation, Israel's history, things that God wanted the children of Israel, and after that, us, we who are of the new dispensation, to think on, believe, and obviously this is where I'm going with this.
So we're tying the old feasts and showing how they connect into the New. The law instructed the children of Israel that when they entered the land; this is always missed; when they entered the land, the Promised Land, the land that God said they would enter into and reap the harvest, that they would bring a sheaf of the first grain to the priest who would weave it before the Lord on their behalf. And there's something that I don't know why it's missed often, but I have it open in front of me and I'll read it to you as well from Leviticus 23 and verse 10, “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them,” listen carefully, “When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, there ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.” So clearly, a lot of times people think━first, how could you do a harvest and practice a real true harvest if they wandered for 40 years in the desert? Hello.
So I mean, you could probably harvest some things, but you're constantly moving. So He clearly says, “When you come into the land which I give unto you,” and that's key to understand how this would become regulated and obviously everything in the law becomes regulated. So by yielding and offering their firstfruits of their harvest to God, the first of it, they acknowledge that they were dependent on God for the harvest yet to come. And this is the other thing I'm finding people━you only know what people mess up when you start to read what people have, in good intention, I'm sure, penned. There's a lot of confusion about Firstfruits that is the gathering of the first of whatever and the feast of ingathering, which happens as we'll call it the full-orbed, full-blown harvest at the end of the season, okay. There's, there are differences here. So this particular Firstfruits would have been observed with somber tone.
The sheaf was to be waved on the day after the Sabbath. What we New Testament folks, I refer to this in my message on the Sabbath as the Lord's Day because it's the day the Savior rose. And the apostle Paul refers to Christ, in 1 Corinthians 15:20, as “the firstfruits of them that slept”" So this act, if you will, of our Lord's, of basically of dying and resurrecting and ascending, but the death and Resurrection portion, the Firstfruits hallowed the harvest from which it was taken. So I want you to think on why Firstfruits is important. Now, don't get me wrong, the late Dr. Gene Scott taught on Firstfruits and made it an integral part, if you will, of giving in this church, which people would basically first of the year and whether it's your first paycheck or the first of anything usually, and that's how it was taught.
I'm not saying that that ought not to be done, but there's something actually, in my opinion, infinitely more important than that, and I'm going to tell you what it is. If let's just say we go to glean the firstfruits of whatever is coming up and we're choosing the choicest and the best, it is a type. We're saying; we're not saying, “Oh, I hope that the rest of the harvest is going to be like this.” The firstfruits that we would be offering to God in the agrarian society would definitely be the expectancy of the rest of the harvest.
Does that make sense? Good, because now I want you to think about what Paul wrote when he said, “Christ is the firstfruits of them that slept.” For the Christian, we should expect, it shouldn't be; I don't know why I've done how many funerals and I still see people doing this very same thing, not understanding their faith. And that to me is the greatest, if you want to know what a crime is, that's a great crime because Christ died, went first as the first Goer. We have a right; we'll call it the right of expectancy that we too will be like Him. We too shall rise. That's the concept that for me, the most important concept of Firstfruit to recognize that something like this had not happened before. And don't get Lazarus confused in the mix. Lazarus was called forward to show Christ had the power over the grave and over death, but Lazarus still had to die.
So he's called out of the dead. Deliberately we know that the passage tells us that he was in the grave, and it's either Mary or Martha says, “You know, by now he's going to be stinking. It's been, so”━you know, it's well beyond the third, fourth day now. And that was deliberately put in there because you could not be considered certifiably dead unless three days had passed.
So we know Lazarus was certifiably dead when Christ called him out of the tomb, but that is not the Resurrection. He did resurrect from the dead, but he'd still have to die again, a normal death, and then like everyone else, hate to say it like this, but Lazarus is not like, he's not an exception, like everybody else, all must die. And this is why that expression that says, “Unless a grain of corn go into the earth.” It takes something essentially that looks dead to bring life. So here we have Christ as the first Goer and what was removed, and you're looking at these feast times, what was removed, the impediment, was the ceremonial impurity, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
The relation that the Firstfruits sustain the harvest is one thing, but remember the steps that had to be taken before. So if we understand the laws of the offerings that we looked at, and we kind of string this together, I hate to say it, like beads, it becomes clear that these times were set up with special times before or after one could be cleansed. Let's just say if you were making a sin and trespass offering, and then this would be offered or this would be celebrated. So God had a way of basically making sure everyone could be included if you went by the prescribed method, which we're looking into right now.
And if you're curious to know, Leviticus 23 spells it out. You've got a couple of passages in Exodus, Exodus 23, I believe━don't quote me on that, but I believe it's Exodus 23 as well. And then in Deuteronomy and Numbers, you've got some kind of extra material there, so yours to kind of pick apart. But when I, and you're going to hear me repeat this throughout this message. If the same relationship that the children of Israel had to the harvest, that is the Firstfruits, the expectancy, the, “Okay, we offered, we took the Firstfruits and we offered the best to God”" we are following the same pattern as Christ is the Firstfruits.
We should be expectant. Not “I expect and it may not happen.” No, that's the first harvest of the Resurrection; we are all going to follow that harvest. There's only one criteria, that you remain connected in faith and trust in Christ. We will all be in that harvest. So it's important to understand, or if you want to say, “If He's the Firstfruits, we will be the harvest,” that is the expectancy of the hope that's promised to the believer. Now the apostle Paul also wrote, “He was delivered for our offenses, raised for our justification.” So God laid upon Him, you've heard me say this before, all the iniquity of us all, and it would not have been a finished work had He not, had God the Father not laid that all upon the Son. As for Christ, the law had no further claim to urge penalty or to exact. Hence, He could be raised up from the dead to take His life again. Remember, He said, “I take my life, no one takes it from me.” So even though; see, these are the things that I, sometimes I have to stop and just scratch my head.
Jesus said, “I take my life, I lay it down, I can pick it up again,” essentially. So it makes no sense to me when I hear our Jewish brothers and sisters get very offended when we talk about the act of crucifying Christ. And the reality is, if you think about it, Christ had to die one way or another. If, if His plan, what He says, something's wrong with the world and only His death could fix it, He had to die one way or another. And it always comes down to this, people with lack of understanding will get very offended when we say the religious leaders basically urged Pilate, and the religious leaders were the ones kind of angling for this. Back to my message and my notes here; like the wave offering, waved to be accepted for the people by God, I'd say that Christ also became the wave offering, not accepted by God, but accepted for us by God. There's that little addition that makes everything count. The Firstfruits was the earnest of the upcoming harvest, a pledge that the harvest would be gathered, and there's also a special set time for that, that God says, “And this is harvest time.” So, if we want to talk about this particular Firstfruits, we can't, in this particular subject, we cannot not talk about the Resurrection, because that is how we connect to the New Testament over and over again.
And several times you'll, you'll hear me mention, especially about it, the apostle Paul will mention Firstfruits. So, it's important to understand the connection there starts at the Resurrection. And if you remember the only sign when they came to Him, they said, “Give us a sign. He said, “There'll be no sign except the sign of Jonah,” which was to say, “three days and three nights,” or at least being in the giant fish's belly, only to be spewed out alive, which if you think about it, we're not going to take this too far to the extreme. But that was Christ basically saying, “You want to know what My guarantee is? Now, your guarantee is Firstfruits. Mine is the sign of Jonah.” And you can take that however you want, but Jesus to us, Jesus is the new covenant. He's not just representing a covenant; Jesus is the new covenant, much like the old when it was given, a promise that God would make good on His word, so here Christ is telling these people, basically, “The only sign you're going to get is the Resurrection,” which Paul calls Christ “the firstfruits of them that slept”" He's the first of his kind.
So forgive me for making a circle here, but just as we are connected to the first Adam in our fallen condition, because of nature, condition, etc, we are indeed condemned. It's a death sentence, being born in Adam, in the first Adam, but being born again into the second Adam or the last Adam, which is Christ, brings life. It is the, we'll call it the reconciling or the making right, what was in the beginning, we have now access to the Father by this avenue, the one named Jesus Christ. And not only that, not just access, but the promise. This is the whole amazing thing, in my opinion, about studying these set times. See, these people didn't have a promise of eternal life or immortality. They didn't have that promise. They knew that the first parents had given it away.
We have that promise though, which makes wanting to know about this Firstfruits. As I said, you can talk about the giving part of it, the component of giving, which is important. But I'd like to start with the most important, which is what, why we're here: “If Christ has not risen, our faith is vain.” And I'm not interested in having the discussion with people. Let me just say it now, so I get it out of the way and, and you know, you can be angry with me later if you want, or you can be angry with me now. I do at both. Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either.
How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. That's what makes you a Christian; you're following Christ, you're learning about Him. It's like saying, “Yeah, my family.” Well, if you spend time with them and you live under the same roof or your blood, born blood, or; but there has to be a connection there to say that. You're not going to go to a stranger out there on the street and say, “Ah, that's my, that's my family over there.” That person's going to be looking at you and saying, “Call 8-1-1.” Not 9-1-1, 8-1-1.
Do you know what that is? 8-1-1 is the number you call before you dig a hole, courtesy of the power company. All right, so what makes the difference here? These people didn't have the promise of Resurrection, but we were given that. Christ said, “I need, A) to go away that I might send the Holy Spirit.” Number two, He had to go away showing basically that this was the pattern planned by the Father. His public ministry would give enough time, demonstrate enough miracles, explain enough about why He came. And then the rest was left back, if you think about it, the rest was left back with humankind, “Now you go out there, you teach, you go make disciples, you go make learners of every nation.” He didn't say, “I'll come back and I'll do that work for you.” He said, “Now you go out and do it.” Just as the first Adam was told to go and tend and till the earth, we in the second or last Adam are still tending and tilling the earth, but it's in the human form that we do it, not working and laboring for the ground.
So there's a lot of, I'm sorry, just a lot of confusion. It's very frustrating for me because I find people, even some who have a good intention, would like to tell you that, “You know, if you come on Easter, it's enough.” That's just a show. How would you like to be married to somebody and you only show, you only come home once a year? It's kind of like that, okay? I don't think that's a marriage, by the way; anyway, enough of my opinions here. So we know, by the way, why Paul wrote, “For we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him,” because we shall be like Him. That is the promise of Firstfruits, and this is why this is so vitally important. The same Spirit of God that opened up the believer's spiritual eyes, that raises us from the death of sin and the life of righteousness in Christ, descends upon a lifeless body.
Now the Spirit's already in the person, but there's also that, what I call the, that the helping Spirit; and don't quote me on this, I'm just trying to make this as clear pictorially as possible, that takes the final, final claim on what is inside the believer. So that means whatever the person's person was, plus the Spirit of God. You remember, I taught on this many years, the part payment, the arabon, it's called in the Greek. Now that ticket is turned in for the whole person, not just, “Hey, I tag you with my Spirit because you belong to Me,” but the whole individual. That means everything in my memory bank, all that I━not this shell, but everything that I am at the point of death basically is released with the Spirit to be with God until a new body, until the time that a new body will be granted to every single believer in Christ. So here's the kind of, we'll call it the litmus test.
I'm curious to know how many people actually believe, don't answer me; I'm curious to know how many people actually believe what I just said because you know, people actually believe that it's very clear to me that we deceive ourselves all day long. You know, you, you, you can be a biohacker, you can be engaged in fitness, eat the cleanest diet, have the best mental health. And when God says it's your time, it's your time. You don't get to bargain. You don't get to plea deal. It is what it is. So this is what is all equally baffling. If you knew and understood, which I hope that every creature that's born on the earth can come to understand and know that there's a terminus to life.
Don't think I'm talking like the grim reaper. This is actually a message rooted in extreme hope and certainty of what's said here that I wouldn't be looking at that day and saying, “My God, no, help me for I'm not ready to go.” No, when that time comes, the expectancy, because I've known; I'm sorry to say this, it's going to sound a little bit funny when I say this, but I've known the Firstfruit for a long time.
And I'm not trying to be blasphemous when I say that. So if I've known Him for a long time and I've built my relationship on that, then when I come to that hour, that moment, I have the expectancy and it's not something that may or may not happen. This either happened, He either died and rose up or He didn't. Now that, I think we've settled in many messages on the Resurrection. So if a person has settled that and you believe that this is absolutely true, that a man, all-man/all-God died, was put to death and rose from the dead, then the expectancy for you and for me should be just like these children of Israel with the Firstfruit of the harvest. They went in there looking for the choicest and the best, presenting it first to the priest as a wave of offering and presented to the Lord with expectancy, that the rest of the harvest, not━and expectancy is a bad word because it leans towards, is there a possibility that it may not be as good as the things that we offer to God, but in fact it's the promise that what we rendered to God at the first, the rest of it, it's putting God first, God takes care of the rest of the rest, but the rest will be just as bountiful and just as good.
And that's why it's important to make these connections between those Old Testament saints and we who believe in Christ, we who faith and trust Christ for our salvation. So I'm going to try and paint a little picture here that gives some understanding because there's a lot, you know, in these feasts there's a lot to think about. Of course there is the sowing of seed, the caring for, ultimately the harvest that would be reaped. And I can tell you as someone who has just recently started growing a lot of food, it's hit and miss. You plant a seed and you can hope and pray, but trust me, the passage says, “Thou shall not kill,” I've probably killed a couple of hundred plants of late, okay? Some people have that green thumb and some people don't.
But imagine this is, you can't just go down to Publix or Vons. You're in the desert, wherever you are, this is your food supply. This is, if it's messed up, you're all going to starve. I want you to think of it in that respect. So going to get those, planting the seeds, taking care to tend and then seeing the first harvest, the first thing that comes out of the ground would be almost, silly, but miraculous. And if the rest of the crop came out like the first part, that'd be even more miraculous, but that's the promise of what God basically was saying, “Put Me first, I'll bless and take care of the rest.” Now the prosperity people get a hold of this and they milk, manipulate, and twist the heck out of that verse to make it mean something that it doesn't.
And you're never going to hear me talk to you about something like that because I don't do that. That's not what God promises either. God's blessings, if you're really interested, you've probably received more and I've probably received more in terms of blessings than most people I know, and they're not tangible. They're not tangible. To be able to stay in the faith. Look, we're living in an age of crisis and chaos and craziness. To be able to stay connected in faith, still look unto Him, still have the sense that I belong to Him no matter what's going on in the world I'm okay because He's got me and I've got Him! Now at the temple time, because remember it said, “When you come into the land,” so I'm going to jump to the temple time. But at the temple time, messengers of the Sanhedrin, those dirty rats, they would go out from Jerusalem on the evening of the feast and they would bind all of the tall standing corn and bundle it to make it easy to be taken up.
See, they had all these little ways of getting around God's rules and regulations and this is one of them by the way, it's kind of interesting. And no wonder why God said, “Enough.” If you keep trying to find ways to sneak around God's back, I think God eventually is saying, “I saw all of it. I didn't just see one time, I saw it all, you children of Israel, you,” all right? Sometimes it's hard to say what you want to say. All right, later at the time of the temple, the grain would be threshed with rods so that the barley corns were not injured. After this it would be parched over an open flame, winnowed in the wind, and that would remove the chaff. Finally the barley corn would be milled and put to an extensive sifting process until it was sifted finely. And to show you how; sorry, how nutty this was, according to the writings in the Talmud, the sifting would go on and on and on and on and on and on until a temple inspector/priest could plunge their hands into the flour, remove the hand without any flour adhering, and then it would be ready.
But I mean the procedure that they did just went on and on and like overkill. But anyway, that, that's their business, not mine. So the sixteenth of Nisan, the Firstfruits were presented to the Lord, an omer of barley, which would equal approximately five pints, was mixed with three quarters of a pint of olive oil and a small amount of frankincense was sprinkled upon it. This was the Firstfruits offering. It was then waved before the Lord by the priests in accordance with Leviticus 23:11-13. Firstfruits was a national observance, not just a singular. So each family at this set time would have to bring their Firstfruits. Every family, one set, one set offering for each family unit, right? So you're not; if you have five people in the family, five people aren't offering Firstfruits.
It's offering from that household, from that family. We have a clearer picture recorded for us by the time of the temple than we do in the tabernacle because it clearly tells us that it says, “When ye enter into the land,” they had not yet entered into the land. And if we were looking at what happened at the time of the temple, there would have been a lot of buzzing, a lot of mulling around, a lot of chatter going on right outside of the temple with people probably repeating Psalm 150 and verse 1, “Praise God in His sanctuary.” Perhaps on the inside you might hear sounds of Psalm 30 being sung out, if you will, “I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou have lifted, you have lifted me up, and have not let my foes rejoice over me.” Essentially there would be some type of psalm before entering and then upon entrance, something worshipful and joyous to the Lord.
That's how they would do it. In the court of the priest, the flames would be seen dancing feverishly from the altar in a trail of smoke that would be ascending. In the court of the Israelites, a steady stream of men could be seen on the steps of the temple, presenting their offerings to the priest. So if you get the whole picture, you know, we tend to maybe have images of things, but we tend to think of the temple really does give the fullest embodiment of this, people lined up with their offerings on the steps waiting to get in. I mean that's pretty powerful if you can imagine and envision what I'm talking about. Now today's modern Judaism, Firstfruits are not offered because there is no temple. Only a ritual survives today of counting the days, perhaps marking them off on a calendar. And this is where, again, I'm going to say things that are controversial, but I'll just say them.
Because there's no temple and there's therefore no priest, but why would you not offer an offering? See, this is where I get a little bit like, okay, there's no more temple for you, but in this day and age where there's synagogues, okay, and there's places of worship, if you are going to be slaying saber-tooth tigers, right? Does everybody know what I mean when I say that? Okay, good. Because if I have to explain it, I will; I don't want anybody to go, “What the hell is she talking about, saber-toothed tigers?” They're extinct, okay? No, there's one at the back of the room. So my point is this, it's mind-boggling to me that Christians and Jews are reading the same book, and the book didn't say, “Now you'll stop.” Okay, I get it, at the fall of Jerusalem, everything ceased. But now you've got places of worship, so why, why wouldn't you do that? “Oh, because we don't live in an agrarian society anymore,” okay, but there's other ways to present Firstfruits, and we've exercised them here for probably at least 40 years.
So there's a lot of things. I don't know, is this as selective, how we're going to worship? Do we, do we engage in selectivity? How do we decide what we worship and what we don't? What we say, “Oh, we don't do that anymore. We just mark it on the calendar, but we don't do that anymore.” I don't understand. And don't, you try to understand because it won't make sense to you either. So first things, first things in general, are very important to God. If you remember, just take the passage of the children of Israel in Egypt's bondage, the firstborn.
So when we think about firsts, that's important. And the first, when I speak of Firstfruits, yes, the harvest is one, but the Firstfruits, first things, Christ coming out of the grave, I'd say, “Put these two things on a very equal plane and understand,” and this is what I think is very important. First things with God matter, and I think they still matter today. Not so much as you're firstborn versus your thirdborn, or if you; whatever it is that's first, but the concept of putting God first.
That still matters to God. See, there are things I can say to you, God has not changed. It's we who have changed, and that's a big problem because I don't think, if people are not being taught a template; that doesn't━don't be a box checker, but if you “put God first, He takes care of the rest” is a concept that basically summarizes Firstfruits. And the promise is to expect no less than what was offered could, in this case, let's say, whatever your crop was; that the rest of the crop would be likewise.
There wouldn't be bugs, it wouldn't be destroyed, it wouldn't be rotted; fill in the blanks, okay? Now in the New Testament, there are no less than seven mentions of Firstfruit, but they deal directly with Christ or with followers of Christ. So the apostle Paul spoke of Epaentus as the firstfruit of Achaia or Achaia in Romans 16:5. He also refers to a Stephanas in 1 Corinthians 16:15. And the difference, because they're both, both being referred to as the firstfruits of Achaia, but one of them is of an individual, the other is of Stephanas, of he and his household, which also must be understood like this, because a lot of it was church in the home.
So it could have meant not Stephanas and his family alone, but the church around him in his house as well. So that's ambiguous, we can't know exactly, but one is to an individual, one is a family. Paul also used the Firstfruits in referencing what was pinched from the dough to teach that if the Firstfruit is holy, then the lump is also holy. He says that in Romans 11:16. By this he means if God chose whomever He chose, say Abraham or Jacob, then the whole lump, that means the whole, all the children of Israel, let's; if we're using that reference, okay? Paul also used the term Firstfruits in relation to the Holy Spirit and the fruits that are manifested within the believer. So all of these components are important, because what they paint is a picture of the whole Christian, of what we are to be focusing on as believers. We're not to be focused on, you know, a thousand different things.
Our focus is, look unto Him, the Author and Finisher of salvation, Jesus Christ. And if we're going to talk about how that focus remains, it's kept by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us, guides us, teaches us, instructs us, help, helps us to even learn while we are being taught. You know, I was reading a message in my office and the message said, “I finally found you again. I lost track of you for several years.” But this person also went on to say how when they were watching, they tuned in and they tried to understand, and it was like I was speaking a foreign language, and now they've learnt more in the last six months.
And the person says in their message, “Maybe I just; it wasn't God's time yet for me.” And that's exactly it. I know because many of you are just like that. I'm like that. I've shared with you my anger. Why couldn't God have opened my eyes sooner, right? But that was part of God's plan. He knew the timing to be harvested, at least to be picked or opened up, right? Because that's what He does. He knows how to do it. We talk about the deposit of the Spirit in each believer. I just referenced as a type of Firstfruit. And much later in the book of Revelation, we'll encounter the 144 preachers of righteousness who will be sealed just prior to the opening of the seventh seal; all these numbers are important, 12,000 from each tribe sealed from God's wrath at the very start of the day of the Lord.
And that expression alone becomes important because these 144,000 will be preaching to people and there will be what we'll call a final harvest, an end harvest. That will be it. That's the final call, like you're in a bar, “Last call for alcohol,” “Last call for salvation happening right here with 144,000 peppered throughout the earth. That's it. That's your last call.” And I, I would really love for people to read that passage and don't read it like it's a cartoon or it's some caricature that maybe will happen. No, that's, that's what God said is going to happen in the future. And by the way, we're, we're far enough along in the world to see what's going on to know that most of the stuff that is being foretold of in the future, for us is coming to pass. So, I don't know, you know, when God has a pretty good track record of, of making things that he says happen, happen, you've got my attention. I don't need to be convinced or coerced into believing what is blatantly obvious.
So these 144,000 are called Firstfruit. They will be the guarantee that God has not cast away all His people or the ones that didn't answer immediately forever. But rather that God will purify the remnant, just as was prophesied by Daniel, in Daniel's seventieth week. Now I know I'm probably saying stuff that some may not be familiar with and that's okay, stick around and we'll eventually get to it. But this is how the apostle Paul makes a bold claim when he says, “All Israel will be saved.” That is in Romans 11:26. If you read that passage carefully, it makes perfect sense that he's talking about a final harvest that will occur.
It makes perfect sense to me. And I, I hate to sound redundant and repetitive, but in the book of Zechariah, it explicitly says, “They will look upon him whom they have pierced and they will mourn,” meaning they will recognize that the very Savior that they said is “A fraud, it's a lie, it's not true. And we're waiting for our Messiah who's not your Messiah” will go, “Uh-oh, my bad. He was the one all along.” Can you imagine that? I mean, I can, I actually have to feel sorry for people who have been so closed in their thinking that they couldn't read the Old and see the description of the One who came in the New.
It's Him; there aren't two Messiahs, there's only One. He was here and He's coming back and God's going to give those people who rejected Him a second chance, which is why when we read passages that talk about all the people coming to the mount to worship, again, don't think that's a caricature. Why is Israel such a big deal? For the right reasons, not all the ones that a lot of people in ministry try to make it a Zionist movement or they try; no, because the Bible says, “In this little swath of land, basically where I started I will finish.” Don't, don't get more hung up on the land or the people, and the people who are there now won't even be there, likely when He returns. And I won't tell you why either. And it has nothing to do, and it has nothing to do with the rapture either. So leave that one alone. The Firstfruits, like Israel's other springtime feasts, has its fulfillment, fulfillment in Christ's first coming, but perhaps the more important emphasis should be, but now Christ is risen from the dead, has become the Firstfruit of those who have fallen asleep.
And we know that Jesus rose from the dead━I told you I'd be repeating a lot, which I'm doing━which makes the fulfillment of that feast as it's applied to Him. Just put a period there because He did come out of the grave. The Resurrection is a guarantee of harvest of souls that will be like Christ. The fact is that there is life after death, not just we just cease being.
Daniel says something pretty profound. Remember, Daniel, he's not known for these things, but his 70 weeks and all the messages within his book are New Testament, or as New Testament as you can get. He says, “And many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame, and some to everlasting contempt,” which means all. Check this out. The resurrection or the resurrected life if you will; oh, you're going to love this, all will be resurrected. All. But not all will be resurrected with Christ. Would you like me to say that again? All will be resurrected, but not all will be resurrected with Christ. Some will be resurrected to eternal damnation. That's also resurrected life that lives on in perpetuity in torment. “Oh, I don't like that.” Well, I didn't write those words, so don't, don't come complaining to me. But, you know, even Christ said something that was pretty shocking in His day.
He said, “Do not marvel for the, for the hour is coming in which all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come forth, some to resurrected life and others to condemnation.” That's John 5. So even out of the mouth of our Lord, He even says this. Don't think everybody gets a ticket and you're all going to paradise. Some are going to get a ticket to “Coffee Break's Over”; that, the ones that laughed, I know how long you've been around, okay? I know where you live. So there's always been two parts to the harvest, and there will always be two parts to the harvest, the wheat and the chaff.
And that sums it up for you. Some will inherit and receive eternal life, dwell with God forever, and some will inherit eternal punishment. And those that belong to Him, that have trusted Him, that have looked to Him their entire time of knowing Him; and that could be a day, a year, a lifetime, they will be resurrected in the same fashion, the same way as He was. So let me take a minute now to wrap this up because I'm really out of time. The main reason for preaching these messages is to demonstrate God didn't just set out in the Old to put together a whole bunch of nonsensical, ceremonial, “Now, these are these routines we do at a set time.” They were all pointing to the future.
They were all pointing to Christ. I explained to you how Christ; we talked about the Sabbath, and we are Sabbathing in Christ daily. I talked to you about the Passover when God said, “Celebrate this, basically in perpetuity as a memorial.” Well, we are, because how could you not do two things? Remember the children of Israel's deliverance out of Egypt's bondage, and then remember your own deliverance out of this world flesh and devil bondage. Now your eyes are open and you can be able to celebrate and to rejoice and to be glad in the Lord. So when I say, without, as I said earlier, without the Old Testament, we wouldn't have the full picture of why it matters.
And if you want to put kind of the exclamation mark, Paul says in Romans 8:29, essentially that we are the first, in terms of brethren or sistern, we are the first of many, the body of believers. So it becomes clear that the church of Jesus Christ must continue until the final harvest of souls comes. Now I cannot tell you how long that time will be. The Bible's very clear, no one knows the day of the hour, but there are signposts.
There are things we can see happening in the world, and wars and rumors of wars. That doesn't mean the end is here. Trust me, when there are definitive signposts along the way that must happen that will tell you the time is nearer and nearer and nearer when these things happen. Some of these have not happened yet. That's why I said to you, there's a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of weird stuff going on.
There's a lot of scary stuff going on, but the end is not tomorrow. Don't, don't walk out here going, “Oh my God, we're doomed tomorrow, tomorrow.” It's not like that. And I'd say to you, if there's anything that should be a takeaway from this message, and I'm, I don't engage in the antics of evangelists, but if anything is a takeaway, especially for people who are not so familiar in listening to me, it would be take the time now while you have the time. The Bible says redeem the time. Take the time now to begin learning about Him, learning about who He is, His ways, His message, His words, not to study them and repeat them like a rote computer, but that His words and Christ may dwell richly in you, that when the day comes, you're not scrambling to figure out what you need to do. You know what; you've already done it, you've already taken care of business. And I'm sorry to say it like that, but just to be as colloquial as possible so there is no misunderstanding.
It is, it is truly, it confounds me that people, if, if people say, “Well, it must be in the last days,” or “It must be close,” well, then why aren't you pressing in closer with God? That's going to be the thing that keeps all of us, I hate to tell you, sane, calm, and with the clarity of vision to know what to do while the stuff is hitting the fan. So I would say to you in, in an age which people don't seem to be that concerned, the church is very important, not the building, but as the Greek calls it, a people that belong to the Lord.
And if we who are trusting Christ, and I'm going to say it this way, you know there's a Scripture that says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” We have been partakers of that goodness. We have tasted what the Lord has in store for those that trust Him. Then it is indeed just like the Firstfruit, we can say, “This offering of Christ stands,” in, in terms of our version of time, “as the expectancy promised,” not, “I'm not sure it's not going to happen,” for you and for me.
Put a period there. Don't be trying to figure out “How much more, what more can I do?” That's the other problem that people engage in, “What more can I do?” Now, one last footnote here and then I'm done. We have a lot of people that will give a Firstfruit offering. And listen, I'm really a strange bird when it comes to money, and I say that because I believe that when we read the New Testament there's great clarity and understanding. God does love a hilarious giver. God loves the spirit of the person; we're not just talking about money, we're talking about somebody who says, “Sure, I'll help you out.
Sure, I'll give you a hand,” that generous nature. So when I say to you, Firstfruits is not just about everything that I've talked about, but it is also about understanding, presenting the first of whatever comes into your hand, and you can't just, where, where do you give it to God? Well, you can't, but the Bible says you bring your tithes and your offerings to the storehouse, wherever you get your spiritual food. And I still believe that's a good way of saying, “I'm putting God first”" That, that's like something that, I hate to say it like this, but it actually costs you something. And I had to learn this from our good friend, Ray Sidney. He said, “You know, you shouldn't give anything away for free,” he was referring to the people in Japan, “because then they don't think it has any value.” And I thought, “That's kind of odd, but okay, if that's your, if that's your mindset.” But if you think about it in God's book, for how much it costs for God to send and give His only begotten Son, and we who take it so casually, I think the concept of Firstfruits is brilliant, because what it does is it says, you know, we don't work to get in, we don't labor in works of the flesh, but it does say, “I'm, I'm giving my first to God, which is my best and my first.” And that could be in dedicating your child, could be any number of things, but I'm not specifically talking about Firstfruits in giving right now.
And I'd say to you, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as the person's doing it for the right reasons. Don't give with strings attached. Don't give and say, “Yes, but I, I'm hoping that if I do this, this will happen.” If you're doing Firstfruits for the reason I said, which is putting God first and He takes care of the rest, then I applaud you and I think it's a good thing.
Any other motives for doing it are the wrong motives and I don't agree with them. Now, I know that's a little bit strange, the way I just worded that, but what I'm trying to tell you is, I'm the person who's known for, I think in all of ministry, there, there might only be one person that does this and it's, it's this person right here who sends back offerings to people who don't get it. And I'm talking about people who have been abusive to me in the past or they think they're going to tell me how to run the church or how to conduct or whatever. I don't want your money. We're not; this is not that type of church.
I'm not here to take your money or grab your money or do anything with your money, because it's not your money anyway; it's God's, ha, ha. But what I am saying to you is I can give you structured ideas that if they're carried out right, they, I believe are good in God's eyes and if they're carried out, like anything else, if they're carried out for the wrong reasons, like people who give to get, if that's your mindset, you're not giving to God.
You're doing some investment scheme or you're doing some trading deal with God. But if you're really giving, this is God's, the rest God lets me keep and He puts His stamp of approval on it. He blesses me for that very reason. Now, I can't tell you what else to do, but I can tell you in these feasts as we've been looking at them, I love this one in particular because going back to the whole message I just preached, it tells me if you and I have that same expectancy, like those people that took the first of their crop, and we should have that expectancy, then there's no reason in the world why whatever we face, whatever we deal with, whatever sickness comes under our dwelling, whatever pitfalls may happen, whatever this country goes to hell in a handbasket, which it's halfway there right now, but I've connected myself to God, I'm not letting go.
I'm going to be just like Jacob/Israel. I may be a little bit crippled right now, but I'll be God-damned if I let go because I know He's the only one that can take me through this. He's the only one that can take you through all of this. So wouldn't you, you'd think you'd want to do your best. In that respect the Firstfruits speaks volumes to me. I hope it speaks to you. We'll continue on with these, but for today that's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center.
If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
foreign [Music] I wanted to say I appreciate letters anything that comes my way somebody taking the time to sit down and write by whatever format I don't care it means the world to me but I also take the time when I see something maybe twisted out of context to correct it so here is one this came in a letter from a King's house and King style that looks relatively new and I'm grateful for you writing me but the person says I know we are not supposed to give testimonies I never said that what I said is testimonies cannot listen what happened to me may not happen to you but in the big picture let me just say this every person who calls themselves a Christian has a testimony make no mistake about that okay if you say oh I don't have one it's because you're too busy focused on the person who stands up who says well I used to be this and now I'm that and you don't understand what it means to say a sinner saved by grace and looking at oneself we all have a testimony the reason why I am against testimony in church is because that is personal subjective to the person and my experiences are not yours so I'm not against testimony per se simply not in a public form and not added to a church service I believe all it does most of the time when people stand up and say what the Lord's done for them usually it creates a sense of well hmm the Lord didn't do that for me or I was never like that when in fact every single person who calls on the name of Jesus Christ has a testimony so I want to clear that up [Music] [Music] coming to this house
foreign many people who tune in they say I'm not sure that I understand everything you said that's okay because I didn't understand everything at the first and most people tell the truth so that the world can hear when you came in you first started listening did it all make sense to you so don't think out there that you're somehow unique because you don't understand it's called tenacity to stay with the stuff until something clicks the lights come on and you actually say oh my God why didn't I see this sooner how many that that was my experience why didn't I see this sooner how unfair is that that God didn't open my eyes sooner but thank God he did [Music] [Music] coming to this house
When people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin. ♪ ♪ ♪ The Passover is described in Exodus 12, after the nine or depending on how you reckon it, ten plagues; nine or ten, depending on your reckoning have been unleashed and afflicted on the Egyptians with little effect.Then God directs Moses to declare this firstborn; that all the firstborns must die in the land of Egypt, man, and beast. This would eventually break the Egyptian hold and let the people go under Moses’ lead. Now I always think this is interesting because there’s a lot here and this is where you might say to me when I taught on the Sabbath, “I can’t exactly see the connection,” because for some people who have not spent enough time in the word, they may not. But here you cannot miss it. So between the death of the firstborn and the institution of the Passover, you have some great clarity here on what God is doing. Now imagine this. Imagine you are enslaved in Egypt’s bondage and imagine that you were born in Egypt. You just didn’t get there. People were born there for a couple of hundred years. So you would A) not have the frame of reference. Most people think, Oh, they were, they were celebrating certain ceremonies already while they were in Egypt.” No, they were not because all of these instituted feasts happened after, either the night that they were liberated or onwards, but there was nothing before that.There was, there was no law given before that. So there was no keeping of customs per se as we have them recorded here. And why that’s important because we begin to see in these practices how there is no way that while they were in Egypt’s bondage, they could have known too much about God. They couldn’t have. So imagine if you were in bondage, you’re in Egypt, and you see all these plagues hit.Now to me, you know, you could say, “Well, one might be a fluke.” You know, and you might see the second one. You say, “Well, that’s odd.” And a lot of people try; I love this, have you ever watched these documentaries where they make rational excuses for miracles of God? Do you ever see that? (Yes ma’am.) “Oh, well, you know, it, it had to be that on that day there was a, a fire bolt of lightning that came down that turned the whole place into ash, and there couldn’t be a God involved in it.” So it’s interesting that here there are too many events for the children of Israel to just go, “Huh,” like, “I’m not sure I can believe in this God” I mean after you see all this stuff, and then God gives the instructions and says basically in a nutshell (we’re going to read the passage in a second), but basically in a nutshell, “All the firstborn are going to die in the land of Egypt unless you heed what the directives are to apply the blood, a specific thing to do, which is taking an animal into your house on the tenth day,” would be in your household for four and a half days; call it that, because the sacrifice that would be the Passover lamb would be sacrificed between the fourteenth and the fifteenth day of the month, and the blood would be applied.And there’s a whole prescription for how to do this. Now imagine you’ve seen all of the plagues fall. You’ve seen everything happen. The water turns to blood, the frogs; you see it all. So when God says, “Apply the blood as I’ve instructed you,” I think for the most part, even if you didn’t know who God was, you’d have enough of fear, maybe you might have the mindset like the Egyptians did of the plural gods, but you’d have enough of a mindset to know after seeing all this to do it.Not because you know who God is, but because you see there’s some type of power at work. I’m trying to say that maybe the children of Israel in Egypt’s bondage didn’t know as much as we tend to think they did about God. So that’s important. The second thing is that this event takes place on the first day; as I said, it falls between the night of the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And we will read the procedure for this speaks volumes about what God was trying to convey for something not just practical, but also prophetical. Let’s take a look. I want to read through the eleventh and twelfth chapter because it paints the picture, and I think without that it might be hard for some people that they are not familiar. So Exodus 11 says, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterward he will let you go hence: when he shall let you go, ye shall surely thrust; he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether. Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.And the LORD gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and the sight of the people. And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out amid Egypt: and all the firstborn of the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and the firstborn of the beast,” so anything firstborn, anything and everything firstborn.“There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, or there will be nothing after it like this. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against a man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” And this is very interesting because here God is not yet; I’m sorry to say it like this, God has not yet had the bad taste in His mouth of these rebellious, stiff-necked people who simply would not do what God said. But here obviously they do. He’s, so He’s now saying, “There’s a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” Later it will be, “Moses, they’re your people,” right? (Laughter.) “And all these thy servants shall come down unto me, bow down themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee: and after that I will go out. And he went out from Pharaoh in great anger. And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you; that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land. And the LORD spake,” There’s no chapter and verse here, I’m just going to go right into it. “The LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Kind of interesting, by the way, that means that they had to have been reckoning time according to the Egyptian reckoning of time, because God says, “Now there’s a new way to reckon time,” and it’s here.“Speak ye unto the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth month; In the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house: and if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of souls, every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb.” I like that, that’s the fact that God is saying, “If there are too few of you, you can join together with your neighbor, and this can be an act done together with your neighbor.” “Your lamb shall be without blemish, the male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or the goats: and ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.And they shall take of the blood, strike it on the two side posts of the; and on the upper door post of the house, where they shall eat it.” So God’s very clear, the door, the sides, and the top to be covered with this blood. “They shall eat the flesh in that, in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs, they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs,” so you get the idea. God is saying, “This is how I want it done.” “Ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth,” if there’s anything left over, you’re going to burn it completely. So there’s not going to be anything left over. “Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, staff in your hand; you shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD’S Passover,” so a couple of things are said here.You know, this is probably the original dine and dash, okay, probably, but God’s giving the instructions, so I guess it’s okay. But I want you to look at something. So when we looked at the Sabbath, it was the Lord’s Sabbath. Here it is the Lord’s Passover. Now, in Judaism, even today, every year, if people are adhering to this and they’re still keeping a Passover, they are recounting this whole passage in what is called a “Passover Haggadah.” It’s a little book that kind of chronicles the Passover/Exodus story if you will. And then there is the main meal, and it’s very interesting because if you, if someone were to analyze, and many people have, but if you were in your own time to analyze, you could see that a lot of the things that are being consumed at this Passover Seder, actually have some correlation to the New Testament as well.So it’s kind of interesting. They correlate in many ways to Christ because Christ, as Paul says in the New Testament, Christ, our Passover. So here are the instructions. Verse 12 begins, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt will I execute judgment: I am the LORD.” So the first thing that’s going to happen is all the firstborn are going to die, and those who remain, they will see that it is the Lord that is doing this thing.“And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the house where you are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt. And this day shall be unto you for a memorial, and you shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever.” Remember, I just said to you last week, anytime you read that in the Old Testament, it means that it is attached to a prophetic fulfillment in Christ pointing to or around either Christ coming in the flesh or His return. Here, this is talking about and pointing to Christ in the flesh of Him laying down His life. And what we are to do in the New Testament, we are told basically to partake of the Lord’s Supper until He comes, the cup representing the blood, and the body, if you will, the roasted lamb for strength.Some people talk about the wafer that people use, the round wafer which is, was never a part of anything. It’s just broken bread, that’s all. Broken bread, that’s unleavened, that’s all. “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” That’s a pretty sharp thing to say. So if you’ve got leaven and you consume it, it says you’re cut off from Israel. “And the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and in the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation to you; no matter; no manner of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you.And you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread.” So very interesting that the prescription is here telling us basically and goes into the Feast of Unleavened Bread which a lot of people, including the New Testament, you’ll read where people tend to say “eight days of Passover,” which is not so. It is Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and you can kind of follow the feasts that are clustered together within that period, including if there are Sabbaths involved. “So seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born the land.” So it doesn’t matter who you are, if you eat leaven, you’re toast, all right.(Laughter.) “You shall eat nothing leavened; in your, in all your habitations; you shall, you shall eat unleavened bread” So here Moses calls out for the elders of Israel, says to them, “Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, kill the Passover. Ye shall take a bunch of hyssops,” imagine a cluster of what would be like branches that have leaves on them, so to speak, “dip it in the blood that’s in the bacon and strike the lintel in the two side posts with the blood that’s in the bason: none of you shall go out at that door of his house until the morning.” So I find it interesting, because here it says, “The LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel and the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. And you shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and thy sons forever.” So again, when God says forever and ever, you’ve got to look at this dispensation that would come to a close.So whatever it is that God says is forever has a prophetic fulfillment to it. We know, of course, the prophetic fulfillment is in Christ. So the next question somebody may ask, because we’re trying, we’re trying to build the foundation for this message, is a lot of people will ask this question, which the answers are in the Bible. I think it’s kind of strange that people do not recognize, for example, that Jesus would have celebrated the Passover. There’s always this argument, would He have, would; of course He would have. His parents both adhered to the prescribed way that was being kept for hundreds if not thousands of years. And you read first in Luke 2, and I believe it’s about verse 40, where He was with His parents during the Passover.And that’s the time where He is left behind, and they don’t realize that they’ve left Jesus behind. That’s the first case of child abandonment (laughter) recorded in the Bible. And then the next one that we encounter is in John’s Gospel, the opening of John’s Gospel, where it talks about when He went into the temple when Jesus went into the temple, it was during the Passover at that time when the money changers were sitting.That’s, that particular instance happened, or that scenario happened during the Passover. There are all of these so subtle messages there, because if you think about it, Christ who is our Passover, and Christ knowing that he was the Lamb, John declared, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” But think of this, He’s going into the temple on the Passover seeing the money changers, and if you can kind of wrap your mind around this, we have that scenario ongoing still today, because instead of being about our Father’s business, there are people that are- I just talked about this regarding the flag, you could make it money, you could make it the flag, anything that doesn’t belong. And this is why He turned over the tables and chased them out of the temple. And this is why I won’t stay quiet about these things because it is the same principle. You cannot let the world come in and run its affairs inside the house of God. You can’t do it, you can’t let that happen.You let, you let it happen once, you see what’s happening everywhere else. So with that said though, the instructions show us clearly that Christ kept the Passover with His parents, and then thereafter; there’s no reason not, to come up with the idea that He did not. And then we see from the apostle Paul’s writing when he talks about, and I just mentioned, Christ our Passover. So remember I described in the reading, it is the Lord’s Passover and Christ becomes ours. And just even that subtle distinction tells you why when people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin, which is on a much greater scale than the exodus out of Egypt.If you want to put it in that, in those terms, that’s why we’re talking about Old and New relevance. Now the other thing that I like about this is that, as I said, if a person’s still not sure about the correlation between Old and New, we have all of these different things being said. The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, that is in Christ, or Christ is our Lamb. Even the details, when we get to the New Testament, of seeing kind of the preparation. And the reason I think that God said on the tenth to bring this lamb and look at it, see it, take it into your house; I want to use a strange term because I’m, I’m exaggerating now, but imagine looking at this, having to look at this animal, knowing this innocent animal is going to be slaughtered. And you’ve got to look at this thing for the next four and a half days.You’re looking at, its sweet eyes or its, whatever it’s doing, and it may be cute or it may be not cute, I don’t know, but you’ve got to look at it. That means that there is a connection to it. It’s not just an animal that was going to be killed, something that would become dear to you, almost hurtful to sacrifice. And these are, I guess, lessons God was trying to paint in pictures to show us the sacrifice, what the sacrifice of Christ was to our heavenly Father is, and we tend to just, I think a lot of people just take it very cheaply because it’s so disconnected from us. We don’t have that same proximity. That’s why I said, a person should develop a relationship with Christ and get to know Christ and know the word, and it would give you a better sense.And I, I’m going to be at a lack to describe this, so indulge me for a minute and forgive me because I’m at lack to find the right words. But this is why for some people, when they start reading the Bible and they see that Christ didn’t just die for the sins of the world. I told you John 3:16, “God so loved the world; God so loved”- you put your name in there. And when it becomes personal to you, you are now entering into this kind of; we’ll call it personal acquaintance like the people had to do by bringing the lamb into their home.When it becomes personal to you that something had to die in your stead, it all starts to gel and suddenly we go from going through the motions of religion to having a relationship with Christ. And these are very important concepts, which believe it or not, as simplistic as it is, most people get lost right there. They think, “I come to church; I’ve got to check the boxes. I’ve got to make sure that I, I pray properly, that I do the right things, that I say the right things.” That’s all the minutia; I’m sorry to tell you, God’s not interested in it at the get-go. Those are details that you work out with Him. But understanding and having that relationship like the children of Israel had to do with that lamb and bringing that lamb into the home, having to look at it, and then knowing you’re going to have to sacrifice it. So everything here, by the way, comes with a price. Now God tells them to roast the lamb whole, to not break a single bone.And I need to say a comment here because I’ve said many times about Christ, a broken body for a broken people. And I never meant it in the context of somehow his bones were severed, but all that was put upon Him, the sins of the world laid upon Him; in that respect, broken body for a broken people. And along with the bitter herbs and the unleavened bread and this meal, as we just read, was to be consumed basically in a state of ready-to-go. When God says, “Okay, one, two, three, eat,” right? It’s almost like “Eat as much as you can. You’ve got 30 seconds to do it. Okay, it’s over. All right, let’s go.” And I’m not saying it was like that, but imagine you would have had a sense of urgency.Something, you wouldn’t be sitting back, oh, I’m stuffed. I can barely move. You know, when you’ve eaten too much, right? It wouldn’t be like that. It would be more along the lines of, I’m, I’m, I’m ready to go. And if, as I said, I just read, there was any lamb left over, they were to completely burn it. And I’m assuming, by the way, that that act of completely burning what was not consumed was to make sure that the surviving Egyptians did not partake of the sacrifice. You could say, “Well, that’s kind of bad.” But no, this was punishment upon the Egyptians, and specifically Pharaoh, but punishment upon those people. So God didn’t want any commingling. It’s going to be completely burned. We’re done with that. Then there is the manner of partaking, which is equally strange, as I said, not just ready to go, but God describes things such as; sorry, these are the details that God gives.For example, if someone was not circumcised, they could not partake in the Passover. And you might say, “Well, okay, well, they weren’t, they weren’t circumcised necessarily in Egypt.” Now, hear me out. Circumcision was instituted with Abram circumcising all the people in his family, his household if you remember that passage. So they would have been practicing circumcision. That would have probably just been something that traditionally, whether or not they knew about God or not, something that would have just been traditionally done. So when God says, “If somebody is not circumcised, they cannot partake of the Passover,” it’s essentially saying, “Not in covenant with Me, you cannot sit down and partake. You can’t even”; sorry to say it, “not in covenant with Me, you can’t be saved.” You think about how you might apply, what I just said, into modern terms, not circumcised by body part; the heart. And then again, it’s all of what I call peeling back the layers of the onion because this story is so familiar, you can just kind of sit back and go, “Yeah, I know the story.” But you look for the minute details and you begin to see how God was basically putting flesh and blood and painting the picture of Christ so perfectly that I don’t know how people could miss it.Another passage describes if a person became ceremonially unclean, that is, they came in contact with a dead body or touched something that would have made them unclean. God said, “You still must keep the Passover, but you will keep it on the following month, on the fourteenth day of the following month.” In other words, see, this is what’s amazing. God didn’t just say, “Okay, well, if you miss this time, you’re done,” but a special dispensation for those people who, whether they did it on purpose or not became unclean, couldn’t partake.And God says, “Okay, you can do it the following month if that’s your condition.” So God made a way for every person to be able to participate, no matter if your family’s too small, then you join with your neighbor. I mean, He’s; you can see all the provisions. I love the fact that it’s almost like God thinks of everything here, sometimes too much detail, but anyway. We’re going to see that as they move from Egypt into the wilderness, this Passover will be kept, but they’re no longer sacrificing in their dwelling. So the place of sacrifice for the Passover will no, it’s no longer necessary to apply the blood as previously to your household. Now it becomes something to be performed at the Tabernacle and eventually, it’ll be performed at the temple.So these are important because it tells you that, you know, we, we tend to think of God giving a prescribed way and then it’s locked in, but even there you can see God modified it as they went from being in Egypt’s bondage and needing to show the sign for the avenging death angel, basically to pass over versus perpetuating and celebrating in perpetuity, which means no longer; no reason to paint the doorpost. You’ve got to bring your Passover sacrifice to the door and there it would be sacrificed. Again, you go to the New Testament, Christ is called what? The Door, so we take all of these pieces and realize God’s been saying the same thing for a long time.We just have been very hardheaded to not listen. That’s okay, as long as the lights come on eventually, that’s okay. On the fifteenth, the sheaf of firstfruits of barley, the new harvest would be offered as a wave offering along with a yearling, as a burnt offering, the prescribed meal offering (we just went through the offerings), two-tenths of an ephah of flour and a drink offering, a quarter of a hin of wine. So you’ve got the prescribed offerings around the pass, around the Passover as well, not just the Paschal lamb, but all the other steps involved in offering. And did it matter to God? It did.Here’s where God starts looking to see if people are keeping His ordinances. Kind of interesting. Each of the seven days of this feast, a goat was offered as a sin offering, two young bullocks, a ram, and seven yearling lambs were offered as burnt offerings after the continual sacrifice. So it’s a lot of offerings and a lot of blood and a lot of burning of stuff, just a lot. On the seventh day, the Sabbath rest, a holy assembly brought the festivities to a close. That also signaled that the morrow which would begin at sundown, leavened bread could now safely be consumed in the household. Now if you read the celebration for Unleavened Bread, even though I’m on the Passover, you’ll read several instances, where we are right now, Leviticus, I’m sorry, Exodus, both in Exodus 23, 34, and Leviticus 23, and Deuteronomy 16. You’ve got those references, so if you want more information on that, read it there. Now, for the language part, the Passover or what is commonly Hebrew, Pesach, obviously refers to or signifies “to stride,” “to spring over,” or “to spare.” And what’s interesting is if you look, this is a this is The Englishman’s Hebrew Concordance of the Old Testament.Thank you. Let me get my little pointing stick here so I can show you. So you’ve got the word here, so you can see it, Pesach, it is the Lord’s Passover, we just read that. But I want you to look at what’s above it because as you know, Hebrew usually works with the three root consonants. So you can see the three, the vowel points are underneath, but here take a look from Pesach to Pesach, and here we have, for example, “I will pass over,” and here it is “the Lord’s Passover,” so you can see the proximity, it’s just the vowel points of the, of the words themselves that change. And I point that out to you for two reasons. One is to show you how easy it is to blur things up in Hebrew, but also to show you the correlation between passing over and the word Passover; they’re the same. If we take the feasts or the set times, I think there are seven: Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles; that is seven.And seven is important. Now these feasts don’t get into the mindset of thinking, “What does it matter to me?” because it does. Because as we study these feasts, for example, as I said, the Passover correlates to Christ and Christ’s sacrifice for us. The Bible says, “For sin comes death.” The wages of sin is death. So without the blood, you know, again, there are people who say, “Well, Christ is not the only way.” Well, if you’re going to read this book, sorry to say it, you’ve got to just, make your own decision. Don’t take my word for it. But if God says the only way that these people can be saved is by applying the blood and moves into the New Testament, says, “The only way these people can be saved is by them applying the blood.” Now it’s to the heart, to the mind, to your thoughts.Don’t think for a second that, these things don’t matter with God. They do. Now the right of redeeming the firstborn was a constant reminder to the Israelites of all generations that the firstborn belonged to God. So wiping out the firstborn of Egypt was a way of saying, “Not only are these people cut off, but they are none of Mine” You might say, “That’s pretty brutal,” but again, I digress to something I just said earlier. You know, could you imagine? And I often entertain this. One pharaoh- you know how much I love history and many of you are into a lot of this history as well. One pharaoh, out of all the pharaohs, turned Egypt into a monotheistic society. And I’m still not certain, even though you can see the hieroglyphs and you can see all of the reliefs, I’m still not sure that there was not an influence in some way, shape, or form by prior history to not go to the thought process of monotheistic God by what all is recorded here.And don’t think, by the way, people say, “Oh, well, this is the only record of this happening.” No, there are, there are scant records within Egypt’s documentation of these events. So do not be fooled when people say, “Oh, there’s no record at all outside the Bible.” Yeah, there is actually. And someone who’s into studying Egyptology will tell you that there are several references to this event that we’re referencing within their records. So I like the fact that you know, when you want to shut somebody up, there’s a, there’s a wonderful way to do it. Just tell them the truth, right? (Laughter.) So we know after the death of the firstborn, they’re pretty eager to get the children of Israel out of Egypt, like, “Okay, go already.Now, before anything worse happens, get out of here.” And we have the plague of the firstborn, God’s way of putting on display, if you thought, for example, that turning the water to blood was nothing but a magician’s trick when your loved one dies, there’s no magic trick there. You know they’re gone. It was God’s exclamation mark, “If you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t- well, finally, you’re going to believe Me when you’re first of your family and the first of your animals are just laying there lifelessly.” It was God’s way of saying exclamation marks and mic drops, okay? So just checking to see if you’re awake, (laughter) but, all right. The other thing that I like to say is in all this, you can go back. There is a pastor who’s been prolifically posting messages online and, you know, he’s wearing his colored scarf and he says, “This is made up. This is all fabrication.” Listen, you can believe whatever you want. You can believe you’re a leprechaun too, okay? That’s fine.That’s your prerogative. But here’s my issue. If you’re going to make those types of statements, you better be ready to back up your words. “Well, how do you know that this is not made up?” Well, here’s the deal. When you start reading what God said to Abram and He tells him, He says very point blank. This is early on, He says to Abram, “Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not there’s, shall serve them,” wonder who that is, huh? “And they shall afflict them for four hundred years, and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And afterward, they shall come out with great substance.” You tell me, it says, “But in the fourth generation they shall come out, they shall come thither again.” So you tell me, and that is the event that happens hundreds of years before this, “Let my people go,” and Moses leads them out. Again, if, if we’re making up a story, there would be some really, we’d have some great flow and there wouldn’t be any, any missing places, but there’s a gap of some kind.So God makes this statement, then there’s a gap. We don’t have any clue what’s going on until it happens. So if you’re going to make up a story, you think you might be, if you were writing and making this up, you would perpetuate. So you’d have Abraham repeat it, then you’d have Isaac repeat it, then you might have Jacob repeat it. No, it’s just repeated to Abram and memorialized for us, and then we have the event that happens a couple of hundred years later on the pages before us.So I’m not inclined to believe that. If I wanted extra-Biblical proof, I told you, to go look at a lot of things that you can trace in Egyptology that will lead you to confirm what the Bible’s saying. So I’m not inclined when people talk about it as a good story. Something is being told to us in the celebration of this event. It’s shadow and type that gives us hope, which is if God spared these people, and listen carefully because it’s so subtle, you can miss what I’m going to say.If God spared these people that they did not know who He was necessary, okay, they might have been referring to the God of Abraham or the God of Isaac or the God, but they didn’t know who God was. They could not. They were in Egypt. And for a couple of hundred years, I said this last week, you see how easily this country has changed just in the last 50 years, how people are forgetting things, how because people have ripped down monuments to great historical figures, there’s a future generation coming that will say, “Christopher who, Columbus? What is that? Who is that person?” They won’t know of it.And that’s going to happen sooner than you think, a generation. Okay, how many of you here will say something like referring to something that maybe was a ’70s TV show and nobody around you knows what the hell you’re talking about? (Laughter.) “Uh, what is that?” Or, okay, do you want to go for the easy one? Here’s the easy one: an old-fashioned telephone with a cord that’s tethered to a wall. Show that to a teenager and ask them, “How do you use this?” (Laughter.) Do you think you have tech problems? I watched a video of somebody staring at the phone going, “I don’t know.I’m not sure.” Okay, you do have problems here. My point is they would not have known. We tend to forget that. So it’s really important to see that God opened His heart to a people that were not well acquainted with Him, to save and deliver them. Does that sound familiar to you at all? (Yes ma’am.) God opened His heart to take someone in that was not familiar with Him, and did not know too much about Him. And I think that’s probably most of us at different stages in our life. So tell me where you think this has radically changed, where God’s changed. He hasn’t. And the principles that are here are still the same. The thing that we have of being in Christ and looking to Him and the blood applied to our circumcised hearts, if you will, is the fact that we know from the words spoken by Christ memorialized in this book, we are saved, we are forgiven.And the Bible even goes on to say that “Whosoever believeth, faiths, trusteth in Him shall have eternal life.” So we even have much better promises. Again, I hate to repeat what I said last week, but the book of Hebrews talks about how much better Christ was over everything in the old dispensation, how much better. We have clarity, we have certainty; we have the whole record laid out for us. That’s why I don’t understand, I’m sorry. I will never understand why it’s so difficult for people to just sit, take 30 minutes to listen, or read the Bible.That doesn’t mean that instantaneously you’re gripped. It doesn’t mean you have understanding. I’m sure people are sitting here that for some of you it’s like, “Oh, I know this story like the back of my hand.” Other people are hearing it for the first time. My point is that God will, for the degree, for every step you take, God’s taking 10 steps towards you, and His approach has not changed. So when we talk about these concepts, they had to celebrate the Passover as a mandate. They were mandated to. Now I’m going to ask this question, which should be rhetorical, but let’s see. How could we look at what Christ did and feel somehow mandated? Like it’s mandatory? No, I want to tell people because I want to share with them the greatness of what I know Christ has done. But this is, again, it’s another one of these issues and I’ll try not to take up too much time here. But if you understand, we’re not mandated, yet we should be, okay, you had a great meal last week.It was the best meal you’ve ever had. Do you have to be mandated to tell somebody that was the best meal you had or if it truly was the best meal, you know what? My guess is you’re probably, “Oh my God! I had this food. It was so amazing, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and you bore people with it, but you go on about how great it was. Well, if Christ is that great and better than a meal, you don’t feel like it’s a mandate. You feel like, you feel sorry for people who don’t know what you know and you want to share it.And this is another part of this; we’re not under that mandate. And when people say, oh, you have a duty or something, no, freely and desirously to share that good news that Jesus Christ is the Passover for us. He is the blood applied and He’s not just as the Passover was, a passing over, but how about a washing, a cleansing and eradicating of sin, past, present, future; much better than any blood applied to a door. And again, the type is Christ is the Door. That’s what the New Testament talks about. So unlike our brothers and sisters in antiquity, I don’t think you need to have a mandate to tell people about the goodness of what’s happened in your life. Now, that’s to say we don’t do testimonials here. Some people say, “Oh, you should have people stand up and do testimonies.” And I’ve told you, we don’t do that because everybody has one. It’s like other body parts, everyone has one, (laughter) all right? But what I want us to focus on here is the importance of making this connection.I think every, Christian for the most part knows Christ our Passover. That’s, seems to be clear, right? But when we talk about the Lord’s Supper, the table of the Lord, to help us to remember; remember Paul’s words, “Do this in remembrance of Him, basically until He comes. So we are keeping the Passover in that sense a memorial, the memory of what Christ did in laying down His life and being our Paschal Lamb. So there are these connections we make when we talk about, by the way, the Passover. Some people use the word Christ’s “Passion,” which is Christ’s suffering for us. And I think the other thing that gets missed in all of this, I just mentioned this in the opening of the message, how we are seemingly facing a lot of challenges as Christians in America, persecution to various degrees, some of it is just verbiage, others harmful; bodily harm.Just remember something, that is pretty much the price of association and, and has been since the beginning. You know, people thought, “Oh, this is outrageous!” Well, do you think that they were saying that while they were crucifying the disciples? Same, why did they crucify them? Why did they put them to death? Because they wouldn’t say what the world wanted them to. Think about it, nothing has changed; this is why I keep going, don’t say this is antiquated. Nothing has changed! They killed Christ for that. They killed His disciples for that. “Say what we want you to say, be as we are, and we can all get along and we’ll all have a great time.” The disciples said, “No,” and it cost them their lives. So we have to kind of be mindful when we say we are under a light affliction if you want to call it that. That’s nothing new. And by the way, that will continue, it will get worse as the days come to a close. We know that God’s word talks about tribulation, the great tribulation. I don’t know what you think that means, that word means, but tribulation means something bad, not something good will be poured out upon the earth.And then of course I’m not going to get into it now, the great debate as to whether Christians will be here or not. You know, I’ll settle that for you: it doesn’t matter. If you’re trusting Christ, it does not matter. You know, people, people get caught up in this, “Well, I, I want to, I want to know, I need to know.” How about you get to know that you know who you’re serving, and where you stand with Him, the rest of it will be taken care of. You say, “Well, that’s not an answer.” Well, it kind of is because the argument will go on with as much ambiguity as people like to talk about.Now I’ve heard people say we won’t be here. Some people said we will, but that’s a message for another day. The important thing is to keep faith and trust Him and to see that He is indeed our Passover. We don’t need to be celebrating something that God said is now over. That way of celebrating has been done away with if you will. In Hebrew, the word “leaven,” I need to touch on this, is châmêts, literally meaning “sour.” Leaven usually, yeast or baking powder is added to produce fermentation, especially in bread and dough, which causes it to rise.As the leaven sours the dough, tiny gas bubbles are released producing the dough to rise. So God said, “All leaven is to be removed from your households, not a drop or speck to be found. Period.” And leaven is usually associated with sin. Now this is the thing that people get stuck on. So modern Jewry, today’s Jews who are celebrating, go through a procedure. That procedure for the set time of Passover would be to clean your entire house. I’m all for spring cleaning, by the way. That’s great. Everybody should do that one time a year, spring cleaning. (Laughter) But the idea is to wash your walls, wash your windows. Every part of the home is scrubbed down meticulously with the idea that everything in the home possibly has been contaminated all year round by the leaven that might have been in the house. And I, I kind of think of it this way and I want you to approach this kind of to see how these two are different.So for the modern Jew, it’s about working to get the leaven out of your house. For the Christian, the only way the leaven is removed is through Christ, not through works. So you can see two distinct ways. This is more of works, “We’ll work to remove. We’ll get rid of it.” And there are, trust me, there are a lot of Christians that think- God, I was preaching somewhere. I think I told you the story. I delivered a message to the potter’s house, in a prison somewhere. And then the chaplain who was a butthead, okay, he was. He came up after all the work I did and told the inmates, “Yes, and you have to pick out all the impurities in the clay.” Okay, if you can do that, you’re God, okay? And I’m not. So anyway, my point is we can’t. So you can just see the juxtaposition between the old way that says, “Keep working, keep doing something to clean” versus You are made clean through the word, you are made clean and washed through the blood of Christ.There’s no work in that. It’s faith and trust in God. And I love that when you put the two side by side you realize there’s no amount of work I could ever do to take the leaven out of this container called Melissa Scott, nor of yours. So I think it’s pretty amazing when you see the grace of God to say, “That’s not the way, but faith in Christ gets it done.” Last but not least, I want to talk about this because it sums up everything that I’ve been saying.We talk about Christ as the Lamb. He was, it was pointed out, the Lamb, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” This is the other mystery, I will never understand. Yes, I understand that cultures, you know, I’ve taught comparative concepts in religion, but I’ve never understood this. In all of the, we’ll call it the pantheon, the whole picture of all the deities, there is not one deity; not one like Christ. And hear me out, don’t say, “That’s racist”” or that’s, whatever you want to call it. There isn’t. Look for yourself. Buddha couldn’t completely cleanse inside and out. The person had to work at achieving the state within themselves. You go through all of the world’s religions. There’s only one person who makes these claims that He, there’s something wrong with the world. His death is going to make a right, that in His death you might live, all of these statements.There’s only one. Look for it yourself, not; sorry, not the prophet Muhammad, not Joseph Smith. There isn’t, there isn’t any. So this is what I, I guess for me is frustrating and I don’t understand. I might say somebody doesn’t understand the concept of sin, both as I described in the offerings, the state of being born in fallen Adam, and the fruit thereof. But if I understood that I was trapped in essence, in my ways, both in my condition and the fruit of my condition, you told me that the only way that I could ever get well was to look at this Paschal offering in Christ and see that He didn’t just cover, He took away, He removed, that I- He died, that I might live. It’s, it’s baffling to me that people will not take a second look at this, and baffling to me, that people still want to celebrate something that cannot cleanse the inside of you.It can perhaps act as a covering in your mind, but it could never remove. It could not do what Christ’s offering as the Paschal Lamb could do. So it’s baffling to me when I see people that whole cloth, they reject, they refuse and I think to myself, it’s okay, your day will come. Not because I wish you mal or malice or ill will towards you, but your day will come. There is not a person; sorry, there’s not a person who gets out of here alive and I don’t mean this building, I mean life. So you figure out quickly, some will get to know Christ as an insurance policy just to check the box, just to make sure and others say, “I want to know more about this Person,” and others say, “I want nothing to do with Him.” Well, the category that says, “I want nothing to do with Him,” I don’t think I have to describe their fate.That will be up to God. I’m not, I’m nobody’s judge, but to the category of people who’ve even looked to Him, entertained, glanced, it’s mind-boggling to me that you can’t take 30 minutes to look and see the uniqueness of Christ that not only is He all of these offerings, is He all of these set times in the fulfillment, but He offers to us something that God did not offer to the children of Israel nor for hundreds of years until the coming of Christ, and that is something that the law could never do. Paul spells it out clearly; this law could only bring death, but truth, peace, and grace by Jesus Christ.With an add-on to something, not one person in this book apart from Adam and Eve who were given eternal life at the beginning, there’s not one person in here until the coming of Christ who can talk about eternity and being with God forever until that time. So what I’m saying to you is if there was ever a message that I said to you, it’s important to know who He is. This is why Easter, which is our Passover, Christ our Passover, is so important. It is the center and circumference. It is the middle, the outside, and the middle of Christianity. Without it, you can’t even make your way into the church. And not seeing the center point you’re never going to find your way to anything else. He solves it all by you focusing on Him in faith, recognizing He died that you might live. And if I could just even say one final thing on this, one last thought because I, my time’s up here.If you examine everything that’s in the passage we looked at, and there are accompanying passages which you can kind of study side by side, you will see that in all of this, even under a concept of law which here was not yet given in Egypt, the, the law had not yet been given, but even in the giving of the law, look carefully and you will see God’s grace. When He says, “Okay if you can’t celebrate it on the fourteenth of that month, you’ll do it the next month,” He makes provisions. If you’re too poor to offer, you can offer the least of the offerings. He included everybody. There wasn’t a person in the camp; if you were too poor, you could take from the gleanings that people left mandatorily behind for the poor. God included everybody. That was God’s plan all along. Now, with our free will, we mess it up.So this is why I said to you, now God says, “You can all come,” and we can all partake of that Paschal Lamb which is Christ, but I’m telling you something. God is not begging for you to come in. He’s looking for people that will look to Him, look at this word and say, “Wow, I never, I never recognized that was for me,” not for the world, not for the camp, the congregation, for me. And when it becomes personal, it will begin to matter to you. When it becomes personal, you’re getting to the point of that acquaintance with the Lamb and then suddenly the Lamb is slaughtered.And all you can look at is recognizing God prescribed a way for you and me to live that in times past would have only been a temporary method. All of these saints, guess what? They all still died. And this is why the Bible talks about when Christ died and speaks of Him going to preach to the departed souls, I think some were so committed to God’s program that He sent Christ to preach to them and to deliver them. We don’t have to wait for that time. We can act now and look to Him now. Now, I know, as I said, a very simplistic message, but very important. These set times, if people will take, the time to read through what the Passover means, how it can be applied in the now, not as an Old Testament dispensation, but as a shadow and type, and all of it points to Christ.Please do not tell me that you can read this book and not see how God was so gracious, not just to the children of Israel, but in giving us this complete Old and New Testament to be able to look at the whole thing and not have, not have any place to say, “You know, well, God didn’t do it there. No, God didn’t do it there.” No, God did it in here. And then you close the book and you recognize when you know who Christ is, God did it 2,000-plus years ago and He did it here as well, no longer the exterior, the works, the performance, but all by faith in Christ. So these set times, maybe for some, oh, it’s an, it’s an Old Testament celebration.No, it’s a New Testament revelation of what God was revealing in a shadow or a type, Christ being the substance. That’s my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday at 11 am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you’d like more teaching and you’d like to go straight to our website, the address is https://www.PastorMelissaScott.com ☃☂ Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!As found on YouTube
foreign [Music] from the get-go God planned to dwell Among Us and as you travel through the scriptures you you see it’s not this Tabernacle wasn’t a new thought it may have been a new way of expressing God’s prescribed method with man but not new in the concept of dwelling among him [Music] lift holy hands coming to this house. Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of! ꆛシ➫ As found on YouTube
Jesus says, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk." Remember it's a Sabbath day. "Immediately the man was made whole, took up his bed, and walked. On the same day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, 'It is the Sabbath day; it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.'" Are you serious? Are you freaking kidding me? You just got healed and you guys are going to criticize me for dragging my bed. What, you want me to leave my bed here so that I'm going to have to come back? Maybe I'll be crippled in the journey back again, getting back here to get my bed. I would have told them to go pound some sand. ♪ ♪ Leviticus 23, "And the Lord speak unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them concerning the feasts of the Lord, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations. And these are my feasts. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh is the Sabbath of rest, a holy convocation ye shall do no work therein; it is the Sabbath of the Lord in all your dwellings.
These are the feasts of the Lord, even holy convocations, which ye shall proclaim in their seasons." And then goes on to talk about Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, and so on. But I want to start with the Sabbath. For most people, they just, who are not in the know, think Sabbath Saturday. But actually Sabbath traditionally would start Friday at sundown, go through Saturday until Saturday sundown. So that would be the full Sabbath. That's how time also was reckoned for the Sabbath like that. So it's important to understand that the Sabbath and Sunday are two different things. But I want to kind of explore this a little bit more because there's a lot more to the Sabbath. Sabbath, when I say that, it's not like Sabbath, it's exciting. Right? No, it's not exciting at all. Okay, let's just be clear. I'm even aware it's not an exciting subject. However, when you study it and you're looking through the lenses, you put on those glasses and you see Christ, it does get exciting because it's no longer an old dispensation.
So we know that as God created the heavens and the earth and everything that's in it, including and on it, including man. And it says that God declared the seventh day to be the day of rest. And the observance of Sabbath was in essence a confession or an acknowledgement to the God of all earth. See, we have this wrong. Even modern Jewry tends to err on this side that thinks it's a rest from our labors, but it is not. In fact, the intention of the original implementation of this day was to get us to stop, one day to really stop everything we are doing that would be for self and self-purposes and to solely and strictly focus on God's completed and finished acts and work that He did.
So we tend to make this mistake of forgetting essentially what the Sabbath is. And when God says He declared that day a Sabbath, it is because, listen carefully, because this is in this statement, much is revealed. God ceased from His work. So He created, He did all this, He makes Adam, He ceases from His work and He declares this day to be special to Him. First and foremost, it's not special to man, although when it gets implemented in the law, it becomes somewhat of a mandate.
But there's actually good reason when you begin to pick this apart to look a little bit deeper as to why God would designate this particular day. God had a plan from the beginning. Now the way that plan was expressed, that changed over time and for various reasons and purposes, which are laid out for any person who will read it abundantly clear. Think about this. The people were in Egypt's bondage. They were in Egypt for over 430 years, not 430 years of bondage, but they were in Egypt from the time that Jacob and his children arrived and started living in Goshen to the time that they were in bondage, to the time that they were set free, 430 years had passed.
Now you tell me if we don't read about Jacob father Jacob, Israel. We don't read that. He understands where the Sabbath is. Now he may have, God may have told him, but there's no implementation of it. So think of it this way, much of what we learn when the children of Israel come out of Egypt's bondage will be new to them. We tend to just think, oh yeah, well they must have been celebrating or they knew that in Egypt, but how could they have known that in Egypt when so much time had ela…, sorry, just take a look at our country okay, from the founding of our country until now, has this country changed radically, almost like turned on its head upside down? And that's not 430 years. So imagine what another 200 years of this country in existence could be, right? Never mind. So what I'm saying to you is that's what you have to remember when they were in Egypt.
We automatically assumed that when they came out, they had a frame of reference. They did not. In fact, much of what God said and did had not been seen before. The instructions had not been heard before. Think about this. If you spell certain things out in a law-like manner for people who do not know, who have complete ignorance, you have just given them something to live by. So we look at the Sabbath and there are things that we can glean and understand about the Sabbath. For example, as I said, you've got to go back to the Genesis account. But the thing that's kind of crazy if you think about this is that when we look at the Sabbath, there is almost in some places a covenant attachment, much like circumcision, but different. Remember God gives the order to Abraham, which was before the law, that then will become refined in the law to circumcise every male child on the eighth day.
But prior to the giving of the law, there was no law per se to circumcise. That was a sign of a pact between mankind, whom God had chosen, and God. So the Sabbath almost becomes a covenant in a different way. If you think about it that way, the covenant is almost by design, forcing the individual every single day of the week to stop if they didn't do it in the week, which I would find it very hard to believe living around this tent and being confronted with much slaughter and worship all day long. I don't know how you would not think of God, but the Sabbath was implemented as another way to get man to say, "Stop what you're doing" and focus. Focus on worship, on praise for what God has done in creation, for what God has done in deliverance, and so on. We don't tend to think of the Sabbath that way. Now, whoever broke keeping the Sabbath basically broke covenant with God, and that's why you'll read that in certain places it says that for someone who did not adhere and follow the Sabbath, they could be punished by death.
Now that's pretty severe if Sabbath is only intended to be a day of cessation from work. That's pretty severe. Why would you impose such a harsh penalty, but if it's to get the individual to look Godward, then I can see it. It makes complete sense. It was at Mount Sinai that the observance of the Sabbath would be instituted after God made a covenant with the people. Now, if you to turn in your Bibles to the book of Exodus. I want you to check something out. Again, it's a thing we've all read commonly and we've seen it many times, but there's something very unique about the fourth commandment in the Decalogue or in the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20, remember Christ said, "I did not come to destroy but fulfill the law," right? So everything must be fulfilled in Him, and some of these things by the way end up getting nailed to the tree, which Paul aptly puts out there. But this is interesting.
Of all the things that are reiterated in the Decalogue, you begin at verse 8, Exodus 20, verse 8, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." Now first mistake is English readers reading that and thinking somehow, purification, ritualization, ceremony. How about, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it set apart," for Him, right? That's first. "Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath" of who? "Of the Lord thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work thou or thy son, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger, that is within thy gates.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them," that is in them is and rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it." So it's interesting that that takes up 1, 2, 3, 4 verses, and the rest of them are just, you know, "Honor thy mother and thy father, thou shall not kill." So this is expanded upon.
That tells you there's something more there we need to, we need to figure out. If you will, turn with me just a few pages to Exodus 31. And Exodus 31 beginning at verse 12. "And the Lord speak unto Moses, saying, Speak thou also unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily my Sabbaths," plural, "you shall keep; for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you." Now, remember what I said about when God says a memorial or in perpetuity, when He uses those words, there is a, there's always going to be a deeper double or even triple meaning to what's there.
So when God says, "for generations," usually that's where you're going to look for the underneath part that's going to take you into the New Testament somewhere, because when God says forever it usually means forever. All right, verse 14 says, "You shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you. Everyone that defileth shall surely be put to death." Again, isn't that harsh if it's just simply a day of rest? "For whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among the people." Oops.
Six days may work be done, but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest. Holy to the Lord, whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. Now, let me help you out here a little bit, because the Sabbath obviously as we'll see is in Christ. The writer of Hebrews explains that to us clearly, and I'm going to show you some other places where we get great clarity. But let me reread this again and make a commentary. Six days may be done, work may be done, but in the seventh is the Sabbath of rest. Holy to the Lord, whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death. We in the New Testament, I'm just going to cut to the chase real quickly, because I'm going to be referring to this throughout the message. We in the New Testament are Sabbath-ing daily in Christ, not one day a week, but every day. So to stop and be recognizing Him in all things, we are Sabbath-ing daily. So whoever works in the Sabbath, I want you to make that more modern application to whoever's trying to work their way in versus looking at Christ's finished work and resting in it.
He says, "Here shall be surely put to death." In other words, this is what Paul highlights about the works of the flesh versus the works of the Spirit. So if you're trying to sort this out, we begin by seing that there are sub-texts right here in the text that we should be mindful of. "Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations for a perpetual covenant." So the writer of the Hebrews says, "These things are about to decay, to pass away, or they have served their purpose and their time." That's right.
There's your key that there must be some secondary or tertiary meaning to the Sabbath," perpetual covenant. God doesn't make a covenant and then break it. Now, the same verbiage is used in the New Testament when they're sitting down. He says, "This blood," basically, the cup of the new covenant. So there's never a time when God says, "I'm, I gave a covenant and then I destroyed it." No, this actually the unfolding of of the fullness of what God promised back there.
Don't think it's some… God ripped this up and he started anew. It doesn't work like that. So what we have here is also a problem of interpretation. As I said earlier, the problem we encounter with interpreting it from English, "A Sabbath does not mean rest because of exhaustion or fatigue, but rather to cease." And in fact, there are other meanings to this word, which I will get to in a minute, but a celebration of God's work being completed in creation. But at Sinai, it's more than just ceasing. What we're going to see is a reminder, the first Sabbath given to a people who had been brought into a covenant by God's salvific action. And I say that for one purpose, because if you turn to Deuteronomy 5, this is your time to do a little bit of work.
I know it's painful, to turn the pages, but bear with me. Alright, so in Deuteronomy 5:12, "Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee." So not personal preference. God said, "That's that. You're going to do it six days. Thou shalt, thou labor and do all thy work." But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. Again, it doesn't say it's the Sabbath of the children of Israel. It's the Sabbath of the Lord thy God, not your Sabbath. You don't get the Sabbath, it's His, and you get to participate in it. That's a novel idea, right? The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord, of the Lord thy God. In it thou shall not do any work, thou nor thy son, thy daughter, thy man servant, thy maid servant. I don't know how you control an ox or any of your animals from not working. And by the way, they considered the act of reproduction working. So I don't know when your animals got frisky on the Sabbath.
What did you do? Holy cow! Wait it's going to get worse. Nor thine ox, nor thine ass. Don't know what to tell you if the shoe fits where it, nor any of thy cattle. So you know, God goes to great lengths to tell you that He doesn't want anybody doing anything, and you better get your animals under control, right? I don't know, I still don't know how you do that. Sit Nellie. All right. Nor thy stranger that is within thy gates, that thy man servant and thy maid servant may rest as well as thou. So everybody, no exceptions. But here's the key to what I want to point out to you, which is in addition to something we just read. Verse 15, it's almost as though God attaches the Sabbath in connection to this.
And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm. Therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day. It's almost as though in reading that 15th verse attached everything, it's as though God is saying, because of my, God speaking, not me, because of my efforts, because of my work, because of my endeavor, because of all that I've done for you, including bringing you out of Egypt, you are to keep this day. So he adds to it a salvation component, and that becomes important for us in the New Testament. I'm not there yet, so give me a chance to catch up, but you can begin to see that God is attaching some concepts to the Sabbath. Deliverance is one of them. The children of Israel identified with God, with Yahweh, by sharing in the Sabbath, which was to be a time of refreshment, if you will, but refreshment in the Lord, worship.
But the instructions to keep the day holy or set apart, reveal the greater purpose simply than just ceasing from the labor temporarily. The day was set aside for worship, devotion to God, not for self-serving purposes. And I'm going to repeat a lot of things, but they need to be repeated. One more point to all this, which I just said, but you can't, I can't say this enough, it shall be a Sabbath to the Lord. So the preposition there to implies possession. Whose Sabbath was it? The Lord's, exactly. This is what makes me go batty, is when I hear people talking about the Sabbath, and they don't even include the fact that God said it was His, not theirs.
Just saying, okay. So this is kind of at the core. If we understand it's the Lord's Sabbath, at the core of why people were not to pursue personal care or taking care of their own issues, but rather to take time, opportunity. I hate when people do this, because I've heard people say a divine appointment. It's a very cheap televangelist type lingo. But if, if that's what resonates with you, an appointment with God, I hate to say that. But in matters pertaining to God, God, you know, if you read through what God says, He's a jealous God, well He wants, He wants the recognition. You might say, well, you're, you're humanizing God, you're anthropomorphizing Him. But think of it, that's why He said, I'm a jealous God, you'll have no other gods before me, and I want you to acknowledge Me.
Just stop for a second and think about this. God knew that these people, although He rained down the plagues and He brought them out of Egypt with a deliverer and He gave them a structure and a system and a society and purpose. He still wanted them to acknowledge Him. Now you might think, well that sounds kind of like, eh, but if you think about it, God risked a lot by just trying to deliver these people, even though they essentially went into Egypt's bondage by a prophetic word, which was foretold to Abraham, which was made good in, obviously in Jacob and his children.
But the point here is this and simply put, failure to acknowledge God. So God says, "I'm not going to wait for you to do it spontaneously, that may never happen. I'm going to orchestrate a day where you will be forced. I command you," imagine that, "to recognize Me in all that I've done." And that kind of gives you a nutshell of why the Sabbath would have been instituted at this point. Okay? We're not in to the New Testament yet. So the Sabbath obviously prefigured something greater than a day declared. And unfortunately the children of Israel, if you know their history, and I've taught on this enough, did not receive the fulfillment of the anticipated rest. They did not. And the reason why is that many of those that, the vast majority of those that came out of Egypt rebelled. And what did God do? It says, "God srew their bones in the wilderness." So many of them did not enter into, we'll call that their promised rest. At Massah and at Maribah, if you remember, the children of Israel tested God and there He swore.
That's kind of interesting that they would not enter into his rest. Think about that. I mean, again, if we're so familiar with the book, it could be like, you know, I just said like, how's the weather? But if you're reading it and you go back and you read the chapter where God says, "You will not enter into my rest." That's almost like that. If I was one of those wandering in the wilderness, I'd be a little bit taken back that God just declared that I'm not entering into His rest. That's a big problem. Based on, of course, their disobedience and their rebellious nature. Turn with me to Matthew 11, so we can start putting some New Testament flesh and blood on this. Matthew 11, and then we'll be in Matthew 12, but Matthew 11, something really important here, and I'm going to show you the beginning of obtaining the rest that God was prefiguring in the Sabbath is actually, begins to be realized here in the words of Christ. Matthew 11, 28 says, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you who learn of me, I am meek and lowly in heart, and you shall find rest in your souls. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." That word, Strong's 373, is a word called anapauo ana, "up", and pauo, you'll recognize menopause. Pauo, to pause, to cease. All right? And this word occurs in different places, but this is the first time that we begin to unfold a little bit of what this means, and don't think that you know exactly what it means, because it's, it's actually kind of complex. Let me look at the 12th chapter with you. So just a few verses later, the 12th chapter of Matthew begins, and this might help us to start gleaning some info here.
"At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn, and his disciples were hungered and began to pluck the ears of corn and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold thy disciples, do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day. But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did when he was a hungered, and they that were with him? How he entered into the house of God and did eat the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priest." Did you not know about that? Or have you not read in the law how that on the Sabbath days the priest in the temple profaned the Sabbath and are blameless? "But I say unto you that in this place is one greater than the temple.
But if he had known what this meaneth I will have mercy and not sacrifice, you would have, you, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath day." In those words something is said that we could read right by and not take into account, which is Jesus is saying, I am the Lord of the Sabbath. I can do what I want. I, I establish the rules. I make the rules. I say, and my say is, this whole passage, think of it, the Pharisees saw it and they began to say, look what they're doing. Now that tells you a couple things. It does tell you, and people tend, again, I love this, people tend to forget that Jesus was born into a life of Jewry, that he would have been part of the ceremonialism and all the things that His parents did, including the Sabbath.
So it's interesting that in front of these religious people he says, I am basically the Lord of the Sabbath. And what is even more interesting than that is we're constantly discussing this. It's a constant discussion. I hear people discuss this all the time about Saturday versus Sunday. The discussion is not about the day of the week. That's the problem. So the Sabbath didn't move to Sunday. I'll just spell that out. We have something different that's happening here and we'll need to get to the book of Hebrews for me to explain this, but Sunday was set aside to commemorate a new event. Sunday was set aside to commemorate the Lord's rising from, from the grave. And if you look at what Paul says in much of his writings, you can kind of see that that is the implication. We have something brand new that happened here.
No one ever was celebrated from coming out of the grave, living, preaching, being around the disciples and then ascending. So something new set the tone for Sunday. But do not make the mistake again, which most people do, which is Sunday is the Lord's day. It is indeed the Lord's day, but so is every other day the Lord's day. And then people say, well, I couldn't keep up with a God who demands my attention for every day of the week. Wow. Okay, it seems to me you may not really be that interested in knowing about God then because someone who's interested, that becomes an integral part of your life, not just a Sunday type thing. So let's park that though we'll, we'll come back to it.
So something that Jesus says in, in one of the Scriptures. He says, "Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man." Again, what does the church world for the most part do? They claim the Sabbath as their own. Again, it's this warped, you've even got groups. And again, I'm going to take flak for this, but I'll say it because I must speak the truth unpopular as it is in these days. Seventh-day Adventist, Seventh-day Baptist, and there are many Sabbatarians within Christendom. They follow Christ, but they also impose the keeping of Sabbath. And if you read the 1689 Baptist Confession, there is an article on the Sabbath or following the Sabbath.
And this is the question that has come up honestly in my mail, in letters to me more often than I can count. So here's the problem. The first introduction, as I said, until the giving of the law. So the introduction, if you will, of the Sabbath, which is in creation, until the giving of the law. The Sabbath's about God's finished work and from Him ceasing from His labors. I've already said that, so that's one. But then with the coming of Christ, something radical does not, it's not that it changes. It's the embodiment. The Gospels record, for example, if you'll turn with me to Luke 14. So again, similar passages of things, but with nuances. "Came to pass as he went into the house of one of the chief Pharisees to eat bread on the Sabbath day, and they watched him." They were just waiting for him to do something that they could comment on and disagree with, right? Which still goes on to this day.
"Behold, there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy. Jesus answering, spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, 'Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day?'" And I love this because he knows the answer. And remember, he is Lord of the Sabbath. So this is kind of like a trick question. It says, "They held their peace." Yeah, it's interesting how to shut people up, right? "He held their peace and he took him, healed him, and let him go, and answered them, saying, 'Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen in a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day?' And they could not answer him again to these things." Then he puts forth a parable and the passage goes on.
But the point is here, I think, I want you to really think long and hard about this, because he just heals a man, sends him away. Later on they're going to condemn him for this act. But instead of talking about healing, he says, "If your animal falls in the ditch on the Sabbath, wouldn't you get it out of the ditch?" And this telegraphs to you part of the problem within Judaism. Still to this day, it's called box checking, okay? So God said, God gave this order. So here's a poor animal suffering in the ditch. Oh, it's the Sabbath. I got to wait until, until sundown. Well, that poor thing will probably struggle and die in the ditch. What's better, to rescue and save that which is dying and risk the ramifications from God or leave it there and be cruel to that thing, which is basically what Jesus is showing in healing the man.
But that also he is Lord of the Sabbath. Bet you never heard a message like this. It's going to go in every direction to bust most people's ideologies of the Sabbath. Now, as I said with the coming of Christ, we read this passage and we see, they go silent. What do you do with this? And I guess they couldn't reply to any of what he said, because the reality is it would make you callous against God's creation and care for God's creation.
It would also make you, if you weren't willing to help your fellow man, think about this, because there's all these, "Love thy neighbor," right? Well then, "I'm conflicted. Which law do I adhere to, the Sabbath or the loving the neighbor," right? Jesus says, "Put an end to that." And he did, and that's why they were silent. This was also a way to begin ending the ceremonialism. I want you to also think of that. See, Jesus for His short lifetime incarnate would have most definitely participated in many of these holy days and set times. And out of His mouth He utters these things as if to say, "This is coming to an end. It's coming to a close." And it would, the closure would be realized at His resurrection. So you've got to put all this together. Now, you've got to something else that happens. It's a similar passage in John 5, but now you get the full impact of Jesus' healing.
John 5, "And these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water, for an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, troubled the water: whosoever then first, after the troubling of the water, went and stepped in, was made whole of what's over disease he had." So it's kind of like musical chairs for healing, right? "And a certain man was there which had an infirmity thirty-eight years. Jesus saw him lie, knew that he had been now a long time in that case, and said unto him, 'Will thou be made whole?' The impotent man answered, 'Sir, I have no man when the water is troubled to put me into the pool, but while I am coming another stepeth down before me.'" So in essence I'm too messed up to get down to where I need to be, so it's a vicious circle and I can never get well.
Jesus says, "Rise, take up thy bed and walk." Remember it's a Sabbath day. "Immediately the man was made whole, took up his bed, and walked. On the same day was the Sabbath. The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, 'It is the Sabbath day; it is not lawful for thee to take up thy bed.'" Are you serious? Are you freaking kidding me? You just got healed and you guys are going to criticize me for dragging my bed. What, you want me to leave my bed here so that I'm going to have to come back? Maybe I'll be crippled in the journey back again, getting back here to get my bed.
I would have told them to go pound some sand. He answered them and said, "He that made me whole, the same said unto me, 'Take up thy bed and walk.' Then ask they him, 'What man is that which said unto thee, 'Take up thy bed and walk?' And he that was healed wist not who it was, for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that place. Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple and said unto him, 'Behold thou art made whole, sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee.' The man departed and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus sought to slay him because he had done these things on the Sabbath day." Let me just pause and say one thing. See, it wasn't that they cared more about God and God's Word. They cared more about their ceremonialism and their box checking. They did not care for love thy neighbor, love thy brother, their brethren, but just box checking. Therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus and sought to slay him because he had done these things on the sabbath day." And as a sidebar, if God, the Father disapproved of what the Son was doing, I'm sure this would have been laid out plain, but there's, there's good reason in here.
Jesus answers them, "My Father knoweth worketh, my Father worketh hitherto and I work." In other words, this is of God. "Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him because he had not only broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was his father making himself equal with God." Now listen, you know, if I met somebody and they did something miraculous like that, and then they said that they were equal with God, I might just have to pay a little bit of attention because miraculously they did what no one else could do.
But no, their thing is kill him, right? So I don't know. It just, it's, it almost appears at face value kind of nutty that they couldn't see this. The other thing that I think is, is kind of tragic here is people do not understand the Sabbath laws were, as I said, a shadow, a type, that there could be rest from trying to enter into the kingdom. And by that I mean how many tried to work their way in to try and do good, to try and perform, whatever it is.
But the new covenant we are taught, Christ did all the work. We rest in Him and His finished work. So not a Sabbath to be performed in ceremony, but one that clearly shows what we need. For that, you turn to Hebrews 3. And I'm going to start at verse 7, and I want to show you a couple of things here. Of course, in this passage the writer of Hebrews is saying how Jesus is superior to Moses. And starting in the seventh verse, I'm just jumping in the middle of things, so don't fault me for that, because there's, I've got to show you some things here. "Wherefore as the Holy Ghost saith," verse 7, "today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts as in the, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness. When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.
Wherefore I was grieved with that generation and said, 'They do alway err in their heart, and they have not known my ways.'" And that, read the Old Testament, it's plain as day. "So I swear in my wrath, here it is, they shall not enter into my rest." And I want you to see that that word right there, 2663, is katapausis, pauosis and katapausis, anapauosis, they're all derivatives of pauosis to cease or to pause, from the same word I orginally described. "They shall not enter into my rest." "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief and departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called today, lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.
For we are made partakers of Christ if we hold to the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end. While it is said today, if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation. For some, when they had heard, did provoke, howbeit not all that came out of Egypt by Moses. But with whom was he grieved forty years? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? And to whom swear that they would, should not enter him into his rest," there's the word again, katapauosis, "but to them that believe not." So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.
And if you read into the fourth chapter, it talks about this, "Let us fear lest a promise being left of entering into his rest," there it is again, "and if you should seem to come short of it. For unto us the gospel, was the gospel preached as well as unto them, but the word preached did not profit them." It didn't do anything. It made no change, made no difference, did nothing, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest." Although the works were finished from the foundation of the world, for he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise, and God did rest the seventh day from all his work.
And in this place again, "if they shall enter into my rest," seeing therefore it remaineth, that some must enter therein, and they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief." Again, he limited a certain day saying in David, "Today, after so long a time, as it is said today, if you will hear his voice," third time, "harden not your hearts. For if," not Jesus, but Joshua had given them rest, that's what it is, reads in the Hebrew, I mean the Greek rather, "then would he not afterwards have spoken of another day, there remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God." And if you read in your margin, it says, "a keeping of a Sabbath." But read on and it tells you it's not a day like we understand the Old Testament was.
"Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest," to enter into that rest, "lest any man fall after the example of unbelief. For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, but all things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." So if you read that passage, what is essentially saying is as we faithe, as we trust Christ for our salvation, for his finished work, for eternity, for entering in and it could keep going. We are entering into that rest.
It was a promise given at the beginning. It is a perpetual covenant, if you will. That covenant, the shadow was introduced in a day. The substance was introduced in the person and the reality after the resurrection becomes a daily, if you will, recognition of God's acts, activity, his creation, his finished work that we never had either in the law or after the law anything to do with except to be focused on him. Remember I said to you, Jesus takes the law, thou shall not kill, but I say unto you, or it is written, thou shall not kill, but behold I say unto you, if you hate in your heart, your as guilty as a murderer. He took the law and put it on a much higher level, but then says it's all fulfilled in me. You know, you no longer have to perform rituals.
So the Mosaic Sabbath, what Moses issued to the people, a shadow, prefiguring what could not yet be understood in a person. How would you explain this? See this is what I'm saying to you, God had sound reason for introducing himself, his ways and his words to these people who, as I said, for all the time in bondage would have had no frame of reference.
And then out of bondage wandering in the wilderness for 40 years and then for those who did indeed enter into the land, whatever time there that passed again, God was chronically, if you will, re-educating people over and over and over and over again. Hence, having the tabernacle in the middle of the community was a good way to keep reminding people to stay focused. This is why if you look at America, most cities, most major cities in America always had a church in the center of town, patterned after what? The Old Testament. If you had this religious entity that invited people, we'll call it an institution in the middle of town, it would remind people in their comings and goings of God.
Good luck with that now. But anyway, all right, more on this. In Romans, and I think it's Romans 14, but let me turn there and I will tell you if I am right. Yes, Romans 14, Paul says, "Let him that eateth despise, let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not, and let him, let not him which eateth not judge him with eateth, for God hath received him." And then he goes on to say. "one esteemeth one day above another, another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind." And why is that important? Because he's talking about observances, whether we should adhere to a day or not. And it seems obvious to me here that if you look at the early church, you've got a collection of people.
You've got a ton of people who were formally following Judaism. You've got the Gentiles, the pagans. So it's very clear to me that Paul would use this type of language to address both Jew and Gentile or Jew and pagan. For the Jew would have been confused, "Well now what do I do now? Do I follow this?" Or do, really if you want to think about it this way, the confusion has gone on for 2,000 years, people are still confused. And by that, it's self-evident when I say seventh day Adventist, Sabbatarians, they're still confused because that one, setting aside of one day for a Sabbath came to an end. And we who are of the New Testament disposition, we are Sabbathing daily in Christ. And Sunday is the Lord's day only for this reason. Paul explains this and he says, "On the first day of the week," blah, blah, blah, "it's gathering together what was newly formed, which was the church which didn't exist until Christ basically rose and ascended." The church did not exist technically until the day of Pentecost, if you will.
But Paul wrote in a way where both Jew and Gentile could understand that these days became irrelevant actually because there was something more on the horizon for us to process. And if you want to add to that, don't just think, "Well, I just read something and it's not perfectly clear." Turn to Colossians, because there Paul does not hold back and I think he spells it out even clearer there. So in Colossians 2, first in verse 7, where he says, "Roited and built up," boy, this is so scribbled up, I can barely read it, "Rooted and built up in him and stablished in the faith as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving, beware," here it is, "beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world and not for Christ." You keep reading verse 16, "Let no man therefore judge you in meat or in drink or in respect of a holiday, holy day, or of new moon, or of the Sabbath days which are a shadow of things to come but the body is of Christ." A shadow of things to, he spells it out right there.
How could we miss this? How could people miss these days, these set times, shadows of things to come and the thing to come was Christ and when we begin to understand how He fulfills them. So I just explained to you, Christ replaces that singular day. Now I can see why some people would go for this angle. I'm just going to tell you, because I tell you everything, all the different dimensions of this. If God created in six days and the seventh day He took rest, there was something new that did happen with the last Adam coming out of the grave.
So you could say, in fact, in Christ was a new creation made and the creation essentially has begun anew in Christ in that we have eternal life through him. We're no longer stuck in the mold of fallen Adam for the rest of our lives. So the argument being, well, if He's the Lord of that new creation, then we should honor that day by, and then they go to a Sabbath. But that actually contradicts what Paul is saying, what the writer of Hebrews is saying, it actually contradicts everything. Because if He is a new and living way and He is put on display in the flesh who He was, not in the flesh previously, then creation hasn't been reinvented. It has been rescued and reconciled back to God. So if we talk about Sabbath-ing in Christ daily, the Christian does not have a Sabbath day. Sorry to bust your bubble. All right, follow this one. Just to, I just, I want you to leave here and be crystal clear on this, and that's why we're going to spend a couple more minutes.
In Acts 15, they had a council decide what would be required of the Gentile believers. If you read this 15th chapter, they're talking about circumcision. What should be required of those that come into the church who are not basically part of the old dispensation? And it says here, verse 5, "There rose up a certain sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying that it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses, and the apostles and the elders came together to consider this matter." So this was being discussed. Everything that I'm talking about, believe it or not, was being discussed. What they came away with is this in verse 19.
And then there's one more in, in verse 29. Verse 19, it says, "Wherefore my sentence is that we trouble not them which from among the Gentiles are turned to God, but that we write unto them that they abstain from polutions of idols from fornication and from things strangled and from blood." And then if you read on, it, there's a reiteration in verse 29, "that ye abstain from meats offered to idols and from blood, from things strangled, and from fornication, from which if ye keep yourselves, you shall do well, fare ye well," and they were dismissed.
If you read this absolutely, unequivocally no Sabbath mentioned, no Sabbath is imposed on the church. They were talking about should the men coming into the church be circumcised or not. And that, they made a decision. This is what they came up with and that was it, that they abstain from meats, offered to idols, from blood, and from things strangled and fornication. That's it. That's what they walked away with. Tell me where you read, you need to keep the Sabbath as a Christian. Do you read it anywhere? (no ma'am) All right.
My sound effects are gratis for you. All right. So, when we discuss these set times, as I said, it's important to see how Christ fulfilled these in a diversity of ways. And the argument of Saturday or Sunday I think that's going to be clarified. So, it's almost like this, and you'll forgive me for this analogy, but people who are ardent Sabbatarians, who are dogmatic about the Sabbath to keep the Sabbath, they're like people who are dressing up and putting on their uniforms to go and slay saber-toothed tigers that are extinct. Go do it if you want, but it serves no purpose.
And in fact, it falls under the category of empty ritualism, which has no purpose, especially if you're doing it with an old dispensation mindset and not Sabbath-ing daily in Christ, because that is the interpretation. Don't take, again, don't take my word for it. One more place for us, and then I will try to be done. Turn to Galatians. Galatians, Paul kind of, I think here might actually put the nail in the coffin, perverbally, so to speak. Chapter 4 and verse 9, Galatians, "But now, after you've known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereon to ye desire again to be in bondage?" Does that not sum it up for you? "You observe days, and months, and times, and years. I'm afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain." And then he says, "Bretheren, I beseech you, be as I am, for I am as ye are, you have not injured me at all." So he's saying there, "Hello, be as I am, is not act like me, look like me, be like me, but I don't," Paul, Jew of Jew, tribe of Benjamin, Pharisee of Pharisee, "I do not do these things.
You should not do them either." Essentially, they do not have any place in our worship in the old mindset, in the old dispensation. Now, when I go back to Leviticus 23, because I'm going to bring this to a close, what leaps out at me so abundantly clear is something that God says to Moses at the close of verse 2. He says, "These are my feasts." He doesn't say, "These are yours." He says, "They're mine." And if they're His, He has the right to ratify them. He has the right to whatever He wants to do with it. So it's not as though He canceled the Sabbath. He showed you this is the shadow, but this is something you must look at because the thing that is the substance will come in the future. Christ is over here, and He puts on full display the meaning of everything that I said to you regarding My feasts. Now, God starts with the Sabbath, moves to the Passover, unleavened bread, and so on, and we'll be looking at these set times in the coming weeks.
The thing that I want to reiterate here is people sometimes think that the most crucial thing that they can do in their faith is to check the boxes. I leave you with this one thought. These are the words of Christ. And I've repeated them so often, you should know them by heart. What's the one singular thing that Christ will be looking for when He comes? He says, "Will the Son of Man find faith?" Not Sabbatarians, not people practicing the old dispensation was for a time. And just to kind of close this on a really kind of positive note, things even in our lifetime serve a time, serve a specific thing. So, for example, when we first, people first came to this country, horse and buggy was the method of transport, right? Now, if you saw horse and buggy going right here on Glendale Avenue, you might think, "Oh, there might be some festival going on somewhere, but that would be out of the normal.
We don't use horse and buggy anymore." And in fact, you know, everybody's trying to push for driverless cars and technology and blah, blah, blah, right? Now imagine, this is a poor analogy, but this is what it's like. Imagine that you've got a whole swath of Christians, and I'm not talking about the Amish, that's a different story, but you've got a whole swath of Christians that want to use the horse and buggy because they think that's the most effective means of transport when here we are and we've got vehicles you can actually get in, you don't have to pick up the poop, there's not the need to carry, you know, amounts of hay or whatever you get in your car and you drive yourself, but there are still people that want the horse and buggy. Now, I'm not saying the horse and buggy is bad, but it served its time.
Guess what? Methinks that God somewhere back in, you know, we tend to think man's innovations and man's creations and man's doing this, but how about God, maybe God had the mind of all of this that would come to fruition, which man takes credit for, that God just saw a better way. And the writer of Hebrews analogizes that to say Jesus is superior to all these things, a better way. So when we look at the Sabbath, hopefully, hopefully I've clarified, if I haven't, I would like you to do something. If you still have questions on the Sabbath, because you know how much I love questions, I love to ask them.
So if you still have questions about the Sabbath, please take the time to write me so I can figure out what I missed and whatever I've missed, I'll come back if you can get them in the mail quickly. I can answer them in the next message or two if I've missed anything that doesn't clear this up, because this one along with some others, when I see the confusion, it drives me crazy. If you know that this is no longer part of our faith and it was just a stepping stone to get to where we are, and that's understood, we're in a good place.
But if you keep saying, "Must have the old. Must keep celebrating the old. I must tell you the old," you've got a problem in not knowing exactly what Christ did for you and what exactly, when He said, "It is finished," what He finished. So hopefully if that's not clear, you'll write me, you'll let me know. I'm looking forward to a few questions. Alright, with that being said, that's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
Have you ever met anyone that actually gave their life for you that, I'm not talking about our great American soldiers. I'm not talking about our law enforcement. I'm talking about have you ever met someone personally come into contact with that gave their life for you? And my answer is there's only One and that's Christ. ♪ ♪ If you have been listening for the last few weeks, you know that we've been looking at the tabernacle in the wilderness, the furniture, and we've moved on to the offerings. So everything that is in, around, and about the tabernacle, kind of moving through the book of Leviticus a little bit. And we've seen when God gives the instructions to Moses, He starts with what is close to Him. And I, for some reason I thought this was so clear because it's been said so often and I see a lot of, in the messages, people are getting this a little mixed up here.
So when we talk about this, there are the offerings, the five offerings that are listed in Leviticus. God starts with the burnt offering and moves on to the meal offering. And then we go to the peace offering. Then we have the sin and trespass. Now, I've said to you, God starts with what is dear to Him. We cannot start at the burnt offering when we come into the realm of even trying to understand, like many of you coming into the church and learning about God. It takes so long for us to even comprehend this: sin and trespass. I've said this to you so many times, you've probably heard this from other people, when people say, “I'm basically a good person.” Nah, all right, so that tells you right away, anybody who utters those words coming into the church tells you they haven't even begun the level of understanding. But the reason why this is important, in the Old Testament when it says, “God starts first with what is near and dearest to Him,” this offering was considered a sweet saver, wholly ascending to God for God, no other, perhaps maybe the only part left off, as I've said, was the skin given to the priest possibly.
I'm not sure of the details on that, but I can say this is completely offered up to God. We come into the church and we cannot even start here. Now I've been in churches and I've been to places where new Christians, so excited, so on fire, think they've arrived at the burnt offering. They're wholly dedicated. They've offered themselves like Romans 12. They've put themselves out there offering themselves to God. But the reality is, until this is crystal clear, we're dealing with two things.
The condition; and I used the word last week, the “congenital condition” you are born in. That is fallen Adam. That means a beautiful cute little baby that comes out the gate, “Ah, la, la,” all cute and everything, all full of wants and whatever else. Not━you say, “Well, how could, how could you look at that baby and say the baby's a sinner? Agh!” right? But we're talking about the condition in which that child was born. And the fruit as we live, as we go, as we have our life, the fruit of that nature brings us to the trespass. When I say this, so much insanity here, and you've heard this over the years, people think sin, “I do or I don't do, I haven't done this, I don't kill bugs, therefore I'm not a murderer.” But the reality is that two things, one, Jesus took that, He took the Ten Commandments and He lifted them up, basically putting them on steroids and said, “Don't think anymore about the commandment of not killing.
Think about if you have hate in your heart, you're as guilty as the murderer.” So it's important that the starting point, you know, I've got people that tune in and they listen, they are, some of them are very dear friends of mine, acquaintances, people that have curiosity, and I'm standing here talking about this, and unless it's something that makes them feel warm and fuzzy, it's discounted or they tune it out. But this is why I said to you, why it's hard to populate a church, because when you start teaching, it requires; Christianity, true Christianity is for the thinking person, not the person who wants to go, “Ugh, ugh,” all right? So, and I say that mockingly, but that's the truth. There are way too many people that want to go to church to feel good emotively, but they've not even grasped this problem, which is, I was born, I was conceived, I came out as a baby in a sin condition, and then as I live, as I breathe, as I have my life, the fruit of that nature that I, the condition I was born in produces this.
So I don't set out deliberately to do things that are an offense against God, but that is what we're dealing with. And failure to even start there, so people are getting this confused when I say, I'm trying to show you how we relate to these burnt offerings, meal offerings, peace offerings, sin and trespass. And when you see them laid out properly, you recognize, yes, they were God's prescription for the children of Israel in the wilderness, but they also represent the pattern in which we come. They also represent Christ. There's so many, as I've said, so many different focis to this, but the one I'm pointing out right now is how it applies to us.
So if your starting point is to understand God sets out to show what's important to Him, what's most nearest and dearest to His heart, something that could be wholly offered up to Him. Yet when we come and we start, God lets us start at this end, sin and trespass, to figure this out; required offerings, commanded offerings. I am not talking about offerings we make now or any type.
We're looking at this, so please stay on the page, all right? Now with that being said, I've said to you, I previously noted this, I think last week, sin and trespass are not sweet savor and that's important. That gives us a clear distinction between the last two offerings and the first three. Sweet savor could be considered something that's pleasing to God, that's acceptable to God. In fact, I even used the word probably more for this offering, the burnt offering than any other offering, is essentially that the fact that it was wholly consumed, ascended, and God said, “It's a sweet savor,” is what I'd also call an “acceptance” offering. So it's important to understand and distinguish between these offerings and how, how it matters to us and the application. It's not just learning about what they did and why they did it, but you begin to see and understand with great clarity there is a lot more here that God was so gracious even in this age of law to basically make inclusions for every person in the community and He's still doing it.
This is the thing that's mind-boggling and I will just say this one thing and I'll move on. If all of our unique population that does not identify in the old-fashioned or traditional way would stop for a minute and think about this; I don't care what you say, society may reject you. A lot of people feel they're normal or their, their sexual preferences stand in what we call “standard” and can still be hated. Figure out real quickly there's only one Person you have to be right with in life and that's God.
And God can show you the way of approval. You don't need other people. So if, you know, these people that identify and say, “But no one approves of me,” well maybe it's because you don't approve of yourself and your, your own truth gives you away, but it's concealed in a lie and delusion. So that's all I have to say about that. Anyway, so we, we see though the importance of recognizing this that God made provisions for all people. Now what we're going to look at today is the trespass offering and there's something really very important about the translation and understanding of the fifth chapter. So you'd like to turn there to the fifth chapter of Leviticus and this is what becomes really important. So if, for example, if a person wronged or robbed God, or wrong, robbed or wronged his neighbor, it was considered a trespass and this is what we deal with; what somebody has done.
I urge you to go through this very carefully because this, I touched on this last week and it can be very confusing because some of this sounds like if I said sin is unintentional acts, the trespass seems to have intent, but it's hard to figure out in some of these areas if they could still be considered “unintentional” and you'll see as we get in there, it can be very confusing. So let me first start by reading, fifth chapter of Leviticus: “And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and it is a witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.” Now unfortunately we're dealing with a translation that can be rather hard to actually understand the way it's written. So those who withhold evidence are guilty and there's an implied situation here based on the Hebrew rendering that the time has passed since the act was committed and any person who was privy or a witness who did not come forward, they were essentially under oath to do so and didn't.
“The voice of swearing” or making an oath seems to point to giving testimony in a legal sense or matter. So you need to read this very carefully because otherwise if you're reading it with a colloquial; or I'm sorry, with a more modern thinking or interpretation, “hear the voice of swearing” like what, so some profane words? That's not what's being meant here. So you can look that up if you're able to look it up in a Hebrew lexicon, you'll see what I'm saying. So here's what's interesting. If a person began to feel guilty about the act that they committed, they would come forward because they were essentially under an oath to do so, and then they would have to basically say their issue, which we will label now as the first time we're reading about “confession.” Hold that thought for just a minute because people will take off on all kinds of tangents with that word “confession.” Second verse, “Or if a soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of an unclean beast, or carcase of an unclean cattle, or carcase of an unclean creeping things, and if it be hidden from him; he also shall be unclean and guilty.
Or if he touch the uncleanness of a man, whatsoever uncleanness it be that a man shall be defiled withal, and it be hid from him; when he knoweth of it, then he shall be guilty”" There's all these kind of nuances in here. So if a person became unclean, did not cleanse or purify themselves in the prescribed manner in the allotted time, they would become ceremonially unclean by one of two ways, either coming in contact with a dead animal, the carcass of a dead animal, or coming in contact with an unclean person and/or a dead person. Those would defile and make you unclean. Now if you want to know more about this, you, on your own time, you can go to Leviticus 12-15, it kind of elaborates on it. I don't want to spend too much time. The next one, verse 4, “If a soul swear, pronouncing with his lips to do evil, or to do good, whatsoever it be that a man shall pronounce with an oath, and it be hid from him; when he knoweth it, of it, then he shall be guilty in one of these.
And it shall be, when he shall be guilty of one of these things, that he shall confess,” there's the first time we're reading it, “that he hath sinned in that thing: and he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb of a goat, of the, a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.” So what we have here, basically beginning at, I'm going to say verse 5: “the law of confession.” Now this has gotten so out of hand and misunderstood, so I, I don't want to spend too much time on it because I have taught in abundance on this subject.
So if you are not in accustomed to listening to me and you say, “Well, what have you taught about confession?” Go on the website, try and find it there. Now's not the time for that, but what I do want to say and what's really important is this is the first time we're seeing that and I want you to look at a pattern that will emerge from this confession, and it is definitely not how we understand it today. So let's kind of let this unfold here. Okay, when a person came to the reality that they were guilty by committing an act and they felt badly or remorseful or for the act or acts, the first thing for the guilty to do was to go and confess what they had done.
And this is what's fascinating. The word for “confess” here, oh, you're going to love this, the word for “confess”━okay, I got to ask this question: How many people have been listening for say twenty years? Okay, so you're going to be familiar with this Hebrew word, and if you're not, I'll explain it; don't worry. But there was a joke, a little bit of a joke when the late Dr. Scott was teaching in a passage and he introduced to you the Hebrew word yadah. And we kind of made fun of that from Jerry Seinfeld, you know, “Yada, yada, yada,” right? But yadah is not; remember Hebrew is ambiguous and can have shades of meanings, so in context of where we're looking at “confess,” and I'm not going to get into too much detail because I don't want to lose people here, but it's in the Hithpael, perfect, and the vav in front of it in Hebrew reveals the concept of sequence.
And this becomes important. So the Hebrew, we can't see it here, but the Hebrew gives you an idea of confession, the word “confess” occurs in a sequence of things. That's number one. Number two━this is what I said you're going to love. If you look up this word in the lexicon, you will be in for big surprise because yadah can mean, in Hebrew can mean “to know.” So just so you know, this, whatever, whatever your secondary words or your vowels might be at the end, I'm not quite sure your consonants rather, but yadah; something like that. But if you were looking at this in any Semitic language, throughout all Semitic tongues, you would find it having all of these different meanings except for Arabic. The Arabic word is not yadah, but idu. In the Hebrew, it occurs a hundred; I'm sorry, 1,058 times in the Old Testament, but listen to all the variations. And I, I shouldn't say “all.” I enlisted ten for the word, but there's a lot. So when, when it says “confess,” look carefully at the word because that yadah word should mean “to know.” So when a person confesses obviously it means what it means, but also that you “acknowledge” that you have done the act or acknowledged that you need to declare something.
But it can also be, yadah; not in this context, “to be quiet,” “to be humiliated,” “to leave alone or reject or neglect,” “to punish”" “to say farewell or send away,” “to flow,” or “to sweat,” “to destroy,” it can also connote “obedience to seek and/or to call,” from that one singular Hebrew word. So you might say, “Well, I'm glad we're dealing in English here,” but don't be too quick for that. The reason why I bring this up is because some of you that look up words might get a little bit confused here. So the best way to understand behind “to confess,” which I've given you the breakdown in the English: con, “with,” fess, “to declare” a declaration of sorts. But if you were wanting to get this clear here, it would be yes to, “to declare,” but also “to acknowledge,” like to acknowledge to self, that lets you then declare aloud, so just a little note to self. Now, verses 7-13 in this passage kind of shift gears a little bit, but manifold instructions here.
So 7-13, “And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, unto the LORD; one for a sin offering, the other for a burnt offering”" Remember I said, the offerings could occur side by side? There you have it. “And he shall bring them unto the priest who shall offer that which is for the sin offering first, and wring off his head from his neck,” he's speaking about the birds as small items, “but shall not divide it asunder: and he shall sprinkle of the blood of the sin offering upon the side of the altar, the rest of the blood shall be wrung out at the bottom of the altar: it is a sin offering. And he shall offer the second for a burnt offering, according to the manner: and the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin which he hath sinned, and it shall be forgiven him.” And you're going to see that.
I'm going to deal with this towards the end of the message, “and it shall be forgiven him,” because it's repeated multiple times. “But if he be not able to bring two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, then he that sinned shall bring for his offering a tenth part of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering; and shall put no oil upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense thereon: for it is a sin offering.” Now I know we're still dealing in sin, and I told you we're talking about trespass, but I'm show; I want to show you something for a reason here.
Understanding the connection between this verse, which goes on to talk about the trespass shows you, there are connected thoughts here. So although they are for two distinct things: unintentional, unbeknownst, and then what we're going to look at, because we'll get an idea of, beginning at verse 14, of the trespass offerings, what is involved. But I want you to; I want you to see something here. I did not read this last week, I don't believe, which is God makes provisions, and this is for the sin offering, and He'll also make the provisions in the trespass offering for anyone of any walk of life, of any standing. And that's what I love about God. If you read that now and say, “Well, that's great for the children of Israel,” but think about in today's society how people are constantly making excuses about how they either can't come to God, or they can't come to church, or they can't, can't; and that's all psychological, blah, blah.
That's all it is. There's no rhyme or reason, it's, it's, it's rationale or rationalizing what you don't want to do with every reason under the sun. But the fact of the matter is anybody who takes the time to read, even in this book, Leviticus, which is full of legalese, God says, “I've made a provision no matter what your standing is.” Now you might say, “Well, how would the poor person? A poor person doesn't have a lamb or a goat, but how would they bring fine flour?” Well, remember there's a provision in the law for very poor people to go and glean the remnants of what's left in the field.
Remember, they're supposed to leave over some stuff and the poor people can go and glean that, but they'd still have to work to take whatever they've gleaned in the field and turn it into fine flour. So it's not as though they just went and freeloaded off of somebody else's crop and then said, “Oh, here God.” they still had to produce it with their own hands, turned it into flour, and then present it. So there was still some work involved which connects the fact that in this category of sin and trespass, there is something of, we'll call it accountability for your acts or your actions, your deeds, whatever. Okay, so I love the fact that that's what this spells out. Now if we turn to the trespass offering, we're going to see differences that will emerge.
One of these concepts is “restitution.” We have not seen that before in, in the offerings. There was no mention of restitution, restitution. Now, Leviticus 5 and beginning at 14, “The LORD spake unto Moses, saying, If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance,” and remember I said to you, now you've got these words occurring together so it may be a little confusing, but I'm going to try and sort this out for you. “If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things, in the holy things of the LORD; then he shall bring for his trespass unto the LORD a ram without blemish out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering: and he shall make amends for the harm that he hath done in the holy thing, and he shall add the fifth part thereto, and give it unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him.” So now you've got a whole bunch of concepts lined up together, but there's something real important that was said in here that we can just read by, and that is a mention of two things.
One, “If soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance in the holy things.” So here, the trespass; note this carefully, is against, the trespass is against the things of God. We're not talking about something else; the holy things, so it's directly connected. Let's just say it's a high holiday. Failure to comply with the laws of the holiday would be sinning. If it was a sin of ignorance, it would be sinning. A known sin probably fall in the category of trespass, that you didn't comply with the prescribed actions of what was required of you. And that would require an offering not only of animal, but also a rest━if you want to call it that a restitution offering: money. Now here's the other thing that we're introduced to for the first time in Leviticus, “a fifth part shall be added.” It would be great if they explained what that fifth part is.
So I'm going to try and do that for you, and hopefully I don't confuse you even more. In order to understand this, I'm going to take you somewhere else where it'll, it's embedded in a passage, and it'll maybe make more sense. So the passage that I'm going to look at will be in Genesis, but basically, let me give the background for those people who are not familiar, my newer listeners. Joseph, who was Jacob/Israel's favorite child, his son, that son Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. His brothers hated him because he was his father's favorite. You remember many even who aren't reading the Bible would know about Joseph's coat of many colors. That was made by Jacob, his father given to him, and others hated him, not just for the coat, but for dreams that he said he saw and the interpretations thereof.
He just was not loved by his brethren, period. So they sold him into slavery. He ends up getting carried off into Egypt and being put in prison in Egypt. You think perhaps he's just going to rot there. Anyway, we know that he, while he's in prison, the Pharaoh has dreams. No one can interpret them. Joseph interprets the dreams. He's basically let out. Those dreams and their interpretations come to pass exactly the way Joseph said, and for that, the Pharaoh of Egypt places Joseph second in command, only second to Pharaoh, gives him his special ring which would be the sign of royalty or royal authority, gives him standing. And so we have all of that going on. Of course, we know that in, in this particular passage, there are seven years of plenty, seven years of famine, and when the famine does hit, Joseph's father, Jacob, and his brethren come to Egypt. When it is disclosed and found out that Joseph is alive, he, he's not dead as was supposed by his father, we have this incredible, the family is reunited, everybody's happy, right? Kind of.
All right that's the background now, first book of Scott; I just gave you the summary. So let's turn to the passage I want us to look at, which happens in Genesis 47. So with all that background, now the seven years of famine hit. There was seven years of plenty, feast. Now seven years of famine hit. Chapter 47, verse 20, “Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh,” he bought it all, “for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's. And as for the people, he removed, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt, even to the other end thereof.
Only the land of the priests bought he not,” so the priests' portion was not touched. And it says here, “For the priests had a portion assigned them a Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them: whereby they sold not their lands.” So the priests were the only ones in Egypt, Egyptian priests that were able to keep and maintain what they had. “Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land,” so both you and your land are owned by the government. Never mind. “Lo, here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land.” So basically Joseph says, “You are owned. Your land and yourselves are owned by Pharaoh, but here is seed for you, and you will go sow the land that no longer belongs to you. You're going to have to basically work for it now.” “And it shall come to pass in the increase,” when it yields, when your crops grow, then “ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own.” Remember, I'm trying to explain to you the fifth part.
So this becomes interesting because the fifth part, what he's saying here essentially is an imposed tax. And if you're not sure about this, please for you who read Hebrew and can even limp through the lexicon, look this up. This would be analogous to essentially a 20 percent levy or tax. And so he says, “The fifth part unto Pharaoh,” let's call it, let's call it for right now in more understandable terms, 20 percent, “and the fourth part shall be your own, for seed of the field, for your food, and for them of your household, and for your little ones.” So I want you to see how that's working. Now he's very clear about this. He says, “In your increase.” Now remember, the law was not yet given here. So there has to be an understanding. Remember what is before the law usually continues in the law. It's refined in the law, and somehow we come out on the other side in the New Testament. This tells you, these people basically sold themselves and their land. They're given seed to sow on the land that's no longer theirs.
And when the increase comes, they will give a fifth part, essentially 20 percent of what has come out of that to Pharaoh and the fourth part they can keep. That's the easiest way to explain this. Now here there was no wrong or injury done. If you want to put it that way, there's no law. There's no, there's no way to catalog because as I said, the law was not given. And where the law was not given, sin cannot be imputed or charged to somebody's account. So turn back to Leviticus so we can read that again because now you've got to add something here. You might say, “Well, what? What's, what's the point?” All right, well, the first thing, I need to point this out because otherwise all things will not make sense. Remember, this is “trespass in the holy things.” And for trespass in the holy things, the prescribed offering would be a ram without blemish, shekels of silver, and “amends for the harm he hath done to the holy thing; in the holy thing,” adding a fifth part, essentially 20 percent, “and the priest shall make atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him.” So I want you to think of it like this.
We might be looking at things like “trespass in the holy things,” failure to bring your firstfruits, failure to dedicate your firstborn child, or sort out the first of anything that is within your possession failure to bring the tithe, failure to keep vows of offerings, and I could go on. So this was, and you've got to read this right because otherwise you can come up with all kinds of ideas that are wrong. “If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things,” I just gave you an idea of what that might be, but it could probably extend to a lot of other “holy things,” so in that regard, essentially think of this. It is an offense done against God. Not only is there an offering of a ram without blemish, which means blood will be spilled. Not only is there shekel, silver money being paid, but then there's also included in here the fifth part, which means essentially 20 percent tacked on to whatever you're offering. Now the reason why this is kind of mind-boggling is because if you think about it, there is no as of yet; we're going to read on, but as of yet, the first thing that's addressed is “trespasses against the things of God.” Hold that thought.
Verse 17, “And if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be done by the commandments of the LORD; though he wist it not,” so there's kind of an explanation, a little bit of, we're talking about he wist it not, yet he is guilty. He didn't know. It sounds again; this gets a little bit confusing.
Did he do it out of ignorance? Did he forget? Was this a non-deliberate act? And that's what this sounds like. “He wist it not, and yet he is guilty, he shall bear his iniquity. He shall bring a ram without blemish of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: the priest shall make a moment for him concerning his ignorance wherein he erred and wist it not,” that explains it to you, “and it shall be forgiven. This is a trespass offering: he hath certainly trespassed against the LORD.” So we're not done here, but I want you to see something that is very important, and that is when God said, “On such and such a day I want you to do this, and I on such and such a day when you do this, I want you to do that,” very easily because there were so many prescribed things to do, it would be, it would be very easy for a person to miss.
How many of you have by accident, by unintentionally, you missed a credit card payment? You didn't intend to, but you did? Oh, good, I'm not alone, all right. What I'm saying is you didn't mean to do that, yet there, there are consequences. It's going to hit your credit report, and unfortunately it's a stain. So it, I don't mean to diminish the things of God, but I'm trying to say something that you didn't know and yet should be common knowledge. Guess what? This is the wonderful thing about God. God realizes our frailty and our frame, knows we can't remember and do it all, and makes provisions for that.
If that is not an image or a picture of grace in the Old Testament, I don't know what is. Let's keep going. “The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, If a soul sin, and commit a trespass against the LORD, and lie unto his neighbour,” so I want you to read that one really carefully, because that bears something we tend to not think about.
In this book, lying to your neighbor is also sinning against God. So it's important to understand the depth of things that are spelled out here, which is why when you go and you read a passage like Matthew 6 that talks about forgiveness, it becomes vitally important, important to have this underneath it all to know where God was coming from in the first place when He talks about sinning against God and sinning against your fellowman, because the sin against fellowman we tend to marginalize or minimalize, but it's still a sin against God. You're reading that right there. So, “lie unto his neighbour in that which was delivered for him unto him to keep, or in fellowship, or in a thing taken away by violence, or he hath deceived his neighbor; or hath found that which was lost, and lieth concerning it, sweareth falsely; in any of these things that a man doeth, sinning therein: then it shall be, because he hath sinned, he is guilty, and it shall, that he shall restore that which he took violently away, or the thing which he had deceitfully gotten, or that was delivered him to keep, or a lost thing which he found, or all that about which he hath sworn falsely; he shall even restore it in principle, and add,” here we go again, “the fifth part more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth, in the day of his trespass offering.” So get this, on the one side, as trespass committed against God in the holy things, restitution is required in forms of offering the shekel and the fifth part.
And here we have, on the other hand, wrongs committed essentially against fellowman, and we still have a fifth part, that 20 percent is going to be tacked on there on, on top of the person's offering. Now you and I may think, “Twenty percent, eh, that's not a lot,” 20 percent would be a lot. Don't kid yourself, okay? “He shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, or ram without blemish out of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him before the LORD: and shall be forgiven for any thing of that, in all that which he hath done in trespassing therein.” Okay, let me go back to my notes, because I've got a lot of stuff here that needs to be kind of a little bit of a simplified version of what we just read.
So there are details in what I just read put in plain English: A person's property rights may be violated by someone else unlawfully, seizing them, stealing them, taking what's not yours, failure to report, lost or found property, or giving a false testimony. And when the guilty party came forward to confess, they would bring an offering, a clear revelation to the individual's remorse and repentance, not like, “Okay, now I got to do this.” It would be the display of remorse for the act, and it all ends, of course, as you can read with, “and it shall be forgiven him.” Now this is what's important. When Christ gave His life for ransom for many, the fullest satisfaction was made for both man and God. In other words, Jesus takes care of all of this, and on top of that, put into the category the things you and I would not consider actually or define as a sin or a trespass.
You know why? Because we're living in different times. You know, it might have been if we went back into the Puritanical times, certain things, you know, if you read enough history, you know, certain things would have been a sin. This would have been a sin: a woman wearing pants, right? That would have been a sin, and, and it would have not just been a sin verbally; it would have been a sin where you're ostracized in the community. There's a whole litany of things within the church; we're not talking about in the world. So it all depends. This is why I say to you, you've got to read this very carefully to see that God was never trying to squeeze the life out of somebody, but trying to point and show and reveal our need is much more than any animal offering could ever do.
Keep in mind that the sacrifices under the law activated or effectuated the temporal remission of punishment, but they could never cleanse the soul. And this is why when you read Hebrews, you go and you read the chapter where it says, “Neither the blood of bulls or goats could not cleanse a guilty mind.” So you could transfer. Remember I said that you've got to place your hand on the animal's head and it's one of those vicarious things. You could transfer, but that would not cleanse the inside. You'd still be walking around with the knowledge that even though that act would basically quell the punishment, the inside of the person was never at peace. You could not be at peace knowing that you have offended God. So there's a lot more to this.
I think the Israelite who sinned and incurred the penalty of death, for example, provided it was not a premeditated, willful, and deliberate act, would obviously bring the prescribed offering. But I don't think even there they thought, “Oh, and this absolves me completely.” It would absolve you of the punishment in the temporal sense, but could never cleanse. That's why I love what the book of Hebrews says. The shedding of blood was required, and I know a lot of people, this drives a lot of people mad, and they don't want to hear it. But God was driving home a point that if we were focused enough, we would look at this and we wouldn't say, “Oh, the bloodshed and oh, the carnality of it all, the,” when I say “carnality,” the flesh being torn down.
But rather we'd look at this and we'd say, “God knew that we needed Christ, we needed the sacrifice of Christ as a full, complete sacrifice to cover it all, to take it away.” And I'll say this one other thing, because I've said this in the past. I don't even think when we interpret the word kaporeth, the covering, which we've looked at on the Ark and many other places; I don't even think that's an adequate word for Christ's work. Do you know why? Because He just didn't cover us; He cleansed us. This, what we're looking at, would be a covering. The actual fullness of Christ's work is something that is cleansing to the core, but you'd have to read the book to see that.
You'd have to read the book to know it. So now that I've painted all this picture, I want us to look at several things that are repeated several times. Starting in the fourth chapter; don't turn there; verse 20, verse 26, verse 31, verse 35; the fifth chapter, verses 10, 13, 16, 18; and in the sixth chapter, verse 7, “it shall be forgiven him,” or “it shall be forgiven them.” The Hebrew word for “forgiveness,” this word is sallâch. I think that's what I'm wanting to write: sallâch, maybe. And there's a whole bunch of words that would be attached to this word. This is what's important. You know, I give you the details, but I want you to see something. This, this word occurs 46 times as a verb in the Old Testament, but there's something really important here. The only one who grants sallâch is God. What's my point? We make the mistake, and I; most of you who are listening to me know this, but I've got a whole host of people who have not heard this before.
The priest here did not dispense forgiveness. The priest here did not have the ability to dispense forgiveness. Only God could forgive; even the Pharisees and the Sadducees in Jesus' day said, “Only God can forgive sin.” And this Hebrew word is used exclusively of God forgiving. So anyone who reads this and takes that as a template and spins it into the modern realm of Catholicism that the priest can absolve you; I'm sorry, but that is just not the case, that will never be the case. No human can absolve another human of the acts, sin or trespass. Sin is your condition, but trespass is anything committed against God. No one can do that except God. God's willingness to forgive is much more, if you see what I see, and I've highlighted them.
You know, you go around and you, the green is where it says “it shall be forgiven him.” That was important for me to highlight that, so that every time I open this book, I do not forget that even here within the confines of the law, God had abundant mercy and grace to provide forgiveness to grant that to His people. I love the fact that, for example, when Nehemiah reminds God of God's past mercies, and if you examine, he's praying for something, he's petitioning, and he's actually petitioning God for something he didn't do, but the people did. And that got God's ear. But only God━do you see what I'm trying to say? It can't be us. We can pray, we can petition, we can ask, but only God has the power, and God did take Nehemiah's words, honored them, kind of a cry for forgiveness and mercy to the people, and that is what opened the door for God to open the heart of Cyrus to let the people to come back.
So you kind of got to see it in proper perspective. You've got the same thing, by the way, if you look at Amos, when he's praying, you know, he's praying about these locusts, and you think about it, he's praying for the people to be forgiven, essentially, to take, to take away this; it's a vision, by the way, it didn't yet happen in, in his time. And God reassures him, basically in a nutshell; I'm giving you the quick version; that all is, all could be, or all would be forgiven. So it's important to see the subject of forgiveness even in the law through the prophets is very, very clear. And there's a formula here. So check this out. The person who commits sin or trespass must bring their offering, there must be shed blood; it's as if God's saying, “I gave you a lot.
I freed you. I gave you life. I gave you all, everything that you could possibly need or want, and you've sinned against Me essentially. It's going to cost you.” And now we can't even imagine that that cost is nothing compared to the cost of Jesus dying on the cross for us, but God says, “Nevertheless, it's going to cost you.” And I don't care what anybody says about this part here. The reason why I'm highlighting all this is because no matter what the people did, it took a long time before God gave up on the people, their apostasy, their complaining, their chronic issues, which if you read just the Pentateuch, you can see these people were, instead of being grateful and going back to God in thanksgiving, they were pretty much a stiff-necked, ungracious band of people.
For God chose them out of a unique group of people, that He chose them, He didn't choose other people, and yet they could not get this. And yet in spite of all that, He still forgave them. He still forgave them. But once we've turned from the Old Testament you understand this. And you get into the New Testament, and we've studied those words for forgiveness, the major Greek words for forgiveness you begin to see God really hasn't changed. The, we'll call it the harshness or the legal binding things, yes, those are, those are not there anymore. But if you read enough, and we've studied these words, for example, the Greek word, aphiemi, which is “to let go, to cancel, to remit, to forgive”; aphesis, which is “to release, to pardon,” it connotes cancellation of debt.
Paresis is another word occurring one time, “to let pass,” or “to let go.” You've got in the New Testament, aphiemi used 142 times; 47 of them are found in Matthew. I mean, if you kind of break it down, you see there's a lot of that concept woven into the New Testament wherever you look. And the importance of this is to understand that when you get to the New Testament, forgiveness of sins, of debts, of trespasses, it's used in a very general context. No longer do we have, we'll call it the details, but it still must be maintained and understood.
Christ takes care of both the condition of man; our condition, our Adamic fallen nature, our condition, our congenital condition, and the fruit of that life lived, which is the sins we commit. And don't go down the pathway and say, “Well, I don't drink anymore, I don't smoke.” Those are, I wouldn't even, tell you the truth, those are the easiest things because they're the obvious things, but what about the things that are not obvious that people tend to forget and gloss over? Think about that, it's a good one. So what we have here is the Old Testament where what we're studying actually shows us that God's grace and God's willingness to forgive was always there, and the method.
Okay, you can say, “Well, God made a prescription, and dah, dah, dah, dah,” well, the prescription for the New Testament was that Jesus must go to the cross and die, that He'd also resurrect. And remember the connection to what Paul says. He says, “If Christ is not risen, our faith is vain, and you are yet in your sins.” This is why it's vital to understand for every person listening to me, the front, center, circumference, anywhere you want to, at any angle, is the Resurrection because without the validity of the Resurrection, everything else crumbles to pieces, including the forgiveness that, the forgiveness of sins, right? So it's important to understand that.
Now, I want you and I to approach the subject of forgiveness now a little bit differently. When you go back and you read this, I don't want you to look at, “Well, those were the children of Israel, the Israelites in the desert.” They have the same disease we have. They, they suffered from the same things we suffer from, and that is basically spiritual blindness, spiritual ineptness, the inability to understand God, God's ways, God's words, God's wishes, God's desires. We struggle with the same problems and it's pretty simple if I may say so.
The offerings point us. So if we take all these offerings and you can say, “Okay, lift away the,” we'll call it the grossness of the offerings for just a minute, because you can't remove it. And what the offerings show us for us, an application to us, we come in already from the get-go offending God. I don't care who you are, I don't care how great you think you are or how bad you think you are. You come in already offending God from the beginning in the holy things. Now, remember there is no law now. The law's been fulfilled in Christ, but how many times have I said to you, people who think they're fulfilling the bare minimum think they'll make it in? They've checked the box; they think they'll make it in, “Oh, I've done the minimum I, I've require to do.” That might be, if that's your mindset, you still don't have a relationship with Christ.
The minimum that you can do is recognize; it's like saying, this person died for me. Don't make this a generic picture of the world. This person died for me. Do you, have you ever met anyone that actually gave their life for you that, I'm not talking about our great American soldiers. I'm not talking about our law enforcement. I'm talking about have you ever met someone personally come into contact with that gave their life for you? And my answer is there's only One and that's Christ.
So when you come to that real reality, not the lip service version, you come in recognizing you've offended God right at the get-go, and then I see my condition. Once these two things have been dealt with in Christ, I begin to be able to have fellowship with God, because that's what the peace offering is. The peace offering is shared; God, the offeror, and the priest all partake.
I'm able to, because of understanding my status, my state of being and the fruit of my state of being, I'm now able, because of the offering now, I'm speaking in the New Testament, because of the offering of Christ, I'm able to have fellowship with God. I'm able to, if I can keep making the journey in my walk and keep faithing, I'm able to get to the mindset of the burnt offering, which is what the apostle Paul was saying in Romans 12, to offer yourself wholly, a living sacrifice to God. You get to that point of recognizing, yes, the burnt offering is Christ, it's also us. And everything in between is a picture, a portrait. So you can get hung up on, “Oh, I can't read that,” because whatever, or you can look at this and say, “God had a roadmap even here in the Old Testament to show us what life would be like for the spiritual and faithful in the New, and it hasn't changed.” The beauty of this is even embedded here, “it shall be forgiven.” We know when we get to the New Testament mindset, this is why this really bugs me when people say, “Well, you know, it's very difficult for me because,” and fill in the blanks.
If God said, “I forgive you, it shall be forgiven you,” then I recommend you take God at His word. There are several psalms that are beloved for most of this congregation. Psalm 103 talks about the forgiveness of God being as your sins are removed as far as the east is from the west. And in another place it talks about, in the book of Micah, your sins being basically thrown into the abyss of the sea, never to be seen again. That is the forgiveness of God. And when one receives that forgiveness, let me tell you what happens. The devil may still come and whisper in your ear, people you used to know may say, “Yeah, sure,” and point their finger at you, but you won't━I will reiterate this. You have one Audience to please, and it's not me. It's God. And when you get that right, everything comes together. Even the faltering and the “Kind of; I'm not sure exactly.” When you're focused on that one Audience, and that's the most important Person, this will all fall into place and you'll understand one thing: God is not against you.
God is for you. All these people that say, “Well, I can't come to the church, because,” those are manmade ideologies that keep people out, the whole, “You've got to clean up before you come in here.” We've never looked at anybody and said anything other than sinners are welcome, but you've got to start with the right place. Don't come in here with your baggage and don't come in here with your ideology and tell me you're okay, when most of us coming in can't even figure out we've already sinned against God. Choose words wisely. We've already sinned against God in our activities before we even came into the church. Don't try and put a halo on it. Recognize it, and the confession part comes when you talk to God. David did that. David had a priest by him, by the way let me remind you, prophet and priest in Nathan, and he may have conversed with him, but when he made that bold declaration in Psalm 51, he's talking to God; he's not talking to an intermediary: “Against thee, O LORD, and thee alone have I sinned.” So if there's a takeaway, all of these point, all these offerings point to Christ, help us understand the New Testament.
If there's another takeaway, it's that only God can forgive. No man can, no one can, no man or woman can forgive sins committed against God. And finally, we serve a forgiving, loving God. What He does want though is He wants us to be honest both with ourselves and with Him. And when that happens, the floodgates of real blessings of knowing Christ begin to happen. So for all those people who say, “Well, what's the point in studying this?” I hope you recognize that there's great value. Now if you go back and you look at these and scrutinize them, because we didn't read every verse in here and there's much more I could have gone into, I want you to see something. As people say, “Well, it's Old Testament” yeah, it's Old Testament, but it, the beauty is that if you look carefully, you're going to see Christ on these pages, even within the book of Leviticus.
Now that's pretty darn special and pretty amazing that God would include that as something for us to recognize, see, and learn from. So hopefully this, this has is gelled with you all. And while I was sitting here and finishing my notes, I couldn't help but think about this. You know, we used to sing a song here, which speaks to my heart greatly, “I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus, how I found in Him a friend so strong and true. I'd love to tell you how He changed my life completely. He did something that no other friend could do. No one has ever cared for me like Jesus.” And when you really get that in your mind, everything else will change.
And that is that He cared for the people back here. He cares for the people today, and if we could only wake up to that and fortify ourselves in that knowledge, there's really nothing that the Christian, that the believer cannot do in Christ. That's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
We've been looking at the offerings. So there are five offerings. They begin in the book of Leviticus, the burnt offering, the meal offering; your Bible may say “meat,” but we are calling it the “meal offering” because, just think of it this way. The “meat offering,” we don't use that term in English anymore like they did when they were writing the King James. So there is no meat in the meat offering, so it's better to just say “meal,” right? That's easier to remember. Peace offering, sin offering, trespass offering. So in the burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering, these all fall into a category we call “sweet savor.” What's interesting is if you read in Paul's writing, and I'll just read it to you because it's just one small verse, but he uses that terminology, “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.” So even Paul made that connection; he makes it many times over.
But what I mentioned about this is important, and I'll, I'll give you the details a little bit later in the message. But when I said to you that Noah and Abraham's offerings could not have been sin offerings, is that what's attached in those texts is it was a sweet savor to God as it ascended. So anything that is “sweet savor” or labeled that way is never associated with a sin offering. So that's why I said that. I can back up things that I say. As previously mentioned also, everything in God's program mattered. It still matters, by the way, and there's still people making substitutions to their own demise. Then there are some, we'll call them refinements to the burnt offering. For example, in Leviticus 7 and verse 8, it says, “And the priest that offereth any man's burnt offering, even the priest shall have to himself the skin of the burnt offering which he hath offered.” So that's another important, there's just so many of them sometimes I think, you know, it's easy to let these things kind of pass and slip through the cracks, but here, even this, so the priest would get to keep the skin of the burnt offering.
So think of it this way, the skin could be used for a myriad number of reasons. I'm assuming, I don't know all the different customs of the day, but I'm assuming that a skin could have been used from anything, we'll call it functional, like maybe covering a seating area or part of your roofing, your housing, but generally speaking, skin across the board is used as some type of a covering, whether it's on a human or placed on something else, it's a covering.
And I found even this to be amazing because what was the burnt offering? Something that ascends up, wholly offered to God. In way of description, it personifies Christ's ministry on earth, right, wholly dedicated to God, ascending upward. But think of this, the skin that was offered, the New Testament says we are clothed in Christ's righteousness. Well, if the skin represented that which was offered as a type of Christ, imagine that this, this covering, if you will, that would have been given to the priest is almost a representation of being clothed with God's righteousness, except it's in the shadow, not in actuality. In actuality it's Christ. In shadow it may have been this skin. Now, I'm reading, I'll tell you what I'm reading between the lines and perhaps adding. This is speculation, but I think that there's reason to attach that there because it seems like, well, imagine how many burnt offerings, morning and night would be offered every day. That's a lot of skin.
Just think about it. You know how many people are in the camp night and day? That is a lot of skin. It's a lot of blood and it's a lot of skin. By the way, probably a lot of smoke too, if you think, no, I don't know. I think we maybe do a lot of caricatures about this. We see what fire in general looks like. You know, somebody's making a backyard barbecue; it's not going to be black smoke. But you're burning a whole entire animal. What do you think that's going to look like? Don't answer. All right, so in the meal offering, we saw, as I said, it had no meat in it, and the main ingredients in that offering: fine flour, frankincense, oil. So the big difference between the burnt offering and the meal offering, as I said previously last week, the burnt offering is a life offered up. And the meal offering, let's just say, was the fruit of that life. So life offered up, wholly consumed, and what's brought to the altar for the meal offering is what we as humans, you know, oil doesn't make itself.
Just, you know, does anybody think you just go out and say, “Ah, rain oil,” we have to make it, right? Like fine flour has to be pummeled. And so it's, it is the fruit or the labor of one's work versus the life that was offered. And I'm hoping at some point this will click with some of you because it's so hard sometimes to adequately convey a concept. But this one is so crystal clear to me. In the meal offering, we kind of get the idea overall of bread or cakes. And I know it's like it's, it's just a little bit around lunch time, so I start talking about bread and cakes, and in about five minutes I'm going to hear tummies going, grr, grr, grrr! (Laughter.) That happened last week or the week before and I was like, wow, it works, (laughter) all right.
But bread being the staff of life, of course and what we see in the meal offering, it's the ingredients that are placed in there give us a description as I referred to the fine flour. Immediately, I don't think fine flour sifted, I think of the bruised One. I think of Isaiah 53, “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.” If you think about it that way, the, the pulverizing, the beating, the smiting that would produce flour from its original state into the state it was in, somehow this is very representational of suffering, specifically the suffering of our Lord. So we can put some flesh and blood on that and see how we might understand it better.
I mentioned the, in the fine flour, no unevenness. Probably the most simplistic way to describe that is there is no change in Him; He is constant, remains the same. That's that concept of flour that is not lumpy or inconsistent; full of inconsistencies. Another difference between the burnt offering and the meal offering I described was the washing of water in the inward parts on the burnt offering versus the oil on the meal offering, but both are descriptive. Of course, the water as the word of God, washing the inner parts, we understand that through the New Testament, washed with the water inside.
It's what comes out of a person; it's already in you that defiles you when you, the Bible says when you open your mouth, but that's why you are constantly to wash your mind with the word of God, the oil on the other hand in the meal offering, representative of the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The meal offering was to be made with salt and emblem of course of perpetuity or preservation and also used against spoiling or corruption. So again, in Him, in Christ, there was no sin; there was no corruption. Let me just stop right here. In fact, I wish I could, there was a pause button so I can take a sidebar and I don't lose everything I've said. You know how often, how many of you have heard, usually it comes around Easter time, that Jesus had a wife, Jesus wed Mary, Jesus had sex, He had children with Mary – how many have heard that? Okay. So just so we can put things in perspective, if the Old Testament is basically revealed or expounded in the New and we read about no corruption, no blemish, no anything.
And listen carefully, sex does not defile a person but in the biblical realm of understanding that would be considered defilement and uncleanness if one was not married. Therefore, again, you either take this whole book and take it, parse it, try and mull it around and then you can say to the, to the people out in the world, “You're full of it; you don't know what you're talking about,” because if you want to go down the pathway that Jesus succumbed to impurity or temptation, then you're saying that all of this that I'm describing and the rest of the book cannot describe Him and He cannot fulfill it.
And that's a lie. So what I'm saying to you is if somebody actually scrutinizes this book enough and you're looking for shadows, types and clarity, you can know that He had to fulfill the offering of, without blemish, which means without bodily defect but also without corruption, which means anything that would have been immorally making Him impure in any way, shape, or form. And in this case, in biblical days, having sex without being married would have constituted what I'm describing. So that's why I'm saying to you, just un-pause now, come back to where I was. So this is why it's important to study the whole book. You can dispel a lot of stuff that is basically thrown at us to make a mockery of our faith.
That's all. You know, they mocked Jesus on the cross. That wasn't enough. They have to kill, still keep mocking Him all these years later. So that's the way they do it. But anyone who's reading this, a light will go on in what I'm saying to you because He is described as the Lamb of God that takes away sin of the world. Well, how could He fulfill that perfect offering if He Himself was not perfect and impure or corrupted? So save that for another argument in another day, but I just wanted to put that in there. All right, if the burnt offering represents the God-man relationship, I've said to you the meal offering and even the peace offering and probably more so the peace offering represent the other side of the Decalogue, the other side of the Ten Commandments, the fellowman-to-man relationship.
Why do I say that? Because the burnt offering offered on the altar was wholly offered up to God, the skin given to the priest, but that's almost like a sidebar, but everything else going to God. For the meal and peace offering, especially in the peace offering, you've got the offeror, God, and the priest all partaking. That's fellowship. That's communion right there. So if you split the first three offerings, the burnt offering to fit into the man-God relationship of the first five laws of the Ten Commandments, and the other five go into the meal and peace and the man-fellowman relationship where you see fellowship and communion, again interesting that the whole thing is fulfilled in Christ. Remember what it says about Christ and the law, “I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it,” and in Him, indeed, He did fulfill both sides of the Decalogue to God and to man. All right, when we look at the peace offering, which we started to briefly, it too is classified as a sweet savor, but there's, as I said, something unique.
If you can read it in your own time, because I do not think time will permit for me to go through that text, but you will definitely see what I'm referring to as communion or fellowship of all persons or parties involved in that offering. The offeror feasts on the meat of the altar very much analogous to we who, and be very careful about how you interpret what I'm about to say, feast on the body of Christ. That's not eating, that is enjoying or partaking by reading, faithing, understanding all that Christ is and does for us. So in that respect, we are partaking of the body of Christ; we are, we make up the body of Christ, the church, but in the respect of the offering. We see man satisfied in Christ.
Through this offering, the offeror is actually feasting with God. So it's almost a circular bringing the offering, the offering is offered, the priest gets to participate, the offeror gets to participate, God is the, obviously, the intended recipient in full, but all get to be included in this offering. So there's something there that's very, we'll call it communal-like, which is kind of neat because you don't think of an offering as a fellowship or a communal activity. All right, the priest, remember I said to you in every, each of these offerings, you've got to peel back the offeror, the offering; the offeror, the person, the offering, the item, and the priest.
And in many ways, Christ will fulfill one or more of these, not just the priest, but a lot of times you can see double and triple meaning in things. So we can see fulfillment that occurs, for example, the priest who is our high priest Christ, but He's also our mediator. The Scripture says Aaron; you've got to follow this one, Aaron and his sons, or Aaron and Aaron's sons, the priest's children, his family get to partake.
So think of it this way, if you're going to make this extra complicated, we're trying to make shadows and types and look at the reality. So Aaron, the priest, his children, they all get to partake. We are heirs and children of God. So it's the same, if you look at all of these different types, they're the same; they lead us down the same pathway. This is why I get frustrated when people say, “Oh, that's the Old Testament. I don't want to read the Old Testament.” Well, you're missing out on a lot, because this fills in a lot of blanks that if you said, “Well, I don't fully, I, I'll read the New Testament, but I don't get all the nuances.” The nuances occur here, and then when you start reading it again, you go, “Why didn't I see that before?” because it needed to be pointed out.
All right, the peace offering could be a thanksgiving or better put praise offering, and that would be more like glorifying God. But it could also be done as a vow or a voluntary offering, which could correlate to service to God. So my hope is these are all concepts that are very generic that I'm putting out, but hopefully in your own time and your own studies, you'll go and kind of dig a little bit more, because once you start digging into what I'm saying, you're going to find all kinds of things that correlate. So the peace offering, one of two, understood in one of two ways, either as a praise, thanksgiving, which would be for us in New Testament times glorifying God, or as a vow or voluntary offering, which could be analogous to service to God in our time.
The law of the peace offering is found in Leviticus 7, verses 11-38. It's pretty lengthy, and it kind of gives you all of the minutia of the offering, in your own time, if you will. But there are two things I want to point out that are itemized here within these verses. And one of them speaks of the fact that Aaron and his sons received as their portion of the peace offering the breast and the shoulder of the animal. And again here, there's beautiful pictorial images put forth; the breast always in Scripture being represented as the heart, the place of emotions, the place of care, empathy, concern, and the shoulders, what would be basically analogous to power or carrying a load, the burdens, if you will.
The priests in this day were a microcosm. They could not even achieve what Christ is to us. But think of it this way. The New Testament says Christ loved us and He died for us. You see, even if you go back into the Old Testament, nomenclature of El Shaddai, the breasted one, the one who yes, at in Him all sustenance, everything is found. But that's not just the nourishment, if you will. It also flows to the needs, our emotional and spiritual needs. He can provide all of that. So think of the breast that way. The priest's portion was that, the priest's and his sons'.
We are the children of God. This is also ours to partake. We receive the love of God. We may love God, but we receive the love of God. He loved us first and gave Himself for us. And the shoulder portion, which in human terms, not in animal terms, but in human terms, the shoulder is usually representative of power or burden bearing, and He is that to us as well. So even in these offerings, the symbolism is powerful. And you go back and you read these chapters where there's all this kind of very dry, boring detail, but when you start to see Christ there, you start to think, this is, it becomes a little bit more like, yeah, I can see the details that maybe in reading the New Testament one can understand, but we'll say the full details or the coloring may not be there. They're here. That's where you find them. Okay, so now we're going to approach the sin offering. And this is the other thing that if I could have one wish in life, it would be this, that I could stop hearing people say this – that they came to the Lord and now, you know, they've been set free and they sin no more.
We are sinners. We have two problems. We are born in the blueprint. You come out of the gate messed up. It's the best way I can say it. That is the condition we are all; you know, if you want to go out there and deny it and, “Nah, nah, nah, nah!” go ahead. But that's what it is.
See, this is what makes me sometimes smile like the cat that ate the canary. Everybody wants to justify, well, they want to seem superspiritual and rationalize their behavior. But if you really go back to the thought process of, we are born in this blueprinted fallen state. A baby is beautiful and innocent, but a baby is born in that state too. It doesn't just, okay, now the baby quit being cute at the age of seven and it's no longer – no, it doesn't work that way. You came out of the gate, fully contaminated in the blueprint of Adam, and the only cure for that is coming to know Christ and what Christ did and faithing in Christ. So you've got the condition of man. It might be easier to say this like this: you're born with a congenital problem. It's called Adam's nature, fallen. That's our congenital problem. Everyone born into this universe has that congenital problem. Now don't come and argue that you're okay; that's the condition of humankind, and then separate it with the fruit that is produced from that nature.
The fruit from that that is produced from that nature is what most people get hung up on, “Well, I don't drink and I don't smoke and I don't cuss and I don't do this and I don't do that, blah, blah, blah,” right? And they're hung up on that and they, you can talk about that until you're blue in the face, but that's not going to excuse you from your congenital problem.
You see what I'm saying? So two things must be dealt with and they're both dealt with in Christ, but in the laws they were separated. Now how can we be sure that what I'm saying is correct? Because I always want to make sure that we're so crystal clear on these things. So if you turn to the fourth chapter in the book of Leviticus, just follow what I'm going to read. I'm trying to figure out if I want to see how this is done in the NIV here for just, just give me a second. I want to see how what they call it before I start reading.
Four, oh, okay. Well, I actually like both of these terms, so we're starting in a good place. I'm going to read both of them to you. “The LORD spake unto Moses,” this is the King James, “the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a soul shall sin through ignorance,” if you're interested the Hebrew word is shegâgâh, okay. You're going to find this word repeated “through ignorance.” The NIV, very interesting, “The Lord said to Moses, Say to the Israelites, When anyone sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord's commands.” So the sin offering, now there are some minute details. So this is very generic, don't, don't get all crazy on me if some of you know the minute details, because we're looking at the more generic concept right now, through and through will be unintentional through ignorance, sinning through some; you did not know, “Oh my God, I didn't know.” Now, by the way, this focus on the sin offering is not so much on acts committed, I'm going to read it to you in a second, but on people.
So I want you to think of this, the first category of people that are being addressed in the sin offering are the priests, “If a priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people; then let him bring for his sin, which he hath sinned, a young bullock without blemish unto the LORD for a sin offering,” okay? So the first category is priests. In fact, let me just give this a breakdown quickly if you want to write it in your margin. The priests are being addressed in verses 3-12, the congregation in verses 13-21, rulers 22-26, and in verses 27-35 it is the common people, whatever that means.
I don't know what difference with the congregation, common people. I'm assuming it means people outside of the congregation. Although I was scratching my head and thinking, if you lived in the desert around the tabernacle, I'm not sure how you could be a common person, maybe a random traveler. I don't know. Don't ask me. I didn't, I didn't write it. I don't know. Never mind. That, that will hit you later. Okay, so you can see people are being addressed over and over again, but it starts with the priest. This is very, very, very- this point is probably the most important thing I want to talk to you about right now.
God who approved of these priests, who chose, who let them be anointed, and yet they could still sin a sin of ignorance; unintentional breaking of some law. Now, ask yourself, what could that be? Because they're not exactly laid out; they're not spelled out. It doesn't matter. I'll tell you what matters. What matters is that God started, if you look at it, He's got priests, congregation, rulers, and people.
But He addresses the priests first. This ought to tell you, we have to stop this nonsense. There is no pastor, man or woman, that is perfect. That doesn't mess up daily and perpetual. I don't care how holy and spiritual they sound, or they look like, or they talk. We're all human. Get, get that and we're good. There's nothing worse than people putting a pastor on a pedestal, which puts extra pressure for somebody to have to feel like, “Well, I've got to, I've got to walk above the line.” No, I don't. I walk the same line you do, because I'm human like you. And I probably make more mistakes and more mess up than you do and they're not, they're not intentional. They're not evil by design. But we have to stop this idea somehow; and what, what the line between ignorance, unintentional, and blatant blasphemy and intentional sinning, different story.
Well, we can come back and talk about that later. But this is unintentional: “I did not know”" We're not talking about “I knew, but I'm just going to say I didn't know when I get busted,” because God knows the difference. He starts with the priest and listen carefully to what is said here, “If the priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people,” that means; just indulge me in this, that means if this person should happen to engage in ignorance like any other person.
And this is why I get very angry when people say, “Well, pastors need to be held to a higher standard.” There's a difference between my stewardship responsibility to the church, to God, the management of assets and money and responsibility versus being a human being that can and does make mistakes. And I do them all the time. Does that make me less to say that in front of you, to admit it in front of you? Absolutely not.
It makes me one hundred percent human and relatable and not somebody who's up here playing church, but saying, “This applies to me as well as anybody else.” Now, if you go through these line by line, I want you to notice something. So I addressed the priest and it gives the prescription for the priest bringing his offering, all right? Then you keep reading and it goes down to, “And if the whole congregation of Israel sins through ignorance, and the thing be hid from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done somewhat against any of the commandments of the LORD concerning things which should not be done, and are guilty; when the sin, which they have sinned against it, is known, then the congregation shall offer”- now you tell me, if the children of Israel did not have, did not yet have the law given to them, Moses is up in the mount, they want something to worship.
God had not yet uttered the words that would become absolute. He had spoken the words to Moses. We know that. But in terms of application, tell me that you can hear something once and go, “Mm, got it.” Sometimes yes, but a lot of times you need to hear things repeatedly. Now it surprises me that the people would have to hear, “Thou shall have no other gods before me. I'm a jealous God.” All the things that God said He did not want them to do. But we tend to, again, we caricature the law was given and then they went, “Okay,” and they went out and they practiced it all, right? Wrong. Think of how many people may have vaguely heard, some didn't hear, some didn't even care to listen, so it would be very easy to take the incident of the golden calf, which happens in Exodus 32, I believe, and put that in the category (even though in my mind's eye they had to know it was wrong), but that could be possibly a concept of whole congregation falling into sin.
I, I don't know how else to describe this one, but I can tell you if you keep going and you read about the ruler, it says the thing, the same thing, “When a ruler hath sinned, and done somewhat through ignorance,” so that key word or “unintentional” is repeated throughout everything that is pertaining to the sin offering, all right? So I want you to kind of just put a note there.
If there's one word to label at the head of chapter 4, it is “ignorance” or “unintentional acts,” so that way when you're flipping through it, you can see that's, that's the big header. Now there are, there are micro-definitions here that we can glean elsewhere, not here. But what's important with this is we see the classification, so God deals with priests, He deals with congregation, He deals with rulers, and then He deals with the common person. And I think the reason for putting in the rulers and common people, I was reading, it's an old-timey booklet and they have a lot of kind of quips. It's “Sermonic Saplings,” I think it's called. But it's a contribution of a whole bunch of authors.
Normally I'd give you some credit, but I think this one was actually anonymous. And how this was described, I think, was pretty adequate. It said the difference between the ruler and the common person might be as such. Think of the ruler as the big clock in the center of town that everyone can see for miles away and the common person simply is wearing their own personal watch. So whatever the ruler does, it's seen on a large scale, whether, if that's a good definition or not, I'm not sure. But to say basically, one would be much more obvious probably and made known to more people than just the common average person.
And it's also interesting; I don't know why they did this though, “the common people sin through ignorance.” So again, we may be discussing the difference between congregation and congregant, or we may be discussing congregation which includes congregants and all other people. I'm not sure. I tell you what I'm not sure, I'm not sure. In any case, if you read through this chapter, you will find one thing. There is no description of the acts committed, only people being addressed: priest, congregation, ruler, common people. Okay, so pretty important to kind of put that in perspective. Now, I also urge you to notice something else which is kind of important. If you're looking at this section, chapter 4 is 35 verses. If you compare that to the burnt offering at 17 verses, the meat offering or meal offering at 16, peace offering at 17, and the trespass at 19, this section covers the most, has the most verbiage in it.
And interestingly enough, it gives you the least detail on what these unintentional sins are. It's kind of interesting. Okay, this offering would be offered with and during all feasts, Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, Tabernacle, Yom Kippur, which is a category all of its own, which we will talk about. And it would be offered, this sin offering would be offered in the same place as the burnt offering, which is kind of, think about it, if you think that the burnt offering is something good and wholly ascending to God, and this is designed for unintentional, “Oops, I didn't know,” being offered in the same place. That's pretty spectacular. That's one. The burnt offering, of course, was voluntary, but the sin offering was mandatory, not discussable.
The burnt offering, as I said, ascended up. And if you read about the sin offering, it is poured out and downwards. They, these are kind of some differences between the two. In the burnt, meal, and peace offering, sin is nowhere in sight, but in the sin and trespass, they are expiatory in nature, meaning it would be required minimally, if you go back to the instructions here, it says in, for example, “For the priest he shall bring the bullock unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation; and he shall lay his hand upon the bullock's head.” So expiatory in nature, usually also in a vicarious way, so by the laying on of hands, it is the transference, if you will, of guilt, whether it is known or unknown, onto the animal, so expiatory in nature.
The other thing I said previously. The burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering were technically, in their technical terms, acceptance offerings. Now, I need to clarify this because somebody will twist my words as they usually do. I described Christ as being a burnt offering in that His life was laid down, wholly offered to God, but He did not need acceptance of God the Father. So when I say it's an acceptance offering, the offeror offering, essentially as it went up in smoke, it was appeared to be fully accepted by God. So I need to, I needed to make that clarification in case somebody goes back to the, “I accepted Jesus” mindset, which I've told you, it doesn't work that way.
I don't care how you- some people just want to pound their fists, “Aw, blah, blah, I accepted, I,” well that's fine. You can, you can accept in your mind, but He decided long ago whether you'd be in or out, okay? That's an easier way to put it, like way back there, before I was even conceived, God said, “I, I want that. I want that which is going to be called Melissa down the line, somewhere in the, in the future, that's Mine.” And maybe to others He just said, “Meh, whatever.” (Laugther.) Transcribe that! (Laugther.) Okay. Okay then; still trying to get serious, all right. A large part of the problem here is that when we discuss sin and trespass offerings, we get so hung up on wanting to classify the sin, put that in the trespass category, but we get so hung up on wanting to clarify, itemize, label that, that which people do, which is okay, you want to do that.
I don't do that, but if you want to do that, but probably the more important thing to, the starting place is to consider the nature. Without understanding that, I am sorry, I don't care who you're listening to as pastor, who's, or if you're self-educating yourself, you will not understand what's wrong with you and why you need Christ if all you can do is produce a checklist that says, “I, I did this, I did that,” because sin inherently, before you can commit an act, as I called it, and it's perfectly designed this way, a congenital problem.
Something that you had from birth, in your DNA, it is, that's the way you came out. If you are not willing to address that, you can't even get to the problem of your trespasses. So I am a sinner. I know I sin. The fruit of my congenital issue are the things I do. And the only remedy for that, there's only one. Now when I read; this is the tragedy. When I read, these folks came to the door and they offered their offering and vicariously by the laying on of hands, it could have technically given them, I would call maybe a sense of momentary relief, but this is why it had to be done on such a regular basis, because it's what the book of Hebrews says. How could that ever wash and cleanse you on the inside? How could it ever free you from the contamination that's called sin as nature? How? It cannot, it could never.
That's the problem is when you, when you think about this, God laid all this out to teach the people, essentially, this is going to sound weird, but this was all teaching the Old Testament saints about God before Christ was in the flesh, but teaching about Christ's work. So failure to understand from the get-go, I came out with a problem. I don't even need to do anything. The initial thing, the condition, my nature needs fixing, but I can't fix it. Only God can. Now God could have done so many different things here, but He chose to do it through animals, teaching a principle that a life must be laid down and sacrificed, that blood must be spilled. There's a whole litany of things that you could parse through this, but it's teaching us something about us. Failure to grab hold of this lesson, Christianity 101; you know, there are people sitting in churches this morning and whatever their, their pastor, minister, priest, whatever, spoke with them, but I highly doubt that this is a concept that is being reiterated on a regular basis to people who come into the church.
And as I said, that's part of the problem because failure to not know exactly who you are and what's wrong with you produces people who are confused. Just go out in the world and you'll find it. There's a lot of confusion out there. That's because people are even confused; the, the argument, I've settled this in my mind, there are people who still want to talk about, “Well, we evolved.
We, we're, you know, we're a product of evolution.” You can argue that all you want, but if you really want to sit down and have a knockdown drag out with me, I'll take you up. And I think I can prove to you that your argument, which you have been indoctrinated with, you, you may not want to call God “God,” but there was a supreme Creator, however, whatever name you want to put on Him. And He wasn't going, “Okay, let's see if we combine the A and the B and the C, we'll come out with D.
And D will be the new specimen that will evolve into D1, D2, D3.” It doesn't work like that, especially when you get into analyzing what we've, we grew up, we all probably grew up on this. You know, the chart that shows the chimp-like, ape-like, you know, we're going from this, “This is how I wake up in the morning, this is me.” There's evolution for you! “So I wake up in the morning, (laughter) midday, I've evolved; I can stand up straight.” We all grew up on that. The problem is when you start looking into DNA and you find out what's in your DNA will tell you that you and I have been fed a lot of stuff under the guise of “science.” Oh, who am I talking to; you guys already know this, you know, “Follow the science.” Yeah. How did that work out for you? So what I'm thinking here is this, you know, if, if we really take hold of concepts like this, being born in a congenital state that has a problem and the cure to that is Christ, then what I'd say to you is talking about how good or how bad or, or whatever it is you want to add to the conversation is, it's going to be nonsensical if you're not willing to deal with what you are first: fallen.
That's why Paul wrote, “All have sinned and fallen short.” Can you imagine that? A man who's so steeped and well versed in, there was only Old Testament at the time and he says, “All have sinned, all have fallen short.” Even he could figure that out. I wonder why in this day and age people cannot see that, but let's leave that for another day. All right, so in the classification for the way animals are presented in this offering, as I said, if you remember in the burnt offering, I told you that God made provisions for poor; rich to poor, so bullock all the way down to turtledove.
In the, in the meal offering, it's described by way of, I hate to say it, by cooking ware, right? Like if you, maybe if you're rich, you had an oven, but if you were a poor person, you might've just had a pot or a pan, which probably gave birth to that expression, but anyway. All right, a couple of really smart people here, following my humor. The rest of you, I'll wake you up when it's over. But even in the sin offering, we have different categories all the way down to God saying, “If you can't offer an animal, you can bring an ephah of flour,” which is kind of interesting. Of course, there would be in the sin offering, there would be no oil and no frankincense. Now think about this, the sin offering, acts committed unintentionally out of ignorance; no oil put there. No Holy Spirit guiding, right? And no frankincense, and I talked to you about frankincense, how when it's heated or burned, it releases its fragrance, but here in type, it also is a type of holiness, righteousness of God. So in neither one of these, you; it kind of goes to make sense, it's intuitive to say that in, in this sin offering, neither oil nor frankincense would be used or appeared as their types.
If you are being guided, now listen, if you're being guided by the Holy Spirit and you live and walk in the Spirit, you can still make mistakes. You can still do things unintentionally. But for the application, making the distinguishment between sin and trespass, just kind of keep that there. It'll help you to remember the differences between these offerings and what they represent. The blood being sprinkled upon the altar of incense made it clear that until this portion of the offering was completed, in essence, every other aspect of worship ceased. That's kind of interesting. Now take it from another page in the Bible. You remember when the whole camp was stopped? Actually, it happened several times, but the one specifically I'm thinking about is in that famous passage where the whole camp is stopped to find the item that was stolen. Do you remember that? (Yes ma'am.) So nothing could go forward, although that was an intentional act, but just say that everything stopped, everything ceased.
So you could try and go from that angle or you could say it the other way, which is a lot of times not so much for unintentional, but usually for things that we do premeditated; we thought about it and we did it. Usually that builds a wedge between you and God in your communion, in your fellowship, in your- you notice somebody who stops reading the Bible, who stops praying, who's less involved, it becomes easier and easier to do that, and actually the wedge gets bigger and bigger and bigger if you let it be because God is not forcing you, and we always have this propensity to go to the easy way, “It's easier this way.” So all of the sacrifice that was going on had to be completed before anything else could be resumed. The sprinkling of the blood now, I just said on the altar of incense, but they also sprinkled blood depending on who offered on the brasen altar. That restored the children of Israel. The sprinkling of blood upon the altar of incense was for the priests. So there's all these little details involved there.
And you might say, “Well, that's weird; a brasen altar for the children of Israel?” Well, think of the brasen altar, the place of, we'll call it judgment, justice, whatever, versus the altar of incense. And you might say, “Well, that's kind of unfair. So basically the priest's offering is almost like pray to be forgiven versus the average person or the congregation that's still going to judgment.
That's kind of unfair,” but that's the way God prescribed it. We also have to deal with the fat, the fat of the offering. The higher the categories of offerings, the fat was burnt upon the altar. When I say the higher the category, the highest quality of offering, the fat would be offered on the altar. The lesser categories, not much detail is given. It's almost like God was saying, “Oh, you get down to that, there's a little bit of fat, oh, who cares? I'm not even going to talk about it,” right? So I don't know if that was intentionally, if that was unintentionally or intentionally omitted, I don't know. But the fat represents, we'll call it the life force, the vitality, the spiritual health of the being or the individual, if you want to put it that way. So it would essentially signal that it was accepted by God. So even though it is not a sweet savor, that portion of the offering being offered up would be like saying, “Okay, all has been accepted,” like, “Okay, everybody's happy now, you can all go home.” The body or the carcass is cast without the camp.
Once more, the lesser offering doesn't specify what to do with it. So perhaps one area of confusion that I need to address if I haven't confused you enough today is in the higher categories of sin offering, and it's called as such, a sin offering, as I said, no act or trespass is mentioned. In the lesser categories, we read some, sometimes the offering is referred to as a trespass offering and other times a sin offering. That's why I said, I gave you the generic perspective, the whole, but they're minute details. So sometimes you're going to find when you're studying this, sin offering on the lesser degrees may be referred to as the trespass, and they sometimes get almost confused or interchangeable, so just note to self, if you read, don't get confused about that.
And I would highly suggest something. You don't need to go out and buy a Bible. Go online if you don't have- I'm sure most of you have multiple versions of Bibles at home, if you don't have The 26 Translation, go online. There are places like; one of the sites is like Bible Hub, where they've got side by side translations and versions. And it would be very, very helpful, especially for people who wrestle with reading through these passages. Go on there and find a version that you actually can read through, like a breeze, because that's going to help to give you the nuts and bolts. Don't worry about, “Well, this said, this here,” get the gestalt of it first, and then come back to your King James to read and fill in the details. I think that's going to be extremely helpful. Okay, I want to go back to one or two last things before I wrap up here, something interesting that I found when I was studying for this fourth chapter sin offering.
Take a look at this. So, for the priest, it says, “The priest shall make atonement,” I'm sorry, for the congregation, it says, “The priest shall make atonement for them.” For the ruler, it says, “The priest shall make an atonement for him in his sin.” For the common person, “The priest shall make an atonement for his sin which he hath committed.” It's almost like as you get further down the road, we have a greater elaborate- not so much, it doesn't tell us what the sin is, but we have a greater expansion.
So, it goes from just making “atonement for them,” “for him and his sin,” and then “make an atonement for his sin which he hath committed,” almost as if; I hate to say this, but almost as if the magnifying glass has been turned up exponentially on the common person, not so much on the priest, the congregation, and the ruler. I think that's pretty fascinating. Why? Because it will be the bulk of the common people who won't know anything or not too much about God, who would be the most likely to do those unintentional things, so it's kind of interesting the way God's word works that out. I think it's very interesting. So, probably the last but not least here, as I said, I'm going to bring this to a close, is if we look at all of these, and we'll, I think I want to go back and put in some more detail for you because we; sin and trespass, as I said, are probably the, the heaviest categories for us to wrap our minds around and be clear about.
But I think the big thing for me is when I consider what today's society is peddling as- we don't talk, no one talks about sin anymore. No one does, and that's pretty obvious. You know, people can be outraged and they can pound their fists, but you know, an example, for example, of what just happened here in California, some of you who like the Dodgers, you may like sports. I don't; personally, I'm just giving you my opinion. I don't care for that. But I don't care for seeing a bunch of people with painted faces pole dancing on a cross. That's blasphemy. That is to anyone who actually even has a modicum of understanding.
That's the highest disrespect that you could show to my faith, to my Lord. I'm not saying worship the cross because we don't. That's the instrument that He died on. That's all, but still making a mockery of it. So you might say, “How do you apply what you're talking about, which is so disconnected from today's society?” I'm telling you. People who have no God, who are indoctrinated and they make up, they make up as they go; it's all accepted.
It's, it's accepted whether it is intentional by design, which I think in the case I just mentioned it was, but some of them are completely unintentional, and done out of complete ignorance because there is in this universe seemingly, in the world we live in, much less God. Even when you think about it, there were, apparently there were some mass baptisms that occurred a couple of weeks ago in California based on the Jesus movement and the movie and everything. People went out in droves. When I was reading the article, the article told me- I, I love the idea that people came out in droves and it was a mass baptism. That's amazing. But I, I would have really loved to have been there maybe about a couple of minutes walking distance from where these people were baptized to ask them, “Do you know what you just did? Do you understand what you just did? Do you know why you just did it?” because the article told me that the bulk of the people could not have known; something very rote and robotic. That to me is an unintentional lack of understanding theologically of what you're doing and it's your responsibility.
If you can't figure it out, find someone who will tell you, and don't just say- I never tell you, “Take my word.” I tell you, “This is what I'm saying, now you go look it up and you go find the, the backup to what I'm saying.” The foundation is there. You do the research. I never want someone to say, “Well, you said this and,” no, go, go check out what I'm saying. And this is why these lessons, although they seem far removed, they are not. They're very applicable to today. Often sins against God, whether intentional or unintentional out in the world are just trivialized. They're marginalized. There are no consequences. For me, I think the bigger thing is if I would put a label on the fourth chapter of “unintentional,” I'd also attach to it if it was possible to understand that maybe unintentional sins may have been a lack in their day as well as ours of morality, of just being decent. But that's for the reader as you parse these verses to figure out, not for me to micromanage in your thoughts.
But what I want to say to you is there's so much in here that helps us, anybody who's struggling to figure out “What's wrong with me? Why am I not making progress with the things of God? How come I'm not advancing?” start here. Maybe the foundation of your starting point wasn't clear enough. And I'm going to say it for the last time. Your congenital problem affects your behavior and the fruits of that behavior become sin that people check the box on.
They become more worried about that than about dealing with the nature. And this is why this book helps us to understand there are two different concepts. They blend into one, but two different concepts that must be understood separately to understand how much of God's grace, how great a God we serve, that He would make provisions not just for the things that you can check a box on, but He also made provisions for things that you had no clue you were doing. That's a pretty remarkable thing. Now while most people have some premeditated bad ideas about God, “Well, God just hates everything and He's just a killjoy,” how about the God that was gracious enough to say, “If a soul sins unintentionally, unbeknownst to you, here's provision I've made for you because I know what your condition is.” That tells me I'm in really good hands with the God I serve because He recognizes there are things that I may know absolutely, I've been schooled on and there are things that I may not know.
And He takes all of that into account and says, and by the way, He didn't say it here, but the words tell me, even here, God loved the people. He cared for the people. Now we have the full book and we know the full thing and the full picture is this. God says, “I know you're not perfect, but I need you,” the believer “to understand one thing: this is flawed. You may have been created perfectly in Me, but this is flawed by nature, by the blueprint, and then everything else that happens after that, they both have to be dealt with.
And if you can understand that,” God speaking now to us, “I can help you to deal with things you know about and things you don't, because I'm the God that forgives.” And if you read carefully, very interesting, many times over here, “And it shall be forgiven them,” verse 20, “And it shall be forgiven them,” verse 26, “And it shall be forgiven him,” verse 31, “And it shall be forgiven him,” and the last one, verse 35, “And it shall be forgiven him.” So even there God was speaking and we have something and someone infinitely better in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We too, not only shall be, but have been, and that's the most blessed state to be in. If you want to hear more, be here next week. That's my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, teach live from Glendale, California, at Faith Center. Service starts at 11am and all are welcome. If you'd like to attend, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to request your pass.
If you'd like to listen, watch, and learn 24 hours a day, simply log on to our website at www.PastorMelissaScott.com There you will find teaching from the Old and New Testament, from the ancient languages of Heberw and Greek, word studies and perhaps, if you stay tuned, that nagging question you've had about the Bible. Something that you've wanted to know will be answered. I hope you come out and join us Sunday morning, service starts at 11AM. See you here..
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