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
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.
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
foreign [Music] I want to say this to you because a lot of times and I make the same mistake I said to you I’m going to speak honestly to you I make the same mistake sometimes it feels like God must be so far away or I must be so far away from God you ever felt that way good here’s the funny part it’s usually in the times when I think I’m far away from God or God is far away from me that he’s the closest [Music] [Music] yeah 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!As found on YouTubeThe Unexplainable Store http://flywait.unexplain.hop.clickbank.net/ Unleash the power of your brain The Unexplainable Store®The Unexplainable Store® ᴀᴜᴅɪᴏ ʙʀᴀɪɴᴡᴀᴠᴇ ꜱᴛɪᴍᴜʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄʀʏꜱᴛᴀʟꜱ ᵃᵘᵈⁱᵒ ᵇʳᵃⁱⁿʷᵃᵛᵉ ˢᵗⁱᵐᵘˡᵃᵗⁱᵒⁿ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜʳʸˢᵗᵃˡˢ Relaxation Brainwaves | Braintuning Classical {relax} | Guided-Hypnosis for Relaxation | 10-day Mindfulness Meditation 100% No Risk Guaranteel ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS OR YOUR MONEY BACK!
foreign [Music] I want to say this to you because a lot of times and I make the same mistake I said to you I’m going to speak honestly to you I make the same mistake sometimes it feels like God must be so far away or I must be so far away from God you ever felt that way good here’s the funny part it’s usually in the times when I think I’m far away from God or God is far away from me that he’s the closest [Music] [Music] yeah 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!As found on YouTube
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
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!
