foreign what makes a priest a priest a priest for example in your own home that means that you you are basically governing your home as the responsible person through God’s word in your home and what makes a priest or a minister or a pastor to the pulpit that person’s responsibility to the word of God and to delivering the word of God to educating in the word of God to edifying and building up in the word of God nothing else and any any ideology short of that is basically setting up your pastor your minister your priest for failure because it says well they could never be like me and they are that is exactly what Jesus came to show although he was all God and all man he came to show in something we could see and identify with this is what drives me crazy all of these things that the church has taken perverted and then the rest of the world starts to believe that this is the way it works when it’s not I’m just as much a sinner as the next person and find me the holiest air quotes the holiest person on Earth you want to make that the Pope the pope is just as much a sinner as I am in fact I’d go so far to say maybe he beats me by a bit and by the way I like to wear black for the camera but if you told me I had a choice of colors to where I’d probably still wear black and not white because I’ve seen enough people parade around in white and I believe what Jesus said except he wasn’t calling the white and sepulchers for that reason but that’s what I believe about that if you’re going to parade around and try and make people think or look at how holy I am okay save it for somebody who believes that stuff hmm jump only hands coming to this houseAs 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 how am I saved you must be born again from above do not use the Expression I’m a born-again Christian unless you understand what that is all Christians are born again from above that is the Greek word to be born again from above the second birth the first one is when you came out of the womb so put that down as correct verbiage [Music] [Music] coming to this house As found on YouTubeWatch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!
foreign [Music] that this ministry has a wealth of teaching available online literally there’s so many what I like to call tentacles with their channels or different places you can go on the site with so much teaching on a diversity of subjects that if you came here today you tune in for the first time and you’re hoping that I talk on something that I don’t speak on then please go to the website and do some research there there’s tons of things I’m sure you’re going to find if there was something you were looking for you might find it there so I want to encourage those folks who don’t know and the thing that makes in my mind the thing that makes this ministry very different from I think all other Ministries and I don’t think I’ve ever used this word all others you know some Ministries have a great teaching pastor but they don’t have the resource center some people have the resource center but they don’t have a teaching Pastor there’s all kinds of Dynamics here this is a very unusual situation not only that this is not a Ministry that engages in Antics about money or playing games or playing Church so what you what you’re seeing here is what you get I don’t have any stained glass special voices that I can offer you that are more spiritual we don’t have a row of candles lit here literally what I say to you is you learn here and you try to put into application throughout the week maybe using the tools on Sunday to do a Bible study throughout the week study a passage read a verse get into something that you’re not familiar with and start digging and then suddenly you find out this is the reason this ministry exists it is really for the word lover who wants to dig in the word there’s nothing else so if you came expecting great entertainment sorry to disappoint you and if you came expecting somebody to clasp their hands and sound spiritual right now that’s not me either okay I am what I am and I’m just like you no different okay that’s why you know people say I’m surprised of your humor or whatever it is that you try to accomplish okay it’s not always funny I get it but what I’m trying to say is this is who I am and I’m not going to be different in front of you like I’m different now and I’m what you see me when you see me when I’m doing something else no this is who I am I’m not a hypocrite so I share with you in the exact same manner that I take in my devotionals my studies Etc. [Music] magnify the love lift only hands [Music] coming through this house.$69.⁰⁰ / bottle $49.⁰⁰ / bottle (6) $59.⁰⁰ / bottle (3)As found on YouTubeWatch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!
Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either. How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. ♪ ♪ So, we've been in a study now, I think 17-plus weeks, looking at through the lens by way of the New Testament, looking into the Old Testament.
We started with looking at the tabernacle, its furnishings, we moved on to the offerings, and now we are kind of in the set times. And it all ties together, but I've been trying to say this over and over and over again. And maybe you'll hear me repeat it a few times, even in this message today. You've got repeatedly things that are; they are types of our Lord. They are pictures. They are things that when we read them, let's just put ourselves in the Old Testament saints' shoes for a minute and there is no New Testament, just for a second, we would only be seeing one dimension, what God said to Moses, “These are the directions.” That's all we would see, all we would know; we wouldn't know that there's more.
So not just the practical application, but we, reading the full book can see the prophetical application and fulfillment in many of these things, pointing to Christ. Now if I sound repetitive on this, it's because this is what this book does. A lot of people say, “Well, I don't, I don't bother with the Old Testament because it's the Old Testament.” That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm sorry, but that is. Without this Old Testament, even reading the New Testament doesn't really make sense. You know, if you're reading “Jesus, born of a virgin,” ah, okay, but if, if you're reading the Old Testament and you can see that there were prophecies foretold that our Lord would be born of a virgin, that certain things foretelling, that's why you need the Old Testament. You can't do away with it, and why would you? It's only those people who really don't understand why it's here or they are adherence to the old way.
They are still slaying saber-toothed tigers, even though the saber-toothed tiger doesn't exist anymore. So we, we've been looking at, we started with the Sabbath, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, marking the beginning of Israel's feasts, commemorating the deliverance of Egypt, out of Egypt's bondage and the first harvest of the year. Now the New Year would later be marked out in the fall season, so we have two New Years to deal with eventually, but I'll explain that in a minute. All of these set times, all of them, first and foremost in their practical setting, were to remind the children of Israel that time, as well as attorney; eternity, as well as everything else, belonged to God. Now, see, sometimes I think these people were really fortunate because, well, they were. They had the direct sight of everything that happened.
We are living generations after and we are having to, by faith, take everything that's here. They got to see firsthand. So if you think about it, if you lived in that day, you might be a little bit better off in some respects, unless you were the stiff-necked, rebellious children of Israel, but you might be better off in that there was some type of connection. I mean, imagine if you were in Egypt's bondage and you saw the plagues poured out and you saw the most powerful ruler in the then-known land basically succumb to the words of God, letting the people go.
I mean, something tells me it'd be a little bit different than how we are in today's day and age, very distracted, it's take it or leave it. We're all in this very, “I'm not sure it really happened, did it happen that way?” And so to really assess why God made these set times, which I've said already, the set times have a connection or a correlation to Israel's history or in general the history, for example, the Sabbath takes you right back to creation. But much of these set times as we begin to study them, we see that God is saying, I want you to remember something in perpetuity, your deliverance out of Egypt's bondage. And why is that important? Because you could read this, just reading the Old Testament here and say, “Okay, I got it already; they, God delivered them out of Egypt's bondage.” But what if Egypt's bondage is God delivering you out of a life basically with no God, full of sin? If that's, then it would be remembered. It would be something you'd keep thinking of and you'd be grateful for that God opened your eyes, that He found you.
That's called prevenient grace. So when God says to remember their deliverance over and over again, yes, He's talking about that specific act, but we who are reading this should remember two things. It's a double; it's a double whammy for us. The first one is that God made good on His word to deliver the people. He said they would go in to a land that was not theirs, they'd be strangers in that land. They'd come out of that land, greater in number, richer, etc., which they did. And then you've got the double whammy for us as Christians, understanding God has called many out of the darkness into His light and that is the same as being delivered from Egypt's bondage. Your, your eyes have been opened.
So don't think, don't just read it in a one-dimensional way. Now on the fifteenth of Nisan, which is the equivalent to our April, depending on when it falls, but usually it's equivalent to April, the Feast of Unleavened Bread began. It went for seven days; no leaven could be consumed. And we read often a term, if you've ever seen━how many of you have ever seen a Passover booklet called a Haggadah? Okay, so it's a little booklet and basically it's, we'll call it the synopsis of the deliverance story, okay? But what's interesting is the Haggadah, the name on there, “festival” or “festivity,” we don't tend to think about this, but the Passover was referred to that. And in fact, there's a passage in━let's see if the brain's working good here━in Exodus, I'll read it to you if I can find it. Okay, here. So Moses is talking to Pharaoh and he says━“And afterwards Moses and Aaron went in, told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” Now why is that interesting? Because that word is we'ahogu, which is very much, because it's a Semitic language, it's very much like the Arab word hajj.
They're just pronounced differently. So we have that same concept, a “pilgrimage,” or “wandering,” if you will. And these feasts or set times, don't think that they just happened like God said, “Okay, we're going to have a party now.” They were all to tie back, as I said, either in creation, Israel's history, things that God wanted the children of Israel, and after that, us, we who are of the new dispensation, to think on, believe, and obviously this is where I'm going with this.
So we're tying the old feasts and showing how they connect into the New. The law instructed the children of Israel that when they entered the land; this is always missed; when they entered the land, the Promised Land, the land that God said they would enter into and reap the harvest, that they would bring a sheaf of the first grain to the priest who would weave it before the Lord on their behalf. And there's something that I don't know why it's missed often, but I have it open in front of me and I'll read it to you as well from Leviticus 23 and verse 10, “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them,” listen carefully, “When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, there ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.” So clearly, a lot of times people think━first, how could you do a harvest and practice a real true harvest if they wandered for 40 years in the desert? Hello.
So I mean, you could probably harvest some things, but you're constantly moving. So He clearly says, “When you come into the land which I give unto you,” and that's key to understand how this would become regulated and obviously everything in the law becomes regulated. So by yielding and offering their firstfruits of their harvest to God, the first of it, they acknowledge that they were dependent on God for the harvest yet to come. And this is the other thing I'm finding people━you only know what people mess up when you start to read what people have, in good intention, I'm sure, penned. There's a lot of confusion about Firstfruits that is the gathering of the first of whatever and the feast of ingathering, which happens as we'll call it the full-orbed, full-blown harvest at the end of the season, okay. There's, there are differences here. So this particular Firstfruits would have been observed with somber tone.
The sheaf was to be waved on the day after the Sabbath. What we New Testament folks, I refer to this in my message on the Sabbath as the Lord's Day because it's the day the Savior rose. And the apostle Paul refers to Christ, in 1 Corinthians 15:20, as “the firstfruits of them that slept”" So this act, if you will, of our Lord's, of basically of dying and resurrecting and ascending, but the death and Resurrection portion, the Firstfruits hallowed the harvest from which it was taken. So I want you to think on why Firstfruits is important. Now, don't get me wrong, the late Dr. Gene Scott taught on Firstfruits and made it an integral part, if you will, of giving in this church, which people would basically first of the year and whether it's your first paycheck or the first of anything usually, and that's how it was taught.
I'm not saying that that ought not to be done, but there's something actually, in my opinion, infinitely more important than that, and I'm going to tell you what it is. If let's just say we go to glean the firstfruits of whatever is coming up and we're choosing the choicest and the best, it is a type. We're saying; we're not saying, “Oh, I hope that the rest of the harvest is going to be like this.” The firstfruits that we would be offering to God in the agrarian society would definitely be the expectancy of the rest of the harvest.
Does that make sense? Good, because now I want you to think about what Paul wrote when he said, “Christ is the firstfruits of them that slept.” For the Christian, we should expect, it shouldn't be; I don't know why I've done how many funerals and I still see people doing this very same thing, not understanding their faith. And that to me is the greatest, if you want to know what a crime is, that's a great crime because Christ died, went first as the first Goer. We have a right; we'll call it the right of expectancy that we too will be like Him. We too shall rise. That's the concept that for me, the most important concept of Firstfruit to recognize that something like this had not happened before. And don't get Lazarus confused in the mix. Lazarus was called forward to show Christ had the power over the grave and over death, but Lazarus still had to die.
So he's called out of the dead. Deliberately we know that the passage tells us that he was in the grave, and it's either Mary or Martha says, “You know, by now he's going to be stinking. It's been, so”━you know, it's well beyond the third, fourth day now. And that was deliberately put in there because you could not be considered certifiably dead unless three days had passed.
So we know Lazarus was certifiably dead when Christ called him out of the tomb, but that is not the Resurrection. He did resurrect from the dead, but he'd still have to die again, a normal death, and then like everyone else, hate to say it like this, but Lazarus is not like, he's not an exception, like everybody else, all must die. And this is why that expression that says, “Unless a grain of corn go into the earth.” It takes something essentially that looks dead to bring life. So here we have Christ as the first Goer and what was removed, and you're looking at these feast times, what was removed, the impediment, was the ceremonial impurity, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
The relation that the Firstfruits sustain the harvest is one thing, but remember the steps that had to be taken before. So if we understand the laws of the offerings that we looked at, and we kind of string this together, I hate to say it, like beads, it becomes clear that these times were set up with special times before or after one could be cleansed. Let's just say if you were making a sin and trespass offering, and then this would be offered or this would be celebrated. So God had a way of basically making sure everyone could be included if you went by the prescribed method, which we're looking into right now.
And if you're curious to know, Leviticus 23 spells it out. You've got a couple of passages in Exodus, Exodus 23, I believe━don't quote me on that, but I believe it's Exodus 23 as well. And then in Deuteronomy and Numbers, you've got some kind of extra material there, so yours to kind of pick apart. But when I, and you're going to hear me repeat this throughout this message. If the same relationship that the children of Israel had to the harvest, that is the Firstfruits, the expectancy, the, “Okay, we offered, we took the Firstfruits and we offered the best to God”" we are following the same pattern as Christ is the Firstfruits.
We should be expectant. Not “I expect and it may not happen.” No, that's the first harvest of the Resurrection; we are all going to follow that harvest. There's only one criteria, that you remain connected in faith and trust in Christ. We will all be in that harvest. So it's important to understand, or if you want to say, “If He's the Firstfruits, we will be the harvest,” that is the expectancy of the hope that's promised to the believer. Now the apostle Paul also wrote, “He was delivered for our offenses, raised for our justification.” So God laid upon Him, you've heard me say this before, all the iniquity of us all, and it would not have been a finished work had He not, had God the Father not laid that all upon the Son. As for Christ, the law had no further claim to urge penalty or to exact. Hence, He could be raised up from the dead to take His life again. Remember, He said, “I take my life, no one takes it from me.” So even though; see, these are the things that I, sometimes I have to stop and just scratch my head.
Jesus said, “I take my life, I lay it down, I can pick it up again,” essentially. So it makes no sense to me when I hear our Jewish brothers and sisters get very offended when we talk about the act of crucifying Christ. And the reality is, if you think about it, Christ had to die one way or another. If, if His plan, what He says, something's wrong with the world and only His death could fix it, He had to die one way or another. And it always comes down to this, people with lack of understanding will get very offended when we say the religious leaders basically urged Pilate, and the religious leaders were the ones kind of angling for this. Back to my message and my notes here; like the wave offering, waved to be accepted for the people by God, I'd say that Christ also became the wave offering, not accepted by God, but accepted for us by God. There's that little addition that makes everything count. The Firstfruits was the earnest of the upcoming harvest, a pledge that the harvest would be gathered, and there's also a special set time for that, that God says, “And this is harvest time.” So, if we want to talk about this particular Firstfruits, we can't, in this particular subject, we cannot not talk about the Resurrection, because that is how we connect to the New Testament over and over again.
And several times you'll, you'll hear me mention, especially about it, the apostle Paul will mention Firstfruits. So, it's important to understand the connection there starts at the Resurrection. And if you remember the only sign when they came to Him, they said, “Give us a sign. He said, “There'll be no sign except the sign of Jonah,” which was to say, “three days and three nights,” or at least being in the giant fish's belly, only to be spewed out alive, which if you think about it, we're not going to take this too far to the extreme. But that was Christ basically saying, “You want to know what My guarantee is? Now, your guarantee is Firstfruits. Mine is the sign of Jonah.” And you can take that however you want, but Jesus to us, Jesus is the new covenant. He's not just representing a covenant; Jesus is the new covenant, much like the old when it was given, a promise that God would make good on His word, so here Christ is telling these people, basically, “The only sign you're going to get is the Resurrection,” which Paul calls Christ “the firstfruits of them that slept”" He's the first of his kind.
So forgive me for making a circle here, but just as we are connected to the first Adam in our fallen condition, because of nature, condition, etc, we are indeed condemned. It's a death sentence, being born in Adam, in the first Adam, but being born again into the second Adam or the last Adam, which is Christ, brings life. It is the, we'll call it the reconciling or the making right, what was in the beginning, we have now access to the Father by this avenue, the one named Jesus Christ. And not only that, not just access, but the promise. This is the whole amazing thing, in my opinion, about studying these set times. See, these people didn't have a promise of eternal life or immortality. They didn't have that promise. They knew that the first parents had given it away.
We have that promise though, which makes wanting to know about this Firstfruits. As I said, you can talk about the giving part of it, the component of giving, which is important. But I'd like to start with the most important, which is what, why we're here: “If Christ has not risen, our faith is vain.” And I'm not interested in having the discussion with people. Let me just say it now, so I get it out of the way and, and you know, you can be angry with me later if you want, or you can be angry with me now. I do at both. Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either.
How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. That's what makes you a Christian; you're following Christ, you're learning about Him. It's like saying, “Yeah, my family.” Well, if you spend time with them and you live under the same roof or your blood, born blood, or; but there has to be a connection there to say that. You're not going to go to a stranger out there on the street and say, “Ah, that's my, that's my family over there.” That person's going to be looking at you and saying, “Call 8-1-1.” Not 9-1-1, 8-1-1.
Do you know what that is? 8-1-1 is the number you call before you dig a hole, courtesy of the power company. All right, so what makes the difference here? These people didn't have the promise of Resurrection, but we were given that. Christ said, “I need, A) to go away that I might send the Holy Spirit.” Number two, He had to go away showing basically that this was the pattern planned by the Father. His public ministry would give enough time, demonstrate enough miracles, explain enough about why He came. And then the rest was left back, if you think about it, the rest was left back with humankind, “Now you go out there, you teach, you go make disciples, you go make learners of every nation.” He didn't say, “I'll come back and I'll do that work for you.” He said, “Now you go out and do it.” Just as the first Adam was told to go and tend and till the earth, we in the second or last Adam are still tending and tilling the earth, but it's in the human form that we do it, not working and laboring for the ground.
So there's a lot of, I'm sorry, just a lot of confusion. It's very frustrating for me because I find people, even some who have a good intention, would like to tell you that, “You know, if you come on Easter, it's enough.” That's just a show. How would you like to be married to somebody and you only show, you only come home once a year? It's kind of like that, okay? I don't think that's a marriage, by the way; anyway, enough of my opinions here. So we know, by the way, why Paul wrote, “For we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him,” because we shall be like Him. That is the promise of Firstfruits, and this is why this is so vitally important. The same Spirit of God that opened up the believer's spiritual eyes, that raises us from the death of sin and the life of righteousness in Christ, descends upon a lifeless body.
Now the Spirit's already in the person, but there's also that, what I call the, that the helping Spirit; and don't quote me on this, I'm just trying to make this as clear pictorially as possible, that takes the final, final claim on what is inside the believer. So that means whatever the person's person was, plus the Spirit of God. You remember, I taught on this many years, the part payment, the arabon, it's called in the Greek. Now that ticket is turned in for the whole person, not just, “Hey, I tag you with my Spirit because you belong to Me,” but the whole individual. That means everything in my memory bank, all that I━not this shell, but everything that I am at the point of death basically is released with the Spirit to be with God until a new body, until the time that a new body will be granted to every single believer in Christ. So here's the kind of, we'll call it the litmus test.
I'm curious to know how many people actually believe, don't answer me; I'm curious to know how many people actually believe what I just said because you know, people actually believe that it's very clear to me that we deceive ourselves all day long. You know, you, you, you can be a biohacker, you can be engaged in fitness, eat the cleanest diet, have the best mental health. And when God says it's your time, it's your time. You don't get to bargain. You don't get to plea deal. It is what it is. So this is what is all equally baffling. If you knew and understood, which I hope that every creature that's born on the earth can come to understand and know that there's a terminus to life.
Don't think I'm talking like the grim reaper. This is actually a message rooted in extreme hope and certainty of what's said here that I wouldn't be looking at that day and saying, “My God, no, help me for I'm not ready to go.” No, when that time comes, the expectancy, because I've known; I'm sorry to say this, it's going to sound a little bit funny when I say this, but I've known the Firstfruit for a long time.
And I'm not trying to be blasphemous when I say that. So if I've known Him for a long time and I've built my relationship on that, then when I come to that hour, that moment, I have the expectancy and it's not something that may or may not happen. This either happened, He either died and rose up or He didn't. Now that, I think we've settled in many messages on the Resurrection. So if a person has settled that and you believe that this is absolutely true, that a man, all-man/all-God died, was put to death and rose from the dead, then the expectancy for you and for me should be just like these children of Israel with the Firstfruit of the harvest. They went in there looking for the choicest and the best, presenting it first to the priest as a wave of offering and presented to the Lord with expectancy, that the rest of the harvest, not━and expectancy is a bad word because it leans towards, is there a possibility that it may not be as good as the things that we offer to God, but in fact it's the promise that what we rendered to God at the first, the rest of it, it's putting God first, God takes care of the rest of the rest, but the rest will be just as bountiful and just as good.
And that's why it's important to make these connections between those Old Testament saints and we who believe in Christ, we who faith and trust Christ for our salvation. So I'm going to try and paint a little picture here that gives some understanding because there's a lot, you know, in these feasts there's a lot to think about. Of course there is the sowing of seed, the caring for, ultimately the harvest that would be reaped. And I can tell you as someone who has just recently started growing a lot of food, it's hit and miss. You plant a seed and you can hope and pray, but trust me, the passage says, “Thou shall not kill,” I've probably killed a couple of hundred plants of late, okay? Some people have that green thumb and some people don't.
But imagine this is, you can't just go down to Publix or Vons. You're in the desert, wherever you are, this is your food supply. This is, if it's messed up, you're all going to starve. I want you to think of it in that respect. So going to get those, planting the seeds, taking care to tend and then seeing the first harvest, the first thing that comes out of the ground would be almost, silly, but miraculous. And if the rest of the crop came out like the first part, that'd be even more miraculous, but that's the promise of what God basically was saying, “Put Me first, I'll bless and take care of the rest.” Now the prosperity people get a hold of this and they milk, manipulate, and twist the heck out of that verse to make it mean something that it doesn't.
And you're never going to hear me talk to you about something like that because I don't do that. That's not what God promises either. God's blessings, if you're really interested, you've probably received more and I've probably received more in terms of blessings than most people I know, and they're not tangible. They're not tangible. To be able to stay in the faith. Look, we're living in an age of crisis and chaos and craziness. To be able to stay connected in faith, still look unto Him, still have the sense that I belong to Him no matter what's going on in the world I'm okay because He's got me and I've got Him! Now at the temple time, because remember it said, “When you come into the land,” so I'm going to jump to the temple time. But at the temple time, messengers of the Sanhedrin, those dirty rats, they would go out from Jerusalem on the evening of the feast and they would bind all of the tall standing corn and bundle it to make it easy to be taken up.
See, they had all these little ways of getting around God's rules and regulations and this is one of them by the way, it's kind of interesting. And no wonder why God said, “Enough.” If you keep trying to find ways to sneak around God's back, I think God eventually is saying, “I saw all of it. I didn't just see one time, I saw it all, you children of Israel, you,” all right? Sometimes it's hard to say what you want to say. All right, later at the time of the temple, the grain would be threshed with rods so that the barley corns were not injured. After this it would be parched over an open flame, winnowed in the wind, and that would remove the chaff. Finally the barley corn would be milled and put to an extensive sifting process until it was sifted finely. And to show you how; sorry, how nutty this was, according to the writings in the Talmud, the sifting would go on and on and on and on and on and on until a temple inspector/priest could plunge their hands into the flour, remove the hand without any flour adhering, and then it would be ready.
But I mean the procedure that they did just went on and on and like overkill. But anyway, that, that's their business, not mine. So the sixteenth of Nisan, the Firstfruits were presented to the Lord, an omer of barley, which would equal approximately five pints, was mixed with three quarters of a pint of olive oil and a small amount of frankincense was sprinkled upon it. This was the Firstfruits offering. It was then waved before the Lord by the priests in accordance with Leviticus 23:11-13. Firstfruits was a national observance, not just a singular. So each family at this set time would have to bring their Firstfruits. Every family, one set, one set offering for each family unit, right? So you're not; if you have five people in the family, five people aren't offering Firstfruits.
It's offering from that household, from that family. We have a clearer picture recorded for us by the time of the temple than we do in the tabernacle because it clearly tells us that it says, “When ye enter into the land,” they had not yet entered into the land. And if we were looking at what happened at the time of the temple, there would have been a lot of buzzing, a lot of mulling around, a lot of chatter going on right outside of the temple with people probably repeating Psalm 150 and verse 1, “Praise God in His sanctuary.” Perhaps on the inside you might hear sounds of Psalm 30 being sung out, if you will, “I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou have lifted, you have lifted me up, and have not let my foes rejoice over me.” Essentially there would be some type of psalm before entering and then upon entrance, something worshipful and joyous to the Lord.
That's how they would do it. In the court of the priest, the flames would be seen dancing feverishly from the altar in a trail of smoke that would be ascending. In the court of the Israelites, a steady stream of men could be seen on the steps of the temple, presenting their offerings to the priest. So if you get the whole picture, you know, we tend to maybe have images of things, but we tend to think of the temple really does give the fullest embodiment of this, people lined up with their offerings on the steps waiting to get in. I mean that's pretty powerful if you can imagine and envision what I'm talking about. Now today's modern Judaism, Firstfruits are not offered because there is no temple. Only a ritual survives today of counting the days, perhaps marking them off on a calendar. And this is where, again, I'm going to say things that are controversial, but I'll just say them.
Because there's no temple and there's therefore no priest, but why would you not offer an offering? See, this is where I get a little bit like, okay, there's no more temple for you, but in this day and age where there's synagogues, okay, and there's places of worship, if you are going to be slaying saber-tooth tigers, right? Does everybody know what I mean when I say that? Okay, good. Because if I have to explain it, I will; I don't want anybody to go, “What the hell is she talking about, saber-toothed tigers?” They're extinct, okay? No, there's one at the back of the room. So my point is this, it's mind-boggling to me that Christians and Jews are reading the same book, and the book didn't say, “Now you'll stop.” Okay, I get it, at the fall of Jerusalem, everything ceased. But now you've got places of worship, so why, why wouldn't you do that? “Oh, because we don't live in an agrarian society anymore,” okay, but there's other ways to present Firstfruits, and we've exercised them here for probably at least 40 years.
So there's a lot of things. I don't know, is this as selective, how we're going to worship? Do we, do we engage in selectivity? How do we decide what we worship and what we don't? What we say, “Oh, we don't do that anymore. We just mark it on the calendar, but we don't do that anymore.” I don't understand. And don't, you try to understand because it won't make sense to you either. So first things, first things in general, are very important to God. If you remember, just take the passage of the children of Israel in Egypt's bondage, the firstborn.
So when we think about firsts, that's important. And the first, when I speak of Firstfruits, yes, the harvest is one, but the Firstfruits, first things, Christ coming out of the grave, I'd say, “Put these two things on a very equal plane and understand,” and this is what I think is very important. First things with God matter, and I think they still matter today. Not so much as you're firstborn versus your thirdborn, or if you; whatever it is that's first, but the concept of putting God first.
That still matters to God. See, there are things I can say to you, God has not changed. It's we who have changed, and that's a big problem because I don't think, if people are not being taught a template; that doesn't━don't be a box checker, but if you “put God first, He takes care of the rest” is a concept that basically summarizes Firstfruits. And the promise is to expect no less than what was offered could, in this case, let's say, whatever your crop was; that the rest of the crop would be likewise.
There wouldn't be bugs, it wouldn't be destroyed, it wouldn't be rotted; fill in the blanks, okay? Now in the New Testament, there are no less than seven mentions of Firstfruit, but they deal directly with Christ or with followers of Christ. So the apostle Paul spoke of Epaentus as the firstfruit of Achaia or Achaia in Romans 16:5. He also refers to a Stephanas in 1 Corinthians 16:15. And the difference, because they're both, both being referred to as the firstfruits of Achaia, but one of them is of an individual, the other is of Stephanas, of he and his household, which also must be understood like this, because a lot of it was church in the home.
So it could have meant not Stephanas and his family alone, but the church around him in his house as well. So that's ambiguous, we can't know exactly, but one is to an individual, one is a family. Paul also used the Firstfruits in referencing what was pinched from the dough to teach that if the Firstfruit is holy, then the lump is also holy. He says that in Romans 11:16. By this he means if God chose whomever He chose, say Abraham or Jacob, then the whole lump, that means the whole, all the children of Israel, let's; if we're using that reference, okay? Paul also used the term Firstfruits in relation to the Holy Spirit and the fruits that are manifested within the believer. So all of these components are important, because what they paint is a picture of the whole Christian, of what we are to be focusing on as believers. We're not to be focused on, you know, a thousand different things.
Our focus is, look unto Him, the Author and Finisher of salvation, Jesus Christ. And if we're going to talk about how that focus remains, it's kept by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us, guides us, teaches us, instructs us, help, helps us to even learn while we are being taught. You know, I was reading a message in my office and the message said, “I finally found you again. I lost track of you for several years.” But this person also went on to say how when they were watching, they tuned in and they tried to understand, and it was like I was speaking a foreign language, and now they've learnt more in the last six months.
And the person says in their message, “Maybe I just; it wasn't God's time yet for me.” And that's exactly it. I know because many of you are just like that. I'm like that. I've shared with you my anger. Why couldn't God have opened my eyes sooner, right? But that was part of God's plan. He knew the timing to be harvested, at least to be picked or opened up, right? Because that's what He does. He knows how to do it. We talk about the deposit of the Spirit in each believer. I just referenced as a type of Firstfruit. And much later in the book of Revelation, we'll encounter the 144 preachers of righteousness who will be sealed just prior to the opening of the seventh seal; all these numbers are important, 12,000 from each tribe sealed from God's wrath at the very start of the day of the Lord.
And that expression alone becomes important because these 144,000 will be preaching to people and there will be what we'll call a final harvest, an end harvest. That will be it. That's the final call, like you're in a bar, “Last call for alcohol,” “Last call for salvation happening right here with 144,000 peppered throughout the earth. That's it. That's your last call.” And I, I would really love for people to read that passage and don't read it like it's a cartoon or it's some caricature that maybe will happen. No, that's, that's what God said is going to happen in the future. And by the way, we're, we're far enough along in the world to see what's going on to know that most of the stuff that is being foretold of in the future, for us is coming to pass. So, I don't know, you know, when God has a pretty good track record of, of making things that he says happen, happen, you've got my attention. I don't need to be convinced or coerced into believing what is blatantly obvious.
So these 144,000 are called Firstfruit. They will be the guarantee that God has not cast away all His people or the ones that didn't answer immediately forever. But rather that God will purify the remnant, just as was prophesied by Daniel, in Daniel's seventieth week. Now I know I'm probably saying stuff that some may not be familiar with and that's okay, stick around and we'll eventually get to it. But this is how the apostle Paul makes a bold claim when he says, “All Israel will be saved.” That is in Romans 11:26. If you read that passage carefully, it makes perfect sense that he's talking about a final harvest that will occur.
It makes perfect sense to me. And I, I hate to sound redundant and repetitive, but in the book of Zechariah, it explicitly says, “They will look upon him whom they have pierced and they will mourn,” meaning they will recognize that the very Savior that they said is “A fraud, it's a lie, it's not true. And we're waiting for our Messiah who's not your Messiah” will go, “Uh-oh, my bad. He was the one all along.” Can you imagine that? I mean, I can, I actually have to feel sorry for people who have been so closed in their thinking that they couldn't read the Old and see the description of the One who came in the New.
It's Him; there aren't two Messiahs, there's only One. He was here and He's coming back and God's going to give those people who rejected Him a second chance, which is why when we read passages that talk about all the people coming to the mount to worship, again, don't think that's a caricature. Why is Israel such a big deal? For the right reasons, not all the ones that a lot of people in ministry try to make it a Zionist movement or they try; no, because the Bible says, “In this little swath of land, basically where I started I will finish.” Don't, don't get more hung up on the land or the people, and the people who are there now won't even be there, likely when He returns. And I won't tell you why either. And it has nothing to do, and it has nothing to do with the rapture either. So leave that one alone. The Firstfruits, like Israel's other springtime feasts, has its fulfillment, fulfillment in Christ's first coming, but perhaps the more important emphasis should be, but now Christ is risen from the dead, has become the Firstfruit of those who have fallen asleep.
And we know that Jesus rose from the dead━I told you I'd be repeating a lot, which I'm doing━which makes the fulfillment of that feast as it's applied to Him. Just put a period there because He did come out of the grave. The Resurrection is a guarantee of harvest of souls that will be like Christ. The fact is that there is life after death, not just we just cease being.
Daniel says something pretty profound. Remember, Daniel, he's not known for these things, but his 70 weeks and all the messages within his book are New Testament, or as New Testament as you can get. He says, “And many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame, and some to everlasting contempt,” which means all. Check this out. The resurrection or the resurrected life if you will; oh, you're going to love this, all will be resurrected. All. But not all will be resurrected with Christ. Would you like me to say that again? All will be resurrected, but not all will be resurrected with Christ. Some will be resurrected to eternal damnation. That's also resurrected life that lives on in perpetuity in torment. “Oh, I don't like that.” Well, I didn't write those words, so don't, don't come complaining to me. But, you know, even Christ said something that was pretty shocking in His day.
He said, “Do not marvel for the, for the hour is coming in which all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come forth, some to resurrected life and others to condemnation.” That's John 5. So even out of the mouth of our Lord, He even says this. Don't think everybody gets a ticket and you're all going to paradise. Some are going to get a ticket to “Coffee Break's Over”; that, the ones that laughed, I know how long you've been around, okay? I know where you live. So there's always been two parts to the harvest, and there will always be two parts to the harvest, the wheat and the chaff.
And that sums it up for you. Some will inherit and receive eternal life, dwell with God forever, and some will inherit eternal punishment. And those that belong to Him, that have trusted Him, that have looked to Him their entire time of knowing Him; and that could be a day, a year, a lifetime, they will be resurrected in the same fashion, the same way as He was. So let me take a minute now to wrap this up because I'm really out of time. The main reason for preaching these messages is to demonstrate God didn't just set out in the Old to put together a whole bunch of nonsensical, ceremonial, “Now, these are these routines we do at a set time.” They were all pointing to the future.
They were all pointing to Christ. I explained to you how Christ; we talked about the Sabbath, and we are Sabbathing in Christ daily. I talked to you about the Passover when God said, “Celebrate this, basically in perpetuity as a memorial.” Well, we are, because how could you not do two things? Remember the children of Israel's deliverance out of Egypt's bondage, and then remember your own deliverance out of this world flesh and devil bondage. Now your eyes are open and you can be able to celebrate and to rejoice and to be glad in the Lord. So when I say, without, as I said earlier, without the Old Testament, we wouldn't have the full picture of why it matters.
And if you want to put kind of the exclamation mark, Paul says in Romans 8:29, essentially that we are the first, in terms of brethren or sistern, we are the first of many, the body of believers. So it becomes clear that the church of Jesus Christ must continue until the final harvest of souls comes. Now I cannot tell you how long that time will be. The Bible's very clear, no one knows the day of the hour, but there are signposts.
There are things we can see happening in the world, and wars and rumors of wars. That doesn't mean the end is here. Trust me, when there are definitive signposts along the way that must happen that will tell you the time is nearer and nearer and nearer when these things happen. Some of these have not happened yet. That's why I said to you, there's a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of weird stuff going on.
There's a lot of scary stuff going on, but the end is not tomorrow. Don't, don't walk out here going, “Oh my God, we're doomed tomorrow, tomorrow.” It's not like that. And I'd say to you, if there's anything that should be a takeaway from this message, and I'm, I don't engage in the antics of evangelists, but if anything is a takeaway, especially for people who are not so familiar in listening to me, it would be take the time now while you have the time. The Bible says redeem the time. Take the time now to begin learning about Him, learning about who He is, His ways, His message, His words, not to study them and repeat them like a rote computer, but that His words and Christ may dwell richly in you, that when the day comes, you're not scrambling to figure out what you need to do. You know what; you've already done it, you've already taken care of business. And I'm sorry to say it like that, but just to be as colloquial as possible so there is no misunderstanding.
It is, it is truly, it confounds me that people, if, if people say, “Well, it must be in the last days,” or “It must be close,” well, then why aren't you pressing in closer with God? That's going to be the thing that keeps all of us, I hate to tell you, sane, calm, and with the clarity of vision to know what to do while the stuff is hitting the fan. So I would say to you in, in an age which people don't seem to be that concerned, the church is very important, not the building, but as the Greek calls it, a people that belong to the Lord.
And if we who are trusting Christ, and I'm going to say it this way, you know there's a Scripture that says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” We have been partakers of that goodness. We have tasted what the Lord has in store for those that trust Him. Then it is indeed just like the Firstfruit, we can say, “This offering of Christ stands,” in, in terms of our version of time, “as the expectancy promised,” not, “I'm not sure it's not going to happen,” for you and for me.
Put a period there. Don't be trying to figure out “How much more, what more can I do?” That's the other problem that people engage in, “What more can I do?” Now, one last footnote here and then I'm done. We have a lot of people that will give a Firstfruit offering. And listen, I'm really a strange bird when it comes to money, and I say that because I believe that when we read the New Testament there's great clarity and understanding. God does love a hilarious giver. God loves the spirit of the person; we're not just talking about money, we're talking about somebody who says, “Sure, I'll help you out.
Sure, I'll give you a hand,” that generous nature. So when I say to you, Firstfruits is not just about everything that I've talked about, but it is also about understanding, presenting the first of whatever comes into your hand, and you can't just, where, where do you give it to God? Well, you can't, but the Bible says you bring your tithes and your offerings to the storehouse, wherever you get your spiritual food. And I still believe that's a good way of saying, “I'm putting God first”" That, that's like something that, I hate to say it like this, but it actually costs you something. And I had to learn this from our good friend, Ray Sidney. He said, “You know, you shouldn't give anything away for free,” he was referring to the people in Japan, “because then they don't think it has any value.” And I thought, “That's kind of odd, but okay, if that's your, if that's your mindset.” But if you think about it in God's book, for how much it costs for God to send and give His only begotten Son, and we who take it so casually, I think the concept of Firstfruits is brilliant, because what it does is it says, you know, we don't work to get in, we don't labor in works of the flesh, but it does say, “I'm, I'm giving my first to God, which is my best and my first.” And that could be in dedicating your child, could be any number of things, but I'm not specifically talking about Firstfruits in giving right now.
And I'd say to you, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as the person's doing it for the right reasons. Don't give with strings attached. Don't give and say, “Yes, but I, I'm hoping that if I do this, this will happen.” If you're doing Firstfruits for the reason I said, which is putting God first and He takes care of the rest, then I applaud you and I think it's a good thing.
Any other motives for doing it are the wrong motives and I don't agree with them. Now, I know that's a little bit strange, the way I just worded that, but what I'm trying to tell you is, I'm the person who's known for, I think in all of ministry, there, there might only be one person that does this and it's, it's this person right here who sends back offerings to people who don't get it. And I'm talking about people who have been abusive to me in the past or they think they're going to tell me how to run the church or how to conduct or whatever. I don't want your money. We're not; this is not that type of church.
I'm not here to take your money or grab your money or do anything with your money, because it's not your money anyway; it's God's, ha, ha. But what I am saying to you is I can give you structured ideas that if they're carried out right, they, I believe are good in God's eyes and if they're carried out, like anything else, if they're carried out for the wrong reasons, like people who give to get, if that's your mindset, you're not giving to God.
You're doing some investment scheme or you're doing some trading deal with God. But if you're really giving, this is God's, the rest God lets me keep and He puts His stamp of approval on it. He blesses me for that very reason. Now, I can't tell you what else to do, but I can tell you in these feasts as we've been looking at them, I love this one in particular because going back to the whole message I just preached, it tells me if you and I have that same expectancy, like those people that took the first of their crop, and we should have that expectancy, then there's no reason in the world why whatever we face, whatever we deal with, whatever sickness comes under our dwelling, whatever pitfalls may happen, whatever this country goes to hell in a handbasket, which it's halfway there right now, but I've connected myself to God, I'm not letting go.
I'm going to be just like Jacob/Israel. I may be a little bit crippled right now, but I'll be God-damned if I let go because I know He's the only one that can take me through this. He's the only one that can take you through all of this. So wouldn't you, you'd think you'd want to do your best. In that respect the Firstfruits speaks volumes to me. I hope it speaks to you. We'll continue on with these, but for today that's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center.
If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
foreign [Music] I wanted to say I appreciate letters anything that comes my way somebody taking the time to sit down and write by whatever format I don't care it means the world to me but I also take the time when I see something maybe twisted out of context to correct it so here is one this came in a letter from a King's house and King style that looks relatively new and I'm grateful for you writing me but the person says I know we are not supposed to give testimonies I never said that what I said is testimonies cannot listen what happened to me may not happen to you but in the big picture let me just say this every person who calls themselves a Christian has a testimony make no mistake about that okay if you say oh I don't have one it's because you're too busy focused on the person who stands up who says well I used to be this and now I'm that and you don't understand what it means to say a sinner saved by grace and looking at oneself we all have a testimony the reason why I am against testimony in church is because that is personal subjective to the person and my experiences are not yours so I'm not against testimony per se simply not in a public form and not added to a church service I believe all it does most of the time when people stand up and say what the Lord's done for them usually it creates a sense of well hmm the Lord didn't do that for me or I was never like that when in fact every single person who calls on the name of Jesus Christ has a testimony so I want to clear that up [Music] [Music] coming to this house
foreign many people who tune in they say I'm not sure that I understand everything you said that's okay because I didn't understand everything at the first and most people tell the truth so that the world can hear when you came in you first started listening did it all make sense to you so don't think out there that you're somehow unique because you don't understand it's called tenacity to stay with the stuff until something clicks the lights come on and you actually say oh my God why didn't I see this sooner how many that that was my experience why didn't I see this sooner how unfair is that that God didn't open my eyes sooner but thank God he did [Music] [Music] coming to this house
When people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin. ♪ ♪ ♪ The Passover is described in Exodus 12, after the nine or depending on how you reckon it, ten plagues; nine or ten, depending on your reckoning have been unleashed and afflicted on the Egyptians with little effect.Then God directs Moses to declare this firstborn; that all the firstborns must die in the land of Egypt, man, and beast. This would eventually break the Egyptian hold and let the people go under Moses’ lead. Now I always think this is interesting because there’s a lot here and this is where you might say to me when I taught on the Sabbath, “I can’t exactly see the connection,” because for some people who have not spent enough time in the word, they may not. But here you cannot miss it. So between the death of the firstborn and the institution of the Passover, you have some great clarity here on what God is doing. Now imagine this. Imagine you are enslaved in Egypt’s bondage and imagine that you were born in Egypt. You just didn’t get there. People were born there for a couple of hundred years. So you would A) not have the frame of reference. Most people think, Oh, they were, they were celebrating certain ceremonies already while they were in Egypt.” No, they were not because all of these instituted feasts happened after, either the night that they were liberated or onwards, but there was nothing before that.There was, there was no law given before that. So there was no keeping of customs per se as we have them recorded here. And why that’s important because we begin to see in these practices how there is no way that while they were in Egypt’s bondage, they could have known too much about God. They couldn’t have. So imagine if you were in bondage, you’re in Egypt, and you see all these plagues hit.Now to me, you know, you could say, “Well, one might be a fluke.” You know, and you might see the second one. You say, “Well, that’s odd.” And a lot of people try; I love this, have you ever watched these documentaries where they make rational excuses for miracles of God? Do you ever see that? (Yes ma’am.) “Oh, well, you know, it, it had to be that on that day there was a, a fire bolt of lightning that came down that turned the whole place into ash, and there couldn’t be a God involved in it.” So it’s interesting that here there are too many events for the children of Israel to just go, “Huh,” like, “I’m not sure I can believe in this God” I mean after you see all this stuff, and then God gives the instructions and says basically in a nutshell (we’re going to read the passage in a second), but basically in a nutshell, “All the firstborn are going to die in the land of Egypt unless you heed what the directives are to apply the blood, a specific thing to do, which is taking an animal into your house on the tenth day,” would be in your household for four and a half days; call it that, because the sacrifice that would be the Passover lamb would be sacrificed between the fourteenth and the fifteenth day of the month, and the blood would be applied.And there’s a whole prescription for how to do this. Now imagine you’ve seen all of the plagues fall. You’ve seen everything happen. The water turns to blood, the frogs; you see it all. So when God says, “Apply the blood as I’ve instructed you,” I think for the most part, even if you didn’t know who God was, you’d have enough of fear, maybe you might have the mindset like the Egyptians did of the plural gods, but you’d have enough of a mindset to know after seeing all this to do it.Not because you know who God is, but because you see there’s some type of power at work. I’m trying to say that maybe the children of Israel in Egypt’s bondage didn’t know as much as we tend to think they did about God. So that’s important. The second thing is that this event takes place on the first day; as I said, it falls between the night of the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And we will read the procedure for this speaks volumes about what God was trying to convey for something not just practical, but also prophetical. Let’s take a look. I want to read through the eleventh and twelfth chapter because it paints the picture, and I think without that it might be hard for some people that they are not familiar. So Exodus 11 says, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterward he will let you go hence: when he shall let you go, ye shall surely thrust; he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether. Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.And the LORD gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and the sight of the people. And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out amid Egypt: and all the firstborn of the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and the firstborn of the beast,” so anything firstborn, anything and everything firstborn.“There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, or there will be nothing after it like this. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against a man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” And this is very interesting because here God is not yet; I’m sorry to say it like this, God has not yet had the bad taste in His mouth of these rebellious, stiff-necked people who simply would not do what God said. But here obviously they do. He’s, so He’s now saying, “There’s a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” Later it will be, “Moses, they’re your people,” right? (Laughter.) “And all these thy servants shall come down unto me, bow down themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee: and after that I will go out. And he went out from Pharaoh in great anger. And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you; that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land. And the LORD spake,” There’s no chapter and verse here, I’m just going to go right into it. “The LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Kind of interesting, by the way, that means that they had to have been reckoning time according to the Egyptian reckoning of time, because God says, “Now there’s a new way to reckon time,” and it’s here.“Speak ye unto the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth month; In the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house: and if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of souls, every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb.” I like that, that’s the fact that God is saying, “If there are too few of you, you can join together with your neighbor, and this can be an act done together with your neighbor.” “Your lamb shall be without blemish, the male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or the goats: and ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.And they shall take of the blood, strike it on the two side posts of the; and on the upper door post of the house, where they shall eat it.” So God’s very clear, the door, the sides, and the top to be covered with this blood. “They shall eat the flesh in that, in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs, they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs,” so you get the idea. God is saying, “This is how I want it done.” “Ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth,” if there’s anything left over, you’re going to burn it completely. So there’s not going to be anything left over. “Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, staff in your hand; you shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD’S Passover,” so a couple of things are said here.You know, this is probably the original dine and dash, okay, probably, but God’s giving the instructions, so I guess it’s okay. But I want you to look at something. So when we looked at the Sabbath, it was the Lord’s Sabbath. Here it is the Lord’s Passover. Now, in Judaism, even today, every year, if people are adhering to this and they’re still keeping a Passover, they are recounting this whole passage in what is called a “Passover Haggadah.” It’s a little book that kind of chronicles the Passover/Exodus story if you will. And then there is the main meal, and it’s very interesting because if you, if someone were to analyze, and many people have, but if you were in your own time to analyze, you could see that a lot of the things that are being consumed at this Passover Seder, actually have some correlation to the New Testament as well.So it’s kind of interesting. They correlate in many ways to Christ because Christ, as Paul says in the New Testament, Christ, our Passover. So here are the instructions. Verse 12 begins, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt will I execute judgment: I am the LORD.” So the first thing that’s going to happen is all the firstborn are going to die, and those who remain, they will see that it is the Lord that is doing this thing.“And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the house where you are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt. And this day shall be unto you for a memorial, and you shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever.” Remember, I just said to you last week, anytime you read that in the Old Testament, it means that it is attached to a prophetic fulfillment in Christ pointing to or around either Christ coming in the flesh or His return. Here, this is talking about and pointing to Christ in the flesh of Him laying down His life. And what we are to do in the New Testament, we are told basically to partake of the Lord’s Supper until He comes, the cup representing the blood, and the body, if you will, the roasted lamb for strength.Some people talk about the wafer that people use, the round wafer which is, was never a part of anything. It’s just broken bread, that’s all. Broken bread, that’s unleavened, that’s all. “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” That’s a pretty sharp thing to say. So if you’ve got leaven and you consume it, it says you’re cut off from Israel. “And the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and in the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation to you; no matter; no manner of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you.And you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread.” So very interesting that the prescription is here telling us basically and goes into the Feast of Unleavened Bread which a lot of people, including the New Testament, you’ll read where people tend to say “eight days of Passover,” which is not so. It is Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and you can kind of follow the feasts that are clustered together within that period, including if there are Sabbaths involved. “So seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born the land.” So it doesn’t matter who you are, if you eat leaven, you’re toast, all right.(Laughter.) “You shall eat nothing leavened; in your, in all your habitations; you shall, you shall eat unleavened bread” So here Moses calls out for the elders of Israel, says to them, “Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, kill the Passover. Ye shall take a bunch of hyssops,” imagine a cluster of what would be like branches that have leaves on them, so to speak, “dip it in the blood that’s in the bacon and strike the lintel in the two side posts with the blood that’s in the bason: none of you shall go out at that door of his house until the morning.” So I find it interesting, because here it says, “The LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel and the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. And you shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and thy sons forever.” So again, when God says forever and ever, you’ve got to look at this dispensation that would come to a close.So whatever it is that God says is forever has a prophetic fulfillment to it. We know, of course, the prophetic fulfillment is in Christ. So the next question somebody may ask, because we’re trying, we’re trying to build the foundation for this message, is a lot of people will ask this question, which the answers are in the Bible. I think it’s kind of strange that people do not recognize, for example, that Jesus would have celebrated the Passover. There’s always this argument, would He have, would; of course He would have. His parents both adhered to the prescribed way that was being kept for hundreds if not thousands of years. And you read first in Luke 2, and I believe it’s about verse 40, where He was with His parents during the Passover.And that’s the time where He is left behind, and they don’t realize that they’ve left Jesus behind. That’s the first case of child abandonment (laughter) recorded in the Bible. And then the next one that we encounter is in John’s Gospel, the opening of John’s Gospel, where it talks about when He went into the temple when Jesus went into the temple, it was during the Passover at that time when the money changers were sitting.That’s, that particular instance happened, or that scenario happened during the Passover. There are all of these so subtle messages there, because if you think about it, Christ who is our Passover, and Christ knowing that he was the Lamb, John declared, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” But think of this, He’s going into the temple on the Passover seeing the money changers, and if you can kind of wrap your mind around this, we have that scenario ongoing still today, because instead of being about our Father’s business, there are people that are- I just talked about this regarding the flag, you could make it money, you could make it the flag, anything that doesn’t belong. And this is why He turned over the tables and chased them out of the temple. And this is why I won’t stay quiet about these things because it is the same principle. You cannot let the world come in and run its affairs inside the house of God. You can’t do it, you can’t let that happen.You let, you let it happen once, you see what’s happening everywhere else. So with that said though, the instructions show us clearly that Christ kept the Passover with His parents, and then thereafter; there’s no reason not, to come up with the idea that He did not. And then we see from the apostle Paul’s writing when he talks about, and I just mentioned, Christ our Passover. So remember I described in the reading, it is the Lord’s Passover and Christ becomes ours. And just even that subtle distinction tells you why when people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin, which is on a much greater scale than the exodus out of Egypt.If you want to put it in that, in those terms, that’s why we’re talking about Old and New relevance. Now the other thing that I like about this is that, as I said, if a person’s still not sure about the correlation between Old and New, we have all of these different things being said. The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, that is in Christ, or Christ is our Lamb. Even the details, when we get to the New Testament, of seeing kind of the preparation. And the reason I think that God said on the tenth to bring this lamb and look at it, see it, take it into your house; I want to use a strange term because I’m, I’m exaggerating now, but imagine looking at this, having to look at this animal, knowing this innocent animal is going to be slaughtered. And you’ve got to look at this thing for the next four and a half days.You’re looking at, its sweet eyes or its, whatever it’s doing, and it may be cute or it may be not cute, I don’t know, but you’ve got to look at it. That means that there is a connection to it. It’s not just an animal that was going to be killed, something that would become dear to you, almost hurtful to sacrifice. And these are, I guess, lessons God was trying to paint in pictures to show us the sacrifice, what the sacrifice of Christ was to our heavenly Father is, and we tend to just, I think a lot of people just take it very cheaply because it’s so disconnected from us. We don’t have that same proximity. That’s why I said, a person should develop a relationship with Christ and get to know Christ and know the word, and it would give you a better sense.And I, I’m going to be at a lack to describe this, so indulge me for a minute and forgive me because I’m at lack to find the right words. But this is why for some people, when they start reading the Bible and they see that Christ didn’t just die for the sins of the world. I told you John 3:16, “God so loved the world; God so loved”- you put your name in there. And when it becomes personal to you, you are now entering into this kind of; we’ll call it personal acquaintance like the people had to do by bringing the lamb into their home.When it becomes personal to you that something had to die in your stead, it all starts to gel and suddenly we go from going through the motions of religion to having a relationship with Christ. And these are very important concepts, which believe it or not, as simplistic as it is, most people get lost right there. They think, “I come to church; I’ve got to check the boxes. I’ve got to make sure that I, I pray properly, that I do the right things, that I say the right things.” That’s all the minutia; I’m sorry to tell you, God’s not interested in it at the get-go. Those are details that you work out with Him. But understanding and having that relationship like the children of Israel had to do with that lamb and bringing that lamb into the home, having to look at it, and then knowing you’re going to have to sacrifice it. So everything here, by the way, comes with a price. Now God tells them to roast the lamb whole, to not break a single bone.And I need to say a comment here because I’ve said many times about Christ, a broken body for a broken people. And I never meant it in the context of somehow his bones were severed, but all that was put upon Him, the sins of the world laid upon Him; in that respect, broken body for a broken people. And along with the bitter herbs and the unleavened bread and this meal, as we just read, was to be consumed basically in a state of ready-to-go. When God says, “Okay, one, two, three, eat,” right? It’s almost like “Eat as much as you can. You’ve got 30 seconds to do it. Okay, it’s over. All right, let’s go.” And I’m not saying it was like that, but imagine you would have had a sense of urgency.Something, you wouldn’t be sitting back, oh, I’m stuffed. I can barely move. You know, when you’ve eaten too much, right? It wouldn’t be like that. It would be more along the lines of, I’m, I’m, I’m ready to go. And if, as I said, I just read, there was any lamb left over, they were to completely burn it. And I’m assuming, by the way, that that act of completely burning what was not consumed was to make sure that the surviving Egyptians did not partake of the sacrifice. You could say, “Well, that’s kind of bad.” But no, this was punishment upon the Egyptians, and specifically Pharaoh, but punishment upon those people. So God didn’t want any commingling. It’s going to be completely burned. We’re done with that. Then there is the manner of partaking, which is equally strange, as I said, not just ready to go, but God describes things such as; sorry, these are the details that God gives.For example, if someone was not circumcised, they could not partake in the Passover. And you might say, “Well, okay, well, they weren’t, they weren’t circumcised necessarily in Egypt.” Now, hear me out. Circumcision was instituted with Abram circumcising all the people in his family, his household if you remember that passage. So they would have been practicing circumcision. That would have probably just been something that traditionally, whether or not they knew about God or not, something that would have just been traditionally done. So when God says, “If somebody is not circumcised, they cannot partake of the Passover,” it’s essentially saying, “Not in covenant with Me, you cannot sit down and partake. You can’t even”; sorry to say it, “not in covenant with Me, you can’t be saved.” You think about how you might apply, what I just said, into modern terms, not circumcised by body part; the heart. And then again, it’s all of what I call peeling back the layers of the onion because this story is so familiar, you can just kind of sit back and go, “Yeah, I know the story.” But you look for the minute details and you begin to see how God was basically putting flesh and blood and painting the picture of Christ so perfectly that I don’t know how people could miss it.Another passage describes if a person became ceremonially unclean, that is, they came in contact with a dead body or touched something that would have made them unclean. God said, “You still must keep the Passover, but you will keep it on the following month, on the fourteenth day of the following month.” In other words, see, this is what’s amazing. God didn’t just say, “Okay, well, if you miss this time, you’re done,” but a special dispensation for those people who, whether they did it on purpose or not became unclean, couldn’t partake.And God says, “Okay, you can do it the following month if that’s your condition.” So God made a way for every person to be able to participate, no matter if your family’s too small, then you join with your neighbor. I mean, He’s; you can see all the provisions. I love the fact that it’s almost like God thinks of everything here, sometimes too much detail, but anyway. We’re going to see that as they move from Egypt into the wilderness, this Passover will be kept, but they’re no longer sacrificing in their dwelling. So the place of sacrifice for the Passover will no, it’s no longer necessary to apply the blood as previously to your household. Now it becomes something to be performed at the Tabernacle and eventually, it’ll be performed at the temple.So these are important because it tells you that, you know, we, we tend to think of God giving a prescribed way and then it’s locked in, but even there you can see God modified it as they went from being in Egypt’s bondage and needing to show the sign for the avenging death angel, basically to pass over versus perpetuating and celebrating in perpetuity, which means no longer; no reason to paint the doorpost. You’ve got to bring your Passover sacrifice to the door and there it would be sacrificed. Again, you go to the New Testament, Christ is called what? The Door, so we take all of these pieces and realize God’s been saying the same thing for a long time.We just have been very hardheaded to not listen. That’s okay, as long as the lights come on eventually, that’s okay. On the fifteenth, the sheaf of firstfruits of barley, the new harvest would be offered as a wave offering along with a yearling, as a burnt offering, the prescribed meal offering (we just went through the offerings), two-tenths of an ephah of flour and a drink offering, a quarter of a hin of wine. So you’ve got the prescribed offerings around the pass, around the Passover as well, not just the Paschal lamb, but all the other steps involved in offering. And did it matter to God? It did.Here’s where God starts looking to see if people are keeping His ordinances. Kind of interesting. Each of the seven days of this feast, a goat was offered as a sin offering, two young bullocks, a ram, and seven yearling lambs were offered as burnt offerings after the continual sacrifice. So it’s a lot of offerings and a lot of blood and a lot of burning of stuff, just a lot. On the seventh day, the Sabbath rest, a holy assembly brought the festivities to a close. That also signaled that the morrow which would begin at sundown, leavened bread could now safely be consumed in the household. Now if you read the celebration for Unleavened Bread, even though I’m on the Passover, you’ll read several instances, where we are right now, Leviticus, I’m sorry, Exodus, both in Exodus 23, 34, and Leviticus 23, and Deuteronomy 16. You’ve got those references, so if you want more information on that, read it there. Now, for the language part, the Passover or what is commonly Hebrew, Pesach, obviously refers to or signifies “to stride,” “to spring over,” or “to spare.” And what’s interesting is if you look, this is a this is The Englishman’s Hebrew Concordance of the Old Testament.Thank you. Let me get my little pointing stick here so I can show you. So you’ve got the word here, so you can see it, Pesach, it is the Lord’s Passover, we just read that. But I want you to look at what’s above it because as you know, Hebrew usually works with the three root consonants. So you can see the three, the vowel points are underneath, but here take a look from Pesach to Pesach, and here we have, for example, “I will pass over,” and here it is “the Lord’s Passover,” so you can see the proximity, it’s just the vowel points of the, of the words themselves that change. And I point that out to you for two reasons. One is to show you how easy it is to blur things up in Hebrew, but also to show you the correlation between passing over and the word Passover; they’re the same. If we take the feasts or the set times, I think there are seven: Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles; that is seven.And seven is important. Now these feasts don’t get into the mindset of thinking, “What does it matter to me?” because it does. Because as we study these feasts, for example, as I said, the Passover correlates to Christ and Christ’s sacrifice for us. The Bible says, “For sin comes death.” The wages of sin is death. So without the blood, you know, again, there are people who say, “Well, Christ is not the only way.” Well, if you’re going to read this book, sorry to say it, you’ve got to just, make your own decision. Don’t take my word for it. But if God says the only way that these people can be saved is by applying the blood and moves into the New Testament, says, “The only way these people can be saved is by them applying the blood.” Now it’s to the heart, to the mind, to your thoughts.Don’t think for a second that, these things don’t matter with God. They do. Now the right of redeeming the firstborn was a constant reminder to the Israelites of all generations that the firstborn belonged to God. So wiping out the firstborn of Egypt was a way of saying, “Not only are these people cut off, but they are none of Mine” You might say, “That’s pretty brutal,” but again, I digress to something I just said earlier. You know, could you imagine? And I often entertain this. One pharaoh- you know how much I love history and many of you are into a lot of this history as well. One pharaoh, out of all the pharaohs, turned Egypt into a monotheistic society. And I’m still not certain, even though you can see the hieroglyphs and you can see all of the reliefs, I’m still not sure that there was not an influence in some way, shape, or form by prior history to not go to the thought process of monotheistic God by what all is recorded here.And don’t think, by the way, people say, “Oh, well, this is the only record of this happening.” No, there are, there are scant records within Egypt’s documentation of these events. So do not be fooled when people say, “Oh, there’s no record at all outside the Bible.” Yeah, there is actually. And someone who’s into studying Egyptology will tell you that there are several references to this event that we’re referencing within their records. So I like the fact that you know, when you want to shut somebody up, there’s a, there’s a wonderful way to do it. Just tell them the truth, right? (Laughter.) So we know after the death of the firstborn, they’re pretty eager to get the children of Israel out of Egypt, like, “Okay, go already.Now, before anything worse happens, get out of here.” And we have the plague of the firstborn, God’s way of putting on display, if you thought, for example, that turning the water to blood was nothing but a magician’s trick when your loved one dies, there’s no magic trick there. You know they’re gone. It was God’s exclamation mark, “If you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t- well, finally, you’re going to believe Me when you’re first of your family and the first of your animals are just laying there lifelessly.” It was God’s way of saying exclamation marks and mic drops, okay? So just checking to see if you’re awake, (laughter) but, all right. The other thing that I like to say is in all this, you can go back. There is a pastor who’s been prolifically posting messages online and, you know, he’s wearing his colored scarf and he says, “This is made up. This is all fabrication.” Listen, you can believe whatever you want. You can believe you’re a leprechaun too, okay? That’s fine.That’s your prerogative. But here’s my issue. If you’re going to make those types of statements, you better be ready to back up your words. “Well, how do you know that this is not made up?” Well, here’s the deal. When you start reading what God said to Abram and He tells him, He says very point blank. This is early on, He says to Abram, “Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not there’s, shall serve them,” wonder who that is, huh? “And they shall afflict them for four hundred years, and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And afterward, they shall come out with great substance.” You tell me, it says, “But in the fourth generation they shall come out, they shall come thither again.” So you tell me, and that is the event that happens hundreds of years before this, “Let my people go,” and Moses leads them out. Again, if, if we’re making up a story, there would be some really, we’d have some great flow and there wouldn’t be any, any missing places, but there’s a gap of some kind.So God makes this statement, then there’s a gap. We don’t have any clue what’s going on until it happens. So if you’re going to make up a story, you think you might be, if you were writing and making this up, you would perpetuate. So you’d have Abraham repeat it, then you’d have Isaac repeat it, then you might have Jacob repeat it. No, it’s just repeated to Abram and memorialized for us, and then we have the event that happens a couple of hundred years later on the pages before us.So I’m not inclined to believe that. If I wanted extra-Biblical proof, I told you, to go look at a lot of things that you can trace in Egyptology that will lead you to confirm what the Bible’s saying. So I’m not inclined when people talk about it as a good story. Something is being told to us in the celebration of this event. It’s shadow and type that gives us hope, which is if God spared these people, and listen carefully because it’s so subtle, you can miss what I’m going to say.If God spared these people that they did not know who He was necessary, okay, they might have been referring to the God of Abraham or the God of Isaac or the God, but they didn’t know who God was. They could not. They were in Egypt. And for a couple of hundred years, I said this last week, you see how easily this country has changed just in the last 50 years, how people are forgetting things, how because people have ripped down monuments to great historical figures, there’s a future generation coming that will say, “Christopher who, Columbus? What is that? Who is that person?” They won’t know of it.And that’s going to happen sooner than you think, a generation. Okay, how many of you here will say something like referring to something that maybe was a ’70s TV show and nobody around you knows what the hell you’re talking about? (Laughter.) “Uh, what is that?” Or, okay, do you want to go for the easy one? Here’s the easy one: an old-fashioned telephone with a cord that’s tethered to a wall. Show that to a teenager and ask them, “How do you use this?” (Laughter.) Do you think you have tech problems? I watched a video of somebody staring at the phone going, “I don’t know.I’m not sure.” Okay, you do have problems here. My point is they would not have known. We tend to forget that. So it’s really important to see that God opened His heart to a people that were not well acquainted with Him, to save and deliver them. Does that sound familiar to you at all? (Yes ma’am.) God opened His heart to take someone in that was not familiar with Him, and did not know too much about Him. And I think that’s probably most of us at different stages in our life. So tell me where you think this has radically changed, where God’s changed. He hasn’t. And the principles that are here are still the same. The thing that we have of being in Christ and looking to Him and the blood applied to our circumcised hearts, if you will, is the fact that we know from the words spoken by Christ memorialized in this book, we are saved, we are forgiven.And the Bible even goes on to say that “Whosoever believeth, faiths, trusteth in Him shall have eternal life.” So we even have much better promises. Again, I hate to repeat what I said last week, but the book of Hebrews talks about how much better Christ was over everything in the old dispensation, how much better. We have clarity, we have certainty; we have the whole record laid out for us. That’s why I don’t understand, I’m sorry. I will never understand why it’s so difficult for people to just sit, take 30 minutes to listen, or read the Bible.That doesn’t mean that instantaneously you’re gripped. It doesn’t mean you have understanding. I’m sure people are sitting here that for some of you it’s like, “Oh, I know this story like the back of my hand.” Other people are hearing it for the first time. My point is that God will, for the degree, for every step you take, God’s taking 10 steps towards you, and His approach has not changed. So when we talk about these concepts, they had to celebrate the Passover as a mandate. They were mandated to. Now I’m going to ask this question, which should be rhetorical, but let’s see. How could we look at what Christ did and feel somehow mandated? Like it’s mandatory? No, I want to tell people because I want to share with them the greatness of what I know Christ has done. But this is, again, it’s another one of these issues and I’ll try not to take up too much time here. But if you understand, we’re not mandated, yet we should be, okay, you had a great meal last week.It was the best meal you’ve ever had. Do you have to be mandated to tell somebody that was the best meal you had or if it truly was the best meal, you know what? My guess is you’re probably, “Oh my God! I had this food. It was so amazing, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and you bore people with it, but you go on about how great it was. Well, if Christ is that great and better than a meal, you don’t feel like it’s a mandate. You feel like, you feel sorry for people who don’t know what you know and you want to share it.And this is another part of this; we’re not under that mandate. And when people say, oh, you have a duty or something, no, freely and desirously to share that good news that Jesus Christ is the Passover for us. He is the blood applied and He’s not just as the Passover was, a passing over, but how about a washing, a cleansing and eradicating of sin, past, present, future; much better than any blood applied to a door. And again, the type is Christ is the Door. That’s what the New Testament talks about. So unlike our brothers and sisters in antiquity, I don’t think you need to have a mandate to tell people about the goodness of what’s happened in your life. Now, that’s to say we don’t do testimonials here. Some people say, “Oh, you should have people stand up and do testimonies.” And I’ve told you, we don’t do that because everybody has one. It’s like other body parts, everyone has one, (laughter) all right? But what I want us to focus on here is the importance of making this connection.I think every, Christian for the most part knows Christ our Passover. That’s, seems to be clear, right? But when we talk about the Lord’s Supper, the table of the Lord, to help us to remember; remember Paul’s words, “Do this in remembrance of Him, basically until He comes. So we are keeping the Passover in that sense a memorial, the memory of what Christ did in laying down His life and being our Paschal Lamb. So there are these connections we make when we talk about, by the way, the Passover. Some people use the word Christ’s “Passion,” which is Christ’s suffering for us. And I think the other thing that gets missed in all of this, I just mentioned this in the opening of the message, how we are seemingly facing a lot of challenges as Christians in America, persecution to various degrees, some of it is just verbiage, others harmful; bodily harm.Just remember something, that is pretty much the price of association and, and has been since the beginning. You know, people thought, “Oh, this is outrageous!” Well, do you think that they were saying that while they were crucifying the disciples? Same, why did they crucify them? Why did they put them to death? Because they wouldn’t say what the world wanted them to. Think about it, nothing has changed; this is why I keep going, don’t say this is antiquated. Nothing has changed! They killed Christ for that. They killed His disciples for that. “Say what we want you to say, be as we are, and we can all get along and we’ll all have a great time.” The disciples said, “No,” and it cost them their lives. So we have to kind of be mindful when we say we are under a light affliction if you want to call it that. That’s nothing new. And by the way, that will continue, it will get worse as the days come to a close. We know that God’s word talks about tribulation, the great tribulation. I don’t know what you think that means, that word means, but tribulation means something bad, not something good will be poured out upon the earth.And then of course I’m not going to get into it now, the great debate as to whether Christians will be here or not. You know, I’ll settle that for you: it doesn’t matter. If you’re trusting Christ, it does not matter. You know, people, people get caught up in this, “Well, I, I want to, I want to know, I need to know.” How about you get to know that you know who you’re serving, and where you stand with Him, the rest of it will be taken care of. You say, “Well, that’s not an answer.” Well, it kind of is because the argument will go on with as much ambiguity as people like to talk about.Now I’ve heard people say we won’t be here. Some people said we will, but that’s a message for another day. The important thing is to keep faith and trust Him and to see that He is indeed our Passover. We don’t need to be celebrating something that God said is now over. That way of celebrating has been done away with if you will. In Hebrew, the word “leaven,” I need to touch on this, is châmêts, literally meaning “sour.” Leaven usually, yeast or baking powder is added to produce fermentation, especially in bread and dough, which causes it to rise.As the leaven sours the dough, tiny gas bubbles are released producing the dough to rise. So God said, “All leaven is to be removed from your households, not a drop or speck to be found. Period.” And leaven is usually associated with sin. Now this is the thing that people get stuck on. So modern Jewry, today’s Jews who are celebrating, go through a procedure. That procedure for the set time of Passover would be to clean your entire house. I’m all for spring cleaning, by the way. That’s great. Everybody should do that one time a year, spring cleaning. (Laughter) But the idea is to wash your walls, wash your windows. Every part of the home is scrubbed down meticulously with the idea that everything in the home possibly has been contaminated all year round by the leaven that might have been in the house. And I, I kind of think of it this way and I want you to approach this kind of to see how these two are different.So for the modern Jew, it’s about working to get the leaven out of your house. For the Christian, the only way the leaven is removed is through Christ, not through works. So you can see two distinct ways. This is more of works, “We’ll work to remove. We’ll get rid of it.” And there are, trust me, there are a lot of Christians that think- God, I was preaching somewhere. I think I told you the story. I delivered a message to the potter’s house, in a prison somewhere. And then the chaplain who was a butthead, okay, he was. He came up after all the work I did and told the inmates, “Yes, and you have to pick out all the impurities in the clay.” Okay, if you can do that, you’re God, okay? And I’m not. So anyway, my point is we can’t. So you can just see the juxtaposition between the old way that says, “Keep working, keep doing something to clean” versus You are made clean through the word, you are made clean and washed through the blood of Christ.There’s no work in that. It’s faith and trust in God. And I love that when you put the two side by side you realize there’s no amount of work I could ever do to take the leaven out of this container called Melissa Scott, nor of yours. So I think it’s pretty amazing when you see the grace of God to say, “That’s not the way, but faith in Christ gets it done.” Last but not least, I want to talk about this because it sums up everything that I’ve been saying.We talk about Christ as the Lamb. He was, it was pointed out, the Lamb, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” This is the other mystery, I will never understand. Yes, I understand that cultures, you know, I’ve taught comparative concepts in religion, but I’ve never understood this. In all of the, we’ll call it the pantheon, the whole picture of all the deities, there is not one deity; not one like Christ. And hear me out, don’t say, “That’s racist”” or that’s, whatever you want to call it. There isn’t. Look for yourself. Buddha couldn’t completely cleanse inside and out. The person had to work at achieving the state within themselves. You go through all of the world’s religions. There’s only one person who makes these claims that He, there’s something wrong with the world. His death is going to make a right, that in His death you might live, all of these statements.There’s only one. Look for it yourself, not; sorry, not the prophet Muhammad, not Joseph Smith. There isn’t, there isn’t any. So this is what I, I guess for me is frustrating and I don’t understand. I might say somebody doesn’t understand the concept of sin, both as I described in the offerings, the state of being born in fallen Adam, and the fruit thereof. But if I understood that I was trapped in essence, in my ways, both in my condition and the fruit of my condition, you told me that the only way that I could ever get well was to look at this Paschal offering in Christ and see that He didn’t just cover, He took away, He removed, that I- He died, that I might live. It’s, it’s baffling to me that people will not take a second look at this, and baffling to me, that people still want to celebrate something that cannot cleanse the inside of you.It can perhaps act as a covering in your mind, but it could never remove. It could not do what Christ’s offering as the Paschal Lamb could do. So it’s baffling to me when I see people that whole cloth, they reject, they refuse and I think to myself, it’s okay, your day will come. Not because I wish you mal or malice or ill will towards you, but your day will come. There is not a person; sorry, there’s not a person who gets out of here alive and I don’t mean this building, I mean life. So you figure out quickly, some will get to know Christ as an insurance policy just to check the box, just to make sure and others say, “I want to know more about this Person,” and others say, “I want nothing to do with Him.” Well, the category that says, “I want nothing to do with Him,” I don’t think I have to describe their fate.That will be up to God. I’m not, I’m nobody’s judge, but to the category of people who’ve even looked to Him, entertained, glanced, it’s mind-boggling to me that you can’t take 30 minutes to look and see the uniqueness of Christ that not only is He all of these offerings, is He all of these set times in the fulfillment, but He offers to us something that God did not offer to the children of Israel nor for hundreds of years until the coming of Christ, and that is something that the law could never do. Paul spells it out clearly; this law could only bring death, but truth, peace, and grace by Jesus Christ.With an add-on to something, not one person in this book apart from Adam and Eve who were given eternal life at the beginning, there’s not one person in here until the coming of Christ who can talk about eternity and being with God forever until that time. So what I’m saying to you is if there was ever a message that I said to you, it’s important to know who He is. This is why Easter, which is our Passover, Christ our Passover, is so important. It is the center and circumference. It is the middle, the outside, and the middle of Christianity. Without it, you can’t even make your way into the church. And not seeing the center point you’re never going to find your way to anything else. He solves it all by you focusing on Him in faith, recognizing He died that you might live. And if I could just even say one final thing on this, one last thought because I, my time’s up here.If you examine everything that’s in the passage we looked at, and there are accompanying passages which you can kind of study side by side, you will see that in all of this, even under a concept of law which here was not yet given in Egypt, the, the law had not yet been given, but even in the giving of the law, look carefully and you will see God’s grace. When He says, “Okay if you can’t celebrate it on the fourteenth of that month, you’ll do it the next month,” He makes provisions. If you’re too poor to offer, you can offer the least of the offerings. He included everybody. There wasn’t a person in the camp; if you were too poor, you could take from the gleanings that people left mandatorily behind for the poor. God included everybody. That was God’s plan all along. Now, with our free will, we mess it up.So this is why I said to you, now God says, “You can all come,” and we can all partake of that Paschal Lamb which is Christ, but I’m telling you something. God is not begging for you to come in. He’s looking for people that will look to Him, look at this word and say, “Wow, I never, I never recognized that was for me,” not for the world, not for the camp, the congregation, for me. And when it becomes personal, it will begin to matter to you. When it becomes personal, you’re getting to the point of that acquaintance with the Lamb and then suddenly the Lamb is slaughtered.And all you can look at is recognizing God prescribed a way for you and me to live that in times past would have only been a temporary method. All of these saints, guess what? They all still died. And this is why the Bible talks about when Christ died and speaks of Him going to preach to the departed souls, I think some were so committed to God’s program that He sent Christ to preach to them and to deliver them. We don’t have to wait for that time. We can act now and look to Him now. Now, I know, as I said, a very simplistic message, but very important. These set times, if people will take, the time to read through what the Passover means, how it can be applied in the now, not as an Old Testament dispensation, but as a shadow and type, and all of it points to Christ.Please do not tell me that you can read this book and not see how God was so gracious, not just to the children of Israel, but in giving us this complete Old and New Testament to be able to look at the whole thing and not have, not have any place to say, “You know, well, God didn’t do it there. No, God didn’t do it there.” No, God did it in here. And then you close the book and you recognize when you know who Christ is, God did it 2,000-plus years ago and He did it here as well, no longer the exterior, the works, the performance, but all by faith in Christ. So these set times, maybe for some, oh, it’s an, it’s an Old Testament celebration.No, it’s a New Testament revelation of what God was revealing in a shadow or a type, Christ being the substance. That’s my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday at 11 am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you’d like more teaching and you’d like to go straight to our website, the address is https://www.PastorMelissaScott.com ☃☂ Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!As found on YouTube
foreign [Music] from the get-go God planned to dwell Among Us and as you travel through the scriptures you you see it’s not this Tabernacle wasn’t a new thought it may have been a new way of expressing God’s prescribed method with man but not new in the concept of dwelling among him [Music] lift holy hands coming to this house. Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of! ꆛシ➫ As found on YouTube
Have you ever met anyone that actually gave their life for you that, I'm not talking about our great American soldiers. I'm not talking about our law enforcement. I'm talking about have you ever met someone personally come into contact with that gave their life for you? And my answer is there's only One and that's Christ. ♪ ♪ If you have been listening for the last few weeks, you know that we've been looking at the tabernacle in the wilderness, the furniture, and we've moved on to the offerings. So everything that is in, around, and about the tabernacle, kind of moving through the book of Leviticus a little bit. And we've seen when God gives the instructions to Moses, He starts with what is close to Him. And I, for some reason I thought this was so clear because it's been said so often and I see a lot of, in the messages, people are getting this a little mixed up here.
So when we talk about this, there are the offerings, the five offerings that are listed in Leviticus. God starts with the burnt offering and moves on to the meal offering. And then we go to the peace offering. Then we have the sin and trespass. Now, I've said to you, God starts with what is dear to Him. We cannot start at the burnt offering when we come into the realm of even trying to understand, like many of you coming into the church and learning about God. It takes so long for us to even comprehend this: sin and trespass. I've said this to you so many times, you've probably heard this from other people, when people say, “I'm basically a good person.” Nah, all right, so that tells you right away, anybody who utters those words coming into the church tells you they haven't even begun the level of understanding. But the reason why this is important, in the Old Testament when it says, “God starts first with what is near and dearest to Him,” this offering was considered a sweet saver, wholly ascending to God for God, no other, perhaps maybe the only part left off, as I've said, was the skin given to the priest possibly.
I'm not sure of the details on that, but I can say this is completely offered up to God. We come into the church and we cannot even start here. Now I've been in churches and I've been to places where new Christians, so excited, so on fire, think they've arrived at the burnt offering. They're wholly dedicated. They've offered themselves like Romans 12. They've put themselves out there offering themselves to God. But the reality is, until this is crystal clear, we're dealing with two things.
The condition; and I used the word last week, the “congenital condition” you are born in. That is fallen Adam. That means a beautiful cute little baby that comes out the gate, “Ah, la, la,” all cute and everything, all full of wants and whatever else. Not━you say, “Well, how could, how could you look at that baby and say the baby's a sinner? Agh!” right? But we're talking about the condition in which that child was born. And the fruit as we live, as we go, as we have our life, the fruit of that nature brings us to the trespass. When I say this, so much insanity here, and you've heard this over the years, people think sin, “I do or I don't do, I haven't done this, I don't kill bugs, therefore I'm not a murderer.” But the reality is that two things, one, Jesus took that, He took the Ten Commandments and He lifted them up, basically putting them on steroids and said, “Don't think anymore about the commandment of not killing.
Think about if you have hate in your heart, you're as guilty as the murderer.” So it's important that the starting point, you know, I've got people that tune in and they listen, they are, some of them are very dear friends of mine, acquaintances, people that have curiosity, and I'm standing here talking about this, and unless it's something that makes them feel warm and fuzzy, it's discounted or they tune it out. But this is why I said to you, why it's hard to populate a church, because when you start teaching, it requires; Christianity, true Christianity is for the thinking person, not the person who wants to go, “Ugh, ugh,” all right? So, and I say that mockingly, but that's the truth. There are way too many people that want to go to church to feel good emotively, but they've not even grasped this problem, which is, I was born, I was conceived, I came out as a baby in a sin condition, and then as I live, as I breathe, as I have my life, the fruit of that nature that I, the condition I was born in produces this.
So I don't set out deliberately to do things that are an offense against God, but that is what we're dealing with. And failure to even start there, so people are getting this confused when I say, I'm trying to show you how we relate to these burnt offerings, meal offerings, peace offerings, sin and trespass. And when you see them laid out properly, you recognize, yes, they were God's prescription for the children of Israel in the wilderness, but they also represent the pattern in which we come. They also represent Christ. There's so many, as I've said, so many different focis to this, but the one I'm pointing out right now is how it applies to us.
So if your starting point is to understand God sets out to show what's important to Him, what's most nearest and dearest to His heart, something that could be wholly offered up to Him. Yet when we come and we start, God lets us start at this end, sin and trespass, to figure this out; required offerings, commanded offerings. I am not talking about offerings we make now or any type.
We're looking at this, so please stay on the page, all right? Now with that being said, I've said to you, I previously noted this, I think last week, sin and trespass are not sweet savor and that's important. That gives us a clear distinction between the last two offerings and the first three. Sweet savor could be considered something that's pleasing to God, that's acceptable to God. In fact, I even used the word probably more for this offering, the burnt offering than any other offering, is essentially that the fact that it was wholly consumed, ascended, and God said, “It's a sweet savor,” is what I'd also call an “acceptance” offering. So it's important to understand and distinguish between these offerings and how, how it matters to us and the application. It's not just learning about what they did and why they did it, but you begin to see and understand with great clarity there is a lot more here that God was so gracious even in this age of law to basically make inclusions for every person in the community and He's still doing it.
This is the thing that's mind-boggling and I will just say this one thing and I'll move on. If all of our unique population that does not identify in the old-fashioned or traditional way would stop for a minute and think about this; I don't care what you say, society may reject you. A lot of people feel they're normal or their, their sexual preferences stand in what we call “standard” and can still be hated. Figure out real quickly there's only one Person you have to be right with in life and that's God.
And God can show you the way of approval. You don't need other people. So if, you know, these people that identify and say, “But no one approves of me,” well maybe it's because you don't approve of yourself and your, your own truth gives you away, but it's concealed in a lie and delusion. So that's all I have to say about that. Anyway, so we, we see though the importance of recognizing this that God made provisions for all people. Now what we're going to look at today is the trespass offering and there's something really very important about the translation and understanding of the fifth chapter. So you'd like to turn there to the fifth chapter of Leviticus and this is what becomes really important. So if, for example, if a person wronged or robbed God, or wrong, robbed or wronged his neighbor, it was considered a trespass and this is what we deal with; what somebody has done.
I urge you to go through this very carefully because this, I touched on this last week and it can be very confusing because some of this sounds like if I said sin is unintentional acts, the trespass seems to have intent, but it's hard to figure out in some of these areas if they could still be considered “unintentional” and you'll see as we get in there, it can be very confusing. So let me first start by reading, fifth chapter of Leviticus: “And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and it is a witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.” Now unfortunately we're dealing with a translation that can be rather hard to actually understand the way it's written. So those who withhold evidence are guilty and there's an implied situation here based on the Hebrew rendering that the time has passed since the act was committed and any person who was privy or a witness who did not come forward, they were essentially under oath to do so and didn't.
“The voice of swearing” or making an oath seems to point to giving testimony in a legal sense or matter. So you need to read this very carefully because otherwise if you're reading it with a colloquial; or I'm sorry, with a more modern thinking or interpretation, “hear the voice of swearing” like what, so some profane words? That's not what's being meant here. So you can look that up if you're able to look it up in a Hebrew lexicon, you'll see what I'm saying. So here's what's interesting. If a person began to feel guilty about the act that they committed, they would come forward because they were essentially under an oath to do so, and then they would have to basically say their issue, which we will label now as the first time we're reading about “confession.” Hold that thought for just a minute because people will take off on all kinds of tangents with that word “confession.” Second verse, “Or if a soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of an unclean beast, or carcase of an unclean cattle, or carcase of an unclean creeping things, and if it be hidden from him; he also shall be unclean and guilty.
Or if he touch the uncleanness of a man, whatsoever uncleanness it be that a man shall be defiled withal, and it be hid from him; when he knoweth of it, then he shall be guilty”" There's all these kind of nuances in here. So if a person became unclean, did not cleanse or purify themselves in the prescribed manner in the allotted time, they would become ceremonially unclean by one of two ways, either coming in contact with a dead animal, the carcass of a dead animal, or coming in contact with an unclean person and/or a dead person. Those would defile and make you unclean. Now if you want to know more about this, you, on your own time, you can go to Leviticus 12-15, it kind of elaborates on it. I don't want to spend too much time. The next one, verse 4, “If a soul swear, pronouncing with his lips to do evil, or to do good, whatsoever it be that a man shall pronounce with an oath, and it be hid from him; when he knoweth it, of it, then he shall be guilty in one of these.
And it shall be, when he shall be guilty of one of these things, that he shall confess,” there's the first time we're reading it, “that he hath sinned in that thing: and he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb of a goat, of the, a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.” So what we have here, basically beginning at, I'm going to say verse 5: “the law of confession.” Now this has gotten so out of hand and misunderstood, so I, I don't want to spend too much time on it because I have taught in abundance on this subject.
So if you are not in accustomed to listening to me and you say, “Well, what have you taught about confession?” Go on the website, try and find it there. Now's not the time for that, but what I do want to say and what's really important is this is the first time we're seeing that and I want you to look at a pattern that will emerge from this confession, and it is definitely not how we understand it today. So let's kind of let this unfold here. Okay, when a person came to the reality that they were guilty by committing an act and they felt badly or remorseful or for the act or acts, the first thing for the guilty to do was to go and confess what they had done.
And this is what's fascinating. The word for “confess” here, oh, you're going to love this, the word for “confess”━okay, I got to ask this question: How many people have been listening for say twenty years? Okay, so you're going to be familiar with this Hebrew word, and if you're not, I'll explain it; don't worry. But there was a joke, a little bit of a joke when the late Dr. Scott was teaching in a passage and he introduced to you the Hebrew word yadah. And we kind of made fun of that from Jerry Seinfeld, you know, “Yada, yada, yada,” right? But yadah is not; remember Hebrew is ambiguous and can have shades of meanings, so in context of where we're looking at “confess,” and I'm not going to get into too much detail because I don't want to lose people here, but it's in the Hithpael, perfect, and the vav in front of it in Hebrew reveals the concept of sequence.
And this becomes important. So the Hebrew, we can't see it here, but the Hebrew gives you an idea of confession, the word “confess” occurs in a sequence of things. That's number one. Number two━this is what I said you're going to love. If you look up this word in the lexicon, you will be in for big surprise because yadah can mean, in Hebrew can mean “to know.” So just so you know, this, whatever, whatever your secondary words or your vowels might be at the end, I'm not quite sure your consonants rather, but yadah; something like that. But if you were looking at this in any Semitic language, throughout all Semitic tongues, you would find it having all of these different meanings except for Arabic. The Arabic word is not yadah, but idu. In the Hebrew, it occurs a hundred; I'm sorry, 1,058 times in the Old Testament, but listen to all the variations. And I, I shouldn't say “all.” I enlisted ten for the word, but there's a lot. So when, when it says “confess,” look carefully at the word because that yadah word should mean “to know.” So when a person confesses obviously it means what it means, but also that you “acknowledge” that you have done the act or acknowledged that you need to declare something.
But it can also be, yadah; not in this context, “to be quiet,” “to be humiliated,” “to leave alone or reject or neglect,” “to punish”" “to say farewell or send away,” “to flow,” or “to sweat,” “to destroy,” it can also connote “obedience to seek and/or to call,” from that one singular Hebrew word. So you might say, “Well, I'm glad we're dealing in English here,” but don't be too quick for that. The reason why I bring this up is because some of you that look up words might get a little bit confused here. So the best way to understand behind “to confess,” which I've given you the breakdown in the English: con, “with,” fess, “to declare” a declaration of sorts. But if you were wanting to get this clear here, it would be yes to, “to declare,” but also “to acknowledge,” like to acknowledge to self, that lets you then declare aloud, so just a little note to self. Now, verses 7-13 in this passage kind of shift gears a little bit, but manifold instructions here.
So 7-13, “And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, unto the LORD; one for a sin offering, the other for a burnt offering”" Remember I said, the offerings could occur side by side? There you have it. “And he shall bring them unto the priest who shall offer that which is for the sin offering first, and wring off his head from his neck,” he's speaking about the birds as small items, “but shall not divide it asunder: and he shall sprinkle of the blood of the sin offering upon the side of the altar, the rest of the blood shall be wrung out at the bottom of the altar: it is a sin offering. And he shall offer the second for a burnt offering, according to the manner: and the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin which he hath sinned, and it shall be forgiven him.” And you're going to see that.
I'm going to deal with this towards the end of the message, “and it shall be forgiven him,” because it's repeated multiple times. “But if he be not able to bring two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, then he that sinned shall bring for his offering a tenth part of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering; and shall put no oil upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense thereon: for it is a sin offering.” Now I know we're still dealing in sin, and I told you we're talking about trespass, but I'm show; I want to show you something for a reason here.
Understanding the connection between this verse, which goes on to talk about the trespass shows you, there are connected thoughts here. So although they are for two distinct things: unintentional, unbeknownst, and then what we're going to look at, because we'll get an idea of, beginning at verse 14, of the trespass offerings, what is involved. But I want you to; I want you to see something here. I did not read this last week, I don't believe, which is God makes provisions, and this is for the sin offering, and He'll also make the provisions in the trespass offering for anyone of any walk of life, of any standing. And that's what I love about God. If you read that now and say, “Well, that's great for the children of Israel,” but think about in today's society how people are constantly making excuses about how they either can't come to God, or they can't come to church, or they can't, can't; and that's all psychological, blah, blah.
That's all it is. There's no rhyme or reason, it's, it's, it's rationale or rationalizing what you don't want to do with every reason under the sun. But the fact of the matter is anybody who takes the time to read, even in this book, Leviticus, which is full of legalese, God says, “I've made a provision no matter what your standing is.” Now you might say, “Well, how would the poor person? A poor person doesn't have a lamb or a goat, but how would they bring fine flour?” Well, remember there's a provision in the law for very poor people to go and glean the remnants of what's left in the field.
Remember, they're supposed to leave over some stuff and the poor people can go and glean that, but they'd still have to work to take whatever they've gleaned in the field and turn it into fine flour. So it's not as though they just went and freeloaded off of somebody else's crop and then said, “Oh, here God.” they still had to produce it with their own hands, turned it into flour, and then present it. So there was still some work involved which connects the fact that in this category of sin and trespass, there is something of, we'll call it accountability for your acts or your actions, your deeds, whatever. Okay, so I love the fact that that's what this spells out. Now if we turn to the trespass offering, we're going to see differences that will emerge.
One of these concepts is “restitution.” We have not seen that before in, in the offerings. There was no mention of restitution, restitution. Now, Leviticus 5 and beginning at 14, “The LORD spake unto Moses, saying, If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance,” and remember I said to you, now you've got these words occurring together so it may be a little confusing, but I'm going to try and sort this out for you. “If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things, in the holy things of the LORD; then he shall bring for his trespass unto the LORD a ram without blemish out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering: and he shall make amends for the harm that he hath done in the holy thing, and he shall add the fifth part thereto, and give it unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him.” So now you've got a whole bunch of concepts lined up together, but there's something real important that was said in here that we can just read by, and that is a mention of two things.
One, “If soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance in the holy things.” So here, the trespass; note this carefully, is against, the trespass is against the things of God. We're not talking about something else; the holy things, so it's directly connected. Let's just say it's a high holiday. Failure to comply with the laws of the holiday would be sinning. If it was a sin of ignorance, it would be sinning. A known sin probably fall in the category of trespass, that you didn't comply with the prescribed actions of what was required of you. And that would require an offering not only of animal, but also a rest━if you want to call it that a restitution offering: money. Now here's the other thing that we're introduced to for the first time in Leviticus, “a fifth part shall be added.” It would be great if they explained what that fifth part is.
So I'm going to try and do that for you, and hopefully I don't confuse you even more. In order to understand this, I'm going to take you somewhere else where it'll, it's embedded in a passage, and it'll maybe make more sense. So the passage that I'm going to look at will be in Genesis, but basically, let me give the background for those people who are not familiar, my newer listeners. Joseph, who was Jacob/Israel's favorite child, his son, that son Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. His brothers hated him because he was his father's favorite. You remember many even who aren't reading the Bible would know about Joseph's coat of many colors. That was made by Jacob, his father given to him, and others hated him, not just for the coat, but for dreams that he said he saw and the interpretations thereof.
He just was not loved by his brethren, period. So they sold him into slavery. He ends up getting carried off into Egypt and being put in prison in Egypt. You think perhaps he's just going to rot there. Anyway, we know that he, while he's in prison, the Pharaoh has dreams. No one can interpret them. Joseph interprets the dreams. He's basically let out. Those dreams and their interpretations come to pass exactly the way Joseph said, and for that, the Pharaoh of Egypt places Joseph second in command, only second to Pharaoh, gives him his special ring which would be the sign of royalty or royal authority, gives him standing. And so we have all of that going on. Of course, we know that in, in this particular passage, there are seven years of plenty, seven years of famine, and when the famine does hit, Joseph's father, Jacob, and his brethren come to Egypt. When it is disclosed and found out that Joseph is alive, he, he's not dead as was supposed by his father, we have this incredible, the family is reunited, everybody's happy, right? Kind of.
All right that's the background now, first book of Scott; I just gave you the summary. So let's turn to the passage I want us to look at, which happens in Genesis 47. So with all that background, now the seven years of famine hit. There was seven years of plenty, feast. Now seven years of famine hit. Chapter 47, verse 20, “Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh,” he bought it all, “for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh's. And as for the people, he removed, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt, even to the other end thereof.
Only the land of the priests bought he not,” so the priests' portion was not touched. And it says here, “For the priests had a portion assigned them a Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them: whereby they sold not their lands.” So the priests were the only ones in Egypt, Egyptian priests that were able to keep and maintain what they had. “Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land,” so both you and your land are owned by the government. Never mind. “Lo, here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land.” So basically Joseph says, “You are owned. Your land and yourselves are owned by Pharaoh, but here is seed for you, and you will go sow the land that no longer belongs to you. You're going to have to basically work for it now.” “And it shall come to pass in the increase,” when it yields, when your crops grow, then “ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own.” Remember, I'm trying to explain to you the fifth part.
So this becomes interesting because the fifth part, what he's saying here essentially is an imposed tax. And if you're not sure about this, please for you who read Hebrew and can even limp through the lexicon, look this up. This would be analogous to essentially a 20 percent levy or tax. And so he says, “The fifth part unto Pharaoh,” let's call it, let's call it for right now in more understandable terms, 20 percent, “and the fourth part shall be your own, for seed of the field, for your food, and for them of your household, and for your little ones.” So I want you to see how that's working. Now he's very clear about this. He says, “In your increase.” Now remember, the law was not yet given here. So there has to be an understanding. Remember what is before the law usually continues in the law. It's refined in the law, and somehow we come out on the other side in the New Testament. This tells you, these people basically sold themselves and their land. They're given seed to sow on the land that's no longer theirs.
And when the increase comes, they will give a fifth part, essentially 20 percent of what has come out of that to Pharaoh and the fourth part they can keep. That's the easiest way to explain this. Now here there was no wrong or injury done. If you want to put it that way, there's no law. There's no, there's no way to catalog because as I said, the law was not given. And where the law was not given, sin cannot be imputed or charged to somebody's account. So turn back to Leviticus so we can read that again because now you've got to add something here. You might say, “Well, what? What's, what's the point?” All right, well, the first thing, I need to point this out because otherwise all things will not make sense. Remember, this is “trespass in the holy things.” And for trespass in the holy things, the prescribed offering would be a ram without blemish, shekels of silver, and “amends for the harm he hath done to the holy thing; in the holy thing,” adding a fifth part, essentially 20 percent, “and the priest shall make atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him.” So I want you to think of it like this.
We might be looking at things like “trespass in the holy things,” failure to bring your firstfruits, failure to dedicate your firstborn child, or sort out the first of anything that is within your possession failure to bring the tithe, failure to keep vows of offerings, and I could go on. So this was, and you've got to read this right because otherwise you can come up with all kinds of ideas that are wrong. “If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things,” I just gave you an idea of what that might be, but it could probably extend to a lot of other “holy things,” so in that regard, essentially think of this. It is an offense done against God. Not only is there an offering of a ram without blemish, which means blood will be spilled. Not only is there shekel, silver money being paid, but then there's also included in here the fifth part, which means essentially 20 percent tacked on to whatever you're offering. Now the reason why this is kind of mind-boggling is because if you think about it, there is no as of yet; we're going to read on, but as of yet, the first thing that's addressed is “trespasses against the things of God.” Hold that thought.
Verse 17, “And if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be done by the commandments of the LORD; though he wist it not,” so there's kind of an explanation, a little bit of, we're talking about he wist it not, yet he is guilty. He didn't know. It sounds again; this gets a little bit confusing.
Did he do it out of ignorance? Did he forget? Was this a non-deliberate act? And that's what this sounds like. “He wist it not, and yet he is guilty, he shall bear his iniquity. He shall bring a ram without blemish of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: the priest shall make a moment for him concerning his ignorance wherein he erred and wist it not,” that explains it to you, “and it shall be forgiven. This is a trespass offering: he hath certainly trespassed against the LORD.” So we're not done here, but I want you to see something that is very important, and that is when God said, “On such and such a day I want you to do this, and I on such and such a day when you do this, I want you to do that,” very easily because there were so many prescribed things to do, it would be, it would be very easy for a person to miss.
How many of you have by accident, by unintentionally, you missed a credit card payment? You didn't intend to, but you did? Oh, good, I'm not alone, all right. What I'm saying is you didn't mean to do that, yet there, there are consequences. It's going to hit your credit report, and unfortunately it's a stain. So it, I don't mean to diminish the things of God, but I'm trying to say something that you didn't know and yet should be common knowledge. Guess what? This is the wonderful thing about God. God realizes our frailty and our frame, knows we can't remember and do it all, and makes provisions for that.
If that is not an image or a picture of grace in the Old Testament, I don't know what is. Let's keep going. “The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, If a soul sin, and commit a trespass against the LORD, and lie unto his neighbour,” so I want you to read that one really carefully, because that bears something we tend to not think about.
In this book, lying to your neighbor is also sinning against God. So it's important to understand the depth of things that are spelled out here, which is why when you go and you read a passage like Matthew 6 that talks about forgiveness, it becomes vitally important, important to have this underneath it all to know where God was coming from in the first place when He talks about sinning against God and sinning against your fellowman, because the sin against fellowman we tend to marginalize or minimalize, but it's still a sin against God. You're reading that right there. So, “lie unto his neighbour in that which was delivered for him unto him to keep, or in fellowship, or in a thing taken away by violence, or he hath deceived his neighbor; or hath found that which was lost, and lieth concerning it, sweareth falsely; in any of these things that a man doeth, sinning therein: then it shall be, because he hath sinned, he is guilty, and it shall, that he shall restore that which he took violently away, or the thing which he had deceitfully gotten, or that was delivered him to keep, or a lost thing which he found, or all that about which he hath sworn falsely; he shall even restore it in principle, and add,” here we go again, “the fifth part more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth, in the day of his trespass offering.” So get this, on the one side, as trespass committed against God in the holy things, restitution is required in forms of offering the shekel and the fifth part.
And here we have, on the other hand, wrongs committed essentially against fellowman, and we still have a fifth part, that 20 percent is going to be tacked on there on, on top of the person's offering. Now you and I may think, “Twenty percent, eh, that's not a lot,” 20 percent would be a lot. Don't kid yourself, okay? “He shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, or ram without blemish out of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him before the LORD: and shall be forgiven for any thing of that, in all that which he hath done in trespassing therein.” Okay, let me go back to my notes, because I've got a lot of stuff here that needs to be kind of a little bit of a simplified version of what we just read.
So there are details in what I just read put in plain English: A person's property rights may be violated by someone else unlawfully, seizing them, stealing them, taking what's not yours, failure to report, lost or found property, or giving a false testimony. And when the guilty party came forward to confess, they would bring an offering, a clear revelation to the individual's remorse and repentance, not like, “Okay, now I got to do this.” It would be the display of remorse for the act, and it all ends, of course, as you can read with, “and it shall be forgiven him.” Now this is what's important. When Christ gave His life for ransom for many, the fullest satisfaction was made for both man and God. In other words, Jesus takes care of all of this, and on top of that, put into the category the things you and I would not consider actually or define as a sin or a trespass.
You know why? Because we're living in different times. You know, it might have been if we went back into the Puritanical times, certain things, you know, if you read enough history, you know, certain things would have been a sin. This would have been a sin: a woman wearing pants, right? That would have been a sin, and, and it would have not just been a sin verbally; it would have been a sin where you're ostracized in the community. There's a whole litany of things within the church; we're not talking about in the world. So it all depends. This is why I say to you, you've got to read this very carefully to see that God was never trying to squeeze the life out of somebody, but trying to point and show and reveal our need is much more than any animal offering could ever do.
Keep in mind that the sacrifices under the law activated or effectuated the temporal remission of punishment, but they could never cleanse the soul. And this is why when you read Hebrews, you go and you read the chapter where it says, “Neither the blood of bulls or goats could not cleanse a guilty mind.” So you could transfer. Remember I said that you've got to place your hand on the animal's head and it's one of those vicarious things. You could transfer, but that would not cleanse the inside. You'd still be walking around with the knowledge that even though that act would basically quell the punishment, the inside of the person was never at peace. You could not be at peace knowing that you have offended God. So there's a lot more to this.
I think the Israelite who sinned and incurred the penalty of death, for example, provided it was not a premeditated, willful, and deliberate act, would obviously bring the prescribed offering. But I don't think even there they thought, “Oh, and this absolves me completely.” It would absolve you of the punishment in the temporal sense, but could never cleanse. That's why I love what the book of Hebrews says. The shedding of blood was required, and I know a lot of people, this drives a lot of people mad, and they don't want to hear it. But God was driving home a point that if we were focused enough, we would look at this and we wouldn't say, “Oh, the bloodshed and oh, the carnality of it all, the,” when I say “carnality,” the flesh being torn down.
But rather we'd look at this and we'd say, “God knew that we needed Christ, we needed the sacrifice of Christ as a full, complete sacrifice to cover it all, to take it away.” And I'll say this one other thing, because I've said this in the past. I don't even think when we interpret the word kaporeth, the covering, which we've looked at on the Ark and many other places; I don't even think that's an adequate word for Christ's work. Do you know why? Because He just didn't cover us; He cleansed us. This, what we're looking at, would be a covering. The actual fullness of Christ's work is something that is cleansing to the core, but you'd have to read the book to see that.
You'd have to read the book to know it. So now that I've painted all this picture, I want us to look at several things that are repeated several times. Starting in the fourth chapter; don't turn there; verse 20, verse 26, verse 31, verse 35; the fifth chapter, verses 10, 13, 16, 18; and in the sixth chapter, verse 7, “it shall be forgiven him,” or “it shall be forgiven them.” The Hebrew word for “forgiveness,” this word is sallâch. I think that's what I'm wanting to write: sallâch, maybe. And there's a whole bunch of words that would be attached to this word. This is what's important. You know, I give you the details, but I want you to see something. This, this word occurs 46 times as a verb in the Old Testament, but there's something really important here. The only one who grants sallâch is God. What's my point? We make the mistake, and I; most of you who are listening to me know this, but I've got a whole host of people who have not heard this before.
The priest here did not dispense forgiveness. The priest here did not have the ability to dispense forgiveness. Only God could forgive; even the Pharisees and the Sadducees in Jesus' day said, “Only God can forgive sin.” And this Hebrew word is used exclusively of God forgiving. So anyone who reads this and takes that as a template and spins it into the modern realm of Catholicism that the priest can absolve you; I'm sorry, but that is just not the case, that will never be the case. No human can absolve another human of the acts, sin or trespass. Sin is your condition, but trespass is anything committed against God. No one can do that except God. God's willingness to forgive is much more, if you see what I see, and I've highlighted them.
You know, you go around and you, the green is where it says “it shall be forgiven him.” That was important for me to highlight that, so that every time I open this book, I do not forget that even here within the confines of the law, God had abundant mercy and grace to provide forgiveness to grant that to His people. I love the fact that, for example, when Nehemiah reminds God of God's past mercies, and if you examine, he's praying for something, he's petitioning, and he's actually petitioning God for something he didn't do, but the people did. And that got God's ear. But only God━do you see what I'm trying to say? It can't be us. We can pray, we can petition, we can ask, but only God has the power, and God did take Nehemiah's words, honored them, kind of a cry for forgiveness and mercy to the people, and that is what opened the door for God to open the heart of Cyrus to let the people to come back.
So you kind of got to see it in proper perspective. You've got the same thing, by the way, if you look at Amos, when he's praying, you know, he's praying about these locusts, and you think about it, he's praying for the people to be forgiven, essentially, to take, to take away this; it's a vision, by the way, it didn't yet happen in, in his time. And God reassures him, basically in a nutshell; I'm giving you the quick version; that all is, all could be, or all would be forgiven. So it's important to see the subject of forgiveness even in the law through the prophets is very, very clear. And there's a formula here. So check this out. The person who commits sin or trespass must bring their offering, there must be shed blood; it's as if God's saying, “I gave you a lot.
I freed you. I gave you life. I gave you all, everything that you could possibly need or want, and you've sinned against Me essentially. It's going to cost you.” And now we can't even imagine that that cost is nothing compared to the cost of Jesus dying on the cross for us, but God says, “Nevertheless, it's going to cost you.” And I don't care what anybody says about this part here. The reason why I'm highlighting all this is because no matter what the people did, it took a long time before God gave up on the people, their apostasy, their complaining, their chronic issues, which if you read just the Pentateuch, you can see these people were, instead of being grateful and going back to God in thanksgiving, they were pretty much a stiff-necked, ungracious band of people.
For God chose them out of a unique group of people, that He chose them, He didn't choose other people, and yet they could not get this. And yet in spite of all that, He still forgave them. He still forgave them. But once we've turned from the Old Testament you understand this. And you get into the New Testament, and we've studied those words for forgiveness, the major Greek words for forgiveness you begin to see God really hasn't changed. The, we'll call it the harshness or the legal binding things, yes, those are, those are not there anymore. But if you read enough, and we've studied these words, for example, the Greek word, aphiemi, which is “to let go, to cancel, to remit, to forgive”; aphesis, which is “to release, to pardon,” it connotes cancellation of debt.
Paresis is another word occurring one time, “to let pass,” or “to let go.” You've got in the New Testament, aphiemi used 142 times; 47 of them are found in Matthew. I mean, if you kind of break it down, you see there's a lot of that concept woven into the New Testament wherever you look. And the importance of this is to understand that when you get to the New Testament, forgiveness of sins, of debts, of trespasses, it's used in a very general context. No longer do we have, we'll call it the details, but it still must be maintained and understood.
Christ takes care of both the condition of man; our condition, our Adamic fallen nature, our condition, our congenital condition, and the fruit of that life lived, which is the sins we commit. And don't go down the pathway and say, “Well, I don't drink anymore, I don't smoke.” Those are, I wouldn't even, tell you the truth, those are the easiest things because they're the obvious things, but what about the things that are not obvious that people tend to forget and gloss over? Think about that, it's a good one. So what we have here is the Old Testament where what we're studying actually shows us that God's grace and God's willingness to forgive was always there, and the method.
Okay, you can say, “Well, God made a prescription, and dah, dah, dah, dah,” well, the prescription for the New Testament was that Jesus must go to the cross and die, that He'd also resurrect. And remember the connection to what Paul says. He says, “If Christ is not risen, our faith is vain, and you are yet in your sins.” This is why it's vital to understand for every person listening to me, the front, center, circumference, anywhere you want to, at any angle, is the Resurrection because without the validity of the Resurrection, everything else crumbles to pieces, including the forgiveness that, the forgiveness of sins, right? So it's important to understand that.
Now, I want you and I to approach the subject of forgiveness now a little bit differently. When you go back and you read this, I don't want you to look at, “Well, those were the children of Israel, the Israelites in the desert.” They have the same disease we have. They, they suffered from the same things we suffer from, and that is basically spiritual blindness, spiritual ineptness, the inability to understand God, God's ways, God's words, God's wishes, God's desires. We struggle with the same problems and it's pretty simple if I may say so.
The offerings point us. So if we take all these offerings and you can say, “Okay, lift away the,” we'll call it the grossness of the offerings for just a minute, because you can't remove it. And what the offerings show us for us, an application to us, we come in already from the get-go offending God. I don't care who you are, I don't care how great you think you are or how bad you think you are. You come in already offending God from the beginning in the holy things. Now, remember there is no law now. The law's been fulfilled in Christ, but how many times have I said to you, people who think they're fulfilling the bare minimum think they'll make it in? They've checked the box; they think they'll make it in, “Oh, I've done the minimum I, I've require to do.” That might be, if that's your mindset, you still don't have a relationship with Christ.
The minimum that you can do is recognize; it's like saying, this person died for me. Don't make this a generic picture of the world. This person died for me. Do you, have you ever met anyone that actually gave their life for you that, I'm not talking about our great American soldiers. I'm not talking about our law enforcement. I'm talking about have you ever met someone personally come into contact with that gave their life for you? And my answer is there's only One and that's Christ.
So when you come to that real reality, not the lip service version, you come in recognizing you've offended God right at the get-go, and then I see my condition. Once these two things have been dealt with in Christ, I begin to be able to have fellowship with God, because that's what the peace offering is. The peace offering is shared; God, the offeror, and the priest all partake.
I'm able to, because of understanding my status, my state of being and the fruit of my state of being, I'm now able, because of the offering now, I'm speaking in the New Testament, because of the offering of Christ, I'm able to have fellowship with God. I'm able to, if I can keep making the journey in my walk and keep faithing, I'm able to get to the mindset of the burnt offering, which is what the apostle Paul was saying in Romans 12, to offer yourself wholly, a living sacrifice to God. You get to that point of recognizing, yes, the burnt offering is Christ, it's also us. And everything in between is a picture, a portrait. So you can get hung up on, “Oh, I can't read that,” because whatever, or you can look at this and say, “God had a roadmap even here in the Old Testament to show us what life would be like for the spiritual and faithful in the New, and it hasn't changed.” The beauty of this is even embedded here, “it shall be forgiven.” We know when we get to the New Testament mindset, this is why this really bugs me when people say, “Well, you know, it's very difficult for me because,” and fill in the blanks.
If God said, “I forgive you, it shall be forgiven you,” then I recommend you take God at His word. There are several psalms that are beloved for most of this congregation. Psalm 103 talks about the forgiveness of God being as your sins are removed as far as the east is from the west. And in another place it talks about, in the book of Micah, your sins being basically thrown into the abyss of the sea, never to be seen again. That is the forgiveness of God. And when one receives that forgiveness, let me tell you what happens. The devil may still come and whisper in your ear, people you used to know may say, “Yeah, sure,” and point their finger at you, but you won't━I will reiterate this. You have one Audience to please, and it's not me. It's God. And when you get that right, everything comes together. Even the faltering and the “Kind of; I'm not sure exactly.” When you're focused on that one Audience, and that's the most important Person, this will all fall into place and you'll understand one thing: God is not against you.
God is for you. All these people that say, “Well, I can't come to the church, because,” those are manmade ideologies that keep people out, the whole, “You've got to clean up before you come in here.” We've never looked at anybody and said anything other than sinners are welcome, but you've got to start with the right place. Don't come in here with your baggage and don't come in here with your ideology and tell me you're okay, when most of us coming in can't even figure out we've already sinned against God. Choose words wisely. We've already sinned against God in our activities before we even came into the church. Don't try and put a halo on it. Recognize it, and the confession part comes when you talk to God. David did that. David had a priest by him, by the way let me remind you, prophet and priest in Nathan, and he may have conversed with him, but when he made that bold declaration in Psalm 51, he's talking to God; he's not talking to an intermediary: “Against thee, O LORD, and thee alone have I sinned.” So if there's a takeaway, all of these point, all these offerings point to Christ, help us understand the New Testament.
If there's another takeaway, it's that only God can forgive. No man can, no one can, no man or woman can forgive sins committed against God. And finally, we serve a forgiving, loving God. What He does want though is He wants us to be honest both with ourselves and with Him. And when that happens, the floodgates of real blessings of knowing Christ begin to happen. So for all those people who say, “Well, what's the point in studying this?” I hope you recognize that there's great value. Now if you go back and you look at these and scrutinize them, because we didn't read every verse in here and there's much more I could have gone into, I want you to see something. As people say, “Well, it's Old Testament” yeah, it's Old Testament, but it, the beauty is that if you look carefully, you're going to see Christ on these pages, even within the book of Leviticus.
Now that's pretty darn special and pretty amazing that God would include that as something for us to recognize, see, and learn from. So hopefully this, this has is gelled with you all. And while I was sitting here and finishing my notes, I couldn't help but think about this. You know, we used to sing a song here, which speaks to my heart greatly, “I would love to tell you what I think of Jesus, how I found in Him a friend so strong and true. I'd love to tell you how He changed my life completely. He did something that no other friend could do. No one has ever cared for me like Jesus.” And when you really get that in your mind, everything else will change.
And that is that He cared for the people back here. He cares for the people today, and if we could only wake up to that and fortify ourselves in that knowledge, there's really nothing that the Christian, that the believer cannot do in Christ. That's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
You have a lot of people who erroneously make this statement, “I accepted Christ.” Hmm? Haven't you heard that? I have said many times, you didn't accept Him. You may think you've accepted Him, but He accepted you when He went to the cross and died for you, and you were not yet, but your name was spoken before the foundations of the earth. He accepted you. You have a choice to accept or reject, this is true, but He accepted you. The offering, first and foremost represents Christ's acceptance of us. ♪ ♪ We have been looking at shadows and types in the tabernacle that point to the work and ministry of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We saw how God delivered a people out of Egypt's bondage, gave them instructions while they were in Egypt when they came out and continuously along the way. But I'd ask you to take notice of something.
Big difference between the instructions given to the individuals living in Egypt where God basically said to the; for the household to apply the blood on the doorpost and the lintels and then in doing so when the avenging angel or the death angel saw the blood, it would pass over. Big difference between that, which was basically something done for the entire body of people, family or servants living under the roof versus the children of Israel being brought out, out of Egypt and learning how to have fellowship and communion with God in a place of worship.
And so, the first one is pure deliverance, just straight deliverance, there's no strings attached except for applying the blood, nothing else. But the second, leading them out, a lifestyle of devotion and worship. Now we, that's kind of like a bird's eye view of looking at the story in two parts. But think of it this way, this is kind of where the modern church has derailed.
The modern church focuses on the outreach of delivering people, right? “Gotta get people saved, gotta go out and witness to them,” right? All that stuff. But fail to do the second part, which just like God did, there's the pattern right there. People are delivered out of Egypt's bondage. They probably knew that they were slaves under harsh labor but didn't know what it all entailed. Now they get out and they're delivered and they must learn to worship, to practice God's ways. Well, that's the church's problem. We're seemingly experts at going out and trying to “seek and save the lost,” even though that's God's job.
But not so expert in educating, showing people, teaching them that second part, the relationship part. It's not enough to say, let's go and preach the word. It's teaching people how to make the application, how to have the relationship, just like the children of Israel. And that started with God laying out first and foremost what He would prescribe for the children of Israel. And then eventually this would be a, we'll call it a universal application, the Ten Commandments, for example. And then after that there's a whole litany of things that God prescribes. The book of Leviticus starts the laws of offerings, which we're going to be looking at. And this is why it's crucially important not just to look at the tabernacle and how everything in the tabernacle functions, how it relates to Christ, but also understanding the offerings, because if the offerings are properly understood, again it gives a fuller perspective. You know, I can tell you about the altar, the brazen altar, and what would be offered on the altar.
But failure to tell you about what and how and why kind of leaves you with the mechanics without the, the heart or the guts. So that's what we're going to look at. And here the laws of offering kind of come with three parts to them: the offering, the offeror, and the priest. And I will show you how many times in each case of these three things I just said, Christ is in there somewhere in some capacity or fulfilling all of them: offering, offeror, and priest. The book of Hebrews says something regarding Christ, “A body hast thou prepared me as an offering,” His offering, the ultimate offering. So in the context of that, that He might obviously offer Himself up to reconcile us to God. And this is where it gets a little weird because we know without it being specified, it's not spelled out in black and white terms, but just think about it. Only the high priest, for example, could take the blood into the holy of holies and sprinkle the blood there; only the high priest alone.
So when, twenty years ago when I wrote that, what I called it “a little diddly,” Lamb of God, it didn't have necessarily a theological wondrous background. But in that song that I penned, I said that Jesus took His blood to heaven to cleanse an angel's band. Now the principle there may be a little bit caricatured, but the idea is there. Just like the priest only, the high priest alone being able to bring the blood and sprinkle it in the holy of holies, only Christ could bring His blood. And if you think about it, the people who passed away in the Old Testament sense, when it says He went and He ministered, they were awaiting the promise but died before it. That's what the book of Hebrews talks about.
So at some point in some theological way, He had to have taken either by Himself or by the act of Him laying down His life that His blood did cleanse those who were, who were already passed and those who were still considered unclean, not yet washed in the blood. So there's kind of all these interesting things. I didn't, by the way, I didn't have that great theological mindset, but it made sense to me when I was putting the words down, which I know now, looking back, I was just the hand in the pen for God to say, “Okay, write this down”" And I, I'm saying that because I cannot take credit for something that just, it flowed out of me, not of my imagination, but obviously of God kind of directing.
And that is the same mindset in the offerings. Now we see Christ as innocent, without spot or blemish, a sweet savor to God, while He carries the sin that was laid upon Him, bearing it, dying for it. So the offerings laid out in Leviticus, you've got the burnt offering, the meat offering, the peace offering, sin, and then trespass. And there are a few oddities along the way, but when God laid this out, it's very interesting that He started with the burnt offering, and obviously ends with sin and trespass. That's how God started. When we come to God, we can't even; we can't even understand what the burnt offering is. I'll explain in a minute. We come, when we're ready to approach God, we come by way of the sin and trespass, like guilty conscience, “How do I make this right? How do I fix the problem?” Not “How do I worship?” or “How do I submit?” So we do things in the reverse. God sets it up that way, just like I showed you with the tabernacle.
You've got to come through the door, and what was obviously should have been first in the instructions for us would have been build the structure, make the door, but God started first with Ark of the Covenant where His presence would be. So it's always, if you read the Bible properly, God is usually starting with Himself or His ways or His thoughts and then gets to us.
So it's important to study it in that way as well. So before I get to discussing the burnt offering, and if you want to turn your Bibles to the book of Leviticus, the word “offering,” first of all, if we look at the etymological side of the word offering from Old English, “the presenting of something to the deity.” If you look this up in an etymological dictionary, offering, the word “offering” is right beside it. It says, “the presenting of something to the deity; a thing presented,” from the verb offre, “to present in worship,” from ob, the prefix o, b, which is “in the direction of or to,” and ferre, not “fairy,” but ferre, “to bring or to carry,” from the root b, h, e, r, “to carry or bear children.” Actually that word, b, e; b, h, e, r, “to carry or bear children,” brought about the word bern in, I believe in Scottish or in Irish.
I just, that just came to my mind as I'm looking at this, “to bring forth a child or a baby.” The idea expressed in the Hebrew when we get to a concept of “offering” is the word qorbân, a “presentation” or a “gift.” The word that we're going to encounter over and over again, qorbân, has several different tentacles to it, but attached to it is for the burnt offering, the word, the Hebrew word 'ôlâh, “to ascend.” The Septuagint renders 'ôlâh, which is being rendered “burnt offering.” The Septuagint renders it olakautoma, where we actually get our word for “holocaust: to ascend up,” all right? So these qorbân would be brought to God's dwelling place, the tabernacle either delivered to the door, at the door, not entering in, but at the door, or in the court to become appropriated or consumed by and in the service to God.
Three classes of qorbânim, and I put the -im at the end because that makes it plural. One, of dedication for the sanctuary of God, better called the “gifts of dedication.” Two, for the maintenance of the servants of God, which would include firstfruits, tithes, and firstborn. Three, for God Himself, or what is referred to as the “altar sacrifices,” where everything presented is completely consumed to or used for God, and this last class, some of these are even called “most holy offerings.” So there's kind of this class inside, and then there's going to be a breakdown of different classes inside the burnt offering. The law of burnt offering, or 'ôlâh qorbân, defined as wholly consumed to God upward, and in contrast to other offerings, was a sweet saver offered for acceptance. And I'm going to have to explain this by reading the text to show you what I'm talking about.
So we'll read the text in a minute. So in this way, the burnt offering is different than the sin offering. It was also, the burnt offering required a life, so it's different than the meat offering. And then, of course, there are offerings. For example, the burnt offering was a sweet saver offering, as I just said, like the meat or peace offerings belonging to a class offered on the brazen altar, where here, we are not talking, for the burnt offering, sin is not the theme. And there is an extreme amount of confusion. If you read commentaries, there are a lot of people confused about this. The burnt offering is not an offering for sin, and I'll explain why in a minute. The sin and trespass offerings were consumed not on the altar, but usually on the ground, right outside the door. And there there's a big difference there. And we'll detail these as we go through them one by one, because I think there's a lot of homogenized ideas that just, we just kind of mix it together and “Oh, it's offerings,” right? Some of these would be portions designated for the priest to eat, for example, but in some cases, the blood would have to be taken, and that blood would be taken by the priest and sprinkled.
Now, in the burnt offering, Jesus is the fulfillment in that He wholly and completely offered Himself for us. But as I said, not as the sin or trespass offering, that comes later, but as completely accepted and pleasing to God. So some of the characteristics of this offering: perfect, voluntary; when I say “vicarious,” be careful, it's not vicarious as in a substitution. I'll explain. Slain by the offeror, blood sprinkled, and wholly consumed, except for usually the skin that sometimes would be held back. And there are, it seems like God wasted nothing here. Now, In Leviticus, we are given the instructions, the how, but we're actually not told why. Think about that for a minute. Okay? Why sin and trespass, that makes sense, right? That's obvious, I hope. Yeah? Okay. But this offering, it doesn't give a why.
It doesn't say why. Now, if you read carefully, and I'm going to read this right now, and I'll probably reread it again because we have to go to Genesis in a minute, so because I asked you to turn to Leviticus, I'm going to read Leviticus. “And the LORD called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man of you bring an offering unto the LORD, you shall bring your offering of cattle, even of herd, and of flock.” And I want you to notice something.
Unlike the prescribed requirement in Egypt to apply the blood, which was considered a corporate application for your family, here this particular offering becomes singular. “Let him, let him, let him offer a male without blemish: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the LORD. And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him.” Now, I want you to focus in on that “it shall be accepted for him.” And the rest of that sense is to make an atonement for him, but do not be confused that “atonement,” the word, the Hebrew word there, Strong's 3722 is kapporeth, but do not make the mistake of thinking that this instruction as you're reading it in English means atonement the same way as sin and trespass, and I'll explain why in a minute.
So just kind of note to self, keep that there, but the more important words is, “it shall be accepted for him.” Okay, now, why am I saying this to you? Because burnt offerings occur, the first place we find them is in Genesis 8. So after God tells Noah to build the ark and tells him that He's going to basically flood the earth. So after the waters abate, Noah emerges. And it's very interesting because it's not as though God said, “Noah, I want you to follow these instructions. Noah, I prescribe or I mandate.” Listen carefully, I'll read it to you. You don't have to turn there if you don't want to, but it says, “Noah went forth,” that would be Genesis 8:18.
I'll read it to you, “Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him: every beast, every creeping thing, every fowl, whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, and after their kinds went forth out of the ark. And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD.” I don't read anywhere where God's voice is recorded saying, “Noah build Me an altar so you can sacrifice.” It doesn't say that. So whether God spoke to him or whether this was what we would carry out in the New Testament mindset of an act of God's Spirit leading, but it says, Noah took, “Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; took of every clean beast, of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Now take a look at something because I, those of you who read Hebrew that I've taught, I highlighted this in my Hebrew Bible so you can see here. So he sacrificed, and you can even see in the word sacrifice, ve-yal, “and he sacrificed,” and here we have 'ôlâh, “burnt offerings.” So it's right there. You can't miss it just in case somebody says, “Well, the English isn't translated properly.” It's there.
So here, this one is unsolicited. God didn't say, “Do this.” We don't have a record. Maybe God did, but we don't have a record of that. We only have a record of Noah coming out of the ark with his wife and his children, and offering of “every clean beast, every clean fowl, offering burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite, any more, every thing living as I have done.” Now, what's interesting here, and I want you to think about this, the burnt offering here cannot be an offering for sin. It cannot. Why? First of all, there was no law yet, so the definition as we understand it had not yet been given. No, we saw the act, for example, of brother against brother, Cain and Abel, killing his brother. But again, there was no law yet given that said, “Thou shall not kill.” So all we have are acts of individuals, which for certain we know there had to be some type of a moral compass, because even in the act of brother killing brother, we have a reaction.
We have a conversation between the individual and God. But here, something very unique, which is God has already smote the earth with water. So if there was an idea that man was evil, that verse I just read 21 says, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.” That expression has to encapsulate the mindset that God knew evil had not been eradicated. Why? Because we're going to see it in the offspring of Noah, and we're also going to see it in Noah himself, so the idea here has more to do if you listen to God's words, He says, “I will not again curse the ground any more.” There's almost a covenant concept behind the burnt offering. I'm not saying it is covenantal in its entirety, but there's this, “I will not again,” almost like an a promise or an oath from God, and then, the last part of that chapter says, “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold, heat, summer, winter, and day and night shall not cease.” So, and then it goes on to God will then give a covenant of the rainbow.
But it cannot be a sacrifice that Noah made for sin, and I'm going to explain to you why. And the best way to show this to you is to have you turn to Genesis 22, because when you see the background of the burnt offering, it makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, how can we properly understand this offering if we just simply read the text I read to you that says, “Accepted and shall essentially be an atonement for him,” and it's automatically assumed that if this is wholly consumed to God, something wholly offered to God, that somehow because the word “atonement” appears, it has to be in balance with sin, but it is not. So, let me show you again. Genesis 22, “It came to pass after these things,” you know the story really well. God speaks to; He tempts Abraham and says unto him, basically, “Take your son, your only begotten son, son of promise, not the son of flesh,” so Isaac, “go into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountains of which I will tell thee of.” So, just so you can see it with your own eyes.
If you can recognize the ayin, lamed, chet, those are your words for 'ôlâh, “burnt offerings.” So, God says, “Take your only begotten son and offer him as a burnt offering, wholly consumed up to God,” right? And you know the rest of the story. The rest of the story basically is they're going up the mount. They tell, or Abraham tells, the servants, “Wait here, we'll be back.” They go up the mount. Everything's all ready, and then, of course, when God saw what was in Abraham's heart, that he would have carried out the act of sacrificing the son of promise, Isaac, the angel basically calls to him, his hand is stayed. He turns around, there's a ram caught in the thicket, and God provided another offering in place of Isaac.
Now, again, this could not have been a sin offering. So, you have a problem if you're going to read the opening passages of Leviticus and read “accepted” and “atonement for,” and I'm going to show you why when you look at the sin offering. There you have something coupled. You may have a burnt offering coupled with a sin offering because there are, there are different dimensions of the offerings, but the burnt offering itself can only be again once more; watch what happens, as he, “Abraham lifted his eyes, looked and behold him, there was a ram caught in the thicket,” that's verse 13 of the twenty-second chapter, “Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. He called the place Jehovah-jireh: in the mount of the LORD it shall be seen. And the angel of the LORD called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time,” and again, if you can't see it, there's a kind of covenant concept going on here, “and said, By myself I have sworn, saith the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing, and not withheld thy son, thine only son: that in blessing I will bless thee, in multiplying I will multiply thy seed.” There's, there's a covenant given here that will be fully understood as you go through the record to show that the seed of Isaac would produce the seed of Jacob that would lead to Christ.
So you can never think of the burnt offering, regardless of how the wording is in the opening chapters of Leviticus, just by using these two examples alone, that somehow this is a sin offering. But if you're still not convinced, I want you to look at something else. If you turn to Exodus 10; at least we're going in the right direction. This is Moses speaking to Pharaoh. “And Moses said,” Exodus 10 verse 25, “And Moses said, Thou must give us also sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice unto the LORD our God.
Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not be a hoof left behind; for thereof must we take to serve the LORD our God.” So you can see right there, it's not that we must go and sacrifice these animals as burnt offerings as an offering for sin. Again, the law had not yet been given; an understanding of God's intent or prescription had not yet been understood. And even after the giving of such, I don't think it was understood. You have one more incident, again, there's no concept of something being offered for sin in this passage. Simply Moses is petitioning Pharaoh. Then you have in Exodus 18, you have Jethro, Moses' father-in-law. Take a look, “Jethro, Moses' father in law, took a burnt offering and sacrifices for God: and Aaron came, and all the elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses' father in law before God.” If you read this whole section, there is no mention here somebody sinned or something happened. So this was the way things worked. And then, of course, as I said, you can see there is a pattern.
So, I think I've shown you enough here. So let, let's go back to Leviticus for a second, Now the intriguing part, as I said, is this offering becomes personal. The offeror offers his offering to the priest, and the priest basically, the involvement of the priest for this particular offering except for one category of it. If you brought of the herd a bullock, of lamb, or goat, the offeror would actually have to slay the animal, and the priest would take the blood. The only exception is the turtledove. That was basically done by the priest probably because it was so small, and to spare the blood, all right. But if you keep reading this, there were appointed times for the burnt offering what would be made every day, morning and evening: every day. That's a lot of burnt offerings. An additional burnt offering was to be offered each Sabbath day, the beginning of each month, at the celebration of Passover on the fourteenth day of the first month with the new grain offering and the feast of weeks, at the feast of trumpets, on a sacred day in the seventh month, and for the celebration of the new moon.
Many times, here's kind of this attaches to what I was saying, the burnt offering many times was done in conjunction with either sin or trespass offering. The offerings offered in Leviticus 5; so let's look there, 5, so for example, this particular section, “He shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD for his sin,” that's verse 6, “which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.” So God's really specific when it says “atonement,” specifically for sin, but there would be a burnt offering offered alongside this particular offering. It's not abundantly clear in the English, but reading in the Hebrew makes it crystal clear. Then you've got an accompaniment also with the sin offering, the freewill offering, the sheaf offering, and the new grain offering. They all could be combined, so you could offer an offering of one and offer a burnt offering in conjunction with that.
The burnt offering was also required for certain times, such as, for example, the cleansing of a leper, the healing of a leper, if a man had an issue of discharge from his body, or if a woman had just had a child, the burnt offering would be offered. Also, the Nazarite, who unintentionally made himself ceremonially unclean by coming in contact or touching a deceased person, or when a member of the camp, this is the kicker, when a member of the camp would unknowingly break one of the prescribed laws of God, they'd have to offer a burnt offering for the entire camp. So there's exceptions, there's all this minute detail, but it cannot be, again, I'm going to repeat this, even though I've just given you details that seem rather interesting.
Some of them are for people who were unclean, but they're done in conjunction with other offerings, they're not burnt offerings alone, and that must be understood. Burnt offering would also be required for the consecration of Aaron, the high priest, as well as those in the Levitical line. Remember, we separated out all the different priests and all their different functions.
The Levites would have to have a burnt offering for consecration as well. All right, three types of offerings in this class; from the herd of bulls, the offering from the flock, an offering of birds. Now, this is what I love. God provided a way for every person amongst the children of Israel to participate. Now, if that doesn't tell you God's insight to see that we don't all have the same blessings, we don't all have the same allotment in life, so think about how valuable, for example, the bullock would have been, because we're not talking about an old animal or a maim or lame animal. We're talking about what would have been considered the best, the youngest without blemish, without flaw, the strongest, the one that you'd probably want to keep for yourself, right? It goes like that.
So, what I love about this is even in the class category, for the bullock, for example, symbolic of strength, laboring endurance, or if you were going to go from the flock, the lamb, and it's innocence and its willingness to submit, kind of, again, all of these can be tied into the gospel, animals that are analogous to each Gospel record, or we could put them as symbolism. So, the ox, or the bullock, rather, as a symbol of strength; the lamb, the willingness to submit, if you will; the turtledove, harmless paradox of the lowliness of Christ, and another paradox, which is the lowliness of a turtledove that's able to be humble and low, but also take to the sky. So, there's all these different pictures in there, but within these offerings, again, you've got these specific class categories, and I always think to myself, interesting, right? You would, if you had it, you would have to offer up your best bullock, for example, right? But a turtledove, let's just say you had no possessions, you could easily, I'm sure not so easily, but you could, you could get a turtledove.
You could find one. There's probably an abundance of them. So, God's saying, “There's no excuse for anyone to not be able to participate in what I've prescribed,” It tells you right here, God is saying, “I don't care what walk of life you come from. I don't care what little or what much you have. Everybody who comes into My realm will learn to worship My way, which means you don't come into My presence empty-handed.” God made provisions for every walk of life, and expected by the way, with no exception.
So, when people say, “But I don't have,” or “I can't participate,” or “You don't know,” yeah, I do actually, and I realize that it's, that's like saying, “You know, I'm going to make, I'm going to give you an excuse that I can't,” and the same people who make those excuses are the very people who will argue down to the last moment of their breath about how giving in any way, shape, or form is legalism and the law. So again, I'll just say this for those who are stout-hearted, if you call yourself a Christian, that means you are a follower of Christ, a little Christ, likened to Him, He lives in you or His Spirit lives in you, and He was the greatest Giver of all times, and He's not asking you to go and die on a cross. But if you think about it, Paul said it; we are to present ourselves a living sacrifice.
And the key words in that verse in Romans 12 are “wholly acceptable,” which ties right back into what this, actually, this offering means. Bear with me, because there's a lot of little minutia here to go through. So, let me recap before I go forward. If you remember, in Genesis 8, there were no instructions, not that we know of, not that we have. Noah builds an altar, he offers burnt offerings, there is no mention of sin, and God, for all intense purposes, has dealt with the sin by flooding the earth. That's not really true, but it was caused by the evil that was in man's heart. Genesis 22 is a completely different concept, “Take your son,” the key words in that passage, God was wanting to see, “tempt,” what was in Abraham's heart. Would he carry through? And both of those references have some, as I said, a form of some type of promise or covenant, “I will not again flood the earth.
Here, a ram is presented for you to offer in place of your son, now that I know that you will obey me. And in his seed of this child that you were supposed to offer up, but I provided another sacrifice, in his seed the whole earth will be blessed.” So, you can never look at this and think, offering for sin. Now, remember what I said to you, the key words in the verse 4, “it shall be accepted for him.” And when you're reading that, don't think “it shall be accepted for him to make an atonement for him,” and think immediately “sin.” Think about it this way, and I'll just say it, and then I can keep going.
Think of the burnt offering as God's offering of acceptance, something that was pleasing to God, something that was laid down completely, and in the eyes of the offeror, knowing it would be completely consumed for God. Now, you tell me when you get to the sin offering, and you read about the sin offering or the trespass offering, how they cannot be the same thing. So, it's difficult, but let me say it this way. You have a lot of people who erroneously make this statement, “I accepted Christ.” Hmm? Haven't you heard that? I have said many times, you didn't accept Him. You may think you've accepted Him, but He accepted you when He went to the cross and died for you, and you were not yet, but your name was spoken before the foundations of the earth. He accepted you. You have a choice to accept or reject, this is true, but He accepted you. The offering first and foremost represents Christ's acceptance of us, and you've got to read it that way and see it that way.
Then there's some interesting details in here, but the main thing I want to, I want to show you is this. In the case of the burnt offering that is attached to the sin offering, it's always in conjunction with forgiveness. So, if you went back and you read, let's see if we can find an example for you. I think I read one of them. Yes, “Make an atonement concerning his sin,” and then if you read on it'll say somewhere over and over again, “and it shall be forgiven,” “And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin, that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him.” So, that's Leviticus 5 and verse 13, and that is within the sin offering, sin and trespass offering. So, what I'm trying to say to you is that sometimes you'd have two offerings done, because remember the burnt offering is morning and evening, and then in conjunction with these other offerings. It doesn't necessarily spell out, but you'd have the offering that was prescribed for sin and trespass. You'd also have the additional burnt offering, or it could be offered alongside in conjunction with.
That's probably a better way to say it. Unlike the offering of meat or meal offering, as some refer to it, frankincense or grain or corn were offered here; for the burnt offering, a life. And again, if you start reading carefully, it says that the offeror shall bring it of his own will voluntarily. So again, remember I said offeror, offering, and priest. So here, when it's speaking of this concept willfully or voluntarily, unlike sin and trespass, where you had to, it was required of you. Here, this is a voluntary offering, wholly consumed, and then of course we can see these concepts appropriated in the New Testament in a diversity of ways, and I'll explain, because sometimes we just, we, we get caught up in one vision, which is “You are to present yourself a living sacrifice; that must be the burnt offering,” but how about, think of it from the inside.
You remember in Matthew 22, Jesus is asked, “Which is the greatest of the commandments?” And He says, “The first one is summed up like this, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, thy soul, and all thy mind. This is the first and basically greatest commandment. The other one is to love your neighbor.” If you think about it, heart, soul, mind, the complete entity of the individual is consumed with God, and there you can make the connection between what is wholly offered to God must have the insides filled with the concepts of God, in order to present oneself. This is why I'd say this, this is why there are so many, I'm nobody's judge, okay, but this is why there are so many impotent Christians. I just want you to stop and think about this. It's like having the best sports car in the world and having no gas in it. You're going to go nowhere, unless you carve out the bottom and do Fred Flintstone, okay? You're going nowhere. Same thing, unless you are filled, that can let the person present themselves and serve God completely.
That doesn't mean that your mind, by the way, is 24 hours a day always consumed with God. It just means; I've used the example of a teabag, being steeped in the word of God. Well, that infusion that takes place, if a person is infused with that word they are essentially wholly committed, consumed to God by His word. So you get, you get the imagery of burnt offering in different ways.
Most people think it's just, I present myself, but you cannot present yourself, as Paul said in Romans 12, without being inside, the inside has to be representative of what the outside is doing. And I think that's one of the bigger disconnects that I have seen within the body of Christ. This is why I start off by saying, most churches do the work of delivering out of Egypt, but they do not want to do the work of teaching the worship practices, of learning God's ways, of understanding things, that a person may actually be filled with the knowledge and therefore able to be, in any capacity, not just as a pastor, in any capacity as a servant of God and a child of God, a burnt offering wholly consumed for God. As I said, that doesn't mean 24/7.
I'm, I am not, if you think I'm the person that sits around and 24 hours a day, all I do is talk about God, you're a lunatic. And anybody who says that they do, I don't know, I can't speak, but I'm going to say I highly doubt it, okay? You're thinking about food at least once or twice a day, and other bodily functions. Don't tell, don't, save that for somebody who's going to believe that skubala, I don't, okay? But what's interesting is that even Christ Himself, you don't read that He had multiple missions. “I must be,” even as a child, “I must be about my Father's business,” and later on He says, “I came to do the will of the Father,” wholly consumed inside with a mission that translated to the outside. As I said, this is a disconnect. Do you remember I taught on a word one time, I probably drove a lot of people crazy. Do you remember I taught on this word, this Greek word homologia, where I said it's basically things that meet, your, call it belief or faith, at the juncture of behavior, where they coincide or where the juncture is.
This is representative of that, and most people, if they even get this concept, will go into, and I'm sorry, but I've met these too, where it's like so well versed in what this says that I can “Polly-wanna-cracker,” tell you, but it's just words, it's, there's nothing in here. I've met those people. God bless them for thinking that's the way, but that's not the way. And the most natural thing that I can say is, the more exposed you are to this word, the more steeped you are, the easier the concept is to understand what it means to be a burnt offering to God, and that you're not burning yourself up or laying on your stove.
You are━I don't know, I just have to say that in case, you never know in this day and age, if somebody identifies today as a piece of pizza that needs to be reheated or something. I don't know. Anyway, all right, I want you to take a look at something else, instructions given for the burnt offering, very interesting, and it is for the offerings that would come of cattle, of herd, but not, not for the bird offerings, okay.
Verse 8 says, “And the priests, Aaron's sons, shall lay the parts, the head, and the fat, in order upon the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar: but his inward,” innards “and his legs shall he wash in water: and the priest shall burn all on the altar,” to be burnt, “a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire of sweet savour unto the LORD.” And this is what's interesting, the catalog here head, fat, inwards, legs. Yes, it's describing the procedure, but the takeaway, if you want to make an appropriation to this, you are, you and I are not animals, but head, where the thoughts are processed; fat is analogous to the seat of emotions or feelings, our thoughts; the inward parts, again, same thing; legs analogous to our walk.
So you could talk about that and say, for example, the inward, the innards and his legs shall he wash in water. That concept we can take right into the New Testament and say, “We must be washed with the water of God's word.” And that process, I just described it, lets you present yourself. Otherwise, how can you? You wouldn't know that. It's not something that you go, “I think I want to present myself today.” It's from it with inside, something that God fills you with.
So I love the fact that even in the offering instructions, there are concepts there. He, “and he wash in water,” again, representative for us as an appropriation to the Holy Spirit that washes us, or what is said in John, “You are made clean through the word,” and the Word that spoke that word, the Logos, Christ speaking, also said, quoting another Old Testament passage, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” So if you think about it, it is interesting that the washing part comes in there. Why not wash the head or the fat, but it says, “But his innards and the legs he shall wash in water.” Those might be considered to the one doing the washing, or to God, unclean until they are washed by water. In our case, we are unclean until we're washed in the word, or washed in His blood.
You can make all these connections, they're there. The only exception where this is not applied, as I said, is the turtledove offering, and I think that's because of its size, and because, again, you wouldn't slaughter it in the same way. There'd be too much, not enough blood to offer if you did it the way the rest of the animals were offered. I know it's kind of gruesome, but we're studying this because it's in the book, so that's what we do. There's every part of this book, the things we like, and the things we may not be so fond of. We study them all. Now, if you read all the way through, He finishes giving all the instructions and the instructions just end with the same thing it started with. In verse 17, “The priest shall burn it upon the altar, upon the wood that is upon the fire: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, a sweet savour unto the LORD.” So don't think that this first offering, even though it, it's self-evident, for anyone who's been here any time listening to me, I don't think that you could assume that this is attached to a sin offering.
But I want to make it clear it is not. Just because of that verse 4 in there, people will do this thing and say, “Well, there it is.” Better to focus on the word “accepted for him” because that's the essence of the burnt offering. And that's why God starts there. It's not as though God says, “Okay, you've sinned and you're a sinner. Now come and offer a burnt offering.” There was something that the sinner needed to do first, which is basically vicariously lay his hands on the animal that was going to be slain for that person's sin and trespass. And then they could go and offer the burnt offering. There is a pattern to all this, and there is a pattern to the way people come into the church and worship.
When those instructions, so don't think that this is disconnected from our worship practices today. When those instructions are followed and understood, what it represents is two things, maybe three. First and foremost, that as we come into the church, as we start learning, we're not even able to understand the concept of what is acceptable to God because we don't even know Him. So there's no way that you could come in and just say, “Yeah, I'm here to offer my burnt offering.” You don't even know about God. You don't even know about yourself. You don't even know how corrupt and perverted and fallen you are, and I am, so I don't want anybody to think that I'm talking down to you I'm included in the same boat as you. You come into the church, you start learning. And how many times have you heard me say this is the utterance of most people when they are new Christians or first in the church, “I'm basically a good person.” How many have heard that? “I'm basically a good person.” No, you're not.
None of us are. That's not self-abasement. That's exactly what the Bible says, so it's impossible for the person that just comes in to recognize that they are not a good person. Note, the self and the flesh says, “But I'm good. I haven't done this and I haven't done that,” and they've got their checkbox, right? So you can't get to the burnt offering, and the burnt offering isn't about you accepting God. It's about God accepting you. And in an appropriation, if you want to put it into a New Testament appropriation, there's multiple levels for this. So let's sum this up so we can close out the message. The first and probably the most important one is the burnt offering in itself being offered must be Christ, okay, as the Offering.
Why? Because He laid down His life voluntarily, He said, “I lay down my life; no man, take it that I lay it down on Myself, and I'll take it up again,” basically. That's number one. So He has to be the Offering. He's also in the offeror. He was not a sinner, but all sin was laid upon Him. So in that way, we identify with Him. There's the process of identification. Now when we come, we are accepted into the Beloved for one thing and one thing alone. That's our faith in Christ. The minute we come to a saving faith, He indeed died for my sins. I can look to Him. He is the Author and Finisher of faith and all the things written of Him in this book being the Architect of faith. I can stand before Him knowing I have been accepted in the Beloved.
And the idea of the verbiage that people use, “Ah, I accepted Christ in 1979,” okay, and I'm assuming that He went to the cross then too in '79 when you decided to accept Him. Or let's put it a better way. There is a church that decided, I'm sure you know about this, the Mormon church had many rules of who they would let in and not let in. And I think in 1976 or 1978, a revelation occurred that black people should be allowed into the Mormon church because before that they said God didn't allow that. Just think about that. These are the ideas that get things messed up. Where people start making interpretations and they're erroneous. God says, “These are all my children. I made them all.” Now, free will allows you the right to say, “No.” Free will allows you the right to be malicious to another person and basically prosecute for your faith or be angry or reject.
That's free will. But the burnt offering tells me something and demonstrates something right down to my understanding of what happens when I'm open, I have received of God. I then can present myself as a living sacrifice accepted, not just acceptable, accepted by Him. So in that case, in that description, I too become part of that in, in my commitment. Now you can say, “So how is it all of these things? How can the burnt offering represent all of this?” It does. In fact, you're going to see that along the way as we look at all these offerings, they carry the weight of a diversity of meanings. And I know when I say this, people are going to be saying, “Well, but the burnt offering should just be considered like a love gift, right? It's, it's free,” and that could be interpreted that way. But define what “lov”" is first before you put that “love gift” on there, because I've been around ministry now too long to hear people use the term “love gift” and it's got strings attached to it.
No thank you. So this offering basically is, I take, I take the item, whatever it is, it's no holding back. Now I'm going to ask you a question because now this, it has to be applied on the personal level. There's no crime. There's no sin in what I'm about to say, but it requires honesty with the self. How many can say━don't answer me. It's something just to think about. How many can say, “This is me. I have placed myself before God holy and completely”" And I can tell you something, human nature says, “There's a part of me I have to keep. There's a side of me.” There are very few people who are willing to just put it all there and leave it there.
Why? Because there's this fear of, “What if, and what will I become?” And I'm telling you something. You find out something about God real quick. Just like Abraham offering up or willingly, willfully going along in obedience to offer up Isaac. You find out real quick that God is not wanting to put you in some box and manufacture Christians. He's looking for people to trust Him. And when that trust is free-flowing, something amazing happens. Now I don't think that in my years, in my experience, I have not heard God speak audibly to me and say, “And you'll be blessed,” and whatever words that people profess that they hear and that they may hear things. I'm not going to say how they hear them.
They may hear them. But what I am telling you is that for the person who's really trying to understand the burnt offering, the burnt offering has to be attached to two concepts that I read and shared with you out of Genesis 8 and Genesis 22. Out of Genesis 8, I think there had to be on the part of Noah, although it doesn't say so, there had to be an element of gratitude that he survived, that he was spared, that he was delivered.
So you could say, “Well, isn't that a type of sin?” No, the flood did that. The flood took care of that. And the fact that God accepted him as the patriarch, if you want to call it, to start over. And you've got the same thing going on with Abraham in a different way. But if you think about it, God said the instructions were, “Take your son, the son that brought you so much joy, the son that I promised you, the thing that I said you would have that you and your wife laughed at, that you now have. Take that and offer it up completely.” Now think about it. How many of us have come to our own Mount Moriah moment? Just think about that. Don't answer it, because the burnt offering, the understanding of the burnt offering is nestled between those two passages. And you could say to me, “Well, but the rest of it is the law. The rest of it is this.” Yeah, and as we go and delve into the meat, the peace, the sin and trespass offering, all of their functions will become clearer. Once you have the gestalt, you don't have to have the micro-details.
Once you have the gestalt of the offerings, you begin to see God's pattern over and over and over again, not in these oddities of slaying animals, but of Him basically telling us of some dimension, some work, some part of the ministry of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It's embedded here in all of these offerings in some capacity, and I hope if you will keep listening, I will show you. But for right now, 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.
