Feasts and Hope
Looking Back to Look Forward
Season of Trials
Our church congregation has been hit with one thing after another lately, both corporately as a church body and in the individual lives of the church members. I’m talking about things no one saw coming— sickness, betrayal, broken relationships, hidden sin. At the same time, our church is actively transitioning to an elder-led congregationalism model. Change is hard. It’s impossible to make everyone happy.
My class has been studying the book of Exodus for almost a year now. The last two weeks we have looked at the three feasts in Exodus 23 that God tells the Israelites to observe after He proclaimed His law. God established these feasts to help the Israelites remember His work in the Exodus. At the same time, the feasts point them forward to what God has promised to do. If God brought them out of Egypt and to Mt. Sinai just like He said He would, He can be trusted to keep His promises as they go into the promised land. Ultimately, He can be trusted to keep His promise to send a Messiah who will reverse the curse in Genesis 3.
God’s Pattern of Remembrance
This isn’t just intellectual knowledge—God provides tangible, physical ways to remember. He gives them feasts. There is physical food, drink, and activity. There are physical sacrifices. They had to give up physical things to remind them that God provided them to begin with and that He would continue to provide.
God knows we need to see, hear, taste, and feel these things. We live in physical bodies, so He gives us physical ways of remembering and celebrating across generations. It’s not just some subjective experience based on feelings. It’s not navel gazing and following your own heart.
How do you celebrate a feast? Do you lock yourself away and eat alone?
No, they celebrated together as a community. God gives them each other. Again, this is a very real tangible way of remembering and celebrating. They reminded one another of how God worked and encouraged each other to look forward.
The Feast of Unleavened Bread: Redemption Through Christ
The first feast was the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which was connected to the Passover. What should the unleavened bread remind them of?
They had to leave Egypt so quickly that they didn’t have time to wait for the bread to rise, but notice even in that haste God provided for them. He rescued them from slavery, and He provided bread for the journey. Not only that, but God told them to ask their Egyptian neighbors for gold and silver as they left and the Egyptians gave it to them.
We know that at the last supper with the disciples, Jesus identified His body with the bread being broken for them. He identifies His blood as the wine being poured out for them. Jesus never mentions a Passover lamb because He Himself is the Lamb of God. The next day Jesus willingly went to the cross.
Jesus essentially says I am the fulfillment of this feast. He brings ultimate redemption by sacrificing his body and blood. Then He rose from the grave conquering death. We celebrate Easter around the same time as the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
The Feast of Harvest: God’s Provision and Pentecost
The second feast God told them to observe was the Feast of Harvest. They also called it the Feast of Firstfruits or the Feast of Weeks, because they counted 7 weeks from the Passover.
Again, this is a physical, tangible expression of God’s provision. They would take the first bundle of Grain that was gathered and wave it before the Lord, indicating that all of the harvest was from Him. He is the provider.
This feast was 50 days from Passover, which puts it right at Pentecost. Crowds from all over had traveled to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Harvest. At the conclusion of the Feast, the Holy Spirit falls on the Apostles and they go out in the street speaking in all the different languages of the people who had traveled there. Peter preaches a sermon and they hear the gospel in their own language.
Acts 2:41 says, “So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about three thousand souls.” This is the first harvest of the church. God orchestrated all of that.
The Feast of Ingathering: God’s Sustaining Presence
The third feast is the Feast of Ingathering, also called the Feast of Booths or tabernacles. This feast was in the fall when all the harvests have been gathered and all the wine has been pressed. For eight days, they lived in booths or tents made of branches and leaves.
What would living in these booths or tents remind them of from the Exodus? How God sustained them in the wilderness. They moved from place to place in essentially a desert. There should have never been enough resources to support the number of people they had, but God provided everything they needed.
All of the feasts required sacrifices, but the Feast of Booths required the most. In the 8 days they made 192 sacrifices.
In Jesus’ day, they simply called this the Feast. On the last day of the feast, the eighth day, they would walk in a procession down to the pool of Siloam, and the priest would draw water and then pour it out in the temple.
They did this in honor of Isaiah 12:2-3, which says:
Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust and not be afraid; For the LORD GOD is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation.” Therefore you will joyously draw water From the springs of salvation.
When they did this Jesus cried out:
“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” John 7:37-39
He is the spring of salvation. He is the fulfillment of the Feast of Ingathering. The journey through the wilderness is over. He is the way to enter the promised land. The people understood exactly what he was saying. Some asked if he was the Messiah. Others wanted to stone him for blasphemy.
God’s Sovereignty Over Time and Trials
Scholars estimate it was roughly 1400 years between the Exodus and the birth of Christ. God had a plan to help them physically remember how he rescued them from slavery in Egypt and point them to how he was going to physically and spiritually rescue them from sin.
God worked over 1400 years to perfectly bring His plan to fulfillment. That is something we should take great comfort in.
If God can do that, He can orchestrate our days and weeks and months. How many things went wrong in those 1400 years? How many times did the Israelites think we’ve blown it? That’s it. There’s no way God is going to come through.
How many times did they think why is this happening, God? Why did you allow this to happen? Just read the Psalms and the prophets. Both David and Habakkuk cry out, “How long, Oh Lord?”
Yet, God was working through all of those years, through all of their failures, to bring salvation to His people. He wasn’t done providing for them. He was sending Jesus.
Baptism and The Lord’s Supper: Our Feasts of Remembrance
It makes me think of all we have going on in the church and our individual lives today. People are hurting. People are struggling with illnesses. Things have happened that no one expected. People feel betrayed in relationships and confused. They may be asking, why did this happen? How long, oh Lord?
God calls us to look back at His provision so we can trust Him to keep His promises. Like the feasts, God gave us two tangible, physical means of remembering how he has provided— baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
They also point forward to how He is going to provide. Death is not the end for us. We are buried with Christ, but we will also rise. One day we will eat and drink together with Him at His table. There will be no more pain, no more tears, no more confusion.
Encouragement for the Church Today
We often recognize God’s work only in hindsight, after the smoke clears. We look back and go, “Oh yeah, all this bad stuff happened but look at what God did. We’ve come out the other side spiritually stronger and closer to Him.” One thing He doesn’t let us do is sit still and get complacent. We may be in the valley right now, but He’s leading us towards the table.
Even though we can’t see it and don’t understand it, we can trust that God is working. He’s working in the church, and He’s working in our individual lives. It may not feel good in the moment. What we’re going through may be traumatic. The pain is very real, but He’s there. He promised to never leave us nor forsake us.
He gives us the Holy Spirit, which leads us in sanctification. Through the good and bad, He is transforming us and making us more like Jesus, until like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, we will see face to face and know fully as we are fully known.
God is Working: A Call to Faith and Community
Like the Israelite feasts, God doesn’t leave us by ourselves. He has given us each other as a church family to come alongside one another, trust one another, and love one another. We experience both joy and sorrow together. As a church, we gather to celebrate baptism and the Lord’s Supper. We remind one another of how God has worked, but also encourage one another to press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. God is working, and He is sovereign.
Charles Spurgeon says:
There is no attribute more comforting to His children than that of God’s sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances, in the most severe trials, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty will sanctify them… It is God upon the throne that we love to preach. It is God upon the throne whom we trust.