Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

Festivals of Faith

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: Festivals of Faith

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 83

Dictation Name: RR171AT83

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Let us worship God. Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High, to show forth thy loving kindness in the morning and thy faithfulness every night. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Let us pray.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we come into thy presence rejoicing in thy mercies, and thine unfailing providential care, and the certainly of all thy works yesterday, today, and forever, ever holy, ever all righteous, ever all wise. Teach us to take hands off our lives and to commit them into thy keeping, to know that thou art able to undertake for us and that thy grace is sufficient for us. Bless us as we give ourselves to the study of thy word and of the things of thy kingdom. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 23:14-19. Our subject: Festivals of Faith. Festivals of Faith. Exodus 23:14-19. “Three times thou shalt keep a feast unto me in the year. Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread: (thou shalt eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded thee, in the time appointed of the month Abib; for in it thou camest out from Egypt: and none shall appear before me empty:) And the feast of harvest, the firstfruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field: and the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field. Three times in the year all thy males shall appear before the LORD God. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread; neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until the morning. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.”

These verses are concerned with the observances of festivals. The Hebrew for festivals is a word meaning “to celebrate.” Hebrew festivals were marked first by ceremonial meals, second by a special liturgy or worship, and third, special ceremonies which set a particular festival apart from others, such as the eating of unleavened bread at Passover. The main festivals or feasts of Exodus are the Passover, also called the Feast of Unleavened bread, the Harvest Festival, and the Feast of Ingathering. The Harvest Festival was also known as the day of the firstfruits. These were pilgrim festivals to Jerusalem. These festivals were also sabbaths. Work was forbidden. They were to be a time of rejoicing in God’s covenant mercies.

In the Christian era, the Rabbi saw Paul’s comments in Galatians 4:10 and Colossians 2:16 as opposed to their festivals. What Paul insisted on was a new content in the festivals, not a repetition of their Jewish meaning. Thus, he wrote in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8, “Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Paul here says first, that in Jesus Christ, we have the true meaning of the old festivals. Therefore, we do not return to the old festival for our celebration, but to the new, to the meaning of the old transformed and opened up in the new.

By our regeneration in Christ, we are now a new creation, we are unleavened bread in Him, for as Old Israel is leavened. Paul here sees the Lord’s Table, the Christian passover, as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Then second, Paul’s words make clear that he has in mind not only the new observance of a passover, but its manifestation in a regenerate life day by day. Our morality must be Christ-governed. A separation is in Paul’s mind, both from pagan Corinthian practices and Jewish rites. Thus, these festivals in Exodus have had their place in the Christian calendar in differing forms. The same motive still governs them. What God has done for us is to be celebrated, it is an occasion for joy and a feast, or festival.

We have forgotten that the older custom of a Sunday family dinner, which in farm years especially was a banquet for the whole family, was in terms of the festival spirit. The sabbath as a festival. The protestant dictionary, an older Church of England work, said of feasts that they are, and I quote, “Days of holy, and joyful commemoration of persons, doctrines, or events connected with the history of the Christian religion. Some are moveable feasts, that is, Easter Day, on which all the other moveable feasts depends. This is always the first Sunday after the first full moon which happens upon or next after the twenty-first day of March. Other feasts are immoveable, or fixed. For example, the Epiphany which always falls on January 6. All Sundays in the year are feasts.”

Now, this was substantially the position of virtually all churches once. It was the view of Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches, as well as of all other reformed churches, because originally, the term “reformed” covered anything that was a national church such as the Church of Scotland, the Church of England, reformed churches, the Church of the Netherlands, and anything with the label Presbyterian. The restoration of the spirit of the feast or festival to the Christian sabbath or holy days is thus, important. The festival commandment in our text is to Israel, and it definitely includes the fact of Israel as a nation. It speaks to Israel as families, as churches, and as a nation. Every nation is, as James McGregor noted, a moral entity. Its laws are inescapably concerned with good and evil and therefore, with God, or against Him.

Thus, while the festival is religious, its focus is national because its benefit is national. According to Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord and the people whom He hath chosen for His inheritance.” The three festivals here are all farm and food related. First, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was at the time when the cereal crop was harvested. For seven days, bread was eaten. This festival marked the barley harvest in particular. It was celebrated with banquets, but with Unleavened Bread.

The second festival was the Harvest Festival at the end of the corn or wheat festival. The first was the barley festival, the second, the wheat. In Deuteronomy 16:9, it is called the Feast of Weeks, because it came about seven weeks after the beginning of harvest. In the New Testament, it has still another name: The Day of Pentecost, because this festival came fifty days, penta – cost, after the giving of the law.

The third feast is, or after the deliverance and after the giving of the law. The third feast is ingathering the harvest of fruits: grapes, olives, and the like, the late summer and early fall harvest. This has also another name in the Bible which sometimes is confusing because the names of these festivals are sometimes given variously, but it is also called the Feast of Tabernacles, and Jesus participated in this festival according to John 7:2 following.

The commandment to avoid unleavened bread applies specifically to passover, or the first feast. The requirement of verse 15, “and none shall appear before me empty,” is an important one. What we received from the Lord stands for all time and eternity. Therefore, gratitude means that we appear before God with gifts. The reference here is not to the mandatory tithe, but to gifts above and over the tithe. The premise is plainly stated in Matthew 10:18 by our Lord, “Freely ye have received, freely give.”

I mentioned that the festivals are food-related, and this is not an incidental fact but a very, very important one. The sabbath itself, in Israel, was a time of rejoicing and feasting, as it has been in much of church history, and many a hymn has celebrated that fact. “O Day of Rest and Gladness.” As McGregor observed years ago and I quote, “The word ‘year’ in verse 17 here is simply that of the world’s life as resulting in the food of man at the various stages from the first appearance of the harvest to its final completion. It is remarkable how greatly the simply providing of bread still occupies the life of mankind. If men no longer used food almost the whole business of the world would stop.” These three festivals are food-related. We have them now in the church as two festivals; communion, the Christian passover, and the other two harvest festivals as Thanksgiving.

Modern man errs in two areas with respect to food. First, because in the western world he has grown accustomed to an abundance of food, he fails to recognize his dependency on things outside his control. He is dependent on the farmers who grow the food, who are, in term dependent on the weather and the soil. Farming is precarious work. A change in the weather can destroy a crop and commonly does. It was in the past decade that my cousin’s two sons worked hard for harvest and rented land, hoping to make enough on the vegetables they were growing to buy the farm they wanted to buy. It was a beautiful crop, but the weather turned two days before harvesting time, and they lost everything. This is why modern man does not understand his food dependency. He has lost the connection to the soil. He does not realize that a chance in the climate of a country by a few degrees can create famine and, as a result, we do face a crisis because of this.

The most abysmal ignorance of this I have ever encountered, I have told you about a number of times, how during the student demonstrations at Berkeley, when a manifesto saying that work was obsolete and it was a capitalist conspiracy to continue a world of work, and to enslave people, and the university was off-base in preparing people for a world of work instead of a world of enjoyment, a reporter, himself liberal, asked a girl who was speaking, “But what about food?” and she looked at him disdainfully and said, “Food is.” Well, God has a way of teaching people like that something.

Second, because of the importance of food, tyrant states routinely seek to control the food supply and the grower. Food is important to life and it is a major weapon of war, but attempts to control agriculture are attempts at playing God, and the results are routinely disastrous. Modern faith is not food-related, and hence, it is abstract and unrealistic and lacks humility. Not until man is brought face to face with his dependence on food when he faces the absence of it, does he begin to realize the implications of being a creature. Our Lord commands us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and to pray to Him as the one who can strip us of food and life. We are not gods, we are creatures and we had better know it.

Verse 19 is the subject of much discussion, in particular, the latter part. “Thou shalt not see the kids in his mother’s milk.” This law has led Jews to avoid eating meat and drinking milk at the same meal. The practice of seething{?} a kid in his mother’s milk was apparently a pagan fertility cult rite. It was also a violation of the requirements of care for animal life. In Exodus 22:30, Leviticus 22:27, Deuteronomy 22:6, Proverbs 12:10, Deuteronomy 25:4, we have verses which call attention to the requirements God imposes. It is important to remember that this particular law is given here, and all-told three times, again in Exodus 34:26, and in Deuteronomy 14:21. It is obviously important. Why then did God not explain its meaning. Well, the answer is a very simple one. God commands our obedience. He gives us explanations when it is necessary. This practice was apparently connected with fertility magic. It was a part of Canaanite worship. In recent years, as the Rosh Shamrah(?) tablets have been excavated and studied, they do require cooking a young goat in the mother’s milk. The Canaanites believed that milk contained the seed of life, and at times they sprinkled it ritually on the ground. The first part of this verse, verse 19, requires that our first fruits be given to God. To give God the first fruits and avoid anything hinting of fertility cult practices was thus a way of witnessing to God’s sovereign power to feed and sustain us. To depend on alien invocations of fertility was thus forbidden and evil.

A comment of a Jewish scholar of generations ago, Mendelssohn, on this law, is good, and it applies to other laws as well. Mendelssohn said, and I quote, “The benefit arising from the many inexplicable laws of God is in their practice and not in the understanding of their motives.” The Canaanite practice of boiling young cattle in their mother’s milk continues to this day among Bedouins. These three festivals, as I said, are food-related. The practice of seething a kid in its mother’s milk was a way, whereby man, through magic, attempted to control the fertility of the earth and its food supply. Modern humanistic statism attempts to do the same thing. In both instances, we have an ungodly belief that man can determine life and fertility apart from God. This law has thus a continuing relevance. What was done once by a simply magical act is now the state policy of the modern humanistic civil governments. The sabbaths are festivals of faith celebrating God’s governing power in our lives and in our world.

These three festivals are as I indicated, now two for us. They are communion and, of course, thanksgiving. To them have been added two others by the Christian church, and rightfully so: The day of resurrection and the day of our Lord’s birth. These are festivals, sabbaths, or holy days. We do have holy days in the modern calendar, but we forget that our word “holiday,” is really holy day, slightly altered in pronunciation and spelling, and the modern state has its “holy” days and the changeover was deliberate. The days were declared to be the holy days in the new canon of life, and there is an interesting difference. While, to a degree, the Christian calendar has been retained, although it is progressively being set aside, and the day of resurrection and Good Friday, one celebration once, is now the spring festival, or the spring holiday. The difference in the calendar is a very marked one, because now, the holy days of the modern state the world over celebrate very different things. They celebrate victories in war, primarily, and of deaths or more commonly the birthdays of its great men, so there has been a dramatic shift in our life.

The Middle Ages were not without their great men. Men who were persons of not only great importance but almost legendary. In fact, became a part of popular legend. Charlemagne, for example, one of the most central, but no attempt was made to turn their birth date or death date in any way, or their victors, into holidays or holy days, because they saw the state in perspective. But the modern state sees itself as the lord of man’s life, and therefore, in terms of that premise, it follows logically that it should set aside its own holidays or holy days. We have had a major revolution in the calendar and how man’s life revolved around fixed dates. The dates that govern the calendar are now dates set by the state, so that even the observance of Christmas, and of Thanksgiving, is state-ordained, not because the Christian community would not have it otherwise. This is a significant change. It indicates that there has been a disastrous shift in the life and character of the people, and it means that now the holy days emanate from another god. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word, and we thank thee that what men do cannot prevail for it is thy will alone that shall be done, thy kingdom alone which shall stand. Make us instruments, O Lord, in the work of rebuilding all things in terms of thy word and of thy kingdom. Make us joyful on our holy days, mindful of the greatness of thy gift to us in Jesus Christ, and the certainty of thy triumph. In Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Well, our holidays have been converted from feast days to shopping days.

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very good point, and it was interesting that yesterday, being Armistice or Veterans’ Day, there were some elderly veterans on televisions commenting sadly on the fact that no one was interested in observing the day, that at the parades in major cities, most of those who turned out were the veterans, very few others. So, we are seeing the disintegration of the modern state and its attempts, and it’s sad because, in the process, they are hurting a great many people who have given sacrificially to the state and to its survival. Yes?

[Audience] I can see how it would be beneficial to keep the old sabbaths, and stuff like that, like the Feast of Tabernacles. I’ve traditionally kept eight days off at the end of the year and feel real good after that, but does the church really have a right to substitute a new like, like Christmas or Easter?

[Rushdoony] Well, remember with regard to these three festivals, Paul tells us that these are now different. So, the Lord’s table and Thanksgiving supplanted them, and very early, Christians began to do that. Then, the day of resurrection is celebrated every Sunday because it is the first day of the week, but it was as a matter of joy in this event that the early church gave it special attention and, very early, there were joyful celebrations of the day of our Lord’s birth.

Now, there are many who say that we really don’t know but, Edersheim, the great Jewish scholar, gave a large section of his two volumes to an analysis of the evidence for December 5, and he said one of the most interesting bits of evidence is that we find, very early, that it was observed as a day of mourning by early Judaism in the Roman Empire, and no reason for the mourning, and he said every time you have no reason given, it has reference to some Christian event. So, he said it’s significant then, that this was a great day of mourning without a reason stated, and it was because it was the birth of our Lord. So, I don’t see anything inappropriate about that, just as it used to be customary in this country, as well as in other countries, to proclaim fast days. That was entirely within the proper jurisdiction. Now, they don’t have the same status, let us say, as communion and Thanksgiving, but they are legitimate. Now, I mentioned how very, very important the family orientation was of the sabbath as a day of festival, feasting. When I was young, it was common for families, on Sundays where there were three of four families living close together, or in the same general area, to come together regularly. If not every Sunday, once or twice or three times in a month, sometimes once a month, to eat together, and it was one of the things that held families close together, and it was a very important part of life when I was a boy. It was done by the Armenian community and the Swedish community alike. Those were the two main groups in the area. It was a festival day, and you looked forward to it. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Past few years, a number of Christian churches have begun to celebrate or hold passover observances during Passion Week. Is that appropriate, in light of . . .?

[Rushdoony] Well, how do they celebrate it?

[Audience] Well, basically holding a traditionally Jewish observance.

[Rushdoony] Well, that was done quite a bit through the centuries. It lingered longest of all in Scotland, and the Pope had to, I think in the eleventh century, threatened the Scottish church to make them cease from what he called Jewish practices, but they did observe the passover in the Old Testament form, but with a totally Christian meaning. The early church, of course, celebrated the Christian passover as a kind of family meal of the church, a potluck, because Sunday in the Roman Empire was a work day, so they would have their services in the evenings, and they would bring the meal there and the workmen would come there, so they maintained it in that fashion. However, the church very early realized that it lost some of its dignity. Whereas, as Jews, because the church was predominantly Jewish for some time, it had been a family rite and the solemnity of the occasion could be maintained. The church dinner commonly had problems, and the church, for a couple of centuries, had to deal with the fact that, as their numbers grew and as there was quite a crowd, it became a rather noisy and disorderly event, and the emphasis had shifted from the fact of communion which climaxed it, to a dinner, and so after considerable deliberation, they separated the two. And I think basically it was a course of wisdom. I have attended one dinner that was also a communion service in a church in Southern California, and I felt that it lost quite a bit. Any other questions? Yes?

[Audience] Some of these Christian passover services are also done by dispensational groups, as if to say, this is what the church will be going to in the future.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] Going back to Judaism.

[Rushdoony] Well, that motive is entirely wrong, because what they want to do is in effect, drop the New Testament, and of course, Scofield says that the cross was just a kind of a last minute thing, that our Lord did not come to make atonement, He came to establish His kingdom, and when He was refused by the Jews, then the cross ensured which is, in effect, to deny Christianity. Yes?

[Audience] Did the Feast of Unleavened Bread occur right after passover, and was that the Feast of the Passover?

[Rushdoony] Yes. The Feast of Unleavened Bread was seven days, and the passover was one day. That’s the only difference. So, usually it’s called the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and other times, the passover, depending on where the stress is being laid. But, in both instances, the emphasis is the same. Well, if there are no further questions, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that thou has called us to a life of victory in Christ, that even in the midst of a world of evil and constant troubles, our life is here now to be a festival, and eternally a triumph in Christ. We thank thee, our Father, for thy grace and mercy unto us. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen. [39:11.0

End of tape.