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Jewish Feasts

The Rapture and “the Feast of Trumpets” Are Separate and Unrelated

by Charles Cooper May 5, 2013

Any attempt to force a connection between the rapture and the so-called “feast of trumpets” is a figment of man’s imagination and is eisegesis to the extreme. Unfortunately, so much of what we believe about the Jewish feasts regarding their relationship to our Gentile age is fanciful thinking (that is what eisegesis is). Much of it is cut from the same cloth that has given us the pretribulational rapture: speculation and the false traditions of man. Sadly, once a lie gets started, it is quite difficult to dissuade people from believing it.

May 5, 2013 0 comment

Pentecost – The Incomplete Feast (Part II)

by Charles Cooper March 23, 2013

written by Charles Cooper

Pentecost – the Incomplete Feast
Charles Cooper
Part II

The celebration of the beginning of the wheat harvest began on Pentecost. However, the end of the wheat harvest was unknown. No one knew when it would end. Several factors regulated when it would end; each year was different. The amount of rain, the temperature, the date of planting, and other intangibles all had an impact on when the harvest would end. No man knew the day and hour when the harvest would be completed. Only the sovereign God of the heavens knows that. As well, the grape harvest would occur after Pentecost and hopefully was complete before Tabernacles.

The harvest is a useful and frequent metaphor for God’s work among his elect. This term describes God’s work throughout the ages and at the end of the final age. In Matthew 9:37-38, the Lord stated, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

Notice that the Lord Jesus states three facts about the harvest: 1) the harvest is large; 2) God is Lord of this large harvest; and 3) this large harvest belongs to God. What then is the harvest? One author states,

The huge crowds are therefore very appropriately called “the harvest,” the very extensive field in need of immediate attention. By a legitimate extension of the figure one can say that this harvest, as here viewed, consists of the sum-total of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6). The application to present (twentieth century) conditions would, without doing violence to the basic idea, enlarge the scope of the interpretation, so that the reference would be to all those who can be brought within the reach of the gospel….^{^[1]}

In essence, what this author and others are saying is that all peoples should have an opportunity to hear the gospel. The harvest refers to the entire world and each person has a right to hear the gospel whether he or she responds or not.

However, we are of the opinion that a much narrower audience is the focus of the Lord Jesus. Lenski would argue that only those “gathered into the heavenly garner,” that is, to “all those in whom the work of God’s grace succeeds,”[2] are intended in Matthew 9:37-38. Calvin agrees and writes, “The limited number of the elect, who were mixed with unbelievers.”[3]

God would never leave the eternal hope of people in the hands of men. If the Lord Jesus indicates here that prayer is necessary to get people to go and preach in order that others might have a chance to hear the gospel – whether they accept it or reject it – then are we to conclude that if people do not go, those poor souls missed the opportunity to be saved because of someone else’s laziness? Will God only save the lost if people go and share the gospel? If a very few people pray and a very few people go, then the lost have no hope, if this line of thinking is correct. These are very logical questions if this passage refers to the world. Surely, that is not the point of this passage. Rather, God requires men to go, but even if a man is disobedient, God’s elect will come to faith.

The correct view of this passage is closer to what Leon Morris adds. Notice,

Jesus does not spell it out, but he is speaking of people who are ripe for inclusion in the kingdom. In that situation, it is necessary that something be done to bring them in. A crop of wheat needs workers to bring the grain into the barn; without the laborers the crop cannot be reaped. Jesus says that in the great harvest of which he is speaking the workers are few.^{^[4]}

My ultimate point here is this: the Lord Jesus looked at the salvation of God’s elect as “the great harvest.” Please do not miss the point that the work of evangelism refers to laboring in God’s harvest now. Please understand that the harvest continues until all the crop is gathered into the barn. We are busy with the work of harvesting now. The work begun at Pentecost continues.

In John 5:34-38 the Lord Jesus again used the harvest metaphor to speak of the ongoing kingdom work of God’s laborers in the world. He told his disciples,

“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

The point the Lord Jesus is making is that the wait is over – the harvest time is now. “The saying of Jesus represents the gathering of people into the kingdom of God.”^{^[5]} Since we are engaged in the same work, the harvest continues and will do so until the gathering ends. Pentecost is a celebration of the coming harvest, not a celebration of a completed harvest. That is the focus of the Feast of Sukkoth (Tabernacles).

^{^[1]} Hendriksen, W., & Kistemaker, S. J. (1953-2001). Vol. 9: Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew. New Testament Commentary (440). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.

[2] R. C. H. Lenski, op. cit., pp. 373, 374.

[3] Calvin, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, English translation, Vol. I, p. 421.

^{^[4]} Morris, L. (1992). The Gospel according to Matthew. The Pillar New Testament Commentary (239–240). Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: W.B. Eerdmans; Inter-Varsity Press.

^{^[5]} Beasley-Murray, G. R. (2002). Vol. 36: John. Word Biblical Commentary (63). Dallas: Word, Incorporated.

March 23, 2013 0 comment

Biblical Studies Jewish Feasts

Pentecost: The Incomplete Feast (Part I)

by Charles Cooper March 21, 2013

written by Charles Cooper

Pentecost: The Incomplete Feast
Charles Cooper
(Part I)

As we enter the week of the Jewish celebration of their Passover, we gentiles remain more confused than ever. Untold Christians will allow this week to come and go with scant real appreciation of it. Others will greatly overplay its importance, but see little value in the Lord’s death as being connected with the Jewish Passover. Messianic Jews will blindly attempt to combine the two events and thereby cheapen both.

Unfortunately, so much of what we believe about the Jewish feasts, in terms of our Lord’s relationship to them, is fanciful thinking (it’s eisegesis: reading back into the text things we want to see and not what God intended). The only real point of correspondence between the spring feasts and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the pattern – the temporal parallel. Two events (his death and resurrection) occurred on the precise day of the Jewish month that two Jewish Feasts occur – Passover and Firstfruits.

Christ both died and was buried on Nisan 14 (See John 19:41-42). This is also the exact day the Jews put to death the Passover lamb that would be eaten on Nisan 15. It is so important for you to understand that the Passover meal was eaten on Nisan 15, however, the Passover lamb was killed and prepared (cooked) on Nisan 14. If you do not keep this information straight in your mind, you will never really understand what the Lord Jesus did for us through his death and resurrection.

On the night before the Lord died, (which is the night of Nisan 14 – remember the Jewish night comes before the day), he instituted a new memorial: the Lord’s Supper. It incorporated his blood = wine (the Feast of Passover) and his body = bread (the Feast of Unleavened Bread). Remember, the Jewish Passover is about God’s physical deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage, but the Gentile Passover is about the spiritual deliverance of God’s elect (both Jews and Gentiles) from sin’s bondage. Elect Jews celebrate both physical and spiritual deliverance from bondage. Sadly, many try to combine the Jewish Passover and the Gentile Passover into one event. This is done in ignorance and with a complete lack of understanding of the intent of the New Testament. If done correctly, Messianic Jews should celebrate the Passover of the Lord Jesus on the day of Nisan 14 (spiritual deliverance) and the Jewish Passover on the night of Nisan 15 (physical deliverance).

Now this is really, really, really, and one more time for even more emphasis, really important: the first day of Unleavened Bread (which is a week-long celebration) is the 15^th of Nisan. The first meal eaten during the week-long celebration of Unleavened Bread is the Passover meal. Again, many New Testament believers read into the New Testament (again, eisegesis) what they want to see instead of understanding God’s original intent. On the first day of Unleavened Bread, the Lord Jesus was in the grave. The first three days of Unleavened Bread saw the Lord Jesus in his tomb. Therefore, the only connection between the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Lord Jesus is his inclusion of the bread, which equals his body, in the Lord’s Supper. The Feast of Unleavened Bread is the bread element of the Lord’s Supper. Any attempt to force a link between Jesus and the idea of leaven as a representative of sin is completely misguided and should be considered an invention of man’s imagination and eisegesis of the highest order.

On Nisan 17, (which happened to be the first Sunday after Passover during the year of our Lord’s crucifixion, which God set as the day for the celebration of Firstfruits), the Lord rose from the dead and became the first one of the firstfruits of the resurrection. I am personally convinced that the Lord Jesus was not alone, but that Matthew 27:51-53 describes others who were also a part of the firstfruits of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus and others represent the firstfruits of the harvest of God’s elect.

The harvest celebration in Israel consisted of two parts: Firstfruits and Pentecost. Firstfruits celebrated the first sheaves of the barley harvest. Fifty days later, Pentecost celebrates the firstfruits of the wheat harvest (Numbers 28:26). The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is a pattern fulfillment in the sense that God grants the blessing of crop production, which the people then celebrate. The Holy Spirit is our guarantee of the future blessings of God (Eph. 1:13-14). Remember this: Firstfruits and Pentecost celebrated the barley and wheat harvests, respectively. The spiritual application of these feasts is still future. Christ, among the firstfruits, has been waved, but the ultimate ingathering of the wheat remains. The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and began the wheat harvest. We are still engaged in the great wheat harvest, [More about that in the next article].

However, no one will ever convince me that the Jewish people do not have a right to expect their Messiah to fulfill the fifth feast for Israel. Gentiles have hijacked the first feast of Tishri. It is my conviction that the rapture completes what was begun at Pentecost—the great harvest. It has nothing to do with the “so called” feast of trumpets. It is almost universally accepted that the rapture will occur in connection with the Jewish feast of “trumpets.” This is nothing more…and I do mean nothing more than man’s invention to satisfy his own imagination. This is Eisegesis gone wild! The first feast of Tishri is never called “the Feast of Trumpets” in the Bible. The title Rosh Hashanah, which the Jews now call the first feast of Tishri, does not occur in Scripture either in connection with the first feast of Tishri. Even Marvin Rosenthal admits, “This designation was not applied to this feast until at least the second century A.D., more than 1,500 years after the institution of the holiday.”^{^[1]} It is man’s invention. The first feast of Tishri has nothing to do with trumpets – whether the first or the last.

[1] Kevin Howard and Marvin Rosenthal, The Feasts of the Lord, (Nashville, Thomas Nelson Publishers 1997), 103.

March 21, 2013 0 comment

Biblical Studies Israel Jewish Feasts

The Feast of the Jews – Part IV

by Charles Cooper December 4, 2012

written by Charles Cooper

The Feasts of the Jews – Part IV

Charles Cooper

The parallel and reinforcing relationship between the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the spring Jewish feasts is one in which our Lord establishes a clearly delineated temporal sequence consisting of the exact days and months on which each Jewish feast historically occurred. The temporal sequence of Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits is evident in the events connected with Christ. In part III, we demonstrated that there is no fulfillment relationship between the burial of Christ and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The body of the Lord Jesus entered the grave on the 14^th of Nisan. The Feast of Unleavened Bread began on the 15^th of that same month.

The third spring Jewish feast celebrates the barley harvest. Could there be any corresponding fulfillment between this feast and the resurrection of Christ, as some argue? The Feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, Trumpets, Atonement, and Booths all have a specific day of the month on which they are to occur. But, in contrast, both the Feasts of First Fruits and Pentecost are not assigned a specific date on the Jewish calendar. Regarding the Feast of First Fruits, the Bible states that the Jews were to celebrate this feast, “On the day after the Sabbath”. It is clear that the text speaks of the Sabbath that occurs after the Feast of Passover. However, scholars do not agree whether a special Sabbath or the regular Sabbath is the focus of this passage.

Scripture commands: “On the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave [the sheaf].” The day after the Sabbath is typically Sunday—the first day of the Jewish week, unless a special Sabbath is the focus of the text, in which case any day of the week would suffice. The day of the week when the Feasts of Unleavened Bread, Trumpets, Atonement, and Booths were festive Sabbaths, the weekly Sabbath always occurred immediately before or after them. In other words, a festive Sabbath and the weekly Sabbath could follow back-to-back.

In order for text to refer to a special Sabbath, the Feast of Unleavened Bread must be the object of the directive: “On the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave [the sheaf].” Since the first day of Unleavened Bread was a festive Sabbath, it is possible that the Feast of First Fruits would begin the next day. Under this scenario, the 14^th of Nisan (Passover) could happen on a Thursday. The 15^th of Nisan followed, which would be the beginning of Unleavened Bread (a festive Sabbath). The weekly Sabbath would follow immediately on the 16^th of Nisan. Sunday, the 17^th of Nisan, would thus become the day after the Sabbath and the Feast of First Fruits. This scenario explains the calendrical dates associated with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.

If there is any correspondence between the Lord’s resurrection and the Feast of First Fruits, then that celebration must have occurred on a Sunday, because Scripture clearly indicates that our Lord’s resurrection occurred on a Sunday, the first day of the week. Scripture is emphatic that Christ rose from the dead on the first day of the week, i.e. Sunday. Luke 24:1-3 states, “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.” With this statement, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John agree.

If First Fruits fell on a Sunday, then the 14^th of Nisan must have been a Thursday. Thus, the Lord was in the tomb Thursday (maybe one or two hours), Friday night and day, Saturday night and day, and Sunday night – a total of three days and three nights.

Matthew 27:62-64a states, “The next day (Friday, Nisan 15), that is, after the day of Preparation (on the preceding day, Thursday, Nisan 14), the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore, order the tomb to be made secure until the third day….” This indicates that the people understood Jesus to mean that his resurrection would occur before the fourth day. The Pharisees only requested the tomb to be guarded through the third day since the disciples would have to steal the Lord’s body before day four in order for their trick to work. It also makes clear that the disciples would need to take the body at night. They could not steal it during the day without being noticed and still make the intended deception successful.

In addition, I do not think the chief priests and the Pharisees would have gone to Pilate on the Sabbath, since such agitation would violate the Sabbath. According to the chronology of Matthew 28:1, the women came to the tomb early Sunday morning. Matthew states, “The guards trembled and became like dead men” when the angel came to roll the stone away. Since the chief priests and the Pharisees wanted the tomb guarded through the third day’s night (Sunday night – remember Jewish night comes before the day), the guards were finishing their last night to guard the tomb.

The Jewish historian Josephus indicates that the Feast of First Fruits fell on the 16^th day of Nisan. This is true, except in those years when Nisan 14 fell on a Thursday. This puts the 16^th on a Sabbath. In those years when the Nisan 16 fell on the Sabbath, the Feast of First Fruits would occur on Sunday (Nisan 17), the day after the Sabbath, which is what Scripture commands. It was only during certain years of the Jewish calendar that the “great day (Sabbath)” and a regular Sabbath fell back-to-back. The week of our Lord’s death was one such date on the Jewish calendar.

That the Lord Jesus rose from the dead on this day is significant. However, was the resurrection of the Lord Jesus the only event corresponding to the Feast of First Fruits? We think not. Matthew records at the death of the Lord,

Tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had died were raised. (They came out of the tombs after his resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. [cf. Matthew 27:53])

The apostle Paul alone designates the Lord Jesus, “The firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Cor. 15:20, 23). However, along with the Lord Jesus, many resurrected individuals were included in the firstfruits of the resurrection. They were God’s wave offering, a testimony to all the world of the greater harvest to follow when all of God’s elect who died will come out of the grave.

Therefore, it is possible to say that the resurrection of Christ is a pattern fulfillment. That is, the resurrection of Christ, along with many others at that time, follows a pattern established after the historical celebration of the Feast of First Fruits.

The Feast of Pentecost comes exactly 50 days later. Leviticus 23:21 explicitly states that this feast is to have a perpetual observance. The precision necessary to mark the actual date on which this event must occur leaves little doubt that God intends a pattern fulfillment. It would lose its significance if that fulfillment occurred on any other month or a different day. And any possibility to convince the Jews of God’s intent concerning pattern fulfillment would suffer greatly. The Jews were meticulous in counting forward exactly 50 days from the Feast of First Fruits.

Consequently, it is no coincidence that on the day of Pentecost, which followed the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the permanent indwelling of believers by the Holy Spirit began. This empowering event marked the beginning of God’s great harvest to gather his elect (both Jew and Gentile) into his kingdom. However, the fact that the third person of the Trinity is the primary focus of this pattern, it is incorrect to speak of this feast as a fulfillment in connection with Jesus Christ.

December 4, 2012 0 comment

Jewish Feasts Uncategorized

The Feasts of the Jews – Part III

by Charles Cooper November 13, 2012

written by Charles Cooper

The Feasts of the Jews – Part III

Charles Cooper

The readily perceived conformity regarding linkage of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ with the spring Jewish feasts is one in which our Lord follows a precise temporal sequence, i.e. a chronology of the exact days and months on which each feast occurred historically. This temporal sequence includes Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, and Pentecost and is clearly noted in the events connected with Christ. Beyond that, however, one can comment on little else concerning Christ and the Jewish feasts.

November 13, 2012 0 comment

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