Loving God and Neighbor, Experiencing God's Goodness
Notes
Transcript
Put yourself in the place of an Israelite. All of your life you have been a slave in bondage to a tyrant of a master, but the God of the universe calls you out and rescues you from slavery. You have never been a citizen of a nation, now you are a citizen of a nation called out by God, and now God is meeting with you, and giving you His law that you are to live by.
And the reason these laws are so meticulous is because they are addressing a whole host of senarios in everyday life.
Laws Concerning Restitution (21:33-22:15)
Laws Concerning Restitution (21:33-22:15)
In this passage laws about theft, harm to animals, property.
Laws Concerning Societal Justice (22:16-23:9)
Laws Concerning Societal Justice (22:16-23:9)
Notice, starting in verse 16, The Lord gives laws of prohibition, laws of what not to do. What i want you to understand is What a society prohibits is what it values.
All the way down to verse 31, these laws of prohibition show us what God values.
(Go through each verse and see what God values)
in Ref to vv 16;19 “There has never been a culture in the world that puts so much emphasis and hope into sex for happiness and fulfilment.”-Tim Keller
in Ref to vv21-27 in Psalm 68:5 God identifies himself as a father to the fatherless and a protector of widows.
God’s Gift of the Sabbath and Three Festivals (23:10-19)
God’s Gift of the Sabbath and Three Festivals (23:10-19)
All through Exodus we find little gospel seeds sown, and they find their full fruition in Christ.
There were three feasts celebrated on the Hebrew calendar. The first Feast came in the Springtime:
The Feast of Unleavened Bread
You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread. As I commanded you, you shall eat unleavened bread for seven days at the appointed time in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty-handed.
Back in Exodus 12-13, we read that the Feast of Unleavened Bread is connected to the Passover Feast.
Explain Passover.
Passover was immediately followed by the seven day Feast of Unleavened Bread. For seven days the people celebrated without eating leavened bread. This celebration was a feast of remembrance.
What were the people of Israel remembering? Well, this feast looked back to the exodus, when God brought His people out of slavery. On the night that Pharaoh finally agreed to let the people go (after the 10 plagues), the Israelites had to leave so hastily that they didn’t even have time to let their bread rise.
In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover.
So every year, in the month of Abib, Israel was called to keep the feast by eating their unleavened bread, and remember the exodus out of Egypt. This was a celebration of being liberated. This was a celebration of salvation.
2. Feast of Harvest
In the early summer, the Israelites were called to celebrate this feast with the firstfruits of the crops.
You shall keep the Feast of Harvest, of the firstfruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. You shall keep the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.
This feast was also known as the feast of firstfruits. When the grain was ready for harvest, the Israelites would take the first sheaf of wheat and wave it before the Lord to acknowledge that the entire harvest came from His providence.
Next, the Israelites would count off seven weeks, which explains why this feast also had another name: Feast of Weeks. Then on the 50th day, the people would bring an offering to Yahweh. The offering usually was leavened bread, to demonstrate the fulness of the harvest the Lord brought.
2. Feast of Ingathering
Seven months after the Passover, when the crops were fully gathered in, the Celebration of the Feast of Ingathering took place.
it lasted a whole week, and the Israelites lived in makeshift boothes made of leaves and branches. This is why this festival is called the feast of booths or tabernacles.
You shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord for seven days in the year. It is a statute forever throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All native Israelites shall dwell in booths, that your generations may know that I made the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
So very similar to Thanksgiving, this was the feast of the harvest.
Just like the Feast of Unleavened Bread the Feast of Ingathering looked back to God’s salvation. When the people camped in these makeshift boothes, they were reminded of what God had done. After they escaped Egypt, the Israelites went out into the wilderness where they lived in tents.
So basically, at every Feast of Booths, they would reenact the exodus experience, reliving it from generation to generation.
These three Feasts were gifts from God to celebrate the grace of God.
Unleavened Bread reminded God’s people of the night they left Egypt, speaking of their salvation.
The Feast of Harvest and Ingathering both celebrated the bounty that God provided.
So the worship year began with Unleavened bread and ended with feasting. What a pattern of salvation! Through God’s grace, salvation is always getting sweeter and better.
What we can’t miss church, is what God is showing us about salvation through these feasts: Through these feasts and festivals, God was teaching them to look to him in faith for full and final salvation, which is ultimately found in Jesus Christ.
Remember when I said that we find little gospel seeds sown all through Exodus? Well, the seeds of the gospel story are sown all through these feasts, and these seeds blossom in what Jesus has done.
Think about the Feast of Unleavened Bread: it was always linked to passover. The Bible connects yeast, or leaven, to the growth of evil and sin. Whenever the Israelites celebrated this, they swept the yeast out of their homes, symbolizing holiness.
When we come to faith in Christ for salvation, we sweep out the old life of sin.
Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
The Feast of Unleavened Bread really helps us understand the gospel. Jesus Christ is our Passover lamb, has swept away our sins by the flood of his sacrificial blood, and now we can put aside wicked ways and live in true holiness. It makes perfect sense that When Jesus was crucified, he was crucified during this Festival Week!
Now think about the Feast of Harvest:
First of all, in verse 16 of ch 23, when I see the word firstfruits, I automatically think of 1 Corinthians 15:20-23 (READ and explain)
The OT Feast of Firstfruits gives us a beautiful picture of the first and final resurrection.
The Feast of Harvest also finds fulfillment in Acts Ch. 2. When you see the word pentecost, that is what the Feast of Harvest is (pentecost in Greek means fifty, remember, the timing of this festival was counted to the fiftieth day.)
Fifty days after Passover, and Jerusalem was packed with people from all over the world making their pilgrimage for the Feast of Harvest. They had done this for thousands of years, only this year would be different. At the time of Passover, Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, was Crucified. And on this Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, God fulfilled the promise that Jesus made and poured out His Holy Spirit on the Church.
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language.
Jews from all over the world heard the gospel in their own language, repented of their sin, and trusted in Jesus for salvation. How appropriate that God poured His Spirit out at the Feast of Harvest, or Pentecost. This old Testament grain harvest finds its fulfilment in the New Testament where God reaps a great harvest of souls.
How did Jesus in the gospel describe the salvation of souls? by calling it a harvest. Matt. 13:24-30;36-43- the world is a field, His people are wheat, the enemies of God are weeds, and the final judgement describes when the wheat will be harvested and the weeds will be burned forever.
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.
This spiritual harvest began at pentecost, and what God sowed in Jesus, he reaped from the nations and is still reaping from the nations.
The Feast of ingathering during the time of Jesus was just known as “The Feast.” On the eighth day of this feast, a huge escort of people would take water from the pool of Siloam and pour it out in the temple.
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.
The context of this passage is when the water from the pool was being poured out at the temple, and Jesus was identifying himself as the water of life, being the fulfilment of this Festival.
This festival also had hundreds of sacrifices made, and Jesus, being the ultimate sacrifice fulfills it.
I think their is a final deminsion of Christ’s fulfillment with this festival. When this sinful world winds down by the sovereign hand of God, Christ is going to gather His harvest together on the great Day of the Lord, and we will finally experience the fulness of salvation with our great King and redeemer Christ Jesus.
How Do We Respond?
How Do We Respond?
Through theses feasts, the Israelites were called to present themselves before God 3 times per year. Now, in light of the mercy shown in Christ Jesus, we are to offer ourselves to Christ as living sacrifices. A life of allegiance offered up to Christ.
And I dont want us to miss the final verse of this text, and maybe the oddest verse of the text found in verse 19: “you shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”
What does this even mean, and what does it mean for us?
It is never right to use the source of life as a cause of death.
This was a pagan ritual of the Canaanites, and the people of God have no business practicing idolatry.
So, in light of what Christ has done, we are to be people of life, with a life giving message, and our lives are to be marked by complete, worshipful allegiance to Jesus, and nothing and nobody else.`