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SEVEN FEAST DAYS OF ISRAEL
PASSOVER
UNLEAVENED BREAD
Ovulation
UNLEAVENED
BREAD
Fertilization
FIRST FRUITS
Implantation
PENTECOST
New Creature (Fetus)
TRUMPETS
Hearing
ATONEMENT
Blood(Hemoglobin A)
TABERNACLES
Lungs
HANUKKAH — Feast of Dedication
Leviticus 23
"Unto Us a Child is Born"
A most intriguing and almost startling application of the system of the seven feasts came my way recently during some research for a book.
Perhaps this whimsical little section will serve as an example of how God's formulas pervade this earthly, human life.
I was asked by one of my publishers to look into writing a book about the birth of a baby from a biblical perspective.
The book was to be a gift book to be presented to Christian couples at arrival of blessed events.
This pleasant assignment led me to the many fascinating birth stories in the Bible, including, of course, the wondrous birth of our Lord.
But I preferred to do more than just celebrate a new arrival; there are many adequate books for such purposes.
Rather I wanted to find some theological principle, perhaps some hidden truth in the Scriptures, about how each of us are born.
I wanted to know if the Scriptures held some secret as to how God makes us.
To that end I contacted Dr. Margaret Matheson, a Bible- reading friend, and a very good obstetrician who has delivered over ten thousand babies.
I questioned Margaret about pregnancy in general, how it is calculated, and how the baby develops within the mother.
I learned that the average pregnancy is 280 days and is counted from the first day of the last menstrual cycle before conception.
Making calculations on the Jewish calendar is rather a hobby of mine, and I placed this 280 days on an "ideal Jewish year."
The ideal Jewish year would start exactly at the spring equinox, with the first day of Nisan, the new moon of the first month, occurring on the first day of spring, March 21st.
Interesting, I found that a pregnancy of 280 days, begun on March 21, would end on a very interesting date, December 25.
We don't know if Christmas Day was actually the date of the birth of our Lord, but we do know that Kislev is the accurate date of Chanukah, the Feast of Dedication, which our Lord did commemorate ().
That discovery led me to think that there must be something very biblical indeed about the pregnancy term, and I asked Margaret for more details.
It was really Margaret's first statement that turned me on to the whole system I'm about to disclose.
I asked Margaret to tell me in some detail just how the baby is made and how it grows, and she began with this statement: "On the fourteenth day of the first month, the egg appears."
I couldn't help hearing that familiar ring of : "In the fourteenth day of the first month ...", God's original instruction for the observance of Passover.
The Jews use an egg on the Passover table as symbolic of the new life they were granted by the sacrifice of the lamb in Egypt.
The egg, of course, appears in the Easter celebration as well, symbolic of the same thing, although not from biblical sources, as we have seen.
The egg is an appropriate enough man-made symbol of a new life, and I was fascinated that the fourteenth day of a pregnancy does the same thing as the fourteenth day of God's festival year: It brings the chance of new life.
I was already thinking in my mind that the baby must develop along the schedule of the seven feasts, but I concealed my excitement from Margaret.
I didn't want to encourage her to slant the facts in any way, just to prove a biblical point.
I questioned her carefully, keeping in mind that the next feast, Unleavened Bread, must occur the very next night, the fifteenth day of the first month, according to .
I asked Margaret how soon fertilization of the mother's egg must occur if pregnancy is to happen.
Her answer was very clear and very definite.
"Fertilization must occur within twenty-four hours or the egg will pass on."
Now I was getting excited.
Not only did the two momentous prenatal events occur on the right days, but they were also the appropriate events.
The egg, of course, for Passover, and the idea of fertilization—the planting of the seed—for Unleavened Bread, the burial of our Lord.
His crucifixion on Passover gave each of us the chance for life everlasting.
His burial in the earth, prepared for each of us, the glorious resurrection to come.
I almost held my breath as I inquired about First Fruits.
I realized that this third feast is not on a definite time cycle.
It simply occurs on the Sunday during the week of Unleavened Bread.
It could be the day after, or it could be almost a week away.
I asked Margaret cautiously what happened next in the birth process.
"Well, that's a little bit indeterminate," she said.
"The fertilized egg travels down the tube at its own speed toward the uterus.
It may take anywhere from two to six days before it implants."
I loved her word "implants" because it so suggested the festival of First Fruits, the spring planting, and it was the correct technical term, I found out.
The medical term is "implantation."
This marks the moment when the fertilized egg arrives safely in the uterus and begins its miraculous growth into a human being.
Needless to say, Margaret and I were very soon occupied with a pile of obstetrical textbooks, embryonic charts, and, of course, the Scriptures in several translations.
I appealed to her to help me track this thing down, but I still did not disclose to her just what I was after.
I was only going to ask her about how our little fertilized egg would develop, without telling her that I fully expected a very exact schedule in accordance with the feasts.
It's probably not necessary for me to say that I was holding my breath by this time, in hopes that something had really been uncovered.
After all, it was so beautiful so far.
Surely God designed the conception of each of us in accordance with those first three majestic feasts, so appropriately fulfilled by our Lord.
But would the system continue?
The next one was the tough one.
It seemed that things were happening fast on the pregnancy schedule, but the seven feasts' schedule now called for that long wait until Pentecost.
I asked Margaret cautiously what the next development would be with our implanted egg.
"Well, of course, we have a slowly developing embryo here for a long time," she said.
"It goes through stages, but there's really no dramatic change until it becomes an actual fetus.
That's the next big event.
You can see it all right here on the chart."
And she turned her medical book toward me so that I could see a page divided like a calendar, showing the first few weeks of the embryonic development.
I looked across the little pictures at what seemed like a little tadpole, which soon had flippers, and then began to look like a little man from Mars, and so on down to the very last picture on the page.
There I saw a human baby, and beside that drawing, the very scriptural message, "Fifty days."
I looked up at Margaret, trying to conceal my excitement, and said carefully, "Is the fiftieth day important?"
"Well," said the obstetrician, "Up until the fiftieth day you wouldn't know if you're going to have a duck or a cocker spaniel.
But at the fiftieth day of the embryo, it becomes a human fetus."
Scriptural phrases were flying through my head.
"A new creature" seemed to be the appropriate one for the momentous event of the change from this indiscriminate life form, the embryo, to what was essentially a human being.
Indeed, on that day of Pentecost, those as yet unregenerate Israelites at the Temple became truly "new creatures".
They became spiritual.
They received life eternal.
They were not the same now as they were before ().
They would now go on to another life outside the confines of the fleshy bodies they were in, in the manner that that fetus would go on to another life outside the body of its mother.
Margaret apprised me that every scheduled event in the birth of the baby varied somewhat with the particular case, just as the length of the entire pregnancy would vary from mother to mother.
The medical book chart had measured its fifty days from fertilization, rather than from implantation (First Fruits in the Scriptures), but the variations among pregnancies would account for the difference.
Substantially, after the seventh week, following conception, this embryo—this inhuman life form—would become that one creature created in God's own image.
I next asked Margaret about the first day of the seventh month.
I had hoped that there were no big events through what would be the long summer on the schedule of the feasts, and indeed, there were none.
It seemed that the fetus, once started on its growth into a human being ready to be born, progressed in a rather general way with nothing momentous happening.
The baby, I now realized, had developed very early and now was only gaining size and strength.
But, of course, there were a few small perfections to be added by the hand of the Creator, and I was delighted to find that one of these coincided so exactly with the next feast.
The perfection that arrived just at the beginning of the seventh month, was the baby's hearing.
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