Celebrating God's Faithfulness Through Israel's Festivals

"GODFREY: Well, we've been looking at various laws in Deuteronomy relative to the love of God, and we saw a law about the place of worship, we saw laws about who not to listen to as leaders in worship. And now we've been looking at a series of laws relative to how we're to worship. And now we come to chapter 16, where the 'how' of worship is being discussed in terms of the three great festivals of Israel." [00:00:07]

"And the three great festivals will come into effect in Israel's life only when the place God chooses to have central worship is revealed to Israel, namely Jerusalem. So this is really legislation that will come fully into effect only in years to come, but it's being laid down here as a guide to Israel in the present, but particularly for the future." [00:00:37]

"The great temptation of God's people in every generation is to become self-reliant, and God wants us to rely on Him and on His grace and on His mercy, on His provision, and that's a good bit of what Passover was all about. And so, they were to come for seven days to Jerusalem to eat unleavened bread." [00:03:21]

"And some estimates were that by Jesus' day, literally thousands and thousands of lambs, sometimes people said a hundred thousand lambs were killed in Jerusalem in the Passover that the blood ran in the streets as a sign of the sacrifice that was offered to God for His mercy. But the greatness of that sacrifice pales in comparison with the greatness of Jesus' sacrifice." [00:04:33]

"And again, the first fruits of the harvest are to be brought to God as an offering in Jerusalem. And in verse 11 of chapter 16 we're told, 'You shall rejoice before the LORD your God in Jerusalem and remember that you were a slave.' Now those two things are together, and I think the sense it makes particularly is to say, 'You were once a slave in Egypt, where all of your work went to someone else's benefit, and you derived none of the fruits of your labor.'" [00:06:25]

"And the fruit of your labor belongs to you, and so in thankfulness, in joy for this deliverance, you present the first fruits of the harvest to the Lord.' But it's interesting how that theme of remembrance and joy are tied together and how they are linked here in this festival that is to be celebrated in Jerusalem." [00:07:08]

"And then the third feast was the Feast of Booths. For those of us who are a little older, usually called in old versions of the Bible the Feast of Tabernacles. We might even call it the Feast of Sheds or of Tents, also called the Feast of Ingathering. This was in the seventh month of the year, which probably means September and October, so you had a kind of spring feast, an early summer feast, and then an early fall feast." [00:09:19]

"And that Feast of Booths was held in a very busy month liturgically. They went up for seven days for the Feast of Booths, but on the first day of that month was the Feast of Trumpets, which is referred to in Psalm 81. We don't know a whole lot about the Feast of Trumpets but it appears to involve trumpets, but that was not a feast that everyone attended." [00:09:58]

"And here is the very essence of worship. As verse 15 of chapter 16 says, 'so that you will altogether be joyful,' that your joy will be shared with one another there in Jerusalem. And now we don't know exactly how they rejoiced, but I think the pattern of the Old Testament suggests that one of the ways they surely rejoiced was by singing together." [00:12:40]

"So we can imagine these crowds in Jerusalem singing together. What a wonderful sound it must have been! How lovely it would be to have those tunes. You know, one of the sad things that's been lost to us, by and large, is any real certain knowledge about what ancient music sounded like. There are great scholars who have worked on this and have some speculations in terms of later music, what maybe earlier music was like, but there apparently weren't tape recorders in ancient Israel or CDs, and so we don't have, we don't have a record, how ephemeral music was in the ancient world." [00:13:06]

"And yet we know they sang together, and we're pretty sure they sang Psalms together. That's why Psalms were given us, and it certainly is a picture of joy, of unity, of serving the Lord, of rejoicing in the Lord. And a picture that still helps inform our worship. We stop our ordinary lives to give ourselves to worship, and that's sort of necessary for us as human beings, isn't it?" [00:13:59]

"So He calls us to His worship as a time apart, as a place apart, as an activity apart, where we can concentrate on worshiping Him, rejoicing in Him, remembering His great saving works. So we have a beautiful picture here of how we are to worship. So we've been looking at these laws relative to the love of God." [00:15:05]