12. “The Divine Calendar” (Leviticus 23)

The Divine Calendar

Leviticus 23

Last week our adult Sunday school class went deeper into thinking through Leviticus’ distinction between clean and the unclean animals, and as I begin this morning I just want to mention a couple of things from that discussion.

The first—and I think this is important—is that when Nick wanted to help us to understand how Leviticus works, when he rather spontaneously reached for the illustration that best could help us to comprehend the glorious mysterious to which Leviticus is pointing, the source he found most profoundly illustrative was from K POP Demon Hunters. I don’t really have anything more to say about that—I just thought that was worth mentioning. 

More seriously, the part of that conversation that especially struck me was the observation of how discouraging at times it must have been to be an Israelite trying to observe these cleanness and uncleanness laws. The pervasive, always present sense that you’re not doing things quite right, that no matter how hard you tried you would often find yourself unclean. How dirty sometimes you might feel. I think that’s probably right. And I think that’s actually part of the intent. Not that God wanted to make people miserable, but he was revealing to his people how deep and how pervasive the problem of their sin really was. This is how reality actually is: even the best efforts to get it right are tainted by selfishness and idolatry.  

But, as MacKenzie reminded us last week, there’s much more that the structures of Leviticus were meant to teach Israel. Yes, sin is real; it’s pervasive; and it’s awful. But there’s another greater truth. God is a God of abundance. And his plan for his people, for this world is to experience and enjoy that abundance. And one of the ways we see him carefully seeking to help his people to see that was through the calendar. 

To this point, most of our attention in Leviticus has been on how God has used physical symbols: sacrifices, animals, tabernacle, to teach spiritual mysteries. But here we see how God also taught about these mysteries through the structures of time.

Have you ever thought about how deeply formative the calendar is? Our days are largely organized around certain key annual events that help provide structure to our year: you need only look at the seasonal section of Target to see that. August is back to school month; then there’s the preparation for Halloween, then Christmas, then Valentines, Easter, Mother’s Day, summer. Each of these events include important traditions, and as those traditions are conducted year after year, they accumulate memories, forming our lives. We reminisce about different costumes we wore, we accumulate Christmas ornaments made at school and Mother’s Day crafts meant as gifts. Year after year, we, together, are formed by the structures of our calendar.

Here we see God designing a calendar for his people, providing them with a set of holy days—which of course is what holiday means. Verses 1 and 2 orient us to the rest of the passage: “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, These are the appointed feasts of the Lord that you shall proclaim as holy convocations; they are my appointed feasts.”

From the outset, God is saying to Israel: “If you are my people, then I am the king of your calendar.” The word translated “appointed feasts” literally is just appointments, and convocations has the idea of calling or summoning. These are special appointments God is making where he summons his people to stop what they are doing, set aside all their other priorities and follow his instructions. There’s no Doodle poll here where people check to see if they’re out of town or have another meeting. This is what everything else is organized around. Because if the Lord is your God, he is the one who orders your life.

And he is ordering it here with a purpose. There is quite clearly an intentionality to this: God is clearly seeking to teach his people, to form them. As we walk through these instructions, what I hope we can see and perhaps even feel is how all of this is oriented toward one main goal: to help God’s people experience the reality of his GRACE. We see this in four ways.

Sabbath Principle

First, we see it in the Sabbath principle. Verse 3 reminds us of the 4th commandment given to Israel, “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, a holy convocation. You shall do no work. It is a Sabbath to the Lord in all your dwelling places.” Now technically the Sabbath is not a holiday. But God mentions it here anyway, because it is the paradigm for all that follows.

The period of time being described here begins with the first month of the year, the month immediately after spring starts, and goes through the 7th month, which, interestingly in Exodus, is identified as the end of the year. Of course there are still 5 other months; but the first 7 months are what we might call the festival season, also the season of harvesting. The seventh month is the conclusion, the culmination—the Sabbath month. What’s more, when we look down to the “Feast of Weeks” in verse 15, we see significance attached to the period after 7 weeks, where, after 7 weeks of 7 days, you have a kind of Super Sabbath. 

And the thing that happens is whenever you hit a 7, you get a command to rest, to cease from labor. In the harvest season, the time when productivity matters most, the time when their life literally depends on the food they gather, they keep being told to stop working. On the 7th day, they have to rest. At the end of the 7th week, you get an additional day of rest. During the 7th month, you get a whole bunch of days of rest. 

Why this emphasis on 7? Because the 7th day is the last day of creation. It’s the day that signifies what the whole world was made for. And what we’re told in Genesis is that God made this world to enjoy rest. And he created us to enjoy rest with him. 

So in structuring time for Israel in this way, God was seeking to help Israel understand: “You are not just workers, you are not productivity machines. That is not what defines you. You are not slaves. You are free human beings designed by me for something more, for rest.” 

It seems to me in our day we’re constantly in danger of forgetting this. We live in a day that evaluates everything by the “bottom line” of economics, and so it’s easy for us to attach our worth to how productive we’ve been. But when we think of what God was showing his people, we see a very different agenda. Yes, work is good, but that is not the meaning of life. We were meant to enjoy rest with him, and our lives should reflect this. That is grace.

New Beginning

The second way we see grace in this calendar relates to the beginning of something new. Verse 5 tells us that the calendar begins with Passover and the Feast of Unleavened bread closely connected to it. On the first month, on the tenth day of that month, a Tuesday, every family would take a lamb and bring it into their home. A few days later, on Friday night, the evening before the 14th day, they would slaughter their lamb, take some of the blood and apply it to their doorposts, and then they would eat the rest. As the children of the family got old enough to have questions, when they asked, “Why do we do this?” their parents were instructed to explain. “When we were in Egypt, God struck down Egyptians, but he spared us because of the blood of the Lamb who died for us. And then he brought us out of Egypt and our new life began.”

And then immediately the next day, the Sunday after Passover, the people of Israel were told to remove all leaven from their home. Remember, leaven isn’t like a yeast packet. It’s fermented dough left over from a previous batch; when it’s kneaded into a new batch of dough, that allows the dough to rise. But whatever sourdough starter they might have kept week after week now must be completely removed. For the first week after Passover, no portions of dough from the past could be used to leaven bread.

The point is that in the events related to Passover, something altogether new had happened. The moment Israel was brought out of Egypt, their new life began. They’ve become something new. The old “leaven” of Egypt is no longer to be theirs, because they now have a new way, God’s way. Every year as the year began, Israel was to reenact this truth: they have been made different, they have made a clean break with what they once were. Something exciting and new is happening.

Paul applies these very ideas to Christians in the Corinthian church who were tempted to hold on to ways of thinking they had before they became Christians. He says to them, “Don’t you know that a little leaven, leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as indeed you are. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore, let us observe the feast, not with old leaven or with the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 

Because, through Christ, something new has begun in us. When we look at the broken ways of things around us, when we look at our past at things we are ashamed of, we have this truth: we don’t have to be that way. We are being made new. This is one of the reasons that every week we return to confession, the good news of the gospel, the Lord’s Supper, and then quite often we say together, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has passed away, the new has come.” Because to an even greater degree than Israel, we who are Christians have been brought out of slavery into something new. That is grace.

Atonement

The third way we see grace in this calendar is in God’s design to help his people understand what has been done for them. There is a kind of frame in this calendar, where the beginning month and the ending, 7th month, somewhat mirror each other. Both of them have week-long celebration feasts beginning on the 15th day of the month. The Feast of Unleavened Bread in month 1 and the Feast of Booths in month 7. And importantly, both of these weeks are preceded by two sacred days. The gateway to the Feast of Unleavened Bread is the Passover. And the Gateway to the Feast of Booths is the Day of Atonement. In both cases, what allows joyful feasting is an atoning death.

At the Passover, a lamb that has for a few days become a member of the family is killed, with its blood being applied to the doorposts to protect the family from God’s judgment. On the Day of Atonement, there are two goats, one sent away to carry away the sins, and another slaughtered all to enable the priest to enter God’s presence and cleanse the relationship of the people. With both of these, the primary responsibility for the people was to receive these things. With Passover, that means the family ate the lamb that was slain for them. On the Day of Atonement, the people were commanded to humble themselves by very carefully doing nothing so that they could accept what was being done for them, apart from anything they did. 

In these two parallel holy days, God was demonstrating that being his people did not come about because people earned the privilege. People were not selected by God based on how nice they were or on what helpful things they could do for God. No: Israel became the people of God, and they were made right with God only through the death of another. Though they would not have fully understood this, Israel was being taught to live in the shadow of the cross. 

Because that’s what the Passover and the Day of Atonement are all about. Jesus is the Passover Lamb who entered our home, becoming one of us and who then was slain on the very Friday the lamb was to be killed. And Jesus is the great high priest who, rather than offering the blood of goats, offered himself to completely cleanse our relationship with God. All of the blessings that we experience as the people of God come to us because Jesus gave his life for us. That is grace.

Created for Rejoicing

The final way we see grace in this calendar is found in the emphasis on grateful joy. One of the interesting things about the structure God gives is that holy days are intimately connected to harvest. To begin with, verse 10 says, “When you come into the land that I give you and reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest.” As spring began, the barley, the earliest of crops would be ready for harvest. And before anyone enjoyed any of that harvest, on the first day after Passover, they were to bring the very initial sheaf they harvested—called the firstfruits, the initial indicator of more to come, and the priest was to wave it before the Lord. It was an act of remembering before God that all of this belongs to him, and all that they were about to eat was from his hand.

And then they were to count 7 weeks from the firstfruits, and following those 7 weeks, they were, as we mentioned before, to celebrate a kind of “Super-Sabbath,” This day was sometimes referred to as the Feast of Weeks or also “Pentecost,” referring to the fact that it’s 50 days after Passover. Pentecost was the time when wheat was harvested. Here was another occasion for a wave offering. A verse not printed in your bulletin, commands the first fruits of the wheat, now in the form of loaves of bread to be waved before God,“And,” it says in Deuteronomy, “you shall rejoice before the Lord your God.” Because again, that was the point. As they dedicated these loaves, they were meant to remember that all of the land’s bounty, all of the wheat they were to harvest, belonged to God, and he had given it to them to enjoy.

And then the 7th month is really the grand finale. The 7th month is especially cool.

Verses 24 and 25 tell us that it kicks off on the first day with a trumpet blast commanding everyone to stop working for a day and pay attention. It’s known, creatively, as the “Feast of Trumpets.”  10 days later, as we’ve mentioned, is the Day of Atonement. And then finally, a few days after that, on the 14th day of the 7th month, is the Feast of Booths, which is the most ridiculously extravagant holiday I’ve ever heard of.

“Booth” here just means temporary shelter; you can call it “Feast of Huts” if that makes more sense to you. It’s called that because for one week, all of Israel was commanded to come together all in one city and build temporary huts to live in, side by side for a whole week. It’s like the most massive summer camp ever, involving all your friends and family. This week also sometimes is called the Feast of Ingathering, because it came at the conclusion of the harvest season where now even the last part, the grapes and the figs are all in. With everything now received, what they were commanded to do was together have a 7-day long party. They were to spend extravagantly on food and wine and treats and for 7 days they were to do no work but instead to eat this really good food and hang out together, all in the presence of God. Verse 40 puts it this way: “And you shall take on the first day the fruit of splendid trees, branches of palm trees and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” This is the culmination of the whole year. This is the end goal. This, God was seeking to teach them, is the destination he intends for his people. 

Do you see how this works? Barley harvest after Passover: wave the firstfruits before God to remember it came from him, and then enjoy it. Wheat harvest at Pentecost, wave the firstfruits loaf before God to remember it all comes from him, and “rejoice before the Lord your God.” And then, when it’s no longer about firstfruits, but everything has been gathered, lavishly enjoy it together as a great party before God’s presence.

What God is saying to his people in all of these holidays is this: “Listen, I have brought you into my land, a land of abundance, so that you can enjoy all of my blessings. I have rescued you to give you delight.”

It’s no accident that Jesus rose on the Sunday after Passover, the day of the firstfruits. Because, as the New Testament tells us, he is a firstfruit of God’s blessing. His resurrection is the beginning of the blessing all of us will enjoy of resurrection life. Likewise, it’s no accident that the Holy Spirit was given to the church on Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks. Because the Spirit also is a firstfruits of the connection to God that we will one day more fully enjoy with him. 

The New Testament tells us that there is a time that is coming when all of the harvest will be completed, when all of God’s people from all nations will have been gathered to himself. Then, we are told, the trumpet shall sound, and all will pay attention. And just as on the Day of Atonement the priest emerged from the presence of God in the tabernacle to pronounce a blessing on the people, so also Jesus will emerge from the true presence of God, the heavenly realms to pronounce his final eternal blessing on us. And as we are all gathered, both those living and those who died in the Lord, we will feast and rejoice. And what we will know in that moment with all of our being is  that God has rescued us so that we can experience delight in him.

Don’t we often lose sight of that in our present lives? Don’t we often become so focused on those things that we need to fix, either in our situation or in ourselves that we forget that God has saved us so that we might rejoice? How might we structure our lives so that we repeatedly recognize the blessings of God: the joys of creation, the joys of being forgiven and having the Spirit—savoring those things that we might remember who our God is and how he has loved us? 

Do you see what comes into focus when you put all of this together and consider how God constructs the calendar of Israel? When you consider how painstakingly he designed the progression of time so that they could return again and again to rest, so that they could experience the reality of the new beginning, so that they could remember atonement, and so that they could rejoice in God’s goodness, how does it all fit together? One word: grace. God structured the very fabric of their existence, of their seasons to develop in his people a deeper awareness of his grace toward them. 

This is a breathtaking thought: not only did God organize all of the calendar of Israel for this purpose, but really, in the end, he structured all of reality toward this end. He’s organized it all so that you and I, completely without any deserving on our own part, but simply because of the love of God, could experience the riches of his kindness for all eternity.

I can think of no better way to sum it all up than with the words of Paul in Ephesians: “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

God’s purpose for you, for all who receive it and trust in Jesus, is for you to experience the immeasurable riches of his grace.

We receive this by recognizing our need and by receiving this gift. Let’s do that now by turning to him and confessing our sins.