How the Feasts of Israel Point to Christ
Before the events happened historically, God had already embedded them symbolically.
The God Who Keeps a Calendar
Calendars reveal priorities. Look at any family’s calendar and you will see what that family treasures: birthdays circled in red, anniversaries guarded, reunion dates negotiated months in advance. Nations do the same, we mark independence days and remembrance days because a people is shaped by what it refuses to forget. Churches order the year around Christmas and Easter for the same reason. What a community celebrates, and when, and how often, tells you what that community believes its own story to be.
Which raises a question worth sitting with: why did God Himself establish a calendar for Israel? Not a king, not a council of elders, not the accumulated customs of centuries, God, speaking from the tabernacle, dictated to Moses a fixed annual rhythm of holy days. And notice, before anything else, whose feasts Scripture says they were:
“Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.”
Leviticus 23:2 (KJV)
Not the feasts of Israel. The feasts of the LORD. My feasts. The Hebrew word is moedim, appointed times, fixed appointments. These were not holidays Israel invented to honour God; they were appointments God set with Israel. Heaven scheduled the meetings, and the nation was summoned to keep them. Year after year, generation after generation, the calendar itself preached.
And it preached more than Israel knew. For when the feasts are laid side by side, Passover, Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Pentecost in the spring; Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles in the autumn, they trace, in order, the story of redemption: a lamb slain, sin removed, life rising from the ground, the Spirit poured out, a people summoned, sin atoned, and God dwelling with man. The feasts were not random celebrations. They formed God’s redemptive calendar, telling the story of salvation long before Christ appeared. Paul says exactly this:
“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.”
Colossians 2:16-17 (KJV)
A shadow, and the body that casts the shadow is Christ. That sentence is the key to this whole article, and it cuts two ways. It frees the Christian from keeping the feasts as obligations; the shadow is not binding once the substance has come. But it also forbids the Christian from ignoring them, for a shadow traces the outline of the very thing we love. Study the shadow, and you are studying the silhouette of Jesus.
Before the Feasts: The Sabbath
Strikingly, before Leviticus 23 lists a single annual feast, it begins with something weekly: “Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath of rest, an holy convocation” (Leviticus 23:3). The Sabbath is the foundation stone of the whole calendar, and its roots run back past Sinai, past Abraham, all the way to creation itself, when God “rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made” and “blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Genesis 2:2-3). God was not tired; omnipotence does not need a nap. He rested as a King rests, ceasing because the work was complete and good, and He built that rhythm into the fabric of the week.
At Sinai the Sabbath became a covenant sign between God and Israel: “it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you” (Exodus 31:13). Every seventh day, an entire nation downed tools, a weekly, visible confession that their life did not depend on their labour but on their God. In a world of relentless ancient toil, Israel’s strange day of stopping was a sermon to the nations: our God provides; we are not slaves anymore; we can rest.
But the writer of Hebrews tells us the weekly Sabbath was itself a shadow, pointing to a deeper rest that a day off could never deliver:
“There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.”
Hebrews 4:9-10 (KJV)
There it is, the gospel hidden in the seventh day. To be saved is to cease from your own works as God did from His: to stop labouring to earn what can only be received, and to rest entirely on a finished work. The Sabbath was always preaching salvation by grace. And so the true Sabbath turns out to be not a day but a Person: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Every Sabbath kept in Israel for fifteen centuries was an appointment with that invitation.
Three Journeys a Year: The Pilgrimage Festivals
Of the seven annual feasts, three required pilgrimage. Three times a year, every Israelite male was to appear before the LORD at the place He chose, ultimately Jerusalem: at Passover (with Unleavened Bread), at Pentecost, and at Tabernacles (Deuteronomy 16:16). Imagine the scene, repeated every year for centuries: roads filling with families, the Psalms of Ascent rising from a hundred caravans, “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD” (Psalm 122:1), the city swelling with worshippers, the smoke of sacrifices over the temple.
These gatherings did more than mark dates; they forged a people. Tribes scattered across the land stood shoulder to shoulder three times a year and remembered that they were one nation with one God and one story. Children asked questions; fathers retold the Exodus; identity was handed down not as a lecture but as a journey. And in God’s providence, those same crowded festivals became the stage on which redemption’s decisive acts were performed, for it was at pilgrimage feasts, with Jerusalem full of witnesses from every nation, that Jesus died, that He rose, and that the Spirit fell. God had been gathering the audience for fifteen hundred years.
Feast 1: Passover, The Lamb and the Blood
What it meant to Israel
Passover was Israel’s birth certificate. On the nation’s final night in Egypt, judgment came for every firstborn in the land, and God provided one shelter: a lamb without blemish, slain at twilight, its blood applied to the doorposts of each house. “And when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13). Inside the blood-marked houses, families ate the lamb in haste, dressed for departure. By morning they were free. Deliverance did not come because Israel was stronger or holier than Egypt; it came because a substitute died and its blood stood between them and judgment.
How it developed
God commanded the meal to be kept annually, forever, as a memorial, and built a child’s question into the liturgy: “What mean ye by this service?” (Exodus 12:26). For fifteen centuries, Israel’s identity was renewed each spring around a table: the lamb, the bitter herbs, the retold story. Whatever else changed, judges, kings, exile, return, Passover endured, the fixed point of national memory: we were slaves, and the LORD redeemed us.
How it points to Christ
Then one Passover season, John the Baptist saw Jesus approaching and gave the feast its final interpretation: “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Every element converges on Him. The lamb was to be without blemish, He was “without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19), examined by Pilate, Herod, and the priests, and no fault found. The lamb was slain at Passover, He was crucified at Passover, while the lambs were dying across Jerusalem. The lamb’s bones were not to be broken, and the soldiers, finding Him already dead, “brake not his legs” (John 19:33, 36). Paul draws the conclusion in five words:
“For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.”
1 Corinthians 5:7 (KJV)
The first Passover delivered Israel from Pharaoh. The greater Passover delivers humanity from sin and death. And the old terms still stand: judgment passes over not the impressive, nor the religious, nor the sincere as such, but those sheltered beneath applied blood.
Feast 2: Unleavened Bread, Leaving Egypt Behind
What it meant to Israel
Passover night flowed directly into seven days of Unleavened Bread (Leviticus 23:6). Historically, the unleavened bread remembered the haste of the Exodus, Israel left Egypt so quickly that the dough had no time to rise (Exodus 12:39). But God turned the memory into a discipline: for seven days, no leaven was to be eaten, and more than that, no leaven was even to be found in their houses (Exodus 12:19). Each spring, Israelite families searched their homes by lamplight, sweeping out every crumb of the old leaven before the feast began.
What the leaven means
Throughout Scripture, leaven became a natural picture of sin and corruption, something small that works silently through the whole lump. Jesus warned of “the leaven of the Pharisees” (Matthew 16:6); Paul warned twice that “a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6; Galatians 5:9). The sequence of the feasts is itself a sermon: first the blood of the lamb, then the sweeping out of leaven. Redemption first, holiness flowing from it, never the reverse. Israel did not clean house in order to be delivered; they cleaned house because they had been.
How it points to Christ
Christ Himself is the truly unleavened One, the only life in history with no hidden corruption working through it: He “did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22). During these very days His sinless body lay in the tomb, buried like seed in the ground, and saw no corruption (Acts 2:27, 31). And Paul tells believers what the feast now asks of us:
“Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast… with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
1 Corinthians 5:7-8 (KJV)
Notice the gospel logic in that sentence: become what you are. Ye are unleavened, declared clean through Christ, therefore purge out the old leaven. The Christian life is the lamplit search of the house, conducted not in fear of losing redemption but in gratitude for it: what old leaven of Egypt still hides in my cupboards, and why would I keep feeding on what God delivered me from?
Feast 3: Firstfruits, The Sheaf That Promised the Harvest
What it meant to Israel
In the midst of Unleavened Bread came a quieter ceremony. When the first barley of the year ripened, a single sheaf, the firstfruits, was brought to the priest, who waved it before the LORD “on the morrow after the sabbath” (Leviticus 23:10-11). Nothing of the new harvest could be eaten until this was done. It was an act of gratitude and of striking faith: the farmer offered the first portion while the rest of the crop still stood unreaped in the field, exposed to hail, fire, and locusts. To wave the sheaf was to say, the whole harvest is Yours, and I trust You for what I cannot yet see.
The principle
Embedded in the ceremony was a piece of divine logic: the first portion guarantees and consecrates the rest. The sheaf was not a substitute for the harvest; it was the harvest’s beginning, same field, same grain, same life. “For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy” (Romans 11:16). Whoever held the first sheaf held the promise of everything still standing in the field.
How it points to Christ
Now follow the calendar. Jesus died at Passover. He lay in the tomb through the sabbath. And He rose “on the morrow after the sabbath”, the first day of the week, the very day the priest waved the first sheaf of barley before the LORD in the temple. On the morning Israel lifted the firstfruits of the earth toward heaven, heaven presented the Firstfruits of the new creation, alive in a garden. Paul, a man trained in that calendar, names the feast outright:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept… Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.”
1 Corinthians 15:20, 23 (KJV)
This is why the resurrection of Jesus is not merely a marvel to admire but a guarantee to stand on. The first sheaf is never the whole harvest, and never separate from it. Because the Firstfruits rose, the rest of the harvest must follow. His resurrection body is the prototype of ours; His empty tomb is the first of millions. Easter morning was the wave offering of a new humanity.
Feast 4: Pentecost, The Harvest Begins
What it meant to Israel
From the day of the wave sheaf, Israel counted seven weeks, fifty days, to the Feast of Weeks (Leviticus 23:15-16), called in Greek Pentecost, “fiftieth.” It marked the wheat harvest: a feast of thanksgiving for bread on the table, when two loaves, baked, this time, with leaven (Leviticus 23:17), were waved before the LORD. Jewish tradition also came to associate Pentecost with the giving of the Law at Sinai, which Exodus places in the third month after leaving Egypt (Exodus 19:1): the season of the feast became the anniversary of the covenant.
How it points to Christ
Fifty days after the resurrection, on Pentecost itself, with Jerusalem crowded with pilgrims “out of every nation under heaven”, the appointment was kept:
“And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place… And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.”
Acts 2:1, 4 (KJV)
Set Sinai and Pentecost side by side and watch the covenants change places. At Sinai, the Law was written on tables of stone; at Pentecost, the Spirit began writing on hearts, exactly as the prophets had promised: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33), an epistle “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3). At Sinai there was fire on the mountain, distant and terrifying; at Pentecost, fire rested gently on each believer’s head, every Christian a little Sinai, indwelt by God. At Sinai, after the golden calf, about three thousand fell (Exodus 32:28); at Pentecost, about three thousand souls were saved (Acts 2:41). “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
And the harvest imagery blossoms. Pentecost was a harvest feast, and on that day the great harvest of souls began, as the church was born and the gospel went out in every pilgrim’s language. Even the leaven in the two loaves finds its place: the loaves of Pentecost were not pretend-perfect. They pictured a real people, Jew and Gentile, still imperfect, yet baked together and presented acceptable to God through a perfect Sacrifice.
The Long Summer: A Pause in the Calendar
Here the calendar does something curious. The four spring feasts fall in a tight cluster, Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits within a single week, Pentecost fifty days later. Then: nothing. Through the long, hot months of summer, while the crops ripen in the fields, the calendar falls silent. Not until the seventh month do the trumpets sound and the autumn feasts begin.
It is hard to miss the pattern in fulfilment. The spring feasts were fulfilled in rapid, datable succession at Christ’s first coming, crucified at Passover, buried during Unleavened Bread, raised on Firstfruits, the Spirit poured out at Pentecost; four feasts, four events, in their exact order and season. The autumn feasts, Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles, gather around themes the New Testament associates with His return: a great gathering summons, final reckoning and national repentance, and God dwelling with His people. For this reason, many thoughtful interpreters have seen in the long agricultural pause a picture of the present age, the era of the growing harvest between the Spirit’s outpouring and the trumpet’s sound, the age in which we live.
We should hold this reverently and loosely. Scripture nowhere says, the summer gap is the church age, and godly students of the Word differ here. What we can say with confidence is this: the spring feasts were fulfilled with such precision, to the day, that it would be strange to think the autumn feasts mean nothing. The pattern invites hope, not date-setting. The farmer in James does not calculate; he waits: “the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth… Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh” (James 5:7-8).
Feast 5: Trumpets, The Wake-Up Call
What it meant to Israel
“In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation.”
Leviticus 23:24 (KJV)
After the silent summer, the seventh month opened with sound. Trumpet blasts rang across the land, a sacred assembly, a national summons. In Israel the trumpet had clear meanings: it gathered the congregation, announced the king, sounded the alarm of war, and called the people to attention (Numbers 10:1-10). Falling ten days before the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Trumpets functioned as a great awakening, prepare; examine yourselves; the holiest day is coming. Jewish tradition deepened this into a season of repentance, the “days of awe” between the trumpet and the atonement.
How it points forward
It is striking, then, how insistently the New Testament attaches a trumpet to the return of Christ and the gathering of His people. “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible” (1 Corinthians 15:52). “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect” (Matthew 24:31). The instrument that gathered Israel to her appointed assemblies will gather the redeemed to the last one.
Christians hold differing views on how these passages fit together, and humility becomes us where Scripture has not drawn the diagram. But the feast’s pastoral note is beyond dispute, and it is the same note Jesus struck: “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matthew 24:42). Trumpets is not an invitation to speculation; it is a summons to readiness. The question the feast asks is not when will the trumpet sound? but if it sounded today, would it find me awake?
Feast 6: The Day of Atonement, The Holiest Day
What it meant to Israel
Ten days after the trumpets came the most solemn day of Israel’s year: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the one day the high priest passed through the veil into the Holy of Holies, and the only day anyone did (Leviticus 16). He went stripped of his golden garments, in plain linen, carrying blood: first a bullock for his own sins, then a goat for the sins of the people, its blood sprinkled on the mercy seat above the broken Law. Then came the unforgettable second goat, the scapegoat. The high priest laid both hands on its head, confessed over it “all the iniquities of the children of Israel”, and it was led away into the wilderness, “unto a land not inhabited” (Leviticus 16:21-22), carrying the nation’s sins out of sight, never to return. Penalty paid; burden removed. And the people fasted and afflicted their souls, the one feast that was less a celebration than a national falling-on-the-face.
How it points to Christ
The epistle to the Hebrews reads like an extended exposition of this one day, and its argument can be put simply: everything Yom Kippur did annually and provisionally, Christ has done once and for ever.
“But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come… neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.”
Hebrews 9:11-12 (KJV)
Count the ways He exceeds the shadow. The high priest first offered for his own sins; Christ had none. The high priest carried the blood of another; Christ carried His own. The high priest entered a tent made with hands; Christ entered heaven itself, “now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24). The high priest came back out and had to repeat it all next year; Christ “after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down” (Hebrews 10:12). And both goats meet in Him: His blood presented before God, our penalty paid; our sins laid on His head and carried away, “as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12).
The feast still teaches the church its posture: repentance is not an entry fee for forgiveness but the honest joy of those who have it. We afflict our souls over sin, and then we look up, because the Priest has not left us at the veil. The veil is torn, and “having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19), we go in.
Feast 7: Tabernacles, God With Us, For Ever
What it meant to Israel
Five days after the solemnity of Atonement came the most joyful feast of all: Tabernacles, or Booths, seven days of celebration at the year’s final ingathering, with one delightfully strange command:
“Ye shall dwell in booths seven days… That your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.”
Leviticus 23:42-43 (KJV)
Every family built a temporary shelter of branches and lived in it for a week, a nation of homeowners voluntarily camping in their gardens and on their rooftops. The booth preached with every rustle of its leaves: remember the wilderness; remember that you were pilgrims; remember that God Himself tented among you and fed you all the way. It was thanksgiving for harvest and humility about home in a single act: all our security is recent, and all of it is grace.
How it developed
By Jesus’ day, two ceremonies had grown up around the feast. Each morning a priest drew water from the pool of Siloam in a golden pitcher and poured it out at the altar, while the people sang, “with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation” (Isaiah 12:3), a prayer for rain and a memory of water from the rock. And each evening, four great lampstands were lit in the temple courts, their light visible across Jerusalem, a memory of the pillar of fire. Water and light: the two gifts that had kept Israel alive in the wilderness.
Now hear two of Jesus’ most famous declarations in their actual setting, both spoken at this very feast (John 7:2). On the climactic day of the water-pouring: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink” (John 7:37). And in the temple treasury, where the great lamps blazed: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). The ceremonies were re-enactments; He announced Himself as the reality. The water from the rock, the fire in the night, they were always Me.
The hope it still carries
Yet Tabernacles also leans forward, further forward than any other feast. Its deepest theme, God dwelling with His people, is the trajectory of the entire Bible. The story opens with God walking with man in Eden, and loses that communion at the Fall. The tabernacle restores it in shadow: God in a tent among tents. The incarnation brings it nearer: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt”, tabernacled, “among us” (John 1:14). And the story ends, in the Bible’s last pages, at a feast of booths that never has to be taken down:
“Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
Revelation 21:3-4 (KJV)
The Bible begins with God walking with man in a garden and ends with God dwelling with man for ever in a city. Tabernacles was the annual rehearsal of that ending, the one feast whose fulfilment is still ahead of us in its fullness, and the reason the Christian can sit lightly to every earthly shelter. We live in booths now. The permanent dwelling is coming.
One Drama in Seven Acts
Step back now and look at the calendar whole, because God teaches not only through statements but through patterns, Egypt to deliverance to promised land; sacrifice to redemption; harvest to resurrection; wilderness to pilgrimage; tabernacle to presence. Laid in order, the feasts are not seven isolated ceremonies but seven chapters of one story, a prophetic drama staged annually for fifteen centuries:
A lamb dies and judgment passes over (Passover). The redeemed sweep sin from the house (Unleavened Bread). Life rises from the ground as the pledge of a full harvest (Firstfruits). The Spirit comes and the harvest of the nations begins (Pentecost). A long growing season passes. Then a trumpet gathers the people (Trumpets); sin is finally and fully dealt with (Atonement); and God dwells with His people in joy (Tabernacles).
Redemption accomplished; redemption applied; redemption consummated. Before the events happened historically, God had already embedded them symbolically. This is the same divine habit we meet everywhere in Scripture, “the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things” (Hebrews 10:1); priests serving “unto the example and shadow of heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5). And it is exactly how Jesus taught His disciples to read their Bibles: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27); “Search the scriptures… they are they which testify of me” (John 5:39). The feasts are among the clearest cases in all of Scripture: a calendar that catechized a nation, and a gospel told in barley, trumpets, and tents.
Where Christians Differ, and Where We Do Not
Honesty requires a brief acknowledgment. Christians who love the same Bible differ over the details of prophetic fulfilment, over millennial frameworks, over how precisely the autumn feasts map onto future events, over whether and how Israel’s calendar carries ongoing significance. These are old conversations among godly people, and this article has deliberately not tried to settle them. Where Scripture sketches rather than diagrams, dogmatism is a poor fit for disciples.
But notice how much common ground remains, and how high it is. Virtually all believers agree that the feasts were divinely appointed; that they pointed beyond themselves; that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us; that He rose as the Firstfruits; that the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost; that He will come again at the trumpet of God; and that the end of the story is God dwelling with His people. In other words: wherever Christians disagree about the edges of the map, we agree about its centre. Christ is the centre. The feasts, whatever else they teach, all face Him.
Keeping the Feasts in Spirit: What They Still Teach
The New Testament is clear that Christians are not required to observe Israel’s festal calendar, that is the plain force of Colossians 2:16-17. The shadow is not a duty once the Substance has come. But a shadow can still instruct, and each feast leaves the believer a lesson worth carrying:
Passover teaches gratitude. Never drift far from the simple, astonished thankfulness of the redeemed: a Lamb died in my place, and judgment passed over me.
Unleavened Bread teaches holiness. Redemption is followed by housecleaning. Search the rooms of your life by lamplight, what old leaven of Egypt is still being quietly fed?
Firstfruits teaches hope. Stand at every graveside, including the prospect of your own, holding the wave sheaf: the Firstfruits has risen, and the harvest must follow.
Pentecost teaches dependence on the Spirit. The Christian life is not self-improvement under religious management; it is the life of God written on the heart. Walk in step with the Spirit you have been given.
Trumpets teaches readiness. Live awake. Hold plans loosely, keep short accounts, and let the possibility of the trumpet dignify every ordinary day.
Atonement teaches repentance. Take sin seriously, more seriously, not less, because it is forgiven, and then take your forgiveness seriously too, and enter boldly where the blood has opened the way.
Tabernacles teaches that this world is not our final home. Live in your booth gratefully but lightly. “Here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come” (Hebrews 13:14). You are a pilgrim, and the journey has a destination: the city where God wipes away tears.
Seen this way, the Christian life is itself a pilgrimage through the feasts, from the blood of the Lamb, through the housecleaning and the harvest and the long faithful summer, toward the trumpet, the great reconciliation, and the everlasting dwelling of God with man.
The Calendar Was Temporary. Christ Is Eternal.
Stand once more before Leviticus 23 and feel the wonder of what God did there. Into the calendar of an ancient nation, into its springtimes and harvests, its trumpets and tents, God embedded the gospel. Before Christ came historically, He had been announced symbolically, every single year, for fifteen centuries. Every feast whispered His name. Every Passover lamb anticipated His cross. Every wave sheaf pointed to His resurrection. Every booth in every garden rehearsed the day when God will dwell with His people and wipe away every tear.
The feasts were never merely dates on a calendar. They were invitations. Invitations to remember, you were slaves, and God redeemed you. Invitations to hope, the harvest is coming, and the King with it. Invitations to look beyond the shadows and behold the One to whom they were always pointing.
The appointments have been kept, the spring ones to the very day, and the remaining ones are on His calendar, not ours, which is exactly where they are safest. The calendar was temporary. Christ is eternal. And the God who kept every appointment of the spring can be trusted, utterly, with the appointments of the autumn.
“Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” Colossians 2:17 (KJV)
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