Passover (Pt.1 ) Series

This has been on my heart for a long while.

Many of you know, I’m a little unorthodoxed in how I preach.

This message is probably more traditionally a spring season message, but for some strange reason, I have this urgency to share this now.

Let me begin by reminding you that I believe the bible is the unified story that leads us to Jesus.

As such, we can’t ignore the OT. I want us to discover together, how the 7 Feasts in the OT leads us to Christ.

My hope is that we all gain a greater appreciation of the OT and see how it really does point us towards Jesus.

I believe when we study the OT we find:

It defends the accuracy of the bible

There are no coincidences to prophecy fulfilled

God has an organized and systematic plan for all the ages

Body

Over the next few weeks, we are going to examine the 7 Levitical Feasts.

As we do so, I would like us to use Colossians 2:16–17 as our NT reference.

“So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.”

As we delve into this, I think this passage will make a tremendous amount of sense to us.

Let’s begin by reading the scripture that Moses recorded as to what God spoke to him in:

Leviticus 23:1–2 “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: ‘The feasts of the Lord, which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations, these are My feasts.”

Let’s look at a few other translations of v2:

YLT “they are my appointed seasons”

NET “my appointed times”

LSB “my appointed times are these”

I think it important to realize God assigned these feasts with deliberate and specific dates or “times” as many translations indicate.

As we examine each of these feasts, hopefully we will accomplish 5 things:

Understand the Hebrew calendar date assigned to each

Historical significance

Scripture that guides us through this journey

How each feast leads us to Jesus

What it means to us as Christians

We’ll look at these as a group, as well as individually.

The first four are feasts in the Spring.

They are also indicative of prophecy that has already been fulfilled in the coming of the Messiah.

They last 3 are Fall feasts, and are yet unfulfilled prophecy of the Messiah.

We’ll begin with Passover.

Passover is celebrated in the Hebrew month of Nisan (NY-san), which is the first month of the Hebrew calendar.

The first day is Nisan is calculated as the day after the new moon that is closest to the Spring Equinox.

What is the spring equinox? I’m glad you asked. It is the day and night are of equal length. Usually around March 20th on our calendar.

Passover for Jewish people lasts for 1 day.

As a reminder, we are going to examine 5 things about each of these feasts.

Calendar date

Historical significance

Scripture that describes the feast

How it leads to Jesus

What it means to us as Christians

So, the date of Passover begins on 14th day of (NY-san) Nisan and lasts for 1 day.

Here’s the historical significance:

The Lord was trying to convince Pharoah to let His people go

Pharoah was a bit stiff necked about this, having been accustomed to free labor (often referred to as “slavery”), he was reluctant to cooperate in the matter.

Now, it took the Lord sending down 10 plagues on Egypt, to convince Pharoah that he oughta do this!

So, we’ll pickup the story beginning in Exodus 11:1 read NLT translation v1-11 from my bible.

In this passage, we see that God is distinguishing the Egyptians from the Israelites.

Has God distinguished you from the Egyptians?

In chapter 12 we see how the Lord instituted Passover.

Exodus 12:1–3 “Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, “This month shall be your beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: ‘On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household.”

Exodus 12:4–6 “And if the household is too small for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the persons; according to each man’s need you shall make your count for the lamb. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight.”