God has a plan... I'm sure that many would agree, and yet, there seems to be a great controversy over just what constitutes that...plan...
For instance...the PASSOVER! What could that 'old Jewish Holy Day' possibly have to do with the Plan of God?
Let's read....
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...why, in all your church-going and religious experience, have you never been told about the rich, CHRIST-centered, NEW Testament meanings of God's annual Sabbaths given to Israel and Judah? Look at the emphasis on Christ in the Passover.
The Passover and the Exodus—
Pictures of Christ
When God called His nation out of slavery under Moses, it was for the express purpose of "sacrificing the `Passover'" (Exodus 3:18; 5:1-3; Exodus 12).
Egypt is a type of sin. As ancient Israel was living as captive slaves in Egypt, so each one of us has lived as a slave to our appetites; to this world, with its false, vanity-ridden, materialistic values; held captive by the sway of Satan, who is the present world ruler (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 2:2; Revelation 12:9).
Pharaoh is a type of Satan. Moses appears in two distinct shadowy roles: (1) as a type of God the Father, calling His people out of sin, breaking the grip of Satan, and granting repentance. Also, Moses typified the Father in giving the law of God from Mount Sinai. (2) As a type of Jesus Christ: as the shepherd of God's people, leading them from Egypt; as the advocate for the people before Pharaoh (Satan); and as a "redeemer," conveying them out of slavery, toward freedom.
Moses and Aaron are also seen as shadowy types of the future "two witnesses" of Revelation 11. Continually, Moses and Aaron went before Pharaoh (type of Satan), performing miracles (see Revelation 11:4-6). Pharaoh's two magicians, Jannes and Jambres (types of the "beast and the false prophet" of prophecy [Revelation 19:19-20]), empowered by Satan and his demons, counterfeited the miracles until the plague of the lice, when they were forced to admit, "This is the finger of God."
The perfect, helpless little sacrificial lamb is a type of Jesus Christ (Isaiah 53:7). The shed blood of the lamb on the lintels and door posts of the Israelites' houses is a symbol of Christ's shed blood atoning for our sins, causing the penalty of death (Romans 6:23) to pass over those who call upon Christ for forgiveness.
The death angel symbolizes God's judgments against unrepentant sinners who will not obey God (Ezekiel 9:2-11; Revelation 14:17-20). The "firstborn" are to be sanctified to God. Instead, the Egyptian firstborn, and everyone else, was lost in the most repugnant idolatrous paganism. God reaped a bitter harvest of the firstborn of Egypt as a terrible penalty for sin, but spared Israel as the "firstfruits" unto God from the earth, His own chosen people, protected under the symbol of the blood of Christ.
Once God had broken the hold of Pharaoh over the Israelites, they were hastily thrust out of Goshen. In like fashion, when one repents, receives baptism and God's Holy Spirit, former friends—sometimes even beloved family members—have no further use for a person whose new understanding makes them uncomfortable. Instead, they attempt to dissuade such a repentant sinner from accepting God's truth, talk them out of it, make them feel "out of step" with the rest of society.
When Israel was hemmed in by the wilderness, facing the Red Sea on one hand, Pharaoh's army pursuing to the rear, and steep mountains on both sides, it typifies the newly-repentant sinner contemplating baptism, as a symbol of the burial of the old man; the washing away of sin in the waters; the resurrection of the "new man," or the "new creature in Christ," to live a new and different life, free from sin.
Satan and his minions do not give up easily. As Pharaoh's armies pursued Israel, so do former friends, habits, appetites, moods and attitudes attempt to overtake the repenting sinner.
Moses had to say, "Stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Eternal!" at the Red Sea.
By a stupendous miracle, Israel walked through the Red Sea bed dry shod! When Pharaoh and his army assayed to follow, they were drowned. Paul wrote, "Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers passed through the sea; and were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat [manna]; and did all drink the same spiritual drink [water, brought forth from the rock miraculously. Christ is the rock; the water is a symbol of God's Holy Spirit]: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:1-4).
When Israel passed through the Red Sea, a Christ-centered, New Testament type, or picture, of God's plan of redemption and salvation took place. Notice how Paul mentioned their miraculous sustenance on manna, which God sent down from heaven.
The Israelites were commanded to eat the Passover with "unleavened bread," called the "bread of haste," bread which was flat, plain—not light and fluffy, puffed up. Immediately following the Passover were the Days of Unleavened Bread.
God commanded them, "In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the Lord's Passover.
"And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the Eternal: seven days ye must eat unleavened bread" (Leviticus 23:5, 6).
Leaven, as an agent which spreads throughout moist dough, and which causes bread or cakes to rise when baked, lending a light, airy texture, was pointed out as a type of sin. Jesus said, "Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees" (Matthew 16:5-12).
Unleavened bread, on the other hand, pictured sinlessness; humility, an absence of vanity, pride, and sin. Christ said, "I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.
"This [pointing to Himself] is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die.
"I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (John 6:48-51).
Do not all Christian-professing churches believe in Christ as Savior? Then why do they never teach the rich meaning of God's annual holy days—the plan of redemption and salvation centering around Christ and His sacrifice as pictured in each of God's annual Sabbaths?
Can anything be more New Testament oriented than the meaning of the Days of Unleavened Bread?
There is an incontrovertible anti-Judeo BIAS among professing Christianity! From the earliest moments in the first century, when many Gentiles—Greeks, Romans, and others—were being converted, when the church wrestled with the problem of circumcision (Acts 15), a gradually increasing anti-Jewish bias began to emerge.
This rejection of all things Jewish took quantum leaps over the passing centuries. Though Christ Himself was Jewish, and though the apostles and the vast majority of the early church were Jewish, the Gentile leaders of the apostate church of the second and third centuries threw out the baby with the bath water: rejected God's Sabbath day; rejected God's annual Sabbaths; changed the date for the observance of the Passover, and called it Ishtar (Easter), instead; embraced the purely pagan festivals of Roman idolatry, such as Christmas, and effectively stamped out all knowledge of God's holy days.
Finally, during the days of Constantine, who had "converted" from sun worship to apostate "Christianity," the then visible church (God's true church had been forced "underground" by horrible persecutions) issued a decree that Christians were not to be found "Judaizing" by observing the Passover on the 14th of Abib, but were ordered to observe Easter, instead!
Is there anything "Jewish" about the CHRIST-centered meaning of the Days of Unleavened Bread? No, nothing. Yet, you have not heard sermons preached in the Sunday-observing churches explaining the rich types and shadows of God's holy days as they pertain to repentance, baptism, the receiving of God's Spirit, the second coming of Christ to set up His Kingdom, the binding of Satan, and the final great resurrection.
Today, the Christian-professing world is lost in a sea of ignorance about God's plan! Embracing the pagan doctrines of the "immortality of the soul," and "going to heaven when you die," they fail to understand the plan of God as revealed in the progression of the seasons—fail to understand the truth about God's mercy upon the darkened races of Gentile nations who have never heard the Gospel.
--Excerpted from the Article, "HOW SEASONAL HOLY DAYS
REVEAL GOD'S PLAN" by Garner Ted Armstrong..
Yeah, that guy.
Phil Barnes
...what good is a book that doesn't mean what it says?
