Join us in this enlightening episode as we explore the deep-rooted traditions of the Holy Days and their profound significance within the Christian faith. Our speaker reflects on nearly half a century of celebrating these days and uncovers the Christological essence embedded in these ancient festivities. Delve into the historical and spiritual journey that aligns the biblical festivals with the life and mission of Jesus Christ, and discover how each Holy Day portrays a unique aspect of Christ’s transformative work.
I’ve been keeping the Holy Days for 47 years now. But I would guess that there’s going to be somebody here who has kept them longer. Hezer, would you raise your hand if you have? You’ve kept for more than 47 years. Would you please stand up, Avon? Anyone else? God bless you, Avon. I know you’ve been around longer than I have. It’s wonderful that God has, in His wisdom, from time to time, brought some of us to see these things. I’ve been observing them for 47 years now, but I think the most dramatic thing that I have learned about the Holy Days came really in the last 10 years. It didn’t come all at once. It grew slowly out of fertile soil. The soil was the simple fact that we observe and should observe these Holy Days in their seasons. That simple. Just that we should do it. That was the starting point. Sometimes, I’ve learned, it is a good thing to do what God tells you to do, even when you don’t understand it yet. Because the understanding may indeed come in the doing. When I was growing up, my favorite question I used to ask my mother all the time was, Why? And her favorite answer was, Because I said so. I can see all you had, I know you didn’t have the same mother, but you had a mother very much like mine, I can see that. So, you know, I learned to do that as a kid. Just, you know, if you can’t figure it out, go ahead and do it. And all else fails, do as you’re told. So I observed the days and I internalized all the arguments for doing so. All the old arguments, the old approach was almost entirely polemic. It involved a set of proof texts, counter-proof texts, and all the arguments to go with them. It was just essentially argumentative. I think that grew out of the natural association that Sabbath-keeping people have with one another across the board. All Sabbatarian churches and Christians feel a special brotherhood with people who are of like mind on that issue. But long before I came into the faith… When the observance of the holy days of the Bible was introduced into the church of God, the holy days produced something of a sectarian split in the churches with all the accompanying argumentation, proof text, and tortured theology that falls on the heels of that. And I imagine some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. You know all of the arguments, know how they ran, and the struggle that’s with them. For me, it became very clear early on that the Sabbath and the Holy Days stand or fall together. The arguments that can be advanced against the observance of the Holy Days fit just as well against the Sabbath. Of course, neither one of them actually stand up at all. So I became fairly skilled in the arguments for the Holy Days. and very well versed in the understanding, the received understanding, of the days. It will probably be very familiar to many of you. The Passover pictured the sacrifice of Christ. The Days of Unleavened Bread pictured putting sin out of our lives. Pentecost pictures the receiving of the Holy Spirit. The Feast of Trumpets pictures the return of Christ. The Day of Atonement pictured the binding of Satan. The Feast of Tabernacles, the Millennium, and the Last Great Day, the Second Resurrection. I could have done it, I wrote it down, but I could have done it from memory easily enough. But there was something else besides the soil of actually observing those holy days that was growing inside of me over these years. My first mentors unwittingly planted a time bomb in my mind. They taught me emphatically that I should preach the meaning of the day or on the day, consistently. Now, I don’t know that all the ministers in my generation really did that, but I did. I thought, okay, the Bible says, these are the days of God, you shall proclaim them in their seasons. We took that to mean, when the time comes, first day of the Feast of Tabernacles, you speak about the meaning of the Feast of Tabernacles. And so, I did that. Now, the problem I had was that there were some little hitches in the received dogma. They weren’t just huge, but they were there, and they sat in the back of my mind, niggling away at me for year after year after year. For example, we don’t actually put sin out of our lives. Christ does that. And as far as the days of unleavened bread are concerned, that’s not when you put sin out or leaven out. You put the leaven out before the days of unleavened bread. Sin is supposed to be out of your life before the days of unleavened bread. And, of course, then there was the question, and I don’t know altogether why it was a question, is during the Days of Unleavened Bread, are we merely to abstain from leaven, or should we actually go to make a point of eating unleavened bread every day for the seven Days of Unleavened Bread? And if so, what does it mean? Because the Days of Unleavened Bread, just putting sin out of our lives, maybe keeping sin out or whatever, that’s there. But there’s a problem. Well, for a long time I dismissed questions like this, bowing to convention. After I was a newbie, what did I know? These people that I was meeting with had been keeping these days a lot longer than I had, and so why should I ask a lot of dumb questions? But once I was liberated from the obligation of following a party line, these questions began to bubble back to the surface, and this time around they demanded an answer that I could give, not merely that someone else told me that I ought to give. Something like 15 years ago, it may actually be 20 now, I sat down to outline my sermon preparatory to this day, the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles in that year. Now, most of the time before this, I would simply speak about the millennium. I would talk about, you know, beating swords into plowshares and lions lying down with lamb, and they shall not teach war anymore, and what the wonderful world tomorrow would be like. And candidly, there’s room for that, and there should be sermons on that as we look ahead to a time when this world will be a very different place from what it is today. So that’s what I generally did with all the scriptures about lions and lambs and swords and plowshares and so forth. And you can make a very inspiring sermon out of all that. But this time, for some reason in that year, I felt I ought to establish the millennium connection with the Feast of Tabernacles. So I got out my handy-dandy crudence concordance and went to work to do this. Imagine my surprise when I found I couldn’t make a good connection. There was no particular way of working my way through this that I could actually demonstrate that it was the intent of the Feast of Tabernacles was a memorial of the millennium to come. What I came to realize at that time was that the whole system really was based upon an assumed time sequence. Trumpets, for example, pictures the return of Christ, followed not long afterward in the book of Revelation by the binding of Satan. And what comes right after that? The millennium. And so the assumption was trumpets, atonement, tabernacles, return of Christ, binding of Satan, millennium. Well, that’s an assumption that I thought that I really should find something else beyond that. And as far as I could tell, that was about as far as I could take it. The problem with this was that Pentecost was a major fly in the ointment. Because Pentecost was not merely about receiving the Holy Spirit and empowering the church. It is also very much about the day of the Lord. In case you’ve forgotten that, you might go back and read Acts 2 sometime and follow that little marginal reference back to Joel, and you begin to realize, no, no, no, Pentecost has a lot to do with what takes place later in time. And so that the presumed time sequence in the life of a Christian was a presumption. We just sort of assumed it and went sailing on down the road. My problem was I couldn’t find that top-to-bottom time sequence, and so how do we establish the meaning of this day apart from those assumptions? Now, about the same time, I stumbled onto something I hadn’t previously connected to this issue. It was the story of the circumstances leading up to the birth of Jesus. If you’ll turn back with me to Luke, the first chapter, I’d like to point out to you what I’m talking about. In Luke 1, verse 30, The angel has appeared to Mary. Mary, this remarkable young woman who probably was in her late teens at the time, really had a surprising aplomb. And it seems to me that when Jesus or an angel appeared to the men in the Bible, they nearly came unstuck. But this young lady did not. She listened carefully to what the angel said. She was afraid initially, but she listened. The angel said to her, “‘Fear not, Mary, you have found favor with God. Behold, you shall conceive in your womb and bring forth a son and shall call his name Jesus. He shall be great. He shall be called the Son of the Highest, and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David.'” And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end. Now, this was not lost on Mary. I mean, there’s no way that Mary did not understand at this point that she was destined to become the mother of the Messiah, because that’s what all this language that she’s hearing here has to do with. Going to assume the throne of his father David. His kingdom is going to go on and on. This is what was prophesied for the Messiah. And for her, a young Jewish maiden at this time, to imagine herself as the mother of the Messiah was staggering, to say the least. And she asked, how shall this be, seeing I know not a man? The presumption, again, is the Messiah would be the son of a man and a woman. It would not be the son of God. He would not be supernaturally begotten of a virgin. None of that was really connected with the Messiah. Not in her mind, not in Jewish mind at the time. And so her presumption was, I haven’t known a man. How am I going to give birth to the Messiah? The angel answered and said, The Holy Spirit shall come upon you, and the power of the highest shall overshadow you. Therefore that Holy One which shall be born of you shall be called the Son of God. Behold, your cousin Elizabeth, she has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. Now, there are just a lot of things Luke could have told us that we would really like to know. There are just a lot of things in the ministry and the life and around the birth of Jesus that I would like to know. I’ve got a lot of questions to ask. And I have to ask myself, and I did at the time, I thought, wait a minute. Why is this thing about the sixth month of Elizabeth in any way germane to the topic? Well, it turns out that it has a lot more to do with it than I realized. This was one of those things that famously make you go, hmm, wonder what that means. What was the point in Luke including the six-month reference here? For some reason, that puzzled me and it started me down a search. It led me to John the Baptist’s father, who was of the course of Abijah. Now, these are things that most people who read their Bibles are, well, they just never have gotten around to looking for it or looking at it or thinking twice about it. But the priesthood was set up in courses. If a man would come in, he would serve for two weeks. He would go out and a new group would come in and serve for two weeks. They had a set of courses they served throughout the year based upon their lineage, whoever was their father. His great-great-great-great-grandfather was a man named Abijah, and it was in his course that he served. They generally would serve that two-week course twice in the course of a year. And, of course, all these things began on holy days or on calendar dates, very familiar to all of them at the time. Okay, calculating from one of those times, adding the six months of Elizabeth and the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy brings you right down to today, the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles. and to the birth of Jesus. Now, I hasten to add that this is not certain. I mean, actually, the number of days from conception to birth isn’t certain, is it, ladies? I mean, there are a number of little strange things that happen along the way, and some babies decide they want to be early, and some of them decide they want to be late. But we’re not talking about all that. What we’re looking for now is symbolism. We’re looking for typology. We’re looking for what God might have in terms of message for us. Now, I also hasten to add that I was not the first person to notice this. I didn’t catch it at the time, but E.W. Bullinger had the information in an appendix to his companion Bible that was published in the late 1800s. If you’re interested, you can find it on the Internet. Look up E.W. Bullinger. The E, by the way, stands for Ethelbert, which may explain why he preferred to be known as E.W., But he has an appendix, and he explains the dating of the birth of the Messiah, and he brings it to the first day, firmly to the first day, of the Feast of Tabernacles. Now, why did this matter, and what was the connection in all this? Well, in the back of my mind, and I knew this Scripture, and I knew it well enough, it came immediately to mind. It’s in the first chapter of John. He starts by saying, in the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. Then in verse 14, he makes this remarkable statement. And the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. So Jesus came to tabernacle with us. Now the precise moment of Jesus’ birth, the precise night of his birth, all of that is something we can leave on the shelf for the moment. In the case of the Queen of England, for example, she has a real birthday and an official birthday. The official birthday is much more convenient. The whole nation can plan for it and work around it, and it works out. They usually set it next to a weekend. You know how that goes. Well, I think what you might look at in this case is that the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles may serve us well for an official birthday, a time when we talk about the birth of Jesus, when we remind ourselves that he did come in the flesh. And, you know, John is at some pains to tell us, who is that spirit of Antichrist except he who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh? And it’s a crucial doctrine of Christianity that Jesus came in the flesh. He camped out with us. By the way, the tabernacle is a strange word to most people. It comes from the Latin, actually. Tabernaculum, which means a tent or a hut, which is exactly the same thing that the Hebrew socha means. And on a side note, by the way, taberna means hut and is a word from which we derive the word tavern. The Greek word for the Feast of Tabernacles is skenopegia, from to pitch tents. That is to drive the pegs in the ground. You have the word tent and peg. We pitch our tent and we live in a tent. So the word was made flesh and camped out with us. But what is this idea of camping with us? And how does it relate to the Feast of Tabernacles? Well, this is the question that was dogging me 15 or 20 years ago when I prepared the sermon for the feast. So I did what I always do in these situations. I unlimbered my trusty concordance, and I proceeded to look up every incidence in the Bible of the word tabernacle, because that, I assume, would be the way I would find the connection between the meaning of the day and the festival and so forth. So off I went, and the first place I went was the command itself. It’s in Leviticus chapter 23. We might go to that and consider what it says for us today. In Leviticus 23, verse 39. So beginning with the fifteenth day of the seventh month, after you have gathered the crops of the land, celebrate the festival to the Lord for seven days. The first day is a day of rest. The eighth day is a day of rest. On the first day you are to take choice fruit from the trees, palm fronds, leafy branches and poplars, and rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. I’m reading from the NIV. Celebrate this as a festival to the Lord for seven days each year. This is to be a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, celebrated in the seventh month. Here it comes. Live in tabernacles for seven days. All native-born Israelites are to live in tents or huts for seven days. So your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in booths while I brought them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. And so it was that for it to Israel, it was a memorial of the years they lived in tents when they were traveling from Egypt to the promised land, which turned out to be a lot longer than anyone wanted it to be or imagined that it would be, 40 long years they lived out there in the desert in their tents. But the question, and this has been asked on numerous occasions, and it bothered me on this occasion, what if you’re not an Israelite? Does that mean then you don’t have to keep this festival? That’s the leap that some people make. You’re not an Israelite. You don’t have to keep it because it’s strictly an Israelite thing. But you’ve got to stop, just back off for just a moment. All who were Israelite born were to dwell in tents for seven days to remember that God brought them out of Egypt and made them dwell in tents. Now there is this other scripture in the Old Testament. Zechariah chapter 14. It’s important in this connection. Oh! Moab, Edom, Ammon, all these nations that fought against Israel, from Egypt to Babylon to whoever it may have been, are going to come up to Jerusalem year after year after year to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. He goes on to say, “…whoever will not come up of the families of the earth to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, there will not be any rain.” So what do we got here? We have a command to the nations to keep the feast and a statement that if they don’t do it, there are sanctions upon them for not doing it. And if the family of Egypt go not up and come not, who normally don’t have rain, then they shall have the plague, wherewith the Lord will smite the heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles. Here’s the question. What on earth does living in tents for seven days because that was what God made you do, your fathers do, coming out of the land of Egypt, have to do with the Egyptians? Nothing. And yet, the Egyptians are commanded to keep the Feast of Tabernacles under sanction. Okay, so we have that pretty much established. It didn’t fit. The old meaning of the Israelite meaning of the festivals didn’t fit, but there was. Now, it didn’t exactly fit for Abraham either. There’s a story, Hebrews 11, really, a summary of Abraham’s story, which I think is revealing. In Hebrews 11, verse 8, “…by faith Abraham, when he was called to go out to a place, he should afterward receive for an inheritance…” Obey. And he went out not knowing where he was going. You know, we start out for the feast sometimes not knowing for sure where we’re going, thanks to hurricanes in the Gulf. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles, in tents or huts, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for a city which had foundations, whose builder and whose maker is God.” Then there is this statement that is made, which I think is absolutely stunning when you consider the implications of it. It’s in verse 13. These all died in faith, not having received the promises. I mean, he believed God. He heard the promises. He accepted the promises. He made decisions to be miserable, really, and sometimes the rest of his life and living in tents and never having a permanent home. At any time after that, neither he nor his son nor his grandson. And he died, never having received the promises, and still died in faith. How on earth does that work? Well, he said that he did these things, not having received the promises, but having seen them far off. And were persuaded of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly they seek a country. So when I got down to this point in my studies, I began to realize how much of ourselves we invest in this world. how dependent we are on this world, how much we love our homes, how much we love our place, how much we desire, even when we’re away for these eight days, by the time the eight days is over, no one really wants to keep another eight days of the feast. We have a yearning to go home, to our comfortable recliner, to our television set with our remote, which has the buttons in the right place. you know, to our workstations and our computers and to our family and our grandchildren, all these things that we left behind to come down here. We would really like to be able to go home. We do try our best to put down roots in this world. The message of the Feast of Tabernacles, let me put it this way, a message of the Feast of Tabernacles is you can’t You absolutely cannot put down any real roots in this world because it’s all an illusion. It will all be taken away. It will all go away. All those people… By the way, how many of you here had to evacuate in the face of Rita or Katrina? How many of you people, you know this, don’t you? You know there comes a time when you just absolutely have to get up and go, and you have no idea what you’re ever going to go back to or whether you’ll get to go back at all. We had people clean up in Tyler who have come there from New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and a surprising number of them have no intention whatever of going home again ever. They are making a new home in a new place. I really think… That the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the greatest things about it, this is a time when we make a confession. We confess that we are not at home. We confess that we are strangers and pilgrims in this earth, that we’re not intended to be comfortable. We’re not intended to put down roots. We’re not intended for everything to be just exactly like we want it to be because this isn’t home. This isn’t our city. This isn’t the place where we are going. We’re camping out here, and Jesus came to camp out with us. It is so powerful when you begin to understand what’s going on in the Bible and the importance of the events that you read there, to realize that Jesus came into this world not on the top floor of the Marriott Hotel, not in a mansion, not in any great wonderful place, not slipped into silk sheets or satin sheets, but wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid on the hay in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. That his birth was lowly. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem was on a donkey, not a horse, not in a chariot. It was on a donkey as he came into that city. And surprisingly how many people, and I suspect… They were the common people, hailed his entry into Jerusalem with hosannas, with palm fronds laid in his way. They did all they could to worship, to honor him as he came, as a king, and yet lowly riding upon an ass and a colt the foal of an ass. So here we are, you know, with our lives that we have so much invested in, our homes, our cars, our clothes, our kids, grandkids, the family, the extended family, all the stuff that we consider our roots, all of which we know are going away. And we have to decide where is home. There’s this remarkable statement that Paul makes in 2 Corinthians 5. And if you do your study from the concordance, you’ll come to this one. Paul says, We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. It’s plain what he’s talking about. He’s talking about his body. You know, if this earthly tabernacle is dissolved… I had a tent. I don’t think I have a tent anymore. I may have one somewhere in my unexamined storage. But we used to try a lot to go out and camp out with the ministers in ministerial retreats, and we had a tent that we used for that. And over the years, you know how it goes, you lose a tent pole. Never know where the thing went. And so I had to tie a piece of string to the tent and run it up to a tree and hold that end of the tent up, which worked. It’s okay. It worked. As time went by, though, I remember one night when Allie and I were lying in the tent sleeping and I heard this little gnawing, scrunchy sound. Next morning I found a row there where some field mice had eaten holes in my tent. And over time, you know, it got laid aside and kind of forgotten about and began to mold and rot and become utterly and completely useless, sort of like my body, which has missing tent poles, which has holes eaten into it by the mice, and which I know is not going to last forever. I’m 71 now, and in very good shape for 71, I think. But I can sort of see it. I once told a friend of mine, I said, now I think I understand why it is that God allows us as we age for things to quit working sequentially and for pain to begin to set in and for aches and groans and, you know, joints not working. I figured it out. It’s because he doesn’t want us to be totally surprised when we die. Someone once commented about people who are occupied with health foods and all this kind of stuff. They said, those people are going to really feel silly one of these days, lying up in a hospital bed, dying of nothing. And so the feast… is an opportunity to look to a better world. And even the millennium, which we all like to look forward to, and the lion lying down with the lamb, and beating swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks, all that wonderful stuff. Do you know that even there we’re not home? Even there we’re not home. Even when the tabernacle, the tent, the pavilion of God is with men, we’re not home. Because there is yet something ahead of us that God has in store for us. I think of that scripture that says, I have not seen, ear has not heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those that love him. And I realize we’re a long way from home yet. And we must never forget where we are and where we’re going. So in time I came to understand that while the Feast of Tabernacles may in part point ahead to the millennium, the kingdom of God, there is another lesson for us here to learn. From Abraham to Jesus to Paul, nothing is permanent. All is temporary. All will be surpassed. But that’s not the most dramatic thing I learned about the festivals. What finally grew up in my heart and mind was an incredible irony. The irony is this. Nearly all of the Christian world out there looks upon the Holy Days, the festivals of the Bible, as being strictly Jewish festivals. That’s what they are. And they turn out to be all about Christ. That was the most dramatic thing, and it was really, the point where it really came home to me was when I finally made the connection between Jesus and the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles, and the realization, no, no, no, these holy days were about Him from the get-go. They’ve always been about Him. They take on different colors depending upon the place they are and the people who handle them. And for the Jews, God did certain things on His appointed times which they attached to their history and which He attached to their history so they would never forget the things that He has done for them. But these appointed times have not gone away. They have taken on a new significance, a greater significance, that which was intended for them from the start. They all point to Christ. And when you begin to understand that, all these polemics, all the arguments, all the proof texts, all the counter proof texts, I mean, they just dissolve into so much dust. Because the fact is, and it is demonstrable, that throughout the entire history in which the New Testament was being written, from the time that Jesus Christ came on the scene until the time when the last word was written on paper in the New Testament, The entire Christian church everywhere in the world observed these holy days alongside the Jews and also observed the Sabbath. And it’s just right there in the pages of the Bible for anyone who cares enough to pay attention. It’s all there. And so when the time comes, came for me really, and I wrestled with it for a little while, not very long, on the radio program, I decided, how am I going to handle the question of the holy days? Shall I just let people find out about them later, or shall I just toss them out there for everybody in the world to look at? Well, that was an easy decision. The question was, how shall I approach it? And I didn’t approach it with proof texts about the law. I didn’t approach it trying to prove whether the law was done away with or not. What I did was approach it from the Christology. That is the significance, the Christological significance of the Holy Days. They are about Jesus. And when you understand that, you have this forehead-slapping experience and say, why in the world would anyone think that a Christian would not keep the Holy Days? of all holy days, Pentecost. Now, I will say in all fairness, Catholics, Anglicans, probably Episcopalians, do observe Pentecost after a fashion because it is such an important day in the history of the church. But there are great large numbers of Christian people, Pentecost comes and goes, don’t even know it was here. And you think about that. Why? I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how people went astray. But it is so sad to see that Christians have lost touch with the Christology of the Holy Days. Once that’s understood, the rest of the arguments are pointless. Passover, our liberation from sin, and our new covenant with Jesus Christ. As he handed that cup to the disciples and said, this is my blood of the covenant of And went on from there. The days of unleavened bread, which we abstain from leaven as a type of sin, but we eat unleavened bread for seven days as a reminder of the body of Christ, which must be renewed day by day. Pentecost, the day the disciples in assembly… were empowered to work for God. A day that looks ahead also to the return of Christ, to the day of the Lord and those events. The Feast of Trumpets, again, still the return of Christ. Atonement, the day of reconciliation of all with Christ, with one another, and the final, complete removal of sin and the control that sin has over a person’s life. The Feast of Tabernacles, when Jesus came to camp out with us in these tabernacles of flesh, and the feast where we confess that we are strangers and pilgrims and we look for a city that has foundations. And even perhaps the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles, taking our old analogy of 6,000 years and a 7,000-year day, even then, not home. The last great day, Well, we’ll let that wait until we get to it. But the moment of revelation came to me with the sixth month of a woman’s pregnancy. John’s statement that the Word was made flesh and camped out, tabernacled among us. And it was at that point I realized how futile all the arguments about the holy days were. And then came kind of the final irony for me. I decided I would do a series of radio programs on that basis, and I started out, did 24 radio programs that are available on 12 cassettes, 12 CDs, in which I systematically, verse by verse, went through the New Testament on the holy days of the Bible, Old and New Testament about them. Much to my surprise, that series of programs has generated more response than any series I have done in the last 10 years. It is as though there is in people a hunger for these. It is as though in Christian people there is this little slot here and there in which something was intended to be that simply has not fit there yet. And it is when they come to this that they suddenly realize what it is that is missing. And it’s been fascinating to me as I get the letters and as I get the emails from people who listen to those programs and begin finally to understand it, the excitement, the worry, the concern, the involvement, and the questions. Well, do you mean that I should actually take off work on these holy days? And, of course, the programs 21, 22, and 23 in that series are about the Sabbath day. And what was fascinating was I was getting positive, positive, positive, positive, positive, real enthusiasm up to 21, 22, 23. Then I encountered concern because of the problems involved with jobs. Well, do you mean I have to take off work on the Sabbath day? And the answer is, yes, sir. Yes, sir, you do. That is, if you’re going to obey God. It’s been a fascinating journey and I think it’s so important that we, you know, as we continue in our lives, the continued observance of these days are crucial to us because we still don’t have all the answers. Proclaiming these days, preaching these days in their seasons, talking about the meaning of these days with the compulsion to try to speak on these days every time they come around and not bore you to tears in the process, takes us a little further down the road every time. God bless you for being here, and may He continue to bless us as we celebrate, as we worship, as we eat, and as we play in His presence.
