Revealing Messiah in the Feasts of the Lord

Most people acknowledge how the Feast of Passover hints at Jesus in the deliverance he provided as the Lamb of God. We talk less about how his life, death, and resurrection show him fulfilling the prophetic significance in the other six feasts of the Lord. The Feasts of Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles join Passover in telling the story of God’s plan for his people.

(If you feel the need to review any of these feasts before or after you read this, please check out my previous posts about them. Just look for the heading of “The Feasts of the Lord” in the top menu.)

Feasts as Appointed Times

In Hebrew, the word translated as “feast” is actually moedim, meaning “appointed times.” God established all seven of these celebrations as special opportunities to meet with his people. He set up Israel’s calendar to revolve around these meeting times, starting with the feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits.

While most of the Gentile world starts its year in the dead of winter, God sets the first month of the Hebrew calendar in the spring. The first three feasts of the Lord appear in quick succession that month. Passover falls on the fourteenth day, Unleavened Bread starts on the fifteenth and continues for a week, during which the Feast of the Sheaf of First Fruits is celebrated.

Since most people are at least somewhat familiar with Jesus’s representation in the Feast of Passover, we’ll skip right to the other feasts of the Lord, starting with Unleavened Bread.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread

Because leaven was often associated with sin in Scripture, observant Jews diligently cleared their homes of yeast and other leavening agents during this week-long feast. They cast every crumb they found into the fire, demonstrating their desire to separate from sin. For seven days, their bread was not allowed to lift up its head. They made their loaves with nothing more than flour, water, and perhaps a bit of salt and oil. This feast commemorated the day Israel fled from Egypt in haste as well as God’s day-by-day provision of manna in the wilderness.

Jesus claimed to be the Bread of Life—a different type of manna from heaven who gives life everlasting (John 6:49–58). The matzah of the Feast of Unleavened Bread was known as the “bread of affliction.” And how well Jesus’s life typified it. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, he separated himself from sin for a lifetime, not just a week. Though Jesus died on Passover, his body was laid in the tomb on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Like the crumbs of leaven cast into the fire, Jesus took our sin with him into the grave.

The Feast of the Sheaf of First Fruits

A weekly Sabbath would fall sometime during the week of Unleavened Bread. The day after that, on the first day of the week, the Jews celebrated the Feast of the Sheaf of First Fruits. As it happened, the year Jesus died, this feast arrived three days after Passover. As the sun rose on the feast, the priests gathered in the temple and waved the first sheaf of barley before the Lord in thanksgiving. As they lifted the grain toward heaven, Jesus himself rose from the dead. Because barley was symbolic of the Jewish nation (Judges 7:13), Jesus’s resurrection that day at least partially signified his presentation as the firstborn of Israel.

But barley was only the first crop of the great harvest God had in mind. The other feasts of the Lord would focus on those.

The Feast of Pentecost

Fifty days (seven weeks and a day) after the Feast of First Fruits came the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. In this third month, spring was transitioning into summer, and the wheat was ripening in the fields. One ritual the priests performed during this feast was to present two loaves of wheat bread to the Lord. In stark contrast to the matzah of Unleavened Bread, these two five-pound loaves were fully yeasted and beautifully risen.

While leaven usually represented sin, it didn’t always. When Jesus talked about it in Matthew 13:33, he likened it to the kingdom of heaven. “A woman took and hid [it] in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.” He was implying that, just as evil can grow if we hide it in our hearts, so too can righteousness.

The leavening action of the Holy Spirit was on full display in the second chapter of Acts. The Kingdom of God fairly exploded from the disciples in that upper room. Because the city was filled with not only Jews, but “God-lovers” from all nations, that particular Pentecost initiated an expansion of God’s harvest field beyond the barley of the Jews to the newly ripening wheat of the Gentiles.

Scripture tells us salvation is for the Jew first and then the Gentiles (Romans 1:16), and the order of the first four of the feasts of the Lord demonstrated this. The barley season opened before the wheat harvest. But the advent of Pentecost also marked the beginning of the crops yet to come. This was the “wet” harvest of grapes, figs, olives, and whatever remained in the fields. Between now and the Feast of Trumpets, farmers would be focused on gathering everything they could into their barns.

The Feast of Trumpets

The first day of the seventh month was heralded as the Feast of Trumpets. Fall was in the air as the harvest season came to a close. Wheat and barley were heaped up in their barns, new wine and freshly pressed oil filled their vats, and the fields enjoyed a brief rest before it was time to plant again.

Trumpets did more than announce the end of harvesting. They also publicized the return of a king to his throne. All spring and summer, farmers worked the fields. But this was the time kings went out to battle (1 Chronicles 20:1). With the changing weather and the return of the prayed-for rains, kings came home to rest from war and rule over the lands they’d won. During this feast, the Jews anticipated the appearance of Messiah and the day he’d reign as King over all the world.

This explains much of the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ distress at Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Even though it happened near Passover, the cry of the crowd was, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” This phrase was specifically tied to the Feast of Trumpets and its prayers welcoming Messiah as King (Mark 11:9–10).

The Feast of Atonement

Ten days after the Feast of Trumpets came the Feast of Atonement. Special sin offerings provided the blood required to give the temple its annual cleansing. Normally, the blood of a sin offering was poured at the base of the bronze altar. But on this feast, it was carried all the way into the Holy of Holies and splattered onto the ark of the covenant, the veil, and all the holy furnishings.

Jesus hinted at a time of cleansing in Matthew 21, when he cracked a whip and sent the moneylenders and their booty fleeing the temple courtyard. But it was after his resurrection that Jesus really acted out the Feast of Atonement. As the Great High Priest, he carried the ultimate sin offering—his own blood—into the Holy of Holies in heaven, working the greatest atonement of all (Hebrews 9:24–25).

The Feast of Tabernacles

The seventh and final of the feasts of the Lord is that of Tabernacles or Booths. It arrived five days after the cleansing Feast of Atonement. This was the only feast where God specifically commanded the people to “rejoice before the Lord your God” (Leviticus 23:39). Their harvest was done. It was time to rest from their labors.

In remembrance of their temporary shelters in the wilderness, they fashioned leafy booths to live in for a week. They spent their days rejoicing that God never left them alone on their journey to their forever home. He even made his home in their midst by dwelling in a tent like theirs.

Today, Jesus is even more Emmanuel, “God with us.” Through his Holy Spirit, he dwells within these temporary booths we call our bodies (1 Corinthians 3:16). Because of the Feast of Tabernacles, we look forward to a final rest, when labor is over and battles are done. Like ancient Israel, we await the day he returns to take up his crown and sit on his throne, to rule and reign and restore the earth as it was always meant to be.

In those days, the feasts of the Lord will be fully accomplished. And the Spirit and the Bride can only say, “Come.”