Should Christians keep Jewish festivals?

Question 11044.

Whether Christians should keep the Jewish festivals has moved from a fringe question to a live one, as the Hebrew Roots movement grows and believers who love Israel start wondering whether they have been missing something God commanded.

It is a fair question and it deserves a full answer rather than a dismissal. The feasts of Leviticus 23 are magnificent, they are saturated with Jesus, and studying them will repay anyone’s effort enormously. Whether we are obliged to observe them is a different matter, and that is where careful theology has to do its work.

What the Jewish festivals were given for

Leviticus 23 sets out the appointed times, the moedim, which literally means appointed meetings. Passover and Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Weeks, Trumpets, the Day of Atonement and Tabernacles. Each was tied to Israel’s agricultural year, to her national history and to the sacrificial system at the tabernacle and later the temple.

They were given to Israel as part of the Mosaic covenant, which was the covenantal constitution of a theocratic nation. Every one of them assumed a sanctuary, a priesthood and a sacrificial system. You cannot keep the Day of Atonement without a high priest entering a Most Holy Place with blood, which is why observant Judaism has had to substitute prayer and fasting since AD 70.

That fact alone should slow us down. Nobody today keeps the Jewish festivals as Leviticus 23 prescribes them, because the central element of most of them has been absent for nearly two thousand years. What is kept is an adapted form, and adapted by whose authority?

The believer and the Mosaic Law

My position here is clear and it governs everything else. The Mosaic Law was a complete and indivisible covenant given to Israel at Sinai, not a collection of regulations from which some parts can be extracted and retained. Paul treats it as a unit when he argues in Romans 10:4 that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

The believer is therefore not under the Mosaic Law in any part. That includes the festival calendar. It also includes the Decalogue, which was the covenantal summary of that Law rather than a timeless moral code extracted from it. What continues for the believer is not any residual portion of the Mosaic code but the moral character of God, which predates Sinai and outlasts it.

This is not a novel or convenient reading. Galatians 3:23-26 describes the Law as a guardian until Christ came, and says that now faith has come we are no longer under a guardian. Hebrews 8:13 says that in speaking of a new covenant, God makes the first one obsolete. I develop this further in whether Christians are still under the Mosaic Law.

What Paul says directly about the Jewish festivals

Paul addresses this head on more than once, and his tone is worth noticing. To the Colossians he writes, “Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

That sentence does two things at once. It forbids anyone imposing festival observance on believers, and it explains why: the feasts were shadows cast by a reality that has now arrived. You do not go on studying the shadow once the person has walked into the room.

To the Galatians he is sharper still, because the situation was worse. “You observe days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I may have laboured over you in vain.” His alarm is not that they found the calendar interesting. It is that they were adopting it as a requirement, and requirement is the point at which a shadow becomes a rival to the substance.

Romans 14 and Christian liberty

Alongside those warnings sits Romans 14, where Paul deals with believers who esteem one day above another and others who esteem all days alike. His ruling is that each should be fully convinced in his own mind, and that neither should despise or judge the other.

This matters enormously for how we handle the question pastorally. A Jewish believer who continues to mark Passover with his family, giving thanks for the Lamb who was slain, is doing nothing wrong. Paul himself observed Jewish customs at points, took a vow, and was in Jerusalem for Pentecost. Liberty runs in both directions.

What changes everything is the word must. The moment observance is presented as obligatory, or as making a believer more pleasing to God, or as necessary for full obedience, Galatians rather than Romans becomes the governing passage. Paul was relaxed about practice and immovable about obligation.

Israel and the Church are not the same body

Underneath this question lies the larger one of how Israel and the Church relate. I hold, as a matter of consistent literal interpretation, that they are distinct. The Church is not a continuation, extension or replacement of Israel. Ephesians 3:4-6 calls it a mystery, something not made known to previous generations.

That distinction cuts both ways, and this is where I part company with two opposite errors. Replacement theology says the Church has absorbed Israel and inherited her promises, which I reject. Hebrew Roots teaching effectively says the Church must absorb Israel’s covenant obligations, which I reject for the same underlying reason. Both collapse a distinction God has maintained.

God’s covenant commitments to ethnic Israel remain, and they will be fulfilled literally, including in the Millennium when the nations will go up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles according to Zechariah 14. I take that seriously and expect it. It is a statement about Israel and the nations in a future age, not an instruction to the Church now. The dispensational framework here is set out well in the material at Ariel Ministries, and I have written on the prophetic significance of modern Israel separately.

Why studying the Jewish festivals is still worth your time

Having said all that firmly, I would hate anyone to conclude that the feasts are irrelevant. They are among the richest teaching material in Scripture, and the church that ignores them impoverishes itself.

Jesus died at Passover as the Lamb without blemish. He rose on the day of Firstfruits, and Paul calls him the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. The Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks, fifty days later. Three feasts, three fulfilments, all in sequence and all on the day. That is not coincidence and it is not allegory.

The autumn feasts remain, and many students of prophecy see in Trumpets, Atonement and Tabernacles a pattern awaiting fulfilment in Israel’s future. I hold that view loosely, since the prophetic texts warrant care and date-setting is forbidden absolutely. But the shape is suggestive, and teaching the feasts is one of the most effective ways to show a congregation how the whole Bible coheres.

Practical counsel for churches and families

If a family wants to hold a Passover meal to teach their children about the Lamb of God, I have no objection whatever, and I have seen it done beautifully. What I would ask is that the framing be clear: this is a teaching exercise, freely chosen, celebrating a fulfilment rather than performing an obligation.

Where I would counsel real caution is when a congregation begins adopting the calendar, the dietary rules and the terminology as a package. That is rarely where it stops. The pattern I have watched repeatedly runs from feast-keeping to food laws to Sabbath obligation to a general suspicion that ordinary Christians are living in disobedience, and it ends with divided churches and wounded people.

The Lord’s Supper and baptism are the ordinances given to the Church, and they are sufficient. A congregation that keeps the Lord’s Supper well and preaches Christ from all the Scriptures is not missing a layer of obedience that a festival calendar would supply.

The spring festivals and their fulfilment

The precision of the spring fulfilments is one of the most striking things in Scripture, and it is worth laying out. Jesus died on the day the Passover lambs were killed. He lay in the tomb during Unleavened Bread, the feast of a people removing corruption. He rose on the day of Firstfruits, and Paul calls him the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep in exactly that language.

Then, fifty days later, on the Feast of Weeks, the Spirit was poured out and the church came into being. Four appointed times, four fulfilments, each on the day itself. No commentator invented this; the correspondences are simply there in the text once you read Leviticus 23 alongside the Gospels and Acts.

This is the strongest argument for teaching the Jewish festivals in any church, and it is quite different from keeping them. Once a congregation sees what happened at Passover, they understand 1 Corinthians 5:7, “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed,” in a way that no amount of general teaching achieves.

The autumn festivals and Israel’s future

The autumn feasts of Trumpets, Atonement and Tabernacles have no completed fulfilment of the same order, and that gap is significant. Many dispensational writers see in them a pattern awaiting Israel’s future: a regathering, a national turning to the Messiah they pierced, and then a dwelling of God with his people in the kingdom age.

I hold that reading with genuine interest and appropriate restraint. The pattern is suggestive and the sequence fits what the prophets say about Israel’s restoration. What it cannot be turned into is a calendar. Date-setting is forbidden absolutely, and every attempt to attach a specific year to a specific feast has ended in embarrassment and damaged faith.

Zechariah 14 does say that in the kingdom age the nations will go up year after year to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. I take that literally, as I take the rest of Zechariah 14 literally, and it is one more reason the Jewish festivals repay study. It is a statement about a future age, not a rule for the Church now, and I say more about the shape of that age in millennial worship and Ezekiel’s sacrifices.

Answering the Hebrew Roots argument

The strongest argument from that direction runs like this: Jesus kept the Jewish festivals, the apostles kept them, Paul was in Jerusalem for Pentecost, and nowhere does the New Testament explicitly command their abolition. Therefore the burden of proof lies with those who abandoned them.

That argument has real force and deserves a real answer. Jesus lived under the Law as a Jewish man before the cross, and his observance no more binds the Church than his circumcision does. The apostles’ continued participation was pastoral and cultural, exercised in freedom, and the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 explicitly declined to place the yoke of the Law on Gentile believers.

As for an explicit abolition, Colossians 2:16-17 and Galatians 4:9-11 are about as explicit as anything gets. Paul forbids judgement over festivals and expresses alarm at their adoption as obligation. Galatians 4:9 asks how they can turn back to weak and worthless elementary principles and be enslaved again. That is not neutral language about a harmless practice.

So study the Jewish festivals thoroughly, teach them gladly, and hold your practice with an open hand. That combination has served the church well wherever it has been tried, and it keeps both the shadow and the substance in their proper places.

One closing word to anyone caught in the middle of this in their own church. Do not let a disagreement about the Jewish festivals become a test of fellowship, in either direction. Paul refused to allow it, and he had a good deal more authority to impose a ruling than any of us. The Jewish festivals are worth studying, worth teaching and worth enjoying, and they were never worth dividing over.

A word about how these discussions usually go wrong. Conversations about the Jewish festivals tend to become arguments about identity rather than about texts, and once that happens nobody is really listening. Someone who has found joy in keeping Passover hears a challenge to the practice as a challenge to their love for Israel, which was never the point.

So it helps to separate three questions that get run together. Are the Jewish festivals good? Yes, they were given by God and they are full of Jesus. Are they binding on the Church? No, and the New Testament says so plainly. May a believer keep them freely? Yes, provided nobody is judged for declining. Most of the heat disappears once those three are distinguished.

I would add that the churches most eager to adopt the Jewish festivals are often reacting against something real. They have sensed a Christianity cut loose from its Hebrew roots, preached from a New Testament that floats free of the Old, and they are right to be unsettled by it. The remedy is to preach the whole Bible rather than to reassume a covenant that has ended.

That remedy is also the more fruitful one. A congregation taught the Jewish festivals as fulfilled shadows will understand the Old Testament far better than one that keeps a calendar without understanding why, and they will read Leviticus 23 with genuine excitement rather than obligation.

So, now what?

If you are drawn to the Jewish festivals, study them properly. Read Leviticus 23 alongside the Gospels and Acts and watch the correspondences appear. You will come away with a bigger view of Scripture’s unity than you had before, and that is pure gain.

If you have been told you are disobedient for not keeping them, read Colossians 2 and Galatians 4 for yourself, slowly. Paul anticipated exactly this pressure and wrote to relieve it, and no one has the authority to reimpose what an apostle lifted.

And if you keep some of them by conviction, hold it without judging the believer beside you who does not, and expect the same in return. Paul gave us Romans 14 for precisely this sort of question. Where has the shadow become more interesting to you than the substance?

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism remains the clearest statement of the Israel and Church distinction that underlies this question, and J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come treats the prophetic significance of the autumn feasts at length. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on the feasts is the fullest treatment available from a Messianic dispensational perspective and is well worth the effort. Lewis Sperry Chafer handles the relation of Law and grace across his Systematic Theology, and John Walvoord’s commentaries on the prophets are useful on Zechariah 14. For a broader evangelical treatment of covenant and law, Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives a fair survey of the competing positions.

“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Colossians 2:16-17 (ESV)