How do the feasts of Israel foreshadow end times events?

Question 10181.

The feasts of Israel in Leviticus 23 are not a religious calendar that expired with the temple. They are a prophetic outline of God’s programme, given fifteen centuries before the events they picture, and the accuracy with which the first four have been fulfilled is one of the quiet marvels of Scripture.

Seven appointed times, four in the spring and three in the autumn, with a long gap in the middle. Anyone who grasps that pattern has a framework for understanding a great deal of prophecy.

The feasts of Israel are appointed times

The Hebrew word Leviticus uses is moed, an appointed time or a fixed meeting. These are the appointed feasts of the LORD, the holy convocations, which you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them (Leviticus 23:4). They are God’s appointments rather than Israel’s celebrations.

That distinction matters. An appointment implies someone who will keep it. The feasts of Israel were dates in God’s diary before they were dates in Israel’s, and Paul says of the whole system that these are a shadow of the things to come, while the substance belongs to Christ.

A shadow is not a fiction. It is cast by something real, and its shape tells you about the object. So reading the feasts of Israel prophetically is not fanciful allegory. It is doing what the New Testament tells us to do with them.

The spring feasts and the first coming

Passover fell on the fourteenth day of the first month, and the lamb was slain at the very hour Jesus died. Unleavened Bread followed immediately, picturing a body without corruption laid in a tomb. Firstfruits came on the day after the Sabbath, and Paul calls the risen Jesus the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Then, fifty days later, Pentecost. Two loaves baked with leaven were waved before the Lord, and on that day the Spirit was given and the Church was born, containing both Jew and Gentile with the leaven of remaining sin still in the loaf. Four feasts, four fulfilments, each on the exact day.

That precision is worth pausing over. Nobody arranged for the crucifixion to fall on Passover, and no human agency scheduled Pentecost. If the first four of the feasts of Israel were fulfilled to the day, it is reasonable to expect the same of the remaining three.

The long gap

Between Pentecost in late spring and the Feast of Trumpets in the autumn lies a stretch of months with no appointed time in it at all. The harvest goes on quietly through the summer, and the calendar waits.

I take that interval as a picture of the present age. The Church age is not mentioned in the Old Testament calendar because it was not revealed in the Old Testament, and the gap in the feasts of Israel corresponds to the gap between the sixty ninth and seventieth weeks of Daniel. Harvest work in an unmarked season is a fair description of what we are doing.

This is one of those places where the dispensational framework earns its keep. Israel and the Church are distinct, the present age is a parenthesis in God’s dealings with Israel, and the calendar itself seems to know it. My article on Daniel’s seventy weeks covers the same interval from another angle.

Trumpets, Atonement and Tabernacles

The autumn feasts arrive in quick succession. The Feast of Trumpets on the first day of the seventh month, marked by the blowing of the shofar. The Day of Atonement ten days later, when the nation afflicted itself and the high priest entered the holy of holies. Tabernacles five days after that, a week of dwelling in booths and rejoicing.

Many students of prophecy connect Trumpets with the gathering of God’s people at the sound of a trumpet, Atonement with the national repentance of Israel when they look on him whom they have pierced, and Tabernacles with the Millennium, when God dwells with his people on the earth.

Zechariah gives that last connection explicit support. He says the survivors of the nations that came against Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths (Zechariah 14:16). That is Tabernacles being kept in the millennial kingdom by Gentiles.

A warning about the trumpet

Here I want to apply the brake. Because the Feast of Trumpets involves a trumpet, and because the Rapture involves a trumpet, a small industry has grown up predicting the Rapture on Rosh Hashanah. It has been predicted for that date many times now, and the record speaks for itself.

The Rapture is signless and imminent. It requires nothing to happen first, which means it is not waiting for a date on any calendar, including the calendar of the feasts of Israel. A doctrine of imminence and a doctrine of scheduled fulfilment cannot both be held at once.

So I hold the connection loosely and gladly. If the Lord comes for his Church on a Feast of Trumpets, the pattern will be beautiful. If he comes on a wet Tuesday in February, the promise is exactly as sure. My article on why date setting is wrong explains why I will not go further than that.

The feasts and the person of Jesus

What strikes me most about the feasts of Israel is how thoroughly they are about him. He is the Passover lamb, the unleavened bread, the firstfruits, the giver of the Spirit at Pentecost. He is the one who will sound the trumpet, the high priest of a better atonement, and the King under whose reign the booths of Tabernacles find their meaning.

That is not a devotional flourish. It is what Jesus said on the road to Emmaus, when beginning with Moses and all the Prophets he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. Leviticus 23 was part of that conversation, and I would give a great deal to have heard it.

It also explains why the New Testament refuses to let anyone be judged over these observances. The shadow has served its purpose where the substance has arrived. Christians are not obliged to keep the feasts, though there is much to be gained from understanding them.

Should Christians observe them?

Some believers keep the feasts of Israel as a teaching device, particularly a Passover meal explained in the light of the cross, and I have no objection to that. Used well it can open the Old Testament for a congregation in a way that a sermon series struggles to do.

What I would resist is any suggestion that keeping them adds to a believer’s standing before God, or that failure to keep them is disobedience. Colossians is explicit that nobody is to pass judgement on us in questions of a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath, and that principle protects Christian liberty in both directions.

The danger is subtle. A practice adopted for illumination can quietly become a mark of superior spirituality, and then a requirement. That is the road the Galatians took, and Paul was not gentle about it.

Why the pattern strengthens faith

Set the whole thing out and consider the odds. A calendar given at Sinai, with seven appointments in a fixed order, four of which were fulfilled on their exact days by events separated from the giving of the calendar by fifteen centuries. No committee arranged that.

It tells us that God plans in detail, keeps appointments, and does not improvise. If the first four were kept to the day, the remaining three are not in doubt, whatever the timing turns out to be. That is a considerable comfort in a world that feels increasingly unplanned.

It also tells us something about the unity of Scripture. Leviticus and Revelation are singing the same tune, separated by a millennium and a half of human history and by two languages. Books do not do that by themselves.

Sabbath and the eighth day

Two further details in Leviticus 23 are often overlooked. The chapter opens with the weekly Sabbath before it lists any annual feast, setting rest at the head of the whole calendar. And Tabernacles concludes with a solemn assembly on the eighth day, after the seven days of booths have finished.

Seven is the number of completion, so an eighth day points beyond the cycle to something new. Many readers connect that final assembly with the eternal state which follows the thousand years, when the temporary dwelling is over and God dwells with his people permanently.

I would not build a doctrine on it, but the shape is suggestive. The feasts of Israel begin with rest and end with an eighth day, and the story of Scripture runs from a creation Sabbath to a new creation that never ends. The calendar seems to know where it is going.

That is the wider value of studying the feasts of Israel. They train the eye to see pattern and purpose in Scripture, and once you have seen it in Leviticus you will start seeing it everywhere, which is exactly what the New Testament writers expect of us.

So, now what?

Read Leviticus 23 this week with the Gospels open beside it. It takes twenty minutes, and it will change the way you see both books. The God of the appointed times has never yet been late for one of his own appointments.

And let the autumn feasts do their proper work. Three appointments remain in the diary, and one of them concerns you directly. Are you living as somebody who expects to keep it?

These are the appointed feasts of the LORD, the holy convocations, which you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them.

Leviticus 23:4, ESV