God's Nation Formed: The Sign

Preached by Joel Nagel on 7/7/24

Transcript

0:09

Hello and welcome to the Kalamazoo church of Christ podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We're startup church. We just planted in September, 2020 and at the Kalamazoo church, we believe that Christianity is done best when it is done together. And so if you live in the Kalamazoo area, we would love to connect, be it coming to a Sunday service, one of our small groups, or even just grabbing coffee with a member to learn more. You can visit kalamazoo.church in order to do that. We pray that you are inspired by what you hear today. All right. Hey, it's so good to be with you guys. I'm Joel, as Jaren said, and yeah, I do the thread stuff, but I wanted to talk a little bit about my family. It was, that was like the best communion I've had in a long time. What I mean by that is we still use like the crinkly cups, you know, and that the bread was good. Yeah. That stuff in the cups. Like, yeah. What is it? Like, what do you mean? I guess, you know, in the wilderness, like, what is it? Yeah. But that's really, it was cool. That was good. Yeah. It was tasty. And it was good. It was a good time of reflection as well. Refreshing. But it's so good to be with you guys. Let me see if I can get this stuff to work here. Hey. All right. Hey. This is my family. We were up in the Upper Peninsula. We were in Marquette all week. We actually just got back last night. And Jaren was like, you can preach, you know, a month ago. And I was like, I don't know. I'll be, I'll be like, that's a lot of driving, but absolutely I want to be with you guys and hang out. And yeah, and it's cool. It's cool to see the church. It's cool to see the church. You guys are in a different location. I came a couple of years ago to see that the church is growing. You know, we, I planted the church in Lansing and it was very small when it started and it grew and grew. We had all kinds of different facilities over the years. And now we have a really cool church building, a church of a hundred and all that stuff. And so it's, it's so cool to be at this part of the journey for a church to, to feel like a small family, to have the lay family band lead you in worship, you know, like all of this, like this is special stuff. And, and I hope that you enjoy every phase of what it is to be a church planting in a church and all that. It's such a great adventure. Amen. And amen. So this is my family though. My wife, Beth, my daughter Genevieve, my daughter, Amelia, G we call Genevieve G. She's, she's going to play her senior year this year. She'll be a senior in high school and, and she's actually getting recruited by Kalamazoo College to play. So I don't know. Yeah. And, and Jaren's been helping trainers sometimes and coming to games and, and bringing the girls. It's, it means so much. So amen. Amen. So yeah, I, I love the small churches in our fellowship. There's a lot of them. And, and so I help cope, co-plan the small church conference, which Jaren and Bianca spoke at last year. And I just really have a heart to help small churches grow as, you know, being in Lansing. So I led the church in Lansing for over 20 years and now I'm moved into this teacher role and I'm working with Thread and I brought stickers if you guys want. Here's my, that's like shameless pandering. There's, there's not a lot of things I wouldn't do for a sticker. I don't know if you feel the same way. But, but it's been so cool, as Jaren said, working on the content, all the, you know, when you guys read the, the daily devotionals, kids do kids church, some of the background material for the sermons, all that stuff is, that's my full-time job is to write all those things, to create the app, to make the portal, the website. And it's really neat to see that you can serve God, you know, as a campus intern or as a church leader or as a, as a teacher, there's a lot of different ways to serve God and his kingdom. They don't have to be full-time jobs. I know that in a small church, you guys probably have so many hats that you wear and different ways that you serve. That's really special and, and it's awesome. So, but I hope that you guys are enjoying Thread. I'm here, so if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear what you think, any encouragement or any, you know, critical feedback, like we need this or whatever. I'm all for it. We want to make it better all the time, amen? You guys are starting a new series called God's Nation Formed. And it's all about formation. And that might be a new word for some of you, but it's really an ancient concept in scripture and in church history. And do I need to put this on or am I good? Okay. Yeah, I want to be on the Kalamazoo Church podcast. There we go. Okay. The Kalamazoo Church has a podcast. It's great. It's just as good as the preaching. That's what it is. It's the preaching. And so, did I get my thing? Here we go. And so, this series that you guys are going to get into is all about how God took his people from slavery when they had nothing. Like imagine 400 years, generation after generation after generation of being slaves in Egypt. They had no identity, no laws, no culture. All of the things that make a people a people were missing. And so, they can't just cross the Red Sea and, hey, we're a people now. They needed to be formed in all of those ways. And so, God formed all those things. But where does God choose to form this nation of slaves with no identity into his people? He chooses to do it in the wilderness, in the desert. And so, Israel, they thought they were just wandering around in circles lost for 40 years. But God was using that time of disorientation, loneliness, scarcity to form them. And so, if you've been feeling down or confused or maybe even a little faithless, then this is going to be a great series for you, these next sermons. Because you'll get to discover that in that disorientation, in those feelings of lostness that we have sometimes and maybe don't want to admit, God forms us. He helps us to discover who we are as his people. Amen? And so, in the app, there are great resources. I try to make them a little different every time. And so, if you haven't done the daily devotionals or you're like, oh, what am I doing with this app? Check it out. There's actually an interview about spiritual formation. Sounds like you guys will do some of that stuff even this Wednesday. Every week, there's an interview with a different spiritual formation expert in our fellowship of churches. Really cool. The daily devotionals get pretty creative. There's some unique things in there. And then, for families, instead of a weekly family devotional, there's a daily family worship time. And there's instructions on how to do it. It's about 10 minutes, probably like before you put the kids to bed. You gather. You sing like four verses of a song. Every day, it's different. You just reflect on one scripture. There's no teaching, but it's just like this. It's really, really cool, immersive family worship time. We've done it for seasons in our family's life, and it's been really cool. And then, there's some great stuff for small groups as well. For this message, let's get into it here. You can follow along if you want to take a picture of that or don't take a picture of it, scan it. You're over my age. Don't take a picture of this. Take a link. And you can follow along. There's going to be a lot of slides. I know you woke up today. You were like, it's summer. I could go to the beach or I could go to church and hear a deep dive lesson on Leviticus chapter 23. And you chose that unknowingly. But this might help you as we get into this to check it out later. I did this lesson as a congregational teaching day for the Chicago church. And it's kind of like a little bit of a thread bonus lesson. And we're going to take this deep dive into something that maybe it's unexpected. Like, you think about God formed Israel. What does a nation need? What does God's people need to be God's people and to thrive? And one of the things that God formed was joy. God wanted his people to be a joyful people. And I'm starting to realize this as I get older that joy is actually not the default mode for most people. You think everybody wants to be happy. Do they? I don't know about that. I don't know if that's true. I think we actually have to be pretty intentional about being joyful. Grouchiness, criticalness, that's an easier way of operating for most people. And so just off the bat, I want you to think before we get into Leviticus here, how's your joy? Are you happy in Christ? Are you a joyful person? You know, maybe we don't even really think those questions matter so much. Like, does it really matter? I'm just plugging away at life. But I think you're going to see this today that joy, celebration, happiness, peace, even rest, those things really matter to God. God wants your experience in this life that he's given you to be one that's full of joy. Okay, so how many of us have ever tried to read the Bible cover to cover? Start in Genesis, get all the way through. How many have tried? How many did it? Okay, you guys are fighters. That's good. What happens a lot of times is you start reading, you're going, and then you get towards the end of Exodus, you get into Leviticus, and you're like, I need some Gospel of John in my life. Like, I'm going to skip. I can't do it, okay? And so that's exactly where we're going to hang out today. And all of the scriptures are on the slides. Hopefully they'll show up well as we get into this. But we're going to talk about joy. We're going to talk about having a joy-filled calendar. And we're going to read these tougher passages or actually kind of go through it. I think this week, if you get a chance to read all of Leviticus 23 on your own, hopefully a bunch of stuff will fire for you. Like, oh, this makes sense. But one of the things when you get into the tough passages, so let's say you decide, I'm going to do it this time. I'm going to read Genesis through Revelation. You get into Leviticus. It's actually, I think, it's fine to skip it and come back when you can really get into it because I think you have to really lean in and use more imagination in those tougher parts. Like the genealogies and the laws, the parts we want to skip. If you can actually lean in and use imagination, law and imagination, those things go together. It really helps to make the text come to life. Imagine yourself being there. So we're going to talk about these holy days and festivals, these times of joy that are in Leviticus. And we'll see that these would have been, I want you to imagine this, I just got back from a week in the UP. It was awesome, resting, vacation, Lake Superior, waterfalls, amazing. These times, these three weeks we're really going to focus on, were the vacation days, holy days, that's where we get the word holidays. This is what they were looking forward to. The stuff that we're like, this is really boring, was the most exciting part of their year. There was feasting and fasting and singing and ceremony, road trips, retreats, this is what they looked forward to as families who worshipped God. So we're going to get into this calendar stuff. I should say, I know that thinking about calendars doesn't always bring us joy. I don't know how you're feeling about your summer, but I'm with a 12th grader and a 7th grader, full time jobs, we talk about calendars, we've got to pray first, now let's talk about our calendar, we're so busy. But today it's going to be a joy to look at the calendar because, here's a question for you, have you ever thought about God's calendar? Have you ever thought about that? Does God keep a calendar? What's God's day like today? What's next on God's calendar? Here's the thing, it's so cool, it's actually mentioned on the very first page of scripture. Can you guys see that ok? There's some room in the front over here if you want to get closer to see this stuff. But the very first, when God created light, and I think you guys talked about this earlier with one of the thread lessons, when he created the stars and the sun and the moon, he wasn't just like, hey, look at this cool stuff in the sky, you guys are going to need some light, here's some things that bring light in the day time and the night time. He said, let them be signs for signs and for seasons and days and years. On page one of your bible, we've got hints that yep, there's a calendar. These days and how we spend our days really matter to God. And then this has always been really interesting to me, if you guys have read Exodus, you're going to get into it in this series, as the people are escaping, this is intense, ten plagues and Pharaoh is stubborn and there's stuff with magicians and it's like a battle and then the parting of the Red Sea, in the midst of all of that, and they have to go so fast, and we'll talk about this, that the bread can't even rise, the yummy bread that we had for communion, no yeast, they had to go so fast to get out of there, to escape. There's an army on their heels and God's like, wait, wait, wait, before you go, I want you to hear about this festival that you're going to have to commemorate every year, based on what's happened. Really? It's this important? Couldn't you tell us after we get to the other side? Read the bible? No. You're going to commemorate this every single year. Before it even happens. That's how important the holy day, the festival and the joy of celebration is to God. Wow, man. God takes joy and rest really seriously. Listen to this. They burned the house of God, broke down the wall of Jerusalem, burned all its palaces with fire and destroyed all its precious vessels. He took into exile in Babylon those who escaped from the sword and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land made up for its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath to fulfill 70 years. That's 2 Chronicles 36. Our bibles are arranged a little differently than the Hebrew bible. If you pick up a Jewish bible, our bibles end with Malachi, there's hope, there's like calves leaping with joy, the son of righteousness will rise, Jesus is coming, it's going to be awesome. You turn the page to Matthew and there he is. In the Hebrew bible, this is actually the last chapter. Can you imagine your bible ending with this? Think about how seriously God takes rest and celebration and joy. He says the reason you have to go to Babylon for 70 years is because you skipped 70 years of Sabbaths. And until we make that up, you guys are going to hang out somewhere else. It's kind of funny to think about joy and law in the same breath. But God takes our joy, our rest, our celebrations very seriously. So what I want to do is we're going to quickly look at the Sabbath part and then we're going to break down these week-long festivals. Joy is commanded. I think that joy needs to be commanded. You'd think that you wouldn't need that command. If there's anything that we don't need to be told to do, it's be happy. But as I said earlier, I don't know how true that really is. We would just work and work and work and keep going. That's our nature to downplay joy and celebration and rest. And so we're going to look at this deep down, rhythmic joy and rest because this isn't just God saying get happy, forget about your problems, don't be sad, turn that frown upside down. That's not the kind of joy we're talking about here. This is the deep stuff. It's like cosmic level as we'll see. So in three places actually in the Torah, Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, God lays out Israel's calendar. And as we read in Genesis 1, there are these seasons, days, years that are supposed to be special for God's people. And we see there's these rhythms. You think about the rhythm of your life. For Americans, a lot of our rhythms are based on sports. Like I was watching the NBA playoffs and the NBA finals and the NHL playoffs, which for some reason go longer into the summer than the NBA. Isn't that crazy? The hockey, can we stop playing hockey for a little bit? No, we want hockey. Hockey's awesome. Let's go Red Wings. Avalanche Stink. And so we we and then, but how many of us are excited about football starting up, right? Is this what God wants us to base our calendar on? No, but we're rhythmic people, so we have these rhythms. And maybe your calendar is based on some other thing. I hope it is. But there's a rhythm in the scripture of these Sabbath days each week. Every seven days is a day of rest. And then there are Sabbath years. Every seven years is a whole year of rest. Imagine the faith it would take to take a year off every seven years. And then, there's like some Bible math going on here. Every 50th year, so that's 7 times 7 is 49. So the 49th year would be a year of rest. And then the 50th year is the year of Jubilee. It's like a double year of rest. And in that year, everything gets reset. You had to sell some property because you fell on hard times. It all comes back to you. Jubilee! Even just saying that word, doesn't it sound like the most joyful word ever? Like, man, I want to have a Jubilee. That sounds awesome. But it would take a lot of faith because rest, again, rest and joy sounds so simple. We want it. But it actually takes a lot of faith to just stop and rest and spend time with God. So much so that God built it into the calendar for His people while they wandered around in the wilderness. They didn't have a home. God's like, you guys are going to need a rest every 7 years. Okay. We're not going to get into the Sabbath a whole lot. But it's important to know that we still need this kind of rest, this ceasing kind of rest. It's like the one commandment out of the 10 that we're like, meh, I don't know. Jesus didn't come to kill the Sabbath. He came to fulfill the Sabbath. And so it means that we still need rest, but we should find that rest in Him. And we're really robbing ourselves of joy if we don't. Amen? Alright, let's get into these festivals. I've teased the festivals. We're going to get into them. I've got to keep up with my slides here. Okay. You guys can follow along here. So we've touched on the kind of rhythm of God's calendar. And then in each year there were 7, lots of cool Bible numbers here, there were 7 festivals. There were 4 in the spring. And that's Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits. And those 3 festivals likely all took place on the same weekend. So that was like a big weekend. This is awesome. And then a week-long festival following that. And then 50 days later, but we know now, 50 really means 49 plus 1, 7 times 7 plus 1. That's why 50 is a special number, was the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost. Pentecost actually means 50. 50 days. Okay? Those are the spring festivals. And then in the fall there were 3 festivals. Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and Tabernacles. And so the Jewish year actually started in the spring, which makes a lot more sense actually than starting in the middle of winter. Like, let's start a new year at the worst possible time. They did it in the spring. Okay. So, we're going to start in the spring as well. And let's look at each of these Holy Days. So first comes Passover. And Leviticus 23 breaks down all this stuff. And I'm just going to show these. I'm not going to read these passages for us. But Passover, like we talked about, is the commemoration of the Angel of Death passing over the firstborn sons of Israel but not sparing the firstborn of Egypt. It was this final plague that finally allowed the people to be let go. In that moment, the Israelites painted lamb's blood on the wooden posts and lentils of their homes. And this ultimately leads to their freedom from slavery. After Passover comes the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The day after Passover was the beginning of this feast. So, why do we have a feast for crackers? Why do we have an unleavened bread feast? This was really good. Usually it's not that good. Yeast is a good thing. But it can also get out of control. It's alive. It can fester. And so it had to be cleaned out of every home every year. And so this feast is like spring cleaning. You ever heard of spring cleaning? This is kind of what it's based on. Get the yeast out. Start over with some new yeast so that the whole village doesn't get overtaken and everyone's bread gets rotten. It's like an important practical thing. It's this week-long festival. And it also ties into that Passover escape. They didn't have time to let the bread, the dough rise. That's how fast they had to get out when Pharaoh finally let the people go. And then the next day, a holy Sunday, was first fruits. And so first fruits is when Israel would bring the very first sheaves of winter barley. That was the first crop to grow in Israel. And so they would faithfully, they'd say, okay, we got the very first pieces of barley. Bring it to the temple. We're having a festival. We're partying. We don't have any leaven in our bread. We just celebrated with a Passover lamb. And now we're bringing the first fruits of barley to this. And so bringing the first grains when we give contribution is like a way of being faithful to God, saying, I know there's more that's going to come. I'm so faithful. I believe that so much. I'm going to give the very first to you, God. And so in Leviticus 23, and then if you've ever heard of Flavius Josephus, any Flavius Josephus fans out there? Okay, great. He's got the big clock. It was a sundial. That was heavy. But he's a Jewish historian who wrote about Jesus a couple of times, like an extra biblical source on Jesus. He wrote about John the Baptist. And he says that these first three holy days were celebrated like on the 14th, 15th, and 16th day, Friday, Saturday, Sunday of the first month of the year. And there's a lot of debate. You can get into the weeds online about these dates. People get crazy with this stuff. But you can imagine this holy weekend kind of like our Good Friday to Easter weekend in the spring, right? And there's some connections we'll get to in a moment. Alright? That's the first three spring holy days. The next one is 50 days later at the end of spring. And this was the feast of weeks, seven weeks, or Pentecost 50. And it would be counted from that first Sunday of firstfruits to the next Sunday. And it was similar to firstfruits where they would bring barley. This was now the wheat harvest was ready. And they'd bring the beginning of their wheat instead of barley. Okay? So that's the spring holidays. Are we enthralled? Are we like, yes, this is awesome, Leviticus 23, let's go. There's more. Okay. Let's get into the fall. I didn't do that one. Got it? Good? Okay, great. Here we go. The fall festivals. Up first in the fall was the festival of trumpets. And this would be like Woodstock or Coachella or Electric Forest for Israel. And trumpets, they're blowing the trumpets. The Lea family band is playing and they're like headlining the feast of trumpets. Okay? And this, trumpets are all over the Bible. The shofar, that ram's horn, they were used for celebration. They were used to announce war or that a battle was coming. They were also blown every Sabbath night from the southwest corner of the temple when three stars became visible in the sky. A priest would go up on the temple and blow the shofar and this would tell everybody that it was a new day and that it was a Sabbath day. And what's interesting about that is that in Hebrew, just like their year starts in the spring, that's different than us, their day started in the evening. When there were three stars in the sky, that was a new day. Which is really cool. Imagine your day starting at night. The first thing you do is go to sleep and rest. Interestingly, mankind was created on the sixth day according to the creation poem and so our first full day was Sabbath. The seventh day was that we were born into rest and the Hebrew calendar reflects that. That's how important rest is. The Sabbath started on what we would consider Friday night when there were three stars visible from the corner of this temple and a shofar was blown, this ram's horn. This was such an awesome part of their life, an intricate part of their life, that they actually had a whole festival about trumpets. Isn't that cool? A music festival in ancient Israel. I would like to go to that. That sounds awesome. When you guys did Thread, there was actually, I think maybe it was week six or seven, there was a whole week of Thread devotionals that were supposed to start in the evening and then in the morning, like double. That was kind of to feel maybe a little bit what it would be like to live back then. The next fall festival is the Day of Atonement. Let me get to that. The Day of Atonement was the one day that the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies, into the innermost presence of God on earth. It was a day that one goat, there would be two goats, one was sacrificed for the sins of the people and the other was freed. Someone would walk it out, but it was symbolically the sins of the people were on the back of this goat. You can imagine this festival and this is the penalty for our sin. Goat. Let's go back to the trumpets, that was nicer. They kill this goat and they take the sins and the priest does a thing and they symbolically imagine that it's on top of this goat and then someone just walks the goat out out of sight and the goat's gone. It's like this is what we deserve for our sins but here's the reality because of how much God loves us. They're just gone. Isn't that cool? That's the day of atonement. If you ever wonder where the word scapegoat comes from, he's the scapegoat. It's not a good thing to be. That's where that word comes from. That's the second fall festival and then the last fall festival is this feast of tabernacles. This would have been my favorite. It was like a national week-long camp out. To commemorate the time in the wilderness they called them booths or tents or tabernacles and they didn't have Columbia and all the sweet gear like we have with our tents and ultralight backpacking stuff. They took palm branches and they actually wanted to be able to see from outside of the tavern, like see the world from the view and look up at the stars. That was the point of it. It was drier there so there was less chance of it getting rained out. They would eat and sleep in these booths that they made out of palm branches to commemorate their time of wandering in these tabernacles or temporary shelters. This is also like at the beginning of the dry season. The winter wasn't snowy for them. It was dry though. There would be all of these prayers and ceremonies for water during this time of tabernacles. I hope that all of that helps you envision and imagine these festivals from Old Testament life but I'm here to deliver more than that because this stuff gets really amazing when we look at it in the life of Jesus and the early church. Let's go back through each of these and see that these times of celebration are actually baked into God's cosmic calendar. God had a plan and we get to be a part of it. Amen? Let's revisit the spring holy days. There they are. When we look at the festivals that we talked about are at the center of major moments in the life of Jesus and the church. Think about Passover. Jesus' death on the cross the very first Good Friday fell on the day of preparation and feast and Passover. Think about the connections there. The Lamb of God's blood was painted on the wooden posts of the cross but God did not spare His firstborn son. God made this happen on this symbolic day that He had proclaimed Israel to celebrate for hundreds of years, over a thousand years beforehand. That's the day that God planned for this. The next day, Saturday was likely this Feast of Unleavened Bread and Jesus' body did not rise from the tomb. Instead, He kills sin and corruption like how the yeast corrupts with His own death as He spends that day in the tomb. And then just as we celebrate Easter on that next Sunday, that is the day that Christ the firstfruits rose from the dead. So these scriptures 1 Corinthians 15, Christ the firstfruits, that's an incredible title. That means that one, that He rose from the dead, just like you bring your first barley, like hey, I'm faithful that there's going to be more barley. Jesus rose from the dead, I'm faithful that He won't be the only one who rises, that we all will. That happened on that day. Right? And we have firstfruits of the Spirit. We've grown inwardly as we wait to see the rest of the harvest. Amen? And then 50 days later, you guys know what happened. On the day of Pentecost, the church began. For 40 days, Jesus, the resurrected Jesus was on the earth. And then for 10 days, the disciples were praying and scared and nervous in the upper room. And then on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes down and the church begins. The full gospel is preached for the first time. And the early wheat harvest of that day was 3,000. But how many thousands upon thousands more have responded to the gospel since that first day? It's really cool. In a lot of ways, we're still living on that day. We're in the church age right now. You know, I love seeing God's spring calendar. Isn't it cool? Like, look at that. Oh, hey, God. What's on your Google calendar? There we go. How it coincided with Jesus and the church. But it gets really interesting as we move through the summer to the fall holy days. So let's look at those one more time, okay? There they are. We saw, in a lot of ways, the fulfillment of the spring festivals in Jesus and the church. These last three festivals all point to the parousia. That's the technical word for Jesus' promised return. Jesus is coming back. And you look at the fall festivals, and you see hints, almost like previews, like if you're really excited about a movie coming out, these are like previews of what it's going to be like when Jesus comes back. And so the first festival is the Feast of Trumpets. And I want to read these passages. This is, like, hey, God, what's next on your calendar? Well, for the Lord Himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Look, I tell you a mystery. We will not all die, but we will all be changed in a moment in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet, for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised to life imperishable. We will be changed. The trumpet blast, signifying a new day on God's calendar, His days are a little longer than ours, is associated with Jesus' return. So I had the privilege of going to Israel like 15 years ago, and in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, they have this stone. You guys see this stone right here? And this is pretty crazy. When the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, the trumpet blast during the trumpet blast point. The trumpet blast, you hear it? Thank you. It took a lot. I had to work with the railroad company to make that happen, but man, it paid off. That's awesome. When the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, and that's a 40 year period, which is like, okay, we get these numbers in the Bible, then you see numbers in history, 40 years, like, whoa, and I'm not a numerology guy or anything like that. We'll talk about that at the end, actually, but cool stuff, okay? 70 AD, Jesus prophesied that not one stone would be left on another. He said, look at this temple, it's beautiful. He said not one stone would be left on another. Have you ever wondered how a temple gets destroyed? How a temple made of stone gets set on fire? Like, what's that going to do? Right? Well, one of the reasons that the temple's destruction was so devastating for Jews and Christians in 70 AD was because of the nature of the limestone that it was built with. Limestone has these pockets of air in it, and so when you set stuff on fire next to it and superheat it, it explodes. The temple, if you've read the Old Testament, the temple is so meaningful. The Jewish people and the early Christians watched it explode. And not one stone was left on another. Except they found this stone. And this stone has this writing on it, and it's called, the writing says, the trumpeting place. That's the one stone with any decipherable phrase on it. It's the stone that was at the pinnacle of the temple where the priest would blow the trumpet and say, it's Sabbath. That's the thing. God's like, well, I do want you to read this one thing. It's where they would blow for this festival, which happens to be the next day on God's calendar. After the Feast of Trumpets comes the Day of Atonement, which we talked about, with the two goats, and you can clearly see the connection with Jesus, with the scapegoat, and then the sins being taken away. Atonement, you can think of it as it sounds, at-one-ment. We get to fully be at-one with God. We don't deserve to be at-one with God, but we get to be at-one with God. We get a taste of that in our lives here, as we're saved, praise God, but we will be one with God. We will be made one finally and forever. Our sins will be out of sight when God returns. That day is often referred to, even in Hebrews, as Jaron read, with a capital D. That's the day that we're all looking forward to. Amen? And then the last feast in the fall was the Feast of Tabernacles. You guys can read this on your own. I don't know if you've ever read John 7 carefully, but it's a really interesting passage where Jesus' mother and brothers want him to go to the Feast of Tabernacles. Where does this come in to the Bible? It's in John 7. And Jesus says, I'm not going. And then, a few days later, he actually does go. And it's like, wait, you said you weren't going, but then you're there. But then, if you read it with this context, so the Feast of Tabernacles, all of the festivals are seven days, but this is an eight-day festival. It starts on a Saturday and then ended on a Sunday. And the eighth day is called the Great Day. And that's when Jesus shows up. He shows up on the last day of the festival. The Great Day of the festival. And he shouts out, and it's a weird, it seems weird when you read it, he's like, all who believe in me, streams of living water will flow from you. Remember we talked about how it's a water, it's the beginning of the dry season, and it's this water festival. And so Jesus comes on this last day, and if you, more Bible math, but like, a seven is like perfect, it's like complete. And so if he comes on the next day, after the week, the complete, the seven, it's like, this is the next thing, the new thing, the beginning of this thing. And he says, streams of living water will flow. And then you read the very last page of the Bible. And what does Revelation 22 call to us? Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. In the end, it's this allusion to all of this. This is the full harvest festival, the tabernacles, this isn't the first fruits, this is the festival they had when everything was brought in. And they could chow down on all the things that God grew in them. This is the full festival for us too, and it's the harvest, this is it. Amen? They built tents during this festival to commemorate the wandering in the wilderness. You guys are going to talk about wandering and all of that in this next series of thread sermons. They ate inside of them and slept under the stars. When this festival is fulfilled, we will wander no more. We will have the most permanent dwelling place, a seat at the kingdom feast with God for eternity. Amen? Alright, we'll end with just some quick applications here. What can we do with all this? Where do we put all of this? It goes beyond head knowledge. I hope for you that you can kind of see this idea that joy, that God wants joy for us in the way that we walk with Jesus and the way that we interact with each other. Joy, feasts, commemoration, restfulness, these are things that are on the first and last pages of the Bible and so many places in between. God wants us to have a great experience in this life. I love that. What magnifies all of that is these festivals are actually based on seasons of harvest and the water cycle. This isn't just based on Leviticus, like this obscure chapter in Leviticus 23. These themes of celebration and joy are baked into the creation of the world itself, like the tilt of the earth that gives us the seasons and the weather patterns that make a dry season in Jerusalem at the end of the year and the time that it takes for barley or wheat to grow. It's not just something in a book. It's how God created the world and then how he sent his son and how he started the church and how he's going to come back again. It's all tied in together. God's keeping a cosmic calendar. Jesus understood this. He said that he didn't know the times or dates himself, but the Father does. And I want to say that with that, please don't take from this lesson that you should go and do internet sleuthing on when Jesus will come back. We can just stand in awe. It's going to be so awesome. We'll never be able to figure out how amazing it'll be. Jesus didn't even try. There's another application here. Looking at these festivals, it gives me so much faith that Jesus really is coming back and that we will rise one day. This is awesome. If you're kind of a faithless person, you're a numbers person. I'm not. I'm a words person. But if you're a numbers person, listen to this. Four out of the seven have been fulfilled. We're over halfway there. It's not three out of seven. You're like, I don't know. It's happened. And they were fulfilled so spectacularly. Another application I think that you can take from this is I think you can do this kind of exercise. This is like deep dive. You've got the notes if you took the picture of the QR code with these festivals, but you could do this with the priesthood, the different materials they used to make the tabernacle, the purity laws, the other laws. It's all threaded throughout Scripture. And you could do this same exercise with any of those things. We should make a podcast about it and call it Thread. Wouldn't that be cool? That sounds awesome. And then here's the last point, and it's awesome that we're doing this in July, in summer. We looked at the spring. We know the fall's coming. Where are we right now? What does that mean for us? It's summertime. You talk about joy? It's summertime. If you're a Christian, if you love Jesus, it's summertime all the time. Amen? The summer was the time for farming, for working the fields, for making sure that the harvest would be as robust as possible, and having joy while you did it. You think about the grape harvest. They're stomping on the grapes and singing. It's summertime. And so I want you to maybe sit with this question. What does it mean for us to be God's people in the summer waiting for what's next in the fall? What should it look like as individuals and as the Kalamazoo Church? I'm especially hoping that you'll have a great harvest this summer, this fall for your church, and that you can live in the summer months of God's cosmic calendar full of joy. And I'll end with this poem. When I think about my calendar, joy is hard to find. I'm whelmed. I'm busy. I'm losing my mind. But looking at the Bible, I see a different view. The days and years are more than just a list of things to do. A life that's based on Jesus should bring joy to every day, but that's only if I see my time in the Jesus way. He wants to fill each moment with meaning from above. I'm not just doing tasks. I'm showing the world his love. I see it in the life of Jesus, my joyful Passover lamb, the bread in the tomb and the risen great I am. And I know I'll see it fully when the trumpet sounds in the fall. But until that day, it's summertime. Let's have a ball. Amen? Thank you so much for listening to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast. If you're in the Kalamazoo area, we'd love to get connected. Please go to kalamazoo.church and fill in your information to come to a Sunday service or any other event that we have going on. In any case, you'll be hearing from us next week.