From time to time the very misguided antinomians of popular mainstream Americanized “Christianity” today go to any one of, or a combination of, three passages from the prophets of Israel—Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea. Due to the statements made in these passages and the shear lack of understanding by those of the antinomian theological mindset, these three portions of Scripture are often taken to mean that God hated His own appointed Feast Days and Sabbaths and that He decided He would do away with them.
There are, of course, numerous problems with this idea. First of all, if that were what these passages were saying, then neither Yeshua nor the apostles seemed to have figured that out as we see them keeping the Torah-appointed Feast Days and the weekly Sabbath all through the Gospels and the Book of Acts. Second, the three passages in question, of which we will be taking a closer look at in this message, were written by three of Israel’s prophets within the context of Torah-keeping old covenant Israel. Regardless of where anyone stands on the position of The Torah within the context of biblical new covenant faith, it’s rather absurd to think that old covenant prophets were saying that God hated His Feasts and Sabbaths and did away with them.
So, this really does beg the question: What were the prophets talking about?
Well, let’s dive in!
Does God Hate His Own Appointed Times?
Bring no more worthless offerings!
Incense is an abomination to Me.
New Moon and Shabbat, the calling of convocations
—I cannot endure it—
iniquity with solemn assembly.
Your New Moons and your Festivals
My soul hates!They are a burden to Me.
I am weary to bear them.
—Isaiah 1:13-14 (TLV)
I hate, I despise your festivals!
I take no delight in your sacred assemblies.
Even if you offer me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
nor will I look
at peace offerings of your fattened animals.
Take away from Me the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
—Amos 5:21-23 (TLV)
In these two passages we find the prophets Isaiah and Amos declaring that God hates the Sabbaths and Feast Days being kept by Israel at this point in history. The consensus in “Christianity” today is that these passages are talking about the same Sabbaths and appointed times that were given to Israel by God Himself when He gave His Torah to and through Moses. Now, if we were to do what “Christians” love to do and take just what is quoted above and pair that with the fact that God gave His Sabbaths and appointed times to Israel, we could certainly come to that conclusion rather easily. There is, however, more that is stated in the segments from which these words were taken.
First let’s turn our attention to the words of Isaiah. Just prior to his rendition of what many take as God saying He hated His own Sabbaths and Feasts, in verse 10, it says, “Give ear to the Torah of our God.” Then, following the passage “against” Sabbaths and Feast Days it says this:
Wash and make yourselves clean.
Put away the evil of your deeds
from before My eyes.
Cease to do evil.
—Isaiah 1:16 (TLV)
That first line reminds me of those words in Revelation 22:14 where it says that it is those who wash their robes who will have access to the Tree of Life, which was a Hebrew idiom referring to Torah-obedience. That is the reason why some translations say it is those who keep the commandments who will have access to the Tree of Life. From there the prophet Isaiah calls the people to cease to do evil. So, this makes it rather confusing that God would be saying He hates the Torah appointed Feasts and Sabbaths right after telling the people to give ear to His Torah and right before making statements that refer to living a life of Torah-obedience.
Then we turn back to Amos, whose statements about The Sabbaths and Feasts mirror those of Isaiah, saying that God hates them. This is where things begin to get interesting.
But you lifted up your images
—Siccuth your ‘king’, and Chiun, your star gods—
which you made for yourselves,
—Amos 5:26 (TLV)
You see, it was not the Torah-appointed Sabbaths and Feast Days that God was taking exception with here. The problem was that the people of Israel had abandoned His Sabbaths and His Feast Days for those given in worship to the pagan gods. The people of Israel—much like when they had offered their children to Molech, built altars to Ba’al, raised up Asherah trees, molded golden calves, and burned incense in the high places—were engaged in the Sabbaths, Feasts, and New Moons of pagan gods. That was the issue here, that is what Yah was taking exception with, that is what He hated.
To better understand it, think of our word “holiday” in modern American English-speaking culture. It’s the word we use for pretty much any “holiday” on our calendar, regardless of what it’s associated with. When we look at it from a religious perspective, there are Roman Catholic “holidays”, there are Muslim “holidays”, there are Buddhist “holidays”, and so on. In ancient Israelite Hebrew-speaking culture their words were “Sabbaths, Feast, New Moons, etc.”. They didn’t use different words if they were speaking of the celebrations of other religions.
“Christians” would do good to think about this when they disregard the Sabbath of their God in exchange for Sun-day worship. I’m not saying it’s wrong to gather on a particular day of the week. But if we really dig into it, Sun-day is so named for the various sun gods throughout history and if “Christians” are honoring Sun-day as their Sabbath—of which many of them do claim that this is their alleged “Christian Sabbath”, without any support from Scripture to that claim—then it becomes a reality that these “Christians” are engaged in the exact same kind of practice that Isaiah and Amos were confronting. The Sabbath and “Sun-day church” are radically different concepts, one based on the Hebrew or biblical week and the other based on the modern secular week that names the days after pagan gods. That would mean that if we brought this passage into the modern day, God would be speaking through His prophet saying: “I hate your Sun-day church services where you lift up your images, your religion, that you made for yourself.” Because “Sun-day church” is not the set apart appointed time given by God in His Torah, and in the overwhelming majority of “Sun-day churches” His Torah is opposed.
Is God Putting An End To His Feasts And Sabbaths?
I will also put an end to all her rejoicing—
her feasts, her New Moon,
her Shabbat, and all her moadim.
—Hosea 2:13 (TLV)
Here again we have a passage that, if taken out of its context, is used by “Christianity” to claim that Yah did away with His Feasts and Sabbaths. And, once again, this is met with the same problems we have already discussed.
But she did not realize that I Myself
gave her the grain, the wine and the fresh oil.
I lavished on her silver, also gold—
which they made into Baal.
—Hosea 2:10 (TLV)
Then I will punish her for the days of the Baalim
to whom she would burn incense—
adorning herself with her rings and jewelry,
going after her lovers—
but Me she forgot.
It is a declaration of Adonai.
—Hosea 2:15 (TLV)
Much like what was revealed in Amos, we see here the same problem but this time with the worship of Ba’al. Once again, the feasts and Sabbaths being referred to in this passage are not those from The Torah, but those of the pagan nations. The rebuke was toward keeping the feasts and Sabbaths of Ba’al worship instead of the Feasts and Sabbaths of Yah.
It’s honestly amazing and mind-boggling to me that those who use these passages to oppose the Torah-appointed Feasts and Sabbaths don’t see this when it’s plainly revealed in the text.
Yeshua And The Apostles Kept The Feasts And Sabbath
I mentioned in the opening words of this message that if the prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea were declaring the Torah-appointed Feast Days and Sabbaths to be done away with, as many “Christians” would like us to believe, then Yeshua and the apostles somehow missed it. I want to take a moment and look a little closer at that.
• Yeshua kept the weekly Sabbath. (Mark 1:21, 6:2, Luke 4:16, 6:6, 13:10)
• Yeshua kept Passover and The Days of Unleavened Bread. (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 2, Luke 22, John 2, John 6, John 11-13)
• Yeshua kept The Feast of Tabernacles. (John 7)
• The apostles kept The Sabbath. (Acts 13:14, 16:13, 17:2, 18:4, Hebrews 4:9)
• The apostles kept Passover and The Days of Unleavened Bread (1 Corinthians 5:7-8)
• The apostles kept Shavuot (Acts 2:1, 20:16, 1 Corinthians 16:8)
Something else worth noting is that the women who prepared the spices and oils for the body of Yeshua following the crucifixion rested from their work [or preparing oils and spices] on The Sabbath according to the commandment (Luke 23:56), further showing that Yeshua and His followers honored The Sabbath. Also, it is worth noting that while The Day of Shavuot (Pentecost) is not mentioned within the record of Yeshua’s life and The Feast of Tabernacles is not mentioned in the record of the apostles following the departure of Messiah in the Book of Acts, it would be the logical assumption that if they kept any of the Torah-appointed Feasts they kept all of them. It’s important to note that because, you know, “Christians” are notorious for saying that if something is not directly mentioned in the “New Testament” Scriptures then it means it’s done away with.
The Feasts And Sabbath Are Eternal
Scripture clearly tells us that The Sabbath and Feast Days are eternal, to be kept throughout our generations. Consider the following passages.
So Bnei-Yisrael is to keep the Shabbat, to observe the Shabbat throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.
—Exodus 31:16 (TLV)
This day is to be a memorial for you. You are to keep it [Passover] as a feast to Adonai. Throughout your generations you are to keep it as an eternal ordinance.—Exodus 12:14 (TLV)
So you are to observe the Feast of Matzot, for on this very same day have I brought your ranks out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you are to observe this day throughout your generations as an eternal ordinance.—Exodus 12:17 (TLV)
So, here we see that the weekly Shabbat (Sabbath) and the celebration of Passover and The Days of Unleavened Bread are to be kept by all of Yah’s people throughout all of their generations for eternity. What’s particularly interesting about Passover being eternal is that when Yeshua was keeping His final Passover before His time of suffering, as recorded in Luke 22, He requested that His followers continue to keep Passover in His memory. This uniquely makes Passover the one thing in The Bible that is to be kept eternally and the one thing that Yeshua specifically said to do in His memory. The lack of this terminology toward the other Feast times doesn’t mean that they are not eternal or may be considered obsolete, however. Consider these passages.
“And it will come to pass,
that from one New Moon to another,
and from one Shabbat to another,
all flesh will come to bow down before Me,”
says Adonai.
—Isaiah 66:23 (TLV)
In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, you will have the Passover, a feast of seven days when matzah will be eaten. On that day the prince will prepare a bull as a sin offering for himself and for all the people of the land. He will prepare a burnt offering to Adonai for the seven days of the feast—seven bulls and seven rams without blemish daily for seven days and a male goat daily for a sin offering. He will prepare as a grain offering, an ephah for a bull, an ephah for a ram and a hin of oil for each ephah. He will do this in the seventh month, on the fifteenth day of the month, during the Feast, for seven days, for sin offering as well as burnt offering, grain offering as well as oil.
—Ezekiel 45:21-25 (TLV)
Then all the survivors from all the nations that attacked Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, Adonai-Tzva’ot, and to celebrate Sukkot. Furthermore, if any of the nations on earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, Adonai-Tzva’ot, they will have no rain. If the Egyptians do not go up and celebrate, they will have no rain. Instead, there will be the plague that Adonai will inflict on the nations that do not go up to celebrate Sukkot. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate Sukkot.
—Zechariah 14:16-19 (TLV)
These three passages are speaking of a period of time widely regarded as “the millennium” or “the millennial reign of Messiah”. It is a period of a thousand years spoken of in Scripture following the return of our Messiah. And here we see that The Sabbath and all Torah-appointed Feasts will clearly be a mandate during that yet-to-come time.
We Are His Temple
One of the common arguments I hear from many people today is that we cannot keep The Feasts or Sabbath today because there is no Temple in Israel. This argument is silly on a couple of points. First of all, there was no Temple in Israel when The Feasts were originally being kept. With regard to The Passover, the first celebration was held while the Israelites were still technically enslaved in Egypt. The record seems pretty clear, they were not granted their freedom until after Passover was celebrated. As for the other Feasts and The Sabbath, these were kept in the wilderness period and while they eventually built the original Tabernacle, clearly they were keeping The Feasts and Sabbath before The Tabernacle was completed. So, we can easily contend on this point alone that there is no need for a Temple, or even a Tabernacle for that matter, to keep The Sabbath or The Feast Days.
As for potentially needing a Temple, even that would not be true. Obviously, The Tabernacle was sufficient before The Temple was built. I often find myself wondering why nobody had enough sense to reconstruct The Tabernacle after The Temple was destroyed. Think about it, the instructions to build The Tabernacle are clearly detailed within the five Books of Moses and if they did not have the means to rebuild The Temple surely they could have built a new Tabernacle. Or they could have built as many Tabernacles as they would need to cover those of Israel who had been dispersed. The point is, they had this option and still do. Also, check this out.
So there remains a Shabbat rest for the people of God.
—Hebrews 4:9 (TLV)
What many today may not know is that there is a case to be made that this passage is telling us that we don’t need a Temple, or a Tabernacle, to keep The Sabbath. Tradition has held that the Book of Hebrews was written prior to the destruction of The Temple in 70 A.D., however there are scholars now coming out with new information that says this traditional belief is in error and Hebrews was written after the destruction of The Temple. Consider these two statements, the first from James W. Thompson from his book Hebrews (Paideia: Commentaries on the New Testament) and the other from Marie Isaacs from her book Sacred Space: An Approach to the Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
Similarly, the author gives a few clues about the dating of this homily. Since the central argument focuses on the sacrificial system, many scholars have attempted to correlate the argument with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, maintaining that the use of the present tense for the activities of the tabernacle suggests a date before the destruction of the temple in AD 70. On the other hand, Marie Isaacs (1992, 67) has argued that Hebrews was written between 70 and 90 in order to reassure the community that atonement is possible without animal sacrifices. Inasmuch as Hebrews argues on the basis of the tabernacle rather than the temple, one cannot draw conclusions about the date of Hebrews by referring to the destruction of the temple in AD 70. The fact that writers spoke of the cultic activities in the present tense after the destruction of the temple (Josephus, Ant. 3.151-224) suggests that we can draw no conclusions based on the use of the present tense. The date remains unknown and of only marginal importance for understanding the book, for our interpretation requires that we know not the location or the date of the composition of this work but the issues that the author confronts.
Christians of Jewish origin, whether in Judaea or the Diaspora, especially those with a priestly frame of mind, would have mourned the loss of Jerusalem. It is this which is the most likely scenario for the composition of our Epistle. Its author did not question Christology or soteriology in the abstract. These emerge out of his attempt to reinterpret the Scriptures to meet the needs of his audience. The interpretive traditions and methods which he brings to bear in this enterprise cannot neatly be categorized, but seem to have their closest affinities with Hellenistic Judaism, since he draws upon both Jewish and Greek traditions. From this interaction Hebrews has created a new and powerful theology of access.
So, what this tells us is that statements in Hebrews like “there remains a Shabbat rest for the people of God” could better be understood this way: They can destroy The Temple, but they cannot prevent us from keeping The Sabbath because The Sabbath exists in time. The same can be said of the Torah-appointed Feast Days. These are days, they exist within the context of time, and therefore they can be kept regardless of whether or not there is a physical Temple or Tabernacle to serve as a part of celebrating any of them. But wait, there’s more.
Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that the Ruach Elohim dwells among you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
—1 Corinthians 3:16-17 (TLV)
Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Ruach ha-Kodesh who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.
—1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (TLV)
You see, here’s what people miss every time they make this argument that we cannot keep The Feasts today because there is no physical Temple in Israel—we are The Temple of Yah in the new covenant. That means we can keep the Feast Days wherever we find ourselves.
Think about how these passages are often viewed. One of the most common uses of these two statements is to say that we should eat clean and healthy foods, not use drugs, and take care of our body as it is The Temple of Yah. It would seem that if people believe that then they should equally believe that their body as Yah’s Temple allows them to keep The Sabbath and Torah-appointed Feasts regardless of where they live and regardless of whether or not there is a physical Temple in Jerusalem.
When it’s all said and done, Yah does not hate His Shabbat and Feast Days, nor has He done away with them. Quite the contrary. He hates when those claiming to be His people keep the sabbaths and feasts of pagan religion and pagan gods, and He will bring those acts of blasphemy to an end. But His Sabbath and His Feast Days are eternal. Also, His appointed times are for all people, not just those of an Israelite bloodline (Exodus 12:19, 49, Numbers 15:16, Ecclesiastes 12:13). If you truly want to follow Yeshua and live in obedience to Yah, you will keep His Sabbath and Feast Days—not dream up excuses to oppose keeping them.
Lawless And Righteous Understandings Of Scripture
You know, I say it all the time, but the passages highlighted in this study are some of the best examples in The Bible of how there is a lawless one, Satan (2 Thessalonians 2) and The Righteous One, Yeshua (Isaiah 53) who are either leading you in an understanding of Scripture that is against The Torah or in favor of The Torah. Lawlessness, or sin, is plainly defined in 1 John 3:4 as “breaking, transgressing, violating The Torah” and righteousness is plainly defined in Deuteronomy 6:25 as “keeping, obeying, following, living daily by The Torah”. This is a biblical fact.
When you read The Bible, no matter where you are reading from—The Torah, The Writings, The Prophets, The Gospels, The Apostolic Writings, The Revelation—Satan is trying to get you to think the passage you are reading supports the idea that you don’t have to follow The Torah, either in whole or in part (it really doesn’t matter to him, so long as he can convince you at least something in God’s Law doesn’t need to be followed, but the more things he can convince you of the better), and Yeshua is trying to convince you that those exact same words uphold The Torah of His Father, your God. The craziest part of it all is that Satan’s greatest success with “Christians” is the exact same thing he accomplished in Eden, Genesis 3, where he convinced people to eat something God said not to eat—today the most opposed of all the commandments by “Christians” are the Leviticus 11 food laws.
It’s not a really difficult thing to figure out, yet there are very few who ever do actually figure this out. The majority today, most especially within the “Christian” religion, simply do not follow The Bible. They use The Bible to support their [unbiblical] “Christian” beliefs. They twist and distort the words of The Bible to support their [unbiblical] “Christian” beliefs. But they don’t follow The Bible.
The Bible is a Hebrew book, not a “Christian” book. The Bible was written about the Hebrew God, Yah, and the Hebrew Messiah, Yeshua, not the “Christian Jesus”. The Bible was written by Torah-keeping Hebrew people (Israelites, Jews), not lawless anti-Torah “Christians”. And The Bible was written entirely from the context and perspective of Torah-keeping Hebrew culture, not Torah-rejecting “church culture”. If you want to have a correct understanding of The Bible, you have to approach the entire thing from the view that it is, from cover to cover, from Genesis 1:1 through Revelation 22:21, upholding the mandate that God’s people follow, keep, obey, live their lives daily according to His Torah and that those who reject, oppose, break, violate, transgress His Torah are His enemies and the servants of Satan. Yes, that includes everyone in these so-called “Christian churches” who reject, oppose, break, violate, transgress The Torah—they are the enemies of God and the servants of Satan. And if you are reading this, and that applies to you, I suggest you stop everything you are doing and cry out in repentance to Yah, making the true commitment to biblical faith that you will live according to His Torah.
So, I will leave you with this. Read your Bible, but read it through the lens of those who wrote it. Read your Bible, but read it submitted to Yeshua, The Righteous One, who upholds The Torah of your God. Follow your Bible. Do what it says. And whatever you do, stop listening to all of the “Christians” out there who are opposed to The Torah of your God. They are liars and whether they want to hear it or not, they are deceivers serving Satan.
Blessings and Shalom
©2024 Truth Ignited Ministry
