9 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 10 “Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: ‘When you come into the land which I give to you, and reap its harvest, then you shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest. 11 He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted on your behalf; on the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it. 12 And you shall offer on that day, when you wave the sheaf, a male lamb of the first year, without blemish, as a burnt offering to the Lord. 13 Its grain offering shall be two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil, an offering made by fire to the Lord, for a sweet aroma; and its drink offering shall be of wine, one-fourth of a hin. 14 You shall eat neither bread nor parched grain nor fresh grain until the same day that you have brought an offering to your God; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. Leviticus 23:9-14
Let’s just have a word of prayer as we come to the Word of God.
Lord, we thank you that we can meet in the name of Jesus, Yeshua HaMashiach. Thank you that you are the Messiah, the Saviour. I pray that you’ll help me as I speak and guide me by your Spirit and help those who here to hear and to learn something about you and about the connections with Jewish festivals and Jewish items as we look at this subject tonight. In Jesus’ Name, amen.
Does anybody know what festival it is which is starting tonight in the Jewish community? Yeah! Not Sabbath, no, Shavuot. Yes, Shavuot. That’s right Shavuoth which is connected with Pentecost and is starting tonight.
If you look around in Golders Green, you’ll see Orthodox Jewish people getting ready for the Shavuot Festival. שָׁבוּעוֹת Shavuot [šābûʿôt] is the plural form of the word Shavua which means ‘sevens’ or ‘weeks’.
And we read about the feast of Shavuot in the Book of Leviticus chapter 23.
Why should this be of interest to us?
Well, if you look at the Bible, you’ll find out that it speaks about Jesus as the Messiah and you’ll find there are many things in the Hebrew scriptures which point to Yeshua as the Messiah. You’ve got direct prophecies like Isaiah 53:
4 Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:4-6
Psalm 22 about the crucifixion,
14 I am poured out like water,
And all My bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It has melted within Me.
15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And My tongue clings to My jaws;
You have brought Me to the dust of death.16 For dogs have surrounded Me;
The congregation of the wicked has enclosed Me.
They pierced My hands and My feet;
17 I can count all My bones.
They look and stare at Me.
18 They divide My garments among them,
And for My clothing they cast lots. Psalm 22:14-18
You’ve got types of the Messiah like Joseph who is the favourite son of Jacob/Israel who then gets rejected and thrown into prison and goes to the lowest place and then is exalted and becomes the means by which he feeds his brothers in the time of the famine in Egypt. And he is a picture, a type of Jesus being exalted and lifted up. And there are many others like that.
You also have connections in the Bible with the Jewish festivals, and I’m going to give you some connections tonight with the Jewish Festival of Shavuot and how it does connect to the Christian concept of Pentecost or the gift of the Holy Spirit.
So the passages in the scripture which describe it is in the Book of Leviticus 23. In fact, Leviticus 23 describes all of the biblical feasts of the Lord. And concerning this particular one, we read in verse 15,
15 ‘And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering: seven Sabbaths shall be completed. 16 Count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath; then you shall offer a new grain offering to the Lord. 17 You shall bring from your dwellings two wave loaves of two-tenths of an ephah. They shall be of fine flour; they shall be baked with leaven. They are the firstfruits to the Lord. 18 And you shall offer with the bread seven lambs of the first year, without blemish, one young bull, and two rams. They shall be as a burnt offering to the Lord, with their grain offering and their drink offerings, an offering made by fire for a sweet aroma to the Lord. 19 Then you shall sacrifice one kid of the goats as a sin offering, and two male lambs of the first year as a sacrifice of a peace offering. 20 The priest shall wave them with the bread of the firstfruits as a wave offering before the Lord, with the two lambs. They shall be holy to the Lord for the priest. 21 And you shall proclaim on the same day that it is a holy convocation to you. You shall do no customary work on it. It shall be a statute forever in all your dwellings throughout your generations. 22 ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field when you reap, nor shall you gather any gleaning from your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the stranger: I am the Lord your God.’”
That’s what Leviticus tells us about Shavuot. If you follow that through, you can see that there are some agricultural connections as there are in all of the Jewish festivals in some way or other. It requires an offering of made of fine flour baked with leaven and it also requires the offering of animals: the young bull and the two rams as burnt offerings before the Lord.
And, in the last verses you have some interesting instructions about not reaping all of the harvest of your land but leaving some for the poor to reap and to gather any gleaning from your harvest leaving them to the poor and the stranger.
If you follow through some of the connections you will know that there is a connection in that with the Book of Ruth which is going to be read at the time of the of Shavuot.
One of the things which is lacking is any connection to any specific biblical event. When you look at Passover, it connects to the Exodus. When you look at the feast of Sukkot, it connects to the Israelites wandering through the wilderness. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in this passage here which links Shavuot to any event in Bible history.
Now, as I’m going to show you, as far as the Orthodox Jewish people are concerned, they have linked it to a very crucial and vital event which took place and they say took place 50 days after the Exodus from Egypt which was the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.
And we’ll look at that connection in a moment. So the connection which most Jewish people and Orthodox Jews in particular teach today is that Shavuot is a time to remember God giving the Torah at Mount Sinai. We’ll see in a moment why that is significant in the light of the New Testament as well.
We’ll also see that there was something about counting for yourself from the day after the Sabbath, seven Sabbaths shall be completed and counting 50 days from the seventh Sabbath which sounds a bit confusing and a bit mysterious, especially if you don’t know when to start counting.
If you want to count 50 days, you have to know when to start in order to get to the right destination. Does that make sense? And it says that you have to count after the seventh Sabbath. And there’s a connection with what is said in the previous verses.
The previous verses speak about the day after the Sabbath referring back to the feast of First Fruits which is known as יום הבכורים [ywm hbkwrym] Yom haBikkurim. Yom haBikkurim is a festival which takes place during the Passover week and it takes place after the Sabbath. Now, if the Passover is a week, there’s always going to be one Sabbath in that week So, on the day after the Sabbath, there’ll be the festival which they call Yom haBikkurim which is the Feast of the First Fruits. And you’re going to see in a moment why that is significant as well.
In the previous few verses in Leviticus it says (verse 9)
9 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 10 “Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: ‘When you come into the land which I give to you, and reap its harvest, then you shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest. 11 He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted on your behalf; on the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it. Leviticus 23:9-11
There, you have the sheath being waved at the bottom there ripe barley and you have to take the barley sheath which is not yet fully come probably ripened and take it and wave it before the Lord. And, according to Jewish tradition, you’re not supposed to eat any fruit of the barley until you’ve done this.
So this happens early, this happens round about April time in our our calendar, which is the Jewish month of Nissan just as the crops are coming out. They take a a sheath of barley and they wave it before the Lord as the First Fruits offering to the Lord. And it’s called יום הבכורים [ywm hbkwrym] Yom haBikkurim. It means the Feast of the First Fruits.
As I said, it happens on the day after the only Sabbath in the Passover week. That is what we call the first day of the week or יום ראשון [ywm rʾšwn] Yom Rishon in Hebrew. And it’s something which is to be kept on that day.
Yom Rishon corresponds, in our calendar, to Sunday and we’ll see why that is significant in a moment. Just keep these things in your mind as we look through the scripture.
According to Jewish teaching, (on the next slide) to work out how to reach Shavuot, Jewish people start to count the Omer or סְפִירַת הָעוֹמֶר [sǝpîrat hāʿômer] sometimes abbreviated as סְפִירַת [sǝpîrat] Sefirat is a ritual in Judaism. It consists of a verbal counting of each of the 49 days between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot.
A period of 49 days is known as the Omer period or simply as the Omer or Sefirat.
50 days after that, Yom haBikkurim, the Festival of Shavuot should be celebrated.
So, you start counting the days on the first day of the week during the the Passover time, you go 50 days and you come to Shavuot when you have the feast of Shavuot.
There are certain things you can’t do during this time. I used to work as a school teacher at the Hasmonean School for Boys which is an Orthodox Jewish school. I was teaching French there and I tried to organize a trip to France and I told them which the day it was. They said to me, “No, you can’t do it then because that’s when we’re counting the Omer.” I said “What’s that about?” They said, “Well, you just have to wait till after we come to Shavuot,” which we did and then we went to France and had a good day out with the Orthodox Jewish boys. But it just taught me that there are certain things certain things you can’t do during this time. And it’s a time which is kept every year by the Orthodox Jewish people.