That Other Feast

I heard Herman Hoeh call it that, in a lecture he gave many years ago about church government and the changes the church could make.

The Radio Church of God had always kept the spring feast for the whole week. There were influences in the church who were trying to make life easier for the members. Keeping all those festivals with that church was a demanding task, in part because of the distances required to get to their feast site. Generally this involved traveling to Texas, which is a long way from anyplace, even if you’re in Texas.

The church could have provided more festival sites closer to the people, but they chose instead to only observe the high days of Unleavened Bread, and treat the common days of that seven-day feast as normal work days.

This church decision was spurred by the fact that observing all the feasts gave people problems with their jobs. It is much easier to get off from work for just the fall feast than it is to get off for both the spring and fall feasts. If you only observe the fall feast, you can fit in fairly well with the society, by simply taking your annual vacation then. If you observe both spring and fall feasts for the whole week, plus preparation and travel time, this makes it somewhat more difficult to fit in, although many corporate workers now are allowed that much vacation time.

Therefore in the early 1960s, the Radio Church of God made the decision to stop observing the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days. This Church administrative decision, based on the government of God in the Radio Church of God, probably affects the way you observe Unleavened Bread today. Even sacred-namers, who never considered Herbert’s church the government of God — and don’t even use the word God — mostly follow this church administrative decision.

You may recall other church administrative decisions that have been made in the past. Such as the early church “authorities” who decided that changing the Saturnalia festival to the birth of Christ was a good way to evangelize the heathen. There was no Biblical authority for that. Only Church authority. That same church also presumed to change the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first. They admit there is no Biblical justification for doing so. The whole change rests on their church authority, being the government of God on earth.

“The Feast”

Church of God people often say, “I’m going to the feast.”

This is said as if there is only one feast — “the feast.” Of course, all of you know that means the fall feast, Tabernacles.

You also know that the Bible teaches three feast seasons: spring for eight days counting 14th Passover, late spring for Pentecost, and fall for Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles and the Last Day.

Most feast keepers have never even thought of observing the spring feast for the whole seven days. They assume there is some Biblical justification for observing a week long Tabernacles but only the high days of Unleavened Bread.

There is no such distinction in the original instructions for the festivals in Exodus 23 and Leviticus 23, nor Numbers 28 and Ezekiel 45.

There are several examples of keeping the Feast of Tabernacles in the Bible. The first temple was dedicated at the feast of the seventh month, which contained an extra week before the feast, I Kings 8 and II Chronicles 7. Nehemiah 8 has the inspiring feast of the seventh month, after the return from captivity. In the New Testament, both festival periods of Passover and Tabernacles are mentioned in John, associated with the life of Christ.

The Bible definitely emphasizes the spring feast just as much as the fall feast.

Examples are the period when Israel marched around Jericho for seven days, Joshua 6; the Passover of Ezra after the building of the second temple, Ezra 6; the 14-day feast of Hezekiah in II Chronicles 30; the extraordinary Passover of Josiah in II Chronicles 35; and the 12-year-old Yahshua and His family keeping the Passover for the whole feast, Luke 2. Some of the highest examples of worship came during these spring festivals.

All these examples show Unleavened Bread being observed for the whole week. There is never an example in the Bible of someone keeping the Feast of Unleavened Bread for only the first and last days. The change by Herbert Armstrong was based more on church authority than it was on God’s authority. The Bible does not teach what they came to teach about the spring feast.

How is it that they thought they could change the observance of the festival of Unleavened Bread, without any Biblical example to support that? Because they viewed themselves as the government of God on earth. The old Bible Correspondence Course was full of admonitions that only God’s true ministers could tell you what was right and wrong. Therefore, like the Roman church, they felt free to make certain adjustments, based on their own authority.

The Bible is God’s word. It is God speaking to you. You do not have to go through a Pope or a Pastor General to know what it says. Whatever the Pope or a Pastor General says, you still go by the Bible. Nothing takes away from it. Nothing adds to it.

And there is nothing in the Bible to indicate that Tabernacles should be kept for the whole week while Unleavened Bread is kept only for the high days. Therefore, if it is necessary to observe all the days of Tabernacles, then Unleavened Bread should be observed for all the days.

Tainted Trust

This church administrative decision was made to make it easier for the members to be members of the church group which Herbert Armstrong led. Workers back in the early 1960s did not get as much vacation time as is common today, so there were times when men did lose jobs because of God’s feasts. But making life easier for the members should never involve slacking off with God.

In general, Satan’s approach is to make life easier for people, so they will slack off from God.

Matthew 4:8, 9, “Again, the devil takes him up into an exceeding high mountain, and shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And says to him, All these things will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”

Satan will make it easy for you if you serve him.

Revelation 18:9-19, “And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble, And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men. And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing, And saying, Alas, alas, that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.”

The end time world will be sad to see Babylon fall because they had such an easy life under her influence. Satan entices people by making it easy for them to go along with his society. He just wants you to relax and go along. Don’t stand up and fight the tide.

This is Satan’s consistent method for tearing down character.

Yahweh God’s method of building character is to purposely put obstacles, challenges, and tests in front of you. Then you overcome those tests — with Him.

God purposely put you in a society where you don’t fit. His feasts don’t fit. The Sabbath doesn’t fit. They’re not supposed to.

Even the most obedient people in the Bible were continually given new challenges to obey, tests to face, and opportunities to grow. Abraham and Job were loved by Yahweh because they were so obedient. Yet because He loved them He gave them opportunities to become more obedient. The New Testament apostles never got a chance to relax and take it easy and fit in with the society around them. They did have many opportunities to grow in the spirit.

Satan’s constant method is to be comfortable and go along. Yahweh’s constant method is to test you, and have you learn to use His spirit as a tool to get through those tests.

“If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me,” Matthew 16:24.

You pick up the cross or pole, and Christ helps you carry it. You have to trust God to make it through this wilderness. Dropping the spring feast tainted this trust.

To some degree, keeping “the feast” became a worldly vacation in the fall. Now the WCG takes its vacation feast in the summer, to be even more convenient.

Christmas is easy. That’s the very reason Christmas was instituted as a Christian holiday — because it was the easy thing to do. The new Christians did not want to give up their old ways, so the church made an administrative decision to make it easy for the members. They adopted Saturnalia/Christmas, which the pagans were already keeping.

If you want feasts that are easy, that’s Christmas and Easter and Halloween.

Keeping all of the feasts all the time is difficult. God never intended for His festivals to be easy to keep in Satan’s society. They never will be. The more time goes on, the harder this will be. Accept it. And use the Spirit of God to help you face this challenge of obedience.

Resorting to Resorts

When Herbert Armstrong abandoned the spring festival, this had the effect of changing the nature of the fall festival, too. By keeping only one feast, that left many people with too much festival tithe to spend in one week.

The sun/moon calendar has a cycle of nineteen years. In nineteen years, there are twelve common years of twelve months and seven long years of thirteen months. This is not just somebody’s figuring. This is the way the sun and the moon cycle together.

In a parallel way, in one year there are nineteen feast days. This includes Passover the 14th of the first month, Seven Days of Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, the seven days of Tabernacles and the eighth day. Of these nineteen days, there are seven holy days and twelve common days. There is also great symmetry, with eight days in the spring and fall, and three days in between.

When the common days of the spring feast were abandoned, and all the festival tithe was spent on the fall feast, that changed the nature of the Feast of Tabernacles.

There are nineteen festival days total, seven high days and twelve common days. When you add a couple of days preparation and travel time to each end of each feast, this totals up to about a month’s time spent on the festivals. For this month of festival time and travel, God told us to use the festival tenth. So we have about a tenth of our income to spend on about a twelfth of our time, slightly disproportionate. However, since it is more expensive to travel and stay away from home than it is to just stay at home, having this festival tenth to spend on the month required to observe the festivals is not out of line at all.

By keeping only the one week of Tabernacles and not the whole week of Unleavened Bread, that left a disproportionate amount of festival tithe to spend that one Tabernacles week. I have heard people be frustrated over how to spend thousands of dollars in one week at the feast. God never intended for you to spend a tenth of your income in one week. He intended for you to spend that festival tenth so you can observe all nineteen feast days, plus cover the time and trouble of getting to the meeting place.

It was reasoned that Tabernacles pictures the Millennium. The Bible nowhere ever states this, but it certainly seems plausible. The Millennium came to represent a time of physical plenty. Therefore, since Tabernacles was the time to spend the whole festival tithe, and since the Millennium supposedly represented a time of physical excess, Tabernacles turned into the time — more than any other time of the year — to partake of the physical amenities of this world.

The Bible does directly state that Tabernacles is to remember the time when Israel was in the wilderness, depicting the New Covenant believer being in a spiritual wilderness today. But this aspect of the feast was overcome by the idea of the Millennium being a time of physical surfeit. Feast keepers had a lot of money to spend in one week, and the Feast of Tabernacles went from a wilderness feast to a resort feast.

From the Pine Woods of Big Sandy to a Condo on the Beach

A tabernacle went from being a tent or a camper to a lavish high rise. Tabernacle was no longer defined as a tent or booth, the succoth, but was defined etymologically as any temporary dwelling.

Notice the subtle change in defining.

Temporary in “temporary dwelling” was taken not to refer to the dwelling itself, but only to the time spent in a dwelling. The resorts and condos are much more imposing and sturdy and permanent than our own homes, but they are considered a temporary dwelling if you don‘t stay in them very long. It’s always amazing what can be done in these etymological exercises.

The net result is that when the Church abandoned the spring feast, the fall feast suffered greatly. It became less spiritual and more physical. God never intended for all the festival tithe to be spent at Tabernacles. It’s not the Tabernacle tithe. He intended for the festival tithe to be used for all the festivals.

Reasons Not to Keep the Spring Feast

Most feast keepers will protest against keeping the whole spring feast. One reason given is to say that some Jews may have observed only the first and last days of Unleavened Bread. As we have seen, the examples in the Bible do not support that at all.

Realistically, it took a day to walk twenty miles. Most who came to Jerusalem for the feasts lived farther than twenty miles away — say an average of forty miles — so if you walked back home after the first holy day, you’d get there just in time to turn around and walk back to the temple for the last holy day.

You’d walk two days to get to the feast, keep a day or two, and then walk back home for two days. Maybe rest on a weekly Sabbath, and then walk two days back to the temple, keep the last day, and walk two days back home. Such a feast would have mixed flat bread and puffy feet.

Besides, citing the Jews in general as an example to follow, contrary to the Bible examples, is not a good idea. Someone could also say that the Churches of God have not kept the whole Passover week for forty years, which is very true, but that does not make it right. The Bible gives no such example.

When people don’t want to obey in some matter, almost always they resort to extended etymology to back up their disobedience. They will search and search for some word which in some particular application can be taken to mean what they want it to mean, and for them, that settles it.

That’s the “Mark Fuhrman Phenomenon”: focus on detail, and forget de head. In the O.J. Simpson trial, the jurors came to believe that the important thing was not whether or not O.J. killed his wife, but whether or not Mark Fuhrman ever said “nigger.” He did, so O.J. was O.K.

Remember in all the Bible examples of Unleavened Bread, they kept the feast for the whole week. There is never an example in the Bible of keeping the feast only for the first and last days.

The real reason not to keep the spring feast for the whole week is the same reason the church forsook it to begin with — it’s difficult to do in this society.

It’s the opposite of Christmas. Ever think about how easy it is to keep Christmas in this society? It comes at you from all sides, for three months, constantly from all the media, from the schools, churches, and your families. Very difficult not to keep it.

Then consider the Biblical feasts. Even the word “feast” itself is offensive to people. How many Christians have you heard say in disgust, “Those old feasts!”

Christmas is three months of preparation, and then one day of observing. People really start shopping in earnest the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, shop right up until Christmas Eve, have Christmas, then go back to more shopping on the day after Christmas, which is the second biggest shopping day of the year. Now some stores are even staying open on Christmas day, for more shopping. What has happened is that they shop so much for the holiday that they don’t actually have time for the day itself.

The feasts, on the other hand, take up not just one day, but about a whole month in travel and observing. Does taking out a month for Yahweh God seem like a whole lot of time to you?

God does demand time! There is no way around that.

Old Covenant Israel was commanded to take time for Yahweh every Sabbath day, 1/7 or 14% of their time. The nineteen festival days plus travel took maybe another 7% of their time. That totals about a fifth of their time, which was taken up directly with worshipping Yahweh. That’s not counting Sabbath years and Jubilee years. Plus the good ones took time out to pray three times a day. And then David lay on his bed at night meditating on God.

I tell you what — wowie. That didn’t leave them a whole lot of time for the really important things like career and sports, did it? They had to spend all that good, productive time just being with Yahweh God.

It’s not ever easy to give God that much time. To spend all that time with God in Satan’s society, in the Sabbaths, festivals, and daily worship, you really have to want to do it. God has to be the most important thing in your life.

You will even have difficulty finding a group to join in observing the spring feast. United, Philadelphia, Living and similar tightly organized Church of God denominations will not do it. They will never go back to observing the whole spring feast. They slave under the law of denominational decline. That is: a church corporation can only make major changes toward less obedience, not greater obedience. If they would change toward greater obedience, they would lose some of their members, and the first law of ecclesiastical rule is — “Don’t lose the members!”

So they cannot observe the whole feast of Unleavened Bread.

But you can.

Reasons to Observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread for Seven Days

When you hear sputtering protests against keeping the whole spring feast — perhaps they are coming from yourself — realize that the basic motivation for these protests is a deep desire to avoid God. The person who doesn’t want to keep the feast for seven days does not want to spend that time with God.

If you really hunger to spend that week with God, instead of on the job, you will search for some way to do it. You will not look for an excuse not to be with God. You will use your strainer to find some reason to be with Him.

And God gives you a good one, since He commanded you to do it. But there is a greater reason to spend the whole Passover week with Yahweh.

“As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” Psalm 42:1-4.

I’ll give you just one reason for observing the whole spring feast. You should observe the whole festival of Unleavened Bread because you want very much to spend that time with your beloved Father.

“O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You. My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water,” Psalm 63:1.

We are in a dry and thirsty land.

The sins of Satan are sweeping the world as never before. Society is filled with violence and filth, coming at us from all directions. Sodomy, Satan’s ultimate lifestyle, is the cause celebre of the liberal political parties in the western world. The electronic media lets Satan send swill to every corner of the world, to the four corners of your house, if you let him. Before, if you wanted to indulge in filth you had to seek it out in some seedy city street. Now, with television, movies, and Internet, you have to actively work to avoid filth. It seeks you out.

Modern machines have made much of the world rich. “Bow down and worship me, and all this I will give to you,” Satan urges. “Give me your time, and I will give you my riches,” Satan preaches.

Jack Benny on his old radio show was accosted by a robber who demanded, “Your money or your life!” When Benny didn’t respond, the robber prodded him. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Benny protested.

Most people do trade their lives for money. It is just as addictive as pornography, and more subtle. Mammonites trade most of their lives for mammon.

All this influence of Satan is sweeping right over the churches. The non-Catholic Christians in the United States were shown by the last census to have perhaps the highest divorce rate in the world. The Sabbatarian churches are right in there with that trend. This terrible sin of destroying families is a continuing reality in the Churches of God, as they constantly have divorces in their congregations.

Check out a Sabbatarian singles web site, all those divorced people who are looking for a mate to grow in Christ with. Christ already gave them a chance to grow with their original mate, and when they couldn’t get along, that was a great chance to grow in Christ.

Women’s lib, the attitude of dissatisfaction and rebellion, has infected many congregations, and is a prime reason for the destruction of families. We hear how so many women are “finding themselves” in their careers. In the judgment day, they may find themselves out on their rear.

Sodomy is sweeping into Protestant Christianity, and will flow into the Churches of God, just as the churches are now filled with divorce. This is already showing up in the organized Churches of God, who are approaching sodomy as a behavior to be altered by counseling, instead of a sin to be immediately and totally repented of.

We live in a creation where everything around us is negative and destructive: Satan, this world, and your own human nature are all negative and trying to kill you. On the other hand, there is only one source of positive Spirit, only one source which gives you life instead of death.

I’ll give you just one reason to keep the whole spring feast — you’re sick of this present evil world, and you’re just gonna bust if you don’t get away and spend that time with Yahweh God. You know you’re traveling through a dry and thirsty land, and, no matter what, you’re going to take the festival week to drink from the living water.

The festivals and Sabbaths are not ends in themselves. Keeping a festival or Sabbath is not just following a rule, one of the 613 laws of the Old Covenant. Keeping a festival and a Sabbath is spending time with your creator. He is the end. God is the goal. The festival is just a means of getting to the goal. The festival is our special time to get with Him.

In the old festivals of the Radio/ Worldwide Church of God, you went there to be taught by the Church. They taught that truth came only through that Church. Ultimately that meant that truth came from God only through one man, Herbert Armstrong. No one could go directly to God for any truth. The truth from God had to come through the Church, which was Herbert Armstrong.

When you attended a festival with them, you went there not to be taught by God directly, but indirectly, by His church. They had two services every day, and much of your time at the feast was consumed in being taught by the church.

At first, most of the people attending the feast were very new, and knew little about the Bible at all. Over the years, the members grew in Bible knowledge, but the church itself did not grow in spiritual wisdom. The greater understanding and commitment was in the early years. The ministry as a whole did not go to new depths of understanding of God and commitment to God — because primarily they were not looking to God.

The longer time went on, the ministers more and more looked to their source of truth, which was the Church, which was Herbert Armstrong, instead of looking directly to God. Therefore, these men lost the ability to give great sermons. They could not go from the elementary to the profound, because Herbert was inspiring them, but Yahweh God was not.

I even heard Herbert Armstrong himself complain about the speaking in the WCG. He didn’t understand why it was that way. At a feast in Big Sandy he complained, “Why do all our speakers sound the same?”

He was why it was that way. God had earlier inspired him, because he had looked directly to God. But in later years, God didn’t inspire the men under Herbert, because they looked to Herbert first.

So at our Tabernacles festivals in WCG in the early 1980s, we were more and more uninspired by the sermons. We weren’t radically disagreeing with them. We just weren’t doing anything with them at all.

We left Worldwide in 1985, and at the different Church of God Tabernacles sites over the next years, we found the same thing. We would listen to the sermons, but most of them didn’t say much. They were still looking for Herbert to inspire them. He was dead, and so were their sermons.

After a sermon at the feast, we would fuss about the sermon, go back to our camp site by a lake, have a simple lunch, and then spend some hours there with very uplifting Bible study, as a family and individually. Then we would have good fellowship with the people observing the feast, with the activities there.

Year after year this was our pattern. We would hear the sermons, gripe and grouse about them and be all frustrated and disheartened, and then solace ourselves with our wonderful Bible studies and quiet time by the lake. And later in the day have good fellowship with the brethren.

Finally, after some years, it hit me. I realized what was happening. I came to see what is really important about these festivals.

When you’re observing God’s festivals, you don’t have to go through the Church to be taught. You don’t have to learn from God’s apostle or apostlelitos. You can visit with God directly.

Hey — that’s what the festival is for!

We were being taught by God directly more than in the sermons. We were not being taught some esoteric 614th point of the law as much as we were being taught who we are and who God is.

“Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace...” Hebrews 4:16.

Again, in the old WCG festivals, you went there to be taught by the Church, and not by God directly. The New Covenant believer, however, observes the festivals to spend time with our beloved Father Yahweh God, and to communicate directly with Him.

When we observe a feast now, our primary goal is to spend time with God. We get a beautiful camp site, hopefully not too crowded, and that is the spot of our primary worship. Secondly, we fellowship with those others who are observing the festival, in activities and personal conversations. Thirdly, we listen to the sermons.

We observe the feasts for these things, in this order:

1 - time with God;

2 - fellowship with brethren;

3 - sermons.

Now think back to a typical Feast of Unleavened Bread for most of you. You attend the first holy day. You drive a ways to get there, have a service, probably a meal, all of which is uplifting to whatever degree, and then you have a drive of some length to get back home. Back home, you have to get ready to go to work the next day, and your mind starts reverting to that, so you’re immediately back out of the feast mentally.

When you’re at work that week, you’re thinking about work. That’s the way work is. That’s why it’s called work. You have to work at it.

You have a weekly Sabbath in the middle of the feast week, but even there nobody is really feastly, nobody has really gathered any spiritual momentum, because everybody is still wrapped up in their daily work. You can’t get removed spiritually from your everyday life by taking just one day off.

After the weekly Sabbath you have two or three more work days during the feast, then you drive to the last holy day, the feast is over, and all you really have to show for that feast is the number of tacos you consumed for lunch.

During that kind of feast, you really haven’t spent much special time with God.

That’s not observing a feast to God. Surely God is not well pleased with that effort. That’s not going the extra mile. That’s not even doing your duty, much less going beyond duty to be a profitable servant.

When you eat the unleavened bread, it teaches you to take in Christ. So take the time that week to do it.

One of the great deceptions of Satan’s modern society is the phrase “quality time.” The deception is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time with your family or your children if the little time you do give them is “quality time.”

That’s a double-edged lie.

First of all, if you don’t spend much time with your family and your children, the time you do spend with them will absolutely not be quality time. Strangers don’t have quality time together. Quantity time makes quality time, because you get to know one another.

Secondly, there is no substitute for spending time with your family and children. There is no way sitting down for a few minutes before bedtime with your children can equal spending a whole day together. If you don’t spend time with them, you will all suffer.

Likewise, if you as a child do not spend time with your heavenly Father, you will both suffer. The relationship will be strained, and not as close.

The feasts are God’s commanded revivals, to use a rural Protestant term. God’s commanded revivals — to take out a week from trivial pursuit to pursue the tree of life — every six months. They are a spiritual shot in the arm, a religious rejuvenation, a gob of God, a splash of sanity in an insane world.

It used to be that the end of Tabernacles was a little depressing for us, because it was a whole year to the feast again. Not so! It’s only six months until the feast. Hot dog!

The United States and the United Kingdom are under attack by insane butchers. It may well be that all of us will have some trying times to face in the near future. This is

the time to have a lot of oil in our lamps, and this oil doesn’t come from the Arabs.

The purpose of a New Covenant festival is for you to spend time with your God. Not looking to a Church for inspiration, not looking to any man for the meaning of your life, but going directly to the Source of your life.

That’s what the festivals mean to you, and you absolutely cannot afford to be without them.

I’ll give you one reason to keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread for the whole week. It’s not technical. It’s not theological. That one reason is because you want to spend that time with your beloved Father and our beloved Messiah. If you really want to, you will do it.

— by Dan L. White W