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Yom Kippur – The Most Christian of God’s Moedim

Yom Kippur is the most Christian of God's appointed times

A guest post by Kay Behrens

As I was sitting in my Living Room ten days ago, honoring one of God’s Moedim, or Set Apart Days, I came to the realization that Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is the most “Christian” of God’s Holy Convocations. But, what do I mean by that?

Let’s look at God’s Set Apart Days, one by one. We can begin with Passover.

Passover ~ On Passover, God instructs us to do several things, besides our offerings. We are to cook the lamb, to remove leaven from our homes, to prepare the bitter herbs.

Unleavened Bread ~ Here we are to eat the meal, but most important of all, we are to tell our children the story of the Exodus. They are to be active participants of the evening.

First Fruits ~ Here we are to offer the first fruits of our harvest.

Shavuout ~ Fifty days after the early First Fruits, we are to have a Holy Convocation and to offer two loaves of leavened bread, a later first fruits.

Yom Teruah ~ The Day of Trumpets. On this day we are to blow the trumpets and shout for joy to the Lord.

Sukkot ~ Here we are to build and live in Booths for 7 days. We are to wave the four species. We are to remember our days in the desert.

But what of Yom Kippur? How are we to spend that day? Doing nothing.

And any person who does any work on that same day, that person I will destroy from among this people. You shall do no manner of work; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings. It shall be to you a Sabbath of solemn rest, and you shall afflict your souls; on the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, you shall celebrate your Sabbath.
Leviticus 23:30-32. 

But why do I say that this is this a “Christian” moedim? Well, let’s look at the Christian understanding of salvation, or atonement. Christians teach that we are not saved by works, but by grace and grace alone. They are taught that “works salvation” as taught in the Old Testament no longer applies and that we cannot save ourselves by our works but only by resting on the completed work of Messiah.

Have you ever spent 24 hours where you can do no work? It truly concentrates the mind. Add to that a fast from food and water and you definitely start paying attention. Get up and take a shower? Nope. Make your bed (probably not a problem for most millennials, but it sure bothers me); fill or empty the dishwasher? Later. Check the internet? Your phone? Your tablet? Not today. Squash that fly? Dust off that spider’s web? Wipe down the counter? Nope, nope, and nope. Read a book, send a note to a friend, start that craft project?  Can’t do.

Your day is to be completely about resting in the Lord. He is your salvation, your atonement, even your bread of life if you are fasting.

Ah, but you say that “Messiah died once for all and He sat down at the right hand of God and for us to keep the Old Testament feasts is to put Him back on the cross to suffer once again”. To this I would say that, yes, Messiah sacrificed once and then sat at the right hand of the Father, but we are not called to remember this once and only once. We are to be reminded yearly of His sacrifice. I liken this to a married couple who keep their vows daily, but once a year takes the time to recognize the special bond that they have. If they don’t take this time to lovingly recall their commitment they might begin to take it for granted. Likewise, if we don’t take the time to recall the sacrifice of our Messiah, we will begin to take it for granted.

So how shall we remember His sacrifice? Certainly by keeping the Passover, or by the remembrance of Good Friday and First Fruits, but Yom Kippur forces us to really remember the totality of His gift to us. On Yom Kippur, we are to completely separate ourselves from the world; we are to completely rely on His provision. We do not work, we do not eat, we do not rely on anyone or anything but our Messiah.

We cannot make the day of Yom Kippur any more holy by doing anything beyond “afflicting your souls” and having “a holy convocation”.

So I invite my dear Christian friends to consider next year keeping Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Try spending a day completely without works. Spend a day in your Living Room without swatting that fly, without squashing that spider, without doing anything. Spend it with the Scriptures that attest to our Lord who gave His life so that we may live. Who is the Bread of Life and the True Vine.

Enemies Within and Without

Every external trial is sent for an internal purpose.

The enemy within your gates must be defeated before you can effectively engage the enemy without, but sometimes the enemy outside is sent to expose and defeat the enemy hiding within.

In Psalm 86, David began with a parallelism that lays out a cause and effect relationship between the state of his heart and God answering his prayers.

  • V1 – Incline your ear, O YHVH. Hear me.
    • For I am sorrowful and destitute.
  • V2a – Preserve my soul
    • For I am pious.
  • V2b – Save your servant
    • Who trusts in you.
  • V3 – Be merciful to me, O Lord
    • For I cry out to you daily.
  • V4 – Gladden the soul of your servant
    • For unto you, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
  • V5 – You, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love
    • To all who call upon you.

David went on to ask God to help him become a more righteous man, to thank Him and glorify Him for His steadfast love and deliverance. Only then did he come back to the problem at hand: A group of lawless and violent men were conspiring against David, and he needed divine protection.

This Psalm is remarkable for more than just the parallelism at the beginning. In it, David touched on every major point of The Lord’s Prayer as taught by Yeshua in Matthew 6 and Luke 11. I have listed some of the correlations here but I am sure there are more:

  • v8,12 : Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
  • v9 : Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
  • v1 : Give us this day our daily bread, and
  • v5,6,15,16 : forgive us our trespasses,
  • v11,17 : as we forgive those who trespass against us, and
  • v2,11: lead us not into temptation,
  • v2,13,17 : but deliver us from evil.
  • v10,12 : For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.

Not only does David foreshadow the Lord’s Prayer, but also the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:

  • v1 : Blessed are the poor in spirit
  • v4 : Blessed are they who mourn
  • v2 : Blessed are the meek
  • v11 : Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness
  • v17 : Blessed are the merciful (David did not pray for their destruction, but their repentance.)
  • v2 : Blessed are the pure of heart
  • v17 : Blessed are the peacemakers (See above)
  • v14 : Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness

Is it any wonder that, despite all of his many sins and flaws, David is called a man after God’s own heart?

Like all of us, David continued to battle his sinful nature throughout his life, recognizing that he needed to have victory over the battle in his own heart before he could hope to have any real victory over external forces. This Psalm is an excellent pattern for every believer.

No matter how righteous we think we are, no matter how close to God we believe ourselves to be, our personal righteousness is a relative thing and will always be nothing compared to Yeshua’s. The trials that God sends are designed, in part, to remind us of this. The prayers of a righteous man are powerful, but righteousness that isn’t continually progressing becomes unrighteousness in time. This is a call to ever greater sanctity in our hearts and behavior, for there can be no victory in the world without victory in the heart.

“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”

Happy New Year

L'shana tova from Brenham, Texas!

Why is the Feast of Trumpets (aka Yom Teruah or Yom ha-Zikkaron) also called Head of the Year (Rosh Hashanah) when God specifically said that Nisan is the first month of the year? Every calendar has multiple years. We have fiscal years, school years, birth years, tax years, etc. The ancient Hebrews were no different. But what, specifically, makes this day a “new year” day?

There are two reasons, one mystical and one practical. Traditionally, Adam and Eve were created on Rosh Hashanah, so we blow the horns in honor of the world’s birthday and in remembrance of the Voice of God that caused the world to come into being. More scripturally, the year of Jubilee begins in the seventh month (this month, now called Tishrei). Every seventh year in the seventh month, debts were forgiven, Hebrew slaves set free, and the land given one year of rest from active agriculture. Every fiftieth year in the seventh month, all land returned to the original owners, the families to whom the land was granted in the time of Joshua. (See Leviticus 25)

Technically, the release of slaves and land begins at Yom Kippur, which is the 10th day of the month, making it simultaneously the most solemn and the most joyful day on God’s calendar. Regardless, the month of Tishrei is still the first month of the year for the purposes of the Jubilee, so the first day of Tishrei is considered the first day of the year.

L’shana Tova! Happy New Year! May you find freedom in Yeshua this year and every year.

An Unbelievable Kindness

I have frequently heard it said that the Law was given as a sort of object lesson, to prove to Israel–and by proxy all mankind–the futility of attempting to earn salvation by keeping the Law. While that isn’t quite correct, it isn’t very far off the mark either.

Paul wrote that the law was given to serve as a witness against us in our sins much as a No Trespassing sign is a Teshuva, Repentance...An unbelievable kindness.witness against the trespasser who cannot claim that he didn’t know he was on private property when it was clearly marked. Despite the clearly marked boundaries of Torah, despite God’s assurance that his laws are not too difficult for us, we all still fail. We are all trespassers, and without God’s grace to forgive us, we would all be condemned to die under the Law by the Law’s own testimony. The real object lesson that demonstrates to us that we cannot be saved by the Law is the destruction of the Temple.

In Paul’s day, he spent a significant amount of time and ink arguing against those who claimed that the new gentile converts could not be saved without undergoing the full ritual conversion of becoming a Jew. Paul continued to keep the Law, circumcising Timothy and sacrificing at the Temple, but he clearly understood that those things were mere shadows of the spiritual reality. He wasn’t alone. Many other Jews understood this, but unfortunately they appear to have been in the minority. The Temple eventually had to be destroyed before God’s grace would be widely accepted.

I recently listened to a 2006 discussion of Yom Kippur and teshuva by Rabbi Meir Schweiger. Addressing the matter of atonement without the Temple, he said:

This is an unbelievable kindness…to allow me the opportunity to once again be in relationship with him.

Perfect obedience to the letter of the law cannot save you, but it can point you in the right direction. Salvation is found in the “unbelievable kindness” of God’s mercy in providing a sacrifice whose blood atones for all who trust in him and commit heart-felt teshuva.

There’s Obedience and There’s Obedience

From Rabbi Zev Leff’s comments on Devarim:

Failure to see the mitzvot as an expression of the totality of God’s will, and not as just disjointed commands, leads to the distortion of mitzvot themselves. One year I received an urgent call just before Yom Kippur from a woman in my congregation. Her husband had been told by his doctor that he was suffering from a condition which could prove life-threatening if he fasted. Nevertheless he was determined to fast. I spoke to his doctor and consulted another observant doctor to confirm the diagnosis. There was no doubt that fasting would endanger his life.

I called in the man and explained to him that he must eat on Yom Kippur. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Rabbi, you’re a young man and I’m about three times your age, well into my 70s. Since my bar mitzvah I have not eaten on Yom Kippur, and I do not intend to start now.” I replied that I could not force him to eat on Yom Kippur, but that as soon as he left my office, I would instruct the gabbai never to give him another honor in our shul. When he asked why he deserved such treatment for being strict with respect to Yom Kippur, I told him that we are prohibited from honoring idol worshipers.

“What idol worship am I guilty of?” he demanded to know. I explained, “The God of Israel has decreed that you must eat on Yom Kippur. If some other god has commanded you to fast, it is irrelevant to me if you call it Zeus, Kemosh or Yom Kippur – all idols are the same.”

A Late Tashlikh

Tashlikh is supposed to be done on Rosh Hashanah, but I think Yom Kippur is really a much better time for it. The idea is that you take stones that represent your sins, and you throw them into the sea or whatever body of water you can find, preferably water that is moving toward the sea. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, and while we can do little things to make our wrongs right, only God can really make them go away.

He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.

Like Egypt’s chariots and like the army of locusts before them. Beyond reach, beyond memory.

I have two stones on my desk, and I have written something on each of them. Maybe they won’t seem like much to you. However, to me they represent the two sins which have dominated my life over the past year. On one stone I have written, “Jonah,” and on the other, “Pharaoh.”

Jonah ran from his calling. While I haven’t been running from mine, I haven’t exactly embraced it either. I have some writing to do, and I have neglected it all this year.

Pharaoh raged against God. I allowed anger and hatred to set the tempo and the terms for this past year. I made some difficult and harsh decisions. I made the right decisions–I don’t think there was any way to avoid it–but I could have done it with more grace and civility.

So now I’m going to go throw my good buddies, Jonah and Pharaoh, into the pond a few blocks away. Then I’m going to try to set some past wrongs aside and concentrate on turning some very unpopular thoughts into electronic bits.