An Introduction to the Biblical Feasts

If you had to sum up the entire message of the Bible in one word what would it be? Probably words such as love, hope, salvation, eternal life or heaven are coming to your mind. But I challenge you to find a better word than the following: r-e-c-o-n-c-i-l-i-a-t-i-o-n. The dictionary defines reconciliation as “to restore to friendship or harmony, to settle or resolve a quarrel, to make consistent or congruous.”

When the first humans chose to listen to the lies of the serpent and to rebel against YHVH by giving in to sin at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil at the very beginning, our first parents chose the path of separation from their Heavenly Father. Sin causes man to be separated from our totally holy, righteous, sinless and loving Creator.

Since that time YHVH has been endeavoring to reconcile man to himself. He has laid out the criteria for this to occur—for man to once again have a loving and intimate relationship with his Heavenly Father as did Adam and Eve before they sinned.

The seven biblical feasts of YHVH (please note, the Bible calls them YHVH’s feasts, not men’s feasts, Lev 23:2, 4; Exod 31:13) prophetically represent the steps man must take to be reconciled to his Heavenly Father. They are the complete plan of salvation or redemption rolled up into an easy-to-understand ­seven-step plan. Though a child can understand these steps, the truths contained therein can, at the same time, be expanded and unfolded until one literally has rolled out before oneself the entire message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation—a message that to the human comprehension is staggering, deep and rich beyond understanding. The biblical feasts are literally the skeletal structure upon which the truths of the entire Bible hang. The message of redemption, sanctification, salvation, the atonement, glorification, end-times eschatology, the history of Israel, the entire gospel message, the covenants, the marriage of the Lamb of Elohim, the truth about the bride of Messiah, and Yeshua the Messiah are all prefigured within the glorious spiritual container of YHVH’s feasts contained in seven steps. Seven is the biblical number of divine perfection and completion, thus revealing to us that his plan of salvation is complete in that it will bring man back into an eternal and spiritual relationship with Elohim.

Quite assuredly, without a deep, walking-it-out comprehension of YHVH’s feasts, no matter how learned one may be in biblical knowledge, one will miss key elemental truths pertaining to YHVH’s plan of salvation. For example, there is no way to correctly or fully understand end-time events such as the second coming of Yeshua, the great tribulation, the wrath of Elohim, the resurrection of the righteous, the marriage of the Lamb, the Millennium, or the New Jerusalem unless one understands the feasts from a deep Hebraic perspective. Spiritual pride may not allow one to handle this fact, but it is the truth none the less! It’s illogical to think that one can throw out the foundation of a building and expect it to stand, or to eliminate the skeleton from a human body and expect a person to stand upright. Similarly, the feasts are both the foundation and the skeletal framework upon which is built or hangs the whole corpus of biblical truth.