From Holidays to Holy Days Again – The Fourth Commandment

From Holidays to Holy Days Again

The Fourth Commandment

Leviticus 23:4-6

“These are the appointed feasts of the LORD, the holy convocations, which you shall proclaim at the time appointed for them. In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at twilight, is the LORD’s Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened bread to the LORD; for seven days you shall eat unleavened bread.”

God appointed three annual feasts for Israel, each one associated with some aspect of His relationship to the nation. These feasts were important as times for the nation to come together to remember and to celebrate the goodness, sovereignty, redeeming love, and provision of the Lord. Special activities attached to each feast would highlight some particular aspect of the Lord’s goodness. Thus the Lord ordained these “dramas” as means of keeping the people together and keeping them before Him in love.

In our day, when the tendency is increasingly to “secularize” the holy days of the Christian people—Christmas and Easter, principally—believers need to recover all the significance of such times and make the most of them for their identity as the people of God, and to renew covenant with Him.

In this series of In the Gates we present a detailed explanation of the Law of God, beginning with the Ten Commandments, and working through the statutes and rules that accompany each commandment. For a practical guide to the role of God’s Law in the practice of ethics, get The Ground for Christian Ethics by going to www.MyParuchia.com and click on our Book Store.

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore, editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.