This is the second of three special teachings on the Fall Festivals of the Bible that will all come out this week before they air on the radio because it’s important to understand the festivals before they happen so that we can celebrate them. Do you understand the reason God commanded that Yom Kippur be celebrated forever? Do you understand what all those sacrifices were about, from the ancient Near Eastern perspective of the cleansing power of blood and sacred spaces? Through my own stories and parables, I will explain why Yom Kippur made the Temple habitable for God and the effect of sin on His Tabernacle, Temple, and even the Temple of Living Stones we are part of today.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, any scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

Have you guys ever heard of Yom Kippur? It means the day (yom) of atonements or coverings (kippurim) and you might be saying, “Um yeah…okay…but what the heck does that even mean? It’s just as confusing in English as it is in Hebrew! And I agree, it is totally confusing but that’s why I am going to teach you about how to clean up a Temple!  WHATTT??? Don’t you just get brooms and windex and furniture polish and maybe a vacuum cleaner like at home or at church or in the synagogue? Well, that works great with the kind of dirt that we can see in our homes but on Yom Kippur, the High Priest was dealing with the kind of terrible mess that no one but God could see, a mess that got worse and worse every time someone did something terrible. And that might sound like crazy talk to you but I am going to tell you some stories to help you to understand why Yom Kippur is so important, and why it is called the holiest day of the entire year.

Have you ever heard the word pollution? I bet you have. Pollution is a big part of the reason why we recycle, and why companies aren’t allowed to dump terrible things in the rivers, or lakes, or oceans anymore. And some companies have those big smokestacks that pour out black smoke, right? Well, when I was born, oh man, it was really bad but when I was about 1 ½ years old, the President created the EPA and a lot of cities where you couldn’t even see the sky and the buildings were black from the gunk in the air, got cleaned up. About twenty years before I was born, it was really bad. I will even include a link in the transcript of pictures of what Pittsburgh looked like when my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were growing up there. But it wasn’t until about forty years ago that it really started looking good because they stopped burning untreated coal. They cleaned up the water, cleaned up the air, and cleaned up the soil. And when that happened, people got healthier too. Just imagine not being able to see the sky because it looks dark gray all the time!

Now, I want you to imagine if all that coal dust and burnt coal fumes was invisible, and the buildings still looked clean and the sky still looked blue and the water looked clear and the soil looked okay. Is everything okay just because it looks okay? Nope! Even though it’s invisible, all the poison would be in the air you breathed, the soil your food grows in, the water you drink and where the fish live. So, the poison from all of that pollution would still be inside of you, making you sick, making it hard to breathe, and all sorts of bad things. I want you to think about sin like that. The bad things people do may not be visible for everyone to see, but every bad act polluted God’s Tabernacle. And if God’s Tabernacle became too polluted, He wouldn’t want to live there anymore. At first, the pollution was just in the outer buildings surrounding the Temple, and then it came into the Court of Israel, where people waited to offer sacrifices to God if they had done something wrong, or were celebrating, or had just had a baby, or whatever. People offered up animals to God for all sorts of reasons. But as people sinned more and more, the pollution got closer and closer to the part of the Tabernacle where God appeared above the Ark of the Covenant. It was like a thick smoke, pushing Him further and further away. By the time a year had gone by, it was like God was holding His nose (if He had a nose) because their sins were so stinky. In fact, in 586 BC, it got so bad that God left and never came back because it had just gotten too stinking gross. So, God let the Babylonians come and burn it all down.

Let me tell you another story. Once upon a time, a very kind and good man moved to a neighborhood with a tall hill and built himself a house on top of it. It was a very beautiful house but he came to find out that the other people in the neighborhood weren’t very nice at all. They didn’t really know him and because of it they had no idea how good and kind and generous he was. In fact, they avoided him as much as they could, and they were very angry about his beautiful house. At night, or when he went to work or to the store, they would sneak up the hill and spray paint the house and even though the spray paint they used was invisible, he would come home and find them doing it, and sometimes they wouldn’t even wait for him to leave because they just wanted him to know how much they hated him and his house. And because he was so kind and good, it hurt him very deeply that people didn’t care about him or his house or how terrible they were making his life. It wasn’t too long before his house didn’t look beautiful to him anymore—all he could see when he looked at it was all the sin and hate and rejection, even though a stranger might drive by and not notice anything. It got so bad that he couldn’t stand to live there anymore because of the bullies and wicked people in his neighborhood who weren’t the slightest bit sorry about what they were doing. I mean, wouldn’t you feel the exact same way? I sure would.

Well, when there was a Tabernacle in the wilderness, it was called the Mishkan (meaning dwelling place, a place to live), and later when Solomon built the Temple, it was called God’s House—the Beit Mikdash—the holy house. It was called His house because He promised that His presence would always be there and He would hear their prayers. That’s why it was so important to keep the pollution of sin as far away from the Temple as possible. But does that mean it is okay to sin just as long as you don’t do it close to the Temple? Um, no, that actually wouldn’t work. When God’s people sin, no matter how far away they are, it would still stain or pollute His Temple with shame. Do you know what shame is? Shame is like when you throw a tantrum in the store or at a restaurant and embarrass your parents. It makes your parents look really bad and other grownups get angry with them if it goes on for too long. There’s a big difference between a tired baby crying and a kid on the floor pitching a fit because they can’t have candy or a toy. My kids learned really quick that as soon as they pulled something like that, not only would there be no candy or toy but I would take them right out to the car for a time out and they hated that so they calmed down pretty quick after the first couple of times. Same thing if they were at school or out in the neighborhood acting like hoodlums—which they also did a few times. People would frown at me because they thought I was a terrible parent. It sure looked like it sometimes! They probably gave my house the stink eye when they walked by. Fortunately, they grew up and aren’t a problem now.

So, when the children of Israel did terrible things like worshiping other gods, and hurting people, and just generally breaking the commandments, people from the outside nations would think that God was like that too, and that those things were okay with Him. As though He had never commanded them not to do those things. I mean, there were no Bibles back then and hardly anyone could read anyway and so the best most people would do was to hear the Torah, that’s the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—read to them once every seven years when they came for the festivals! So, if they only got to hear the commandments that often, the people in other nations never got to hear it at all. They only example that they had of Israel’s God was to look at the behavior of the people who worship Him.

You see, the gods of all the nations around Israel were all just like humans with powers and really important jobs like making sure the sun came up every morning, making it rain, making the animals have babies, all the things that they needed to live. But their gods weren’t good, they were just like people. They did mean, spiteful, terrible things. They killed each other and they killed people just for being too noisy, or sometimes just for no reason at all. Those people had to be scared to death of their gods because they couldn’t ever predict that they would do and, if one of them died, their world would be in big trouble. Or, that’s what they thought. They could make their gods angry, but it wasn’t always clear what would make them mad because they didn’t give their followers rules or commandments about how to behave just as long as their idols were taken care of in the city temples. When something would go terribly wrong, they didn’t even know which god they had made angry, or why, so they would have to sacrifice to them all, which could get really expensive. But our God is entirely different because He tells us what makes Him happy and unhappy. The things that make Him happy are the things that keep His house clean, with no pollution—that invisible spray paint that gets on it whenever we sin.

When we do terrible things now, even though there is no Temple, we still make God look really bad. Have you ever known a really mean person who wears a cross around their neck, or who has Jesus bumper stickers all over the back of their car, or one who wears tzit-zit? And maybe when they are in the store, they are mean to the employees who are there trying to help them, or maybe at restaurants they are mean to the cashiers and the servers. When those people see the cross or the tzit-zit, they think, “Wow, I don’t want anything to do with their god because if he is anything like them then he has to be just horrible and doesn’t deserve to be worshiped by anyone!”

Even though there is no Temple in Jerusalem now, there is a much bigger and better Temple that gets bigger every day! That’s because the new Temple is everyone who love Jesus and worships God. In fact, Paul said that we are the stones of the new Temple, but we are stones that are alive. And that’s good because it means that because God is with us, He goes everywhere that we go. But it is also bad because if we are making God look wicked and cruel and unloving, then we are polluting His Temple of living stones. It’s our job to always be making sure that our stone is as unpolluted as possible. That includes the sins people see on the outside, how we treat people, and the ones on the inside when no one is looking.

Now, when there was a Tabernacle and then a Temple, when a normal person would sin and then be sorry, they would bring an animal to God and they would place their hand on it. But they had to be sorry first—this wouldn’t work if they weren’t sorry and determined to do better from then on. Repentance doesn’t just mean we feel bad, it means that we want to change and will try our hardest to change and if someone else was hurt, it means that we have to fix it if we can. When they placed their hand on the animal, they weren’t putting their sin on the animal, there was only one time a year when that would happen, they were saying, “Lord, this animal belongs to me and I am giving it to you so that my mess can be cleaned up.” And the priest would take the animal and wait until it was calm and quiet, and then the animal would be killed and the blood would be caught in a bowl. For a normal person, the blood would be taken by the priest up to the top of the altar and the blood would be smeared on the horns of the altar. But what about if a leader sinned? That was more serious because they were setting a bad example and shaming God and polluting His house even more than if a normal person did it. So when they brought an animal, the blood actually had to go into the Holy Place, where the Menorah and the Shewbread and the Altar of Incense was and the blood had to be sprinkled on the altar of incense that was very close to the Ark of the Covenant behind the curtain. That’s because the shame and pollution were bad enough that it even got inside the actual Temple building.

But what about really terrible sins that people aren’t even sorry for committing? What happens to God’s house when people are really evil? Well, it means that the sin gets all the way behind the curtain into the Holy of Holies and to the Ark where the presence of God appeared above the cherubim. And that’s serious. If it happened enough then God would leave, like He did in 586 BC, and never come back. Should everyone suffer just because some people are really evil and wicked like that? Of course not. So God commanded the Israelites to have a special day, one day a year, called Yom HaKippurim, the Day of Atonements. But everyone calls it Yom Kippur for short. It was a special day. It was a happy day and a sad day. It was the day when all of the really bad sins were cleaned out of God’s Temple, from the outside all the way to the very inside, the most holy place in the entire world. This happened nine days after the festival of trumpets, the agricultural New Year when everything began again—except for the festivals, the year for that started back in the spring. So, on the first day of the month of Tishri, if you remember from last week, they would celebrate the new year and celebrate God as their king, and if there was a new king because the old king was dead, they would have his coronation party on that day. That was a very happy day, the first of the days of awe. Awe is a word that means that you are just overwhelmed by something or someone. Imagine if your favorite actor or sports star or singer or whatever appeared at your door. You would probably be so shocked that you wouldn’t even be able to talk. Now multiply that by a million and that’s how you would feel in the presence of God.

For those ten days, that’s how people felt about God. Yom Kippur was getting closer every single day, the one day a year that the High Priest would go into the Holy of Holies. And there were special ceremonies, and he couldn’t wear his special clothes, the ones with the jewels on his shoulders and on his chest, and a golden grown that said “Holy to the Lord” on it. When he performed this ceremony, he only wore his linen garments and a sash around his waist and a plain turban on his head. And no shoes because no one could ever wear shoes in the Temple. If the High Priest did something wrong, or if He was unclean, then the Temple wouldn’t be cleaned and God might leave and so he lived at the Temple for a whole week beforehand, studying and staying away from everything that might make him unclean. If God left, then they wouldn’t be protected from their enemies and they wouldn’t be blessed and the Bible says that the Land of Israel wouldn’t even want them there anymore and would vomit them out. That’s what happened when the people started worshiping other gods in His house (can you even believe it?) and carving creepy crawlies on the walls and baking unleavened bread not for Him but for the Queen of Heaven! The Babylonian goddess of war! And weeping for Tammuz all summer long so that the rains would come back. And bowing down to the sun, which meant sticking their butts in the air toward God’s house. And who knows what else. I don’t even want to think about it. Too awful to even write in the Bible and the Bible talks about some really horrible things. We just really probably don’t want to know and shouldn’t know.

But every year, they would pray and not eat or drink anything all day, to show God how serious they were about taking their pollution out of His house. Nobody looks happy when they are really sorry and apologizing, right? They want to make sure that the other person knows that they are taking what happened seriously and not being silly about it. When we don’t eat, we are very, very focused on God. And the ceremony to clean God’s house took a bull, a ram (a male sheep), and two goats. Next year I will explain how that worked. The blood of the animals cleaned the outer altar and the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, and when that happened, it was a time of great celebration because God’s house was clean again.

But it didn’t always work. Actually, we read in the Talmud (Yoma 39b) that for the forty years after Jesus died, God didn’t accept the Yom Kippur sacrifices. And after that forty years, the Temple was destroyed and was never rebuilt again. Why do you think that is? Let’s think about it. Were they worshiping false gods there? No way! Were all the people of Israel wicked? Nope. It was only the leaders of Israel, the chief priests (not even all the priests, just the leaders) and some of the elders who wanted Jesus to die. And most of them weren’t sorry afterward either and especially not the chief priests and Caiaphas, the High Priest. He was the one who was behind it all. What do you think would happen, six months after Passover, when the High Priest, who isn’t at all sorry about having the Romans kill Jesus, tries to clean God’s house? It’s totally not going to work, right? Not because God hates the Jewish people but because the High Priest has done something so terrible that the Temple is too polluted with sin to clean even if a good High Priest was performing the ceremonies. And since the High Priest wasn’t sorry at all, and was glad he did it, nothing he was doing would make it better. It probably made it worse.

Remember I told you that the presence of God used to be in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness and in the Temple? It looked like a pillar of fire during the night and a cloud during the day. The people of Israel always knew that God was right there with them because they could see the fire or smoke at all times. Whenever they were supposed to travel, the cloud of smoke would pick up and move away and they would pack up their camp and follow until it stopped somewhere and they would set up camp again. Imagine if they hadn’t followed the presence of God? That would have been bad but Moses and Aaron and Miriam made sure they always followed. But when the Jews built a new Temple after they returned from Babylon, the presence of God didn’t come back—even though He told Haggai to build it. Why did God tell the prophet to build something He would never go to? And why did God say that this Temple would be even greater than Solomon’s Temple when it was so puny and poor when they made it that the people were old enough to have seen Solomon’s Temple cry because they were so disappointed and ashamed? How could a smaller Temple be greater when the Presence of God never showed up?

Well, that’s the thing. The Presence of God did show up—they just didn’t realize it. It showed up when Jesus was there, teaching people at Solomon’s Porch. It showed up when the tables of the money-changers got moved from the Mount of Olives to the place where the Gentiles were trying to worship God. It was there when the Pharisees, Scribes, elders, Sadducees, and chief priests all tried to trap Him and make people hate him—of course, it didn’t work. The people just loved Him even more than before! But they didn’t understand. All the leaders saw was someone who was dangerous and trying to take their place so that the people would listen to Him instead and follow Him and live the way God wanted them to. And so, just like in 586 BC, when all the false gods and the creepy crawlies and all the pollution drove God’s presence out of the Temple, when Jesus left after being rejected and treated so badly by the leaders of Jerusalem and the Temple, Jesus said that the Temple would be completely destroyed. A Temple that rejects God isn’t His Temple anymore, it’s just a building.

When Jesus rose from the dead, God’s presence came to live in everyone who believed Him and trusted Him and followed Him. That’s why we are called living stones, because all of us together are the Temple of God now. That makes us very important, and it makes how we live our lives very important. But you might ask, why would we still celebrate Yom Kippur? There is no Temple in Jerusalem to get all filthy with our sins. Well, that’s right, but our sins still make the living Temple of God filthy, and so every year, we have to really think very hard about what the world sees when it sees us. Do they see God’s mirrors? Like Jesus walking around in our bodies and doing the things He did for people and teaching people about God’s love and peace and how He wants us to live and treat others? Or do they see, like those messed up funhouse mirrors where everything is warped and weird looking, really bad images of God because we don’t care how we treat people, how we talk, what we do and how we behave? Every year, on Yom Kippur, it is important that we are very serious about asking God whether we are better people than last year or worse, and what we need to do to keep His living Temple as clean as possible so that other people will want to be living stones too. It’s a lot to think about, and one of the most important things we can do to be honest with God and ourselves. It isn’t okay to say we are Christians and then not act like it. But there are Jews and Gentiles all over the world who want to be very good mirrors for God, so that we make Him look good and not bad. How about you? Do you care about what people think of God when they watch you?

I love you, I am praying for you. And I know that, if you want to, next year your mirror can look a whole lot more like God than it does this year. And so can mine.

This is the first of three special teachings on the Fall Festivals of the Bible that will all come out this week before they air on the radio because it’s important to understand the festivals before they happen so that we can celebrate them. This teaching will be about the festival that has a lot of descriptions in the Bible but no actual name! That’s why we call it different things but they all mean that we are going to celebrate and worship God our King and His Son Jesus, the King of kings.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

Hey howdy hey, Bible fans, this is a special week because it is the beginning of the Fall Festivals! What are the Fall Festivals? I am so glad you asked and we will spend the next three weeks talking about them, and maybe your family even celebrates them. I started cooking last month when I made blueberry pies, and last weekend I made the best breakfast crumb cake with like an inch of streusel on top and raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries between the cake and the streusel. And parents, I will link to the recipes I used in the transcript, and I am making my famous smoked Pastrami Brisket (I have to affiliate link the whole book because this is where the recipe comes from)! Now, why would I go to all this trouble? For a few reasons. The first reason is that the first day of this new Biblical month is also the first day of the new agricultural year for the ancient Israelites. It’s the last day because the harvest is over and now it is time to celebrate before planting the next year’s barley crop before the end of the month—you see, that barley waits in the ground all winter before popping up so it can be harvested in the spring, when the year of festival months begins and the Passover is celebrated. We’ve talked about that before.

Another reason this day is very important is because it was the day that new kings would have their coronations. A coronation wasn’t the day that someone became the King (and nowadays there are Queens too), because they became the King on the day that their dad died, which is super sad for them even though they are getting to become the King. The coronation is the day that the celebration happened. Maybe you have been watching what is happening in England right now. Queen Elizabeth died this month, and her son Charles is the King now but no one wants to celebrate because the whole family is very sad. So, sometime next year, when everyone has finished mourning (which is what they call it when the family and friends of someone who has died are taking time out to be sad and to remember them, and to celebrate their life, because it is very hard to live a normal life when you are so sad)—but when a certain amount of time has passed, the entire country will celebrate having a new King and there will be big parties and people from all over the world will come. But right now, no one wants to celebrate. It was the same in ancient Israel too. Becoming the king meant that your dad had died. Having a party right away would be super messed up and so they would wait until the first day of the new harvest year when all of the fruit and veggies would be fresh and all the new animals who were born were old enough and fat enough to eat.

Of course, not every year would be a year where there would be a new king, and in fact it wouldn’t happen very often at all. There were just a few kings who reigned three years or less and quite a few who reigned for over forty years! One was even king for fifty-five years. Queen Elizabeth II was queen for over seventy years and so she is the only person most of the people of England would ever remember to be reigning over England. The word reign means to rule as a king or queen. You know who else the Bible says reigns over Israel? Over all of us? In Moses’s song, in Exodus 15, the shortest verse also says the most: “The Lord will reign forever and ever!” That’s right, the Lord, our God, is King over all of Israel—that’s what happened at Mt Sinai after God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt. He became their king! It wasn’t until after the time of the Judges that the people became so wicked that they demanded a king who was just a human being because they wanted to be like the other nations around them—the nations who needed human kings because their gods were useless. But, before that they celebrated on the first day of the Bible month of Tishri—it is called two things in the Bible, but it is never given a name like all the other festivals! So mysterious!

The Lord spoke to Moses: ²⁴ “Tell the Israelites: In the seventh month (that’s called Tishri), on the first day of the month, you get to have a day where all you do is rest, remembering (the great works of God for you) with teruah (blowing on the shofarot which are animal horns)—a holy gathering (which means that you can’t treat it like just a normal day). ²⁵ You must not do any of your normal daily work, but you must present a food offering to the Lord.”

What does that mean? A food offering to God? Does He eat? The Bible tells us all over the place that God is spirit and He has no need for food or sleep or anything like that so what gives? I am going to teach you a big phrase today but I will explain it and there won’t be a test later, thank goodness. That means if you don’t remember it tomorrow, it doesn’t even matter. That phrase is, brace yourselves, “cultural accommodation.” And it means that God would take something that meant something to people of the ancient world and He would use it to teach them something different about Him. Like, in other countries, the people actually thought their gods needed to eat because they were so totally pathetic that they would faint from hunger and even die if they didn’t get their sacrifices every day. But not our God, all He ever said was that the smell makes Him happy because His people are having a barbeque in His honor. The sacrifices that people brought for the festivals were very special. They weren’t all burnt to a crisp as a gift, because the people would give God the fat and the insides and they would eat the meat with their families—and the priests would get the animal skin, which could be turned into scrolls of the Bible books as they were written. Cool, eh? So, they were sharing the party with God—He was the guest of honor—even though He didn’t eat. But He could appreciate them coming to His party!

So, on this day, God was being celebrated as their King because they were remembering that day on Mt Sinai when He spoke from inside the dark cloud and His voice sounded like thunder and the people were so terrified that they told Moses to speak to God because they were way too scared to listen. When God gave them His commandments and they agreed to keep them, He became their king. And on the first day of the new agricultural year, they celebrated that. How do we know this was the first day of the agricultural year? Because God talked about that back in Exodus while Moses was carving the new tablets with the Ten Commandments! He gave these important instructions in Exodus 34:22: “Observe the Festival of Weeks with the firstfruits of the wheat harvest (that’s Pentecost or Shavuot, which was earlier this year), and the Festival of Ingathering at the turn of the agricultural year (which happened in the fall when there were three festivals in one month!).”

Because of these different descriptions of this important day, even though the Bible doesn’t give this holiday an official name, it is known by a couple different names. Some call it Yom Teruah, which means Day of Teruah, or shofar/trumpet blowing. And that is a perfectly fine name because it matches one of the descriptions—they were supposed to blow trumpets on that day so that they could remember what God had done for them in becoming their king and making them unique, special, and unlike any other group of people in the whole earth. But it has another name too, because that was the day when the new harvest year began and so that name is Rosh HaShanah, which means “head (or beginning) of the year.” And that was a weird time in the world for a new year celebration. The Egyptians had their new year in the summer when the Nile flooded. The Babylonians and Assyrians had their new year when the barley harvest happened in the Spring, it was called the Akitu festival (which means barley-cutting) and that was the time of year when they crowned their kings. So, when you hear Yom Teruah, Day of Trumpets, or Rosh Hashanah, they are all describing that same day—Tishri one, the first day of the seventh month, the beginning of the fall festival month! It was time to party!!

Just imagine all that farming work being done for the whole year—they had no tractors or sprinklers or anything like that. They had worked so hard and the harvest is in and they can celebrate because they have enough food to survive on for another year and who deserves all the credit? God, their king! Because of this, there is a very special focus on foods for this celebration. First of all, one of my favorite things is dipping apple slices in honey. Yesterday we went to the farmers market here in town and bought a big bag of fresh picked local honeycrisp apples and raw local honey. Just don’t eat too much or you might get sick! If you can’t get honey, you could do that with caramel sauce instead. I love that too. Remember that Israel was called the Land of milk and honey so of course celebrating the new year would involve eating honey! But what else did they eat?

This was the time of the year where they could eat all of what were called the “seven species” which the Bible talks about growing in the Land of Israel and specifically being a gift from God. Pay attention and see if you can figure out how many of these you have eaten. There’s barley, which I like to have in beef or vegetable stew, that’s a grain that the Israelites also made bread out of and especially if they were poor. How about wheat? We find wheat in most breads, and donuts, and tortillas and so many other things you see everyday. If you were wealthy in ancient Israel then you always ate wheat instead of barley but both were very important. Those are two of the seven species, but there were also many fruits! Have you ever had a fig? How about a Fig Newton? Those are my second favorite cookies after Nutter Butters, oh wait, there’s also coconut macaroons so Fig Newtons are my third favorite cookie. But if you cut open a fig, and they are extremely sweet, it looks pretty wild! That’s because a fig is actually an inside out flower, and a very yummy one! And their leaves are very itchy, some of them will give you a rash. Just ask Adam and Eve and they will tell you!

How about grapes? I bet you have had grapes and raisins too, because raisins are dried grapes. I love grape juice—how about you? Have you eaten pomegranate seeds or had a drink of pomegranate juice? It is very yummy and sweet but it is also tart. They can be a total mess though because the seeds are full of red juice that can stain your clothes. Still, if you are careful a pomegranate is a real treat. Dates are different, oh my goodness they are super sweet! You can’t even imagine how sweet they are, sweeter than cake frosting even. The last of the seven species is olives! I hated olives when I was a kid but now I love them, you can’t really eat them until you soak them in salt brine for a long time but once you do they are really awesome. But they can also be pressed to make oil out of for cooking but the olive oil was also used in the Temple to cook the bread offerings and for the Menorah lamp in the Temple. These were all very important in ancient Israel and they are still all grown there today!

But those aren’t the only things that people would eat for this holiday—they would also eat a lot of fish like sardines because the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea both provided the Israelites with very yummy fish. And even when they were in Egypt, they would eat fish and we know from hieroglyphics, that’s the most ancient Egyptian written language, that the fish they were eating and even wanting when they were in the wilderness, was tilapia! Tilapia is actually the oldest fish that we know people ate because there are pictures of them carved into Egyptian temples and tombs. They still fish them out of ponds along the Nile four thousand years later! Most of the tilapia where I live are farmed in big tanks but they originally came from Africa. They were so popular that you can find them on every continent now, except in Antarctica. If they were there, they would be ice cubes!

Now, you might ask, “Miss Tyler, why on earth would we want to celebrate a Jewish festival today since Jesus has come and the Temple is gone and everything?” Well, that’s a great question and I am super glad you asked, you guys are just too smart. In the Bible, we are told to celebrate these festivals forever because we are the people of God. These festivals—Passover, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets (Yom Teruah or Rosh Hashannah), Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement which we will learn about next week), and Sukkot (The Feast of Tabernacles) aren’t called festivals of the Jews in the Bible but festivals of the Lord! So, they are His parties where we celebrate everything He has ever done for us and on this particular festival we celebrate because when we accept Jesus as our Savior, God becomes our king too and not only the King of the Jews.

But how does Jesus fit into all of this? Well, in a very big way, actually. We know from very early in the Bible that God is the king over all of the children of Israel and not just their God. The other nations on earth had great many gods and sometimes those gods were kings over the other gods but they had a king that they could see and who would lead them in times of war and defend them if they were attacked. But when Israel stopped obeying God, and bad things happened because of it, they decided that they needed a human king and that usually didn’t work out very well but God told them that one day, there would be a king like no other, a king who obeyed Him perfectly and would rule over them forever. So after they lost their Kingdom and didn’t have kings anymore, the very wise people who studied the Hebrew Bible (because that’s all they had before Jesus came and for quite a while after) began to look for someone called the Messiah who would be God’s perfect king over them. They had lots of ideas about what kind of king the Messiah would be. Some thought he would be a religious leader, like a priest, but most believed that he would be a mighty warrior, killing all of Israel’s enemies so that they could be a glorious kingdom again like when David, Solomon, and Hezekiah were kings.

¹⁸Jesus came close and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. ¹⁹ So go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰  and teach them to do all the things I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28)

²⁴ Then (that’s after everyone who loves Jesus has come back to life) the end will happen, when Jesus hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when he abolishes all rule and all authority and power. ²⁵ For he must be King until he puts all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be gotten rid of is death. ²⁷ For God has put everything under his feet. Now when it says “everything” is put under Jesus, it is obvious that God isn’t going to be included in that. ²⁸ When everything and everyone has Jesus as their King, then Jesus himself will be obeying God, who made Jesus King, so that God may be all in all. (I Cor 15)

“These (really bad guys) will make war against the Lamb (Jesus), but the Lamb will conquer them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings.” (Rev 17:14)

And he (Jesus) has a name written on his robe and on his thigh: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. (Rev 19:16)

So then, on the first of Tishri, the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Teruah, Rosh Hashannah, the New Year, it is a day to celebrate the King and so although it might seem like sometimes we don’t have a king, the Bible says that we absolutely do! God made Jesus the King of the world (the king of us) when He rose from the dead and freed us from sin and death and made it possible for us to live the kind of lives where we can love people and love Him too! We have a King who isn’t just the King of Israel! He’s better than David and Solomon and Hezekiah and Josiah and all those guys combined! And so, what kind of celebration do you think we should have? Should there be costumes? Fancy clothes? Decorations? Your favorite foods? How about a parade and some music? The Bible talks about blowing horns but if you don’t have one you can sing songs and worship all day long!

In Bible times, they would have sung a lot of the Psalms, called Enthronement Psalms, that were written specially to honor God and the kings of Israel. Why not use pots and pans as drums and march through the house shouting Psalm 47? Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a jubilant cry. For the Lord, the Most High, is so awesome, a great King over the whole earth…God ascends among shouts of joy, the Lord, with the sound of a ram’s horn. Sing praise to God, sing praise; sing praise to our King, sing praise! Sing a song of wisdom, for God is King of the whole earth. God reigns over the nations; God is seated on his holy throne. The nobles of the peoples have assembled with the people of the God of Abraham. For the leaders of the earth belong to God; he is greatly exalted.

Psalm 95: Come, let’s shout joyfully to the Lord, shout triumphantly to the rock of our salvation!Let’s enter his presence with thanksgiving; let’s shout triumphantly to him in song. For the Lord is a great God, a great King above all gods. The depths of the earth are in his hand, and the mountain peaks are his.The sea is his; he made it. His hands formed the dry land.Come, let’s worship and bow down; let’s kneel before the Lord our Maker.For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the sheep under his care.

Psalm 100: Let the whole earth shout triumphantly to the Lord! Serve the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Acknowledge that the Lord is God. He made us, and we are his—his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, and his faithful love endures forever; his faithfulness, through all generations.

So, you can shout too! You can celebrate that God is our King and that He put Jesus in charge of everything and everyone. What better reason for a party could there be? When my sons were little, they used to take the cardboard tube out of the paper towel roll (after it was empty) and when they would talk through it, it made their voice sound like a horn! Maybe you can play music all day and dance! Maybe you can learn more about our King Jesus. I know—maybe you can sit around as a family talking about what it will be like when Jesus is here with us, and He is in Jerusalem ruling as King of the world. That will be a cause for celebration for sure and I bet there have never been better parties ever. All the world will be singing and dancing in the streets because we have a King who will never be cruel, or unfair, and no one will be hungry or treated badly. And we won’t cry anymore! I want you to be excited about Jesus being the King of kings and Lord of lords!

The days after our holiday are important too. They are called the days of awe and lead up to the holiest day of the year—Yom Kippur. That’s the day where the Temple got cleaned up in a special way. For the days before Yom Kippur, we think about all that we have done over the past year that we shouldn’t have. We say sorry when we have done wrong and we stop doing those things. And if we have hurt someone, we need to make things better again. Next week, we’re going to talk about how special the day is. I love you guys.

So, Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread are upon us!

I wanted to share my favorite part of the Passover seder – no it isn’t the food! It’s the Dayenu prayer! The version I read from in the video was taken from the website Haggadot.com, so definitely go and check it out. Catch the Maccabeats Dayenu video – it is very funny and watch their Les Miserables Passover video.

This week we are going to talk about Leviticus 23:40 and the shaking of goodly branches at the Feast of Sukkot! 

Here are the prayers in Hebrew and English:

Sorry about the video being so dark – for those of you familiar with my life this last week, things got crazy with my kid getting hurt and I didn’t think my lighting through well enough. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon.

Okay, so here we have all seven parts of my teaching series on Hannukah and why it is so important to understand. We start with the significance of the Temple, and the offerings that were given on feast days. Then we cover the events leading up to the Maccabean revolt and end up with the story of the first Hannukah. In the final video, I read from numerous accounts of Hannukah from I and II Maccabees, Josephus, and i even talk about the famous Hannukah argument between Hillel and Shammai in the first century BCE. If you want to just get the whole playlist on YouTube, here it is

Okay, here are the links to some of the resources:

I Maccabees (starting with Chap 1)

II Maccabees

Josephus

The Hannukah Anthology by Philip Goodman

and here are some of my favorite fun videos from the Maccabeats, a Jewish acapella group (I love acapella)

So here is part 2 and 3 of my Maccabean Revolt series. There will be one more installment before the beginning of Hannukah where we will talk about the very first Hannukah and what we know about the celebration in the following years. 

And here are some online versions of the resources I mentioned in the video – I am using different sites to let you know what is out there:

I Maccabees (starting with Chap 1)

II Maccabees

Josephus

The Hannukah Anthology by Philip Goodman

Did you know that when Christians talk about the Maccabean Revolt, they focus entirely on the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes who defiled the Temple, but when the Jews talk about it they often focus on the Hellenized Jews? Why is that? Well, the historical accounts make it clear that without the meddling of the Jews who wanted to be Greeks, even at the expense of the rest of the nation, Antiochus most certainly would have left Jerusalem and the laws of God alone! Antiochus was a pawn in local political wranglings that had been going on for some time – he still gets a lot of the blame, but he was instigated by traitors who had little or no love for God and so they are considered to be the true villains.

For fun, I am going to include a Hannukah song video that I enjoy. It is based on a Midrashic legend (meaning it isn’t true but is a story people tell to convey a concept of God’s miraculous provision) written hundreds of years later. The candelabra you see in the video is called a hanukkiah and is entirely different than a menorah. In the time before Yeshua (Jesus), the heads of the Pharisaic schools of thought, Hillel and Shammai, had an argument over how the lamp should be lit. Hillel argued that each night, a new candle should be lit, working up to eight on the last night. Shammai insisted that they should start with eight and work their way down to one on the last night. As in most things, Hillel won out in the end!

And here are some online versions of the resources I mentioned in the video – I am using different sites to let you know what is out there:

I Maccabees (starting with Chap 1)

II Maccabees

Josephus

The Hannukah Anthology by Philip Goodman

So this week is our fourth installment in the Backgrounds of the New Testament series but it is also the second installment in our series on Hannukah and the Maccabeean Revolt. We are going to talk about the pilgrimage olah, which is an important piece of Bible context from the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and we are also going to explore what exactly is meant by the phrase “coming before the Lord empty-handed.” It is a much misunderstood and abused verse because, like most laws in the Bible, no specific instructions are given as to how to fulfill that. So where do we find our answers? Well, interestingly enough, Paul gives us the exact definition in the Book of Acts – once we see that, you will be able to spot it hiding in plain sight throughout the Bible.

For those of you who never caught it last year, please take the time to watch my teaching on Vayikra last year – “What were the sacrifices really about?” Understanding how the ancient Israelites viewed the sacrifices is crucial to understanding the reasons for the Temple, and why it is being rebuilt – it is not for the reasons that most people think because they do not understand the purpose of the sacrifices!

This week I am so excited, as I love to teach about the Temple in Jerusalem. I have been studying the Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple for almost two years now – and I have just scratched the surface. I put the links to the site where I am learning from at the end of the video and I will include links here as well. It is very important for all of us to know why the Temple was so important in the Bible – important to the Israelites, important to God – and so important to Yeshua (Jesus) that he violently reacted when people disrespected it! Paul was almost killed just because some people thought he defiled it! So, we are going to find out why David was called a man after God’s own heart, what David and Moses had in common, and what God had to say about his Temple being in ruins after the exile when everyone else was living in houses.

If you are interested, this is the place where I learn about the Temple – not only is there a formal curriculum for gold-level subscribers, but there are also years worth of teachings and download about all sorts of very in depth topics such as the Feasts, eschatology, the writings of Paul, and one of my favorites is “The Heavens Rejoiced” – which proves from the Temple liturgies when Mary conceived our Messiah and when she gave birth to Him as well. My teacher is Joseph Good, and he is a Messianic believer who is well respected by the leaders at the Temple Institute in Jerusalem.

www.jerusalemtemplestudy.com

hatikva.org

So the video I wanted to make never turned out and so I started wondering if maybe it wasn’t supposed to be made. It happens, right? So instead, before sundown at the beginning of our “Season of Joy” I made this video encouraging parents who don’t know what to do but need to start making memories!

Let’s face it, we enjoyed Christmas and Easter, they were our times of great happiness – but then something happened. We found out about the Feasts of the Lord and desired to keep them with God – but the Bible really says almost nothing about how to to it. “Eat. drink. Don’t work. Worship with goodly branches. Build a Sukkah and dwell in it for 7 days.”

Can I be honest here? I wasn’t enjoying anything except the tent fort we made in the basement in frigid Minnesota! Why? Because Christmas and Easter were enjoyable because they were about shared family memories – something we didn’t know how to reconnect with in the Biblical Feasts because we felt like we started the race too late to even bother putting on our sneakers.

This year something changed and I looked at the experts who have been faithfully keeping these feasts for over 3000 years – the Jews. They go nuts enjoying this holiday, they look forward to it all year. I want that joy, and so this year I started looking into why and we changed some things about what we are doing, and involved the kids (who are now 15 and tower over me). I will share what we have learned over the course of the next year and next week so that you can prepare to celebrate the Feasts joyfully as well. But as for this year, I wanted to release this video about making memories and not feeling bad about starting small in keeping this very wonderful commandment.

Now, for fun, this is one of my favorite Maccabeats videos, I always laugh when I watch it: