Sunday School Teachers Meeting, 2004Eve, the HelperNovember 27th, 2004Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”  Genesis 1:26 We need to make an effort in order to come to know the Bible in detail, but it is not necessary to force an interpretation of it. There are many many parts of the Bible that are mysterious so if you start to force interpretations onto these matters, there will be no end to it. There are a tremendous number of books that focus on interpreting the book of Revelation in particular. There are people who read about the seven churches that appear in the introduction to the book of Revelation and think that even the people who are born again must go through the tribulation. The book of Revelation from chapter 1 is not related to the church in any way, since it presents Jesus’ second coming.  In that case, what are the seven churches? The seven churches in the book of Revelation are explained in the Old Testament. That describes how the Jews will go through the tribulation. The seven years that appear in the Revelation are prophesied in the Old Testament as the final period of the history of Israel. The history of the Jews depicted in the Bible offers an image of the process through which the Gentile church was to go, and the seven churches in the Revelation offer images of the phases through which the Gentile church has come. If you read carefully what it says about the seven churches in the book of Revelation, it might seem that no one could be saved. Each of the passages that depict the seven churches talks about “he who overcomes.” Jesus also said something similar: “he who endures to the end shall be saved” (Matthew 24:13). But all of this is in reference to the physical suffering that the Jews are fated to endure and is all based on the Old Testament. In Old Testament times, the Israelites persecuted the prophets who were entrusted with God’s word, and as a result they went through many trials themselves. One representative example of this is when the Israelites were taken as captives to Babylon, and then came back to their land. They will experience something similar during the final seven years of their history that lie ahead. When those seven years have been fulfilled, a new period of one thousand years—a time of sabbath rest—will begin, during which the Messiah will reign. There are people who do not know this and claim to have come to a certain realization while reading the book of Revelation. They say they themselves have received a revelation, but this is just not possible. There are also very many people who force interpretations of the book of Genesis, and write books about these interpretations. They pull up scientific information from various sources that have nothing to do with the Bible and claim they are correct without any doubt. When you are studying the book of Genesis, if you do not connect it with the many passages that come in the books of the Bible that follow it, it is easy to stray from the focal point of the Bible. There are many times when we ignore the law that was given to the Israelites. We tend to do this because in the letter to the Romans it says that by the law is the knowledge of sin, and we have been forgiven for our sins through Jesus Christ who fulfilled all the requirements of the law. For this same reason, we tend to skim through books like Leviticus and Numbers when we are reading the Bible. Once we get past Exodus chapter 20 we lose interest. We find Leviticus difficult to understand and have no idea what it is saying, and we find the book of Numbers even less interesting. We might find passages like the account of the bronze serpent intriguing, but when we come to long passages that tell us how many people were in which tribes, we lose all interest. Then it talks about how inheritances are to be passed down, and what was to be done when there were only daughters in a family, and we become bored once again. Yet, all these accounts are actually related to the life of the one Man, Jesus. Now, as we turn to the fifth and sixth days of the creation, you will find it impossible to understand if you do not first understand Leviticus chapter 23. Leviticus chapter 23 talks about the feasts the Israelites were to keep. First it explains the Feast of the Passover, then the feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Firstfruits, the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles.  The point to keep in mind here, is that before describing these feasts in Leviticus chapter 23, Moses spoke first about the Sabbath. Moses began by announcing that these are “the feasts of the Lord.” Then he said, “Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest” (verses 2-3). Before speaking about the feasts, he began by speaking about the Sabbath. Then when he went on to speak about the seven feasts, we find repeated reference to the day on which no work was to be done: days of sabbath rest. The Jews have been keeping the seven feasts in the course of their history. They have been keeping the feast of the Passover every year, but God has told the church that Christ died as the Passover lamb (see 1 Corinthians 5:7). The Jews had been observing these seven feasts very closely and yet the New Testament describes as the “Passover lamb” the person they despised more than anyone else.  There is another point we need to consider here. Did Jesus die on the day of the Passover, or had the Jews been keeping the day of Jesus’ death as their feast of the Passover? As I said before, God’s time is expressed in our human world in the form of a 24-hour day. Similarly, the Jews were simply keeping the feasts, including the feat of the Passover because of what was going to happen to Jesus when the day and the hour came. The feasts observed by the Israelites in the course of their history reflected the things that had to happen to Jesus. It is much easier for us to understand the meaning of these feasts if we read the Bible already knowing how Jesus lived and how He died. Jesus was sacrificed as the Passover lamb, and then He rose from the dead as the firstfruits before God, the first Son. The Jews commemorate this in the feast that has the name of the Feast of Firstfruits. Over a period of forty days after He rose from the dead, Jesus explained to His disciples about the kingdom of God, and then He ascended into the third heaven. Ten days later—precisely fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead—the Holy Spirit came down to this earth. The Feast of Pentecost was fulfilled in Jesus and that marked the beginning of the age of the church which had not been in existence before that time. Then there is the Feast of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement. This is what it talks about in the book of Revelation. The Feast of Tabernacles will be observed at the time of the thousand-year kingdom. We read about this in the book of Isaiah chapter 2. But when you read the Bible, do you find it saying when Jesus died? On a Friday. Which day of the week did He rise from the dead? It was a Sunday. In the book of Jonah, how long does it say that Jonah was in the belly of the big fish? It says very clearly that he was there for “three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17). And how long was Jesus in the tomb? Since He died on Friday and rose from the dead on Sunday, that does not make three days; it is just two full days. In that case, it does not add up. If we think about this in our human way, there is definitely a day missing.  As Jesus hung on the cross, however, the skies went dark. The Bible says, “Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over

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