Shape of the future

Some year it will be the last year. Some issue of WORLD will be the last issue. But how does the world in fact end, assuming Robert Frost is half right with “Fire and Ice,” and T.S. Eliot all wrong in forecasting “not with a bang but a whimper”? Surely it comes like a thief in the night for the unready, and surely no man knows the hour or the day. But is this all we can say? Do we peer into shadows and fog?

What if history is not shapeless and unknowable but has a shape? What if we are meant to know that shape, that we may be like the tribe of “Issachar, men who had understanding of the times” (1 Chronicles 12:32)? What if that clear outline is under our very noses, and broadly hinted at by our eminently Jewish Messiah when He says He came to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17)?

The Law and the Prophets ordained feast days that structured the Jewish year, the main ones being, sequentially: Passover, First Fruits, and Feast of Weeks in the spring; Trumpets, Day of Atonement, Feast of Tabernacles in the fall. Today we think them quaint. Some churches re-enact them for our cultural enrichment. Jesus, for His part, enacted them with studied deliberateness.

Yeshua, emphatically laying down His own life as He chose, chose to lay it down at Passover season and no other. Was it random that the Baptist called Him “lamb of God,” of all possible titles? Or that Paul writes “our Passover lamb” who was “sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7)? Or that on the very pre-Passover days when the high priest Caiaphas was inspecting a selected lamb for imperfections, the religious leaders were examining Jesus with questions?

Does the Jewish calendar give us clues about events to come? If Jesus in careful sequence has fulfilled the first three great Jewish feasts in seam-bursting fulfillment, why would we not expect Him to fulfill the other three?

First Fruits comes second, and corresponds to Jesus’ resurrection. An offering to God from the harvest, the ancient feast was celebrated the first day after the Sabbath falling during Passover week. No sooner did the priests finish sacrificing countless lambs on the temple mount than they would cross the Kidron Valley and cord the standing shocks of barley to be offered publicly three days later. Jesus, three noncoincidental days in the tomb, rose as the “firstfruits” (1 Corinthians 15:20), and with Him saints who came out of their graves and appeared to many (Matthew 27:53).

Next, the Feast of Weeks 50 days after Passover, like Pentecost—perhaps explaining the baffling lag time in an upper room in Jerusalem. No coincidence here either.

But wait. If human history is like a calendar of a year, that leaves us with still three Old Testament feasts not yet fulfilled, still future to us—Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles. These are the autumn celebrations in the Jewish annual cycle, coming after a gap of about four months from the completion of the spring feasts. Are we in that gap?

Now a word about patterns. I learned from Esther Meek, Christian philosophy and apologetics professor, that an integral part of the human act of knowing things, whether about God or our auto mechanics, is extrapolating the whole pattern of something from the part of it we know, in order to have assurance about the part still hidden (Longing to Know).

If Jesus in careful sequence has fulfilled the first three great Jewish feasts in seam-bursting fulfillment, why would we not expect Him to fulfill the other three? What do the Scriptures say? That Israel, which will never cease to be a nation before God (Jeremiah 31:36), which has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles comes in (Romans 11:25), will be the scene of the Lord’s return with trumpets, according to Matthew 24:31; 1 Corinthians 15:52; 1 Thessalonians 4:16; Revelation 11:15 (Feast of Trumpets). That a spirit of repentance and mourning as for an only son will be poured out on Israel, according to Zechariah 12:10-11 (Day of Atonement). That after the divine defeat of the rage of nations against Israel we shall see the ingathering of their remnant worshipping in Jerusalem from year to year, according to Zechariah 14:16 (Feast of Tabernacles).

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed, to us. With so much thus revealed, let us exchange a hazy future for the shape vouchsafed by prophets, and rejoice in expectation.

Email aseupeterson@wng.org