Building on the Foundation

We write about a lot of different topics on this blog, and one of the most popular topics we've covered has been God's Holy Days versus the world's pagan holidays. If you're a long-time follower of the blog you've probably realized that we've covered all the holidays by this point (If you aren't, I'll link to the rest of those posts at the end). Well, almost all of them. There is one we haven't talked about, and, as I'm sure you can guess from the title, that one is Thanksgiving.  The question we want to look at today is whether or not it is okay for a Christian to keep Thanksgiving, or if, like the other holidays, it is simply a thin Christian veneer over a very evil and pagan holiday. Obviously, every day is a day of giving thanks to God for what He has done for us, but is declaring one day of the year as a special day to pause and come together with your family mean you don't give thanks the other days? No! It would be ludicrous to assume ...

  The title of this commentary poses a question uniquely for American readers, for Thanksgiving would appear to be a uniquely American holiday. Yet we may also observe that, as a harvest festival, it has parallels throughout the world, for nearly every nation, culture, and religion on earth celebrates harvest festivals. Almighty God, too, has His harvest festivals: the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Unleavened Bread marks the beginning of the barley harvest, as we’ve seen previously , and the Feast of Pentecost is “the firstfruits of wheat harvest” (Ex. 34:22). The Feast of Tabernacles, on the other hand, marks the end of harvesting: “Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep the feast of the LORD for seven days” (Lev. 23:39). For this reason, the Feast of Tabernacles is also described as “the Feast of Ingathering at the end [lit. “turning”] of the y...

  In Leviticus 23, we find, “And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Speak to the children of Israel, and say to them: “The feasts of the LORD, which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations, these are My feasts”’” (Lev. 23:1-2). The rest of the chapter follows with a list and description of each of God’s feast days. This seems pretty straightforward, but surprisingly there seems to be some controversy out there over which days are God’s feasts. So which days are they? First, it’s important to note that the NKJV translation of Lev. 23:2, which we just read, isn’t quite faithful to the Hebrew text. The Hebrew word translated “feasts,” moed (Strong’s # H4150 ), simply means, “an appointed time, place, or meeting.” A better translation would be, “The appointments of the LORD, which you shall proclaim to be holy convocations, these are My appointments.” Does it matter? Yes, a bit. For example, the Day of Atonement, a day on which “you shall afflict souls” (Lev. 23:27), a day of fastin...