1408 - Exodus 13:4, Getting Ready for Resurrection Day-The naming of the months.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1408. Today I want to talk to you about the Hebrew calendar in this time of year, which is a wonderful time of year, it is springtime. And as you open up the Torah, as you open up the first five books of the Bible written by Moses, you immediately are confronted with a calendar. In the West, that is, in Western European life and in America and North America and Canada, we name everything. We name every day of the week. The Bible doesn't do that. It counts days by numbers. Sunday is the first day of the week. Monday is the second day of the week. Now many times in nations that have a Judeo Christian background, especially a Christian background, we look at Sunday as Shabbat. That is not accurate. It's the first day of the week. And Shabbat is, always has been, always will be what we call Saturday. It's the last day of the week. And the reason that we as followers of Jesus worship on the first day of the week, and many worship on Shabbat, or that is, they observe the day of creation that is celebrated in the Bible, Shabbat, Saturday, and take that day as a day of rest. And then Monday was the first day of the week. Shavuatov, that is, have a good week. That's always expressed early on the first day of the week. And the reason that we worship is not because we're commanded as followers of Jesus to worship. No, we don't have a precept telling us and a prescription telling us we need to worship them. We do that primarily for pattern, the pattern set by the New Testament believers after the day of Pentecost. That is when Jesus rose from the dead, is on the first day of the week after the Shabbat of Passover. And so we celebrate, and the Jews, for the first ten years, all the church was made up of Jewish believers. For the first eight to ten years there was no Gentile. And so they worshiped two days. That is, they gathered on Shabbat as they normally would as religious Jews and kept that day holy. But then they met on the first day of the week in order to celebrate the reality that Jesus is alive. Why? Because that's the day he came out of the grave. That's the day he rose from the dead. That's the day that he appeared to Mary and the other disciples. That's the very day that he met the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Later appeared to those who were gathering together in that private place with the doors locked and the windows barred. No doubt they were fearful and mindful that the Lord, his body, had disappeared, but they didn't know what had happened. I'm just telling you, the first day of the week was a special day, and throughout the New Testament, whether it's in the Book of Acts or throughout the epistles, you had the early disciples, Jews first, and then the Gentiles, meeting on the first day of the week. And so it was a special day. And so we have the days numbered, and then one day of the week, Shabbat, is named. The same ratio is true pretty much concerning the months. There were only two or three months that were named in the Torah throughout what we would call the Old Testament. That was the first month it was named Aviv. That's A V I V, as in Victor. But then in our many of our English Bibles, it is A B I B as in Bravo. So you have a Bib and a B. It's the same word, just a different pronunciation. But it is the word for spring. It's actually the fruit that comes or the flowering that comes with the barley harvest, because this was the beginning of the barley harvest. It was the spring of the year. That's when everything is green. Now, those of you who live in a desert climate like Southern California, that is a climate very much like the climate in modern day Israel. Israel is the most meteorologically diverse place on the planet in such a small confined area. Mount Hermon is 9,200 feet above sea level. The Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth, 1,300 feet or more below sea level, and all that's in the same country, in a close proximity to each other. You have weather of every kind, and in the wintertime it begins to rain. Late November or early December, the early rains come, the louder rains come, usually in late January, February, sometime like that. And so for a period of three months, sometimes four months, you have green. In other words, there's snow on the mountains, there's snow and white where it needs to be white. It's green where it needs to be green and brown where it needs to be brown. And so we don't know very much about that in most of the United States and in North America, but that's the reality of a desert country. This green time, this time that was lambing season in the beginning of the year, this springtime, that's when all the lambs were bred to be born all at the same time, because they had grass and the ewes would be able to graze for three months or so and produce plenty of milk for their lambs. And so it was a great time of the year, it was a happy time of the year, and that's the time of the year that God brought the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage. And you can read about this in the book of Exodus, but especially Exodus chapter 12, where the Passover was given, and that was on the fourteenth day of Aviv. That's what it was called in the Old Testament, in the Torah. And uh you can look, for instance, at chapter 13, God says, I want you to do this as the first day of the year. And I want you to do this every year. And in verse 4, he says, On this day you're going out in the month of Abib. That's what our English Bible says. Aviv, A B I V. That's a very common name for a young lady, for a girl, for a female in Israel and in uh modern Israelic culture, Aviv, Aviva. I know several that are named that in Israel. But uh all I'm saying is that the months as we have them, we name everything. We name all the days of the week, we name all of the months of the year, but that was not so in Jewish life until five hundred and eighty six BC. Now in five hundred and eighty-six BC, everything changed in the nation of Israel because that was the third and final phase of the Judean exile. The land of Judah, the people of Judah and the southern kingdom. The northern kingdom had already been decimated, scattered throughout the face of the earth at that time in 722 BC. Now, 586 BC, uh the Babylonians came in. They had already taken two groups of captives, Daniel in the first group that was taken captive in 605 B.C. 597. Uh you have uh Ezekiel taken away. Jeremiah was left in Jerusalem. 586. You have Nebuchadnezzar coming back in and he raised the city of Jerusalem. He destroyed it, destroyed the beautiful temple that Solomon built. They were officially in exile without a central place of worship. Now you've heard me talk about in podcasts the things that went on. This is a very sad time in the life of the Jewish people, but it's also a time of renewal and revival. Because in 538, when they began to come back in the land, they came back in with things that would stick with them until today. One of those is the names of the month. They were named after the Babylonian months. They all had pretty much pagan names, just like we have pagan names for our months, pagan names for the days of the week. Those are not Christian names, they're not Jewish names, they're not biblical names, they're ungodly Roman names by and large. And so that's the way we named our months, that's the way we named our days. And when the Jews were in exile, in captivity in Babylon, Aviv, the spring, the first month of the year, was changed to Nisan, N-I-S-A-N. And it's been that way ever since. And that's the months as they are called in Esther in Nehemiah, that period of time that was right after, within a hundred years after them coming back in, Esther first, then Ezra, then Nehemiah. So these months are called like that. So it's important that we understand what they are, but even more what took place during those days. And so in the days ahead, I'm going to be getting us ready for the great resurrection day. And in the podcast I'm going to cover a number of things having to do with time periods, having to do with the great providence of God that got us ready for the coming of Jesus and for his substitutionary, death, burial, and resurrection. I hope that in the days ahead you will come back to these podcasts so that I can share with you the events that God in his great providence used to get the world ready, not only for the birth of Jesus, but for his sinless life and his substitutionary death on our behalf and his wonderful, glorious resurrection, and ultimately his ascension to heaven. All of that happened in the spring of the year. We'll talk about that in the days ahead as we walk together on the way. This is Tony Crisp.

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Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's Questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.