Dennis Tuuri

# Reformation Covenant Church Sermon Transcript
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Exodus 23:10-17. In six years thou shalt sow the land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof. But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still, that the poor of thy people may eat, and what they leave, the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard. Six days shalt thou do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest, that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thine handmaid, and the stranger may be refreshed.

And in all things that I have said unto you, be circumspect, and make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out of thy mouth. Three times thou shalt keep a feast unto me in the year. Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread. Thou shalt eat unleavened bread seven days as I commanded thee in the time appointed of the month Abib. For in it thou camest out from Egypt, and none shall appear before me empty.

And the feast of harvest, the firstfruits of thy labors, which thou hast sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labors out of the field. Three times in the year all thy males shall appear before the Lord thy God.

I love and glory. Blessing on my praise and God. Thank you. And I hear you say that are true of what we’ll be saying today in terms of resurrection, in terms of coming into the holy city of God into Zion.

You’ll notice though that the fifth verse did begin with “Loud Hallelujah to the Lord, to the Lamb” rather from all below and all above. Hopefully next time we’ll sing this song will be a little louder, more in keeping with the words. Next week we’ll have an opportunity to practice that same tune although to different words again. You’ll notice that with many of the songs we sing the words will change but the tune remains the same.

That’s because we only know certain selected tunes. And so what I’m doing is making some of the words that are tremendous words written by men of God over the years fit to the tunes that we know. That’s in keeping with what we believe is worship before God. We come together to practice singing songs. We come together to sing the songs that God has taught us already and typically responsive to him.

And that’s why we don’t sing new tunes on Sunday. And that’s why we’ll also need to have a few more days scattered throughout the year learning new tunes at somebody’s house in the evenings.

We continue this morning with our long series of talks through the confessional statement of Reformation Covenant Church. We have provided this morning as we have for a number of months now an outline of what we’ll be talking about.

It is interesting that if you read the early church fathers, they use three terms specifically to refer to the Christian Sunday. Those terms are the first day, the Lord’s day, and the eighth day. Some examples of this: Beckliff and Scott in their book “The Christian Sunday,” which is a very good book although out of print, remarks on this in the following paragraph. “The eighth day then is generally an eschatological name in orthodox circles. For instance, its first appearance in Barnabas 15 is as the day which follows the seventh day, the true Sabbath, when God will have restored all things and brought them to rest, the final age. Yet it is connected with Sunday and quoting now from that early epistle of Barnabas. ‘Wherefore we keep the eighth day for rejoicing in the which also Jesus rose from the dead.’”

I’ll read a quote now from Augustine along this same line.

Now, one of the things the early church fathers recognized and thought about somewhat was the fact that the seventh day of the creation had no end to it as the other six days had an evening and a morning. The seventh day had no evening. It had no end. And so they had the concept that the seventh day merged into the eighth day. And you’ll see a note of that in this quote from Augustine.

Augustine says: “The Lord’s day, however, has been made known not to the Jews, but to Christians, by the resurrection of the Lord, and from him it began to have that festal character which is proper to it. For the souls of the pious dead are indeed in a state of repose before the resurrection of the body, but they are not engaged in the same active exercises as shall engage the strength of their bodies when restored. Now, of the condition of active exercise, the eighth day, which is also the first day of the week, is a type because it does not put an end to that repose, but glorifies it. For with the reunion of body and soul, no hindrance to that soul and its rest returns.”

Again, the last line of Augustine’s “The City of God,” he says the following: “The eighth and eternal day consecrated by the resurrection of Christ and prefiguring the eternal repose not only of the spirit but also of the body. Then we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.”

Now, why did these early church fathers talk about the eighth day? What is there in what they said that may be correct biblically speaking? Does one have to have numbers colored spectacles to see an emphasis on the eighth day in the scriptures, alien presuppositions? I don’t think so.

One of the reasons we read the early church fathers, a correct reason, is that they obviously were as plagued with difficulties in their cultural context as other scholars were. But one of the things that’s peculiar to the early church fathers is that they were closer to the milieu, or the social environment, which was the origins of the new covenant writings. Okay.

Now one of the specific things that you’ll find reading the church fathers is that they had a tremendous understanding, as part of that milieu, as part of that environment in which the scriptures were completed and which was the birth of the church, of the Old Testament. And it is sad but true that our social and cultural milieu today excludes an understanding of the Old Testament.

In the early church, there were divisions between those people that thought we had a short Bible and those people that took the entire word of God as the inspired and authoritative word from God who spoke to man in it. Today, we have churches that deny two-thirds of the Bible or more. And yet, because of the laziness and slothfulness of the church of America today, those churches get by with nearly hardly even an outcry from the Orthodox Christians that find themselves in the context of those churches.

What I’m saying is that if you had the same thing going on in the first couple of centuries, the churches you had today, there would have been dissension. There would have been discussion and indeed there were. And so there were sects that said specifically that the old covenant is not for Christians. Today we have that by implication. In the early centuries of the church, we had that explicitly stated and the church fathers battled that and knew that enemy well.

The church of today does not understand that enemy or refuses to acknowledge the presence of that enemy, but it is with us anyway. What I’m saying is that if we understood the old covenant, we’d understand what the early church fathers said about the eighth day. But we have a scarcity of knowledge of the Old Testament, which we’ll try to correct to a certain degree today by looking at the Old Testament occurrences of eighth days.

And I think we’ll see in the Old Testament references to eighth days, a prefiguring of the great eighth day to be ushered in by the Messiah, the covenant mediator, Jesus Christ. And remember that Jesus Christ—one of my favorite Easter passages that people have preached on throughout the years is Jesus’s sermon on the road to Emmaus and how in his resurrected body he was teaching the disciples that the whole of the Old Testament, the whole of the Old Testament, taught and witnessed to him.

And I think if we keep that in mind today as we go through some of these occurrences of the eighth day, it’ll be a tremendous encouragement to us in the faith to understand what Jesus has accomplished. And then it will also show us a great presupposition: that the Sabbath day itself underwent a change from the seventh to the eighth day. And that’ll become more clear as we go through these three points.

There are a number of references to the eighth day in the old covenant. We won’t go through them all, but I would like to touch on a few of them. But before we reach the three points of the main outline, one more reminder of what we said over the last three or four weeks.

The Sabbath, as we’ve seen from the Decalogue and its recitation in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, is an ordinance that teaches two things: one, creation; the second, redemption. Exodus 20 says it’s a creation ordinance. Deuteronomy 5 says it’s a redemption ordinance. And those things of course are linked together. And it’s important that we keep those in mind as we look at what we’re going to talk about today.

I know I’ve said this several times but when we repeat things we hopefully get them drilled into us a little bit more and understand this: Because it’s a redemptive ordinance, it has ceremonial aspects to it. Okay?

There are redemptive historical reasons for what occurs in the Old Testament in terms of the Sabbath festival and the Sabbath year. What I mean by that is that the history that the Old Testament and New Testament gives us is a redemptive history post-fall. God, through a series of his historical acts, brings his people to an ever-increasing knowledge of what will be the full redemption offered in the Messiah, the covenant keeper, Jesus Christ.

And so when we look at those things that have ceremonial or redemptive aspects to them, they teach in the old covenant a coming redemption that is greater than what is found in the old covenant. And so things change: signs change. Circumcision changed to baptism. The meals of the Passover and other Old Testament meals change to communion. And that’s because these are redemptive historical progressions in the history of the scriptures that God gives us.

You see, it’s an unfolding, as it were, of God’s true redemptive plan little by little to the covenant community. And this alone—since the Sabbath is a redemptive ordinance and has ceremonial aspects to it—this alone then should set up a presupposition in our mind that there would be some change to occur as we go from the old covenant Sabbath into the new covenant Lord’s day. The fact that it’s a redemptive historical ordinance means that there’s very likely a change going to happen in that Sabbath day.

Okay, let’s go then. Now having said that as a background, let’s go to the three points of our main talk as evidenced on your outline. First we’ll talk about sacrificial prefigurements of the eighth day. Second we’ll talk about old covenant death-to-life ceremonies and the eighth day. And third we’ll look at the actual Sabbatical feasts themselves and their looking forward to an eighth-day Sabbath.

**First: Sacrificial Prefigurements**

It is told us in Exodus 22:30 and Leviticus 22:27 that the sacrificial maturity of animals did not occur until the eighth day. And specifically what the scriptures say is that the firstborn thing to be sacrificed will be with its mother for seven days and then in the eighth day it’s acceptable now as a sacrifice to Jehovah as a sacrificial animal.

Commenting on this, Kuyper says the following: “This maturity in the sacrificial animal was not reached till after the lapse of a week, that period of time sanctified by the creation.”

Okay. So there’s a new creation as the animal reaching a mature stage. Matthew Henry quotes an old Jewish saying that this eighth-day maturation of the sacrificial animal was because the Sabbath sanctifies all things and nothing should be offered to God till at least one Sabbath had passed over it.

In any event, whether or not you agree with those specific interpretations, there is a definite identification of the seven days throughout the scriptures with the seven days of creation. And so there’s an identification of the animal, the birth of the creature with those seven days of creation and then a maturing into its ability to be used for worship in the old covenant.

Now, that’s fine as far as it goes. But what it really gets interesting is if we see the implications of that in terms of the other eighth day occurrences referring to Sabbath or referring to the sacrificial system in the old covenant. What we see now from Leviticus 22:27—and I won’t take the time to read it right now—is that there’s a sacrificial maturity of the thing being sacrificed that occurs on the eighth day.

Okay. Now, let’s look at the second element of this sacrificial system that we have in the outline. Leviticus 9:1. Leviticus 9:1 says the following: “And it came to pass on the eighth day that Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel. And he says unto Aaron, ‘Take a young calf for a sin offering.’”

This tells us that the priests themselves were going to work or minister in the temple or the tabernacle in this case. Their consecration was preceded by seven days again of consecration to God. Their ability to perform their side of this sacrificial rite, the giving of the animal, also was followed by a week of maturation or consecration of them to God.

Aaron and his sons were locked up, as it were, for seven days and Moses—the mediator, remember now, between God and man and really between God and Aaron as well—God spoke to Moses mediated to God Aaron. Then Moses is a picture of the covenant mediator Jesus Christ. Moses goes through a series of seven days of sacrifice to make consecration for the priest, for Aaron and his sons.

Now we always see a lot of symbolism between the high priest and Christ and that’s certainly true but here we see symbolism between the mediator Moses and the coming mediator, Jesus Christ, who would affect full covenant mediation for the people. And in this work then, the priests—the men that are going to offer up God’s sacrifices on his altar—are consecrated through seven days, another week. And they’re not able to perform their duties until the eighth day.

Matthew Henry says of this: “This work of consecration lasted seven days for it was a kind of creation.”

Now in Hebrews 10:19, this is referred to, I believe, by the writer of the book of Hebrews by saying the following: “Jesus by one offering perfected forever those that were sanctified.”

Okay. Hebrews 10:19. Jesus through one offering perfects forever those who were sanctified. And we then, because of the one offering of Jesus Christ prefigured in the old covenant work of Moses, now are able to come to God’s very presence on the Lord’s day and offer up spiritual sacrifices to him.

But any event, now we have two pieces of the puzzle. The sacrificial animal could not be offered till the eighth day. The person sacrificing the animal had to undergo a week of consecration and his work begins on the eighth day as well.

Then, okay, but there’s more than just this. By the way, it’s important to recognize in this context, in verse four of this same passage of Leviticus 9, he says, “I’ll stick a bullock and a ram, peace offerings, meat offering for today the Lord will appear unto you.”

This was the entrance of the priests and all the elders of the people of God, the elders of the covenant community, into sacrificial work on the eighth day. And it’s on that eighth day now, not the Jewish Sabbath, but the eighth day as it were, the Sabbath, the eighth day completion of that work. It’s on that eighth day that God’s appearance, the presence of God that they come into, is promised to them. Okay?

They’re ushered into the presence of God on the eighth day and it’s with the elders also joining in that worship before God. Worship is spiritual work to God and so they enter into the day of worship here on the eighth day.

Now the third element of the sacrificial system is the temple itself. You had the thing being sacrificed. You had the priests. You had the temple in which the sacrifice occurred. And in 2 Chronicles 29:17 there is a reconsecration of the temple. This is during the time of Hezekiah. And the temple has been desecrated and polluted. And the temple has to be cleaned and made ready now for spiritual sacrifices.

And we find from 2 Chronicles 29:17 that the temple itself must also undergo a week of consecration to be ready to be used on the eighth day again. Okay, we see a pattern developing here.

Actually there were two eighth days in the Hezekiah passage if you’ll read it out later for yourselves in 2 Chronicles 29. The first was the sanctification of the courts themselves, the outer courts of the temple. That sanctification or consecration, purging out the uncleanness, occurred for seven days. On the eighth day it was ready. Another seven days then they worked on the inside of the temple itself. And on the eighth day now the temple is ready and sacrificial sacrificing again begins. Not on the seventh day but on the eighth day specifically.

2 Chronicles 29:17 tells us that specifically. The verse reads: “Now they began on the first day of the first month to sanctify and on the eighth day of the month came they to the porch of the Lord. So they sanctified the house of the Lord in eight days and in the 16th day of the first month they made an end.” Two series of eights.

So now the temple itself is cleaned up and consecrated just like the animal had to go through a period of consecration. The high priest went through a period of consecration. Temple itself now goes through a period of consecration lasting eight days—seven days. On the eighth day sacrifice is going to begin again.

Now remember that the temple—and we don’t have time to look up all these references—but the temple of course was according to the picture that had been given to the people of God from heaven. So the temple represented the holy of holies, the presence of God, heaven being in the presence of God. But the outer courts also symbolize the whole earth.

And when the temple is destroyed—as Reverend Chilton explained at some length in his book and again a couple of weeks ago—that temple is a symbolic destruction, a decreation as it were, death of the old heavens and the old earth. And so now we have a reconsecration of heaven and earth. And that reconsecration, ready to be worshiped, ready for the people of God to worship God again, is that consecration lasting seven days and completed on the eighth day.

So now we’ve got the animal, the sacrificer, the temple itself, but there’s an altar that the sacrifice has to occur on. And that’s our fourth point: in Ezekiel 43:27, we read that sanctification of the altar also occurred on the eighth day.

Ezekiel 43:27 says: “And when these days are expired, it shall be that upon the eighth day and so forward the priest shall make their burnt offerings upon the altar and your peace offerings and I will accept you, says the Lord God.”

The altar itself goes through a period of consecration and purification which ends up with an eighth day fulfillment when sacrifices can again begin on the altar.

Now this completes the eighth day anticipatory picture of the sacrificial system itself. And what it shows us is the sacrificed animal, the priests doing the sacrificing, the elders who accompany and who really are—it’s their sacrifices as well through the identification with the animals—the temple itself and the altar on which the sacrificing occurs. All those four elements of the old covenant sacrificial system, which was a picture of the worship service of the new covenant when we come before God with sacrifices of praise, with giving of our firstfruits and offering to him, all that was acceptable not on the seventh day, the Sabbath of rest (when there were two sacrifices under the sacrificial system), but the sacrificial type in the old covenant pointed to an eighth day realization of coming into the presence of God and offering up our sacrifices to God.

And so the sacrificial system itself teaches an anticipation of the eighth day as the acceptable day of worship when the sacrifices are acceptable to God, when the offerings are acceptable to God, and when the very temple itself in which God chooses to dwell—which in the new covenant of course is his church—is acceptable to God. All those things occur on the eighth day as a prefigurement of full redemption to come in Jesus Christ and that providing a day, an eighth day of worship before him in which we offer up spiritual sacrifices.

The eighth day services in which we offer up to God praise—sacrifices of praise ourselves—we as mature sacrifices, we are priests now offering up ourselves on the eighth day, the Lord’s day, offering up prayers meeting in the special eighth day sanctuary of the people, brought into holy convocation into God’s very presence. Christ’s body, his church, is now his presence being ushered into the very holy of holies.

All of this is based on the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. The old temple system was not sufficient to accomplish true worship before God. And it pointed to a new heaven, a new earth, a new temple, a new people built not with hands but with the death and resurrection, the death, burial, and resurrection, the decreation, as it were, and recreation of man in Jesus Christ, the covenant mediator.

Aaron and his sons were locked up, as we said before, seven days until atonement could be made for them. And you find that in Leviticus 8:33-34. Aaron and his sons were removed from the presence of God, as it were, for a full week, ushered back into an eighth day.

The Old Testament then, we can see, is in prefigurement here: it was locked up as well. The people of God were locked in the Old Testament outside of the presence of God until the great and final eighth day to come in which the covenant people of God would be ushered into the very presence of God.

Remember God said he would promise to appear to the people on that eighth day when the priests offered fire before him. Now Hebrews 12:28 confirms this because it tells us that we’re to offer to God now acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. Hebrews 12:28 tells us God has fitted us for service.

Now the eighth day has been ushered in and we come into the very presence of God, especially on the eighth day now, as a special service to the Lord’s day, and we offer up what is to be acceptable reverence and awe acceptable service before God.

Remember what we do here at the end of the sermon and after we conclude the sermon portion of this service—we come forward with our tithes and offerings, don’t we? And when we do that, we’re indicating we’re giving ourselves to God. And Romans 12 tells us we’re to offer ourselves as to God. That’s acceptable worship. That’s acceptable sacrifice. And it’s made acceptable because it occurred on the eighth day, the Lord’s day, which was prefigured by the acceptable sacrifices of the Old Testament.

Remember here that God had promised his presence and indeed in Leviticus chapter 9, at the end of the chapter, God does appear as Aaron and his sons come forward on the eighth day. “Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation and came out and blessed the people. And the glory of the Lord appeared unto all the people. And there came a fire out from before the Lord and consumed upon the altar the burnt offerings and the fat. Which when the people saw, they shouted and fell on their faces.”

They’re worshiping here. The word for worship of the old covenant consistently means to get down on your face before God. God promises to appear before the people on the eighth day. God appears before the people on the eighth day and his appearance is manifested by fire coming down from heaven and consuming what’s on the altar. The people see that and they recognize the acceptability of their sacrifice before God now on the eighth day and they fall down and worship before God.

And so Hebrews 12 tells us to offer up acceptable sacrifices. We’ve been fitted for that. Why? Because our God is a consuming fire. Okay? Picturing again this coming down of God in fire.

It’s interesting by the way that this fire of course is God’s special fire. And David Chilton, when he was here, talks about Nadab and Abihu offering up strange fire—fire that didn’t originate, as it were, from the throne room of God to light the sacrifices with. Now the reason I bring that up, besides a nice little curiosity, is this: it helps us to remember to refocus, to focus what is correct about reality.

Now, we would think that God’s presence is zapping down this lightning bolt from heaven and this fire to consume what’s on the altar. We’d think that was pretty strange fire, right? But God’s reality says, “No, that is fire. That’s normative fire.” Okay? And what’s strange is when man attempts apart from God to offer up acceptable services to God. That’s the strange part of it.

You see, it helps us to understand that reality is not on the basis of what necessarily our eyes see and are in the fallen creation that’s around us. Reality is given to us by God in the scriptures. And he wants us to see that our acceptable sacrifice is really acceptable because Jesus has come on the eighth day and now we can offer up acceptable sacrifices to God who is a consuming fire and not strange fire. Okay.

So the old covenant sacrificial system itself, with the thing being offered, with the offerer, with the temple that was going to be offered in and with the altar it was going to be offered on, all prefigured an eighth-day acceptable sacrificial worship service to God. And that prefigured then the change of this day, as we were talking about, of the Sabbath from the seventh day to the eighth day.

And we meet on the eighth day now to offer up this acceptable sacrifice to God as we’re instructed and commanded to do by the very word of God in Hebrews 12.

But secondly, there’s another system here in the old covenant that taught the eighth day. And that’s the system that speaks of death to life.

**Second: Old Covenant Death-to-Life Ceremonies and the Eighth Day**

Old covenant death-to-life ceremonies prefigured and looked to an eighth-day resurrection and an eighth day then new creation of man in which we would come together in convocation before God. We’ll just look at two things here. There’s many more verses than this that refer to all these things. We’ll just look at two though.

First of all, the new creation of circumcision, performed on the eighth day, prefigured the eighth-day resurrection. Leviticus 12:3 and Genesis 17 tells us that circumcision was commanded to be done on the eighth day of the child’s life.

Now, there is some reason there to believe that there’s some correspondence between that eighth day of the child and the eighth day, the acceptable sacrifice animal coming to maturity on the eighth day. And that would certainly be true, as we said earlier, when we come and when we give our firstfruits, we’re really giving ourselves to God. So that’s true.

But I think there’s a bigger picture behind all this. When God comes to Abram to give him the sign of circumcision as the sign of the covenant, God now identifies himself by a new name to Abram: El Shaddai, God the mighty one. By this God is declaring his ability to perform his promises in spite of nature’s presenting no prospect of the fulfillment of the promises that God gives to man and nature having no power to secure the promises.

In Romans 4:19, commenting on the giving of the covenant sign of circumcision to Abram, it says that Abram’s own body was dead and Sarah’s womb was dead. We’re talking about two dead people here in terms of age. Nature is unable to provide life to these people by means of physical seed. They’re dead. And God comes to Abram and says, “I’m El Shaddai, able to perform what I have told you I’m going to do.” And he promises him a seed. He promises him a physical child. And he gives him at that time the eighth-day circumcision. And he says, “This is a sign of the covenant between me and you, this covenant that God will perform that man and nature can’t perform.”

What we have in circumcision then, in its very giving of God in that passage in Genesis 17, is a death-to-life example or illustration of the resurrection to come in the future. Abram, through the sign of circumcision, as it were, cuts off his ability, declares his own death in terms of nature to produce acceptable seed before God.

The circumcision sign is applied to the very organ that men have been given by God to create, to produce life, to propagate and so it becomes then a symbol of the cutting off of the vitality of man or the life of man. And so circumcision is a death to the man. But God gives him that sign because God himself is going to fulfill the promises that nature can’t fulfill.

And you either accept the sign of the covenant in circumcision and the death that’s figured in that as a token of God’s giving his own son to die for our sins eventually. Or if you reject that—what happens to you? God tells Abram right here in Genesis 17: if you reject that new covenant, that new creation, you’re cut off from the community, killed. You either accept the symbolic death of your own flesh, recognizing the new life to come in Jesus Christ, or you really die in your flesh.

Okay? There are only two choices. You either cut off a small token portion of mankind, or you yourself are cut in half the way the sacrificial animals were cut in half as Abram did according to what God had instructed him to do.

And this is why Abram and Sarah at this particular point in time—God, El Shaddai, perform what he’s going to do—promises a new son, gives him sign of circumcision, death to life. And then what does God give them? He gives them a new name: Abraham, Sarah. Why? Because they’re new people.

This circumcision then is a sign of death to life. And it occurred when? On the eighth day. Circumcision shows that the act stood for the destruction or decreation or death of man and the coming recreation of man. When? On the eighth day.

Now, this is—you might think I’m being a little bit speculative here—but this is clearly spelled out in the New Testament. In the new covenant, there are three references in the New Testament scriptures that talk about how circumcision doesn’t avail anything, availeth nothing.

In 1 Corinthians 7:19, we’re told that circumcision is nothing and that uncircumcision is nothing but the keeping of the commands of God. In Galatians 5:6, we’re told, “For in Jesus Christ, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but what? Faith which worketh in love.”

Galatians 6:15 completes this three-fold witness to what circumcision by telling us the following: “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but what? A new creation.”

Circumcision was a sign of the new creation. It didn’t guarantee it. Baptism availeth nothing if people don’t understand and accept the salvation offered in Jesus Christ apart from their own works. It wasn’t the work that did anything, but he’s saying what the work really meant was that you had a new creation in being, that new creation was going to be faith working in love which would result in the keeping of God’s commandments.

I mean if you find people that don’t keep God’s commandments, what’s it mean? It means their baptism doesn’t avail anything, does it? But anyway, these verses tell us specifically that circumcision prefigured a resurrection, death to life, and that life now is characterized by faith working in love which resulted in keeping of God’s commandments.

John 7:23. Jesus said, “If men receive circumcision on the Sabbath, why are you upset when I make the whole of the man whole? If he can receive circumcision on the Sabbath to keep the law of God, here I am bringing about the very creation, the recreation as it were, it symbolized by the healing of people, the new creation of man, the total healing of them that circumcision pointed to. Now, how come you’re going to get mad at me? I’m bringing in what circumcision pointed to do?”

That’s what Jesus is saying in John 7:23.

Colossians 2:13 talks about “in whom we also were circumcised with the circumcision made without hands.” What does it say? “And putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ.” See, killing that old body, moving on into new life in Jesus Christ. Cutting off the body of death, moving into the body of life, the recreation given to us in Jesus Christ.

That’s what circumcision is. And Colossians goes on, of course, to say that because this covenant has now matured historically, redemptively, that covenant sign of circumcision is now replaced in Colossians by baptism. Baptism: death and resurrection. Same thing being taught. Decreation of man, death of man, new creation of man, birth of man. Very clearly pointed out that the correlation between circumcision and baptism is so clear in Colossians.

If you understand what circumcision was all about, it didn’t just teach a theological formulation of justification by faith. It taught death and resurrection on the basis of God’s being El Shaddai, able to perform what he had promised. It’s a tremendous, tremendous thing.

Now, one more thing needs to be said about circumcision. God said: “This is the covenant, okay, that you circumcise everybody. If you don’t circumcise them, they’re cut off. They’re ripped in half. They’re killed, as it were, which is what I’m avoiding with you by giving you this covenant sign of circumcision.”

There are only two acts of man in the old covenant which are specifically stated by God to be covenant signs, saying “this is a sign of the covenant perpetual throughout generations. This embodies, as it were, what it teaches the very covenant itself.” One is circumcision. We can see why of course: death to life and that’s the covenant work of Jesus Christ to come.

What’s the other sign? You know why? It’s the Sabbath. God says the Sabbaths are the sign of the covenant between him and his people forever. Okay? And if we believe in the continuity of the covenants, we believe that as people were circumcised, we should darn well better get our kids baptized and as early as possible. And I think there’s much reason to do it on the eighth-day worship services we have.

And if we believe there’s continuity in the covenants and if we believe because of that baptism is important to us because of its now replacing the covenant sign of circumcision in this redemptive historical pattern of God, what should we think about Sunday? Do we think that it’s going to be done away with somehow?

If we think that, then why don’t we say the same thing about circumcision? If we have new creation now and no need anymore to keep a day, one day out of seven, the eighth-day worship to God because of the redemption that’s been accomplished in Jesus Christ, why for heaven’s sake do we keep the sign of baptism?

You see, they’re parallel. The fathers understood that. It may seem strange—I read last week about the octagonal baptistries of the first-centuries church and how they did that because circumcision and baptism were eighth-day occurrences. Eighth day, Lord’s day, death to life—may sound a little strange to you, but if you see this in the context of the scriptures’ plain teaching that those two covenant signs of the old covenant were circumcision and the Sabbath, both those signs that have been prefigured, death to life as it were, restored, changed, at least coming into the new covenant realization of Jesus Christ, then you’ll see why they made correspondence between circumcision and the eighth-day worship service.

It’s so plain once you just go back to the Old Testament and look to see what God had taught in them. The essence of circumcision is kept: what it taught, death to life. The essence of the Sabbath then also will be kept in the new creation with a new day of rest. Both circumcision and baptism, seventh day, eighth day, based upon redemption—their essence is kept. The sign is changed to indicate the fullness of the redemptive historical realization of what has been accomplished in Jesus Christ.

The second Old Testament death-to-life ceremony we want to look at has to do with what? Well, there’s several I put together here and I don’t think I put it on your outline, but Leviticus 14:10 talks about leprosy and the man who is ceremonially dead because of leprosy. Leviticus 15:14 and 15:29 talk about uncleanness due to emissions from the body. Numbers 6:10 talks about the Nazarite, okay? And the man, the Nazarite, who because of kind of contact with a dead body becomes ceremonially unclean.

And all three of those occurrences—the leprous man, the man or woman with emissions, and then the Nazarite who becomes unclean through contact with the dead—all three of those have an eighth-day re-entrance into full fellowship with Jehovah, with the covenant community. We’ll just look at one of those things, but for your own private study, I’d recommend you look at those verses later on.

By the way, in relationship to your own private study, you know, I study this stuff out all week and it goes around and around in my mind and it takes some form and I get to understand what God’s teaching us in the scriptures. I cannot hope—and neither can you—for me to come here on Sunday and give you fully what I’ve studied out throughout the rest of the week and make it real for you the way it’s become real for me this last week.

What I can do for you, and I think this is the proper role of eldership in the church, is give you some parameters by which to govern your own study of the word. And that study of the word then could correspond. If the Sabbath is an important thing and we as a church believe it is, then you should be studying out the Sabbath too, and making sure if this stuff is correct.

And so I’d encourage you at least sometime during the week to at least look at some of these verses and do your own study and see if all this is true. And that’s what the idea of the noble Bereans is all about. All I can do is guide and direct your studies for the coming week and you would be well to look at those verses.

Numbers 6:10, Leviticus 15:14-29. And then we’ll talk a little bit about Leviticus 14.

Now, leprosy of course was a sign of death. You had a death eating up the flesh, the very flesh wasting away as a sign of the living dead as it were. And by the way, that’s a great picture too, isn’t it, of man, fallen man. The new covenant tells us that we’re living dead. We’re walking dead men before regeneration of Jesus Christ. So leprosy is a sign of that as well.

There were two stages of re-entrance of the leprous man back into full fellowship with Jehovah and the community. The first stage was entrance back into the covenant community in verses 2 through 8. Now, there was a ceremony that occurred outside the camp, okay? And it’s a beautiful ceremony. We’ve talked about it a little bit before, but I won’t be able to tell you the whole thing, but if you look it up for yourselves in Leviticus 14, it’ll be a tremendous encouragement to you to begin to teach your older kids also the meaning of what this is talking about.

There were two birds. One bird was killed and its blood put into a basin with some water. The other bird was alive and then the blood and the water mixed together—the live bird was dipped into, or had the blood from this blood and water mixed together, the dead bird applied to it—and then the live bird was let go free. You see death to life. This bird comes back to life and has free movement and can fly around wherever it wants to go now in true life because of the death of the other bird.

Okay, it doesn’t have to undergo the death. The other bird does. The dead bird of course points to Jesus Christ. The application of his blood and his water to us and consecration of us brings us back to life and it’s a death-to-life ceremony going on here. And of course the leprous man is—the whole point of leprosy is being cleansed. He’s coming back from being dead into being alive.

By the way, this blood then is also sprinkled upon the leper as well. And what’s used to apply it? What’s used to apply it is a hyssop branch tied with a scarlet thread made out of wool tied to a piece of cedar wood. Cedarwood, scarlet thread of wool—lamb, right? Sacrificial lamb. The blood of the lamb, hyssop branch to apply the blood of the lamb in cleansing and purification.

It’s a hyssop branch, by the way, that’s used to apply the blood to the people when the covenant is retaken in the Bible and people are gathered together before God, he sprinkles them with the book. He sprinkles the book with the blood. He sprinkles the people with the blood. And in Hebrews, it talks about how all things are cleansed by the sprinkling of blood. Well, that’s true of the leprous man. Same basic instrument is made here: cedarwood, scarlet thread, hyssop branch dipped into this blood and water, sprinkled on the leprous man, and he becomes now like the bird. He’s resurrected. He has new life.

Now, then an interesting thing happens then though. After this consecration that occurs, the man has entrance back into the community itself. He comes back into the camp now. Okay? He can’t live in his home and he can’t go to the temple, but he comes back into the covenant community for seven days. And he stays in that seventh day locked up again like Aaron and his sons were locked away from the presence of God. But in covenant community, remember what we talked about last week—in the days of holy convocation.

Remember what the scriptures tell us in Leviticus 23? The people, because of the new covenant being prefigured in the old covenant redemptive acts of God, were ushered back into covenant community but not into the very presence of God. Their Sabbath, their seventh-day holy convocation was marked by assembling together in the community in the camp to enjoy the life they had been given by God. But they were still excluded from the special presence of God in the temple, right?

And so the leprous man has two stages. First stage: re-entrance into the covenant community. And that’s like the old covenant, isn’t it? Death to life being prefigured. But then when—he comes into total life is when he’s ushered back into fellowship with Jehovah God. And that occurs, guess when? On the eighth day.

On the eighth day, the man has applied to him there’s a sacrificial system, sacrifice that occurs. Again, we can’t go into all of it, but that sacrificial act enters through that act on the eighth day. Then he’s entered back into fellowship with Jehovah and readmitted into his sanctuary, the place of his special presence of God. And that occurs on the eighth day.

The Sabbath is reinstituted to a holy convocation of the old covenant. As we said, for the first week of new life. But a greater restoration is pictured and then accomplished in the new covenant with the re-entrance into the sanctuary and presence of God. Okay? And that’s the same thing that’s being talked about here.

The eighth day was accompanied with a wave offering of the leprous man before God. He was waved before God and dedicated to God, as it were. And then also the consecration of the leprous man for re-entrance into fellowship with God was completed with the same thing being applied to him as is applied to the priests.

Aaron and his sons had it: blood appointed to Aaron and his sons to their right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe. Blood and oil is applied to it. And the same thing is true of the leprous man. As he’s entered back into fellowship with God, the blood is applied to his right ear, his right thumb, and his right big toe. Because now he can really hear what God instructs him to do. And now he can put his hand to do all that God tells him to do. And now his foot will walk in the path of what God has instructed him to do.

He’s ushered back into total life now, not just of the covenant community, but brought into the very presence of Jehovah God because of his recreation pictured in this whole ceremony.