Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text is found in Exodus chapter 23. I’m going to be speaking on verse 14, but we’ll read it in context. We’ll read verses 13-19 of Exodus 23. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Exodus 23, beginning at verse 13.

“And in all that I have said to you, be circumspect and make no mention of the name of other gods, nor let it be heard from your mouth. Three times you shall keep a feast to me in the year. You shall keep the feast of unleavened bread. You shall eat unleavened bread seven days as I commanded you at the time appointed in the months of Abib. For in it you came out of Egypt. None shall appear before me empty. And the feast of harvest, the first fruits of your labors which you have sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering at the end of the year when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.

Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God. You shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread, nor shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until morning. The first of the fruit—first fruits of your land you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God. You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word, not as we ought, but as we are able. And we pray that you would graciously now grant us an understanding and a submission and obedience and a delight in this word by your Holy Spirit. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

The song we just sang, following up on the teaching of the responsive reading, affirms God’s knowledge of us. Remember we said that in this progression of the fifth book of the psalter, we had this high praise after receiving God’s law and then the problem enters in the flow of that series of psalms. You know, how shall I praise God when in captivity? And we said that the next two psalms were answers to that question. One is that God is wherever man is and God has magnified his word above his name. So that God is there with him in the context of his word being with him in captivity. And this psalm we just read responsibly is part of that answer as well—that God is intimately associated with our affairs.

So while we’re a while from his special presence at Jerusalem, nonetheless, God knows us and is with us. And that truth is a great delight to us—to know that God’s presence is with us. And it also means that God knows us better than we know ourselves. Certainly because of the deception, the self-deception that sin has brought into the world. And God knows what we need. And in this particular section of scripture that concludes the law of the covenant, God tells us that we need to have celebrations.

It is part of our nature that we are required by God to celebrate. So what we want to talk about today is the Christian’s requirement of celebration.

Now before I get going on this, let me say that the C.S. Lewis article that I distributed last week both electronically and then had printed copies here as well talks about the danger of preaching on the goodness of the family without saying it’s a fallen institution and has various difficulties associated with it. I’m going to reference that article one more time in this sermon. But I just say it at the beginning to say that while I’m going to preach what I think the scriptures tell us about the need for celebration, I understand that it’s not always the easiest thing to do depending on the circumstances of our particular lives that God has brought us into.

What we’re not talking about today is to paste on a smile at church when we come together to celebrate the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day. But what we are saying is that Sabbath worship, Lord’s day worship, the festival that God commands us to come to every Lord’s day in the context of the Christian church is one that processes all the difficulties and trials and tribulations of our lives and brings us to a point of celebration in the work of the savior by the end of the process.

You know, there’s a movement to the worship service from confession and God assuring us of our forgiveness to the word preached and then finally it culminates in the Lord’s Supper, which is sort of the high point of the celebration. It’s the Eucharist, it’s the thanksgiving, it’s the joy, and it’s the celebration of the supper. So I want us to understand that I’m not saying that this is necessarily easy. Our fallen nature wars against us in the context of doing this requirement from God. But we should know that God in his law, in the law of the covenant, commanded his people in the Old Testament to keep particular feasts to celebrate them, to keep a feast.

Now what this verse tells us in verse 14 is three times you shall keep a feast to me in the year. You are to keep a feast. And this particular Hebrew word in terms of keeping a feast means to hold a feast, to have a festival time, to make a pilgrimage or to keep a pilgrimage feast, to celebrate. And it’s also translated at various times to dance—in one translation which we’ll look at in a moment—or even to stagger. This same word here, to keep a feast, means to be joyous in celebration.

The word usually is reused to refer to the three main pilgrimage feasts of Israel which we’ll consider in the following three sermons in this series. We’ll deal with each of these feasts in separate sermons. And this word to keep a feast primarily is related to these three feasts. These three feasts are the Passover—the feast of unleavened bread—the feast of weeks, or harvest of first fruits, and the feast of Booths or tabernacles, the feast of ingathering, marking the agricultural year of God’s people and marking the calendar.

You know, we need calendars. God made us creatures who live in a particular cycle, and there’s a weekly cycle, but there’s also a yearly cycle that God sets up in the context of the Old Testament. And we see inherent to the nature of man the entering into that kind of cycle of feasting.

Now I want to begin by looking at some representative texts where this same word to keep a feast is used, and look at them just in a brief overview here.

First, in Exodus 5, verses 1 and 2, is the first occurrence of the use of this term “keep a feast.” And you know, in scripture the first occurrence is an important thing to note in terms of looking at a particular word or a concept as it works its way through the scriptures. In Exodus 5, of course, Moses and Aaron go in and speak to Pharaoh, and they say, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, let my people go that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.” Pharaoh, of course, says, “No.”

Now the point is that the whole purpose of the deliverance of God’s people from Egypt is so that they might celebrate, dance, keep a feast, have a joyous celebration in the presence of God for one week in the wilderness. So we recognize here that to keep a feast means to celebrate. And it’s really the very purpose of our deliverance, so to speak, being typified by deliverance from Egypt in the Old Testament.

Secondly, the next verse I want to look at is 1 Samuel 30:16. Now the context here is some Amalekites have made a raid on some of God’s people and David finds out about this and he has this young man come to him, an Egyptian. And in verse 16 of 1 Samuel 30, we read, “When he had brought him down, behold, they were spread abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking and dancing because of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the hand of the Philistines and out of the land of Judah.” And David then rises up to smite these people.

Now the point is God’s enemies are being described here, the Amalekites. But after they have success in battle against the Philistines and against the possessions of the land of Judah, it says they engaged in eating, drinking, and dancing. This word translated dancing in the King James is our same word for celebration that we find in the law of the covenant. Three times a year you shall dance, you shall celebrate, you shall keep festival to me. Here it’s used in a negative connotation. It’s unholy celebration. Of course we don’t need a text in the scripture to remind us of that. But the scriptures do remind us that while men have this inbuilt need and propensity to celebrate, the fallen man celebrates in the wrong kind of thing.

Let’s move on to a different verse now. Psalm 107, verses 27 and 28. Now in this verse it’s talking about the various groups of people who in their difficulty turn to the Lord. And what we read in verse 27 is they reel to and fro, stagger like a drunken man and are at their wit’s end. Then they cry to the Lord in their trouble and he brings them out of their distresses.

This word to reel to and fro—this particular Hebrew word—is the same word as our word for keeping a feast to God. So to keep a feast is identified here with the staggering of men who are on a ship out in the middle of the ocean and the waves are carrying it up and way down, way up and way down, and they’re like drunken men. They’re tottering about. They’re dancing, so to speak, on the deck of this ship.

Now this shows us again there’s a correlation to drunkenness here. And there’s an improper way to celebrate or hold festival, which is to get drunk and then lose your balance. But if that’s true of the negative side, then it means the positive side means that the celebration of God’s feast is a joyous activity. And it has these kind of connotations of dancing—not in a drunken stupor sort of a way, but in a way of moving about in the presence of God, rejoicing in his great deliverance.

It’s not quite like the sober sort of meetings that, you know, we commonly have represented to us in an understanding of the Sabbath or the Christian Sabbath or the Lord’s day. There is this idea of festivity and of rejoicing.

In Psalm 42:4 we’re told that there’s a relationship of this celebration with singing. And I remember these things. The psalmist says, “I pour out my soul within me. I used to go with the multitude. I went with them to the voice to the house of God with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept a pilgrim feast.” So there’s that same Hebrew word—a celebration is what he’s talking about. And in the context of celebration that was to be heard is the voice of joy and praise.

So we come together on the Lord’s day and we’re supposed to sing in our celebration of Christ’s victory over sin and death, sing of our redemption, sing of the joy that God has ushered us into through the work of our savior.

The celebration is also seen in Zechariah, chapter 14, verses 15-21. Now this is a portion of scripture that’s probably more familiar to us for the closing words of these verses, in verse 20: “In that day, ‘Holiness to the Lord’ shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. The pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holiness to the Lord of hosts.”

So the idea is that there’s coming an eschatological day here pointed to in which holiness will not be now a portion of a particular people, a priestly nation, but it will penetrate the whole globe. We’re now in that day when everything is supposed to be seen as inscribed as the priest’s forehead was inscribed at the plate: “Holy to the Lord.”

And so this is a text that speaks of holiness. But in the context of holiness, it speaks of joy and celebration and of keeping the feast. And it does it in a particular interesting way.

We said that it’s part of the law of the covenant that we’re to celebrate in God’s presence. And indeed, what we read in verse 16 is that it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles, to celebrate, rejoice, dance in the context of the feast of tabernacles. And it shall be that whoever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of Hosts, on them there will be no rain.

If the family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they shall have no rain. They shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations which do not come up to celebrate, to rejoice, to dance, so to speak, to have great joy and celebration in the context of the feast of tabernacles. This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not come up to celebrate the feast of tabernacles.

So you see the law of the covenant is repeated here with curses attached to it. If you don’t convocate at the times that the Lord commands you to convocate, and if you don’t come up to celebrate, to rejoice, to give praise and thanksgiving to God at a loud voice, God says he’s going to bring judgments upon you—the nations that refuse to celebrate the feast.

Now I think that we can infer from this language that it’s not simply an attendance at the feast that’s required. It’s that they celebrate the feast. Anybody can come to church and not enter into the joy of the Lord, that what the worship service represents to us. And the scriptures seem to tell us that entering in is not just a matter of attendance of Lord’s day services. It’s a matter of entering into the joy and celebration that the day and the festivities bring to us.

Another passage in Deuteronomy 16, verses 14-17. Now this is a parallel passage to the one we are considering in Exodus. At the conclusion of these verses in verses 16 and 17, it says that three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place which he chooses—feast of unleavened bread, feast of weeks, feast of tabernacles. They shall not appear before the Lord empty-handed. But listen what it says in verse 14 and following:

“You shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless and the widow who are within your gates. Seven days you shall keep a sacred feast, and the New American Standard has celebrate a feast in that phrase—to the Lord your God in the place which the Lord chooses because the Lord your God will bless you and all your produce and in all the work of your hands so that you surely rejoice.”

The New American Standard says that last phrase: “So that you shall be altogether joyful.” God says he wants us to celebrate his festive times, and in the context of that celebration, we are to be altogether joyful. That’s what Lord’s Day worship services, the Christian Sabbath, the Old Testament Sabbath—that’s what it was all about.

In Leviticus 23, the Sabbath day itself, in addition to these feasts that are listed in Leviticus 23, the Sabbath itself is identified as a feast to God. And so the Sabbath worship services of the Old Testament were a time of great joy, great celebration, and a rejoicing altogether in the blessings that God had given to us.

Now this word joy that’s used in Deuteronomy 16—let’s talk about it a little bit. This word joy denotes being glad or joyful with the whole disposition. There are various verses that talk about the joyfulness of one’s heart, the joyfulness of the soul. And we’re to rejoice or to have joy with the lightning of the eyes. In Proverbs 15:30, many occasions in the scriptures are related to this joy that’s supposed to characterize our celebrations and our festivities on the Christian Sabbath or the Lord’s day.

Wine is related to joy. Of course, ointment and perfume are related to joy. A wise son brings joy to one’s heart. A kind word joys up the heart. And this joy that’s supposed to be comprehensive. Meeting a loved one is a joyous occasion in Exodus 4:14. We’re to create great joy in God’s law in Exodus 19:8. And the increase of the righteous is told us as a cause for joy in Proverbs 29:2. And then preeminently, of course, the joy of God’s feasts.

And this is pointed out in Nehemiah 12:43. There’s a feast, a holy convocation held with the completion of the wall of Jerusalem. And this is what it says in Nehemiah 12:43: “On that day, they offered great sacrifices and rejoiced because God had given them great joy. Even the women and children rejoiced so that the joy of Jerusalem was heard from afar.”

Heard from afar. The shouts of God’s people in praise and worship to him and in joy can be heard a long way away when they truly understand and enter into the worship of God, into his day of celebration and festivity.

Joy is to mark our celebrations and our convocations together. Of course, the most oft repeated statement in the Old Testament of this Hebrew word for joy is in the Lord and in the salvation that he brings to man. The Lord calls us to rejoice at the feast because they’re a picture of his salvation. And we’re to—this is a communicable attribute of God. You know, you talk about God’s attributes. Some are singular to him. He does not share them with his creatures. This is one of those communicable attributes.

In Psalm 104:31, “Let the glory of the Lord endure forever. Let the Lord be glad or be joyous in his works.” God has an attribute of joy in the works of his hands. And as we draw near to God, we should have a holy joy that reflects the joy of him and his Spirit who indwells us. And these festivals, these appointed days were to be days of this great joy and festivities before God.

A failure—as I said earlier—a failure to worship God with gladness and joy brings his judgment. In Deuteronomy 28:47, we read this: “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart for the abundance of all things.”

And this is then cited as a reason for God’s judgments coming upon them. The reason, one of the reasons for the curses of Deuteronomy 28:47, is because you didn’t serve the Lord your God with joy and a glad heart for the abundance of all things. Again, God commands us to do what is important for us to do as men and women, boys and girls, to rejoice in the context of his holy convocations.

David appointed Levites to sing with joy at the temple in 1 Chronicles 15:16. David spoke to the chiefs of the Levites to appoint their relatives, the singers, with instruments of music—harps, lyres, loud sounding cymbals—to raise sounds of joy. And so part of the maturation of the worship in the Old Testament was musical instruments added to increase the joy, the festive nature of Christian worship.

And so here we’re having John come up who can sing a little louder, knows music a little better than us, and he can lead us into more joy with the singing of our songs. He can help us to raise songs of joy to God. And so God says that joy is very important in terms of our Christian life.

Now, why don’t we rejoice then? Why don’t we celebrate more than we do?

One thing we want to take out right away is the objection that this is all Old Testament stuff. I’ll read the verse and talk a little bit about it at communion today. 1 Corinthians 5:8 says that we’re to keep the feast with unleavened bread of sincerity. So in 1 Corinthians 5:8, we have a text that reminds us—I mean, obviously, all this points to the joy of the coming of the savior. But in 1 Corinthians 5:8, it actually tells us to keep the feast. It’s the same idea—to enter into celebration, to enter into joy, to enter into the divine festivities of the Lord’s day.

So why don’t we do it? I heard a man talk on television this week. He’s a famous director. His name is Arthur Penn. And he was being interviewed about how he helped actors. What does an actor need to do to get into his part correctly? And he talked about some technique he used and basically the idea was the actor has to understand the obstacles to him in accomplishing his end purpose. And he used as an illustration Hamlet, you know, the play by Shakespeare.

You know, within 10 minutes, you know, in the opening stages of the play, the opening section of the play, you know, Hamlet knows what he’s got to do. He’s got to avenge his father’s death and his dad comes to him as a ghost and tells him who killed him. So Hamlet’s got to do this thing. But Shakespeare then takes five acts—he takes hours—for Hamlet to accomplish this taking of his vengeance. See, so to understand the role of Hamlet, to understand who he is and to play that part, you have to understand why it takes him so long. What are his obstacles to killing his father?

He commented that if Macbeth, the character of Macbeth was Hamlet in the play Hamlet, the play would be over in about 10 minutes. Macbeth would know who he had to kill. He’d go out and kill the guy and that’d be it. But Hamlet is a different guy. He’s got problems and difficulties, and it just takes him forever to accomplish this vengeance.

Well, you know, as I heard that, I thought it’s the same thing with this Christian revelation to us by God in his scriptures. Really, what we need to know is pretty obvious—particularly today, of course—you’re supposed to be happy. You’re supposed to rejoice. You’re supposed to celebrate on the Lord’s day. Well, why don’t we then? Why doesn’t it always feel like a celebration to us? What are the obstacles in us as characters, so to speak, that prevent us from entering to the fullness of this joy?

And so I’ve listed a few things here, and I want to talk about them. What are some obstacles? These aren’t all of them, but these, I think, are some of the things that prevent us from entering into the fullness of the joy of the Lord’s day.

The first thing I list here is Gnosticism. Now, we’re studying in our world history class the young men and young women of that class. We’re studying now the first five or six centuries of the church after the coming of Christ and its warfare against Rome. And we’ll move into its conquering of the barbarian tribes, and both conquering elements of course the preaching of the gospel, not through arms primarily. And the history of the first four or five centuries of the church is a history of various heresies.

You know, the church has enemies from without—persecution of these emperors, 10 persecutions, entering horrific persecution at the end of that, leading up to Constantine—but also the church is beset with enemies within. It’s got a number of heresies that it has to deal with. And so the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon and other things go on to try to deal with these various heresies of the church. And one of the initial heresies that you can see actually being rebutted in the epistles themselves is Gnosticism.

You know, the church is birthed in the context of a Roman/Greek culture, and we’ve talked about this a lot, but it’s important to understand that Rome had basically bought into Hellenism—the Greek philosophy of things. And there was basically a Greek mindset, although mediated through Roman power and authority and might and statism. But in any event, Gnosticism sort of took some of this Greek idea that man is kind of to get away from matter and problems and transcend into this spiritual idea.

In its most articulated form, Gnosticism saw creation and fall as linked. That the fall of man—they affirmed the fall of man. But the fall of man was not a fall into rebellion and disobedience. The fall of man was a fall into matter. Man was the spiritual entity, true spirit, full spirit. And he falls in the context of falling into matter, becoming incarnate, so to speak, taking on flesh. And everybody’s got this little spark of the original divine knowledge. And what he has to do is kill off the body and its passions one way or the other and feed that little flame of spiritualism and spirituality. And that’s salvation.

So salvation really is not the sovereign work of God who redeems us out of disobedience and rebellion, but rather the work of God in assisting us to kind of raise ourselves up away from the matter of the created order.

So the Gnostic mindset is one of the things that prevents this. Now, I know nobody here believes that. I mean, nobody here is a full-blown gnostic, but the church was birthed in the context of this, and an awful lot of churches become neoplatonic. One reason for that is the short Bible—you know, 27 books instead of 66—New Testament as opposed to the whole Bible. If you take the New Testament and split it off from the very incarnational Old Testament, then you can reread it. You can put into it new values that aren’t there. You must know the Old Testament to understand the New Testament. It draws on those same themes. If you split it off from the Old Testament, you start to look at it. It’s written in Greek. And so you start to look at it through Greek eyes.

When we read flesh in the New Testament, the Gnostic thinks in terms of matter—that the problem is man’s carnality, the fact that he has matter, that he’s fleshy. But if we read it with an Old Testament perspective, and we’re reading Paul here who was, you know, trained in the Old Testament to the nth degree, and he speaks of flesh. What are the associations we should make? Well, it’s with the flesh of the animals. It’s with the flesh of uncleanness. All that stuff in the book of Leviticus through chapters 11-15 about the flesh and the various difficulties of it. That’s the correlation God wants us to make.

So I know that none of us embrace wholeheartedly, but what we end up doing is still thinking in terms of a matter-spirit distinction, and that ultimately salvation is to sit on a cloud strumming a harp with not a body, no body, you know, just kind of a spirit form. But God says we’re going to have new bodies. Jesus was raised up and had a new body—picture of our coming new bodies. And while that new body is spiritual as opposed to being, you know, the same old Adamic body which is fallen, it’s still substantial. It’s still substantial. It still eats. It still moves about. It’s a body.

And so because we fall into these errors, these gnostic errors, we’re afraid to celebrate. Our celebrations become kind of Zen meditation, you know, on kind of what’s really going on. And all we’re celebrating with is our mind, and we tend to just kind of want everything in an intellectual package. And you know, best of all cases would be our limbs would just sort of wither away and we’ve got a big brain and we’re meditating on everything.

Now meditation’s good. It’s proper. But the scriptures want us to celebrate in a holistic sense, using our vocal cords, using our mouths, to eat the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, tasting good things and enjoying these things.

When we come to worship, one of the things we’ve tried to do at this church to move us towards celebration is to get us to raise our hands. Goofy, isn’t it? Don’t you feel a little goofy? I mean, it’s not normal for us. I don’t know anybody that’s come here and said, “Oh, boy, we all raised our hands together.” No, it doesn’t happen. It seems odd. And maybe it is.

What we’re trying to do, what we base that on, is that when the law was read and people praised God in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, they raised their hands to praise God. And behind that, what we’re trying to do is say that we want to engage our bodies in worship. Worship is not an intellectual exercise. You could not accomplish worship at your terminal at home plugged into, you know, a sermon being read out through RealAudio or whatever. You come together with your bodies. You engage your whole bodies in the celebration of the Christian Sabbath, the Lord’s Day.

So we have you stand up. You’ve got to throw up your hands. You’ve got to walk forward. You know, if we had a different time in church history, maybe we’d need to emphasize more the meditative aspect of it. But right now, what we need to do, it seems, in terms of correction, is to have you engage your bodies as well as your minds.

Everybody—well, babies can’t—but the little children, two years old and up, they can all raise their hands. They can’t understand what I’m saying necessarily, but they can raise their hands. They can enter into celebration before God, and they can get up and bring up a quarter or a nickel or a dime, whatever it is, and put it in the offering. They can engage in the celebration of thankfulness to God. They can combat, and doing this, we’re raising children who have been given a discipline and a structure to combat Gnosticism, to combat this idea that our bodies are somehow bad, to engage the bodies in this great height of our lives—the celebration of the worship of God—combats this Gnosticism.

There was a movie called Babette’s Feast done in 1987, and it’s this little group of Christians, and they’re going to have a dinner in commemoration of their founder who has died. And there’s this woman named Babette who has won the lottery in France, and she spends herself both physically and then monetarily. She uses all of her money to prepare this great banquet in honor of the dead founder of this religious community and to bring them into celebration.

Now the people have been kind of aesthetic, you know, they’re kind of somewhat gnostic, and they don’t really want to enjoy. They’re afraid of the good food. I mean, she’s got like a live big sea turtle which she’s going to cook up, and she’s got all these fancy delicacies and a bunch of wine and stuff, and they’re afraid of all that stuff. So they have to do it. It’s in memory of their founder. But what they say is we’ll come together and we won’t really enjoy it. We’ll eat without really believing we’re eating. We won’t let the goodness of this stuff affect us.

And of course that’s impossible because the food is delicious. This is Babette, who knows how to cook up a feast. She knows how to celebrate. And the wine is flowing and the food is flowing, you know, and they get moved from a gnostic position to a Christian position of celebration by the end of the meal. And what happens in the context of that is the relationships in the community get healed as well. You see, they’re connected to their bodies, and they’re connected to the body of Christ in the context of that Christian community as a result of the feast, the celebration.

That’s what the Lord’s Supper does for us. And that’s why it’s nice when you can do it. Sometimes we can’t. Who knows what the future will hold, but it’s nice when we can do it in the context of a full meal and then the height of the meal is the bread and wine. But at least the bread and wine brings us into that celebratory mood that moves us away from Gnosticism.

You know, Gnosticism can be defined as eating food but not enjoying it. Eating it purely for utilitarian purposes, essentially to keep your body going for the purpose of feeding your mind. And your mind is everything.

You know, the whole Old Testament—that is such a foreign concept. I read something the other day that said it wasn’t really until I think within the last thousand years or so that people even figured out what the brain was, what organ it was. One of the early Greeks—Plato or Aristotle—one of those guys, thought it was just a cooling device, the brain, because, you know, in the Old Testament revelation, it doesn’t talk about your brain. It talks about your heart. Talks about your bowels, your kidneys and stuff. Talks about the center of your being. It talks about you as a physical personage, not as a thinking entity.

And now it’s good to think. Glad we know what the mind is for. Glad we know how to cure it and things like that. But the point is that we want to get away from this notion that we’re here today primarily to fill our mind with thoughts. That’s not why we’re here. When we come to the Lord’s Supper, we do something with our bodies. We taste something that’s good.

So one reason we don’t celebrate is Gnosticism.

Looking for a quote here. Irenaeus, a church father, said that one test of orthodoxy was whether a doctrine was consistent with the practice of the Eucharist. So by this measure, any religion that requires its disciples to eat while pretending not to eat, as in Babette’s Feast, can hardly be called Christian. So Irenaeus said that one test of orthodoxy—does it, is it consistent with the practice of the Eucharist?—is it you know, bodily centered? The various heresies of Gnosticism led then to a series of Christological heresies, some of which held that Jesus didn’t really have a body. He was just a phantom or a spirit. So you can see that the heresies kind of flow out of this false view of the relationship of matter and spirit.

Harold Bloom wrote in The American Religion that Gnosticism is the American religion rather than anything else. He says really Gnosticism is the basic faith of the American people. And as I said, this idea—it permeates into our minds. Then we don’t accept it in an intellectual way, but it’s sort of the context in which we’ve been raised. And unfortunately, many of the churches that dot our landscape feed this concept repeatedly.

So one reason we don’t enter into full celebration is Gnosticism.

A second reason we don’t enter into full celebration is a denial of our humanity. And in a way, this is kind of the same sort of thing with a little different tack. I said at the beginning of this that Psalm 140 tells us that God knows us. He knows our rising up and our sitting down. He knows us better than we know ourselves. So in the Old Testament, what does he say to us as the pattern for discipling this nation into maturity?

He tells them, “Keep a bunch of feasts.” And oh, by the way, there’s one fast day on the Day of Atonement. But mostly what I want you to do is to eat, drink, and be merry.

Now we hear that phrase and our reaction is, “Oh, no, that’s bad.” You know, Ecclesiastes: eat, drink, and be married. Tomorrow you die. That’s the view of the hedonist. Well, it can be. It can be if it doesn’t see all those things in terms of celebration to God. But Isaiah tells us that the obedient ones will eat, drink, and be merry. And the ones who are disobedient will be cut off from food, drink, and joy.

So in the scriptures, eat, drink, and be merry is the picture of what God wants us to do in celebration of him.

Now remember I said that Leviticus 23:3 says that every Sabbath day is a feast day before God. It says that in verses 2 and 3. And then it goes on to give a couple of week-long celebrations. Other various double Sabbaths happen. You count them all up and there are 80 feast days in the Old Testament and one fast day.

What’s our normal response to the way to achieve religious maturation or sanctification? You want to grow, right, as a Christian. And unfortunately, many of the churches teach you the way to grow is to have perpetual fasting, is to go on a lot of fasts. And we’re approaching the season of Lent. And you know, we believe that God sets up this liturgical calendar in the old system that we’re reading about in the law of the covenant. And we can say there’s correlations to that to what we do in the Christian year.

But the problem with some churches that move that way liturgically is they end up then imposing a feast called Lent that’s filled with 40 days of fasting leading up to one feast day, as opposed to the idea of God saying that feasting is what’s going to make you a better Christian.

See, that’s counterintuitive to us, isn’t it? We think the way to become a better Christian is to deny ourselves and to fast. Now that’s okay. I’m not, you know, this is a balancing thing what I’m trying to do here. I’m not saying get rid of fasting. I’m not saying you’re wrong if you fast occasionally. While there’s only one complete day of fasting in the Old Testament, there are many times at which the people would fast, do partial fasts. When particular problems came upon the nation, a fast would be preparation for victory and feasting. Though it always pointed to that.

So I’m not saying you’re wrong to hold partial fasts, but what I am saying is that God knows us better than we know ourselves. And God says that while we in rationalistic 21st century America think the calendar is irrelevant to us because we have heat that keeps us at a constant temperature, God says, “No, the calendar has been set up since creation because it’s good for us to think in terms of a progression and maturation.” And he says, “It’s good for us. What’s going to help you grow and how you can disciple a nation of Christians is to teach them to celebrate, to hold festivals, to get together and rejoice.”

You know, Baptist churches may not understand the biblical basis for it, but most churches have a week-long Bible camp in the summer or the fall, the spring, whatever it is. They don’t know why they do it. They just go out and do it. Well, we know why, because God has put it in the heart of man. He’s revealed it in the Old Testament calendar. And he’s told us that cycle of the feasting days of the Sabbath and then two week-long festivals—one in the spring, one in the fall—the Old Testament, at least, talk more about that in the next couple of weeks. That cycle is what matures us and brings us into maturation.

If we want to disciple our children, we disciple them not in fasting so much as we disciple them in feasting. Now it’s proper feasting. It’s not the eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die kind of feasting. It’s the feasting of eating, drinking, and be merrying in the presence of God.

You know, in the golden calf incident, Moses comes down and they’re having a celebration. They’re celebrating, but it’s the wrong celebration. You know, the men, the Amalekites are celebrating, but it’s the wrong celebration. There are ditches on both sides of the road, as Doug Wilson wrote in that book about federal headship—ditches on both sides of the road—and what I’m trying to do is point us to the fact that this ditch of fasting, as opposed to feasting, should be avoided by us, that God gives us the cycle of festivity.

This used to be the way churches were. In the old days, churches were—Christians were public about their profession. There’d be processions through the church, through the streets. In Catholic countries, there’s still a degree of this that goes on. The procession would involve joy. Music would be playing. Typically there’d be dancing, a lot, you know, usually women dancing with other women, holding hands, you know, and dancing along, moving in the procession, you know, up to the church, or the men would be holding hands with other men and dancing and skipping up to the church.

This is what the Old Testament, or the older church used to be like before the modern secular version made us want to take our Christianity back into the halls of the cloistered monastery of the church.

See, so if we start celebration here, it should work its way out into our culture.

And again, I want to emphasize that, you know, in a way, this is coals to Newcastle. We’re a church that has practiced celebration and festivities, and people like that about us. The danger to us is that while we go about doing those festivities and celebrations, we make sure it’s the right kind of eating, drinking, and being merry.

Because the flesh, having been repressed by a false view of Christianity, now brought into the fullness that Christianity is celebration and festivity, it wants to then take over that deal. It wants to then say, “Oh, now the restrictions are off me. I can party and have a good time and drink too much, drink. Now I can get drunk,” see, and celebrate the wrong way.

So we want to take great care in the planning of our seasons of festivities and festivals and rejoicing. We want to take great care in that, that rejoicing be in the presence of God with an awareness of his presence, the preaching of his word, that his word should be prominent in prayer in these festivities and assemblies, and that again starts on the Lord’s day.

The third reason why we don’t celebrate can be said to be an embracing of our humanity. One is the rejection of our humanity. We want to think that we’re, you know, not people. And the other is embracing our Adamic humanity.

I mentioned I said I’d mention the C.S. Lewis article again—on the family, the sermon in the lunchbox, or the sermon in the lunch rather, that I distributed last week. And one of the main points he makes about the family is that this preacher, the vicar, says the family is the place you can be yourself. It’s such a great place you can be yourself, and all the constrictions of the world are removed. And C.S. Lewis says that’s one of the great difficulties of the family, that’s one of the problems because that’s where you can be yourself, and you probably said things to—you might have said things this last week you sitting in the pew here to your wife or your children or to your husband or your children or children to their parents—that if you said those things in public, C.S. Lewis said, somebody would just knock you down. He’d just punch you and knock you right down for what you’d say to him if you said it in public.

So we embrace our humanity. We don’t want to come together to convocate in celebration with one another because we embrace our Adamic humanity, who wants to be off by ourselves and enter into that wrong kind of celebration. We don’t want to be around those who are going to put constrictions upon us.

We’ve got two large houses—not large, two houses going up right next to our house. I mean, seven feet away there’ll be a deck overlooking my backyard. Well, there’s always a deck overlooking my backyard. There’s always angels who are observing what God is doing. God is always there seeing what I’m doing. And if he wants to remind me of that through neighbors, well, praise God. You see, it will make me—I’m ashamed to say this, but it’ll make me kinder to my children when I am outside having neighbors next to me.

It’s good to live in community. See, it restricts our fallen Adamic nature. We don’t like that kind of restriction. So we say, “No, we won’t get together. If we get together, we’ll just come to church, hear that intellectual sermon, rush home afterwards. We won’t enter into the convocation and celebration of the day.”

Two other reasons here, briefly, can be a lack of knowledge and a lack of preparation. We know our primary component of difficulty is ethical, not intellectual. You know, we’re not—our biggest problem in life, see, the Gnostics said, “Your biggest problem is knowledge. You’ve got to have this secret knowledge to turn things around.” We don’t believe that. We believe that our biggest problem is submission.

So when we come to the Lord’s table, he doesn’t say, “Now, think about this a lot.” He says, “Do this as you remember or proclaim me. Do it.” Because our biggest problem is submission.

However, having said that, again, there’s ditches on both sides of the road. An intellectual component is part of the problem. You, some of you may not have known that there were 80 feast days and one fast day. Some of you may not have known that there was so much joy celebrated with the Old Testament Sabbath, which you probably thought of in sort of bleak, dark sort of terms.

So when we bring the word of God to bear and renew our minds, it helps us to see what we’re supposed to be entering into on this Lord’s day. It helps us to see that the culmination of all those feasts is coming together in the Christian Lord’s day with great celebration and joy. And maybe you didn’t know that you are required to attend here with joyful hearts and with thankfulness and joy before God.

Now, as I said, that doesn’t mean putting a plastic smile on, but it means processing all the things that, the difficulties that you’re struggling with, real problems—the way the Psalms process all through us to bring us to a place of rest and reliance and praising God.

Each of the five books of the psalter ends with a doxology. And the thought is—and this is probably, you know, I’m pretty sure this is true, don’t know it as a fact—but it seems like the idea was that doxology would close each of those psalms in that book.