Sid: You know Mishpocha I’ve been speaking all this week about the brand new Zechariah Prophecy Calendar. It’s a 16 month calendar, a Jewish calendar. The artwork is by a Russian artist is all done in Israel from the book of Zechariah. For myself I always want to know when the Biblical festivals are because God talks about special blessings in these festivals. I have the man that put this calendar together Eric Morey on the telephone. I’m speaking to him at his home in Tiberias, Israel. I have a question for you Eric something that never made any sense to me before. I want to see your spin on this. We know as a fact before Jesus came there was a requirement to observe all the Biblical festivals and traditional Jews did it then and still do this today. We know that the first church was all Jewish and they all, according to the best book we have on the first church, the New Testament, they all observed the Biblical festivals initially. Then for some reason the Biblical festivals were replaced with a mixture of paganism and great events in the life of the Messiah. All the Biblical festivals were kind of stopped, however, when I read about the millennium we know that these Biblical festivals will be reactivated. So my question is, if the first church observed these Biblical festivals, if we’ll be observing the Biblical festivals in the millennium, why did we put it on instant pause now?
Eric: (Laughing) That’s a good question Sid and I don’t have a good answer. You know I think the church went off base around as you said earlier around the time of Constantine. All kinds of elements were introduced and Christmas was chosen partly because of the Misraich religion at that time was very prominent and they celebrated the winter solstice, the rebirth of the… the shortest day of the year when the days begin to get longer which they miscalculated as December 25th it is really December 21st. So they decided to celebrate the birth of Messiah on the day that the Mithras celebrated to kind of steal the glory from them…
Sid: How were they able to do that because of my understanding of the New Covenant the shepherds were out in the field and in December in Israel they can’t be out in the field which means the Messiah wasn’t even born in December.
Eric: I’m sure he wasn’t.
Sid: (Laughing)
Eric: More than likely He was born in September, but nobody knows for sure. My feeling about is, well you know we’ve got to celebrate it sometime and… we don’t have to actually we are not commanded to at all, but if we do chose to celebrate it then I guess December 25th is okay. When you look at the roots of it you realize that it comes from a pagan celebration concerning the sun god, then you have to really question it.
Sid: You know what I believe is it is not so much a legalistic letter of the law requirement, a matter off salvation, a matter of righteousness… No! No! No! It really and truly as I read Isaiah about the great blessings of worshiping God on the Sabbath. As I read Zechariah that in the millennium if the Gentile nations do not celebrate the Feasts of Tabernacles they’ll literally not have any rain come on them and they’ll be hit with plagues. There’s such a blessing and celebration connected with these festivals. That’s why I want to get this Zechariah Prophecy Calendar into as many hands as possible that the wind of the Spirit is saying “I want your roots, your Hebraic Biblical roots restored not as a mandatory thing but as an appointment with God.” I really believe this calendar is a good first step because… well tell us a little bit about some of the things in the calendar.
Eric: Well Sid you’re right it’s an excellent tool for that for connecting Christians and Messianic believers with Israel and with the Jewish people and with the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. Because in any nationality, any culture the calendar and the holidays that are celebrated and the way that time is measured is extremely important. The Jews have got a unique calendar unique within. They invented, well God invented the Sabbath but He gave it to the Jews. The whole world celebrates a 7 day week today. So these Jewish traditions that are incorporated into their calendar and many of them are scriptural of course are a window into the soul and the history of the Jewish people and of the Jewish roots of the Christian faith. Our calendar everyday of every month of the year, its 16 months on this calendar, you can see what day it is on the Latin calendar, of course you can also see what day it is on the Jewish calendar, you can see what day of the week it is called in the Hebrew on the Jewish calendar. You can see what month it is on the Jewish calendar. You can see what year it is on the Jewish calendar and they have their own cycle of years. So you’re keeping track of their way of Biblical based method of time keeping. Every Sabbath, a very interesting fact the Jews read through the first 5 books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, they call it the Torah, the first 5 books of Moses it’s called sometimes. These are very very important to the Jews and they read through every year the whole Pentateuch, the whole Torah, in a cycle and every Jewish community in the world, every synagogue all over the world reads the same scripture portions on the same Saturdays all over the world. It’s like a clock that’s ticking in the heart and the mind of every Jewish person in the world. You can read on our calendar what passage of scripture they’re reading that week. You can line yourself up, you can tune… this is scripture. Tune yourself with the heartbeat of the Jewish people through these scripture portions, through the holidays. The holidays are extremely important and as you said “Christianity has gone off.” What’s Easter? Easter was named after Astarte. Astarte was a pagan goddess is condemned by name repeatedly in the Bible and yet this holiday was named after her. We have the Easter eggs and the Easter bunny, and all this fertility stuff, it’s an abomination.
Sid: The goddess was the fertility goddess that’s where we… I never knew where the Easter egg and the bunny came from, but that’s literally where it came from the fertility goddess Ishtar.
Eric: That’s where it came from. So this is what we celebrate as a resurrection of our Lord? Hello!
Sid: (Laughing)
Eric: You know its Passover. The Last Supper was the Seder supper that’s Passover. He resurrected from the dead on Sunday on the middle of the Passover week, the first day of the week during Passover. That’s when it ought to be celebrated.
Sid: Tell me a bit about the descriptions you have of each of the Biblical festivals in the calendar itself.
Eric: Well we think it’s important that people understand where these holidays came from. They all came out of scripture. The only one that didn’t actually come out of scripture is Chanukah because Chanukah celebrates an event that took place after… between the 2 testaments, between the close of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament. But it’s mentioned in… Jesus celebrated it, it’s mentioned in the New Testament it is called the Feast of Dedication. So all these feasts have a Biblical base and then we say how they were celebrated in New Testament times. Most of these holidays were mentioned in the New Testament and celebrated by the New Testament believers and by Yeshua Himself. Then there’s the modern celebration of these festivals which in some cases align with the Biblical and in some cases do not. For example, the Passover Seder today is quite different from what God commanded the Jews to do in the beginning in the Passover, quite different. It’s more of a traditional thing but it goes back probably to the time of Yeshua, actually. So we talk about kind of a perspective on what these holidays mean to a New Testament believer today, a spiritual perspective on it. See how for all that… for each of these holidays. As you go through you come to the Feast of Pentecost, or as it’s called in Hebrew Shavuot. You go back to the opening pages of the calendar, you flip back and you say “What is the Biblical origin of this feast? How is it celebrated in the New Testament times?” Very famous holiday in New Testament times in the book of Acts. “How is it celebrated today in the modern Jewish world? What is the significance of it for the New Testament believers?” Every one of these holidays you have this.
Sid: Mishpocha I can hear some you screaming. Eric you didn’t finish that very important teaching you were doing from Zechariah 14 about the Lord returning of which you have the most beautiful artwork in this calendar. Would you quickly summarize that and finish that.
Eric: We have a painting of Yeshua coming on the clouds of heaven with power and glory. It triggers from Isaiah 14:5 which says “The Lord my God shall come and all the holy ones with thee.” But the same scene is described in Matthew 24, Revelation 19, and Isaiah 63. We took elements for this painting from all those passages of scripture. In Revelation it says that He has a sword in His mouth, and so we were contemplating this and we were thinking “Surely this doesn’t mean a physical metal sword it means the word.” As the word of God is compared to a sword and called a sword in many places in scripture and it comes out of the mouth, so it’s a word coming out of His mouth. What word would Yeshua be speaking at this incredibly significant moment of Him coming on the clouds with power and glory? Coming back the second coming of Yeshua! What would He be saying? We didn’t have to make it up because in Isaiah 63 there’s a dialogue recorded where the narrator says “Who is this coming out of Bozrah and Edom with His robes dyed in red?” This is Yeshua and you can in this painting His robes are dyed in red just like it describes also in Revelation. Then the horseman Himself, Yeshua Himself, answers the question in Isaiah 63 and what does He say? He says “It is I who speak in righteousness mighty to save.”
Sid: Mishpocha this is such a wonderful family calendar to talk and to teach your children and that’s what the scriptures say that we’re supposed to do. When it’s opened up it’s 13.5 x 26 inches. The paintings are literally suitable if you’d like to frame them they’re so beautiful. The calendar is big enough so that you can write your various appointments and various social functions, or something the Lord did for you on that day. They are 16 months long and they start with the Jewish New Year, so that’s why they start with the month of September. It has the Jewish year and the year that we celebrate here in America. It’s in Hebrew, it’s in English.
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth