It was in the spring of the year when the barley the Jews had planted began to ripen, and they entered the fields. The Jews came together at this time for one of the three annual feast days, and part of the harvest was waved before God. Every Jewish male was required by God to come and spend time together rejoicing in what God had done for them.
That time was special, for it commemorated the precise time of the year when the Jews had left Egyptian bondage. It is hard to imagine how any Jew could forget that final plague, the death of the firstborn, and what they were doing as the plague came. They gathered together and ate the Passover lamb and were dressed and ready to depart. The bread they ate that night was different for it had been made without leaven—there was no time to wait for it to rise. It was God’s will for them to duplicate this event as they kept the Passover. God had passed over (bypassed) every house where the blood of that lamb had been on the outside of their houses. We too are blessed by the blood of the Lamb.
It is interesting to note that God promised them that no enemy would attack their unguarded homes while they were absent. There is no record of this ever happening until 66 A.D., as God sent Rome to begin plans to destroy Jerusalem.
Seven weeks after the feast of Passover was celebrated, the feast of weeks or the feast of first-fruits was kept. By this time the wheat was ready to be gathered, and sheaves of wheat were waved before the altar. It was a time of joy and all Jewish males assembled to rejoice before God.
All Jewish males assembled together, and it was truly a time of joy, for God said, “You shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, the Levite who is within your gates, the stranger and the fatherless and the widow who are among you, at the place where the Lord your God chooses to make His name abide” (Deut. 16:11).
We know this feast better because it came on the morning seven weeks after the Passover sabbath. As this was fifty days, the Greek word for fifty (Pentecost) is the word used in the New Testament for this feast. Now consider this. Pentecost is also a time of joy for us because the church began, and this joy is for all men, women, sons, daughters, foreigners, orphans and widows. This day marks the time when all mankind finds joy in what began to happen. That “day of harvest” spread throughout the world, and Jews and Gentiles were part of it. Pentecost is when the door opened to all of us! Enough for this week—we’ll look at the feast of tabernacles, the third feast, next week.