The Feast-Keeping that Is Sin

“At whose request do you come before Me, making My house unclean with your feet? Give Me no more false offerings; the smoke of burning flesh is disgusting to Me, so are your new moons and Sabbaths and your holy meetings. Your new moons and your regular feasts are a grief to My soul: they are a weight in My spirit; I am crushed under them” (Isaiah 1:12-14 BBE).

Are you “keeping” the Levitical Feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and/or Tabernacles? What do the Lord Jesus Christ and the Scriptures say about your “Feast-keeping”? Is it pleasing to Him? Let me ask you some questions.

Do you think you can please God by doing things different from the way He commands that they be done? Does not God say that you must keep the Law according to His description and the commandments given through Moses?

“Only take heart and be very strong; take care to do all the law which Moses My servant gave you, not turning from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may do well in all your undertakings” (Joshua 1:7 BBE).

“They were to offer sacrifices on the altar every morning and evening, just as the LORD had commanded in the Law He gave Israel” (1 Chronicles 16:40 CEV).

“Following the written directions, they celebrated the Festival of Booths [Tabernacles]. Each day they sacrificed the required number of burnt offerings” (Ezra 3:4 GW).

Are you following God’s written directions and requirements as recorded in the Law of Moses? If not, then you cannot be keeping the Feasts in truth, can you? If you are not doing things His way, but are substituting something else for His specific and precise instructions, yet call what you do by His chosen name for the real event, is that not presumptuous and deceitful? Are you not breaking His Law and sinning?

“Everyone who sins breaks God's Law, because sin is the same as breaking God's Law” (1 John 3:4 CEV).

When you are found trying to fulfill the works of the Law by your own power and by doing whatever is right in your own sight in His Name, are you not said to be under a curse?

“For as many as are of the works of the Law are under the curse; for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all the things which are written in the book of the Law, to do them'” (Galatians 3:10 EMTV).

So how can you be pleasing to God when offering works according to your will and wisdom?

Isaiah 66:1-3 MKJV
(1) So says the LORD, Heaven is My throne, and earth My footstool. Where, then, is the house that you build for Me? And where is the place of My rest?
(2) For all those My hand has made, and all those exist, says the LORD. But to this one I will look, to the afflicted and contrite spirit, and the one who trembles at My Word.
(3) He who kills an ox is is as if he killed a man; he who sacrifices a lamb is as if he broke a dog's neck; he who offers an offering is as if he offered swine's blood; he who burns incense is as if he blessed an idol. Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delights in their abominations.

While we point to Scripture that expressly denounces any deviation from the specifics of His commands, can you point to anywhere in Scripture that indicates the worshipper is permitted to rearrange those specifics to suit his purposes, reasonings and opinions?

Will you then tell us that instead of trying to keep the Law, you are simply getting together with others in memory of Christ during these times? What is the difference between doing this and keeping the Feasts in a way not commanded, in other words, offending against the Law of God? Did God ask you to do this in His memory? Has He not spoken contrary to your keeping of the Feasts, even calling them things that wax old, and that vanish?

“For this is the [new] covenant which I shall covenant with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws in their mind, and I shall inscribe them upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people...By the saying ‘new,’ He has made the first covenant obsolete. And the one becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish” (Hebrews 8:10,13 EMTV).

Has God not removed the temple and the sacrifices of the first covenant? Has He not removed the Levitical priesthood, which offered the sacrifices of the Passover and other Feasts, because those things were found insufficient, being called “shadows” because portending the Substance to come, which is Christ? So, if God has removed those things that have already served their purpose, who are you to re-institute them, contrary to His declaration of a better covenant by which He has not only replaced, but has fulfilled His Feasts?

“Therefore, when He entered into the world, He said: Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, Behold, I have come--In the volume of the book it is written of Me-- To do Your will, O God. Earlier saying, Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings, and sacrifices for sin You did not desire, nor had pleasure in them (which are offered according to the law), then He has said, Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God. He takes away the first in order that He may establish the second. By which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:5-10 EMTV).

Those of you who say, “We are remembering the Feasts as did Paul and the apostles in the Book of Acts,” have you not considered that God eventually took away the priesthood, the temple, and even the nation of Israel itself, that the sacrifices of the first covenant should no longer be performed? Paul and the other believers did not make up their own version of Feast-keeping, with their own sacrifices and rituals, but went to the temple of God in Jerusalem, while it yet stood, to give honor to God and to testify of the grace given to them. They lived in the days when those things that waxed old vanished away, even as Jesus said that the temple would be removed. Where is the place that God has placed His Name, that you may now go there to honor Him? Do you know? You need to.

You who think to please God by memorializing the Feasts He has already fulfilled, “once for all,” and thereafter removed those elements necessary to perform them, have you not heard what the same Paul you think to imitate has written about keeping the Feasts?

“Purge out the old leaven, in order that you may be a new batch of dough, since you are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. So then let us observe the Feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8 EMTV).

Does there need to be a special time and place to celebrate or remember the truth? Is there anywhere or any time that truth does not apply or reign? If there is, then there is also a time when the Feasts are not presently fulfilled and realized, in sincerity and truth, in those that walk in truth without hypocrisy or pretense.

Has not the Lord Jesus Christ commended all true worshippers of God to a spiritual worship of walking in truth, and not to a carnal reckoning of places and times?

“Jesus said to her, Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we Jews worship what we know, because salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24 EMTV).

And:

“But now, having known God, or rather, having been known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements, to which once again you wish to be slaves? You observe days and months and seasons and years” (Galatians 4:9-10 EMTV).

Are you Feast-keepers not observing days and months and seasons? Therefore, how can you be said to be worshipping in spirit and in truth when you are turned back to “the weak and beggarly elements”? Are you not gathering together on every high hill you see, worshipping according to a carnal form and precept that is pleasing to the flesh, but is anathema to the Spirit of God? How can you possibly gather together in His Name, contrary to His commandment?

What happened to Israel when they gathered together at altars in “memory of Christ” (the Lord their God Who led them through the wilderness)? Have you not red or considered that Israel fell into sin when they worshipped at the altars set up by Jeroboam, and the surrogate Feast he ordained and devised according to his own heart? (Read 1 Kings 12:26-33.)

Does God want you to do the things that you choose to do in remembrance of Him (sacrifice), or is He after your obedience to His commandments? Do you not recall what happened to Saul, who lost the kingdom when he did not follow the instructions given by God through Samuel?

“And Samuel said, Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” (1 Samuel 15:22-23 KJV).

Are you not aware of what happened to Nadab and Abihu, who presumptuously performed the sacrifice of incense unto the Lord their way? Be reminded:

“And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, and put incense on it, and offered strange fire before Jehovah, which He had not commanded them. And there went out fire from Jehovah and devoured them, and they died before Jehovah” (Leviticus 10:1-2 MKJV).

Remember, they were offering, not to foreign gods, but to the Lord God. Neither were they of “some other denomination.” These men were none other than the “chosen and accepted of the Lord,” the sons of Aaron, the first high priest, chosen for the work of the priesthood. God did not give them so much as a moment’s opportunity to repent. Are not those presuming to keep the Feasts not in keeping with the Lord’s instructions, doing as Nadab and Abihu?

Why do you think God wants you to obey Him rather than to choose your own ways of pleasing and serving Him? Could it be because you cannot, outside of His will, please Him? What other reason could there be? If it were good and pleasing in His sight, He would be a fool not to let you do your own thing. But He is no fool. You would be the fool to continue in iniquity, doing your own thing.

“You shall not do according to all that we do here today, each doing whatever is right in his own eyes” (Deuteronomy 12:8 MKJV).

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but the end of it is the ways of death” (Proverbs 16:25 MKJV).

“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkens unto counsel is wise” (Proverbs 12:15 KJV).

Having now heard the truth, ignorance is no longer an excuse for your sin. If you continue trying to keep the Feasts in the imagination of your heart, you will surely suffer the consequences. The wrath of God is on all those who take His Name in vain.

Paul Cohen
Victor Hafichuk