Dear Friends,

With the Spring Festivals arriving, I noticed that this year is a little bit special. The holidays closely follow the same pattern that they did in our Lord’s final year. Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits occur on the same weekend along with what we have come to call Easter and that positioning also affects the Jewish and Christian Pentecost. Obviously this pattern repeats itself every so often, but we should be conscious of the significance of these holy days. The seven biblical feasts are explained in a single chapter in the Bible, Leviticus 23; I have explained them thoroughly in our ministry’s most read book, The Seven Feasts of Israel.

The seven feasts are an elegant demonstration of God’s prophetic time table. Briefly, our Lord was crucified on Passover, buried on Unleavened Bread, raised on First Fruits, and sent the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Those are the feasts we have Seen fulfilled. Evidently in upcoming days He will hold the Rapture on the Feast of Trumpets and return in His Second Coming on the Day of Atonement. Finally, the Kingdom itself will be characterized by the triumphant Feast of Tabernacles.

The question constantly arises: If the Lord was really crucified on Friday and rose again on Sunday, how could that have encompassed three days and three nights? The Lord was indeed crucified on Friday at 9:00 a.m. and taken off the cross at 3:00 p.m. His body was then Prepared for burial and interred at sundown that Friday which is the beginning of the Festival of unleavened Bread. It is the Jewish way of counting days and nights that allows us to see the prophecy fulfilled. “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). The Lord then of course arose on Sunday morning after sunup. The three days are as follows: Since any portion of daylight is counted as a day then Friday and its previous evening — what we would call Thursday night — is one night and one day. We must recall that the Jewish day always starts at sunset, and so Friday really begins at what we would refer to as sunset on Thursday. The moon calendar requires Friday to start on “Thursday night,” just as in the language of Genesis, “the evening and the morning” are the first day. Sundown on Friday begins the second day, again beginning with the evening. What we would call Friday night and Saturday daytime are the second night and day. Finally, Sunday begins at sunset Saturday and involves Saturday night and the daylight hours of Sunday, the evening and the morning of the third day.

People have struggled to make Wednesday night and Thursday Passover in order to get three days and three nights the way we count in the Western world with the sun calendar, but that would be inaccurate. Even in the Western world we begin each day at midnight on the night before, so the concept is not so strange. When you look at a national weather report and it says “early Friday,” it is usually referring to what we would call Thursday night, the time we are sleeping before dawn.

This year Passover will begin on Friday evening, when the Jews will sit down to the first Seder or the first festival meal. Unleavened Bread will occur on Saturday and since First Fruits, the day of our Lord’s resurrection offering, is specified to be on the Sunday during the week of Unleavened Bread, then the following day “Easter” will be First Fruits, resurrection Sunday. In some years, First Fruits and Easter are separated because of anomalies in the Jewish and Western calendar, but they are very definitely the same feast. Obviously, the farmers bringing in the first fruits of their crops to thank the Lord for restoring the fertility of the land each spring is symbolic of our Lord’s resurrection. In fact, our Lord gave His own First Fruits offering: “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection” (Matt. 27:52–53a). The farmers could predict by the time of the first fruits that they would have a bountiful harvest later that year, and the Lord’s resurrection serves to remind us that we will all be raised, as Paul eloquently puts it in First Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” I often teach that we all have a number in this resurrection, since Scripture specifies “each man in his own order.” When you go into a busy store and they give you a number you are sure you will be served, and it is evidently likewise with the resurrection. “The dead in Christ will rise first” (I Thes. 4:16) because they obviously have lower numbers.

This year Pentecost and Shavuot, the Jewish Festival of Harvest, will occur on the same Sunday, May 31st. This is because Pentecost is correctly reckoned from the Scripture as fifty days after First Fruits. It varies with the Jews since they omitted First Fruits a long time ago (to be rid of the resurrection, I suspect) and they begin counting the fifty days from the second day of Passover. But since this year the second day of Passover will actually be Fruits, both faiths will begin and end counting at the same time.

Our Deluxe Tour, the one involving Israel only, is very special this year as we have contracted with Lufthansa, a premium airline, which offers gateway city departures from the U. S. to Israel. In other words, rather than paying a domestic airfare to fly to New York to catch the flight to Israel you can leave from the nearest Lufthansa city to your home town. In addition, the airline provides very low fares for those short transfers to the gateway city. The savings could be $500 or $600 depending on where you live in the U. S. Taking that into consideration, this is the lowest priced Deluxe Tour we have offered in years. We have also reduced the price of our Grand Tour, our cruise of the Greek islands, so that all in all this is a bargain hunter’s year for tours. We have described the sights available on these two tours in several letters but know that the Greek cruise involves Athens, Corinth and the islands of Rhodes, Pathos, Mykonos and Ephesus in Turkey. The Deluxe Tour of Israel; includes the Sea of Galilee, the Upper Room, the Mount of Olives, the Garden Tomb, Masada, etc. The dates are May 20th – 24th through June 3rd. Please contact Cynthia at 214-696-9760 for your brochure.

On television we will begin our series The Covenants of God shortly after you receive this letter in April. I think this will be a very successful and interesting series for those of you interested in verse by verse Bible teaching. Thanks for your support of this series and stay tuned and Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem!

Your messenger,

Zola

P.S. As we were going to press my son reminded me of my “Christian Birthday.” I came to the Lord and the happy life I lead now on March 14, 1971. If you would like to help me celebrate this most joyous occasion, a gift to our ministry would be highly appropriate. It will help us put the finishing touches on The Covenants of God. Thanks !

Zola Levitt Ministries is ECFA approved and has Charity Navigator’s top rating of 4 stars.

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