THE MASTER’S CLOCK!
Discerning The True 7th Day Sabbath of Yeshua!
PART 9
That Sabbath Was
A High Sabbath!
In 2003 I was becoming disenchanted with the Christian church, there were too many doctrines that I simply disagreed with. I had one foot out the door of Sunday Christianity when I discovered Herbert W. Armstrong’s World Wide Church of God. I was enamored with their teachings and found support for many of the disagreements I had with the Sunday church. For a year I became a student of their history and doctrine. It was a time for me that I describe as, ‘Standing on the dry beaches of Sunday Christianity getting rolled by a tsunami of Biblical truth.’ But as I studied their doctrine I found factions of disagreement within their ranks. One particular area of contention arose from this verse that pertains to the Wave Sheaf offering.
And he shall wave the sheaf before YHWH, for your acceptance. On the morrow after the Sabbath the priest waves it. (Leviticus 23:11 Scriptures ’98)
Here again, to the undiscerning mind there is nothing there to argue over but I am here to tell you that this verse was the source of splits in the WCG. I can’t begin to express the amount of time and scholarship devoted to this single verse as they struggled to understand when to offer the Wave Sheaf. What’s the problem you ask? They were trying to reconcile this verse to a Gregorian Calendar which has an unbroken chain of 7 day weekly cycles! Try as they might they were never able to resolve the issue and the division in their ranks remain to this day! So what’s the problem?
Here it is in a nutshell. The priest was to wave the sheaf on the morrow after the Sabbath. While that seems straightforward enough the question arose, ‘Which Sabbath?’ Was it the High Sabbath upon which the Feast of Unleavened Bread begins, i.e. the 15th Day of the 1st Month or the weekly Sabbath that falls at some point within the 7 Day Festival of Unleavened Bread according to the Gregorian Calendar. If you say the Wave Sheaf should be offered on the day after the High Sabbath, i.e. the 15th of the 1st Month and that day falls on the 6th Day of the Gregorian week then the Wave Sheaf would be offered on the weekly Sabbath according to the Gregorian Calendar, the problem being that the day of Wave Sheaf is a workday when people had their last opportunity to go into their fields to gather the first fruits of the barley crop to offer later that day. If you say the Wave Sheaf should be offered on the day after the weekly Sabbath and the weekly Sabbath falls on the last day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread then the Wave Sheaf offering would fall outside the Festival of Unleavened Bread! Clearly both sides of the debate had issues the other side could contest. There were no winners in this debate, it was impossible to reconcile the Wave Sheaf offering with the Gregorian Calendar but no one ever suggested the problem lies with the calendar the nations are keeping today. It may not be possible for you to appreciate, without reading the dozens of articles that the leaders of the WCG wrote on this topic as I did, how beautifully the Lunar Sabbath Calendar totally eliminates the entire debate! How does the Lunar Sabbath Calendar eliminate the debate? The 15th Day of the 1st Month, and every month, is ALWAYS a weekly Sabbath! The answer as to whether the Wave Sheaf offering follows the High Sabbath on the 15th of the 1st Month or whether the Wave Sheaf offering follows the weekly Sabbath is… YES! They are one and the same, which is why John says in his gospel…
Therefore, since it was the Preparation Day, that the bodies should not remain on the stake on the Sabbath – for that Sabbath was a high one – the Yehudim asked Pilate to have their legs broken, and that they be taken away. (John 19:31 Scriptures ’98)
It is not just a coincidence that the weekly Sabbath happened to land on the High Sabbath the year Messiah Yeshua was crucified, it happens that way every year according to the Lunar Sabbath Calendar!
I thank YHWH for exposing this dilemma to me through the wrestling of the WCG leaders, they at least realized there was a problem even though they were never able to fix it. (Years later, I have read articles written by WCG people acknowledging and proclaiming Lunar Sabbath Observance.) As is, the rest of the Sunday and Saturday church continue to 'blindly march on' totally oblivious to there even being a problem! The Lunar Sabbath Calendar’s ability to simply remove the unfixable problem from the table impressed me greatly and made accepting the Lunar Sabbath very easy! My faith is an evidence-based faith and the Lunar Sabbath has provided the evidence of its veracity.
This has been Part 9 of the 17 Part series titled THE MASTER'S CLOCK! It is my sincere hope and prayer that in reading this series you'll be blessed with the revelation of Time According to the Author of Time! May your eyes be opened to The Creator's Cosmological Calendar!
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