DO
THE JEWS [ JUDAISM ] REALLY
POSTPONE GOD’S ANNUAL SABBATHS ?
There
is nothing of more paramount importance in the life of a true Christian
than to establish his belief - his spiritual foundation - on the written
words of the Eternal. And thanks be to God for using the experience
of Mr. Herbert W. Armstrong in the advertising world; all those long
lost Holy Day truths were brought back to life with the plainness
of language that even an ordinary mind like ours was able to understand.
One of those foundational understandings we came to know, is God’s
Sabbath command. We know that this day is holy to Him. We know that
we are commanded to observe it on the seventh day and not on any other
day of our own choosing. Genesis 2:3 tells us God blessed and sanctified
the seventh day - no other! Therefore, man, has no authority whatsoever
to observe it on the first day of the week like those in the deceived
“Christian” world are doing today. The same holds true
with the annual feasts of God. We know that we cannot observe the
annual Sabbaths on just any day, nor can we postpone
it to suit our own convenience! Obedience to God and His Commandments
is life and to disobey or do otherwise is sin. It’s as simple
as that.
Amidst
all the appalling conditions that have befallen the people of God
in the seventh and final era, the Laodicean, there is one central
doctrine that all the splinter groups from the most dominant to the
smallest are in agreement with: that the Hebrew/Jewish Calendar is
the “Sacred Calendar” of God. The one of the few exception
is the “Church of God, In Truth.”
A
couple of scriptural references used by the Hebrew Calendar advocates
are Romans 3:2 and Acts 7:38-39. The claim is that the Jews were used
of God to faithfully preserve the Old Testament Scriptures including
the calendar. They also claim that though the Hebrew Calendar
was given apart from the Holy Scriptures, it is still a vital component
of the “oracles” entrusted to them. That claim is partly
correct. Read it again carefully: It is a fact - the Old Testament
Scriptures are the oracles
of God . . . including the calendar. The question is, which
calendar? This is the crucial point at issue. The answer is, God’s
true calendar is not some “oral
tradition” passed down from generation to generation (like gossip);
the true Sacred Calendar has
been preserved by the Jews in the
Old Testament Scriptures! Moses recorded God’s true
Sacred Calendar in the books of the law, but as Christ said, they
did not believe Moses: “For had you believed Moses, you would
have believed Me: for He wrote of Me. But if you believe not His writings,
how shall you believe My words (John 6:46-47)?” In the “Good
News” magazine dated May 1964, Mr. Herbert Armstrong released
the following statement that settles this issue once and for all.
He said: “It was God who actually preserved the exact same
words, in the true Hebrew and Greek copies, that He has inspired
in the original writings. He (God) merely used the Jews as His instrument
in accurately copying and recopying (as copies became used, worn,
and old with age) the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. All these
were true and accurate. God actually committed the oracles . . . that
is, the actual written words
of the scriptures . . . to the Jews (Romans 3:2).”
There
you are! God’s twentieth century apostle, Herbert W. Armstrong,
accurately and dogmatically stated that the “oracles”
of God are the ACTUAL WRITTEN WORDS OF THE SCRIPTURES which God Himself
inspired! Read it again and consider God’s end-time messenger’s
pronouncement. It agrees 100% with the Bible and absolutely excludes
ALL WRITINGS OF MEN TO THE CONTRARY! Clearly, anything outside
of the written words of God are not
part of the “oracles” committed to the Jews. Anything!
And “anything” includes the “sacred” calendar
of the Jews!
Most
of God’s people today, will agree that Mr. Armstrong was effectively
used by God to restore a great many of His truths to His church, however,
many also say any attempt to change, alter, or add to the teachings
Mr. Armstrong left behind is wrong - which also includes the calculation
of God’s annual Holy days. They maintain that the Hebrew Calendar
is a valid calendar for Christians to use in setting the dates for
the observance of God’s Holy Days. But is that really true?
If
it is true that the Hebrew Calendar is God’s “Sacred Calendar”
and need not be altered or changed then let them explain why they
don’t follow it all the way? Why don’t they observe Passover
on the 15th like the Jews do even to this day? Why, if
the Hebrew Calendar is God’s calendar and a “sacred”
one at that, don’t they observe Pentecost on Sivan 6 or on a
Monday? Can we “pick and choose?” Can we disregard the
observance of Passover on the 14th - keep it on the 15th
and Pentecost on Sivan 6 - as mandated in their Hebrew Calendar, yet
insist that it is the sacred calendar of God?
If we don’t believe they have that right - why do we trust them
with the rest? For all we know this is nothing more than a simple
exercise of plain absurdity and madness of an irrational mind at play.
They may not realize it, but it is not the Spring Holy Days alone
that they have innocently manipulated, but all the other feasts of
God down to the Last Great Day! [Please call or write for our free
booklets on God’s Holy Days and the Postponements. Ed.]
Imagine;
for more than forty years, the Worldwide Church of God was made to
observe the Monday Pentecost of the Jews as prescribed in the Hebrew
Calendar. After that 40 year period of time when Mr. Armstrong realized
the magnitude of the error the church had made, and notwithstanding
the strong resistance from within, he did not give a second thought,
but instituted and immediate correction by changing it to Sunday in
accordance with the clear instruction from the Book of Life - the
Holy Bible! Yes, he then made the correction, proving what he had
often said, “If shown to be wrong he would change.”
He also added, “That willingness to change, when shown
to be wrong was an important difference between God’s true church
and the denominations of this world.” Again, here is his
statement at a Ministers’ Refresher Program given on February
27, 1985, less than a year before he died. Notice that in those short
remaining months of his life he still expected God’s people
to make changes as they grow in grace and knowledge: “If
there is any place we are wrong, or that I am wrong, that’s
the first thing I want to change. That’s the most important
thing in my life, to get that change and make it right. Now the hardest
thing in the world for the average person to do is admit he’s
been wrong. That’s not the most difficult thing for me to do.”
“You
know, if I admit that I am wrong and I change it, someone says, ‘well,
you can’t depend on Armstrong. He’s always changing all
the time.’ I’ll change as often as I am wrong and I expect
to continue doing that.” A legacy of spiritual Israelites
today seem to have completely forgotten.
And
mind you, why did Christ through the epistle of His most beloved apostle
John, significantly put it on record that the Jews’ observance
of these feasts have been attributed in their own name instead of
God’s?
Notice:
“ . . .
and the Jews Passover was at
hand.” John 2:13
“After
this, there was a feast of the Jews.”
John 5:1
“And the
Passover, a feast of the Jews was
nigh.” John 6:4
“Now the
Jews’ feast of Tabernacles
was at hand.” John 7:2
Strange? But
not strange enough if you know what I mean. After all, God calls things
the way they are. If it is His feast He call it “My
feasts. . . (Lev. 23:2)!”
God
saw to it that the Jews preserved what was entrusted to them, but
carnal minded and unconverted as they are, they preserved it alright,
but they did not obey and believe it! The Pharisees and the Sadducees,
two prominent groups contesting for power in religious matters of
the day, believed in the one true God, but did not believe that God
is a family. Shame on the Jews. They are not even of one accord with
regards to the resurrection. Imagine the “oracles of God”
committed to them, yet the Sadducees did not even believe in the very
essence of our only hope - the resurrection of the dead! Neither group
believed that Jesus was the Messiah - in spite of all the miraculous
evidence provided. Throughout His ministry, Christ called them “vipers,
liars and hypocrites, blind guides (Matt. 23:13-33).” And to
their faces Christ bluntly told them, “You are of your father
the devil, and the lust of your father you will do (John 8:44).”
The New Testament account is filled with lots of harsh name-calling
and straight forward condemnations that Christ directed toward the
Jews - virtually every time He confronted them! Later, fearful that
they would lose their most coveted position in the temple, they willfully
conspired and eventually succeeded in murdering Him with the most
horrible and painful of death ever devised by man. It is true that
when the curtain of human civilization was raised after the garden
of Eden, the Israelites and their descendants, the Jews in particular,
have always been at the forefront of the human drama. But their rejection
of the Christ is its own clear indication that they understood very
little of that which they were entrusted with - the oracles of God.
For
sometime, it has been carelessly assumed that man can’t produce
a calendar from the Bible. That is a satanic lie that has been accepted
as truth by the many. Knowing the heart of man to be deceitful above
all things, would an all and ever-knowing God entrust to man
apart from His Holy Words, a matter so delicate as His true
calendar? Even to entertain such an idea would certainly be an insult
to the sound exercise of one’s mental faculties. The Hebrew
Calendar is just but one of the many pagan calendars that came into
existence as a result of man’s innovative ingenuity. It is a
counterfeit skillfully woven by the rebellious nature of people whom
God has patiently wielded in His loving arms. Their calendar is a
clever look-alike, riddled with errors and deceit - clothed with some
semblance of truth that even the very elect, if not careful, can be
deceived by!
The
many splintered groups of God’s churches have been operating
under what is commonly called the “Jewish Hebrew Calendar.”
And that’s what it is! It is
their calendar just as the Julian Calendar was that of Julius
Caesar and the Gregorian Calendar was that of a Pope named Gregory!
In all respects, it is entirely different from God’s calendar
of the Bible.
On
page 15 of his book, “The Comprehensive Hebrew Calendar,”
Arthur Spier openly admitted that “. . . 60% of all years
Rosh Hashanah (Trumpets) does not occur on the day of the molad, but
is postponed according to one
of the dehioth (rules).” In other words, even though the
new moon has already been erroneously reckoned at the molad, the Holy
Day for the Feast of Trumpets (among the Jews) is still postponed
60% of the time ever since they could remember! If the
true new moon conjunction is considered, the Jews are 100%
in error! There are postponements alright, but it was the already
erroneous Jewish molad that was “postponed” through the
use of many of their four applicable “postponements rules.”
It is the postponed molad of the 7th month that serves
as the Hebrew calendar’s starting point in determining all the
so called holydays of the Jews, (they count backwards
177 days from this postponed date to arrive at the “beginning”
of the new year that the Spring Holy Days are determined from)! I
think we can safely assume that none
of God’s true, ordained Holy Days have been in any way postponed!
Postponement
means, “to defer, to delay, to put off, or to momentarily set
aside the celebration of an event from a fixed date of reference to
a latter date.” Since the new moon of the Jews is officially
reckoned at the molad or middle conjunction, it is therefore their
own feast that has been postponed
to the appearance of the faint crescent moon. There would not be postponements
of God’s Holy Days if the Jews recognized the true new moon
conjunction as the correct reference point for the observance of God’s
feast days. Unfortunately, they do not. According to the Encyclopedia
Judaica, the Jews know there is a difference between the true new
moon conjunction and the molad or middle conjunction. It is true that
the molad is still within the darkened phase of the new moon, but
it is important for us to recognize according to many observatories
literature, “there is a difference between man’s astronomical
mean, or middle conjunction and God’s true conjunction. There
is always a true conjunction before a mean or middle conjunction .
. . a time variation of 14 or more hours between the Hebrew molad
and the actual beginning of the new dark moon phase. That is plenty
of time to put you into the next day from the true conjunction of
the dark moon.” The Roper Mountain Science Center and Observatory
affirms that observation when it said “the very beginning
of the new dark moon phase can be pushed back as much as nearly a
full day from the middle conjunction.”
In
the Philippines, there are about 10 annual holidays officially declared
by law. The celebrations are held on a fixed date of the year. Most
often, the occasions are associated with the most significant events
in the history of our country. One of these is the Declaration of
our Independence every twelfth day of June. It is commemorated every
year to remind us that once, for almost 400 years we were under the
sovereign rule of the colonial power of Spain. Once in a while, these
are postponed to accommodate the whims and pleasures of the powers
that be. But June 12, regardless of what they do, will forever remain
the day of our deliverance.
I
am also inclined to believe that the Sabbath has not been changed
or postponed to Sunday, as done by deceived, so called, “Christianity”
at large. In the first place, they believe that the Sabbath of the
Bible is no longer binding to man. It is their belief that it was
a commandment for Israel in the Old Testament and that when Christ
came there was a change of the law. They believe that Easter Sunday
commemorates the resurrection of Christ from the dead and thus Sunday
is the day we should worship on. The 7th day Sabbath of
the Bible is far from their mind.
In
God’s earthly domain, His Sabbaths, weekly and annual, are to
be kept at the times specifically designated in the Old Testament.
They are prescribed by God’s law. And this time, we are dealing
with the Supreme Lawgiver of the universe. They had been designed
and given to us for a very important reason. Compliance to God’s
Law will allow us to understand the grand purpose of our being. We
may choose to obey or not to obey, but God doesn’t
give us (or the Jews or anyone else) the right to change or postpone
His annual Sabbaths! No other
option is acceptable but death or maybe the great tribulation to those
who are sitting on both sides of the fence. Postponement in whatever
form and manner cannot be entertained. Even in man made laws, ignorance
to the law excuses no one. How much more so, in God’s sight?
Get it right, do it right, or die. It is vitally important that we
get the right understanding of exactly what and when, the new moon
is, as contemplated in the mind of God. Genesis 1:1-5 clearly tells
us, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and
darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light
and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and
God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light
Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning
were the first day.” As we can see, in the beginning of re-creation,
the beginning of darkness started
the day and beginning of darkness starts a new month! We must in loving
obedience to His commands, truly worship and honor Him. ☜
Romeo
Samudio