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The Feast of Unleavened Bread: Yes, a Christian Holy Day Centered on Christ
Last night was the Passover, and today begins the Feast of Unleavened Bread, so what does that all mean?
This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. I’m going to talk about today’s holiday and what it means for you, your family, and what it means to God and to Christ.
I’ll be right back.
Bob Barney here for The Plain Truth Today, reminding everyone to come here every day for three broadcasts each day on Monday through Friday, 7-11 a.m., 7-11 p.m., and noontime, and on the weekends once or twice a day. Always come to theplaintruthtoday.com or find it from theplaintruth.com. Thank you.
So last night was the Passover.
2:39 We had a show yesterday explaining the Passover. Today I’m going to explain a little bit more about the Passover, but the symbolism of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the symbolism of these Holy Day’s as it relates to Jesus Christ Himself…for He is our unleavened bread.
What does unleavened bread mean? It means a sinless person. I’ll get into that in a minute. But I wanted to get back to the Passover for one point that I did not mention last night. When I said that I hope you guys decide to follow a Passover last night, don’t worry about if you make it or not, if you do it all right or not. Just try to have a meal and you just pray to God for forgiveness and that you’re trying to follow the Passover. I was wanting to stress that it isn’t about doing it perfectly, it was about your heart stance about it.
I’m going to give you a personal side story here about myself. I first listened to Garner Ted Armstrong in 1975 while I was going to college, and I had listened to him for about three years…I just simply did not want to believe what he had to say. It was against who I wanted to be, and it was going to disrupt my life if I were to follow the path of life that God says to in the Bible. I didn’t want to follow it, and I didn’t want to believe in God to tell you the truth. It took me three years of trying to deny that the Bible was real, and that God was real. I came to the conclusion in 1978 in December that God was real and that I had to face that fact.
So my very first Passover was in April.
4:11 I was following the Passover at the time because I didn’t know any better, but it was in April, I believe, of 1979, and I was at odds with my own family over it. I actually had it at my grandmother’s house right up the road. She was only like five houses up from us, but I stayed the night at my grandmother’s house. I didn’t understand all about unleavened bread. I didn’t understand leavening. I didn’t understand the symbolism of leavening equaling sin and I realized I have to find wine, too…so I went to the grocery store that we had in town, and I loved Italian bread, so I brought a loaf of Italian bread, and I bought a bottle of Rianidi. I did like Rianidi back then a lot, and I went up to my grandmother’s house, and I ate the bread and drank it with the Rianidi, and that was my dinner, and I prayed to God that He accepted what I was doing. I read a lot out of the Bible, mainly out of Exodus, not that much out of the New Testament because I really didn’t understand the connection at the time of Passover.
I understood Christ was our Passover, verses like that, but I mainly read out of Exodus, the Exodus version of the Passover, the very first Passover when God saved the Israelis from the Egyptians and took them out of Egypt with a strong hand and through the Red Sea. Basically, all of that stuff that we all know about from the movie The Ten Commandments, but I’ll tell you something right now. I was stupid. I didn’t understand the Passover. I didn’t understand the symbolism, and I didn’t understand the idea that you can’t have regular bread because regular bread with yeast symbolizes sin. I was a sinner. I still am, but I was a sinner, and I guess I have to say this out of the bottom of my heart. I guess it was probably one of the best Passovers in my memory because it was done out of a sincere heart after fighting with God for three years! I insisted that He didn’t exist! But attempting the Passover, I know that it was done out of a sincere, pure heart to try to please the God that I had been running away from. I did the best I knew how, and I think to this day that God looks at that Passover, my first Passover, as probably one of the best Passovers I ever had because it was done like a child.
There is a reason why Jesus said our faith should be that like a child.
6:00 There is a reason for that, and the reason, of course, is that when you’re a child, you simply only have your parents to look up to, especially your mother, who is the church, by the way, symbolically, and your father, who is the Father God, symbolically, and so when you’re young, you don’t have young friends, you’re not in school yet, and so the most important things in your life is pleasing your mother and pleasing your father next, and though you’re young and everything is traumatic to you, you cry over every little thing, you are thinking that you don’t have any experience of life, so you’re new in everything. Everything is brand new to you, and so you’re trying to learn, and you’re trying to please, and you make a lot of mistakes, and you do a lot of things you get spankings for, but at the same time, your parents look back, I look back at my children at that age with kindness and fondness and a lot of love because what you see is the person before this world corrupts them.
You see the person that God intended you to be, and that is why Jesus Christ said you have to have the faith like a little child, and anyone who causes that little child to stumble, he says, well, a millstone, I mean, a big rock tied around his neck and thrown into the sea, he would be better off that way than what’s going to happen to him in the day of judgment when he and the Father gets done with the person that destroyed the life of that little child. Think about that for a while, too, and so, yes, my first Passover was one of ignorance and not doing the right thing, but somehow, I think God enjoyed that Passover, and it is good memories to me, and the same for you out there listening. If you haven’t done a Passover, you never knew you had to do a Passover, or you didn’t want to do a Passover, or you thought all that stuff was done away, it’s Jewish, and it’s not, by the way, which you can prove, which we have, I think, on this show, and you decided to do it last night, I can guarantee you it’s going to be one of the most memorable of your day if you did it all wrong. Down the road, you learn what you got to do for Passover, and you realize you did everything wrong, but it’s still going to be a fond memory to you because you surrendered to God’s will, and you made God happy. Most of us in our faith, in our journey of faith with God, oftentimes does not make God happy, but that first turning, trying to obey his will, trying to obey his holidays makes God happy, both God being the Father and the Son, which we call Jesus Christ, the Lord of the Old Testament, the Lord of the New Testament. So, anyway, I thought I’d throw that little thing in before we get into today’s Feast of Unleavened Bread, and I want to give you a New Testament thing to think about and read, and we find this in 1 Corinthians chapter 5, and that’s written by the Apostle Paul, who was not an original disciple, as we all know.
8:32 He was a convert, and one that wasn’t intending to be a convert. He was killing Christians as a zealot Jew working for the high priest until Jesus himself struck him blind on the way to Damascus and said, why are you persecuting me, Saul? And Saul, who is renamed Paul, all Paul is the Greek version of the Hebrew Saul, and he says, why are you persecuting me? And Saul, who became Paul, says, who are you, Lord? I am Jesus, whom you’re persecuting, and he struck Paul blind, and for three days Paul stayed blind until he was told where to go, straight street in Damascus, where the man of God there gave Paul back his sight, and Paul became one of the most zealous Christians who wrote most of the New Testament books, and turned out to be a real warrior and champion for Jesus Christ, the Apostle to the Gentiles, as he calls himself. But anyway, we go into Christ our Passover, chapter 5, and he goes, when you have gathered together, I am with you in spirit, then in the name of our Lord Jesus and with his power, hand such a person over to Satan, he’s talking about people who are not following God’s way, and then he goes, therefore, verse 7, purge out the old leaven, leaven is yeast, among you, so that you can stay pure.
Christ our Passover, that’s Paul talking here, has been sacrificed for us, therefore, let us keep the feast, the Passover feast. Paul is saying, and he’s talking to Gentiles here, you’re to follow the Passover, not an Easter, not a pagan holiday, you’re to follow Christ’s Passover. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with the old yeast, nor with the yeast of malice or wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. So, we are to follow not only the Passover, but the feast, keep the feast, and that means Passover and unleavened bread. Now, I got into yesterday talking about what does unleavened bread mean. Unleavened bread means bread made without yeast.
10:03 They did so when they left Egypt because God said you had to make bread in haste, to symbolize they had to leave quickly that night, but that’s really not what it means spiritually. Yeast is a representation of sin, pride, arrogance, all the things God hates in human nature. And so, when you get the yeast out of you, you get that arrogance, pride, and rebellious nature against God out of you. Jesus Christ was a perfect human being who never sinned in his entire life, who qualified, which Adam did not before him, to be king of kings and lord of lords of this earth as a human, not just as a God, the God who created everything, but as a human, he did everything exactly right. He is the perfect sinless human being to have ever existed on this earth, and therefore, the unleavened sinless bread, the only kind of bread you could offer to God in the Old Testament temple was unleavened bread, by the way. You could not give God a loaf of bread made with yeast when all of the show bread was unleavened bread at the temple.
And so, it represents Christ, unleavened bread represents Christ, because like unleavened bread, bread made without sin is sinless, yeast less is sinless, that Christ was the person whose body was sinless, like the unleavened bread. And so, all of these Old Testament holidays merely reflect and point forward to Jesus’s earthly ministry and the ministry to come when he comes back to this earth as king of kings and lord of lords and God of gods, and he reigns on this earth for a thousand years before God the Father comes down and lives with us as well. And that is the reason we are to follow these holidays, to understand God’s plan for us.
The plan is so much more wonderful, so much greater than anything any church is teaching you about going to heaven when you die and that you don’t want to go to hell when you die. They don’t even understand, or they don’t want to, or they’re lying about their knowledge of the words that are turned into hell and heaven in the Bible. Hell just means a hole in the ground where you put bodies, a grave is a better translation. You know, old English that used the word hell, people would say, I’m putting my potatoes in hell for the winter, meaning in the basement, in the ground, so it would keep. Hell just meant a pit, an open grave, something like that, not another world where Satan reigns with pitchfork and flames and all of this stuff. That came out of Dante’s Inferno, and has nothing to do with your Bible…it has nothing to do with your God.
12:43 God, when you die, puts you into a hell, a hole in the ground, and you wait in that hole in the ground, and you rot away, and you’re there until the resurrection of the dead. Either you’re going to be resurrected when Christ returns because you are a Christian, or you’re going to be resurrected 1,000 years later in a general resurrection who are not Christians, and then you will be judged, and your name, if it’s not found in the book of life, you will be destroyed, burned up, gone, not suffering forever in a hellfire to try to, you know, scare you into donating to your church. No, in fact, if your name is not found in the book of life, God takes your resurrected self and throws you into the lake of fire, and you burn up, and you no longer have a memory, and you’re no longer suffering. You’re gone. Your existence is out of this world forever, and eventually your memory is gone forever. Not yours. Yours is gone the minute you’re burned up, but the memory of you will be gone in no time as well.
You’ll just be forgotten like so many thousands of people who have died, paupers and people who were poor that died of diseases who no one knows even lived, and that’s what will happen to those who are sinners, who refuse to repent, who refuse to obey God, and whose names are not found in the book of life. So, today’s celebration is a weeklong, actually. Today is the first day, and it is a holy day. You should not work on this day. You can work. You could have worked yesterday up until evening, because Passover is only an evening celebration, but the Feast of Unleavened Bread starts today, and it goes for seven days, followed by an eighth day, which is in the Bible called First Fruits.
14:34 First Fruits also is counting the Omer, and all that means is on that day is when you say this is the first day towards 50 days of Pentecost, and the next day after that is the second day, and the third day, until you count up to 50 days, and 50 days from First Fruits brings us to, in our calendar, May 29th, and that is when Pentecost will be, 50 days after the counting of the Omer, which is First Fruits, which represents, again, Jesus Christ is the first born from the dead.
He’s the first person to ever be born again, which simply means to have his physical being replaced by a supernatural being, and he took the mantle of being God again. God so loved the world that He gave his only son, whoever believed in him should not perish. Yes, you can perish, but have eternal life. That’s, but is a big word right there, because that means you can have eternal life. You don’t have eternal life. It’s not a question if you have it in heaven or hell.
So, that is the simple scenario that God has in all of His holy days, and there’s a reason that God wants you to follow his holy days. His holy days symbolize the entire plan that God the Father, and Jesus is the Word of God, worked out long ago after Adam and Eve sinned, and maybe even before, we don’t know, but they had a plan, the plan to bring their children, because we are children of God, we are made in the image of God, when we are born again, we will become God’s children, therefore we will be God.
We’re not going to be like some angel in highway to heaven. No, we’re going to be God’s children.
16:34 When you’re your parents’ children, are you not in your parents’ image, and are you not a member of the same species as your parents? Of course you are, and so the same thing applies to when you’re born again, when you’re raised from the dead at the resurrection of the dead, then you become spiritual gods. That is the Bible. That is what it’s wrapped up, and these holidays symbolize that, and it’s why God wants you to follow his holidays. He wants you to understand the plan that has been made for us. We are fortunate beings. We are not angels. We are made a little lower than God, and we are going to become God. We are going to be above the angels. Christ says we are going to judge angels and demons and other people. That is our destiny if we want to accept God and accept Jesus and believe in him. Believe in him and obey him.
You can’t just believe alone. Belief gets you there, and belief makes you saved, but then you have to do something after you believe. You have to grow, but at first, when you first believe, God compares this to a little child first understanding how to walk and how to talk and gets bathroom trained and learns how to act around other people and to learn everything from their mother and their father. It’s a great time in any parent’s life as their child is so small and so innocent that everything they do, for the most part, is heartwarming because you’re seeing a human being grow up as a child and learn to become what the person they will be, and if they’re a good person, they had a good childhood, and they’re a godly type child growing up with God in their life, they probably are going to grow up to be a great citizen, a great person, and someday a Christian, and then after that, dead and resurrected as an eternal God figure. That is the most wonderful story there ever has been that is not told to you. No church teaches you this, mainstream church anyway. I know there are some Armstrong offshoot churches that teach this to a degree. There are many things they have wrong, including when the day begins, what calendar you’re supposed to follow, and what laws you are to follow, and which laws really have been replaced by older laws. Our system of laws based on English law, common law, comes from the Bible and comes from God’s law.
18:02 God’s law says there’s precedence, and in our law system today, a lot goes by what happened before. So, for example, I’ll give you one example from the Bible where an older Mosaic law was replaced by Christ, but it wasn’t replaced by a new law. It was replaced by an older, more important law, and that’s the way case law is today. If you can find an example of something that happened 100 years ago, and you find that there was a court case that made a certain decision that the Supreme Court upheld, then you cite that in your court case, and it can actually negate a modern law if it turns out to be against the law that was originally there. And Jesus used this example, by the way, when he was talking about divorce, when they asked, well, Moses gave us the right to divorce whenever we wanted to. And Jesus said, that is because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning, it was not that way. For God put man and woman together, and the two shall be in one flesh, and what God has put together, let no man separate. God hates divorce. And Jesus said, yes, Mosaic law allowed you to divorce your wife, but I’m telling you right now, that is not the original law at the Garden of Eden. That is not the law that has got the precedence. So whenever there is a Mosaic law that disputes or is in conflict with an earlier law, that earlier law applies.
Let me give you a case of this.
Mosaic law says you cannot marry your half-sister or your sister or your brother or half-brother, and that is the Mosaic law, and it’s a law you should follow. However, obviously, the Bible shows you an example when that law is replaced by an earlier law, because Jacob married two sisters, and Abraham married his half-sister, and Abraham is one of the greatest men who ever existed, and God blessed Abraham through his half-sister’s children, not his concubine’s children. So what am I talking about? When Tamar, David’s daughter, was raped by her own half-brother, then she went to him and said, you have to marry me now, and he didn’t want to marry her, he put her away, and she said that’s even worse, and eventually his half-brother, her full brother, killed the rapist, but the point being is she understood that he could marry her after the rape because he had defiled her, and that an earlier law did allow half-sisters to marry their half-brother, and though it was forbidden in Israel, and it still should be, you’re not supposed to marry your close relatives, that part of Mosaic law hasn’t been done away with, but there are circumstances where you go to an earlier law, just like modern law, English law, American law, does the same principles.
People don’t understand that as nobody explains that to most people, but that’s the plain truth.
22:56 So getting back to today’s unleavened bread, today symbolizes for a week now Christ on earth as a sinless human being, and to me it’s a week-long commemoration because it represents an entire lifetime of Christ on earth, some 33 years, that he lived for 33 years a sinless, blameless life. He was the symbolic fulfillment of unleavened bread, and that is what this day means, and the other thing about this day, and this is where I’m going to end the show, because what, and I showed you yesterday on the calendar, Christ was following the true solar calendar that God intended us to follow, and last night was the last supper, his Passover meal, the true Passover meal, but when he was crucified the next day, it was right before the Jewish Passover, which only happened, by the way, on April the 3rd in 30 AD, and that was done on purpose, so this exact moment from three to five o’clock that the Jewish high priest and the priest at the temple were slaying the lambs for that night’s Passover meal, Christ was being slayed by those same priests, by their orders, and so he was the total fulfillment of the Jewish Passover as well, and of his own Passover and unleavened bread. The symbolism is just too great to ignore, and the planning that went into that could be done by no human being. It was planned by God. It was perfectly planned.
The astronomy was perfectly, not the astrology, but the astronomy, the science of the planets lining up, the moon, everything was perfect that year, and it also happened to be a year of jubilee. Every 50 years is called a year jubilee when all debts are forgiven, and what is a symbolism of debt? Sin. All sin was forgiven by Christ on that year of jubilee, and that’s an important thing because I believe Christ is coming back on a year jubilee, and so we know 30 AD, if you add 2,000 years to that, 2030 is going to be a year jubilee. Does that mean something? I don’t know. After that, it’s 2080, and after that, it’s whatever, 50 years from now, I guess that’s 2130. So, I do believe that the tribulation may happen during a jubilee year. It implies that. There’s nowhere it says it definitely, but Christ did come on a jubilee year. Now, there is some controversy because when he announced the jubilee year, it was three years before he died. So, it’s possible that AD 27 was a jubilee year, and he died three years later, or 30 AD was a jubilee year. So, you got 1977 to 1980 time, 2027 to 2030 time, 2077 to 2080 time seems to be the time of the jubilee years. So, anyway, that’s the story for today.
25:24 I hope you did have a Passover. I hope you did do it. I hope you follow. Try to get to east side of your house. Don’t worry if you don’t do it right. If you’re new to this, God will overlook a lot of things if you’re trying to follow him. God loves sinners, and he loves to see sinners change direction. Jesus said, the one lost sheep, when you find it, you’re happier than the other 99 sheep that stayed there, and God is so happy when one person out there sees the light and says, you know, I’m going to try to please God. I’m going to try to follow his Sabbath day. I’m going to try to follow his holy days, and even if I don’t do it right, I’m going to try, and God is happy, and God is pleased. Well, that’s the show for today. Tomorrow, we go back. The feast of Unleavened Bread lasts for the whole week, but we’re going back to mainstream programming again, and there will be a 7-11 p.m. show tonight as well, and I really do appreciate those who listen.
I hope many people take what I had to say yesterday and today seriously. I hope you look into this, and I hope you decide if you didn’t do it this year that you will consider all of this for next year…that you will follow God’s holy days, and you are going to leave behind pagan man’s holy days and try to make God happy.
Don’t you think God deserves to be happy and not always be like the parent who’s always unhappy with their child because they always make the wrong decision?
Isn’t a parent always happier when the child makes good decisions? Well, make a good decision for God. God did a lot for you. Jesus Christ did a lot more for you than you will ever know or that you will ever understand. Think about that.
29:01 This is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today. Happy Passover, happy Unleavened Bread, and we’ll talk later on next week about First Fruits and the countdown to Pentecost. Until then, have a good day. This is Bob Barney signing off. Bye-bye.