At the beginning of the chapter God had said of these “feasts of the Lord” that “these are My feasts.” God has His joy in redemption (the Passover), and He had His own special joy too in the resurrection of Christ, as seen in the waving of the sheaf of first fruits.
What a solemn time it was for God when His beloved Son lay in death! But what a time it was when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the highest glory — a living Christ, body, soul, and spirit in heaven, a glorified Man not to be spiritualized away, for that is what spiritualizing does. It takes the whole thing away. This truth of the resurrection of Christ has been attacked so widely in these last days.
But God has had His joy in the resurrection of Christ. It is an accomplished fact. He will never lie in death again — he will never be raised from the dead again. How wonderful that God should give us the shadows of these things in the Old Testament Scriptures.
In Romans 6 it says He was raised from the dead “by the glory of the Father.” The Lord Jesus lay in death in obedience and love to God as well as in love to poor sinners. Could God allow His beloved Son to remain in death, He who has so glorified Him? God’s very character, His glory, was in question. He was a debtor to that blessed Man who lay in death, and He owned it. So it says, “raised from the dead by the glory of the Father.”
“And ye shall eat neither bread, nor parched corn, nor green ears, until the selfsame day that ye have brought an offering unto the Lord your God.” Here is something practical for us. In Scripture God is first, and there is blessing when we give Him the first fruits. How often instead of getting the first fruits from His people, He actually gets what is left. No doubt much of our poverty of soul is the result of forgetting what is due to God. So often He reminds His people in a practical way that they were His and not their own, and we who now belong to Him need to be reminded of this too.
Next came the “feast of weeks” fifty days after the waving of the sheaf of first fruits. “And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven sabbaths shall be complete: even unto the morrow after the seventh sabbath shall ye number fifty days.’ This is both interesting and precious. As Christians we have nothing to do with the Sabbath — our day is the morrow after the Sabbath — not the seventh day but the eighth, and the eighth is the first day, when God begins a new work, a new creation. The first day of each week reminds us that we are part of new creation, a new work of God founded on redemption.
ML-08/27/1972