Terry asked," Well, I have recently heard of Christian celebrating the Passover. Do you or Anabaptists in general celebrate the Passover? Why or why not? I know we are Gentiles, but it was a requirement for the Jews, and Jesus celebrated it. Okay. I'm sorry. I was taking a drink there. I was hoping the question would go a little bit longer. Yeah, in answer to that, no, the Anabaptists do not celebrate the Passover. I do not celebrate the Passover.
My question would be, why would a Christian want to celebrate a feast that is pointing to something ahead, pointing to Jesus Christ, now that the fulfillment has come and the Passover has been replaced by communion, why would we want to go back to the old law and celebrate something that was a temporary thing pointing to Jesus Christ? It was a shadow. The reality is here. It made me think the question, and it's a good question.
I'm not knocking you for asking it because I've got Christian friends, particularly friends in the evangelical world who, yeah, they'll have Passover Seder meals and all that. And they think this is really spiritual. This is getting closer to the New Testament church to have these Jewish feasts you know around the time of Easter. And yeah, it just stuns me. But it's a growing thing. It's not diminishing. It's growing. But it makes me think of Paul's words in Galatians 4, 9 through 11.
But now after you have known God or rather are known by God, how is it that you turn again to the weak and beggarly elements to which you desire again to be in bondage? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I am afraid for you, lest I have labored for you in vain. So certainly the season, one of the seasons, the big season among the Jews in the Mosaic Law was the Passover. And he says, I fear for you, you know, because you're observing these days and seasons and New Years, that sort of thing.
So yeah, to me, it's a strange new thing. I mean, this isn't something that's been going on for 2000 years or something like that. You know, it disappeared all these celebrations of the Passover. And I don't know. I would say it's been more in the last century that there's been this renewal, I think, with renewed interest in Israel and the creation of the modern state of Israel, that then Christians are wanting to turn back to Judaism. You have so-called Messianic Jews who are nearly always Gentiles.
And yeah, they're wanting to embrace the law and everything like that, the very things that Paul goes to great lengths to write against. Well, what about Jesus? Well, Jesus says the law and the prophets were until John. And since then, the kingdom of God is preached. But yet Jesus was sent to none but to the lost house of Israel. And so the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So yeah, he lived his life as a Jew. And of course, the Passover wasn't fulfilled until Jesus died on the cross.
So yeah, there was good reason. It was still pointing to the future. But Jesus came as a Jew. He was circumcised. His parents took him to the temple when he was a baby. He kept all of the Jewish commandments, didn't break anything in the law. But yeah, it came to an end with Jesus. It really ended with John. The new came in, the gospel age. But everything was finalized with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. So Christians shouldn't go back and be celebrating the Jewish feast. We gain nothing.
And it's a step backward, not a step forward.
No materials available for this lesson.