Feast #1 - The Feast of Passover - Lesson 2
Excerpt
Passover is perhaps the most well-known of all the Feasts of God. Passover occurs close to the holiday of Easter. It is the first of the 3 spring feasts. Exactly when does it occur according to Lev. 23:4-5?
The first question that we need to answer here is, when does twilight begin? We know that in western civilization, our new day begins at midnight, 12:00 am. However, the Jewish day begins at twilight, or the moment when the sun disappears from the horizon. That means that we cannot necessarily look at our watch and say definitively when twilight will be. If we categorize it according to our watches, the time would vary from evening to evening and would be even more varied from season to season. There are times of the year, like winter, when we do not have as much sunlight. During the winter months, twilight comes much earlier than it does during the summer months. The Jewish year begins with the month of Nisan. Passover actually changed the way Israel reckoned time. Prior to this event, Nisan wasn’t the first month. After this event, it was. It’s similar to the way we reckon time based on the death of Christ. We have BC and AD. You can see the chart on the following page that shows how our Gregorian calendar corresponds with the Jewish calendar. We are going to look at the very 1st Passover in this lesson. The first Passover occurred in Egypt after God had sent 9 other plagues to the Egyptians and still their Pharaoh refused to release the children of Israel. The 10th plague was the worst by far because it was a plague that killed the firstborn from every family, even the firstborn of all the livestock. Only those with the blood of the lamb over their doorposts were spared this horrible fate. Read the entire chapter of Exodus 12. This is the very first Passover as it was instituted in the foreign land of Egypt.
