Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Ladder Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in. Today I'm starting a series of episodes called Torah 101 that will be interspersed from time to time to help you connect more to our Jewish forefathers. I see this as critical because this series, Lessons in the Ladder Days, is all about preparing listeners for the Day of the Lord.

There's a problem. The problem is that most Christians are unaware of the full understanding about God's day because we are disconnected from the primary source of this wisdom which is found in Judaism, the faith of our fathers. Let me explain it this way: God meets with his children every week on the day that he set aside to impart understanding about his kingdom that he's been preparing for us for almost 6,000 years. The day to meet with him is not Sunday. It is Saturday, the Sabbath. God sanctified the Sabbath and set it apart as holy. The bottom line is this: if we're not showing up at the right time for the teaching, we will miss out on the full instruction.

I understand this disconnect all too well because I was there for many years. One of my mandates in this series is to address this problem. I'm going to insert episodes from time to time on topics that God meant to be part of our Jewish heritage that most believers don't know about. Today I want to talk about an appointed time on the Hebrew calendar. It's called Counting the Omer, O-M-E-R. Through it, you are going to learn incredible insight into the specific spiritual gift that Messiah gave to you following his resurrection. Let me first answer a question that you may be asking as to what qualifies me to teach this. That's a good question.

In an earlier episode called Jewish Roots, I explained that though I have walked with God as best I knew how for over 50 years, in 2005 the Lord called me to reconnect with my Jewish heritage. I subsequently pulled away from traditional church in order to honor the Sabbath and began meeting with God on his day. I spend each Sabbath all day with the Lord, studying the Torah each week and learning from a Messianic rabbi whose congregation in El Paso I am a part of. I get emails from listeners all the time telling me that what I'm writing about has blown them away.

Let me say humbly that everything I have been writing has come from my times alone with the Lord. I cannot tell you what a difference spending the Sabbath with him has made in my spiritual life. If you want more information on how I made this transition, I have a series of podcasts as well as a monograph, if you want the transcripts in writing, called Jewish Roots. You can find these resources on my podcast page and in my online store at candacelong.com.

The second thing I want to say by way of introduction is to update you a little as to where we are on God's timeline and how close we are to the kingdom. The bulk of this teaching can be found in the episode called How Close Are We? Or you can read about it in the monograph called Where Are We on God's Timetable? I'll put links to these in the description notes to this episode. There are two things that confuse many people about God's timetable. Number one: they have this mistaken belief that we are not supposed to know when the Day of the Lord is. This comes from a mistranslation of the Hebrew which these resources will explain. God wants us and expects his children to know when his day is.

Number two: there is a confusion about the current year on the Hebrew calendar, which is 5784 in the year 2024. For thousands of years our Jewish forefathers have understood and taught that the Day of the Lord will begin when the world has been in existence for 6,000 years. It would appear then that if we're at 5784, we have 216 more years to go. However, I want to quote my rabbi, Michael Washer, from his book When All the Pictures Are Restored. This is the book God used to teach me about the coming kingdom. After reading Matthew 24, most people ask when the Day of the Lord is going to begin on our calendar, which by the way is the Gregorian or Roman calendar, not the Hebrew calendar.

Rabbi Washer refers to the book Seder Olam, which means the great order of the world. It is a second-century work by Rabbi Eliezer which chronicles the dates of all of the biblical events from creation all the way to Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia. Rabbi Washer explains: "Rabbi Eliezer only gave the Persian period 34 years, but that period was 244 years long. That drops out 210 years. However, if you add those years back into the date of the present Hebrew calendar, the Day of the Lord, the resurrection and the birth pangs will fall on Rosh Hashanah in the Hebrew year 2030." Since we are now in 2024, that is only six years away.

Today's teaching is centered around three topics. Number one: where are we now on the biblical calendar? Number two: what does Counting the Omer mean? And number three: how does it relate now and teach us about our spiritual gift? Where are we in the spring of 2024? We have just celebrated the resurrection of the Messiah which most Christians call Easter. I want to introduce you to the Hebrew understanding of this time period, which is one of God's appointed festivals known as Pesach in which the Passover Lamb is chosen on the 10th of the month of Nisan and is sacrificed on the 14th of Nisan.

Three days later on the 17th of Nisan is another appointed festival called Bikkurim, which is the festival known as First Fruits. Our Messiah fulfilled each of these dates to the letter. He was chosen as the Passover Lamb on the 10th of Nisan, which believers refer to as Palm Sunday, and then he was sacrificed as the Passover Lamb on the 14th of Nisan. Three days later he burst forth out of the tomb on Bikkurim and that year the 17th of Nisan fell on Sunday.

Let me explain a little about the Hebrew calendar. It is the foundation of the life of God's people. The Lord never meant for us to throw it away in favor of our own traditions. In Leviticus 23 we read: "The Lord said to Moses: Say to the people of Israel, the appointed feasts of the Lord which you shall proclaim as holy convocation, my appointed feasts are these." Then Moses lists all of the times the people were to meet before God. The very first of these holy convocations is the seventh day, the Sabbath. The next one is Pesach, commemorating the Lord's Passover, followed immediately by the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and then First Fruits three days later.

The month of Nisan, which falls in the spring, contains four of the seven appointed feasts. Seven months later in the fall are the remaining three: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. Let me introduce you to two terms being used here. The first term used is Moed, which is the Hebrew word for appointment. There is a set time to meet with God which is why it is called an appointed time. Even if Jews forget these appointments, God does not. The second word I want you to take note of is translated "holy convocation". The Hebrew word is Miqra, which is a calling together, but a better translation of it is the word "rehearsal".

These appointed times are pictures, or tavniyot, that serve as rehearsals for the real thing which is to come. That thing is a divine appointment fulfilled to the day, the hour, and exact moment when the Lord will celebrate his union with his bride. Everything pertaining to God leads us to that day, his day, the Day of the Lord. What is Counting the Omer? The biblical instruction for this appointed time is found in Leviticus 23: "And you shall count for yourselves from the morrow after the Sabbath, from the day of the Omer of the wave offering, seven Sabbaths complete or perfect they shall be, until the morrow after the seventh Sabbath you shall count 50 days."

For the rest of the time we're going to look deeper at this 50-day period so you can see what God sees. There is an anointing right now for understanding the gift that Messiah gave you. An Omer, O-M-E-R, is a specific measure or amount of grain. It's about two quarts or eight cups. It's the amount of manna that God gave each person every day in the wilderness as a picture recognizing God's provision every day to meet our needs. Grain fields all around the temple grew the crops for the offerings. This Moed, Counting the Omer, begins when the first harvest came in at Bikkurim and an Omer was brought by the priests as a first fruit offering to the temple.

Because the Omer is one-tenth of an ephah, Counting the Omer is also a picture of tithing, of giving back to God one-tenth of all he has given us. This festival lasts 50 days from the 17th of Nisan, the day we celebrate Messiah's resurrection, until the 6th of Sivan, which is another appointed time called Shavuot. Believers refer to this as Pentecost. This was the day God gave his people the Torah at Mount Sinai, and also the exact day when Holy Spirit was poured out on Jesus' followers after the resurrection.

This time period is seven Sabbaths long, 49 days, which is the time of completion whereby each person is to prepare ourselves to be worthy to receive God's Torah in the Old Testament and to receive Holy Spirit in the New Testament. This is a beautiful tavnit for us to learn from. It's part of God's curriculum. This 50-day period is divided into five 10-day periods where the quality of the grain, which is a picture of the inner character of our soul, becomes more perfect in God's eyes. During this time God gives an anointing to see areas in our lives that need purifying.

If you're seeing things in your life that you haven't seen before that is bothering you, God is doing his job. These soul impurities are surfacing for you to deal with. Interestingly during this period of time, our assigned Torah readings are all in Leviticus which deals with sacrifices, with separating ourselves unto God, pulling away from defilement and uncleanness. This is where the Levites are especially needed. Remember Levites are those believers whom God has called to live in deeper consecration to him because we're the ones anointed or chosen to help others through this process of refinement, to protect them from being disqualified from entering the kingdom.

At the beginning of this seven-week journey we are harvesting barley, and midway through this period the wheat begins to grow and that's what we harvest at Shavuot. Even this is a picture because wheat is much more valuable than barley, takes longer to mature and is needed even more for our sustenance. The objective during Counting the Omer is for the priest each day to offer an Omer of pure barley or wheat. Anything less than 100% purity will not cut it and will not be brought into the temple. There were specific instructions to the priests in how to test that Omer to make sure of its quality.

How can you learn your spiritual gift in all of this? I want us to look at the five separate processes that the grain had to go through to qualify to be brought to the temple as an offering. These processes were all done by hand, showing that God uses people to help others become more perfect and fit for the kingdom. This picture really comes to life in Ephesians because the Apostle Paul relates all five processes to the five ministry gifts known as the fivefold ministry. Let me read Ephesians 4. I want you to see that each of these processes has been assigned to five ministry gifts that Jesus imparted.

He gave every one of us one primary gift. Let's see if you can find yours. Paul writes: "To each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Messiah's gift." Jesus had a measure, an exact amount of five different gifts that he distributed freely to everyone on the planet. He gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and some teachers for the equipping of the holy ones for the work of the service, to the building up or filling up of the body of Messiah. Let me stop here a minute and comment because this is a familiar passage to many Christians.

Unfortunately, some believers have been taught that we don't have apostles and prophets anymore. But that interpretation cannot be found in this passage which you will understand in a moment. It takes all five gifts to carry out the five processes that the grain, referring to each one of us, has to undergo to become purified and fit for service to the Lord. Paul says these five gifts are needed until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Messiah.

Messiah is all five gifts and he distributes those parts of himself to his body in order to purify the grain, which is us. There's a lot to grasp here and I'm only touching the surface, but I will provide links to other resources that will help you go deeper. I'm going to quote from Rabbi Washer's book The Five Gifts and the Omer to describe these five processes. Process number one is reaping. Each priest was sent out into the fields to reap his own first fruits. They went down to the fields specially designated for this purpose, they tied up the barley into sheaves and then sliced down the stalks.

Reaping is the special gift of the evangelist who goes out in the fields and brings in the harvest. An evangelist is anointed to bring people to the Lord. Process number two is threshing. After the baskets of grain were brought up to the temple courts, the barley stalks were subjected to threshing. This is the process of beating out the grain using rods and canes to remove the husks from the grain but not damage it. Threshing is the role of the pastor who beats out the grain and separates it from the husks.

Many of us have a very wrong picture of the gift of the pastor. The biblical pastor knows what needs to be broken away because the pastor has a God-given concern for the grain as God made it. Process number three is winnowing. This was where the grain was thrown into the wind by the use of pitchforks or shovels. If there was no wind then a winnowing fan was used to blow the chaff into one pile and the heavier grain would drop into another pile. This process is done by the teacher who is anointed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Chaff, which looks just like wheat, is not allowed. It is assaulted and teachers can spot something false a mile away and can be harsh when confronting it. The poor grain doesn't know what hit it when thrown to the wind because the number one concern of the teacher is to free God's children from everything false. Process number four is parching. You should be seeing by now that the processes are getting harder and harder the more the grain is put through refinement. After winnowing the grain was roasted by parching. Every single grain had to be touched by the fire.

This is what the prophet does: tosses the grain and roasts it over the fire. In the natural this was done by placing the grain in a perforated pan or pipe-like device and rolling and jiggling it over the fire. It hurts. It burns. When we are confronted with our sin and the ways that we have gone against God, it stings. No one does this better than the prophet who is equipped with discerning eyes and whose mouth does not mince words with what's on God's mind. The fifth process is sifting. This is the last process that transforms the grain.

During this phase the rough flour was passed through 13 different sieves until it was perfect and incredibly fine. These sieves were made of a mesh that grew to an increasingly tighter weave until no impurity at all was left in the flour. After the 13th sieve the grain was pure, perfect. This depicts the role of the apostle who is anointed for order and protocol and doing things God's way. At the very end of all five processes, one of the temple treasurers would thrust his hand into the basket to check its purity. If it stuck to his hand, the Omer was accepted and could be offered to God.

Rabbi Washer explains that this Omer is first of all a picture of Messiah showing the way that he was brought to the temple compound for judgment and beaten. His flesh was stripped off of him, subjecting him to sifting and refining by every kind of abuse. He showed himself to be perfect without blemish. It is also a picture of those of us who follow him. God has set aside Counting the Omer as a 50-day period for us to become more and more refined day after day. This is what we need to be doing now. Jesus has given you one of these gifts. Are you an evangelist, a pastor, a teacher, a prophet, or an apostle?

I will include links in my description notes to some excellent resources which will help you go deeper and learn which of these gifts the Lord gave you. The process by which we enter the kingdom is not for sissies. It is a narrow path called the derech, the way. God's way. It is a choice that we make every day. The kingdom is God's home that he wants to share with those who pay the price to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. The kingdom is a great reward, but be advised the journey to it is a narrow path.

Thank you for being with me today. You'll find this episode, Torah 101: Counting the Omer, and all of my resources at candacelong.com. I'm Candace Long. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Ladder Days. God bless.