The Rhythm of Gratitude: Feasting Before the Lord Text: Exodus 23:14-19
Introduction: The Liturgical Calendar of Liberty
We live in a secular age that is desperately trying to escape from time. Our culture wants an endless weekend, a perpetual holiday from responsibility. It wants to flatten time into a meaningless, uniform stretch of moments, each one as insignificant as the last. But this is a rebellion against the way God made the world. God is the Lord of time, and He has built a rhythm into the fabric of creation itself. He gave us the rhythm of evening and morning, the rhythm of work and rest in the week, and here, in the Book of the Covenant, He establishes a rhythm for the year. This is a liturgical calendar, a calendar of feasts. And we must understand that this is not a list of suggestions for how to have a good time. This is the divinely mandated structure for the life of a redeemed people.
God did not deliver Israel from the grinding, meaningless slavery of Egypt just to turn them loose in the wilderness to invent their own meaning. He did not free them from Pharaoh's brickyards so they could establish their own autonomous schedules. He brought them out so that they might feast with Him (Ex. 5:1). He delivered them from slavery into worship. Liberty is not the freedom to do whatever you want; true liberty is the freedom to do what you ought, which is to worship and enjoy God forever. The opposite of slavery to Pharaoh is not radical autonomy; it is joyful feasting before Yahweh.
These feasts were not arbitrary. They were gospel sermons preached in the medium of time and agriculture. They were designed to continually reorient Israel's heart toward God as their great Redeemer, their constant Provider, and their ultimate Hope. They were anchors in the year that prevented Israel from drifting into the paganism of their neighbors, whose calendars were governed by the worship of created things, the sun, the moon, the harvest, fertility. Israel was to worship the Creator of all those things. And so, these laws about feasts and offerings are not some dusty legal code for an ancient agrarian society. They establish foundational principles of worship, gratitude, and covenant life that are fulfilled and transformed, but not abolished, in Christ.
The modern church has largely forgotten this. We have stripped our calendar down to Christmas and Easter, and even those are often more sentimental than robustly theological. We have forgotten that our entire lives are to be a feast before the Lord. This passage calls us back to the grammar of grateful worship, a grammar that is structured, rhythmic, and centered entirely on the gracious character of our God.
The Text
"Three times a year you shall celebrate a feast to Me. You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread; for seven days you are to eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the appointed time in the month Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt. And none shall appear before Me empty-handed. Also you shall keep the Feast of the Harvest of the first fruits of your labors from what you sow in the field; also the Feast of the Ingathering at the end of the year when you gather in the fruit of your labors from the field. Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord Yahweh.
You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice with leavened bread; nor is the fat of My feast to remain overnight until morning.
You shall bring the choice first fruits of your ground into the house of Yahweh your God.
You shall not boil a young goat in the milk of its mother."
(Exodus 23:14-19 LSB)
The Threefold Cord of Remembrance (vv. 14-17)
The central command here is a call to gather for worship three times a year.
"Three times a year you shall celebrate a feast to Me... Three times a year all your males shall appear before the Lord Yahweh." (Exodus 23:14, 17)
This is a command for a national pilgrimage. All the men of Israel were to leave their homes, their fields, and their businesses and travel to the central sanctuary. This was a radical act of faith. It required them to trust that God would protect their borders and their families while all the men were away. It was a tangible demonstration that their security and prosperity came not from their own strength or diligence, but from the hand of Yahweh. This is a principle we must recover. Our lives, our families, our churches are not secure because we have bolted all the doors. They are secure because we are in covenant with the living God.
The three feasts mentioned are the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering. The first, Unleavened Bread, was tied to the Passover and commemorated their redemption from Egypt. It was a feast of history, looking back to God's mighty act of salvation. The second, the Feast of Harvest (also called Pentecost or Weeks), celebrated the beginning of the wheat harvest. It was a feast of provision, acknowledging God's present faithfulness in providing their daily bread. The third, the Feast of Ingathering (or Tabernacles), celebrated the completion of the harvest at the end of the year. It was a feast of hope, looking forward to the final, full harvest and rest.
So we have redemption, provision, and hope. Past, present, and future. This is the structure of a healthy Christian worldview. We are to be a people who constantly remember where we came from (redemption), who live in gratitude for what God is doing now (provision), and who look forward with eager anticipation to where we are going (hope). A church that forgets its past becomes rootless. A church that is ungrateful for the present becomes bitter. And a church that has no hope for the future becomes useless.
Notice the requirement: "none shall appear before Me empty-handed." This is not a cover charge for worship. This is the principle of grateful reciprocity. Because God has given everything to us, we are to come before Him with a portion of what He has given. Our giving is not a way to earn God's favor; it is a response to the favor He has already shown. It is a declaration that we know where our stuff comes from. It all belongs to Him, and we are simply returning a portion to the Owner. This demolishes the consumer mindset that plagues modern worship, where people show up asking what they can get. The biblical question is, "What shall I render to the Lord for all His benefits to me?" (Psalm 116:12).
The Purity of the Feast (v. 18)
Verse 18 gives two specific regulations concerning the sacrifices offered during these feasts.
"You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice with leavened bread; nor is the fat of My feast to remain overnight until morning." (Exodus 23:18 LSB)
First, no leaven was to be present with the blood of the sacrifice. In Scripture, leaven is a consistent symbol of sin, corruption, and hypocrisy. It is that which puffs up and spreads silently and pervasively (1 Cor. 5:6-8). The blood, on the other hand, represents the life given in atonement for sin. To mix the two would be a profound theological contradiction. It would be like trying to celebrate forgiveness while clinging to your sin. It is an abomination.
The apostle Paul applies this directly to the church. "Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Cor. 5:7-8). The Christian life is a continual Feast of Unleavened Bread. We are to be constantly purging the leaven of sin from our lives, our families, and our churches, because the blood of Christ has been shed for us. To come to the Lord's Table, which is the fulfillment of these feasts, with unconfessed sin and a heart full of malice is to bring leaven to the sacrifice. It is a dangerous and profane act.
The second prohibition, that the fat of the feast must not remain until morning, is a command against presumption and sloppiness. The fat was considered the richest part of the sacrifice, belonging to God. It was to be offered promptly and completely. To leave it lying around overnight showed a casual, disrespectful attitude toward the holy things of God. It treated the sacrifice as leftovers. This teaches us that worship requires our full attention and our best effort. We are not to give God our tired, distracted dregs. We are to offer Him the fat, the best, and we are to do it with reverence and godly fear.
First Things First (v. 19a)
The first part of verse 19 reinforces the principle of giving God the first and the best.
"You shall bring the choice first fruits of your ground into the house of Yahweh your God." (Exodus 23:19a LSB)
The first fruits were the very first sheaf of barley that ripened in the spring. This was an act of profound faith. The farmer was to take the very first part of his harvest, before he knew how the rest of the crop would turn out, and give it to God. He was not to wait until all the barns were full and then give God a portion of the surplus. He was to honor God first, trusting that God would provide the rest of the harvest.
This is the principle of the tithe. We are to give God the first tenth of our increase, not the last tenth of our leftovers. "Honor the Lord with your possessions, and with the firstfruits of all your increase; so your barns will be filled with plenty" (Proverbs 3:9-10). When we give God the first part, we are sanctifying the rest. We are acknowledging that the whole thing belongs to Him, and that our prosperity depends entirely upon His blessing, not our cleverness.
Of course, the ultimate first fruits is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. He is the first fruits from the dead (1 Cor. 15:20). His resurrection is the guarantee of our resurrection. Because the first sheaf has been raised and presented to the Father, we who are in Him can have absolute confidence that the full harvest of God's people will one day be gathered safely into His barn.
The Perversion of Life (v. 19b)
The final command in this section is one that sounds strange to our modern ears, but it contains a principle of immense importance.
"You shall not boil a young goat in the milk of its mother." (Exodus 23:19b LSB)
On one level, this was likely a prohibition against a specific pagan fertility rite. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Canaanites engaged in this practice as a form of sympathetic magic, hoping to induce fertility in their flocks. God is commanding His people not to worship like the pagans. Our worship is to be governed by His Word, not by the superstitious and grotesque practices of the surrounding culture.
But there is a deeper principle here, what we might call the general equity of the law. The mother's milk is God's ordained instrument for nurturing and sustaining the life of her young. To take that very substance of life and turn it into the instrument of death, boiling the kid in the very thing that was meant to give it life, is a grotesque perversion. It is a twisting of the created order. It is an act of profound disrespect for the way God has structured the world.
This principle has wide-ranging application. We are not to take things God has designed for life and turn them into instruments of death. God designed the woman to be a life-giver, so to turn her into a death-dealer, as in combat roles in the military, is to boil a kid in its mother's milk. God designed the sexual union to be a life-giving and covenant-affirming act within marriage, so to turn it into a sterile act of recreation or an instrument of degradation is to boil a kid in its mother's milk. God designed the Lord's Day to be a feast of life and rest for His people, so for legalists to turn it into a joyless burden is to boil a kid in its mother's milk. Our entire lives are to be lived in grateful submission to the Creator's design. To rebel against that design is to engage in a kind of cosmic cruelty, a perversion that God hates.
Conclusion: Keeping the Feast
So what does this mean for us, who are on this side of the cross? The sacrificial system and the specific calendar have been fulfilled in Christ. He is our Passover Lamb. He is the first fruits from the dead. His coming brought the great harvest that the Feast of Ingathering anticipated. We are not required to travel to Jerusalem three times a year. But the principles embodied in these laws are permanent.
We are still commanded to assemble together for worship. And our worship is to be a feast. It is to be structured by the gospel story: redemption, provision, and hope. We are to remember what Christ has done, we are to thank God for His daily grace, and we are to look forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
We are still commanded to come before God with gratitude, not empty-handed. Our giving, our singing, our attention, our very lives are to be offered to Him as a joyful response to His grace.
We are commanded to pursue holiness, purging the leaven of sin because the blood of Christ has cleansed us. We cannot feast with God and entertain sin at the same time.
And we are commanded to honor the created order, refusing to pervert the good gifts of God. We are to live in harmony with the grain of the universe, which is the will of our Creator.
God has delivered us from the slavery of sin and death. He did not do this so that we could live aimless, unstructured, ungrateful lives. He delivered us so that we might keep the feast. And that feast begins now, every Lord's Day, as we gather in His name, and it will culminate in that great day when we see Him face to face, and feast with Him forever.