Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

This is another day that unexpectedly brought me to tears, and I can't wait to tell you why.

Today we continue with God's laws for the people delivered to Moses, but remember that the

point of what we're reading isn't the laws. It's what's underneath the laws. What do they point to?

I always want to be encouraging us to look for God when we read. Some days it'll be harder than others.

Maybe today was one of those days. That's okay. The way you feel about the text doesn't decrease its value in

your life. It's adding value to your life to fix your eyes on these pages, whether you feel it right now or not.

So what do we see about God in the laws he's setting out? One of the things underneath much of what

we read today was that God wants his people to be clean and he keeps reminding

that he is the one who makes them clean. I am the Lord who sanctifies you. We get repeated reminders

of both God's holiness and his rescue in these passages. In chapter 23 we see a lot about

feasts. Since I don't have time to go into this in depth, we'll include a short article in the

show notes that explains these seven feasts and their significance. As always, when we include a

resource, we can't vouch for everything on that site. We're just including that one particular resource,

though in general we do try to be careful about what we're sending you. So back to the feasts. First,

God reminds them again about a weekly

feast called the Sabbath. Then there are six annual feast covered here, and you should recognize a

few of them from our reading so far. It can get really confusing, though, since a lot of these feasts

have multiple names. You probably recognize Passover, which is also called the Feast of Unleavened Bread. You may also recognize the Feast of First Fruits, although when we read about it in Exodus 34, it was called the Feast of Harvest. And on that same day, we read about the Feast of End Gathering, which is called the Feast of Booths here. And then there's the one we read about most recently in Leviticus 16, the Day of Atonement. Aren't you glad there isn't a quiz on this? Me too. I'm just telling you all of this because I used to be under the impression that there were like 30 feasts based on the names I'd read. Turns out they're just the same six feasts with nicknames. One weird thing about the Day of Atonement, it's called a feast, but they're fasting on this day.

That's part of what it means when you see the phrase they afflicted themselves.

That refers to fasting.

This is the only feast day where they're fasting, because this is the holiest and most solemn day of the year.

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