The month of Nissan
Gavriel
According to the lunar cycle, the month of Nissan started on the 30th of March this year.
We know that among other things, God created the stars and the other celestial bodies so that the people of Israel recognise the arrival of the feasts and the fulfillment of the prophecies. This has nothing to do with the astrology which God has forbidden His people to use as a means of knowing the future. The feasts appointed by God happen in a prescribed order and succeed each other in a cycle. They are all prophetic feasts, which show in a well-defined order and ahead of time God’s plan of salvation and the way His people have to follow.
We can read in the Bible about the feasts that each one of them has well determinated limits - a beginning and an end, a month, a day. The former names of certain months as well as their more recent ones are still used in the Jewish calendar. Since all Hebrew names have a meaning and give us some information about the characteristics of a person or a thing, it is interesting to know the meaning of the names of months because they relate to the events which happened at that time.
We will chronologically look at the month of Nissan and examine the significance of events in the Old Testament as they are still valid today and have a significance in the New Testament.
• The original name of the month of Nissan was Aviv, which means ”ripe grain” (in modern Hebrew it means ”Spring”, because the grain ripens in that season). The sown seed begins to sprout in a stalk and ripens to grain. It is the beginning of a new life, the time of a new start.
• And this is the first month of the year, which God decreed for the first time when His people came out of Egypt. They left Egypt in this month and the fulfillment of the promises made to our ancestors began. A people of slaves started on their way to become free people. Jews celebrate Pessach (Easter) to remember this event. This feast was ordained by God for all eternity. Pessach and the week that follows, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, are both falling on the month of Nissan.
Jews start getting ready for this Feast at the beginning of the month. They clean their house of everything that contains leaven. They even light a candle to search in the the tiniest cracks of their rooms, they sweep away the smallest fallen crumb of bread and make sure that everything is in order and that their house is clean (Ex.12: 43-51). They remember from generation to generation the place where they came outof and thank the Lord for their deliverence.
We could also apply that to our lives: God had also made a day when He called us out of Egypt, when He called us to come out of the world where we were slaves because of our sins, a day when he freed us through the sacrifice of Yeshua HaMashiach on Golgotha. This is the testimony we have to hand down to our physical and spiritual children when we sit around the Seder table, when we tell them the way we have been saved by God. All this can not be authentic if we don’t show a constant purification in our lives of believers, if we don’t sweep the leavened crumbs out of our lives which are uncovered by the Holy Spirit. This is the moment of happy remembering, the renewal and the reinforcement of the Covenant.
• It was in this month that God decreed the setting up of the sanctuary (Ex.40:2).
According to God’s plan, the various components of the temple and the tools were made separately to finally be assembled together in a perfect unity. From that moment the ministry began. God prepares everyone like this so that each of us, according to his calling, could accomplish the ministry which was entrusted to him. It is in His spiritual unity that He puts us into the Body of Christ so that in Him, we could be built up as a real temple. Every part of our life has to be built in this precise order so that it functions well because we ourselves are temples in which Christ is reigning.
• It was also the month of the crossing of the Jordan river (Jos.4:19)
The wandering in the desert reaches its end, and the following step is the entrance into the Promised Land where beside the many blessings, a lot of battles are still waiting to be fought. After the desert training and the trials, the time of fights has come, when my main duty is to conquer the territories given to me by God. It means that my duty is to accomplish everything that God has inteded for me. We can neither wander any longer in the desert nor can we return to Egypt. The time will come sooner or later when we stand at the banks of the Jordan river, and we’ll have to step foward in faith. And in that moment the waters will part.
• It is also the time of the purification of the Temple in Jerusalem (2 Chron. 29)
Many years have passed since the people celebrated Pessach. Moreover, they have put many idols into the sanctuary and neither were any offerings made. The priests had to sanctify themselves and had to throw out the idols to be able to restart the ministry in the Temple.
Through His feasts, God shows us that it is important to put our lives in order. The offerings are the prayers and the worships. If these offerings don’t work in the order established by God, our lives will be untidy, religious or even dead. We even could fall in the mortal trap of idolatry. We often make all these offerings mechanically or we even don’t do them at all. It would be good to restore these things in our lives and assemblies before Pessach.
• One part of Ezra’s and Israel’s sons came out from Babylon in this month (Ezra 7:9).
We can see that a big part of the captives of Babylon got used to their new environement after a few years. Just a few of them decided to return to their country to rebuild the destroyed cities including Jerusalem and it’s sanctuary.
Similarly it was in the same month but in another year that Nehemiah received the possibility to return to Jerusalem.
Today we are living in a time when God prepares again the return of His people to their Holy Land through Alyah. Some Jews don’t take note to this, especially if they live already most comfortably somewhere else. But the time will come when God will gather His people from all the nations where He has scattered them.
• It was also the time given to the people to send back their foreign wives (Ezr.10:17)
When the people of God came home from their exile they did not only have to reconstruct the cities from their ruins, but also had to purify themselves. The men had to send their foreign wives back from where they got them because God did not allow intermarriages. The idols which were imported through those marriages could infect the people of God.
We also have to break off with any covenant with foreign powers. We have to be exclusively the bride of only one, of the only one bridegroom who will come back very soon, the one who got engaged with us for ever.
• It was the time of certain visions of the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, the time of Pessach in the new Temple.
The prophet Ezekiel received several visions in this month while living in captivity (Ezra 29:17; 30:20). And in the order of the offerings of the new Temple, Pessach continued to fall invariably on that month (Eze. 45:18-24). In the same way the prophet Daniel received also his visions in the month of Nissan (Dan.10:4).
Today we also need to pay attention to prophecies. Without them we would not have a clear vision in this world which is getting more and more obscure. The empire of the Antichrist is under construction but we need to bring light and need to announce the reign and the power of God in it. We don’t need to argue uselessely and literally about the meaning of the prophecies or find forced parallels between them and the events that surrounds us, but we have to be ready and have to have open ears to hear the Holy Spirit’s voice and to be able to recognise at the right moment and the right place the instructions that God wants to give us.
• It is also the month of the latter rain (Joel 2, 23)
In Israel the rainy season starts at the time of the Autumn’s feasts and finishes in Spring. It is important to have enough precipitation because it ensures the growth of the seeds together with the water reservoirs for the long period of drought. God promised to always give early (autumn) and late (spring) rain if His people stay faithful to the Covenant (Deut. 11:14).
When the people became unfaithful there was a drought and no food to eat. But after a sincere repentence God promises the rain according to Joel’s prophecy. This rain is nothing else like the gift of the Holy Spirit through whom our lives become alive and growing. This order is unchageable! Many people are waiting for revivals, spectacular miracles and yet do not allow God to show them their sins, their mistakes and their blindness. God only sends rain on an earth which has been ploughed and into which the pure seeds of His Word were sown. He sends this rain at its appointed time, before the time of the great harvest, the one which will begin in the month of Nissan.
Translated from hungarian by Richard (Zeev Shlomo)
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