The Messenger Church of God keeps the festivals God commands his people to keep. The commanded festivals and annual Sabbaths are listed in Leviticus 23. They include, in addition to the weekly Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets, the Feast of Atonement, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Last Great Day, associated with the Feast of Tabernacles, but technically a separate feast. The 2023 festival observance planned by the Church for the commanded annual festivals is summarized below.

A common belief is that these festivals were somehow “done away” for Christians, but the Bible does not support such a belief. That the early New Testament Church kept the Passover on the fourteenth of Nisan (or Abib, the first month of the Hebrew sacred calendar), is easily proven from extant historical records, and is admitted by virtually all competent Bible scholars (see chapters 9 and 10 of When Is the Biblical Passover?).

Nowhere in the New Testament is there any suggestion that the weekly Sabbath or any of the annual feasts was abrogated (see “Why Christians Should Keep the Sabbath”). Jesus and the apostles and their disciples kept the Sabbath and the feasts God commanded to be kept as recorded in Scripture, not the feasts borrowed from paganism that have become popular in the human devised traditions of apostate Christianity (Matthew 26:18; Luke 4:16; John 7:2, 8-43; Acts 2:1; 16:13; 17:2; 20:6, 16; 27:9; 1 Corinthians 5:6-8).

Unheard of in the New Testament is the keeping by Christians of such days as Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc. There is no command or suggestion in the Scripture that Sunday is to be kept as a day set apart for regular weekly worship services and rest from secular labor. All such customs are of human invention, and are not sanctioned anywhere in the Bible.

The calendar of annual feasts and holy days we plan to keep in accordance with God’s word in 2023 are as follows:

Passover	Nissan 14	April 5*
Unleavened Bread	Nissan 15 – 21	April 6 – April 12
First Holy Day	Nissan 15	April 6**
Last Holy Day	Nissan 21	April 12**
Pentecost	Sivan 6	May 28**
Trumpets	Tishri 1	September 16**
Atonement	Tishri 10	September 25**
Tabernacles First Holy Day	Tishri 15	September 30**
Last Great Day	Tishri 22	October 7**
* Service previous evening
** Begins previous evening – days in Hebrew calendar begin at sunset

We plan to have a service on each annual holy day, and services daily during the Feast of Tabernacles. Details regarding our services for the annual festivals will be made available to registered attendees at the appropriate time.

Our services are intended for our members and for persons genuinely interested in learning about and following real Biblical Christianity. If you wish to inquire about attending any of our services, please contact us.

Copyright © 2023 by Rod Reynolds

Unless otherwise noted Scripture taken from the New King James Version^TM
Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Messenger Church of God
PO Box 619
Wentzville, MO 63385
USA

cogmessenger.org