Can A Christian Keep Passover? God’s Harvest Festivals. The Best Way to Cook Sweet Potatoes.

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Can A Christian Keep Passover?

““That’s not what we Christians do. We keep Easter. Jews keep Passover.” This was blurted out one day by a gentleman with whom I was doing business. It illustrates the traditional beliefs of many people when it comes to Christmas, or in this case, Easter versus Passover.

I am a Christian believer in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and a person who observes the Passover of the New Testament. I do not observe Easter. Every year I teach the doctrines of the Bible to students and I thoroughly cover what the Bible says about the Passover Christ kept with His disciples. The New Testament teaching is very clear. The Church Jesus founded kept Passover with the new symbols Christ gave them. As the Church spread to the gentile peoples, the same teaching was given to them. The Church of the New Testament did not teach or sanction Easter.

Let me show you one clear scripture to give you something to consider. In 1 Corinthians, Paul is writing to a gentile congregation about problems they need to deal with. After telling them to work with a moral problem he pivots to teaching about God’s festivals. He tells them, “Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed 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 Corinthians 5:6-8).

Did you catch that? “Christ our Passover, was sacrificed for us.” Christ’s death was the Passover sacrifice.

You are probably familiar with scriptures describing Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” At the original Passover in Exodus 12 a lamb was killed. Christ was the fulfillment of that symbolic lamb. Christ, in truth, was the sacrificial “lamb.” Before His death He gave teaching which enhanced the meaning for a Christian. He told His disciples to take bread and wine as symbols of His sinless life and shed blood. That is what I do at Passover—once a year, on the anniversary of His death. There are important lessons I learn each year during this service.

You can learn the same lessons of humility, obedience and thankfulness. Christ’s death opens life for us. A Christian cannot fathom the hope of eternal life without coming to understand the full expression behind the words, “Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us.” Christian identity is tied to this truth of Christ as our Passover. Keeping the Passover is a key to your identity as a Christian.

You need to study this topic from your Bible. Your eternal life depends on this.

To learn more about the Passover of the New Testament you will find this chapter from our study guide, God’s Holy Day Plan, very informative. It’s titled, “The Passover: Why Did Jesus Have to Die?” It might also challenge your assumption that Passover is not for Christians.”

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God’s Harvest Festivals

Exodus 23:14-16

“Three times you shall keep a feast to Me in the year: You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread (you shall eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt; none shall appear before Me empty); and the Feast of Harvest, the firstfruits of your labors which you have sown in the field; and the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.”

God’s seven annual festivals listed in Leviticus 23 are several times grouped together as three main festival seasons of the year.

• Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread fall in an eight-day period in the spring.
• The Feast of Harvest, called Pentecost in the New Testament, falls in late spring or early summer.
• And the Feast of Ingathering, better known as the Feast of Tabernacles, comes in the fall, along with the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement and the Eighth Day/Last Great Day.

For an overview of God’s festivals and God’s plan of salvation, see “Festival Meaning: What Are the Meanings of Each of God’s Festivals?” From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/gods-harvest-festivals/?

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Zech: 14: 16-19

^{16 “}And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. ¹⁷ And it shall be that whichever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, on them there will be no rain. ¹⁸ If the family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they shall have no rain; they shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations who do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. ¹⁹ This shall be the ^[i]punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.”  NKJ.

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The Best Way to Cook Sweet Potatoes

How does sweet potato baking compare to boiling and steaming, and should we eat the skin?

Transcript of YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwZ6Nbf7Dio

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

“The only potential downside of eating sweet potatoes is if you eat too much, you could get a yellow nose. It’s called carotenemia. It’s a common, harmless condition due to elevated levels of beta-carotene in the blood, first noticed a century ago, when carrots were introduced into infant diets. It’s treated mostly by just reassuring parents that it’s harmless. But, if you don’t want your child’s nose to be yellow, you can decrease their beta-carotene intake, and in a few months, it will be gone.

But, color is what we’re looking for when picking out varieties at the supermarket. “The intensity of the yellow or orange flesh color of the sweet potato is directly correlated to [its nutritional] content.” So, the more intense, the better. Though, if you really want intensity, “sweet potato varieties…[range not only] from white [to] yellow…[and] orange, [but to] pink [and] “very to deep purple”—the natural pigments of which may have special anticancer effects of their own.

What’s the best way to cook sweet potatoes? Boiling may actually best retain the antioxidant power of sweet potatoes, compared to roasting and steaming. If you compare baking to boiling, microscopically, boiling helps thin out the cell walls and gelatinize the starch, which may enhance the bioavailability of nutrients, while at the same time the glycemic index of boiled sweet potatoes was found to be only about half that of baking or roasting. So, boiled gives one less of a blood sugar spike.

Make sure to keep the skin on, though. The peel of a sweet potato has nearly ten times the antioxidant power as the flesh—an antioxidant capacity “comparable [to] that of blueberries,” though it really takes a hit when baked, wiping out over two-thirds, whereas microwaving or boiling was comparatively much gentler. The same with the rest of the sweet potato. Baking can cause an 80% drop in vitamin A levels—twice as much as boiling. So, “from a nutritional standpoint, boiling rather than baking can be recommended for sweet potato cooking.”

Boiling may be best, but sweet potatoes are so incredibly healthy, the best way to prepare them is whichever way will get you to eat the most of them—with the exception of deep frying, which can lead to the formation of acrylamide, a potential human carcinogen.”   From: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/flashback-friday-the-best-way-to-cook-sweet-potatoes/

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