(By Rabbi Charles Ian Luge) Last night, Tuesday, May 30 at 7 p.m., we celebrated Shavuot (Pentecost). We counted the omer and anxiously waited for this moment. Each day brought us closer to the expectation of God’s promised revelation and renewal. We believed for echoes of the first Shavuot at Mount Sinai and the first Shavuot at the Temple in Jerusalem, ten days after Yeshua (Jesus) had ascended to heaven. Both events included heavenly fire, noise and extraordinary phenomena. At the original Shavuot, the people of Israel stood before the Lord at Sinai, and the Lord called them to be a holy nation before Him: “All the people answered together and said, “We will do everything that the Lord has spoken'” (Ex. 19:8).
The instructions to count seven complete weeks (fifty days) “from the day after the Sabbath, from the day when you brought in the sheaf (tied bundle of grain) of the wave offering”, to the day after the seventh week, are found in Leviticus 23:15-16. The omer (sheaf) counting began as an agricultural commandment to wave the first fruits of the barley harvest. Symbolically, it points to Yeshua who is the first fruit of the dead through His resurrection. Spiritually, it is a time of “cheshbon” or spiritual accounting. READ MORE
