How To Count Pentecost

The first of the firstfruits wave offering was made on the day after a weekly Sabbath – always on a Sunday. This was the Sunday that occurred during the Days of Unleavened Bread (Lev. 23:11).

The date for the Feast of Weeks must be counted beginning on the day the first of the firstfruits was offered (Lev. 23:14-16, Deut. 16:9-10).

The authorities in the Church of God are to count the days towards Pentecost, not “from,” but “beginning with” the starting point, as per the original Hebrew wording of Leviticus 23:15-16. The English word “from” is therefore misleading. The New American Bible (1970) makes the correct method of counting very clear: “Beginning with the day after the sabbath, the day on which you bring the wave-offering sheaf, you shall count seven full weeks, and then on the day after the seventh week, the fiftieth day,” you shall keep the feast of firstfruits (Lev. 23:15-16).

The day of the wave offering, the Sunday during the feast of Unleavened bread, was day one. Day seven would be the next weekly Sabbath. Day 49 would be the seventh Sabbath, and the 50th day would be a Sunday, the day after the seventh week, or seventh sabbath. This is how the original Hebrew and the authorized version state it. Thus, Pentecost always falls on a Sunday.

The Truth About Fasting And Healing!

What is fasting? No one seems to know the real truth about this subject. Some call it the fast way to health, and others call it a starvation diet. If you miss a meal or two, will you die or be in serious health danger?

On the one hand sensible fasting is not a “starvation diet,” and those who have the “starvation fear” are at one erroneous extreme — whether ignorant layman or professional physician. Most doctors, incidentally, have studied medicine, not fasting as an aid toward elimination of disease.

In the “healing arts” — (an unfortunate and incorrect term) — professional men have tended to specialize each in his one field only. The medical physician seeks the cure almost exclusively by drugs, or surgery. The Chiropractor seeks to cure everything by manipulating the spine — perhaps with the aid of prescribed diet. The Naturopath by “natural” means. Medical doctors generally ridicule fasting in the case of sickness or disease, just as they would avoid recommending chiropractic treatments, or any other method outside their one field of medicine. Fasting is simply outside their field. A few medical doctors have advocated fasting, but certainly they are in the minority.

But to look on sensible fasting as “starvation” is an untrue extreme, based on plain ignorance. On the other hand, some go to the opposite extreme of regarding fasting as a cure-all. Neither extreme is the truth!