In the pages of your Bible, you may find something mildly surprising. You find holidays, quite prominently, and in both Testaments. Not only that, but they are found observed by the Church in the New Testament. These festivals are called <q>the appointed times of Jehovah</q> and around them flow the entire history of the people of God—from the Israelites, to the Jews, to the Christians of every race and nation. And not only the history of God’s people, but their future as well.

I first began celebrating the festivals of the Bible nearly 50 years ago, but I can’t say that I really understood them in the beginning. What I did was to follow the old rule: <q>When all else fails, do as you’re told.</q> So, since God said to do it, and all I had to do was take off work and go to church, I thought, <q>Let’s do that.</q> That was a simple first step. And because it was the custom to teach and study the meaning of the days in their seasons, year by year I learned the rich history of God’s dealings with his people, especially at those pivotal points in their history, like the original Passover.

To those of us who have been keeping the holy days for years—in some cases, for all of our lives—the practice seems so natural, so right. We all know what blessings we get from it, we all know how encouraging it is to us, we know what it means to us to spend that eight days together and how uplifted we can be when we go home from the Feast of Tabernacles. The scriptures supporting the practice seem so obvious. Why doesn’t everyone see it? Why, we wonder, doesn’t everyone observe the holy days?

The most obvious reason, frankly, is that most Christians know little or nothing about the holy days. They just have never heard of them. One person will say <q>Feast of Tabernacles</q>, and another will say, <q>What?</q> They just frankly have no idea. For many of them, the Old Testament is about as uncharted as the Atlantic was for Christopher Columbus. They really don’t know where anything is if they wanted to look for it.

For those that are maybe a little more familiar with the Bible, the holy days have been dismissed as being Jewish and irrelevant to Christians. <q>That’s part of the Old Testament religion, and we have a New Testament religion</q>; and they just make that simple demarcation and never really inquire any further along the line.

A few people, on the other hand, have studied the subject and arrived at a conscious decision not to observe the holy days. Why? What is the rational, philosophic, theological, or scriptural basis for people to make that decision?

I found to my surprise that studying the reasons that people advance as to why they do not keep the holy days has turned out to be a very useful study. A number of very interesting things have arisen from it—things that I guess I had taken for granted, had not really looked at as carefully as I might have done; and in the process of asking myself the question that I’ve asked you—<q>Why is it everybody doesn’t keep the holy days?</q>—and beginning to look carefully at the reasons advanced by those who don’t, I have found some things that have turned out to be rather interesting to me.