Isaiah 58: The Day of Atonement: Chapter 15: The Purpose of Fasting

The purpose of a fast is to deny one’s flesh—that is, one’s fleshly will—in favor of doing God’s will. It subjects the will of man to the will of God, putting the word of God as one’s highest priority. It is one way of putting the flesh to death, as Paul would put it, so that the New Creation Man may rule in one’s life.

An advantage of proper fasting is that it compacts time by the principle of “a day for each year” (Ezek. 4:6). When Jesus fasted 40 days in the wilderness (Luke 4:2), He packed 40 years into those 40 days. Thus, He was able to overcome where Israel had failed in their 40 years in the wilderness. By fasting, every day was the equivalent of a whole year in Israel’s wilderness journey.

The misuse of fasting does nothing but feed the flesh, and, as Jesus said, “they have their reward” (Matt. 6:16). But it is as if Jesus added 40 spiritual years to His age by fasting according to the will of His Father. By this view, Jesus was not 30 but 70 when He began His ministry. His conflict with the religious leaders from 30-33 A.D. thus culminated in 70-73 A.D., when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and finally Masada (73 A.D.).

In my own experience, I was led to fast 21 days, which later represented 21 years of ministry from 1993-2014 and from 1996-2017. If you have followed my writings in the past few years, you will recall that 2014-2017 was a culmination of revelation in regard to the transfer of authority from the kingdoms of men to the saints of the Most High (Dan. 7:21, 22).

That 21-year period was the final phase of the rule of the beast systems in the earth, the final “time of Jacob’s trouble” (Jer. 30:7, KJV) or “distress” (NASB). For a fuller study of the number 21, see Secrets of Time, chapter 14.

The Light Comes

The prophet tells us that when the Day of Atonement is fulfilled by doing God’s chosen fast, the results will be evident. Isaiah 58:8, 9 says,

⁸ Then your light will break out like the dawn; and your recovery [aruka, “healing, restoration”] will speedily spring forth; and your righteousness will go before you; the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. ⁹ Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry, and He will say, “Here I am…”

Other biblical patterns prophesying the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement (or Jubilee) give us greater insight into Isaiah’s meaning. In my book, The Laws of the Second Coming, chapter 4 shows how Jacob’s wilderness journey set early patterns for Israel’s wilderness journey centuries later under Moses. The first set of feasts were established in Jacob’s journey to Haran, while the second set of feasts were established in Jacob’s return to the land.

In this case, Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel set the pattern for the Day of Atonement. His flesh was weakened permanently (Gen. 32:25), but the dawn was breaking, and he received the divine blessing (Gen. 32:26). When he lost the wrestling match, he won the prize and received a new name, Israel, “God rules.”

Jacob became Israel when his will became submitted to God’s will. The light of divine revelation had dawned upon him. A new kind of faith, unmixed with the need to help God by the power of his flesh, changed his outlook and his very nature. When his will was subdued, he became a new creature that recognized the sovereignty of God. From then on, he carried in his name the testimony that “God rules.”

It is not hard to equate his wrestling with the principle of fasting, where the flesh is denied its desire to have dominion. The flesh in its pride thinks that its help is needed to fulfill the promises of God, but the truth is that flesh only gets in the way. These are the same lessons that every man needs to learn in order to fast properly. In fact, learning those lessons are vital in turning the Day of Atonement into a Jubilee.

This revelation, given to Jacob-Israel, was the “light” that broke forth upon him as the dawn. It changed his life forever. You might say it made him an Israel-Light. His prayer for blessing was answered, and he was never the same afterward.

We all have the same prayer, because we all share the same need. The problem is that we do not know the answer. We pray and we fast, but without understanding the real purpose of fasting, our prayer remains unanswered. We may receive answers to other things, but we remain in our flesh, wrestling perpetually, without seeing the dawn of Jubilee. We think the answer is to overpower God and show Him the strength and determination of our fleshly will, while failing to understand that we win by losing.

I recall in my own journey how I struggled mightily for close to a year (1982), after being crucified at Las Cruces (December 4/5, 1981). I was determined to not die. But in the end, I did die. I remember the date: October 23, 1982. I have talked about this in the past, but I have never made my journal entry for that day public. Until now.

“I think I’m just about at the end of my rope. I may as well admit that I am ruined, and I’ll have to start over again in a new kind of life. Faith is too impractical. I might as well admit it doesn’t work, at least not for me. The more I try to take problems with a proper attitude, the more God beats me over the head. It’s as though He is trying to make me admit ruin and throw in the towel.

“So far, I’ve taken everything on the chin and have come up fighting. Maybe if I give up and quit, He’ll stop beating me into the ground. It’s not fair, nor is it just, in promising one thing and doing another. If He’d give me some encouragement once in a while, I could keep on… I just give up trying to please Him. I quit.”

I was one of the walking dead for the next 42 days until God began to raise me from the grave on December 4 of that year. Then I discovered that He was waiting all that time for me to admit defeat and to die to my own fleshly faith. I had to stop relying on my own faulty faith, which was really faith in my own ability to stand true to God and my calling. That had to die in order to be replaced by faith in God’s ability to keep His promises.

I realized later that this was the difference between Old Covenant faith and New Covenant faith. We either have faith that God will help us fulfill our Old Covenant vows, or we have faith that God is perfectly capable of fulfilling His promises without any help from the flesh. That was Jacob’s dilemma. That was my dilemma. That is everyone’s dilemma.

All of this is bound up in Isaiah’s revelation of God’s chosen fast. It is so much more than just depriving one’s flesh of food and drink. It is about coming to the place where we have “no confidence in the flesh” (Phil. 3:3). I did not learn this on my own initiative. I fought it with all my might. But the angel prevailed in the end, and I went away limping in the flesh, while the light of dawn began to heal and restore me.

I have shared my own experience, not to evoke sympathy but so that you will rejoice with me in the power of resurrection. Resurrection requires death. The flesh dies with great difficulty, but the result is that our Adamic nature (the “old man”) ceases to rule our lives, and we enter into His rest, His Jubilee, His true Sabbath. We are transformed from Jacobites to Israelites.

We all have many needs and many requests that we ask of God. The most important request, the prayer that overrides all other prayers, is to be like Jesus. We all want to manifest His glory, but we do not want to pay the price that He did. The flesh wants free glory. It seeks immortality without dying. But God makes no exceptions, because all flesh must die so that the spiritual man may live.

Paul and other apostles all suffered greatly during their lifetime. Yet Paul wrote in Rom. 8:18,

¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us.

Living the Jubilee Principle

Isaiah 58:9, 10 continues,

⁹ … If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger [accusations] and speaking wickedness, ¹⁰ and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom will become like midday.

As I have said, the purpose of the Day of Atonement is to learn how to walk out the principle of the Jubilee. Fasting is only a means to an end. If our fasting does not reveal the principle of the Jubilee, something is amiss. The Jubilee cancels all debt. Sin is reckoned as a debt. The Jubilee ends all liability for sin. Everyone returns to the inheritance that he lost through Adam.

We must learn to live through the awesome power of the law of Jubilee. It is the law of grace, where debts are cancelled whether or not we deserve it. But to maintain its rule in our lives, we too must be forgivers. We must not only learn to die but also to forgive those who kill us. That is the art of divine love. We become living sacrifices, “considered as sheep to be slaughtered” (Rom. 8:36), betrayed by friends, all to be of benefit to those who kill us.

It took me a few years to work through all of these emotional barriers. It was not easy. It took time. But once I was shown the intercessory nature of my own experience, it became easier.

It is difficult to come to the place of Jubilee without knowing the purpose of our betrayal and death. Purposeless suffering is a terrible place to be.

Yet the prophet tells us that we are to “remove the yoke” from the shoulders of those who are bound in slavery to sin. Feeding the hungry on the Day of Atonement is an illustration of doing one’s part to alleviate the suffering of others. But it is so much more than that. Jesus’ ministry was a Jubilee ministry, as we will see shortly in our study of Isaiah 61:1, 2. We ourselves are partakers of His ministry. If our calling does not involve setting people free in some way, we may want to double-check our understanding of ministry.