PREPARING FOR THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES
(Written by Sheila Gail Landgraf)
God is
happy to meet us where we are, but once He shows up; you must be willing to
take the journey!
Late
September, early October brings the seven fall holy days we call Sukkot, or if
you prefer English; The Feast of Tabernacles.
It is called The Feast of Tabernacles because we dwell in temporary
booths or shelters during this time.
These temporary booths are called sukkahs. The word “sukkah” actually translates from
Hebrew to English to mean “temporary booths.”
For some people, learning the name of the shelter and building it is about
as deep as the meaning goes. For others
there is SO MUCH MORE to the whole experience.
For those willing to open their eyes and see, there are awesome surprises
waiting in the sukkah.
If you
actually participate in building a sukkah for Sukkot you will more than likely
realize there is a lot of hidden meaning to the simple building process. You really won’t get this unless you DO
this. The doing has a lot to do with
obeying God just because He is God. Obedience
is the first step toward growth in any part of God’s Kingdom. It is also a straight path toward joy! You can be happy from using your human reason and doing what is logical, or you can have JOY from having faith in God and doing what He says. He knows the difference. He looks on the condition of our hearts.
Those of
us who have enJOYed our Sukkah’s at the feast have realized after building
the first one that there were many reasons God asks us to do this. It is all about stopping to savor the
journey, remembering the past and moving on to the future, and it is spiced
with love, worship, compassion and mercy. All of
these things come filtering through to us from building and living in a sukkah.
At first
though, it is all about obedience. This
is the scripture that we are obeying:
“Also in
the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of
the land, you shall keep a feast unto the LORD seven days: on the first day
shall be a Sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a Sabbath, and you shall
take on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and
willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven
days. And you shall keep it a feast unto
the LORD seven days in the year. It
shall be a STATUTE FOREVER in your generations; you shall celebrate in the
seventh month. You shall DWELL IN BOOTHS
SEVEN DAYS; all that are Israelite born shall dwell in booths; that your
generations may know that I made the Children of Israel to dwell in booths,
when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD thy God.” (Lev. 23:39-43)
So if you
are wondering if you REALLY should obey this because you might not have been
born Israeli; think again. Are you a
Christian? Then you have been grafted
into the family of God and you are an adopted Son of God. That gives you the same rights, privileges
and responsibilities as the natural born children. The other Christian customs you observe came
from the Children of Israel, such as baptism and communion, so why would this
be different? God commanded them all for
The Children of God.
Building
the sukkah and observing the Feast of Tabernacles makes us consider many things in a more careful
manner. God always shows us something
new! It never gets old or boring. Each year our lessons are layered on top of
the last year’s lessons until we are full of the knowledge of what God wants us
to have inside our hearts and minds at this feast. Like everything else in life it is a process. When you begin any process you have to make a
conscience decision to begin, carry on and finish the process. Every phase carries a different meaning,and each
season the meanings deepen. Please don’t
take my word for it, test me and find out if what I am saying isn’t true.
God knows
we humans have short attention spans.
Sometimes just hearing words isn’t enough for us. When we are involved in the process of
building something, we consider what we are doing and grasp the meanings that
correspond with our actions. Our
attention span last longer and we are able to retain the lessons learned much
longer. They also mean more to us
because we were “hands on” with our first memory of the event. We have a visual image in our brain of what
we were trying to accomplish. It is like
a photograph that we can pull back up and look at closer whenever we decide to
ponder our actions deeper at a later time.
By the
time we begin building our sukkah for Sukkot those of us who keep all of God’s
holy days have already passed through a process of examination of our lives for
the past year. We have found ourselves unworthy and lacking and we have asked for God’s mercy and forgiveness. We have received atonement and cleansing
for our mistakes over the last year. This all happens
through The month of Elul, Rosh Hashanah, The Days of Awe and The Day of
Atonement that lead us up to Tabernacles.
By the time we are finished with all of those days and their processes and
we come to the place of building our Sukkah for Sukkot; we approach the
building process with clean hands, hearts and lives. By entering the temporary shelter after it is
built on good instructions from God we come to a new place in life, a new
beginning again of the rhythms of life with everything in sync with God and
ready to make a glorious new song for all the world to hear. We don’t have all our “stuff” in the sukkah,
so we feel much less inhibited and a lot less stressful because we have been
reminded of what we REALLY need and dropped off the extra baggage before The
Day of Atonement and we are refreshed from not having to carry it around anymore.
To build a
proper sukkah, you need to be willing to follow God’s instructions for doing
so. It isn’t hard, but God wants things
the way God wants things. After all, He
IS God. His way is the way to go when
building and using the sukkah. It does
seem that most Christians today have either forgotten or are not inclined to
follow God’s instructions. It was this
way during the days of Nehemiah too. The
people had been in captivity so long they had forgotten God’s customs and how
important they were to God. Ezra had to
remind them by reading the scriptures and repeating what they had been
forgetting to do. We can read about this
in Nehemiah 8:1-8 and Nehemiah 8:14-18.
“All the
people came together as one in the square before the Water Gate. They told Ezra the teacher of the Law to bring
out the Book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD had commanded for Israel. So on
the first day of the seventh month Ezra the priest brought the Law before the
assembly, which was made up of men and women and all who were able to
understand. He read aloud from
daybreak till noon as he faced the square before the Water Gate in the presence
of the men, woman and others who could understand. All the people listened attentively to the
Book of the Law. Ezra the teacher of the
law stood on a high wooden platform built for the occasion. Beside him on his right stood Mattithiah,
Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah and Maaseiah; and on his left were Pedajah,
Mishael, Malkjah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah and Meshullam. Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was
standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the LORD, the great God; and all
the people lifted their hands and responded “Amen! Amen!
Then they bowed down and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the
ground. The Levites – Jeshua, Bani,
Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah,
Jozabad, Hanan and Pelaiah – instructed the people in the Law while the people
were standing there. They read from the Book
of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood
what was being read.
They found
written in the Law, which the LORD had commanded through Moses, that the
Israelites were to live in temporary shelters during the festival of the
seventh month and that they should proclaim this word and spread it throughout
their towns and in Jerusalem: “Go out
into the hill country and bring back branches from olive and wild olive trees
and from
myrtles,
palms and shade trees, to make temporary shelters” as it is written.
So the people went out and brought back branches
and built themselves temporary shelters on their own roofs, in their
courtyards, in the courts of the house
of God and in the square by the Water Gate and the one by the Gate of
Ephraim. The whole company that had
returned from exile built temporary shelters and lived in them. From the days of Joshua son of Nun until that
day, the Israelites had not celebrated it like this. And their joy was very great.
Day after day, from the first day to the last,
Ezra read from the book of the Law of God.
They celebrated the festival for seven days and on the eighth day, in
accordance with the regulation, there was an assembly.”
So you see the people in the days of Nehemiah
were a lot like the people of today.
They had been away from God’s laws and God’s Holy Scriptures so long
that they had forgotten He said to keep the Feasts! Those wise people corrected their nation and
God had mercy on them for the time that they remained faithful. Can ours do the same? Have they even considered this, I
wonder? I’m not just speaking of just Holy
Days here, but a million subjects where America has forgotten to chose to
follow the ways of God.
But I
regress, I was telling you all that God shows us when we begin to build a
sukkah and keep Sukkot simply out of obedience and respect for God’s word and
commandments.
We begin
to think about many things in the building.
The family becomes a team and works together in the building. We all want to make our sukkah special and
bonds are formed among family members that might never happen otherwise. Father’s teach sons, Mothers teach daughters,
grandparents pass down their stories and everyone learns history and how to get
along well together. Memories of being family are made! Everyone learns if they
work together they can accomplish more.
Abilities and talents shine forth from some that had never been noticed previously in
the day to day struggles of family life. Confidence is built. People are bonded together in love and respect. People are more appreciated for what God made them to be here at the
feast while building the sukkah. This
all happens like in the days of Nehemiah, where people learned a lot about each other
from simply building walls and gates.
Then comes
the “MORE” part. There is an element of
the sukkah that makes it more than an agricultural shed, that element is the
structure of the roof. There are several
reasons that the builders learn that make the roof special. First, because it is a canopy made from
stalks or branches everyone appreciates the shade that is given by the
roof. Then when night comes everyone
realizes it is special because they can see the stars through the leafy holes
in the roof. You grasp for the first
time that by looking through something grown by the earth you can see glimpses
of heaven! Now how do you think that
helps the relationships of different types of family members to improve? Even better, how do you think that type of
thinking improves us when we leave our temporary shelters and go back to a more
permanent structure of day-to-day life? Have you ever caught a glimpse of
heaven by looking into the eyes or seeing the actions of another person? This is yet another lesson of the
sukkah.
We also
learn that the roof acts as a covering.
This is the most important element of the whole structure. It reminds us of how God covers all of our
needs, both spiritually and literally.
He provides a covering for us.
The covering of the blood of Christ.
That roof over our soul provides us salvation.
We are also reminded to remember that God COVERED
all of the needs of the people as they wondered through the wilderness in their
temporary shelters. They did not want
for a thing because they had a mighty God looking after them. Each night that they looked up through the
covering of the roof and saw the stars of the heavens they were reminded of God’s
provision for their every need. We too,
remember when we build and dwell inside our sukkah!
There is
SO much to learn from building the sukkah.
So much that it cannot be contained in this one little article. I will be writing more on this subject of building and living in a sukkah as time goes on.
Do you have all that you need for your sukkah? The Feast of Tabernacles will be here before you know it!
