Showing posts with label JOY. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JOY. Show all posts

Saturday, October 8, 2016

SEASONS - PREPARING FOR THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES - THE JOY OF BUILDING A SUKKAH

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!





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