Sukkot is a harvest festival, and harvesting involves cutting plant material, separating it from its previous environment on a branch or stalk and starting its journey of transformation to something else. That something else could be decorations for a sukkah, which looks forward to God’s setting up a permanent home for the Kingdom of God on Earth. Today’s we’ll explore two weddings and a funeral found in Scripture.
Category: Appointments With God
Moses’ final words about the “statutes and judgements” have a particular significance for us during Sukkot. There are no amendments to the statutes of God. And we aren’t allowed change or alter God’s judgements. We should read them not to challenge them but to understand them, wrestle with them and apply them to our lives.
What does it mean to be a bond-slave of Yeshua? Both the TaNaK (Torah, Prophets and Writings) and the Apostolic Scriptures tell us repeatedly that we are called to be bond-slaves to God and to His Messiah, Yeshua. In this discussion, we learn a little bit about how to do this and why we should make it our life’s goal to be a bond-slave to Yeshua. The process of being Yeshua’s bond-slave even carries over into our roles during the Millennium reign of Christ and beyond.
When we look in the Tanak to find examples of the Messiah, we ususally look to the “good” men in the TaNaK (Torah, Prophets and Writings), men such as Moses, David and Solomon. However, there is an “evil” son of King David whose final hours gives us clues about the life, death and resurrection of the Messiah. The clues of the final hours of Absalom were so important that the Apostles allude to them when teaching and writing about the Gospel to their communities.
The Temple, as envisioned by King Solomon was meant to be a “house of prayer for all nations.” Yeshua was upset at the fact that the priests of His time had lost sight of that mission to the point that they set up sales tables in the courtyard where the Gentiles were supposed to pray. However, the Bible tells us that even in the Messianic age, there will be a temple for God to dwell.
Yom Kippur, also called the Day of Covering or the Day of Atonement, has two meanings to the people of God. When God “reasons” with mankind, it is not a conversation of compromise and obfuscation. God judges the sin of each man, woman and child and no one has a defense against God’s judgement, except the defense provided by Yeshua.
We often reserve some very harsh judgment for our ancestors who left Egypt, presuming that if we were with them, we would have been smarter than them and not made their mistakes. However, this attitude shows our arrogance because we forget that it is God who has been gracious enough to us to give us His word so we would have the blessing of hindsight and insight at their expense. Rather than condemning our ancestors for their ignorance, we need to look at our own faults in the light of His word so that He can bless us with hindsight and insight to keep our own feet from stumbling.
From reading about the history and reliving the teachings through the annual appointed times, a.k.a. “feasts to the LORD” (Leviticus 23), we gain insight on the role of Messiah in the past and the future.