Understanding Tabernacles Pt 1
The final feast of the Fall Feast Season was called the Feast of Tabernacles, but I like to call it “party time”! It’s the season you enter God’s unlimited blessing, and I can’t wait to share with you what God has shown me about this feast. For the Israelites, it was the time of restoration of all things, and since the same principles—created by the same God—apply to them as to us, when we position ourselves to participate in God’s principles, we can experience God’s restoration of all things too!
How excited would you be if I told you that now, today, was the season where God wants to restore everything the enemy has taken from your family, your finances, and everything else that the enemy has touched or stolen in your life? That should excite you because all of us have experienced the thief who comes to kill, steal, and destroy. But God wants to give us life, and life abundantly (see John 10:10)!
So if restoration sounds good to you, it’s time to learn how to position ourselves and follow God’s blueprint so we can get His results. Let’s look together at what the Fall Feast Season is all about and how it applies to your life.
The Tabernacles Season
In Deuteronomy chapter 16, the Lord instructs that three times a year the men of Israel were to meet with the Lord at a place He chose. These three meetings were the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles. They were to bring a gift to the Lord, each according to however much God had blessed him.
The Fall Feast Season or Tabernacles Season starts with the Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah, which is the call to repentance. God wanted His people to examine their hearts and see the sins and clutter that had accumulated in their lives that were distracting them from Him. It’s a time where we examine ourselves to see what is causing us to miss the mark—not just to sin or backslide, but anything that is distracting us from God and to not put Him first in our lives.
Life has a way of burdening us and weighing us down, and fear, stress, worry, and anxiety can creep into our hearts. God knew that His people needed a spiritual tune-up, and they needed to get back on track, so He began the Tabernacles season with a call to repentance. He called us back to Himself, back to basics, back to the core fundamentals of what it means to follow Him as we celebrate the fall feast season. He takes this opportunity to remind us of who we are—blood-bought children of God—and the covenant we have in Him through His Son Jesus Christ!
In the Old Testament, the blowing of the rams horn, the shofar, was the call to repentance. We’ll be following along with the prophet Joel as he explains God’s principles for His people. We read, “Blow the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in My holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble; for the day of the Lord is coming, for it is at hand” (Joel 2:1 NKJV). The blowing of the horn was a weighty event not to be taken lightly. It was intended to bring trembling and self-reflection, to rid God’s people of their complacency and sense of self-contained independence.
But it wasn’t all fear and trembling; the same trumpet was a call for Jubilee we read about in Leviticus 25: “And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his possession, and each of you shall return to his family” (Leviticus 25:10 NKJV).
This word, “return,” meant a movement back to the point of departure, to reverse direction, and to go back along a path already traveled. This is the very essence of repentance. Repentance has to do with reconsidering our ways, forsaking them for God’s ways. He means to turn around, to think differently afterward, to change one’s mind, direction, and purpose.
Repentance was the purpose of the Feast of Trumpets—awe and repentance. God ordered them to take ten days for serious introspection, a period for considering the sins of the previous year and repenting before Yom Kippur, the Day Of Atonement because He was preparing their hearts for what He was going to do.
That has not changed—God still wants to prepare our hearts. The question is, will we obey and be ready for what He wants to do in us?
-Paula White-Cain
