The Feast of Tabernacles

“And I that am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt, will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles, as in the days of the solemn feast.” — HOSEA xii. 9.

THE Jewish Feast of Tabernacles must have been most picturesque and striking. Every year, as the seventh month came round, the city of Jerusalem bloomed into a forest. The houses were deserted and all the people took up their abodes in booths or tents built temporarily and slightly wherever any room for them could be found. They were set up upon the flat tops of the dwellings, and along the crowded streets, and in the broad court-yard of the temple, and in the public squares. The staid, respectable inhabitants of the houses came out and lived in primitive fashion under the extemporaneous shelter of leaves, alongside of the homeless wanderers who knew what such outdoor lodging was by the whole habit of their lives. The palace and the hovel alike turned their inhabitants into the streets. Every morning while the feast lasted it must have seemed as if the entire population were ready to forsake the beds where they had spent the night and move on like an army on the march, or a host of pilgrims ready for the next stage of their journey, and leave the old city of David empty on its hills.

And what was the meaning of the feast of
tents?

“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 your God.” This is the explanation of its purpose which Jehovah gives in Leviticus. It was a perpetual memorial of the life in the wilderness. God wanted to be to them always “the Lord their God which brought them up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” He never wanted them to forget those forty years. And so the Feast of Tabernacles restored it every year.

And the value of such reminiscence lay in three things. First, it reminded the people of God’s mercy which had led them through all their dangers. Then, it made them feel the comfort and security of the settled life into which they had arrived. And yet again, it suggested to them the deeper sense in which they will still and must always be wanderers; the way in which, though the wanderings of their feet in the wilderness were over, the higher part of them, their spiritual part, must always be a wanderer in a world which has no final satisfaction for the human soul. Every year the great acted parable proclaimed this truth. As the multitude left their solid houses to live in travellers’ tents, could be heard the heart of the people saying to itself: “We have here no continuing city, but we seek one. We are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

In this last meaning of it, is not to-day a Feast of Tabernacles? On the first day of a new year, with the sense of transition strong within us and the atmosphere of change everywhere about us, is it not exactly as if our souls went out of their solid houses and lived in booths? We leave for the moment some, at least, of our well-built certainties and dwell for awhile amid the realized doubtfulness of life. Our well-built certainties are not pulled down. They stand there still like the Jews’ houses in Jerusalem. We shall go back to them after our Feast of Tabernacles is over. But for the time the narrow walls are forsaken and we live in larger air. The possibilities of life seem greater. The skies and stars and waving branches of the booths are over our heads.

And here comes in the verse out of the prophet Hosea, which I have made my text. “I will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles,” says God to His people, “as in the days of the solemn feast.” May not the words mean for us something as large as this? — that the dispensation of tabernacles is perpetual; that always in the midst of man’s most settled life there shall come times when he shall be compelled to remember his unsettledness; and then, what seems to be suggested in the last words of the verse, that these times of realized unsettledness, shall be and ought to be feast-times, — in other words that, truly understood, it is a joy and privilege and exaltation to the soul of the true man when he is made to realize that his most fixed condition is not really fixed, but sure of disturbance, exposed to all the winds of change. This is a great truth — worthy of being set forth in picturesque and elaborate symbol. For not the things which happen to us, but the meanings which the things which happen have for us, are the real facts of our existence. Not that we dwell in tabernacles, but whether our dwelling in tabernacles is a fast or a feast is the really important thing.

To many men it is a fast. They crawl out of their solid houses and take up their abode in their tents of uncertainty because they cannot help themselves. They dwell there with groans and tears. They chant the litanies of sorrow. They eat black bread and bitter herbs. They are all gladness when the Fast of Tabernacles is over, and they can go singing back to their dear solidity again, to forget that things are not to be forever as they are to-day. To other men the whole experience is a festival. The anticipation of it makes the long year bright and saves it from monotony. To be reminded that the most settled routines are after all but temporary habits, that the most permanent abodes are only halting-places on a journey, that change and not continuance is the true condition of the deepest life; — all this is full of exhilaration and delight. The soul’s booth under the waving branches is glad and bright with song; and by and by when the soul returns into its well-built routine again, it carries with it the newly felt certainty of change, to burn like a candle in the house until the next time to leave the house for the wide-open sky shall come.

What makes the difference in these two sorts of men? “It is a difference of temperament,” we say — covering our puzzling question with a large-sized word, as one puts the cover on a boiling pot in hopes that the confusion within will boil itself out of itself to some result. “It is a difference of temperament,” we say, as if temperaments were absolute, eternal things, with no beginning and no end, which came from nowhere and which issued in nothing. Temperaments are but the habits of the soul, which have become unconscious of their causes, as habits do, but which have their causes nevertheless. What really makes the difference in the two sorts of men is their willingness or unwillingness to think of the infiniteness of life.

Does that seem a great name to give to the reason why men like or dislike to face the changefulness of the world? But remember that the deepest differences of human natures must of necessity declare themselves in superficial varieties of act and feeling. The heart of the earth is convulsed and a small crack on the earth’s surface tells the story first. And so when one of God’s Feasts of Tabernacles comes, and all mankind together are driven out into the thought of instability and changefulness, one man goes reluctantly and bitterly because the summons disturbs that which he had dared to think of as final, and another man right by his side goes triumphant and joyous because the whole event satisfies his deepest expectation and his fundamental thought of life. “I knew this could not be the end,” he says; “I knew that there can be no end until the infinite perfection has been reached. The tent-life is the true life until the building of God, the house not made with hands, is reached. Therefore welcome this signal and token and reminder of it, breaking in upon the hardening security to which my life was settling.” Is it not clear how to the first man the Feast of Tabernacles is a fast while it is a true feast to the other?

All this is true of every department of life. It is true about men’s thoughts. A man learns all he can learn, and is satisfied. His creed is fixed and settled. He and the men about him think alike. There is no dream of growth or of enlargement. To change an item of this faith is of necessity to wander into error. Another man no less sincerely holds his faith. It is his light and law. He lives by it and works by it; but all the time he knows that the entire truth is more than any creed can state, is vaster and more mysterious than any human soul can comprehend. He not merely holds this as a conviction; it fills him through and through and colors all his thought. He never slips out of the certainty that what he holds, true as it is, is only a small part and fraction of the truth.

Now to these two men, standing side by side, comes one of God’s Feasts of Tabernacles. Do you not see now what that means? There comes one of those times in which God makes the whole world feel how large is truth and how far all men are from having found its end. These two men have to go out together and live in their booths side by side. The law of the Feast is universal. Neither can stay behind in his house, however much he wishes. But how differently they go! To one the feast is no feast, but a mournful fast. To the other it is full of solemn joy.

I think all this is most familiar to us now. This day of ours is one of God’s Feasts of Tabernacles. In things of faith and creed what hosts of the people of God are living in tents, seekers not finders, sure that they have not yet reached the “continuing city” of final and established truth. To some men it is a perpetual misery. To other men it is a perpetual delight. For them to think that they had reached the fullest truth which they were capable of knowing — that would be misery to them. For it would mean, “We are not then capable or worthy of dealing with and seeking the infinite. Here in this little limit we must rest “; and so man’s noblest conception of himself and noblest ambition for his future perishes.

There comes some great disturbance on a land — a war or a commercial crisis. There are the two sorts of greeting for it in men’s souls. One kind of man goes into it as if he went to the funeral of every thing. Another man goes to it as to a feast — “a solemn feast,” as Hosea calls it, — not a time of frivolity or lightness, but a time when the world grows large and the souls of men shake themselves free of the fixed littleness of life. Such days as these are Feasts of Tabernacles. You walk the streets and see men’s faces anxious and perplexed. The quiet complacency is gone. These men evidently do not hold to-morrow’s bread in their safe hands. They do not know where to-morrow’s bread will come from. They listen to each other’s prophecies and turn away incredulous. “What does he know about it more than I do? What does either of us know? Is it not all uncertain?”

Yet have you not sometimes, in the midst of such uncertain days, seen here and there an eye that kindled and a face that flushed? Have you not sometimes caught glimpse of a look which made you think of the words of Jesus: “Then look up and lift up your head, for your redemption draweth nigh?” It was a look of liberty. It seemed as if to some men this confusion meant the breaking of cables and the scattering of clouds. In the disappointment of their immediate hopes, the deepest instincts and expectations of their souls sailed forth into satisfaction. “Behold, then,” they say, “business is not every thing; and business success is not the end of living. A man can live without it. There are higher things, — we have dreamed of them in the visions of the night. Now our eyes see them in the broad light of this tumultuous day.”

Men used to think that the constitution of Society was fixed forever. Just how class was to live with class, — who was to command and who was to obey, who was to sleep in luxury and who was to do the work, all this was settled and decided in the nature of things. The axioms were all found out and folded away. They never could be changed. Within these solid walls we were to live forever. There, too, the Feast of Tabernacles has arrived. The trumpet has blown and man after man is seen, under a compulsion which he cannot resist, coming out of his solid house of absolute conviction and taking up his abode in the frail booth of uncertainty. Some men — perhaps most men — hate it and would be thankful to be let alone. To other men the change is full of a mysterious and awful joy. The whole of this mysterious life is a “solemn feast.”

To the more personal and private Feasts of Tabernacles I need only to refer, and your own memories will recognize them. Your own hearts and homes are full of them. You said: “My household’s way is fixed for many years. There is nothing here that will not last.” You limited your thought and wish to what your walls contained. And then, just when you were surest, the solid walls turned to tremulous branches, and you were out among the winds, under the stars, and nothing was fixed. Anything was possible. It may have been a joyous or a melancholy change. It may have been a glad or sad event which broke the spell and brought the difference. That does not matter. The change from certainty to uncertainty, from fixedness to instability, is the great thing. And then, oh, how the real question stood in the midst of your astonished household, and looked you in the face, and asked each one, “Have you then any hold on the infiniteness of life?” And each one answered by the way in which he met the new life of the opened household. A solemn joy or a despondent dread was in the face of each.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that the way in which the Feast of Tabernacles become;’ a fast or a feast to any man depends upon whether he has learned to live in the infinity of life. There is a nature to which the thought of the temporariness and transitoriness and changefulness of things is absolutely necessary, and brings the highest inspiration, — not from mere restlessness and the superficial weariness with circumstances which have been but half exhausted and enjoyed, but from the need of some symbol or expression of that sense of incompleteness and aspiration of which the heart is full. The outward change is but a symbol and in some degree a means. If it goes no deeper and does not get at the soul and make it live a new life, and think new thoughts, and be another soul, it comes to very little. Indeed, there are very many of the noblest natures who are realizing the instability of life by the continual fluctuation of thought and feeling even while every outward circumstance remains unchanged. There is great beauty in this unseen Feast of Tabernacles which very often is being held in a man’s soul, when it seems to all his friends who live about him as if he were dwelling in a house of the most solid unchangeableness. At the very time when his life seems to be most absolutely monotonous, he may be going outside of his most treasured and well-built convictions and recognizing how partial they are, how they cannot be the final home of a soul’s faith. And so he may be dwelling for the moment in the open booth, into which come freely suggestions of undiscovered truth and revelations of the distant future.

Whether the changefulness be that of outward and visible conditions or the subtler one of inward thoughts, there are men to whom it brings inspiration which they could not lose without losing their best strength. Every disturbance and unsettlement opens anew the infinite prospect. Every jolt and jar assures them that the chariot is moving. The fact of present change is a satisfaction for them, be cause it justifies their hope that they shall not always be the poor thing which they are to-day, but shall attain diviner things.

And then, what follows from this? Must it not be that any power which opens the infinite life to any man must be the interpreter and transfigurer to him of all the petty special changefulness of life? And so, if Christ “brings life and immortality to light,” if He truly compels the man who becomes His disciple to look far on and see vast things before him, then He irradiates changefulness and makes it a satisfaction and assurance to the soul.

I feel so strongly that here, and here alone, we are on the highest and the strongest ground! We make most feeble efforts at consolation. Mostly our efforts at consolation, either for ourselves or one another, are merely, in one form or another, the reiteration of the fact of the inevitableness of change. “Why is it that nothing will stay fixed or settled?” And you think that you have answered the querulous and puzzling question when you say: “Oh, they never have! In the days of Julius Csesar, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, things changed just as they do to-day. They always have. They always will. Go back and take it as it always was and is and will be to the end.” There is no consolation there. Suppose not you, but Christ, tries to console the puzzled soul; suppose He begins not here in the detail of the man’s present existence, but far off, far on in the great purpose of the man’s being, in the far range of his eternal life. “You are eternal,” He declares. “You belong to the Eternal Father, and you share His immortality. You are a stranger here, a stranger and a traveller. This is no place for you to live in. You can be at rest only when you have reached the Infinite and have found your home in God.” Let Christ teach the man that. Let Him fill the man with that consciousness. Let Him make the man enthusiastically, triumphantly aware that not here and now, but far away, is the completion and rest of his soul; and then let Christ turn back with him suddenly to the present moment of which the man was complaining, and say: “With all this future prospect vast before you, what do you want here and now? Do you want everything to speak of fixity and settlement, as if there never could be any alteration? or do you want the sound and sight of change to be in everything?” Does not the man’s soul answer truly: “Let me not root myself too deeply where I do not mean nor wish to stay. Let me have ever round me the promises and prophecies of the great freedom, the great progress to which any soul belongs. O, for the Feast of Tabernacles, in which I shall know myself but a pilgrim! O, for a perpetual Feast of Tabernacles, in which all shall seem a pilgrimage, and the infinite prospect shall shine ever through the scattered dust of these earthly experiences, broken with perpetual change!”

It may be that it seems to be asking too much of man that he should thus desire and demand perpetual disturbance and continual change. Let us be thankful, then, that God does not wait for him to demand it, but sends it to him whether he will or no. He treats us as you treat your children. Not what they wish, but what they need, you give them. It would be cruel to wait for the conscious desire before you, seeing the unconscious need, sent the supply. God does not wait for us to say: “Now it is time for me to be uprooted. Now let my health be shaken. Now let my riches disappear. Now let the solid landscape fade in mist, and the great dispensation of uncertainty arise.” That would be cruelty indeed. As well might the surgeon wait till the sufferer himself called for the knife. God, by His own will, knowing Himself that the time has come, beckons, and we follow Him, often reluctantly, often in tears. And it is only as we follow Him that our hearts respond to His heart, and we see the beauty of the new life into the midst of which He leads us, and by and by are surprised at our own voices praising Him for giving us that from which we shrank, that which we never should have had the courage or the strength to ask.

Thus we have sung our Psalm of Changefulness and have felt through it all, I trust, the music of God’s purpose. It is not accident. It is not because this man’s roof leaked and this man’s wall was crumbling that all the world have come out of their houses and are living on the streets of Jerusalem in tents. It is the utterance of a fundamental truth of life. It is the recognition of an unchanging fact. That fact is change; whose perpetual and necessary recurrence is the most changeless thing in all the history of man. But it is not the only fact. It is not the deepest fact. And now it is quite time for us to remind ourselves, and to say, before we close, that unless beneath every change there runs a deeper identity, change becomes demoralizing and corrupt. See how it was in this historic instance which has made the basis of our study. God says, by the lips of Hosea: “I that am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles.” “The Lord thy God from the land of Egypt!” All that was hundreds of years ago. Change after change had come, following quick upon each other, from the time of that great change which brought the chosen people out of the house of bondage. The Feast of Tabernacles had been kept every year. And yet all the time there had been, behind and under all, the identity of God and their identity and the unchangeable fact of their relationship to Him. Everything else had changed; but these three things were always there: “The Lord,” “thy God,” and “from the land of Egypt.” And now, five hundred years afterwards, when the people are summoned once more out of their dwellings, the great identities are reasserted in the very midst of the renewed demand for change. “I that am the Lord thy God from the land of Egypt, will make thee to dwell in tabernacles.”

We must not take half the teaching and not take the whole. God summons us to constant change, but it is God that summons us, the God who is unchangeable; and we who pass under His summons from one region of life on into another are the same beings always, and between us and Him there is the unalterable kinship and memory of manifested love. Whatever be the variations of the ever-richening music, that theme runs through it all and keeps it all compact and real and simple.

O my dear friends, do you not know the picture of all this in your earthly life? You go from field to field. The landscape changes constantly. The ground under your feet is now barren and now rich. The sky over your head is now stormy and now clear. Onward you go, and every year is a new field with other foliage and other soil; but, as you go, the same Friend always holds you hand-in-hand. He is the same. You are the same. And the same love and duty bind you to each other. That is the identity which sounds its steady cadence under every change and binds the years together. Personal identity is everything. Could you live in the same house — every least bit of furniture the same — with the dear faces of your family vanished, and make life seem the same? Could you live with your unbroken family about you in the depths of Africa or Hindostan, and make life seem very different? To live a life of changing circumstance, with great life long friendships running through it from end to end, that is the lot of highest privilege. It keeps change and identity both, but identity always as the deeper fact, — change woven on identity, as the golden pattern is woven on the golden cloth.

There is no limit to this truth. It stretches out from world to world and fills eternity. You know nothing about the world beyond the grave save that your father or your child is there. You know nothing of what will happen to you as you enter on that world, but you believe that your father and your child will greet you, and that you will know each other — you and they. That makes the unseen world exactly what it is best that it should be to you. That makes it mysterious, yet real, — real, yet mysterious.

Can you not lift all that and feel how through the confusion of change runs the identity of God and of your soul, and of the love and duty which have place between them? Everything is changed since twenty years ago. Only God is the same, and you are the same, and as you were loving Him and obeying Him then, and He was loving and protecting you, so now you love Him and obey Him, and He loves you and protects you still. Everything will be changed ten years hence. Only wherever you are, whatever you are doing then, God will be the same and you will be the same; and you will be loving and obeying Him, and He will be loving and protecting you.

I glory in the vitality and the solidity together which that truth gives to life. I see the practical law of life which will result from such a truth. Be sure of God and of yourself, and of the love between your soul and His, and then shrink from no changefulness, cling to no present; be ready for new skies, new tasks, new truths. This is the voice that comes to us out of the ever-changing world, which has the unchanging God at its heart.

May that voice be heard in our Feast of Tabernacles now! We will not, we cannot, shut our eyes to the certainty of change to-day, but, O Christ, into the midst of our change bring the changelessness of God! Then it shall be indeed a feast that we celebrate, for every change shall only make the changeless more manifest and sure. And at the last the world shall fade away from us only to let Him, in whom the preciousness of the world has always lain, shine out upon us in His perfect glory and unhindered love!