My Simple Sukkah

 This year, for the very first time, I set up a simple sukkah and celebrated Sukkot.   "What is a sukkah?" you might ask, and "What is Sukkot?"   Well, "sukkah" in Hebrew means "booth"  and "Sukkot" is the Feast of Booths, but perhaps it is better known to many as the Feast of Tabernacles as written about in Leviticus 23:39-43.  This appointed time of the Lord was a joyous celebration that occurred in Israel after the summer harvest, and for that reason it also was known as the Feast of Ingathering.

Sukkot was one of three pilgrimage feasts in which the Israelites were required to journey to Jerusalem.  I think of it as a community camping trip!  At just the time when the agricultural communities were feeling satisfied and secure with having gathered the crops into their storehouses, God sent his people away from their creature comforts of home and out into a primitive camping experience with family and friends. How would you like to have three required vacations each year.....time to get away, re-connect, re-group and reassess your priorities?

Sukkot was a time for the Israelites to remember.  It was a time to recall their ancestors' nomadic years of wandering around the wilderness, living in tents, while longing for a more permanent home.....even as the God of heaven and earth had made his home in the midst of them!  Sukkot celebrates that the Lord was very close and very real to his people through his presence and power and provision.

I like to look at this pilgrimage feast from God's perspective.  I think it's like God was saying to his beloved, "Come away with me.  Look at me.  Look deeply into my eyes and see my love for you!  Don't look at the mere gifts that I have given to you and be satisfied, but see me, the one who provided them for you."  God was teaching his chosen people how to relate to him, how to find their home in him, how to be satisfied in a way that would supersede earthly cares and worries.....how to love him.

What an affectionate lover our God is!  He still longs for our undivided hearts with a passionate and healthy jealousy.  I invite you to question your heart with me as I ask myself, "Am I running into his arms.....to be with him, or am I feeling distant, even running away, distracted, uninterested, and overcome with the concerns of this world?  Am I contentedly sitting at his feet knowing that he is the 'one thing', or am I just too busy, busy, busy, thinking, 'I'll get around to spending time with my love later?'"  Sukkot is a time that God invites his people to spend intimate time with him under heavenly covering.

I have found the facts of this feast to be fascinating and very prophetic.  It is the final and seventh feast of year that is celebrated in the seventh month on the Hebrew calendar.  It lasts for seven days, with an eighth day following, and the various sacrifices that God directed during the seven days each add up to multiples of seven!  I am no detective, but it is obvious to me that our God is trying to tell us something here through the repetition of the number seven. 

I have learned that the number seven in the Bible is used to symbolize perfection and completion.  Used in conjunction with the Feast of Sukkot, we must realize that without spelling it out in words, our God is giving us clues as to the importance of this feast.  Galatians 4:4 speaks about the perfect timing of Messiah's birth, "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son".  John 1:14 tells us, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  In the literal Greek, the word "dwelt" means "tabernacled".  Taken together we see that in God's perfect timing, he sent his Son, Jesus ("Yeshua" meaning "salvation" in Hebrew) to live among us.  It fits perfectly into prophecy that Yeshua would have been born in a sukkah at the start of Sukkot and then was circumcised on the eighth day.  And our Savior also celebrated Sukkot!

I enjoyed a number of lovely meals under the sukkah with friends who appreciated the ambiance of the canopy, but one of the meals I served was to my sons on a breezy, cool evening.  After many complaints about the weather and urges to go inside where it was warm, a mutiny ensued.  Reluctantly I followed, but with the promise of conversation to follow.  I shared how the situation had proved how much we as humans crave comfort and security.  And yet, at times, as during Sukkot, the LORD calls us from our comfort in order to draw us closer to himself. 

This life is like living in a sukkah.  It's not a place of permanence or of true rest and lasting comfort.  We are aliens and strangers living in a strange land.  God alone is our real comfort.  He is our true security.  Where he is.....that is our true home.  

He is our shelter!  

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
    will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
    my God, in whom I trust.”

Psalm 91: 1,2