The description of the Feast of Tabernacles in Leviticus 23 can open our hearts to dream dreams, just as if we were living in Old Testament times and keeping that feast. Some of the other feasts described in that chapter were very simple and brief. The Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Pentecost lasted only a day or two. However, the Feast of Tabernacles and the Passover’s Feast of Unleavened Bread lasted several days. It takes a little while for the truths of those feasts to penetrate progressively the barrier of our awareness and consciousness. We must contemplate them for a while before they seep into our beings. It does not happen overnight. For this reason, the Lord told the children of Israel to leave their regular way of living for several days during the Feast of Tabernacles and dwell in little booths like those their forefathers had lived in when they wandered through the wilderness.
The Feast of Tabernacles should become a spiritual experience to believers today. Such an experience should be given as a prescription to those who are facing problems. When people are threatened with problems, they generally become absorbed in their resentments and murmurings, and negative attitudes take over their spirits. Husbands and wives usually begin to fuss at each other when the tensions and pressures of problems build up. How blessed is the person who does not murmur or complain or fight when he faces problems; instead, he voices his trust and confidence in the Lord. Jehoshaphat was like that. Even though he was afraid when he saw the different armies invading Judah to cast the people out of their inheritance, he turned his attention to seeking the Lord (II Chronicles 20).
You can face one problem after another until you feel that there simply is no answer for you, and you do not know which way to go. Then you should go back again to a time like the Feast of Tabernacles and spend several days just thinking upon the beginning of God’s working in your life—the days in which He began to move you out of bondage, the days in which He taught you to dream. Learn to dream all over again. Dreams have a way of disappearing into nightmares when pressures are on. The pressures can become more important than the dreams. Learn to awaken in the morning contemplating your trust in the Lord. Keep your dreams fresh. Take a step each day toward their fulfillment, believing God that you can move toward it.
It is grievous when your relationships with God and with one another become a little ragged because of pressure or neglect or because you take them for granted. There ought to be times when everyone in a family sits in a corner for half a day to think and to dream. Then when they all come out of their corners, it is not to fight, but to become acquainted again. It would seem that since they live together, they should know one another. Nevertheless, the easiest place for people to become strangers is in the same room. When you are in the same room continually with another person, you begin to feel that the other person does not understand you or what you are going through. Probably that is true. You probably develop an unawareness too.
Once a year, in Palestine, the Feast of Tabernacles was a good opportunity for people to break out of their routine. They usually built little huts on the flat roofs of their houses and dwelt there. At first they probably grumbled and complained about leaving their comfortable beds, until God began to meet them. Today it would be good for you also to get out of your routine and seek the Lord. If you do, it will not be very long before you have the feeling again that you are in a progressive walk with God and that God loves you. You need to be renewed in the awareness of what God is doing.
Revivals that were held every spring and every fall were somewhat effective in days past, because the people experienced their salvation all over again. The evangelist made them feel as if they were sinners with a need to be converted again. You do not need that. It is a wrong counterpart to the spiritual Day of Atonement experience which prepares you for the days of tabernacling with the Lord. You need to believe God, repent of everything that is wrong—wherever you have fallen short—and then go into a period of remembering again the days of His presence when He first tabernacled with you. Learn to dream humbly in God all over again.
One of the greatest prophecies of Joel states, “Your old men shall dream dreams” (Joel 2:28). For an old man to dream dreams is contrary to nature; people tend to stop dreaming as the years advance. Either the dreams seem unattainable and are finally discarded, or something happens to prevent their fulfillment. Do not forget how to dream. Learn to hold on to your dream and believe that God can yet accomplish that which you first envisioned when you looked to Him. The old men have to keep dreaming the dreams of God. Joel also prophesied, “Your young men shall see visions.” That is good, but the young people must learn to dream, too. When someone starts murmuring and complaining, it is evident that something has gone wrong in his dream mechanism. That person is not hoping in God. Put your hope and your trust in God.
It is very important that you be concerned about the interaction of the Body of Christ. There is such an interrelationship among the members that the way you react affects the way your brother reacts. Be concerned about your own reaction as well as about the reactions of other people. It is amazing how the bondage of one individual affects another, and how a liberation of one member affects another who is under bondage. There can be situations in which a person who is under deep bondage reaches such impasses that he cannot overcome them. But when someone else moves into a liberation, he experiences it also. Our liberty is not something we enjoy individually; our liberty is something we enjoy collectively. Either we are all free, or we are all bound.
Every member participates in the oneness of the Body because of the interaction involved. If something rests upon one, everyone else will share it. Nothing can be hidden in the Body. If everyone is experiencing God’s dealings and one member breaks into a new victory, everyone else will also experience the victory to that degree. Everyone will share it. If you seem to be getting along all right with a measure of victory, you should seek a greater victory. Even though you do not feel the need for more victory, others need to feel the greater victory you will be experiencing. The spiritual level of the Body rises in this way.
Leviticus 23 outlines all the feasts that the Jews were to keep throughout the year. Beginning with verse 33, we read about the Feast of Tabernacles: Again the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘On the fifteenth of this seventh month is the Feast of Booths for seven days to the Lord. On the first day is a holy convocation; you shall do no laborious work of any kind.’ ” Verses 33–35.
Exactly how were the people to keep this feast? “ ‘Now on the first day you shall take for yourselves the foliage of beautiful trees, palm branches and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days. You shall thus celebrate it as a feast to the Lord for seven days in the year. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. You shall live in booths for seven days; all the native-born in Israel shall live in booths, so that your generations may know that I had the sons of Israel live in booths when I brought them out from the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.’ ” So Moses declared to the sons of Israel the appointed times of the Lord. Verses 40–44. Each feast was an appointed season.
Anyone who wants a meeting with God can have it. A meeting with God is not dependent upon certain actions, such as fasting and praying; meeting God is a very simple matter of awareness. Many times people pray and pray, but they do not hear God and they wonder where He is. All the time God is right there, and He is speaking; but they are not listening. It is wrong to think that you survive only by going from one experience to another—by having a meeting with God every six months or so. You can always be aware of God if you just remember a time when you were in a hard place and the way God finally met you. If you study how God met you, you will realize that it was not a matter of God meeting you nearly as much as the fact that you opened up to an awareness of Him.
The awareness of the Lord is exactly what the Israelites were practicing when they kept the Feast of Tabernacles. For eight days they left their daily manner of living to come before the Lord; but their means of livelihood were there when they came back. The feast started on the first day with a Sabbath rest to the Lord, and it ended on the eighth day with a Sabbath rest to the Lord. There was to be a total release from their daily cares. You, too, should drastically change your pattern of living and your routines, because you cannot move into something new in God until you stop what you are doing and look to Him.
Can you understand why the Feast of Tabernacles was such an effective time? It was a fall harvest season and a time of thanksgiving and of being altogether joyful. In the midst of it all, there was a tremendous rejuvenation of spirit among God’s people. They were all renewed because they followed a simple formula. This could be compared to following the right combination of numbers to open a safe. If you turn the dial to a wrong number, nothing happens. God has the right combination for you to open the door to a real blessing. Let there be times when you are hidden away with the Lord. First feed on His living Word; then spend a couple of hours not listening to anyone, even if you have to put plugs in your ears. Soon you will become aware that the Lord has been speaking to you. As you wait upon the Lord, He will renew you. Learn to tune in to God. Clear your spiritual ears so that you have an ear to hear what the Spirit is saying. Let God begin to speak to you. If you do not make room for that to happen, then your dreams will go sour.
What causes people to murmur and complain? Their dreams are fermenting and they have spiritual heartburn. Their dreams are not being digested into the process of becoming reality in their lives. Then they must return to the dreams and visions God gave them in the beginning when He first opened them up to an awareness of Himself. Wherever there is bitterness of spirit, it is because some beautiful dream has not been mingled with faith in order to be assimilated into that life. A beautiful dream that goes sour in your life causes you much grief.
Is something wrong with you now? Do you have spiritual heartburn? Do you need this renewal? Determine to get away and seek the Lord. Determine to walk with Him today. You need times of waiting on the Lord. Reach in to the Lord for keys of renewal. It is not a matter of how little or how much work you do; it is a matter of how you come to rest before the Lord and lay hold of that renewal. Your visions and dreams must not fail. As God puts pressures upon you, your dreams either will go sour or they will give way to your walking in their fulfillment. You will have to wait on the Lord. You will have to reach into those hopes and visions and dreams that God has quickened to your mind.
Keep your relationship to the Lord sharp. One of the best illustrations of this is the relationship of a man and his wife. When they marry, they are eagerly anticipating their lives together; but after a while, frictions may arise. Because of their different ways of living, they may find that some adjustments must be made so that a routine can be handled in managing the household. Because they love each other, it should be very easy to change. Love initiates change, but love alone is not enough. Love embraces a faith. Love has to have faith. When two people marry, they must love with a faith that anticipates their relationship. That is where dreams become effective.
You may start out with a dream, but after a while you realize that nothing has been done to change that dream into a reality. If you are making no steps toward that dream, it will become a nightmare. Then as friction and tension build up, you begin to murmur and complain and withdraw. You feel that what is happening to you is not good. All of that happens because those reactions are within you. You cannot blame others. If you were to take tranquilizers, those who you thought were harassing you would suddenly seem to act better. But you must understand that the problem is in you, because your faith is not reaching out and taking hold of what the Lord has for your life.
A time of tabernacling with God is an opportunity to polish up your dreams and take off some of the tarnish. It is a way to start your spirit functioning once again. A dream is either something you live on, or something that becomes a slow death to you. Many a person who has been walking with God suddenly finds himself in real trouble as far as his walk is concerned. Even though he has been listening to wonderful truths that are keys to the Kingdom, he is having a problem walking in them because he is becoming immune to them. He is no longer reacting in faith to bring them to pass. Therefore he feels, “Why should I have any more dreams? Why do I need any more sermons? I have several undigested sermons sitting in my stomach now.” Then he begins to turn away. Happy is the person who listens to what God is saying and strives to keep his relationship to the Lord very much alive.
There cannot be a good relationship between you and God, or with another person, without hopefulness, which is actually what a dream is. When you try to put images to your hopes, like a young girl who envisions a knight upon a white horse, your spirit starts reaching up. The hope that is in your subconscious causes you to start putting together a little dream. In your dream, everything is wonderful and beautiful. As you think about it, you begin to believe. Soon your whole being becomes motivated to see that dream happen.
It is time to polish up your dreams and your relationships. Let the hopefulness within you begin voicing, “Not only is it in my heart that things will be better, but God’s Word has declared that they will be perfect. Everything will be exactly the way the Lord said it would be.” How wonderful it can be to walk along with God and say, “Not one of the promises which He made has failed. All have been fulfilled” (Joshua 21:45). Not many men can say that in their lifetime; and that is why old men must dream dreams.
The greatest things that happen do not happen only to young people. Some of the greatest events in the Scriptures happened to older people, but they were all people who were still dreaming their dreams. They had faith like that of Joshua and Caleb. Think of what tabernacling with God was like in the days of Joshua and Caleb. Some of the people in the wilderness grumbled at the sand. Others grumbled at the difficulty of the way. But some, like Joshua and Caleb, were looking toward hills in the distance and thinking about the day when they would possess the land. They knew that they were tabernacling enroute to fulfillment. Every day that they lived in their little huts before the Lord, they lived with the anticipation of possessing Canaan.
Every day that we keep a spiritual Feast of Tabernacles, we do it with hope; we do it with vivid dreams. We are not where we were, and we are not yet where we will be. We are traveling; we are enroute. Our hopes and our expectations are going to be met. We will have everything. All the promises will be ours.
It is time to get rid of sour dreams. Let your hope and expectancy be in the Lord. Do away with the garbage—the murmuring and complaining, the doubts and fears, the spiritual nightmares. Get rid of all of it. Reach up to the Lord and be renewed in His presence. Wait on Him until you are radiant with fresh, vivid dreams.
Those who have walked with God for many years must continue without disillusionment. They must still have their dreams. If the old men continue dreaming, it is because those dreams have become a reality in their hearts. Any delays do not alter their vision of the hour of fulfillment that is as sure and as positive as the Word they have believed.
You do not want to walk with God for many years, only to have your heart disillusioned at the end. Do not work hard for the Lord, only to become a casualty. Your survival depends upon your attitude. Stop just working, and instead build the Kingdom of God. Dream a dream of seeing it come to pass, and keep it fresh and open. Let everything you do channel a little more divine energy toward bringing forth God’s will in the earth. Let your vision be stronger. Let your hopes and expectations be greater. Shake loose the things that are wrong so that you do not become a casualty. Scrub out the garbage of bitterness. Polish up your dream.