Annual Feasts
485
much by lack of sympathy with one another. He who shuts himself
up to himself is not filling the position that God designed he should.
We are all children of one Father, dependent upon one another for
happiness. The claims of God and of humanity are upon us. It is the
proper cultivation of the social elements of our nature that brings us
into sympathy with our brethren and affords us happiness in our efforts
to bless others.
The Feast of Tabernacles was not only commemorative but typical.
It not only pointed back to the wilderness sojourn, but, as the feast
of harvest, it celebrated the ingathering of the fruits of the earth, and
pointed forward to the great day of final ingathering, when the Lord of
the harvest shall send forth His reapers to gather the tares together in
bundles for the fire, and to gather the wheat into His garner. At that
time the wicked will all be destroyed. They will become “as though
they had not been.”
Obadiah 16
. And every voice in the whole universe
will unite in joyful praise to God. Says the revelator, “Every creature
which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as
are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and
honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne,
and unto the Lamb forever and ever.”
Revelation 5:13
.
[542]
The people of Israel praised God at the Feast of Tabernacles, as
they called to mind His mercy in their deliverance from the bondage
of Egypt and His tender care for them during their pilgrim life in the
wilderness. They rejoiced also in the consciousness of pardon and
acceptance, through the service of the day of atonement, just ended.
But when the ransomed of the Lord shall have been safely gathered
into the heavenly Canaan, forever delivered from the bondage of the
curse, under which “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in
pain together until now” (
Romans 8:22
), they will rejoice with joy
unspeakable and full of glory. Christ’s great work of atonement for
men will then have been completed, and their sins will have been
forever blotted out.