The Spiritual Symbolism of Sukkot

The recent week-long Jewish celebration of Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles, is one of the Bible's most joyful holidays. Besides building temporary huts or booths and feasting together, Sukkot is also an agricultural celebration of God's provision during the harvest season. It's a time to rejoice in His abundance and give thanks for all that He has done. As my Jewish boss aptly shared, sitting inside the sukkah shelter feels like God wrapping His arms around you in a hug after the sombre season of repentance ending with Yom Kippur.

As families gather together to build and live in a temporary, handmade shelter, they remember the 40 years their ancestors spent wandering in the wilderness of the desert on their way to the Promised Land, after escaping slavery in Egypt. The first two days are considered the holiest where work, other than that related to Sukkot, is forbidden.

The word Sukkot or Sukkah means shelter, which is a significant part of the observance of this joyous holiday. You could say it is a visible symbol of God’s presence, protection, and His gracious provision. As they leave the comfort and security of their homes, they place themselves, symbolically, in God's hands.

The building of the Sukkah is a fun family affair where the children will have fun decorating it and where they will gather for the eating of the feast. Some even choose to sleep there under the elements, looking up at the heavens through the gaps in their shelter’s roof. The Feast of Tabernacles was an annual reminder that God chose to ‘tabernacle among them,’ to protect and bless them wherever they wander.

There are specific rules about how this shelter is to be built, and what materials are allowed to be used, but what I find fascinating are the rituals that accompany this holiday, and how they all foreshadow Yeshua (Jesus) in their symbolism.

The first ritual is the drawing and pouring of the water, which can be referenced back to the origins of this practice found in Isaiah 12:3 which says “With joy shall you draw water out of the wells of salvation”. We know from many verses in the Bible, like John 7:37, that say that Jesus offers us living water, which we can interpret to mean the Holy Spirit.

The second ritual is to illuminate the shelter with the lighting of candles. This glorious blaze of fire is to remember the pillar of fire by day and smoke by night that accompanied their ancestors throughout their wanderings in the wilderness.  Again, we know that in John 8:12, Jesus refers to Himself as the Light of the world.

The third ritual is to eat an olive-sized piece of bread or mezonot (grain-based food) inside the Sukkah on the first two nights.  In John 6:35 Jesus says He is the ‘Bread of Life’; therefore, eating it is just like taking communion. (1 Corinthians 11:24)

The fourth ritual is the waving of branches, typically 4 different species of trees, although, in Israel, many choose 7 to represent all the species of the harvest, with each having a special meaning. Each tree type symbolizes the different personalities of everyone, and how we are all joined together to complement each other’s weaknesses and strengths. A blessing is recited over them and waved in 6 directions, north, south, east, west, up, and down, to emphasize the omnipresence of God.  On the last day of Sukkot, they make a procession around their Synagogue or room seven times whilst waving the branches of Palm leaves, known as the lulav, where they cry out with shouts of praise and beat the bundle on the ground.  This reminds me of how Jesus was welcomed on Palm Sunday with the waving of Palm leaves. Circling around for seven times, also reminds us of the story in Joshua 6, where the Lord gave the people victory over the city of Jericho.  

It seems a fitting end to Sukkot to celebrate with drinking of wine, the fruit of the vine, for in John 15, we are told that Jesus is the true vine, who we are to abide in.

Just like the Sukkah is a temporary dwelling, it should remind us that the Holy Spirit now dwells in us permanently. The Tabernacle where the Holy Priest visited on our behalf, is no longer necessary.  The curtain separating us from God’s Holy presence was torn when Jesus died on the Cross, where we now can enjoy direct and permanent access to dwell with Him.

Below are some Bible verses that refer to this joyous, week-long holiday. As you consider this festival, may it remind you of Jesus and the significance of His message through the traditions of Sukkot.

Genesis 33:17 - And Jacob journeyed to Succoth, built himself a house, and made booths for his livestock. Therefore, the name of the place is called Succoth.

Leviticus 23:39-40 - On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you are gathering in your produce of the earth, you shall celebrate a celebration of God for seven days... And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a beautiful tree (etrog), palm branches, the branch of a thick tree (myrtle, hadas), and brook-willows, and you shall rejoice before God for seven days.

Deuteronomy 16:13-16 - Celebrate the Festival of Sukkot for seven days, when you gather in from the grain and the vine. And you shall rejoice on your festival, you, your son, your daughter, your manservant, and your maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and widow who live in your gates... and you shall be only joyful.

Embracing Life’s Disruptions

Health is Wealth

As an adult who is rarely sick, I recently had a hard time embracing a 6-week illness, with pleading prayers to God to make me well quickly.  I had religiously taken my multi-vitamins and minerals, with immune booster properties, so when the first symptoms arrived, I believed, like always, that my famous Scottish ‘Hot Toddy’ would nip it in the bud and that would be it. 

However, no matter what I tried, and believe me, I tried everything, it just seemed to get worse.  From a simple cold, to full-blown flu, to bronchial asthma, to bronchitis to laryngitis, it continued to morph. 

After 2 doctors’ visits, and countless medicines, including antibiotics, penicillin, and a nebulizer, I was still far from well.  I even tried all the herbal, natural combinations that my well-meaning family and friends suggested. I was desperate to get better!

Obviously, I had everyone praying in agreement with me for healing, with myself taking communion every night and declaring my healing, but still, God chose to make me wait, which got me to the point of asking why.

This all happened when our tax season had just started and the work that I do was not able to be paused, which left me with two choices, either to work from home or increase my backlog. I stoically chose the first option, which I believe might have delayed my healing.

I had been sensing in my spirit to slow down, but I continued to work full-steam ahead, and I believe now that when your body or God tells you to rest, you must obey!  If you don’t, He will, like Psalms 23 says, bring you to green pastures, and for me, this was through an unexpected, unexplained, unfair and lengthy illness, where I was forced to put my life on pause and rest if I wanted to be restored to wellness.

During this season of ill health, I was so focused on getting better, instead of focusing on God and trusting Him for my healing, which I realise also delayed it. Sometimes we can get so caught up in trying to rush God, that we lose sight of why He has allowed it in the first place.   It was only when a sermon at my Church reminded me that we are to embrace life’s disruptions, that I started to fully rest and accept my fate.

I have learned that, although I still trust doctors, in most cases, they are only treating the symptoms and not the root cause of our illnesses.  I have also learned to listen when I need to rest and embrace life’s disruptions instead of wrestling with them. There is a great peace to discover, when you put your life on pause and rest, both physically and mentally, when it is needed, and allow God to fully refresh and restore you back to health.

So, next time I am faced with the sudden disruption of illness, I will drink lots of water, eat nutritiously well, rest often, and continue to pray, trusting only in God for my healing.  For I have learned that health truly is our greatest blessing, for without it, you cannot enjoy any of His others!

Seeking Comfort from God instead of Food

I don’t know about you, but the lockdown during this Corona virus pandemic has thrown many people like myself further into emotional or comfort eating.  I recently looked at why we are not running to God for our comfort and what is making us turn to food instead. Let’s begin by looking at the definition of comfort -

• noun - a state of physical ease and freedom from pain or constraint. 
• verb - the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress; to give solace or to soothe.

The verb comfort comes from the Latin word comfortare, which means to “strengthen greatly.” As a noun, comfort is anything that provides satisfaction or a relaxed and easy feeling.

We escape to food for many reasons, but sometimes it can become our hiding place, where we eat our feelings or emotions that we’d prefer not to deal with, or find hard to express.  Unfortunately, as delicious as some food can be, it can never fully satisfy us or fill that void we are insatiably trying to fill.   

If your diet is full of sugar, carbs, salt or additives, these are addictive, in which case you need to ask yourself if it is time to fast these or do a detox so you can break their stronghold.  Anything you are craving, is for a reason.

God gave us His Holy Spirit, who should be our built-in Comforter, but when we choose to turn to food instead, it blocks out His power and defeats us from gaining victory in this area. 

Some of the things we can try to stop us turning to food is the following:-

1. Ask God for help – not for the willpower to stop but to give you a true hate of this sin of gluttony
2. Fast from thinking about yourself and focus on God and others – doing this will stop our thoughts turning to food
3. Turn to your Holy Spirit and read your Bible, until you feel satisfied and comforted
4. Recognize your triggers and addictions – I need a…
5. Be accountable to one another in your successes and failures.  When you share your triumphs and struggles you will no longer be hiding the problem, and by exposing it, you can find healing.
6. Be mindful when you eat, and savor each bite slowly, focusing and celebrating God as the provider of it.
7. Stop eating on autopilot and start listening to your body when it says it is full 
8. Eat for fuel and nourishment and not for entertainment or pleasure.

Food fixations or desires is a sign that food has become your master and that you are a slave to food.  Yes, even food can become an idol, especially when we are worshiping it instead of God!

When we are going through a tough time, we need to assess our thoughts and problems and name our emotions.  When we speak them out aloud, we will find we won’t be tempted to run to food for comfort.  Instead, eat a ‘daily bread’ verse and ask God to fill you with the kind of comfort that you are needing.

We need to have a good relationship with food and stop obsessing about it. Even healthy eating to the extreme is bad for you. When we seek to find our satisfaction in God and not in food, we will realize that only God can give us the kind of comfort that sustains us and brings us joy.

Food is not our enemy.  It is a good and delicious gift from God, that was designed to be eaten and enjoyed in fellowship with others, to give us the energy and nourishment our bodies need.  It is not God’s design for us to be bingeing on our own, with junk food or snacks that adds no value.

Satan is our enemy who has used food to distort our relationship with God and uses food to hijack our intimacy with our Comforter. The lies that the devil uses are: -

• I need to finish what’s on the plate
• I deserve this if you’ve had a bad day (reward yourself with a treat)
• A little bit more won’t matter
• I’ll do better tomorrow – my diet starts on Monday

A small bite of something delicious can become an act of worship – you don’t need to eat the whole cake or the whole packet of crisps.

We need to start craving God and developing an appetite and a hunger to consume His Word as our Daily Bread.  When we hide God’s Word in our heart, (memorize it) He will use it as a sword of truth when we need it.

Here are some bible verses to help use as weapons when we are fighting this battle: -

Psalms 34:8 – Taste what is good. Change your delight focus from the food to the source of the food. 

Psalm 23:4 – staff & rod comforts us – for protection and rescue 

Isaiah 55:2 – nothing can satisfy us except God 

Isaiah 66:13 – God comfort’s us like a mother 

Psalm 119:50/76 – God’s love and promises comfort us 

Proverbs 13:25 - a righteous man eats until his heart (soul) is content or eats enough to satisfy his appetite.  

Matthew 5:4 – the mourning will be comforted 

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 - your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit - therefore honour God with it 

1 Corinthians 10:13 – you will not be tempted beyond what you can bear. Endure it, until it passes 

1 Corinthians 10:31 - eat or drink for the glory of God 

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 – the purpose of comfort is for it to be a cycle – God comforts and encourages you, so you can comfort and encourage others. (Give a dose of hope) 

2 Thessalonians 2:16-17 – God gives us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comforts our hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

My prayer is if you too are struggling in this area, that this information will be of benefit to you in helping you to seek and receive your comfort from God, instead of from food.

As I continue daily, to resist the temptation to turn to food and by acknowledging my emotions and what kind of comfort I am needing, I am finding it easier to turn to God instead, and I hope you will too. Each opportunity is a choice we must make to either turn to food for our comfort, or to God, our true and only real source of Comfort.

Trash to Treasure

I love living in my complex at month end, especially one with such a well utilised, effective recycling area. The end of April saw the delight of another great find at the ‘Pre-loved’ corner in our bin area, where I got to rummage amongst a huge box of books. In God’s gracious, amazing goodness, there were even books on writing, as well as a Christian devotional, which you could say, had my name on them!  I also claimed a bag full of brand-new gift bags, which now just needs gifts to fill them. Previous treasures have included plants, Tupperware’s, magazines, scarfs and even fancy boxes.

I have always been perplexed at what a throwaway society we have become, and although I wouldn’t quite call myself a dumpster diver, I must confess I get very excited to see what treats have been left aside at month end or when residents clear out or move out.

It has made me reflect on how sometimes our dreams can be someone else’s nightmare.  Whilst one person may be praying for a spouse, someone may be wishing they were single again.  Likewise, someone is longingly broody for a child, whilst another may not quite enjoy being a parent.  I realise this is quite extreme cases, and not as superficial as ‘trash’, but it makes the point that what one person throws away, another is delighted to receive.

The key is all in our perspective of what makes something truly valuable.  Although I applaud the actions of residents moving out to gift their unwanted belongings to someone else, I have to wonder on what value they placed on the items in the first place. To throw away anything would imply that it is unwanted ‘trash’, but to someone else it could be regarded as a quite a treasured treat.

I leave you with the thought that whatever you don’t want, someone else might love, so learn to be grateful with appreciation of what God has blessed you with. Value what you have, sell or gift what you no longer need and please continue to recycle…

The Passover Blood of the Cross

The Church I belong to (Life Changer’s – Century City) has been studying the Exodus story in their series ‘Move Again’, and I’ve come to see how the final plague of the Passover night was a foreshadow of Jesus on the Cross at the time we celebrate as Easter.

The Passover is a beautiful illustration of the gospel. It’s a story of redemption and deliverance from bondage. It’s a story of faith in the grace of God and it’s a story of victory. The tenth plague was God’s wrath on sin, idolatry, pride, false religion, cruelty, and so much more. The Angel of death would sweep through the land of Egypt and lay waste in one of the most heart-wrenching ways of killing every first-born. But, as always, God made a way.

God instructed Moses for the people to put the blood of a sacrificed, innocent lamb upon their doorposts, which would rescue and save them from death. When the angel of death saw the blood covering the doorposts, he passed over them, sparing them from death. However, it was not the blood itself that protected them, but what the blood represented, as a sign of a covenant.

When you think of the action of those people who painted their doorposts with the blood from a basin, using the leaves from a branch of a hyssop tree, they were performing the sign of a cross. The blood from the top crossbeam would have dripped down the center, and painting the blood from the left -side post to the right-side post, would have completed the sign of the cross.

In the Old Testament, blood was used to seal covenants and to create an inseparable bond of relationship, a blood link between two parties. The sacrificing of an animal without blemish and the sprinkling of its blood was also used to consecrate, to purify and to atone for the sins of the people.

The night of the Passover gives us a picture of what Jesus did when He shed His innocent blood to save us from our sin and give us eternal life. It is Jesus’s blood that covers our sins, like it did on those doorposts, so that when God looks at those who believe and have placed their faith in Jesus, He sees His child because of our precious blood covering and passes over us, sparing us from the penalty of our sin and giving us eternal life.

Jesus hung on crossbeams and bled for all of us. His blood covers anyone who surrenders to put their faith in Him. We don’t have to be innocent or perfect, because Jesus was on our behalf. Those rescued from Egypt were imperfect people, and so are we and just like those who God rescued from Egypt, we have to follow Him out of slavery. God didn’t deliver Israel so they could stay put in bondage.

Jesus came to sacrifice His life to rescue and save ours. He was perfect, without sin, and through His sacrifice, He offers deliverance from the power of sin in our lives. Jesus was our Passover Lamb.

When we plead the blood of Jesus over our lives or over our situations, we are not doing a ‘Harry Potter’ like incantation of breaking a curse, but we are acknowledging and standing on the promises of the power of what His blood signifies, and celebrating our inheritance of what His blood has given us.

So as you partake of Communion this Easter, consider this verse:-

1 Corinthians 10: 16-18 “The cup of blessing that we bless—isn’t it a sharing of Christ’s blood? The bread which we break—isn’t it a sharing of Christ’s body? 17 Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body—for we all partake of the one bread. 18 Consider physical Israel. Those who eat the sacrifices—aren’t they partners in the altar?

 Wishing you and your family a blessed, holy and meaningful Easter!

Supernatural Miracle of Time

I know that with God all things are possible, but recently I experienced God doing what would seem the impossible!  Something like the story of multiplying the fish and bread, but in my case it had to do with time.  I had two important deadlines for the next day but felt that there was not enough hours in the day to meet them. Although the deadlines weren’t life-threatening or anything, they were very important to me. My only solution I could see was to burn the midnight oil to get finished in time, which is what I did. Climbing into bed at 3am, I whispered a quick prayer for help, knowing that I would need to waken again at 6am.  I was sure to set the alarm and resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be needing lots of coffee and a red-bull to see me through the day!  Little did I know that God had heard my prayer… You see, when I woke up to the alarm buzzing, I felt completely wide-awake and totally refreshed!  It was as if God had supernaturally given me my full 8 hours of sleep in the mere span of 3 hours! I know it is hard to believe, but it’s true – and if He can do this with time, I know He can do it for energy too!  All He needs is a single cry for help from us, accompanied with righteous motives…

2 Keys to your Spiritual Growth

During the past two months, of what could be called a wilderness season, I discovered that there are two areas of spiritual growth that determines whether you are just a surviving Christian or a thriving Christian. Firstly, it is knowing your identity and who you are in Christ, i.e., who God says you are and what you have inherited as a child of God. And secondly, it is knowing who God is and who He says He is, by having an intimate relationship with Him.

You cannot walk in victory if you still have the mindset of a victim and behaving in defeat. To fully discover your identity in Christ and operate in your inheritance of what you have been given and how God sees you, a great start is to read Ephesians 1, and on a piece of paper, write down all the “I am” statements.  Read these as declarations to yourself every day, until you start believing them in your heart.  Acknowledging that you are loved, chosen, redeemed etc, are the building blocks to your true identity as a Royal Prince or Princess of our King.  Once you have sealed those in your spirit, do this for every passage of Scripture that you read, and you will discover many more powerful “I am” statements for you to declare. Once you start believing them, you will start walking, talking and acting like God intended you to.

You cannot fully trust God if you don’t really know Him. We may know of God, and be familiar with His role in the Bible stories, but until you can fully grasp who God is as a person, and have an intimate relationships with Him, you will always lack a confident trust and belief in Him and His promises. To learn who God is and what He has promised you, you need to be reading His Word to discover this, and be open and quiet to listen to His Holy Spirit speaking to you. A helpful way I was taught, is to get A4 sized paper, and mark down in the left column A to Z, leaving a few lines in-between each letter.  Then, whenever you are reading your Bible, look out for the many characteristics of God that you can find, and write them down in the corresponding first letter of that word.  For example, under H, you will eventually have one of the words as ‘Holy’, and under K, you will need to write ‘Kind’.

My prayer is that you will join me on this adventure of discovering and building ourselves up in these two areas.  I am confident that as we start walking in our true identity and discovering how great is our God as we grow closer in our relationship with Him and start believing it, these keys will help set us free to fly like an Eagle and excel at being a true Christian disciple.