Who Tabernacles with Whom?
As most of you know, this week we’re celebrating sukkot, the Festival of Huts, or the Festival of Tabernacles, or the Festival of Booths, however you want to call it. Just don’t call it the Festival of Booze. Booths, not booze. It’s not Oktoberfest.
In Leviticus 23 our Torah says sitting in the sukka for seven days commemorates the time God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt and sat them in huts. Interestingly, our Torah nowhere else describes this event. Deuteronomy chapter 16 contains further instruction for celebrating the Festival, but doesn’t mention building huts or sitting in huts.
Our Torah makes no overt connection of the festival of sukkot with any event in salvation history. Jewish tradition preserves very little of what the commandment of sitting inside the sukka might mean. The ancient translators of the Bible into Jewish Greek however, translated sukka with the same word they used for tent.
Of course, a hut and a tent aren’t exactly the same thing. The purpose of a tent is to protect the occupant from the sun and the rain, whereas the hut for celebrating the festival must be only partially covered. If the roof is rainproof or sunproof, the sukka isn’t kosher. So the sukka is not exactly a tent, but both are temporary shelters. We can surmise this is what the ancient translators had in mind when they called both a hut for celebrating the festival of sukkot and a tent by the same word.
Furthermore, the ancient translators used the same word for the sanctuary which the children of Israel built for God. English usage has followed the lead of the ancient Greek translators. In English we call the sanctuary which the children of Israel built for God “the tabernacle.” In English we call the festival of sitting in huts “the Feast of Tabernacles.” In English we’ve made a clever connection which doesn’t exist in the Hebrew Bible.
Let’s look at the work order for constructing God’s tabernacle. Exodus 25:8.
“And let them make me a sanctuary, and I will tabernacle among them. According to all which I show you, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its utensils, thus you shall make.”
Rav Issachar Ber ben Israel Parnas Eilenburg, who was the rabbi of Gorizia in Italy four hundred years ago, noticed something unusual about the wording of Exodus 25:8. Why doesn’t God say, “Let them make me a sanctuary, and I will tabernacle in it?” This would seem the logical purpose for constructing a building, so that somebody can live in it. But instead of “it,” God says “them:” “Let them make me a sanctuary, and I will tabernacle among them.”
From the unusual wording of this verse, Rav Eilenburg concluded that God doesn’t so much tabernacle in the sanctuary as he tabernacles among Israel. God really tabernacles among Israel, not in the tent his children pitch for him.
Rashi has a similar understanding of the sanctuary, which he expresses in his Torah commentary at Leviticus 20:3. Leviticus 20:3 reads,
“And I shall set my face against that man and I shall cut him off from among his people, because from his seed he has given to Molekh that he might defile my sanctuary and profane the name of my holiness.”
Rashi wants to explain the connection between defiling God’s sanctuary and being cut off from the people of Israel. Rashi explains “my sanctuary” in this verse as “the assembly of Israel, which is sanctified to me.” In other words, when God says “my sanctuary” Rashi takes this to mean “the assembly of Israel.” Rashi, like Rav Eilenburg, points out that sometimes “God’s sanctuary” refers to Israel, not to the building.
Christians have a very similar concept. When Christians say “the church” sometimes they refer to the building where a particular congregation meets, but most often “the church” refers to the worshipers who comprise the congregation. The term “the church” usually refers to the people, not to the building. When Rashi and HaRav Eilenburg point out that “God’s sanctuary” can refer to the people of Israel, not just the big tent, they’re pointing out something Christians readily understand.
Due to the influence of the ancient Greek translation of the Torah, Christians have frequently associated the festival of sukkot with God’s tabernacling among his people. Christians have frequently associated the celebration of sukkot with the incarnation. Many of our Messianic friends suggest that sukkot ought to be the true festival of the incarnation, the true Christmas.
Frankly, I think this a bit far-fetched. The celebrations of the seventh month seem to point to endtime events in the plan of salvation. The ten days of shofar blasts points to repentance prior to the finalization of verdicts in the judgment. The day of atonement points to God’s people’s identity with his cause and to his final vindication. These are endings, not beginnings. The incarnation would seem to be out of sequence here.
A further aspect of sukkot which would seem to rule out the incarnation is that the celebration is only commanded once Israel is out of the wilderness. When your day-to-day reality is living in a tent, God doesn’t tell you, “Go make a hut.” It’s only after the gift of the Promised Land and the experience of permanent housing, that God commands Israel to remember what it was like before they reached their destination. Sitting in a hut becomes a meaningful reenactment only when it is no longer routine. The characteristic activity of sukkot points to the endtime, when salvation has finally been achieved, and God’s people can look back on his completed work.
Furthermore, Leviticus 23 explicitly says that the purpose of sukkot is that further generations may know that God made the children of Israel sit in huts when he brought them out of Egypt [23:43]. During sukkot it’s the people who do the tabernacling, not God. God has been tabernacling with the children of Israel all along throughout their long sojourn in the wilderness. sukkot points to God’s children tabernacling with him, rather than to God tabernacling with them. God’s incarnation simply doesn’t fit the bill here.
So how then is this festival a celebration of the divine/human partnership? Evidently, at the end of salvation history God’s children will join him. This joining shouldn’t be thought of merely in terms of a change in physical location. We aren’t going to join God merely in the sense of moving from point A to point B, from a terrestrial home to a celestial home. Joining God isn’t a matter of reducing the travel time between us and him. The plan rather, is that redeemed creatures will someday move inside the life that today is the exclusive interaction between Father, Son, and Spirit. The Apostle Shaul hints at this qualitative move when he talks about the resurrection life in 1Corinthians 15:24-28.
“Then the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, when he abolishes all rule, and all authority and power (for it is necessary for him to reign until he puts all the enemies under his feet). The last enemy he will abolish is death. For “all things he has subjected under his feet.” But when it says that “all things” will be subject, it is clear that the one subjecting all things to him is exempt. But when he has subjected all things to him, then the Son himself will be subject to the one who subjected all things to him, in order that God should be all in all.”
In other words, in some wonderful way, which we don’t begin to understand, we will come to be “inside” God rather than being “outside” God. Instead of being only part of God’s consciousness, as we are now, we will someday become part of God’s own ego. God will be all in all.
Before any of this can happen, of course, we’ll have to be entirely beyond our present rebelliousness and alienation. It’s bad enough that our selfish desires, our ugly thoughts, the painful consequences of our sin are all part of God’s consciousness. God has to constantly put up with our unholy clamor ringing in his ears just to catch our prayers. Imagine what that must be like for God! Before God can safely take us deeper inside himself, there has to be total victory over sin. We have to wait "until he puts all enemies under his feet." The way things are now, God loves the likes of us by keeping us at a safe distance. Getting any closer would be a cosmic disaster. If sinners got inside God's ego, God would think he was a sinner.
But evidently, after the Son has subjected all things to the Father, God will once again completely fill everywhere just as he did before he withdrew to make room for creatures. There will then be no more “foreign territory” in the universe. How God will manage this without violating our creatureliness, our individuality, and our freedom we have no inkling at all. But if God has already managed to join us without losing his divinity, he will surely find a way for us to join him without losing our humanity! Just as a Jew on a cross can be an identity of the transcendent Creator, far above and beyond all that is created, and yet obedient unto death, so there is evidently room for redeemed creatures within God. Somehow we will join him without dissolving in him, and “God will be all in all,” as the Apostle Saul says.
The 2nd Epistle of Peter also suggests this qualitative move on the part of creatures, a move from being external to God to being internal to God. 2Peter 1:2-4.
“Grace and shalom be multiplied to you by the acknowledgement of the God of Jesus our lord! (As all things pertaining to life and piety his divine power has granted us, through the acknowledgement of the one who has called us to his own glory and virtue, by which he has granted us precious and exceeding great promises, in order that through them you may be partakers in divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by way of passion).”
Within a biblical context, “divine nature” is not an abstraction. Within a biblical context, the possession of “divine nature” is not some generic characteristic which ensures deity. Peter certainly recognizes no other “divine nature” apart from the person of HaShem. There are no independent alternative sources of “divine nature.” Within a biblical context, the only possible route to “partaking in divine nature” is to become part of HaShem’s inner life. Evidently HaShem has some way for us to be simultaneously human and divine, just as Jesus is simultaneously human and divine. This circumcised Jew’s creatureliness doesn’t detract from God, nor does his divine action eliminate his creaturely dependence. Evidently, redeemed creatures will come to enjoy some such arrangement.
The ancient teachers of Christianity in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire had a name for it, they call it Θεωσις or divinization. By Θεωσις they didn’t imagine that redeemed creatures would become other gods like Mormons teach, or that the integrity of HaShem’s unique personhood would be broken by the admission of additional individuals, but that God will someday enable us to join him in the same way that God the Son has joined us.
I would suggest that the festival of sukkot points us to that joining. At the end of our journey we will tabernacle with God, just as God has tabernacled with us. We will come to dwell among him just as he has come to dwell among us.
Why God should wish to incorporate us within his self we don’t know. Perhaps he desires our diversity. Perhaps for him reconciliation doesn’t feel complete until the final barrier between Creator and creature is broken down. Perhaps divine love is outrageously inclusive. It would be more than generous of him to respect the gap between finitude and infinity and enable us to fellowship with him as creatures in our proper sphere. We simply don’t know why his salvation should go to such extremes.
When we are part of him in this radical new way a new life of creativity and fulfillment will then commence which is currently beyond imagination. Even the Bible doesn’t attempt to describe it. The Bible simply says,
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God!; and so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it does not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” [1John 3:1-2]
! חג שמחHappy sukkot!
