Up to this point, God gives us strength.

When we enter the rest of the feast of Tabernacles, God Himself becomes our strength.

Up to this point, God gives us peace.

When we enter Tabernacles God Himself becomes our peace.

God gives us joy.

When we enter Tabernacles God Himself becomes our joy.

Can you see the difference?

In the first situation we are a person separate from God and so God gives us things.

In the second situation we are not a person separate from God. We have become one with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore God does not give us anything. He Himself for eternity IS all we need and desire.

Can I invite you forward to the climax of the work of salvation? I do not claim to have arrived but, as Brother Fullerton used to sing, "I'm pressing on the upward way. New heights I'm gaining every day."

We have titled this brief essay, "Tabernacles and the Testimony." What do we mean by this?

Let's move on and see.

The Light of the World

If we are to understand what relationship the spiritual fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles has to our witness to the world we must come to realize the difference between the Church and the world.

God loves the world, the crazy, drunken, rebellious world. God does not love the spirit of the world, the spirit of Antichrist. Rather God loves the people of the world. As Isaiah says, they grow up like grass in the field that is thrown into the fire and burned. Yet God knows each person and cares for him or her.

But God has no way in which He can communicate His love, His person, His will, His way to the average person. At one time God visited the earth in the Person of His Son, but the results were disastrous. Immediately the religious leaders were overcome with envy and sought to murder Him. Imagine! They strove to murder their Christ and Lord!

No, it is not that easy, because of our sin, for God to dwell with us.

God's solution to His problem of communication is to call out of the world a Church. When the Church has attained the spiritual stature God is seeking, God then will be able to return to the earth in Jesus Christ and His coheirs and tell people of His love, His Person, His will, and His way.

First the Lord Jesus had to come and make an atonement for mankind. This He did through the Holy Spirit. The perfect atonement has been made, the perfect Lamb has been slain.

The next step in the program is the Church Age. I think we have misunderstood the Church Age. The Lord Jesus commanded us to preach the Gospel to every creature, saying whoever believed and was baptized would be saved in the Day of Judgment.

But the main purpose of the two thousand years of the Church Age is not the salvation of the nations. I am not implying by this statement that evangelistic efforts should cease, I merely am pointing out the grand plan for reconciling God to man and man to God.

To be continued.