19.1 Fulfilling Tabernacles
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
There is no greater expression of our complete and intimate Symmorphy with Almighty God than Jesus’ words in John 17:20-23. There is no greater expression of total opposition (blasphemy) to an image of God coming through the lens of the serpent than Jesus’ words in John 17:20-23. And there is no deeper center of the New Creation coming out from Jesus, the all speaking of God every moment, than Jesus’ words in John 17:20-23.
Thy Kingdom Come – is Tabernacles. Now is come Salvation and power, and the Kingdom of our God, and the authority of His Christ – is Tabernacles.
Holding Wide the Doors
At this point, I strongly urge you to read my book, The Feast of Tabernacles, if you have not already done so. Many, many, will rush into Tabernacles without a clue as to what it’s all about, most certainly. But those who hold wide the Doors of Tabernacles must know Father, His Heart, and all of His purposes. And how can we show many the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles in the life of the church except we know it’s full meaning inside of God?
But my purpose in this session is not to teach you about Tabernacles, but to show it to you (and me) already fulfilled. Thus I depend on your having already much understanding.
A Tabernacles Church
And when I say “Tabernacles Church,” I am speaking entirely of the Church of Jesus Christ walking upon this earth with a post-resurrection ministry at its heart.
In the next two lessons, I want to look at the Church of Christ on this earth during the Age of Tabernacles. In this lesson, I want to re-iterate the mighty events of Tabernacles itself. I also need to establish how we are to interpret the Old Testament. I make use of all Old Testament verses in the same way that Paul did, following Paul’s pattern. Paul used his approach to Old Testament interpretation on only a limited number of verses of necessity, but I use that same approach to interpret ALL Old Testament verses.
Paul’s Use of Prophecy
There is little connection between how Paul interpreted the Old Testament and how most Christians today do so. Paul (and Hebrews) first saw Christ out from every Old Testament verse and then he saw that same word of Christ fulfilled in the Church, in an Israel of the Spirit, in the seed of Abraham by faith, in what Paul called “spiritual Judaics.”
A Christian Judaic once told me, in looking at a verse in Ezekiel, “That applies to the J-s, not to the church.” Yet when I investigated further, I discovered Paul using that very verse in His claim that Gentiles in the church were part of Israel. The church does not “replace” Israel. The church is Israel. Israel is the church. This is Paul’s argument in Ephesians 2 and in Galatians, a reality rejected by most.
Salvation only IN Christ
I apply ALL Old Testament prophecy only to the Church of Christ, for there is NO fulfillment of anything separate from Christ. All the promises of God are only inside of Jesus. In Christ there is neither Judaic nor Gentile, but one new man, called by Paul the true, “spiritual” Judaic. There is no Israel alongside of Christ, but only inside of Him. Salvation is not “by” Christ, but IN Christ, and there is no other salvation.
So, having asserted how I treat all Old Testament Scripture, by Paul’s model, I will now be speaking ONLY of a successful Church through whom Jesus proves Himself faithful and true right here on this earth.
The Age of Tabernacles
But a new term has crept into our vocabulary, a term I intend to exploit from here on out.
The Age of Tabernacles
God applies the concept of six days of labor and one day of rest, not just to the week, but also to Himself in His acts of creation and to the years of Israel and to the earth. Every seventh year was to have been a year of rest for the gardens and fields. And after seven years of rest, or 49 years, there was to be another great year of rest, the year of Jubilee when all things were set free and all debts canceled. The Age of Tabernacles is the seventh day of rest for the earth and for mankind and stands in contrast to the six days of humans trying to “work things out.”
From One Day to the Next
This Sabbath Day of Rest is the pattern of God, and I hold to it fully. Not to our outward week, except as a wise concept, to give the physical body its needed rest, but to the purposes of God. Thus in all of my understanding, just as January 1 is the day following December 31, no different in measurement, so the first day of the Age of Tabernacles is simply the next twenty-four hours of human history following the final day of the age of human folly. And the one thing that marks the moment the new age begins is the resurrection of the physical bodies of God’s elect, but of God’s elect only. The resurrection is only by faith; God does not force it on anyone.
The Firstfruits
It is clear to me that all who will not have God immerse them into His Holy Spirit also will not allow God to flood their bodies with resurrection life.
Thus what I am saying is this. The resurrection is of the firstfruits of God, a small number of people in comparison, not only to all humans in heaven and earth, but also in comparison to those humans alive on this earth These resurrected humans might be about 50/50 regarding those presently dead in Christ in the heavens and those still alive in mortal bodies on this earth. Could their number be 144,000? We have no way of knowing if that is a literal number as well as a number of spirit meaning.
Enabling Us to Understand
I will let you know just as soon as I am able to count them.
And this is the whole POINT!!! God cannot teach us of the Age of Tabernacles except by using the things in this age that we do understand as symbols and metaphors pointing to that time when all of human society in the heavens as much as in the earth flows out from the governance (not government) of those who are walking in this heaven/earth immortal and incorruptible. And thus so many elements in the prophetic Scriptures of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation are God’s attempt to use things we can understand to give us an outline of things we cannot understand, not until we are immortal and incorruptible.
Preceding the Resurrection
For this reason, I am mixing my own human conjecture, not as a “prediction,” but as a necessary placing of things out where we can begin to have a look at them, together with a prophetic word of calling forth Christ into the human experience.
The moment when our bodies are swallowed up by life and the Age of Tabernacles begins in this heaven/earth is preceded by a momentous series of events covering, maybe, several weeks of time. In the days prior to our resurrection, every demon will be stripped out from the human experience and confined to chains binding them far away from all humans. And prior to that, according to Revelation 19 and 20, all human government will be eliminated as utterly worthless.
God’s Pattern
Okay!! Now I see the pattern. ALL human government is shown to be false BEFORE Adam’s contract with the devil is broken out from the appearance of man upon this earth. Thus it is Adam’s false authority ruling through the fear of pain and loss that is removed before God turns and deals with the problem of angels.
We see, then, that the Age of Tabernacles is bounded by the removal of all false angels out from any symmorphy with humans just before the beginning of that age with their return into the human experience at its end. It’s as if God is saying, “Okay, you messed with an infantile human in the beginning, now come mess with a completed Christ in the end.” – The final moment of the proof of Christ.
The Absolute Proof of Christ
That’s it!!! This is so cool. God’s whole program is to give an absolute and final answer to “Did God indeed say.” – Yes, here is all that God speaks, every single Word, now fulfilled in human flesh in totality, in a many-membered Body of Christ, laying down their lives for the sake of all.
I like this Fellow, and I like what He intends to do. And I see no reason at all to consider the “1000 years,” not of the “reign of Christ,” but of the absence of all angelic symmorphy with man, as anything but literal. And the return of fallen angels is for one purpose only, to prove that God speaks the truth as the foundation for all the ages to come. – AND WE ALSO – lay down our lives.
A Basic Framework
Now that we have the basic framework of the Age of Tabernacles, let’s return to the topic of this lesson, the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles prior to the resurrection. I like laying out the fulfillment of Tabernacles over and over, each time in a new context of understanding. I will like it far more as it becomes our outward reality.
The fulfillment of Tabernacles in the life of the Church inside this present age of human folly has three parts. Those three parts are the first Day of the Feast, a Sabbath Day, the six in-between days of dwelling in booths, and the final Great Day of the Feast, also a Sabbath Day. In our reality, the first and last parts are momentary events, with the in-between part being the proving of Christ.
Jesus, the Pattern Son
The experience that begins this fulfillment, an experience in our lives far greater than being born again or being filled with the Holy Ghost, will be the action of our Father, in filling His Body with all of Himself in all outward connections. This is an action passing entirely through our faith, for it is not yet visible to outward appearance, to any who are not part of this experience.
It is here, then, that we bring into our view, for the first time in my teaching, the pattern of Jesus as the Pattern Son. This first Day of Tabernacles is the same for us as the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River and the Spirit coming upon Him by God’s declaration to anoint Him as the manifest Christ of God.
Loving One Another
This means two things, inward and outward. Inwardly, we will walk in these present bodies of sinful flesh with NO knowledge of sin, just as Jesus walked, fully inside the Love of God. Outwardly, we will be marked together by one mighty quality – we will LOVE one another with a pure heart fervently.
But immediately, the in-between days of dwelling in booths will begin; that is, two mighty things will begin to flow out of our love for one another. The first will be a witness of Christ that this world has never seen or imagined – that the world may know. And second will be the wide-open doors of Tabernacles through which MANY will rush with all abandonment.
Gathering unto Christ
That rushing in is the gathering together unto Christ. And it will be, I am convinced, the gathering into Christian community out of the spontaneous moving of the Holy Spirit, just as in the early church – only far more so. The harvest of God is that of Christians harvested into Tabernacles, the Body of Christ in outward expression.
Now, as I am writing, many Scriptures are appearing in my mind, but I do not include them here. Rather, I expect you to know them or to seek them out until you do. I do not include them because I am not here making use of godly human reason, but rather, I desire to give us a vision of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Seven Years of Ministry
Now, I suspect (only by conjecture) that in the patterns of God, Jesus Himself bore one-half of that seven-year period of the fulfillment of walking without sin in all the love of God while in bodies of sinful flesh.
I don’t see by that the concept of Jesus’ taking one half and our taking the other half. Rather, I see it as Jesus’ bearing all first, and then bearing all again through us – and we also. Yet the two time periods together makeup God’s pattern of seven years of the ministry of Christ among men. AND – the dividing point between those two time periods is the changing of the Covenant. Our part is better than Jesus’ part! That is the claim of the writer of Hebrews.
Our Place
Jesus walked His manifest Son ministry still as placed “under the law,” though never by the law, but only by faith. We walk our manifest son ministry placed IN Father IN Christ – a totally different place, with no thought of law, but only of Life, yet still entirely by faith.
Now, I am getting ahead of myself, for I want to reserve a fuller discussion of these things for the sessions on the transitional church and the authority of Christ through us. The final Day of the Feast is marked, then, by two things. First is the resurrection of our physical bodies, as our bodies are swallowed up by immortal and incorruptible Life and as the other part of us in the heavens returns to this earth.
Waiting upon God
But then with the Pattern Son, the time from the moment of the resurrection to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the fulfillment of Pentecost was fifty days of human time. Does that mean, then, that we will have fifty days of gathering together with Paul and John, Abraham and David, Patrick and Wesley, and all those of God’s elect from both sides of the veil in fellowship together waiting upon God together BEFORE God releases the rivers of living water to flow out from us into all the human experience? I don’t know. What I do know is that these things are REAL, and they are upon us, and we are part of them. Yet even my conjecture serves as a calling forth of Christ into our present human experience.
Out of Zion
What I want to do next, then, is to outline my present view of the governance of Christ within human society as the Kingdom of God in full expression on this earth, inside of human history but after the age of human folly is only a memory. As I said earlier, we know the way only by the destination.
Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it. Many people shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, and we shall walk in His paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem (Isaiah 2:2-3).
A New Man for a New Age
The ringing of this word is like deep resounding bells inside of me, a calling forth of God made visible. Let me define Zion: the rule of Christ through us, His Body. Let me define Jerusalem: a fully successful Christian Church walking upon this earth. This is how Paul used every one of these prophetic words from Isaiah. This is how God means them.
For He Himself …has made both (Judaic and Gentile) one (vanished into Christ), and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity… so as to create in Himself one new man (Ephesians 2:14-15).
A new man for a new age – the Age of Tabernacles.