The season of Tabernacles focuses on two main points: the presence of God dwelling with His people and the emphasis on family. After the Exodus from Egypt, Israel became a people and began to function as family in the presence of God. Yet as awesome and powerful as that Presence was, it was still something they beheld from a distance. God appeared to them when they camped around the Tabernacle, but there was a separation between them and God.

When God appeared on Mount Sinai during the giving of the Law, He directed Moses to actually set up boundaries (Exodus 19:12). The author of Hebrews picks up that picture again and says, “You haven’t come to Mount Sinai with the borders around it; something different has happened” (see Hebrews 12:18–24). Christ ended the separation. He is the real fulfillment of Tabernacles because it is God dwelling in the presence of man. Suddenly, the picture of God appearing in an arm’s distance manifestation separate from us changes, and we recognize that He is appearing in the flesh. We need to let that point sink into our hearts and see what a dramatic gift and open door that really is.

Tabernacles paints a beautiful picture of the pillar of fire and the cloud of smoke that was over them in the wilderness. Then God morphed that picture so that it was not untouchable and unrelatable; Christ our Tabernacles became the Word of God made flesh. John the Beloved wrote about the Word of God: “What we have seen and heard and touched with our hands concerning the Word of Life” (see 1 John 1:1). In the wilderness they may have seen God’s presence, heard the voice of the Lord, and observed His moving, but now the disciples were feeling it—the Word of God had become flesh. We recognize Yeshua (Jesus) as our Lord and call Him Messiah, but there is something we need to recognize about Tabernacles. Tabernacles is not focusing on the cross of Christ or His resurrection. Rather it focuses on this idea of the presence of God.

One of the essential parts of salvation as we know it is this internalizing of God’s presence. It is not a theology; it is a reality. When the Word became flesh, God became flesh and dwelled among us. On the last day, the great day of Tabernacles, Yeshua cried out, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).[1] If you come to Yeshua and drink of Christ as the Word, out of your innermost being will come the same flow of the Spirit—that Word. The Word went into Christ and dwelled among us. God brought about the working of that oneness of Christ and the Word until there was no separation.

I do not want to leave Tabernacles without realizing this aspect of God’s presence. The picture we see in Exodus is wonderful of God dwelling in the midst of the family and the family really coming together. But now when we come to Christ, we see that the family is being infilled with the Holy Spirit. The family is becoming one as Christ and the Father take up their abode in us “that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us” (John 17:21).

[1] All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).