The Children of Israel were told to keep three feasts each year - the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of first fruits, and the feast of ingathering. Should we still do that?

In Exodus 23:14-16, Moses receives the instructions about these feasts. Those three verses in Exodus comprise our brief story. Their inner meaning is explained in Arcana Coelestia 9286-9296.

There are three feasts. In the Word, the number three represents a completeness, a sense of things being covered from beginning to end. Our thankfulness to the Lord is supposed to keep going - to endure.

The first feast, of unleavened bread, stands for worship, for our thankfulness for the Lord's action in our minds to get rid of false ideas. That enables us to start to receive good loves.

The second feast, of first fruits, relates to the planting of true ideas in that "soil" of initial loves for doing good.

The third feast, of harvest, or ingathering, stands for the time when, by applying our true ideas, we receive real good - loves of the neighbor and of the Lord - that become the middle of our lives. This is the state of rebirth, where we have - by working through the year (our lives), and enduring in thankfulness, allowed the Lord to get rid of our false ideas, and push our evil loves to the periphery, so that good can work, and be fruitful.

These feasts, then, represent the progress of our spiritual lives. In some manner, we need to keep them.

3889. To enable me to know not only that there is a correspondence of celestial things, which are those of love, with the motions of the heart, and of spiritual things, which are those of faith derived from love, with the motions of the lungs, but also the nature of this correspondence, I was allowed to spend a significant amount of time with angels who were to demonstrate this to me visually. By means of wonderful circular movements, impossible to describe, they formed a resemblance of the heart and a resemblance of the lungs, including all the intricate interior and exterior parts which the heart and lungs possess. They traced the spontaneous flow of heaven, for heaven strives to exhibit that form from the influx into itself of love from the Lord. In this manner each individual part of the heart was exhibited, and after that the union of the heart and the lungs, which union they also represented by means of the marriage of good and truth. From this also it was evident that the heart corresponds to the celestial element of good and the lungs to the spiritual element of truth, and that the material form in which the two exist joined together is the heart and lungs. I was also told that the same applies throughout the whole body, that is, to things of the heart and those of the lungs within all the individual members, organs, and viscera of the body. For where the two are not acting together but each one by turns separately, no motion of life belonging in any way in the will can exist there nor any feeling of life beginning in any way in the understanding there.