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.

One thing this shows is that at its heart, the Bible is the Lord's way of loving us, and the commandments there are His way of helping us accept his love and live in joy forever. That was literally true of the people of Israel at the time, and is true for all of us now and forever if we understand those laws in their spiritual meanings. The spiritual meaning of "the law" is closely tied to the literal meaning. At its deepest, it represents divine truth, which is the perfect, infinite expression of the Lord's love flowing as a life-giving force to the world. The divine truth permeates the text of the Bible, including the books of the law, and is encapsulated in the Ten Commandments, which are the center and heart of the law. Because of these relationships, "the law" can also represent the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament, the books of the law or the Ten Commandments. Jews at the time of Jesus had a number of ways to break down and describe the books of the Old Testament. Among the more common was "the Law and the Prophets," with "the Law" meaning the five books of Moses, Samuel, Kings and other books offering a historical narrative, and "the Prophets" meaning Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the other prophetical books. This phrase was used a couple of times by Jesus himself, including His statement in Matthew 22:40 that on His Two Great Commandments "hang all the law and the prophets.