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.

7681. 'Morning came' means the state of heaven in rearranged order. This is clear from the meaning of 'morning' as the Lord's kingdom, and in the highest sense as the Lord Himself, dealt with in 22, 2333, 2405, 2540, 2780, and as a state of enlightenment, 3458, 3723, 5740, 5962, though at this point 'morning' means heaven in a state of order. The nature of this may be recognized from what has been stated in 7643. There it is shown that the evil undergo vastation as the Lord rearranges heaven; for the inflow of goodness and truth from heaven leads to the vastation which the evil undergo. Therefore when the Lord rearranges the heavens the hells too, which are opposite heaven, are automatically rearranged. They are moved away from heaven, to positions determined by the degrees of their evil, and they are allotted places determined by the variety of their evil. This shows that nothing but good emanates from the Lord, and that evil springs from those who are opposed to good and ultimately cannot bear it. From all this it is evident that 'morning came' here means the state of heaven in rearranged order.