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.

8439. 'Come near before Jehovah' means a state in which that influx is accepted and applied. This is clear from the meaning of 'coming near before Jehovah' as influx, dealt with in 8159, and therefore also acceptance, acceptance being the response to influx since the two answer to each other. To the extent that a person accepts influx from God he is said to come near before Him; nothing other than this is meant in the spiritual sense by 'coming near before Jehovah'. What enables a person to draw near Him is faith and love; and since both faith and love come from Jehovah, that is, from the Lord, drawing near Him is also the acceptance of goodness and truth flowing in from Him. The reason why applying is also meant is that receiving it has no value unless it is applied, that is to say, put to a useful purpose. For what flows in from God passes first into perception, which belongs to a person's understanding; from there it passes into his will, and after that into action, that is, into a good deed, which is the useful purpose, and in this reaches its goal. When this passage of goodness and truth from the Lord is complete, the goodness and truth become the person's own, for now they flow all the way through to the final level of order, that is, of the natural order, which all Divine influx heads towards. The person who has the Divine flowing all the way through him may be called a road of heaven. From all this it may now be seen that 'coming near before Jehovah' means a state in which that influx is accepted and put to use, here a state in which the good meant by 'manna' and the delight meant by 'selav' are accepted.