He brought us to a meeting in the place designated and chosen by God Himself with two main things: His name should be settled there, and His habitation would be there. The place which God has chosen for us to meet is with His name and His habitation. His name and His habitation both keep His people in oneness. There is only one name into which we should meet (Matt. 18:20). And there is only one center where we should meet, and that center is God’s habitation. Without these two things God’s people will be divided. We will meet according to our tastes. We will come together according to our choice, our preference. But God says, “You have no preference. I don’t let you have your choice. The choice must be uniquely Mine. Only I, your God, have the choice. I will choose a place and designate it with My name and put My habitation there” (Deut. 12:11-18). Eventually we know that this place was Mount Zion. God put His holy name there, and God built His habitation there. That became the unique and undivided and indivisible center of God’s people where they met together.
So you can see that meeting is not a small thing. The meeting life, even in the Old Testament, was God’s people’s life. God’s people’s life was a meeting life. By reading the Old Testament carefully you could see that all the males of Israel should come together three times a year: at the Feast of the Passover, at the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, and at the Feast of Tabernacles (Deut. 16:16). According to the Old Testament any male who would not come was cut off (Num. 9:13). It was so serious because the proper life of God’s redeemed people was a meeting life. For them to meet was to gather together into the name of God and into the habitation of God to offer food to God and to serve God with food. It was not a matter of singing or praising or bowing down or prostrating. In this service the serving ones, the priests, have a share to eat before God, with God, and with one another.
Dear saints, this is to meet. To meet is to offer sacrifices. To meet is to eat what you have offered to God. To meet is to rejoice in what you eat. Have you ever realized that we Christians must meet together to feed God? We are the waiters and some of us are even the cooks. We cook and we serve God with food. When we serve Him we eat with Him and we eat before Him, and we eat one with another. Then we rejoice (Deut. 12:7).
These things concerning the meetings are not so easy to describe, so God gave us a photo. The photo is in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Don’t think that those are just Old Testament teachings and that they are just for the old Israel. At least you have one book in the New Testament, Hebrews, which gives us a lot of interpretations of the Old Testament books. Also the writer in Hebrews indicated clearly that he didn’t have the time to give us the full interpretation of the Pentateuch (Heb. 5:11; 11:32). So this means there are a lot of things in the Pentateuch which have not been touched by the writers of the New Testament. But we should not believe that because they were not touched by the New Testament writers, they mean nothing to us. That is not logical. Logically speaking, they should mean something to us.
Most Christians realize that the Passover is a type of Christ. We should not consider that only the Passover offering was a type of Christ and the rest were not. In principle we cannot say this. In principle you must say that every offering and every bit of a certain offering must be the type of Christ. Based upon this principle not only the offering but also the produce of the good land must be also a type of Christ, because the offerings or the sacrifices came from the produce of the land. It was around 1959 that the Lord showed us that even the land of Canaan was a rich and all-inclusive type of Christ.
One of the first conferences I gave in this country was concerning the good land as a type of the all-inclusive Christ. Most of those messages came from a few verses in Deuteronomy 8. No doubt there are sufficient reasons to believe that every aspect of the good land is a type of the riches, the all-inclusiveness, of Christ in certain points. So the good land was a type of Christ, and the produce, no doubt, was also a type of Christ. Out of the produce you have the tithes, and you have the firstborn ones. All these are Christ. All the tithes, all the firstborn ones, all the firstfruits brought to Mount Zion to present to God are Christ. All these things became the burnt offering, the meal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, the trespass offering, the wave offering, the freewill offering, and the offerings of the vows. All the different offerings are Christ.