The David’s Tent Story pt. 15 – For Such a Time as This

          Those first dates I had come up with on the spur of the moment turned out to be impeccable timing. September 25th – November 6th, 2012 … I had just pulled the dates out of thin air in the pressure of the moment, basing it on my thirty-seventh birthday. It was only later that I realized that the evening of September 25th, the night we were scheduled to begin our worship in David’s Tent, was the beginning of the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, on the Jewish Calendar. Yom Kippur typically begins at sundown, and we had planned to start that night at 7 p.m. A day earlier, there in D.C., the sun would have set at 7:01. A day later, it would have been 6:58. But that night, it set at exactly 7 p.m., the very minute we had set months earlier to begin the worship song. We had not done that on purpose. It was another wink from Heaven. In ancient Israel, Yom Kippur was the one day each year when the High Priest was permitted to enter the Most Holy Place, behind the Veil in the Tabernacle, and make intercessory atonement for all of Israel. The nation would wait in fasting and holy convocation, with bated breath, for word from the High Priest that this atonement had been deemed enough for that year’s sins. We now know that Jesus is our High Priest, and we found it totally fitting to have begun on that day, pleading and celebrating His atoning blood over the sins of America. Yom Kippur is followed, five days later, by the Feast of Tabernacles, a week-long celebration that even whole nations will be compelled to observe in the future (Zechariah 14). Historically, this “Feast of Ingathering” was also a time of pilgrimage, when Israelite families left their own dwellings to camp out with God in their capital city. This was so important to the Lord that He warned, in Zechariah 14:17, that He would hold back rain from any family that did not make the pilgrimage. As I studied this feast and the sobering reality of Zechariah 14, God solidified the vision for David’s Tent even more strongly in my heart. We had to do this, and representatives of every state, all fifty, had to be there. I began to pray that God would compel many to make the pilgrimage to our nation’s capital, just as the ancient Israelites had done to theirs.