Herbert W. Armstrong's Error Regarding the Feast

Very soon the Feast of Tabernacles will occur and the COGs will observe them by gathering themselves together to the various Feast sites and fellowship with one another and listen to sermons for eight days as the entire COG from all over the world unite together for eight days of fellowship and communion with each other.

But there is a problem with their observe of the Feast of Tabernacles.

Notice Leviticus 23:40-43:

And ye shall keep it a feast unto the Lord seven days in the year. It shall be a statute for ever in your generations: ye shall celebrate it in the seventh month. Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths: That your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

And that is exactly what the Jews do today.

Look at how the Jews observe this day. They do it by building booths, called sukkah (sukkot plural) in the Hebrew language, within their houses or somewhere on their property.

Take a look at how the Jews observe the Feast of Tabernacles and the booths they observe it in.

They do not go around gathering themselves up together to assemble to listen for eight days to their Rabbis teaching the religion to them, instead they have fun and socialize with each other while staying at their own places or visiting their friends' places.

Does Leviticus say, Assemble yourselves together in a large warehouse far away from the world and go on vacation for eight days while you listen to my priests explaining the mysteries of the universe to you that you have already been hearing all year?

HWA has willfully misunderstood what this Feast is about. Instead of getting his followers to rejoice and celebrate with each other by meeting together in booths (sukkot) as seen above, in their own places, he exploited the peoples' misunderstanding and ignorance of this feast to get the COG members to assemble themselves together in a hotel, warehouse, campus, or some other such place in order to indoctrinate them into his syncretic religion.

Recently I had the honor of reading Carla Powers' book, Matches in the Gas Tank. She well described how the Feast was a terrible burden as her family had to drop everything from their regular lives and take a compulsory eight day vacation by order of HWA.

The Feast is designed to isolate COG members from society. It makes keeping a job that much harder for the COG members as they try to take eight days off. Kids are forced to take several days off from their education at school. Going to the Feast likely forces COG members to sacrifice by not using their hard earned money to go somewhere else. Instead they must go where the minister orders them to go.

They have no idea that they are not following God, but instead are following a man made tradition invented by one Herbert W. Armstrong.

Instead of observing the Feast as it is actually described in Leviticus and how the Jews observe it, HWA devised his own man made tradition in order to indoctrinate his followers.

The truth is HWA invented this man made custom of assembling together to hold a great feast in which every member is ordered to attend. The COGs think they are following God's law. In fact they are following a tradition invented by HWA.