Well, today we move into Hebrews Chapter 9. You remember that Chapter 8 contained a rather extensive expansion on the giving and meaning of the New Covenant foretold by Jeremiah, the prophet, 600 years before the coming of Christ, but the covenant which was inaugurated by Jesus Christ when he shed his blood upon the cross, which therefore the Old Covenant, that is the Mosaic Covenant, and rendered it obsolete. So therefore, to the Hebrew Christians that this epistle is addressed to, there's the clear message you cannot return to the Old Covenant. It's gone.
They were obviously considering that possibility in the face of the persecution which they were experiencing because of their embrace of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant. But that is no longer an option. That was there for a time and for a purpose, but that time is gone.
That purpose is over. And now there is nothing of any eternal value in the Old Covenant, but everything is centered in the New Covenant of which Jesus Christ is the mediator, of which Jesus Christ is the high priest. Moving into Chapter 9, we are going to find some aspects of the Old Covenant and its worship. Today, verses 1 through 5, we're going to talk about physical aspects of the Old Covenant worship. And then verses 6 through 10, some of the rituals and ceremonies attached to Old Covenant worship because the writer of Hebrews is trying to connect with these Hebrew Christians who were very familiar with all of the terms of the Old Covenant under which they had worshiped until they had come to Christ. But trying to show them what was the meaning of all of that. It had a purpose, but it could not bring worshipers into the very presence of God. It did not do that.
It was not designed for that. For that, you have to have the New Covenant and so he gives some of the details of Old Testament worship so that they can understand that more clearly. So, that old saying that you all heard that the new is in the old concealed and the old is in the new revealed. That is, the New Testament, the truth of the New Testament is found in the Old Testament, though often concealed and difficult to see clearly. But the Old Testament is made more clear by the New Testament which has come to us or the New Covenant scriptures that we call the New Testament. And I remind you again that in studying the New Testament, you are forced to keep going back to the Old Testament. And we see that so clearly in Hebrews and especially in our passage for today.
And so even though we've been in school the last two or three Sundays, we're still in school today. We're going to deal with some details. They are in the scripture. We need to talk about them.
You need to have your thinking cap on. You need to be willing to learn, to study, to grow, to pay attention to these details which God himself has given us in his word. So what are we going to see today in Hebrews 9, 1 through 5? We're going to see, number one, the place of worship. Two, the furnishings of worship. Three, questions about worship. And four, the significance of worship. Number one, the place of worship. And the first thing we should notice is that worship is prescribed by God.
Verse one. Then indeed, even the first covenant, the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and the earthly sanctuary. It was prescribed by God as to its activities, the ordinances of divine worship, that is the ceremonies, the rituals, the activities that were in line with it, that were connected to it.
All of that prescribed carefully by God. The location, at least the central location of old covenant worship was also prescribed by God. First in the tabernacle, what is called here the earthly sanctuary, and then of course in Solomon's day in the building of Solomon's temple, which is not really referred to in our passage today. But this tabernacle of the wilderness, the tabernacle of the old covenant was given to us, recorded for us in scripture, details about in 50 chapters of the Old Testament.
Do you think that's something we should skip over lightly and not pay any attention to? Two chapters to describe the creation of the universe, 50 chapters to describe the creation of the tabernacle, or the construction of the tabernacle, and the worship that is involved with it. It is a detailed presentation, a detailed command, detailed instructions given by God, and it is important. The place of worship, talking now about old covenant worship, was prescribed by God. But not only was it prescribed by God, but it is described also by God and by the writer of the book of Hebrews, who cannot get into very many details, but he does give us a few things to hang our thoughts on. And what we know, both from the Old Testament and what we have in the book of Hebrews, is that the old covenant tabernacle consisted of three spaces.
The first one is the courtyard, and there's no reference to that here in chapter nine of Hebrews, but it's good to understand that the sanctuary, what we would call the building, the main part of the tabernacle, was contained within a courtyard. And that courtyard was, and all of the measurements that I'm going to give you today are originally given in cubits, and most of us don't use those anymore. And if you have a house that was built according to cubits, all right, I just mentioned that everything is in cubits, but from here on out I'm going to translate that into feet and inches. Is that okay? Good.
That'll be more helpful to us. But the courtyard, we'll start out with that, was 50 by 100 cubits, 50 cubits wide and 100 cubits long, which translates into 75 feet wide by 150 feet long. That was the courtyard. This building that you're sitting in right now is 59 feet wide. So the courtyard was just a little bit wider than this building. I don't know how long this building is from front to back.
I don't know. So I can't tell you, but it was 75 feet wide and 150 feet long. And the furnishings that you would find in the courtyard, again, which are not mentioned in Hebrews, but there were two items of furniture, if you want to call them furniture, two items of worship. Number one, the brazen altar, and number two, the brazen laver.
That is, these two articles were made of brass. The brazen altar was where the animal sacrifices took place. It was a busy place. Animals were being sacrificed there in the multiples.
Many, many animals every day, all day long, basically, during the daylight hours. It was a busy place where these sacrifices were burned continually upon this big altar made of brass in the courtyard. And then behind that altar, going toward the door of the tabernacle proper, called here the sanctuary, there was the brass laver, the brass wash bowl, which was huge. And that was for the priests to wash themselves. A priest's work was dirty.
They got all kinds of dirt on them with these animal sacrifices, and particularly were just, probably after not very many hours of work, were just absolutely saturated in blood that was splattered everywhere. And so if this priest was going to go into the sanctuary, he had to wash himself, get all of that defilement off, all of that blood off, all of whatever else dirt he picked up along the way off. There had to be a washing, a cleansing, before he entered into the sanctuary, which we usually call the tabernacle.
We'll call it that as well, the tabernacle proper. The sanctuary, that's the word that is used here. And what does sanctuary mean? Many churches call the main worship space a sanctuary.
We don't normally do that, though I don't object to that. But sanctuary means that which is sanctified. What does that mean? It simply means that it's set apart. It is sanctified to God. It is set apart to God. It is set apart for God. It is set apart for a particular purpose prescribed by God. There are a lot of things in the Old Testament that were sanctified, set apart wholly for the use of God. And so the sanctuary, the main part of the tabernacle, was set apart for God.
Oh, I should have mentioned, and I'll back up to the courtyard for just a minute. In each of these three spaces, I will tell you who was allowed into those spaces. Into the courtyard were allowed all the worshipers who came to present their animal sacrifices. And all the priests and Levites. Levites were not priests.
Priests were Levites, but Levites were not priests necessarily. And all of the priests and Levites and all of the worshipers were allowed into that courtyard. So that was the large space.
Even larger in Solomon's temple and even larger yet in Herod's temple later on. In fact, the opening, which was a curtain. I didn't tell you about the curtain that made up the walls of the courtyard.
I should have mentioned that as well. Beautiful linen tapestry hung on pillars made of boards but covered with silver and placed in brass sockets on the earth. Each about seven and a half feet apart so that there were lots of these pillars to hang this curtain that went around this whole area 75 feet wide by 150 feet long. And that courtyard was entered by an opening that was 30 feet wide. That's a pretty big space.
It seems to be signaling a lot of you are welcome here. I don't say all because there were prescriptions about who could enter there. But worshipers by the hundreds and thousands, not all at one time, but throughout the course of the day, the week, the months, the years. Many people could enter into that courtyard wide, wide, wide. Wide is the gate that leads into the courtyard into the place where sacrifices are made to atone for sin. It was important that that be a place that was widely available because there are lots of sinners who need to come and to offer their sacrifices upon the altar. But now we come into the sanctuary itself and it was divided into two rooms, two compartments. The first one is most commonly called the holy place and the second one the holy of holies.
Sometimes you'll find slightly different language but that's the most common terminology that is used. The holy place, the first room, was twice as large as the second one. It was 15 feet wide by 30 feet long by 15 feet high. 15 feet wide, if you would take in the aisles and the center row of pews, that's about how wide it would be. 15 feet wide, 30 feet long, it would be all the way to the back wall from the first to the back.
I don't know exactly how far that is either but something approximating that space. You could probably put that inside this auditorium or sanctuary, whatever you want to call it. You couldn't quite put it in because it was 15 feet high. I'm trying to remember the peak of our ceiling here is maybe 14 feet high so it would come close but of course we have an angled roof so it would be bigger than what you would be able to erect inside our auditorium. And then behind that was the holy of holies, a room half the size as the holy place. It was 15 by 15 by 15.
15 wide, 15 long, 15 high, a perfect cube. Now who was allowed in the holy place? Only priests. In the courtyard, priests, Levites, and all of the worshippers.
Anyone who was qualified to worship Yahweh, the God of Israel, and to bring their sacrifices to him. Into the holy place, only priests were allowed. There was what is called in our passage a veil. The tabernacle was a beautiful, costly, and elaborate tent. And the door into the tent was like a big tent flap.
It's called the veil. And I'm not sure exactly how they opened it and closed it but that's what was there. And only priests were allowed to go into the holy place. And then there's the holy of holies, the last compartment.
And that, as I say, was a cube. And into that compartment, only one priest, the high priest, was allowed to enter one time a year on the day of atonement. That was a very, very restricted place. I noticed this interesting comment at this point by Jeffrey Wilson, one of the commentators that I study in my preparation for these messages in Hebrews. And he said, and I quote, the old covenant was a dispensation of distance. Into the courtyard, many were allowed, but not all.
Gentiles couldn't go unless they were incorporated into the people of Israel, unless they came into to qualify as members of the old covenant. But many people allowed into the courtyard, but nobody, nobody, nobody but a priest dared to enter the holy place. And nobody, nobody, nobody but the high priest only once a year was entered into the holy of holies. This was all designed to illustrate that coming into the presence of God is not an easy and simple matter. It does demonstrate the wideness in God's mercy, and yet it also demonstrates God is a holy God, and he is not easily accessed by guilty sinners. You must carefully follow his prescription if you're going to come into a right relationship with this thrice holy God, holy, holy, holy, which may be why the holy of holies was a cube. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. All right, moving on from the place of worship, the buildings, we come to the furnishings of worship.
And now we'll deal with just the ones that are mentioned in our text. There is, first of all, the lampstand, verse two, for a tabernacle was prepared, the first part of which was the lampstand. In the King James Bible, it's called the candlestick, but candle is not as good a description, a good enumerate name as lampstand because this wasn't a candle like we think of it with wax and so forth. These were oil lamps. This lampstand was a very large golden lampstand, as lamps were in that day, that had a central column that went up several feet high. I didn't check on the height of that. And then out from that column on either side, there were three branches that went out and curved up, out and curved up, out and curved up so that altogether there were seven lamps.
The six that were on the curved branches and the one that was on the central column. We're familiar with that. We've seen those.
We've seen pictures of them. Today we call that a menorah, but that's the lampstand, the original menorah that was in the tabernacle. If you'd enter into the holy place, you would come from the east.
It was always pitched so that it was facing east. So you would enter into the holy place from the east and you would see the lampstand to your right on the north wall of the tabernacle in the holy place. That lampstand was constructed out of 75 pounds of gold.
I expect it took several men to heft that up and move it when it needed to be moved. And it did have to be moved regularly when they were traveling around in the wilderness, of course. And what was the purpose of the lampstand? To give light. There were no windows in the tabernacle. Without the lampstand, it would be as dark at noonday inside as it was at midnight.
So it provided an ample supply of light to see what was going on and to perform what needed to be done in there. The second article of furnishings was the table, also mentioned in verse 2. A tabernacle was prepared, the first part of which was a lampstand, and then the table and the showbread. The table and the bread that went on the table is described next. Table of showbread, we usually call it.
It is sometimes called the table of presents or loaves of presents or the bread of presents might be a more accurate translation. But this was a relatively small table made of acacia wood but covered completely with gold. And it measured three feet long by one and a half feet wide and one and a half feet tall. It was only about six and twelve, eighteen inches tall. Rather low table.
I think it would look to us like a large but not huge coffee table. But the purpose of that was to place twelve loaves of bread representing the twelve tribes of Israel. Some people imagine them as being like flat pancakes but I think it's more likely that they were what we would call loaves of bread and they were stacked.
Six on one stack and six on another stack. But however, those details are a little difficult to determine precisely. But the bread was placed there. It was prepared according to the recipe that God gave. It had to be baked with the ingredients that he told them to use to bake it. And the bread would sit on the table that would be replaced every week, every seven days on the Sabbath day. The old bread would be removed, a new fresh batch of bread, twelve more loaves would be replaced. But apparently it wasn't really stale bread at that point. The recipe was such that it kept it reasonably fresh because the priest would eat it.
And enjoyed it evidently. And so that was the table. And then the third article in the holy place was the altar of incense or the golden altar referred to in verse four. It says which had the golden censer in our Bible is the way it's translated but I'll talk about that in a moment. And it goes on to talk about the ark of the covenant.
I'll talk about that in a moment. But the golden altar, the golden altar would have been straight ahead when you come into the holy place from the door facing east, you're now facing west. And on the back wall in front of the second veil, the one that separated the holy place from the holy of holies, the one that inherits temple was ripped from top to bottom when Jesus Christ died on the cross. But in front of that second veil would be the altar of incense which was also gold and it was one and a half feet square, one and a half feet wide, one and a half feet on each side it was square.
And it was three feet high so it was not a large article either. But it also had horns on it like the brass altar did but it was a much smaller altar. And what was the purpose of the altar of incense?
Well it was to burn incense, again the formula, the recipe for the incense prescribed in detail by God as to exactly what went into it and no one was allowed, they were strictly forbidden upon penalty of death for anyone to make any incense for their own use or any other use than the incense that was used in the worship of God. It was unique and it was burned on this golden altar two times a day in the morning and the afternoon and it represented the prayers of God's people that rose unto God. Now there is one other piece of furnishings that we will mention and that is the Ark of the Covenant which was the only piece of furniture in the Holy of Holies.
It was a wooden chest covered in gold and it measured three feet nine inches long, a little less than four feet long, two feet three inches wide and two feet three inches tall. But on top of that in the mercy seat which we will mention in a moment there were cherubim which of course rose up much higher than the surface of the lid on the chest. And in this chest we are told, this Ark of the Covenant, there were three items. Number one, the decalogue on the tablets of stone. These would be the very tablets of stone which Moses carved out after he broke the original ones that God had given to him up on the mountain and wrote the Ten Commandments on. And he came down and found the people worshiping the golden calf and he broke them but then God commanded him to construct two more tablets like the first which Moses carried back up on the mountain. But once again it was the finger of God Almighty who wrote on those tablets what we call the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image and so forth.
The Ten Commandments. That was in the Ark of the Covenant but there were two other items that were in there at least for part of its existence. There was a golden jar that had manna in it that God gave to his people in the wilderness to feed them miraculously. And that manna is interesting because even on a weekly basis from one day to another it didn't last, it spoiled, except on Friday it would last for both Friday and Saturday. You didn't gather any on the Sabbath day so miraculously the same manna that spoiled in one day on Thursday was fresh on two days for Friday and Saturday and evidently existed in the pot of golden manna for years without spoiling. And was a reminder of God's provision in the wilderness.
And then beyond that there was another item and that was what we call Aaron's rod that budded. And that goes back of course to the time when Korah rebelled against Aaron and said, What makes you think you're the only one who qualifies to be the priest? What makes you think only your sons can be the priest? We're as holy as they are.
We're going to take that task unto ourselves. And God destroyed Korah and all of those who sided with him. They were swallowed up. And then to settle the issue God said, Okay, every leader of a tribe, 12 leaders of the 12 tribes, bring me your rod. Everybody had a staff in that day. Everybody bring your staff and we're going to put them in the Holy of Holies and then let's see what happens the next day when they were brought out. They all had their names on them. Aaron, Judah, Manasseh, so forth, Zebulun. And when he brought them out, Aaron's rod miraculously had almond blossoms on it and I think even almonds on it.
It had grown. How does a dead stick get life? Only if the giver of life, God Almighty, gives life to the dead. And God did that indicating Aaron is my choice. I decide who qualifies to be a priest. I decide the qualifications for any of those who serve me. You're serving me.
I give the qualifications. Don't you dare ignore that. Seems to me God's pretty clear in his qualification for pastors and elders under the new covenant that they can only be men. It's a sin similar to that of Korah for women to say, I've been called of God to preach.
I have as much right to do that as the men do. That's an abomination. And those who agree to that and submit to that and accept that are also an abomination to God. God may not strike them dead, but you can be sure he's just as displeased with that defiance of his right, his right to choose who will serve him in which place.
That's God's prerogative. And that was memorialized by Aaron's rod that butted being in the Ark of the Covenant. Now I mentioned as a separate item, the mercy seat, which was the lid of the covenant, because it is significant, though it's still part of the Ark of the Covenant. But on that mercy seat, as it is called, I love that name. Sometimes people think of the God of the Old Testament as being stern, different from the loving Jesus of the New Testament.
Well, what did they call this? The mercy seat. It was a place of mercy. The God of the Old Testament is as merciful as the God of the New Testament because it's the same God.
There is no difference whatsoever. And on that mercy seat, there were two cherubim who faced, they were facing each other, but their faces were pointed downward to the seemingly to the lid of the Ark. But I think they were really looking down even through the lid to the Ten Commandments below. And this was a reminder of God's visible presence. When God visibly manifested himself as present with Israel, he came in his Shekinah glory, and that focused in the Holy of Holies upon the mercy seat. And that mercy seat was the place of annual propitiation.
Propitiation means to cover or to appease. And it required a blood sacrifice once a year by the high priest who entered the Holy of Holies twice, the first time to atone for his own sins. A sacrifice was made for that, and he would carry that blood in and put it on the mercy seat. And then he would come back out and he would bring in a second supply of blood, which was the sacrifice that was offered for the people. And that blood would be applied upon the mercy seat, and then God would, as it were, cover over the sins of all of the people who were represented by that act for another year.
Propitiation means to cover or to appease. In one of the hymns we sing, His Robes for Mine, we sing Propitiation One. I mentioned to the author, Chris Anderson, one time in a correspondence that our teens had introduced us to that hymn. I heard them singing it for the first time in the teen room, and we got copies of it and had begun to sing it as a congregation. And he said, if you've got teens who sing about propitiation, I think you've got a good youth group.
But indeed, that's the fact. So the mercy seat was the place where propitiation took place year by year by year by the activity of the high priest who went there once a year to bring blood sacrifice to atone for what? The broken law. The law is in the covenant, in the Ark of the Covenant. There it is, the tablets of stone, the ten thou shalt nots or the ten commandments of God. And those are broken by the people of God. How can they live? How can they escape the eternal damnation of God for their breaking of His holy law? It is by His mercy when the remedy which He Himself has prescribed is properly applied on the lid of the mercy seat and covers over the transgressions represented by the breaking of the law in the Ark of the Covenant.
It was a temporary solution repeated every year. I'm going to try to quickly deal with the questions that are raised by this passage because it does raise some questions. I hope I don't get too bogged down with them. But the first question involves the altar of incense. What was it and where was it? My translation calls it the altar of incense or calls it the sensor, the golden sensor rather than the golden altar, verse four. And that's a legitimate translation but I don't think it's a correct translation. I think the context makes it clear that we're not talking about a golden sensor. A sensor is where fire and incense are placed but it's not a sensor. The word itself could be translated place where incense is put. It doesn't specifically say an altar of incense. It says a place where incense is put or it could be literally translated a vessel for burning incense.
So you can see a sensor is a possibility based upon the word that is used but I don't think it's a possibility based upon what we learn elsewhere in scripture and what we learn even here in this context. If in fact this is talking about a golden sensor rather than the golden altar of incense, then the altar, the golden altar of incense is the only piece of furniture that's omitted from the description of what's in the tabernacle. What's in the tabernacle? The candlestick, the lampstand.
What's in the candle? The table of shewbread. What's in the tabernacle?
The Ark of the Covenant. What's in the tabernacle? What we know from reading the Old Testament that there is this altar of incense. If that's not what this is, then how did it get omitted in this description of what is found inside the tabernacle?
And the Old Testament is clear. In fact, Exodus 30 verse 6 tells us, Exodus 30 verse 6, talking now about the altar, the golden altar. And you shall put it before the veil that is before the ark of the testimony, before the mercy seat that is over the testimony there where I will meet with you. Aaron shall burn on it sweet incense every morning when he tends the lamps. He shall burn incense on it and it goes on. He's also going to burn incense on it every evening.
Well, think that through. We're told very clearly that Aaron, or whoever's the high priest, only enters the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement, one day a year, one time only. And yet we're told here that he burns incense on the altar of incense twice every day. Clearly, the altar of incense is not in the Holy of Holies, as it sounds like from reading our text for today, but that cannot be the case. Because Aaron, or the other priests, burned incense on it there twice a day.
But I think what we need to understand, and we might not really focus on this if it were not this conundrum we find in Hebrews 9, it makes us look at it more carefully. The altar of incense has a special connection with the Holy of Holies. It's not in the Holy of Holies, but it has a special connection to the Holy of Holies and what goes on in there. You get that reading from Leviticus 16 12, then he shall take a censer full of burning coals of fire from the altar before the Lord with his hands full of sweet incense beaten fine and bring it inside the veil. This is Aaron, or whoever's high priest on the Day of Atonement, and he takes incense from off the altar, the golden altar, and he takes fire. He does have a censer, and he takes fire, and before he does anything, before he sprinkles any blood on the mercy seat, he fills that whole Holy of Holies with the smoke of burning incense. It's like he's extending the altar of incense from the holy place into the Holy of Holies.
It has a close connection there. We would also get that idea in the passage I read before in Exodus 30 verse 7, Aaron shall burn on it sweet incense every morning. Oh no, verse 6, and you shall put it before the veil that is before the ark of the testimony.
Why this mention? When he's telling them where to put the altar of incense, the golden altar, why doesn't he just say you put it on the north side of the room? Lampstand goes on the west side of the room. Lampstand goes on the north side.
Table goes on the south side. Altar goes on the west side. But you see, in the placement of the altar of incense, there's a verbal connection to the Holy of Holies in the ark of the covenant.
You shall put it before the veil that is before the ark of the testimony, before the mercy seat that is over the testimony where I will meet with you. So evidently there is a special connection between the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies. And it's likely that we are losing something in translation that maybe what is actually being said here is the golden altar of incense is connected to the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies.
It is joined to that. Aaron couldn't even go into the Holy of Holies once a year until first he had gathered incense from the altar of incense for a cloud of incense to fill the Holy of Holies. But then we also have some questions that relate to the ark of the covenant, which contained, as we've already seen, the tables of the covenant, that is the Ten Commandments, God's covenant with Israel. And I only can mention this, I can't have time to expand on it, but I want to point out that there are numerous times in the Old Testament, and here again in the New Testament, where the Old Covenant, the one that we call the Mosaic Covenant, or the one that is sometimes called the First Covenant, is related directly to the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are called the Covenant.
Now there was a lot more law connected with that. I mean there's all that Mosaic law, all of those commandments, 613 commandments that they were commanded to keep. But evidently the actual covenant itself was all connected to the Ten Commandments.
That was the issue. These Ten Commandments constitute the covenant that I've made with my people when they came out of Egypt. Keep that and you shall live. Break that and you deserve to die.
Break that and you need to receive the mercy that I prescribed, but you can only receive it in the way that I prescribed. But in regard to the golden pot of manna, and Aaron's rod of but that I've already spoken upon that, but what's interesting is that those two items somewhere disappear, and they are no longer found in the Ark of the Covenant. When Solomon built his temple and placed the Ark of the Covenant in his temple, only the Ten Commandments were there. 1 Kings 8 and 9, nothing was in the Ark, talking about putting it in the new temple, nothing was in the Ark except the two tablets of stone which Moses put there at Horeb, when the Lord made a covenant with the children of Israel when they came out of the land of Egypt. Where did the pot of manna and the rod of Aaron go? The Bible doesn't tell us.
No idea. But they disappeared, as did the Ark itself. There's no more mention of the Ark after the Babylonian destruction. Where did it go?
We don't know. They came back from Babylon, reconstructed a new temple. There's no mention of the Ark being placed in the temple. And we know that when Pompeii sacrilegiously invaded the Jewish temple in 63 B.C., he went into the Holy of Holies and found it empty, no Ark there. The people of God have been worshiping without an Ark of the Covenant, without a mercy seat to atone for their sins, not just since Jesus came and rent the veil from top to bottom, but since the Babylonian captivity, they have actually had no way to atone for their sins for now hundreds of years. They keep going through the ritual as if they did, but they clearly didn't. Let that be a lesson for us. It's possible for people today to go through the rituals of Christianity week by week without any true faith in Christ, without any new birth experience, without any real relationship with God.
Going through the rituals of Christianity, church membership, baptism, communion service, all the other things as if I am a Christian, but just going through the ritual, but it doesn't mean a thing because if Christ isn't your savior, you don't have cleansing from your sin, just like the old covenant people had no Ark of the Covenant upon which the blood could be sprinkled for the annual atonement of their sins. It was gone. Where did it go?
Of course, let's see, what's his name? Indiana Jones went looking for it. People go look for it.
It's quite an interesting mystery. Where is the Ark? Where is the Ark? Where is the Ark? Is it going to be found?
Some people think it's going to come back. A new temple is going to be built and the Ark is going to be placed in it. Well, I doubt it.
We shall see, but good luck on that one. They couldn't put it in the temple that Ezra built. They couldn't put it in the temple that Herod built. They couldn't find it.
They had no idea where it is. Now, God knows if it even exists anymore. God knows. But why would there be an Ark when Jesus has come?
Why would there be sprinkling of blood upon a mercy seat when Jesus has already given the final blood sacrifice that one time, not every year, not over and over and over again, but one time takes care of the whole thing forever and ever and ever. Amen. For all who trust in Him. Why would you go back to a ritual that involves this annual business?
Well, I don't really have time to talk about the significance. I wish I did, but I will be respectful of your time and we shall close. Thank you, Father, for your word. Thank you, Father, for your mercy. Thank you, Father, for giving your son. Oh, Heavenly Father, how grateful we are that you, Lord God, so loved the world that you gave your only begotten son, that whoever trusts in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. We cling to that promise. We trust you. We worship you. And we look forward to being in your presence forever and forever and forever. Amen.
