Hebrews Lesson 124 May 1, 2008
NKJ Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on
your own understanding;
NKJ Proverbs 3:6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct
your paths.
Galatians 3 – Paul says some
interesting things about the Law. The Galatians were plagued by a problem. These
Judaizers (Jews who were trying to merge the new
Christianity with the observance of the Old Testament Law) were following along
behind Paul. They were saying basically that all those things that Paul said
were fine and good and “It’s great that you trust Jesus as the Messiah, but
that’s not really enough. You need to have the second blessing. That only comes
when you have circumcision and you follow the Mosaic Law”.
It’s just an early form of the same
kind of theology that you pick up down through the ages. The current
manifestation is in the charismatic Pentecostal camp; but, man always tries to
add something to the grace of God, to help God out by some type of synergistic
work: that God may start the process, but gosh we just need to help Him out. If
we don’t help Him out in the process of salvation, then at least we have to
help Him out in the process of maintaining our salvation.
So Paul really had to deal with all
of these false ideas and false teachings that these Judaizers were communicating
to the Galatians. So he has an extensive discussion of the purpose for the
Law.
In the middle of that (almost right
smack in the middle of Galatians 3), he talks about this purpose. He says in
Galatians 3:24:
NKJ Galatians 3:24 Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
The word there is “pedagogue”. In
Greek culture a family (usually a wealthy family) would hire a tutor who was a
slave; but his goal was to discipline and to instill discipline and rigor into
a young child and to teach him everything he needed to learn in order to be
able to function effectively when he became an adult. Once he reached the
proper age, then he assumed the responsibilities of adulthood and he was no
longer restricted by the more rigorous rules and regulations set down by the
pedagogue. So Paul uses that as a point of comparison to understand the role of
the Mosaic Law in history.
Behind this lies an approach to the
history of mankind and man’s understanding of God’s revelation of Himself and
salvation that pictures man in the Old Testament dispensations as being like a
child. He’s like a child because he has insufficient revelation and an
inadequate understanding and because he doesn’t have the Holy Spirit and all
these other factors that come into that dispensation.
So Paul says:
NKJ Galatians 3:24 Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
Ultimately that is a purpose of the
Law - is to direct the attention of people to Christ so that in the Law they
see the need for Christ. They understand that they are sinners. More
specifically within the Law, the ceremonial law, all the rules and regulations
related to temple worship, tabernacle worship, the sacrifices and offerings -
that all these elements ultimately point to some aspect of the person and work
of Christ. So he says:
NKJ Galatians 3:24 Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
But after faith has come we’re no
longer under a tutor. The idea is that once we get to a point in revelation
truly in terms of the accumulation of doctrine (Faith here is used not just in
terms of trusting, but it is used in the sense of what we trust: that body of
knowledge that we have), we’re no longer under a tutor.
NKJ Galatians 3:25 But after faith has come, we are no longer under a
tutor.
Paul says in Romans 10:
NKJ Romans 10:4 For Christ is the end of the
law for righteousness to everyone who believes.
Now that doesn’t mean that we throw out the Old Testament. It’s
really sad because there have been so many great and wonderful Bible teachers.
But somehow along the line, people got this idea that you don’t really need to
know the Old Testament and that somehow the Old Testament just pertains to Jews
and the Old Testament just pertains to the old dispensation.
“But it doesn’t really unpack the
mystery doctrines of the Church Age and it doesn’t really deal with all the
doctrines God revealed to the Apostle Paul so let’s spend all of our time
studying Pauline epistles.”
I could name you a dozen Bible teachers
and that’s all they did. They never taught the gospels. They never taught anything
in the Old Testament. They never taught Proverbs. They never taught Genesis. They
just focused everything on teaching the Pauline epistles and Hebrews primarily.
Every now and then they might step out of that. But Paul was viewed by many
dispensationalists as being the one who has the greatest grasp on the Christian life for today so that’s all
we’re going to study.
You can’t understand Paul (as you
well know) unless you understand the Old Testament background. There is a
context for everything. When you get into especially the book of Hebrews (as
we’ve seen) you just can’t understand what the writer of Hebrews is trying to
communicate to these former Levitical priests who are now believers because the
writer of Hebrews uses so much language and he refers to so many Scriptures
that come out of the Old Testament and weaves them together to encourage them
and help them understand all the tremendous things that we have in Christ as
our High Priest. But you can’t even understand the concept of what a high
priest is if you don’t understand what’s going on back in Leviticus and back in
Exodus.
We’ve come in our study of Hebrews
9:1-4 to an overview of the tabernacle. Last week (the last lesson), we took
our time and I walked down here and did an overview of all the different pieces
of furniture that are in the Tabernacle. We looked at that and talked about
their general basic function.
Starting this week I want to start
zeroing in a little bit more on all of the details that we have in the
tabernacle. So we’re going to look at its construction. We’re going to look at all the different
materials that are used. We’re going to look at its dimensions. We are going to
look at each piece of furniture in detail and what it was used for.
Of course, the first major piece of furniture that we will
come to is the brazen altar. I’m not going to take it in the order it’s
revealed in Scripture because in Scripture it starts with the Ark of the
Covenant in the middle and works out. But we’re going to take it from the
perspective of the Jewish worshipper who is coming to the Tabernacle and what
he would see for the first time and what he sees as he goes in. So we’re going
to take it from the outside in.
We’ll probably spend 5 or 6 weeks going through all these different
things and then connecting them to what’s going on in the New Testament.
When we look at the brazen altar for
example, what goes on at the brazen altar? Well, you have all the different
– you have the burnt offerings, peace offerings and all the different
offerings and sacrifices that are given that are described in the first 7
chapters of Leviticus. So we’ll go through those to try and understand what
they are saying about the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
So we are going to step back and
have our little overview picture here of the layout of the tabernacle. We’re
going to go through each one of these things to see how it communicates to us
because even though the tabernacle and the sacrifices and offerings and all of
the ritual were designed for the Jews during the Old Testament period; all of
these things pictured something about the person and the work of Christ. So as
Paul says the Law was designed to be a tutor to bring us to Christ. As we
studied these things, the focal point is Christ in the Tabernacle. It will give
us perhaps a little more in-depth understanding of just what all of this is
about and how it teaches about what Christ did on the cross.
So we’re going to start with 11
reasons why it’s important to study the Tabernacle.
This is one of those concepts that a
lot of folks don’t understand when they begin to read the Bible. God reveals things
of Himself incrementally. He reveals things about sin incrementally and about
the solution for sin incrementally. If you think about the problem of sin, when
Adam and Eve were in the garden and He first warned them that there was a
penalty that if they ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil they would die. He doesn’t really spell out what that death is. Actually
it’s not until you get into some things in the New Testament that you begin to
understand that it’s not a physical death. It’s a spiritual death. Ephesians
2:1 says that you were born dead in your trespasses and sins. But if we’re dead; we’re also alive. So we have to understand that there are
different categories of death there. But we don’t really unpack that nuance
until there is more revelation.
When Adam ate he didn’t die
instantly so what do you thing they thought?
“Hmm, maybe we’re not going to die.”
Then God shows up walking in the
garden and they run and hide. They know that something’s not right. Then after
God meets with them He explains all the different consequences of sin; and then
He clothes them. In that act of clothing them, He clothes them with animal
skins which means He has to show them how to take a animal (and I’m sure that
He took a lamb) and He shows them how to cut its throat. That must have been
quite a sight for them because they may have been 20 or 30 years in the garden
and they’ve never seen death. Now they see this animal die and they’ve got to
learn to kill the animal. They
have to learn how to skin the animal and how to treat the skin so that they can
use it so it’ll be nice and soft and supple so that can work with it and use it
to make clothes. God has to teach them all of that. Of course the verse just
says that He clothes them with animal skins. But in order to do
that all of these other things have to be done. They’re all in the
background of that particular verse. In that, He probably taught them about
sacrifices: why it was necessary and the impact of sin. So they have their own
little Bible class there.
Then we have in Genesis 4 the
episode with Cain and Abel. Abel brings the right sacrifice and Cain brings the
wrong sacrifice. Then the next time we really see an emphasis on sacrifice is
when Noah gets off the ark. When Noah gets on the ark, he is taking 7 of every
clean animal on the ark, which means that there is an extra one for sacrifice. He
builds these altars when he gets off the ark and he sacrifices these animals
there as God makes a covenant with him.
Then we get to Abraham and we see
that Abraham somehow has a finer understanding of altars and sacrifices and
he’s doing more. We’re not given any more explanation, but we see that when he
goes places he builds an altar and he prays to God. There is a sacrifice and he
dedicates the area to God as he moves through the land that God has promised
him.
So we work our way through Genesis
and we understand that there are patriarchal sacrifices, the patriarchal
priesthood, and the Melchizedekean priesthood.
Then we come to Exodus and God calls
out His people from slavery in Egypt. He redeems them nationally as He brings
them out through the Red Sea into the wilderness to Mt. Sinai where He gives
them the Law. In the Law now He is going to give them a much more intricate
sacrificial system and a much more intricate understanding of the different
manifestations of sin and the consequences of sin. So it’s progressive.
Then when Jesus shows up, John the
Baptist says:
NKJ John 1:29 The next
day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, "Behold! The Lamb of God
who takes away the sin of the world!
Any Jew who had any understanding
has been properly prepared by all of the ritual to immediately understand who
the Lamb of God must be and what its function is within the ritual system.
Then after that in I Corinthians
Paul says that Christ is our Passover. So you see how things unfold
progressively down through the ages and down through the dispensations. So the
Tabernacle is designed by God to depict a variety of aspects of what Christ is
going to do on the cross. We can understand redemption; we understand
atonement; we understand covering and cleansing; we understand the need for a
substitutionary atonement; we understand different sacrifices related to
salvation and other sacrifices related to ongoing fellowship with God. All of
these different things are there as part of God’s plan of redemption and they
are pictured in very graphic ways.
Then we get into the early church
and for those of you who have been in the History of Doctrine class on Monday
night, we went through and realized that nobody has a really clear articulation
of the atonement until the early 11th century, about 1000 when
Anselm comes along and he writes a theological treatise called Cur Deus Homo (Why the God-man?) That’s the first clear development of the
fact that the atonement is substitutionary. Now, that idea is there in a rather
naïve or generic form going all the way back to the early church fathers. But,
it’s never really explained. They talk about “Well, Jesus died for us”; but
they never tell you what that means or what they mean by it.
Then not long after Anselm (and I
mean within 20 or 30 years), you have Abelard that came along. Abilard had this idea of the atonement that “Well, it wasn’t
substitutionary at all. This idea that Christ would have to bear the penalty of
other people – well, that is a rather primitive concept.” What he is
doing is demonstrating the satisfaction of God’s morality, God’s righteousness.
It’s not the propitiation idea. It’s more a moral example that we are to
follow. That’s not at all what the Scripture teaches. When you go back and use
that Old Testament example of the lamb and of somebody bringing the lamb and
putting their hand on the lamb’s head and then reciting their sins, it’s a very
clear picture of substitution. And then they cut the lamb’ throat. Then the
lamb dies. That’s a clear picture of substitution. But they get away from that. So Anselm introduces this moral
example view of the atonement.
Then you go through another two or
three hundred years and you have these different competing ideas in the Roman
Catholic Church. Then you go into the Reformation Church. The main idea of the Reformation
Church is it’s a substitutionary atonement for about 100 years. Then there’s a
guy that shows up in Holland by the name of Hugo Grotius. Grotius says, “Well
it’s not quite the moral example of Abelard; it’s more the idea that God hates
sin so He’s going to exact punishment to show how much God hates sin, to show
God’s righteous judgment of sin. That’s why Jesus had to go to the cross.” It
is a picture for us of how much God hates sin and to thus motivate us not to
sin.
But of course the problem with both
the Abelardian view of the atonement and the Grotian view of the atonement is that some sins really
aren’t paid for. Nothing is
actually paid for. So under both of those systems, if people commit certain
sins or do certain things then they can’t get to heaven and there’s no
redemption. It also impacts your understanding of sin because sin isn’t so bad
that somebody has to pay the penalty for it. You’re not really spiritually
dead; you’re just spiritually weak.
So these ideas really infect and
impact the way people think down through the centuries. Grotius’s view affected
an evangelist in the early part of the 1800’s named Charles Grandison Finney. Finney
is always thought by most of the evangelicals to be this great evangelist. He
wasn’t because he didn’t believe people were born spiritually dead. He didn’t
believe in a substitutionary atonement so nobody was really saved. I doubt that
he was saved on that basis. But this permeates evangelicalism – starts to
permeate evangelicalism in the 19th century all the way down to the
present.
On Monday night I read a little
newspaper article that Connie had found and sent out that was dealing with this
guy McLaren who is one of the leading figures in the emergent church movement. He’s
teaching a workshop up at Willow Creek which is the flagship of the church growth
movement up in Chicago. He’s talking about the fact that Jesus just died, like
the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square to demonstrate the injustice of it
all. See once you understand the Grotian view of the
atonement and the Anselmic view of the atonement and the Abelardian
view of the atonement; you realize that this guy doesn’t believe in substitutionary
atonement at all. Therefore he has got a crummy view of sin and he’s got a poor
view of salvation. He doesn’t even think that Jesus is coming back. We don’t
need to worry so much about how Jesus is coming back or when He comes back. Yet
this is what is steamrolling and truly steamrolling evangelicalism today coming
out of this emergent church stuff. But if you stick with the Tabernacle and the
pictures of the Old Testament you understand what is going on when Jesus is
hanging there on the cross and it starts getting dark and God is putting our
sins on Him because you’ve got that understanding from the Old Testament.
I had a conversation today with an
old friend of mine who is a lawyer now. He has started a little home church in
his home and lives up in Navasota. He is a lawyer up there; and he was a camper
of mine years ago at Camp Peniel. He’s got this little home church and he is a
lawyer up there and he’s teaching the Bible and having a great impact on about
20 or so people that are coming to his house every Sunday morning. So we were
talking about what he was going to teach this Sunday.
I was going through some things and
I said, “Well, what this really pictures here is positional truth.” I said,
“Now a lot of people have a hard time understanding positional truth because
positional truth is this abstract concept and people need a concrete image of
it.”
That’s what baptism does. Water
baptism is what we were talking about. That’s a picture of the abstract
realities that occur at the instant of salvation in terms of our being
identified with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection.
I said, “That’s positional truth.”
He said, “That’s an easy concept. I
deal with that every day in the courtroom.”
He said anybody who goes into the
courtroom has a legal standing before the judge in the courtroom. That is your
position in the law. That is positional truth.
I thought, “Well, I had never
thought of positional truth as a courtroom concept.”
It is one of those other things that
reinforce the idea that I always talk about that we have justification and
forgiveness - all these concepts are legal, everything that God is within a
courtroom framework.
So God has a way of cleansing us
experientially as well as positionally. Positionally
relates to our legal standing before God in relation to justification and
ongoing cleansing has to do with the ongoing cleansing of sin based on that
positional reality.
I can hear somebody now saying,
“Well, that seems so mechanical.”
When I first went up to Preston City
and I was teaching (I had been there about 6 months), there was a lady (and I
won’t explain who she is because then some people would know who she was. She
wasn’t from Houston. She was from another part of the state.)
She said, “Well, I want to hear some
of your tapes.” So I sent her some stuff.
She said, “You do that stuff that
you have confession every time you have Bible class. That’s so
mechanical.”
I said, “Well, let me explain why
that’s done. When you’re teachings somebody anything (whether you are teaching
them music, whether you are teaching them athletics, baseball, football, hockey
whatever it is whether you are teaching dance whatever it is that you are
teaching) when you’re initially teaching anybody anything, you go through the
mechanics. The mechanics are frequently very uncomfortable. People don’t just
naturally take to those mechanics.
Take somebody who is taking dance. They’re taking ballet and they’re 4
years old or 5 years old and they have to stand a certain way and they have to
hold their feet a certain way that would break my legs. They have to stand up
on their toes and do all these things. It’s not natural. It’s not normal. We
don’t normally do that. But they have to learn. After they practice it and do
it over and over again, then it becomes natural.
I remember (I guess I was about 7)
when I was taking piano lessons, the same kind of thing. I had to hold my
fingers a certain way. I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that. Don’t let
your hands go flat. You just have to learn the mechanics. Then you have to play
technique exercises which is boring because that had
no tune to it whatsoever. But, you
have to do these mechanical things so eventually when you’re playing a song
you’ve mastered the skills so that you can produce something that has beauty
and has art to it. Same thing in football, you go out and a guy tries out for a
football team in junior high. You’ve got to go to two-a-day practices. You’ve
got to learn how to bend over, how to hit the blocking dummy and all these
kinds of things that you have to do to learn the basic mechanics. You have to
practice them over and over and over again so that people learn what they are
supposed to do and how to do it. Once you practice it, it becomes a skill, it’s
something embedded in your lifestyle.
But the reason I always start by
going through confession is you are teaching it by example and it’s not a
mechanical process. Teaching mechanics isn’t mechanical. So, people often
misunderstand that. That’s what they did in the Old Testament. Every time they
went in day-in and day-out, you always had these priests washing their hands,
washing their feet. How mechanical. But it was to teach the principle that
before you can come into the presence of God, serve God, worship Him do what He
said to do, sacrifice; you’ve got to be in right relationship with Him.
So this is why it’s important to
study the Old Testament and to study the Tabernacle. So we get into the
Tabernacle and just by way of continued introduction I have 5 points I want to
try and cover tonight. The first has to do with nomenclature. The nomenclature
helps us to understand the nature of the Tabernacle. Why is it called what it’s
called? With God, God doesn’t name things just to name things. There’s a
connection between its name and its inherent reality.
a.
The first word
is miqdash which is from the Hebrew qadash noun. It has an “m” in front
of it which is related to the formation of the noun.
It means a holy place. It emphasizes that this is a place of distinction, a
place that’s been set apart.
b.
Then a second
word that is used is the verb shakan. Now turn with me while we’re here back to Exodus
25:8. God says:
NKJ Exodus 25:8 "And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may
dwell among them.
That’s the word miqdash.
The word there for dwelling is Hebrew verb shakan which comes into Greek as skene and is where we get the word Skekinah,
meaning the dwelling or the indwelling of the God. So these are the first two
words.
c.
Then a third
word that’s used is the word hamishkan. See we had miqdash from qadash and now we have another
noun formed on shakan:
hamishkan,
which means the dwelling place. These are the two words that are used as
synonyms for the Tabernacle. Miqdash emphasizes that it is a distinct and a unique place
that is set apart to the service of God. Hamishkan indicates that it is the place where God
dwells, where we have the localized presence of God on earth that He who is
infinite has taken up a dwelling place on the earth.
d.
Another term
that is used frequently in the Old Testament is the term “the tent”. It occurs
19 times just as “the tent”. It’s also found in various other expressions as
the tent of the testimony, because you have the testimony of the Law that
resides there Numbers 9:15; tent of the Lord, because the Lord dwells there I
Kings 2:28-30; house of the tent, I Chronicles 9:23; and the tent of meeting, because
this is where Moses would go to meet God. That’s used over 130 times such as in
Exodus 33:7. So the tent is a key reference for this. This indicates its temporary
nature. The tabernacle was the mobile home that God lived in before He got a
permanent house.
NKJ 1 Corinthians 3:16 Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
It’s not talking about the outer precincts where
anybody could go; but only the inner precinct which has been set apart,
sanctified positionally and is the place where the pre-incarnate Christ dwelt
in the Old Testament.
Exodus 25:9 says:
NKJ Exodus 25:9 "According to all that I show you, that is, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its
furnishings, just so you shall make it.
So, God shows to Moses a pattern, a model that He
built it on. Now when we get into Hebrews it seems there is a heavenly
tabernacle that the earthly tabernacle is patterned on.
We run into several other phrases that are used based on the word tabernacle
in the Old Testament. We have the phrase “Tabernacle of the Lord” in Joshua
22:19 and I Kings 2:28 and I Chronicles 16:39, indicating that it is YHWH who dwells in the Tabernacle. It’s also called the tabernacle of
testimony or witness in Exodus 38: 21, Numbers 1:50, 17:7-8, II Chronicles 24:6
and Acts 7:44, emphasizing the presence of the Mosaic Law there. …Tabernacle of
the congregation because this is where the congregation would come in order to
have fellowship with God and worship God. Exodus 27:21, 33:7 and 40:26. All of
these terms involve the word “tabernacle of something” which indicates a different
aspect of its function. Fourth is the Tabernacle of Shiloh. Shiloh is a title
for Jesus. Psalm 78:60. Fifth, it is called the Tabernacle of Joseph in Psalm
78:67. Its’ called the Temple of
the Lord I Samuel 1:9 and 3:3. Remember they don’t have Samuel as a young boy. There
is still the Tabernacle; but it’s called the Temple of the Lord in those
passages. The House of the Lord in Joshua 6:24, I Samuel 1:7,
24. So all these give us different designations for the Tabernacle.
God comes along and He reveals to Moses that he is to build the
Tabernacle and the key passages to understand this…there is a lot of repetition
in this part of Exodus. I would never want to teach Exodus verse-by-verse
because you have God revealing it and then building it and then it describes it
a third time when they finish it. So it’s a lot of repetition. But it shows the
detail that is there in the historical accuracy.
In chapter 25 the focus is on the basic elements, the
basic furniture within the Tabernacle. It starts off in the first 9 verses just
to kind of give you a structure for these verses. In Exodus 25 God explains the
need for the tabernacle and gives Moses and introduction and plan for starting
the Tabernacle. It says that he is to take up an offering.
NKJ Exodus 25:2 "Speak to the children of Israel, that they bring Me an offering.
From everyone who gives it willingly with his heart you shall take My offering.
This was the first real building plan in history. It’s based on freewill
offering. It wasn’t based on a mandated tithe, but a freewill offering. The
material that they had was material that they had taken from the Egyptians that
they were given by their Egyptian masters almost as if the Egyptians were bribing
them to leave because they were tired of the judgments of God from the plagues.
So they gave them gold and they gave them silver and all kinds of costly
material. So from this they were to bring this material (the gold, the silver
and the bronze, the material that they had) so that it could be used in the construction
of the tabernacle. So we see these elements here.
NKJ Exodus 25:3 "And this is the offering
which you shall take from them: gold, silver, and bronze;
NKJ Exodus 25:4 "blue, purple, and scarlet thread,
fine linen, and goats' hair;
We’ll look at that because the colors are significant. It’s not just
because God likes vibrant colors.
One of the interesting things is that people didn’t normally dress
because these are very expensive dyes – to produce the blue and the purple
dyes and the scarlet dye. Only the very wealthy (only kings, usually only
royalty) had clothes that were in these dyes. When you look at the high
priest…Aaron was showing up in a $10,000 custom-made suit. I mean he was dressing
well. It was impressive. When you came and looked at the Ark because most
people dressed in the same basic colors, when you looked at the Ark and there
is all this blue and purple and red it was like going from black and white TV to color TV. Some of you can’t quite remember that. I don’t know
what the analogy…some of you are too young to know that there was even a time
without color TV. But that’s what it was like. It was like going from
Eastern Europe or Russia in 1980 or in the early 90’s when the wall first came
down and then coming back to the West. It was like suddenly your eyes were
returned to Technicolor. It was just amazing. It was so impressive to see the
Tabernacle. In our culture where we have so many different colors and we get
bored with the colors this year so all the designers come out with a new set of
colors next year. Everybody has to wear all the latest colors and all the
latest fads. Next year it is something else. We can’t quite grasp how
phenomenal it was so see all this color. It just blew them away. But it wasn’t
just for that purpose. It had other signification as well.
Then they brought various skins for the coverings over the Ark. Ram
skins that were dyed red and badger skins. If you are using a King James or a
New King James, it says badger skins. If you are using a New American Standard,
it says dolphin skins. I think that maybe some other versions use different
things. Actually nobody is sure what this word refers to. There are some
guesses based on cognate languages that it is probably some kind of dolphin sea
creature. But, we’re not sure exactly what it was.
They were to bring oil for the light and spices for the anointing
incense and onyx stone and stones to be put in the ephod and the breast
plate.
God says:
NKJ Exodus 25:8 "And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.
He gives these initial instructions on how to get the
material and what to build it from and to lay it out, and then starting in
25:10 he begins to describe the different pieces of furniture that will be in
the Ark. In 25:10-16 he describes the Ark of the Covenant. Then we come out
from the Holy of Holies to the Holy Place and he describes the Table of
Showbread, then the golden lampstand and then he gets into verse 26 and he
describes the 6 different layers of curtains that are going to be there rather
than …four different layers of curtains that are there. The first layer is
described in 26:1-6. It’s a linen that is dyed
scarlet, blue and purple again. Then there are the images of cherubs
embroidered into the linen. But the people on the outside won’t see that;
you’ll only see it on the inside as you look up. This is what the priests would
see on the inside is this blue, purple and red fabric with the cherubs
embroidered in it. So he is looking up and seeing the cherubs. Part of the
purpose of the cherubs relates to the holiness of God.
Then in 26:7-10 it describes the second curtain made of goat’s hair. This
is a rugged fabric that will protect the linen that’s underneath. Then on top
of that you have the ram’s skins dyed red. Ram’s skin dyed red is a picture of
atonement: something covered in blood. Then on the outside it’s covered with
porpoise skins or badger skins or whatever it was. It was designed to provide a
waterproof, watertight covering on the outside of the Tabernacle.
Then in 26:15-30 there are intricate details about the boards and the
sockets. You have some sockets of gold, some of silver, some of bronze. Then in 26:31-35 it describes the inner
curtains of the tabernacle, the inner veil that separated the Holy of Holies
from the Holy Place, and then the outer screen is in 26:36-37.
Then it goes out and talks about the brazen altar in 27:1-8 and in
27:9-19 we get into the outer courtyard and the hangings that surrounded the
courtyard which would keep people out of the outer courtyard.
As we get to that – once again the hangings are
made of fine woven linen. This was a very prized linen
that was made out of Egyptian flax. Again it was very expensive and only the
wealthiest of people (usually only wealthy royalty and aristocracy) had access
to this kind of linen. So there would be hangings in the court of fine woven
linen 100 cubits long on one side. It describes all the details there. Then it
describes the colors that are woven into these various hangings.
As we go through this and get down to the garments of the priesthood in
chapter 28 and it begins to describe all of the uniforms for the priest, his
coverings, his ephod, his breastplate, all of these different things. One of
the things that we continue to run into is these same colors keep showing up
again and again and again. That tells us that there must be some sort of
significance for these colors.
Now there is one that’s usually translated blue – at least in the
King James it’s translated blue. Some translations translate it purple; but
it’s more of a bluish purple. This is a bluish purple that was used to dye many
wool garments. It was an expensive dye that came from the crushing of certain
species of shellfish. As they crushed these mollusks, they would take the
secretions and then from that they would create these dyes. So they would use
the pupura lapillus from the Atlantic Ocean was
the one that came and was used for this bluish purple dye. Then there was a
second one from the murex snail that was also known as the fiery horn snail or
the Turk’s blood snail and it produced more of a reddish
purple.
The dyes were not always exact in the ancient world. Often you had
families who were…that was their job. That was the family business and each
family had their own recipe for making the different dyes. So you would go to
one family and their color of purple would be a little bit different from the
next one’s color of purple. It just depended on how they mixed the dyes. So you
had one that was more of a bluish purple and one that was more of a red purple.
The argaman
is one that was derived also from the crushing of a mollusk. It was used to
develop this dye which was typically used of royal
purple and so was considered to be extremely rare and extremely expensive.
Then you had a third dye that was used – a third color –
that was used here. That’s the color of red. There are two different words used
to describe two different reds. One is the word that we see in some of these
passages here which is usually translated scarlet. It
tended to be a little bit more of an orangey red. Then there was a redder red
that was used the word towla
which is the word sometimes translated crimson. We see both of these words used
synonymously in Isaiah 1:18
NKJ Isaiah 1:18 " Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD,
"Though your sins are like scarlet,
That’s the first word shaniy.
They shall be as white as snow; Though they are red
like crimson,
That’s towla.
They shall be as wool.
So the red pictured death. It pictured blood. Of course this is a
picture of the atonement that was needed to cover sin. Then the reddish purple
was the color of royalty. This would speak of the kingdom of God and the
royalty of God as the king who ruled over Israel. Then the bluish purple would
speak of heaven. It would speak of the heavenly source of God and God’s
ultimate domain as the ruler from heaven so that every time you looked at the
Tabernacle and saw these colors they would be a reminder of something that was
totally different in the first place. In the second place it spoke of these
different aspects, the royalty, the kingdom, the home of God in heaven and then
the need of bloodshed to cover sin.
So that gives us a basic introduction to some of these elements. Next
time we’ll come back and start looking at the basic structure of the Temple and
the furnishings. We’ll start getting into the offerings and the sacrifices.
Let’s bow our heads in prayer.