Well, I thank your session for inviting me to address you this morning. Trust that your pastor will have a good day as well. Let's turn on our Bibles to Exodus chapter twenty five and I'll read for you verses nine According to all that I will show you, that is, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its furnishings, so you shall make it. And they shall make an ark of acacia wood, two and a half cupids shall be its length, a cupid and a half its width, and a cupid and a half its height. And you shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and out you shall overlay it, and shall make on it a molding of gold all around. You shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in its four corners. Two rings shall be put on one side, and two rings on the other side. And you shall make poles of acacia wood, and cover them with gold. You shall put poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, that the ark may be carried by them. The poles shall be in the rings of the ark, and they shall not be taken from it. And you shall put into the ark the testimony which I will give you. You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two and a half cubits shall be its length and a cubit and a half its width. And you shall make two cherubim of gold. Of hammered work you shall make them at the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub of one end and the other cherub at the other end. You shall make the cherubim at the two ends of it of one piece with the mercy seat. And the cherubim shall stretch out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and they shall face each other. The faces of the cherubim shall be towards the mercy seat. You shall put the mercy seat on top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I will give you. And there I will meet you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of the testimony of all things which I will give you in commandment to the children of Israel. Let's pray. My precious God and Father, how grateful we are that down through the eons of creation you have not broken the ties with men and rather you have made the provision in the Old Testament, of course, once Israel was organized and brought together, you made this wonderful provision of the tabernacle and then of the temple. And in the Lord Jesus Christ, O Lord God, you've picked all of those stuff, all those material and principles up and shown us how Jesus is the fulfillment of all of them. All of those details, all of those illustrations of your sovereignty and your holiness and your godliness render to us ultimately a beautiful picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, the real thing, Jesus himself, far exceeded in glory and in honor and in worthiness that ancient temple and his predecessor, the tabernacle. In the book of Revelation, you certainly draw our hearts into a view of the city coming down from above, even the church, the bride of Christ. You repeat some of these same principles found in the Old Testament. What a glorious unity there is in the scripture. From beginning to end, preaching to the sons of men that they must be born again. from beginning to end, telling us that there is only one way to come, ultimately Christ. But that way is your way. There is no other path to restoration of fellowship with you. There is nothing as worthy in all of this world, in all of this creation, as finding our heavenly Father and living a life in fellowship with Him. Teach us this morning, we pray, from your Scripture. We pray it in Jesus' most holy and righteous name. Amen. So, my topic to start the title this morning is the gospel and tabernacle. I sort of tempted to call it the gospel in a bag. Remembering that the sons of Kolkhoz carried around these elements, the tools of the temple, and they wrapped them in the curtain that surrounded the Holy of Holies, at least some of those parts. But the gospel in the tabernacle is the tabernacles. I prayed in the temple after it. are intended by God and designed by God to teach us about the Lord Jesus Christ ultimately. So, when you read these passages in the Bible, sometimes they're very boring. I can remember as a young child reading through the books of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and coming to all those directions, all those details about the tabernacle and then later in the Bible about the temple. But all those things are God's design to teach to us how precious is worship with him. And, of course, we go over all the principles. I was tempted to read a lot more scripture, but I think we'll more or less follow a topical thing against the background somewhat of the passage that we read. When we come to the idea of public worship in the Bible, we see that public worship is unique from private worship. God certainly encourages men to private worship from the Garden of Eden. There is no tabernacle. There is no temple. And yet there certainly was public worship. Once the tabernacle and the temple was established, there continued to be private worship. And of course, the Book of Psalms is full of all kinds of hints and suggestions and even examples of how men related personally to God. But God set up in Israel and for us the concept there is a need to come together as God's people for public worship. The Reformed Church sees that very strongly and we get our what we call the regular principle of worship out of a reading of the Old Testament fundamentally as we compare it with the New Testament. The principle is that we are commanded by God to do certain things and the implication is that we are forbidden to do other things. That is, God in public worship wants us to do only what he has specifically directed. We may squabble sometimes, or debate would be a better word, over some of the details, but the Reformed history is clear. We're not free to do anything we want in worship. In private worship, we can do a good many things that are not specified and directed by God immediately. But in public worship, we're bound to the Scripture and what God has given us. The temple preaches or the tabernacle preaches the gospel. Of course, you all know what the gospel is, I trust. Man is sinful. In the Garden of Eden, man was created for fellowship with God and he enjoyed fellowship with God. And then he rebelled against God and the punishment for man and for mankind was that they were to be driven from the garden and no longer would fellowship be the natural thing for man. It becomes a supernatural thing and even an extra natural thing. The man of heart longs for fellowship. But it's not to be immediately obtained to God. After the Garden of Eden, fellowship was attained only by God's directive. God sought out those whom he wished. He called all men to himself, I'm sure. I don't know the means by which he did that, but he did it. Nonetheless, I'm confident that he only chose some. And he so worked in their lives that he came to them. All the while, he said to all the world, you must have fellowship with God. And as Paul outlines in the book of Romans, that's declared in nature around us. It's declared in our own hearts. We're created for fellowship with God. Our hearts long for heaven. The heart of every man longs for heaven. That's why everybody is unhappy with almost everything. Now, if people think that you get a lot of money, that will make you happy. And if you know people that are rich, you find out that that doesn't make them happy. Fame doesn't make you happy. Good health doesn't make you happy. A good marriage doesn't make you happy. Nothing makes you happy. Nothing makes you content with this life until you find fellowship with the eternal God. The tabernacle, first, and temple later, teaches us that we must come to him, to fellowship with him, especially in public worship, in the way that he details. So, we learn in this tabernacle and these temple ideas a lot about God, who God is, how He lives, how He exists a little bit. We learn a lot about man and who we are and how it is that we can approach a holy God. We learn a lot about salvation. As far as God is concerned, we see throughout that God is sovereign, that He has the voice of power when He speaks to His people, when He does things. His sovereignty is displayed in all of the universe, all around us, even though it's amazing how the mind of man cannot see the sovereignty of God in things. It's there so clearly. I'm tempted to launch onto a whole lecture on the sovereignty of God in nature, but you've probably been through that enough sufficiently just to say that it's there. But even more, in public worship, God declares to man that he is sovereign. He has the right to command us what to do. God is holy. The Sabbath and Eccles certainly teaches us that God is holy. There are books written on the holiness of God. Not all of them are from a Christian perspective, that is, a Bible-believing perspective. But in the Bible, it teaches us that God is holy and that He cannot and does not abide sin. There's no sin in God. God's sin is like fire to a moth. When man approaches God in this sinfulness, without the saving power of Jesus Christ, then that holiness consumes us. The New Testament tells us God is an all-consuming fire, emphasizing His holiness. So that's true in the Old Testament, and God gives man the path to come to Him. God is holy. In the temple we find out, as you go through the temple, if you were in the Old Testament or the tabernacle, one of the things that is necessary before you even approach the tabernacle is purity or purification, to cleanse yourself of sin, or at least of the outward marks of sin. Israel lived under a host of laws that taught them about purification, purity, in New Testament terms, about holiness. In Jesus' time, they had pots in every house. Read about those at the wedding at Canaan. They had these pots holding six or eight gallons of water. They're made with a narrow neck. No one dipped themselves into that pot. They didn't dip anything else into it. They poured water from the pot. And these big pots were for purification. The Jews took what God said in the Old Testament and multiplied it quite a bit in their zeal misguided zeal for holiness, they sprinkled everything. Mark 7 says, when they came in from the marketplace, they sprinkled themselves, they sprinkled their seats, they sprinkled the floor. It lists all those details. Interestingly, it tells us that they sprinkled their beds, their couches. They were to sprinkle everything in their judgment for purification purposes. Now, mere outward purification is needed if it's according to God's Word. But what God really wants is inward purification. And in the tabernacle, that principle of purification was upon Israel before they came. Just like we preach today that being a Christian is good, is great, is wonderful, but faith without works is dead. And so we strive as hard as we can in our imperfect way to have purity in our lives by following the commandments of God. In Israel, before they came to the tabernacle, as they walked around in their lives, there were all of these laws that taught them that their God is holy. But especially when you come to the tabernacle, you realize that God is holy. In the Garden of Eden, man just walked right up to God, as it were. Of course, God came down to meet him. But man walked with God. There was no tabernacle. There was no temple. They didn't have to go through a lot of purification rites. God was immediately there and they had fellowship with God. But at the fall, that entry was blocked. God put, it says, a guard at the gate of Eden. And so men speculate about what the guard looked like and all those kinds of things. But God is making the point. He doesn't show us what it looks like. We read that it was an angel. He doesn't give us a picture of that. He just tells us that Eden was guarded. Its entrance was guarded. So men have spent all types of effort and time and energy trying to find out where Eden is. And obviously, God confiscated its existence so that we don't know. Probably they didn't know where it was either. But God tells in the Bible for all perpetuity that The door, the path of fellowship with God is blocked by divine sovereignty, and it's blocked because of the sinfulness of man. You know, when you raise children, I raised four. What you try to teach them is they need the Lord Jesus Christ. There's no happiness in this life. But the natural mind thinks that statement, that idea that there's no happiness in this life apart from Christ, that that's foolishness, Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2.14, among the many things that the natural man believes is foolishness. And so people don't want to live for the Lord Jesus Christ. They don't believe that happiness is there. We Christians keep telling them, you can be happy in any circumstances. In our church we have some missionaries or some groups in Ethiopia and recently they were rounded up. They came to worship Sunday morning and they were rounded up by the state police and put in jail. Did they renounce Christ because they went to jail? You know what they did? They sang songs to God in jail. This one young man even became a deacon while he was in jail. He had been nominated and trained before. They hadn't gotten to the ordination, so when they got into jail, then they ordained him. It meant that he would be the special focus of attention from the guards who wanted to stamp out Christianity. Christians have faced difficult circumstances. But in jail, they found peace with God and they could sing glory to God, even though they were being persecuted. It wasn't very pleasant in that jail. Wasn't enough food. There wasn't enough water. It wasn't very comfortable in the surroundings. But they sang to the Lord Jesus Christ. We get a little bit of problems, some of us, and we start complaining. But if you have a strong faith and you understand what Christ is saying, we can go through anything. We're trying to teach our children. Not to be defeated by the things of this world, not to be hung up on the desires of this world, but to realize that we have access to the Lord Jesus Christ. This was taught, of course, in the tabernacle. They had it in the middle of Israel as they walked through the wilderness was sort of a little. Little Eden in the midst of the tabernacle. And it was there was curtain around it. It was blocked. People couldn't get into it except except by God's path. In a sense, the door to fellowship, the door to Eden was opened again in a concrete way in the midst of Israel. It taught about the glory of God. It taught about the holiness of God. It taught about how majestic God is. And so, when they built the temple, it was really a fascinating story in the Bible, because just before Israel left Egypt, God sent upon Egypt all of these plagues. And it taught the people of Egypt that their gods were nothing, because every plague was aimed at a particular god in Egypt. And it taught them that their gods were powerless, and the God of Israel was almighty. They weren't converted, but they certainly understood that the God of Israel was powerful and that the God of Israel was angry with them. He was bringing all these plagues upon them. And so when the people of Israel, just before they left, at God's direction, they asked the Egyptians, would you please give us some money and give us some gold and some silver and give us things to give to our God? And the people of Egypt just opened up their pockets. They were glad to give these things to Israel to get rid of these terrible plagues that was coming upon them. They were buying off the Lord God. So the people of Israel went across the Red Sea and out into the wilderness and God gave them, when they got to Sinai, He gave them these commands about the tabernacle. And then He tells them, if He hadn't told them before, you know why you plundered the Egyptians and walked through the desert with no water and no food? And you had all this wealth that you're carrying in your saddlebags. You know why that is? It's so you can build me a marvelous temple. Only the ungodly wonder why God wanted such a marvelous temple. God was almighty. He's the King of kings and the Lord of hosts. In the midst of Israel they had this monument to God, decked with all the precious stones. Isn't it fascinating that the book of Revelation, now you know that, at least I don't believe that the kingdom of God has golden roads. I don't know if you've ever tried to walk on gold. I've never been that close to the walk on it. It doesn't sound to me like it's terribly comfortable to walk on. It's hard. Why did God say those things? Then you have that vision of the church coming down on all these stones. All these precious stones. Maybe that's the Christians hard-headed, right? Calvinists. No, I don't know. But anyway, it's a precious stone. The emphasis isn't on trying to figure out why this one is a Sardis and why this one is that and why it's all these, what each of these stones mean and uniquely. It represents that the same thing as it did in the Old Testament. Our God is a God that deserves the best we have. He's the King of Kings. The president of the United States is a little creature in comparison to God, but we heap upon the president all kinds of stuff. He's surrounded by luxury and wealth. God's teaching us that he is the great king, mightier than the president, greater than any king that's ever been. And Israel had that in their very heart, that our God is worthy of all that we have and the best that we have. Of course, God gives them a whole scad of laws. Not just how to build a temple, but how to live your life. And the emphasis there is not that they're to win salvation by the law. Israel knew they weren't supposed to win salvation by the law. Who was their forefather after all but Abraham? What's the life of Abraham? Teach us except that the just walk by faith. And you live before God not by your works, but you live before God and with God because of the right faith. And what does the tabernacle teach you except that if your heart is not right, well, outward purification, absolutely. You can't say I'm a marvelous harlot, but my heart is clean. That's ridiculous. Biblically speaking, if your heart is clean, then God says you have to be outward. Outwardly, you have to be clean. So God gives all these commandments about how to build the tabernacle, and he gives you all these commandments, how you to live life, to teach man that man is a sinner. That's what the whole thing teaches. Man is a sinner. Man is separated from God, he desperately needs God. They don't need God just to get away from the persecution and slavery of Egypt. That's not what the whole story is about. It's not about how do you find water out in the desert. It's not about that. It's not about getting to the end of the road and you have, after all the struggling, you have a marvelous land flowing with milk and honey. Although I never thought I'd like to have land flowing with honey, literally. I kept bees at one point in my life and I found out I'm allergic to bees. It was no fun at all. But at any rate, that's not the point of it. The point of the whole thing is that God is a wonderful God. Just as Egypt was horrible, life with God is wonderful. It teaches that man is a sinner. How do you get from one to the other? You get there by the sovereign grace of God. I'm not sure all the people of Israel wanted to leave Egypt right away. Now, they may have, because they lived in terrible persecution there. But when they got out into the wilderness, you remember the stories, every time, it seems like almost every time they stopped, they complained. And they complained that God wasn't enough. We don't have food. We don't have water. You bring us out here to kill us. We'd rather be back in Egypt and eat the good spices of Egypt. I've never eaten any of those spices, but I probably wouldn't like them. Because it's foreign to me. But you know, a good steak with some good steak sauce, that's the equivalent. We want to go back to Egypt and get the steak and once more get the good sauce. We want to eat luxuriously the way we did back there. So man is a sinner. The best of religions can be changed by man into oppression. The best of religion, the Old Testament faith, became an instrument of oppression to the people of Israel. That's not the way God designed it, that's just what wicked people did with it. In today's world, the purest of faith, the purest of churches, can become oppressive. And what the Bible teaches us is that the problem isn't the faith. The problem is that man doesn't have regeneration in his heart. Man is a sinner. How do you get from the outside of the temple into the inside? By following God's rules. Why do God have so many rules? Because God is holy and we are not. We need to follow God's rules, not because we're getting salvation that way, but we're acknowledging the sovereignty of God. So Israel was taught that. They were taught not only that man is a sinner and needs salvation, not only does he live outside of Eden, not only is every place he stopped, does he find reason to complain even against Almighty God, but man is a sinner and needs salvation. In New Testament terms, man needs to be born again. In Old Testament terms, in Deuteronomy 16.10, God tells Israel, circumcise the foreskin of your hearts. What's that mean? You think Israel didn't understand that? Abraham walked by faith. Don't you think they know those stories just the way we know them? They knew that Abraham's relationship to God didn't rest upon what he was or any value in himself, but because God called Abraham and God made Abraham his friend, as it were. Abraham experienced a change unlike all the other men of his day. And now Israel is being called that they would circumcise the foreskins of their hearts, just like we say to men in New Testament terms, you must be born again. God says that in Deuteronomy 16 that He gives all the laws and that at the end of Deuteronomy He says again Well, he doesn't say you should circumcise the foreskin of your hearts, but he says I will circumcise the foreskin of your hearts in chapter 30. What does that mean? Paul explains that in the New Testament in the book of Colossians, but he doesn't say anything they didn't understand. Your heart needs to be changed. When Jesus preached you must be born again, that wasn't anything new to Israel, just that they refused to read it. They refused to get it out of the Old Testament, but here it is. How do you get into the Holy of Holies? only by God's route. And there were sacrifices for everything. I like that prayer in the psalm that says, Lord forgive me my unknown sin. But there was a sacrifice for the unknown sin. It wasn't called that, but there was a sacrifice in the sacramental system, not for any particular sin, but just for sin in general. God covered everything. But you read the details of that sacramental law and you find out that sin is everywhere. Just like cockroaches in Texas. It's everywhere. And sin is pesky little things. I mean, you start struggling against your sin, you find it out by studying the Bible. That's one of the reasons we study it, so we can find out where we are short of what God wants us. We want to be obedient to God. We don't find it oppressive that we have to obey God. We find that that's good. God's teaching me what I can do so I can have fellowship with him. Do you think I can figure it out on myself, on my own? No, the Bible tells me I'm ignorant and I can't get up to God's way. It says in Isaiah so clearly, my thoughts are not your thoughts and my way is not your way. What does God mean except I can't figure it out, neither can you. And so we're bound, as the Jews were bound here with this tabernacle, so we're bound with all of life. God wants us to purify ourselves and purify ourselves. God teaches in the temple this purification, the need, To get away, get our sin cleansed by God. It's not instrument, it's not an instrument. We don't have a water fountain out here, because unlike one of the most popular churches today, we don't believe that water affects purification anymore. It didn't in the Old Testament either. It was sacramental. We just know from the New Testament that that's set aside. It's said very clearly in the New Testament. Not specifically, but very clearly. God teaches them about expiation. That our sin would be covered over. The evangelical circles, a few years back, they began talking about expiation as over against propitiation. By expiation, they meant to wipe out the angry anger of God. I was taught as a Baptist disciple that God's Christ's sacrifice wiped out the anger of God, but it didn't apply it. It's just that God isn't angry at me anymore. When God taught them that in the Old Testament, in the sacrament, in the tabernacle, that just because you're my people, it doesn't mean that you can come before me. And then all those sacrifices that they moved from the outer outer altar into the most inner altar, ultimately to the Holy of Holies. All those sacrifices taught them that the covering of sin, the removal of the anger of God, is something we have to be concerned about. Not all thought But these things themselves didn't remove the anger of God. Because the New Testament tells us so clearly that the final sacrifice, the final offering in the Holy of Holies happened only once a year. And not only that, they were taught you have to do these things over and over and over again. Why was that? Because no one of them worked. It's like spanking a kid. You have to do it over and over and over again. The first one usually doesn't work. And so if God teaches men that If we're going to do it just in a purely physical way, this business of having expiation and wiping out his wrath and his anger, then our act would have to be done over and over and over again. But Christ did it once for all, and in the Old Testament sacrifice and the Holy of Holies, they did it once a year. But more than that, it teaches us that God provides propitiation. Maybe you don't make a distinction between the two words. Don't be bothered by that. I'm just going from my background. I don't think they have a proper distinction, but they by propitiation. I was taught that the son of the son of man would be removed. And so God taught it teaches Israel that if you spiritualize all this, if you see what this means, I'm I haven't changed the gospel from what I changed did Adam and Eve in the garden when I said Adam come forth. I haven't changed it. And he came forth. His life was changed before he was under the curse of sin and death. Now he's still there, but now he has fellowship with me again. And the same with Abraham. Locked in the darkness of paganism. Abraham was raised a pagan without any Christian education, without any Bible memory work, without even a Bible being available. He was raised in a pagan society and they worshipped about everything there was around them. Hundreds of gods made out of everything. But in the midst of all that, God spoke from heaven Abraham, come forth. You're not hiding in the bushes, but you are hidden in the bowels of paganism. Come forth, and Abraham came forth. God established a living relationship with him. Now, all this is contained in seed form in the synagogue, or in the tabernacle, where you go into the Holy of Holies. Man is to come forth. It's complex, because God wants to teach Israel that you can't get salvation by works. And those sacrifices have no end. But when Jesus came, revealed in the Bible, he died on the cross once and for all. He didn't die just for expiation, if you make that distinction. He didn't die just to remove the anger of God and make it possible for all men to be saved. He died for propitiation, to wipe out our sinfulness before God. And those for whom he died, he calls forth. He called Abraham, as He called Adam, as He called Israel. He calls us. Jesus says in John 10, He knows us by name. He calls us by name. So we claim no righteousness in ourselves, but we tell our children and we tell those to whom we speak that unless God calls you, you can't come, but you must come. There's help nowhere else. There's fulfillment nowhere else. All these things. When you young people fall in love, you don't find Christ. You find another human being like yourself. And you get married, you find out, sadly, maybe, that she's a sinner or he's a sinner, just like you are. True love says, I know that. Jesus is the only perfect one. And I'll live with this creature who is less than perfect. I'll love him anyway. But you see, The Gospel is taught in the tabernacle over and over and over again. It teaches clearly about the nature and requirements and the specificities of God and the glory of God. It teaches about the holiness of God. It teaches about man and our sinful fall and how we're separated from God and the difficulties that we have using any mechanical means to find peace with God and fellowship with God. It teaches us about the absolute necessity of that fellowship with God and it teaches us about salvation. that God has provided the entryway, God has provided the path, and you must come this way. So we're in the business, you as a Christian, we as churches, of saying to all mankind the only path to the Lord Jesus Christ is the path that he set forth in the Bible. You must be born again. You must repent of your sin. And you must find in Jesus Christ that he is the Savior, the Lord and the King. And I can tell you from it, from my own example, if you're a Christian, you can no doubt too, that I have peace in Jesus Christ. The winds of time swirl around me and swirl around you, and you have the ups and downs of life and the disappointments of your own nature sometimes. But yet Christ stands in the middle of our heart. He's the rock that won't be moved. He's the peace that can't be taken away. He's the source of life and enjoyment that we can always go to. And thank the Lord he's given us a wonderful book that explains it to us over and over again. May God bless you as you consider these things. We're going to sing a hymn of response after I pray, and we'll be asking you to stand at that point.