Exodus - The Dwelling Place of God
Lord, we just thank you for the work that you are preparing and the word that you're preparing through pastor Luke this morning, and I just ask God that we would have an open heart and open ears to hear what you have for us this morning and just speak through him this morning. And we just ask that you bless his words and bless this time together. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Luke:Amen. Thank you, Ellen. So I was thinking about the message today and sort of the theme that we're going to be in. We're continuing in through Exodus, and we're getting close to wrapping it up here in the next week or two. But, you know, we kind of talked about these kind of themes that were in the book of God's faithfulness, God's promises, God's moral law.
Luke:And this last part, these last couple of weeks, is really emphasizing God's presence. And I was thinking about this idea of presence and how just important presence matters. I think we can kind of take it for granted a little bit. I know that we have a lot of parents here, and there's that dynamic in parents, and this was even the dynamic in my family growing up, is like, one of the parents is the easygoing one, and then one is the not so easygoing one. And there is a difference in the behavior of children when the presence of one parent is there versus the other.
Luke:Right? Oh, dad's home. Okay. Right? Or mom's home, whatever it happens to be.
Luke:That presence, trying to parent long distance. I don't know. I've seen parents try and, you know, parent over the phone. And the only reason that works is because they know that the parent's going to be there later. Right?
Luke:And, you know, it matters. It makes a difference. I was thinking about even my wife did some travel for a couple weeks in a row, maybe last month, or maybe it was earlier this month. I don't know. Just like even though we were talking and texting and chatting every day, there is no replacement for her just being here, for being able to have dinner together in person, to be able to sit down and just spend time with one another.
Luke:You know, I know that we've got some Bills fans in the house, pretty much all of you. And like, the difference between watching the Bills play on TV versus watching the Bills play in the stadium. Right? That presence, being with one another, the difference I remember I went to my first Bills game last year, so I like, remember, I was like, Oh, I get it now. This is different.
Luke:Okay. Like, can get on board with this a little bit. Right? Because it's it's different versus just watching on TV. Like, yeah, you can kind of see some cool angles and, you know, yeah, being in the stadium, you kinda you're locked into one particular view, but that doesn't really matter because of the presence of with everybody else and being with one another.
Luke:We all had a great lesson in the importance of presence, of being with one another through those terrible years of COVID. Right? All of a sudden in 2020, all of a sudden, we like, everything was a video chat. You know? Everything had to be, like, done over FaceTime, and we weren't seeing people.
Luke:I was in Chicago at the time. And so, like, it was really kind of it was it was pretty strict. I didn't get to see very many people except for my, like, one roommate that was there, and we were starting to get on each other's nerves. And, you know, it was it there was nothing like, you know, we could kind of pretend, oh, we're gonna, like, have, like, you know, like, we're trying to do Bible studies over video conferencing and trying to, like, do shared meals together. Oh, how's your food?
Luke:Like, showing it to the camera. I'm like, this is lame. Right? Like, we can pretend that it was what it needed to be at the time. But like, that's just it didn't match up.
Luke:Right? No matter how much we pretended we were together, we just simply weren't. And so presence matters. Where we are and who we're with, all of that is significant. And so it comes to God's presence.
Luke:God's presence matters. Where we believe and where we see God as being, is he where is he even? God's location in his presence matters. Now, if I ask you the question, where is God located? Some of you might go, well, He's up in the sky.
Luke:He's up in the heavens. Right? Maybe maybe you'd give a maybe a churchy answer, a Sunday school answer, and you say, He's in my heart. Right? But what does that mean?
Luke:Right? Is he actually there or is just the idea? Like like, where is he? Because where we think God is or he isn't matters. It makes a difference in how we conceive and we interact and how our relationship is affected with Him.
Luke:It's an important thing that we believe. And often it's something we don't think about very often. It's something that's just kind of like, Oh, well, he's near and he's far and sometimes he's there and sometimes he's there and mostly out there. And I don't know. You know, we just kind of have a kind of a fuzzy sense of this of God's physical, even, spatial relationship to us.
Luke:And I think that we have time, and I think we should think about this. Now, Pastor Cameron's been on vacation, and he somehow I ended up with seven chapters of Exodus to teach today. So I don't know how intentional that was or not. But have no fear. It won't be that long.
Luke:But so the question that we kind of have is, what are these seven chapters in Exodus? What are they actually going to tell us about this question? Where is God? And how does that impact our relationship? How does that even impact the way we live our lives?
Luke:Because I think I think if we conceptualize God as not being very close, I think that's going to change the way you and I live our daily lives. So before well, first, one of the things that I think of is like talking about this idea of God's presence impacting how we live our lives is I think that sometimes I think, you know, we we live in a mostly secular culture where God pops up from time to time. I think he's been popping up more often than not as of late. But I don't know that the God that gets talked about in the public square is actually God. Right?
Luke:And what I mean by that is that often God is kind of invoked out of convenience rather than reality. So what I mean by that is where you're like, well, God says this or God agrees with me. Well, does he? Right? Or does it just kind of make you look good?
Luke:Right? This is kind of the God of convenience and politics is the way I kind of think of it, where God is paying attention and affirming me when I want Him to, and then He's far and distant from me when I also want Him to. And I think that's the type of God that we have oftentimes in culture. He shows up in our films and movies when it makes us feel good, but then is also distance when having him around would make us uncomfortable. So where is exactly God?
Luke:We're going to be in Exodus chapter 24. We left off in the middle of the story. If you're familiar with the story of Exodus, right? It's the story of the leaving the exit out of Egypt. Moses has come.
Luke:He has, along with God, rescued the people of Israel out of Egypt. They've gone through the wilderness. They've passed through the Red Sea, and they've come to this mountain, Mount Sinai. And there they are, and they're kind of encountering God. Moses has been going up and down this mountain.
Luke:He's been given the 10 Commandments, the essence of the law, saying this is how God is going to interact with Israel. And then they've made a covenant, a promise, a relationship together. Israel has said, We will abide by the law that God has given us. And God says, I will be your God then. And so that's what's just happened.
Luke:And now all of a sudden, this is where we're picking up right in the middle of that story in verse 15 of chapter 24. It says I'm gonna lose my place. 15. It says, then Moses went up the mountain. He's going up Mount Sinai again, and the cloud covered the mountain.
Luke:The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day, he called Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of God was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain, and Moses was on the mountain for forty days and forty nights. So the people of Israel, they're down on the bottom and they've made this agreement.
Luke:They made a covenant with God. And they see that Moses is up there. And then they see God shows up on the mountain in a more intense way than He even was before. And then they see Moses disappear into this midst and consuming fire on the mountain. And he's gone for like forty days and forty nights.
Luke:So just what exactly the Israelites were thinking was going on with Moses, we'll find out next week when Pastor Cameron's preaching. But for now, Moses has kind of gone up, and he has ascended into the presence of God. He's there with him. And that's what all of that is meaning to communicate. Moses is literally walking into God's presence.
Luke:And then once he's up here, verse chapter 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, thirty and thirty one, all are instructions about the tabernacle. They're all instructions about this tabernacle. And if you're like, Luke, I don't know what a tabernacle is, that's okay. These are like I was talking about these verses and these chapters. These tend to be like the passages, the type of passages, if you've ever done one of those, through the Bible in a year studies, or you're like, I'm going to read the whole Bible.
Luke:This is the point in the Bible where people start to get, let's say, tempted to just read the headings. Right? Because we start to go in here and it's talking about gems and rubies and lampstands and wood types and beaver skins. And it's supposed to be this many cubits and that many cubits. And we just kind of go, What?
Luke:What does that have to do with me? Why is this in Scripture? Why is this so important? And today I want to kind of highlight why maybe perhaps it's so important. But in order to do that, we have to have an understanding of Genesis.
Luke:I know I did this last week. We went back to Genesis, but I'm going to do it again because it's important. It's where everything starts. Now, the book of Genesis, we've probably heard this story of creation a number of times, so I don't know that I necessarily need to read the details for you. But if we can go back and we remember this creation story, God speaks everything into being.
Luke:And he if you were to take the story of Genesis and the creation story, it could be divided up into two general parts, where God creates the heavens, the seas, the sky and the land. And then he does that for the first half. And then the second half, he fills it. He puts the fish in the sea, the animals on the land and the birds in the sky. And so you see that there's this three division.
Luke:There's three areas. I've got a little slide up here that should show that for us. In the creation story, there's the sky, there's the land, and there's the sea. And that's kind of the three spots, the three places or areas in the creation story. And for them, you know, the sea was of this dark, unknowable, scary space.
Luke:The land was the place where humanity and all of the animals dwelled. And then the sky, the sky is where God was. He was up there. And so this is this three division that kind of happens in the story of Genesis. Now, all of those things are created and then filled by God doing what?
Luke:He doesn't do much with his hands, but he speaks. He has seven things, seven repetitions of God saying, And God said, Let there be. And it goes over and over and over again. This is just in general the way that this kind of plays out. You have God saying on day one, day two, day six, day five, and then day seven, God says it is all good.
Luke:And then he rests. And then he established this pattern of seventh day rests. We've talked about Sabbath a lot this year, so we're coming back to that. So if you were to go through, read chapters one through two of Genesis, you would find this pattern happening. It's the story that we're maybe perhaps familiar with, but it's a significant pattern.
Luke:He then creates this garden. He makes a garden in the land in the middle of Eden. He creates a garden, and he places Adam and Eve. Right? He places them in the garden, says to work and to worship, to keep the land and to be with God.
Luke:And so God meets with Adam and Eve in the Garden Of Eden. That's where He is. That's where they are. And then there's those two trees that always get talked about, the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life in the center of the garden. And that is this pattern that gets created.
Luke:And so one of the things that I want us to hear here is that the created world should point to God. Right? And I think we all know this to some intrinsic sense. We all get this when we look out and we see a magnificent sunset. Each one unique, each one different.
Luke:We get this when we see a beautiful vista or when we just look across the vastness of the ocean or when we see just the intricacies of creation in a tiny little bug where we see nature just happening all around us, and we see its power, its strength, and its subtlety and its detail. All of that screams that this didn't happen by accident. It's like the coming along and finding a perfectly functioning and working watch laying on the ground. We wouldn't come up to that watch and say, wow, that watch sprung out of nowhere. We would say, No, somebody built that.
Luke:There was a watchmaker who made this watch fit together and function the way that it does. And so too, when we see all of creation, it cries out inside of us that God made it. And when we silence the longing or understanding of God, when we make the world all that there is. We silence our longing and our understanding of God when we say, This is it. The physical world is it.
Luke:There's nothing beyond that. When we make creation and the world around us kind of the limit, we're shutting down our understanding and our longing for God. And this is what I think that I this is, again, what I was kind of getting at when we talk about kind of a God of convenience, when we say, Well, God's kind of there when I want him to be, and he's there when I don't want him to be. When we do this, this leaves us in a place of despair. It leads us in a place where there's nothing beyond the beauty.
Luke:Why do I find anything beautiful at all if it wasn't meaningful? If God didn't make it? If it's just a random assortment of light and I'm deciding to assign value to it, but it doesn't have any meaning beyond that, what does that do to the way we conceive of the world and our own lives? I came across a poem called Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. And in this poem, Matthew Arnold is he's describing this this scene of being by the ocean in the evening.
Luke:It's dark out and just close enough to the ocean to hear the tide going out as the waves crash against the pebbles and the rocks and the sea, and it just kind of slowly recedes. And the tide is going farther and farther away. And he kind of has this reflection about the ocean and the tide going out. And he says, Oh, it's kind of like the sea of faith. There was a world, our world was surrounded by this sea of faith.
Luke:It was full, that was at full tide one time. Everybody had an experienced faith. But now the sea of faith is fading away. It's going away. And he's reflecting on this, and this is his kind of conclusion.
Luke:This is how he ends this poem as he's reflecting about this idea that faith is going away in the world. He says, The world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And we are here as on a darkling plane, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. What he's saying is there's no joy in this world. There's no hope.
Luke:There's nothing worth dreaming. There's no hope for your pain because all there really is, is just us. That's what he's reflecting on. He's saying the world is losing its idea of faith. The world is becoming disenchanted almost.
Luke:Where there's just science. We can explain away all this religion mess with science and reason. We have no reason to kind of hold on to a sense of faith. And he's making this argument, he's making this plea that we should just understand that all we got is this one life and we should just be kind to one another and we should just be true to one another and be honest about it and not pretend that there's a God out there. I got to be honest, that's a very, very bleak place to be.
Luke:It's a place where he's almost you can hear it. He says there's no there is no help for pain. When we live in a world where God is far, where he is distant, where he has disappeared, that's the type of world we begin to live in. Even if we think God is real, but he's he's so distant, he's so far away that he doesn't really pay attention to my daily life, doesn't really care what's going on with me. How often are you going to pray if that's what you believe about God?
Luke:How urgently are we going to pray if we come to a place where we believe and we say, You know what? God's going do what God's going to do. Why should I pray about anything? Why should I ask for anything? I should just be happy with what I get.
Luke:All of a sudden, we're cutting off the strings of our relationship with God because we think he is far away and we think he is distant. What I mean to say here is that you don't have to think that God doesn't exist to begin to undermine your relationship with him. You only need to think that he's very far away and distant and doesn't care. But here we see in Genesis, we see that God created the whole world to display himself. He declared it good.
Luke:I think we get into a place where we begin to trust we become more likely to trust science than we are to trust the divine action of God. How often do we pray for something and we're kind of like, Well, you know, I pray, but I'm mostly trusting in the science to work things out right now. And that's not the place of faith that God calls us to live in. It's yes of bothand. I'm not saying disregard medical science or taking care of yourself or practical wisdom.
Luke:I'm not saying that. But I am saying that we perhaps we should pray before we go there. Perhaps we should pray as earnestly and have as much faith there as we do over here and trust that God can and will come through. So this brings us with kind of Genesis in the backdrop with the world displaying who God is. We're now ready to talk about the tabernacle, talk about Exodus chapter 25.
Luke:In verse eight through nine, we kind of get this overarching statement that God makes here about what's going to happen. He says he says in verse eight of chapter 25, he says, let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. That word dwell today, that's the important word for today. If you notice anything in the texts we read, look for that word dwell. Verse nine says, Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and of all of its furniture, so you shall make.
Luke:And that's what goes on for the next couple of chapters, God is giving instructions about the tabernacle and then all the furniture that's supposed to go inside of it, how it's to be made, how it's to be placed, how it is to be used. Now, this word tabernacle is not a word we use very often, right? But simply put, the word tabernacle is meant to say a tent or a dwelling place. That's all that that fancy word means. And one of the things that is kind of lost in our translation here of the Bible is that the word tabernacle and dwell are related words.
Luke:It's kind of like one is kind of a noun in which you dwell, and then the other is kind of the verb to dwell. So if we could kind of put it this way, is that to dwell, God says He was going to dwell with them. He was going to tabernacle with them. They were kind of a noun and a verb thing going on. So God is saying, Make me a dwelling place so that I can dwell with you.
Luke:God's presence was meant to be with his people. He says, I want my presence to be with you. And I want you to make a place for that to happen. And then he goes about and he gives these instructions. Now, rather than I reading all of the very detailed instructions and trust me, there is absolute value to going very, very detailed here.
Luke:But we would be here for the next week if we were to do that. So rather than do that, I have a short video. It was not animated at Pixar, so I'm not promising high quality here. But this quick video will give us a quick overview of the Tabernacle, what it looked like, what was in it, and kind of the scale and look of it so that we can have a better idea of what we're talking about. So we'll go ahead and play that now.
Speaker 3:The tabernacle. In Exodus 25, I think, to none. Enclosure that was supported by pillars. This courtyard was about a quarter of the size of an American football field. Several slaughtering tables stood within the court of the Tabernacle along with the bronze laver and the bronze altar.
Speaker 3:The Tabernacle itself was a rectangular shaped structure, its roof consisted of multiple layers of animal skins and linens. An outer covering of tachash skin which may have been porpoise, beaver, or a type of leather. A covering of ram skin dyed red, a curtain of goat's hair, and finally a curtain of fine linen. The interior of the Tabernacle was divided into two sections that housed a number of sacred objects. The first section the holy place contained the table of showbread the lampstand and the altar of incense beyond the veil lay the holy of holies or the most holy place which housed the Ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 3:The Tabernacle was the first temple dedicated to God and the first resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. It served as a place of worship and sacrifices during the Israelites forty years in the desert and their subsequent conquest of the land of Canaan. This transportable house of worship was eventually replaced by a more permanent structure, King Solomon's temple.
Luke:So that is the tabernacle in very brief. So I've got another picture up here of I think a real life recreation of the tabernacle. But don't pay attention to the electrical power hooked up to it. But what you get here is you see that God has very specific instructions. And if you were to read the details of these next couple of chapters, the reason we're able to make something like this is because of how detailed the instructions are in the Bible.
Luke:It has these measurements of how big each thing was meant to be and what each thing was meant to be made out of and what it was to look like. And so we get this idea that there's these three components. There's the courtyard, which is that white tent there, the outer part. And there would have been places to prepare sacrifices, places to make ritual cleansing and washing. And then inside the tabernacle itself, there was the holy place, that first kind of entryway as you come into that tent.
Luke:And there would have been this menorah, when there would have been a place for the bread, and there would have been lamps and lights that were meant to be kept on. And then there was this incense offering. And then there was this other like, curtain that was there that was separating the final place, the third space, which was the Holy of Holies or the most holy place, which is where the Ark of the Covenant, which you've all seen in Indiana Jones, I'm sure. But the idea, the Ark of the Covenant there, right, is the place where God's one, God's covenant, the 10 Commandments were kept. But it was the place where sacrifice was made once a year sins of the people.
Luke:It was the place where God's glory rested on the mercy seat. It was the place where God was. And so that was the most holy of places because God resided there. So you see there's kind of these degrees of separation from God, but there's still this way of access to God in that. And so what I want us to kind of notice, and maybe if you're really astute, you've already noticed it, is that there's a repetition of three spaces here.
Luke:Remember in Genesis, we were talking about the sky, the land, the sea. And then here we come in to talk about the tabernacle, we're talking about the courtyard, the holy place, and then the most holy place. We have this repetition of three. And both the sky and the Holy of Holies being the place where God resides. And we kind of get this understanding that begins to make a little bit more sense.
Luke:We get to see that the land and the holy place, we think, well, perhaps even with the Garden Of Eden, where Adam and Eve were placed to work and to be with God and to take care of those things, perhaps Adam and Eve were a foreshadowing of the priests, the ones who were allowed to enter the Holy of Holies once a year and were charged of caring with the holy place. Or maybe better yet, the priests are just echoing back to the place that Adam and Eve lost. But even more, if you just think, well, Luke, that's kind of a unique coincidence, you're kind of just making that up. I think the thing that makes this all the more clear in this passage is that if you were to read and pay close attention, you would find that God breaks up his instructions to Moses about how to build the tabernacle with seven speeches. Remember in Genesis, God says seven times and God said and he creates seven times with these seven speeches.
Luke:If you were to read the next couple of chapters, you would find that it says that the Lord speaks to Moses and it's seven times that sentence is repeated and God gives instructions. And then the very last time, the seventh time that God says something to Moses, he does what? He give instructions about Sabbaths. It's this pattern that is repeated over and over again. And then if you're like, Well, Luke, sure, seven times, twice, but like, is that really like intentional?
Luke:Maybe you're just making that up. And I got to tell you that, no, it happens a third time. If you were to go forward into Exodus chapter 40 or so, you would find another place where Moses does what the Lord commanded. That same phrase is said seven times. And then finally, on the seventh time, Moses and the people rest in the building of the tabernacle.
Luke:So you get this pattern, this divine pattern that is happening of the tabernacle echoing the creation of the world. What does that what does that mean to us? Well, I think I think that this means a lot. I think, one, I think it means that God is making a way back into his presence through the tabernacle. If we we talked about the story of Genesis, Adam and Eve were placed in the garden and had access to the presence of God.
Luke:They had relationship with him. The sin, the fall happened, and they lost access. They were kicked out of the Garden Of Eden. And when that happened, they lost access. There was no way to get back into the garden.
Luke:You might remember what happened at the end of when they were kicked out. There was cherubim. There was an angel placed guarding the entrance to Eden. Do you know what was placed in the tabernacle as a decorative entrance to the Holy of Holies? Cherubim, angels.
Luke:Right? And so God is saying, like, I'm creating a way for you to get back to the garden. I'm creating a way for you to have access to my presence again. And it's through this tabernacle, it's through this tent. I'm going to dwell with you again.
Luke:I'm not going to be distant and unknowable. And there is a way for you to get to me. It's through mercy. It's through sacrifice. I'm going to forgive you and not judge you.
Luke:And then we see that the whole world, through the lens of the tabernacle, is God's temple. We get this understanding when we look at both of these stories together and we understand, oh, all of creation is God's temple. All of creation is God's dwelling. As creation was mirroring God's the tabernacle, we see that God created all of the world and all of the universe as a place for Him to inhabit and for us to be in relationship with Him. But it got distorted.
Luke:It got broken. And then God creates this picture of the tabernacle, a way to get back to him. This is This is massive. It's important because it shows that God isn't just sitting up on a mountaintop. This is the way that I find a lot of times we conceptualize of God is we think there's this spiritual mountain.
Luke:God's up on the top with a long beard sitting there cross legged, waiting for us to get up there. And, you know, and this shows up in like Sunday cartoons and all the stuff, you know. Somebody's got to climb up this big mountain to get up to ask the wise man or get up to there to find the guru and ask the meaning of life, You know, something like that. But we get this understanding that there's this mountain and we have to do certain things to get up this mountain. We have to understand that, Okay, well, maybe I need to live a good life.
Luke:Maybe I need to walk the sevenfold path. Maybe I need to cease from all desire. Maybe I need to make my in laws happy. Maybe I need to live the American dream. Whatever it is that we think we need to do in order to climb either success, significance, meaning, being a good person in order to get to the place where we can finally meet God.
Luke:And that's the way we conceptualize it. But the way that the Bible talks about it is that God actually comes off of the mountain. God doesn't stay up there. He doesn't say, You have to figure out how to get up there to me. I'm going to come down to you in a tent.
Luke:I'm going to make a very clear way for you to have access and relationship to me. And this is the picture that happens all throughout the story of the Old Testament is where is God's presence? You could read the rest of the Old Testament kind of looking for that theme, seeing the building of the temple, seeing the removal and removal of the the Ark of the Covenant, seeing all of these things happen and tracing where is God's presence and when does his presence leave? And the thing is, is that the story doesn't end there because here we are, you know, we're in this church, and for all of the things that we like about this building, it's not a tabernacle. Right?
Luke:Why is it not a tabernacle? Why aren't we still in this kind of tent or temple? It's because that God came down off the mountain in another way. He came in a different tent, as it were. He came in flesh.
Luke:Jesus became incarnated. That's the theologic world to mean to say that God became human in Jesus Christ. That he came so near to us as to have flesh, that he could sit and eat, that he could cry, that he could feel, that he could grow tired and weary. He became one of us. We're going to turn forward into the book of John in the New Testament.
Luke:There's a ton of places we could go to talk about this, but John chapter one is the most clear place because it's going to draw specifically on the words and the language we were just talking about in Exodus. John chapter one, one through five here. Notice the echoes of Genesis that happen right here. Because how does Genesis begin? It begins the same way.
Luke:In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Luke:You're like, Luke, what's the word? Are you talking about the Bible? No. We're talking about Jesus. Right there when it says the word was in the beginning.
Luke:It's a way of saying Jesus, the logos, the source of all things. This is something that I don't want you to miss. Jesus wasn't an afterthought to the Bible. It's not like he's just like, Oh, Jesus is here. Where did he come from?
Luke:Jesus was in the beginning. He was the active He was an active agent in creation. He helped create it all and sustain it all and give it life. That's what John one here is saying. When God says, Let us create humanity in our image, he's talking about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all the way back in Genesis.
Luke:And so we see that the Word became flesh. And then if we jump down to chapter or to verses 14, look for our keyword dwell. Verse 14 says, And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory, glory as the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness about him and cried out, this is the one of whom I said, he comes He who comes after me ranks before me because he was before me, because he was before all of creation.
Luke:For from his fullness we have received grace upon grace. For the law, the law that was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Here's the key. No one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the Father's side. He has made him known.
Luke:Right? Jesus has made God known. Jesus is the word that has come close, the word that has become flesh, that has dwelt among us, that has tabernacled among us. That is so close. It is so radical.
Luke:This is an idea that shatters our minds. The thing is, is so often we rush to Easter, right? We're like, I love Easter. I love celebrating Resurrection Sunday and Good Friday. And we kind of like treat Christmas as kind of like cartoon land.
Luke:We're like, Oh, it's kind of cute, baby Jesus. But the thing is, is that without the incarnation, without Jesus being in flesh, without Jesus having come at all in Christmas, there is no salvation. Without Jesus being fully human and fully God at the same time, without him holding all of that, there is no salvation. The incarnation, the understanding that God has come near at all, is the essential first understanding of the gospel. We have to understand that God has come to you or I.
Luke:He has torn down any barrier or division between us. Jesus echoes this. If we turn forward in John to John chapter two verse 18, we're going to see Jesus make very clear who he is, but using the imagery we've been talking about. John chapter two verse 18. Jesus has just come into the temple of God.
Luke:He's come into the temple of his Father, and he's seen that they're using the temple not to worship God, but to rather to make money. That they're taking advantage of travelers and people coming to the temple to worship God. And they're making money off of exchange rates and taking money from people. And here Jesus comes in and He says, None of that. He flips the tables.
Luke:He overturns and says, None of this is happening in my Father's house. And then the Pharisees and everybody, that's where we pick up in verse 18. So the Jews said to him, what sign do you show us for doing these things? They're saying, What? Who are you that you can come in and flip our tables and rebuke us like that?
Luke:What what sign are you going to show that shows that you have the authority to do that? Verse 19. Jesus answered them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. The Jews then said, It has taken forty years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days? But he was speaking about the temple of his body.
Luke:When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. Jesus is saying, tear down this temple, not referring to the physical temple because He says, I'm making it obsolete. The new temple, the temple that is here is my own body. Tear it down, crucify me on the cross, and in three days I will rise again from the dead, is what Jesus is saying. Amen.
Luke:And when he does that, there's this small little detail that happens in the Gospels that they echo. They say that when he dies on the cross, when he breathes his last, when he says it is finished, there's this mighty earthquake. And you know what happens in the temple? There is this curtain that separated the holy place. A curtain that kept where God's presence was.
Luke:Separated from everybody else. It gets torn in two. God's presence is now made accessible, not through a bunch of sacrifices and a courtyard. It's made accessible through the person in the life of Jesus Christ. Through faith in him and following him, through saying yes to Jesus and saying he is my Lord and my Savior, we get access to God.
Luke:And that's not where it stops. It doesn't stop there because Jesus then commissions his church. If we turn forward in the Bible to Ephesians chapter two, I want us to see this because this is this is crucial to understanding what we're doing right now. Why we're here on Sunday. Why we're here with one another.
Luke:Ephesians chapter two has an important thing for us. Ephesians chapter two, verse 13. This is Paul, he's talking to the believers in Ephesians and the believers in Ephesians are dealing with this division amongst themselves. They're like, Well, you're a Jew and you're a Gentile and we can't get along. And Paul's saying, No, no, no.
Luke:But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace. He who has made us both one has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. By abolishing the law and the of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace. He's saying there's not differences here in the church.
Luke:We're made one new people by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Verse 16, and it might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came, and he preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him, we both have access in one spirit to the father. So then you are no longer strangers.
Luke:You are no longer aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. In whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Church, who are we? We're being built into a spiritual temple where God dwells, where God abides, where he tabernacles among us.
Luke:And that cornerstone isn't that we dress similar. That cornerstone isn't that we like the music. The cornerstone isn't that we like the preaching here. The cornerstone isn't that we're maybe hip. Maybe.
Luke:No, the cornerstone. The cornerstone's Christ. It isn't anything else. It's that. It's that one thing that makes us the church.
Luke:And when we're built together into this temple, Christ is among us. Here's three things that I want you to be able to take away from all of this. First is to know that God can be known and experienced in Jesus and in the context of the church. If you want to know God, you want to experience God, it's through Jesus and the context of the church. And they're inseparable in my mind.
Luke:That's a difficult pill for us to swallow. But that is the truth. That Jesus the church isn't like something that just kind of happened. Jesus meant for the church to be a thing. He planted the church.
Luke:And yes, it's imperfect. Yes, is it broken? Yes, it does not always honor him. But when it does, when we have Christ as the cornerstone, when we do our best to abide, when we do our best to follow the Spirit, when we are honoring the Lord, he is among us. Jesus is our one and only access to God.
Luke:We would love for there to be some other way than Jesus sometimes. Because Jesus Jesus can be a little dividing. We've been studying the parables on Wednesday nights, and we were having some reflection on the things we've been reading. And one of the reflections that came out of our time was, Man, Jesus is kind of harsh sometimes. Like, Jesus kind of says some pretty, like, divisive things.
Luke:Jesus is kind of like, You have to accept me or there will be consequences for not accepting me. Jesus is our only access to God. We don't get to make up some other way. We could spend our whole lives trying to climb this spiritual mountain, trying to figure out how are we going to get up to God. All the while Jesus is down here off the mountain saying, Just come to me.
Luke:Come and know me. Come and see who I am. See who they testify about me. Come be among the people who love me. If you abandon the church, you abandon the context for experiencing God.
Luke:And like I said, that's a hard pill to swallow because I know that not everyone in here has had great experience in church. I know that's difficult. We've talked about that here. And I just want to say that, like, yeah, the church is going to mess up. Or better yet, the people in the church are going to mess up.
Luke:We are not always going to love you well. I'm going to try my best as a pastor here to do my best to love you and serve you well. But I do and will mess up. It happens. And I pray that you would have grace for me.
Luke:And I pray that I would have the humility to humble myself when I mess up. These are the things that we're meant to do in the the body. Notice that that whole passage in Ephesians, the whole thing, that little conclusion at the end, we're the temple, we're being built in the spiritual temple. You know what Paul is talking about the whole chapter before that? He's talking about all the hostility.
Luke:He's talking about how much they don't get along. And he's saying the root of that, the root that makes it so that we can be this temple is the blood of Christ. It's the fact that we ought to always remember how much we have been forgiven so that we can forgive those around us, so that we might love God much, so that we might love one another out of that. In one John, I love the book of First John. And this First John for me is the place where you get the clearest statement of what the church is supposed to be.
Luke:It says that no one has ever seen God. It states this problem. No one's ever seen God. But it says God is love. How are you supposed to experience the love of God if you can never see God?
Luke:And the passage then goes on, and it answers the problem by saying, But we make God's love complete when we love one another. When we love one another, when we serve one another, it is not just us being kind to one another. It's us loving one another out of the source of Christ's love. It's the spirit that makes that love complete. We're the full expression of God's love to one another when we serve one another, when we're kind to one another, when we say, I'm going to serve you.
Luke:And that's what makes the church work. So like I said, presence matters. Where we think God is matters. Because if we think God is somewhere far off and distant, inaccessible, the way we pray, the way we live our lives, the way we even conduct ourselves here in church, is going to be radically different than if we understand that God wants to be in us and among us. If we understand that the other person I'm talking to is another building block in the temple that houses God, does that not change the way we conduct ourselves?
Luke:Doesn't it change my life if I know that tomorrow that God isn't just far away, but that God's here, That God is with me in a way that he wasn't with anyone else. That his Holy Spirit abides in me. That I have full access to the Father through Jesus Christ. That I can kneel down, I can pray to God and have a communion with Him that used to have to be mediated through animal sacrifices and curtains and incense, but now we have access to the Father through the love of Jesus Christ. That changes my life and it changes yours, I pray.
Luke:Let's take a moment and have the worship team come back up here. And I want us to pray and just thank the Lord for his goodness to us in that. Heavenly Father, Lord, I am, for one, so thankful, so thankful that you have made yourself known to us, that you invite us near, that you haven't stayed far away, but that you have come close to us, Lord. Lord, thank you for the sending of your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank you that he dwelt among us.
Luke:Thank you that he separated and broke down all division. That there is nothing that separates us from you. Not our sin, not our shame, not our guilt, not the things that have been done to us. Lord, nothing, nothing can stand between you and us. Lord, thank you that you are a God who has pursued us, that has chased us down with your grace, that while we were still sinners, while we were still far off, while we didn't have it together, you came and brought us close through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Luke:Lord, I ask that you would help us to live out that reality. Help us to be your church. Lord, I pray that we would keep as the cornerstone, Christ. I pray that we would remember, that we would be reminded of how much we love one another because of how much you have loved us. Lord, remind us again afresh of the grace and love you have for us and how you have given us new life in Jesus Christ.
Luke:In Jesus' name, pray. Amen.
