"From Eden to Eden -- Exploring the Saga of Salvation History"

Part V: Passion Play In the Desert

Sermon by Pastor Dale Wolcott

January 13, 2001

(Scripture passages from New King James Version except as noted)

And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to Me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them. . . .

And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into the mount: and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights.

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering: of every man that giveth it willingly with his heart ye shall take my offering.

And this is the offering which ye shall take of them; gold, and silver, and brass, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, . . .

And let them make Me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it. [Exodus 24:12 to 25:9]

Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an High Priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens;

A minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man. . . . For, See, saith He, that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount. [Hebrews 8:1-5]

Yea, he magnified himself even to the Prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of His sanctuary was cast down. . .

Then I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot?

And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. 
[Daniel 8:11-14]

 

Sermon

Please open your Bibles with me to Exodus chapter 1. Maybe you've noticed that this is "Part 5" of our ten-part "Eden to Eden" series. Today we complete the south half of the series of banners hanging in our church sanctuary. And we're only at Exodus!

The first 2 books of the Bible lay a foundation for everything else in the Old Testament and all of the New Testament. You'll read the gospels, and Paul's letters, and Revelation, with new understanding because of what we've covered so far: "the story behind the stories" -- how that serpent got into Eden; the foundational promise of God's persistent grace, revealed at the gates of Eden. As soon as there was sin, there was a Savior! The Flood of Noah, the dramatic story of Abraham, the Father of the Israelite people -- all of that is in the first book, the book of beginnings, Genesis.

And now we come to Exodus. God had told Abraham two mutually exclusive things:

1) Through your son Isaac, your descendants are going to become a great nation; and

2) Offer your son Isaac as a burnt offering to me. Abraham believed both, and acted on them -- and Exodus begins by saying that God kept His word! Exodus 1:7, "the children of Israel...increased abundantly, multiplied, and grew exceedingly mighty" in the land of Egypt.

Is God still able to do that kind of thing today? Yes!

For example: God says I should feed my family. But He tells me not to work on Saturday; and I'm going to lose my job if I don't work on Saturday. Can I trust Him? Yes!

Another example: God says He wants me to be happy, but He turns around and tells me to give up this particular worldly activity which is a very important source of happiness for me. Can I trust Him? Yes!

Back to Exodus: chapter 1 goes on to tell how Pharaoh, the Egyptian ruler, placed the people in bondage. Note verses 13, 14: "So the Egyptians made the children of Israel serve with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage -- in mortar, in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor."

And when you come to chapter 2, notice verse 23, "Now it happened in the process of time that the king of Egypt died. Then the children of Israel groaned because of the bondage, and they cried out...." They didn't even cry to God; they just cried. They had almost forgotten that there was a God!

We live in a crying world. Kids, what would you do if your mom and dad both died, and you didn't have any relatives or neighbors who were willing to let you eat at their house? Banza, a little orphan boy in Africa, was in that very situation. In Africa there are millions of AIDS orphans -- children whose parents have both died of AIDS. (In most countries of Africa, around 20% of the adult population has the HIV virus; so far over 12 million people in Africa have died of AIDS, and it keeps getting worse.) One morning Banza stood in his neighbor lady's doorway and scuffed his foot in the dirt as he listened to her say, "Banza, you don't belong in this village any more. None of us can afford to take care of you. You need to just go down and live at the market. That's where you belong now."

Children who live in the market survive by stealing. Banza didn't want to become a thief, but it seemed that he would have no choice. And as he shuffled down the dusty path toward the marketplace, the tears in his eyes and the groaning in his heart were the same kind of crying and groaning that Exodus talks about. Banza's story is repeated a hundred times over, a thousand times over, every day, around the world. Of course this story has a happy ending -- somebody told this little guy who didn't want to become a thief about some people called Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) who had a home for kids like him, and today Banza gets three good meals a day, and goes to school, because ADRA is there. So that's good.

But back to Exodus chapter 2. Banza didn't know how to cry to God, so he just cried. That's how it was for Israel. That's how it is for much of the human race. But note the end of verse 23 and 24, "and their cry came up to God because of the bondage. So God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob."

What was the covenant? "In your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed." All the tears will be wiped away, all the groaning will be heard and answered. It was time for the next phase of God's great Plan of Restoration, this Eden to Eden story. Our banner for today's story depicts one of the great events of salvation history -- the passage through the Red Sea. God worked miracles, took a nation of slaves and told them He was making them into a nation of priests, setting them free, and He was going to use them to spread the Gospel story to the ends of the earth.

When God brought the people out, they thought they were ready to enter the promised land, but God knew better. The way God dealt with Israel in the book of Exodus became a parable, a model, an example, of His dealings with "all the families of the earth" in delivering us from spiritual slavery, and ultimately taking us to the Heavenly Canaan. Theologians call this "typology."

The New Testament calls Jesus' death on the cross His "exodus" [Luke 9:31, Greek] -- setting us free from slavery to sin. Moses is the type; Jesus is the anti-type. Israel is the type; the church is the anti-type. And Revelation [12:6] tells how the church is going to spend a long time "in the wilderness" (1260 years, each day prophetic day representing a year) just as Israel did (40 years, each day of the spies' faithless expedition pointing to a year of wandering [Num. 14:34]), and then finally we'll enter the Promised Land!

God knows we need some time in the wilderness before we're ready for the Promised Land.

So, after the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, where specifically did God take them? There was a well-traveled trade route right up the coast that could have taken them to Canaan in a couple of weeks -- the route Jacob and his sons took when they first went down into Egypt. But instead He took them south into the heart of a barren desert, to a place called Mt. Sinai.

If we were to play a word-association game, and I said "Sinai," what's the first thing that would pop into your head? "Ten Commandments." At Sinai, God gave the Ten Commandments.

What I want to share in next few minutes is very important -- if you forget everything else, this is what I hope you'll take from today: When God brought Israel out of slavery, into freedom, and took them out to Mt. Sinai, He gave them much more than the Law. He gave them the Law and the Gospel together.

Turn to Exodus 19. In chapter 19 God comes down to meet the people, just like He came down to meet Adam and Eve in Eden, and they reacted just like Adam did -- they were terrified. In chapter 20 God speaks the Ten Commandments with thunder, lightning, smoke, & trumpet blasts. And the people say to Moses, "Tell God to go away, we can't handle this."

So at the end of chapter 24, Moses goes up the mountain, and now look at chapter 25:8. God says, I really want to be close to My people. Let's figure out a way that will work: "And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them."

That's the ultimate goal of the gospel -- Revelation promises that someday "the tabernacle of God" will be "with men, and He will dwell with them." [Revelation 21:3]

So at Mt. Sinai God gives two things: first the Ten Commandments -- eternal moral law -- the foundation of His government. His law defines sin and defines righteousness. This is the basis on which people and God can dwell together. It's unchangeable, immutable, written in stone with His own finger. But He doesn't stop there. He also gives the sanctuary to show us what to do when we break the Ten Commandments; how to get back into fellowship with God; how to get back to Eden.

Go back up to Ex. 24:12, which we read in our scripture responsive reading: God says, come up on the mountain, so I can give you the tablets of stone (the Ten Commandments). Then when Moses gets up there, in chapter 25 God immediately launches into instructions for building the sanctuary. This goes on all the way through chapter 31:11. At 31:12 He finally begins talking about the Ten Commandments -- only mentions one of them, the 4th -- and then in 31:18 it simply says, "And when He had made an end of speaking with him on Mount Sinai, He gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God."

In giving the sanctuary He was giving Israel the Gospel, in types, in symbols, in an interactive audio-visual teaching / learning experience. Elder George Vandeman used to speak of the sanctuary, and the daily and yearly services that took place there, as a "Passion Play in the Desert." It was the gospel preached in advance, just as it was preached to Abraham on Mt. Moriah (where the permanent temple was later built).

Or, to say it another way, the sanctuary was "salvation in a sandbox." Some of us are old enough to remember the Sabbath School sandbox. It was a bit messy, but a great teaching tool. Much more interactive than a felt board! Professional communicators tell us that 70% of communication is non-verbal. And so God gave these spiritual babes, fresh out of the womb of their horrible slavery experience, a highly visual, tactile, touch-and-feel teaching tool that they actually built together right there in the wilderness -- salvation in a sandbox. And one of the great reasons why most Christians in the world today (Adventists and non-Adventists) don't truly understand the Gospel is that we haven't understood the sanctuary.

Everybody who told about the gospel in the New Testament used sanctuary language. Peter, Paul, John and Jesus understood the sanctuary. If we're going to understand Peter and Paul and John and Jesus, we need to understand the sanctuary. When God called the Seventh-day Adventist Church to be His final remnant, restoring the full understanding of Law and Gospel together, He gave them what we sometimes call "the sanctuary doctrine" -- a whole-cloth grasp of how the whole plan of salvation fits together, beginning to end, in the context of the Great Controversy between Christ and Satan, as revealed in what the Old Testament and New Testament say about the sanctuary on earth and the sanctuary in heaven.

Don't let anybody ever fool you into thinking that the sanctuary doctrine is outmoded, or unbiblical, or peripheral. We'll deal with this more fully on April 14, "Life in the Cosmic Courtroom." The sanctuary doesn't just teach about the cross. It teaches about the whole plan to reclaim this whole world, not only from the penalty of sin, but from the power of sin -- and not only from the power of sin but from the very presence of sin.

Let's spend just a few minutes with the handout. In the center is a diagram of the sanctuary with its furnishings. Approaching from the bottom (east) as a worshiper would, you see first the altar of sacrifice in the courtyard, then the laver or washbasin. Then the Holy Place, with its table of shewbread, candlestick, and incense altar. Then the veil or curtain enclosing the Most Holy Place, and in Most Holy Place only one item: the Ark of the Covenant, symbolizing the throne of God, and under that 'mercy seat,' the tables of stone, the Ten Commandments.

Remember, Moses not only heard God tell how to build this; he saw the heavenly original in vision. This is an earthly model of God's heavenly dwelling -- the heavenly Command center, if you will, for the forces of good in the Great Controversy. Some people argue whether or not there's really a heavenly sanctuary. It doesn't seem to me there's a whole lot to argue about. Moses says he saw it. John, in Revelation, repeatedly says he saw it. Paul speaks of it very specifically in Hebrews: "the true sanctuary which the Lord pitched and not man," and identifies it as the specific location of Jesus' ongoing work as He is still to this very moment fully engaged in completing the plan of salvation. Jesus is not up in heaven twiddling His thumbs or waiting around for some clock to strike so He can come back and get us. Jesus is a real Person with a real body in a real place doing real work.

The Bible says that place is the heavenly sanctuary. If God says it, do you believe it? It seems simple enough to me. Now let's very briefly notice the 4 columns (I hope this will stimulate you to study this more on your own).

The left side: symbols. Both the furnishings and the festivals were prophecies of "the Long Road Back to Eden." All sanctuary worship involved a movement from the courtyard, through the Holy Place, toward the Most Holy Place, the place where God's throne was represented by the Ark of the Covenant.

The right side: reality -- planetary reality and personal reality. The sanctuary symbols teach us about how the human race is ultimately going to be reunited with God, and dwell with Him forever. They also teach us about our personal path back to the throne of God: justification through the blood of the Lamb (in the courtyard - this earth where Jesus died). Sanctification through daily fellowship with Jesus, the Bread of life, the Light of the world (in the Holy Place -- "our citizenship is in heaven"). Glorification when Jesus comes again and sin is gone forever, and we are in His very presence (the Most Holy Place), returned to Eden!

Turn to Exodus 25 again. When God began instructing Moses about building the sanctuary, what was the very first item He told him to build? Note verse 10, "And they shall make an ark of acacia wood; two and a half cubits shall be its length, a cubit and a half its width, and a cubit and a half its height."

And what went into the ark? Verse 16 "the Testimony", the Ten Commandments. The whole point of the sanctuary is to teach us how to come back into God's presence, how to get back to Eden, how to get from the groaning of Egypt to the glory of Canaan, how to replace our earthly tears with heavenly joy. That means how to get back into harmony with His Law, the foundation of His government.

The Way back is Jesus, Jesus the Lamb, Jesus the water of life, Jesus the bread of life, Jesus the light of the world, Jesus the one who makes our prayers worthwhile, Jesus our High Priest, the Pioneer of our Salvation. He's more than our Guide on the path to God's throne; He is the Path to the throne of God.

But the destination -- the place where Jesus wants to take us -- the goal of everything He has done and is doing and has promised to do -- is the Most Holy Place, where a Most Holy God and His Most Holy Law can meet only with Most Holy people. And folks, we're almost there! Can you say Hallelujah?

I want to conclude with a New Testament story, and with an opportunity for you to make a response. Turn to Matthew 8, and as you're finding it the ushers are going to distribute a response card. Everyone who's old enough to read, please take a card. After we look at this last story, Mac is going to sing a song about the story, and while he's singing I want to encourage you to take the pencil from the pew in front of you and just mark your response on the card, and then hand it to the usher as you leave.

AIDS is the symbol, I suppose, of our modern world's crying and groaning. Incurable, devastating, contagious, deadly -- and usually (not always but usually) the result of somebody's sinful behavior (not necessarily the person who has it, but somebody's). The sanctuary teaches us that sin and suffering are related. The way God deals with suffering is by dealing with sin. The AIDS of Bible times was leprosy. Like AIDS, it was incurable, devastating, and contagious. It was also seen as connected with sin; leprosy was a symbol of sin. The health code that God gave Moses included quarantine for communicable diseases -- public health textbooks today point to Moses as the first known instance in history of several common-sense health practices. So leprosy was less probably less common in Israel than in other countries. But in Jesus' day the laws of Moses had been stripped of compassion and robbed of their saving significance. In first-century Jewish society, the law of the leper meant that if you had leprosy, you became an outcast. Instead of "go to the market and become a thief," it was "go to the desert and become a beggar."

Note Matthew 8:2-4, "And behold, a leper came and worshiped Him, saying, 'Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.' Then Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, 'I am willing; be cleansed.' Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus said to him, 'See that you tell no one; but go your way, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.'"

"The gift" for cleansing a healed leper, according to the sanctuary worship instructions, is prescribed in Leviticus 14. As far as I know, this New Testament story is the only place in the Bible where the law of Leviticus 14 was ever implemented. Lepers didn't get well! But the sanctuary makes provision for miracles. Jesus can work a miracle in your life too!

As we wrap up this morning, Mac, come and be ready to sing for us. I'm going to read the prescription from Moses, and then, Mac, you're going to give the commentary. And while Mac is singing, please fill out the response card. After the song we'll have the closing prayer and be dismissed. Please hand the card to the usher as you leave.

As you listen, imagine that healed leper bringing this offering to the priest: [Leviticus 14:4-7] "Then the priest shall command to take for him who is to be cleansed two living and clean birds, cedar wood, scarlet, and hyssop. And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water. As for the living bird, he shall take it, the cedar wood and the scarlet and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water. And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed from the leprosy, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose in the open field."