This is a transcript of the sermon linked in the title below:
How many of you had gotten the ELife and did the “Read Ahead” this week? Anybody do that? Well, I apologize in advance that you did a lot of reading, but I admire your commitment. I applaud your commitment.
So, yeah, we’re supposed to be in Exodus 37-39, but Benjamin’s not here, so I’m going to go rogue. We are in Hebrews, chapter 9, and what I would like you to do is reach into your bulletin and pull out this yellow sheet, because like verse 5 says, there’s just too much detail for us to go through. But we will refer to this sheet, and it will help you kind of get an idea of what’s going on.
So, good morning! For those of you who don’t know, my name is Amy Ickes. I moved here about five months ago – I actually had my five month anniversary last week – and when I moved here five months ago, I left my family on the other side of the country. My parents are in New Jersey, my brother and his family are in North Carolina, and I’m all the way over here in California. We’ve had a lot of phone calls with each other where we’ve just talked for hours, and hours, and hours about what’s going on in our lives.
With the beauty of technology, we’ve gotten to do some FaceTiming so we can actually see each other. When I FaceTime with my parents, I get to see the cat. Those of you who know me know that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. So it’s just, we have these opportunities to be able to talk to each other, and to even see each other. But my mom’s here this weekend. My mom’s here this weekend, so we have had the opportunity to actually be in each other’s presence. We’ve gotten to experience things together that normally, I would just call on the phone and say, “Yeah, this is what I did today; this is what it’s like”, and I can send her some pictures. So when I went to Yosemite a few weeks ago with the high schoolers, I got to take some pictures of that. Got to go to Lake Tahoe a while ago, sent some pictures of that.
But there’s something about being with her. Yesterday, we drove up and went to the summit of Mt. Diablo. It was just – the opportunity to be with her. That’s been missing. And I didn’t realize how much I’d been really missing it until she was here.
So we’ve been following the story of the Israelites out of Egypt. God has brought them out of Egypt. He’s brought them over here to the Wilderness. (If you remember, last time I preached, this (to the left) is the Wilderness, this is the Mountain over here.) So He’s brought them over here to the Wilderness. And what He has done is, in the form of this pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, He has had this physical representation of Himself among the people. They’ve been able to look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s the cloud – that’s God’s glory over there”. But there’s been this disconnect for them.
And so in Exodus 25, God says to Moses, while Moses is up on the Mountain getting the Law, God says to Moses, “Ok, here’s what I want you to do: I want you to build a Sanctuary, where My presence will dwell among you.
It was this thing that God wanted them to build so that His presence could dwell – could live – among them. So no longer was His presence going to be this pillar of cloud and pillar of fire, kind of hovering over the Mountain. He was actually going to come down into their camp to be with them. And so God shows Moses these plans. These plans that are a representation of what Heaven is like. So Moses gets to see these holy, heavenly blueprints. And so if you go back and read in Chapter 25, God’s like, “Ok, I’ve been with you. Now I really want to be with you. I’m going to move in with you.”
So God asked him to build this Tabernacle. Those of you who did the Read Ahead know the incredible detail to which Moses kept the records. You’ve got this [diagram of the Tabernacle]. We’re going to save you some math – that is a huge thing for those of us who don’t math.
The writer of Hebrews decided – if you have read the book of Hebrews, you know the whole idea of Hebrews is that the writer is setting up this contrast between the Old Covenant, which is the Old Testament, these laws that Moses had, this Tabernacle they went to, and the New Covenant, and that’s where we live. We live on the other side of history from the cross. And it sets up this New Covenant. So what we’re going to see this morning is this contrast in the Tabernacle itself between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
We’ll start with verse 5 in Hebrews 9, and again, verse 5 is this great, great statement of, “It is not possible to speak about these things in great detail right now”. So the first thing you’ll see if you [look at the diagram of the Tabernacle] is the bronze altar. The bronze altar was – the people would come into that courtyard you see there – that was the first thing they would come to. And the bronze altar is where they would bring their lamb or their bull or their pigeons, or whatever it was they were bringing as their sacrifice for their sin.
What they would do is they would bring it over and the priest would come out and meet them, and the person would confess what their sin was. And they would lay their hands on the head of the animal. And then the priest would slaughter it and drain the blood and burn the animal on this altar. And as the smoke and the smell went up to God – so God likes BBQ – as the smoke and the smell goes up to God, He smells it and this is the atoning sacrifice for that person’s sin.
The problem with this system is that every time they sinned, they had to go do it again. So the people would come in, they would walk into the courtyard – they had the big altar there – the altar was seven feet by seven feet, so we’re talking, this thing’s big. So they would walk in and they would go through this sacrifice ritual. So then after that, the priest who was on duty would move over to where you see it says “brazen laver”. That’s a fancy word for a really shiny sink. So they would go over – the priest would go over – and the priest would wash his hands and wash his feet, and kind of prepare himself for the next step.
So the next step then is the priest goes into the actual Tabernacle. The Tabernacle itself is the tent. The courtyard just encircled the Tabernacle to keep people and animals from accidentally going in there. You know, sometimes your small children go running off, this was to keep your small children from running off into this sacred space.
So the priest would then go into the first room of the Tabernacle, and our passage talks about, this is the Holy Place. This first room in the Tabernacle, it has a lamp stand. This is the only source of light in the Tabernacle. So the priest would go in and he would trim the lamps and make sure it was filled with oil because this lamp had to keep burning constantly because it was this symbol of God’s presence with them – the light that this room had.
Then he would go across the room to this table that was sitting there. And on this table are loaves of bread – twelve loaves of bread. The twelve loaves represent the twelve tribes of Israel, and it’s the bread of God’s presence. Because if you remember, in the Wilderness, what is God feeding them with? Manna, right. So God is feeding them with this bread from Heaven and then they’ve got this bread of His presence in the Tabernacle – this reminder that He’s always going to provide for them.
Then the priest would move to a much smaller altar, about the size of this podium. And on this altar, he would put incense. So there’s this very special blend of spices that God said, “this is what I want you to offer Me”. And so he would constantly burn that on this altar, and as that smoke went up, that was the representation of the people’s prayers going up to God.
So this is stuff that would happen every single day: all day long, into the night, people constantly bringing their sacrifices for their sin. There were other offerings they could bring as well, but we’re really just going to look at the sacrifice for sin today. But they would constantly be doing this. This was an everyday thing – day after day after day after day after day.
Now once a year, if you look in verse 7, it says, “but the high priest alone enters the second room”. And he only does that once a year. So this second room – that’s the back part in the diagram – all that’s in there is the Ark of the Covenant, covered by what’s call the Mercy Seat.
The Ark of the Covenant is this big, gold box, and the Law, the tablets – you know, when you imagine Moses and the Ten Commandments, those tablets – those tablets are in this box. Those tablets represent the covenant that God had with His people, and so this place behind this thick veil, that’s all that was in there, just this box.
And then on top of the box is what’s called the Mercy Seat, and it was this gold surface, and it had these two cherubim coming up. This spot, between the wings of the two cherubim, is where the cloud of God’s glory rested and dwelt among them. And so the high priest could only go back behind that curtain once a year. And when he went back behind that curtain – before he went back – he would have to do a sacrifice. He would have special clothing that he had to wear.
A little morbid fun fact for you: The special clothing had bells along the bottom of it, so that as the bells rang – again it was partly symbolic of the prayers of the people – but it was also for the priests who were not in the room. If the bells stopped ringing, chances were pretty good that something that priest had done had not pleased God, and that God had smote him – to use a great King James Version word – and he had died. Actually, when he would go in, they would tie a rope around his ankle so they could pull him back out. So, great, great system, right?
So the high priest would go in behind this curtain, this veil, once a year. And what does verse 7 say? Why did he have to do this? It says, “for the sins the people had committed in ignorance”. So this sacrificial system, we’ve got this altar over here that the people would come to day after day after day after day after day to sacrifice for the sin that they knew they had committed. But once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would go back, and he would take blood from a sacrifice to the Ark of the Covenant, to the Mercy Seat and he would sprinkle it on the Mercy Seat. And this was the sacrifice for those sins that people didn’t realize they had committed. The things that somehow slipped through the cracks in this system.
The hope was that, for another year, God would preserve them and give them life. The hope was that if this high priest did everything exactly right, he would be able to come out alive, and the people would be okay with God for another year. Aren’t we glad we don’t have to do that? That’s a lot!
So the end result of all of this, if we look at verses 9 and 10, is that the people lived in fear of God – and not like, you know we talk about “the fear of God”, we’re talking about reverence for God, we’re talking about when we come to worship Him, we know who He is. They lived in terror of God. This was not a great relationship. They didn’t know Him well, still, after all this time. And they’re used to the gods of Egypt where the priests would really just be out to get whatever they could from the people. So this is just a whole different thing for them.
So these people are living with this fear. And the other problem is – if you look at the end of verse 9 – this system of sacrifice, this system of making sure they’re doing everything right, the writer of Hebrews says this: “This is a symbol of the present time, during which gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the worshiper’s conscience”. So even if they’re doing all of these things right, they’re still living with this guilt. They’re still living with this fear.
They have the very presence of God among them, but they’re still living with this fear, this dread that they’re at some point going to do something so wrong, that God is not going to be able to forgive them. God is just going to say, “You know what? We’re done”. What we see here is that the effects of the Old Testament sacrifices were temporary, and they only lasted until the next sin. So even if someone came and did this sacrifice, they’d have to come back again tomorrow. It was this temporary thing.
So the high priest goes back behind this curtain once a year, and what’s interesting is that he is the only person that whole year who gets to see the Holy of Holies. The common people, you and I, the ones who aren’t priests at all, pretty much we get to see the altar, and that’s it. The other priests would at least get to be in the Holy Place, and they’d get to see some of that stuff, but they wouldn’t get to see the Holy of Holies. So the common people are separated from God by layers of priests and rituals and fabric. There’s this permanent separation for them. They can really only get so close.
But what are the first two words of verse 11? “But Christ.” These words change everything. John chapter 1 tells us that Christ is God with us. He is Emmanuel. Emmanuel means “God with us”. That’s one of Jesus’ names. He is Emmanuel, in the flesh, not in a tent. Jesus came. He lived, He breathed, He walked among us. And then, He gave Himself up as the last sacrifice that would ever need to be made for sin.
The Bible tells us in Matthew 27, the moment Jesus died on the cross – it literally says, the moment He “gave up His spirit”, which tells us that the moment Jesus died, that was His decision. Nobody took His life from Him. He gave His life up for us. The moment He did that, the veil between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place – between the place where the priest could go and the place where they could only go that once a year – Matthew 27 says that the veil tore from top to bottom.
Those of you who have worked with fabric, you know how easily fabric can tear if you can get it going. But what you need to understand about this veil is that this veil was fifteen feet high by fifteen feet wide. It did not have a split in it. So when the high priest would go in, he actually had to go in on the side, he couldn’t go in in the middle. He kind of snuck in the side. So this veil is fifteen feet high, it’s fifteen feet wide, and it’s like a tapestry. It’s like these rugs. So if somebody were to come up here and try to tear one of these rugs up here, how do you think that would go? Probably not well, right?
But Scripture says that the moment Jesus died, that veil tore from the top to the bottom. And in that moment, the layers of priests, and ritual, and fabric were gone. And in that moment, God was dwelling among His people in physical form, and He made the last sacrifice that would ever need to be made.
Verses 13 and 14, it says that the blood of the animal sacrifices, it was good. It did its job. It did what God required when people sinned. It did it to cover one person’s sin. But the blood of Jesus is sufficient to cover every sin of every person who has ever lived, past, present, or future. Everything. There is not a single person in the world who is not covered by the blood of Jesus. There is not a single person in the world whose sin cannot be forgiven because of the blood of Jesus. There’s no sin that you have committed that Jesus’ blood can’t cover. There’s no sin that you will commit tomorrow that Jesus’ blood can’t cover. He died once, for all, and once for all time.
And this is the good news of the Gospel. This is the news that we as the Church get to take out these doors and bring to people, and say, “you are so burdened, and you don’t even know why. But this burden that you’re carrying is called ‘sin’. This burden that you’re carrying is fear of this God who you are so afraid of.” You know, we hear people say, “I can’t go to church. If I go to church, I’ll get struck by lightning”. It’s a joke, but it’s that fear that there’s something about them that Jesus can’t take care of. But we know the truth. We know the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: That His blood covers once, for all.
So let’s skip down to verses 21 to 23. Twenty-one says this, “In the same way, he sprinkled the Tabernacle [‘he’ being the priest], he sprinkled the Tabernacle and all the articles of worship with blood”. So he’s taking the blood of the sacrifice, and he’s sprinkling it on the altar itself. He’s sprinkling it on the altar of incense. And again, once a year, he takes the blood and sprinkles it on the Mercy Seat over the Ark of the Covenant. So he is sprinkling the Tabernacle itself and all the articles with blood, “according to the Law, almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. Therefore, it was necessary for the copies of the things themselves to be purified with better sacrifices than these”.
So again, what the writer of Hebrews is talking about is this idea that the Tabernacle is a copy of something that is happening in Heaven. So these holy blueprints that God gave Moses. It’s this model of what Heaven is like. Because you remember, back in the Garden of Eden, God literally, physically walked with Adam and Eve in the evening, in the cool of the day. When Adam and Eve sinned and God comes looking for them, it’s that moment. He’s had this habit of coming down and walking with them, and talking with them, and being in their presence, because at that moment, sin had not entered the world, and He could be with them.
But the moment sin entered the world, the holy God had to separate Himself from sinful people. So this is, again, this system these people have been living in ever since.
So Exodus 25, God says to Moses, verses 8 and 9, “they’re going to make a Sanctuary for Me that I may dwell among them. And you must make it according to all that I show you, the pattern of the Tabernacle, as well as the pattern of its furnishings”. So it’s this unworldly thing. If you read, I love Ezekiel, and Daniel, and Revelation, where these writers are trying to describe the visions of Heaven that they see. And they stumble over their words. They say things like, “Well, it’s like this, but not really. Um, it’s kind of like this…Well, you know that thing you know? That tree you know? Well, it’s like that, but not really.” And they stumble over their words, trying to describe what God is allowing them to see in Heaven – things that our brains cannot even begin to fathom.
So for the Israelites building this Tabernacle, and you read the description and it’s got cherubim woven into the fabric. It’s got cherubim over the Mercy Seat. These angels – if you read in Revelation – angels who surround God’s throne at all times. And all they do, while they’re surrounding God’s throne, is just worship Him. That is their only job. They constantly, day and night, cry out “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty” over and over and over and over again. And they never tire of doing that, because these angels are in the presence of God. And there’s this future that we have when Christ comes back and we get to go to Heaven, that we will be in the presence of God, and like these angels, we will be worshipping day and night. And we are never going to get tired of that, because God is so much more than we can imagine.
So we see back in Hebrews, verse 24, it says this: “For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with hands - only a model of the true one - but into Heaven itself so that He might now appear in the presence of God for us”. And verse 35: “He did this, not to offer Himself many times as the High Priest enters the Sanctuary yearly with the blood of another, otherwise He would have had to suffer many times since the foundation of the world. But now, He has appeared one time, at the end of the ages, for the removal of sin by the sacrifice of Himself”.
Christ died once, and it was enough. We are not bound by a system of sacrifices and rituals like the Israelites were. We don’t need a High Priest – or really any priest – to offer prayers on our behalf. We don’t need to go a priest and confess our sin and have them pray for us. We don’t need to do penance when we sin. When we sin, all we have to do is turn to God and say, “God, I messed up. And I’m sorry. God, I accept the forgiveness I have through Christ.”
And then, we know, because Psalm 103 – I love Psalm 103 – Psalm 103 tells us that when we bring our sin to God, He removes it as far as the East is from the West. I have no idea if this is East and West, but we’re just going to go with it. The idea being, if you start traveling East around the world, you will never start going West.
If you traveled North and South, once you got to the North Pole, you’d start going South again. East and West doesn’t work like that. They never meet. And so what the psalmist is saying in Psalm 103 is that when we confess our sin, God takes it so far away from us, that it never meets up with us again. And as far as He’s concerned, we never did it. It’s done. It’s over. Because when He looks at us, He sees the righteousness of Christ on us, because of the sacrifice that Christ made for us
So yeah, we don’t have to go through this system of sacrifices all the time. But there is something to be said for regular confession. Regular confession, that time when maybe we just sit quietly for a minute and say, “Holy Spirit, is there anything in my life that maybe isn’t right?” Or that time when we say something to a coworker that we really should not have said. You get that catch in your spirit. “God, I’m sorry. I should not have said that. Thank you for Your forgiveness.” That regular time of confession is good. What is not there for is for us to wallow in guilt and shame.
We don’t go and say to God, “God, I’m such a horrible person! I just keep messing up. I keep doing this, and I said that to my kid, and I did this, and it’s just, ugh, I’m so…” That’s not what that confession time is for. God gives us that time to free us from sin and shame. That regular confession time is that time for us to go back to the Holy Spirit and say, “You know what? You convicted me of this sin, and I’m sorry for it. Will You, in Your power living in me, help me stop, or help me change that attitude”, or whatever it is for you. Regular confession is simply a time for us to acknowledge that we need Jesus.
Regular confession does something else: it alerts us to habits in our life. For me what this ends up looking like is, if I’m constantly going back to God and saying, “God, I let my pride get to me again…” Again. That’s that key word. Because what that tells me is that this is starting to become a habit in my life. Ok, Holy Spirit, let’s work on this.
So confession gives us this opportunity to be freed from the weight of sin that Satan wants to keep piling on us. And it also alerts us to those times when maybe something we’re doing is becoming a habit for us. So on our own, even after Christ has come, we’re still going to run headlong into sin, because we will still want to do what feels good in the moment, we still have our humanness to us. But keeping short accounts with God keeps our conscience clear and helps us grow in our relationship with Him.
Here’s the thing about confession: Confession is not about sin prevention. Confession is about heart transformation.
So maybe this morning, you feel like an Israelite or a priest and you feel like you have to keep doing the same things over and over and over again, hoping that God will forgive you. The good news for you is that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was once, for all.
Maybe for you, you’re kind of struggling with the idea that, I know I learned in Sunday School that Jesus died on the cross for my sin, but I don’t know what it feels like to be forgiven. I don’t know what it’s like to not have this constant guilt. When I was growing up, I had a Sunday School teacher who told us that if we had sin in our life, God would not hear our prayers. And so what that triggered for me was this obsessive, constantly, “God, did I do anything wrong today? Maybe, did I say that wrong?” And it was just this constant within me, “Well, if I want to pray, I’ve got to make sure I confess everything first. I’ve got to make sure there’s absolutely nothing because I want God to hear my prayers”.
That’s not what this is about. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we have full, unrestricted access to God’s presence. There is nothing that stands between us. How much guilt and shame could you offload from your own heart and mind if you knew you could be completely forgiven for everything you have done in the past, everything that you have done that falls short of God’s standard for you? Everything that falls short of your own standard for you?
If you have been carrying this guilt and shame through your life, today can be the day that you drop it. Today can be the day that you bring it to the cross, leave it there, and never pick it up again. Today can be the day that you get out from under the weight of sin that Satan has been trying to pile on you. This guilt and shame that you have.
Guilt and shame are never from God. Conviction is from God. And the difference is that conviction leads us to repentance, and leads us to change something that we’re doing. Guilt and shame just feels heavy and it weighs us down. That is not from God. If you are feeling guilt and shame, that is your enemy trying to beat you down. But if you’re feeling a stirring in your spirit about something, and you’re feeling like, “you know what? Yeah, that is in my life. I do need to work on that”, that’s conviction. That’s the Holy Spirit. And the difference is, conviction leads to freedom. It leads to this weightlessness of knowing that you have been forgiven
If you’ve found yourself confessing the same sin over and over and over again, feeling like you will never get past it, like it has a strangle hold on you, maybe as you listened today, the Holy Spirit’s nudging you. Maybe there’s some sort of habitual sin in your life. For you it might be bitterness, or anger, or a sense of entitlement, or dishonesty or any kind of…usually it’s an inward kind of thing. Today can be the day you drop that at the foot of the cross.
If this is that day for you – if you are ready to be free from sin – if you are ready to be done with the process of constantly feeling like you have to do penance, or feeling like you have to make sure you are so perfectly clean before you approach God or before you come to church. If you’ve been living with the fear that maybe your relationship with God isn’t good, today can be the day that changes for you.
I’m going to ask the band to come up, and as they come up, we’re going to play a video, and they’re going to sing a bit. I want us to take this time to just sit with the Holy Spirit. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you examine yourself. Is there a habitual sin in your life? Is there a place, something in you, that you have not been able to fully accept the forgiveness that Christ has offered you? And while the band is playing, while we’re showing this video, this space here is open for you. If you want to come up, if you want to come up and symbolically lay whatever it is at the foot of the cross, I will be up here. I would be happy to pray with you.
If you’re still not sure about all of this. If you’re still thinking, “yeah, but I don’t know if this really applies to me”, my contact information is [here]. Would you please reach out to me this week? I would love to talk to you about this.
And if you’ve already accepted Christ’s forgiveness, then let this be a time when of just worship. Let this be a time when you let yourself rejoice in the freedom that you have claimed in Christ. Let this be a day that changes everything for you. Because Christ came, and He changed everything.
Let’s pray. The Book of Common Prayer says this:
“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against You, in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. We are truly sorry, and we humbly repent. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight in Your will, and walk in Your ways, to the glory of Your name. Amen.”
