SACRED TIMES AND SACRED SPACES
SACRED TIMES AND SACRED SPACES
“Let
them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dell among them. According to all
that I am going to show you, as the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern
of all its furniture, just so you shall construct it.” Exodus 25:8, 9
When it
comes to sacred spaces, the first one we come to in the Bible is the Sanctuary
that God instructed Moses to build. God wanted to dwell among His people and to
be their God. He could not dwell in their hearts at that time because the atoning
sacrifice of Christ had not yet been made and the blood of animals was not
adequate to draw us into the immediate presence of God.
So the
sanctuary of Moses, followed by the temple of Solomon, the tabernacle of David
and the second tabernacle that was reconstructed after the Babylonian exile;
these became the focus of God’s purpose and His presence in their midst. The
children of Israel, no matter where they were, always faced Jerusalem and the
temple when they prayed. That is where God dwelt and so their prayers were pointed
in that direction. As an example we see Daniel praying facing Jerusalem from
his Babylonian exile.
Now, as
for sacred times, we have first of all the Sabbath day. It was in fact
established as a part of creation and existed before the Law. God blessed the
day and hallowed it and He rested from His work on that day. The first thing
God did was to enter Adam and Eve into that rest. And since they were created
as the last item on the 6th day, God entered them into rest before
they had done any work.
By this
God was indicating from the very beginning that it is not by works that we
please Him, but by being temples of His Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that
bears the fruit of God in our lives and Adam and Eve were created to be containers
of God’s presence.
When
Adam and Eve sinned and chose the word of the enemy over the word of God, there
was a sudden spiritual death as the glory of God departed from them and in that
very moment they lost their Sabbath rest as God pronounced a judgment upon them
saying:
By the
sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground because
from it you were taken; for you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Gen. 3:19
So
humanity lost the rest that God had provided for them and we don’t hear about
the Sabbath again until Mount Sinai where God reminded them of that rest by
establishing a holy Sabbath day of rest.
Now,
Hebrews chapter 4 says: “For if Joshua had given them rest He would not have
spoken of another day after that. There remains therefore a Sabbath rest for
the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested
from his works as God did from His.” Hebrews 4:8-10
In
other words the Sabbath of the Law points back to a time before the fall when
Adam and Eve had complete rest because they were temples of the Holy Spirit and
it points forward to the Rest that would be restored in Christ when we rest
from our own works and trust in His work in us.
But God
gave Moses many other holy times as well. He established 7 feasts by which He
would outline the complete plan of salvation. The spring feasts would be
fulfilled by Jesus Christ at His first coming and the Fall Feasts would just as
accurately be fulfilled by Christ at His second coming.
God
gave Israel exacting details on how to observe each feast because they served
as physical patterns of spiritual events. All of them, including the animal
sacrifices, pointed forward to Jesus as the true Lamb of God that would take
away the sins of the world and reconcile us to God.
Some
say that the Law and all of these sacrifices, Sabbaths and Feast days were done
away at the cross, but that is not really true. Think about it: Everything God
does is eternal and He in turn is trying to teach us how to enter into eternal
things. But there are two kinds of people who miss the point: 1. those who try
to observe all of these Old Testament types and shadows and 2. Those who say
they were done away and no longer valid.
“So”
you may ask, “How is Rick going to get himself out of this mess? Well here is
what I believe to be the truth of the matter. Even though everything that God
does and every Law and Sabbath and feast day is eternal, yet they go through a
metamorphosis under the New Covenant. All of those Sabbaths, Feast days and
sacrifices pointed forward to the work of Christ on our behalf.
Instead
of the tabernacle of Moses, we have become the temples. Paul exclaims in 1 Cor.
3:16: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God
dwells in you?
That
Shekinah glory that once dwelt in the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle now
resides in our born again spirit. And the reason why God had to have Moses
build a tabernacle in the first place is
that from Adam and Even on, man’s spirit was dead and there was literally no
Most Holy Place within them for the Holy Spirit it dwell.
Jesus
came here to bring back what Adam and Eve had lost and that is why He is called
the last Adam. This then is the reason for the New Birth and it is the reason
for Pentecost, for the disciples were born again when they believed in Jesus
and received Him as their Savior and Lord, and then on the day of Pentecost,
Jesus poured out His Spirit upon them, thus empowering them to do the works of
Christ.
Today
there is a falling away in some parts of Christianity that no longer believe in
the New Birth and there are many who do not believe in or receive the Baptism
of the Holy Spirit and Fire that Jesus paid such a great price to bring to us.
John the Baptist said it like this:
As for
me, I baptize you in water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is
mightier than I and I am not even fit to remove His sandals; He Himself will
baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Mt. 3:11. This prophecy Jesus
fulfilled on eth day of Pentecost.
Let me
say this: You cannot do away with the Old Testament types and shadows, laws,
feast days and Sabbaths unless you have received all that they pointed forward
to. Through the New Birth and the infilling and baptism of the Holy Spirit we have
become living temples in which the fire of God dwells and He is refining and
purifying us by His work and not ours. It was Jesus who cleansed the sanctuary
when He came on the scene and it is He who cleanses our sanctuary when we
invite Him in.
This is
why I harp on Romans 8 so much. Some Christians like to stay in Romans 7 saying
“Woe is me. Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” But the solution is
in Romans 8. Here Paul tells us that the Law (Everything in the Old Testament)
is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the
Spirit and he goes on to say that: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please
God. However you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of
God dwells in you, But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does
not belong to Him.”
Tell me
something. As Christians, should not our first priority be to make sure that we
are both filled with the Holy Spirit and Baptized in the Holy Spirit as on the
day of Pentecost? And if we say that Pentecost is over with, then how are we to
bring in the last great harvest? Pentecost will come again when the church
makes Him a priority in their lives.
If we
understand in the grand scheme of things that Adam and Eve lost the Spirit of
God and that Jesus came here to restore both the Spirit of God and our capacity
to hold that Spirit within us, should we then not comprehend the magnitude of
this outpouring as central to scripture?
Jesus
said to Nicodemus: “Truly, truly I say to you unless one is born again, he
cannot see the kingdom of God.” and later He said, “Do not marvel that I said
to you, you must be born again.” This is not some side issue of the Christian
faith… why? If we are not first born
again, we have no new spirit for the Holy Spirit to dwell in. God is Spirit and
those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth and for Him to dwell
in us He must first create a new spirit within us for Him to dwell in. We must
become new creatures in Christ.
Jesus
said: “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being
shall flow rivers of living water. But this He spoke of the Spirit whom those
who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because
Jesus was not yet glorified. John 7:38,
39
There
are some who believe that the Old Testament saints were spirit filled as well.
This is not true and Jesus said so at least twice. Both here in John 7 and in
John 14 where He said to His disciples: “And I will ask the father and He will
give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of
truth whom the world cannot receive because it does not behold Him or know Him,
but you know because He ABIDES with YOU and WILL BE IN YOU. John 14:16, 17.Before
the cross of Christ, the Holy Spirit would come upon people to anoint them to
be prophets or kings, but He could not dwell inside them until Christ brought
the New Birth
Now,
here is the crux of the matter when it comes to sacred times and sacred spaces.
If a Christian thinks of the Holy Spirit as being Someone outside of us… a name
to be invoked in prayer and baptism, but not as a living and breathing part of
our very being, then they will think of the church building as a sacred space
where they go to meet God and the Sabbath as a sacred time in which to meet
Him. They may go to church, pay their dues, encounter God there on this
specific place and time, but then they may go out and live largely secular
lives when not at this sacred time and place.
But if
you are born again and filled and baptized with the Holy Spirit and you live
with the consciousness that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, then for
you there is no such thing as a secular life. For you all time has become
sacred and all space is holy because the Holy Spirit is in you wherever you go.
In this
understanding then we don’t go to church to meet God per se. We bring God to
church with us and we meet with other believers that bring God with them and
the dynamic becomes an explosion of His multiplied presence as the Holy Spirit
gives expression and life to our combined worship.
In
truth much of the church today doesn’t know what kind of dynamite we are
handling. In the early church the glory of God was so powerful that when
Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit, they fell over dead .They didn’t
know what kind of dynamite they were dealing with and a great fear fell upon
the early church. They learned rather quickly that if they wanted to operate in
the power, of the Holy Spirit, they could not be sinning at the same time.
Well,
the Holy Spirit desires to pour out the latter rain upon His people today, but
He is held back because His church has become lax and incapable of handling His
holy fire. If He really poured it out, chances are many of us would fall over
dead as well. We have not prepared ourselves to enter into His presence.
We must
now seek the Holy Spirit with all of our hearts… make Him a priority again… understand
that we cannot truly worship Yeshua except by His Spirit…allow Him once again
to be the river of living water that flows from our innermost beings…allow Him
to purify our lives… fast and pray… Ask Him to manifest His gifts in and
through us…repent of our sins and turn back to God with the same fervor with
which the early church worshipped God as their first love. We really need to
cleanse ourselves of every sense of being secular. We have been called out of
the world system. We have been called out to be a kingdom of priests and a holy
nation.
We, through
Christ, have become the sacred spaces and God has fixed a certain day saying
“Today.” Today if you hear His voice do not harden your hearts. Heb. 4:7 The
sacred times and spaces of the Old Covenant have not been done away for they
are eternal, but just as surely, they have been changed into living reality by
Jesus Christ and they are being fulfilled in us who walk not according to the
flesh, but according to the Spirit.
Think
about this in closing: Just as Yahweh brought the children of Israel out of
Egypt to give them the Law; so Jesus brought us out of the world to give us
Pentecost. And just as the Law was the very life blood of Israel, so the Holy
Spirit must be the very life blood of the church. Pentecost is not a side
issue; it is the very heart and soul of what Jesus brought to us by His death
and resurrection.
“He who
descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He
might fill all things. And He gave some as apostles and some as prophets and
some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints
for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ until we all
attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a
mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of
Christ.” Eph. 4:10-13
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