THE WAYS OF THE LORD

THE WAYS OF THE LORD

                Even as I agreed to teach a class this fall on the feast days of the Lord; I find myself quickly overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. Everything God does is infinite in scope. One of the problems is that the feast days are intimately tied to the Sanctuary and its services, and here again we run into the exhaustless energies and attributes of God.

                He took just two chapters in the Bible to tell us about the creation of the world, but He spent fifty chapters describing the building of the Sanctuary. One suddenly gets the idea that it was much easier for God to create the entire universe than it is to redeem lost humanity. With creation He spoke and it was done, He commanded and it stood fast. Psalms 33:9. But with mankind, He speaks and it is not done, He commands and we run. It is much more difficult to deal with rebellious men than it is to create a galaxy or turn stones into bread. Stones obey.

                One thing we often face as soon as we talk about the feasts of the Lord or even the tabernacle is the subject of legalism. There are entire churches today that would like to remove the entire Old Testament from our belief systems. But surely they do not understand God’s intentions, or the fact that everything in the Old Testament points forward to our Messiah, Jesus the Christ.

                The very word “Temple” is related to words like “Temporary” and “Template.” Both apply to the sanctuary of Moses because it was built to be temporary and moveable. But more importantly, it was designed by and infinite God to become a template for the New Covenant. The tabernacle is the perfect picture of Christ as both fully God and fully Man. He could not have qualified as our Redeemer had He not been fully God and fully Man and this is one of the things that the Sanctuary tells us with every board, every curtain and every piece of furniture. Wood speaks of His humanity, but being overlaid with gold speaks of His Divinity

                Every service in the sanctuary shows us the same progression that we see in the feast days.  We come out of the world and into the outer court of the sanctuary where we are saved by the blood of the lamb. We offer our bodies as a living sacrifice upon the altar. We are baptized as typified by the laver. We are purified and made clean. We eat the Lamb for strength for the journey, even as Jesus said, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink My blood you have no part with me in the kingdom. John 6:53-56. This is Passover.

                We clear the sins out of our lives. We renounce sin and repent and turn to God. He removes the leaven from our lives.  This is accomplished by the New Birth for as Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ now lives in me…This is the feast of unleavened bread. We die to our sinful lives and we receive His sinless life in its place. Likewise Jesus lay in the tomb as our sinless sacrifice.

                Then we are raised up with Him in the power of His resurrection. “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me.” Phil. 4:13. Then Jesus goes back to the father as the wave sheaf offering, to present Himself before the Father as the first fruit of the resurrection to bring many sons to glory. This is the Feast of first fruits and the counting of the Omar.

                Then last but not least we celebrate the feast of Pentecost. It is both the day when God brought the Law to us on Sinai and the day He wrote that Law in our hearts by His Holy Spirit. This is Pentecost.

                Likewise we have received the blood of the lamb (in the outer court) and been baptized and cleansed and that qualifies us to pass through the first veil into the Holy Place. This is the place of intimacy, of communion with the Lord. There His Word is there for us to eat and to assimilate into our hearts and lives. God’s word is lighted by the Holy Spirit and we pray before the altar of incense, offering up sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving and making our requests known to the Lord. The Holy Place represents our soul.

                So the temple is not only a template of Jesus Christ, but it is a template of us as well. The three sections of the tabernacle represent our body. (The outer court) Our soul… (The holy place) and our re-created and born again spirit. (The Most Holy place.)

                Our soul is positioned between our spirit and our body. Christ dwells in our spirit, and so our soul, positioned between spirit and flesh, becomes the battle ground in which we daily choose whether to live by our flesh or by His Spirit. If our flesh has truly been offered as a sacrifice to God, then it is dead in Christ and we are much more likely to serve the Spirit. This is where we need to live by the Spirit for as such the battle is not ours but the Lords.

                I don’t think that God ever intended for the Old Covenant to be legalistic. Yes, it is Law based, but so is America. In fact it is the rule of law that protects our freedom. Without the law there would be chaos and survival of the fittest. There is no freedom in that, in fact sin, as a transgression of the Law is actually called slavery and breaking God’s laws or even the laws of the land will eventually take a nation into slavery whether God punishes that nation or not. Slavery is simply the final fruit of evil.

                But one of the reasons that I don’t believe that God intended legalism in the Old Covenant is that Jesus opposed it at every opportunity. Legalism is a point where laws, instead of protecting our freedoms, begin to oppress us and remove our freedoms. Such are the laws of men when they decide to play God. They never do a good job of it. As long as the laws of the land conform to the Word of god they produce freedom, but as we can presently see, our freedoms are being eroded away because mankind is in open rebellion against God. So they create laws that infringe upon our freedom or they remove laws that once protected our freedom.

                We are now witnessing the approaching darkening storms of the spirit of antichrist as his global elite conspire to rule the world in the place of Christ.

                So in spite of their good intentions, Jesus opposed the Pharisees and their brand of religion for with their man made additions they had placed a burden upon the people that they could not bear.

                So again, Paul, even as he explains to us that the Law can never be our means of salvation, he then turns around and calls it the perfect law of liberty. And this is where we need to get our feast days in order. In their exodus out of Egypt Passover came first and with it the blood of the Lamb by which they were saved. Therefore we are all saved by the blood of the Lamb apart from the Law. Jesus Christ is the center and the main course of our salvation. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the First and the Last, the Author and the finisher of our faith and we can add nothing to our salvation.

                So the Law is not in any way a means of our salvation, but it does protect our freedoms by telling us how we should treat each other and how we should worship God. If He is to save us, then He can be the only One. There can be no other gods in our lives. We can’t go around making up our own gods or even our own ideas of God for He has spelled out His true nature for us in the Old Covenant and then Jesus came to show us the Father and to demonstrate how life is to be lived in the Spirit.

                And if we are to call ourselves His children, His chosen people… if we take His name in marriage, then we should act as if married, not doing things to bring dishonor to His name…not chasing after other gods or the things of this world. And finally we must find our rest in Him. How often have we sought comfort in the things of this world, in booze, or pills, or psychiatrists, or self-help books, or the philosophies of men? We are forever seeking rest when there is only One who can give us divine rest. Therefore the Sabbath served to point us to the true rest that would be found in Jesus when He said, “Come unto Me all you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me. for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls, for My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

                The last six of the commandments tell us whop we should treat each other and we can quickly see, that if we don’t treat each other this way society will collapse in short order. Our freedom is dependent upon how we treat each other.

                What both the ancient Tabernacle and the Feast days of the Lord, were telling us is that Jesus Christ is everything. He is our all in all. He is the whole ball of wax and if we truly have Him we have everything. But we also see that God’s remnant people are obedient as well because they see the wisdom in God’s ways. See Rev. 12:17 and 14:12. You can’t call Him King if you refuse to serve and obey Him as King.

                Unfortunately there are many Christians who never make it beyond the outer court. They “get born again” but they never enter into the intimacy of the Holy Place that would make them part of the Bride of Christ. They choose to live largely by the flesh rather than by the Spirit. They find their comfort and rest in the world. Like the foolish virgins, they allow the oil to run out in their lamps and they don’t know until the marriage supper of the Lamb that they did not qualify for the wedding party.

                You can interpret these events any way you want to. I am not pushing doctrine here concerning one interpretation or another of the rapture and the parable of the wise virgins. But what I am saying in principle is true and Paul bears it out over and over again. “All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” “And those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” and if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness…” Read Romans 8 and study it and pray over it and seek the Holy Spirit over it until it becomes a very part of your entire being. The Christian life as displayed in the Tabernacle service and in the Feast days of the Lord is in there for Jesus Christ is everything and it is by His Spirit that we live moment by moment.

                There is not much use in studying either the feasts or the tabernacle unless we will allow it to transform us by the Holy Spirit. It is we who must look into the innocent and fearful eyes of the lamb and realize that this innocent creature must die for my sins. He must die because I chose to serve my flesh rather than God’s Spirit. And in the enormity of this senseless loss, we must repent and turn away from that sin with repugnance… to put it behind us forever. And then we must have the faith to understand and believe that this sacrifice of the flawless Lamb of God, the true sacrifice to which all others pointed, is qualified to forgive our sin, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1John 1:9) and to present us faultless before the throne of grace (Jude 24) and to seat us with Him in heavenly places. (Ephesians 2:4-6)

                We can actually live lives of confidence before God… confidence in the blood of Jesus to forgive… (Rom. 5:9) confidence in His robe of righteousness to cover me…9luke 15:22) confidence that what He has started in me He will finish…(Phil. 1:6) confidence that His grace is sufficient for me…(2Cor. 12:9) confidence that He is able to keep me from falling and to present me faultless before His throne.(Jude 24)

                But confidence is not carelessness. We must overcome as He overcame. (Romans 12:21, Rev. 3:21) We must stand on and be guided by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (Mt. 34:4) We cannot be conformed to this world, but we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds. (Romans 12:2) for we have been predestined to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. (Romans 8:29)

                The name of the game in these last days is maturity. We need to come into spiritual maturity in Christ Jesus. WE literally need to deny self, to take up our cross and follow Him… learning to be His disciples more than mere members of His church. We are sons and daughters of the Most High God and joint heirs with Jesus. Do you think that such a position would not require training? Let us therefore enter into the training program of the Lord. Don’t complain when things go wrong… learn from them.

                In many ways we are still babies feeding on milk when we should be eating the meat of the word by now. It is time to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. It is time to prepare to meet our King.