Hebrews Lesson 109
NKJ Psalm 119:105 Your word is a lamp to my
feet And a light to my path.
Well, tonight we come to a
new chapter in Hebrews. We begin
Hebrews chapter 8. As we get into this
new chapter (and we’ve been in this section in Hebrews for several months now),
we’ve gone through various different studies as we looked at Melchizedek. We’ve looked at giving. We’ve looked at the doctrines related to eternal
security and we just want to remind everyone of where so we are so we don’t
lose the forest for the trees. So often
that is the problem…is that we just want to take out the posthole digger on a
verse and burrow down on a verb or a noun or some different details within the
text that when we get done with that we need to sort of get back up, get in our
airplane, fly over the passage and get that overall view.
There are some really interesting
things that we are about to go through.
In chapter 8 they get introduced.
In chapters 9 and 10 they get developed.
They are very important for understanding the challenge that comes
beginning in chapter 10 where we come to the exhortation section of this third
or fourth point that we have here in Hebrews.
Actually we are in the 4th
section that began back in chapter 7. Chapter
7 (just to go back a little bit) began with a discussion about Melchizedek in
the middle of which he gets very upset with them. Actually that is the recovery. He gets upset with them in 6. He comes back to the topic of Melchizedek to develop
the idea of being a priest. So chapter 7
deals with this whole issue of the Melchizedekean priesthood and why it is unique
and why it’s important for us as believers to have a distinct priesthood from
the Old Testament priesthood. That
brought into play an understanding that God governs or administers history in
different ways in different ages and the framework for understanding that is His
revelation. What changes things from one
dispensation to another (and that word dispensation comes from the Greek oikonomos or oikonomia. This word has the idea of administration.)
is how God is overseeing human history which tells us that human history isn’t
haphazard. It’s not just a collection of
random events that occur from things that people do, but that there are certain
characteristics of each age that are there for a purpose.
We have to say, “Why is it
this way under the Mosaic Law? Why did
we have in the Old Testament angels that seem to be visible at some times more
than other times?”
You have a patriarchal
priesthood in the first part of Genesis.
It actually extends up until you get a different kind of priesthood developed
under the Mosaic Law. What’s going on
with this priesthood? What are the
characteristics of the patriarch priesthood versus the Levitical priesthood?
Then you also have this other
priesthood that shows up which is the Melchizedekean priesthood, the royal
priesthood of Melchizedek which is very cryptic in the Old Testament. So you have this quick little vignette in
Genesis 15 where we are introduced to him.
It is left to the writer of Hebrews to go back and under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit explain the significance of this event in the Old Testament.
What we see in all of this is
that the Bible all comes from the mind of God. This is the most important fundamental thing
that we have to understand is that God has revealed the Word of God. He has revealed the Scripture so that there
is a unity and a coherence in all 66 books.
You have 40+ authors in the Scripture, but they don’t contradict each
other. You may have one author in one generation
giving information that helps elucidate something that was given maybe 500 or
1,000 or even 2,000 years earlier.
So we have to approach the
Scripture from the presupposition that it’s not a contradiction, from the
presupposition that God actually knows what He is doing in revealing things and
from the presupposition that every word is inspired by God so that if God the
Holy Spirit chooses this synonym instead of that synonym that there is more
than likely a reason for it. It’s not
haphazard. It is not necessarily the style
or personality of the writer. If we
don’t start from that kind of a presupposition, that kind of assumption, we
start to read the Bible, and then we could easily go off the charts and get
involved in wrong thinking. So we
constantly have to be brought back to understand a lot of things and then
understand all these things, the boundaries that God set within His Word.
We also have rather cryptic statements
(or undeveloped statements let’s say) where something is alluded to, something
is said and we think, “Well, it could mean this but I’m really sure.”
We have wait until we get a
little more data from revelation to understand what it means. So there are these things that show up as we
go through Scripture here and there. One
of those is this idea of tabernacle and temple that is introduced in the first
part of chapter 8. We go back to the Old
Testament and we see the tabernacle of course is first introduced to us in the
Old Testament.
The word that is translated
tabernacle that we will run into in verse 2 is the Greek word skene. This
means a habitation, a dwelling place. It’s
etymology in Greek is that it was used originally to refer to tents or what we
would call a lean-to, a temporary dwelling place. But the Greek word skene
didn’t originate with the Greeks. It
shows a heavy Semitic influence which indicates that there is some element of
Jewish thought or influence (Old Testament influence) behind that word because
the Hebrew word for the tabernacle which also means a habitation or a dwelling
place is the word mishkan. That SHK are your two consonants that form
the root of the Greek word as well. Skene comes from mishkan.
It shows that the Bible has a
priority. It comes before these other
languages.
I think an argument can be
made that Hebrew or a proto-Hebrew was the language in the Garden of Eden. Otherwise the names like Adam from adamah (the ground), havah
Eve for life - these words would not have meaning. These names would not have the meanings they
have if that wasn’t the language being spoken at the time.
Once again if you say
something like that you have just violated everything you were taught in
history, everything that you have been taught in science about evolution, about
the development of cultures and everything else. So what the Bible challenges us to do is to
go back and rethink almost everything we have ever learned in terms of a divine
viewpoint framework. In a developed framework
you not only have to do detailed exegesis so that you make sure that the
details are right, but you also have to come back up and be able to synthesize
this and put things together.
This is one of the things
that I have become irritated over in recent decades because the trend that has
occurred among some scholars and among evangelicals in hermeneutics is to never
correlate Scripture with Scripture. What
you run into is that for example you get into Genesis 3 and you are introduced to
this serpent - nahash. You are not told who it is in Genesis 3.
So there are a lot of people
today who teach as a principle of hermeneutics that “Well, that’s just the
serpent. You can’t say it’s Satan because
the original readers of Genesis would not have understood that it was Satan. You
don’t have an occurrence of the word shatan in
the Pentateuch. So how can you say that
it’s Satan? You can’t read that into
that period of history.”
That of course…I think a
number of principles one of which what is called the analogy of Scripture which
is comparing Scripture with Scripture. God
makes it clear down through history that this is with subsequent revelation because
shatan means adversary. That’s more of a title of the fallen angel than
it is a proper name.
The first personage we see
after the creation of Adam and Eve is this adversary to God that shows up in
the garden. He counters God at every
point. He functions as an adversary. If
it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck; it’s a duck. Just because it doesn’t come out and say it’s
a duck doesn’t mean its there. It just
doesn’t suit the purpose of God in the progress of revelation to say these
things.
Then when you come to
revelation, in Revelation 12, God identifies the dragon, the serpent of old –
Satan.
It’s sort like God is thumping
these people on the head and saying, “Okay, if you didn’t get the symbolism up
to this point, now that we are at the end of the Bible if you weren’t sharp
enough to understand this let me tell you what the symbols are and who these
individuals are that you should have figured it out all along.”
But we have this mentality
today and it really is a very subtle attack on being able to understand
anything of a macro-thematic sense in the Scriptures.
What happens is these same
people who are coming along for the most part who say, “You can’t identify the
serpent in Genesis 3 as Satan”, is they are also the same ones who are finding reasons
to say that Isaiah 14:12-14 doesn’t refer to the fall of Lucifer and that
Ezekiel 28:12f doesn’t refer to the fall of Satan either. These passages are simply borrowed elements
from various Canaanite or Phoenician myths.
So now you are left without
any ultimate origin of evil. You don’t know where sin came from in the universe. You end up so abridging your understanding of
the impact of Scripture on history and the total framework that God gives us
that you end up being forced into a position where all you think is that the
Bible just addresses “spiritual things”.
It just talks about sin, how to get saved and your spiritual life. What it does is you lose the idea that there
is this interconnectedness in the Scriptures and that there is this correlation
of ideas where one passage complements and helps to interpret another passage and
that all of these pieces really do fit
together. What we have to do is use our
brains to start thinking about these things and to realize that God hasn’t
connected all the dots, but He put all the dots there so that we would connect
them. What you have today is a lot of
folks, a lot of scholars who don’t want to connect the dots.
“If God didn’t connect the
dots, we shouldn’t connect the dots.”
Well, do you believe in the
trinity? See, that is a dot-connected
doctrine. You can think more precisely and
more accurately about the trinity than the Apostle Paul did. Did you know that? See, a lot of people get confused with
that.
“Look at everything the
Apostle Paul knew. Look at what he
wrote.”
Yeah, but he didn’t have the
word trinity. You have the word
trinity. So therefore you can think
because you have a precise vocabulary that was developed in the post-biblical
period based on what the Scripture teaches.
You have vocabulary that allows you to think more precisely about what
Paul wrote than even what Paul had. That
is why we talk about the progress of doctrine.
We are talking about the progress of understanding doctrine which is the
foundation for what I am going to be teaching on Monday nights in the spring
when I teach the History of Doctrine course.
It is how to understand how believers in the Church Age have come to
refine and understand what the Scripture teaches about various categories of doctrine
all the way up to the present. So we
have to look at it in terms of framework.
It’s not wrong to move beyond
the details of Scripture as long as you don’t slip your anchor. See that is what happens with a lot of
folks. They will come along and they
will develop what seems like a logical conclusion from a particular passage,
but then they’ll start trying to impose that on other things. It really doesn’t fit, but now they have a
nice tight system of theology that in and of itself like High Calvinism is logically
coherent, but when you look at the passages that are cited as proof texts for
the elements, those passages don’t always say that. So you have to constantly go back and forth
between the overall synthesis and universal principles that you derive from
Scripture to make sure that you can ultimately trace everything back to what is
said in the Scripture.
So one of these things that pop
up is this whole concept of skene which means
dwelling for God’s dwelling among his people and upon the earth. Just think with me through the Bible for a
minute. When is the first time we see God
having any sort of presence and dwelling on the earth? Pre-Adam.
We see according to my view and the view of many Ezekiel talks about the
Then there is this
restoration of the planet. Then we see
God coming and walking regularly in the garden that is east of
We come to Genesis 6:3 and
God says He is tired of abiding with man.
Now if you have a King James based translation is says:
KJV Genesis 6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall
not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days
shall be an hundred and twenty years.
But the Hebrew word is only used
one time in Hebrew literature. They
weren’t sure in 1611 how to translate that Hebrew word. So when they come up into the 19th
century and the 20th century, they start finding documents and parchments
with Semitic languages like Ugaritic and up in
So what God is saying is, “I
don’t want My Spirit to continue to abide with man because the thoughts of his
heart are evil continually.”
So God has a presence on the
earth that is now going to depart the earth which is why you don’t have the
delegation of judicial authority to man until after the Noahic Flood when you
get the Noahic Covenant and the delegation of judicial authority in terms of
capital punishment. Once you get that,
that lays a theological foundation for government. Man is responsible to govern his affairs and
he is responsible to adjudicate in the case of crime.
So you go from Genesis 6 and
now God is no longer on the planet, He shows up now and then with Abraham, with
Isaac, and with Jacob. Then you come
into the period of the Exodus and He is going to have a new dwelling place set
up called the Tabernacle. The tabernacle
means a dwelling place. It’s a temporary
dwelling place that preceded the temple that Solomon built.
God’s glory resides there in
what’s called the Shekinah glory. What
was that word I just used? Shekinah…Do
you hear skene-shekinah-mishkan? See, those are all cognates. Shekinah is not found anywhere in the Old
Testament in Hebrew by the way. It was a
word the rabbis developed in the intertestamental period to describe the
dwelling of God in the tabernacle in the Old Testament.
Of course when the
Babylonians were going to destroy the
Then Jesus comes back and you
have God dwelling among men. Then Jesus ascends
to heaven and 10 days later the Holy Spirit comes down and the body of every
believer becomes a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit who makes the body of the
believer a temple for the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit and the Son of God
and the Father. So, all three members of
the trinity inhabit every single believer.
Then there will be a removal
of that habitation to heaven. But there
is something else going on. That is that
these patterns of habitation on earth (the physical patterns, the tabernacle
and the
“This is the main thing I’ve
been saying.”
It’s not just summarizing
what he said in chapter 6, he is summarizing what he is about to say (I said
chapter 6. I kept saying that tonight. It is chapter 7.) He is not summarizing what he said in chapter
7; he is drawing a basic point from what he said in chapter 7 that becomes the
foundation for the next stage in his argument.
He says because we have a
high priest who is in heaven who is serving at the heavenly perfect temple. There must be this covenant structure. What He is doing in heaven must have some
relationship to a legal foundation. It
doesn’t just happen. God doesn’t do
things apart from law. He has (I don’t
care for the word so much but it is one that has been used historically in
theology) God condescends to His creature to limit the way He interacts with His
creature according to creaturely standards so the creature can understand what He
is doing. So God willingly limits His interaction
with man and defines His interaction with man in terms of these covenants, these
contracts.
What happens when Jesus
ascends to heaven and He is at the right hand of the Father and He is serving
as our high priest and He is serving in the heavenly temple which is the
archetype of the earthly tabernacle and temple that all of this is founded on what
must be a superior covenant because the earthly temple was temporary. It was based on a temporary earthly covenant,
the Mosaic covenant. So he brings in the whole idea of this new covenant which supplants
the old covenant. The very terminology “old”
and “new” tells you that the old covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, was never
intended to be permanent. It was never
to have any kind of longevity. It was designed
for a purpose. It had pedagogical
purpose. It had legal purposes in terms
of providing a government for
So once he lays these points
in chapter 8 which is a short chapter, 13 verses, we come to chapter 9 where he
starts to connect things to the furniture in the tabernacle. If you look down here on the table, we have a
model of the tabernacle. It’s show and
tell time. This will be up here most of
the time. We also have some other
articles of furniture for the tabernacle that we picked up for teaching in prep
school. I’ll be bringing those out as we
go through chapter 9 to talk about each of these things in the tabernacle relates
to the person and work of Jesus Christ. These
things all connect together.
So the writer of Hebrews rehearses
the elements of the earthly tabernacle in the first part of chapter 9 and then
beginning of verse 6 he starts to talk about the role of the priest in the tabernacle
and then moves in verse 11 to the role of Christ as our High Priest in the
heavenly tabernacle and the importance of that in relationship to the
sacrifice. The sacrifices that you had
in the old covenant were temporary. They
weren’t permanent. They could not
resolve the problem. They were only a
temporary fix in contrast to Christ’s death which is once, for all. That comes across when he gets down to verse
16 down to 22. Then he wraps it up in
the last part of the chapter. This will
then set the stage eventually for the warning and exhortation which begin in
chapter 10 verses 19 to 39. All of this
is ultimately based on the fact that Christ had to ascend to heaven to be at
the Father’s right hand to serve and operate as a high priest because of the
implications of this for the spiritual life of the believer today.
So when we look at this broad
panorama of these themes, I was going through this today and I started making
some connections. One of the connections
I want to work through initially is just this idea of tabernacle…not what we
have talked about already in terms of the dwelling of God in the garden and
before the flood in the tabernacle, but the idea of temple and the use of the
word skene and this concept of a heavenly
prototype or archetype for the tabernacle.
One of the things we note when we get into verse 2 is that this
tabernacle in heaven is called a true tabernacle. The Greek word there alethenes
has the idea that this is the archetype – this is the true, the perfect, the ideal standard by which anything
that is made on earth is simply a copy.
It is a limited copy of this perfect prototype that’s in heaven. We are told that God pitched it and not
man. The word, the verb that is used in
the Greek for God pitching it is the same verb that’s used in Exodus 33:7 of
Moses pitching the tent (the tabernacle) in the Old Testament. So he is definitely drawing this comparison
and contrast between the two.
So we look at some of these
passages like Hebrews 9:11:
NKJ Hebrews
Once again this drives us into
the future – the good things to come.
There is this anticipation. If
you think with me back to when we first started Hebrews and we looked at a number
of the things in the beginning (two or three years ago) that the writer of
Hebrews is always focused on the future.
One of the main ideas in Hebrews is to challenge believers to not grow
complacent in their spiritual life today because there is ultimate
accountability. On the other side of the
accountability there is position and privilege in the kingdom, ruling and
reigning with Jesus Christ. So we need
to live today in the light of eternity. That is what we see in
So His high priestly ministry
today is related in some way to what’s going to happen in the future for
believers. Now we have to hold on to
that idea. There is going to be some
connections between that and some of the things we see in Revelation. All these things start to interconnect.
with the
greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this
creation.
That word for perfect is
complete. It is from telios,
the same word we have run into again and again in Hebrews. It’s the complete tabernacle not made with
hands that is not of this creation. It’s
not something that man made. It is God
made. I think that excludes having the Ark
of the Covenant up there. Some people
take the view that God is sort of zapped the Ark of the Covenant into heaven before
586 BC and that is where it resides today.
But, I think this is a heavenly tabernacle. The furniture there is not made with
hands. I don’t think it has all the elements
of furniture anyway that we have on earth because some of it’s related to the
sinfulness of man. You don’t have sin in
heaven.
You go back to the Old Testament.
NKJ Exodus 25:9 "According to all that I show
you, that is, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its
furnishings, just so you shall make it.
God is speaking to
Moses.
God shows Moses on
NKJ Exodus 25:40 "And see to it that you make them
according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain.
These are not random things that
are in the tabernacle. They all fit into
a broader perspective and a broader plan.
NKJ Psalm 11:4 The LORD is in His holy
temple, The LORD's throne is in heaven; His
eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men.
So there is a dwelling place
in heaven. That’s ultimately the idea in
the temple or tabernacle – a dwelling place that is where the Lord’s throne is
located. So when we get into passages
as we’ve been in Revelation 4 and 5 and some
other passages in Revelation 12 where you have these heavenly scenes before the
throne of God (not the throne of Christ because He’s sitting on the Father’s
throne right now at the right hand of the Father according to Revelation 3:21.) He is not on His own throne. This is where God the Father’s throne is in
heaven.
We go on to Psalm 18:6 where
the psalmist says:
NKJ Psalm 18:6 In my distress I called upon the
LORD, And cried out to my God; He heard my voice from His temple, And my cry
came before Him, even to His ears.
He calls to the Jews to
listen to him.
NKJ Micah 1:2 Hear, all you peoples! Listen, O
earth, and all that is in it! Let the Lord GOD be a witness against you, The
Lord from His holy temple.
So again and again I am
throwing up a series of these verses to reinforce this idea.
NKJ Habakkuk
Then when we get into Revelation,
John says:
NKJ Revelation 15:5 After these things I looked, and
behold, the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened.
But guess what. When we get down to the end of Revelation in Revelation
21:2, there is no temple in heaven. In
the New Heavens and New Earth there is no temple because God the Father and God
the Son dwell with man. So this whole temple thing seems to also have a
somewhat temporary significance until the New Heavens and New Earth are created
and the whole sin and evil problem is completely dealt with and we’re in a
completely new heavens and earth that has never been affected by sin and by
rebellion. So there is this whole idea
that we have to deal with that you pick up here and there all the way through
Scripture. It’s never fully developed as
it were in places, but there is enough evidence there to where we can put it
together with some other things and come to some pretty clear conclusions.
Then as we think about this and
the idea that there is a heavenly temple, tabernacle that there is a royal
priest that is now ministering in that temple.
It takes us back to another piece of imagery that we have in the Old
Testament and that’s in Ezekiel 28.
So let’s turn back to Ezekiel
28. This is our well-known passage that
deals with the fall of Satan. However, he’s
not identified as Satan in the passage.
He is identified as the king of
In verse 2 the focus is on
the human ruler of
NKJ Ezekiel 28:13 You were in
This is the key thing.
Look at the list.
The sardius, topaz, and diamond, Beryl, onyx, and jasper,
Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold. The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes Was prepared for you on the day you were
created.
You look at those precious
and semi-precious stones there in verse 13.
Nine of the 12 are on the breastplate of the High Priest. Now if you’re Jewish and you are reading this
and you are familiar with the breastplate of the High Priest with the 12 stones
on it, as soon as you read this that’s the connection that is going to come
into your head. So there is this
allusion in the wearing of the stones to the priestly ministry. But it
doesn’t stop there.
Look down at verse 14.
NKJ Ezekiel 28:14 "You were the anointed
cherub who covers; I established you; You were on the holy
You have this word anointed mishiak which is applied to the Lord Jesus Christ. It simply means an appointed or anointed one,
someone who is designated by God with a specific mission. He is a cherub. These are terms that speak of a certain role
that He has. Then when you get down to
verse 16:
NKJ Ezekiel 28:16 "By the abundance of your
trading You became filled with violence within, And you sinned; Therefore I
cast you as a profane thing Out of the mountain of God; And I destroyed you, O
covering cherub, From the midst of the fiery stones.
Now what does that have to do
with anything? Well, it’s an allusion to
the fact that
They sent out their
ships. We will study this. It’s fascinating. We will study this when we get a little
further along in I Kings that in the time of David and Solomon there was this
trade alliance between Solomon and the Phoenicians. Hiram was the king of
That’s what a priest would
do. A priest brings the worship, the offerings
of a people to God. A prophet speaks
from God to the people. A priest speaks
for the people to God. So the picture
that we see here is that the king of
So we have the perversion of
this original priestly-like character. There
are things in the Scripture that I don’t think we can be very dogmatic about,
but we have this priestly overtone to the King of Tyre here. We are going to have a new High Priest who functions
in the heavens who is a creator-creature united in one person. This early priest-creature Satan is called
the Bride of the Morning Star in Isaiah 14:12-14. When we come to the end of Revelation, the
title that’s applied to the Lord Jesus Christ is the Bright and Morning Star. There is something going on here in terms of
the creature fails to perform certain functions and it’s up to God Himself to
do what needs to be done for the creature so he becomes a creature.
I don’t know what all the
implications of that are, but we can’t just say, “I don’t understand it so it’s
got to mean something else.”
That is what a lot of people
do.
“Oh, that doesn’t fit. I don’t know why that would be. Let’s give it a naturalistic explanation.”
But we can clearly say these
things are clearly there in the Scripture and we’ll just have to recognize that
it’s something of a mystery.
So we have this relation
between Satan and the heavenly court. This
of course takes us from the whole concept of the dwelling of God and this
priestly concept into the angelic conflict.
So what we see here and we are
reminded in Hebrews, in Ephesians it talks about Jesus ascended above the angels. He is elevated over the angels. Man was created lower than the angels but
eventually he will rule over the angels. I Corinthians 6:3 talks about don’t you know
that we will eventually judge angels. All
of a sudden what has happened here as we start thinking about plugging this
detail of Hebrews 8 into a broader structure in the Bible. We realize that it shows that what we are
doing in our Christian life in relation to Christ our High Priest really fits
within a much larger cosmic conflict. It
has cosmic ramifications that the decisions that we make every day in terms of
our own spiritual life don’t just affect our families. They are not just related to what’s happening
in our area of life, our arena of life.
It has these ramifications that go out throughout the cosmos.
This is why angels are
watching us. Several passages talk about
that in I Peter and I Corinthians 11. We
have these passages that talk about angels watching us, observing us. This is why we studied the angelic conflict
in relationship to the 7 letters to the 7 churches of Revelation 2 and 3. These angels aren’t just watching. They’re not just voyeurs. There is a purpose to their watching. They are legal witnesses. There is a forensic role to what they are
doing. Forensic means that it’s related
to court room activity. So it’s related
to the justice of God. All of a sudden
what we see is the throne of God in heaven centers in a heavenly temple,
heavenly tabernacle that Jesus Christ the Second Person of the Trinity is
currently serving in that temple as a High Priest in view of things to
come.
All of this is focused on
something. It is all driving to an
ultimate conclusion. This takes us even
further back to some other connections that we can make both in Hebrews and in
the Old Testament. We look at Hebrews 2:2. It talks about:
NKJ Hebrews 2:2 For if the word
That was the Mosaic Law in
context.
spoken
through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedience
received a just reward,
There are a couple of
observations we made when we went through that.
Number one, this isn’t the only place that talks about angels being involved
in giving the Mosaic Law. It is also
mentioned in Galatians 3:19 where Paul said:
NKJ Galatians
Again, a very technical legal
term violating a standard.
till the
Seed should come to whom the promise was made; and it was appointed
through angels by the hand of a mediator.
So we come back to this
relationship between the giving of the law and angels. The giving of the law shows that angels are
involved with the giving of the law, Hebrews 2:2. But, they are related to observing the fact
that there are penalties that are given, assigned to people based on their
violation of the Mosaic Law. So we see
this connection now between angels and law.
We see the same kind of thing that we see in Revelation 2 and 3 - angels
being witnesses.
In the Old Testament they are
witnessing
Now who are the witnesses
against
God doesn’t just do what he
does with
This lays down a very
important principle that was discovered and rediscovered by the Puritans back
in the 1600’s. A man by the name of
Samuel Rutherford wrote a tract called Lex Rex, the law is king. That is where this comes from. It’s not the king who is the ultimate
authority politically. It is the
law. This is why the law matters. We have a tradition in our culture that is at
stake today. That is the rule of law. Even God is willing to limit the way He deals
with man according to these covenants.
We go back to the creation covenant in Genesis 1 and its revision in the
Adamic Covenant in Genesis 3 and then the Noahic Covenant.
So all of this all fits
together. One thing, one part of the
puzzle fits with another part of the puzzle fits with another part of the
puzzle and it all comes together as we approach the end of the Apostolic Age
with the giving of the canon of Scripture.
So we connect temple to the
whole operation of the temple to the angelic conflict. The angelic conflict relates to the whole
covenant structure. The covenant
structure ultimately has to conclude with a perfect covenant that solves the
creature’s problem which is the New Covenant which is why he brings the New
Covenant into chapter 8 at this particular point.
This all ties back to the
basis problems that you see in the temple in the Old Testament. There are two problems that have to be
resolved in history. The first problem
has to do with the character of God because God and God alone can provide life
for the creature. But because the
creature is sin which is the second problem when the creature comes into the
presence of God there has to be a reckoning, a dealing with sin on some sort of
permanent basis. That permanent basis
comes through of course the sacrifice of Christ. But we see this in the Old Testament when Isaiah
shows up in heaven. He’s in the temple in heaven. But he’s a creature. He is fallen and the sin problem hasn’t been
resolved yet. He says:
NKJ Isaiah 6:5 So I said: "Woe is me,
for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the
midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The LORD of
hosts."
NKJ Isaiah 6:6 Then one of the seraphim flew to
me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs
from the altar.
He places that on Isaiah’s
lips to cleanse him. It is that picture
of fire, purification, cleansing. So
that brings another element into this whole thing with the
All these things get resolved
on the basis of law, on the basis of all these structures. It’s very complex, but it shows that the
Bible is not just this simple little thing of a bunch of stories that are
strung together to sort of entertain Sunday school kids. The more you get into it and the more you
dig, the more you realize that there are all these threads that constantly show
up again and again all the way through the Scriptures and they are not just
interesting things that we see. We can
put all these things together – tie them together and it gives us a great
understanding of what we have.
The focal point of all this
is to drive us to recognition that we’re in training right now and we will
ultimately rule and reign with Christ who is now our High Priest but will be
the ruler in the
All of that comes out of an
understanding of what’s happening in Hebrews 8 and 9. We will get into the details next week. Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer.