Food for Friday
For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the true; but into Heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us. Hebrews 9:24
Somewhere in the storage room of our house is a large piece of paper laminated in plastic. If you spread it out, you will see the architect’s drawings that the carpenters used to build the house. The drawings show the dimensions of rooms and the location of walls, doors, windows, electrical and plumbing services, and so forth. You could use that drawing to locate anything in the house, or even to replicate the house if you are a good enough carpenter. If you asked us about the drawing, we might well say that it is our house. But it is not our house, it is just a scale-model drawing of our house. Using the words of our text, the drawing can be considered a figure of the true. In the same way, the tabernacle that formed the centre of Jewish worship as the dwelling place of God was just a figure of God’s new order for worship.
The tabernacle certainly looked real enough. The Israelites could touch its walls, walk its courtyards, see and smell the offerings burning on the altar, wash their hands in the brazen laver, and hear the lovely psalms of the tabernacle singers. To those Israelites, it was a very special place, the focus of everything in their lives. Their atonement depended on the high priest entering annually into the Holy of Holies. But it was only a figure, as was the temple that followed it. The tabernacle is long gone. So too is the temple, all but for a small section of one of its walls, known as the Western, or Wailing, wall, an ancient structure that is currently the most venerated site in all of Jewry. If God still is to be worshipped, why do the tabernacle and temple no longer exist? For the same reason we relegate the drawings for our house to a shelf in the storage room. We no longer need it; we have the actual house. The drawings are only a relic and their disappearance would be no big loss. In the same way, we don’t need the tabernacle and temple for anything but illustrations of what God’s new order is like.
Consider the place where God is worshipped now: a company of believers with an ordinary table spread with a simple cup of wine and a plain loaf of bread. Physically, it doesn’t look anything special, certainly nothing like the splendour of the tabernacle and the temple. But the promise of the Lord Jesus today is ‘where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20). So the humble gatherings of the Lord’s people to worship are the true of which the figures of the Old Testament spoke.
In our worship, let us be careful that we don’t surround ourselves with the figures and the shadows that have been replaced. If God is no longer interested in the figures, why should we drag them along with us when we worship? – Jim MacIntosh