This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope Alive, Applying God's Word to Your Daily Life.
Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today in Jesus name.
Good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We're in Exodus chapter 38, and we're really dealing with the two. The two aspects are the two pieces of furniture or the two items that are outside the temple. That's what Exodus 38 deals with.
And then it deals with the outer courts and how to make the outer courts. But the main thing is. Is are these two these two places that are very important. Now, what's interesting about it is inside inside the tabernacle, everything is made of gold. Everything tends to point to the royalty of God.
But outside everything is made of bronze and bronze is a picture of God's judgment of sin his righteous judgment of sin. And so it says in verse one, and we talked about this last week, he made an altar of burnt offering of acacia wood, five cubits long with its length and five cubits was its width.
It was square and its height was three cubits. He made it its horns. On four corners, the horns were one piece in it, with it, and he overlaid it with bronze. Now notice, this is this is a place where they would offer their sacrifice, and it's made of cashew wood, so that always points to us, that always points to at its core it's us, and then the horns are a place where you could Grab hold to it and it has the picture of the horns of an altar or the places where you it's a picture of grabbing hold to God.
It's a quick. It's a picture of touching and reaching out to God and in a lot of ways like God is in the Old Testament as far as worship to thrust your hands. It's a picture of it's a picture of reaching out to God and and this altar was made with horns because through the judgment of sin is how we get to God.
And when you say how do we handle that? Remember, we're not handling our sin. This is the ultimate picture of Christ's sacrifice for us. But that being said in the salvific process, we do grab hold of our sin. We do reach out and grab hold of the altar and take hold of what what is is ailing us, what is destroying us, What is controlling us the sin that entangles us and causes us not to be able to walk in the way that God has for us to walk that sin that is out there and that is so prevalent and so painful for us the altar of sacrifice, the burnt offering.
Is a picture not only of Christ's ultimate sacrifice, which gets us through the penalty for what I like to call the sin nature is the it's the part of us that separates us from God. But it's also a picture of us and it's uniquely a picture of us. In Romans 12, 1 says, All for your bodies is living sacrifice.
This is holy and pleasing to God, which is your reasonable act of service. And in many ways, this is a very, this may be, for us, That's the most personal altar, the most personal place in the whole in the whole tabernacle compound. It is the place where we learn to be as Christ is. When we go to the bread, we eat of the bread, but we're not the, we're not the bread.
We we see the light of the spirit and we do become that light, but we're not we're not the source of it. Here God invites us to join Him in His work, and the only way for us to do that is for us to lay aside our sin, and to lay aside ourselves and our own will and our own way. And when we're doing that, it makes it it makes it personal, real personal.
And so there's horns there to grab hold of God, because really the only way to get To the place where God has for us, the place where his his power, his might his want with us, the only way for us to get there is to reach out to him, to go to him. Notice there's utensils at the altar, pans and shovels and basins and forks and firepans, and all the utensils are made of bronze.
And it says, And he made great a grate of bronze network for the altar under its rim, midway from the bottom. So there's a grate to catch catch the ashes, catch the finished offering, the finished sacrifice. He says he cast four rings for the corners bronze grating as a holder of the poles.
And he made the poles of acacia wood and overlaid them with bronze. And then he put poles into the rings in the side of the altar. To which he took to bear it, and he made the altar hollow with boards. And this has all the trappings, all of, it is very similar in how it was made, and the ultimate use of it, and how it was moved, it has all the similarities.
It was carried just like the Ark of the Covenant, just like the showbread, just like the Altar of Incense, just like the Table of Incense. It was carried on acacia wood poles. It is carried by human beings. It has all the trappings of this except for one thing. And that is, it's made of bronze, and God is dealing with our sin, and let me tell you something, the dealing with our sin is really, in my opinion in all the parts that are The tabernacle, it is the most difficult because no matter how young you are or how old you are, you always as David, as King David said, my sin is always before me.
That was not a statement made by young King. That was a statement made about old King. He was saying, I see it all the time. The apostle Paul makes a similar statement in the new Testament. And the understanding is that even though these great men of faith, these people who have, who've worked with God over and over again, they have to deal with their sin personally, and they have to deal with their sin.
In reality and it is difficult and these bodies of flesh that we live in have to be handed over to God. They have to be given to him and and the process by which we learn to do that because it's not something that just comes natural to us. It's not something that is in our innate nature. It's in God's innate nature and as we take on and we eat of his bread and we are filled with this Holy Spirit it becomes.
It becomes an actual possibility because God can work that out in us, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't just sweat us out. It doesn't just it's like going in a hot sauna and God sweating that sin out. Or it's like. Being burned burned the way as the refiner fire burns us.
And then the, the picture of the potter and him molding the clay. And that's probably the easiest and most pleasurable aspect or picture of God molding and making us in his image and likeness. But that potter is needing out all the issues and all the problems.
And so when you really go through all the pictures in the Bible of God molding of God's redemption and his work and his moving in our lives. When you go through them all it's hard. It's a difficult process and it's a hard live process. And when you come to the altar outside.
You've got all the good stuff ahead, and really all the good stuff ahead, the God Jesus and his word the light of the Holy Spirit, the the holy of holies and the presence of God and all that good stuff ahead, but before you get there. You got to deal with yourself and as a pastor I am more keenly aware of that every day for the people that I pastor and more keenly aware of it as the issue the primary issue that keeps us, From the very best of God and each person's struggle is unique and different and yet all the same it is all the same because it's all sin.
It's all the same because it's all not God But it finds itself in it and it's finds itself in its struggles in different and unique ways for each person But God is going to burn it out. He's going to He's going to accept that sacrifice of yours, and he's going to he's going to, he's going to deal with it so that you might enter into his presence.
And the best way to handle that is just to surrender to it. And there's no other way to do it other than that surrender to his righteous judgment against that, which is not him in you and allow him to change that and remove that. And, if you do. He's faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us and to fill us with his righteousness and his holiness.
And I pray that will be the case for you this morning. I pray that you will find him and you will ultimately know him and walk with him. And I pray that the sin that you struggle with God will step in and give you His wonderful peace and deliverance as He has always promised to do.
Salvation is a process, it's an ongoing process. But it is God's process that we get to join him in and I pray that you will walk in it. As you go today, I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.