Exodus 40:1-8 Bible Study | Episode 649

April 5, 2024

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Exodus 40:1-8  Bible Study | Episode #649

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had 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. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

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Transcript

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 churches morning Bible study. We're in Exodus chapter 40. That's the last chapter in the book of Exodus. And we're talking about the tabernacle. It's finally, everything's ready to be set up. And, as we go through this.

You could read this chapter. If you were just reading through the Bible, you could read this chapter and go that's just so boring for me as I'm reading through it, I feel the same way. When I first superficially look at a passage, sometimes I think I don't know where I'm going to find anything to talk about in that passage or anything that's going to be of interest to people and talk about in that passage, but the truth is.

Is the building of the tabernacle is the building of the tabernacle is the picture of God coming and dwelling with humanity and how has that done in the New Testament? That's done in us. So the tabernacle, like I've said over and over again is a picture of us. And then.

When we get to this chapter, you've got really four separate events that are happening and it makes it perfect for our Bible study for the week because we can cover for these four happenings in one chapter. First, you have God telling the Israelites how to set it up, to go ahead and set it up. Then, weirdly, you have God Explaining how he wants Aaron and his sons to be anointed and made made priest so that they can serve before him.

And then you have Moses setting it up. And then you have God's presence coming down and dwelling with men. Now, what's so wild about this and what, and I say, it's wild is that. When you read it, you realize that God tells them to set up the tabernacle from his perspective, from inside the Holy of Holies out to the gate.

Then you have God saying, I'm going, I want to tell you, this is how. The priest are going to be anointed so that they can have a relationship so that they can come and meet with me. And you go what does that mean? That means that God is telling us how the priest, how we're anointed by him, how we're, and remember in the old Testament, the anointing is a picture of the filling of the Holy Spirit with power.

It's the picture of the power of the Holy Spirit being on us. And And the oil, the anointing oil represents the resonant power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit on us. And then after that you see Moses setting up the tabernacle, but he doesn't start with the inside. He doesn't start with the inside and build out like God told him how to do in, in, in his way.

Moses starts with the gate and comes in and then God's presence Falls upon the place. God's the cloud of God's presence is your kind of glory falls on the place and you go. Did Moses do it wrong? No, Moses didn't do it wrong. In fact, Moses didn't do it wrong at all. What you have here is God building a way to meet with us a place that we can come and meet with him.

Moses being a representation of us, because remember they, they're the one that sent him on the mountain to to get the instructions. They, he was going to be representative of all Israel. God didn't want that. God wanted to dwell with his people, but he didn't he didn't get to because they wouldn't come up on the mountain.

And so when you're studying this, I want you to see this is the culmination. This is the coming together of God dwelling with his people, which is a foreshadowing or a picture of how God does that with you right now, with you right now he is wanting to he's wanting to fellowship with you. He's wanting to commune with you.

He's wanting. We use that word, he's wanting to tabernacle with you. He's wanting to meet with you. It says, then the Lord spoke to Moses saying in verse one on the first day of the first month, you shall set up the tabernacle of the tent of meeting. Now they they had been in the wilderness for a little bit less than a year.

And God says, We're going to start with the start, and I love this. God says, I want it to be on the first day of the first month. Why? I want it to be, for us, it would be January 1. That was not the case for them, but for us, it would be January 1. I want you to start off with me. We're gonna, we brought you out of Egypt.

We brought you into the into the wilderness to meet with me. You have had a rough first year. A glorious first year in that you're, you've been delivered from slavery, but a rough first year in that you're You're not you're not you've not done everything that you should have done.

You, you haven't been the people that that I wanted you to be. And then he says, but we're going to start new. We're going to start fresh. It's going to, it's going to be, it's going to be the God of the second chances all the time. And that's who he is. The God of let's take this new opportunity.

He says on the first day of the first month, you should set up the tabernacle to the meeting. Now notice he says. You shall put in the Ark of the Testimony. They don't even have the tent yet. He says, I want to start with Ark of Testimony. Why? Because that's the place where, that's the place where between the two Cherubim the propitiation point, the point where God meets with his people is right there in between the wings of those cherubs, it's right there in between what God is doing and what God wants to do, it's right there.

He says, that's the spot. That's the place where I want to meet with you. And so you set that up first. That's where I get to come and touch humanity. The Holy God, the father, his presence can come and dwell with us. And he says, you shall put the ark of testimony. And a petition and petition off the art with the veil.

Now, this is the picture of you've got to approach him rightly. You can't just approach him any old way. God has a way to approach him. He has a way that we do worship. And by the way, I've already said it and I've said it a couple of times as we studied through the book of Exodus, if you look at the worship services.

Of some very different Christian groups, Christian churches from the Catholics to high church Christian, when I say high church, very formal with robes and a lot of liturgy and things like that, all the way to what you'd call a very charismatic, free worship service.

When you look at, when you look at. How they play out. Sure. There's a lot of differences in how it appears, but if you go down to the bones of it, the bones of how we do worship, the bones of how we interact with God, when you go down to the very bones of it, It's all really the same. It's all a, it's all a us coming to God through the gate, who is Jesus all the way to the Holy of Holies.

And there, there's worship. There is a lot of times there's reading of the word, there's some testimony, there's things like that. In the different churches, there's reading or group reading of the way my best way to say it's liturgy. And then ultimately there is a time of sacrifice, a time of giving to God.

There's a time of hearing God's word. And then there's a time of reflecting on what God has said. And. Those play out in a numerous and varied ways, but they are each one of them spelled out or shown in this story. So he says, put the ark of the testimony and partition the ark and veil.

You shall bring in the table and arrange the things there to be set in order on it. And you shall bring in the lampstand. So we say, he said, if you'll notice, he's starting with the. He's starting with art and then he, you have the veil and then outside the veil, you have the table and the show grid and you have the the lamp stand and and the lamp stand gets lit.

So as far as seeing the tabernacle. He's, you start out with God saying, build it this way. And it's from his perspective is how he sees his people coming to him and his desire for his people to come to him. He says, you also shall shut up the altar of gold for the incense before the ark of the testimony.

And then he's. Notice that we've got we've got him, him desiring once you have all the things in place right there where we meet with him. The art, the incense is a picture of the prayers of the saints. It's a picture of us praying and it creates that cloud inside the Tabernacle. The cloud is the communion or communication of us with God.

And then he says then you shall set the altar of burnt offering before the door of the tabernacle and the tent of meeting. And he says, and you shall say, set so you've got the altar of burnt offering that's right outside the tent, but between that altar and where they offered their sacrifices.

You shall eat there. There's that labor. And that's where we wash and we were cleansed by the Holy Spirit. And I want to on our Bible study this morning. I do want to focus a little bit on that because maybe I haven't talked about that enough in our Bible studies when they offer that sacrifice that release that you get when you.

When you the first time you do it, we call it repentance. But the truth is that each time we go through worship, there should be a time and a place of repentance or a time and a place of turning away from the things that have been going on in my life that have distracted me. And turning toward God and it may not be the repentance that you had when you first were born again.

It may not be the initial where you just totally turned away from the world and chased after God, but it does need to be a time of reflection and turning toward God. And that's what the sacrifice is all about. That's where we offer ourselves as living sacrifices. And so when you have that repentance, when you have that Turning away and turning to God.

When you have that laying down of shame and fear and doubt, all the things that are the anti spiritual gifts. If you go through the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, it's the things that are separate from that, that are opposite from that. Love is hate and joy is and consternation all the time and struggle.

If you see it that way and realize that those things are not fruit of the spirit, and you've been walking in them, when you lay that thing on the altar, when you lay that issue up there on the altar as an issue of sacrifice, when you do that you feel a sense of release. You feel like a burden has been lifted.

And it has. He says, come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. And there's a need for that there, there is that part of the worship service. Oftentimes, when I was a young kid and they were taking up the offering, I saw it as a break, we had the break in the services like halftime, yet.

You had the singing, then you had the offering and that was halftime. And then you had the sermon and oftentimes as a young child, it wasn't as interesting to me as it is now. The sermon. So I made it to halftime and all I had to do was get through the other half. And then I get to go home.

And as a young child, that's the way you see it sometimes when you're in church. But as an adult, we realized that's the time where we. Where we give up ourselves, where we relinquish ourselves to God and allow him to be in charge of him to be in control and at that place in that time, when we do that what we've done is we've put ourselves in a position where I, I can.

I can now be clean and that's what goes on at the laboring where they have the water. And he says, and you so set the labor between the tabernacle meeting and the altar and put water in it. And so when I've laid myself down and I've sacrificed myself and I've said, okay I'm turning back from this.

I'm turning back from that I'm releasing this and I'm releasing that's when the Holy Spirit. You've already been anointed with power, but that's when the Holy Spirit removes all that gunk. It's where you get cleaned up a little bit get the world washed off of you. And if you'll notice, God sees that as a very important.

Oftentimes we don't even talk about it when we talk about worship, but that moment when you relent, you give up and let God be God and God be in control is a important place because then you're really open to hearing God and you're really open to, to hearing what God has to say for your life.

And at that point. You're alive. Your spirit is resonating with the Holy Spirit. And you are really you are really coming and being one with God. And then he says, you shall shut up the court all around and hang up the screen at the court gate. And what he's saying is make sure when you put the gate up, That Jesus is the only way in and ultimately that's how God sees the tabernacle He starts out in the holy of holies and he goes all the way out to Jesus and Jesus is the way in and I think it's neat when you're going to see tomorrow we'll talk about the anointing of the priest and the anointing of power that God has given us and then we'll talk about How Moses set it up, starting with the gate outside with the fence outside, and then comes all the way in.

And then ultimately we're going to see the power of God come down. And these are great pictures of what God's doing, great pictures of how God's working. And I pray that as you study God's word, as we finish the book of Exodus, I pray that you'll see that ultimately the whole point of the book of Exodus is to take God's.

Children, God's people out of slavery and in the perfect 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 toda