Pillars in the Church: The Tabernacle – God’s Pattern – Spiritual Maturity/Responsibility

Exodus 27. There will be two messages tonight. Actually, there will be seven. One plus another, but I just, in considering where we’ve got to go by Tuesday night, I found out I was six messages behind, and that’s just the way it is. We have so much to cover this weekend, and all I know to do is drop it on you and just hope one or two words of it the Holy Spirit bears witness to, and in the days to come, the Lord will show you. Brothers, I trust you to the Lord.

Exodus 27:10. I’m going to read only one verse. …and the twenty pillars thereof and their twenty sockets shall be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver. Oh, I’ll read the next one. And likewise for the north side in length there shall be hangings of a hundred cubits long, and his twenty pillars and their twenty sockets of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets of silver. Alright, quickly, what is God’s eternal purpose? Alright, very good.  What is God’s eternal purpose? Alright, that’s good enough. God’s eternal purpose is that man might have God’s life, and that out of this will come man with God’s life, bearing the image of God and having the authority of God. Now then, for this to happen, God had to build up who? The man. The man. He has to be built up together. We are a corporate man to be built up. Now, brethren, we have seen a little of it. We have just been going so quickly, and praise the Lord, we move from place to place.

I want to suggest that in the morning, let’s skip breakfast and let’s have a fast, and let’s, for the church, for what we have decided to do and for what should be done, and I would also say this, that I believe we all know that the big problem is not tonight and tomorrow. The big problem is about three or four days from now, and a week from now, and about a week and a half from now, and two weeks from now, but let’s just have tomorrow. Let’s skip our breakfast and give that time to the Lord for prayer.

We move, and we will come into the garden. What are some of the things we see in the garden? What’s in the garden? What’s the very first thing you see in the garden? Before you even see the tree of life. Audience: You see a man. Alright. Praise the Lord, brother. Then what do you say? The Tree of Life. Then, after the Tree of Life, what? The River. What comes out of the River? Praise the Lord. Onyx, bdellium, and gold. Now, brother, what does all of that mean? Gold typifies the purity of God; bdellium is the pearl which stands for the suffering and the Life of God inwrought in a little grain of sand. By this, the oyster is extended. He’s wounded, and he’s extended. Now, does this have anything to do with our sinfulness? No, not at all. It’s still God imparting life to man through the crucifixion of Christ by the wounding of Christ. It really has the imparting of life by God’s own death that he might be resurrected into us. Okay, brother, and the stone, the precious throne. What is it? It is the clay being transformed into stone. This is the work of the Holy Spirit transforming us.

Now, this is the building material. What is God building? A city. But what is the city? Alright, it’s more than that, but what else? That’s not enough. In the Old Testament, they saw this little, but it’s more than that. Praise the Lord. This is God being built up with man, and the two are one. Now then, brother, we see the lumberyard in the beginning, and we see the finished house at the end. And what’s in the middle? The building process. Now then, we are in the building process. Tell me what we’ve got to come out of. One at a time. What have we got to come out of? Babylon, Sodom, and Egypt. Praise the Lord. Either way, the picture of Sodom is not really very clear; in a way, it is the compilation of all the others, but it was destroyed before it was fully grown. Babylon is still there, but we are not within.

Now then, what next? We come into the presence of the Lord, and the Lord gives us His pattern. I believe that when we come out of all this, if we come into the presence of the Lord, the Lord shows His pattern. I really mean that. I kid you not. I mean that. Babylon is organized religion, even if it is Christianity. You remember that Babylon eventually had in its own temple the very vessels of God’s tabernacle. When they came and captured Jerusalem, they took her vessels with them and put them in a pagan temple. In one of the last pictures in Revelation, there is the gold, the silver, and the stone around the neck of Babylon the harlot. She dangles them out there so that no one will forget that she has something of the Lord. There’s a little of the Lord in Babylon. So many of the Jews wouldn’t leave Babylon because the vessels of the temple were there. They said, “Our temple, God’s temple, is in Babylon, and we have to stay where these precious things are.” Ezra and Nehemiah said, “We are going back to the city. We’re going back to the building.”

Egypt, then, is the world that just is ground into us from almost the day we’re able to walk and talk and think, and we have to leave that. Then we come to the Lord and say, “Lord, what is your pattern? What do you want? The Lord tells us…brothers and sisters, what did He show you? Praise the Lord. You come into the Lord’s presence, and there’s a sense that what God wants is the church. They came into the Lord’s presence, and the Lord showed them the picture, the pattern, of the tabernacle, and He gave it to them. And then what did they do? They made an offering to the Lord, and the offering was a good thing. What is a good thing? Here is a rule of thumb that I will pass on to you. Something you want, not something you don’t. So, they made the offering of the good things, and then the Lord began to give them those things that are necessary to get into the building.

What is the first one? What altar is this, sister? The altar of bronze. This is something of the picture of going through the cross, not in the matter of salvation, but in the matter of judgment upon us. We get into the church by a funeral. Then what do we come to? The laver. The laver was made out of mirrors of the women. The laver was used to expose. And there was one other outward thing. The white linen wall that is built around the tabernacle. If you try to get in, you go all the way around, and all you can see is white. The only place you can get in, and there’s an altar there, and you have to stop at it before you can get in. Then what is this white fence? What is this boundary line? What is it? It’s our separation from everything outside and what the outside sees. The outside may not make much sense, but at least when they look at us, they see nothing dirty. They see nothing dirty.

What is the first thing you do when you pass bronze, and you pass all the outward things, to come into the very tabernacle itself? You eat the bread on the table, light the candles, and offer incense. Now then, what does all that mean? We take the bread, and the bread works the gold into us. This is more than the righteousness of God; it is God Himself expanding into you. The righteousness is something white; the gold is His very essence; His very life itself.

The table comes before the eating of the showbread. The bread sits on the table to show what the table is for them, and the way for the symbol of the table to become you. You eat the bread. Then, when you have eaten the bread, what happens? Let’s go back to the bread. You eat the bread, and you trim the light, and the light is brightened. Out of the eating of the bread comes the lighting of the light, the brightening of the light. Now then, you eat bread, and you get enlightened when you eat the bread. Not when you study it. When you study it…I used to when I was a young Christian, I had question marks all through my Bible, you know, on the side. I wanted someone to explain that to me someday. I still don’t know the answers to those, but it’s not important anymore. You get the enlightenment, and then what do you do? You offer up incense. So, brother, you come, and you eat the bread, you get the enlightenment, and whatever that enlightenment is, you offer to the Lord, and the Lord takes it. Hallelujah.

Take the scripture, but don’t study it; don’t even read it. Just kind of eat it…chew on it. In the beginning was the Word. I don’t have the vaguest idea what that means, Lord. And the Word was with God.  I don’t know what that means. And the Word was God. I don’t know what that means. I don’t have any idea what the Word pertains to. Lord, I praise you that you came as the Word. You were God. You were way up there, and I was way down here, but God became flesh; praise you, Lord, that you became a human just like me. That’s where light begins. Then you read a little bit further. And life was the light of man. And you say, “Oh, praise the Lord. The light I just got inside me is Jesus. Praise the Lord.” Father, I just got light, and the light is Jesus. Praise the Lord.