From Sinai to the Sanctuary: The Ark of the Covenant

Show Notes

Episode 458: 
In this episode, we focused on the Ark of the Covenant. We discussed how God instructed Moses to build the Ark as a tangible representation of His presence among the Israelites. We explored the detailed instructions God gave for the construction of the tabernacle, the portable sanctuary where the Ark would reside. We wrapped up by reflecting on how these Old Testament practices foreshadowed the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

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You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Bible Guys another episode. My name is Chris, this is Jeff, and we are here today bringing you the story of Moses, bringing it in a series that we're calling what Highlights of the Old Testament. That sounds good to be milestones, milestones, posts, big events. Yes. So anyway, before we get to that, Desiree has asked us to pause from our normal fun games and to highlight where are our listeners from. Well, there you go, and this is fun. People listen from all around the world. Yes, this is amazing to me. It is amazing, And so she writes, it's so fun to see where our listeners are from. Today, we're going to highlight some of our listeners by stating fun facts about their location. These are the funnest. Yes, we recently talked about how we are listening to around the world, so today we're to highlight a whole It says a whole country, but that's not true. That's not true. Today. This is a whole city. This is a whole city, all right here we go. The city has the largest and most diverse collection of ice age fossils in the world. I had no idea. I had no idea either. Wow. Wow, Okay, this is the city is the birthplace of the Internet. Ooh, I bet you those who live there know. Oh my god, that's a big deal. That's a big one. Yeah, just a little thing called the internet, right right. Number three. Their residents spend over one hundred hours in traffic on average each year. Yuck, yuck. Yeah, everybody, I think everybody knows how this one's gross. Yes, yes, the city is home to the only solar powered ferris wheel. Okay, all right, okay, little known fact there must be so proud. Okay, all right. So it works when the sun's out right, and the sun's always out of this because it's it is Los Angeles, California. Hey La, Yeah, so thank you whoever's listening for LA from LA, thank you. Yeah. And I didn't know there were any Christians in La. Oh stop stop, I'm joking. No, I'm joking. Oh no, I'm joking the jeez. I was out to LA several times. Oh good for Yeah, have you ever been lots of times? Yes, yes, yes, it's it's great. It's a great place to be, is it. But it feels like a different world. Yeah, you don't like La? I hate La, do you really? Yeah? I have several friends who live there. I love them. I hate everything about the city, you really? Yeah, I like it. I had never want to live there. I had a free ticket yeah to I could, you know, take a companion on Delta, And so I came towards the end of the year. It was almost over, and I'd go to my daughter's sixteen and I said, hey, listen, I'll take you anywhere in the country. We'll spend four days just you and me. It'd be like a daddy daughter trip. Wherever you want to go. And I was just getting ready to say except La, and she goes, I'm gonna go to La really? So we went out. Yeah. Yeah, we had a nice time. It was fun. It was fine. It's just everything is inconvenient, everything is stacked on top of each other, and everything's too expensive. That's right, right. I would not want to live there because mainly because the traffic, the weather way too hot, and it's the housing market is crazy. And but there's lots of good people there, right, So I love the people, I just don't like the place. So yeah, and so well, and it's also so transient, he says the guy from just outside Detroit by the way, So right right, so that's fixed volumes about about you know whatever. That's so funny. They were there, they'd be like, I'd rather live in La than Detroit. I'm like, yep, probably, Hey, thank you for listening. By the way, around the world, he's bored to death with you are we have we have we do have people in a lot of countries. We do. How how many countries would you say? I don't know. Last time I counted those, like eighty eight countries have tuned in? Hey did you know this? We we are we are charting right top top podcasts in Hungry, Botswana and Indonesia. Wow. Yeah, I mean we are killing it in those markets. That's that's true. It is true. Wow. Yeah. So I thought that was a really amazing thing for the you know, accomplishment for us. Well, I want to do it now. I want to shout. I want to do a shout out to people and Hungry, yeah, Hungry and Botswana and Botswana in Indonesia. Yeah, I mean, thank goodness that people are listens up with all you people in Malawi though, right, come on, come on, get with it. Thank you for listening for real. That's pretty, that's pretty. That's fantastic. Yeah. So I'm sorry if I said bad things about LA and offended somebody. Now all of a sudden, there's like nobody listening from LA anymore, if they're tuning out. What do you think about LA people? No, I said, I love the people like some of my dearest friends love. I said, you don't think there's any Christians analogy? Well, I know my friends. Wow, you know who? Five people among you? Know who? You have a million? Yeah? No, I'm joking. So today we're jumping into really we're establishing the fact that the God's putting into motion his system. Right he says, he says, you are my people, and if you obey me, then you'll be my special people, and I'm gonna set up a tabernacle for you. And then he creates this thing today that we're talking about called the Arc of the Covenant, which is a wild, tangible box that God creates that is just unbelievable. It represents so many things that will become so important for so many generations. The whole thing is important up up until this point. Now, as we're coming to Genesis twenty five. From Genesis twenty where he gives the Ten Commandments, to twenty five, he gives a bunch of other guidelines for how they're supposed to be living. Right, So he talks about how to treat servants. There was slavery back then. It was always to pay off debts or to pay off crimes. But even here, the sentences could only go seven years, right, stuff like that, So they work that out. He goes through how to deal with personal injury. He deals with protection of property. Right. I know it's not popular right now people think it's okay to just trash property, But in the Bible times there was big consequences for ruining property and other people's stuff. There's a lot of social responsibilities, how to take care of people, how to manage your justice, all the things. He sets up some festivals, and then God promises, as you follow these things, I'll be with you. I'm going to be with you from start to finish. And so then Israel goes, Okay, we accept this. This is a contract between us and God. We're going to accept this contract. And then God says, all right from there. Now that you've accepted me as your God and you're accepting this contract that we have on how to live your life, then God says, I want you to build a place that kind of represents where I'm going to be with you. And so in Exodus chapter twenty five, verse one, it says the Lord said to Moses, tell the people of Israel to bring me their sacred offerings. Accept the contributions from all whose hearts are moved to offer them. Here's a list of sacred offerings you may except from them. Gold, silver and bronze, blue, purple and scarlet thread, fine linen and goat hair for cloth, tanned ramskins and fine goat skin, leather, acacia wood, olive oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil, and the fragrant incense, Onyx stones and other gemstones to be set in the ephod and the priests chest piece. Have the people of Israel build me a holy sanctuary so I can live among them. You must build this tabernacle and its furnishings exactly according to the pattern I'll show you. And then he goes on. He starts telling them these are all the things that go inside the tabernacle. And the first thing he says that we'll go inside the tabernacle is the ark of the Covenant. He says, Have the people make an arc of acacia wood, a sacred chest forty five inches long, twenty seven inches wide and twenty seven inches high. Overlay it inside and outside with pure gold, and run a molding of gold all around it. Cast four gold rings and attach them to its four feet, two rings on each side. Make poles from acacia wood and overlay them with gold. Insert the poles into the rings that the sides of the ark to carry it. These carrying poles must stay inside the rings, never remove them. When the arc is finished, placed inside it the stone tablets inscribed with the terms of the covenant, which I will give to you. Then make the arcs cover the place of atonement from pure gold. It must be forty five inches long and twenty seven inches wide. Then make two cherubim from hammered gold and place them on the two ends of the atonement cover. Mold the cherubim on each end of the atonement cover, making it all one piece of gold. The cherubim will face each other and look down on the atonement cover with their wings spread above it. They will protect it. Place inside the ark the stone tablets inscribed with the terms of the Covenant, which I will give to you. Then put the atonement cover on top of the ark, and I will meet with you there and talk to you from above the atonement cover between the gold cherubim that hover over the ark of the Covenant, and from there I will give you my commands for the people of Israel. And he goes on, and he has the table of presence and the lamp stand, and the design and the layout of the tabernacle, and the altar for the burnt offerings. God builds or designs for them, and the courtyards, and then he lays out the clothing for the priests, and the design of the ephod and all those things. So all of this is about now, how how to begin communing with God regularly? Right? And so this tabernacle will serve as where God dwells. Until really the three tabernacles that we have, or we have the we have that we were, were the three places that God has addresses. Right is this, and then also Solomon's temple and then the temple that is rebuilt, right right, that's right. And temple, the Herod's temple, and so we have we have those, we have those three and this is the first of the three. And this one wasn't made of stones or bricks. This would have been you know, made out of cloth and and uh and so but thick, very very thick cloth. And they were and they were they had like just you know, there was silver woven in there. There was all sorts of you know, thick braided decorative cloth. This would have been extravagant to look at. And even though it was more of a you know, temporary type material, it was it was very sturdy, and it was magnificent and so uh it's you know sometimes I've seen you know, drawings of it that that don't match, you know when you when you read it, and you really, man, this thing was extravagant, right, very extravagant. Yeah, stunningly beautiful. And God says at the very beginning he's receiving offerings from people who are moved to offer, right, so he goes, hey, gold and silver and bronze, we're gonna need all these things. Your finest linens, your finest threads, right, purple, red and blue and scarlet represented royalty, all the finest leathers, the finest woods, Acacia wood is amazing, the finest oils, all those things, and the people willingly came and gave of their offerings to God. And then God said, okay, take those and build this magnificent place that has a certain amount of I don't know it's set aside as holy, but it has this really spiritual Have you ever been like in a cathedral? This designed to make you look up, you know, the European cathedral builders designed things to cause you to look up, to make you realize how small you are and how grand God is, and then oftentimes just stunningly beautiful. I think that was the idea. It's not that the building itself was God, but rather it represented where God was with the people. Yeah. I remember one time I went to Israel and we came on the I think it was the Pool of Bethesda, I think, and there was you know, in a lot of times, what happens. Does the Catholic Church, you know, declare a holy site than they would build cathedral And the reason why is because they knew that once you build a church on a property, that it could never be you know, taken over by the government. Right, So there's all these churches on these holy sites just to protect them, which is just amazing that that's a great gift that the Church has given to everybody. But anyway, we were in this massive, massive cathedral and they just like you said, they had built this thing to where it's designed to look up. But beyond that, they did it acoustically because you know how much they were just masters of acoustics, weren't they back then. They just knew how to build something to where somebody could stand in the center of the room and talk, and all of a sudden it just reverberated throughout the entire cathedral because they didn't have any sound systems or anything like that. So anyway, we're there, and you know how it is, there's people from all over the world. I bet you there was one hundred and fifty people at this one holy site, and we probably represented thirty to forty languages, right, I mean, everybody who just was in twosies and three zis of every country of the world. You know, nobody speaks you know her in the English or whatever. And so we're in this chapel and all of a sudden this girl who was with us on our trip. She was one of one of the most beautiful singers that we had. She sang on the big stage, right, and she was just amazing. She would beld it out and everything else. Anyways, all of a sudden, she stands in the center and all by herself. She's in the chape all by herself. All of a sudden, she starts singing, Ah, they MORI right, and this is a universal song, and she knows the whole song because she sang the whole song all of a sudden. I'm not even kidding. I bet you one hundred people floked into this church and just had a seat. It was so emotional. Everybody just has a seat and they're just listening, and everything quieted down, and she's standing there with her eyes closed and she's listening to her own acoustics. Right. She opens her eyes about halfwa through the song, realizing she now has one hundred people gathered listening. So she continues to sing, but she only knows the one song, right, so every starts clapping and everything else, and then she doesn't know what else to do. She's like, I don't know what else to sing, So that she sings it again and everybody just but it was beautiful anyway. It was just a story that almost had nothing to do with anything. Well, just beautiful, right, So that's the idea. Here is a little bit of beauty for a sacred place, and then God begins to set up all these tools, And man, I wish we had the time to really dig into the Tabernacle. We should come back and do a Tabernacle series. Yeah, because every element in the Tabernacle represents some points to Gesus. Yeah, that'd be cool, that would be fun, and it'd be like a mini series. Yeah, and unpack all the pieces because it helps you understand the law better. We're not going to spend a ton of time in the levitical law, but it would help understand the law better if you understood all the different pieces in the Tabernacle that eventually were transferred into the Temple. But particularly this arc of the Covenant. I mean, we've all seen Indiana Jones, so I believe it or not, the design of the Ark of the Covenant India Jones is pretty close. It is. It's pretty close to what the arc would have been. The thing that seems to be the biggest difference is the angels weren't prostrate, so like right here it says that the bent over bent over it so very specifically says bent over. But there's if you remember, they had like the straight their wings were straight as an arrow straight. Yeah, and they weren't necessarily they were tilted down, were they? Yeah? Okay, all right? But yeah, So anyways, the Ark of the Covenant and the Indiana Jones thing is kind of you have an image in your mind of this thing. So it wasn't very big. It's twenty seven inches by twenty seven inches by forty five inches right, right, So it's it's just over two feet by just over two feet wide, so it's not very big, yeah, and then just at just under four feet, right, So it's a narrow box. So the scale of the Indiana Jones one might have been off just a little bit on that, but it's it's it would have been four feet two feet two feet is what it would have been, right, And so four feet is yeah, I mean yeah, but it only would have been about this, why right, two feet yeah, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, so it wouldn't have been very big. But anyways, the covered in Gold has got these angels on there, and then it keeps talking about this atonement cover. You and I would have learned it as the mercy seat, right, and this represented where God, the presence of God would be, and this is also the place where the atonement, sacrifice for atonement would be poured out, would be on this mercy seat place. And it represented the fact that sins could be covered by blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins, and so the priests would come in and pour out this one offering every year to atone for the sins of all the people for the whole year. And so it really represents even more than just this. Really, you know, people think of it as a magic box. It'st it has inside, it has the we didn't even talk about this, but Aaron's rod that flowered, and then it has the Ten Commandments, and then eventually there's going to be this man man. This hasn't happened yet, but it's going to be in there. And God laid all these things out to a little bit of trivia. That's the only thing mentioned tangible that's in heaven from Earth. Well, well, no, the Ark of the Covenant and its contents are the only thing that is mentioned that's going to be in Heaven that existed on Earth except people, well, tangible yeah, items, items. I was referring to things. Oh I see yeah yeah yeah yeah. God liked it so much he took it to heaven. Yeah. It reminds me of that joke. Can I tell it? Certainly? Okay. So the guy dies he's super wealthy, goes to heaven and and he begs Peter and says, you know, well, sorry, Peter's a the parlegates, right, and that's every joke. And he says to Peter, he says, hey, id a request. He says, I was so rich in Heaven that on earth. He goes, I want to go back down. I want to take something with me, and Peter says no, no, no, no no. He goes, everybody knows you can't take anything with you in heaven, and he goes, oh please, oh please, so please. He made such a fuss that Peter says, fine, I'll go talk to the boss. Comes back and says, okay. He goes, this is the first time in history that God's done this. But he says, you can go back, and He's given you one suitcase and you can fit anything you want as long as if fits in this one suitcase and bring it back. And the guy's like so excited, So he sends it back to Earth, and the guy doesn't know what to do, so he decides to liquidate everything that he has and he turns into gold bars and he stacks it into you know, it just brings gold back into heaven. But he realizes as he's packing it in that there's spaces between the gold bars, and he's so greedy that he eventually grinds all the gold down to gold bullion and just so there's no spaces whatsoever, and he packs the suitcase with gold bullion, so there's not even not even a space that isn't gold bullion, closes it up and brings it into Heaven and drags it as it's really heavy, and all of a sudden, at this time, it's not just Peter, it's it's everybody, and they're there and they're so ex because this is historic, right, and he says, man, we can't believe that you bring something to heaven. You've created such a fuss. So he drags it all the way up and he says, I can't wait to see what's inside. And so the guy clicks it open. He says, oh, wait, do you see this man? You've never seen anything like this. And the guy pops it open, you know, and every he looks down and Peter glances and says, you brought pavement. So the arc of the Covenant, and then it goes on to lampstand the table of Presence, and all of these elements represents specific things in the way that God is interacting with his people, Representing how God gives light, representing the food that God provides, representing all these things. And then there's these altars. There's the clothing for the priest and the epod that he's wearing, and the chest piece that he's going to wear, and all of these elements so that the people would have an understanding that they're dealing with the Holy God and that God is set apart from them, and that our sin separates us from God. That's a part of that. But through sacrifice and then ultimately through the the the shed blood of the innocent lamb on this mercy seat, on this this this uh what what what's what's the title? Atonement cover that because of that, God will be with his people and God offers to bless his people as they choose to obey him and follow his commands. Right, But the possibility of having this connection with him was not because of the the law. It was because of the sacrifice, the innocent one sacrificing for the guilty. And so that's what they do, is they would pour it out here on this this holy box, and it would atone for the sins of the people. And uh yeah, And even the placement within the tabernacle is important as well, because it was it was located in the very center, right, and and and so God existed in the epicenter of the tabernacle, and not all of that. But then he sets forth forth laws that only certain people can enter into the presence of of where the the ark of the Covenant was. Right, so the Holy of Holies becomes, uh, you know the room in Solomon's temple that is not only in the very center of the temple, but in that case it's also on the third level. So there's actually like levels you know that that that are down below on the outer rim. And then as you went into the next level, it goes up slightly and then you get to the Holy Holies and it's on the third third floor, So it's it's interesting how it's so symbolic everything about it and the rules of who's allowed closest to God's presence. Everything was was was because of sin, because of God's holiness. So you had you had the courts right where there there would be places where people could who were not Israelites Hebrews that they could come and and be around. But then the Israelites or the Hebrews would be allowed in an open court. Then from there there'd be the Holy Place, this is where only the priests can work. And then there'd be the Holy of Holies, and this is where the arc of the Covenant would be, the mercy seat would be, and this is where they would only go and they had a huge thick curtain and they could only go in one time a year, and they'd tie a rope around their foot. They had bells on the bottoms of their thing just in case they died because they hadn't gone through the purification process right or something, and they could pull him out rather than have to go in and get them. So it was a big deal because if he died without a rope, then how do we get him out. How do we get him out because somebody's alloed in. Yeah, So it's really really fascinating stuff. I just encourage you go ahead and read through it. There's several really good books on the idea of the tabernaclin what that's all about. But just ultimately know God's desire, even in the midst of our sin, is to have a relationship with us. And this was his way of initiating a relationship in his presence with an entire nation of people. Now he desires an an intimate personal relationship with you. And the Bible says, now, because of what Jesus did on the Cross, that that veil between us and the Holy of Holies is torn apart, and that we can go boldly before the Throne of Grace. Right, the throne of grace, this covering of atonement, it's the same thing. Right, we can go boldly before the Throne of Grace to God with our requests and our needs. And He wants to have a relationship with us. But this is the beginning of God instituting with an entire nation. I want a relationship with you, and there's an appropriate way to do it. And he's very specific I mean, it's dozens and dozens and dozens of pages about the specifics of how to approach him, and it's just an indicator of the fact that we don't create our own way to God. God makes a way to Him that's right for us, right, got establish all of that, that's right. Yeah, Well, hey, that is our time, and so that's a good place to end. So we will continue on next time. Hopefully you'll join us on the Bible. Guys,