Chapter 9
The tabernacle was erected more or less three thousand five hundred years ago and is no longer in existence. However, its spiritual significance is very much for the present time and it is practical. Moses built the tabernacle according to the heavenly pattern shown to him by God on the mountain. He probably did not know that, in addition to being a physical place for worshipping God, that great tent symbolized many spiritual realities. Thanks to the New Testament, especially to the writings of Paul (considering him as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews), we can understand the spiritual aspect of the tabernacle and also its application to our daily living.
The spiritual application of the various items of the tabernacle allows us to better understand the facts related to God’s full salvation, such as justification, sanctification, reconciliation and redemption. In reality, these items are the Lord Jesus Himself (cf. 1 Cor. 1:30). Many children of God are not aware of the need to experience God’s full salvation in all these aspects. For example, many of them find that the justification obtained at the altar of burnt offering in the outer court is sufficient for them because they are not aware of the need for subjective justification, which is represented by the embroidered garments (Psa. 45:13-14), the garments of fine linen, which are the righteousnesses of the saints (Rev. 19:8), and the wedding garment (Matt. 22:12), which qualifies us to enter into the millennial kingdom.
They also have a partial and superficial understanding regarding sanctification. Many think that sanctification is a sinless state of moral perfection or they understand it merely in its positional aspect. They do not know that, in reality, the most important aspect is dispositional sanctification, which depends on our willingness, our desire to be sanctified. This takes place by receiving more and more of God’s holy nature. The holy position that we receive at our regeneration, which is positional sanctification, placed us in the right and proper position to participate in God’s holiness, which refers to dispositional sanctification, as we saw in the previous chapter in the example of the cup under the faucet.
In relation to redemption, we also need to know clearly that it is a process in three stages. At the time of our regeneration we were redeemed in our spirit, today we are being redeemed in our soul and in the future, at the Lord’s coming, our body will be redeemed.
Finally, reconciliation also has three aspects and we need to experience all of them. The first reconciliation brought us from the position of being enemies of God to being sons of God; the second occurs continuously and makes us His priests that we may serve Him in the Holy Place; and the third reconciliation eliminates our natural living and service and brings us into the Holy of Holies, into our spirit, where we must live in order to intimately know our Lord and the desire of His heart.
All the foregoing is implied in the figure of the tabernacle. Therefore, to only know these wonderful and heavenly truths is not enough. We need to receive a spiritual vision, a revelation in our spirit that will change our life, even to the point that we can say like Paul, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision” (Acts 26:19). If we “see,” if we spiritually discern the Lord’s will for us, we will realize that His intense desire is that we would be reconciled to Him “beyond the veil,” that we may mature and become overcomers. The love of Christ constrains us to seek this. When we realize how much He loves us and how much He wants us to be absolutely for Him, we are spontaneously drawn to the Holy of Holies to live in oneness with Him (1 Thes. 5:10).
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