Tag: OldTestament
foreign in Judaism even today every year if people are adhering to this and they’re still keeping a Passover they are recounting this whole passage in what is called a Passover Haggadah it’s a little book that kind of Chronicles the the Passover Exodus story if you will and then there is the main meal and it’s very interesting because if you if someone were to analyze and many people have but if you were in your own time to analyze you could see that a lot of the things that are being consumed at this Passover seder actually have some correlation to the New Testament as well so it’s kind of interesting they actually correlate in many ways to Christ because Christ as Paul says in the New Testament Christ Our Passover [Music] hmm coming to this house [Music] today coming to this houseAs found on YouTubehttps://is.gd/cgc_9_8_prescreen_submissionMy 6-step formula for GCSE exam success. Achieve a top grade in all your GCSE exams whilst spending half of your time doing the things you enjoy. I explain why note-taking is NOT the way ➯➱ ➫ ➪➬ The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is an academic qualification in a particular subject, taken in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. State schools in Scotland use the Scottish Qualifications Certificate instead. Private schools in Scotland may choose to use GCSEs from England.http://flywait.jeevan91.hop.clickbank.nethttps://www.facebook.com/LeRoystudio/shop/?view_public_for=599164993460144&ref_code=mini_shop_profile_plus_header_cta&ref_surface=profile
How Are Sins Being Forgiven?
foreign [Music] God clearly says without the shedding of blood the remaineth no more remission for sin so the big question is if somebody is leaning into the Old Testament how are sins being forgiven that’s the big question mark and if you look in rabbinical literature it’s all over the map but clearly God gave a prescription for that that ceased and it’s no accident that at the coming of Christ some what three plus hundred years after the close of the Old Testament there is no new prescription there’s only the Forerunner to Christ that basically points to him and says Behold the Lamb of God the perfect Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world and you have to remember that there was no new testament at the time so that’s coming from a hebraic mouth there was no Christianity then so people who will blatantly ignore that are blatantly ignoring the big picture God said I have a new way that the Son of God came to tent inhuman flesh and ultimately his death on the cross became what Paul refers to as Christ Our Passover there is no more book of Hebrews says there is no more need to keep doing these offerings One Singular one suffice for the world and whether you turn to Christ or not whether somebody looks to Christ or not he paid it past present and future those who look to him the Bible clearly says are basically saved by his shed blood [Music] [Music] coming through this houseCreate Animated Whiteboard & Motion Video Promos Ads & Sales Letters In Minutes! 37.⁰⁰
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The worship practices that God prescribed are not being practiced anymore and modifications have crept in like “God doesn’t want our sacrifice anymore, but acts of lovingkindness,” which I’m sorry to say – acts of lovingkindness cannot cleanse the soul. They cannot take away sin. They can make you a better human being, but that’s about it. And I’m sorry to say it like that, but; and you could say, “Well, that’s, that’s kind of crazy. Why would you say that?” Well, I’m saying that because we’re looking at God’s word. And God’s word has another problem here. And do you want to know what the problem is? Leviticus 17, it is the blood that makes an atonement for your soul. So if you remove all the blood, how is your soul being atoned for? You’re either performing the sacrifices of old, or you’re looking to the final sacrifice: Christ.♪ ♪ ♪ The Day of Atonement is the English for what is called Yom Kippur. In the Hebrew Old Testament, the word Yom, “day” in Hebrew, and Kippur is from the Hebrew word kâphar, “to cover,” carrying the concept of the day as covering or atoning for the past year’s sins. Now, I want to just take a second here and I’ll probably drive some people crazy with this, but you’ll hear me say this to the close of the message, where this system failed; not God, the system, is you begin to see that the children of Israel did not fully trust God, they didn’t fully follow God, even, trust me, when you get to the book of Malachi it becomes apparent that God had had enough. We’re talking about first and foremost, the priests who were just doing everything under the sun, the opposite of what God prescribed, and then you’ve got the people who are rebellious, stiff-necked, they think they know better than God, and some point, you get an awareness that where the system failed; not God, is people need more than a covering.You need more than a covering for the year’s past sins. And that opens up a floodgate of theological questions which I won’t get into now, but I’m just, I want to say this at the end of the message. If you didn’t know the Old Testament from the New, what would you rather have? Are your sins covered for a year, or are your sins taken away permanently? It’s a no-brainer, right? (Yes ma’am.) So this is where when you read the book of Hebrews, it starts with telling you how much better Christ is, how superior the New Testament, how superior; it’s because it’s referencing these things that are very difficult to articulate in their conceptual meaning, but when you see it on the pages, it’s clear as day. So the people were following this prescribed, or these prescribed set times, Yom Kippur, for example, occurs on the tenth day of Tishri, which would be the seventh Hebrew month, which is the equivalent to our September/October, observed after the Feasts of Trumpets, but before the Feast of Tabernacles.This day was supposed to be very solemn, and there’s a passage that describes the day. The Lord said would be a day when you shall afflict your souls. And we can understand what that means. “Afflicting your soul” would be abstaining from food, so fasting and repenting. So that whole day was emblematic of cutting off, essentially when it says afflict your souls, cutting off all of what you would normally do, including work. If any person chose to work on the Day of Atonement, the Bible says it at least three times, if you worked on the Day of Atonement, how solemn it was, and how important it was for God, if you even tried to work, you’d die. You’d say, “Huh?” Yeah. That’s, and it’s in the Bible, so you can look it up. This day also marked another peculiarity, which is the high priest was permitted to enter into the Holy of Holies and stand before God, which was not done as we think sometimes, “Oh, the priest did this regularly.” No, he did not.Wearing his holy garments, special holy garments for that particular day, not his usual but still festive robes, these garments were only worn on this day, only, to ensure that the high priest did not make himself ceremonially- unclean there are all these minute details. Now, I’m talking more about temple times than Tabernacle. We have more details as you go into the book.So I may be combining things from the Tabernacle and the temple, but this would be more towards temple time. If the priest, high priest became ceremonially unclean himself; coming in contact with a dead body and not cleansing, or there was a whole list of things that could make someone ceremonially- a high priest ceremonially unclean, it would disqualify him from performing his tasks. The high priest would stay in the high priest’s quarters inside the temple. So obviously, this is during the temple times, they had a quarter, an area just for the high priest. And it’s kind of interesting because there’s also a backup to the high priest in case he couldn’t fulfill his duties. There are all kinds of details that God was saying, “Hey look, I’m going to think of everything here,” and I think He did, covered it all, backups to backups with the course of the 24 ministers standing by, everybody’s watching. All these things ritualistically must be carried out. For example, for the high priest, it would be the sprinkling of the ashes of a red heifer, twice before his required duties were to be fulfilled.Now, if you’re one of these people who studies eschatology and what’s going to happen in the future, that’s the whole big fuss about, you know, there, there are people in this day, and this has been going on for a long time, that is looking for that particular red heifer to make sure that that particular red heifer has no blemish, that fits the criteria. But guess what? That red heifer that they chose 10 years ago, it ain’t so red heifer anymore, right? So there’s a whole group of people out there doing different things in preparation for the end, but even if the end were to start today, you probably still need to see, the Lord will provide that when the time comes.I love that people want to be prepared. Some people are trying to build the temple now, they’re trying to build the tools, the utensils, and everything, but when the time comes, God will pull the switch, and there’ll be people who will be driven to do these things, to bring to fulfillment what God has revealed in His word. Now, for the ritual cleansing, if you want to read about this, I don’t have time to do this now, but if you want to read about the ritual cleansing, there are many passages including Numbers 19. They are the basic required cleansing for ceremonial defilement and cleansing.Now, as I said, there would also be a backup priest, usually the next in line in succession, standing by to fill in case the high priest himself could not accomplish or perform his duties. And this person would be referred to as the “captain of the temple,” just all these little neat names. And then when you go in to read the New Testament, you might find some of these names and not know what exactly they mean. So the captain of the temple would be the backup person. By the time of the temple, where we see very clear developments of patterns of worship, we see that the ashes from the altar were removed and four fires were lit instead of the usual three.There are a lot of activities here that you just say, “Wow, for one day?” Yes, and on this unusual day, and I say unusual because it is the special practices and activities that go on this day that are radically different from everything else. The priest would go about washing his hands before carrying out his duties, but on this day the priest would also be required to be immersed and cleansed in a large tub or bath. Now there’s great debate about this because you’ll hear me say, you’ll hear me repeat this somewhere else, but it seems like when they were getting ready when they were preparing the high priest, a lot of things were done behind a curtain of linen so that people who wanted to make sure that these things were being carried out could see the shadow of what was happening behind the curtain.That’s a little freaky; I’m going to tell you, okay? I don’t even know what to say about that, but anyway, so would you like to have 50 people watch you bathe? I don’t think so, okay? And that’s just one of the weird oddities, like, “Thanks, but no, thanks.” So the oddity of all this cleansing for the high priest, as I said, was carried out behind a curtain so that it’s not because people were perverts or weirdoes; it was if one thing was omitted, it could ruin the whole day and that whole day, just not being ruined, but God’s wrath could be poured out. So it was important to do every jot and title of what was required to the best of their abilities, which they did.The priest would then wear a special attire for this day, perhaps most noteworthy were the ornaments that would be at the hem of his garment down by his feet. This was designed so that the people could hear the priest’s movement. And when I say that, because he would enter into the Holy of Holies, this was to make sure that if they heard the noise from the hem of his garment, they knew the priest was still alive, he did not die. Why? Because the Bible clearly says that anybody who sees God, could die, but also if you didn’t carry this out in an exact way. Everything is very precarious here. His special robe and on top of his special robe, he did wear the breastplate with the twelve names of the tribes of Israel, which we kind briefly went through. The priest would wash his hands and feet to carry out the daily, regularly occurring service. Now this is what’s interesting.The high priest would change his clothes five times on the Day of Atonement. Now not, I’m not focusing on the number, I’m just saying, if you know why, then it makes sense. There was a lot of blood being sprinkled and splattered everywhere. So it would make sense. I mean, tell the truth. Would you want to encounter the high priest all decked out with a little spattering of blood here and there? No. And if you didn’t change your clothes, I think you’d probably be covered. You’d be wearing a red outfit, not a white one. So it’s all these little things you’ve got to take into consideration. With each change of clothes, the priest would also have to wash his hands and feet. The high priest’s work began early in the day, and by the afternoon the singular focus would be on the Day of Atonement. There would be a sin offering for the high priest and the entire priesthood, one offering of a young bull. This portion of the ritual took place close to the area where the priest ministered, and that’s also important. God didn’t say do it outside or do it over there, but where they ministered.So if anyone had sinned, this would be the blanket covering for the high priest and all the priesthood. The high priest would place his hands on the head of the sacrifice; both hands and we’ve looked at this concept before, vicarious, communicating all the confession of sins onto the animal, to confess one’s sins to the animal. So the high priest was then taken by two other priests to the eastern side of the altar. These two goats stood side by side, so identical in color and size.Two stones or lots would be cast, and each stone had an inscription. One stone said for Yahweh, and the other one said Azazel on it. But the two goats were considered one in their offering. And it’s kind of interesting because the two goats faced the temple and awaited their fate for the goat to be determined which lot would fall on which goat, and then they would get to work, and I’ll tell you about that in a second. But let me discuss the word Azazel for a minute because we know Yahweh’s name is Lord. But Azazel, most have taken it to mean Satan or some form of demonic representation. If you look it up, however, the etymology of the word is highly disputed. So, and I’m not going to tell you, I know the principle, but I’m not going to tell you definitively, although these speak generic enough for us to understand something.So, it is either a verb, azaz, which is from us, “to be strong,” or el, “God,” which I reject. And I’m telling you why I reject it. I don’t think that knowing the nature of what they were doing with this goat and what its fate would be, I do not believe that it represents that. Or, ez, which is another strength word, and “she-goat”; I’m sorry, ez, “she-goat,” and azel, “to go away.” But commonly translated, specifically in the book of Enoch, you can take the meaning as “scapegoat,” all right? The Oxford Companion to the Bible says, “Azazel is a fallen angel.” And in the Midrash, they say, “demon.” All I would care for you to know is because that goat, that the lot fell on it, and it was named Azazel, it would have a red cord tied around one of its horns, and that basically, they would, again, do this transference of every confession laid on it, and it would be essentially let out, kind of interesting, outside of the epicenter of worship, and the people remained behind waiting for the priest that was chosen for this task to say, “It is done.” At that time the priest would finish the task by offering both the other goat and the bull, but they had to wait for the first to come back and say, “It is done.” The high priest would recite passages from the Torah, specifically Leviticus, and Numbers, to ensure that every prescribed situation was carried out in the ears of the people, mind you.That was the whole premise of this. The remaining offerings on Yom Kippur would be carried out at this time, and the final offerings would not be sin offerings, but they would be burnt offerings. And if you remember, I taught that. Those are wholly ascended and offered to God. There is no sin or trespass attached, just something that should be acceptable and pleasing to the Lord. But now let me take a few steps back to address the sprinkling of the blood within the Holy of Holies. I think I missed something here, and I did. Let me go back to the goat for a second.So originally, if you read in the inception of these instructions, the goat was merely led out to wander, and that was that never to return. But what is not said here, you will not find it anywhere in this book, but I think it can be deduced from this, is I think at some point in one of these annual celebrations or a high day, one of these goats had to return. And the reason why I say that is because during temple times, there was a switch from just merely leading it out and letting it wander and hopefully never to be seen again, that was the idea, versus what developed at a later time where the priest who was assigned to this duty would push the goat backward off of a high crag or a cliff to its death to ensure that it did not return.God, by the way, never prescribed that. See, these are the subtle things in here. These people are worried about the goat coming back. Well, it did one time, perhaps. I’m speculating on this. I don’t know why you would change what God said into something more brutal. I mean, we have enough sacrificing and blood being spilled. Why more, right? Unless you’re into that type of thing maybe, but anyway, that takes care of that.Now, let me go forward to address the sprinkling of the blood within the Holy of Holies. After the bull’s blood filled the golden bowl, the high priest would bring the blood-filled bowl into the Holy of Holies. The blood was carefully sprinkled before the Ark of the Covenant as God instructed. Now, the high priest would sprinkle one time with an upward motion and seven times with a downward motion, almost like a whipping motion. That’s how the blood would be applied. It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t, it was kind of an aggressive type of sprinkling if you want to call it that. And during this time, while the priest was engaged in the sprinkling, anyone standing maybe in the Holy Place or the other court would hear the high priest counting the number of times he sprinkled, as to not sprinkle one time too many, or not enough. You can see how this is a very box-checking scenario. And I’m not; I don’t want to paint this in a negative light. I think if I was charged to do something back then and God said, “And see to it that you do it exactly like this,” I’d be like, “Okay,” because I know what the consequences are, right? So I don’t blame them for this type of legalism, but that’s what would go on.There he would slaughter, well, he would, he would come out from there and he would slaughter the goat that was determined to be for the Lord, collect the blood, and once more enter into the Holy of Holies with the goat’s blood sprinkling the same way as the first animal’s blood. So you’ve got, you’ve got a couple of times, several times throughout this particular day where the high priest will go in and out of the Holy of Holies. It’s very interesting, because if you think about it, you know, the thinking person would say, “Save time, do it all at once, go in there, do it one time so you don’t risk,” but this is the prescribed method that God said. So the blood of the goat that remained, along with the remaining bull’s blood, was placed in a single bowl and sprinkled on the horns of the altar. Another step in this ceremony was the burning of incense. Now all of this is like minute details, but they all culminate in something which I will get to.Because we’ve studied a very generic overview of these acts, I’m going to try and paint a visual picture a little bit better to try and help us understand the nature and the proportion of these offerings. So the high priest would take a golden censer or a pan, and he’d fill it with live coals from atop the altar. Then he would take two handfuls of the incense.Remember we looked at some of these things, particularly the incense. He’d take two handfuls of the incense and place them in the golden ladle- this is another tool inside the tabernacle or the temple- and carried the fire censer with the live coals in one hand and the incense in the other. He would make his way into the holy place, the area we previously looked at, where the lampstands, the table, all of that stuff, but then he’d make his way through the veil into the Holy of Holies with that. Once inside he would stand quietly and then he would pour the incense on top of the coals and wait for the fragrant cloud to fill the room before exiting. Now you start to put these pieces together and you recognize that alone all these things are oddities, but put together you can see some reason, if you will, of why. The blood, which is always synonymous with life, atonement, death, and the cloud, if you will, the fragrant aroma ascending to God; all of these symbolize, we are basically, “We’re carrying out everything You’ve prescribed, God; what You’ve asked us to do, we’re doing it.” So it seems like a lot of steps, they all kind of in the big picture, if you look at all this you realize this is all pictures and types of Christ; I’ve said this before, I’ll keep saying it.We do know that at every stage from the Tabernacle to the temple, the glory of God referred to as the Shekinah glory would, would fill the Holy of Holies, everything done right, kind of what I like to say is God’s seal of approval, like, “Okay, you did it well, everything was done to My standards; you may all live now.” It’s kind of; I think that’s a little bit like kind of like that, all right? But what I love about this is God didn’t just appear, oh He could, and He did in other times, but God could have just appeared on that day in the cloud and without all this being done, but there are reasons for all of these steps that unfortunately, as I will go on to discuss in a little bit, modern practices completely fail what God required.And I will, I’ll prove it to you. But between the Lord’s appearing and people hearing, because all the general public, and when I say general public, the rest of the priesthood, they didn’t see what the high priest would, would be given to see. So all they could go on was the sound of the pomegranate bells at the bottom of his garment, basically making the noise to say, “He’s alive,” and that’s a good thing. So in this series of messages, I’ve tried to show what is celebrated in today’s Judaism falls far from the things that God said they were specifically to carry out or do. Now, I have a ton of Jewish listeners, so I am- this is not bashing or meant to offend, this is meant to educate. And I’ve always said, do not take my word, go and follow up on the things I say. I have no issue with that; I’ve done my homework. But any honest scholar from any observation would see as plain as day that modern observance is a man-made concept; man-made.The modern, what is celebrated today is man-made. Oh, you may go to the temple and they may read certain passages; that is true. But when I get into this, you’ll see, no, it’s, it’s just modified. And then the question is, you know, people make the argument, “Well, there’s no temple to carry out these activities, therefore, if there’s no temple, we can’t do any of this, we cannot.” Hold that thought for a minute. So if one chooses to investigate what is behind not just the destruction of the temple, see, the temple could have been destroyed and people fled, but if they were, forgive my word, indoctrinated or well studied enough, they would have continued to carry out the practices, except, which I will get to in a minute if they were well versed, they would have read Deuteronomy 12, and that may have been the reason for not practicing these sacrifices and rituals.Bear with me for a second. A rabbi by the name of Yohanan ben Zakkai put into practice the idea that because the temple had been destroyed that acts of loving kindness could be adequate substitutes for the brutal sacrificing of bulls and goats, prescribed by none other than God Himself. So that’s interesting. A man of God makes a decision that “God’s word doesn’t mean what God’s word means, so we can put something in its place.” And by the way, it’s not just the Jews, it’s the Christians; we’ve all done this, unfortunately.We’re, there’s probably no person on the face of the earth that isn’t guilty to some degree of doing this, modifying, changing, whatever you want to call it. But the rabbis quoted the words of Hosea, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” is the verse that would allow them to change the worship practices. That’s rich, isn’t it? So the blood offering is still observed in the smallest sects of Orthodox Jewry today, but it’s small. And, if and when sacrifices, blood sacrifices are offered, it’s a chicken. Think about that. So after carefully reciting several passages from the Old Testament, a chicken is slaughtered and there’s a, there is a specific way as prescribed by the rabbis of how to slaughter the chicken. Now, in all fairness, let me show you something because this is important. I don’t want to; I always try and show you everything so that we’re not forming an erroneous opinion. Turn with me to Deuteronomy 12. Now, if you have a Bible like mine- I love saying that. I don’t; I stole that one by the way.I plagiarized that one. If you have a Bible like mine, on page 261, there’s a header over the twelfth chapter of Deuteronomy in the Bible I’m using, “Worship Only in the Special Place.” And that pretty much sums up this chapter. And I’m going to do some emphasizing, so bear with me, “These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee, giveth to possess it all the days that ye live upon the earth.Ye shall utterly destroy all places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, upon the hills, and under every green tree: and ye shall overthrow their altars, break their pillars, burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God.” Now, here becomes emphasis, all right? “But unto the place,” emphasis, “which the LORD your God shall choose out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come: and thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, your heave offerings of your hand, of your vows, and of your freewill offerings, and the firstling of the herds of your flocks,” emphasis, “and there ye shall eat before the LORD your God, and ye shall rejoice in all that ye put your hand unto, ye and your households wherein the LORD thy God hath blessed thee.” So if you keep reading this, say verse 11, “There shall be a place which the LORD your God shall choose to cause his name to dwell there,” the emphasis is “ there .” And all of these references are pointing to; remember, they are in the wilderness now perhaps, but all these are pointing to a fixed place.And if you read the whole chapter, which I think I, it’s not that long, I think I have time to do it. So let me go back a little bit because this explains they are not yet in the land because He says, “But when ye go over Jordan and dwell in the land which the LORD God giveth you to inherit, and when he giveth you rest from all your enemies round about so that ye dwell in safety; then there shall be a place which the LORD your God shall choose to cause his name to dwell; thither shall ye bring all that I command you; your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, your heave offerings of your hand, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto the LORD: and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God, ye and your sons, and your daughters, and your menservants, your maidservants, and the Levite that is within your gates; for as much as he hath no part nor inheritance with you.Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in every place that thou seest.” That verse right there is a clue. Don’t go offering everywhere, so specifically God says, “I’m going to, I’m going to map out a place and you’re going to do all that I’ve commanded you to do there .” And if you keep reading, “But in the place which the LORD shall choose out of one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee.” So if you want to go with extreme legalism in the interpretation of the word, if somebody’s reading this, they would have plausible cause to say, “Well, we can’t offer the offerings that God prescribed, and we can’t do the things that God prescribed us to do, because the there doesn’t exist anymore,” right? It sounds plausible to me. And like I said, I’m trying to show you where this reasoning might come from that because there is no there anymore, the main temple. But here’s the question, and it’s a big question.It’s one that I can’t answer for you. So does that mean that every synagogue and every temple is not sanctioned by God or that every synagogue and temple cannot function in the same way God prescribed for His original temple? Don’t answer that because I don’t have an answer. I don’t think anybody does. No one knows this except I can tell you that in the big scheme of things, interesting concept to think about. There has to be a trace remnant of strict, adherent Jews somewhere in the land for the rest of the fulfillment of the prophecy to come to pass.See what I’m saying is there have been Christian groups that have said, “We’ll build, we’ll build the millennial tabernacle. We’ll take it upon ourselves,” but those are not the people to build it. If you read Ezekiel very, very carefully, you will find there’s enough instruction in there to make us know that this is why there is a practicing remnant, not the quasi, not the non-practicing Jew. We’re talking about, the orthodox, strict adherents. There’s a reason why they are still practicing.And don’t say it’s because, “Well, that’s their faith,” because I’ve told you often enough and over and over again, I have a lot of Jewish friends and I could turn blue in the face talking to them, and telling them that their Messiah that they’re waiting for is Christ who was here before; it doesn’t matter. So what I’m telling you is it’s, it’s kind of, it’s, it’s heartbreak because if I hate to say it like this, if they knew what I knew, they wouldn’t be practicing what they’re practicing anymore. They would abandon it because it has no value in this age. But there has to be a small segment following and practicing to A) understand what the fulfillment of God’s word will be in the future, and there also must be a remnant for several other reasons which I choose to not get into right now, possibly in a future message. So what I’m saying to you is if you read through this, there are more instructions here that just kind of, you know, I, I just read to you, “But in the place which the LORD shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there shalt thou do all that I commanded thee.Notwithstanding thou mayest, thou mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates,” so that’s permissible, “whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, according to the blessing of the LORD thy God which he hath given thee: the unclean and the clean may eat thereof, as of the roebuck, and as of the hart. Only ye shall not eat the blood: ye shall pour it upon the earth as water.Thou mayest not eat within thy gates the tithe of thy corn, or thy wine, or thy oil, or the firstlings of thy herds, of thy flock, nor of thy vows which thou vowest, nor thy freewill offerings, or heave offerings of thine hand.” Verse 18 is very important. “But thou must eat them before the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD thy God shall choose.” So if you read this whole thing, you realize, yeah, it would be very difficult to carry out much of the practices that God instructed. Now, hear me out, a little sidebar. After the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D., God could have made it so that there was another temple, another epicenter, anywhere else. God could have done that. If God can do whatever He wants, don’t you think that He could have either resurrected that original temple or made the epicenter just shy somewhere outside or around Jerusalem? But He didn’t. So that’s what I’m saying to you. You can’t look at this and say, well, that’s a contradiction.You’ve got to look at it as a closed chapter, a closed dispensation. And so verse 18, where God chooses; where your son, your daughter, your servants, “and the Levite which is within thy gates: and thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God, and now that thou puttest thine hands upon.” And if you keep reading it, the whole chapter, as I said, makes certain that this becomes a difficulty. So, I’m not trying to make an excuse when I say the worship practices that God prescribed are not being practiced anymore and modifications have crept in like “God doesn’t want our sacrifice anymore, but acts of lovingkindness,” which I’m sorry to say that – acts of lovingkindness cannot cleanse the soul.They cannot take away sin. They can make you a better human being, but that’s about it. And I’m sorry to say it like that, but; and you could say, “Well, that’s, that’s kind of crazy. Why would you say that?” Well, I’m saying that because we’re looking at God’s word. And God’s word has another problem here. And do you want to know what the problem is? Leviticus 17, it is the blood that makes an atonement for your soul. So if you remove all the blood, how is your soul being atoned for? You’re either performing the sacrifices of old, or you’re looking to the final sacrifice: Christ.Hmm, now we have a contradiction. God says, “You may not do any of this in any other place where I say you can do it.” The rabbis collectively discuss and decide these are not necessary, “We can do whatever we need to do and swap it out.” But there’s only one problem. If God did say that the blood was the key for the soul, for the atonement of the soul, then Houston, we have a problem. No amount of praying or whatever you want to do on one set day is going to eradicate what God said was required to remove sin. And I don’t care if you’re Jew or Gentile. This is a concept that runs straight through the book. Now what do you do? And even there I’m going to tell you, a thinking person is going to look at this and say, “Gosh, you’re right.” If God says, “You can only do what I tell you to do, where I tell you to do it,” then they change it, and there is no blood being offered, and not just any blood.So you might say, “Well, doesn’t the chicken suffice?” I can’t answer that question because God said it was to be a bull or a ram or a goat; His specified offerings. So I can’t answer that question for you, but I can tell you it’s a conundrum, which I’m sure has caused great confusion among the practicing or semi-practicing Jews.In modern Jewry, for example, the synagogue is usually decorated with white linens to symbolize cleansing and purity. And if you drive around, we have a particular side of town here where there are a lot of, still there are a lot of temples and synagogues, you will see people pouring out of the buildings or entering the buildings dressed usually in white on that day. Now this is also interesting because, remember, it is a somber day and the idea is that they’re going in dressed in white to symbolize that they have been cleansed and purified. My question to you, rhetorical; no answer needed, is how? You can pray until the cows come home for God to forgive you, but if God says, “This is the method and this is the way,” and that’s not being performed, I don’t know that you can say, “I know that I’ve been made clean and whole,” or “I’ve been covered for the year,” as they like to put it. So during the service, a typical service would be reading portions of the book of Jonah.This is another interesting sidebar, okay. It’s usually read in the afternoon service. There would be five services in all. They got that number from the five services of the priest that I just told you about, okay? So five services and they chose, modern Jewry chose to read Jonah in the afternoon service and the idea is that they, the people, should understand, read and listen to the repentance of Jonah when God gave him the assignment to go and he went the other way and then he didn’t want to go and preach salvation to the people he was supposed to and of course, he repented and it all worked out and everybody was happy, right? All right, sorry, that was my words.But I’ll tell you why this is all so tragic. First and foremost, again, you make all these connections and you begin to think, there’s much more to this than just a cursory reading. Why did they choose Jonah? They could have taken from any other book and there are abundant Scriptures and ironically it is Jonah that Christ refers to when they ask, “Give us a sign.” You think about that and you don’t tell me that people are deliberately just kind of wearing blinders and, “Okay, we’ll read that book. We can understand it.” You can’t understand the book either unless you’ve been reading about Christ because, you know, I’ve told you some people get hung up on, “A great fish could not swallow a person.” And we know in this day and age because there’s a video of it, of great fishes swallowing people but spitting them out immediately.So living in the belly three days and three nights was the symbol pointing to the Resurrection when they said, “Give us a sign,” and He said, “That’s the only sign you’re going to get.” So ironically they’re reading Jonah but for a completely different reason and the mention of it makes me kind of go, “Huh? You can’t see that?” But again, that’s, that’s for another day. There’s more tragedy here in my opinion. If people profess to read the Old Testament and one reads the book of Daniel, prophetically he addresses the need for Israel to repent future time. Meanwhile, modern Jewish scholars seem to completely ignore this future impending doom for an unrepentant people. I’ve noticed that as I read a lot of material written by Jewish scholars. It seems to be completely ignored. Like, “Oh, everything’s going to be good because we’ve been spared.” No, I’m sorry you haven’t.If you read the whole book, particularly Ezekiel’s writing and some parts of Jeremiah, you’re going to find out that’s not the case. Sorry. And if you’re not reading this book and parsing it you’re not going to know the details, you’re just going to have some generic idea and I can just say that’s that. But in the book bearing his name, Daniel, he writes about the 70 weeks. These are prophetic weeks of seven, seven, we’ll call them years of weeks point to a future time. A later part of Daniel predicted that there would be 69 weeks, seven years, weeks of years period or 483 years from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah, Prince; that’s Daniel 9:25. He prophesied the cutting off of Messiah; that’s Daniel 9:26, after the end of the 69th week. Daniel’s 70th week is yet to be fulfilled. And when I say this to you, you know, people say, “Well, how can you be sure about all the things you’re talking about?” Because one who understands all that is written in here, you don’t need to be a great genius to see it.Here are writings that describe successive kingdoms and territories which were prophetically foretold about which happened. You remember just Daniel’s, the statue, his telling Nebuchadnezzar what the statue was, what every segment of the statue, what it all meant. And he’s talking about things that had not yet occurred. So you’ve got so many historical fulfillments already. To me, if anybody’s reading the book of Daniel, it would, it would make me think, you better get right with God. You better find your way and you better figure this out quickly. So the 70th week is still a future time where the Bible says an evil ruler will come to power in the last days, we’re looking at Antichrist and the prophet, his prophet if you will. In the middle of the 70th week, he will desecrate the rebuilt temple. When Christ returns He will do battle against His enemies. Let me pause right there. Who are the enemies of Christ? You read that. Who are the enemies of Christ? What enemies does Christ have? Well, I’d say at the start, the people who rejected Him. See, now you start putting pieces together and instead of looking at it in caricature, you look at it in, in its whole entirety.Who are Christ’s enemies? Remember when the family of Jesus is standing there and they were coming to take Him away and they said, “Oh, look, Jesus, your whole family’s there.” And He said it because He knew they were coming to take Him away. They thought He was crazy. And He said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren, but those that do the will of the Father.” So enemies would be anyone; sorry, who hasn’t gotten in line, whether that, you want to call it, would have referred to the term “prevenient grace.” God does the work to open the soil of the soul, to plant the seeds that can take root, or you are wearing blinders and you whole-cloth, wholeheartedly reject everything that was ever said. He came to His own and His own received Him not. Does that qualify as enemies? (Yes ma’am.) How about all the people who in their hearts of hearts, they may not have been the best or the most sanctimonious, but they followed Christ and they were persecuted, put to death, injured, and afflicted because of their faith?Those who brought on the affliction are Christ’s enemies. So you start looking at all this and you have to, you have to ask these questions. Who are His enemies? And He’s going to come with an army and you will see if you read the book, the book has how it all turns out, but at the end of the week much devastation and wrath will have occurred and the Lord will set up and establish His throne. The Lord will be king over all the earth and nations, a nation’s sin,” and when I say a nation’s, I’m talking globally, will be dealt with. Now what’s interesting is if you read what Isaiah wrote, Isaiah 66, I wrote it in my book, in my, on my notes here, I’ll read it to you. Isaiah 66:8, the gist of it is that a nation would be born in a day. How is that even possible? The Scripture says, “Who hath heard of such a thing? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.” So that tells you there, there’s a lot of stuff that’s going to hit the fan and in one singular day, a lot’s going to change.This will mark the prophetic fulfillment of the Day of Atonement, but, the fullness of it will always be in Christ. You cannot escape that. He is the, He is our atonement. You think about the work that He did on the cross and, there again, parse all the minute details and you find yourself kind of in awe because you can see a lot of the practices that I’ve just spoken about, you will find them not as they are read in the Old Testament, but in, we’ll call it a more modern way in Christ’s time, but you’ll find many of these steps: washing, cleansing, partaking of a certain meal, whatever that is, to line up to a lot of the recorded life of Christ in His final year on earth. It’s very interesting. Now, let me go back, take one step backward because this is another very important piece. It’s a big part. And that is, you remember I said to you when the high priest went into the Holy of Holies, he would sprinkle the blood before the Ark of the Covenant.And I know most of you heard me talk on the Ark of the Covenant. I did a whole message in a half or two on it; one of my favorite subjects, by the way. But when you talk about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, you can’t speak on that without talking about the Ark of the Covenant because God specifically said, “There is where you’re going to sprinkle the blood.” All right, so, this is not my opinion, this is Scripture. While people are still looking for the Ark, and I’ve given you all the plausible theories, and you’ve probably watched a bazillion programs that go nowhere. They waste half an hour of your life you’ll never get back to give you no answers. Yeah? (Laughter.) Okay, so I’m not the only one. Theories running rampant on, you know, some guy says, “And I saw the gold shimmering in the cave, but then we were told we had to get out because we were digging illegally, by the way.” Or, you know, the last program I saw, they said it was in the desert somewhere; all the theories from Jeremiah taking it from this person.They’re all flawed. I could go through everyone and say it’s flawed for a reason. But probably the most important thing that I want to show you, turn to Revelation 11, please, this, this will make it clear why I say- remember, the book of Revelation is John on the Isle of Patmos, exiled there, the sole survivor from amongst the original disciples, writing the book of Revelation which was given to him by God to tell us about everything we need to know as much as we can from his time until the end time. And in chapter 11 of Revelation, I’ve never; I’ve watched a bazillion programs, I’ve read books. No one mentions this. Verse 19, “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament,” the Ark of the Covenant, “and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.” Now, you remember, I, I emphasize this, remember the words to Moses, “See to it that you build it exactly according to the pattern,” and why? Because I believe that while God was giving this shadow pattern to Moses, He was probably sitting and looking at what He had created in heaven, which is the real, what will come down from heaven, the real everything.We’ve only been looking at what we call the shadow or a type of. So here’s the thing, and I’ve said this before, without the Ark of the Covenant, how can you sprinkle the blood and perform the ceremonial rituals that God required for the Day of Atonement? Now, hear me out. If God, through John, knows that there is no more earthly Ark or it’s hidden or it’s been destroyed or for whatever reason, I believe that God has just made it vanish, because I’ve said this before, if men, mankind, I’m not aiming at men, but people, humans, find the Ark, what will they do? They will worship it, not God.Oh, it’ll bring a few people around and go, “Oh, God is real,” but most people would probably bow down before that and venerate that, which is no more than Catholicism does with every other trinket that they have in their church. God does not want that. “The day will come when you will worship God in spirit” is what Christ said to the woman, not the day will come when you will bow down and venerate a bone from an apostle that was found was probably somebody’s other appendage or something, okay? (Laughter.) I’m sorry to say it. And I don’t mean to be blasphemous, but I, I grew up in that and I resent, I feel like I was duped.And many of you who grew up in that probably feel like you were duped too. So, all I can tell you is this amazing Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, in all of its entirety, Christ fulfilled it, and not just in being the offering. Think of it this way. Even if I could, I could probably spend another message on this. You remember when the crowd was screaming, “Give us Barabbas,” right, instead of Jesus? Do you remember that? (Yes ma’am.) There are your two goats. There’s so much parallel that occurred that you’d have to go, “Okay, maybe the days are wrong, but the events are not.” And you can see them as plain as day when you start studying.You see it. So all I’ll say to you is Christ’s work on earth, His truly finished work of taking away sin, we might better understand then, instead of people talking about “repentance,” which comes from the Latin, the flagellating; that’s not what repentance means. You’ve got to go to the Greek to see clearly.I’ve taught this. This ministry has been saturated with these words, metanoia, the Greek word, meta “with,” noia, “the mind,” turning of the mind, you turn from doing what you’re doing to following Him. That is the definition of “repentance.” Look it up. Any Greek dictionary, please look it up, don’t take my word. And the byproduct that happens after this is called metamelomai, “with deep remorse” or “deep feeling.” You, once you have made the change of mind, metanoia, begin to feel deeply plagued in your spirit that you failed God, that you’ve been such a lousy child.You, all of these things come upon you and they may not just come upon you once, they may be lifelong. But if we understand the Old Covenant could only be a shadow giving us some insight and listening carefully. The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur preferably in this reference, could only be a covering. When we read the New Testament, one of my favorite books, of course, I think it is my favorite book: John, you’re washed and cleansed by the word. All of the things that we can put together, the Word which is Christ and the words He spoke and the act that He did on the cross, all of this is cleansing through and through. And somebody might say, “Well, how is that, how could an act that was done so long ago still carry on?” Well, I hate to say this and I hate to do this to you, but read the Greek in the grammar and you will see that even the writers made no mistake about it.A lot of the tenses that they used were continuous. It happened on that day and it will continue until God says, “It’s time, I’m done, the last call for humanity.” So it’s important to see this and then make the comparison. If you think about it, the Old said “just a covering,” the New says “washed and cleansed.” No matter, listen carefully to this because there are a lot of people that struggle with this.No matter what you think your past or even your present acts, as long as you are turning to Him and recognizing Him. See, we’re all going to fail. This is, this is this bad stuff that people don’t want to talk about. We’re all going to fail. I’m going to fail. That’s why I said, “Don’t put me on a pedestal.” I can fall just as easily as you, but my fall will be much harder because you elevated me. I don’t want that. I’m just like you. I’m, I’m a sinner being saved by grace. I’ve got my issues, the things I have to work out. The same goes for you. We’re all humans and we’re all fighting and struggling to kind of keep our head above water. So if you think about this, there could not be a time from when somebody comes to the knowledge of Christ to not say, “This is,” like the writer of Hebrews said, “a better way, a superior way,” one that says “washed and cleansed.” And the only time that you will, you will not, if you drop your guard and you let Satan whisper in your ear because that’s what, why he’s called the accuser of the brethren, he can come and he says, “Oh, you remember that time when you did this,” or, “You remember that,” and then it all wells up again.But if you think about it, there is a big difference between bulls and goats and lambs offered versus the Lamb of God doing what only He could do. And the mission was pointed out at the beginning to make it clear. We are washed and cleansed, not just simply covered. So I leave you with this thought. It’s important to study this, to recognize what a great gift we’ve been given in Christ, that He did this, that we’re privileged, that He opened up our eyes, our hearts, our minds to receive, because we know whom the Lord sets free is (free indeed), and He set me free.There is something so profound when I say those words; I cannot articulate to you what it means to me. And I’m not saying do as I do or be as I am, but when you realize God chose you out from among people He did not hear His Word and to grow in Him, that’s a pretty big concept. It’s not something small. It’s not to be reduced or to be marginalized. So for those people who realize the gift you’ve been given of our atonement in Christ, we are no longer having to go year by year. I’ve told you this. Some of us have to go to God day by day and probably should. That’s the way you keep the channels of communication open, confessing and talking to God daily.Others will let it bottle up and finally, when they’re brought to their knees, they’ll do it. But all in all, there’s one big principle here and that is the connection that you have with Christ, the ability to talk, to pour it all out. He’s, He knows it all by the way, so it’s not, it’s not like He’s going to fall off His throne when you say something to Him, “Oh, well He couldn’t possibly know this.” Of course, He does. He saw it when you did it. Hello, He was there. So the better thing is you have your open channel with Him and you recognize all that He’s done. And when we quote the Scripture, by the way, we used to quote this all the time, “Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven,” there’s something to that. The Word, His Word, and the Word, Christ, are settled in heaven. They’re written there. So when somebody says, “Well, how will I know?” Stand in faith, read in faith, operate by faith, and keep studying and keep growing in the word and at some point, for those people I’m talking to maybe my newer listeners, a light’s going to come on and you’re going to say, “Why didn’t I see this longer, long before this time?” Guess what? God was getting you ready but it wasn’t the right time.So just praise God that He opened your eyes, your mind, and your heart to receive and you stand in the knowledge of what an amazing God we serve His grace is amazing to a people who do not deserve any of it, yet we are recipients of that great sacrifice He made. I can only say I feel incredibly blessed to be able to stand here in front of you and tell you all about this and I hope you feel blessed to receive it. That’s my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday at 11 am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass.If you’d like more teaching and you’d like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.As found on YouTubeWatch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of! ↯
Christ Is the Firstfruits, and We Are the Harvest – The Tabernacle through the Eyes of Christ #18
Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either. How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. ♪ ♪ So, we've been in a study now, I think 17-plus weeks, looking at through the lens by way of the New Testament, looking into the Old Testament.
We started with looking at the tabernacle, its furnishings, we moved on to the offerings, and now we are kind of in the set times. And it all ties together, but I've been trying to say this over and over and over again. And maybe you'll hear me repeat it a few times, even in this message today. You've got repeatedly things that are; they are types of our Lord. They are pictures. They are things that when we read them, let's just put ourselves in the Old Testament saints' shoes for a minute and there is no New Testament, just for a second, we would only be seeing one dimension, what God said to Moses, “These are the directions.” That's all we would see, all we would know; we wouldn't know that there's more.
So not just the practical application, but we, reading the full book can see the prophetical application and fulfillment in many of these things, pointing to Christ. Now if I sound repetitive on this, it's because this is what this book does. A lot of people say, “Well, I don't, I don't bother with the Old Testament because it's the Old Testament.” That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm sorry, but that is. Without this Old Testament, even reading the New Testament doesn't really make sense. You know, if you're reading “Jesus, born of a virgin,” ah, okay, but if, if you're reading the Old Testament and you can see that there were prophecies foretold that our Lord would be born of a virgin, that certain things foretelling, that's why you need the Old Testament. You can't do away with it, and why would you? It's only those people who really don't understand why it's here or they are adherence to the old way.
They are still slaying saber-toothed tigers, even though the saber-toothed tiger doesn't exist anymore. So we, we've been looking at, we started with the Sabbath, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, marking the beginning of Israel's feasts, commemorating the deliverance of Egypt, out of Egypt's bondage and the first harvest of the year. Now the New Year would later be marked out in the fall season, so we have two New Years to deal with eventually, but I'll explain that in a minute. All of these set times, all of them, first and foremost in their practical setting, were to remind the children of Israel that time, as well as attorney; eternity, as well as everything else, belonged to God. Now, see, sometimes I think these people were really fortunate because, well, they were. They had the direct sight of everything that happened.
We are living generations after and we are having to, by faith, take everything that's here. They got to see firsthand. So if you think about it, if you lived in that day, you might be a little bit better off in some respects, unless you were the stiff-necked, rebellious children of Israel, but you might be better off in that there was some type of connection. I mean, imagine if you were in Egypt's bondage and you saw the plagues poured out and you saw the most powerful ruler in the then-known land basically succumb to the words of God, letting the people go.
I mean, something tells me it'd be a little bit different than how we are in today's day and age, very distracted, it's take it or leave it. We're all in this very, “I'm not sure it really happened, did it happen that way?” And so to really assess why God made these set times, which I've said already, the set times have a connection or a correlation to Israel's history or in general the history, for example, the Sabbath takes you right back to creation. But much of these set times as we begin to study them, we see that God is saying, I want you to remember something in perpetuity, your deliverance out of Egypt's bondage. And why is that important? Because you could read this, just reading the Old Testament here and say, “Okay, I got it already; they, God delivered them out of Egypt's bondage.” But what if Egypt's bondage is God delivering you out of a life basically with no God, full of sin? If that's, then it would be remembered. It would be something you'd keep thinking of and you'd be grateful for that God opened your eyes, that He found you.
That's called prevenient grace. So when God says to remember their deliverance over and over again, yes, He's talking about that specific act, but we who are reading this should remember two things. It's a double; it's a double whammy for us. The first one is that God made good on His word to deliver the people. He said they would go in to a land that was not theirs, they'd be strangers in that land. They'd come out of that land, greater in number, richer, etc., which they did. And then you've got the double whammy for us as Christians, understanding God has called many out of the darkness into His light and that is the same as being delivered from Egypt's bondage. Your, your eyes have been opened.
So don't think, don't just read it in a one-dimensional way. Now on the fifteenth of Nisan, which is the equivalent to our April, depending on when it falls, but usually it's equivalent to April, the Feast of Unleavened Bread began. It went for seven days; no leaven could be consumed. And we read often a term, if you've ever seen━how many of you have ever seen a Passover booklet called a Haggadah? Okay, so it's a little booklet and basically it's, we'll call it the synopsis of the deliverance story, okay? But what's interesting is the Haggadah, the name on there, “festival” or “festivity,” we don't tend to think about this, but the Passover was referred to that. And in fact, there's a passage in━let's see if the brain's working good here━in Exodus, I'll read it to you if I can find it. Okay, here. So Moses is talking to Pharaoh and he says━“And afterwards Moses and Aaron went in, told Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness.” Now why is that interesting? Because that word is we'ahogu, which is very much, because it's a Semitic language, it's very much like the Arab word hajj.
They're just pronounced differently. So we have that same concept, a “pilgrimage,” or “wandering,” if you will. And these feasts or set times, don't think that they just happened like God said, “Okay, we're going to have a party now.” They were all to tie back, as I said, either in creation, Israel's history, things that God wanted the children of Israel, and after that, us, we who are of the new dispensation, to think on, believe, and obviously this is where I'm going with this.
So we're tying the old feasts and showing how they connect into the New. The law instructed the children of Israel that when they entered the land; this is always missed; when they entered the land, the Promised Land, the land that God said they would enter into and reap the harvest, that they would bring a sheaf of the first grain to the priest who would weave it before the Lord on their behalf. And there's something that I don't know why it's missed often, but I have it open in front of me and I'll read it to you as well from Leviticus 23 and verse 10, “Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them,” listen carefully, “When ye be come into the land which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, there ye shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the priest.” So clearly, a lot of times people think━first, how could you do a harvest and practice a real true harvest if they wandered for 40 years in the desert? Hello.
So I mean, you could probably harvest some things, but you're constantly moving. So He clearly says, “When you come into the land which I give unto you,” and that's key to understand how this would become regulated and obviously everything in the law becomes regulated. So by yielding and offering their firstfruits of their harvest to God, the first of it, they acknowledge that they were dependent on God for the harvest yet to come. And this is the other thing I'm finding people━you only know what people mess up when you start to read what people have, in good intention, I'm sure, penned. There's a lot of confusion about Firstfruits that is the gathering of the first of whatever and the feast of ingathering, which happens as we'll call it the full-orbed, full-blown harvest at the end of the season, okay. There's, there are differences here. So this particular Firstfruits would have been observed with somber tone.
The sheaf was to be waved on the day after the Sabbath. What we New Testament folks, I refer to this in my message on the Sabbath as the Lord's Day because it's the day the Savior rose. And the apostle Paul refers to Christ, in 1 Corinthians 15:20, as “the firstfruits of them that slept”" So this act, if you will, of our Lord's, of basically of dying and resurrecting and ascending, but the death and Resurrection portion, the Firstfruits hallowed the harvest from which it was taken. So I want you to think on why Firstfruits is important. Now, don't get me wrong, the late Dr. Gene Scott taught on Firstfruits and made it an integral part, if you will, of giving in this church, which people would basically first of the year and whether it's your first paycheck or the first of anything usually, and that's how it was taught.
I'm not saying that that ought not to be done, but there's something actually, in my opinion, infinitely more important than that, and I'm going to tell you what it is. If let's just say we go to glean the firstfruits of whatever is coming up and we're choosing the choicest and the best, it is a type. We're saying; we're not saying, “Oh, I hope that the rest of the harvest is going to be like this.” The firstfruits that we would be offering to God in the agrarian society would definitely be the expectancy of the rest of the harvest.
Does that make sense? Good, because now I want you to think about what Paul wrote when he said, “Christ is the firstfruits of them that slept.” For the Christian, we should expect, it shouldn't be; I don't know why I've done how many funerals and I still see people doing this very same thing, not understanding their faith. And that to me is the greatest, if you want to know what a crime is, that's a great crime because Christ died, went first as the first Goer. We have a right; we'll call it the right of expectancy that we too will be like Him. We too shall rise. That's the concept that for me, the most important concept of Firstfruit to recognize that something like this had not happened before. And don't get Lazarus confused in the mix. Lazarus was called forward to show Christ had the power over the grave and over death, but Lazarus still had to die.
So he's called out of the dead. Deliberately we know that the passage tells us that he was in the grave, and it's either Mary or Martha says, “You know, by now he's going to be stinking. It's been, so”━you know, it's well beyond the third, fourth day now. And that was deliberately put in there because you could not be considered certifiably dead unless three days had passed.
So we know Lazarus was certifiably dead when Christ called him out of the tomb, but that is not the Resurrection. He did resurrect from the dead, but he'd still have to die again, a normal death, and then like everyone else, hate to say it like this, but Lazarus is not like, he's not an exception, like everybody else, all must die. And this is why that expression that says, “Unless a grain of corn go into the earth.” It takes something essentially that looks dead to bring life. So here we have Christ as the first Goer and what was removed, and you're looking at these feast times, what was removed, the impediment, was the ceremonial impurity, and I'll explain what I mean by that.
The relation that the Firstfruits sustain the harvest is one thing, but remember the steps that had to be taken before. So if we understand the laws of the offerings that we looked at, and we kind of string this together, I hate to say it, like beads, it becomes clear that these times were set up with special times before or after one could be cleansed. Let's just say if you were making a sin and trespass offering, and then this would be offered or this would be celebrated. So God had a way of basically making sure everyone could be included if you went by the prescribed method, which we're looking into right now.
And if you're curious to know, Leviticus 23 spells it out. You've got a couple of passages in Exodus, Exodus 23, I believe━don't quote me on that, but I believe it's Exodus 23 as well. And then in Deuteronomy and Numbers, you've got some kind of extra material there, so yours to kind of pick apart. But when I, and you're going to hear me repeat this throughout this message. If the same relationship that the children of Israel had to the harvest, that is the Firstfruits, the expectancy, the, “Okay, we offered, we took the Firstfruits and we offered the best to God”" we are following the same pattern as Christ is the Firstfruits.
We should be expectant. Not “I expect and it may not happen.” No, that's the first harvest of the Resurrection; we are all going to follow that harvest. There's only one criteria, that you remain connected in faith and trust in Christ. We will all be in that harvest. So it's important to understand, or if you want to say, “If He's the Firstfruits, we will be the harvest,” that is the expectancy of the hope that's promised to the believer. Now the apostle Paul also wrote, “He was delivered for our offenses, raised for our justification.” So God laid upon Him, you've heard me say this before, all the iniquity of us all, and it would not have been a finished work had He not, had God the Father not laid that all upon the Son. As for Christ, the law had no further claim to urge penalty or to exact. Hence, He could be raised up from the dead to take His life again. Remember, He said, “I take my life, no one takes it from me.” So even though; see, these are the things that I, sometimes I have to stop and just scratch my head.
Jesus said, “I take my life, I lay it down, I can pick it up again,” essentially. So it makes no sense to me when I hear our Jewish brothers and sisters get very offended when we talk about the act of crucifying Christ. And the reality is, if you think about it, Christ had to die one way or another. If, if His plan, what He says, something's wrong with the world and only His death could fix it, He had to die one way or another. And it always comes down to this, people with lack of understanding will get very offended when we say the religious leaders basically urged Pilate, and the religious leaders were the ones kind of angling for this. Back to my message and my notes here; like the wave offering, waved to be accepted for the people by God, I'd say that Christ also became the wave offering, not accepted by God, but accepted for us by God. There's that little addition that makes everything count. The Firstfruits was the earnest of the upcoming harvest, a pledge that the harvest would be gathered, and there's also a special set time for that, that God says, “And this is harvest time.” So, if we want to talk about this particular Firstfruits, we can't, in this particular subject, we cannot not talk about the Resurrection, because that is how we connect to the New Testament over and over again.
And several times you'll, you'll hear me mention, especially about it, the apostle Paul will mention Firstfruits. So, it's important to understand the connection there starts at the Resurrection. And if you remember the only sign when they came to Him, they said, “Give us a sign. He said, “There'll be no sign except the sign of Jonah,” which was to say, “three days and three nights,” or at least being in the giant fish's belly, only to be spewed out alive, which if you think about it, we're not going to take this too far to the extreme. But that was Christ basically saying, “You want to know what My guarantee is? Now, your guarantee is Firstfruits. Mine is the sign of Jonah.” And you can take that however you want, but Jesus to us, Jesus is the new covenant. He's not just representing a covenant; Jesus is the new covenant, much like the old when it was given, a promise that God would make good on His word, so here Christ is telling these people, basically, “The only sign you're going to get is the Resurrection,” which Paul calls Christ “the firstfruits of them that slept”" He's the first of his kind.
So forgive me for making a circle here, but just as we are connected to the first Adam in our fallen condition, because of nature, condition, etc, we are indeed condemned. It's a death sentence, being born in Adam, in the first Adam, but being born again into the second Adam or the last Adam, which is Christ, brings life. It is the, we'll call it the reconciling or the making right, what was in the beginning, we have now access to the Father by this avenue, the one named Jesus Christ. And not only that, not just access, but the promise. This is the whole amazing thing, in my opinion, about studying these set times. See, these people didn't have a promise of eternal life or immortality. They didn't have that promise. They knew that the first parents had given it away.
We have that promise though, which makes wanting to know about this Firstfruits. As I said, you can talk about the giving part of it, the component of giving, which is important. But I'd like to start with the most important, which is what, why we're here: “If Christ has not risen, our faith is vain.” And I'm not interested in having the discussion with people. Let me just say it now, so I get it out of the way and, and you know, you can be angry with me later if you want, or you can be angry with me now. I do at both. Don't say you are a Christian. Don't parse words with me. Don't play games with me. You are a Christian when you are following Christ, period. You're not a Christian because you come to church one day out of the year. You're following Christ. And following Christ doesn't necessarily mean you come to church either.
How's that for putting it the way it is? But you're following Christ, which means you are studying Him. And “Him” is not a pronoun limited to one book or one half of a book. It's the whole thing. That's what makes you a Christian; you're following Christ, you're learning about Him. It's like saying, “Yeah, my family.” Well, if you spend time with them and you live under the same roof or your blood, born blood, or; but there has to be a connection there to say that. You're not going to go to a stranger out there on the street and say, “Ah, that's my, that's my family over there.” That person's going to be looking at you and saying, “Call 8-1-1.” Not 9-1-1, 8-1-1.
Do you know what that is? 8-1-1 is the number you call before you dig a hole, courtesy of the power company. All right, so what makes the difference here? These people didn't have the promise of Resurrection, but we were given that. Christ said, “I need, A) to go away that I might send the Holy Spirit.” Number two, He had to go away showing basically that this was the pattern planned by the Father. His public ministry would give enough time, demonstrate enough miracles, explain enough about why He came. And then the rest was left back, if you think about it, the rest was left back with humankind, “Now you go out there, you teach, you go make disciples, you go make learners of every nation.” He didn't say, “I'll come back and I'll do that work for you.” He said, “Now you go out and do it.” Just as the first Adam was told to go and tend and till the earth, we in the second or last Adam are still tending and tilling the earth, but it's in the human form that we do it, not working and laboring for the ground.
So there's a lot of, I'm sorry, just a lot of confusion. It's very frustrating for me because I find people, even some who have a good intention, would like to tell you that, “You know, if you come on Easter, it's enough.” That's just a show. How would you like to be married to somebody and you only show, you only come home once a year? It's kind of like that, okay? I don't think that's a marriage, by the way; anyway, enough of my opinions here. So we know, by the way, why Paul wrote, “For we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him,” because we shall be like Him. That is the promise of Firstfruits, and this is why this is so vitally important. The same Spirit of God that opened up the believer's spiritual eyes, that raises us from the death of sin and the life of righteousness in Christ, descends upon a lifeless body.
Now the Spirit's already in the person, but there's also that, what I call the, that the helping Spirit; and don't quote me on this, I'm just trying to make this as clear pictorially as possible, that takes the final, final claim on what is inside the believer. So that means whatever the person's person was, plus the Spirit of God. You remember, I taught on this many years, the part payment, the arabon, it's called in the Greek. Now that ticket is turned in for the whole person, not just, “Hey, I tag you with my Spirit because you belong to Me,” but the whole individual. That means everything in my memory bank, all that I━not this shell, but everything that I am at the point of death basically is released with the Spirit to be with God until a new body, until the time that a new body will be granted to every single believer in Christ. So here's the kind of, we'll call it the litmus test.
I'm curious to know how many people actually believe, don't answer me; I'm curious to know how many people actually believe what I just said because you know, people actually believe that it's very clear to me that we deceive ourselves all day long. You know, you, you, you can be a biohacker, you can be engaged in fitness, eat the cleanest diet, have the best mental health. And when God says it's your time, it's your time. You don't get to bargain. You don't get to plea deal. It is what it is. So this is what is all equally baffling. If you knew and understood, which I hope that every creature that's born on the earth can come to understand and know that there's a terminus to life.
Don't think I'm talking like the grim reaper. This is actually a message rooted in extreme hope and certainty of what's said here that I wouldn't be looking at that day and saying, “My God, no, help me for I'm not ready to go.” No, when that time comes, the expectancy, because I've known; I'm sorry to say this, it's going to sound a little bit funny when I say this, but I've known the Firstfruit for a long time.
And I'm not trying to be blasphemous when I say that. So if I've known Him for a long time and I've built my relationship on that, then when I come to that hour, that moment, I have the expectancy and it's not something that may or may not happen. This either happened, He either died and rose up or He didn't. Now that, I think we've settled in many messages on the Resurrection. So if a person has settled that and you believe that this is absolutely true, that a man, all-man/all-God died, was put to death and rose from the dead, then the expectancy for you and for me should be just like these children of Israel with the Firstfruit of the harvest. They went in there looking for the choicest and the best, presenting it first to the priest as a wave of offering and presented to the Lord with expectancy, that the rest of the harvest, not━and expectancy is a bad word because it leans towards, is there a possibility that it may not be as good as the things that we offer to God, but in fact it's the promise that what we rendered to God at the first, the rest of it, it's putting God first, God takes care of the rest of the rest, but the rest will be just as bountiful and just as good.
And that's why it's important to make these connections between those Old Testament saints and we who believe in Christ, we who faith and trust Christ for our salvation. So I'm going to try and paint a little picture here that gives some understanding because there's a lot, you know, in these feasts there's a lot to think about. Of course there is the sowing of seed, the caring for, ultimately the harvest that would be reaped. And I can tell you as someone who has just recently started growing a lot of food, it's hit and miss. You plant a seed and you can hope and pray, but trust me, the passage says, “Thou shall not kill,” I've probably killed a couple of hundred plants of late, okay? Some people have that green thumb and some people don't.
But imagine this is, you can't just go down to Publix or Vons. You're in the desert, wherever you are, this is your food supply. This is, if it's messed up, you're all going to starve. I want you to think of it in that respect. So going to get those, planting the seeds, taking care to tend and then seeing the first harvest, the first thing that comes out of the ground would be almost, silly, but miraculous. And if the rest of the crop came out like the first part, that'd be even more miraculous, but that's the promise of what God basically was saying, “Put Me first, I'll bless and take care of the rest.” Now the prosperity people get a hold of this and they milk, manipulate, and twist the heck out of that verse to make it mean something that it doesn't.
And you're never going to hear me talk to you about something like that because I don't do that. That's not what God promises either. God's blessings, if you're really interested, you've probably received more and I've probably received more in terms of blessings than most people I know, and they're not tangible. They're not tangible. To be able to stay in the faith. Look, we're living in an age of crisis and chaos and craziness. To be able to stay connected in faith, still look unto Him, still have the sense that I belong to Him no matter what's going on in the world I'm okay because He's got me and I've got Him! Now at the temple time, because remember it said, “When you come into the land,” so I'm going to jump to the temple time. But at the temple time, messengers of the Sanhedrin, those dirty rats, they would go out from Jerusalem on the evening of the feast and they would bind all of the tall standing corn and bundle it to make it easy to be taken up.
See, they had all these little ways of getting around God's rules and regulations and this is one of them by the way, it's kind of interesting. And no wonder why God said, “Enough.” If you keep trying to find ways to sneak around God's back, I think God eventually is saying, “I saw all of it. I didn't just see one time, I saw it all, you children of Israel, you,” all right? Sometimes it's hard to say what you want to say. All right, later at the time of the temple, the grain would be threshed with rods so that the barley corns were not injured. After this it would be parched over an open flame, winnowed in the wind, and that would remove the chaff. Finally the barley corn would be milled and put to an extensive sifting process until it was sifted finely. And to show you how; sorry, how nutty this was, according to the writings in the Talmud, the sifting would go on and on and on and on and on and on until a temple inspector/priest could plunge their hands into the flour, remove the hand without any flour adhering, and then it would be ready.
But I mean the procedure that they did just went on and on and like overkill. But anyway, that, that's their business, not mine. So the sixteenth of Nisan, the Firstfruits were presented to the Lord, an omer of barley, which would equal approximately five pints, was mixed with three quarters of a pint of olive oil and a small amount of frankincense was sprinkled upon it. This was the Firstfruits offering. It was then waved before the Lord by the priests in accordance with Leviticus 23:11-13. Firstfruits was a national observance, not just a singular. So each family at this set time would have to bring their Firstfruits. Every family, one set, one set offering for each family unit, right? So you're not; if you have five people in the family, five people aren't offering Firstfruits.
It's offering from that household, from that family. We have a clearer picture recorded for us by the time of the temple than we do in the tabernacle because it clearly tells us that it says, “When ye enter into the land,” they had not yet entered into the land. And if we were looking at what happened at the time of the temple, there would have been a lot of buzzing, a lot of mulling around, a lot of chatter going on right outside of the temple with people probably repeating Psalm 150 and verse 1, “Praise God in His sanctuary.” Perhaps on the inside you might hear sounds of Psalm 30 being sung out, if you will, “I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou have lifted, you have lifted me up, and have not let my foes rejoice over me.” Essentially there would be some type of psalm before entering and then upon entrance, something worshipful and joyous to the Lord.
That's how they would do it. In the court of the priest, the flames would be seen dancing feverishly from the altar in a trail of smoke that would be ascending. In the court of the Israelites, a steady stream of men could be seen on the steps of the temple, presenting their offerings to the priest. So if you get the whole picture, you know, we tend to maybe have images of things, but we tend to think of the temple really does give the fullest embodiment of this, people lined up with their offerings on the steps waiting to get in. I mean that's pretty powerful if you can imagine and envision what I'm talking about. Now today's modern Judaism, Firstfruits are not offered because there is no temple. Only a ritual survives today of counting the days, perhaps marking them off on a calendar. And this is where, again, I'm going to say things that are controversial, but I'll just say them.
Because there's no temple and there's therefore no priest, but why would you not offer an offering? See, this is where I get a little bit like, okay, there's no more temple for you, but in this day and age where there's synagogues, okay, and there's places of worship, if you are going to be slaying saber-tooth tigers, right? Does everybody know what I mean when I say that? Okay, good. Because if I have to explain it, I will; I don't want anybody to go, “What the hell is she talking about, saber-toothed tigers?” They're extinct, okay? No, there's one at the back of the room. So my point is this, it's mind-boggling to me that Christians and Jews are reading the same book, and the book didn't say, “Now you'll stop.” Okay, I get it, at the fall of Jerusalem, everything ceased. But now you've got places of worship, so why, why wouldn't you do that? “Oh, because we don't live in an agrarian society anymore,” okay, but there's other ways to present Firstfruits, and we've exercised them here for probably at least 40 years.
So there's a lot of things. I don't know, is this as selective, how we're going to worship? Do we, do we engage in selectivity? How do we decide what we worship and what we don't? What we say, “Oh, we don't do that anymore. We just mark it on the calendar, but we don't do that anymore.” I don't understand. And don't, you try to understand because it won't make sense to you either. So first things, first things in general, are very important to God. If you remember, just take the passage of the children of Israel in Egypt's bondage, the firstborn.
So when we think about firsts, that's important. And the first, when I speak of Firstfruits, yes, the harvest is one, but the Firstfruits, first things, Christ coming out of the grave, I'd say, “Put these two things on a very equal plane and understand,” and this is what I think is very important. First things with God matter, and I think they still matter today. Not so much as you're firstborn versus your thirdborn, or if you; whatever it is that's first, but the concept of putting God first.
That still matters to God. See, there are things I can say to you, God has not changed. It's we who have changed, and that's a big problem because I don't think, if people are not being taught a template; that doesn't━don't be a box checker, but if you “put God first, He takes care of the rest” is a concept that basically summarizes Firstfruits. And the promise is to expect no less than what was offered could, in this case, let's say, whatever your crop was; that the rest of the crop would be likewise.
There wouldn't be bugs, it wouldn't be destroyed, it wouldn't be rotted; fill in the blanks, okay? Now in the New Testament, there are no less than seven mentions of Firstfruit, but they deal directly with Christ or with followers of Christ. So the apostle Paul spoke of Epaentus as the firstfruit of Achaia or Achaia in Romans 16:5. He also refers to a Stephanas in 1 Corinthians 16:15. And the difference, because they're both, both being referred to as the firstfruits of Achaia, but one of them is of an individual, the other is of Stephanas, of he and his household, which also must be understood like this, because a lot of it was church in the home.
So it could have meant not Stephanas and his family alone, but the church around him in his house as well. So that's ambiguous, we can't know exactly, but one is to an individual, one is a family. Paul also used the Firstfruits in referencing what was pinched from the dough to teach that if the Firstfruit is holy, then the lump is also holy. He says that in Romans 11:16. By this he means if God chose whomever He chose, say Abraham or Jacob, then the whole lump, that means the whole, all the children of Israel, let's; if we're using that reference, okay? Paul also used the term Firstfruits in relation to the Holy Spirit and the fruits that are manifested within the believer. So all of these components are important, because what they paint is a picture of the whole Christian, of what we are to be focusing on as believers. We're not to be focused on, you know, a thousand different things.
Our focus is, look unto Him, the Author and Finisher of salvation, Jesus Christ. And if we're going to talk about how that focus remains, it's kept by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us, guides us, teaches us, instructs us, help, helps us to even learn while we are being taught. You know, I was reading a message in my office and the message said, “I finally found you again. I lost track of you for several years.” But this person also went on to say how when they were watching, they tuned in and they tried to understand, and it was like I was speaking a foreign language, and now they've learnt more in the last six months.
And the person says in their message, “Maybe I just; it wasn't God's time yet for me.” And that's exactly it. I know because many of you are just like that. I'm like that. I've shared with you my anger. Why couldn't God have opened my eyes sooner, right? But that was part of God's plan. He knew the timing to be harvested, at least to be picked or opened up, right? Because that's what He does. He knows how to do it. We talk about the deposit of the Spirit in each believer. I just referenced as a type of Firstfruit. And much later in the book of Revelation, we'll encounter the 144 preachers of righteousness who will be sealed just prior to the opening of the seventh seal; all these numbers are important, 12,000 from each tribe sealed from God's wrath at the very start of the day of the Lord.
And that expression alone becomes important because these 144,000 will be preaching to people and there will be what we'll call a final harvest, an end harvest. That will be it. That's the final call, like you're in a bar, “Last call for alcohol,” “Last call for salvation happening right here with 144,000 peppered throughout the earth. That's it. That's your last call.” And I, I would really love for people to read that passage and don't read it like it's a cartoon or it's some caricature that maybe will happen. No, that's, that's what God said is going to happen in the future. And by the way, we're, we're far enough along in the world to see what's going on to know that most of the stuff that is being foretold of in the future, for us is coming to pass. So, I don't know, you know, when God has a pretty good track record of, of making things that he says happen, happen, you've got my attention. I don't need to be convinced or coerced into believing what is blatantly obvious.
So these 144,000 are called Firstfruit. They will be the guarantee that God has not cast away all His people or the ones that didn't answer immediately forever. But rather that God will purify the remnant, just as was prophesied by Daniel, in Daniel's seventieth week. Now I know I'm probably saying stuff that some may not be familiar with and that's okay, stick around and we'll eventually get to it. But this is how the apostle Paul makes a bold claim when he says, “All Israel will be saved.” That is in Romans 11:26. If you read that passage carefully, it makes perfect sense that he's talking about a final harvest that will occur.
It makes perfect sense to me. And I, I hate to sound redundant and repetitive, but in the book of Zechariah, it explicitly says, “They will look upon him whom they have pierced and they will mourn,” meaning they will recognize that the very Savior that they said is “A fraud, it's a lie, it's not true. And we're waiting for our Messiah who's not your Messiah” will go, “Uh-oh, my bad. He was the one all along.” Can you imagine that? I mean, I can, I actually have to feel sorry for people who have been so closed in their thinking that they couldn't read the Old and see the description of the One who came in the New.
It's Him; there aren't two Messiahs, there's only One. He was here and He's coming back and God's going to give those people who rejected Him a second chance, which is why when we read passages that talk about all the people coming to the mount to worship, again, don't think that's a caricature. Why is Israel such a big deal? For the right reasons, not all the ones that a lot of people in ministry try to make it a Zionist movement or they try; no, because the Bible says, “In this little swath of land, basically where I started I will finish.” Don't, don't get more hung up on the land or the people, and the people who are there now won't even be there, likely when He returns. And I won't tell you why either. And it has nothing to do, and it has nothing to do with the rapture either. So leave that one alone. The Firstfruits, like Israel's other springtime feasts, has its fulfillment, fulfillment in Christ's first coming, but perhaps the more important emphasis should be, but now Christ is risen from the dead, has become the Firstfruit of those who have fallen asleep.
And we know that Jesus rose from the dead━I told you I'd be repeating a lot, which I'm doing━which makes the fulfillment of that feast as it's applied to Him. Just put a period there because He did come out of the grave. The Resurrection is a guarantee of harvest of souls that will be like Christ. The fact is that there is life after death, not just we just cease being.
Daniel says something pretty profound. Remember, Daniel, he's not known for these things, but his 70 weeks and all the messages within his book are New Testament, or as New Testament as you can get. He says, “And many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame, and some to everlasting contempt,” which means all. Check this out. The resurrection or the resurrected life if you will; oh, you're going to love this, all will be resurrected. All. But not all will be resurrected with Christ. Would you like me to say that again? All will be resurrected, but not all will be resurrected with Christ. Some will be resurrected to eternal damnation. That's also resurrected life that lives on in perpetuity in torment. “Oh, I don't like that.” Well, I didn't write those words, so don't, don't come complaining to me. But, you know, even Christ said something that was pretty shocking in His day.
He said, “Do not marvel for the, for the hour is coming in which all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come forth, some to resurrected life and others to condemnation.” That's John 5. So even out of the mouth of our Lord, He even says this. Don't think everybody gets a ticket and you're all going to paradise. Some are going to get a ticket to “Coffee Break's Over”; that, the ones that laughed, I know how long you've been around, okay? I know where you live. So there's always been two parts to the harvest, and there will always be two parts to the harvest, the wheat and the chaff.
And that sums it up for you. Some will inherit and receive eternal life, dwell with God forever, and some will inherit eternal punishment. And those that belong to Him, that have trusted Him, that have looked to Him their entire time of knowing Him; and that could be a day, a year, a lifetime, they will be resurrected in the same fashion, the same way as He was. So let me take a minute now to wrap this up because I'm really out of time. The main reason for preaching these messages is to demonstrate God didn't just set out in the Old to put together a whole bunch of nonsensical, ceremonial, “Now, these are these routines we do at a set time.” They were all pointing to the future.
They were all pointing to Christ. I explained to you how Christ; we talked about the Sabbath, and we are Sabbathing in Christ daily. I talked to you about the Passover when God said, “Celebrate this, basically in perpetuity as a memorial.” Well, we are, because how could you not do two things? Remember the children of Israel's deliverance out of Egypt's bondage, and then remember your own deliverance out of this world flesh and devil bondage. Now your eyes are open and you can be able to celebrate and to rejoice and to be glad in the Lord. So when I say, without, as I said earlier, without the Old Testament, we wouldn't have the full picture of why it matters.
And if you want to put kind of the exclamation mark, Paul says in Romans 8:29, essentially that we are the first, in terms of brethren or sistern, we are the first of many, the body of believers. So it becomes clear that the church of Jesus Christ must continue until the final harvest of souls comes. Now I cannot tell you how long that time will be. The Bible's very clear, no one knows the day of the hour, but there are signposts.
There are things we can see happening in the world, and wars and rumors of wars. That doesn't mean the end is here. Trust me, when there are definitive signposts along the way that must happen that will tell you the time is nearer and nearer and nearer when these things happen. Some of these have not happened yet. That's why I said to you, there's a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of weird stuff going on.
There's a lot of scary stuff going on, but the end is not tomorrow. Don't, don't walk out here going, “Oh my God, we're doomed tomorrow, tomorrow.” It's not like that. And I'd say to you, if there's anything that should be a takeaway from this message, and I'm, I don't engage in the antics of evangelists, but if anything is a takeaway, especially for people who are not so familiar in listening to me, it would be take the time now while you have the time. The Bible says redeem the time. Take the time now to begin learning about Him, learning about who He is, His ways, His message, His words, not to study them and repeat them like a rote computer, but that His words and Christ may dwell richly in you, that when the day comes, you're not scrambling to figure out what you need to do. You know what; you've already done it, you've already taken care of business. And I'm sorry to say it like that, but just to be as colloquial as possible so there is no misunderstanding.
It is, it is truly, it confounds me that people, if, if people say, “Well, it must be in the last days,” or “It must be close,” well, then why aren't you pressing in closer with God? That's going to be the thing that keeps all of us, I hate to tell you, sane, calm, and with the clarity of vision to know what to do while the stuff is hitting the fan. So I would say to you in, in an age which people don't seem to be that concerned, the church is very important, not the building, but as the Greek calls it, a people that belong to the Lord.
And if we who are trusting Christ, and I'm going to say it this way, you know there's a Scripture that says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” We have been partakers of that goodness. We have tasted what the Lord has in store for those that trust Him. Then it is indeed just like the Firstfruit, we can say, “This offering of Christ stands,” in, in terms of our version of time, “as the expectancy promised,” not, “I'm not sure it's not going to happen,” for you and for me.
Put a period there. Don't be trying to figure out “How much more, what more can I do?” That's the other problem that people engage in, “What more can I do?” Now, one last footnote here and then I'm done. We have a lot of people that will give a Firstfruit offering. And listen, I'm really a strange bird when it comes to money, and I say that because I believe that when we read the New Testament there's great clarity and understanding. God does love a hilarious giver. God loves the spirit of the person; we're not just talking about money, we're talking about somebody who says, “Sure, I'll help you out.
Sure, I'll give you a hand,” that generous nature. So when I say to you, Firstfruits is not just about everything that I've talked about, but it is also about understanding, presenting the first of whatever comes into your hand, and you can't just, where, where do you give it to God? Well, you can't, but the Bible says you bring your tithes and your offerings to the storehouse, wherever you get your spiritual food. And I still believe that's a good way of saying, “I'm putting God first”" That, that's like something that, I hate to say it like this, but it actually costs you something. And I had to learn this from our good friend, Ray Sidney. He said, “You know, you shouldn't give anything away for free,” he was referring to the people in Japan, “because then they don't think it has any value.” And I thought, “That's kind of odd, but okay, if that's your, if that's your mindset.” But if you think about it in God's book, for how much it costs for God to send and give His only begotten Son, and we who take it so casually, I think the concept of Firstfruits is brilliant, because what it does is it says, you know, we don't work to get in, we don't labor in works of the flesh, but it does say, “I'm, I'm giving my first to God, which is my best and my first.” And that could be in dedicating your child, could be any number of things, but I'm not specifically talking about Firstfruits in giving right now.
And I'd say to you, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as the person's doing it for the right reasons. Don't give with strings attached. Don't give and say, “Yes, but I, I'm hoping that if I do this, this will happen.” If you're doing Firstfruits for the reason I said, which is putting God first and He takes care of the rest, then I applaud you and I think it's a good thing.
Any other motives for doing it are the wrong motives and I don't agree with them. Now, I know that's a little bit strange, the way I just worded that, but what I'm trying to tell you is, I'm the person who's known for, I think in all of ministry, there, there might only be one person that does this and it's, it's this person right here who sends back offerings to people who don't get it. And I'm talking about people who have been abusive to me in the past or they think they're going to tell me how to run the church or how to conduct or whatever. I don't want your money. We're not; this is not that type of church.
I'm not here to take your money or grab your money or do anything with your money, because it's not your money anyway; it's God's, ha, ha. But what I am saying to you is I can give you structured ideas that if they're carried out right, they, I believe are good in God's eyes and if they're carried out, like anything else, if they're carried out for the wrong reasons, like people who give to get, if that's your mindset, you're not giving to God.
You're doing some investment scheme or you're doing some trading deal with God. But if you're really giving, this is God's, the rest God lets me keep and He puts His stamp of approval on it. He blesses me for that very reason. Now, I can't tell you what else to do, but I can tell you in these feasts as we've been looking at them, I love this one in particular because going back to the whole message I just preached, it tells me if you and I have that same expectancy, like those people that took the first of their crop, and we should have that expectancy, then there's no reason in the world why whatever we face, whatever we deal with, whatever sickness comes under our dwelling, whatever pitfalls may happen, whatever this country goes to hell in a handbasket, which it's halfway there right now, but I've connected myself to God, I'm not letting go.
I'm going to be just like Jacob/Israel. I may be a little bit crippled right now, but I'll be God-damned if I let go because I know He's the only one that can take me through this. He's the only one that can take you through all of this. So wouldn't you, you'd think you'd want to do your best. In that respect the Firstfruits speaks volumes to me. I hope it speaks to you. We'll continue on with these, but for today that's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center.
If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
As found on YouTube
Exodus 11-12 – The Passover: Old Testament Celebration or New Testament Revelation?
When people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin. ♪ ♪ ♪ The Passover is described in Exodus 12, after the nine or depending on how you reckon it, ten plagues; nine or ten, depending on your reckoning have been unleashed and afflicted on the Egyptians with little effect.Then God directs Moses to declare this firstborn; that all the firstborns must die in the land of Egypt, man, and beast. This would eventually break the Egyptian hold and let the people go under Moses’ lead. Now I always think this is interesting because there’s a lot here and this is where you might say to me when I taught on the Sabbath, “I can’t exactly see the connection,” because for some people who have not spent enough time in the word, they may not. But here you cannot miss it. So between the death of the firstborn and the institution of the Passover, you have some great clarity here on what God is doing. Now imagine this. Imagine you are enslaved in Egypt’s bondage and imagine that you were born in Egypt. You just didn’t get there. People were born there for a couple of hundred years. So you would A) not have the frame of reference. Most people think, Oh, they were, they were celebrating certain ceremonies already while they were in Egypt.” No, they were not because all of these instituted feasts happened after, either the night that they were liberated or onwards, but there was nothing before that.There was, there was no law given before that. So there was no keeping of customs per se as we have them recorded here. And why that’s important because we begin to see in these practices how there is no way that while they were in Egypt’s bondage, they could have known too much about God. They couldn’t have. So imagine if you were in bondage, you’re in Egypt, and you see all these plagues hit.Now to me, you know, you could say, “Well, one might be a fluke.” You know, and you might see the second one. You say, “Well, that’s odd.” And a lot of people try; I love this, have you ever watched these documentaries where they make rational excuses for miracles of God? Do you ever see that? (Yes ma’am.) “Oh, well, you know, it, it had to be that on that day there was a, a fire bolt of lightning that came down that turned the whole place into ash, and there couldn’t be a God involved in it.” So it’s interesting that here there are too many events for the children of Israel to just go, “Huh,” like, “I’m not sure I can believe in this God” I mean after you see all this stuff, and then God gives the instructions and says basically in a nutshell (we’re going to read the passage in a second), but basically in a nutshell, “All the firstborn are going to die in the land of Egypt unless you heed what the directives are to apply the blood, a specific thing to do, which is taking an animal into your house on the tenth day,” would be in your household for four and a half days; call it that, because the sacrifice that would be the Passover lamb would be sacrificed between the fourteenth and the fifteenth day of the month, and the blood would be applied.And there’s a whole prescription for how to do this. Now imagine you’ve seen all of the plagues fall. You’ve seen everything happen. The water turns to blood, the frogs; you see it all. So when God says, “Apply the blood as I’ve instructed you,” I think for the most part, even if you didn’t know who God was, you’d have enough of fear, maybe you might have the mindset like the Egyptians did of the plural gods, but you’d have enough of a mindset to know after seeing all this to do it.Not because you know who God is, but because you see there’s some type of power at work. I’m trying to say that maybe the children of Israel in Egypt’s bondage didn’t know as much as we tend to think they did about God. So that’s important. The second thing is that this event takes place on the first day; as I said, it falls between the night of the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And we will read the procedure for this speaks volumes about what God was trying to convey for something not just practical, but also prophetical. Let’s take a look. I want to read through the eleventh and twelfth chapter because it paints the picture, and I think without that it might be hard for some people that they are not familiar. So Exodus 11 says, “And the LORD said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterward he will let you go hence: when he shall let you go, ye shall surely thrust; he shall surely thrust you out hence altogether. Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of his neighbor, and every woman of her neighbor, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold.And the LORD gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Moreover, the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the sight of Pharaoh’s servants, and the sight of the people. And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out amid Egypt: and all the firstborn of the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and the firstborn of the beast,” so anything firstborn, anything and everything firstborn.“There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, or there will be nothing after it like this. But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against a man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” And this is very interesting because here God is not yet; I’m sorry to say it like this, God has not yet had the bad taste in His mouth of these rebellious, stiff-necked people who simply would not do what God said. But here obviously they do. He’s, so He’s now saying, “There’s a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.” Later it will be, “Moses, they’re your people,” right? (Laughter.) “And all these thy servants shall come down unto me, bow down themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee: and after that I will go out. And he went out from Pharaoh in great anger. And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you; that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he would not let the children of Israel go out of his land. And the LORD spake,” There’s no chapter and verse here, I’m just going to go right into it. “The LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.” Kind of interesting, by the way, that means that they had to have been reckoning time according to the Egyptian reckoning of time, because God says, “Now there’s a new way to reckon time,” and it’s here.“Speak ye unto the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth month; In the tenth day of this month they shall take every man a lamb, according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for a house: and if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house take it according to the number of souls, every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb.” I like that, that’s the fact that God is saying, “If there are too few of you, you can join together with your neighbor, and this can be an act done together with your neighbor.” “Your lamb shall be without blemish, the male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or the goats: and ye shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.And they shall take of the blood, strike it on the two side posts of the; and on the upper door post of the house, where they shall eat it.” So God’s very clear, the door, the sides, and the top to be covered with this blood. “They shall eat the flesh in that, in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs, they shall eat it. Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with fire, his head with his legs,” so you get the idea. God is saying, “This is how I want it done.” “Ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and that which remaineth,” if there’s anything left over, you’re going to burn it completely. So there’s not going to be anything left over. “Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, staff in your hand; you shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD’S Passover,” so a couple of things are said here.You know, this is probably the original dine and dash, okay, probably, but God’s giving the instructions, so I guess it’s okay. But I want you to look at something. So when we looked at the Sabbath, it was the Lord’s Sabbath. Here it is the Lord’s Passover. Now, in Judaism, even today, every year, if people are adhering to this and they’re still keeping a Passover, they are recounting this whole passage in what is called a “Passover Haggadah.” It’s a little book that kind of chronicles the Passover/Exodus story if you will. And then there is the main meal, and it’s very interesting because if you, if someone were to analyze, and many people have, but if you were in your own time to analyze, you could see that a lot of the things that are being consumed at this Passover Seder, actually have some correlation to the New Testament as well.So it’s kind of interesting. They correlate in many ways to Christ because Christ, as Paul says in the New Testament, Christ, our Passover. So here are the instructions. Verse 12 begins, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt will I execute judgment: I am the LORD.” So the first thing that’s going to happen is all the firstborn are going to die, and those who remain, they will see that it is the Lord that is doing this thing.“And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the house where you are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt. And this day shall be unto you for a memorial, and you shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an ordinance forever.” Remember, I just said to you last week, anytime you read that in the Old Testament, it means that it is attached to a prophetic fulfillment in Christ pointing to or around either Christ coming in the flesh or His return. Here, this is talking about and pointing to Christ in the flesh of Him laying down His life. And what we are to do in the New Testament, we are told basically to partake of the Lord’s Supper until He comes, the cup representing the blood, and the body, if you will, the roasted lamb for strength.Some people talk about the wafer that people use, the round wafer which is, was never a part of anything. It’s just broken bread, that’s all. Broken bread, that’s unleavened, that’s all. “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread; even the first day you shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.” That’s a pretty sharp thing to say. So if you’ve got leaven and you consume it, it says you’re cut off from Israel. “And the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and in the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation to you; no matter; no manner of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat, that only may be done of you.And you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread.” So very interesting that the prescription is here telling us basically and goes into the Feast of Unleavened Bread which a lot of people, including the New Testament, you’ll read where people tend to say “eight days of Passover,” which is not so. It is Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and you can kind of follow the feasts that are clustered together within that period, including if there are Sabbaths involved. “So seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born the land.” So it doesn’t matter who you are, if you eat leaven, you’re toast, all right.(Laughter.) “You shall eat nothing leavened; in your, in all your habitations; you shall, you shall eat unleavened bread” So here Moses calls out for the elders of Israel, says to them, “Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, kill the Passover. Ye shall take a bunch of hyssops,” imagine a cluster of what would be like branches that have leaves on them, so to speak, “dip it in the blood that’s in the bacon and strike the lintel in the two side posts with the blood that’s in the bason: none of you shall go out at that door of his house until the morning.” So I find it interesting, because here it says, “The LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel and the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. And you shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and thy sons forever.” So again, when God says forever and ever, you’ve got to look at this dispensation that would come to a close.So whatever it is that God says is forever has a prophetic fulfillment to it. We know, of course, the prophetic fulfillment is in Christ. So the next question somebody may ask, because we’re trying, we’re trying to build the foundation for this message, is a lot of people will ask this question, which the answers are in the Bible. I think it’s kind of strange that people do not recognize, for example, that Jesus would have celebrated the Passover. There’s always this argument, would He have, would; of course He would have. His parents both adhered to the prescribed way that was being kept for hundreds if not thousands of years. And you read first in Luke 2, and I believe it’s about verse 40, where He was with His parents during the Passover.And that’s the time where He is left behind, and they don’t realize that they’ve left Jesus behind. That’s the first case of child abandonment (laughter) recorded in the Bible. And then the next one that we encounter is in John’s Gospel, the opening of John’s Gospel, where it talks about when He went into the temple when Jesus went into the temple, it was during the Passover at that time when the money changers were sitting.That’s, that particular instance happened, or that scenario happened during the Passover. There are all of these so subtle messages there, because if you think about it, Christ who is our Passover, and Christ knowing that he was the Lamb, John declared, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” But think of this, He’s going into the temple on the Passover seeing the money changers, and if you can kind of wrap your mind around this, we have that scenario ongoing still today, because instead of being about our Father’s business, there are people that are- I just talked about this regarding the flag, you could make it money, you could make it the flag, anything that doesn’t belong. And this is why He turned over the tables and chased them out of the temple. And this is why I won’t stay quiet about these things because it is the same principle. You cannot let the world come in and run its affairs inside the house of God. You can’t do it, you can’t let that happen.You let, you let it happen once, you see what’s happening everywhere else. So with that said though, the instructions show us clearly that Christ kept the Passover with His parents, and then thereafter; there’s no reason not, to come up with the idea that He did not. And then we see from the apostle Paul’s writing when he talks about, and I just mentioned, Christ our Passover. So remember I described in the reading, it is the Lord’s Passover and Christ becomes ours. And just even that subtle distinction tells you why when people say, “Should we be celebrating the Passover?” I’m telling you why because Christ is our Passover. We’re not sitting down at a table recounting the deliverance of the children of Israel, although that should be told. We are standing and proclaiming the deliverance of God’s children out of the bondage of sin, which is on a much greater scale than the exodus out of Egypt.If you want to put it in that, in those terms, that’s why we’re talking about Old and New relevance. Now the other thing that I like about this is that, as I said, if a person’s still not sure about the correlation between Old and New, we have all of these different things being said. The Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, that is in Christ, or Christ is our Lamb. Even the details, when we get to the New Testament, of seeing kind of the preparation. And the reason I think that God said on the tenth to bring this lamb and look at it, see it, take it into your house; I want to use a strange term because I’m, I’m exaggerating now, but imagine looking at this, having to look at this animal, knowing this innocent animal is going to be slaughtered. And you’ve got to look at this thing for the next four and a half days.You’re looking at, its sweet eyes or its, whatever it’s doing, and it may be cute or it may be not cute, I don’t know, but you’ve got to look at it. That means that there is a connection to it. It’s not just an animal that was going to be killed, something that would become dear to you, almost hurtful to sacrifice. And these are, I guess, lessons God was trying to paint in pictures to show us the sacrifice, what the sacrifice of Christ was to our heavenly Father is, and we tend to just, I think a lot of people just take it very cheaply because it’s so disconnected from us. We don’t have that same proximity. That’s why I said, a person should develop a relationship with Christ and get to know Christ and know the word, and it would give you a better sense.And I, I’m going to be at a lack to describe this, so indulge me for a minute and forgive me because I’m at lack to find the right words. But this is why for some people, when they start reading the Bible and they see that Christ didn’t just die for the sins of the world. I told you John 3:16, “God so loved the world; God so loved”- you put your name in there. And when it becomes personal to you, you are now entering into this kind of; we’ll call it personal acquaintance like the people had to do by bringing the lamb into their home.When it becomes personal to you that something had to die in your stead, it all starts to gel and suddenly we go from going through the motions of religion to having a relationship with Christ. And these are very important concepts, which believe it or not, as simplistic as it is, most people get lost right there. They think, “I come to church; I’ve got to check the boxes. I’ve got to make sure that I, I pray properly, that I do the right things, that I say the right things.” That’s all the minutia; I’m sorry to tell you, God’s not interested in it at the get-go. Those are details that you work out with Him. But understanding and having that relationship like the children of Israel had to do with that lamb and bringing that lamb into the home, having to look at it, and then knowing you’re going to have to sacrifice it. So everything here, by the way, comes with a price. Now God tells them to roast the lamb whole, to not break a single bone.And I need to say a comment here because I’ve said many times about Christ, a broken body for a broken people. And I never meant it in the context of somehow his bones were severed, but all that was put upon Him, the sins of the world laid upon Him; in that respect, broken body for a broken people. And along with the bitter herbs and the unleavened bread and this meal, as we just read, was to be consumed basically in a state of ready-to-go. When God says, “Okay, one, two, three, eat,” right? It’s almost like “Eat as much as you can. You’ve got 30 seconds to do it. Okay, it’s over. All right, let’s go.” And I’m not saying it was like that, but imagine you would have had a sense of urgency.Something, you wouldn’t be sitting back, oh, I’m stuffed. I can barely move. You know, when you’ve eaten too much, right? It wouldn’t be like that. It would be more along the lines of, I’m, I’m, I’m ready to go. And if, as I said, I just read, there was any lamb left over, they were to completely burn it. And I’m assuming, by the way, that that act of completely burning what was not consumed was to make sure that the surviving Egyptians did not partake of the sacrifice. You could say, “Well, that’s kind of bad.” But no, this was punishment upon the Egyptians, and specifically Pharaoh, but punishment upon those people. So God didn’t want any commingling. It’s going to be completely burned. We’re done with that. Then there is the manner of partaking, which is equally strange, as I said, not just ready to go, but God describes things such as; sorry, these are the details that God gives.For example, if someone was not circumcised, they could not partake in the Passover. And you might say, “Well, okay, well, they weren’t, they weren’t circumcised necessarily in Egypt.” Now, hear me out. Circumcision was instituted with Abram circumcising all the people in his family, his household if you remember that passage. So they would have been practicing circumcision. That would have probably just been something that traditionally, whether or not they knew about God or not, something that would have just been traditionally done. So when God says, “If somebody is not circumcised, they cannot partake of the Passover,” it’s essentially saying, “Not in covenant with Me, you cannot sit down and partake. You can’t even”; sorry to say it, “not in covenant with Me, you can’t be saved.” You think about how you might apply, what I just said, into modern terms, not circumcised by body part; the heart. And then again, it’s all of what I call peeling back the layers of the onion because this story is so familiar, you can just kind of sit back and go, “Yeah, I know the story.” But you look for the minute details and you begin to see how God was basically putting flesh and blood and painting the picture of Christ so perfectly that I don’t know how people could miss it.Another passage describes if a person became ceremonially unclean, that is, they came in contact with a dead body or touched something that would have made them unclean. God said, “You still must keep the Passover, but you will keep it on the following month, on the fourteenth day of the following month.” In other words, see, this is what’s amazing. God didn’t just say, “Okay, well, if you miss this time, you’re done,” but a special dispensation for those people who, whether they did it on purpose or not became unclean, couldn’t partake.And God says, “Okay, you can do it the following month if that’s your condition.” So God made a way for every person to be able to participate, no matter if your family’s too small, then you join with your neighbor. I mean, He’s; you can see all the provisions. I love the fact that it’s almost like God thinks of everything here, sometimes too much detail, but anyway. We’re going to see that as they move from Egypt into the wilderness, this Passover will be kept, but they’re no longer sacrificing in their dwelling. So the place of sacrifice for the Passover will no, it’s no longer necessary to apply the blood as previously to your household. Now it becomes something to be performed at the Tabernacle and eventually, it’ll be performed at the temple.So these are important because it tells you that, you know, we, we tend to think of God giving a prescribed way and then it’s locked in, but even there you can see God modified it as they went from being in Egypt’s bondage and needing to show the sign for the avenging death angel, basically to pass over versus perpetuating and celebrating in perpetuity, which means no longer; no reason to paint the doorpost. You’ve got to bring your Passover sacrifice to the door and there it would be sacrificed. Again, you go to the New Testament, Christ is called what? The Door, so we take all of these pieces and realize God’s been saying the same thing for a long time.We just have been very hardheaded to not listen. That’s okay, as long as the lights come on eventually, that’s okay. On the fifteenth, the sheaf of firstfruits of barley, the new harvest would be offered as a wave offering along with a yearling, as a burnt offering, the prescribed meal offering (we just went through the offerings), two-tenths of an ephah of flour and a drink offering, a quarter of a hin of wine. So you’ve got the prescribed offerings around the pass, around the Passover as well, not just the Paschal lamb, but all the other steps involved in offering. And did it matter to God? It did.Here’s where God starts looking to see if people are keeping His ordinances. Kind of interesting. Each of the seven days of this feast, a goat was offered as a sin offering, two young bullocks, a ram, and seven yearling lambs were offered as burnt offerings after the continual sacrifice. So it’s a lot of offerings and a lot of blood and a lot of burning of stuff, just a lot. On the seventh day, the Sabbath rest, a holy assembly brought the festivities to a close. That also signaled that the morrow which would begin at sundown, leavened bread could now safely be consumed in the household. Now if you read the celebration for Unleavened Bread, even though I’m on the Passover, you’ll read several instances, where we are right now, Leviticus, I’m sorry, Exodus, both in Exodus 23, 34, and Leviticus 23, and Deuteronomy 16. You’ve got those references, so if you want more information on that, read it there. Now, for the language part, the Passover or what is commonly Hebrew, Pesach, obviously refers to or signifies “to stride,” “to spring over,” or “to spare.” And what’s interesting is if you look, this is a this is The Englishman’s Hebrew Concordance of the Old Testament.Thank you. Let me get my little pointing stick here so I can show you. So you’ve got the word here, so you can see it, Pesach, it is the Lord’s Passover, we just read that. But I want you to look at what’s above it because as you know, Hebrew usually works with the three root consonants. So you can see the three, the vowel points are underneath, but here take a look from Pesach to Pesach, and here we have, for example, “I will pass over,” and here it is “the Lord’s Passover,” so you can see the proximity, it’s just the vowel points of the, of the words themselves that change. And I point that out to you for two reasons. One is to show you how easy it is to blur things up in Hebrew, but also to show you the correlation between passing over and the word Passover; they’re the same. If we take the feasts or the set times, I think there are seven: Passover, Feast of Unleavened Bread, Firstfruits, Pentecost, Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles; that is seven.And seven is important. Now these feasts don’t get into the mindset of thinking, “What does it matter to me?” because it does. Because as we study these feasts, for example, as I said, the Passover correlates to Christ and Christ’s sacrifice for us. The Bible says, “For sin comes death.” The wages of sin is death. So without the blood, you know, again, there are people who say, “Well, Christ is not the only way.” Well, if you’re going to read this book, sorry to say it, you’ve got to just, make your own decision. Don’t take my word for it. But if God says the only way that these people can be saved is by applying the blood and moves into the New Testament, says, “The only way these people can be saved is by them applying the blood.” Now it’s to the heart, to the mind, to your thoughts.Don’t think for a second that, these things don’t matter with God. They do. Now the right of redeeming the firstborn was a constant reminder to the Israelites of all generations that the firstborn belonged to God. So wiping out the firstborn of Egypt was a way of saying, “Not only are these people cut off, but they are none of Mine” You might say, “That’s pretty brutal,” but again, I digress to something I just said earlier. You know, could you imagine? And I often entertain this. One pharaoh- you know how much I love history and many of you are into a lot of this history as well. One pharaoh, out of all the pharaohs, turned Egypt into a monotheistic society. And I’m still not certain, even though you can see the hieroglyphs and you can see all of the reliefs, I’m still not sure that there was not an influence in some way, shape, or form by prior history to not go to the thought process of monotheistic God by what all is recorded here.And don’t think, by the way, people say, “Oh, well, this is the only record of this happening.” No, there are, there are scant records within Egypt’s documentation of these events. So do not be fooled when people say, “Oh, there’s no record at all outside the Bible.” Yeah, there is actually. And someone who’s into studying Egyptology will tell you that there are several references to this event that we’re referencing within their records. So I like the fact that you know, when you want to shut somebody up, there’s a, there’s a wonderful way to do it. Just tell them the truth, right? (Laughter.) So we know after the death of the firstborn, they’re pretty eager to get the children of Israel out of Egypt, like, “Okay, go already.Now, before anything worse happens, get out of here.” And we have the plague of the firstborn, God’s way of putting on display, if you thought, for example, that turning the water to blood was nothing but a magician’s trick when your loved one dies, there’s no magic trick there. You know they’re gone. It was God’s exclamation mark, “If you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t believe Me now, if you don’t- well, finally, you’re going to believe Me when you’re first of your family and the first of your animals are just laying there lifelessly.” It was God’s way of saying exclamation marks and mic drops, okay? So just checking to see if you’re awake, (laughter) but, all right. The other thing that I like to say is in all this, you can go back. There is a pastor who’s been prolifically posting messages online and, you know, he’s wearing his colored scarf and he says, “This is made up. This is all fabrication.” Listen, you can believe whatever you want. You can believe you’re a leprechaun too, okay? That’s fine.That’s your prerogative. But here’s my issue. If you’re going to make those types of statements, you better be ready to back up your words. “Well, how do you know that this is not made up?” Well, here’s the deal. When you start reading what God said to Abram and He tells him, He says very point blank. This is early on, He says to Abram, “Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not there’s, shall serve them,” wonder who that is, huh? “And they shall afflict them for four hundred years, and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge. And afterward, they shall come out with great substance.” You tell me, it says, “But in the fourth generation they shall come out, they shall come thither again.” So you tell me, and that is the event that happens hundreds of years before this, “Let my people go,” and Moses leads them out. Again, if, if we’re making up a story, there would be some really, we’d have some great flow and there wouldn’t be any, any missing places, but there’s a gap of some kind.So God makes this statement, then there’s a gap. We don’t have any clue what’s going on until it happens. So if you’re going to make up a story, you think you might be, if you were writing and making this up, you would perpetuate. So you’d have Abraham repeat it, then you’d have Isaac repeat it, then you might have Jacob repeat it. No, it’s just repeated to Abram and memorialized for us, and then we have the event that happens a couple of hundred years later on the pages before us.So I’m not inclined to believe that. If I wanted extra-Biblical proof, I told you, to go look at a lot of things that you can trace in Egyptology that will lead you to confirm what the Bible’s saying. So I’m not inclined when people talk about it as a good story. Something is being told to us in the celebration of this event. It’s shadow and type that gives us hope, which is if God spared these people, and listen carefully because it’s so subtle, you can miss what I’m going to say.If God spared these people that they did not know who He was necessary, okay, they might have been referring to the God of Abraham or the God of Isaac or the God, but they didn’t know who God was. They could not. They were in Egypt. And for a couple of hundred years, I said this last week, you see how easily this country has changed just in the last 50 years, how people are forgetting things, how because people have ripped down monuments to great historical figures, there’s a future generation coming that will say, “Christopher who, Columbus? What is that? Who is that person?” They won’t know of it.And that’s going to happen sooner than you think, a generation. Okay, how many of you here will say something like referring to something that maybe was a ’70s TV show and nobody around you knows what the hell you’re talking about? (Laughter.) “Uh, what is that?” Or, okay, do you want to go for the easy one? Here’s the easy one: an old-fashioned telephone with a cord that’s tethered to a wall. Show that to a teenager and ask them, “How do you use this?” (Laughter.) Do you think you have tech problems? I watched a video of somebody staring at the phone going, “I don’t know.I’m not sure.” Okay, you do have problems here. My point is they would not have known. We tend to forget that. So it’s really important to see that God opened His heart to a people that were not well acquainted with Him, to save and deliver them. Does that sound familiar to you at all? (Yes ma’am.) God opened His heart to take someone in that was not familiar with Him, and did not know too much about Him. And I think that’s probably most of us at different stages in our life. So tell me where you think this has radically changed, where God’s changed. He hasn’t. And the principles that are here are still the same. The thing that we have of being in Christ and looking to Him and the blood applied to our circumcised hearts, if you will, is the fact that we know from the words spoken by Christ memorialized in this book, we are saved, we are forgiven.And the Bible even goes on to say that “Whosoever believeth, faiths, trusteth in Him shall have eternal life.” So we even have much better promises. Again, I hate to repeat what I said last week, but the book of Hebrews talks about how much better Christ was over everything in the old dispensation, how much better. We have clarity, we have certainty; we have the whole record laid out for us. That’s why I don’t understand, I’m sorry. I will never understand why it’s so difficult for people to just sit, take 30 minutes to listen, or read the Bible.That doesn’t mean that instantaneously you’re gripped. It doesn’t mean you have understanding. I’m sure people are sitting here that for some of you it’s like, “Oh, I know this story like the back of my hand.” Other people are hearing it for the first time. My point is that God will, for the degree, for every step you take, God’s taking 10 steps towards you, and His approach has not changed. So when we talk about these concepts, they had to celebrate the Passover as a mandate. They were mandated to. Now I’m going to ask this question, which should be rhetorical, but let’s see. How could we look at what Christ did and feel somehow mandated? Like it’s mandatory? No, I want to tell people because I want to share with them the greatness of what I know Christ has done. But this is, again, it’s another one of these issues and I’ll try not to take up too much time here. But if you understand, we’re not mandated, yet we should be, okay, you had a great meal last week.It was the best meal you’ve ever had. Do you have to be mandated to tell somebody that was the best meal you had or if it truly was the best meal, you know what? My guess is you’re probably, “Oh my God! I had this food. It was so amazing, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah,” and you bore people with it, but you go on about how great it was. Well, if Christ is that great and better than a meal, you don’t feel like it’s a mandate. You feel like, you feel sorry for people who don’t know what you know and you want to share it.And this is another part of this; we’re not under that mandate. And when people say, oh, you have a duty or something, no, freely and desirously to share that good news that Jesus Christ is the Passover for us. He is the blood applied and He’s not just as the Passover was, a passing over, but how about a washing, a cleansing and eradicating of sin, past, present, future; much better than any blood applied to a door. And again, the type is Christ is the Door. That’s what the New Testament talks about. So unlike our brothers and sisters in antiquity, I don’t think you need to have a mandate to tell people about the goodness of what’s happened in your life. Now, that’s to say we don’t do testimonials here. Some people say, “Oh, you should have people stand up and do testimonies.” And I’ve told you, we don’t do that because everybody has one. It’s like other body parts, everyone has one, (laughter) all right? But what I want us to focus on here is the importance of making this connection.I think every, Christian for the most part knows Christ our Passover. That’s, seems to be clear, right? But when we talk about the Lord’s Supper, the table of the Lord, to help us to remember; remember Paul’s words, “Do this in remembrance of Him, basically until He comes. So we are keeping the Passover in that sense a memorial, the memory of what Christ did in laying down His life and being our Paschal Lamb. So there are these connections we make when we talk about, by the way, the Passover. Some people use the word Christ’s “Passion,” which is Christ’s suffering for us. And I think the other thing that gets missed in all of this, I just mentioned this in the opening of the message, how we are seemingly facing a lot of challenges as Christians in America, persecution to various degrees, some of it is just verbiage, others harmful; bodily harm.Just remember something, that is pretty much the price of association and, and has been since the beginning. You know, people thought, “Oh, this is outrageous!” Well, do you think that they were saying that while they were crucifying the disciples? Same, why did they crucify them? Why did they put them to death? Because they wouldn’t say what the world wanted them to. Think about it, nothing has changed; this is why I keep going, don’t say this is antiquated. Nothing has changed! They killed Christ for that. They killed His disciples for that. “Say what we want you to say, be as we are, and we can all get along and we’ll all have a great time.” The disciples said, “No,” and it cost them their lives. So we have to kind of be mindful when we say we are under a light affliction if you want to call it that. That’s nothing new. And by the way, that will continue, it will get worse as the days come to a close. We know that God’s word talks about tribulation, the great tribulation. I don’t know what you think that means, that word means, but tribulation means something bad, not something good will be poured out upon the earth.And then of course I’m not going to get into it now, the great debate as to whether Christians will be here or not. You know, I’ll settle that for you: it doesn’t matter. If you’re trusting Christ, it does not matter. You know, people, people get caught up in this, “Well, I, I want to, I want to know, I need to know.” How about you get to know that you know who you’re serving, and where you stand with Him, the rest of it will be taken care of. You say, “Well, that’s not an answer.” Well, it kind of is because the argument will go on with as much ambiguity as people like to talk about.Now I’ve heard people say we won’t be here. Some people said we will, but that’s a message for another day. The important thing is to keep faith and trust Him and to see that He is indeed our Passover. We don’t need to be celebrating something that God said is now over. That way of celebrating has been done away with if you will. In Hebrew, the word “leaven,” I need to touch on this, is châmêts, literally meaning “sour.” Leaven usually, yeast or baking powder is added to produce fermentation, especially in bread and dough, which causes it to rise.As the leaven sours the dough, tiny gas bubbles are released producing the dough to rise. So God said, “All leaven is to be removed from your households, not a drop or speck to be found. Period.” And leaven is usually associated with sin. Now this is the thing that people get stuck on. So modern Jewry, today’s Jews who are celebrating, go through a procedure. That procedure for the set time of Passover would be to clean your entire house. I’m all for spring cleaning, by the way. That’s great. Everybody should do that one time a year, spring cleaning. (Laughter) But the idea is to wash your walls, wash your windows. Every part of the home is scrubbed down meticulously with the idea that everything in the home possibly has been contaminated all year round by the leaven that might have been in the house. And I, I kind of think of it this way and I want you to approach this kind of to see how these two are different.So for the modern Jew, it’s about working to get the leaven out of your house. For the Christian, the only way the leaven is removed is through Christ, not through works. So you can see two distinct ways. This is more of works, “We’ll work to remove. We’ll get rid of it.” And there are, trust me, there are a lot of Christians that think- God, I was preaching somewhere. I think I told you the story. I delivered a message to the potter’s house, in a prison somewhere. And then the chaplain who was a butthead, okay, he was. He came up after all the work I did and told the inmates, “Yes, and you have to pick out all the impurities in the clay.” Okay, if you can do that, you’re God, okay? And I’m not. So anyway, my point is we can’t. So you can just see the juxtaposition between the old way that says, “Keep working, keep doing something to clean” versus You are made clean through the word, you are made clean and washed through the blood of Christ.There’s no work in that. It’s faith and trust in God. And I love that when you put the two side by side you realize there’s no amount of work I could ever do to take the leaven out of this container called Melissa Scott, nor of yours. So I think it’s pretty amazing when you see the grace of God to say, “That’s not the way, but faith in Christ gets it done.” Last but not least, I want to talk about this because it sums up everything that I’ve been saying.We talk about Christ as the Lamb. He was, it was pointed out, the Lamb, “Behold the Lamb that taketh away the sin of the world.” This is the other mystery, I will never understand. Yes, I understand that cultures, you know, I’ve taught comparative concepts in religion, but I’ve never understood this. In all of the, we’ll call it the pantheon, the whole picture of all the deities, there is not one deity; not one like Christ. And hear me out, don’t say, “That’s racist”” or that’s, whatever you want to call it. There isn’t. Look for yourself. Buddha couldn’t completely cleanse inside and out. The person had to work at achieving the state within themselves. You go through all of the world’s religions. There’s only one person who makes these claims that He, there’s something wrong with the world. His death is going to make a right, that in His death you might live, all of these statements.There’s only one. Look for it yourself, not; sorry, not the prophet Muhammad, not Joseph Smith. There isn’t, there isn’t any. So this is what I, I guess for me is frustrating and I don’t understand. I might say somebody doesn’t understand the concept of sin, both as I described in the offerings, the state of being born in fallen Adam, and the fruit thereof. But if I understood that I was trapped in essence, in my ways, both in my condition and the fruit of my condition, you told me that the only way that I could ever get well was to look at this Paschal offering in Christ and see that He didn’t just cover, He took away, He removed, that I- He died, that I might live. It’s, it’s baffling to me that people will not take a second look at this, and baffling to me, that people still want to celebrate something that cannot cleanse the inside of you.It can perhaps act as a covering in your mind, but it could never remove. It could not do what Christ’s offering as the Paschal Lamb could do. So it’s baffling to me when I see people that whole cloth, they reject, they refuse and I think to myself, it’s okay, your day will come. Not because I wish you mal or malice or ill will towards you, but your day will come. There is not a person; sorry, there’s not a person who gets out of here alive and I don’t mean this building, I mean life. So you figure out quickly, some will get to know Christ as an insurance policy just to check the box, just to make sure and others say, “I want to know more about this Person,” and others say, “I want nothing to do with Him.” Well, the category that says, “I want nothing to do with Him,” I don’t think I have to describe their fate.That will be up to God. I’m not, I’m nobody’s judge, but to the category of people who’ve even looked to Him, entertained, glanced, it’s mind-boggling to me that you can’t take 30 minutes to look and see the uniqueness of Christ that not only is He all of these offerings, is He all of these set times in the fulfillment, but He offers to us something that God did not offer to the children of Israel nor for hundreds of years until the coming of Christ, and that is something that the law could never do. Paul spells it out clearly; this law could only bring death, but truth, peace, and grace by Jesus Christ.With an add-on to something, not one person in this book apart from Adam and Eve who were given eternal life at the beginning, there’s not one person in here until the coming of Christ who can talk about eternity and being with God forever until that time. So what I’m saying to you is if there was ever a message that I said to you, it’s important to know who He is. This is why Easter, which is our Passover, Christ our Passover, is so important. It is the center and circumference. It is the middle, the outside, and the middle of Christianity. Without it, you can’t even make your way into the church. And not seeing the center point you’re never going to find your way to anything else. He solves it all by you focusing on Him in faith, recognizing He died that you might live. And if I could just even say one final thing on this, one last thought because I, my time’s up here.If you examine everything that’s in the passage we looked at, and there are accompanying passages which you can kind of study side by side, you will see that in all of this, even under a concept of law which here was not yet given in Egypt, the, the law had not yet been given, but even in the giving of the law, look carefully and you will see God’s grace. When He says, “Okay if you can’t celebrate it on the fourteenth of that month, you’ll do it the next month,” He makes provisions. If you’re too poor to offer, you can offer the least of the offerings. He included everybody. There wasn’t a person in the camp; if you were too poor, you could take from the gleanings that people left mandatorily behind for the poor. God included everybody. That was God’s plan all along. Now, with our free will, we mess it up.So this is why I said to you, now God says, “You can all come,” and we can all partake of that Paschal Lamb which is Christ, but I’m telling you something. God is not begging for you to come in. He’s looking for people that will look to Him, look at this word and say, “Wow, I never, I never recognized that was for me,” not for the world, not for the camp, the congregation, for me. And when it becomes personal, it will begin to matter to you. When it becomes personal, you’re getting to the point of that acquaintance with the Lamb and then suddenly the Lamb is slaughtered.And all you can look at is recognizing God prescribed a way for you and me to live that in times past would have only been a temporary method. All of these saints, guess what? They all still died. And this is why the Bible talks about when Christ died and speaks of Him going to preach to the departed souls, I think some were so committed to God’s program that He sent Christ to preach to them and to deliver them. We don’t have to wait for that time. We can act now and look to Him now. Now, I know, as I said, a very simplistic message, but very important. These set times, if people will take, the time to read through what the Passover means, how it can be applied in the now, not as an Old Testament dispensation, but as a shadow and type, and all of it points to Christ.Please do not tell me that you can read this book and not see how God was so gracious, not just to the children of Israel, but in giving us this complete Old and New Testament to be able to look at the whole thing and not have, not have any place to say, “You know, well, God didn’t do it there. No, God didn’t do it there.” No, God did it in here. And then you close the book and you recognize when you know who Christ is, God did it 2,000-plus years ago and He did it here as well, no longer the exterior, the works, the performance, but all by faith in Christ. So these set times, maybe for some, oh, it’s an, it’s an Old Testament celebration.No, it’s a New Testament revelation of what God was revealing in a shadow or a type, Christ being the substance. That’s my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday at 11 am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you’d like more teaching and you’d like to go straight to our website, the address is https://www.PastorMelissaScott.com ☃☂ Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of!As found on YouTube
It Was God’s Plan to Dwell Among Us
foreign [Music] from the get-go God planned to dwell Among Us and as you travel through the scriptures you you see it’s not this Tabernacle wasn’t a new thought it may have been a new way of expressing God’s prescribed method with man but not new in the concept of dwelling among him [Music] lift holy hands coming to this house. Watch The Video Below To Find Out How YOU Have Been Programmed To Study The Wrong Way All Your Life And Because Of This, YOU Have Achieved Far Less Than What You’re Capable Of! ꆛシ➫ As found on YouTube
Leviticus 4 – The Sin Offering: Provision for Our Unintentional Sins
We've been looking at the offerings. So there are five offerings. They begin in the book of Leviticus, the burnt offering, the meal offering; your Bible may say “meat,” but we are calling it the “meal offering” because, just think of it this way. The “meat offering,” we don't use that term in English anymore like they did when they were writing the King James. So there is no meat in the meat offering, so it's better to just say “meal,” right? That's easier to remember. Peace offering, sin offering, trespass offering. So in the burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering, these all fall into a category we call “sweet savor.” What's interesting is if you read in Paul's writing, and I'll just read it to you because it's just one small verse, but he uses that terminology, “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.” So even Paul made that connection; he makes it many times over.
But what I mentioned about this is important, and I'll, I'll give you the details a little bit later in the message. But when I said to you that Noah and Abraham's offerings could not have been sin offerings, is that what's attached in those texts is it was a sweet savor to God as it ascended. So anything that is “sweet savor” or labeled that way is never associated with a sin offering. So that's why I said that. I can back up things that I say. As previously mentioned also, everything in God's program mattered. It still matters, by the way, and there's still people making substitutions to their own demise. Then there are some, we'll call them refinements to the burnt offering. For example, in Leviticus 7 and verse 8, it says, “And the priest that offereth any man's burnt offering, even the priest shall have to himself the skin of the burnt offering which he hath offered.” So that's another important, there's just so many of them sometimes I think, you know, it's easy to let these things kind of pass and slip through the cracks, but here, even this, so the priest would get to keep the skin of the burnt offering.
So think of it this way, the skin could be used for a myriad number of reasons. I'm assuming, I don't know all the different customs of the day, but I'm assuming that a skin could have been used from anything, we'll call it functional, like maybe covering a seating area or part of your roofing, your housing, but generally speaking, skin across the board is used as some type of a covering, whether it's on a human or placed on something else, it's a covering.
And I found even this to be amazing because what was the burnt offering? Something that ascends up, wholly offered to God. In way of description, it personifies Christ's ministry on earth, right, wholly dedicated to God, ascending upward. But think of this, the skin that was offered, the New Testament says we are clothed in Christ's righteousness. Well, if the skin represented that which was offered as a type of Christ, imagine that this, this covering, if you will, that would have been given to the priest is almost a representation of being clothed with God's righteousness, except it's in the shadow, not in actuality. In actuality it's Christ. In shadow it may have been this skin. Now, I'm reading, I'll tell you what I'm reading between the lines and perhaps adding. This is speculation, but I think that there's reason to attach that there because it seems like, well, imagine how many burnt offerings, morning and night would be offered every day. That's a lot of skin.
Just think about it. You know how many people are in the camp night and day? That is a lot of skin. It's a lot of blood and it's a lot of skin. By the way, probably a lot of smoke too, if you think, no, I don't know. I think we maybe do a lot of caricatures about this. We see what fire in general looks like. You know, somebody's making a backyard barbecue; it's not going to be black smoke. But you're burning a whole entire animal. What do you think that's going to look like? Don't answer. All right, so in the meal offering, we saw, as I said, it had no meat in it, and the main ingredients in that offering: fine flour, frankincense, oil. So the big difference between the burnt offering and the meal offering, as I said previously last week, the burnt offering is a life offered up. And the meal offering, let's just say, was the fruit of that life. So life offered up, wholly consumed, and what's brought to the altar for the meal offering is what we as humans, you know, oil doesn't make itself.
Just, you know, does anybody think you just go out and say, “Ah, rain oil,” we have to make it, right? Like fine flour has to be pummeled. And so it's, it is the fruit or the labor of one's work versus the life that was offered. And I'm hoping at some point this will click with some of you because it's so hard sometimes to adequately convey a concept. But this one is so crystal clear to me. In the meal offering, we kind of get the idea overall of bread or cakes. And I know it's like it's, it's just a little bit around lunch time, so I start talking about bread and cakes, and in about five minutes I'm going to hear tummies going, grr, grr, grrr! (Laughter.) That happened last week or the week before and I was like, wow, it works, (laughter) all right.
But bread being the staff of life, of course and what we see in the meal offering, it's the ingredients that are placed in there give us a description as I referred to the fine flour. Immediately, I don't think fine flour sifted, I think of the bruised One. I think of Isaiah 53, “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.” If you think about it that way, the, the pulverizing, the beating, the smiting that would produce flour from its original state into the state it was in, somehow this is very representational of suffering, specifically the suffering of our Lord. So we can put some flesh and blood on that and see how we might understand it better.
I mentioned the, in the fine flour, no unevenness. Probably the most simplistic way to describe that is there is no change in Him; He is constant, remains the same. That's that concept of flour that is not lumpy or inconsistent; full of inconsistencies. Another difference between the burnt offering and the meal offering I described was the washing of water in the inward parts on the burnt offering versus the oil on the meal offering, but both are descriptive. Of course, the water as the word of God, washing the inner parts, we understand that through the New Testament, washed with the water inside.
It's what comes out of a person; it's already in you that defiles you when you, the Bible says when you open your mouth, but that's why you are constantly to wash your mind with the word of God, the oil on the other hand in the meal offering, representative of the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The meal offering was to be made with salt and emblem of course of perpetuity or preservation and also used against spoiling or corruption. So again, in Him, in Christ, there was no sin; there was no corruption. Let me just stop right here. In fact, I wish I could, there was a pause button so I can take a sidebar and I don't lose everything I've said. You know how often, how many of you have heard, usually it comes around Easter time, that Jesus had a wife, Jesus wed Mary, Jesus had sex, He had children with Mary – how many have heard that? Okay. So just so we can put things in perspective, if the Old Testament is basically revealed or expounded in the New and we read about no corruption, no blemish, no anything.
And listen carefully, sex does not defile a person but in the biblical realm of understanding that would be considered defilement and uncleanness if one was not married. Therefore, again, you either take this whole book and take it, parse it, try and mull it around and then you can say to the, to the people out in the world, “You're full of it; you don't know what you're talking about,” because if you want to go down the pathway that Jesus succumbed to impurity or temptation, then you're saying that all of this that I'm describing and the rest of the book cannot describe Him and He cannot fulfill it.
And that's a lie. So what I'm saying to you is if somebody actually scrutinizes this book enough and you're looking for shadows, types and clarity, you can know that He had to fulfill the offering of, without blemish, which means without bodily defect but also without corruption, which means anything that would have been immorally making Him impure in any way, shape, or form. And in this case, in biblical days, having sex without being married would have constituted what I'm describing. So that's why I'm saying to you, just un-pause now, come back to where I was. So this is why it's important to study the whole book. You can dispel a lot of stuff that is basically thrown at us to make a mockery of our faith.
That's all. You know, they mocked Jesus on the cross. That wasn't enough. They have to kill, still keep mocking Him all these years later. So that's the way they do it. But anyone who's reading this, a light will go on in what I'm saying to you because He is described as the Lamb of God that takes away sin of the world. Well, how could He fulfill that perfect offering if He Himself was not perfect and impure or corrupted? So save that for another argument in another day, but I just wanted to put that in there. All right, if the burnt offering represents the God-man relationship, I've said to you the meal offering and even the peace offering and probably more so the peace offering represent the other side of the Decalogue, the other side of the Ten Commandments, the fellowman-to-man relationship.
Why do I say that? Because the burnt offering offered on the altar was wholly offered up to God, the skin given to the priest, but that's almost like a sidebar, but everything else going to God. For the meal and peace offering, especially in the peace offering, you've got the offeror, God, and the priest all partaking. That's fellowship. That's communion right there. So if you split the first three offerings, the burnt offering to fit into the man-God relationship of the first five laws of the Ten Commandments, and the other five go into the meal and peace and the man-fellowman relationship where you see fellowship and communion, again interesting that the whole thing is fulfilled in Christ. Remember what it says about Christ and the law, “I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it,” and in Him, indeed, He did fulfill both sides of the Decalogue to God and to man. All right, when we look at the peace offering, which we started to briefly, it too is classified as a sweet savor, but there's, as I said, something unique.
If you can read it in your own time, because I do not think time will permit for me to go through that text, but you will definitely see what I'm referring to as communion or fellowship of all persons or parties involved in that offering. The offeror feasts on the meat of the altar very much analogous to we who, and be very careful about how you interpret what I'm about to say, feast on the body of Christ. That's not eating, that is enjoying or partaking by reading, faithing, understanding all that Christ is and does for us. So in that respect, we are partaking of the body of Christ; we are, we make up the body of Christ, the church, but in the respect of the offering. We see man satisfied in Christ.
Through this offering, the offeror is actually feasting with God. So it's almost a circular bringing the offering, the offering is offered, the priest gets to participate, the offeror gets to participate, God is the, obviously, the intended recipient in full, but all get to be included in this offering. So there's something there that's very, we'll call it communal-like, which is kind of neat because you don't think of an offering as a fellowship or a communal activity. All right, the priest, remember I said to you in every, each of these offerings, you've got to peel back the offeror, the offering; the offeror, the person, the offering, the item, and the priest.
And in many ways, Christ will fulfill one or more of these, not just the priest, but a lot of times you can see double and triple meaning in things. So we can see fulfillment that occurs, for example, the priest who is our high priest Christ, but He's also our mediator. The Scripture says Aaron; you've got to follow this one, Aaron and his sons, or Aaron and Aaron's sons, the priest's children, his family get to partake.
So think of it this way, if you're going to make this extra complicated, we're trying to make shadows and types and look at the reality. So Aaron, the priest, his children, they all get to partake. We are heirs and children of God. So it's the same, if you look at all of these different types, they're the same; they lead us down the same pathway. This is why I get frustrated when people say, “Oh, that's the Old Testament. I don't want to read the Old Testament.” Well, you're missing out on a lot, because this fills in a lot of blanks that if you said, “Well, I don't fully, I, I'll read the New Testament, but I don't get all the nuances.” The nuances occur here, and then when you start reading it again, you go, “Why didn't I see that before?” because it needed to be pointed out.
All right, the peace offering could be a thanksgiving or better put praise offering, and that would be more like glorifying God. But it could also be done as a vow or a voluntary offering, which could correlate to service to God. So my hope is these are all concepts that are very generic that I'm putting out, but hopefully in your own time and your own studies, you'll go and kind of dig a little bit more, because once you start digging into what I'm saying, you're going to find all kinds of things that correlate. So the peace offering, one of two, understood in one of two ways, either as a praise, thanksgiving, which would be for us in New Testament times glorifying God, or as a vow or voluntary offering, which could be analogous to service to God in our time.
The law of the peace offering is found in Leviticus 7, verses 11-38. It's pretty lengthy, and it kind of gives you all of the minutia of the offering, in your own time, if you will. But there are two things I want to point out that are itemized here within these verses. And one of them speaks of the fact that Aaron and his sons received as their portion of the peace offering the breast and the shoulder of the animal. And again here, there's beautiful pictorial images put forth; the breast always in Scripture being represented as the heart, the place of emotions, the place of care, empathy, concern, and the shoulders, what would be basically analogous to power or carrying a load, the burdens, if you will.
The priests in this day were a microcosm. They could not even achieve what Christ is to us. But think of it this way. The New Testament says Christ loved us and He died for us. You see, even if you go back into the Old Testament, nomenclature of El Shaddai, the breasted one, the one who yes, at in Him all sustenance, everything is found. But that's not just the nourishment, if you will. It also flows to the needs, our emotional and spiritual needs. He can provide all of that. So think of the breast that way. The priest's portion was that, the priest's and his sons'.
We are the children of God. This is also ours to partake. We receive the love of God. We may love God, but we receive the love of God. He loved us first and gave Himself for us. And the shoulder portion, which in human terms, not in animal terms, but in human terms, the shoulder is usually representative of power or burden bearing, and He is that to us as well. So even in these offerings, the symbolism is powerful. And you go back and you read these chapters where there's all this kind of very dry, boring detail, but when you start to see Christ there, you start to think, this is, it becomes a little bit more like, yeah, I can see the details that maybe in reading the New Testament one can understand, but we'll say the full details or the coloring may not be there. They're here. That's where you find them. Okay, so now we're going to approach the sin offering. And this is the other thing that if I could have one wish in life, it would be this, that I could stop hearing people say this – that they came to the Lord and now, you know, they've been set free and they sin no more.
We are sinners. We have two problems. We are born in the blueprint. You come out of the gate messed up. It's the best way I can say it. That is the condition we are all; you know, if you want to go out there and deny it and, “Nah, nah, nah, nah!” go ahead. But that's what it is.
See, this is what makes me sometimes smile like the cat that ate the canary. Everybody wants to justify, well, they want to seem superspiritual and rationalize their behavior. But if you really go back to the thought process of, we are born in this blueprinted fallen state. A baby is beautiful and innocent, but a baby is born in that state too. It doesn't just, okay, now the baby quit being cute at the age of seven and it's no longer – no, it doesn't work that way. You came out of the gate, fully contaminated in the blueprint of Adam, and the only cure for that is coming to know Christ and what Christ did and faithing in Christ. So you've got the condition of man. It might be easier to say this like this: you're born with a congenital problem. It's called Adam's nature, fallen. That's our congenital problem. Everyone born into this universe has that congenital problem. Now don't come and argue that you're okay; that's the condition of humankind, and then separate it with the fruit that is produced from that nature.
The fruit from that that is produced from that nature is what most people get hung up on, “Well, I don't drink and I don't smoke and I don't cuss and I don't do this and I don't do that, blah, blah, blah,” right? And they're hung up on that and they, you can talk about that until you're blue in the face, but that's not going to excuse you from your congenital problem.
You see what I'm saying? So two things must be dealt with and they're both dealt with in Christ, but in the laws they were separated. Now how can we be sure that what I'm saying is correct? Because I always want to make sure that we're so crystal clear on these things. So if you turn to the fourth chapter in the book of Leviticus, just follow what I'm going to read. I'm trying to figure out if I want to see how this is done in the NIV here for just, just give me a second. I want to see how what they call it before I start reading.
Four, oh, okay. Well, I actually like both of these terms, so we're starting in a good place. I'm going to read both of them to you. “The LORD spake unto Moses,” this is the King James, “the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a soul shall sin through ignorance,” if you're interested the Hebrew word is shegâgâh, okay. You're going to find this word repeated “through ignorance.” The NIV, very interesting, “The Lord said to Moses, Say to the Israelites, When anyone sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord's commands.” So the sin offering, now there are some minute details. So this is very generic, don't, don't get all crazy on me if some of you know the minute details, because we're looking at the more generic concept right now, through and through will be unintentional through ignorance, sinning through some; you did not know, “Oh my God, I didn't know.” Now, by the way, this focus on the sin offering is not so much on acts committed, I'm going to read it to you in a second, but on people.
So I want you to think of this, the first category of people that are being addressed in the sin offering are the priests, “If a priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people; then let him bring for his sin, which he hath sinned, a young bullock without blemish unto the LORD for a sin offering,” okay? So the first category is priests. In fact, let me just give this a breakdown quickly if you want to write it in your margin. The priests are being addressed in verses 3-12, the congregation in verses 13-21, rulers 22-26, and in verses 27-35 it is the common people, whatever that means.
I don't know what difference with the congregation, common people. I'm assuming it means people outside of the congregation. Although I was scratching my head and thinking, if you lived in the desert around the tabernacle, I'm not sure how you could be a common person, maybe a random traveler. I don't know. Don't ask me. I didn't, I didn't write it. I don't know. Never mind. That, that will hit you later. Okay, so you can see people are being addressed over and over again, but it starts with the priest. This is very, very, very- this point is probably the most important thing I want to talk to you about right now.
God who approved of these priests, who chose, who let them be anointed, and yet they could still sin a sin of ignorance; unintentional breaking of some law. Now, ask yourself, what could that be? Because they're not exactly laid out; they're not spelled out. It doesn't matter. I'll tell you what matters. What matters is that God started, if you look at it, He's got priests, congregation, rulers, and people.
But He addresses the priests first. This ought to tell you, we have to stop this nonsense. There is no pastor, man or woman, that is perfect. That doesn't mess up daily and perpetual. I don't care how holy and spiritual they sound, or they look like, or they talk. We're all human. Get, get that and we're good. There's nothing worse than people putting a pastor on a pedestal, which puts extra pressure for somebody to have to feel like, “Well, I've got to, I've got to walk above the line.” No, I don't. I walk the same line you do, because I'm human like you. And I probably make more mistakes and more mess up than you do and they're not, they're not intentional. They're not evil by design. But we have to stop this idea somehow; and what, what the line between ignorance, unintentional, and blatant blasphemy and intentional sinning, different story.
Well, we can come back and talk about that later. But this is unintentional: “I did not know”" We're not talking about “I knew, but I'm just going to say I didn't know when I get busted,” because God knows the difference. He starts with the priest and listen carefully to what is said here, “If the priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people,” that means; just indulge me in this, that means if this person should happen to engage in ignorance like any other person.
And this is why I get very angry when people say, “Well, pastors need to be held to a higher standard.” There's a difference between my stewardship responsibility to the church, to God, the management of assets and money and responsibility versus being a human being that can and does make mistakes. And I do them all the time. Does that make me less to say that in front of you, to admit it in front of you? Absolutely not.
It makes me one hundred percent human and relatable and not somebody who's up here playing church, but saying, “This applies to me as well as anybody else.” Now, if you go through these line by line, I want you to notice something. So I addressed the priest and it gives the prescription for the priest bringing his offering, all right? Then you keep reading and it goes down to, “And if the whole congregation of Israel sins through ignorance, and the thing be hid from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done somewhat against any of the commandments of the LORD concerning things which should not be done, and are guilty; when the sin, which they have sinned against it, is known, then the congregation shall offer”- now you tell me, if the children of Israel did not have, did not yet have the law given to them, Moses is up in the mount, they want something to worship.
God had not yet uttered the words that would become absolute. He had spoken the words to Moses. We know that. But in terms of application, tell me that you can hear something once and go, “Mm, got it.” Sometimes yes, but a lot of times you need to hear things repeatedly. Now it surprises me that the people would have to hear, “Thou shall have no other gods before me. I'm a jealous God.” All the things that God said He did not want them to do. But we tend to, again, we caricature the law was given and then they went, “Okay,” and they went out and they practiced it all, right? Wrong. Think of how many people may have vaguely heard, some didn't hear, some didn't even care to listen, so it would be very easy to take the incident of the golden calf, which happens in Exodus 32, I believe, and put that in the category (even though in my mind's eye they had to know it was wrong), but that could be possibly a concept of whole congregation falling into sin.
I, I don't know how else to describe this one, but I can tell you if you keep going and you read about the ruler, it says the thing, the same thing, “When a ruler hath sinned, and done somewhat through ignorance,” so that key word or “unintentional” is repeated throughout everything that is pertaining to the sin offering, all right? So I want you to kind of just put a note there.
If there's one word to label at the head of chapter 4, it is “ignorance” or “unintentional acts,” so that way when you're flipping through it, you can see that's, that's the big header. Now there are, there are micro-definitions here that we can glean elsewhere, not here. But what's important with this is we see the classification, so God deals with priests, He deals with congregation, He deals with rulers, and then He deals with the common person. And I think the reason for putting in the rulers and common people, I was reading, it's an old-timey booklet and they have a lot of kind of quips. It's “Sermonic Saplings,” I think it's called. But it's a contribution of a whole bunch of authors.
Normally I'd give you some credit, but I think this one was actually anonymous. And how this was described, I think, was pretty adequate. It said the difference between the ruler and the common person might be as such. Think of the ruler as the big clock in the center of town that everyone can see for miles away and the common person simply is wearing their own personal watch. So whatever the ruler does, it's seen on a large scale, whether, if that's a good definition or not, I'm not sure. But to say basically, one would be much more obvious probably and made known to more people than just the common average person.
And it's also interesting; I don't know why they did this though, “the common people sin through ignorance.” So again, we may be discussing the difference between congregation and congregant, or we may be discussing congregation which includes congregants and all other people. I'm not sure. I tell you what I'm not sure, I'm not sure. In any case, if you read through this chapter, you will find one thing. There is no description of the acts committed, only people being addressed: priest, congregation, ruler, common people. Okay, so pretty important to kind of put that in perspective. Now, I also urge you to notice something else which is kind of important. If you're looking at this section, chapter 4 is 35 verses. If you compare that to the burnt offering at 17 verses, the meat offering or meal offering at 16, peace offering at 17, and the trespass at 19, this section covers the most, has the most verbiage in it.
And interestingly enough, it gives you the least detail on what these unintentional sins are. It's kind of interesting. Okay, this offering would be offered with and during all feasts, Passover, Pentecost, Trumpets, Tabernacle, Yom Kippur, which is a category all of its own, which we will talk about. And it would be offered, this sin offering would be offered in the same place as the burnt offering, which is kind of, think about it, if you think that the burnt offering is something good and wholly ascending to God, and this is designed for unintentional, “Oops, I didn't know,” being offered in the same place. That's pretty spectacular. That's one. The burnt offering, of course, was voluntary, but the sin offering was mandatory, not discussable.
The burnt offering, as I said, ascended up. And if you read about the sin offering, it is poured out and downwards. They, these are kind of some differences between the two. In the burnt, meal, and peace offering, sin is nowhere in sight, but in the sin and trespass, they are expiatory in nature, meaning it would be required minimally, if you go back to the instructions here, it says in, for example, “For the priest he shall bring the bullock unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation; and he shall lay his hand upon the bullock's head.” So expiatory in nature, usually also in a vicarious way, so by the laying on of hands, it is the transference, if you will, of guilt, whether it is known or unknown, onto the animal, so expiatory in nature.
The other thing I said previously. The burnt offering, the meal offering, and the peace offering were technically, in their technical terms, acceptance offerings. Now, I need to clarify this because somebody will twist my words as they usually do. I described Christ as being a burnt offering in that His life was laid down, wholly offered to God, but He did not need acceptance of God the Father. So when I say it's an acceptance offering, the offeror offering, essentially as it went up in smoke, it was appeared to be fully accepted by God. So I need to, I needed to make that clarification in case somebody goes back to the, “I accepted Jesus” mindset, which I've told you, it doesn't work that way.
I don't care how you- some people just want to pound their fists, “Aw, blah, blah, I accepted, I,” well that's fine. You can, you can accept in your mind, but He decided long ago whether you'd be in or out, okay? That's an easier way to put it, like way back there, before I was even conceived, God said, “I, I want that. I want that which is going to be called Melissa down the line, somewhere in the, in the future, that's Mine.” And maybe to others He just said, “Meh, whatever.” (Laugther.) Transcribe that! (Laugther.) Okay. Okay then; still trying to get serious, all right. A large part of the problem here is that when we discuss sin and trespass offerings, we get so hung up on wanting to classify the sin, put that in the trespass category, but we get so hung up on wanting to clarify, itemize, label that, that which people do, which is okay, you want to do that.
I don't do that, but if you want to do that, but probably the more important thing to, the starting place is to consider the nature. Without understanding that, I am sorry, I don't care who you're listening to as pastor, who's, or if you're self-educating yourself, you will not understand what's wrong with you and why you need Christ if all you can do is produce a checklist that says, “I, I did this, I did that,” because sin inherently, before you can commit an act, as I called it, and it's perfectly designed this way, a congenital problem.
Something that you had from birth, in your DNA, it is, that's the way you came out. If you are not willing to address that, you can't even get to the problem of your trespasses. So I am a sinner. I know I sin. The fruit of my congenital issue are the things I do. And the only remedy for that, there's only one. Now when I read; this is the tragedy. When I read, these folks came to the door and they offered their offering and vicariously by the laying on of hands, it could have technically given them, I would call maybe a sense of momentary relief, but this is why it had to be done on such a regular basis, because it's what the book of Hebrews says. How could that ever wash and cleanse you on the inside? How could it ever free you from the contamination that's called sin as nature? How? It cannot, it could never.
That's the problem is when you, when you think about this, God laid all this out to teach the people, essentially, this is going to sound weird, but this was all teaching the Old Testament saints about God before Christ was in the flesh, but teaching about Christ's work. So failure to understand from the get-go, I came out with a problem. I don't even need to do anything. The initial thing, the condition, my nature needs fixing, but I can't fix it. Only God can. Now God could have done so many different things here, but He chose to do it through animals, teaching a principle that a life must be laid down and sacrificed, that blood must be spilled. There's a whole litany of things that you could parse through this, but it's teaching us something about us. Failure to grab hold of this lesson, Christianity 101; you know, there are people sitting in churches this morning and whatever their, their pastor, minister, priest, whatever, spoke with them, but I highly doubt that this is a concept that is being reiterated on a regular basis to people who come into the church.
And as I said, that's part of the problem because failure to not know exactly who you are and what's wrong with you produces people who are confused. Just go out in the world and you'll find it. There's a lot of confusion out there. That's because people are even confused; the, the argument, I've settled this in my mind, there are people who still want to talk about, “Well, we evolved.
We, we're, you know, we're a product of evolution.” You can argue that all you want, but if you really want to sit down and have a knockdown drag out with me, I'll take you up. And I think I can prove to you that your argument, which you have been indoctrinated with, you, you may not want to call God “God,” but there was a supreme Creator, however, whatever name you want to put on Him. And He wasn't going, “Okay, let's see if we combine the A and the B and the C, we'll come out with D.
And D will be the new specimen that will evolve into D1, D2, D3.” It doesn't work like that, especially when you get into analyzing what we've, we grew up, we all probably grew up on this. You know, the chart that shows the chimp-like, ape-like, you know, we're going from this, “This is how I wake up in the morning, this is me.” There's evolution for you! “So I wake up in the morning, (laughter) midday, I've evolved; I can stand up straight.” We all grew up on that. The problem is when you start looking into DNA and you find out what's in your DNA will tell you that you and I have been fed a lot of stuff under the guise of “science.” Oh, who am I talking to; you guys already know this, you know, “Follow the science.” Yeah. How did that work out for you? So what I'm thinking here is this, you know, if, if we really take hold of concepts like this, being born in a congenital state that has a problem and the cure to that is Christ, then what I'd say to you is talking about how good or how bad or, or whatever it is you want to add to the conversation is, it's going to be nonsensical if you're not willing to deal with what you are first: fallen.
That's why Paul wrote, “All have sinned and fallen short.” Can you imagine that? A man who's so steeped and well versed in, there was only Old Testament at the time and he says, “All have sinned, all have fallen short.” Even he could figure that out. I wonder why in this day and age people cannot see that, but let's leave that for another day. All right, so in the classification for the way animals are presented in this offering, as I said, if you remember in the burnt offering, I told you that God made provisions for poor; rich to poor, so bullock all the way down to turtledove.
In the, in the meal offering, it's described by way of, I hate to say it, by cooking ware, right? Like if you, maybe if you're rich, you had an oven, but if you were a poor person, you might've just had a pot or a pan, which probably gave birth to that expression, but anyway. All right, a couple of really smart people here, following my humor. The rest of you, I'll wake you up when it's over. But even in the sin offering, we have different categories all the way down to God saying, “If you can't offer an animal, you can bring an ephah of flour,” which is kind of interesting. Of course, there would be in the sin offering, there would be no oil and no frankincense. Now think about this, the sin offering, acts committed unintentionally out of ignorance; no oil put there. No Holy Spirit guiding, right? And no frankincense, and I talked to you about frankincense, how when it's heated or burned, it releases its fragrance, but here in type, it also is a type of holiness, righteousness of God. So in neither one of these, you; it kind of goes to make sense, it's intuitive to say that in, in this sin offering, neither oil nor frankincense would be used or appeared as their types.
If you are being guided, now listen, if you're being guided by the Holy Spirit and you live and walk in the Spirit, you can still make mistakes. You can still do things unintentionally. But for the application, making the distinguishment between sin and trespass, just kind of keep that there. It'll help you to remember the differences between these offerings and what they represent. The blood being sprinkled upon the altar of incense made it clear that until this portion of the offering was completed, in essence, every other aspect of worship ceased. That's kind of interesting. Now take it from another page in the Bible. You remember when the whole camp was stopped? Actually, it happened several times, but the one specifically I'm thinking about is in that famous passage where the whole camp is stopped to find the item that was stolen. Do you remember that? (Yes ma'am.) So nothing could go forward, although that was an intentional act, but just say that everything stopped, everything ceased.
So you could try and go from that angle or you could say it the other way, which is a lot of times not so much for unintentional, but usually for things that we do premeditated; we thought about it and we did it. Usually that builds a wedge between you and God in your communion, in your fellowship, in your- you notice somebody who stops reading the Bible, who stops praying, who's less involved, it becomes easier and easier to do that, and actually the wedge gets bigger and bigger and bigger if you let it be because God is not forcing you, and we always have this propensity to go to the easy way, “It's easier this way.” So all of the sacrifice that was going on had to be completed before anything else could be resumed. The sprinkling of the blood now, I just said on the altar of incense, but they also sprinkled blood depending on who offered on the brasen altar. That restored the children of Israel. The sprinkling of blood upon the altar of incense was for the priests. So there's all these little details involved there.
And you might say, “Well, that's weird; a brasen altar for the children of Israel?” Well, think of the brasen altar, the place of, we'll call it judgment, justice, whatever, versus the altar of incense. And you might say, “Well, that's kind of unfair. So basically the priest's offering is almost like pray to be forgiven versus the average person or the congregation that's still going to judgment.
That's kind of unfair,” but that's the way God prescribed it. We also have to deal with the fat, the fat of the offering. The higher the categories of offerings, the fat was burnt upon the altar. When I say the higher the category, the highest quality of offering, the fat would be offered on the altar. The lesser categories, not much detail is given. It's almost like God was saying, “Oh, you get down to that, there's a little bit of fat, oh, who cares? I'm not even going to talk about it,” right? So I don't know if that was intentionally, if that was unintentionally or intentionally omitted, I don't know. But the fat represents, we'll call it the life force, the vitality, the spiritual health of the being or the individual, if you want to put it that way. So it would essentially signal that it was accepted by God. So even though it is not a sweet savor, that portion of the offering being offered up would be like saying, “Okay, all has been accepted,” like, “Okay, everybody's happy now, you can all go home.” The body or the carcass is cast without the camp.
Once more, the lesser offering doesn't specify what to do with it. So perhaps one area of confusion that I need to address if I haven't confused you enough today is in the higher categories of sin offering, and it's called as such, a sin offering, as I said, no act or trespass is mentioned. In the lesser categories, we read some, sometimes the offering is referred to as a trespass offering and other times a sin offering. That's why I said, I gave you the generic perspective, the whole, but they're minute details. So sometimes you're going to find when you're studying this, sin offering on the lesser degrees may be referred to as the trespass, and they sometimes get almost confused or interchangeable, so just note to self, if you read, don't get confused about that.
And I would highly suggest something. You don't need to go out and buy a Bible. Go online if you don't have- I'm sure most of you have multiple versions of Bibles at home, if you don't have The 26 Translation, go online. There are places like; one of the sites is like Bible Hub, where they've got side by side translations and versions. And it would be very, very helpful, especially for people who wrestle with reading through these passages. Go on there and find a version that you actually can read through, like a breeze, because that's going to help to give you the nuts and bolts. Don't worry about, “Well, this said, this here,” get the gestalt of it first, and then come back to your King James to read and fill in the details. I think that's going to be extremely helpful. Okay, I want to go back to one or two last things before I wrap up here, something interesting that I found when I was studying for this fourth chapter sin offering.
Take a look at this. So, for the priest, it says, “The priest shall make atonement,” I'm sorry, for the congregation, it says, “The priest shall make atonement for them.” For the ruler, it says, “The priest shall make an atonement for him in his sin.” For the common person, “The priest shall make an atonement for his sin which he hath committed.” It's almost like as you get further down the road, we have a greater elaborate- not so much, it doesn't tell us what the sin is, but we have a greater expansion.
So, it goes from just making “atonement for them,” “for him and his sin,” and then “make an atonement for his sin which he hath committed,” almost as if; I hate to say this, but almost as if the magnifying glass has been turned up exponentially on the common person, not so much on the priest, the congregation, and the ruler. I think that's pretty fascinating. Why? Because it will be the bulk of the common people who won't know anything or not too much about God, who would be the most likely to do those unintentional things, so it's kind of interesting the way God's word works that out. I think it's very interesting. So, probably the last but not least here, as I said, I'm going to bring this to a close, is if we look at all of these, and we'll, I think I want to go back and put in some more detail for you because we; sin and trespass, as I said, are probably the, the heaviest categories for us to wrap our minds around and be clear about.
But I think the big thing for me is when I consider what today's society is peddling as- we don't talk, no one talks about sin anymore. No one does, and that's pretty obvious. You know, people can be outraged and they can pound their fists, but you know, an example, for example, of what just happened here in California, some of you who like the Dodgers, you may like sports. I don't; personally, I'm just giving you my opinion. I don't care for that. But I don't care for seeing a bunch of people with painted faces pole dancing on a cross. That's blasphemy. That is to anyone who actually even has a modicum of understanding.
That's the highest disrespect that you could show to my faith, to my Lord. I'm not saying worship the cross because we don't. That's the instrument that He died on. That's all, but still making a mockery of it. So you might say, “How do you apply what you're talking about, which is so disconnected from today's society?” I'm telling you. People who have no God, who are indoctrinated and they make up, they make up as they go; it's all accepted.
It's, it's accepted whether it is intentional by design, which I think in the case I just mentioned it was, but some of them are completely unintentional, and done out of complete ignorance because there is in this universe seemingly, in the world we live in, much less God. Even when you think about it, there were, apparently there were some mass baptisms that occurred a couple of weeks ago in California based on the Jesus movement and the movie and everything. People went out in droves. When I was reading the article, the article told me- I, I love the idea that people came out in droves and it was a mass baptism. That's amazing. But I, I would have really loved to have been there maybe about a couple of minutes walking distance from where these people were baptized to ask them, “Do you know what you just did? Do you understand what you just did? Do you know why you just did it?” because the article told me that the bulk of the people could not have known; something very rote and robotic. That to me is an unintentional lack of understanding theologically of what you're doing and it's your responsibility.
If you can't figure it out, find someone who will tell you, and don't just say- I never tell you, “Take my word.” I tell you, “This is what I'm saying, now you go look it up and you go find the, the backup to what I'm saying.” The foundation is there. You do the research. I never want someone to say, “Well, you said this and,” no, go, go check out what I'm saying. And this is why these lessons, although they seem far removed, they are not. They're very applicable to today. Often sins against God, whether intentional or unintentional out in the world are just trivialized. They're marginalized. There are no consequences. For me, I think the bigger thing is if I would put a label on the fourth chapter of “unintentional,” I'd also attach to it if it was possible to understand that maybe unintentional sins may have been a lack in their day as well as ours of morality, of just being decent. But that's for the reader as you parse these verses to figure out, not for me to micromanage in your thoughts.
But what I want to say to you is there's so much in here that helps us, anybody who's struggling to figure out “What's wrong with me? Why am I not making progress with the things of God? How come I'm not advancing?” start here. Maybe the foundation of your starting point wasn't clear enough. And I'm going to say it for the last time. Your congenital problem affects your behavior and the fruits of that behavior become sin that people check the box on.
They become more worried about that than about dealing with the nature. And this is why this book helps us to understand there are two different concepts. They blend into one, but two different concepts that must be understood separately to understand how much of God's grace, how great a God we serve, that He would make provisions not just for the things that you can check a box on, but He also made provisions for things that you had no clue you were doing. That's a pretty remarkable thing. Now while most people have some premeditated bad ideas about God, “Well, God just hates everything and He's just a killjoy,” how about the God that was gracious enough to say, “If a soul sins unintentionally, unbeknownst to you, here's provision I've made for you because I know what your condition is.” That tells me I'm in really good hands with the God I serve because He recognizes there are things that I may know absolutely, I've been schooled on and there are things that I may not know.
And He takes all of that into account and says, and by the way, He didn't say it here, but the words tell me, even here, God loved the people. He cared for the people. Now we have the full book and we know the full thing and the full picture is this. God says, “I know you're not perfect, but I need you,” the believer “to understand one thing: this is flawed. You may have been created perfectly in Me, but this is flawed by nature, by the blueprint, and then everything else that happens after that, they both have to be dealt with.
And if you can understand that,” God speaking now to us, “I can help you to deal with things you know about and things you don't, because I'm the God that forgives.” And if you read carefully, very interesting, many times over here, “And it shall be forgiven them,” verse 20, “And it shall be forgiven them,” verse 26, “And it shall be forgiven him,” verse 31, “And it shall be forgiven him,” and the last one, verse 35, “And it shall be forgiven him.” So even there God was speaking and we have something and someone infinitely better in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
We too, not only shall be, but have been, and that's the most blessed state to be in. If you want to hear more, be here next week. That's my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, teach live from Glendale, California, at Faith Center. Service starts at 11am and all are welcome. If you'd like to attend, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to request your pass.
If you'd like to listen, watch, and learn 24 hours a day, simply log on to our website at www.PastorMelissaScott.com There you will find teaching from the Old and New Testament, from the ancient languages of Heberw and Greek, word studies and perhaps, if you stay tuned, that nagging question you've had about the Bible. Something that you've wanted to know will be answered. I hope you come out and join us Sunday morning, service starts at 11AM. See you here..
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The Ark and the Mercy Seat: God’s Plan to Dwell with Man – The Tabernacle through the Eyes of Christ
From the get-go it was God's plan to dwell among us. And as you travel through the Scriptures, you, you see it's not, this tabernacle wasn't really a new thought. It may have been a new way in expressing God's prescribed method with man, but not new in the concept of dwelling among Him. ♪ ♪ ♪ We are investigating and going through the tabernacle and I probably may even go back to a couple of areas that I was very generic on, because I'm now seeing that more people are catching on when I've told you to go back and read how it changes the reading.
When you're looking at, instead of looking at very bland instructions of constructing or materials, and you start seeing all of this, it tells you God had a plan. There were shadows and types prefiguring and pointing to Christ. Exodus 25:8 basically says, “Build me a tabernacle that I may dwell among them.” So I want you to stop there for a minute, because this is all familiar territory and I really want you to think about this. And I'm even going to go so far as to say to my Jewish listeners, please listen to what I'm saying, because I think there are people out there in the sound of my voice that know what I'm saying is true, but your traditions, Jew or Christian, make void the word of God. So it's pretty staggering when you start to think that God from the beginning wanted to dwell with man. Just kind of pretend you just are not going to think about anything else except the concept that God from the beginning; I'm not talking about the beginning of building a tabernacle, I'm talking about from the beginning when He said, “Let us make Adam.” And Genesis 3:8 and 24, Genesis 3:8 and 24 both express that God was with Adam in the Garden.
So from the get-go it was God's plan to dwell among us. And as you travel through the Scriptures, you, you see it's not, this tabernacle wasn't really a new thought. It may have been a new way in expressing God's prescribed method with man, but not new in the concept of dwelling among Him. The same is true of Noah, the same is true of Abram, the same is true of Isaac, the same is true of Jacob. When we see the close proximity, you know, we, we tend to read God spoke to these patriarchs, but think about it. Whether it was a voice that came from wherever or whether it was an appearance of Christophanies or Theophanies, pre-incarnate, sometimes referred to as the “angel of the LORD,” which is a hard thing to pin down because some people believe that could be Michael or Gabriel, or that could be Christ Himself pre-incarnate, as I said, a Christophany.
Nevertheless, God was repeatedly manifesting Himself to these people. So the plan of dwelling among the people, we read it in Exodus, but it's not new. And in fact, think about this. This is what's so heartbreaking. You start to look at the Bible. If you're going to investigate this book, God starts out wanting to dwell among man, knowing, by the way, giving man the free will to make his own decisions, to not listen, to disobey. And what you end up with, eventually, the proximity that was designed, the space goes and increases more. As sin increases, the greater the distance between God and man and the dwelling portion, if you will. So it's kind of sad, but in this, there's this beautiful concept that God is saying, if you read and study the tabernacle, you'll see that God was always saying, “I want to dwell with My creation, but My creation now is so stained with sin that there must be a prescribed way to approach that we may be able to reconcile and still be together.” The revelation to Moses takes up many chapters in the book of Exodus.
You've got, and by the way, you have that same pattern right there with God speaking to Moses; think about this, at the burning bush and then repeatedly up in the mount. If that doesn't tell you that God still desired to dwell among His people, you see the same thing later with David, but here's the interesting thing. God says to David when David desires to build a house for the Lord, He says basically, “No.” But David, who's called a man after God's own heart, He says, rather, “I will be with thee wherever thou goest.” To Solomon who has the idea to build the temple, we have the glory of the Lord that settles in. And then, of course, after that, we'll call it prophecy of the divided kingdom, we see no more of this for a time. But the point, the clarity is when you start reading the New Testament and you realize over and over again, but specifically the opening portions of John make it clear that God had to come; God was in Christ, taking up a tent of human flesh.
Again, the Greek word there in John's Gospel when it says the eternal word or “The word was, or became, flesh and dwelt,” more specifically, that Greek word eske-, eskenosen, which if you look that up, Strong's 4637, “to have one's tent,” or “to tabernacle,” God was in Christ tabernacling among us. So we have what was being alluded to, prefiguring, being pointed to, now realized, made in the flesh in Christ in the New Testament. So it's important when I say study the tabernacle, because not only do you see God's design, you can really find yourself.
As I've said, the way of approach, if, if we were being honest, if I think about my real eyes-open approach some, how many years ago; 25, 30, more than 30 years ago, really in reality trying to understand God, it made me see the white boards, the holiness of God, and made me almost say, “How could I approach?” The same thing is true by these people as they were living around the tabernacle, camped around the tabernacle, constantly reminded of God's holiness by those outward walls that basically were a constant reminder of what was inside. So just to recap, I made a list here; of course, on my list I have chapter and verse, so this one just has a list somewhat in order. But you can see kind of the order that God gives for the things that were important to Him, as I said before.
And if you think about that, He starts with offerings and materials to be brought by the people. And that is directly said in the opening of Exodus 25, “Speak to the people.” He doesn't say, “Demand it; manipulate them, make them feel bad.” God says to the ones that will “bring it with a willing heart,” and God has not changed that. But here's the interesting thing. I just, before I get too far into this, I want you to think about this. God being God could have created all of this tabernacle without the resources, without anyone bringing, without anyone lifting a finger. I'm not saying that God's a magician per se, but if He had created the heavens and the earth and all the creatures and everything that's in it, He could have surely made a tabernacle without the help of human hands, without the help of human resources.
You think? (Yes ma'am.) So it's interesting that He didn't, and that's the starting point. And I'm going to keep repeating this, because I think there are some people just waking up to this fact. So it bears; it's a worthy endeavor for me to keep repeating this. You can, you can rationalize or justify however you want your approach to God, but when God says, “This is the way of approach,” and He starts with this, “Speak to the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering.” And interestingly enough, if you really think carefully about this, those words read in the Hebrew can only be translated one way, “My offering,” God's offering; never anyone else's offering, nothing that the people actually possessed.
If you think about it, as they came out of Egypt, they possessed nothing. It was what they took along the way that became their possessions. And so it's, these are the things that I think are very important, God giving these instructions, a necessary step to begin building. And then from there, God goes immediately, the first place, if you look on that list right there, to the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat. He doesn't say, “Build Me a door, or make Me a curtain, or make boards.” He says: ark and mercy seat.
Why? Because that was going to be the place where God would make His presence known and dwell among the people. So it's kind of very interesting. You go down the list and you, you can kind of see a level of importance, and then bookends because God starts with where He's going to dwell and the final reading in; between Exodus and Numbers is that God's glory settles down to reside. So, “Build Me a tabernacle where I may dwell; mercy seat, ark of the covenant,” and the final place is God's glory, chapter 40, I believe, in the book of Exodus.
So it, it is relative to the study to understand this. There's nothing that is accidental. And when man would approach what, I've said this before, what God started with, that was, think about this, the last thing that, except for the, by the way, only the high priest would get to go into the Holy of Holies. But think about where God started; ark of the covenant, only the high priest would get to go in. So think of it this way, what He started with that was most important to Him would be the least likely to be seen by the congregation; they couldn't.
So that's kind of interesting. Now when we start, as I say, we start in the outer area looking at the white boards. So God is gracious to show us what's important to Him first. And then, when He lets us approach, He knows our frame and He gives us basically the furthest point away to start our journey inward. There's a very interesting imagery that one could draw upon, which I'm sure I'll, I will maybe go to in the next message or two, but it's interesting to see that if you really see the whole tabernacle in a bird's-eye view, it is the way of salvation in its entirety.
It spells it out from start to finish. So what we're going to look at today will be mostly around the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat. The designated high priest would approach the ark of the covenant as God's representative. The special area called the Holy of Holies basically curtained off another partition to keep it separate. And so when you are inside the tabernacle, now you've come in the door, you would actually not even see the ark of the covenant, because it was behind a curtain.
So if you were even allowed to come in and do service, only the high priest would go behind that special veil. That special veil has a particular Hebrew name, pârôketh, “separation” or “partition,” only used for this particular veil, because you'll see reading the King James sometimes can be a little bit confusing. You'll have references to actually two different veils, but in the Hebrew they are two distinct words. One should be properly more translated, “curtain,” the other one, “veil.” And this veil, actually the concept of the veil and the Holy of Holies becomes very important to understand as we, future perhaps, may look at the temple, because in the New Testament it describes that the temple veil was torn from top to bottom.
And that has a very important representation, which in the tabernacle is still represented but could not have the same application. There is a reason for this that I may again get to. But everything within that pârôketh, within that special veil required blood, and without the blood no one entered in, or if the high priest did so, he entered at peril of death, which was certain. The veil that partitioned off the Holy of Holies basically was the ultimate symbol of God's holiness and the inability of any person, not cleansed by the blood, consecrated and cleansed by the blood, to be able to even approach. I want you to think about that because every step of this message and all of these messages keep saying the same thing. How can you approach Christ if you're not willing to look at what happened at Calvary and the shed blood that He spilled? The writer of Hebrew spells it out so eloquently, but you'll see people who are, they don't want to talk about the blood of Christ, it repulses them.
Well I'm sorry, friend, if it repulses you, then you're not interested in God's prescribed way which is the, the picture is here, it's graphic, it's terrible to see animals being slaughtered and death, but this is the way God was painting a picture to say, “This is the way of salvation,” which will ultimately end in the final sacrifice of the Lamb of God, who as the book of John says, “taketh away the sin of the world.” So the, the writer of Hebrew says, “Having therefore, brethren, the boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, his flesh.” So understanding the veil, even as I said, even though it is not 100 percent the perfect type, which it will be in the temple, signifies something about Christ's finished work, so just kind of note to self, the body of Jesus, if you want to put it this way, was a veil that hid the inner glory of His deity, because He was all-man and all-God.
For it was the Father's good pleasure for all fullness of the deity to dwell in Him. At a later time, as I've referenced already, how the veil was torn symbolizes something about the flesh body of Christ completing its ultimate and final work here on earth for the time prescribed. I'm not talking about future return, I'm talking about in the work that was needed at that particular time that He came to do. So the veil we would say is symbolic of the incarnate life of Christ, but more specifically the flesh body, the tearing of the veil, His death on the cross. His death opened up a new and living way, as I just quoted from Hebrews. And what is important for us is that we no longer need a veil or a cloaking or a way of approach, because He provided it. This is a difficult thing I'm going to say, but I'm going to keep repeating it, because people misconstrue, and they selectively hear what I've been saying.
If you really; Jew or Christian, if you're really reading this book, you're going to see something with great clarity: God brought an end to the old dispensation. And you can say, “Well, there, there are people still celebrating.” I have many friends who still celebrate their Jewish faith. And that is, I mean, no disrespect, but the reality is if, if this is the pattern and the prototype, then it's like saying people are still going out to slay saber tooth tigers when they're extinct. You've heard that before, right? Yeah. So just to put that in perspective- and it becomes important, not, you know, people say, “Well, yeah, are you a person who is anti-Jewish or anti-whatever?” No, I'm a person looking at this and understanding that even people that came before me. I was reminded by something that the staff handed to me a week or two ago concerning this particular subject of the tabernacle, because I've been saying Old and New, you can't understand one without the other, nor could you actually live in the mindset of simply the Old Testament.
It lacks every fulfillment. It's like saying, “Yeah, I'm only going to wear the right shoe today.” Go out there and walk, brother. So, back on the inside, the veil itself, five cubits in height, five if you remember, the number of grace, and also speaks of the fullness of Christ. So at some point I'll, we'll prepare a chart of the numbers for those of you that are not familiar with the numbers and the dimensions, because I think that becomes important as a study tool.
But the area of this enclosure, we're talking about the Holy of Holies and what is in the Holy of Holies today, ten by ten by ten; I know that's a strange number, but a thousand cubits more or less. And I, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that that concept of a thousand cubits is represented in a thousand-year millennial, if you want, reign of Christ. There is something connected, which we'll see, but obviously the foursquare concept that is presented in not only Ezekiel, but Revelation is presented right there in the Holy of Holies. It's kind of another important piece that we would want to look at. You cannot study this without seeing God did not leave any details out. So I've already talked briefly about the ark, box if you will. The Hebrew word is 'ârôwn, meaning “chest” or “ark.” And there are different arks mentioned, of course, in the Bible.
The most, we'll call them the most common, well-known, obviously Noah's ark, different from the basket that carried the Moses child, which is also referred to in some translations as “ark.” But the box, or I'm sorry, the basket for Moses was called têbâh, in Hebrew; not the same as the word I just referenced, meaning the “ark of the covenant.” But they all served a purpose, a same or similar purpose to save or to preserve.
And some people may not understand that just yet because you'll hear me reference later that at a later time the lid being moved off of the ark seems to kill people, because people who don't understand why will go, “Wow, God was really sadistic. He just killed people.” No, it's called; it's like a traffic law out there, you know, the speed limit says 35, you want to go 75 in a 35, you're probably going to have a consequence attached to that. It may not be death. In some cases it might be. You might kill somebody, okay? But there's a reason for prescribed things, and God's way was no different. He said this was how it's going to be. So of course, let me go back a little bit. God tells Noah to build an ark that he and his family would live and they would find safety in the ark. Moses, the same thing, was preserved in that ark. So we know what was placed inside the ark, which I've referenced before.
The ark itself made of shittim wood, acacia wood overlaid with gold. And again, the number four appears everywhere on that ark. I reference the number four as meaning the four corners of the earth; the whole earth being covered. The items placed inside: the unbroken tables of stone, and it's important to repeat this part, “upon which the Ten Commandments were written,” representing God's truth; the pot of manna showing us the way; and Aaron's rod that budded overnight showing us the life. So if you want to call it “the truth, the way, and the life” right there, preserved within that ark. No matter what fallen man would do, these things would be safe and preserved within the ark.
So there's again that attachment. We see the ark to preserve life. This would actually preserve our lives if we understand how these are all in Christ. So let's look at the covering that would, the lid that would cover the ark of the covenant called the mercy seat. On the mercy seat, the blood of the sacrificed bullock would be sprinkled. Leviticus 16, “The LORD spake unto Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered before the LORD, and died. The LORD said unto Moses, Speak unto Aaron thy brother, that he come not at all times into the holy place within the vail before the mercy seat, which is upon the ark; that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat.” Again, you know, how many of you feel this way? You read something and you're familiar with it, but when you really start to try and put all the pictorial sense and bring it to life, it has such a deeper meaning, because now you're looking at this in a sense like I just explained.
God is speaking, which means He's amongst men, He's giving the instruction, and He says basically to “not come at all times into the holy place within the vail before the mercy seat, which is upon the ark; that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat. Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.” And I will probably go through the offerings at a future time, but right now, just stay with what's being said here.
“He shall put on the holy linen coat, he shall have the fine linen breeches upon his flesh, shall be girded with a linen girdle, a linen miter,” he shall be attired this way, “these are holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, put them on. He shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goats for a sin offering, one ram for a burnt offering. Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is for himself, to make an atonement for himself, and for his house.” So before he could even deal with the rest of the congregation, he had to deal with his sin and the sin of his household.
And this is why I categorically reject all of these people who do not read and understand, don't just go, “Oh, that's Old Testament.” Every priest, every pastor, every minister is no different than any parishioner. We have all sinned. There isn't a one, I don't care if you're wearing a white suit with a white beanie on your head. You are as much a sinner as I am, brother or sister, whatever you are, whatever your pronoun is. And don't try and make it otherwise. It's, it, these are the things that I look at. People say, “Oh, well, you know, a person of God.” Still sinning flesh, not perfect. I make mistakes, they make mistakes; sinning is part of every person's lot. Put a period there. So I like the fact that God includes this, that he has to make an atonement for himself first, for his house, before he can even deal with the great Day of Atonement for the congregation and the camp.
“He shall take two goats, present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats, one lot for the LORD, the other for the scapegoat. Aaron shall bring the goat which the LORD'S lot fell upon, bring him as the sin offering. But the goat, which the lot fell on to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and let him go for a scapegoat in the wilderness.” And I leave that there because there's a whole bunch of other instructions here, but the one that probably needs to be repeated so that it's abundantly clear, because you can keep reading down, but there's a mention of the blood, and it's repeated over and over again.
“And he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy seat eastward; and before the mercy seat he shall sprinkle the blood with his finger seven times.” Again, numbers have value and have reason, not just because, “Because seven is my lucky number today.” No, there was reason, okay? It's a perfect completed act. “Then,” he goes on to say, “he shall kill the goat of the sin offering. That's for the people.” So if he's dealt now with himself and his house, now we're going to deal with the people; it's for the people, “and bring his blood within the vail, and do that,” which he did with the other blood, basically the same thing.
“And he shall make an atonement for the holy place.” Again, everything that is touching the things of the Lord and His people will be covered or sprinkled by the blood, and there's no escaping that. And anybody who says, “Well, I just can't deal with that,” I don't think you really want to deal with what God's saying here that is the prescribed method, which again brings you right back to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Now in Leviticus 17, the blood is then called “sacred.” And a particular verse there, which unfortunately over time has been misquoted, which is 17:11, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” So it's very important to see God's method with man, the approach, the blood, the mercy seat.
So the mercy seat then, we're talking about how it fit and covered the ark. And I'm going to come back to the blood and some other aspects, but this at least gives you the, the bullet points that are needed for this. The mercy seat that covered the ark was the same length and breadth as, we'll call it the box. But the top lid or covering was made of pure gold; there was no wood in the lid at all. And I love this. You've got the two cherubims at each end, basically facing each other, wings folded inward, almost like everything's pointing to, like two fingers going “This way,” right? And what I think is important here is you can always look for symbolism and numbers. Here you've got the two cherubim, which is adequate witness of God's presence, and their faces basically looking down towards the lid itself, which is important, because these are not, like some have said, “Whoa, are the angels on the lid to be; were they meant to be worshiped?” No, they were guardians and heralders, and they've always been that in the Bible.
So, you know, people say, “Well, how do you make a distinguish; how do you distinguish between Aaron building or making the golden calf and God prescribing this on the lid?” They were two very different things. One was at the behest of the people's impatience to wait on Moses to worship something they made with their hands versus something God said, “You make this, and I'm going to be there, and you will worship Me there.” So, you know, don't, don't homogenize or mix things up. But I love the fact that if you go and you read through Scripture, once more, you go back to Genesis, and you find when God basically gets them, first parents, Adam and Eve out of the Garden, He puts a cherub there with a flaming sword to, to guide the way, to protect the way. And again, there are different ways to understand this, if you want to look at and say, “One that stood watch,” but it is definitely progressive revelation as you go through the Scripture that you can see these cherubim, these angelic beings.
And some of them are called cherubims, regular wings, some of them are seraphims with multiple wings, some of them are called “angelic ones,” “messengers of the LORD”" But what's important is they are usually heralding or announcing. Sometimes it's good news; sometimes it's not such good news, right? If you remember in Genesis 19, they were dispatched to get Lot out of Sodom. And I'm not sure that I'd call that good news or not because, if you know the story, maybe Lot should have stayed there. Leave that one alone. In Genesis 28, you've got them, the angelic beings are communicating to Jacob as he slept. So messengers with purpose, sometimes guardians of the way, and I think on the ark itself, I think they were doing double duty there, guarding the way, if you will, as a symbolic meaning.
Remember there was also cherubim on the veil itself, embroidered into the veil itself. So it's almost like we're going to keep repeating this. You're, if you were approaching maybe the, the design of the cherubim on the curtain would, was the heralding announcement, if you needed one: “You're approaching God's presence,” or “You're approaching something sacred and holy,” but certainly definitely guarding the way that no ordinary person would enter in. All right, so some other things that are interesting here. Moses had gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with God. It is then that he hears the voice of one speaking to him off the mercy seat, I think that's equally interesting, that was upon the ark of the testimony from between the two cherubim. Sounds strange, unless we know the original promise: “Build Me a tabernacle that I may dwell among you.” So if you didn't read that part, you'd say, “Well, that's strange that God's only going to be heard in that little area.” But God's prescription was that He would meet him there, and commune with him there.
That is also part of Exodus 25:22: “I will meet you there, commune, commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony.” And put a period right there. It, it's not like God said, “And if you don't meet Me there, I'll catch up with you over here,” right? These are the things we tend to do, we like to kind of fudge things and maybe, maybe, you know; no. This is what God said. A similar thing is stated, by the way, in Psalm 99, “The LORD reigneth: sitteth between the cherubim.” And what I would like you to just take note of is we, sometimes in the New Testament, we mention something called “the throne of God; to approach the throne of God boldly.” I want you to think about this because God said He would speak to Moses there from that particular place, which is called the mercy seat, for which no man ever sat upon. Yet when we read the New Testament, we talk about the throne of God. This is the depiction, the shadow, if you will, of the reality of God's throne.
Again, I don't care how you do this, you're going to be confronted with every picture here points back to the same place. That's why I love it. And it's important to study these. The dimensions, by the way, of this furniture, and I'm now talking about the base, two and a half by one and a half cubits; again, the numbers, and they're repeated on both sides, basically 5 and 3. If you're taking the numbers and making them whole, 5 and 3; again 5, the number of grace and the fullness of Christ, and 3, the number of divine manifestation, which is what you would get if you were to be able to approach and see or hear God speaking. So I think there's a beautiful design right there. If you remember, three items placed inside, as I just referenced them. So think about this, and then the lid is placed on there, and no human eye is to basically see these items again; that kind of sounds strange. They would be discerned in a spiritual way.
Now the people, the children of Israel would not have that capacity, but we do, knowing what these embody. Remember Christ said that He came to fulfill the law, and the law was fulfilled in Him. But prior to Christ coming in the flesh, and this is what's really important, there's a story, if you remember in the Old Testament, after the death of Eli, which happens in 1 Samuel, I believe the fourth chapter, where we read how the Philistines took the ark, and they took it from Ebenezer, which is being translated “the stone” or “the rock of help” unto Ashdod to bring it into the home of Dagan, the heathen idol worshiped, carved, little whatever it was made with hands.
1 Samuel 5:7; let's see if we can find that passage. It might be a little bit more helpful if I can read it to you or show it to you. So 1 Samuel, I think it's 5:7; yep. So it's, I'm going to pick up here to show you something. People often talk about this incident that happened. It says, I'll start in verse 6, “The hand of the LORD was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof. And when the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, The ark of the God of Israel shall not abide with us,” and get this thing away from us, right? “For his hand is sore upon us, and upon Dagan our god.” Because if you remember, if you go back and read that, that little carved god keeps somehow falling on the floor.
If it was me, I would have just been pushing it off, but it just kept falling on the floor, right? Hey, at least I'm honest. That's what I would have done. “They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the Philistines unto them, and said, What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel? And they answered, Let the ark of the God of Israel be carried unto Gath.
They carried the ark of God of Israel about thither. And it was so, after they had carried it about, the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction: he smote the men of the city, both great; small and great, they had emerods in their secret parts,” whatever that means. "Therefore they sent the ark of God to Ekron. It came to pass, as the ark of God came to Ekron, that the Ekronites cried out, saying, They have brought about the ark of God, of the God of Israel to slay us and our people.” They recognized that. Now, if you remember, there is the passage. Ultimately these people, they want to “Send the ark back to the children of Israel, get it away,” because it, there was destruction everywhere.
But you remember, they had it in their possession. If you read this whole story, they had it in their possession for seven months, and they decide to send it back towards Beth-shemesh. If you remember that, they lifted the lid. And that's probably the most important thing that people get wrong, because they say, “Well, God's sadistic. He wiped these people out for lifting the lid”" or they caricature it like Raiders of the Lost Ark.
There was a purpose, do not look inside the box. And that purpose is so abundantly clear, the law, the tables of unbroken law, that we know no human being could keep, not a one. What does the New Testament say? The New Testament says, “For sin comes death.” So someone not covered by the blood already and then looking to the law: death, “For the wages of sin is death.” The law acted directly upon them. Don't think that because they just merely glanced in; the consequences of being exposed to the law brought death. And this is what Paul explains, by the way, so brilliantly in Galatians. The law could never bring life. It could only bring death. So when people say, “Oh, well, God's pretty sadistic; He wiped those people out for looking inside.” Yep. But think of the purpose and really go, don't look at the pot of manna or those are secondary items, the most important one, because the rod that budded was an emblem of the resurrected life. But it was the law and that exposure to the law, direct exposure to the law would bring death.
And still to this day, if you think about it, the tables of stone do not make up the whole law as we know it. The whole law is 316 do's and don'ts. But if you split the Ten Commandments in half and the relationship between man and man, and God and man, I'd say there is a very good likelihood that no one in the sound of my voice, including yours truly, could live if that's all we had, could stay alive if that's all we had. And now, you might say, “Well, how could something like 'Honor thy mother and thy father' or, well” think about what's on those stones, but then translate them into everyday life, and then you'll realize, if that's all you had, we'd all be dead. So don't be too harsh on God wiping these people out.
And I often think this one story in the Old Testament helps clean up and clarify what most people do not understand about God. The apostle Paul said, “I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God.” Even he understood that. Now, why is it? Talk to people who don't understand these concepts. I remember talking to somebody who said, “Oh, I, I love the law. The law is good.” Well, you may love the law, but that's like saying, “I like to have a noose around my neck,” because that's what it, if you really understand it, that's what it means because no one can live to those standards. Even the most simplistic man-man or God-man relation, no one can live to those standards, not a one.
And as I've said repeatedly over the years, Jesus raised the bar. So let's talk about “Thou shalt not kill, which some people want to parse and say, “Well, is it kill? Or is it murder? Or how would you describe that?” Jesus said, “If you hate in your heart, you're as guilty as a murderer.” So don't parse the words of killing or murdering. Just put a period on that. And then Jesus says, “And if you hate,” okay, I hate to do this. Don't put a camera on anybody. How many of you have ever hated somebody? Okay? So that's what I'm saying to you. And that's the importance of studying this to see if you really, really understand it the Old Testament could not ever be a complete book to follow.
You want the canonized version of it. If you understand what I'm saying, the prescribed method could not have represented the fullness of God's desire for humankind ever. So it would take the shed blood sprinkled upon the mercy seat to change what was judgment towards man and upon man into grace. And even there, this is the remarkable thing, people say, “Oh, well, the God of the Old Testament – there's no grace there.” Of course there is. Just in that one act of letting the priest go in and sprinkle the blood that would cover the whole congregation, that's an act of grace in and of itself, because, if you think about it, without that blood being applied, they would have died.
In fact, you've got the same application. You don't like this one? Go back to the children of Israel in Egypt's bondage. And God says, “Apply the blood and my avenging angel, when he sees the blood, he shall pass over.” But failure to apply that blood meant death; pretty simple. So God's holiness and mankind's sinfulness could not meet unless the blood was authenticated, validated in that sacrificial death that had to take place, and then God's wrath ceased. People don't even like to talk about the wrath of God. And that's another disturbing thing. Again, you have ever heard people say, “Oh, I just can't read the Old Testament. You know, God, God's an angry God. I like the God of the New Testament.” Like somehow God said, “Excuse me, bear with Me”" I; bear with me, I don't mean to be blasphemous, “but I'm, I'm going to be trans-testamental.” (Laughter.) I'm just going to slip into something a little bit more comfortable for you all in the New so that you can all appreciate it.
God has not changed. Just God has not changed. So it's no different in type, as I've said, if you cover to cover, see what God did, whether it is the Passover, where, whether it is the slaying of animals to clothe Adam and Eve, or through and through even, as I've mentioned, the cord that Rahab hung out the window to save her and her family. Through, cover to cover, you find this concept of blood and God's way with fallen man. So to reconcile man back to God, we read of the effects: the finished work of Christ. Therefore, let us come boldly unto the throne of grace. We can now approach! The veil is now open. We can approach. There's no more fear that if we approach without covering, we shall surely die. And so it's kind of interesting. Covered in Christ's sacrifice, we no longer fear the wrath of God. I think, try and make the application now to a Scripture, again, I've quoted abundantly over the years, Romans 8, “There is therefore now no ultimate condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.” Think of “ultimate condemnatio”" as judgment, wrath; all the things that would have been poured out, now covered in the finished work of Christ.
There is no more. There are remaineth no more. So what the Old Testament could not accomplish in full, we see it in the New. So again, every concept is going to come back to one thing here, Exodus 25 where God says, “And there I will meet thee and commune with thee.” If that's been God's intent since day one; this is why I feel sorry for some people who are stuck in an old dispensation and don't understand this. If that was God's desire for man from day one, and basically Adam and Eve messed it up, and along the way God is showing us it's still His desire, think about what God gave us in this new dispensation to, to basically commune with Him, to be at one with Him.
Not only first and foremost the death of Christ, the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but remember when Jesus said, “It's expedient that I go away. If I go another way, I cannot send you the Holy Spirit.” So the Holy Spirit has sent to us for all the reasons I've said, but also to dwell with us, part payment. So it's like God's saying, “I'm no longer going to dwell with the people as I originally proposed. I'm going to dwell with them all in fullness as they come to Me in faith.” So I'm going to ask this question again, because I, I'm repeating it, but I'm trying to nail something down here. If you only had the Old Testament, could you actually understand God's desire for humankind? With, (no ma'am) right, without Christ and without the finished work of Christ, you'd be left with half of a picture and honestly quite confusing one at that.
Not that the words themselves or the book is confusing, but the fact that you're left with an incomplete picture, and it's incomplete in so many ways. Even if you want to go down to, as I said, materials, the numerology, everything here speaks and points in the direction that I've been pointing to you. And so it's, it's very clear what was made possible by God through the blood is the gateway, if you will. The picture is clear. As I said earlier, this is why Jesus is called “the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the”- this is mind boggling.
Think of now everything I've said and pretend for a second you never heard this book. You never heard anything about this except for the descriptions I've given you regarding the tabernacle. And here are these people early on in the first and second chapter of John, Jesus doesn't say, “I am the Lamb of God.” They say, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin”" It's kind of, if you really think about it, it was God's prescribed way.
These people in Christ's time were Jews, knew the Old Testament, which was the only Testament. So even that declaration, see, we're familiar with it so it doesn't have the same impact, but if you, if you really could try and not be so familiar you'd realize that even that in itself, that declaration is pretty staggering. That somebody did not recognize this in the flesh by themselves. God had to open up the eyes and give the declaration to be uttered to say, “That's Him. No longer the blood of bulls and goats, but that's Him. That's the one that's going to do it.” And all the names of God even that we've covered over the years, the “with us God,” the “all sufficient God”; these all are tied up in Him. So I just feel really terrible when I hear people say, “Well, but you know,” and I, as I said, I have a lot of Jewish friends.
“You know, I, I just can't, can't read the New Testament.” Well, I feel sorry for you because you're missing out. Like I said, you're only wearing one shoe. Go run a marathon. So the other thing that becomes clear is that not only how Paul declares in Romans 3:25 and 1 John about the word “propitiation.” He was not only our Reconciler and Propitiation and Propitiatory, both the essence of what was needed to reconcile, the Reconciler and actually the place of reconciliation all in one, which is again back to the mercy seat, so every detail in this work that we're looking at to try and figure this out, it keeps revealing over and over again concepts, and they all are materialized in Christ.
Then you've got passages, for example, like Luke 18:13, where you've got the publican saying, “Be merciful to me, a sinner.” And if you read that again, it would be very easy to see the publican saying, “Be mercy seated to me,” the way it is written in the Greek. All of these, again, we're, we're reading a New Testament where they were still primarily a Jewish community. So even these words to them would have been staggering to hear somebody say, “Be mercy seated to me,” but this is exactly what we see. So last but not least here, let me just say it this way, the most oft repeated Scripture. You go to these big gatherings, sometimes I'll see it on the back of a truck somewhere, John 3:16, “God so loved the world,” and you know the verse of Scripture. When it says “he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life,” what should be understood by that as well is that had God not given His only begotten Son, where exactly, I want you to think about this, because this is why Paul wrote a certain thing about “if Christ be not risen, our faith is vain.” I want you to think about what that would mean living in a world where there was no ultimate sacrifice.
And the ongoing sacrifices, at some point, I said this to you, ceased. Why did the, why did the old way cease? Now people say, “Well, because they; Jerusalem was destroyed. The people were expelled, or they were put, they were deported.” But if this was so that they believed that this was the only way of salvation, even if they didn't have a high priest, but they believed this was the only way of salvation, don't you think they would have still been practicing it? (Yes ma'am.) Right. So it leads me to some conclusion about something, and I know when I say this, people will take what I'm saying out of context.
So if you do, that's your problem because the spirit in which I intend to be meant. There is no way that God intended this ceremony, sacrificing, and the rituals to continue. No, there's no possible way. And in fact, a closer examination of some of the Hebrew words, and in the New Testament, some of the Greek words really hit that home to the point of asking the question. So how could people still be steeped in something that technically no longer was meant to exist? And this is why I use all these Scriptures frequently, but they all tie together.
This is why when it says, “They will look upon Him whom they have pierced,” because it's the same people perpetuating the same customs, the same traditions that make void the word of God, who also perpetuate that Christ did not live or that He was a mere prophet or that He was not the Messiah. And these will be the same people where it says, “They will look upon Him whom they have pierced, and they will mourn,” because they will recognize that the whole time that they were perpetuating ceremonial concepts, no longer carried out and actually slaughtering animals and applying the blood, but in conceptual concepts, but the whole time they were doing that, God was here, Emmanuel, God, the with us God, showing us that that dispensation came to a close and is no more. Now, why build that temple for the future? Why? Because that temple in the future will teach people who Christ is who did not know Christ.
That temple in the future to be built will point in every dimension. You know, I, I've talked about this both here and on Festival, about the red heifer, about all these special tools that they're trying to make, but the bigger point is being missed which will be revealed, but it will not be revealed until Christ reveals Himself. And that's the part that I just want to kind of pause here right now to bring this all to a close to say, you and I may not live perfect lives, and we don't, and we can't, but we look unto Him who is the Author and Finisher of faith.
He's shown us the way. He's shown us as I taught last week and spoke about the resurrected life, that all of that is encompassed in the finished work and that there is no need to go down this ceremonial trail. And to people in other, we'll call them dimensions of the quasi-Christian faith who, who are insistent on ceremony plus Christ, people who are still, by the way, eating the body of Christ or drinking Christ's blood, again, you've made void the word of God; these traditions, or if they are religious traditions or traditions of man. And I do challenge some of my listeners out there who may be, you be in total disagreement with me, that's fine. I'm not asking you to just nod your head and go along with me. I'm asking you to go back and reread the passages that we've looked at so far, and you tell me how they could ever be complete; complete for the person of that day, complete in this day and age or at any other time because I go back to one thing that still looms large over this whole populace that insists on those traditions: the law.
You want to live by the law? You're going to die by the law. You want to live by faith, you'll have eternal life in Christ. And these two, I'm sorry, you say, “Well, but the law is good.” Yes, but what does Paul say? The law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. That comes out of the mouth of the most zealous Jew that ever lived: the law was a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. So if you understand that and every other thing that Paul wrote about, saying, “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” Well, the curse fell on, the curse being the curse of the law, fell on Him, and because of what He did, we pass out. We are no longer exposed, lid open, looking at the law. The law, the curse fell on Him, we get to walk out from under it, and because of His work, we live. And we don't just live in the now, we have eternal life. So to all of my listeners and particularly people out there that say, “This is, it's very simple.” It's also very complicated, because if you're not willing to leave your baggage and your traditions at the door, none of this is going to make sense even though it's so simple.
Furthermore, as I've said, and I appreciate the messages that you've communicated with me, to go back and to reread, even just portions of the mercy seat, portions of Leviticus 16 and 17 now, with Christ in mind and with all of these various depictions in mind, and see that God was always saying one thing, “I want to commune with you. I want to dwell with you, and I want us,” that's what Christ said in His high priestly prayer, “to be one.” Well, that oneness will not occur at the moment, but the part payment has, the deposit of the Spirit has, and we will be one with Him in eternity.
So the messages will, we'll see if we continue on in the tabernacle, but I hope this is helping people fill out some of the areas and recognize you are incomplete with just one Testament, but you put the two together and you see the big picture. And the big picture is pretty incredible, because God from the beginning was saying, “I want to be with My creation”" Now sin, sinning man and free will messed that up, but God said, “I'm going to give you the door. I'm going to give you the way and the truth.
And it's no longer the truth that is the law that kills, but the truth that's in Christ. And I'm going to give you the way, which is the manna, the bread from heaven, no longer gathering it up daily, but basically, if you want feasting on it, 'Taste and see that the LORD is good.' And I'm going to give you the life. Aaron's rod that budded, symbolizing the resurrected life; I'm going to give you that too, in My Son Jesus Christ, who is the First Goer.” And if you call yourself a Christian, you're a follower of Christ; you follow after Him in that same way. So I can't see how anyone would not want to look at the whole picture and say, “That's where I'm going to stand, the complete picture, all fulfilled in Christ.” For right now, that's my message, possibly to be continued, but that's my message. (Applause.) You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center.
If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you'd like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
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