by Jacob Ninan
One the day Jesus died on the cross at Calvary, several miraculous events took place. For example, "And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split" (Matt.27:50,51). This veil was what protected the innermost part of the Jewish temple from people till then. It was made of an extra thick material that would have been difficult to cut even with a knife. But at this point it was cut from the top to the bottom, indicating to us that it was God Himself who had cut it miraculously. There was a great significance to this.
From the time when God instructed Moses to construct a tabernacle for Him in the midst of the people of Israel moving away from Egypt towards the Promised Land, there was this almost total separation of the Most Holy Place from the rest of the tabernacle, and later the temple. There was the Outer Court into which people could come in at the appointed times, with their sacrifices which they gave to the priests in that area for making the formal sacrifices to God on their behalf. Moving from there, one would come to the Holy Place into which only a selected few priests could get in daily and keep lamps burning perpetually, offer incense to God, and symbolically place bread daily before God. Behind this was the Most Holy Place which contained the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat on its top where the glory of the presence of God was seen. Into this place, only the high priest could enter once a year on the Day of Atonement, after he had offered a sacrifice for his own sins, bringing blood into the Most Holy Place as an offering for the sins of all people. Even looking casually into this place was something that was judged with immediate death.
It was this Most Holy Place that God opened up to people on the day Jesus died. The blood of Jesus had been shed on the cross for the sins of the whole world, and it was now potentially open for anyone who would repent from their sins and accept the offer of grace for forgiveness to walk into the very presence of God. Jesus has finished all that He needed to do to bring people back from their sin to the very presence of God which they had lost when Adam and Eve sinned. However, a lot of people have not understood how to live in the presence of God the Father enjoying His blessings in every way.
Making a reference to the structure of the tabernacle and the temple, we can loosely group the experience of Christians into three levels, being symbolised by the Outer Court, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place.
In the Outer Court, people bring in their sacrifices and give them to the priests, and it is the priests who stand between the people and God, offering up their sacrifices. The people themselves have no direct contact or relationship with God. This represents nominal Christians who only know God in theory and not in a practical way. They have no personal relationship with God, and their contact with God is only through the priests or pastors as the case may be. Whenever there is any occasion for prayer, these people request the pastors to pray for them, whether it is to bless their new home, their new car, when they start a new business, get married, go for a new job, start on a journey, etc. Here the assumption is that these priests/pastors have access to God which the people themselves lack, but many times it is possible that these pastors/priests themselves have no personal relationship with God and that they are performing only what they consider their professional obligations. But the system continues on a level that seems to be satisfactory for everyone.
The biggest problem with this arrangement is that the people assume that everything is right between them and God because they have their pastors mediating for them with God. They assume that these pastors' prayers have some special power that they don't have, even to the extent of considering 'holy water' blessed by the pastors to have miraculous powers. The people do not realise that unless each of us is personally born again, we cannot have any part in the kingdom of God (Jn.3:3). Even a so-called belief in the true God, without an accompanying repentance from their sins, will not make them Christians in God's sight.
In the Holy Place, there is the placing of the show-bread, offering of incense and the lamp that spreads light that needs to be kept filled with oil. Loosely speaking, this can be used in our context to represent people who are born again, and who have a personal relationship with God. They read their Bible daily, pray and take part in praise and worship meetings sincerely. They also have a part in serving or ministering to other people and they are actively involved in such ministries. Since they know that they are born again, they imagine that everything is fine between them and God.
The danger for these people is that their relationship with God may be getting maintained through a set of activities they are involved in, and what is lacking may be an intimacy with God. They are happy they are regular in their personal devotions and active in ministry, and they may not even be aware that anything is still lacking in their lives. It is possible with many such people that their idea of sin is limited to what they do externally, and so they feel complacent thinking that as long as they are not committing any external sin, they are right with God, while inside their heart and mind there may be all kinds of sinful and selfish thoughts, ideas, imaginations, plans and schemes going on. These will bring a distance between them and God (Isa.59:1,2). Even though they have a relationship with God, this may be the reason why they lack an intimacy with God.
What God had originally planned for mankind was an intimate relationship with God. This is what we see about the life of Adam and Eve before the Fall. This is what a relationship with God in the Most Holy Place represents. In that place, we are alone with God, finding that He is all we need. He knows everything about us, and He surrounds us with love and acceptance. In turn, we open ourselves to Him without any inhibition and let His light shine into our lives, showing us things that need to be purified even in our thoughts and attitudes. When we get into that kind of a relationship with God, and we hold ourselves entirely accountable to God, we become more sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit, and it is no longer the opinions of men that we give attention to any more (Gen.17:1).
If before this we were focussing only only correctness of our external behaviour, now the Holy Spirit helps us to discern more clearly about the will of God for our lives in greater detail (Rom.12:1,2). Even though we become more aware of the sinfulness that taints everything in our life and our goal is to become more and more able to stop doing wrong, we rejoice in the mercy of God that He gives us at the same time (1Jn.2:1). We become smaller and smaller in our own eyes and learn to cling on more closely to God for strength, wisdom, comfort, encouragement, teaching, correction, etc. More and more of our life becomes in line with fellowship with God Himself. This was what the apostles experienced, and also longed for us to come into (1Jn.1:3).
How silly to become content with a life in the Outer Court or the Holy Place when God is offering us a life with Him in the Most Holy Place!