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Gobles SDA Church

Mark Howard

Aaron’s Rod

I'm so glad you've chosen to listen to this message.

This is actually a sermon I preached in the year 2013, far removed from the current happenings in the Michigan Conference, and yet so relevant to what's happening right now.

I hope that as you listen to this, the principles will guide you in your current faithfulness to the Lord.

I pray that this will be a blessing to you and it will help you be a blessing to others.

Thank you so much again for listening and God bless you as you put him first.

Father in heaven, we thank you again for your love, for your watch care, for your faithfulness.

And Father, we pray this morning that that faithfulness would continue in the promise of your Holy Spirit to lead us into truth and to give us understanding in spiritual things.

So bless us now, Father, as we open your word, we ask and pray this in Jesus' name.

Okay, more than, Maybe more than other times, today is kind of an Adventist sermon.

And you'll see what I mean as I go on here.

If you've read the story of Aaron's Rod, I think there are some really important lessons for those of us who are living on the earth at the end of time.

I want you to start with me by going to the book of Revelation.

And I know there's nothing specifically about Aaron's rod in Revelation, but that's where we're going to begin.

Revelation chapter 11, in fact, chapter 10, we're going to start in Revelation chapter 10.

And in Revelation chapter 10, I'm just trying to get a setting here, I don't want to go into a lot of the detail of the passage of Revelation chapter 10 with the little sweet and bitter book.

But in Revelation chapter 10 there's this account that's given And it tells us in verse 7, that in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel, when he is about to sound, the mystery of God would be finished as he declared to his servants the prophets.

Now Paul tells us in Ephesians 6 in verse 19, the mystery of God is the Gospel.

And the work of the Gospel message, there's coming a time, according to Revelation 10, where the work of the Gospel can be said to be finished in the earth.

In other words, the gospel that is supposed to transform and recreate and restore humanity, that work will have come to its completion in the days of the sounding of the seventh angel.

Now I want you to tie that in to Revelation 11 and look at verse 19.

I'm sorry, I need to go back to get the setting.

Verse 15, but I'm not going to read all the way through, just follow along.

So this is what we're reading about in chapter 10.

The mystery of God is going to be finished in this time period and it concludes, and I'm not going to read all the way through, but I'm going to come down to verse 19 and I want you to look at something.

It says in verse 19, Then the temple of God was opened in heaven, and what?

The Ark of His Covenant was seen in His temple and there were lightning, noises, thunderings and earthquakes and great hail.

Now for Seventh-day Adventists, we know that Jesus is presently doing His final mediatorial work as our high priest in Heaven's Temple.

And he's in that most holy place apartment of Heaven's Temple ministering in the presence of that Ark of the Covenant, only a reality of it, not the figure of it, the throne of God.

And so this whole Ark of the covenant, and we see it here in the Revelation setting, is something that specifically fits the end of time.

If there's any time where what was going on in that compartment is important, it's at the end of time.

And so I got to thinking on this idea of the Ark of the Covenant and I want you to see something in the book of Hebrews chapter 9 and this will lead us into our message.

In Hebrews 9 the Apostle Paul describing the earthly tabernacle tells us something about the Ark of the Covenant that I want us to pick up on.

Hebrews chapter 9, Verse 3, so far the apostle has described the earthly sanctuary and the first apartment which we would call the holy place.

Now in verse 3 he says behind the second veil, the part of the Tabernacle which is called the holiest of all, the holy of holies, the most holy place.

Notice verse 4, which had the golden censer and the ark of the what?

Covenant overlaid on all sides with gold in which were the golden pot that had the what?

The manna, Aaron's rod that budded and the tablets of the covenant which is the tables of the 10 Commandments.

And we always think of the 10 Commandments being in the Ark of the Covenant but the Apostle places 2 other things there.

He places the manna and there's other places in scripture that talk about it.

In Revelation Jesus talks about how he will give us of the hidden manna and then you have Aaron's rod.

Why these 3 articles and what do they all say?

And I'm going to introduce our subject by saying this.

All 3 of those artifacts, if you want to call them that, inside the Ark of the Covenant have to do with the authority of God.

The 10 Commandments, the manna, the manna is representative of the Word of God or the prophets.

You've got the law, you've got the prophets, and then Aaron's rod.

Now the law and the prophets, that's pretty clear.

Aaron's Rod, I'm going to tell you up front and we're going to go to Scripture and look at it, but Aaron's Rod was, Aaron's Rod came out of an experience where God had to confirm in the minds of his people the authority of his leadership on the earth.

And I like to tell people that there are 3 sources of authority, primary sources of authority that God employs in the Bible.

The Word is the foundation of the Christian's belief.

But that is not the only authority God uses in Scripture.

He uses the prophets and he uses his church.

And I'm afraid that we are living in a day and age where God's people have been picking up on the congregational winds that blow and we've been losing confidence and respect for the organized church of God in the earth.

And I believe that as we look in Revelation and we see that Most Holy Place ministry, we realize inside that Most Holy Place there are 3 articles.

What that communicates to me is that at the end of time, as no other time before in earth's history, the authority of God is going to be attacked in the person or presence of his law, his prophets, and his church.

And I don't think we have to talk about the law of God being attacked in the last days, right?

And after those of you at least who were here last night, we talked about the gift of prophecy, I don't think we really have to say a whole lot about the gift of prophecy being attacked in the last days either.

I want to get into this story of Aaron's rod and I want to go to the book of Numbers.

Now I'm going to have to give you a little bit of background to run into this story, and most of you will remember it.

If you don't remember all the details, I'll refresh those a little bit.

In Numbers 14, we read about God working with Moses to send 12 spies where?

They went into the land of Canaan, right?

And the 12 spies spied out the land flowing with milk and honey and when they went into the land and they looked at everything, well how did the land look?

It was full of the abundance that God had said, only there were giants in the land that intimidated the people.

And when the spies came back, the 10 of the 12 came back first to the congregation and what did they say about the land?

The giants are there, the grasshoppers in their eyes, and they gave a faithless report.

And then trailing behind came Caleb and Joshua, 2 of the 12, who said, It's true, the land is abundant.

But it's also true that it's God's battle, not our battle, and God can give us the victory if we put our trust in Him.

And you remember that the congregation, you've got 10 and 2, and the congregation sided with the majority, which is a bad tendency of God's people always.

They sided with the majority, and so the whole congregation of Israel sides with the 10 and they decide that they're going to stone Caleb and Joshua to death for daring to say we can take the land.

And just about the time they're picking up the stones, God's presence appears in the midst of his people and puts a stop to it.

And he tells the rebels, because of your rebellion you're going to wander in the wilderness for 40 years and you're going to die in the wilderness.

No, actually they didn't say it to God, they said to Moses, Moses what have you done leading us out here into this wilderness for you led us out here to die?

And so when God appeared to his people he said okay, they said better for us to have died in the land of Egypt or died in this wilderness than have to deal with this.

And so when God showed up, he said, okay, you guys get what you asked.

You're going to die in the wilderness, you're not going to make it into the Promised Land.

Now, In the aftermath of that, there's a little bit that goes on in Numbers chapter 15, and we're coming to Numbers 16.

1 of the Levites, a man by the name of Korah, didn't like the direction things were going.

And you can imagine that the multitude of them really didn't like the direction things were going because they didn't want to wander in the wilderness for 40 more years.

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Aaron’s Rod

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