GYC 2013: Before Men and Angels

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Sanctuary: How Sinners Can Safely Approach a Holy God

Steve Bauer

01-Overview and Approaches to the Sanctuary

02-The Ministry and Protocol of Forgiveness, Part 1

04-The Day of Atonement, Part 1

05-The Day of Atonement, Part 2

06-Other Aspects of the Sanctuary (Lamp, Table)

03-The Ministry and Protocol of Forgiveness, Part 2

This message was presented at the GYC 2013 conference, Before Man and Angels, in Orlando, Florida.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

We want to welcome the fitness fanatics who have hiked all the way over to this remote location.

Stephen Bauer from Southern Adventist University.

I teach theology and ethics and sometimes pinch hit in biblical Hebrew.

And I like to say when I teach Hebrew that when I get done I hope it's not all Greek to them.

And so I'm deriving from some of my sanctuary materials that I do in Christian theology.

And Eric Lowe asked me to present here, so it's a pleasure.

My first GYC, I've done an SEYC, and here comes some more faithful few.

Before I get started, why don't we have a word of prayer?

I wanna thank you, Lord, for being with us and as we Probe this wonderful topic, guide and direct us, me with those here and those who listen later through the internet, that your spirit would open our hearts in Jesus' name, amen.

I'm not certain I'll use all quote 50 minutes.

I figure the seat can only stand so much, but we'll see how many slides.

I usually don't do this with slides, so I'm trying something new.

David Vetter, known as the Bubble Boy, was born in 1971 with severe combined immunodeficiency, SCID for short, and he was forced to live in a specially constructed, sterile, plastic bubble from birth until his death at age 12.

Water, air, food, diapers, clothes, all had to be sterilized before being put into his chamber.

So they had a joining chamber where they sterilized it in ethylene oxide gas for 4 hours at 140 degrees.

Then it had to be aerated for 1 to 7 days.

Here is a picture of him in his chamber, the airlock, and I presume the sterilization chamber.

You can't touch him because the bacteria from your skin will infect him and kill him.

And so all touch has to be through these gloves that are built in to the bubble this way.

NASA did make him a little space suit but it was so cumbersome he only used it a few times where he could get out of his bubble and actually interact a bit.

You can see they put their logo there on it.

But think about it now from the mother's perspective and the father's perspective.

You have a child that you love, but if you kiss him or touch him you'll kill him.

And the heartache of always having a barrier between you and your child.

And I thought, what an illustration of God's problem.

But if he comes near to us his glory will kill us.

And so God's got a problem he's got to solve.

How can I get close to my child and show him I love him without killing him?

Imagine a life, you can't even really hug your child unless he's in the space suit.

And that didn't come along for years, you know.

All the natural instincts have to be thwarted.

You can do nothing spontaneously because it's all got to go through that gas and a day to 7 of cooling off, right?

And you want to be close and yet, so close, yet so far.

God has a similar problem in that He wants to be close to us and yet, if he gets direct contact, it would kill us.

And so we find in the sanctuary, God says, let them make me a sanctuary, Exodus 25, that I may dwell in their midst.

In other words, to make it possible for me to dwell in their midst.

And in Exodus 33, after the golden calf, he says, I won't go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.

If for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you.

So take off your ornaments that I may know what to do with you." again, direct contact with God as sinful man, his glory will be a consuming, destructive fire.

How can God draw near to man and draw man near to himself.

He says, I'm going to do it through the sanctuary.

So the goal of the sanctuary is to make it possible for man and God to come together.

It's not to make it difficult, it's to make it safe.

And sometimes the way we present the sanctuary gets so complicated that you walk away with this big mass of information and you're saying, what does this mean to me in real life?

I think God intended the sanctuary to be simple sanctuary to be simple and understandable, not complicated, and I guess complicated is enough.

And Sometimes when I've read on the sanctuary or listened on the sanctuary, you know, there were 3 flowers on the corner of the table and that represents the Trinity and there were, you know, blue threads and you have all this stimulation, you go home and say, so what?

And I'd like to propose that there's an easier way to approach a sanctuary.

But before we get to that easier way, let's just review our geography.

For those who just came in, we've got some handouts here that have a little map of the sanctuary that I'm about to use.

I'm wondering if we just kind of grab a chair and put it in the middle of that junction, then people will see it when they come in.

Now for our cartographers, the map is upside down so that we can go left or right on it.

So north is down, as you can see with the little compass rows here.

And of course, this is not to scale or it wouldn't fit in my screen.

We have a courtyard that surrounded the whole complex with a gate on the east.

And so the direction of the worship was oriented toward the west.

And I'm thinking spontaneously of that passage in Ezekiel, around 8 and 9, where the people are in the courtyard and they were facing the rising sun.

So if you're in the courtyard facing the rising sun, where is the sanctuary relative to you?

And I've wondered perhaps if that might symbolize the fact that, see, worshipping the rising sun was what pagans did, and God says, I'm going to take my worship and make it 180 degrees different.

I think that God calls us to be different from the world.

Not that there won't be common elements because there are the artistry and so forth that the sanctuary borrows from the local culture of art and so forth and so on.

But the philosophical, theological orientation of the worship and content of the worship was 180 degrees out of kilter with the pagans around them.

They may have used local musical forms and local art forms and local dress forms, et cetera, but the doctrinal, theological, spiritual, philosophical content was radically different in worldview from what was around them.

And it's that worldview issue that I think we point to here in the sanctuary.

And So we have this courtyard with 1 way in and then in the outer outside, well before we get to the outside, we have the sanctuary itself with the holy place, its door also on the east end, and then that was the only way to the most holy place.

Now we go to the furnishings, and again we'll start out in the courtyard in the open air.

We have the bronze altar of burnt offering.

King James says brass, but brass hadn't been invented yet, and so this is the late Bronze Age.

Then we go into the holy place and everything under cover is gold.

So we have the golden lamp stand on the south and this is a replica that I photographed on display in Jerusalem.

And according to their archeological research, because of course they believe that they're going to rebuild the temple and that they're going to reinstitute the sacrifices.

And so they have built apparently the furnishings and they're waiting until God miraculously gets rid of that dome of the rock so they can rebuild their sanctuary.

And in the meantime, they have this out in a Lexan case out in the open air where you can walk around it and look at it.

And so I thought that was a very interesting, around as tall as me.

And they had a whole excursus on it and longing for the day when it would be put into use in a proper sanctuary across the valley on the Temple Mountain.

We also have the table of showbread, also called the bread of the presence on the north side.

The golden altar of incense before the veil.

And finally the Ark of the Covenant in the most holy place.

Now those of us who have done our Bible readings, you got 6 chapters of, build a table so many cubits long, so many cubits wide, so many cubits tall, and put 3 flowers on this corner and 2 flowers on that corner and 3 leaves here and you know gory detail after detail and when you're trying to read your Bible through in the year this is the section that kills me after 35th flower you know you And you wade through it for 6 chapters.

Detail after detail after detail after detail, ad nauseum.

And then when it's all said and done, you have the golden calf incident, and then Moses builds it.

He puts so many flowers on this corner, and so many leaves on that corner, and you go through it all over again.

And you're saying, Lord, if this is your holy word, why is all this stuff here?

Series

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Sanctuary: How Sinners Can Safely Approach a Holy God

01-Overview and Approaches to the Sanctuary

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Sanctuary: How Sinners Can Safely Approach a Holy God

02-The Ministry and Protocol of Forgiveness, Part 1

57m

Morning Devotional

The Belly of the Beast

1h 7m

GYC 2011 Seminar: Reaching the Heart of a Broken World

Living on E

1h 57m

Karl Tsatalbasidis ~ The 'Rock' and Worship: Music and Worship at the End of Time

If the Foundations Are Destroyed, What Can the Righteous Do? Part II

42m

How We Can Be Sure Christ Will Soon Come

6. Daniel Bound to Hebrews by its Design and the Sanctuary

55m

ECYC 2012: Plenary Sessions

Messenger Without a Message

1h

Biblical Faith - Secular World

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

51m

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Sanctuary: How Sinners Can Safely Approach a Holy God

04-The Day of Atonement, Part 1

54m

Don Mackintosh - Burnt Offerings and Incense: the Sanctuary and Salvation

The Core Truths of the Sanctuary for All Generations

52m

GYC 2012 Seminar: A Revolution of Destiny - The Sanctuary Context

The Sanctuary Rebellions in Adventism

56m

An Intelligent Faith: An Adventist Apologist's Adventure

Called by Name

1h

GYC 2013 Seminar: The Sanctuary: How Sinners Can Safely Approach a Holy God

03-The Ministry and Protocol of Forgiveness, Part 2

50m

Sound Doctrine