Sermon Transcript

0:00:00.0

Well, we are in a study of the Old Testament Tabernacle as you can tell.  And we have some furnishing on the platform with us this morning to illustrate our lesson this morning.  We have been talking about this portable worship facility that God instructed Moses to build for the Israelites in the Old Testament, this worship facility called the Tabernacle that went and followed the Israelites during their 40 years of wilderness wanderings.  A tabernacle that was designed first for a place where God could dwell with His people because He desires to hang out with us.  But there was a problem.  Sin was that problem.  How does a holy God hang out with unholy people like you and me?  Well, the Tabernacle was in part that answer.  And it was not only an answer for the present time of Moses and the Israelites, but it was also something that pictured and foreshadowed and pointed us to Jesus Christ.  He is in every one of these elements.  He is the bronze altar and the bronze laver and the golden lampstand and, yes, today the table of showbread.  There are spiritual realities that are found in all of these pictures.  Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words was right.  And God loves to communicate to us through pictures.  You may not remember some of my words today, but hopefully you’ll remember the pictures.  And the pictures help cement the truth in our hearts.

0:01:21.8

We started off a couple weeks ago at the bronze altar.  That’s the first piece of furniture, as it were, you come to when you step inside the outer courtyard of the temple.  And the bronze altar is the place of sacrifice.  It’s where the Old Testament worshipers brought that unblemished lamb or the goat or the bull.  And you immediately understood it was a place of sacrifice.  It was a bloody place.  And something had to be sacrificed if you as worshipper were to enter into the holy presence of God.  After the bronze altar, which represents the sacrifice God made for you, that Jesus made for you and for me at the cross, comes the bronze laver.  And it’s a washbasin, a place of cleansing, a place of purification, a place of washing.  And the priest would go there to cleanse himself.  The picture there is of both the sanctifying work of the Word of God and the Spirit of God, that God uses those two tools to sanctify us.  And we said even as believers who have come to the altar and our sins have been forgiven through the sacrifice Jesus made for us, we still walk through this world.  We pick up dirt and defilements, and we sin, even as redeemed people.  And we need to come to that bronze laver every day.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us, to wash us, to purify us from all unrighteousness is the idea.  And then we’re ready to go into the Tabernacle itself.  Of course, the Old Testament it was the priest who represented us.  But as New Testament believers, we are priests unto God.  So last week we stepped inside the Holy Place, the first of two rooms in the Tabernacle.  The one behind the Holy Place is the Most Holy Place.  But inside the Holy Place there are three pieces of furniture.  There was a golden lampstand that we looked at last week; a picture of Jesus who says, “I am the light of the world,” and of believers who are to walk in the light, to grab their light, the Word of God that is a light unto our feet and a light unto our path, and to shine our lights very intentionally, as we talked about, in the dark, dark world in which we live.

0:03:37.1

But as you walk into the Holy Place, if the golden lampstand is here on the left, there is a little table to the right. You can see it because of the light coming from the golden lampstand.  And this table is called the table of showbread, also known as the table of Presence.  And it’s a small little table.  We have, you know, our version of it as best as we can, painted in gold.  It wasn’t very big.  But it was a table set by the Lord.  And from this table and from Exodus 25 and Leviticus 24, we have at least three pictures and three principles that we want to draw from that.  But before we get to that, I just want to pause for a moment and remind all of us that we are in the Holy Place of the Tabernacle and to remember a few verses of scripture.  Romans 12:1-2, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice,” here it is, “holy and acceptable unto God, which is your spiritual worship.”  What’s acceptable in the presence of God, in the presence of a holy God, are people who have been made holy.  1 Peter 1:15-16, “As he who called you in holy, you also be holy in your conduct since it is written, ‘You shall be holy for I am holy.’”  And where was it written?  Well, this is where we go to the book of Leviticus.  I know you haven’t been there in a while.  I know it’s probably the sticky pages in your Old Testament.  Leviticus 11:44, the Lord says, “For I am the Lord your God.  Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am holy.”  That’s Leviticus 11.  Now turn with me to Leviticus 24.  And if Exodus 25 gives Moses the instructions on how to construct the table itself, we go to Leviticus 24 to find out how He wants to set the table and the significance of the bread.  And maybe you haven’t been to Leviticus for a while, and I confess I haven’t either.  It’s not the first place we go.  We tend to go to the Psalms or to the Gospels or places like that.  But Leviticus is an Old Testament handbook on holiness.  It was the instruction manual for the priests who represented the people in worship.  And God was very specific about how the priest was to be cleansed and purified and how he went about his duties.  Because, again, how does a holy God dwell with unholy people?  How do unholy people like you and me enter into the presence of a holy God and have an audience with the Almighty?  Well, as strange as some of the things in Leviticus sound to us today, back then it was a handbook.  It was an owner’s manual, as it were, for holy living.  And in Leviticus 24:5 we have some further instruction about this table and the bread on it.

0:06:54.8

“You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it; two tenths of an ephah shall be in each loaf.  And you shall set them in two piles, six in a pile, on the table of pure gold before the LORD.  And you shall put pure frankincense on each pile, that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion as a food offering to the LORD.  Every Sabbath day Aaron shall arrange it before the LORD regularly; it is from the people of Israel as a covenant forever.  And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the LORD’s food offerings, a perpetual due.”  Now, again, from Exodus 25 and Leviticus 24 I find three pictures and three principles.  So let’s talk about the pictures first.

0:07:43.8

In this table of bread I find a picture of fellowship.  Back to Exodus 25:30 the Lord says to Moses that, “You shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me regularly.”  There was something about entering into this Holy Place that made the priests then and us as New Testament believer priests enter into the holy presence of God.  I know when you came to church this morning you desired, at some level, to experience the presence of God.  Your presence here matters.  Hopefully my presence here matters, and we encourage one another.  But none of that matters a whole lot if we don’t experience the presence of God.  When we step into a Holy Place on God’s terms and we have readied ourselves for worship to enter into that Holy Place of God, we will experience and sense the presence of God.  Every week I have people that come from me from time to time and say, “You know, Pastor, wow, the presence of God was so real in this place today.”  It not only had to do with His presence, but it had to do with how you prepared yourself to enter into His presence.  This table is known as the table of showbread and the bread of the Presence.  It also kind of reminds me, the bread does, in a simpler way of the fellowship or the presence we enjoy with one another in something called the church potluck.  You know, the Lord is inviting us here, is He not, to a table, to a meal.  And we love the presence of one another.  And the church potluck is a real popular thing, isn’t it, when we, you know, bring some food together.  And we fellowship with one another, and we enjoy each other’s presence.  I’m not a big fan of church potlucks.  I like catered meals a little bit better because you never know what you're gonna get in the church potluck line.  You know what I’m talking about?  You know what I’m talking about.  It reminds me of a story I heard about two guys who were getting ready for the church potluck that weekend.  And one guy called the other and said, “Hey, I’m just calling to remind you of the potluck, this weekend.  And we’re responsible for the cheese sandwiches.”  He says, “I got a way for us to remember this.  Why don’t my wife and I bring the cheese, and you and your wife, you bring the bread?”  And the other guy was a little high-strung and busy that week, and he just says, “I don’t know.  There’s just too many details.  I don’t know if I can remember all of that.”  And the other guy says, “Well, I’ll make it real simple for you.  Just cheese, us; loaves, you.”  Cheese, us; loaves, you.  Jesus loves you.  Come on now.  You’re in church this morning.  What did you expect?  Jimmy Fallon?  I mean, that’s the best I’ve got for you.  Jesus loves you.  Some of you are gonna ride down that slide this afternoon at Hallelujah Harvest.  About halfway down you’re gonna say, “Oh, I get it now.”  Jesus loves you.

0:10:57.6

All right.  Here is something better.  Revelation 3:20.  Jesus has this fellowship meal in mind where He says, “Come and enjoy my presence.”  He says to the church at Laodicea, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.”  What a powerful picture that is of the Lord Jesus Christ standing at the door of the Church, His Church, and knocking, waiting for you and I to open the door.  And he says, “I just want to sit down and have some fellowship with you.”  There’s a picture of that in this little table.  A holy God inviting us to sit down at His table and enjoy His presence.  That’s who we often get to know each other, isn’t it?  Over a meal.  We invite friends over for a meal.  We go out to lunch or dinner or breakfast with somebody, and we share a meal together.  God is inviting us to His table to experience His holy presence after we’ve gone to the altar, after we’ve gone through the bronze cleansing, the laver cleansing.  Then we’re ready to step into the Holy Place and move over here and enjoy His presence.  It’s a picture of fellowship.

0:12:19.9

Secondly, it’s a picture of the sufferings of Christ.  Now, go with me to Leviticus 24:5.  “You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it.”  Now, I’ve got a bowl of fine flour up here.  It’s fun to kind of put your hands in there, you know.  Fine, fine flour comes from wheat.  You can just go to the grocery store and get yourself a bowl.  And I’m gonna make a mess up here.  But this is not the way wheat comes out of the ground, is it?  Now, you’ve seen fields of wheat, and a stalk of wheat is eventually what you end up with.  And, you know, it goes through a process for that wheat to become fine flour.  The process looks something like this.  First, you’ve got to plant it in the ground.  Then you’ve got to harvest it.  Then you get this talk of wheat.  And in Old Testament it would go through a threshing process.  You know what threshing was?  They would take the wheat stalk and they would beat it.  They’d beat it on the ground because you wanted to separate the wheat, the good stuff, from the chaff, which is the bad stuff.  And as you beat and thresh the wheat, the chaff would fly off into the wind and you’d be left with the grain of wheat.  But that’s still not fine flour.  Then you take the wheat grain and you grind it in a grinder until you get fine flour.  The little bread cakes on the table of showbread, the table of Presence, were to be made of fine flour.  It’s a picture of the sufferings of Christ, who was bruised and pierced for our transgressions and, Isaiah says, crushed or grounded for our iniquities.  We’ve seen the sufferings of Christ throughout this movement through the Tabernacle.  But this bread made of fine flour is another picture of the sufferings of Christ.  And it’s a reminder to us that, as God is working in us to make us more holy, more pure as vessels, that sometimes He puts us through a difficult time, right?  Through a time of threshing to separate the wheat and the chaff in your life. By the way, Jesus often used this analogy in His teachings in the Gospels.  And He said right now in the world and even in the Church today, the wheat and the chaff, He says it’s okay that they’re hanging together.  We don’t always know what’s wheat and what’s chaff, sometimes even inside the Church.  The tares and the wheat are together.  But there is coming a day, Jesus said, when He will separate the wheat from the chaff.  Okay?  And while we live this life, as He is making fine flour out of us, He plants us, He harvests, He threshes, He grinds us so that we’re more usable to Him.  So it’s a picture of the sufferings of Christ.

0:15:26.5

Thirdly, it’s a picture of the way Christ satisfies our life.  And what do I mean by that?  Well, let’s go to the New Testament to John 8:35 where Jesus said these familiar words.  He says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”  Now, when Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life,” He was pulling in a lot of Old Testament imagery that we’re familiar with.  For instance, the manna that came down from heaven.  Remember when the Israelites came out of Egyptian slavery, they came into the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  They got hungry, and the Lord chose to feed them every day with little manna cakes that would fall from heaven.  And they would be out there on the ground in the morning.  And the Lord told them, “Just take enough for the day, you know.  If you take more than you need for a day, it’s gonna rot in your pantry.”  And it did.  But the Lord taught them, as Jesus taught us, to pray for daily bread.  And also He taught them that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  That’s an important Old Testament principle.  And so when Jesus says, “I am the bread of life,” He pulls in that imagery.  He also pulls in the bread imagery here from the table of Presence and the table of showbread as a reminder to us that He and He alone satisfied the deepest, deepest hunger of our soul.  And don’t tell me you’re not hungry for that satisfaction.  You were created for a relationship with God.  And anything less than the bread of life filling the belly of your soul is gonna leave you dissatisfied.  Mick Jagger figured it out years ago—you know, the Rolling Stones guy—when he sang, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”  It’s because he tried to stuff the emptiness in his own spiritual belly full of all kinds of things.  Drugs, sex, rock and roll, money, whatever it might be.  Whatever the world out there, you know, says to us, “This will satisfy you,” and we eat it and we take it in and we consume it.  And we’re more unsatisfied than we were before.  Because the only thing and the only person who will ever satisfy the deep hunger in our hearts and in our souls in the Lord Jesus who said, “I am the bread of life pictured in this little table with these flour cakes made of fine, fine flour.”  Reminds me of what the Lord said through Isaiah the prophet in Isaiah 55:2.  “Why do you spend your money for what is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”  Some of you are here today, and you’re just like old Mick.  “I just can’t seem to get any satisfaction in life.  And I’m tired of consuming this and consuming that, of taking all my cues from what the world says will satisfy the deepest hunger.”  Well, come to Jesus today.  Come to the table and eat.  Feed on the bread of life.  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.  Eat my flesh and drink my blood.  Consume me.”  And He said those who do will never be hungry again.

0:18:55.1

So those are just three pictures, three pictures: a picture of fellowship, a picture of the sufferings (0:19:00.1) of Christ, a picture of how Christ satisfies our life.  Now let’s talk about some principles from this little table of showbread.  The first is the principle of purity.  The principle of purity.  Exodus 25:24 says, “You shall overlay it with pure gold and make a molding of gold around it.”  Now, I’m not gonna linger long here because we talked about this last week when we looked at the golden lampstand.  Remember, it was a priceless stand made out of a talent of gold worth about 1.2 million dollars in today’s economy.  But it was pure gold.  And we said, you know, gold doesn’t come out of the ground pure.  It must be purified.  The other elements that might be mixed in need to be separated from.  The point here again is that God works best and exclusively through pure instruments.  Now, I didn’t say perfect, (0:20:00.1) because there’s not a perfect one among us here.  But through the sanctifying work of the Word of God and the Spirit of God, God is perfecting us.  And pictured in the bronze laver, there is the daily cleansing and purification that we need because we pick up defilements as we walk through this world.  We do sin, even as redeemed followers of Jesus.  But, remember, we’re in the Holy Place now.  And we have two pure gold instruments right next to us.  It’s the principle of purity.

0:20:37.3

By the way, what does God want to purify in your life?  Let me ask you a real personal question.  This may sound a little bit odd.  But what kind of bar of soap do you use in the shower?  I know that’s a personal question.  I’ll tell you what I use.  I use Ivory, a little bar of Ivory soap.  And I noticed one day when I was at the grocery store or the drug store buying some Ivory soap, here is how they advertise Ivory soap.  You look at it one day.  “99.9% pure.”  Now, wait a minute.  I understand advertising and Madison Avenue, but is anything pure if it’s 99.9% pure?  No, that 0.1% makes it impure, does it not?  I’m just thinking logically here.  And so it is when it comes to the purity of our own lives.  Have you tolerated, perhaps, that 1% of impurity?  And you’ve said, “You know, God, I’m doing pretty good over here.”  But He’s saying, “No, I need a pure instrument.  I need you to be just as intolerant of that little bit of impurity as you would be if your doctor came back and said, ‘We just found a tiny, tiny little cell of cancer.  It’s no big deal, no big deal.’”  No, you’d get after that right away, wouldn’t you?  And so a holy God desires for us to be pure.  “Make the table of pure gold.”  Gold doesn't come out of the ground pure.  It’s purified, and God is in the business every day of purifying His instruments.  Because there is power that flows through purity.

0:22:20.5

Principle number two is the principle of unity.  Unity.  Leviticus 24:5.  Listen to this.  “You shall take fine flour and bake twelve loaves from it; two tenths of an ephah shall be in each loaf.”  Now, we already went to the bowl here, and we saw the fine flour.  Once he had fine flour, it’s interesting.  The instruction comes to bake 12 loaves and to put them in two stacks of 6.  And each loaf was to be made out of the same measure.  Are you seeing a picture of orderliness here?  And you’re thinking, “Well, why 12 loaves?”  Well, the obvious answer is the 12 tribes of Israel.  This was meant in part to picture the community of faith—which was Israel at that time—and their common unity.  There is unity.  There is sameness.  There is orderliness.  We serve an orderly God who wants to see His people in community, sharing a common unity.  Remember, Jesus prayed in John 17, “Father, make them one as we are one.”  The deep desire of His heart was that His people, the Church, the ecclesia that He birthed would be one.  That there would be unity in the body of Christ, even in the midst of great diversity.  And this is a principle that, if you were to reach into your pocket and pull out a coin or a dollar bill, you’d see it woven into our coinage and into this great country called the United States of America.  You ever heard the phrase “E Pluribus Unum”?  It’s a Latin term.  It’s on your coins.  It’s on your dollar bills.  And it means “Out of many, one”.  Let me show you where that principle that’s engraved into our coinage and on our bills came from.  It’s a biblical principle.  You want to know why we say that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles?  Well, here is just one small example.  1 Corinthians 10:16-17.  And now Paul brings in yet another bread analogy.  Now we’re going to the Lord’s Table.  Here was the Lord’s Table in the Old Testament, a table of Presence, a table of showbread.  Bread comes into the picture again at the communion table.  And here is what Paul writes to the Corinthians, a really messed up church, by the way, where there was no unity in the body.  And they were expressing their disunity at the communion table.  They were just a really messed up church.  And he says, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”  The answer is yes, and then he applies.  “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body.”  He could have just as easily said, “E Pluribus Unum,”—out of many, one—a biblical principle that was applied to our country here.  “For we all partake of the one bread.”  This was a picture of Old Testament Israel, the community of faith, in oneness, in symmetry.

0:25:49.3

But you may be asking, “What does it mean to be in unity?”  Let me tell you what it doesn’t mean.  Unity doesn’t mean uniformity.  It doesn't mean we all wear the same uniform.  A football team can wear the same uniform and still not be unified as a team.  That’s evident in the locker room.  It’s evidence on the field.  They're not unified behind a single game plan.  But they wear the same uniform.  So unity is not uniformity.  Unity is not unison.  A choir can sing in unison and, oh my, be very unified.  Likewise, a nation can say on its coinage, “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one—and go through a very divisive election cycle.  We don’t feel like we’re one these days, do we?  By the way, I think this is a wonderful time for the Church of Jesus Christ to be a witness to the world, that out of many and in much diversity in the body of Christ we are one in Christ.  Yes, even across racial lines.  There are people in our culture today that want to divide us over race.  There are legitimate sinful feelings that people have in our society that are racist just because we’re sinners.  Racism is never about the color of your skin or my skin.  It’s about our sin, not skin.  And even in the 1^st century, there was no stronger division by race than between Jews and Gentiles.  Jews hated the Gentiles, and Gentiles despised the Jews.  And then you throw the Samaritans in there, who were half Jew and half Gentile.  Well, the Jews calls the Samaritans “dogs”.  I mean, how is that for a racial tension?  And the apostle Paul addresses this in Ephesians 2.  And he talks about the power of the gospel to bring even Jews and Gentiles together into one body.  And a little bit later he says in that letter to the Ephesians 4:3-6, “Maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”  The idea here is it’s gonna take some work, friends, to maintain that.  Because everything in our world wants to pull us apart to divide us, to create divisions.  “Maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.”  No wonder Jesus prayed, “Father, make them one as we are one,” because the natural tendency of our sinful hearts is to divide ourselves by race or any number of things.  So there is a principle of unity here just in the mere picture of the 12 tribes together as one.  There is symmetry.  There is unity.

0:29:04.4

If you’re still not quite getting it, let me appeal to a blog entry I made several years ago.  Maybe this will drive the point home.

“10 Little Christians all standing in a line,

1 disliked the pastor, and then there were 9.

9 little Christians stayed up very late,

1 slept in on Sunday, and then there were 8.

8 little Christians on their way to Heaven,

1 took the low road, and then there were 7.

7 little Christians chirping like some chicks,

1 disliked music, then there were 6.

6 little Christians seemed very much alive,

1 lost his interest then there was 5.

5 little Christians each busy as a bee,

1 got her feelings hurt, then there were 3.

3 little Christians knew not what to do,

1 joined the sporting crowd, then there were 2.

2 little Christians, our rhyme is nearly done,

Differed with each other, then there was 1.

1 little Christian can't do much, 'tis true,

Brought his friend to Bible study, then there were 2.

2 earnest Christians, each won one more,

That doubled the number, then there were 4.

4 sincere Christians worked early and worked late,

Each won another, and then there were 8.

8 splendid Christians…”

You see where we’re going.

“…if they doubled as before

In just a few short weeks, we'd have 1,024.

In this little jingle, there is a lesson true,

You belong either to the building or to the wrecking crew!”

Wow.  Some of you maybe needed to hear that this morning.  I don’t know.  The principle of unity and orderliness.  Okay?  Let’s get that as the body of Christ.

0:30:51.2

And then, finally, a principle of exclusivity.  Back to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  Remember, the Corinthians church was a messed up church.  I mean, there were divisions.  There was no unity there.  In fact, he starts the letter by saying, “I’ve heard that there are some divisions among you.  There are difficult camps, different cliques.  Some around the apostle Paul, some around Peter, some around another guy named Apollos.  There were cliques.  There were camps.  This group wasn’t talking to this group, and this group thought they were better than that group.  It was a very immature church in that way.  And some of that immaturity spilled over into when they came to the Lord’s Table.  And so a little bit later in the letter in chapter 10 verses 21 and 22, Paul addresses the table of the Lord.  And he says, “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons.  You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.  Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy?  Are we stronger than he?”  What he was saying to the Corinthian believers as they came to the Lord’s Table where the presence of the Lord was in the bread and in the cup in a representative kind of way, he says, “Listen, when you come to that table, you need to come as one.  And you need to come not taking the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons at the same time.”  In other words, you can’t have one foot in the world and one foot in the Church and expect it to work that way.  You can’t expect to be doing the Sunday thing—“Lord, hey, I’m all You.  I’m on Your team”—and then Monday morning, well, you haven’t made the connection from your weekend experience to the rest of your week.  You can’t have one thing going on over here that looks real spiritual to everybody, and then another thing going on over here.  He says you can’t drink from the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons at the same time.  “Do we not provoke the Lord to jealousy when we do that?” he says.

0:32:54.3

Think of the marriage relationship.  You have a bride and a groom standing at the altar.  And somewhere in their exchange of vows you hear the words “forsaking all others, I choose you.”  You imagine a groom that says that to his bride in that holy place called the marriage altar.  And then next week he’s having an affair over here.  You can’t do both.  You can’t have one foot here and one foot over there.  The marriage vows demand exclusivity in your devotion to one another.  Well, so it is in our relationship with the Lord.  As the Church, we are the bride of Christ.  He is our heavenly groom.  He said in the Old Testament to Moses and to the Israelites, “You shall have no other gods before Me.  You can’t come into My presence with one foot in the Holy Place here and another one, you know, worshipping Baal and Asherah and some of the other pagan gods.”  And the same is true with us.  He demands purity.  He requires that we’re unified.  “Father, make them one as we are one.  Don’t bring your divisions to my presence.”  And He demands the exclusivity of our commitment and our devotion to Him.  And these are all principles that we derive from this little table that’s described in the book of Exodus and in the book of Leviticus.

0:34:38.3