At The Gate

The scripture that we're going to be looking at this morning is found in Exodus

Exodus 27:9–19

chapter 27, verses 9 through 19.

Make a courtyard for the tabernacle. The south side shall be a hundred cubits

long, and it is to have curtains of finely twisted linen with twenty posts and

twenty bronze bases, and with silver hooks and bands on the posts.

The north side shall also be a hundred cubits long, and is to have curtains

with 20 posts and 20 bronze bases and with silver hooks and bands on the post.

The west end of the courtyard shall be 50 cubits wide and have curtains with 10 posts and 10 bases.

On the east end, towards the sunrise, the courtyard shall also be 50 cubits wide.

Curtains 15 cubits long are to be on one side of the entrance with three posts

and three bases. And curtains 15 cubits long are to be on the south side with

three posts and three bases.

For the entrance to the courtyard, provide a curtain 20 cubits long,

blue, purple, and scarlet yarn, and finely twisted linen.

The work of an embroiderer with four posts and four bases.

All the posts around the courtyard are to have silver bands and hooks and bronze bases.

The courtyard shall be a hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide,

with curtains of finely twisted linen, five cubits high, with bronze bases.

All the other articles used in this service of the tabernacle,

whatever their function, including all the tent pegs for it and those for the

courtyard, are to be of bronze.

So why did we read this? We've been looking at the book of Exodus,

we've been looking at Genesis, and then now Exodus, and we've seen this before,

this picture of this tabernacle in the wilderness and the.

Details of it, and we look at what it is that God has done.

If you look at these measurements, this tabernacle, this fence around the place

of meeting was 150 feet long by 75 feet wide.

And so we're looking at this huge thing, and we're going to be looking at that

today. There are many kinds of doors in this world, many kinds of gates.

There are doors in this building. There are doors at the entrance to the mall.

There are garage doors and house doors and bathroom doors and closet doors and prison doors.

There are wooden doors, glass doors, plastic doors, Dutch doors,

and there are hollow as well as solid doors.

Some doors are massive. Some are small.

But every door, every gate has one purpose, and that is to close off an entrance

to an opening or to keep the unwanted out and keep the wanted secure.

It may be a very strong or imposing door, but when you see one,

you realize only those who have a right to enter are allowed to come in through that opening.

Everyone else is a trespasser. Even with this tabernacle, this

fence that they had, fence made of linen, around the opening had gates in it

that made of linen that you could only be opened by those who were allowed to open those.

They had clasps that kept those gates closed.

Several years ago, back in Otisville, Michigan, our oldest daughter,

Mallory, and a friend of hers had an assignment at school.

They were eighth grade, and they had an assignment at school to design a house

for one of their classes.

As they made this, Mallory was assigned to design the second floor of the house,

and her friend was to design the ground floor of the house, and they worked

very hard, didn't want any input from their dad, which it would have probably failed anyway,

but they didn't, and they turned in their assignment on time,

but the teacher only gave them a B on their house design.

They were kind of disappointed until he said, everything was well-designed for

function and flow except for one thing.

They had forgotten to put doors on the main floor.

Every one of us has doors in our houses to let good things in and keep bad things out, right?

Not everybody gets to go through that door.

In fact, you might ask, Pastor, what kind of person won't you allow into your house?

And I would say, here's the test.

You come to my door and you knock.

If I let you in, you're him. If I don't, you're not.

That's just the way it is. Anyway, here in Exodus chapter 27,

Exodus 27 · chapter mention

we're introduced to a different kind of door.

It's the gate that barred the way into the tabernacle of God.

And as you'll notice here, the tabernacle was a tent-like structure,

if you can see that up there, that sat inside a large courtyard.

So the tabernacle was that tent in the middle there with what seems to be a

pillar of fire coming down to it.

This was the design of the tabernacle that God gave to Moses in the wilderness

to provide a place for worship and for his presence to be.

And even after they arrived in the promised land, they continued to worship

in a tabernacle for a long time.

Everyone was ascribed their certain job to do.

When they broke camp and moved to another place, there were certain people that

took the post, certain people took the gates, certain people took the linens,

and they all moved with them as they went.

This was their worship center for the people of Israel for the next 647 years.

I can't imagine even a church building lasting that long.

It was finally replaced in the days of King Solomon with a wonderful temple,

but for 647 years, God's people worshiped in a tent with no air conditioning.

So that's three times longer than our nation has even been in existence.

But this wasn't just an old tent. This was a tent designed by God for a specific purpose.

In Exodus 25, verse 9, God tells Moses to make this tabernacle and all its furnishings

Exodus 25:9

exactly like the pattern that I will give you.

This tent was not a human invention. It was a divine sanctuary.

It was built for God's people.

To come into God's presence and to worship him, but it was also built only in

a way that God wanted it to be built.

When a congregation builds a church building, the first thing they do,

if they want to do it properly, right, Terry,

is lay out a blueprint of the building that will function well in the worship

of God, and they will get everything they need lined up on that blueprint,

from electrical to plumbing and all that.

Of course, they didn't have that then. but even after making a blueprint,

they can often change things, a few things here and there.

I was helping my brother-in-law build houses back in my college days.

And there was one house that we built that the homeowner decided to change the

light fixture in their master bedroom, not just the fixture,

but the location of the fixture.

They decided to change it five times times, after we had done it and redone it and redone it.

You know, you might add a few inches to a classroom or shave a foot or two off the stage.

You can paint the wall any color you want, or you could arrange the chairs any way you want.

These days, we build our building for God's use, but God really doesn't care

about the specifics as long as we do it to honor him as a place to come and

minister to his people and to worship him.

It's the purpose of the building that God wants, not the luxury of it.

That's because God knows that now the real tabernacle is not a tent out in the

wilderness or a building like

this, but the real tabernacle is the place that God has in our hearts.

Our hearts are the temples of the living God. But the people of Israel couldn't

do that with the Old Testament tabernacle.

Every dimension had to be precise.

Every item had to be made to specification.

In fact, if you build a house without exact specifications, it doesn't fit together well, right?

And to make sure everything was

done properly, God selected a general contractor by the name of Bezalel.

Wouldn't you love to have that name? Exodus tells us the Lord has chosen Bezalel,

son of Uri, the son of Hur, the son of the tribe of Judah, and he has filled

him with the Spirit of God with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of crafts.

So if there was anybody to go to, it was Bezalel. In other words,

Bezalel was endowed by God to read the blueprints that God had given,

or the oral words of what it was supposed to do, and make sure everything was

built exactly as God commanded.

This man wasn't trained in some university or tech school.

He was trained by God so that people would build the tabernacle exactly the

way God had. The reason that everything had to be so precise was because God

was communicating heavenly truths through this earthly building.

Hebrews 8, verse 5 says, The temple priests serve at a sanctuary that is a copy

Hebrews 8:5

and shadow of what is in heaven.

God prepared those plans for what we are going to have when we worship him in heaven.

There are specific messages God wanted to communicate.

Communicate there were deep spiritual truths about what

he wanted what he meant to live in

the presence of a holy god so let's look

at this the first thing that we can all notice is that

the tabernacle was right in the exact center of the entire camp as as you've

studied in exodus you will find that three of the 12 tribes were encamped on

the north side three were on the south three Three were on the east side,

and three were on the west.

The nation of Israel literally had God living right inside them and in their midst.

In a lot of cultures, the pagan gods were displayed as living off by themselves

on a shelf somewhere or in a niche outside the house or even up on a mountaintop

or in a forest or down in the depths of the seas.

Their temples were usually separated from the general populace because as far

as the pagans were concerned, their gods never really wanted to spend time with

them anyway, and they were to worship them from afar off.

Most religious activities of that day involved trying to buy off your gods,

bribe your gods, keeping them from bringing disaster down on you.

Their relationship with these gods had nothing to do with love, just convenience.

But with his tabernacle, God is telling us and telling his people,

he's saying to them, I want to spend time with you.

I want to live among you, and I want to be the very center of your lives.

Think about that. The God who created everything, who told Noah to build the

ark, and then when Noah wasn't so sure, God said, how long can you tread water?

No, that was Bill Cosby that did that.

Anyway, even when they offered their sacrifices and offerings to God,

many of these offerings were then eaten by the worshipers or the priests.

So in the offerings, God was asking his people to sit down and eat with them.

It was like having a big church potluck dinner with God in the center.

Hmm, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?

Maybe it should be that way. And that's how it is now with you and me who are Christians.

In John chapter 1, we read that

John 1 · chapter mention

God came and made his dwelling among his people in the person of Jesus.

But Scripture also tells us that God's Spirit is right here among us and inside

of us, of those who are called Christians, those who believe in Christ.

So if you have repented of your sin, confess Jesus as your Lord and Savior,

and if you put your entire trust in God, then God has promised that his Spirit lives in you.

So he's living among you, he's living right in the center of your life,

and he can't get any closer than that.

But what does it take for God to live in the center of life?

It takes us to remove everything else, or God to remove everything else,

in us so that he can have a complete dwelling in our hearts and in this temple

in which he wants to dwell.

If you remember, that's how it was at the beginning when God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve.

They were very much in communion with each other, walking together even daily.

On a daily basis, talking with God in the garden.

But then there was a problem.

There was a problem them that Adam and Eve sinned and lost their communion with the Holy God.

Back in the Old Testament, this was also a problem.

And it was a problem that only allowed God's people to get so close to them

because they're an unclean people. That problem was called sin.

Too often, we don't call it that now. And we need to look at that.

What is right and what is not? What is of God and what is not?

One of the primary functions of the tabernacle of that time was to teach the reality.

We sin and our sins separate us from God. There's a fence around the presence

of God, and you can't go in there except for one purpose, and that is to present

your offering to come back into the presence of God.

And so all around the tabernacle, there was this fenced-in area.

It was a rectangle, as I said before, that was 150 feet long and 75 feet wide.

And just like that, there was a fence around the tabernacle to keep the people

from just banging into presence.

So, So too, our sin keeps us away from God's presence.

So there's a fence around that tabernacle so you couldn't come to God unless

you brought a sacrifice, and there's a tent around our lives that keeps us from

coming into God's presence, and that is our sin.

But then I read something I'd never heard about before when I looked into this

tabernacle and this fence around it.

This linen curtain was full of holes, like eyelets, so that though they kept

people from entering in,

they did allow people to see what was going on in the inside,

kind of like the little boy who's at the baseball game and cuts a little,

that allows him to look in and see what's going on.

This is what was happening there. They could look in and see what was happening

in the presence of God, but they couldn't go in unless they brought a sacrifice.

Now, I can't independently verify that, except that the fabric was woven and

probably not solidly opaque. And after all.

I wasn't there. Yet it seems that while God wanted the Israelites not to enter

in an unworthy manner, he apparently wanted them to look inside.

He wanted them to see what was going on in his presence.

Why would he want them to do that? Maybe because then it would get them to long to be in his presence.

The tabernacle's main purpose was to serve as a place to offer sacrifices for sin.

So when someone sinned, they were required by the law to bring an animal into

the presence of God through that gate of curtains and to the north side of the altar.

There, the one offering the sacrifice would place his hand on the head of the animal,

symbolically transferring his sin to the sheep or goat or whatever the animal was,

and then he would kill the animal there at the altar, and the priest would take

the blood and sprinkle it on the four sides of the altar and then place the

sacrifice on the altar to to present it to God in place of this man.

All of this could have been observed by those who kept around the courtyard

and were looking in through the walls.

If this was so, God had wanted all the people to see the result of their sin.

He wanted them to be looking in to watch as some of their friends brought their

sacrifice in, brought it up to the priest, laid their hands on the sheep,

and then sacrificed the sheep as they sprinkled the blood.

This is what he wanted them to see, that your sin is what's causing you to be

separated from the holiness God.

That's a part of the reason we celebrate Lord's Supper.

We remember what christ has done we

remember the fact that he has been the ultimate lamb

of god that has been slain for us in a

sense when we when we act as as sinners we are placing our hands on jesus and

saying you're going to take this from me how many of us really think that when

we're living in a way we shouldn't we don't think that but that's what jesus

did he took our place for 1 Corinthians 11,

23 to 33, Paul wrote, For I received from the Lord what I was also passed on to you.

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given

thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me. And so communion is a time

for us to look back through the curtain of time and revisit the sacrifices that

had been made for our sins.

It's a time for us to once again see an innocent man dying on our behalf.

He is not a physical lamb, bless you, physical lamb or a goat or oxen or anything

like that, but he is the spiritual lamb of God who was slain for us.

And so oftentimes, we just kind of go on and let it roll off as we go about our lives.

But Jesus died for you. He died for me. Thank God he did.

He did this in a way so that he could redeem us from our lost life.

He could renew us in his presence, and he could give a new life to us in such

a way that we could join him as his children and be in relationship with God.

The only way that people could come close to the tabernacle of the Old Testament

and have their closest relationship with God was when they brought their sin

offering through the gate and the fence.

God wants us in his presence. That's the repeated message throughout Scripture,

from the Garden of Eden through the days of Moses and the law,

the kings, the prophets, and finally coming to Jesus.

God has repeatedly cried out that to his people, I want to walk with my people

as I did with Adam and Eve in the garden.

I want to walk and spend time with them in their midst. I want to build their

lives and existence around me so that I can live through them and give them my love and blessings.

But we can only come by invitation. We can only come into the presence by the

offering that is made for our sin.

We don't ask you to bring a sheep and lay it on the altar. Thank goodness, we don't have to.

That sacrifice has been made once and for all for all of us.

We can only come into the presence of God by the sacrifice of a lamb that walks

through those gates, and Jesus has walked through those gates to sacrifice for us.

In the book of Exodus, God tells us he wanted the temple built so that he could

come and make his dwelling among the people.

John chapter 1 verse 14 says that God came and made his dwelling,

John 1:14

God, the word, Jesus, came in flesh, and he made his dwelling among us.

Now Jesus comes down so that God could

dwell in our hearts Jesus comes down

so that he can allow us to come into God's presence

Jesus comes down so that he lays the invitation

before us he is the door by which we can come into the presence of God but John

John 10:9

chapter 10 verse 9 says that then Jesus said to them I am the door if anyone

enters by me he will be saved and will go in and out and have pasture you can't come any other way.

No other door has been designed where God will dwell. No other place for us.

We know that the only way to God is through Jesus.

One night a great minister had dreamed that he had died and stood at the gate of heaven.

He gave his name only to be told that his His name did not appear upon the books.

At last, at his earnest plea, he was allowed to enter in and was told he would

have the privilege of appearing before the judge of all the earth,

and if he could stand his test, he would live in heaven forever.

So standing before God's throne, he gave his name, and the following questions

were asked of him. Have you led a righteous life?

He said, no. Have you always been kind and gentle?

No. Have you always been forgiving to those who have been around you?

No, I guess I failed there too. Have you always been honest and just?

No, I don't think so. As question after question were put to him by the judge,

his case seemed to be more and more hopeless.

Every time a question was asked, his face began to become more downcast.

The last question was asked of him and that he replied also but when it seemed

like there was no hope for him, the brightness about the throne began to become

brighter, and suddenly he heard a beautiful voice,

the most beautiful to which his ears had ever listened.

It was sweeter than a sound of a mother's voice.

It was more beautiful than the most beautiful music of all of heaven.

It filled all the arches of the skies and thrilled the soul of this minister

as he stood there before the judge, trembling and was about to fall.

And then this voice, this beautiful voice said, Father, I know this man.

It is true that he was weak in many ways, but he stood for me in the world.

And I will take my place and stand before you in his place.

Just as the last words of the sentence were spoken, the dream was over,

the man woke up, but he had his lesson, and his lesson was for all of us.

There is nothing in us that deserves a standing before God. God,

it must be in Christ that we stand.

Jesus said this, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me. Jesus is the door.

He's the gate. He is the only way we can come to him.

Jesus, the Lamb of God who has given us the once-for-all sacrifice,

only when we have been redeemed can we have entrance into the fellowship of God.