The Ark & the Presence of God

If I was standing up here with a surfboard, just a surfboard, what would be missing?

Surf.

Perfect answer, Janet.

I was thinking it could be leg rope, wax, no, you went straight to it.

Surf is what is missing if you have a surfboard.

If I had a big sheet, a sail, well, it's just a big sheet, a messy big piece of fabric, but if you put it on a yacht and you give it a breeze, it's something special, isn't it?

What about if you put a human being on a stage like this?

Well, there is one, here I am.

What's the purpose of a person?

Well, I've got a purpose, I've got a sermon to preach, and there's lots of things that we do as people that are so important.

Humanity overall, the one thing that rises above everything, I think, humanity was made for the presence of God.

Well, what do you reckon?

We are meant to worship Him and tell others about Him and obey Him, but that all comes out of relationship.

We were made for the presence of God.

Let that sit there for a sec.

You and I were made to know God, to experience His presence.

Genesis 2 verse 7 says, God created man from the dust of the ground, and He was an average creature.

That is until something happened to Him.

The presence of God, quite literally, the breath of God, the ruach of God, was breathed into Him, and He became a living being in the image of His Creator.

We are created for the presence of God.

We are created for the breath of God, and without His breath, we are less than what we were designed to be.

Amen?

It's the truth.

This is why Moses says in Exodus 33 verse 15, if your presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here.

How will anyone know we are the people of God?

We are in the second week of our series entitled Kings and Characters, and this week we have a very special character to look at.

Last week it was Samuel.

This week we are looking at the Ark of the Covenant.

And for many of us, we think immediately of Indiana Jones, the Ark of the Covenant.

Well, I hope after today, when you hear Ark of the Covenant, you will immediately think of Kathleen singing that song, and you will think about the presence of God.

God with us is what the Ark of the Covenant is all about.

That's what the Ark was designed for, to remind the people of Israel that their covenant-keeping God, who they were in covenant relationship with, was with them.

That's what the Ark is about.

God is with his people.

And that's the truth for us as Christians.

The presence of God goes with us.

His presence has gone before us, and he's following behind us.

He is with us in Christ.

I'd like to read from Exodus 25.

This is when we're introduced to the Ark of the Covenant, this character in the grand story of God's glory.

Exodus 25.10.

God says, Have them make an ark of acacia wood, two and a half cubits long.

Now, a cubit is 18 inches.

A cubit and a half wide and a cubit and a half high.

Overlay it with pure gold both inside and out and make a gold molding around it.

Cast four gold rings for it and fasten them to its four feet with two rings on one side and two rings on the other.

Then make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold.

Insert the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry it.

The poles are to remain in the rings of this ark, they're not to be removed.

Then put in the ark the tablets of the covenant law, which I will give you.

Make an atonement cover of pure gold, two and a half cubits long and a cubit and a half wide.

And make two cherubim out of hammered gold at the ends of the cover.

Make one cherub on one end and the second cherub on the other.

Make the cherubim of one piece with the cover at the two ends.

The cherubim are to have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the cover with them.

The cherubim are to face each other, looking toward the cover, place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the tablets of the covenant law that I will give you.

There above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites.

The nexus point between heaven and earth is this spot atop the ark of the covenant where the God of heaven, the creator of all things, would meet with his people, initially represented by Moses and then later the high priest.

The ark was nearly always housed in the tent of meeting before the temple was created.

The tent of meeting, otherwise known as the tabernacle.

I'd like to take a couple of minutes to unpack and understand God's thinking about how this was all going to work.

So, they were to make an ark and God would meet a representative of his people right there at the ark in the tabernacle.

Now, the tabernacle had an outer courtyard and two inner chambers.

The outer court was an enclosed space of about 140 square meters.

Now, who's good with your spatial awareness?

Gary is, I know that.

How many square meters do you reckon this actual auditorium is?

Because I was thinking it might be about 140.

All out there?

It'd be a big seal.

Okay.

So it's probably half as big as this auditorium, is the space in the outer courtyard of the tabernacle.

So maybe the square part here is what we're talking about.

In the courtyard, in that courtyard of the tent, there were two objects.

The first one was a bronze altar, like a big, flat table.

It was square, seven and a half foot by seven and a half foot and four feet high, four and a half feet high.

So it's a bit longer than our communion table, square and quite a bit higher.

And there was a horn at each of the four corners.

So when an animal was to be sacrificed, they were to tie down the legs and the legs to the four horns.

And there were five primary kinds of offerings or sacrifices that were given on this altar.

First was the burnt offering.

These are all described in Leviticus, and I'm not going to spend too much time going through it, but burnt offerings were the only kind where the whole animal would be consumed by fire.

Normally when a sacrifice was made, the priest would cook up a lot of the animal and they would sort of eat it together in community.

The fat portions in the liver and kidney often were burnt for the Lord, but there was a sense of celebration, of worship and thanksgiving.

The burnt offering was a picture, which is I guess pretty obvious, of total consecration, isn't it?

The whole animal, everything.

And that was reminding the people of Israel, God wants your all.

He is asking you to give him everything.

And then there was the cereal or grain offering.

This was particularly for the poor, who couldn't afford a whole animal.

Part of what the sacrificial system did for Israel was made a way for everyone to access God, to offer something in worship, even when they didn't have a whole lot of resources.

They were poorer.

So some were able to bring a whole animal, others gave a cereal offering.

And then to summarize, there was the peace offering and another offering called a free will offering, the sin offering and the guilt offering.

All very important, but not our focus today.

The other item in the courtyard was a large basin.

Let me read what the Lord says about it in Exodus 30.

Then the Lord said to Moses, make a bronze basin with its bronze stand for washing.

Place it between the tent of meeting and the altar and put water in it.

Aaron and his sons are to wash their hands and feet with water from it.

Whenever they enter the tent of meeting, they shall wash with water so that they will not die.

So this is all about getting ready to encounter the presence of God, isn't it?

The presence of God is at the Ark, but this is a process.

There's a great big altar and there's a large basin.

And then you move inside the tabernacle, this big tent of meeting.

There were three main pieces of furniture inside the tent, in one of the chambers.

There was a lamp stand.

It's very important that there was a lamp stand that was always lit.

And basically, it was saying this, just like you'd hope it was saying.

It was saying, when it's night and it's dark and people are afraid and you're scared and you're worried about how things are going to go, there's a light always on.

The Lord's at home, in your home.

He's there for you.

His presence is there.

And inside the tabernacle, there was an altar of incense to cover up the odour of animal slaughter, which obviously would be intense.

And then the third object is something that I'd forgotten about and I wonder if you had as well.

There was a table, the table of the presence.

Who remembers about the table of the presence?

Not many of us.

Isn't that interesting?

Not one hand.

We don't talk about this much, do we?

What was in the tabernacle?

In Leviticus 20, Israel were told every week, 12 loaves of bread were to be freshly baked and they represented the 12 tribes of Israel.

And so every week there would be 12 freshly baked loaves of bread to set out on the table, this sort of smell of fresh bread wafting throughout the tabernacle with the smell of sacrifice.

It's a bit of a mixture.

But it's also that people would be reminded, this is a Middle Eastern culture.

Hospitality is really important.

This is like a home.

This is a home, this welcome bread.

And of course, we celebrate around that table when Jesus broke the bread.

And it's a symbol back in the Old Testament of the bread that would be broken later on.

But everyone's welcome in this home.

The bread was called the bread of the presence.

Literally in Hebrew, it's called the bread of the face.

The bread of the face.

And then there was the inner chamber, a place called the holy place, or the holy of holies.

This was carefully set apart from the rest of the tabernacle by a veil, which now we're probably thinking about when it tore with Jesus.

That was in the temple.

It was a very heavy curtain made of blue, purple, and scarlet colors.

God's pretty creative and clever, isn't he?

He designed that, the colors of royalty, colors of majesty.

This room was like a bedroom in the house.

It was the room of the greatest intimacy.

The penalty if someone violated the rules of the holy of holies was death.

In the most holy room, there was only one piece of furniture.

And you know what that was, don't you?

The Ark of the Covenant.

Four foot long, two foot high, two foot wide.

And in the Ark of the Covenant, this box that represented the presence of God, were three objects.

Three objects which reminded the people about the presence of God.

The presence gives at least three things for God's people.

His presence brings revelation, transformation and proclamation.

More than that, but at least these three.

His presence brings revelation.

God said, I want you to put in the Ark, the two tablets of the Covenant, your copy and my copy.

Remember, it wasn't five on each.

It was a copy for the people and a copy for God.

They were in a covenant treaty, a relationship by covenant.

The great symbol of God's revelation to his people about how to live with him and each other was the law, the Ten Commandments.

The Ark of the Covenant as a character in the story taught the people that God's presence brings revelation, not just information, but revelation.

Have you discovered the difference?

You can gather a lot of information without revelation, but we need revelation.

I want to skip over to the New Testament because Jesus is the epitome of the presence of God, isn't it?

He is the very presence of God.

He is God incarnate, God in human flesh.

And when the presence of God in Christ, God himself, was in Capernaum, he visited Peter's mother-in-law.

I've been to the traditional house that is meant to be Peter's mother-in-law's house at Capernaum.

It's interesting.

It's one of the most highly attested historical places in antiquity, the mother-in-law of Peter.

And last week we mentioned that there are small parts in the great drama.

And Stanislav, Stanislavski, or whatever his name was, said, no small parts, only small actors.

The mother-in-law of Peter had a small part to play.

But we're thinking about her now, because it was significant what happened to her.

And it teaches us a lot about revelation, transformation and proclamation from the presence.

Luke 4, a little passage I'd like to read.

Jesus left the synagogue and went to the home of Simon, Simon Peter.

Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her.

So he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her.

She got up at once and began to wait on them.

She had a fever in a very bad way, and she received a revelation from the Presence of God.

Have you ever had a really bad fever?

Put your hand up if you've had a...

Lots of us have had bad fevers.

They are no fun, are they?

They're one of the least fun things you can do.

Have a really bad fever.

And my experience is you can have a fever that's about 38, but you can have other fevers that really take you to special places, don't they?

You start seeing things.

I had one of the most significant opportunities in my life at the time.

I was about 27 years old.

It was 1997.

And I'd been given an opportunity to go with 15 other pastors on the trip of a lifetime.

We were going to Africa.

I'd never been to Africa before at that stage.

And we were going to Africa together for five and a half weeks.

We were going to be most of the time in Africa.

I was in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, and Uganda spending time with pastors over there.

And then we went to Spurgeon.

We were going to go to Spurgeon's College for a debrief in London.

It was just an amazing trip.

The night before, I got so sick.

It was one of those early flights out.

You had to get up at four or five in the morning.

I was so sick with the fever.

I was hallucinating.

And you know, I don't want to go into too many details, but you know what it's...

Well, maybe you don't know, but it's no fun to be hallucinating such that you're crawling to get to the bathroom to vomit and then you can't even stand up.

It's like, wow.

And I started thinking, this is a terrible tragedy, Lord.

I can't get on that flight tomorrow.

How could I?

I am so sick.

And I was feeling, what you can imagine, very fuzzy, in pain.

I was confused.

I was scared.

And like Sam testified, into that mess, I so clearly remember the presence of God came into my presence there, while I was crawling on the floor.

And he gave me a revelation.

The presence of God came, God himself came, and his spirit said to me, you're going on this trip.

And I can't explain it any other way, but the fact, it sounds cliched, but a piece came over me that transformed me.

And I ended up going on this trip.

I wasn't sick again.

I got well within probably about an hour after that happening.

I went on the trip and that was the most pivotal moment in my life, in my career, in my ministry.

Everything changed after that trip.

I didn't know what happened, if it was a spiritual attack or what, it probably was.

But I just want to testify and give thanks to God today for His presence that came into that space that I was in.

When He floods over you, even though you can be feeling so lacking in clarity, God is light and with light comes revelation.

Amen?

I wonder if you're here today and you need that, because today you are here and you are fuzzy and you're confused about what's next.

Whatever's happening in your life, we were created for His presence so that we can receive His light and revelation.

This is what the Ark always symbolized, God with His people, the God who gives direction because He's light.

He doesn't just give information, He gives revelation and He will give direction and revelation to us too if we come before Him and acknowledge this as holy ground, amen?

Say, Lord God, I need You to guide me.

I don't know what to do next.

I think to find the revelation that He wants to give us, we need to spend time in His presence and the key being time, to be time in His presence.

His presence brings transformation as well.

God said to Israel, I want you to put in the Ark the rod of Aaron, the rod God caused to miraculously blossom and bloom as a way of authenticating the ministry of the priesthood He gave to Aaron and his descendants.

It's interesting, why would he put that particular rod in?

I think it's because it justified Aaron and it was a rod that showed transformation.

The priest was to intercede between the people and God, the presence of God.

And what was God going to do?

He's going to transform someone who's a sinner into someone who's clean.

The rod of Aaron is all about transformation.

Peter's mother-in-law had been lying in that house in Capernaum.

She's seriously sick, it would seem like on the way towards death.

And she received the revelation of the presence of God in Jesus, shook her out of the fever, and then her next experience of the presence was a profound transformation.

The fever left her and she got up.

When the presence of God comes near, I would put to you that He changes us.

He changes people.

If I was to ask, who's seen a healing or experienced a healing, I'm sure many in this room would say, yeah, I have.

Does God always do what we ask Him to do, right on time, on cue?

Not always, but He always hears our prayer and He's a God who causes transformation.

When the presence of God comes near, I have seen all these things in people in my life.

Timid people become brave because they're transformed by the presence.

anxious people become peaceful.

Mute people speak, overseas I saw that.

Bitter people become sweet.

Harsh people become soft.

Nasty people become nice.

Stingy people become generous.

Dirty people get clean.

Needy people get healed.

The Apostle Paul said this to the people of Corinth in 2 Corinthians chapter 3.

Let me read.

It's a wonderful passage that brings the Old Testament into the new, I think.

He writes, if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, we're talking about the glory of the presence of God above the Ark, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory fading, though it was after he had been in the presence of God at the Ark.

Will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious?

If the ministry that condemns man is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness?

For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory.

That's saying the glory of the Ark of the Covenant has no glory compared to what we are experiencing as the people of God with the Holy Spirit in us.

That's incredible.

For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory.

If what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts?

Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold.

We're not like Moses who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away, but their minds were made dull.

For to this day, the same veil remains when the Old Covenant is read.

It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away.

Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.

But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.

Now, the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

And we who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory are being transformed into His likeness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

The Presence brings transformation, amen?

He does.

He changes us.

And we need to remember that whenever we think of the Ark, it's for revelation, for God's people, it's for transformation, this Presence, gracious Presence of God.

And His Presence brings proclamation.

God says, put a jar of manna in there, that crazy heavenly bread that God provided to the people in the wilderness, which was a pointer to the bread of life, Jesus, the bread of life.

The manna was always God's provision, which ultimately leads us to the breaking of bread at the table, which is all about gospel, gospel proclamation throughout the ages.

The presence of God in Jesus came into that room with Peter's mother-in-law.

And in that house in Capernaum, into the realm of Peter's mother-in-law's world, she receives revelation, she receives transformation, and then what happens?

I know it's subtle, but I think it's interesting and powerful.

She gets up and begins to wait on Jesus.

She's changed to serve.

She's changed to proclaim to be part of the kingdom agenda, to do stuff for Jesus.

revelation lets us see clearly, transformation lets us become, and proclamation lets us do.

And this is, of course, possible for us all because of the gospel.

It's only because of the gospel.

That God's presence in Christ went to a cross and died for the sin of the world, and He rose again, and He has made a way for revelation, transformation, and proclamation to be ours in Christ.

The presence of God in our lives is not for us to snuggle up to it and just enjoy it.

Amen?

Like a warm blanket, like a doona.

Oh, this presence, just nice.

When Jesus gave the Holy Spirit His presence to the church, He said, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the earth, the presence of God is for proclamation, to take the good news and be Christ's witnesses.

Moses said, as I read before in Exodus 33, if your presence does not go with us, don't send us up from here.

How will anyone know we are the people of God?

Because the presence is for proclamation.

It's for testimony.

It's for proof.

We are God's people marked by the presence of God.

And that's what Jesus says.

They'll know you are my disciples when the presence reveals your love for one another.

We were created to know the presence of God and to be carriers of the presence of God, to speak of his greatness, of his grace, to do the works that he has prepared in advance for us to do.

Amen.

proclamation of God's fame in word and in deed.

I wonder if you ever feel nervous about doing that, about stepping out, knowing that the presence of God is with you, he's revealed his truth to you, he's changed you.

But that proclamation part, stepping out, it's challenging.

Can I encourage you with Moses' words, when he said to God, I can't do what you're calling me to do, I can't speak in public.

And God said, go, my presence is with you.

I am with you.

Joshua said, basically, I'm scared.

God said, be strong and courageous.

I will be with you.

Jesus said to his disciples, go into all the world.

And what else did he say?

Hey, I am with you always.

Are you getting the feeling that the presence of God is important?

Of course it is.

We're designed for his presence.

And his presence changes us, brings revelation, transformation and proclamation.

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