Clough Hebrews Lesson 41
A Better Tabernacle – 9:1-5
In the chapters that we are studying in Hebrews, from 8:1-10:18, we have a large section that is devoted, not so much to Christ’ person but to Christ’s work. And Christ’s work involves a better covenant, a better tabernacle and a better sacrifice. Last week we dealt with part one, Jesus Christ priestly work is grounded on a better covenant. Admittedly it’s a very difficult section of Scripture. I’d like to start by going to the covenants and just quizzing, throwing out questions for any daring volunteer. Why is all this important? Why does the author of Hebrews spend so much time working with what looks like fine details of the covenant? As far as we are concerned in the 20th century, there may be many applications but at least one general application as to why this covenant is important, or the argument. Remember, he’s trying to prove Christ has based His work on a final irrevocable covenant; so what?
What application does that have as far as we are concerned. The key word is final irrevocable covenant? [someone answers] We know that the New Testament, at least we… you can disagree with the New Testament but the point is what does the New Testament say, whether you disagree with it or not. The New Testament is saying that Jesus Christ’s work is built on a covenant that will never go obsolete, whereas the first covenant and all its details was deliberately designed to go obsolete, it was designed to self-destruct when Jesus Christ came and put away that order. So we’ve come to this point, that Jesus Christ’s work is final, it won’t be amended, it’s based on something that is not going to pass away. Jesus Christ, the New Covenant controlling what Jesus Christ is doing, is something that will not be wholesale change like the old covenant.
He mentioned the mish-mash of thought today; can someone give some illustrations of, say a prominent cult, that would advocate that really the revelation of the New Testament was not final but needed to be amended by succeeding prophets. [answers given] The Church of the Latter Day Saints is one; there are a lot of them Baha’i, Christian Science, in a way; Baha’i and Church of the Latter Day Saints probably are the clearest forms because they come right out and say there was a prophet that restored the Church. And when you get that claim bells ought to go off in your head, there’s something wrong because in the New Testament, Jesus Christ’s covenant, the whole point of Hebrews was that the covenant doesn’t have to be amended, it’s here to stay, it is not going to be changed. There’s no radical new thought pattern that’s going to come bursting into history through the mouth of a prophet.
That’s one of the key points that you want to remember. The key word behind Hebrews is finality and finality means that the Christian faith does not need a restorer. The kind of bona fide restoration is the kind that was formed during the days of the Restoration, when you had Luther and Calvin calling the Church back to the New Testament documents. That is a restoration that is bona fide because it’s not adding anything new, it’s just simply going back, it’s not going forward. But that’s altogether a different ball game than claiming that Martin Luther went into some sort of a tower in the monastery and had some special spectacles or something and an angel came and gave him a new book of the Bible. There’s a whole different ball game between the bona fide restoration and this additional business. And that difference is the crux behind this epistle. That’s where this epistle is very, very critical today.
Now I want to review points about the New
Covenant, see if we can get this down, what the New Covenant is. The first thing to remember about the New
Covenant, we’ll try to establish this New Covenant under six principles. The New Covenant belongs to
The second point about the New Covenant is
that it belongs to mankind only indirectly through
The third thing you want to remember, at
Pentecost the Holy Spirit came to establish the New Covenant, Acts 2:16. Peter addresses the house of
Now on that day, when the Holy Spirit came, Peter said “this is that which was spoken of by the prophet, Joel,” and Joel was talking about the phasing in of the New Covenant and the kingdom. So we infer from Peter’s speech that as of the day of Pentecost the kingdom became a theoretical possibility. If the Jews had heeded the addresses in the early chapters of the book of Acts, then the kingdom could have been instituted. The kingdom was still open, for forty years after Jesus Christ died the kingdom was still being offered and offered and reoffered to the nation Israel, and all during that time had the nation, as a nation, collectively responded to Jesus Christ, that nation could have been… blessed the world through the millennial reign of Christ.
So Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes to establish the Covenant. Let’s pretend things worked out the way theory calls for it. Jesus Christ would come to the nation Israel, Israel would go on positive volition nationally toward Jesus Christ and since you have, then, all these Jews who were now believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, they were all regenerated and now, when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, He came to indwell them and to set up the modus operandi of the New Covenant meant that the Holy Spirit was to indwell all Israel, all the house of Israel. It was to be a national indwelling to fulfill prophecy.
So on Pentecost, then, the Spirit comes,
faithful to His promise, but and this is the fourth point, since
So, it resolved by the fifth point, and
that is since the Holy Spirit came and since the nation Israel wasn’t prepared
for the Holy Spirit nationally, God set up the Church. So on the day of Pentecost, although it wasn’t
made clear until Paul came along, God had done something new. Pentecost was the beginning of the Church
Age. Now the Church Age is not to be
confused with
This means that the New Covenant, which is
given to Israel, not to the Church, happened also because the New Covenant gave
the Holy Spirit on Pentecost because this New Covenant with Israel made the
Holy Spirit available on the day of Pentecost, therefore the Church received
benefits from the New Covenant, but the Church didn’t have the covenant made
with it. We, as church members, can’t claim that we are in contract agreement
with God by means of the New Covenant.
Israel is in contract agreement; God, so to speak, blessed Israel, just
as He promised He would and we’re catching the crumbs from the table, the
spillover, so to speak, and that’s the olive tree illustration in Romans
2. So keep this is mind, that our
blessings come from the physical literal nation of the Old Testament called
In the future, as I showed from the quote
last time, and I forgot the verse but in Romans 11 there’s a quotation to the
effect that the future blessing upon the world will come through physical
[question asked] The theoretical problem, of course, is how would Christ have gotten crucified if that had happened and it’s just speculation. Obviously He would have had to have been, probably the Roman legions would have come in saying that He had started a revolution and killed Him and then He would have been risen from the dead…remember He could rise from the dead and start the kingdom. [something else said] Christ had to die, yeah, no question about it. But the point is, just remember this is all through Scripture. Opponents of dispensations always seize on this, they say well, Christ couldn’t have really offered the kingdom because if He really offered the kingdom then it would have shorted out the cross, because theoretically the people could have accepted them and then He would have been the Messiah and He wouldn’t have been crucified and then what would have happened to salvation. But the answer to that is that’s the way God always works in history; He always promises and makes a genuine offer, even though He knows in advance men won’t accept it.
Obviously God, in the Garden of Eden, made
an offer to Adam that Adam could mature and subdue the earth and go into
In Hebrews 9, we’ve passed from the New Covenant to the second topic and that is the tabernacle. You see, in the Old Testament it was the covenant that formed the basis for everything, meaning that God’s Word establishes everything else that follows. This being so, after the question of the covenant is dealt with in chapter 8 what do you suppose is the next thing. Chapter 8 is the Word, the Word of God, that’s the topic of chapter 8. What follows immediately after you deal with the question of the Word of God? Obviously what follows next is worship because it’s through the Word that you learn to worship God. So the topic now of chapter 9 is worship; a very logical sequence, first you have to have the Word, then you have to worship. Please notice this, as against those who would get together in hand-holding groups and say that feeling precedes worship. It’s not that at all, it’s objective, the Word of God that precedes worship.
You don’t have to have a big feeling to
worship God. Christians are just
mimicking the dope head crowd when they go to this feeling business. If you want to have a feeling take some pot
or something, you’ll get good feeling but don’t call it Christian
theology. Now bona fide feelings may
accompany true worship. You can’t sing with all your heart the great hymns of
the faith without having some emotional response; we’re not denying that. All we’re saying is that the Word of God
doesn’t hold up a barrier to you, thou shalt come no further until thou hast
the right feeling. That is not in the
Scripture, you don’t have to worry about that. So if you’re an unemotional
person, don’t get upset because you don’t have the titillating experience of
your neighbor. You don’t have to, that’s
the wonderful thing about Christian; if you’re an unemotional person, so, you
can be a Christian and be unemotional about it. If you’re a person that’s very
emotional about things, well then you’ll probably be a very emotional type
Christian, but the
In Hebrews 9:1, “Then, truly, the first covenant had also ordinances of divine service, and a worldly sanctuary.” He’s dealing with what flows from the covenant. Hebrews 9:1 is transitional so you transition from the topic of covenant, and you see it in italics if you have a King James, “had also the ordinances of divine service,” now here’s where those with Greek can get a little added insight into sharpening up your understanding of the New Testament. What is the Greek text that is translated in the English for ordinance; anybody recognize the vocabulary word? [someone answers] Okay, what does that mean? Righteousness, it’s a noun. So look, we have this strange things, “righteousnesses,” literally “the righteousnesses of service.”
Now I want you to notice something about that, I’m going to pause here until it locks in. The “righteousnesses of service” is referring to the Law and is correctly translated in verse 1 as ordinances. That’s the correct translation, but what do you notice is interesting about this. The concept of an ordinance is used, the same Greek noun, as the word for righteousness. What does that thereby tell you immediately? What was going through the Jewish mind when he thought of righteousness? He was thinking of legal stipulations. To the Jew that was incongruous to divorce righteousness from legal stipulations; he was at heart, at this point in the good sense of the word, he was a legalist, that righteousness has to be a defined righteousness, it’s not some vague ooohhh kind of thing. It is something that can be stated with subject and predicate. It is verbally expressible; it doesn’t mean just verbally expressible but at least verbally expressible.
Righteousness means that God requires something He can tell you to do. Now that’s the great breakthrough that Scripture makes. And you’re not going to find this in basically any system of religion apart from the Bible. Righteousness is elusive apart from verbal revelation. You have this overbearing sense of guilt. This is where the modern man and all his psychology has problems; he has this overbearing guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, what do I do not to be guilty. And you never can tell him what can you do not to be guilty. What have I transgressed that makes me guilty; well, it’s not really anything, it’s just kind of society and you’re just kind of a square peg that bounces around in a round hole, that kind of thing. Now the Bible is altogether different; the Bible says God tells you something, just as though you can sit down with your best friend and say hey, what do you want me to do in our relationship, what pleases you, and that person can tell you back what pleases him or her in the relationship, and that person communicates to you. All right, God does the same thing, He’s a personal God. The God of the Bible tells us, here’s what pleases Me. So when the concept came of righteousnesses, it was that which pleases God and that which pleases God is what says verbally and you can repeat it and memorize it so you make sure you know what it is that God wants you to do. A very important concept, remember that next time you deal with the attributes of God, the word “righteousness” itself means standard. Now do you understand Romans 3:23, why He says “we have come—blank—of the righteousness of God.” He wasn’t [can’t understand words] He was thinking of a yardstick, a measure, we have come short of the standard; we have come short of His standard.
Okay, the “ordinances of divine service,” this particular word means divine service, “and a worldly sanctuary,” now this last part of verse 1 has to be carefully translated; it is ambiguous and the scholars themselves fight about it. The best guess, and that’s what it amounts to, the best guess as to what this last phrase means, to te hagion cosmikon, the holy, and this thing is the problem, now obviously cosmikon comes from cosmos which means an order of some sort and that’s where they’ve tried to, in the King James they figured “the holy” was the substantive, that was the noun, although it was an adjective it was acting as a noun, “the holy place, a worldly.” And that’s where you get the translation that you pick up in the King James, “the holy place,” thinking of the sanctuary, and then describing this, which is an adjective that would describe that, “the worldly sanctuary.” But there’s a problem with that and that is in every other place in this epistle, whenever you have the word for tabernacle or something it’s hagios, which is the plural, the neuter plural, not the neuter singular and when you see this, this sets up a rule of interpretation, that is what the author means to say when he’s talking about the tabernacle, not this, and so since we obviously have a singular here in the Greek, we’ve got to find some other interpretation; this doesn’t really fit too well with the Greek the way it’s translated here.
So what we’d like to do is have something, “the holy cosmikon.” Now, let’s look at cosmikon; cosmikon is only used one other place in the Scripture and there it’s translated worldly. The best guess is that which is orderly or a ritual. So you would have “the holy ritual” and that would fit and make sense with the transition; he’s transition from the ordinances or the covenant that tell you what to do, the ritual would be what it is the covenant tells you to do, and then the tabernacle is the place where the ritual is carried on. So it would fit, without strain, into the context. So we prefer “the holy ritual,” instead of the worldly sanctuary.
Hebrews 9:2, “For there was a tabernacle
made: the first, wherein was the candlestick, and the table, and the showbread;
which is called the sanctuary.” The word
“tent” is used in verse 2 for two parts of the tabernacle; we’re going to show
some slides and you’ll be able to see this but just get acquainted with the
terms so when you see these slides you’ll be able to hook up your names with
what you’re looking at. The tabernacle on the inside, you’ll see this model, a
picture, it had this place, the large place is called the
This incidentally shows you something, doesn’t it, about such a thing as interior decorating, that God, in His interior decorating of the tabernacle, proved that art forms can communicate truth. So don’t knock things that might challenge you to see what is the interior of my house saying to some one who walks in; it may be saying something theologically, guess about it, don’t get too deep.
All right, “bread” and “light,” both that
speak of the work of Christ. Now He
called that the sanctuary or the
Now this place, verse 4, “had the golden
censer, the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the
golden pot that had manna, and Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the
covenant; [5] And over it the cherubim of glory shadowing the mercy seat; of
which we cannot now speak particularly.”
He lists things that are in this small Holy of Holies part. First he lists “the golden censer.” Now this caused no end of discussion because
it looks like it’s in the wrong place.
The golden altar of incense was in the
The word “golden censer” is not used of the golden altar in the New Testament, that word. So this has led some to say well it doesn’t mean the altar of incense, it just means a censer, a place where you burn the incense other than the altar. However, this breaks down because in following Josephus this word clearly is used of the altar of incense. That avenue of escape is cut off, you can’t deny, in other words, that verse is indeed talking about the altar of incense. And it does appear to mislocate it; it does appear that verse 4 is teaching opposite to what the Old Testament teaches. In the Old Testament this altar was here and this verse appears to say it’s here.
The first point we’re making now is we can’t use the cheap solution that this is not talking about the altar of incense as some Christians have done; that is not a secure defense against this verse, against the contradiction argument. We have to admit that the altar of incense is being spoken of. Also, he’s only going through the major items of furniture and it would be highly unusual if he’d talk about a little censer instead of the altar of incense. So number one, we have to agree with the critic that verse 4 is indeed talking about the altar of incense.
Now in the second point, the Old Testament
insists the altar of incense is definitely in the
What is the resolution? Two theories, beside the first one I showed
you, have been erected to explain this problem. The first theory, which I do
not subscribe to, is that the author Hebrews is talking about the temple of
Solomon because in the temple of Solomon the altar of incense was in the Holy
of Holies, 1 Kings 6:22. In Solomon’s
temple the altar of incense had been moved inside. It had been moved from this position over to
this position, so this would be correct if he’s talking about Solomon’s temple.
We now this, not only from 1 Kings
So there’s only one solution left. Turn to Leviticus 16:12, this is the high
priest on the day of atonement. This
passage is very critical because very shortly in Hebrews the author is going to
move exactly right into the day of atonement and what the high priest did on
the day of atonement. So let’s go to
Leviticus 16 and see what the high priest did on the day of atonement. “And he shall take a censer full of burning
coals of fire from off the altar before the LORD, and his hands full of sweet
incense beaten small, and bring it within the veil.” Now “the veil” at the end of verse 12 is this
thing, this thing that divides the
Now, Leviticus 16:15, when he kills the sin offering for the people, he will “bring its blood within the veil, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat.” Now the blood that is being offered here, “he shall do with that as he did with the bullock” and the bullock he used to sprinkle blood on the altar of incense. So there were two places he sprinkled blood, both on the altar of incense and on the mercy seat. So the regulations then, in Leviticus 16, teach that whatever this procedure was that he went through once a year the altar of incense was integrally related to that entry, the enter into the Holy of Holies.
So coming back to Hebrews here’s the way we handle this problem in Hebrews 9:4; it says, “Which had the golden censer,” in verse 4 the Hebrew verb is not “in which,” it’s not a prepositional [can’t understand word] it’s a verb. Notice, for example, in verse 2 you see the word “wherein,” that definitely is locative, it’s a locative type construction that locates something. Notice in verse 4 further on, “the golden pot wherein” it should be, “was manna,” before it, “wherein was the golden pot,” the golden pot is inside the ark, that’s locative, but when he goes to describe the golden censer in verse 4 at the very beginning, it is not a locative construction, it just is the word to have and here we are forced back to uncertainty in the use of terminology. We, at this point, cannot be sure whether he meant, when he said “had,” whether he was talking about the ritual, the ritual of entry into this place, the altar of incense was associated with the entry, in which case, remember he started off in verse 1 talking about the holy ritual, so it could be that the word “had” just means “had to do with,” so the Holy Spirit has to do with the golden censor and the ark of the covenant, his point there not being to locate them but simply to associate them in the ritual procedure.
Now he goes locative at the middle of verse 4, “now inside,” he says, “inside the ark was the golden pot that had manna, also in there was Aaron’s rod that budded, and the tables of the covenant.” What does this show you about the Jewish mind? Let’s stop here and not worry about getting into detail, just back off for a minute, just think a minute, what does this show you about the Jewish mind, the fact that they had this stuff inside the…? They wanted to remember history. Isn’t that neat? Look at the ark; what did they preserve in the ark? How God gave them life; what was that manna, the manna kept them alive for forty years, and what they had done is scoop up some of the manna and they plopped it inside this pot and when they built the ark they put the stuff inside that ark as a historic monument. So the Jewish mind, against the 20th century mind, is not talking about the symbols of something or the ideas of something, it’s talking about the real thing. It’s not talking about Coke. This is talking about historical monuments. This is the trouble, a very good expression, like “the real thing” has been ruined by Madison Avenue. Aaron’s rod that budded, this is another incident that spells out resurrection, and the table of the covenant.
This tells us that he is not talking about
Solomon’s temple, because Solomon’s temple, by the time that it was built, the
ark of the covenant had only one thing in it, or two literally, the two
tables. The ark did not have the pot of
manna and the ark did not have Aaron’s rod by the time Solomon built his
temple: reference, 1 Kings 8:9. By that time these two other objects had been
taken out of the ark. Some scholars
think they were taken out during the captivity of the ark in
We conclude then in verse 5, “the cherubs of glory shadowing the mercy sear; of which we cannot now speak particularly.” That is, we cannot now go into the details. This implies that the man could have, had he wanted, gone in here and talked about all sorts of things, the symbolism involved.
Now we want to clear up one last thing that we always get questions on. What happened to the furniture of the tabernacle? It just disappeared from history; the last we now of it, 586 BC, from that point on nobody knows. I’ll read you a tradition that has come down to us in the apocrypha, it may be reliable but the apocrypha is not the Word of God so we can’t be sure of this passage. 2 Maccabees 2:4-8. “It was also in the writing that the prophet,” this is talking about what happened to the furniture in the tabernacle, “It was also in the writing that the prophet, having received an oracle,” this is talking about Jeremiah, “ordered that the tent and the ark should follow with him and that he, Jeremiah, went out to the mountain where Moses had gone up and had seen the inheritance of God, and Jeremiah came and he found a cave and he brought there the tabernacle and the ark and the altar of incense and he sealed up the entrance to the cave. Some of those who followed him came back to mark the way but they could not find it. And when Jeremiah learned of it he rebuked them and declared, the place shall be unknown until God gathers His people again together and shows his mercy. And then the Lord will disclose these things and the glory of the Lord in the cloud will appear, as they were shown in the case of Moses, and as Solomon asked that the place should be specially consecrated.” (end quote).
So this is a tradition of Jeremiah’s burial of these things; he rescued them just before the disaster of 586 and took them out to a mountain, he sealed them up and he cursed the man who would unseal it and said essentially that place is protected, it’s located in Israel some place and it will not be opened until the Second Advent of Jesus Christ.
There is a hint that the New Testament supports this tradition and that hint is found in a little word in Revelation 2:17. The rabbinic tradition says the man who is going to discover it will be none other than the prophet Elijah that will come back and the Jewish people believe that Elijah will lead the way to the mountain pass and open the cave and out from the cave Elijah will pull these articles of the tabernacle. In Revelation 2:17, “He that has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches: To him that overcomes I will give to eat of the hidden manna…” “the hidden manna,” exactly the phrase used in Jewish tradition for the manna that is hidden. Apparently this would argue that Jeremiah hid the pieces of furniture, Aaron’s rod and the manna were not in the ark in Solomon’s temple but rabbinic tradition says they were in the Holy of Holies by the ark. So this would say that apparently in Revelation we have just a hint, not something to be dogmatic about, that those things are buried.
Now we’ll get the projector on and I’ll show you what some of these things look like. This is a model that was on display at Dallas Seminary a while ago and hopefully we’re having a model about here. This is an overall view of the tabernacle, the enclosure. The tabernacle proper is the tent shaped thing and the wood, you’re looking head on; the worshipper would enter through these gates and he’d go here, this place is the brazen altar where the sacrifices were made and from there he’d walk in. This is a side view of it with part of the roof off. The tabernacle was made of various colors, keep watch how many colors they use. Here’s a good shot of the location, notice there were two things, here’s the altar where the sacrifice, and there’s the water for the washing, picturing salvation first and then confession of sin, and then you enter the place of worship. This is the blue roof with the red imposed over it; the goat skin above that. This is the one below it, these slides somehow got mixed up, this is the multicolored roof.
Notice the four colors that are used. These colors are used again and again; white,
red, blue and there’s purple in there located on the roof side. These all are theological colors; the white
is righteousness, the blue means from heaven or heaven is the source. Red is the color of atonement and purple is
the color of royalty. The flag of
Here are the two veils, this is the first
one, the
The altar of incense, this is the article of furniture we’ve been discussing, was it inside the Holy of Holies or outside. Notice the incense rising; the incense speaks of what. Prayers. Now you remember this picture because when we conclude I’m going to take you to one more passage of the Word of God. Now you just look where that smoke is going and remember where is the mercy seat in this picture? The mercy seat is behind that second veil. All right, the mercy seat is behind that second veil, the incense does not come before God’s throne, just keep that in mind. A visualization of what the Shekinah glory must have looked like, it was some sort of a glow that existed between the two cherubs. This is the mercy seat. Now later on, you keep this picture in mind too, the author is going to draw the work of Christ from here; this is the ark in which the covenant, Aaron’s rod, and the manna was kept. This was wood covered with gold. How does that speak of Jesus Christ? His deity and His humanity and on top of this is this sea of gold flat glass like surface of gold and that is where the blood was sprinkled and the cherubs, the guy kind of copped here because he covered them so you can’t see what they looked like, but nobody can so he’s safe, they’re looking down at this place. The Bible tells us when they were designed they were looking down toward this place where the blood was spattered. Now you can imagine over the years, each year the priest going in there and splattering blood, what a mess that thing was after some centuries. But the thing was just covered with caked blood; it was never apparently washed off. And those cherubs kept looking down, looking for fresh blood spilt there because that’s a picture of God’s righteousness looking down for shed blood. Now the epistle from Hebrews 9 onward now is going to talk about shed blood, she blood, shed blood, mercy seat, mercy seat, mercy seat, that’s the picture.
This is what the high priest supposedly wore, again some of it is artist’s conception, some of it is pretty definite. The stones on his chest, for example, each one representing the 12 tribes; the fact that he has 12 on him means that the memory, because remember, whose work does this man picture? It’s pictures Jesus Christ’s work. All right, on his heart are the people he makes intercession for, and it graphically shown in his clothing that these, the rocks symbolizing these tribes were close to his heart. The names of the tribes are on each one. These were pomegranates and bells that were for his garments.
Turn to Revelation 8:3, we have one more passage. This helps you understand the book of Revelation, to know these Old Testament symbolisms. “And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.” Okay, the throne in heaven answers to… here’s a top view of what you just saw, that ark with the two cherubs on it. That’s the throne of God. Now this passage clearly indicates that the altar of incense is before the throne. In other words, what has happened to the veil that separated them? It’s removed. And since Jesus Christ died that veil has gone away and you’re going to see that. The veil is in shreds, there is no more separation between the Holy of Holies and the Holy Place, and now the incense of the prayers of the saints come directly to the throne of God; it’s not excluded by the veil, God smells the prayers of the saints directly; no separation.
Next week we’ll deal further with chapter 9.