“Heaven” on Earth
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the October 12, 2013
Sabbath School Lesson
“They serve at a sanctuary that is a
copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was
about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to
the pattern shown you on the mountain.” Hebrews 8:5, NIV
Joseph, a
faithful servant of God, had been sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt.
What they had intended for evil, God intended for good.[i]
Joseph was eventually the means of saving his entire family from a prolonged
famine. His father, Jacob, and all who were with him, eventually moved to Egypt,
and they settled there as honored guests. They enjoyed Joseph’s protection as a
favored official who ruled over the nation on Pharaoh’s behalf. However, over the
following 430 years,[ii] their
situation deteriorated until they found themselves in abject slavery. During
that time, not only had their status changed, but their relationship to God had
also devolved.
Surrounded
by idolatry and witnessing the apparent prosperity of the idolaters compared to
their own sorry lot may have caused many to question the efficacy of their
inherited faith. Nonetheless, the Bible witnesses to the faithfulness of a few.
Most notably, the family of Moses still sought to follow God’s leading and to understand
His will. This was apparently a powerful witness that Moses never forgot as he
chose to identify with the oppressed Israelites rather than with the Egyptians,
even though he had been raised in Pharaoh’s household.[iii]
This Moses, God chose to call at the burning bush[iv]
to free the Israelites and fan the barely burning ember of their faith back to
a flame. Later, God also provided through Moses two tablets of laws and a
sanctuary sacrificial system as teaching aids to help them grow in
understanding their responsibilities to God and to one another. Unfortunately,
they and we have failed to grasp the lessons, tending instead to bind heaven
and God to human perspectives rather than informing our humanity from God’s
perspective.
Perhaps this
is what is happening with the writer of Hebrews.[v]
Familiar with the wilderness tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple and its
services, he proposes that this is what is in heaven. In spite of the fact that
God told Moses that He was showing the leader of the Exodus a pattern to be
copied[vi]
and never said that what he was showing him existed in heaven, the author of
Hebrews interprets the event in that manner.[vii]
By doing so he imposes on heaven, the entire sacrificial system of the
sanctuary. From such a perspective, heaven must be a very bloody place indeed.
Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of animals bled out their lives in the
sanctuary as repetitive symbols of the death caused by sin. While these may
have been symbolically pointing to an eventual death upon a rough, wooden cross
outside of Jerusalem, one cannot help but wonder why so many thousands of innocent
animals had to die over hundreds of years to make the point? Some may find the
picture that accompanies this article repugnant, but imagine that same image
hundreds of times a day.
Perhaps this
was the purpose, to make sin offensive in the eyes of the people. If so, it
failed miserably as the Israelites became so sinful that they did what none of
the nations around them had done.[viii]
Instead of learning such a lesson, they turned from it and found the gods of
the nations around them more accommodating to their desires. Yet, they were not
less bloody in doing so as they replaced the bloody sacrifices of animals in
the sanctuary with the sacrifice of their own children, burning them in the
fires of the idols.[ix]
This was how poor the spiritual understanding of the Israelites was. Not until
the Babylonian captivity was the desire for idols extinguished among the
faithful. Even then, only a remnant chose to reject the idols of Babylon and
return to Israel,[x]
but they were more faithful than those who had come out of Egypt. As a result
their bodies did not litter the road back to Israel as their ancestors’ had.
Apart from
any symbolic significance of the sanctuary service to the apostate Hebrews, is
it part of a larger picture that we are somehow missing because we want to
impose our perspective on heaven rather than the other way around? In order to
find out, we may need to abandon the perspective of the immature faith of these
struggling Israelites and see if we can discover a more mature understanding to
inform our perspective. Perhaps we can set aside other “childish” perspectives as
well in order to do so.[xi]
If we look
at the Bible, all sixty-six books, as a whole, we can perhaps discern a
continuous timeline from Eden lost to Eden restored. The first Eden was created
in the beginning. It is where God walked in the garden with mankind and
conversed face to face with us. Eden is restored in the final chapters of
Revelation. Once again God will be present with us in that Eden.[xii]
Between the two Edens is a long tale of woe. Like some Dickensian novel, all seems
darkness and misery with only random flashes of light until the denouement. It
seems somewhat mindboggling then that anyone would want to take the form of
worship, with all its blood and burning of animal flesh, used during the
darkest period and use that as a model for heaven.
If we look
at the Bible record we can see a progression of worship forms as we move from a
lost paradise to a restored one. As I have already shared, we initially walked
together with God in the garden and spoke with him face to face.[xiii]
Even after Eden this may have continued for generations.[xiv]
After the flood, we begin to see a transition to a form of worship involving
offering sacrifice to God on the high places of the earth. When the Ark came to
rest on the Mountains of Ararat and everyone exited the ship, Noah offered
sacrifice on that high place.[xv]
Perhaps another example that illustrates the association in peoples’ minds and
the idea of heaven being accessible from a higher place can be seen in the story
of the construction of the Tower of Babel.[xvi]
We should
note that Noah’s offering of sacrifice on the Mountains of Ararat, although
pleasing to God per the text, was not ordered by God but rather was a
spontaneous response by Noah. Perhaps this was conditioned by an ongoing
tradition of sacrifices from the time of Abel. In any event, Noah’s is the
first example of sacrifice being offered in a “high place.” As worship transitioned
to the wilderness tabernacle and then to the temple in Jerusalem, many people
had difficulty transitioning from one form of worship to the other.[xvii]
Perhaps they questioned why anyone could once build an altar under the panoply
of heaven and worship God directly, but now God is hidden away in a building
and only certain individuals can approach Him?
Changing
worship styles can cause contention, as we have seen even in our day with
churches splitting over things like music or order of worship. Perhaps we need
to avoid becoming too heavily invested in a limited perspective regarding how
we approach God in worship. Those who did so with the temple were extremely
offended at some of Jesus’ remarks regarding the temple. They could only
understand His words from the limited, set-in-concrete perspective they had.[xviii]
Jesus’ words to the woman at the well would seem to indicate that He was
announcing a transition in worship to come that would supersede both worship in
the high places and the worship in the temple as well.[xix]
Just as with
the high places, though, we are having trouble making the transition. We
continue to associate the presence of God with buildings. The Jews have done it
with their synagogues. We have continued the form with our churches. We even go
so far as to call our churches or at least a portion of them “sanctuaries.”
This harks back to when mankind first started worshipping God in a structure during
the Exodus.
Our desire
to continue making this the model of our worship overlooks the tearing of the
temple curtain in two at the death of Christ.[xx]
Should we view this as symbolic of the partition between God and His people
being removed? Has Christ’s death restored the relationship with God that
existed once before when He communicated directly with each of us? That seems
to be a message repeated not once but three times in the Bible.[xxi]
But what implication does that have for our understanding regarding the
sanctuary and heaven? Perhaps we will discover more as we progress with our
study in future commentaries.
