SACRED TIMES AND SACRED SPACES

By Rick Lange
http://bibleprophecybyricklange.blogspot.com/
Posted with authors permission

“Let them construct a sanctuary for Me, that I may dell among them. According to all that I am going to show you, as the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of all its furniture, just so you shall construct it.” Exodus 25:8, 9

When it comes to sacred spaces, the first one we come to in the Bible is the Sanctuary that God instructed Moses to build. God wanted to dwell among His people and to be their God. He could not dwell in their hearts at that time because the atoning sacrifice of Christ had not yet been made and the blood of animals was not adequate to draw us into the immediate presence of God.

So the sanctuary of Moses, followed by the temple of Solomon, the tabernacle of David and the second tabernacle that was reconstructed after the Babylonian exile; these became the focus of God’s purpose and His presence in their midst. The children of Israel, no matter where they were, always faced Jerusalem and the temple when they prayed. That is where God dwelt and so their prayers were pointed in that direction. As an example we see Daniel praying facing Jerusalem from his Babylonian exile.

Now, as for sacred times, we have first of all the Sabbath day. It was in fact established as a part of creation and existed before the Law. God blessed the day and hallowed it and He rested from His work on that day. The first thing God did was to enter Adam and Eve into that rest. And since they were created as the last item on the 6th day, God entered them into rest before they had done any work.

By this God was indicating from the very beginning that it is not by works that we please Him, but by being temples of His Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that bears the fruit of God in our lives and Adam and Eve were created to be containers of God’s presence.

When Adam and Eve sinned and chose the word of the enemy over the word of God, there was a sudden spiritual death as the glory of God departed from them and in that very moment they lost their Sabbath rest as God pronounced a judgment upon them saying:

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground because from it you were taken; for you are dust and to dust you will return.” Gen. 3:19

So humanity lost the rest that God had provided for them and we don’t hear about the Sabbath again until Mount Sinai where God reminded them of that rest by establishing a holy Sabbath day of rest.

Now, Hebrews chapter 4 says: “For if Joshua had given them rest He would not have spoken of another day after that. There remains therefore a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works as God did from His.” Hebrews 4:8-10

In other words the Sabbath of the Law points back to a time before the fall when Adam and Eve had complete rest because they were temples of the Holy Spirit and it points forward to the Rest that would be restored in Christ when we rest from our own works and trust in His work in us.

But God gave Moses many other holy times as well. He established 7 feasts by which He would outline the complete plan of salvation. The spring feasts would be fulfilled by Jesus Christ at His first coming and the Fall Feasts would just as accurately be fulfilled by Christ at His second coming.

God gave Israel exacting details on how to observe each feast because they served as physical patterns of spiritual events. All of them, including the animal sacrifices, pointed forward to Jesus as the true Lamb of God that would take away the sins of the world and reconcile us to God.

Some say that the Law and all of these sacrifices, Sabbaths and Feast days were done away at the cross, but that is not really true. Think about it: Everything God does is eternal and He in turn is trying to teach us how to enter into eternal things. But there are two kinds of people who miss the point: 1. those who try to observe all of these Old Testament types and shadows and 2. Those who say they were done away and no longer valid.

“So” you may ask, “How is Rick going to get himself out of this mess? Well here is what I believe to be the truth of the matter. Even though everything that God does and every Law and Sabbath and feast day is eternal, yet they go through a metamorphosis under the New Covenant. All of those Sabbaths, Feast days and sacrifices pointed forward to the work of Christ on our behalf.

Instead of the tabernacle of Moses, we have become the temples. Paul exclaims in 1 Cor. 3:16: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

That Shekinah glory that once dwelt in the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle now resides in our born again spirit. And the reason why God had to have Moses build a tabernacle in the first place is that from Adam and Even on, man’s spirit was dead and there was literally no Most Holy Place within them for the Holy Spirit it dwell.

Jesus came here to bring back what Adam and Eve had lost and that is why He is called the last Adam. This then is the reason for the New Birth and it is the reason for Pentecost, for the disciples were born again when they believed in Jesus and received Him as their Savior and Lord, and then on the day of Pentecost, Jesus poured out His Spirit upon them, thus empowering them to do the works of Christ.

Today there is a falling away in some parts of Christianity that no longer believe in the New Birth and there are many who do not believe in or receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and Fire that Jesus paid such a great price to bring to us. John the Baptist said it like this:

As for me, I baptize you in water for repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I and I am not even fit to remove His sandals; He Himself will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” Mt. 3:11. This prophecy Jesus fulfilled on eth day of Pentecost.

Let me say this: You cannot do away with the Old Testament types and shadows, laws, feast days and Sabbaths unless you have received all that they pointed forward to. Through the New Birth and the infilling and baptism of the Holy Spirit we have become living temples in which the fire of God dwells and He is refining and purifying us by His work and not ours. It was Jesus who cleansed the sanctuary when He came on the scene and it is He who cleanses our sanctuary when we invite Him in.

This is why I harp on Romans 8 so much. Some Christians like to stay in Romans 7 saying “Woe is me. Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” But the solution is in Romans 8. Here Paul tells us that the Law (Everything in the Old Testament) is fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit and he goes on to say that: “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. However you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you, But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.”

Tell me something. As Christians, should not our first priority be to make sure that we are both filled with the Holy Spirit and Baptized in the Holy Spirit as on the day of Pentecost? And if we say that Pentecost is over with, then how are we to bring in the last great harvest? Pentecost will come again when the church makes Him a priority in their lives.

If we understand in the grand scheme of things that Adam and Eve lost the Spirit of God and that Jesus came here to restore both the Spirit of God and our capacity to hold that Spirit within us, should we then not comprehend the magnitude of this outpouring as central to scripture?

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “Truly, truly I say to you unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” and later He said, “Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again.” This is not some side issue of the Christian faith… why? If we are not first born again, we have no new spirit for the Holy Spirit to dwell in. God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth and for Him to dwell in us He must first create a new spirit within us for Him to dwell in. We must become new creatures in Christ.

Jesus said: “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water. But this He spoke of the Spirit whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. John 7:38, 39

There are some who believe that the Old Testament saints were spirit filled as well. This is not true and Jesus said so at least twice. Both here in John 7 and in John 14 where He said to His disciples: “And I will ask the father and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it does not behold Him or know Him, but you know because He ABIDES with YOU and WILL BE IN YOU. John 14:16, 17.Before the cross of Christ, the Holy Spirit would come upon people to anoint them to be prophets or kings, but He could not dwell inside them until Christ brought the New Birth

Now, here is the crux of the matter when it comes to sacred times and sacred spaces. If a Christian thinks of the Holy Spirit as being Someone outside of us… a name to be invoked in prayer and baptism, but not as a living and breathing part of our very being, then they will think of the church building as a sacred space where they go to meet God and the Sabbath as a sacred time in which to meet Him. They may go to church, pay their dues, encounter God there on this specific place and time, but then they may go out and live largely secular lives when not at this sacred time and place.

But if you are born again and filled and baptized with the Holy Spirit and you live with the consciousness that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, then for you there is no such thing as a secular life. For you all time has become sacred and all space is holy because the Holy Spirit is in you wherever you go.

In this understanding then we don’t go to church to meet God per se. We bring God to church with us and we meet with other believers that bring God with them and the dynamic becomes an explosion of His multiplied presence as the Holy Spirit gives expression and life to our combined worship.

In truth much of the church today doesn’t know what kind of dynamite we are handling. In the early church the glory of God was so powerful that when Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit, they fell over dead .They didn’t know what kind of dynamite they were dealing with and a great fear fell upon the early church. They learned rather quickly that if they wanted to operate in the power, of the Holy Spirit, they could not be sinning at the same time.

Well, the Holy Spirit desires to pour out the latter rain upon His people today, but He is held back because His church has become lax and incapable of handling His holy fire. If He really poured it out, chances are many of us would fall over dead as well. We have not prepared ourselves to enter into His presence.

We must now seek the Holy Spirit with all of our hearts… make Him a priority again… understand that we cannot truly worship Yeshua except by His Spirit…allow Him once again to be the river of living water that flows from our innermost beings…allow Him to purify our lives… fast and pray… Ask Him to manifest His gifts in and through us…repent of our sins and turn back to God with the same fervor with which the early church worshipped God as their first love. We really need to cleanse ourselves of every sense of being secular. We have been called out of the world system. We have been called out to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

We, through Christ, have become the sacred spaces and God has fixed a certain day saying “Today.” Today if you hear His voice do not harden your hearts. Heb. 4:7 The sacred times and spaces of the Old Covenant have not been done away for they are eternal, but just as surely, they have been changed into living reality by Jesus Christ and they are being fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

Think about this in closing: Just as Yahweh brought the children of Israel out of Egypt to give them the Law; so Jesus brought us out of the world to give us Pentecost. And just as the Law was the very life blood of Israel, so the Holy Spirit must be the very life blood of the church. Pentecost is not a side issue; it is the very heart and soul of what Jesus brought to us by His death and resurrection.

“He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. And He gave some as apostles and some as prophets and some as evangelists and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.” Eph. 4:10-13