Building on the Foundation

  This is Part 7, the final part of this series on the tabernacle. That doesn’t mean we’ve learned all there is to know about it, mind you; there’s always much more to learn from God’s Word! We frail humans could never plumb the full depth of God’s mind and His Word, not in ten thousand lifetimes! But this wraps up our current study of the tabernacle in relation to the Holy Days, the days of Creation, and the ten commandments. Last time , we saw that, on the Day of Atonement, Jesus Christ returns to the earth with His 144,000 saints, slays the Beast and his armies, and casts Satan into the bottomless pit. He will return from the heavens, the Holy of Holies, and stand on the Mount of Olives where He was crucified. Under the Old Covenant, this was foreshadowed each year when, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest returned from the Holy of Holies to the altar of burnt offering and sprinkled it with blood. Jesus Christ’s thousand-year reign, then, also begins on this same day, the D...

  As we saw last time , Jesus Christ created the Sabbath and Holy Days at Creation, the same Sabbath and Holy Days that He later listed in Lev. 23. Then, about 4,000 years later, He came to earth as a Man, died for our sins, and, as Heb. 9:15 says, became “the Mediator of the new covenant.” Obviously, there are differences between the Old Covenant and the New, or else there would be no such thing as a new covenant. Yet God still requires us to obey His laws, and those who defiantly refuse, He will destroy in the lake of fire. This will include many self-proclaimed Christians, who do many “wonderful works” in Christ’s name, but “practice lawlessness” and refuse to obey His laws (Mat. 7:22-23). So what laws are we bound to obey under the New Covenant? Does our heavenly Father still want us to keep the seventh day Sabbath and the Holy Days that He and His Son established at Creation? Let’s see what the Author of the New Covenant did and taught while He was on this earth! What Did Jesu...

  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Thus the physical creation, everything we see around us, sprang into being. The great clock of the universe began ticking. God set the gears of His plan in motion. The Gospel of John echoes Genesis: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3). When Genesis tells us that God created all things in the beginning, that means God the Father created everything through His Son Jesus Christ. When God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26), that means God the Father worked through His Son Jesus Christ to make mankind. When, “on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done” (Gen. 2:2) and “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen. 2:3), that means that God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ, blesse...

  Hebrews 9:11-12 proclaims, “But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.” Jesus Christ is the High Priest of the heavenly sanctuary. God commissioned the earthly tabernacle built by Moses to be a model of this heavenly reality and of His plan for mankind. God’s goal is to bring His children out of the east (sin) and into His presence (the Holy of Holies), as we’ve seen throughout this tabernacle series so far. In Part 4 and Part 5 , we saw the culmination of this plan for the firstfruits. Those in the First Resurrection, accompanied by Jesus Christ, will enter the heavens on the Day of Trumpets and stand before God’s throne in the Holy of Holies. This isn’t the culmination of God’s whole plan, though. In fact, it’s just getting ...