Ex. 25-26
The portable Temple –this thing was no small feat! For leaving Egypt “in a hurry”, they sure took a bunch of stuff with them!! Just the stuff that went into the Temple is A LOT, and of no insignificant weight. And let’s not even talk about the tools and equipment needed to use all this stuff to fabricate all the temple parts. It is just so hard for me to fathom several hundred thousand people roaming through the wilderness as a group with all this stuff!!! I guess these nomadic ways were far more common in that day. Perhaps we are all far too ‘settled’ these days in a land where we don’t really belong.
Anyway, a couple other things I find interesting about the Temple other than what a massive project it was for a group of people wandering out in the middle of nowhere…First, it is interesting to note that the articles placed in the Temple are not random things – they all represent Jesus in some way or another. In this passage we have the table with the “bread of the Presence” – Jesus is the bread of life. And we have the golden lampstand – Jesus is the light of the world.
And something I had not really paid attention to before that intrigued me for some reason this morning is that God told Moses He would meet with him and speak to him from the Mercy Seat on the Ark of the Covenant. Obviously, God had been speaking to Moses from all over the place prior to the construction of the Temple. But once built, God speaks from the Mercy Seat – a very specific location that seems to hold a great deal of significance.
Mark 1:1-22
I did some thinking on this whole idea of “baptism” several months ago. I get that it is symbolic of our death to our old lives and birth into our new lives in Christ…buy why? And what’s the deal about baptizing with water vs. baptizing with the Holy Spirit?
So here’s the thing – God established passing through the waters as a symbol of our salvation, as we pass from death to life. This started with Noah and the flood. Noah and his family passed safely through the flood waters to have their lives saved. We see it again with the Israelites, twice, in fact. They passed through the Red Sea to escape the Egyptian army and slavery, and they passed through the waters of the Jordan River to enter into God’s Promised Land. Even Jonah ‘passed through the waters’ in the belly of that big fish. So when we are baptized, we are passing through the waters from death to life. But water, of course, cannot save us. Hence, the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to save us; to bring us from death to life; to reconcile and reunite us with God. The Holy Spirit is the ‘waters’ through which He does that.
It is also interesting to me to note that immediately after Jesus was baptized with water, he went into the wilderness for 40 days – the same amount of time that God sent rain on the earth when Noah was in the ark (though he was actually in the ark way longer than 40 days).