The Bible Is Just So Amazing...

This week in Community Bible Study, we were in Revelation 4...  I know I've said this before, but WOW...  Revelation is so incredible!!  In Revelation 4, John takes us into the throne room of heaven, it is an amazing vision!!

Several years ago, our pastor talked about some different worship scenes in Scripture and how he would read them at the start of his quiet time to prepare his heart to meet with God.  I decided to do that with Revelation 4 and I will never forget the first time I read it and really tried to imagine it...  For some reason, it made me so uncomfortable...  The thought of such abandoned worship was really hard for me to grasp (I'm not a hand-raiser, although God is working on that!)...  But I decided to read it for 30 days...  And Revelation 4 became one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture...

But I had never studied it depth until this past week... The imagery...the symbolization was stunning...  How God ties to the Old Testament with the New Testament, just takes my breath away.

There are so many different opinions about what the descriptions in the throne room mean, but I believe that Scripture interprets Scripture and since Hebrews 8:5 says that the earthly tabernacle was a shadow or copy of heaven, it made sense to me to look back at the tabernacle and its meaning to understand the throne room scene.

I learned so much, but there was one treasure that still just makes me shake my head in wonder...

In John's vision, he describes a sea of glass, as clear as crystal before the throne.  In the tabernacle, the bronze laver (a big round basin) was sometimes referred to as the sea.  And when King Solomon built the temple, he built a replica of the bronze laver and in 2 Chronicles 4:2, it was referred to as the sea.

So here's what blew me away...  The bronze laver was used to cleanse the Priests before they could go into the tabernacle to serve God.  When the Levites first became priests, they had to go through a consecration process, a ceremonial cleansing.  Their entire body had to be washed in the bronze laver, but they couldn't do it for themselves, someone else had to do it for them.  Then they were dressed in their priestly garments.  From that point on, they never had to wash their full body again, only their hands and feet and they could do it for themselves because the full cleansing was complete.

That is such a picture of Jesus!!  In John 13: 8, Jesus said to Peter, "Unless I wash you, you can have no part of Me."  We cannot enter the presence of God, or be in relationship with Jesus, unless we have been washed in the blood of Jesus...  He has to do it for us...  Then, Romans 13:14 tells us to clothe ourselves in Christ.  Jesus is our High Priest and so we are to clothe ourselves in the garments of the priest.  And then, Jesus tells Peter in John 13:10, "A person who has had a bath needs only to wash his feet; his whole body is clean."  Once we have been cleansed by Christ, we simply have to wash ourselves daily from the remnants of our daily sins...

The bronze laver is a picture of the saving and sanctification process that happens in Christ.  In heaven, it is a sea of glass, clear as crystal because in heaven, we are made into the image of Christ...  There's no more sin to dirty the waters of the 'sea,' Jesus has defeated sin and death, once and for all and when He returns, it will NEVER corrupt creation again!

But here's the thing, what John sees in heaven is a present reality!  It's a done deal...  We have a freedom from sin that I think we really don't grasp.  Will we experience the fullness of that on earth?  No, but we can learn to grab hold of it, more and more... 

I don't know about you, but I have far too many sins that I still struggle with...  I commit them, they break my heart, I confess them, decide to do better next time, and then I fall on my face again.  But what if I really learned to live in the reality of my salvation...  What if I really got that sin only has the power over me that I give it...  Maybe I would experience just a little more victory in my life... 

I am so thankful for God's amazing Word that teaches me about the reality of being a child of God...