What if you were invited to dine with a king or president?

Imagine how you would feel if tomorrow, you received a very fancy envelope in the mail. Inside the envelope is an invitation. You are invited to have lunch with the king of England or the President of the United States.  (If you don’t like the current one, choose someone else.) You would arrive at Buckingham Palace. You would be led to a special dining room. The king would enter, greet you, and chat while you both ate.  That would be an amazing opportunity.

I would feel very surprised, excited, and a little scared to be invited to such an occasion. After all, who am I to dine with the king or president? I don’t actually need to worry about this. I have no political power. No one is likely to invite me to even meet, let alone dine with, a key government official. I’ve never even been invited to dine with a CEO of a big company.

God Sent You a Much Grander Invitation

God has a very different perspective. He invites us to come to him.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews has an amazing exhortation to come into God’s presence.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he inaugurated for us through the curtain, that is, his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God,

let us draw near with a true heart in assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

     I first heard about this exhortation in a song by Paul Clark:

(Heb 10:19-22)

“Let us come into his presence.

His blood shed for you is the evidence

That he wants us to come and have fellowship and be free.”

The God who created the universe, from quasars to quarks wants us to come to him, into his very presence. On our own, we can’t do that.  Leviticus stresses the importance of being ritually clean to approach God. Romans 1-3 stresses that we have all sinned and have no right to salvation or to know God. I know myself. I’m certainly not qualified to come to God on my own. I know what my life has been like, how many times I have failed to be faithful to God.

God himself has dealt with our sins through Jesus. We can enter the holy place, the first chamber of the tabernacle, through the blood of Jesus. His death enables us to be forgiven. Jesus’ blood sprinkles our hearts clean from an evil conscience.

Entering the Tabernacle

You probably know that Solomon built a temple for God in Jerusalem. Hebrews, however, seems to focus on the original tabernacle. The tabernacle, as described in Exodus, had two parts: a holy place and the most holy place or holy of holies. The two were separated by a curtain.

Only the high priest, and this once a year, was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies. He did it carrying blood. That blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat, part of he Ark of the Covenant. If the high priest wasn’t ritually clean, he could die in the Holy of Holies. According to tradition, the high priest had a rope tied around his leg. If he died inside the Holy of Holies, priests could pull his body out. They were never allowed in this part of the tabernacle. Sprinkling blood on the mercy seat enabled the high priest and all the people to be forgiven. However, this did not enable all the people to enter the most holy place.

Jesus as the Way into the Holy of Holies

Hebrews declares that Jesus’ very body is the curtain between the two parts of the tabernacle. We can enter the very presence of God, the Most Holy Place, through Jesus’ body. This is a metaphor, of course, but it emphasizes that Jesus’ death makes us clean from our sins before God. 1 John 1:9 tells us that

if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Read Hebrews 9-10 to get a fuller picture of this.

I don’t generally use a big theological term. Here is one. 1 John 2:2 declares that Jesus is our propitiation for sin. A propitiation is a sacrifice that turns away divine wrath. Many don’t like this term because they don’t see God as expressing wrath. Yet, you cannot read the book of Revelation properly if you don’t accept the idea that God is pouring out judgment. It comes upon those who rebel against him. The Lord is not inviting those who killed Christians over for milk and cookies. He is destroying them and casting them into the Lake of fire.

Jesus Took Our Place

If we take seriously that Jesus died for us, in our place on the cross, carrying our sins, and becoming a curse for us, it is not hard to see that Jesus paid the price of our divine judgment in his own body. Contrary to some, Jesus died in our place, as our substitute. If we reject that, we don’t understand what the cross was for.

Jesus’substitutionary death, facing death in our place as the punishment for our sins, is not the only thing that Jesus’ death is about. Ephesians 1:7 says that Jesus redeemed us. In Jesus’ day, a slave could redeem himself or herself by paying money to be released from slavery.  Jesus’ death ransomed us, which rescued us from the ultimate power of sin and death. Jesus’ death dealt with the sin that separates us from God, and reconciles us to God. We are no longer God’s enemies.

I don’t normally delve into these issues, but recently, one of my recent favorite authors, John Mark Comer, denied Jesus’ death as penal substitution. Yet, Jesus died in our place as our substitute. According to 1 Cor 6:20, “you were bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God with your body.” Jesus’ life was the price. Jesus paid the price for us.

Romans 5:7-8 says that, “Only rarely would one die for a righteous man. Perhaps for a good man one would dare to die, but God demonstrated his love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died on our behalf.” This means he took our place and died because of our sins.

Why We can Now Enter the Most Holy Place

This is all to explain the idea that we can now enter through the curtain of Jesus’ body into the Most Holy Place. This is what it meant that when Jesus died, the curtain of the temple that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place was torn in two, from top to bottom.

My wife has a degree in fashion design. She told me that you can tell by looking at a piece of fabric which direction it was torn. God tore the curtain from the top to the bottom. At the moment Jesus died, “the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split” (Matt. 27:51 NASB).

God made a way for sinners to enter his most holy presence without us being disintegrated. He not only made this possible, but calls us to come and draw near. James promises that, ”If you draw near to God, he will draw near to you.” For anyone who, like me for much of my Christian life, sees God as frowning at you and puts up with you, though he doesn’t really like it, hear this: God chooses to draw near to us when we draw near to him. He won’t force us to come, but he welcomes us when we come. God wants you to draw near to him, to come into his very presence. How awesome is that?!

Other passages support this idea. Hosea 6:3 states, “So let us know, let us press on to know Yahweh. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and he will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth” (Hos. 6:3). What should we do when we do this?  “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps 46:10 NIV).

This is truly an amazing invitation. God does not need us. He created us for himself. Revelation 4:11 declares that, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things and by your will they were created.” God chose to make us. He wants us to come. I’d be a fool to say, “no.”

Accept God’s Invitation!

Since we can come to God directly, the author of Hebrews exhorts us to “come boldly therefore with confidence to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace and find help in the time of need” (Heb 4:13).

In John 14, Jesus promised the disciples that he would one day come back and take them to be with him. Yet, we are invited to be in God’s very presence even now.

It’s easy to busy ourselves doing things for God, and that’s useful. I’m convinced that what God wants most is not our deeds, but us, in his very presence. Let’s not ignore this most wonderful of all invitations to come.

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