In Hebrews, in the 9th chapter, and a
little over in the 10th, now you will
remember that there was a tabernacle made in
the Old Testament times.
The first wherein was a candlestick and a
table and a showbread, and that tabernacle was
called the sanctuary, that section.
Then after the second veil, the tabernacle which
is called the holiest of all.
Sometimes that's called the holy of holies, sometimes
people call it the sanctum, or sanctum sanctorum,
the holiest of all.
Now, over the, now when these things were
thus ordained, the priests went always into the
first tabernacle, busy in the service of God,
but into the second, that is, clear in,
went the high priest alone once every year,
not without blood, which he offered for himself
and for the heirs of the people.
The Holy Ghost this signified that the way
into the holiest of all was not made
yet manifest, while the first tabernacle was yet
standing.
Verse 11, But Christ, being come in high
priest of good things to come, by a
greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with
hands, that is to say, not of this
building, neither by the blood of goats and
calves, but by his own blood he entered
in once into the holy place, having obtained
eternal redemption for us.
And over in the 10th chapter, a little
exhortation there based upon all this teaching, verse
19 and on, Having therefore, brethren, boldness to
enter into the holiest by the blood of
Jesus, by a new and living way which
he hath consecrated for us, through the veil,
that is to say, his flesh.
And having an high priest over the house
of God, let us, let us draw near
with a true heart and full assurance of
faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil
conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
Now, you have in your mind, no doubt,
the Old Testament tabernacle, with its outer court,
with its holy place, and with its holy
of holies.
Now, priests could come to the outer court
and they could come to the holy place,
but inside the holiest of all, the holy
of holies, they could not come.
Only one man could enter that holy of
holies, and that was only once a year.
And then he came with the blood of
bulls and goats, which he sprinkled upon the
mercy seat where the fire burned.
For now we are taught that by the
death of Jesus, the rending of his flesh,
which was the tearing of that veil that
separated from the holy of holies, now anybody,
all of God's people, can come in.
Now, what I most particularly want to emphasize
is this holy of holies.
You see, there was a golden chest, a
sort of cedar chest affair, and it was
plated outside and inside with pure gold.
And then there was a lid on that
chest, also made of pure gold.
And then there was a collar around that
lid, with the four corners sticking up a
little to give it artistic beauty.
Then on that lid there were two figures
made of pure gold of the cherubim, holy
creatures.
And they stretched their wings and their wingtips
touched.
And then between the wingtips there burned and
glowed an awesome, awful, holy fire, which the
ages have called the Shekinah, meaning the presence
or the face.
And that was God.
That's why the careless crowd couldn't see it,
couldn't come in.
That's why the average rank and file of
the clergy couldn't come in, only the high
priest could go in there and with a
verted face look on that awesome presence.
Once a year, while he held in his
hand a basin of blood, saying, O presence,
I ought to die.
O Shekinah, O God, I ought to die,
but I bring this blood as an evidence
that I ought to die, and that another
has died for me.
Now it's this holy presence that we want
particularly to talk about, and why so many
Christians are shut away from it.
I read recently and carefully checked again, though
I've preached this truth lots of places, I
carefully checked again to know that the words
in the Old Testament, the word that is
translated presence and face is the same word.
The face of God in thy presence is
fulness of joy, he said.
And you'll find all through the Psalms the
worshiping man of God celebrating his entrance into
the presence, and his looking forward to the
presence of God, and he talked about the
face of God.
That passage, for instance, when thou saidest, seek
ye my face, my heart said unto thee,
thy face, Lord, will I seek.
Now that same word is presence.
In thy presence is fulness of joy, thy
presence, Lord, will I seek.
When thou saidest unto me, seek ye my
face, my heart responded, thy face, thy presence,
Lord, will I seek.
It is the same.
And what I'm trying to present is that
there is an unseen presence which is God,
that holy one, that one in the midst
of us, which theology sets forth in the
doctrine of the divine amendments.
It says that that holy presence, that one
time localized himself there between the wings of
the cherubim, is wherever his creation is.
But there is a difference between a presence
and a manifest presence.
I have said this before, and I don't
hesitate to repeat it again, because a thing
like this ought not to be tossed out
and forgotten, that there is a difference between
the presence and the manifest presence.
It is the fine shade of difference between
a man's presence and his face.
The same word, and relative, very nearly the
same meaning, but not quite, a man comes
into the room and keeps his back turned
to you, you can say he was in
my presence for half an hour, or I
was in his presence for half an hour.
But you don't have much fellowship with a
man who keeps his back turned to you,
it is when he turns his face to
you that the fellowship begins.
So it is different, there is a vast
difference, all the difference perhaps in the world,
between God being present and God's face being
manifest to his people.
Now Israel knew that God dwelt in the
midst of them, that the high priest was
able to go in and look on the
face once a year with blood.
Men come back out and pull a heavy
veil, they say it took some men to
push it aside, and that veil was there
to shut out the unprepared from that holy
face.
And then, when Jesus, our Lord, died, it
says that when he gave up the ghost,
the veil of the temple was rent from
the top to the bottom.
God himself rented with his finger from the
top to the bottom, not from the bottom
to the top, then it might have been
done by a priest or an enemy, but
from the top to the bottom down, and
was forever removed.
Poor old Israel, they say, sewed that veil
up and used it again, sewed it back
up again, to try to undo what God
had done by the death of his son.
And so they have wandered all these centuries,
shut out from the presence by sewing a
veil up again, when God was telling all
the world that my son, my eternal son,
is the renting of his flesh, the tearing
of the veil, and now there's nothing to
keep you out of the Holy of Holies,
where only a priest could go before.
Now all of God's people can go.
So the Bible teaches that God's presence is
everywhere, but the Bible teaches that God's face,
God's realized, manifest, and joyed presence may be
the precious treasure of all of the people
of God.
Now what is this, and who is this?
Who is this?
Am I preaching about God too much, friends,
am I?
I preach about God an awful lot.
Am I preaching about God too much?
Do you want to hear something else?
If you want to hear something else, let
me know, and I'll know what to do
about it.
But I won't change my preaching, because I
must preach about God, I must.
I don't know how long I'll have to
preach yet.
The way I feel now, it'll be 20
minutes.
But what the doctors say, it'll be a
good many long years yet, so we'll take
the doctors for it.
But anyhow, I can't preach anything else.
I can't preach anything else.
I must talk about God, God the Father,
God the Eternal Son, and God the Blessed
Holy Ghost.
And as God reveals himself, he reveals himself
in nature as the Strong, the Mighty One.
And he reveals himself in the scripture by
various names, Elohim, and Jehovah, and Jehovah-Nissi,
and Jehovah-Jireh, and Jehovah-Cain.
He has these various names, setting forth various
facets of his majesty and his glory.
I had read again in the Psalms this
morning, before I came down, the beauty of
the Lord our God.
One man said, I'd like to enter into
this one thing I've sought after, that I
might enter into the presence of God to
enjoy the beauty of the Lord.
And I looked it up to see what
it was, the beauty of the Lord.
Well, in the Hebrew, it's beauty, it's grace.
One translation says, the grace of the Lord.
Anything that is graceful is beautiful, and the
person of God is beautiful.
And this beautiful, awesome presence was dwelling there,
and the priest could push in past that
veil, but nobody else could.
He could only once a year, I repeat.
But that presence has revealed in Christ.
Is there ever, is it ever possible to
overdo the talking about the glory of Christ?
My wife and I are reading every morning
a letter, one of the letters of Samuel
Rutherford.
We've read, I guess, maybe 300 pages now,
and are on our way through to the
end, which will be another couple of hundred,
of the letters of this holy man.
His love for Jesus Christ is one of
the most awful, wonderful, beautiful things in all
Church history.
His wonderful love.
He loved Christ to a point where he
embarrassed her with the warmth of his devotion.
He had no hesitation, this wonderful Scotchman.
He had no hesitation to plead that the
Lord might allow him to kiss him.
He wanted to love him so much.
And as the woman who came into his
presence and kissed his feet, anointed and kissed
his feet, and he honored her because of
it, so Rutherford honored the Lord and kissed
the feet of the Lord the best he
could in what he called his prison in
Aberdeen, shut away from his pulpit.
My brethren, this Lord Jesus Christ, this wonderful,
loving, self-sacrificing Lord Jesus, who is said
to be a star and a sun and
a light, who's called the Prince and the
Lord and the Beloved, and as revealed by
the Holy Spirit in human experience, unutterably holy
and unspeakably adorable.
I don't want to be hard on people.
You'll say, now look who's talking.
I don't.
I really don't want to be hard on
people, but I'm afraid that our lukewarmness about
the person of Christ is a great proof
that we don't know very much about him
in personal experience.
I tell you, I tell you, we can't
keep still about that which we love.
We can't keep still about it.
That which we love supremely and first above
all else, we're going to talk about a
lot.
I never get over it.
It's still a delight to me.
It's still a pleasure that I cannot get
over it.
I don't try to get over it.
I just enjoy it, to see young parents
with their baby, particularly their first baby.
It's just something now to see a young
father.
We had a certain baby born into the
midst of us here a little while back,
and I told a number of people about
it.
This young father was walking exactly four inches
off the sidewalk when he talked to me
out in front here about it, and she
was, I think, maybe two weeks old, and
he told me with enthusiasm that she could
turn her eyes and look at him.
He said, you know, she can turn her
eyes and look at me.
Astonishing, isn't it?
There are just three billion people in the
world, and all of them have turned their
eyes and looked.
But that father, now that's love, my brethren,
and I think we ought to take off
our shoes in the presence of that burning
bush, because it's one of the few beautiful
things left in the world of selfish men
and women, that we can love a baby
like that, that we can love somebody like
that and then not be able to keep
still about it.
When our seventh baby was born, a girl,
little Becky, into our home, I had pictures
of her taken in all stances and poses
and directions, and I carried them around, and
all anybody had to do would be to
say, how's Becky?
Out of thing.
Instantly and at once.
And I did that so long innocently, not
knowing I was making a nuisance of myself,
until I was at a Bible conference one
time where they had a little skit.
I don't go much for them, but I
was present and saw this thing.
And a very, very large lady, very large,
with a robe down to the feet, stood
up to be a preacher.
She was a minister, and she was taking
off on me, and somebody said something to
me, and that sort of dampened me down.
I didn't show them a picture quite so
frequently after that, but I carried them around,
and I believe in this.
I believe this ability to love is one
of the few desirable things left in the
world.
And it's tragic how it has been dragged
down.
The world has made romantic love to be
its mainspring, but the church has made the
love for the Lord Jesus Christ to be
its spring and fountain of joy.
For me to live is Christ, said the
man Paul.
For me to live is Christ.
And isn't it true, then, that if it
is the nature of love to be enthusiastic
to the point of even being a bit
of a nuisance about the thing it loves,
or the one it loves, if we never
mention the Lord in conversation with each other,
is it not a proof that we are
not much concerned about him?
If we do not in our conversation ever
have an impulsive, warm statement to make about
our relation to the Lord, can we not
properly conclude with charity that it is because
we do not know very much about him?
You couldn't talk to David long until the
Lord was in his mouth.
You couldn't read anything David wrote for one
minute or one half minute or one quarter
of a minute until you ran into the
Lord is God.
And so it is with Paul.
Paul was the man Jesus man, and I
like it that when missionaries go to the
foreign field they're known as Jesus people.
They're known, the Jesus man was here, Mama,
they'll say.
The Jesus man just passed the village.
That's exactly what we ought to be known
as.
Now he waits for us to enter, not
in theology only, but in experience.
This is what I'm trying to do, and
it happens occasionally, once in a while it
happens, occasionally, that somebody will pass through theology
by means of theology and through experience.
I got a very wonderful and lovely letter
from a young man attending one of the
institutions of learning here in the city, and
he told me that he felt his experience
was quite like the number of others about
the city.
He said, I went over to hear you
and left determining never to come back again.
He said, I was irresistibly drawn, I had
to, and then he went on in an
exuberant, enthusiastic letter to tell me what the
Lord had done for his soul.
Now God was blessing his soul and leading
him on and leading him in.
I hope that there are many others like
that, because what I'm pleading for is that
we learn to know the Lord in living
experience for ourselves, that we are not forced
to go to theology to prove something but
that we can say, I know, I know.
Seeing the man that was healed standing among
them, they could say nothing.
And there's always an answer to any theology
that you present.
Somebody has an answer, but there's never any
answer to your glowing face.
There is never any argument that is valid
against the glowing, throbbing heart of a man.
I can prove to the young father that
his baby is only one more baby among
millions, but I can't stand up before the
face of the glowing face of a happy
young father.
And the mother that looks down upon that
baby is not going to help her in
her name or the world to say, listen,
you're looking down in joy on the face
of your baby, but don't you know that
twenty-six or three or five or whatever
years ago, your mother looked down on you
like that, and so back to Adam when
she looked down on Cain and Abel and
smiled and held him in her arms.
That doesn't mean anything to somebody who is
enrapturously loving someone.
So there's lots of theology that can be
brought up to prove that a man like
me, there's something wrong with me, I know
it.
But, my brother and sister, uh, before, before
the glowing face of men and women who
have been in the presence, ah, my old
friend Tom Hare, I often talk about him.
An old Irish plumber, not much education, but
he's been educated where it counts.
God educated him.
And I was talking with old Tom once
and I said, Tom, do you know that
there are certain scientists who have a different
view from you on this?
And they don't accept what you have to
say.
He bowed his old white head and said,
but they haven't been where I've been.
Ah, that's it, brother.
That's it.
They haven't been where I've been.
And the man who's been there, scientists can't
argue him out of anything.
They can get into rockets and go around
the earth and kid from a hundred miles
up this glen, very funny and very wonderful
and, and, and very admirable.
But they don't change a man who's been
in the presence.
The man who's walked in there and looked
down that awful fire, even for a brief
second, is able to say, show me thy
face, thy one transient gleam of loveliness divine,
and I will never think or dream of
any love save thine.
Well, now, why do we stay outside so
much?
Why do most people not enjoy the presence
of God?
I think it is because there is a
veil.
But you say, you just said that there
was a veil was taken away.
Yes, there were two veils.
God took one of them away.
There was one veil that God had put
up.
That was to keep us out.
He took that away and says, let's enter
Bali now.
He's taken his veil away.
But there is another veil, a veil that
he did not make.
It is the close-woven self-veil, the
veil of carnal self.
Just as the sun shines in its brilliance
all day, but a cloud can shut out
a city from its rays, so the veil
of self can shut out the face of
God.
And I believe that most Christians, I don't
hesitate to say it at all, I believe
that most Christians spend their lifetime outside the
veil.
Though the veil that shut us out has
been rent away and is not there anymore,
God has taken away that veil.
We have sewed a veil up with our
own little busy carnal hands.
We have put up a veil woven of
self-love, self-pity, self-trust, self-admiration,
self-defense, and these other self-sins.
My friend, there is in every ransomed breast
a flame.
And that flame came from that fire that
was before the wings of the cherubim, our
God is a consuming fire.
And that little flame that burns in the
breast of every redeemed man longs to be
reunited with that eternal flame, the fire of
his presence.
But that little flame of ours is sheathed
in clay and hidden behind the veil of
self.
And the rank and file of Christians don't
go along with this at all.
They don't go along with it.
They want me to come and tell them
here and there all over.
Mexico City is my latest.
They want me to go down there for
a few days.
People coming from all over Mexico, to Mexico
City, they want to talk about the deeper
life.
So I spend seven hours flying down there,
and I spend three days there, and I
spend seven hours flying back.
And all I've done is tell them what
I've been telling you these months.
Is it unbelief or is it realism?
It leads me to picture a lot of
people traveling from all over Mexico to here,
spending three or four days together, and then
going back just as they came with something
else in their head but no change in
their hearts.
The rank and file don't go on to
enter.
You've got to be holy to enter.
I think if I might use an experience,
an expression, it's like this.
I don't think that the members of the
Commonwealth all around the world would very much
enjoy spending their time in the presence of
the Queen, do you?
I think everybody would want to go in
once and bow and go through all the
protocol, and would be very happy and would
tell it for the rest of their lives.
I think they want to do that.
But I don't think very many would want
to live every day in the palace, because
they'd have to be on their alert all
the time.
They'd have to be dressed properly, they would
have to watch their English, they would have
to know all of the etiquette and procedures
of courts, and it would just be a
little too much for the average easygoing Canadian
to want to do.
Am I right or wrong?
I think I'm right.
Just as you don't want to always stay
dressed up, you want to relax and fall
apart and put on an old pair of
slippers with a tear in the side and
be comfortable, you don't want to stay always
dressed up.
So I think we are not spiritual enough
to want to live in His presence, because
we've always got to be at our best.
We've got to have the robe of righteousness.
We cannot wear the old dungarees or the
old sloppy shirt.
To enter that awesome presence and live means
morally and spiritually we have to be right,
we have to be clean.
And that's why the average Christian is perfectly
willing to wait for heaven, to have the
experience of being always in the presence of
God.
I think if the average Christian would tell
the truth in the deep of his own
heart, he would have to admit that being
in the presence of God all the time
would be a bore.
Can't take it.
We want to relax and go to the
world and the flesh and go to Adam
and back to the flesh parts of Egypt.
Just a little too much to demand of
us that we gird ourselves and go into
the land and stay there.
And yet that's what the Holy Ghost is
pleading that we do.
Let us enter boldly to the throne of
grace.
Let us, he says, come boldly, having a
high priest by a new and living way,
having opened a way.
Let us draw nearer with a true heart
and full assurance of faith, having our hearts
sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies
washed with pure water.
I say the rank and file, satisfied to
live just a little veil removed from the
presence of God.
God has always had his Davids and his
Pauls and his Stevens and his Rutherfords who
would die to taste what one man called
the piercing sweetness of the love of God.
So what can I do now?
Well, briefly.
First, hold faith and love.
Hold faith and love.
These make a man dear to God.
Come in full confidence.
Turn your back on self.
As Fenelon says, cut and tear and burn
and destroy and spare nothing of the old
flesh and of the old veil.
So take away that veil from before your
face.
God has taken away the one that he
had up to shut you out.
Now you take the one that you have
up to shut him out.
Remove his experience.
Tear and rend and cut and burn until
there's nothing left of the old veil that
shuts us.
We celebrate the Lord's Supper this morning.
In one way, we're celebrating the rending of
that veil, the tearing away of that veil
that had shut men out from the Shekinah.
How tragic, how deplorable that we allow the
veil of self-love, self-pity, self-confidence
to shut us out when God has never
meant it should be so.
So let's pray that the blood of Jesus
Christ might cleanse away that veil.
We might mortify ourselves until as the sun
shines this morning unhindered on Toronto, bathing it
in its golden light, so the face of
God should shine upon our hearts all the
time.
And we'd get ready for heaven, for that's
the way it'll be there.
Lord, our Heavenly Father, we ask that thou
wilt bless this meditation on this great book,
Hebrews.
How we thank thee that Hebrews was ever
written.
How we thank thee thou didst in thy
kind love ever move a man by the
Spirit, put down on parchment such golden words,
such liberating sentences, such keys to the light
in the Spirit.
How we thank thee.
Lord, we pray that we might have this
morning's faith to enter in by the blood
of Jesus, by the new and living way
which he consecrated for us in his flesh,
and we might not be guilty of allowing
our own little veils to interpose.
We would tear them away.
We would put under feet self-love, self
-pity, self-aggrandizement, self-confidence, pride, and all
these things to shut out thy presence.
May this be our best communion service for
a long time.