 We thought I'd get started. Did you hit the button already? Yeah, it's pretty really not. That's a frightening thought. Alright, we're going to get started. It's a little after 6.30. Week two. Think like an Israelite. And as I said last week, if you weren't here, we did a purity and impurity, clean it and clean that sort of thing. And that sort of bridged into this topic of sacred space. All these topics are going to be somewhat interrelated. We're taking that one at a time because that's how the time sort of sorts out. Tonight, it's going to be mostly sacred space. I might have a few comments about sacrifice. Sacrifice is going to be really the focus next week. But again, like I said, all these things just sort of run into each other. And this will be our focus tonight. So we need to actually define some terms, kind of get thinking in the right mode here about this phrase sacred space. And I have here on the slide takes a little bit of an intellectual adjustment. I mentioned this last week. Use a little bit of different terms, but you have to sort of be able to think abstractly on one hand. And I'm going to add a few things tonight. Sacred space is largely about what scholars call mythic thinking. That's a fancier way of saying abstract thinking, but mythic is an important term because it has to do with divine character, divine beings. And we do not mean that biblical stories are fairy tales. When we see the word mythic, that's where our mind goes. We think of mythology in the sense of fairy tales. If you are familiar with, like if you're really into Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, or C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia, they talked about mythic thinking a lot in relation to what they did and how they viewed the Bible. We're both believers. Basically myth really refers to a story that's told where God or supernatural beings are characters in the story. That's what mythic thinking is. That's what mythic literature is. And every culture has this. And Tolkien and Lewis were both scholars of comparative mythology. And this is why they would refer to the Bible and the Gospels as the myth that is true. So the Bible is mythic literature in that you have divine characters in the stories. Angels, demons, Satan, God. It's very obvious. But that doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. That's a term that just refers to who some of the characters are. And again, for Tolkien and Lewis, they would look at the Gospels and say, well, of course they're mythic, but it's the myth that's true. And we have to think that way in terms of biblical thinking. When we talk about mythic thought and that takes you into divine characters, there are going to be things in stories that have sort of transcendent meanings because they are connected with God or angels or demons or Satan or whoever the supernatural character is. The Bible has a lot of this kind of stuff in it, again, that we miss because we're just, we're either not thinking in this model or when we come across certain terms, we're so accustomed to having them defined for us in light of our own traditions, our own theology, and even biblical theology, take it broadly, that we don't really think of a term the way an original hearer or an original reader would have thought of it. For instance, I'll just use one that doesn't refer to sacred space, it actually refers to the opposite. Well, when biblical writers talk about the sea, S-E-A, they might be referring to a body of water. That's true, but they might also be referring to something far more abstract, more mythic, because the sea in ancient Near Eastern thought, whether it was Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Canaanites, or the Israelites, since the sea was a place where you couldn't live, it's not the domain of humans. Humans don't live in the sea. It's a scary place, it's unpredictable. You could very easily die. You can't grow food there. Normal life for humans is on the land. You use the sea, but you live on the land. So the sea became this other place that was very threatening and foreign, very chaotic. It was sort of across the board a metaphor, a mythic metaphor for the forces that are dangerous in life, chaos, unpredictability. It was a fearful thing. This is why at the end of the book of Revelation, for example, in the description of the New Jerusalem, which is the New Jerusalem, the New Heavens, New Earth, the New Eden, John actually says in Revelation 21, there is no more sea. That's what he means. There's no more chaos, there's no more danger, there's no more threat to life, there's no more bad stuff, there's no more unpredictability, all that is just in the bag. It's out the window, it's over and done. But again, we don't look at a term like that and think on those terms about a particular term, but they did. And again, the Bible has lots of this kind of stuff in it. And Sacred Space is one of these. And there are terms that convey theological concepts and not just sort of a literal one-on-one correspondence with what we might immediately associate a term with. Sacred Space isn't something scientifically testable. It's not necessarily physical, even though it might have a physical association. It's more about an idea and a set of ideas attached to a supernatural being, namely God. Now, a little quotation here from the dictionary of biblical imagery. Sacred Space is a place where God is encountered in a special or direct way by virtue of which every place or the very place becomes holy and set apart from ordinary space. So ordinary space is the opposite of Sacred Space. Sacred Space is associated with God. Other space, other places that are not associated with God, they're just ordinary. Ordinary versus the extraordinary. Normal versus stuff associated with God. It's a point of reference to which people return, either physically or in memory. Some sacred places are the site of once-only encounters with God, while others are places of perpetual visitation. More short definition, Sacred Space is where God is or has appeared and it's set off again from normal or mundane space. It can include land, physical terra firma that God has claimed as his own and sort of absorbs or grants to humans as an inheritance. It has to be connected with him in some way. So it can be a literal thing or more abstract thing. I'm going to go through a real quick overview starting in the Old Testament. We'll end in the New Testament about the biblical theological concept of Sacred Space. Again, spaces or places, realms, either physical or abstract locations that are associated with God. Eden is the first one. What's Eden? Do you think of it as a garden? Okay, it's described, but it's ultimately God's dwelling. It's the place where God chose to move people to live when he created the world. All the world is not Eden. I hope that we realize that. We're kind of taught that when we think about Eden, that's the whole world. It's this wonderful, no, it actually isn't. Eden has geography and Genesis too. It's a little speck, a little piece of the created world. Outside Eden, there's more unpredictability. It's where God isn't. It's the place that needs to be subdued and brought under dominion. That's what the humans are tasked to do it. Adam and Eve were told be fruitful and multiply, go fill the earth, have dominion and rule over. Well, we don't really need to do that in Eden, because Eden is already under control. Where God is, it's not out of control. Now, the humans are there to help maintain that and enjoy it, benefit from it. But they're ultimately tasked with going out into the world and making the rest of the world like this place. So Eden is where God lives. It's an analogy in some ways to the entire heavens and earth cosmos. God dwelt in the heavens, humanity is on earth. So if you want to think of it even more broadly, God creates everything. His domain is in the heavens. However, that's conceived. Heavens don't have lives, we don't want you to. It's not like a point in space. Sort of everything that isn't earth, because earth is for humans. Humans don't live up there. God lives up there, we live down here. So God's dwelling is, again, this big cosmos kind of thing. But it's also this little spot on earth. There's a veil of separation between God and earth, originally, before He was created. The firmament and all that stuff. The Psalms say that God lives above the firmament and sky and so on and so forth. So God lives up there, but He also lives down here in this water place. They're both places where God lives. And because they're both places where God lives, they're somehow connected. God's dwelling up here is somehow connected to His dwelling here, because God is everywhere. Like if God goes from here to here, He's not absent over here. God is omnipresent. He's in both places at the same time. He's everywhere at the same time. But He chooses to mark certain places as His dwelling. Now you have another instance of this. Eden doesn't last forever. We have the fall, lots of things going on on earth. The next sort of, I would say most obvious place where sacred space becomes an issue is babel. So the wide babel, that's a bad thing. Well, it is. But if you understand what was happening at babel, you can see the relationship. God had created everybody. You have the fall. They're supposed to disperse. It doesn't work. So we have the flood. What does God tell them at the end of the flood? He repeats the same commands He'd given them in Eden. The descendants of God, survive the flood, be fruitful, multiply, go out there and all that. In other words, He repeats the whole thing. We're going to try to do this over and over again. And what do they do? God says, I want you to turn the world. I want you to make the world fit for me. I want you to go out and fulfill the original mandate. I'm still interested. I will return. I will come back and set up my rule again. But we want to see if you're going to fulfill the Edenic command. That's still on the table. They don't do that. What they do instead is they kind of start migrating and then they settle at babel, and they start building a tower. Everybody in the biblical studies and archaeology will say that this is a ziggurat. I'm no different. I think that's kind of obvious what they're doing. A ziggurat was part of a temple complex. What's a temple? Anybody? Sacred space. Sacred space. It's a place of worship. And if you're building a temple, you imagine what's going to happen there. That's where the deity is going to come to live. What a visit. Is that what God told them to do? No. I didn't tell you to build me a place where I would come to you. You must have been confused. That's like the opposite of what I asked you. So God is a little meft, and we know the story. But they're actually building sacred space for God. They're changing the game plan. They want some relationship with God, but they want him to come to them. Ziggurats is done not so much. That is not the game plan. And again, we know the rest of the story, what results of that. Now, ziggurats are also interesting because of their shape. This is one of the reasons why, I don't want to rabbit trail too much here, but it's one of the reasons why everywhere you go, there's this triangular pyramid ziggurat kind of shape in every culture that marks sacred spots. They're trying to get to the heavens. How do you do that? Well, you build something really big, and eventually it's going to go, because that's how you have to build. We don't have the technology to really build anything else that gets very high. It's just a physical thing. It has to be this shape to keep moving up into the heavens. This is ancient technology, so it might look a little bit different, might be different materials, but this stuff featured to it might be smooth on the sides. It doesn't matter. Every continent, every culture has this shape, because they're trying to rebuild the stairway to have an amenity to have some relationship with the deity. Now, the mountain idea is going to be significant in a little bit too. But this is part, again, scholars have, they like to label things. This is actually part of what scholars have come to call the tree thinking. We say that is just kind of weird. What's the point of the term? Well, you look at a ziggurat, or a pyramid, and it goes up. We get that part. But here's a picture. This is actually something from Nordic religions, but I like the picture. So it's a little misplaced, but the idea was that we build this thing. It reaches to the heavens. It's based on earth, but it actually forms an axis from heavens to earth to the world underneath. It connects heaven, earth, and the world under the earth. Scripture has the same kind of cosmology. Exodus 20. Now, shall it not make a graven image of things in heaven, on the earth, or under the earth? Philippians, it shows up three or four times in Scripture. Heavens, the earth, under the earth. It's a three-tiered cosmology. And so ancient people would view this ziggurat, pyramid, whatever it was. As the place where the deity will come and where the deity lives, it will sort of hold everything in balance. Everything is ordered in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. It's this pole idea. Scholars call it the world truth. The truth is why, in Ezekiel 5, Jerusalem is referred to in ways like the navel of the earth. Well, Jerusalem's not like in the very center of everything in the globe. It's just not. But in Israel, I would say, oh yes, it is. Because Jerusalem is the place where the real deity dwells and holds everything in balance. Everything in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. Can you have to think of this Axial, this Axis kind of image? It was the way they tried to express order. When God was in his temple, in his house, and he was happy, and he stayed there with us, everything was right. Everything was in order. The heavens are in order, where his people, earth is in order, and everything underneath the earth that God wants there is where it's supposed to be. And again, the place under the earth is the realm of the dead. You've got evil spirits there, all that kind of stuff. Everything was sort of, all the ducks were in a row. Just vertically, think vertically. This is the kind of thinking that they were accustomed to. Now, there were a couple ways to express this as well on earth. One is the mountain, that's kind of the easy one to see. The other one was a garden. The other is the villages for the dwelling place of God in the Bible. Even, believe it or not, in Ezekiel 28, is called a garden, like in Ezekiel 3, but it's also called a mountain. Ezekiel 28, 13, 14, 15, 16, those verses there. Why is Eden called a mountain? Can't the writer make up his mind? Can't he tell the difference between a garden and a mountain? That isn't the point. Why is Eden called a mountain? Because high mountains and lush, paradise-like gardens were where deities dwowed. That's where you'd expect to find why. Let's think about the metaphor. Why the mountain? Because people don't live there. This isn't like they have their own REOs at the right name for the store. Nobody's going out and climbing mountains, or what is it? R.E.I. R.E.I. R.E.I. I'm thinking of something else. Nobody's going out in the ancient world and living on mountains. Mountains are sacred. It's because people can't get there. They can't get very far up. Sinai is the most obvious one, the biblical tradition. But you have other ones. But Eden is also called a mountain. And the reason it is is because the idea is Eden is sacred space. That's God's house. That's not for people. People aren't there. God wanted people there originally. And then they sinned and they had to be cast out. And isn't it kind of interesting that when God starts making moves to restore his presence on Earth, it's at a mountain. And the mountain moves. It isn't always Sinai. Sometimes it's Gibeah. Days of Solomon, the Alpha Sacrifice there. Mount Zion is the most familiar besides Sinai. But you have a number of mountains. You have the Mount of Transfiguration. Why a mountain? That one's especially interesting. It's the place you expect divine encounter. Because it's remote. It's inaccessible. Gardens. If you're living in an arid culture that most people barely get by, it's a subsistence kind of existence. The oasis is of course where you would expect to find the gods. Because that's the best place to live. It has water. You never have to worry about water. It has abundance of food. It's beautiful. It's got the perfect climate. Of course. You wouldn't have God living out there in a cave somewhere where he's got a scratch for food. You've got a whole bunch of animals out there kind of living within that. It stinks. You know, God is in an oasis. Where else would you expect him to be? He's got the best living quarters. And this is how the ancients were conceiving. And God's own activity in the Old Testament sort of formed the idea and also in some ways catered to it. But mountains and gardens are referred to as cosmic spaces. In biblical studies. After Babel, the sacred space gets localized. Humanity is dispersed. You're trying to again create a space for God. And God says, I will not be tamed. This is not what we're doing here. You don't make the rules of engagement. I do. This is not what I asked you to do. So we're not doing this. You've got to learn the lesson. After the Babel incident, God turns around and calls Abraham. Where does he appear to Abraham and patriarchs? Starts in Genesis 12. Abram passed through the land of the place that check him to the oak of Mora. In Hebrew that's the oak of the teacher. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land and the Lord appeared to Abram and said to your offspring, I'll give this line. So he built their an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. He appeared to him at a tree. This is the beginning of a theme or a motif in Scripture. Certain trees in certain places became sacred sites, sacred space. And to an Israelite, that made sense because the roots of the tree go all the way down to the underground and the top of the tree symbolizes connection with God. So God appears at trees. Trees become important. You bury your dead under certain trees. Why would you do that? Because you want them to be with the Lord. That's where God is. That's where God has been appearing to the patriarchs for centuries. Of course we would bury our dead. And you have to get with the conceptual thinking. Genesis 18. The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre at this time. That's actually another oasis. So you actually have a garden and a thing going on there too. As he sat at the door of his tent and heaned the day, he had rest yourselves under the tree. Genesis 21. Abraham planted a tamariz tree in bear Shabbat and called there in the name of the Lord. The everlasting guy. Why would you plant a tree and call the Lord? It was response in Genesis 21. God had appeared at bear Shabbat. So what does Abraham do? He plants a tree. Now the sanctuary. Trees mark sanctuary spots. They mark sacred space. You get a little, maybe less abstract or maybe more abstract. What's in the holy place that corresponds to this? Think of the tabernacle. The menorah. The golden lampstand. It's fashioned in the shape of a tree. That's deliberate. There are other things about the tabernacle decorations that are supposed to make you think about Eden. Especially the temple. The temple. The carvings of the temple. It's a forest. It's a jungle. It's got lions and all these animals, exotic, you know, animals in there, exotic plants. It's a garden, but it's on Mount Zion. And again, you've got these different pieces of furniture that take the mind. The idea was to take the mind back to Eden, but also to take the mind back to certain concepts. This is now the place where God meets us. We can even talk about the vine and the branches here in the New Testament. The imagery has a certain appeal because it harkens back to certain things in the Old Testament that are associated with divine presence, divine encounter. And once you get there, your mind goes to the covenants. This is what God promised us. This is all deliberate. It's all designed to make you think a certain set of thoughts, just with word pictures. Joshua 24. Yeah, I mentioned the tabernacle a little bit. We're skipping around here a little bit. Here we have Joshua. Makes a covenant with the people that Dan put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem. Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law. He took a large stone and set it up under the terabith. It's another kind of tree. That was by the sanctuary. Wow! Who would have thought that there would be a tree by the sanctuary? Well, the answer is everybody would have thought that. That's what you do. You mark these places in these ways because that takes the mind back to the history of appearances that God made with not only the patriarchs but all the way back to Eden. They're connected. It's dot-connected. It's dot-connected. Judges 6. The angel of the Lord comes in and meets and gets in at the terabith at Ophrah. Again, it's another sacred site. We're going to try and train this conversation. Sinai. Let's talk about Sinai. Here we get mountains. But of course, where does God initially meet Moses? I mean, Bush. Bush, another plant. A little tree, but it's a tree. Sinai, again, this is from the dictionary of biblical imagery. Second sacred space in salvation. History, the big one, is Mount Sinai, a place where God meets face to face with Moses and gives him the law. The sanctity of the place itself is sites that before Moses ascends the mountain, people undergo a ritual purification for three days. Then you have the purity and purity thing along. The people are prohibited upon pallium death from even touching the border of the mountain. Now, I have a cross-referencing here to Exodus 24. Anybody know? You've been a gold star for the day. If you know what happens in Exodus 24, 9 through 11. I'll give you a hint. It's a meal. That's the passage. You get the law at Exodus 20, Exodus 19, you know, they're preparing the mountain to purify themselves to have the covenant ceremony. Exodus 20 is where they get the tablets of stone. And after they do the ritual there to enact the covenant, Moses and Aaron and 70, again, an interesting number, 70 of the elders go up Mount Sinai and they have a meal with God. It actually says, And they saw the God of Israel. And under his feet, it describes the brilliant appearance of the courtyard. And there is God's house. God invites them over for a meal on the mountain. Well, of course it's on the mountain because that's where God lives. And again, the meal, they're having this grand feast in the middle of nowhere. I've never seen the candidates for Sinai. You don't really scratch up a big meal there. You're just kind of out in the middle of nowhere. But where God is, there is abundance because he has the best place. Tabernacle in sacred space. Tabernacle. That Yahweh dwells in a tent before the construction of the temple, which later during the time of Solomon is important for marking sacred space. So we've got trees, we've got mountains, we've got gardens. Let's talk a little bit about tent structures. Tabernacle is the tent, Mishkan, which literally means dwelling place. This was the place where Yahweh would cause his name, his presence to dwell. As the divine abode, the Tabernacle was also analogous to Eden. Like Eden, the Tabernacle was cosmic in conception. The place where heaven and earth met a veritable microcosm of the Edenic creation where God first dwelt on earth. There are many connections, again, between Eden and the Tabernacle. Some of them are wrapped up in Hebrew vocabulary. You have the menorah, which we've mentioned, the tree of life, described in the vocabulary of the tree. In the appearance of the tree in Exodus 25, these aren't accidents. Cherubim. You can see them back in Eden. Genesis 3 in Exodus 25. Eden was a garden to the east when you had the Tabernacle because it was mobile in the way of promised land when they camped. They camped in a certain order the Tabernacle would face east. The temple is going to face east. It's not an arbitrary set of directions. It's to make you think of the garden to the east. It's looking to that place, conceptually. There's gold in there in the Tabernacle. The tachonic stones, again, that's part of the description of Eden. The temple dwelling itself, again, would have spoken a lot to ancient Israelites because in other cultures, you would have deities dwell in tents. Why? Because it was a patriarchal culture. If you were the big concho, the sheep, the chief, whatever you wanted to call it, if you were living in this environment, the kind of environment that the Tabernacle was, you know, designed to not withstand, but just it was the kind of thing you had to make because you had a journey to make with it, your leader would live in a tent. Even when you had settled cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia, there were certain festivals in the time of the year that they would actually erect tents on the top of ziggurats or inside temples. It was part of the trappings of divinity and, depending on how you designed it, of royalty as well. This would have been a familiar sort of pattern. Moses was actually told to construct the Tabernacle and its equipment according to the pattern shown to him by Yahweh on the mountain. And again, some of the cross references here, so you can get the slides from the website, from my site. You actually have God dwelling in a tent in other scenes and other contexts. And the idea was this is where God is supposed to dwell. This is where even, you know, kings, depending on what part of the house would dwell. The patriarch dwells there. It's the head honcho. This is, again, how to describe that. In Jesus, I don't think I have this verse at the end, the passage of John, I think it's 14, in my father's house so many mansions. You may have heard that the better translation of that and his better is in my father's tent. Tent dwelling on many ruins. It's a patriarchal image that goes back to the Old Testament. And it's even better than being sort of in a, you know, let's say everyone says better, it has the same effect because if you read through your Old Testament carefully, they had these huge families and everybody kind of lives together. What they would do is they would just, you know, section off part of the tent or add to the tent and everybody lives under the same roof, so to speak, under the same tent in different sections. That's what it's talking about. Everybody had their quarters. And again, the leader's quarters and not your quarters, you don't come in there. They're special. They're his. But he's sharing his living space with you. And so the metaphor is that God is sharing his living space with us, with you. And it's communicated by the garden, by the mountain, where the elders go out there. You know, the tent, the temple itself. These are familiar terms, again, to the Israelites. Keep going and get Mount Zion, of course. Mount Zion is called the highest mountains in Micah. That's an error in the Bible because we can whip out an atlas here at Google Earth and like, see how big those mountains are. It has nothing to do with literal geography. It's called the highest mountain. Why? Because that's where God lives. It's preeminent. It's superior to all other mountains. It has nothing to do with inches and feet. There's a reason why the descriptions are what they are. Yahweh tabernacles. The tabernacle was Mishkan in Hebrew. The very is Shachan to dwell. Yahweh has said to tabernacle, the own Mount Zion. Again, the terminology is deliberate. It's designed to make you think, because you're an Israelite, you're doing Hebrew, Shachan, oh, God, it sounds like the tabernacle. It's supposed to sound like. It's supposed to take your mind back to that. The temple is very exotic. Flowers, palm trees, gourd, cypress trees, cherubian, lions, pomegranates, all this stuff. That's what the inside is decorated as. Why? Because they wanted to see if they had a Michelangelo in their midst. Well, it's boring if we don't put anything on it. No, it's designed to take your memory back to E. It's all deliberate. I don't know how much of this we want to get into specifically, but here you've got the temple. At least this tabernacle and temple. Here we have the tabernacle. Again, this is the general outlay of it. Again, this is all, I'm assuming, familiar. You've got the holy place, the most holy place, the most holy place where the Ark of the Covenant is. You've got other furniture there. They're all numbered here. The temple is a little bit different. You don't have these two pillars in the tabernacle. Those are different features. I don't know if we'll get to really talk about those or not. The bronze sea is different. Week four we will probably get to that because that has some really, I want to say strange, but obviously really cool associations with that. And the altar is much bigger, but it's still outside. So you've got some similarity here. The inner area of the temple had two giant cherubim in it. Now if we go back to the tabernacle, the tabernacle in the innermost part has cherubim as well because they're on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant. But in the temple, we've also got two giant ones standing side by side, the tips of their wings stretching across to touch each other. The effect of this, here's the Ark of the Covenant. And there are certain passages on the next slide that suggest that what they did after they built the temple was they took the whole tent structure, the tented structure of the holy place that had two compartments, holy place, most holy place, and they moved it inside the temple so that the two giant cherubim were asleep. This is where God sat and his feet rested on the Ark. This is why the Ark becomes known as the footstool. See, back in the days of the tabernacle, it was the place where the Lord would meet Moses between the wings of the cherubim. That was where God met them. But here it becomes a footstool. The reason is they essentially slid the whole thing inside to form a throne, which they added the two cherubim for the seat. Again, it's still an Edenic imagery. We're not going to click out to that because I don't have a laptop here. But again, this whole idea of moving, there are references to, I'll just give you one instance. I think it was Hezekiah. It's either Hezekiah or Josiah. They wanted to repair the temple. There's a mention, kind of a throwaway reference, to when you repair the temple, you need to be repairing the tent. It's there with the temple. They're inside the temple. Well, if you go back to the construction of the temple, you don't have that. There's only one tent that it could be. It's the tent associated with the most holy place inside. There are a couple of those that really suggest that this is what they did. The Promised Land, in general, was also viewed as sacred space. Deuteronomy 32.8.9 is kind of an important passage. We don't need to rabbit trail too much on that, but that's the passage where the nations of the world are disinherited by God at Babel, and they are assigned to lesser sons of God and Israel becomes Yahweh's own portion. There is no Israel yet. Right after Babel is when Abraham is called, there will be an Israel. Now God's place and his people. So the rest of the Old Testament is framed by that event. God's decision to essentially put a barrier between himself and the nations, and then create a new nation out of nothing for himself. And it worked out geographically. The Promised Land becomes a sacred space that one enters and leaves. So it's linked to geography. There's even a hint that it's watched by an angelic guardian. This is a reference to Joshua 5. Anybody know what that might refer to? Joshua, they're on the verge of going into the land. Who does he meet? Who does he meet at the door? Who meets him at the door? Before they cross into the land, who does he run into? Yeah, it's the commandant, the captain of the Lord's host. And when he sends to Joshua, Joshua asks for your friend or foe. I'm paraphrasing here. And the answer he gets is, take your shoes off. Because the place where you're standing is holy ground. It's the same language at Exodus 3, the burning bush. It gets the same reply than Joshua's like, oh, okay, you know, I get it. And he does, because this is the commander of the Lord. So this is the angel of the Lord, because you can, the description there, just will commentary on this. If you go to Joshua 5, the commander of the Lord's host is described as having his drawn sword in his hand. That phrase occurs only two other times in the Hebrew Bible. And they're both using the angel of the Lord in other scenes. So it's kind of obvious who it says. First Samuel 5, 5, just by way of another illustration. There's a lot of cosmic geography in the Bible. Israel is attached, is associated with the God of Israel. This is God's space. You need to be in God's space, His sacred space to be in right relationship with Him. If you were not, you weren't supposed to be there. Remember last week we talked about there were certain sins you could commit that would pollute the land. This is why those sins were punished by either death or banishment. And if there was enough of it, God said, I'm going to kick all of you out, because this is my space. And we looked at a little bit of Lviticus 26, some of the curses in Deuteronomy. There was this sense that the land itself was sacred. And if it was polluted enough, God would just remove its occupants. It's not an occupants for a certain kind. And maybe bring them back. They would repent to Him. There are other passages that hint at this too. There's actually a lot of them. One of my favorites is First Samuel 5, 5. This is when the Philistines enter Israelite territory to fight against Israel. And they capture the Ark of the Covenant. They take the Ark of the Covenant back to their camp, their place. And there's a shrine of Dagon there, a little temple wherever they had for Dagon. They put the Ark in there. And again, we know the rest of the story. They come back the next day and Dagon is a stump. Heds gone, his limbs are gone. It's funny. But what we miss is verse 5. It says that the priests of Dagon, after they find what's left of Dagon, the priests of Dagon refuse to walk over the threshold of Dagon to this day. In other words, the place where they found Dagon is now ground that Yahweh owned. It was under a new Lord. It was under dominion of the God of Israel. And so even in their own temple, they walked around the spot because it was controlled by a different deity. They weren't taking any chances. We're not Yahweh's worshipers, so we're not going to walk on His turf because we might just end up like Dagon. That was the whole point. 2 Kings 5, that's the Naaman story, which is part of the sermon I did here, but the cosmic geography stuff there, this is when Naaman wants to take dirt back with him. Because he said, I'm only going to sacrifice to Yahweh now. Can I take dirt with him back home? Sure. What does he do then? Because it connects him to Yahweh. He wants dirt from Israel. David's, I don't have the passage up here, but David is running from Saul, he is most of the time. And he has to leave Judah and he winds up in Philistine territory, but when he leaves Judah, he essentially has a pity party and says, how in the world am I going to pray to the Lord here? I'm no longer in the land. It's not a denial of Yahweh's army presence. David's upset because he doesn't know how or if he can actually be in fellowship with God because he is not in sacred space. It bothers him. He's troubled by it. There's a whole bunch of these kinds of stories in the Old Testament. Now, to transition a little bit to new, we mentioned this last time, but you take all these ideas. Think about the verbiage. The tent of the deity. The mountain language. The garden language. Tabernacle. The temple. This language gets drawn into the New Testament in really interesting ways. And we'll park here a little bit on John, a little bit on what Paul says. John portrays Jesus as not only revealing the divine presence in the midst of the temple. This is John chapter four, by the way. But also replacing the temple as the locus of divine presence. This replacement joins with a number of other implied replacements to form part of a conceptual web that portrays through the narrative the point that Jesus has come as the fulfillment of the plans and purposes of God in the Old Testament revelation. Now, to finish the quote, the various strands of this web include replacements of holy space. So a couple of these references. We'll just start with John four, the last one. John four is the passage where Jesus ticks religious leaders off by saying, destroy this temple and I'll raise it up in three days. And they're like, you're just a moron because it took us like how many years? They're thinking he's talking about the building that they think God cares about. Not so much. John says he spoke of the temple, which was his body. It's a reference to the resurrection. John 151. This is the passage where Jesus has met Nathaniel. Nathaniel, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And Jesus shows up and he says, basically before I got here, I saw you when you were under the tree and all that. And it says, Nathaniel says, wow, I believe you, Jesus, believe that? You're going to see a whole lot better than this. And he actually says, you will, before it's all over, paraphrasing, you will see angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. And the weird thing is, that never happens in the Gospels. You never have an episode like angels are coming up in their head on Jesus. What's it a reference to? Ascending and descending, what does it make you think of? Where have you seen that phrase before? Jacob's Ladder. Okay, what's the ladder? And if you did a little digging and word study, one of these ziggurat kind of pits the cosmic mouth. It's the place of divine presence. Isn't that what Jesus is? Place of divine presence? So by describing Jacob's epiphany, Jacob's encounter with the God of Israel, they take that language and apply it to Jesus. When do we see angels associated with Jesus? Birth and death, birth and his death. Especially the death, which of course winds up in a garden and Mary supposes that he was the gardener. Again, all of these sort of throwaway descriptions and these sort of like odd cryptic references. They're designed to make people think, what could that possibly be? Where have we seen this language before? Jesus is the new Jacob. Why is that important? Because Jacob is the one who inherited the promise from Isaac. Jacob is the one who meets God at Bethel. He builds an altar there. Jacob is the one who encounters, he's there on the spot where God is. He always right there next to the Lord like that. All these things about Jacob. Jacob is Israel. Jacob's name is changed to Israel. Jesus is the new Jacob. He is the new Israel. He is the son of God. Israel is called the Son of God. When Moses goes in before Pharaoh, let my people go away. Yeah, to go out and sacrifice to me. But in that passage, Israel is called the Son of God, singular. Let my son go that he may go out and worship me in the desert. That's the demand put before Pharaoh. Israel is the Son collectively. It's Jesus. Again, all these things tether together conceptually in little words or phrases or pictorial images. In this case, it's about sacred space. Again, there are just a number of these that you can go to. I'm hurrying here a little bit. The temple, of course, uses body. That's what he is because he's God incarnate. God is living inside the flesh with the body of this man, the incarnation. Again, Jesus is God coming and going. We'll let him hear it. All of this is transferred to believers, all this language. This is why we are called the temple. This is why we are called the building stones of the temple. This is why Peter says that we tabernacle on this earth and earthen bodies, earthen temples, because of the epistles. Paul, several places. You collectively are the temple of God, individually you're the temple of God. All of this language is deliberate. You are sacred space. This is the logic of the rationale for how you should treat not only your body but other believers. You don't violate them. It's sacred space. Of course, you would behave differently here when it's something that's just common or mundane. Again, that's real quick. You get this because we are the temple because we are the body of Christ and Christ's body is the temple because He was God incarnate. We know all these terms. We know the concepts theologically. But sometimes we know them too well that we don't ever try to see how they connect together and how they build off each other, how they play off each other. All of this language is ultimately drawn from the Old Testament. This is the last slide. What should we take away from this about sacred space? I'm hoping, again, that when you catch certain terminology, when you read about places where God visits people, it's a good idea in your Bible study to mark those places down and see what else happens there. In many cases, it's not just sort of a one-off. There will be other things that happen at those places, both good and bad, and it sort of propels a story when those places are part of the story. What people do at certain places, again, good or evil, is significant when you realize that this place was associated with either divine appearance, divine presence, or whatever. It helps explain some of the offense of things that happen at those places, sometimes the severity of the punishment, why this place was important, because if you don't sort of look at a place's history, it's going to feel kind of random. It may not be random at all. It may be very intentional, very deliberate. Threshing floors. Threshing floors are like this. There are interesting things that happen at threshing floors. It's so interesting about that. There's stuff in the air, the chaff goes away, and there's stuff that's left. You eat, you pound that off, and you make kind of a crummy look and wafer. There are other things that happen at threshing floors. Threshing floors are part of complexes. They're parts of towns. They have meaning to them. And there are different things that happen there that are theologically interesting. We don't have all this kind of stuff in our head, so I would encourage you. Places are important. Place names are important. And in many cases, the writer is trying to, when you read his story here, he's trying to take you mentally somewhere else. He's trying to get you to remember something, to connect divine presence with some divine act or presence. Again, I'll help in the Bible reading a little bit. And then, if you sort of get a feel for that, look up the same terminology in your New Testament. It's kind of startling in places. Why they would use a particular word and not some other word. It might even sound clunky to us. It's not clunky. To them, it was designed again to associate Jesus with something that happened earlier. An event, a person, a place, an act of God. Sometimes Jesus becomes a substitute for God in telling the same story in the Old New Testament. They know what they're doing. They're actually very intelligent about it. It's just that the methods that the writers use are often lost on us because we're not following the breadcrumb trails. We'll take some questions if you have questions. No, that's a lot. It's a lot to do. It's just interesting. And I'm not suggesting to go off on a bunny trail when Dax is preaching or something like that. But sometimes you can get a little lost. It's typically a good trip when you try to chase things down. Next time we'll talk about sacrifice because that makes people fit for sacred space. It takes away impurity and certain sins but not a lot of them. Some sins, there's no solution for that. It makes you fit to occupy sacred space to put your toe in God's turf to go in his own tent. The sacrificial system is largely about that. Anybody? What are the implications now for us Gentiles, and going through Colossians the mystery of Christ in us and now we are that sacred space. It doesn't re-establish the law for us, right? You look at a lot of these to the Corinthians and Paul includes the Gentiles in that whole picture. See that's the shocking part. If you take the larger concept of sacred space where Israel is sacred space and the people in the other nations by definition aren't on sacred space which means they're outsiders. They're like exiles in American countries. What Christ does and this is actually talked about in the Old Testament. You look at some of the later chapters in Isaiah to talk about the Gentiles being the priests of the living God. They weren't a lot anywhere near sacred space. But it talks about Gentiles becoming worshipers of Yahweh even to the point where they occupy sacred space as a priest. It's prefigured. But when it comes to Jesus the New Testament is very clear that he is not the Messiah for the Jew only. In his ministry he goes to Gentile areas just to telegraph this. Why does he go to the gatherings? He confronts legion there. Delaniac with legion legion of demons. That was Gentile territory. They're raising pigs there. This is not Jewish. This is under dominion of Gentiles. So there. He goes anywhere he wants. That's not the only place he goes to telegraph the idea that just in case anybody thought that all this preaching we're doing here that I'm just here for the Jews that your vision is too small. And we're here for all of it. Why does Jesus when he first sends out disciples send out 70? Or Luke 11. Why does he send out 70? Because that's the number of the disaherited nations back at Babylon. Deuteronomy 32.8.9. What nations were dispersed and divorced from relationship with God? Well the nations in Genesis 10 if you go count them they're 70. If you count them in the Septuagint they're 72 which is why some of the intestines will say 72. It's talking back to the same event just depends on which translation which text you use. He sends out 70. It's not an accident. I'm not just here I'm not just employing the 12 to get the 12 tribes back in the fold. I'm here sending out 70 because it's all mine. I'm here for all of it. Again these gestures these statements that Jesus makes to people who know their Old Testament they're not lost. They're either offensive or they're like you're either like kind of thrilled by it and you get the hint or you're like this is a crazy man we gotta get rid of this guy. They understand the messaging so the Gentiles just buy to fall even on the basis of certain Old Testament ideas are included in this and that becomes part of what is kind of offensive later on with Paul because Paul pushes this because he is called to go to the Gentiles and the Jews just don't want to hear this and what happens at Pentecost you've tracked through the nations of Pentecost all the nations listed at Pentecost or in the Book of Acts including Spain and Paul's writings the last place he gets to there are all the nations from the disinherited parts of the world back in Genesis 10 again it's deliberate telegraphy it's message it's illogical messaging so Paul's not the only place you're going to find Gentile inclusion but he's the one that hammers it consistently but he has good Old Testament reasons for doing so he quotes from Isaiah 66 several times to make the point that he's not just a lunatic throw the Old Testament away and do his own thing he tethers it back to their own Scriptures but of course it's offensive they're not going to accept the Messiah they're not going to accept this idea you know anybody else with the sacred space now residing in the temple which is us does it lessen the significance of all these we mentioned dozens of geographical physical references did lessen the significance for us or did more symbology I think if you're really if you're paying attention to God's meaning conceptually what it doesn't mean is that the presence is isolated so just speaking for myself here on the one hand it's like hey we've got Israel we've got Jerusalem I think that there's still a role for that nation that place to play like a biblical prophecy but I don't think for a minute you're really interested in I think God's interested in the world this is special because of its history and because of its history it has tremendous symbolic and theological meaning so it's important things that happen there and things that God telegraphs the Scripture will happen there or shouldn't happen there it retains its meaning because of the theology but the theology can't be restricted to those sorts of situations in those places for me personally and I think again the more you become aware of it it does help abstractly and specifically with Bible study but I think conceptually we can still appreciate the messaging behind all of it especially if you know where it leads if you know where it leads you can actually look and this thing we call the Bible is something produced over a couple of millennia by at least 66 but probably a whole lot more hands when it really get down to it and it leads very coherently it follows certain threads and trajectories all the way up to today so to me that makes places it helps them retain significance but it's not restricted to that I don't think we can just throw it out the window that we should because the stuff that we do now now it gives it roots it gives it a history and if you know the history that should tell you if you learn one thing from it it should tell you that God's really been interested in this for a long time even longer than Jesus I mean he's really been at this for a long time and again to me it's a question of rootedness about sustained interest on God's part for anybody else thanks for coming a little bit of blood and guts next week I guess we're not going to bring any no animals will be harmed next week