40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 93 (Exodus 25:23-40)

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

Chad Bird and Daniel Emery Price continue talking about the Bread of the Presence. What does it have to do with the Lord's supper, the Trinity and Holiness? They also discuss the name of God and begin looking at a tree bearing the fruit of light. Check it out. 

welcome to another episode of 40 minutes in the old testament i'm daniel emery price joined by Chad Bird. Good morning, Chad. Good morning. Good morning. Here we are once more. Here you are again. Here we are again. I've just been looking over some notes here and marking some spots in the New Testament we're going to look at. We're actually going to dip our foot in the New Testament a couple times today, in fact, right away. So we're going to do something different. Yeah, podcast crossover podcast crossover yeah that's right well that is the uh that's the main difference between me and you chad is uh not the new testament that's not the main difference uh the main difference is preparation yeah yeah tuesday morning is is like my morning it's like

this is when we're recording we always record tuesday mornings that is my uh my favorite morning of the week because i get to uh i get to spend an hour and a half two hours just kind of swimming around in the uh in the torah soaking up uh some of this good stuff and taking a few notes looking over some commentaries and getting ready for uh all the stuff that we're going to talk about then we record so hey tuesday morning is uh is a good morning it is it is a good morning and uh i'm sure i'm sure that whenever 40 minutes in the old testament releases is everyone's favorite time of day of whenever that whenever it happens you know oh of course yeah i mean they stop whatever they're doing and immediately download immediately download and

start listening to it yeah yeah that's what that's what that's how i imagine it in my head anyway everyone just everyone's waiting waiting waiting oh there it is uh i'm sure that's how it is so chad we left off in a little bit of a middle of a thought last time yeah we were uh we were we're in the middle of chapter 25 of eclipses in case you're uh joining us for the first time and we have been talking for uh about the tabernacle uh israel is is camped at the foot of mount sinai they're going to be there for a while they're everybody else except moses and joshua are at the bottom they're just waiting and doing other things as we'll hear in later chapters but moses is on top of the mountain joshua somewhere close by and moses is receiving

all these instructions about how to build the tabernacle itself how to build all of the sacred furniture that goes inside the tabernacle and lots of other stuff as well so that's where Last time, we talked about just some kind of general things about the tabernacle, and then we jumped into a discussion of really the main piece of furniture inside the tabernacle, and that is the Ark of the Covenant, as well as the mercy seat or the atonement cover that is on top of it. We talked about that, and then beginning in verse 23 and going through verse 30, we started talking about the table of, well, it's usually translated as showbread. And we'll pick that up and wrap that up in the next couple minutes, and then we'll go on to the lampstand, or as it's commonly known, the menorah. So just to kind of recap what we talked about last time with this particular table, this bread table, it is to reorient you, make sure you kind of get this picture in your head. We've moved outside the Holy of Holies. Now we're in the second part, the entrance chamber into the tent itself, which is called the Holy Place.

and uh the holy place really has three pieces of i want to say furniture even though that's probably not the best uh when i every time i hear furniture i think of living room and this is of course not that uh this is this is very very different but i don't know what what else uh what else to call it you got three items we'll say inside the holy place we'll get to the second one of those in a minute which is the menorah the first one that is discussed is this table this bread table it's on the north side of the uh the holy place and it's uh it's covered in gold and it has a flat top and on this top you have two rows of six loaves each of unleavened bread that are placed there every sabbath there's a very specific recipe for the making of this bread

You didn't go out and buy a couple of loaves of Wonder Bread and stick it on the table. It was a very, very kind of special bread. In fact, we don't hear this now. This is much later. But we know that one of the families of the tribe of Levi, the Kohathites, they were responsible for making the bread the sacred bread and uh putting it on the the table so that was one of their one of their unique responsibilities in their temple service we got that going on in my church you got you got your your koathites well we got we do have a uh

a family that makes all the the communion bread oh yeah that's right i forgot your your church uh makes you don't buy the little flat cardboard wafers no we bake we bake uh unleavened bread but yeah so we bake we bake that uh every week you know it's nice uh for for lots of reasons first of all because uh even though uh in practicality uh many most congregations purchase little wafers to to use you know nobody nobody would uh would say they taste like bread i don't know what they taste like i mean they they dissolve on your tongue and then and then they're gone but there really is no taste to them but the fact that you make the bread that you use not just real bread but you can taste i think that that uh underscores the fact that that

the Lord's Supper is actually a meal. I mean, it's not meant to be just simply like an appetizer or just some tiny little cardboard tasting piece of food. It's actually supposed to be understood as a meal.

You can taste the bread. It's important. Yeah, yeah. I want you to have to chew. That's the whole thing. Yeah, there you go. I also don't want to like, hey, it's hard enough to believe it's the body of christ i don't want you to have to use any extra faith to believe it's bread you're just trying to help us out as much as possible yeah you're like well yeah obviously that's bread you know if you

are if you walk up to some places you're like wait that's not bread like trust me it is okay so now now i'm now i'm trusting you that it's bread and the body of christ yeah it's a double trust it's a double for me it's it's easier to trust it's the body of christ and then that is bread that's right the way some of it tastes that's right so you got your you got your uh uh your your your particular family like there was a particular family among the levites that were responsible for making this this uh this bread so as i said it was replaced every sabbath before it was replaced or as part of the whole ritual of being being replaced the other bread was consumed it was consumed in the sacred precincts of of the temple and it was consumed only by the priest

so this wasn't something they could put in a ziploc bag and carry home to to their family to share with them instead this was understood to be a distinct priestly bread And the significance of that I'll get to in a minute. So it was unleavened, made by the special family, placed on this special table, and consumed and then replaced by the priest every Sabbath day. Now, a little bit about the name. I use New American Standards in my translation. I don't know what the other translations, how they rendered this.

But looking here at verse 30, it says, you shall set the bread of the presence on the table for me at all times. The Hebrew there, lehem panim, is something like bread of the faces, bread of the presence. I think this is as good a way to translate it as any. But the idea is this, that this bread for seven days is in the presence or is in the face of Yahweh. It is directly before the most holiest location on earth, where Yahweh himself resides between the cherubim above the Ark of the Covenant. so you can kind of picture the uh the bread soaking in sacredness if you will uh it's in god's presence and when something is brought into god's presence in fact the closer something is brought into god's presence the more sacred it becomes because in the old testament holiness

is understood spatially uh we've talked before about how it's not understood morally but uh Holiness is understood spatially so that the closer something is to God, the more sacred it is. So holiness has to do with a connection to this specific locatedness of God himself. So this bread being in the holy place is holy bread, but it's not just holy bread. I think maybe I alluded to this last time or at least some other time. In the Old Testament, there's a couple of different categories. for holiness you've got holy things and most holy things now we've already talked about of course the most holy place and the holy place the distinction between those two but you also have most holy

things as well as holy things and the main difference is this if a thing like this bread is most holy, it not only is holy in and of itself, it can actually communicate, it can give that holiness to other things. So it can communicate the holiness it has received to something else. Now think about that. That's what's going on here with the consumption of this bread by the priest when the priest would eat the bread of the presence they would eat bread that was most holy and as a result the holiness of that bread which was none other than the holiness of god would be given to would be communicated to the priest and so this was the way that god would sustain the sanctity of his of his servants he would give them he would give his holiness into

the bread and then he would give the bread to his he would fill them with with his own with his own holiness and this happened once a week every every sabbath i got thoughts on that first let me uh let me backtrack and uh ask this question because it appeared i've always thought that this was the case so you have the bread of the presence but uh in the hebrew there is the uh the implication that it's it's plural like uh plural so you're saying the the bread of the presences or the bread of the faces uh which is what it means to be the presence of god to be in his face or whatever right um right and i've always thought that there was i mean obviously there's nothing three about it but i always thought that the idea that it was plural was sneaky trinitarian

well there's certainly the possibility of that uh because of a kind of a parallel case where i do believe that uh that is the case in uh in hebrew as most people probably heard at one time or another. The word for God is Elohim. There is a singular of that, El. El is God, and Elohim is plural. The difference is this. When Hebrew speaks of Elohim, and it's talking about the true god is talking about yahweh the even though that's a plural noun it always takes a singular verb i think about that in english you know if you use a plural noun you got a plural verb that's just that's basic grammar but and that's the way it's supposed to be in hebrew too you got a plural noun you have a plural verb right but the grammatical rule is is broken when it comes to

Elohim, because God, Elohim, takes a singular, singular verb. So you've got the plurality of Elohim, but you have the singularity of the verbs that go along with it. Now, that in and of itself is a very strong hint of the Trinitarian nature of God, because there's a plurality. You see that In the Elohim, the Trinitarian nature of God, three persons, a plurality of persons. But this Trinitarian God, this plurality of persons that you see in Elohim, takes a singular verb. So the three of them, the three persons, do actions which are unified. So whatever the Father does, the Son does. And whatever the Son does, the Spirit does.

And whatever the Spirit does, the Father and the Son do. so these three are always acting in concert in in that way so yeah i mean with that kind of in in the background uh it's it's possible that we have the same thing going on here with this there's plurality yeah because it seems interesting to be like well in the in the faces or or in the in the presences of what that you know it's um you can't be in my presences like yeah you can i suppose i don't even know this is a word but uh in english but uh you could be in like chad and i's presences i guess you know you would just be in our presence but you get what i'm saying like you would be in in multiple presences at once um yeah right which is sort of implied

there uh that you're and this is in like since god is thrice uh you have uh it's endowed with like the the whole the holiness of the trinitarian god and you know and and also i think it's uh it's it's important to note anyway or interesting to note that when we are talking about holiness and set-apartness and stuff this certainly is is something that the holy spirit is active in when we talk about and this is leading into what we were talking about next uh if you're talking about the lord's supper certainly the spirit is is involved in i mean it's the body and blood of christ but i but we would confess that the that it through the working of the holy spirit like this is this is happening yeah that's the that is the the way that the spirit sanctifies us

right the holy spirit yeah i mean the very the very uh word holy in front of spirit is an indication not only of who he is but what he does right he's the holy who sanctifies yeah the holy spirit the holy spirit the sanctifying spirit so the spirit is taking the the bread if we want to jump forward here he's taking the bread of the of the supper which is the body of christ and by means of that by giving that into us he is doing his sanctifying work now this this runs contrary to what a lot of people think when they they when they uh consider sanctification i mean they they hear sanctification there and they immediately jump to good works oh yeah sanctification well that's the life of holiness that's a lot of doing good works the work of the spirit and

sanctifying us is always work in which he is the subject and we are the object so he is the giver and we are the one given to he sanctifies and we are the the ones who are sanctified so the way the spirit is living up to his name if you will being the holy spirit is by holying us by sanctifying us, by means of that body, which is in the bread, which we consume, and by which the Spirit then makes us holy. Yeah, yeah. Now, Chad, as they eat this bread and then it's replaced every week, I must say, this is not concrete.

it's not it's not like you know the um the the absolute go-to but it is involved in my argument for weekly communion oh yeah i think it's uh it serves as a as a fitting old testament backdrop to that um because just as the priests would be sustained in their holiness be filled with the holiness of god on uh on saturday on the sabbath so the church gathers as we are the priesthood of the baptized sometimes called the priesthood of all believers we have been united into our great high priest christ and so we are we are priests so we are uh We enter, that's a beautiful thing here, is that all of this is brought to fulfillment in Christ and the church. So as those who are now priests, we enter into the holy place, that's what the book of Hebrews is talking about.

And in this holy place, around the presence of Christ and the Father and the Spirit, we gather around a different table. It's no longer the table of the shepherd, it's the table of the supper. and the spirit uses this bread of the presence bread that is filled with the presence of christ with his own body and by means of that he he sanctifies us he fills us with the sun and this happens on a uh on a sunday by sunday basis yeah hopefully yeah hopefully yeah i mean In times past, I know in, I can't really speak for other fellowships, but in the particular church that I belong to, early in the 1900s, certainly in the late 1800s, I mean, it was common for churches to celebrate communion like once a quarter. there was like this gradual movement it went from like once a quarter four times a year which i can't even imagine to maybe once a month that was a huge move uh then it went to

once you know every other sunday so you had twice a month and more and more of a of a of a push within the last i'd say 20 years toward every every sunday communion not some churches will kind of uh mix it up they'll have like uh i know this church in my town where uh one week it's early service one week it's late service so if you want communion every sunday you basically have to switch up your service times but at least it's offered every every sunday yeah yeah the uh i think one of the ideas behind it is because well at least one of the arguments i've heard for it not being every week um and that's why i think this is a good argument um for it is you know they'll say well it's it's sort of a sacred thing it's a it's a holy thing and we

don't want it to become common however regularity does not equal unholy uh that's not that's not how it works or neither it is common equal unholy and so and this is why this text is useful because you have here something that is very holy uh explicitly in the text it says so and uh and this is happening every week uh they weren't worried about it because you know like oh well maybe we should do you know god wasn't like maybe you should just do this once a year because it's a pretty special thing no i mean i would think that you know prayer is a holy thing and paul tells us to do that without ceasing so uh the the frequency in which you do something does not add to or take away from how holy it is it's not how it works yeah exactly exactly in fact

me being as unholy as i am probably need to be doing the holy things as often as possible yeah precisely it's it's the need it's our it's our need that drives us to the sacred gifts and uh that need is an ongoing is an ongoing need uh the the pattern that is established by the old testament is that the priest needed this every sabbath and if they needed every sabbath and we certainly need it once uh once a week as well amen amen all right continuing now not not really a bunny trail i mean we're still we're still up in that text yeah yeah we're still We're still pretty close. Yeah.

I promised we were going to look at the New Testament. The story I wanted to bring in here in connection with the bread of the presence is a somewhat familiar one. And some of the other Gospels record this as well, Matthew and Mark. But I'm looking here at Luke chapter 6. And this is where Jesus has the discussion with the Pharisees about his disciples picking grain, the heads of grain and rubbing them and eating them on the sabbath if you remember that story this is the first few verses of luke chapter six you know it's on a sabbath he and his disciples are going through these grain fields i guess the disciples want a snack so they're they're picking

some heads of grain they're eating the grain which uh the pharisees say this is this is not lawful on the sabbath to engage in this activity as you know the pharisees were uh sticklers about everyone adhering to their thousands of laws about about the sabbath day and this is one of those one of those laws can i just say that so can i just say that if you're like picking heads of grain and then like breaking them up with your hands and then eating them you're desperate for a snack yeah you are very hungry yeah i helped my brother-in-law when i was younger help harvest wheat uh in the summertime and uh yeah i did that a few times not because i was hungry just because experimenting. It's not

the same as buying a candy bar at the convenience store to take care of your hunger. You're hurting if that's really what you're relying on for nourishment. It's not even like eating a piece of bread. It's not like that at all.

It's just not pleasant. Here's how Jesus responds. Here's what they're saying. He says, have you not even read what David did when he was hungry he and those who were with him

how he entered the house of God this is the tabernacle how he entered the house of God and took and ate the consecrated bread which is not lawful for any to eat except priests alone and gave it to his companions

and he that is Jesus was saying to them the son of man is lord of the sabbath now i think it's interesting if you look at this particular part of luke within the broader context of scripture so here you have a discussion about the sabbath day and what his disciples were doing and jesus jumps to the story of of david this happened back in first samuel 21 david and his companions were were uh were hungry they were on the run they stopped at the tabernacle and all they had to eat there was the bread of the presence which was supposed to be only for the priest situation and uh so the priest gave this unleavened

bread to david and his companions and they they consumed it and they went went on their way now i think uh if you look at this particular discussion of jesus the pharisees in light of the broader context of scripture it's a great jumping off point for talking about how christ has brought all things to fulfillment in himself because he says here the son of man is lord of the sabbath so he places himself first of all as the son of man the messianic messianic figure the messiah himself he is the lord of the south and he's also he's also as we know the son of david he is the davidic king just like david had his companions so now this son of david has his companions as well and what jesus is going to do is he is as the son of david he is going to

by and by he is going to give to his companions uh the bread of the presence he's going to give them gathered in the upper room the bread of his very presence the bread of his body because they have become priest just like he is they become priest in him and so you see this whole discussion of the bread of the presence and the son of david kind of coming into focus in this in the story in the in the gospels and then you see this especially made clear in the book of hebrews where it talks about all of us as priests entering into the holy place and their uh being in the presence of the father and nourished with uh the bread which is christ himself yeah i mean yeah dude i mean like david and his companions eating the bread of the presence that is uh meant only for for priest is

totally about jesus in the upper room with his disciples i mean like it's totally what that's about it's like it's like god orchestrated it specifically to point to that uh because it is honestly uh it is actually a fairly crazy thing i mean i couldn't like that's the only instance of something like that happening yeah only time it ever happened the old testament yeah yeah it wasn't like well you know it wasn't like a known thing if you get real hungry here's what you can do yeah no no you can't do that in fact i find it amazing that they show up the tabernacle and And supposedly all there was to eat was the bread of the presence. Right.

What did you tell me? The priest didn't have anything? But they give them that particular bread. And this is an instance where the spirit was definitely orchestrating the events of biblical history so as to be a foreshadowing of what was going to happen centuries later with the new son of David. Yeah, pretty awesome stuff. yeah it is okay well uh my goodness we spent uh we spent a good half hour with that it's good stuff man there's a lot of good stuff here get me and me get me and you going on the

lord's supper time will pass yeah it certainly will well uh let's go to what next what's next there's uh there's actually an amazing and very rich amount of material about what uh is coming up in the next next section beginning in verse verse 31 and that is the uh the golden lampstand which uh elsewhere later in the scriptures is called a menorah it's not called a menorah until you get really into a discussion of the temple but today anyway we commonly refer to it as the menorah this is the uh this is the lampstand golden lampstand Now, what's most fascinating about the lampstand is the way that it is described. The language it's used to describe the lampstand is from the world of nature.

You have the main shaft of the lampstand, its base, if you will, is taken from a hebrew word which means which is for the the stalk of a plant uh so not the trunk of a tree but the stalk of a plant and this same word is used to describe the the branches of the lampstand of course you know when we hear branches we usually think of a tree these are the branches of of the lampstand and you've got uh seven in all you've got the the main one the main main uh shaft the center one and then you have three coming on on each side so a total of total of seven we'll talk about the numerical significance later on but what and not only that so you've got you've got uh a base or shaft like kind of like the trunk of a tree

and you have branches that are that are coming out of this of this base this center trunk if you will of the lampstand but not just that it says that on top of each of these branches you have these cups they're shaped like almond blossoms uh like a bulb and a flower it says in verse verse 33 so the overall picture of this of this lampstand is not of a lamp the overall picture of it is of a tree so you've got the base you've got the branches and then you have these almond blossoms on top of on top of these branches and that i think is uh uh for me anyway that is the most compelling image that comes over that we that we can take away from from the lampstand is that this is a tree in the presence of god whose fruit is light

you kind of got to keep all this in the back of your mind i want to unpack it as we go along so you got this tree-like lampstand and its fruit is is light so keep that in mind as we go on through this now let me pause for a second and mention that so on the south side of the the table of the presence so now we've covered two of the items in there we're going to get to the table of incense later on but we're able to the showbread on the north side of tabernacle in the holy place now you the golden lamp stand on the south side now i did serve of course uh somewhat out of a practical purpose, utilitarian purpose, because this was a tent that was completely covered. In fact, there were four layers over the top of the tabernacle. There weren't windows in

the tabernacle, so there was no light that was coming in. The only light within the holy place was coming from uh from the lampstand but it wasn't just practical because the lampstand was lit and it remained lit all night when nobody was in there so it wasn't as it'd be kind of like you know if you leave your lights on in church all night even though there's no services being held even though no one is there you still you know you you've got all the lights in the church on all night long well that's kind of what it was in the in the in the tabernacle you had this lamp that was burning burning all evening so a light that never that never goes out it keeps it keeps burning so with with those couple things in mind uh what does what do the rest of the

scriptures have to say about uh about the lampstand well the first thing and i've i've already hinted at this is that the lampstand has always been understood as symbol of the tree of life within the holy place just as you had the the tree of life in the garden of eden so now you have this representation of the tree of life directly in the presence of god in this new eden that is now called the holy place i think before we've talked about the connections between creation and the tackle we'll we'll get through some of these other chapters but there's amazing parallels between the creation of the world in genesis one and two and the creation of the tabernacle here in exodus and this is one of those connections so just like eden had the tree of life so now you

have the tree of of life in the holy place and this tree of life is there for illumination it's for it's forgiving light in fact uh remember what the first thing that was pronounced good was in creation was light god saw the light and he called it he called it good so the very first thing in creation that was called good was light and now we have this light shining in the dark place of of the tabernacle now if you jump ahead if you look in the rest of the of the scriptures not just not just the old testament but the new testament as well there's all sorts of ways in which the significant the theological significance of the menorah is unpacked now one of these is uh directly related to to the presence of christ so if we uh if we look for instance in

i'm turning there now for instance in in revelation uh the first very first chapter so you've got uh john speaking here he says he he turns to see see the voice that was speaking with him and when he turned he saw seven golden lap stands and in the middle of the lap stands was one like a son of man dressed in a robe reaching to his feet and girded around his breast with a golden girdle and then he goes on to to describe him so this is christ dressed as a priest dressed as the the high priest who's in the middle of these seven golden lampstands and then when you go further down at the end of chapter one of revelation it says that the seven golden lampstands are the seven churches which will be talked about in the

next couple of chapters of revelation so one of the ways in which the lampstand functions symbolically is of the church there is christ as the high priest who's in the midst of these seven lampstands or these seven churches because he is the source of their light so christ as our priest is in his church giving light to the church and that church then becomes the light that shines in the darkness of of the world so we have the seven churches in revelation ephesus myrna pergamum so on and so forth christ is a high priest is in their midst so that they are taking of his light then become that light that shines to those who are those who are around them and there's a whole lot more that we i guess we're gonna have to say for for next episode but there's a whole lot more

imagery about the menorah that is unpacked in uh in revelation as well as zechariah and some and some other places but the gist of it is this kind of uh give you a heads up what we've talked about next time so christ is the one who is who is the light who is the tree of life who gives his light by means of the spirit to the church so the church shines that light shines the light of christ itself to those who are around them in order that they might too be brought from darkness in to light from the world into the holy place which is where christ resides oh man yeah and And that is it. That is it.

We're going to leave it right there. Again, I guess I think that next week we'll probably have more to say about that. But we're doing a good job of, like, teasing out the next episodes at the end of the previous episode. So, you know, we'll see how long that goes. Maybe that's just a tabernacle thing. But, all right. Well, Chad, thanks for hanging out, man. Yeah, it's been fun.

All right. I hope everybody enjoyed it. We'll see you all next week. All right. © transcript Emily Beynon