Jesus, the new and better Tabernacle

Some jottings for our Marquee Service:

Readings:

Introduce OT reading

Marquee – tent - tabernacle

Ex 40

Sermon series there – year of Bible studies, symbolism – not today’s sermon!

Introduce NT reading

John 1:1-18

Jesus made his dwelling among us – pitched his tent among us, tabernacled among us

Jesus is the new and better tabernacle

(1)   God wants to meet with his people

He didn’t need to

God a happy and holy fellowship

He wasn’t lonely!

God overflows with love for the world

God acts and reveals himself and provides for us to know him

Need to be introduced to the Queen

(2)   God is on the move with his people, leading them to the Promised Land

God is always with us

Pilgrim

Journey of life

The promised land of the New Creation not ancient Israel

(3)   If you want to meet with God, come to Jesus, the new and better tabernacle

Not Tabernacle, Temple, Jerusalem, Holy Land or church but Jesus

Jesus is with us here just as much in a tent on the green as in a 13^th C building on a hill.

In Jesus the fullness of the deity dwells in bodily form

Jesus reveals the glory of God; Jesus is the glory of God

God’s glory is the shinning forth of his greatness

Jesus is the outgoing God, God to the rescue

(4)   Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, the new and better altar, sacrifice & priest

Jesus is our only ultimate unique high priest

Jesus is the only and all sufficient sacrifice for sins

The blood of sheep and ghosts…

Jesus God and man

Jesus the spotless lamb of God

Mad, Bad, Son of God / Liar, Lunatic, Lord

This blog is largely intended for me. One of its main purposes is to help me find stuff again later. I am surprised that I appear not to have blogged this from C S Lewis before. Again, I might quote it today:

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."

One Solitary Life

This is all over the internet in different versions. I might quote it today:

Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another village. He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher.
He never owned a home. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put His foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself...
While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth – His coat. When He was dead, He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.
Nineteen long centuries have come and gone, and today He is a centerpiece of the human race and leader of the column of progress.
I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that were ever built; all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.