Gaining Access To God That's Acceptable To Him

God’s Desire To Meet With, Speak To, and Instruct, Us

Exodus 25:22: “And there I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak to you, about all that I will give you in commandment for the sons of Israel.”

Earlier in our comments about this chapter we pointed out how there seemed to be a bit of confusion as to what exactly was to go into the Ark that God wanted His people to construct.  Was it just the Testimony, the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) that He had given them in chapter 20 and if so, why was verse 21 referring to the Testimony He was to give them in the future? It turned out as we saw that the whole Testimony of God includes more than the Ten Commandments and this verse validates that interpretation. God wanted them to place in the Ark all the commands and instructions that He would give the people of Israel.

But what is really of greater focus at this point in the chapter is that God again repeats or makes reference to both His desire to meet with us and that He actually will. He intended then to meet with His people and speak to them and give them instructions.  And He still wants that for you and me today.

In the days of Moses, God said He would come and meet with Israel “from above the mercy seat”. He would come there because that was the place the blood of animals sacrificed to Him would be poured on once a year, on the Day of Atonement, and at that time, that was the necessary and acceptable sacrifice that God wanted.  Today, He comes to us also ‘through’ another ‘mercy seat’.  It is because of the acceptable sacrifice made on our behalf by His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Christ, whose own blood was shed for us on the cross of Calvary.  What was happening with and because of the Ark in Moses’ day was symbolic of what was to happen, and did happen, with Christ on the cross – the ultimate “mercy seat” when God showed us ultimate mercy that we did not deserve and provided us a way of salvation through His Son.

It is because God accepted His Son’s sacrifice for us, and because we have acknowledged that Jesus paid the entire penalty for all of our sins, and taken Him as our Saviour and Lord, that God can and wants to come to meet with us today, to speak to us, and to give us His commandments (to us as a Body of believers through His Holy Word) and to us individually through His specific instructions for us.

While none of us were around to help build the Ark that God wanted and to experience Him visiting His people from above the mercy seat between the two cherubim, we have the privilege of being invited to meet with God, to have Him speak to us and to be guided by Him in our everyday lives because of the mercy shown to us by God and His Son.  All we have to do is accept that Christ’s sacrifice was made on our behalf; that His blood was shed for the purchase of our salvation; and that the one and only Almighty God, the Creator of the universe and all that is within it, does in fact want to meet with us, speak to us, and provide for us all we need to live this life.

The skeptic would say it’s too good to be true.  The salesman would say, “but it can’t be free.”  The scientist would say, “It doesn’t compute.”  The philosopher would say, “Surely, if there is a God, He could have come up with other plans.”  Believe me, it’s true and it’s free. It does not make sense from our perspective until we earnestly want it to see it from God’s perspective. And, no, there is no other way.  Yes, there is a catch – for one or more of all the above objections, our human nature often gets in the way of our believing it and thus we ultimately miss out.

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