Preached in Markham Baptist Church, February 4, 2007

As we continue our study of the wilderness tabernacle the place where God told His people He would meet with them - we come to the great truth that if we want to be intimate with God cleanliness matters. 

This is what we see illustrated for us in the bronze basin of the tabernacle. We are not given the dimensions of the basin in Scripture so no one knows for sure what it looked like – the one pictured here is one of the generally accepted depictions with its two levels. 

We do know that the basin is situated after the altar and before the entrance to the Holy Place.  It is to be used by the priests alone, those people designated to meet with God.  The priests are to wash their hands and feet with the water from it.  They are to do this continually whenever they enter the tent of meeting – that is, God’s presence – and when they offer a sacrifice on the altar, they were to wash their hands and feet.

Of course all of this points us to the fact that cleanliness matters to God.  You can imagine how filthy the priest would get in the offering of the blood sacrifices and the continual work they did.  Their hands and feet would get very dirty.  So from a practical point of view the washing of hands and feet were needed.  But from a spiritual point of view it symbolized the fact that the people of God needed to be cleansed of the filth of this world before they could enter into God’s presence.  The idea of washing the hands and feet is very symbolic.  They are the two contact points with the world – symbolically washing both hands and feet symbolizes the cleansing the whole body.

Later when Jesus washed the disciples feet in John 13, He would say the same thing – leaving out the idea of hands – He would say that the feet need to washed - it was a symbolic act cleansing the disciples of the dirt of this world.  

Cleanliness matters to God.

Now of course we are not talking about outward cleanliness, outward appearances.  It is not that God wanted His priests to come into His presence smelling like Irish Spring and look they have just stepped out of a Tide commercial. No - all of this ceremony speaks of the heart.  It is a outward action demonstrating an inward reality.  It all speaks of the heart.  

Scripture tells us that God looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)

And if we desire to be intimate with God we must have clean hearts, pure, holy.  So Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the pure of heart for they will see God!”  That’s an amazing promise!  That’s exactly what I want – I want to see God – I want to see Him in the lives of others, in His church, at work in this world.  I want to see God and I know you do too. That’s why you come week after week.  And Jesus tells us that it is possible to have such an intimate relationship with Him if we have a pure, clean heart.

Cleanliness, or holiness as we often read in Scripture, matters to God.  It is the condition for living in His presence.  Psalm 24:3-4 asks, “Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?”  And then the Psalmist is given the answer, “He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.” 

Cleanliness, holiness matters to God. 

Now we can ask, why is holiness, a clean heart so important to God?  If I want to see God and be intimate with Him why is it so important that we be pure? 

And as we read Scripture the answer comes back, Because God hates sin.  God is holy and He hates sin.  

I tell our kids don’t use the word “hate”. It’s such a strong word.  Instead of saying you hate someone or something say, “I dislike vegetables”, or “I don’t appreciate liver,” or  “Dogs are not my favourite animal.”  It’s much more polite.

But in this case there is no other word that can be used.  God hates sin.  He is revolted by it, hates it.  In Zechariah 8:17 God is telling His people not to sin – don’t plot evil against your neighbour, don’t lie, and God says, “I hate all this.”  God hates sin.

Look at our text. What does our text say will be the result if the priests do not wash before they enter the tent of meeting?  Verse 20 – they will die.  Again at verse 21 – if the priests don’t wash before they offer the sacrifice on the altar they will die. 

This is telling us that cleanliness matters to God.  You thought it mattered to your parents – it really matters to God.  Why? Because He hates sin. 

Now I think we need to regain this whole doctrine of sin.  We have a whole young culture right now that thinks nothing of sin – they feel no shame, no regret, no guilt – because the previous generation has taught them that God is equal to a big soft teddy bear whose standards, whose laws are like the code from “The Pirates of the Carribean”.  Do you remember in the first Pirates movie? Elizabeth is pleading with the pirates to come help Jack Sparrow – they refuse and Elizabeth says, “But what about the code?”  And the pirates reply – “Well they’re more like guidelines really.”

So when kids ask us about the law of God many Christian parents have said,  “You can overlook them, they are more like guidelines really written by men not by God and he’s a big soft teddy bear to whom you can go to at any time.”

Yes it is true – you can go to God anytime in any state. Thanks be to God that Jesus Christ came and ate and drank with sinners.  Thanks be to God that He came and sought out the sick, not the healthy – that He would leave the 99 sheep that were safely home in order to go and search for the one son who had lived in the far country of sin.  Thanks be to God for His love for sinners such as you and me.  May the truth never be ignored.  But never, never lose sight of the Biblical fact that God hates sin.

We have a picture of Jesus eating and drinking with sinners and we take that to mean that He turns a blind eye to sin. No, He does not. He has come to condemn sin. So we read in Romans 8:3 – “For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us…”

It has been pointed out that we like to say that God hates sin but loves the sinner.  And it is true, but too often we rush quickly over the first part of that statement in order to get to the second.  We cannot escape the fact that God hates sin.  We may excuse our sin – but God cannot. He hates it and condemns sin. 

Therefore every time we sin we are doing something God hates.  He hates our lustful thoughts, He hates our pride, our jealousy and our selfishness.  We need to be gripped by the fact that God hates all of these things.

Because we have pulled sin down to a place where we think God can just turn a blind eye to it, and we have made sin to be trivial, excusable, and even laughable – we’ve pulled sin down to such a degree that many don’t understand why death is the result of it.

Why does there need to be blood shed to be forgiven of sin?  Because sin is that horrible, that wretched, that terrible.  It is not an adorable quirk that we humans fall into. Sin is wickedness and God’s whole being hates it.  I know it’s not a pleasant topic, and I know that its not seeker friendly, and I know some of you don’t like what I am saying – but I am telling you the truth – God hates sin. 

That’s why we must be cleansed.  But more, God not only hates sin – but God’s character demands holiness, because God’s character demands cleanliness.  God said, “Be holy, because I am holy.”  (1 Peter 1:16; Leviticus 11:44,45; 19:2; 20:7)    1 John 1:5,6 says that God is light in whom there is no darkness at all. If we continue to walk in the darkness of sin how can we be intimate with Him?  We cannot.   

Again the Psalmist asks the question, in Psalm 15:1-3, “Who may live on your holy hill?”  Who can be intimate with God?  And the answer is given, “He whose walk is blameless and who does what is righteous who speaks the truth from his heart and has no slander on his tongue, who does his neighbour no wrong and casts no slur on his fellowmen.” (Psalm 15:2,3a)

We have a problem called cultural holiness.  This cultural holiness occurs when we adapt our behaviour to meet the standards around us.  I was never so holy as I was when I was at Bible School or camp.  Why?  Because as our environment is holy so we are more or less holy.  But God has not called us to live like those around us, He has called us to be like Him.  Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God.¹

So a clean heart is important to God because God hates sin and because God’s character demands that we be holy. 

I know you didn’t want to come here to have a good bath in sin.  So hear the good news.  God has done an amazing thing.  He has made it possible for us to be cleansed.  We are cleansed fully when we come to the cross in repentance and faith.  Just as the Israelites did at the bronze altar but for us it never needs to be repeated.  Christ’s sacrifice is so much better than the blood of goats and bulls because it is substitutionary, sufficient, and satisfactory. It is a  completed act and we are now declared holy before God.  Therefore there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:1).  

“Now therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.”  (I Corinthians 5:17)

How are we made new? 

We now have a new status – through faith in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross our status before God changes. 

“At one time we were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.  But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:12-13) 

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household.” (Ephesians 2:19)

“You too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.” (Ephesians 2:21)

Not only does our status change but our circumstances change. We now are given the Holy Spirit. When you believe in Jesus Christ He comes and lives in you by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit now lives in us as our teacher, our enabler, our counsellor.  He gives gifts to us so that we can serve God. He helps us to pray, and enables us to live the Christ life by producing His fruit in us.

A new status, a new identity, a new life living in us, a new nature.   All of this is because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Because He died to sin, we died to sin.  The dominion, the reign, the rule of sin no longer has power over us.  We are cleansed through faith in Him.  

But in our text you will note that the priests had to wash in the bronze basin continually whenever they wanted to approach God.  The sacrifice may have been offered for their sin but they still had to wash in the basin.  It is the same for us.  The sacrifice of Christ has washed us of our sin nature, but we still have sins that need to be cleansed.

You need to know that when you became a Christian all sorts of things changed for you, but we also know that there are some things that do not change.  When I became a Christian I did not have a change in brain cells.  I forgot names before I was a Christian and I still forget names.  I freeze when it comes to forms – I have a phobia about forms – that did not change when I became a Christian.  I did not get a new brain.   

When I became a Christian I did not get a whole new body.  Too bad - what a great marketing tool – Join Jesus Christ, eat what you like and you’ll still lose weight.  That did not happen.

I have the same temperament, the same psychological characteristics, and personalities, the same relatives, the same storehouse of memories are distressingly intact, the same old behavioural and emotional patterns the same old ways of dealing with stress and conflict.  All of that never changed when you became a Christian. 

The Holy Spirit living in you wants to change all that, but the old you, your old nature - as it is called in Scripture - is not going to give up easily. 

And this brings us back the bronze basin.  It points us the truth that while we are cleansed of our sin the sacrifice has been given. While we have had a bath so that our sin nature is washed – that is who we are - we still need washing. Our sins – that is, what we do - need to be cleansed.

Why?  Because our old sin nature doesn’t die easily.  We’ve been sinners since birth – we’ve developed sinful habits, we’ve learned how to deal with life from sinful people, do think that changes overnight? No. 

For a long time I owned a pair of glasses that I had to push up my nose because they kept sliding down.  It got to be such a habit that even when they didn’t slide down my nose I would reach up to adjust them. 

So with you and me.  We sin out of habit and we deal with situations, people, and circumstances in the same old sinful ways we always have - so we need to constantly came to God to be cleansed.

For the Israelites this was done on their behalf by the priests, representing the people – they would wash regularly in the bronze basin.  For you and me – what acts as a bronze basin for you and for me?   What is it that continually washes us clean?  

Very simply three agents are at work to be cleansed – there is the Holy Spirit using the Word of God as we submit our wills to Him.

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE WORD 

The Holy Spirit lives in us and He takes the word of God to convict and cleanse us.  Ephesians 5:25 says that Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy. There’s the action of cleansing done on the cross -  cleansing her by the washing with water through the word – there’s the continual action of cleansing.  And it is done through the water that is the word.

Psalm 119:9 says, “How can a young man keep his way pure?  By living according to your word.” 

How does it work?  The Holy Spirit takes the word of God and it acts as a pulsating shower head as it pounds at all those old thoughts, old sinful attitudes and habits and ways of dealing with life and shows me the sinfulness of them so that I repent and ask for forgiveness and the Holy Spirit is able to work and those sins are washed away.

None of this absolves us from responsibility.   We do not simply sit and hope that God will make me into His image – since it is God who purifies us, there’s nothing left for me to do.  Well, yes, there is.

OUR WILLS

Like the priests we must go to the basin to be cleansed.  If the Word of God is able to cleanse us as the Holy Spirit applies it to our lives, doesn’t it make sense that we should be reading the book on a consistent basis? 

We complain sometimes that God isn’t changing us, isn’t making us different – like a child who comes home from camp smelling like an old locker room and we ask the child why do you smell so bad – and he says, “I don’t know.”  Well did you take a shower?  No.  Did you go for a swim?  No. 

Look - God will not magically cleanse us from our old sinful ways if we are not willing to take the cleanser in our hands, open it and apply it to our lives and ask the Holy Spirit to do His work of convicting us of sin and bringing the forgiveness of Christ into our lives.   We have to read it.

Second – we have to obey what we see written there.  We Christians can be deceived about our own sins.  We somehow feel that consent to the teaching of the Bible – saying “Amen” to good teaching – is equal to obedience.  We may hear a “point of application in a sermon, or perhaps discover it in our own personal Bible reading or study, We say, ‘Yes that is true, that is something I need to act on.’  But we let it drop at this point.  James says if we do that, we deceive ourselves.”²

Listen, for those of us who have grown up in the Christian home there is a great danger that we fall into spiritual pride. We know the right doctrines, the correct methods, we know when to stand to sit, when to act shout for joy and when to be quiet, but we may not see the poverty of our own spiritual character.  We may not see our critical, unforgiving spirit.  We may not see our habit of backbiting, our tendency to judge others.  We may become like the Laodiceans of whom our Lord said, “You say I am rich I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.  But you do not realize that you are wretched pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” 

So after reading it we must come humbly seeking to obey – depending on the Holy Spirit to show us the horror of our sin and convict us and to apply the healing grace of Christ to our lives when we repent and ask for forgiveness.

God says, Isaiah 66:2  “This one I esteem; he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.” 

If we want to be intimate with God,  purity matters. 

Well this morning we are going to come to the communion table.  Here we remember that we are cleansed fully and completely through Christ’s sacrifice.  But this morning – let us come realizing that we want to live constantly in God’s presence so we need to ask God to cleanse us of all sins.  

Copyright MBC and Tom Cullen - February 2007

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