The Glory of God’s Presence Returns
- Tim Cain
- Dec 12, 2009
- Series: Topical
The Glory of God’s Presence Returns
Kaleo El Cajon
December 12, 2009
Tim Cain
I have been thinking about how relational we are as human beings, and how we were made for relationship. One vital aspect of relationship is actually being near each other. It’s seeing each other, talking to each other, being together. I am going to use the word presence to talk about this. Because we are relational beings, we long for the people that we love and depend on to be present, to be with us. When a baby is born they cry and sometimes they are inconsolable until their mother or father takes them in their arms. The baby is not merely crying because they want to be held, they want a specific person to hold them. I know this because most of the time when I pick up a baby, he starts crying and then as soon as I hand him back to his mother he stops. When I talk about us being relational beings and longing for presence, I don’t mean that we simply long to have people around us. We long to have those we love around us. We can be lonely in a crowd of people because we are longing for a specific person that we love. All of us know just how important the presence of the people we love is to us.
I just came from a wedding and it made me remember my own wedding which was three years ago this Wednesday. I was thinking of the vows I wrote to Abbey and how they speak of presence. I remember one of the lines in my vows was I told Abbey, “Come what may girl, it’s me and you, held together by the unfailing love of our savior.” I was promising to her my loving presence. I was promising that whatever happened, in the good times and the bad, what she can count on is that as long as I am alive we will be together. As long as I am alive we will face all that God has for us in this life together. That’s what makes marriage so special. You have a companion. You have someone who is promising to be there for you.
As I have been thinking about this it struck me that this is also why we hate death so much. That is why death is seen as such a tragedy. Death is the end of a person’s presence with us. Death takes people away from us. It is so tragic because we long to be with those we love. We long to hear their laugh, to see their smile, to feel their touch, to watch them and to listen to their voice. Most of us have experienced the great pain of losing someone we loved and the great pain that their absence caused in our life. Certainly it is true that the greater the relationship, the more dependent we were on the person, the deeper our love for them, the harder it is to bear their absence and the more pain we experience when we lose them. C.S. Lewis talks about this reality when he says, “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal." Lewis gave his heart to a woman who was dying of cancer. He chose to give himself to the joy of being together for the last few months of her life even though he knew it would cost him dearly when she died. The joy of being with her is what made her death so tragic. The pain of her loss was in direct proportion to the joy of her presence.
With this in mind I want us to look to the Bible and its overarching story from beginning to end through the lens of the presence and absence of God. This message is going to be different because it’s going to talk about this whole book and one of the points is that we would begin to understand what God is doing and how we fit into it. For some of you who are unfamiliar with the story, this might take a little work to follow along, but it’s going to be sweet because after tonight you will have an overview of what this book is all about. So, let’s take a little while and see what this book says about the presence and absence of God.
The story begins with God’s presence. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Then he made man in his own image. God brought all the beasts of the field before the man, Adam, and he named them. But there was found among them no suitable companion. God knew Adam needed a companion, so he made woman and her name was Eve. God dwelt with Adam and Eve. He walked with them in the garden. They had a special relationship. There was no pain, no suffering, no death, no loneliness, everything in creation was good. Until one day the man and woman decided that they wanted to be like God. They did not want to submit to his ways anymore but wanted to live for themselves. So they listened to the words of the serpent, Satan, and they ate of the tree that God had commanded them not to eat. So began the separation. When they ate, they realized for the first time that they were naked and they felt ashamed. Because of their shame they tried to cover themselves with leaves. But when God came to walk with them in the evening, they realized how flimsy their leaves were and for the first time the presence of God scared them. Whereas before they had loved his presence, now they fled and hid themselves in the bushes. They were afraid of God. Contemplate for a moment what it was like for them. For the first time ever they felt fear. For the first time ever they felt shame, guilt, and loneliness. The one who had been their best friend, their maker, their Lord, their protector and provider now scared them. They had lost their relationship with the one who had been everything to them. So they hid themselves and no longer felt comfortable in the presence of their creator.
But notice a few of the things God does. After making a promise to them, he killed an animal and made them clothes. Here for the first time we see the wages of sin. Their sin which caused them to be separated from God and severed their perfect relationship with him could only be fixed with blood. The wages of sin was death. Their leaves would never work because in order for Adam and Eve to be able to stand before a holy God and not be consumed, something had to die. So the first death occurred as God killed an animal and made them clothes to wear. Then he kicked them out of the garden because the clothes that he made them were only temporary. They did not truly fix the problem, they simply foreshadowed the way that God would one day ultimately and totally fix the problem and restore his relationship with his people. So, because the skins were only temporary, God kicked them out of the garden so that they would not eat of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was meant to make things permanent and God did not want them in their sin to be made permanent. Their relationship with God had been severed and God in his love did not want them to have to live forever separated from him. He did not want them to eat of the Tree of Life until he had totally and completely been reconciled to his people. The blood of the animal that God slaughtered to clothe Adam and Eve was not enough to truly wash away their sins, and until a better sacrifice came along and was able to truly cleanse them, they could not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.
So God kicks them out of the garden and places angels with a mighty sword around the tree. Then God began his massive work to fix the problem caused by Adam’s sin and ultimately restore all things to himself. He began it with a promise to Eve that one day a child would come who would defeat Satan and restore all creation to a right relationship with God. So the story goes on, and we see that because of peoples’ severed relationship with God, their relationship with each other also suffers. In fact, Adam’s first child, Cain, ends up murdering his brother, Abel.
We will skip ahead and find years later God rescued his people out of slavery in Egypt. He rescued them in order to bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey, a promised land. He led them through the desert with a cloud to protect them from the sun during the day and a fire to light their way at night. But, just like Adam and Eve, the people rejected God and chose to worship a calf instead. Because of their sin, God said that he would no longer lead them, but would send an angel to lead them instead. When Moses told the people this, they all wept. Moses begged God to relent. He begged him to come with them, to please lead them. He said, “I will not go from here unless you lead us.” So God agreed to lead his people. Again we see the importance of his presence. The Bible says when Moses would go out to meet with God, everyone in Israel would stand at their tent door and watch, and when Moses went in to the tent they would all worship. The Bible says that Joshua, Moses’ assistant, would stay outside the tent and even after Moses would leave he would stay there. He loved to be near his God. Even though he couldn’t go into the tent, he longed to be near his God.
I want you getting a taste of the importance of the presence of God to his people. That is what made them God’s people. They were God’s people because he dwelt with them. That was why Moses refused to lead them unless God would go with him. Later, when Solomon built the temple meant to replace the tent of meeting where Moses used to meet God, we see that the glory of the Lord fill the temple. We see in II Chronicles 6 just how important God’s presence in the temple was to his people. Because God dwelt there, if people would pray to him, he would hear them. See how important the dwelling place of God was to his people? Solomon knew that even if they were taken away, if they repented, God would bring them back. Why must they come back? Because their God’s presence dwelt in his temple and his temple was in Jerusalem. This was so vital to the people. Again we see the importance of sacrifice. Look at II Chronicles 7. 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep were sacrificed. The house of God was dedicated. Do you see how massive an event this was? The Glory of God came and dwelt in this house in a very special way.
In fact, the Bible tells us that only the high priest could enter the holy of holies. He could only enter it once a year and then only with blood. The presence of the glory of the Lord in this place was immense and it separated Israel, Jerusalem, and the temple from every other place in the world. It is so hard for us living in this time to understand the depths of the importance and the beauty of God dwelling on earth in his temple. The God of the heavens and earth was dwelling with his people. Oh what a privileged people the Jewish people were during this time! God himself dwelt with them in the holy of holies.
The people of Israel and Judah failed to treasure, value, and adore the God who dwelt among them. Instead they gave themselves to following idols, pathetic images made of wood and stone when God himself the creator of heaven and earth dwelt in their midst. In fact, they even filled his house, the temple, with abominations. One of the most tragic sections in the Bible comes in Ezekiel 8 and following.
Before you read it, I want us to take a minute to try to understand the purity and the sacredness of the holiness of God. I think we have almost totally lost any understanding of holiness in our culture. Nothing is sacred to us. In fact, our comedy is seen as pushing the envelope. We have shows like Fear Factor that try and get you to do outrageous things so that nothing is considered gross, holy, separate, untouchable, clean, or pure. I think maybe the operating room is one of the last bastions of purity. When you have a loved one going in for serious surgery, it’s pretty scary. However, you take comfort in the fact that your doctor knows what he is doing, that he is going to be the one holding the scalpel, that only qualified nurses are going to be in there, and that everyone will wash their hands. But what if this didn’t happen? What if some hidden camera showed that for some reason the doctor chose not to wash his hands but instead ran from one surgery to the next wiping his hands on his scrubs? What if you saw him work without a mask on? What if he sneezed into the air because both his hands were busy? What if you saw him drinking Red Bull in order to stay awake because his head was nodding up and down as he was trying to figure out which vein to cut? You would be sick right? My sister’s son had surgery where to rebuild part of his hip with a bunch of metal. Somehow, an infection was in the metal so that her son has had fevers for months and they can’t get it out because something wasn’t totally clean when it went in. The operating room is a place where life and death matters are decided; it is a place that must be taken seriously. It is a place where one germ, one impurity, one misstep, could mean death or at least infection. We understand that. Well, the temple of God is a holy place. It was a place to be taken seriously. It was a place where life and death stood in the balance. It was the place where God dwelt. It had a cleansing protocol to be followed. Only certain people were allowed, and they had to wash a certain way and animals had to be sacrificed before the priests were supposed to enter. The people where supposed to take seriously God’s holiness and the immense privilege it was that the God of all creation chose to dwell in a temple made with human hands.
But in Ezekiel chapter 8 we find that no one cares about God’s presence in his temple anymore and we read about disgusting abominations that exceed anything I said about the operating table. Listen to what is happening in God’s house. (Read chapter 8.) Because of this God’s glory chose to leave his temple. Because of the gross sin of his people, his glory left the temple. This is one of the most tragic scenes in the Bible. The glory of God leaves his people. Soon the temple would be burned up; soon the people would be taken away to captivity. God’s people went into exile. The exile was not merely that they were taken away with hooks in their mouths to Babylon, but the exile began the day God’s glory left the temple. Who cares where you live if God’s glory is not there? Even those who stayed behind in Jerusalem were still in exile, for the glory of God had left.
Then, 70 years later, they came back. The people rebuilt the temple. In Ezra we find that when they had finished building the foundations, some of the younger people shouted for joy but the older ones wept. Listen to Ezra 3:11ff. One thing that is important to note is that they are not weeping because Solomon’s temple was so much better or bigger. The foundations were laid the same way. However, the weeping was because the older ones knew that this was no mere building, the older ones remembered when the glory of the Lord used to dwell in this place. They longed for it and wondered if it would return. They did not care how big the temple was; all they wanted was to know if the glory of the Lord would return. In Haggai 2:9 we see how God responds to those who were weeping. He promises that, “the glory of this house would be greater than the former says the Lord of hosts. And in this place I will give peace.” This is an awesome promise. Do you remember the glory of the former house? Do you remember how fire came down from heaven, how all the people saw the glory fill the house, how the priests could not worship, how Solomon sacrificed 120,000 sheep and 22,000 oxen? That was amazing right?
So here we have a promise that God’s glory would fill this second house in a greater way than it ever did the first. This is an awesome promise. So the people wait, and we wait. We look in the last few books of the bible and the glory never comes in this way. So God’s people waited. Time passed. Years turned into decades, decades into centuries, and as 400 years passed, very few were still waiting. Very few were still hanging around the temple waiting for God to fulfill his promise. Very few were waiting to see how his glory would fill this second temple in a greater way than the first.
But the Bible does tell us about two people who were still waiting. In Luke 2:22, the glory of God returns to his temple. This time there were not 120,000 sheep sacrificed, but only two pigeons. There was no fire from heaven, just a man and a woman carrying a baby. But still, there was a man named Simeon who was waiting for the consolation of Israel, waiting for the promise of Haggai to come to pass. God’s spirit directed him to the temple on this special day, and as Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to his temple, Simeon took him in his arms and blessed God. He said, “My eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the gentiles, and glory to your people Israel.” Though God’s salvation was prepared before the eyes of all people, very few recognized him.
Then we see a woman named Anna. She is an amazing woman. In a culture where being married was pretty much the only way to actually survive, in a culture where your identity was so tied up to your husband and having children, this woman had been married for seven years and then when her husband died she had remained single. For the next fifty or sixty years, she had chosen to spend all of her time at the temple. This woman is amazing. This woman had experienced what it was like to be let down by someone she had loved. She had experienced the pain of the loss of a husband. She had experienced the fragile nature of any human relationship. Though everyone else expected her to find hope and security in the arms of another man, though any comfort or luxury or pleasure she might have in her life would come through getting married again, having a family, and living in a home, she chose instead to wait by the temple for her God. She would give her whole life to waiting for one who would never leave her nor forsake her. She would rather suffer now by waiting for him than enjoy the temporal pleasures of companionship that would not last. This woman was waiting for her true husband. She was waiting for the one whose steadfast love would never leave her alone. The Bible says she did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day.
What I love so much about our God is that he did not leave these two waiting forever. There must have been days when they were tired, when they wanted to give up, when they thought of what everyone else was doing and how they looked like they were having such a good time. But while everyone else was busy doing their own thing, the Glory of God came back to his temple and Simeon and Anna got to hold him. They got to hold the glory of God. II Corinthians 4:6 says that we see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That is where the glory of God is revealed. I just picture Anna and simeon. As they take Jesus from his parents arms and they hold him up, and look at his face they are seeing the glory of God. That infinite, divine, magnificent glory. That is what they are beholding. The glory of God that shook Mount Sinai, the glory of God that Joshua used to sit around the tent just to be near, they got to touch it.
This glory of God was so much better, so much greater than the former glory. With the former glory, if anyone even touched the mountain where God was, they would die. The former glory lived behind a veil where only the high priest could go and then he could only go one time a year. He went with blood and he went with bells and a string around his ankle because if he did not properly cleanse himself he would be struck dead and no one could go get him because no one else was allowed in, so they would have to pull his dead body out with the string attached to his ankle. This glory of God was greater than that. It was better because he could be held and because regular people like Mary and Joseph and Anna and Simeon could touch him. He was accessible. Anyone who was waiting for him could have held him. Anyone who was looking for him could have seen him, for he was prepared in the sight of all.
I want you to see that Jesus’ return to the temple as a little baby is the fulfillment of Haggai 2. It is the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of all God’s people since Eve who have longed to touch and see the glory of God without dying. Since Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden, there has been a longing within mankind for that perfect pure relationship to be reconciled, to be able to once again walk with our God, to speak to him as a friend, to worship him as our creator, to touch him without dying. All of this took place when the Son of God chose to leave heaven and become a baby. Immanuel was his name and it means, God with us. God was with us in a way that was greater than he had ever been before. He was with us in a way that was so precious and so beautiful and so superior to anything that Solomon ever dreamed. And only two people saw it—the fulfillment of the promises of the OT, the promise that through Eve and through Abraham God would bring about a hero, a messiah who would restore his presence with his people. All of this took place while people ran to and fro. The temple was crowded that day. Many were there, praying, giving money, many thought they were worshiping; but only two were waiting for God’s promised glory to return. Both of them attested that it was worth it.
Simeon said, “I can depart in peace.” Think about those words. Think of how we fear and dread the thought of death, and then listen to these words. Simeon can depart in peace because he had seen Jesus. He has seen the glory of God. He knows Jesus. Both of these people gave years of their life to waiting but now they can depart in peace for they have seen what they were waiting for. They have beheld the glory of God. They have experienced his presence with them. God has returned to his people. He has come back and they have touched him. The relationship they were made for, the one that will never leave them or forsake them, they have finally seen and touched and now they know that they are safe. They know that they can die at peace with God for he has kept his promise and sent his son to reconcile sinners to himself.
Now there is a massive question that this story must bring up to us. What changed? Why could Simeon and Anna hold the glory of God in their hands while anyone who happened to touch Mount Sinai would be struck dead? How could the glory of God that they held be greater than the former glory and not strike them dead because of their sin? How could it be greater than the former glory when before only the high priest could see it and then only once a year and only with blood? How could this glory be greater and yet still be held by sinners? What made this glory so much more accessible than before is that this glory was accompanied by a greater sacrifice. The glory of God can only be seen by those who have been cleansed through the shedding of blood. So, for this glory of God to be so much more accessible, it required a much greater sacrifice. For this glory of God to be so accessible, for God to be so near to his people, it required a sacrifice of infinite worth. It would be greater than 120,000 sheep, greater than 22,000 oxen. Hebrews 10 tells us of this greater sacrifice. It speaks of the great sacrifice that tore the veil which had always kept God’s glory hidden from his people. This sacrifice was none other than the precious blood of Jesus.
This glory of God, this precious Jesus, allowed sinners to come to him, to know him, to love him, to look upon him without dying because he chose to die in their place. Sin has severed our relationship with God. Sin is what keeps us from being able to truly know and love and walk with God as Adam and Eve did. Sin is what makes God’s presence something to be afraid of and not something to be craved. However, Jesus came and he brought with him the presence of God that all of us so desperately needed. He came as the very glory of God and he dwelt with his people even though they were sinners. In order to bring the gracious presence of God to sinners who deserved only God’s wrath, Jesus chose to take our sin and bear in his body the absence of God that we deserved.
We see what we deserved in Jesus on the cross. All of us were made to need God. We were made to need him desperately, and yet our sin has cut us off from him. So in the time of our greatest need, when we call out to God with all our hearts, he should forsake us. When we need him the most, when we call out to him, he should not hear us. But he does. He does because Jesus came and on the cross he experienced the absence of God. On the cross the world goes black as God turns his back on his only son. On the cross, when Jesus needed God the most, when everyone else had left him and he was all alone, dying upon the cross, when he needed the presence of God so that he might die in peace, God forsook him. When he called out to him there was no answer. God the Father forsook his only son. He turned his back on him, poured his wrath out on him. Jesus experienced the death that we deserved, and God forsook his son so that he might shine his face upon us. He placed our sin on his son and then turned his back on Jesus because he carried our sin. And instead he took all of Jesus’ perfect righteousness and he has given it to us so that we might look upon his glory and live.
There is a beautiful image when we look at the Garden of Eden and then think of Hebrews chapter 10. Do you remember when God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden? Do you remember how he placed two cherubim angels around the Tree of Life with a flaming sword? He did this so that Adam and Eve would not eat of it and live forever in a state of separation from God. But still, somehow, if we are to have eternal life, we must eat of the tree. If we are ever to have eternal life, it will only be because our relationship with God is restored and we are once again invited into his presence. The images we get of Jesus’ torn body may well allude to those angels with the flaming sword. You see Jesus comes as the second Adam to make right what Adam messed up. He comes to fix what Adam broke. He comes to begin a new family. To fix what Adam broke, he must make a way for us to eat of the Tree of Life. Because Jesus lived a perfect life he actually deserved to eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. The angels would have let him pass. But instead of freely going and eating what he deserved, he instead chooses to take on himself the sin of Adam. And not merely Adam’s sin but also the sin of anyone else who would ever believe in him. Then, carrying all of this sin, he went to the Tree of Life. The flaming sword came down upon him because he bore our sin. The sword cut him in two, just as the veil in the temple was cut in two. Now the Bible says that we can approach our God. We can approach his throne, we can once again enter into his holy presence, and the way we enter is through the torn body of our savior. His body absorbed the flames that we deserved and now we can walk through his torn body into the very presence of God. Not with the blood of an animal sprinkled over us, but with the blood of the very Son of God sprinkled upon us. The blood of Jesus shed on the cross is a far better sacrifice than that of goats and bulls, and that is why we can behold and touch the very glory of God in ways that no one ever could before.
So, the death which we hate so much has been defeated. The way to the Tree of Life has been reopened. Now, like Simeon, we can die in peace and behold the very glory of God through Christ without being consumed. We can know the satisfaction of God’s presence and we be assured that nothing can ever separate us again from his love. Neither life nor death nor angels nor demons, nothing can separate us from the amazing love of God through Christ Jesus. As we prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of Jesus, recognize that the glory of God has come to earth in a magnificent way in Jesus. In Jesus we can see just how amazing and beautiful our God is. Because of Jesus, we no longer need to run from his presence; instead we can dwell with him forever. We were made for relationship, not for relationships that will only last a lifetime, we were made for an eternal relationship; we were made to know and love and worship God. All human relationships are meant to point us to our amazing God. When they are good, they are to remind us of just how much sweeter and more amazing our God is than any earthly relationship he created. When they disappoint us, they are to remind us that there is one who will never leave us nor forsake us. There is a relationship that will never end. There is a relationship that has conquered death, that will never bore us, will never hurt us, will never use us. There is a relationship that will satisfy us for all eternity and it is this relationship that we were made for. It is this relationship with God that Jesus left heaven and gave his life on the cross to make possible. The story will soon end, and all those who have given their lives to knowing and loving Jesus will find that they get to spend all eternity with him. Every tear wiped away, every suffering ended, every void filled, every loneliness eternally banished, and we will find eternal pleasures at his right hand and the fullness of joy in his presence. What an amazing God who gave his son so that he could dwell with his people forever!
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