Finding True Freedom In God’s Presence
For every high priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices: wherefore it is of necessity that this man have somewhat also to offer. For if he were on earth.
As Moses was admonished by God when he was about to make the Tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount.
Hebrews 8:3-5
A new way of worship was being opened for Israel by blood. God instructed Moses to make the Tabernacle after a divine pattern shown to him on the mount.
God gave them the tabernacle with its altar of sacrifice made of brass where beasts were offered, and the altar of incense typifying prayer.
Read and Learn More Bible Verses about the Presence of God
Beyond that, in the holy of holies, was the Ark of the Covenant with its gold lid, called the mercy seat.
And over that golden mercy seat were two cherubim with their wings outstretched toward each other. Between the wings of the cherubim burned the awful fire, the Shekinah.
Then there were priests, born priests and anointed to exercise their function as priests. They wore garments—all symbolic and typical of heavenly things. Above them, the high priest—typical of the great High Priest who was to come.
It took a tremendous amount of labor to construct altars, this mercy seat, this Ark of the Covenant, and these tables and the walls and the curtains.
All these had to be made, and Moses was not permitted to draw a single plan. Not one. In making the veils, not one man was allowed to draw the pattern.
Moses might have been qualified, as he was an educated man, a genius in his own right. Living in Egypt, he saw beautiful buildings about the palace where he grew up as a boy, the supposed son of Pharaoh’s daughter.
I would be happy to live in a house Moses designed, with his ability and experience. However, God instructed Moses, “I want you to make this earthly tabernacle a reflection of the tabernacle above.
So the light shining down from God upon this area will reflect what it sees will be your earthly tabernacle. This will be here only a little while. Shadows do not remain very long.
The light continues, but the shadows go. I want you to make this and do not dare improvise. Don’t you take any liberties with the score? Don’t tack on anything.
Don’t do it, Moses. Stay by the pattern shown to you on the mount, because if you fail Me in the making of this, then there will be an imperfect reflection of the shining glory above.”
God Explains The Plan
God warned Moses not to fluctuate from the pattern He gave him on the mountain. Moses had his instructions and did not have the liberty to change or improve on the pattern. This springs out of a threefold presupposition.
Redemption Is Wrought By God
Redemption is wrought by God and not by man. There is not any place in the head of a man or the fingers of a man, however skilled or brilliant, for redemptive plans or purposes.
God purposed redemption in Christ Jesus before the world began, and it does not need any editing on my part or the part of any living man.
True Religion Is Revealed By God
True religion is not discovered or conscripted by man. Christianity grows downward from heaven, not upward from the earth.
It does not stand upon the earth. Its roots are in heaven, so that man has nothing to say here at all. True religion is revealed from above.
Man has constructed many religions throughout the world, and some are very beautiful and meaningful, but they are not redemptive religions.
God said, “This true religion, which you are to enjoy, comes from heaven above and all you are to do now is simply let the light above shine down and reflect the glory that is above.”
And when you pull away the Old Testament’s mirror, there is no more reflection. That is gone, but the eternal world above remains.
Salvation Is Received From God
There” is a third presupposition: Salvation is received from God and not achieved by man. If man had achieved salvation even a little bit, say by 1 percent, then God would have said, “Moses, I’m giving you a 99 percent perfect blueprint.
You can doodle a little and write in and improvise and put in anything you want to put in because I allow you 1 percent.” Rather, God said, “No, Moses.
I give you a plan that is 100 percent fr6mJehovah, thy God, so don’t take liberties with the pattern.” Heaven will tell Earth how to live.
Remember that, Heaven speaks and it is for Earth to listen. Heaven commands and it is only for Earth to obey, not to ask questions. Heaven calls and it is for Earth to answer. Heaven invites and it is for Earth to respond to the invitation.
The New Testament Church has also been handed the pattern, consisting of things eternally true, revealed by God.
Commandments laid down by God, are eternally true, and true for all nations, for each single nation and all persons and each single person, and true under all conditions, and not relative.
We have today what is called the relativity of morals. When you come to the things of God, open your Bible and put away this woozy idea of relativity, this floating standard of morals.
When God speaks, let the world listen. “O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the LORD” (Jer. 22:29).
God’s New Testament Pattern Was Shown on the Mount The pattern God has given us is a mirror reflecting God’s truth from above. These truths are not relative and floating; they are true beyond debate.
However, on this day of the panel discussion, half a dozen people sit around and pool their ignorance. Nobody knows anything about the topic, but they sit around and discuss it.
Our admonition is, do not doodle the plan. Do not improvise. Do not stick in a single board or plank. Do not put one thread into the garment of God.
Do not dare lay one foundation or put one pillar upright except God tells you to do it. Do not deviate from the pattern given by God Himself.
The trend today is for preachers not to be so dogmatic. After all, so they say, there is another side to everything. But there is 6nly one side to what God says—and that is God’s side.
We, therefore, dare not allow ourselves to take another side and begin debating. The Word of the Lord is not debatable.
And the commandments of Christ are not there to be discussed by a panel. They are there to be obeyed in humility and tears, in the power of the Holy Ghost within us.
What God has revealed to us in His Word is built into the Christian faith. They are the threads God works into the holy garment. They represent the philosophy by which all men live.
This is where true freedom lies —not making it up as you go along, but discovering the immutable decrees of God.
The Word of the Lord stands. Here it is. What are you going to do about it? “The word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day” (John 12:48).
“These are My words,” says God, “and let no man add anything to them lest he be cursed.
And let no man take anything away.” God’s words are not for me to edit and tinker with, but to believe and obey.
We are committed to the Bible pattern, and no man has any authority to add anything to it.
No man has any authority to subtract anything from it, to alter it in any way, to remold it nearer to his heart’s desire. “Look that thou make them after their pattern” (Exod. 25:40).
Some people are afraid of this kind of teaching. They do not want to be confined, or fenced in. They feel that to hold any dogmatic view like that is to be narrow, tame, and static.
That is the devil’s argument because the answer to it all is that the misery in the world is the result of our not believing God’s pattern.
All the miseries in the world come originally from the human race not following the pattern shown on the mount.
God laid down a few certain rules for them and said, “If you want to live in the light of my face, live like this.”
Of course, everybody thought they knew better. Eve thought she knew better than the rest, and the result is the mess we are in.
There will not be a tear shed in the world today— around the whole wide globe—but what is the result of broken hearts?
The effect is people thinking they know better than God about things, taking things out of God’s hands and taking them into their own.
If Adam and his people—-his race—had obeyed the pattern on the mount and lived the way God told them to, there would be no Cold War and no hot war and no graveyards and no bereavement and no cancers and no tuberculosis and no murders.
There are two ways to be dumb. One is not to go to school at all and the other is to go too long. I think some of these people have been in school too long.
For example, take a sardine—as long as my little finger—into the middle of the vast rolling Pacific and put him down. Just before you put him down, say to him, “Now, sardine.
After you’ve roamed around the ocean awhile, you’re going to have to hunt another ocean.”
How long would it take that sardine to stagnate? It would take him a million years, and he would not have found the borders of that vast, rolling, undulating sea.
God has given us this wonderful world with its high peaked, snowcapped mountains, and arched over it the starstudded sky, and made the winds blow through her valleys, and clothed her in green and decked her with flowers.
And He hath said, “This is yours now; Everything you put your foot on belongs to you. I’ve given this to the sons of men.”
The ‘temptation is to get anxious and say, “Watch that you don’t stagnate, brother.” According to the experts, we do not use one-third of the brain we already have.
We spend our time fooling around, and the result is that we are not developing the mighty pattern that is within our nature.
I am not going to stagnate because I do not go to the moon or somewhere else up there and float around. I am doing pretty well down here, thank you.
If you come to know God, you can go on to know God, because we are not dealing with matter, space, time, law, and motion. We are dealing with the eternal God who made both the visible and the invisible.
Take all the creatures God ever made, from the holy watchers beside the throne to the amoeba in the sea, they could all search into God for millions of years and eternities to come and not have found or even touched the hem of His garment.
Let men out in the world stagnate, but Christians do not stagnate. We have God, the everlasting, self-renewing fountain that never gets stale.
Our mistake, and the mistake we have made all down through history, is in thinking that we know better than God. God says, “See thou make it after the pattern,” and we say, “Well, we’ll party do that.
We’re glad for the inspiration of the pattern, sure. It’s wonderful to have the inspiration for the pattern. But we do not think that it is necessary to stay by the pattern. If we do, we’ll stagnate.”
If that is true, then the one that goes the farthest from the pattern ought to be the happiest and freest man. But you know it is not so.
If it is true that keeping the Word of the Lord binds us and makes slaves out of us; and repudiating the Word of the Lord and breaking the commandments of Christ sets us free, then the man who is the farthest from God ought to be the freest.
But it is exactly the other way around. The man who is the farthest from God is the greatest slave. Look at the man who has gone the farthest and who is away from God.
If the drug addict says, “Let’s cast God’s cords from me,” he has been temporarily freed from the commandments of God, but he has a monkey on his back. He is now a slave to drugs or alcohol or whatever.
In the city of Chicago, there are beautiful parks. There was a beautiful park off Sixty-Seventh Street and North with a hedge around it.
A beautiful, carefully trimmed hedge went all the way down one street, down another, and another. Of course, there were openings and gates where you could go in and enjoy the park.
But they had to remove that hedge because young men hiding in the hedges jumped out and attacked women. To get rid of this hiding place for moral morons, they had to remove the hedge so they would not have a place to hide.
There is an example of your free man. He laughs at the pattern shown in the mount, and the commandments of Christ mean nothing to him. He is free.
He is following his desires. He is an unsuppressed animal. However, do not let your daughter near him.
If it were true that Christians are slaves and that there was a great deal of bondage associated with obeying the commandments of Christ.
And in living in obedience to the faith of our fathers, then Christians should have shackles on their wrists. And the Beatniks and the rest should be the freest people in the world.
Exactly the opposite is true. We are free as birds, and the bearded beatnik with his feet up and espresso coffee between In is brown unscrubbed teeth is a slave to the opinion of the beatnik crowd.
He is a nonconformist, he says, but as a nonconformist, he is slavishly conforming to his nonconformity.
Free Indeed
The four Gospels, the book of Acts, Romans, the Corinthian epistles, Galatians, Thessalonians, the epistles of John, and all the rest are the patterns shown to us in the mount.
“He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him…
If a man loves me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:21,23).
The man to whom God has come and in whose heart God dwells is a free man compared with the man who is trying to be free in his own right.
The murderer, the drunkard, the drug addict, and the suicide —they are free from the commandments of Christ, but they are slaves to the devil.
The Christian, according to Paul and Christian experience, gets free from the bondage of Satan and becomes a happy servant of Jesus Christ the Lord.
I know there are households where the servants are better off than many householders are.
In the kingdom of God, the humblest servant who serves by the kitchen sink is a happier, freer man than the lord of the manor across the street if he is not a Christian.
Follow the Pattern Shown on the mount
I do not apologize for being a Christian. I once looked up to highly educated men and felt they were so learned that if ever I would find out what they knew, I could not believe the Bible at all.
I had an itch in my head to find out what they knew to see if it would invalidate what I believed. Therefore, I did a little reading on my own and found out that nobody knows enough.
Furthermore, I venture to say that nobody can ever know enough to invalidate one word of the Scriptures or prove wrong one single sentence from the Book of God.
Be careful to follow the pattern shown on the mount; that is where true freedom is found.
Listen to people and you will go wrong. Listen to editors and those who feel they must amend the Word of God, change the truth, and modify it, and you will go wrong.
You will come under bondage to yourself, to the world, and the devil. However, if you go free, you will find that freedom lies in obedience to God’s laws.
Therefore, the Christian is free when he is obeying his Lord. He is the freest of all beings unless it would be the angels above.
The airplane that flies up yonder is obeying the law of gravitation and all kinds of aerodynamic laws.
Sometimes when I have nothing else to do as I ride on an airplane, I read the literature explaining about the various engines.
I find out there is not a single part in all great planes that is accidental. It is all put there in obedience to a law.
Which God Almighty had given to the material world. When the law is broken, down plunges the machine into the mountain below or the sea.
The keeping of the law makes us free; the breaking of the law makes us slaves. So it is with beauty. So it is with the stars in the heaven that shines above.
If you obey the pattern shown in the mount, you will be free and happy and completely at rest and be able to develop all of the hidden potentials that lie within your nature.
But if you refuse, if you fail, or if you let the Word of God stay outside your knowledge, you will find yourself in inevitable bondage.
Regarding God’s Word, let us love it and live in it and eat it and drink it and lie down on it and walk on it and stand on it and swear by it and live by it and rest in it.
This is the book of God. “Look that thou make them after their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount” (Exod. 25:40). Clean up your life. Bring it around to the harmony of God.
If Moses had found some of his workers and said, “What’s that thing there?” and the worker responded, “I don’t know.
I was just improvising,” Moses would have rebuked the worker, “Take that out and burn it. Stay by the pattern shown thee in the mount.”
If Moses, Paul, or some other biblical saint were alive today and came to our average church, they would find a great deal of just improvising on the part of people who ought to know better.
Let us determine to obey God and do what we are told to do. Let us have faith and believe it.
Let us not make the mistake of mixing the two—of trying to believe what we should do and do what we should believe. There are things to do and there are things to believe.
An old saint was once asked, “Which is more important: prayer or the reading of the Word?” He thought for a moment and then responded, “Which is more important to the bird?
The right-wing or the left?” That is a question I want to pose: Which is more important to a Christian, believing or obeying? For the sparrow flying through the air, both wings are equally important.
With only one it is almost impossible to fly. So, we must believe God’s Word and we must obey it. By these two wings, a man will rise to God in faith and humble obedience to the Lord Himself.
The truest Christian is the freest Christian, and the gospel of Jesus Christ sets slaves free. However, you say, “My experience with Christians has not taught me that they are the ideal people you’ve described.”
The reason is that very few Christians are prepared to go with God all the way. They go part of the way and then improvise.
They follow the Lord until things look a little sticky and then they say, “Well, there’s no use to get radical about this and be a fanatic.
I think I can reason this out myself.” So, they have a panel discussion and decide what the Lord really should have said there. The result is, of course, lukewarmness, which God will spew out of His mouth.
Let us return to the Book. Or rather, let us go forward to the Book, for we lag so far behind it. Thank God for the Book. See that you do all things after the pattern shown on the mount.
See that your faith conforms to God’s revelation. See that your footsteps walk in God’s path. If you do that, God will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. And God will look after you.
True and undiluted freedom finds itself in the presence of God. Following the pattern set for us in God’s Word will bring us into God’s presence where we will discover this freedom.
Every generation seeks something new when they are seeking something “other.” It is this presence of God that is the “other” each generation seeks and longs for, if only they knew it.
Blessed Fire the Sons of God by Joseph Humphreys (1720-?)
Blessed are the sons of God,
They are bought with Jesus’ blood;
They are ransomed from the grave,
Life eternal they shall have;
With them numbered may we be,
Here, and in eternity.
They are justified by grace;
They enjoy a solid peace;
All their sins are washed away;
They shall stand in God’s great day;
With them numbered may we be,
Here, and in eternity.
They have fellowship with God,
Through the Mediator’s blood;
One with God, through Jesus one,
Glory is in them begun;
With them numbered may we be,
Here, and in eternity.