Hope From the Word

Bill Luebkemann: The tabernacle once needed to have a curtain in it, but now the curtain is torn in two. Pastor Bill Luebkemann explains why.

Bill Luebkemann: Mankind and God were not separated in the time of Adam and Eve until Adam and Eve sinned. There was a separation between God and man and this curtain represented it. And Jesus Christ entered into this most holy place. It says in Hebrews 9:12.

Bill Luebkemann: He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all. This curtain was torn in two, because the price was paid and mankind no longer needed to be separated from God.

Bill Luebkemann: Quite a number of churches these days are involved in building projects. Maybe that's true of your church. Today on Hope From the Word, Pastor Bill Luebkemann opens Second Chronicles, where a huge building project is about to commence. It's the building of the Temple of God. Like any big project, this is going to require a lot of prep work.

Bill Luebkemann: From Second Chronicles chapter two, beginning in verse 12, here's Pastor Bill.

Bill Luebkemann: Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, who made heaven and earth. He's acknowledging, number one, that there is a Lord, so he's not an atheist. He's acknowledging who the Lord is. He's the God of Israel.

Bill Luebkemann: You know, everybody had their god. Everybody, Dagon was a god. They had loads of gods. There was gods everywhere. In the days of Jesus, some years after this, there was even more gods, probably than there were here, hundreds or thousands of gods. There was a god for every occasion.

Bill Luebkemann: And they had a lot of paganism going on at this time also, but this guy says that the God who is the Lord and the God of Israel is the same God who made the heavens and the Earth. And there can only be one of them because he didn't share that task.

Bill Luebkemann: You can make up your statue and put it there and worship it, but you can't really say that the statue that you just made made the heavens and the Earth. You can say, I'm going to pray to this thing, it'll have some mystical magical powers. If you believe that, you should watch the Sci-Fi channel more often.

Bill Luebkemann: It seems like every time I go past that channel, they're always on some Ghostbusters thing. I think that's all they ever put on there. They're there with their tape recorder. If you play this backwards at two-thirds speed, you can hear the ghost talking to you. Isn't that like when we were kids and you played the records backward and you were supposed to hear, you know, something satanic in there or something.

Bill Luebkemann: This guy here knows who God is. Praise be to the Lord who's the God of Israel, one and the same, who made heaven and earth, one and the same. These are all the same God. The God of Israel is the Lord and he's the one that made the heavens and the Earth. They're all the same. So that any other claim of any other God to be God is wrong. Because no other God made the heavens and the Earth.

Bill Luebkemann: You see, this guy had some knowledge of God also. He has given King David and then he recognizes, too, that this God of Israel who made the heavens and the Earth has control over, you know, the people and places and things that are going on. He has control over the world scene.

Bill Luebkemann: You know, Paul tells us in the New Testament we should pray for our leaders. It's hard to do some years, more hard than other years, but he tells us we should pray for our leaders that God has everything under control.

Bill Luebkemann: And he's acknowledging that, even here, that this God who made the heavens and the Earth is active and involved in the affairs of men and that he has given King David his son, who's wise and intelligent and who has discernment to rule his people and that this is the son who's going to build this Temple for the Lord and a palace for himself.

Bill Luebkemann: This is amazing considering this was, you know, these events are happening around, you know, the year 986 BC or something like that. A long time ago. It's hard for me to imagine people back then even could talk. I would have thought without the Bible that people back then just kind of grunted. You know, give me some meat, you know, or whatever, but to actually be able to write and make sentences and everything, just amazing.

Bill Luebkemann: And that they would know this much about God could only be because God was involved in their affairs. I am sending you Hiram Abi, a man of great skill, whose mother was from Dan and whose father was from Tyre. So this guy's half Jew and half pagan Gentile.

Bill Luebkemann: It's interesting because God told them not to marry the Gentiles, you know, but here somebody did and yet this son is actually going to be used by God. I am sending you Hiram Abi, a man of great skill, whose mother was from Dan and his father was from Tyre. He is trained to work in gold and silver, bronze and iron, stone and wood, and with purple and blue and crimson yarn and fine linen.

Bill Luebkemann: In other words, he's an experienced craftsman. He's a journeyman. He's not an apprentice. He learned his trade, he practiced, he already did his time as an apprentice, he went through basic training, he did the things he needed to do. This is a highly skilled, top-notch professional person. He is experienced in all kinds of engraving and can execute any design given to him.

Bill Luebkemann: He will work with your craftsmen and with those of my Lord David, your father. So this guy is not only skilled, but he can do anything you give him. You give him the design, he can execute on it. And he'll work with your craftsmen and those of your father.

Bill Luebkemann: Recognizing, too, that David, even though David was gone, many of his workers were still there. Now, let my Lord send his servants the wheat and barley and the olive oil and wine he promised, and we will cut all the logs from Lebanon that you need, and we'll float them in rafts by sea down to Joppa. Place that you're going to see a lot of in the New Testament, right? You can then take them up to Jerusalem.

Bill Luebkemann: So he said, go ahead and send the payment and we'll get started. And we'll cut down as much as you need. This is a pretty good deal. You're going to pay a fixed price, you're going to get as much as you need. And their job was to cut them down, bring them down to the sea, tie them together, make rafts out of them, float them down to Joppa. And when they get to Joppa here, we're going to give them to you guys and you're going to have to carry them uphill to Jerusalem.

Bill Luebkemann: When this says up to Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you know, uphill. Imagine how much work that was going up and down the hill with logs. Back and forth, over and over and over again. Not like today where you can load a whole bunch of them on a tractor trailer rig and drive it up there in a few minutes.

Bill Luebkemann: Solomon took a census of all the aliens who were in Israel, after the census his father David had taken. Remember, David got in trouble for taking that census. And they were found to be 153,600. Maybe this is speaking of a census that David took just of the aliens, by the way, in which case it would be a different one.

Bill Luebkemann: He assigned 70,000 of them to be carriers and 80,000 to be stonecutters in the hills with 3,604 men over them to keep the people working. They were divided up into groups and tasks and they had four men over groups and they began the work.

Bill Luebkemann: Then Solomon, chapter 3, verse 1, then Solomon began to build the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah, the Jebusite, the place provided by David. He began building on the second day of the second month in the fourth year of his reign.

Bill Luebkemann: Mount Moriah here, if you steer back a few chapters, we were looking at when David took that census of the fighting men and he was punished for doing so, and he came up to Mount Moriah here, he came up to the threshing floor there. I don't know if I could find it quickly or not because we went through so many chapters since then.

Bill Luebkemann: But this was where he bought the threshing floor to make a sacrifice to God. David did. It's also, by the way, the same place where Abraham brought his son Isaac and was prepared to sacrifice him. And it's the same place or it's very close to the place where Jesus himself was crucified. We're talking about a lot of things that happened on this hill or very close to it.

Bill Luebkemann: Solomon began to build the Temple of the Lord there at this place where David had, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of this guy Araunah the Jebusite. It was a place that David had bought and provided for it. And he began building on the second day of the second month in the fourth year of his reign. Now, does this mean he wasted the first three years of his reign?

Bill Luebkemann: Why didn't he get started building it right away? Why'd he waste three years? Well, if you steer back to Kings and read some more history, you'll find he was very busy those three years, figuring out who was on his side and getting rid of the ones who weren't. He had to get rid of a few people who were troublemakers and consolidate his kingdom.

Bill Luebkemann: And I have every reason to believe he took his time to plan all this and figure out what to do. David said, my son is young and inexperienced, he needs a lot of help. And if he began building on this day, he had to begin getting supplies much earlier. You know, if you build a building, you don't break ground until you've already got your plans approved and you got your supplies coming in and, you know, stones are being quarried and carried a long distance and lumber is being carried a long distance. So these preparations were on way, were underway for a long time to arrive at this place where he could begin to build.

Bill Luebkemann: All the planning and the preparation of all the years that had gone on before him there. The foundation Solomon laid for building the Temple of God was 60 cubits long and 20 cubits wide, using the cubit of the old standard, a cubit being about 18 inches. Approximately, we're talking about a building that was about 90 feet long and 30 feet wide.

Bill Luebkemann: I'm, you know, not a whole lot different than this building, probably narrower than this building and maybe a little bit longer. The portico at the front of the Temple was 20 cubits long across the width of the building and 20 cubits high.

Bill Luebkemann: So this building here, we said it was 60 long and 20 wide. That's 90 feet by 30 feet wide. And the portico, the vestibule if you will, the opening, the lobby, you know, that was another 30 feet. The width of the building, 30 more feet in front of it. So 120 feet now, total length. 30 feet wide, first 30 feet was the building, was the, was the entrance way, the next 90 feet were the building itself.

Bill Luebkemann: He overlaid the inside with pure gold. He paneled the main hall with pine and covered it with fine gold and decorated it with palm tree and chain design. So we're talking about something that was very, very, very ornate. He adorned the Temple with precious stones.

Bill Luebkemann: Some people feel that might have been a floor, you know, that kind of had a design in it, maybe. Or, I don't know what you would call that kind of floor. We have little designs in it. He adorned the Temple with precious stones and the gold he used was gold of Parviam, or Parvaim. He overlaid the ceiling beams, door frames, walls and doors of the Temple with gold and he carved cherubim on the walls. He wanted people when they were in there to feel like they were in heaven.

Bill Luebkemann: You know, you're going to worship God. If you're in heaven worshipping God, there's lots of angels around. You know, we don't worship the angels. Somebody said, but we worship with the angels. So they're worshipping God. And when you're in there, you say, oh, angels all around. And just imagine if, if all of the window frames and all the wainscoting in here, and just imagine if everything was covered with pure gold, what it would look like.

Bill Luebkemann: Ornate and everything. This was something, you know, it would have been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world if anybody alive today had seen it. If there were any pictures of it to, to, to show to anybody. Probably would have been the number one of the wonders of the ancient world.

Bill Luebkemann: He built the Most Holy Place. Its length corresponding to the width of the Temple, 20 cubits long and 20 cubits wide. So, again, we have a 30 by 30 foot area. So this building now, we're looking at 120 feet long. The first 30 feet is the entrance way. The next 30 feet, the next 60 feet is the Temple area, the outer, the outside part of the Holy of Holies. And then the last 30 feet, 30 feet this way, 30 feet wide, this was the Most Holy Place.

Bill Luebkemann: This was the place where only the high priest could go. And he could only go in there once a year. And they were so afraid that he would drop dead when he was in there that they tied a rope to his foot. So if he just stopped moving, they could drag him back out of there because there wasn't anybody else going to go in to bring him out.

Bill Luebkemann: He overlaid the inside with 600 talents of fine gold. The gold nails weighed 50 shekels. He also overlaid the upper parts with gold. So every single thing here is covered with gold. You know, they were in the promised land at this point, something like 400 years, since the time of Moses, to the time when they were building this Temple, something like 400 years.

Bill Luebkemann: And during that time, they worshipped God at the Tabernacle that Moses had made in the desert. And now it's time for an upgrade. And so we need a place, a permanent place for God to be worshipped. And we're going to make it just off the charts in terms of its beauty.

Bill Luebkemann: In the Most Holy Place, he made a pair of sculptured cherubim and overlaid them with gold. The total wingspan of the cherubim was 20 cubits. One wing of the first cherub was five cubits long and touched the Temple wall, while its other wing, also five cubits long, touched the wing of the other cherub.

Bill Luebkemann: Similarly, one wing of the second cherub was five cubits long and touched the other Temple wall, and its other wing, also five cubits long, touched the wing of the first cherub. The wings of these cherubim extended 20 cubits. They stood on their feet facing the main hall.

Bill Luebkemann: So if you walked in, you walked through the lobby, which was 30 feet wide by 30 feet long. Then you went into the main room there, 30 feet wide by 60 feet long. Then you went into the Most Holy Place, which was as big as the lobby, another 30 by 30 feet, and you are, you come upon these two imposing statues of cherubim, standing upright with their wings extended.

Bill Luebkemann: And the wingspan of each one was 15 feet. Seven and a half feet for each wing. I'm converting to feet here. Hope I'm, you'll tell me if I'm getting it wrong, right? So one wing was touching one wall of the one statue and his other wing was touching the wing of the other statue. And that statue was touching the wall on the other side.

Bill Luebkemann: So the width of the building was twice the wingspan of these two giant statues. We're talking about a wingspan again of 15 feet, which is, you know, probably greater than from me to that wall there. Gigantic things. I don't think it says how tall they were.

Bill Luebkemann: He made the curtain of blue, purple and crimson yarn and fine linen with cherubim worked into it. This was the curtain that separated the Most Holy Place or the Holy of Holies from the outside. It was the, the curtain that separated the people from God, if you will.

Bill Luebkemann: It was the curtain that was spoken of in Matthew 27:51, when Jesus died, and when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment, the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Different Temple, by the way. Solomon's Temple was destroyed and another Temple had been built.

Bill Luebkemann: But the same curtain, the same type of curtain representing the separation between mankind and God. Mankind is on the outside and God's on the inside. You may not approach God. If you do approach God, you're going to get killed for that. Only the chief priest could do it. He could only do it once a year. And if there's anything wrong in his life, he better get somebody else to volunteer. You know. Hey, you want to trade shifts with me? How about if you do that shift instead? No way, man, you're doing it. You got, you got it.

Bill Luebkemann: They wore little tinkling bells on the bottom of their robe. So as they moved around, the bells tinkled. And if the people outside heard the tinkling stop for a while, they figured, oh, that's it. Something, he wasn't right with God. And poof. You know, God got him. We better pull out his body. I don't know if that ever happened, but it's said that they did that.

Bill Luebkemann: This is, this is what that curtain represented. It was a curtain that represented a separation between mankind and God. Mankind and God were not separated in the time of Adam and Eve until Adam and Eve sinned. And then, then this curtain was installed symbolically, if you will. They didn't actually have a Temple back in those days. But there was a separation between God and man and this curtain represented it.

Bill Luebkemann: And Jesus Christ entered into this Most Holy Place. It says in Hebrews 9:12. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all, by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. This curtain was torn in two, because the price was paid and mankind no longer needed to be separated from God.

Bill Luebkemann: In Hebrews 10:19, therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way open for us through the curtain, that is, his body. And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.

Bill Luebkemann: Look, he's saying here that we can enter, that this curtain was open to us. Back at this time, the time of Solomon, they made the curtain. They knew that this was God's presence, that he was holy, that they were not holy, that they couldn't go in to that place. Except under very, very specific circumstances. This curtain here represented the separation of mankind from God, and it's a separation that's not there anymore thanks to the price that Jesus paid.

Bill Luebkemann: Verse 15. In the front of the Temple, he made two pillars which together were 35 cubits long, each with a capital on top measuring five cubits. He made interwoven chains and put them on top of the pillars. He also made 100 pomegranates and attached them to the chains. He erected the pillars in the front of the Temple, one to the south and one to the north. The one to the south he named Jakin and the one to the north Boaz.

Bill Luebkemann: So as a fitting triumph, he made these two pillars out front 35 cubits tall when they were erected. So that's a and a five cubit capital or some type of ornate fixture on top bringing the total height to 40 cubits or 60 feet. These were twice as tall as the building was. If I'm getting my numbers right.

Bill Luebkemann: And he named one Jakin and the other Boaz, Jakin meaning he shall establish. And Boaz meaning in strength. So you put them together. He shall establish in strength. And every time people came into this Temple, they would realize and give glory to God, that everything that we are and everything that we do and, and everything about us, you know, is because of him.

Bill Luebkemann: And that he has established us and he has put us here. And they were reminded of God's presence. The reason why this kingdom was established was because of God. It wasn't because he knew how to fight wars. The reason why David won so many battles was because he sought the Lord and he did it God's way and God gave him the victory. It wasn't because, you know, he went to West Point and learned how to fight battles the proper way.

Bill Luebkemann: And this was a constant reminder now, we have our own kingdom. This was the high point of it. When Solomon reigned, it was the glory years of the Kingdom of Israel. And every time they came to that Temple, they were reminded who it was that established their kingdom.

Bill Luebkemann: And to a lesser degree, but you look at America today, America was established on godly principles by many people who were believers. But it seems like we've lost that now and so many today in America, they don't want to be bothered of that. They don't want to be reminded of that. I read on the internet today, a principal of a school and the athletic director of a high school. These two guys, principal and the athletic director are facing criminal charges because they allowed praying at some kind of luncheon in their school.

Bill Luebkemann: Because some judge ordered, now, it's not against the law to pray, but some judge ordered, you know, that they not do it. And now since they did it, it's, what do you call it when you don't follow what the judge says? Contempt of court. It's criminal contempt of court. And these guys could go to jail because some moron judge thinks it's okay to legislate that you cannot pray.

Bill Luebkemann: And the praying was, I forget what it was at, some kind of a luncheon or something when somebody prayed. And it's, it's believed that some students who aren't even there anymore complained about it. But you can see the ridiculousness of sending people to jail for praying. You know, they say there's no enemy in a foxhole. I bet you if those students were in a foxhole getting shot at, and the person next to them said, hey, how about a quick prayer? Oh, all right, put me under that prayer too. Sign me up.

Bill Luebkemann: These Jews were reminded every day when they went in the Temple, who it was established by. He shall establish, the Lord will establish it. And they were reminded that it was established in strength. They were not a weakling kingdom. They had the premier kingdom of their day. Because God had established them, God had given them strength, and God had given them power.

Bill Luebkemann: And we should think about that same kind of thing in our life. That everything we are, we've been established by God. Wherever, anything we think we have is because God gave it to us. Anything we think we know how to do is because God allows us to do it. It's not because we're so smart, went to the right school, or, you know, hung out with all the smart people.

Bill Luebkemann: Those who think they're smart, just showed off that they weren't by thinking that they're smart. But we should be reminded here also that he established us in this place and us in our lives, and us, our, our very existence was established by him and we owe everything to him. And he'll keep us strong if we follow him.

Bill Luebkemann: You've been listening to Hope From the Word. We're currently in a study of Second Chronicles. You can hear this message or more Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann by going to CCMarlton.org. Pastor Bill's messages can also be found by downloading the Hope FM app on your smartphone or tablet.

Bill Luebkemann: If you prefer to listen via podcast, you can find Hope From the Word wherever you find your podcasts. We'd love to have you join us at Calvary Chapel of Marlton either in person or online. Our Sunday service begins at 10:00 AM, and there's a Wednesday evening service at 7:00.

Bill Luebkemann: To catch us online, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Calvary Chapel of Marlton. Or just go to our website for the link, CCMarlton.org. And if you'd like to take a moment to write to Pastor Bill, it would be such a blessing to us. We're thankful each and every time we hear what God is doing through our listeners lives. And we want to pray for you too.

Bill Luebkemann: Either email us through the website at CCMarlton.org or call 856-983-1662. We'll continue our study in Second Chronicles next time on Hope From the Word with Pastor Bill Luebkemann. A presentation of Calvary Chapel of Marlton.