Feeling Thankful

Sunday, February 22, 2009

I can't imagine being one of the Israelites during the wilderness wanderings. Alan just finished a study of the tabernacle with Briana and Destry, and the more I learn about this, the more I appreciate living under the New Law, rather than the Old. Alan took great delight in trying to make us understand what the offering of the animal sacrifices would have been like. Can you imagine all the blood? The sounds of the animals? The stench? The flies??!! As I remember someone else once saying, "You wouldn't want to be my neighbor if I still had to offer animal sacrifices, because it would be constant yuck going on in my backyard!" But I can't help but wonder if God chose this restitution for sin to try to make us humans understand, just a little bit, how ugly sin is in His eyes. There's just nothing pretty about sin--why should atonement sacrifices be any different. Here is a picture of the kids with the completed tabernacle model. They did a good job putting it together and learning about the various parts and what they represented. The foreshadowing, the lines the Lord connects between Old and New Covenants are simply awe-inspiring to me. And to think of all the work involved in taking this down and carrying it from place to place, then setting it back up again. The vast number of people, moving together through the wilderness. I may not be remembering this correctly, but I'm thinking Alan said the people standing in lines of fifty across, one line behind another, would have stretched for 15 miles. I may have to check on that, but that picture helps me begin to grasp how many people were camping around the tabernacle. I really enjoy the books by Francine Rivers. She has a series of novellas about various men of the Bible. They are fictionalized accounts of these characters, which I thought I wouldn't like (for fear of getting the fiction confused with the Biblical account), but I did enjoy them. She uses a great deal of Bible and history, but then uses her imagination to personalize the characters. The one about Aaron, called The Priest, was very powerful to me. It literally brought me to tears, reading about the mistakes both Aaron and the children of Israel made, and then the way her powerful writing expressed Aaron's sense of inadequacy as he looked toward the Messiah, the final Sacrifice for sin. I can't help but feel thankful I live in this time period, drawn near to God by a better hope, under a better covenant with better promises because of the better sacrifice (Hebrews 7-9).