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“Oh, the unspeakable greatness of that exchange,—the Sinless One is condemned, and he who is guilty goes free; the Blessing bears the curse, and the cursed is brought into blessing; the Life dies, and the dead live; the Glory is whelmed in darkness, and he who knew nothing but confusion of face is clothed with glory.”

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Location: Kingsland, Georgia, United States

A person God turned around many times.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Jesus in the heavenly Most Holy Place

M____,

I saw that you do believe in the heavenly sanctuary, but aren't perfectly convinced that Jesus waited to enter the Most Holy Place upon His ascension.

I would like to help clear this up. But first I must ask an essential question, Is it not enough to accept what EGW wrote on this subject? The reason I bring Ellen White into this is because in these last days, the Lord knew the devil would know his time was very short and would use every conceivable means to confuse and deceive the very elect. So He gave us His final weapon against Satan; He gave humanity a prophet.

If you need the Bible and the Bible only on this, then here is a good verse, "Believe in the Lord your God and so shall ye be established; believe His prophets, and so shall ye prosper." (2Chron. 20:20). We cannot survive the final days of every conceivable kind of misinformation through false prophets (which Peter called false teachers) without the clear and trustworthy testimony of Ellen White on the Bible.

I am just a layman, but as I understand the subject, the three compartments of the earthly sanctuary were a shadow of things to come. (Col. 2:17). The court represented the crucifixion of Christ. The daily sprinkling of blood in the holy place throughout the year represented the efficacy of the crucifixion brought into our sanctification throughout the Christian age. And the cleansing of the sanctuary at the end of the year represented the grand finale of the Christian age and the judgment at the end of the world.

I know Paul mentioned that they had received the atonement (Rom. 5:11), were sealed (Eph. 1:13), and that Christ had passed within the veil (Heb. 10:20) as our High Priest (Heb. 4:14). These all seem to indicate that there was no need for a Most Holy ministry of Christ.

Yet, looking at the whole picture, we also see that the apostolic church's sealing was only an earnest, a down-payment and not the full thing, and that they had only had a taste of the powers of full atonement and the sealing (Eph. 1:14;Heb. 6:5). It was the "early rain," but there was yet to come the "latter rain" which would come after a long dry spell of hardship and slow growth of the gospel dispensation. We also see from the earthly sacrificial system that there are three phases, and this undeniably illustrates a heavenly work of three phases that couldn't end immediately after the crucifixion. The second phase had just begun at the opening of the gospel to the world by the apostles.

When reading Daniel 8:9-11;23-25 we see that another issue is brought into the big picture. Another reason would come into play for cleansing the sanctuary--that is, Satan's insidiously flattering work in men's hearts (Dan. 11:32) to destroy the heavenly ministry of Christ and His atonement. From within the church itself Satan would accomplish his masterpiece of destroying God's redemption for man (Acts 20:29-31;1Tim. 4:3,4; 2Thess. 2:3,4), an infiltration of Satan's people into the church which had already begun before Paul and Peter were martyred.

In preparation for translating and resurrecting all who proved faithful to God and His Law at His coming, the work of cleansing the Most Holy place of the heavenly sanctuary must necessarily begin by extracting the evil one from the church and his errors from the church's understanding of the Bible's truths.

Thus, the Bible came out from behind convent walls during the Reformation of the 16th century as a mighty sword into the gluttonous belly of the abominable beast, the Papacy went down in 1798 by Napoleon, and the judgment began in 1844 to determine who would accept a special work of sanctification that would endure that climactic day when heaven would come to earth to destroy sinners and set the stage for destroying sin altogether. All this is included in the verse, "I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death," and "that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live." (Rev. 13:3,14).

As all this relates to the cleansing of the sanctuary in heaven, we can see in Dan. 8:9-12, “And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them. Yea, he magnified himself even to the Prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of His sanctuary was cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practised, and prospered.”

Here we can see that Satan’s attack on Christ was while He was in His “daily” ministry, that foreshadowing His work in the Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary, and this all immediately after the growth of the Papal church as the early church fell away into apostasy. The church is also called a temple of God, so we can also see that in cleansing the heavenly sanctuary, the Lord must necessarily cleanse the church of all the paganism inculcated during its departure from the pure religion of the apostles.

On the cross we must see the dying Son of God, His surrender, His meekness and self-sacrifice, His love for God and for man. We must see in His face all that so satisfied His Father that He would become able to forgive us for what we had done to His kingdom. (Is. 53:11). We must see the stunning beauty of Jesus’ love shining from the cross. “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2Cor. 4:6). Between the divine Two, the image of love, of mercy and grace under the heavy demands of infinite justice upon sin, a snapshot of love between them Both and toward man, will give the sanctifying effect on our hearts and lives that God has intended from the days of Adam to our day. Without it we come to greatly misunderstand God and Christ.

In the blood of the expiring lamb being sprinkled on the shewbread and its table, we see that the crucifixion must be brought into our Bible study. Otherwise we will perceive the Son of God as harsh and overbearing in both Old and New Testaments. In the blood sprinkled on the candlestick, we can see that we need to bring the cross into our witness and Christian service for the same reason. To do otherwise results in breaking the third commandment through misrepresenting God.

And we need to bring the crucifixion into our prayer life, as was foreshadowed in sprinkling the blood on the altar of incense. Once the church is fully sanctified through Christ’s ministry in these regards, then God can finish the process in the Latter Rain and the preaching of the gospel to all the world. And then the end will come.

“As it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation.” (Heb. 9:27,28).

In the slow but sure movements of the Papacy to unite the world under its control, and the Protestant attack on their own American government to unite church and state, as well as the steady move of spiritualism into Christianity, we see the fulfillment of Bible prophecy unfolding before our eyes. Let’s give ourselves anew to Jesus and His shed blood, letting the crucifixion do for us as the Holy Spirit designs, and let us place our trust in the God of the Advent movement, in that He has so mercifully spelled out the future for us if we will have a ears to hear and eyes to see.

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