Beauty and the Blood

This is a strange time in my life. In some ways this is a dry time--very little sense of the personal presence of God. Fortunately, I have learned not to depend on feelings. Fickle things, those feelings. Like children needing to be herded and controlled as best we can.

Here's another way to look at our feelings about God. Think of a train with one engine, one car and one caboose. The engine that runs the train is "fact." The second car is "faith." And finally, at the end of the train, "feelings." The fact is, I'm blood-bought, and Christ paid the price to redeem me. As previously posted, my "self" is now the temple of the living God. He is with me. Period. So the second part, the car of the train, is "faith." The reason faith is not the engine is that you can have faith in all sorts of silly things. Bambino curses--that sort of thing. A rabbit's foot in the pocket, the need for a certain team to win their last home game in order for the incumbent to win the election--I actually heard that one this weekend. So you have to have your faith following a factual thing. The fact--I'm blood-bought. God is present in my life. I have faith in the presence of God, and one of these days, that "feeling" caboose will catch up.

Anyway, here's the thing. Although there's no measurable sense of the presence of God in my life, I see the evidence in profound ways. Like the way my church and my outside-of-church Bible study keep saying the same things.

Last week at Bible study we were talking about the tabernacle and the Holy of holies. I remember last year we were working on some artsy things at church and were struck by how God annointed the artists who built the furniture in the tabernacle.

When I was little my dad, a pastor, bought and built a little paper model of the tabernace. It was fascinating to me. He used model airplane paint to coat the bronze altar bronze and the Ark of the Covenant gold. I remember being especially taken with the glittery gold Ark, with the little angels facing one another, their wings touching overhead. It seemed such a beautiful thing. So all my life I've held this image of a sparkling gold Ark of the Covenant, where somehow the Spirit of God lived, and once a year a high priest would go in and perform some sort of duty which was vague in my mind, but he got to see that beautiful thing that had been built by some annointed artisan.

Then last week we were talking about that ritual the high priest performed. Get this! He splattered the pretty ark with blood. Seven times. Every year. Think about it. Year after year, splatter after splatter, the layer of dried blood built up, until the beutiful Ark became a grim spectacle. Imagine the High Priest. Every year the big Day of Atonement would get here, a day of dread, because every time you entered that room you took your life into your own hands. Or into God's hands. Because if you touched the altar, you died. If you went in without washing properly, you died. So in the back of his mind, there had to be a certain amount of dread associated with that task. With the scene set by an undercurrent of dread, you tiptoed in to be faced with the image of two blood-covered angels standing guard over the Presence of God. Because who would dare go in there and clean the Ark? Forty years of blood covered it, transforming it from a thing of beauty to a grim place of slaughter. Like a forty-year-old crime scene.

Then they talked about the VERY same thing in Sunday School. It has to mean something. But what? Why would God go to all the trouble to instruct the artists to make a thing of such beauty when He knew what would happen to it?

Hmm. One clue was brought out both at Bible study and Sunday school. God sees sin as a grim thing. And He had to find a way to teach us how He felt about sin. The picture of blood was a way to do that. As sad and hard as it is to slaughter the best of your herd in sacrifices, God considered the act of reconciling us to Himself to be more important than the life of good sheep, goats and bulls. Not that He didn't value that life. But given the choice of allowing bulls to live and keeping us out of hell, He chose our eternal souls. We had to know the awfulness of sin. And that blood-spattered altar, and the continuous sacrifice of burning flesh going on outside on the brass altar, with its own blood-spatters and the stench of the whole place of slaughter, gave us a picture of the awfulness of sin to Him.

Maybe the beauty of the Ark of the Covenant showed how we were meant to be. And maybe the blood helps us to see the defacement that sin wreaks upon us. And so this whole picture of a travelling slaughter house that went with the Isrealites wherever they went. They were followed around by a giant object lesson of what a grim mess their lives were.

You know, when I was a kid I remember reading a piece of fiction (?) in which a dog killed a chicken. And in order to keep it from becoming a chicken killer, they tied the chicken to his collar in such a way that he could not remove it. The chicken rotted on the back of his neck, and nobody could stand to go near him, and eventually even the dog himself couldn't stand the stench of that defilement back there. After a couple of weeks of misery, the dog never touched a chicken again as long as he lived.

In a way, the dog has a better memory than we do. My sin caused the slaughter of the living Christ. Did you see the Passion of the Christ? Afterwards, I felt I could never sin again, knowing what my sin caused. So how long did that last? Not long, I can tell you. But Christ chose to buy us with His precious, grim sacrifice anyway, and still the Holy Spirit chooses to tabernacle with us, even when we defile the temple (our selves) with our sin. God is most generous with us.