In the 33rd chapter of the book of the prophet Jeremiah appears this strong summons from our God: “Call to Me and I will answer you and tell (or show) you great and mighty things you do not know.” “Mighty” is also translated “wondrous” or “fortified” or “inaccessible” things. It is that last rendering “inaccessible” that leads me to believe that there is an intimation of the atoning work of the cross of the coming Messiah contained in this verse. The Holy of Holies and the Manifest Presence of Yahweh God in the Hebrew Temple was inaccessible to all but the High Priest in Old Testament times. And he could only enter it once a year on the Day of Atonement.
When the prophesied Messiah (and there are roughly 300 Messianic prophecies) was crucified on a Roman cross, their empire’s form of sternest capital punishment, there was an earthquake and the curtain of the sanctuary dividing the Holy Place from the Most holy Place was mysteriously and amazingly rent from top to bottom. In more ways than one the way was cleared by the Messiah’s atonement (which also occurred on the Day of Atonement according to the Hebrew calendar) for all believers to enter the Holy of Holies at will as a part of what the Apostle Peter called “a royal priesthood” offering sacrifices of thanksgiving and praise, for every priest brings a sacrifice.
Not only does every priest bring a sacrifice but every priest functions under a High Priest, in this case our High Priest who entered first in our behalf, Jesus the Messiah. How superior is this New Covenant in that He entered the Holy of Holies once and for all with His own sacrificial blood, opening the way for us to come whenever we want and as often as we want. What was once inaccessible to us became continuously accessible and abundantly available!
It is so significant too that thickest of curtains was rent from “top to bottom.” There was nothing we could do from the bottom as mortals to divide that curtain. It was impenetrably thick and heavy with the stubborn independence of our sin. It had to be rent from top to bottom by immortal strength and perfection. Jeremiah was beginning to tell the good news even back then hundreds of years before the arrival of Messiah. The good news that the immediate Presence of God was going to be as near as the word in our mouth, because confessed sin would be not merely covered but washed away by sacrificial blood. One of the mighty, wondrous, fortified and formerly inaccessible things Jeremiah said God wanted to show us was His immediate availability to us. Yahweh God was saying to Israel and to humankind through the prophet, “Here I am, come and be with Me, get to know Me.”
When I was newly married, I often spent Saturdays and Sundays without my wife who had to work as a nurse in the Emergency Room of the local hospital. That made for some lonesome weekends. We had good friends though who recognized the situation and invited me to spend these afternoons with them inviting me as a frequent guest to their table. They were literally saying, “Come and be with” which was one of the traditions that had been handed down so effectively in their family. We hung out together those weekends, they extended a sense of family to me that I’ll never forget it and for which I’ll always be grateful. They were a living illustration to me of one of the divine names: Emmanuel: God with us. It made it more real to me that Emmanuel is reaching out to us all moment to moment in exactly that way.
trbarlow 