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Exodus chapter twenty eight. God had given Moses all of the specifications concerning the building of the tabernacle. Then he had told him about the high priest and gave him here all of the specifications for the garments of the high priest. And I call your attention especially to one paragraph in verse thirty one and following. And thou shalt make the robe of the ephod all of blue, and there shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst thereof it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of it, as it were the hole of an habergeon, and that it be not rent.
You see, it was a square garment, and the hole so that the high priest could slip it over his head, and part of the garment was in the front and in the back. Beneath upon the hem of it, thou shalt make pomegranates of blue and of purple and of scarlet round about the hem thereof. Little ornaments, the shape of the fruit that was so well known in the Orient, and bells of gold between them round about. A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate upon the hem of the robe round about. That the bell and the pomegranate was for a very special purpose.
The high priest on the Day of Atonement killed, first of all, a sacrifice for his own sin. He then killed a sacrifice for the sin of the people, and after he had washed his feet at the laver, he took this inside the first curtain of the temple and on through the holy place to the Holy of Holies, and he took the incense pot, and the cloud of incense was shaken inside of the great veil of the temple until the place was filled with smoke, and then he walked in and put the blood on top of the ark. Outside, thousands of people were waiting. There was a deathly stillness because he had taken this sacrifice in before the presence of the Lord.
And the people waited, the people waited, and finally they heard the tinkling of a bell and a great shout went up, for they knew that God had accepted the sacrifice and that the priest was on his way out. We sing that in one of our great hymns, very frequently we sing it here on the Sundays of communion. Thou art coming, O my Savior, thou art coming, O my King, in thy beauty all resplendent, in thy glory all transcendent. Ma- well may we rejoice and sing. Coming, in the opening east, herald brightness slowly swells. Coming, O my glorious priest, hear we not thy golden bells.
As though we anticipate that the coming of the Lord is soon to be. But I have chosen this passage because of that which now follows. This robe shall be upon Aaron to minister, and his sound shall be heard when he goeth into the holy place before the Lord, and when he cometh out, that he die not. Well, why was there danger of the priest dying? Don't forget his two sons died. On the very day they were ordained, Nadab and Abihu were struck dead by God because they did not observe the complete order of that which God had told them. For all of this passage, as we're about to see, is talking to us about the solemnity of worshiping God in the way that he wants to be worshipped, in spirit and in truth.
And thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, engrave upon it, engrave upon it like you'd engrave upon a signet ring, holiness to the Lord. And thou shalt put this little golden engraving on a blue lace that it may be upon the mitre, and on the forefront of the mitre it shall be, and it shall be upon Aaron's forehead. They took this, tied it around his head, so that that blue cloth and that golden plaque was there with holiness to the Lord. Now listen. It shall be upon Aaron's forehead so that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things.
That's my text, that phrase, the iniquity of the holy. You see, he represented the nation before God. He had to go in there where the presence of God was. For in the Holy of Holies there was the ark where God dwelt among his people in a special way. And as Aaron had to go into the presence of the Lord, ever there must be that golden band holiness unto the Lord, because nothing that man does is perfect. Everything that man does is contaminated, and even the holy things, the acts of worship, had within them iniquity.
Perhaps you'll get at what I'm meaning when I remind you that Robert Murray M'Cheyne, the great Scotch preacher, wrote in his memoirs one day, "Oh God, how I need to be cleansed. Even the tears that I cry need to be washed in the blood of Jesus Christ. I must repent even of my repentance, because anything that comes from us, anything that touches us, is necessarily contaminated. And so there is always iniquity attached to everything. Let us think of the iniquity of public worship. Now, God is the judge of each individual case.
He knows, but in an audience there are people that come to public worship that bring with them hypocrisy. They're there, and they're in the midst of that public worship. In the holy thing there is the iniquity of human hypocrisy. People who are pretending to be all right with the Lord that even come to the communion service and take the communion as though they were absolutely at one with the Lord. Then there's the great iniquity of formality. Now, don't misunderstand, I believe in dignity, but it is very possible to have a church service that simply leaves God out of it by the fact that it's all done so much by rote and by ceremony and by liturgy, that there is no free course for the Spirit to lift the hearts of men, to come in and take the hearts of men and lift them toward God.
The Lord Jesus Christ told the woman at the well, God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. And in the great formality of a merely organized religion, people can go into a service and go through the service and go out from the service without having met God, without having in any wise been touched by him. And worship is, is the heart coming and pouring itself out before God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. All the earth is filled with his glory. And yet how frequently in the midst of the church there is the iniquity of worship, the iniquity of lukewarmness.
Because you're neither cold nor hot, but are lukewarm, said God, I will spew you out of my mouth. Oh, how in the iniquity of the holy things, how often it is that there's the wandering of the heart. How often there's a forgetfulness of God. I believe that it's possible for people to come and go through an entire church service and not only not worship God, but to be singing as they're thinking of something else, to pray and be planning what they're going to do, to listen to a sermon and perhaps take one phrase and go off in the corner of your mind, think a little bit about that. But as far as the heart saying, oh God, I'm a creature and I'm sinful, and I've come here because I want to say that thou alone art God and that there's none like unto thee, and that thou art my God and that thou hast redeemed me and that thou hast loved me, and that thou hast poured out thy blood that I might be cleansed.
And O God, love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. How little of that there may be in a whole hour of church service. And the Lord knew this, and so before Aaron went in, they put this gold upon his head, holiness to the Lord, and God said, you be sure and have that on his head, for he must bear the iniquity of the holy things. Let me talk in second place, not only about the iniquities of our supposedly holy worship, but let's talk about the iniquities of our work. How often in the Christian work we do, there's a great deal of emulation. Someone sees somebody else doing something and said, wouldn't that be nice?
Let's remind ourselves what happened to Ananias and Sapphira. You have the story of the church at one in this marvelous communion of the early church, and nobody called anything that he had his own, but everybody was willing to share, and if anybody was in need, and somebody in the crowd named Barnabas had a property and sold it and came and laid all at the disciples' feet. And when this happened, the whole church says, oh. And Ananias and Sapphira went home, and the thought in their mind was, wouldn't it be nice to have the whole church say, oh, about us? And this was the secret of it. So they went out, and it was a rising real estate market.
He came in and said, look how much I got. Well, they put away forty percent, and Ananias came in. I surrender all. God struck him dead. Now, God didn't strike him dead because he only gave sixty percent. God struck him dead because he said he gave all when he only gave sixty percent. God doesn't act that way today. If he did, we'd have to have a morgue in the basement of the church. Well, there was emulation in the midst of a holy surrender. What should have been the beginning of the yieldedness of the life was founded on emulation and ended in their death because God wanted to point the way to show how he hates that which is marred by the flesh and how he wants that every approach and every action shall be holiness unto the Lord.
There was emulation, trying to keep up with somebody else, trying to imitate somebody else. It exists in Christian work, and in the midst of Christian work, there's often selfishness. People work for selfish motives. There's often carelessness. People don't realize what it really is to work for the Lord. You'll have Sunday school teachers that will say, oh yes, I, I must get my lesson better prepared for next Sunday. And they say Saturday night about twenty minutes at twelve, oh, I'm so tired, I'll get up a little early, and I'll get that Sunday school lesson, and they get up and they're a little late, and they come in, and on the way in they glance at a few lines and then get up to teach their Sunday school class.
And this happens, and not only thus in a Sunday school preparation, but with many other things that we're supposed to do. How careless you are about your witness. Are you always very careless to realize that you represent the Lord Jesus Christ? What slackness in private living, and what unbelief there is in the midst of our work. We do not lay hold upon God, and this again is the iniquity of our holy things, but I must hasten on. I've shown you the iniquity there can be in public worship. I've shown you the iniquity that there may be in Christian living. Let me give, as the last of these points, the iniquity of our private devotions.
This is iniquity. This is a laxity in our own private devotions, or what coldness there is. How many, many Christian people have a spiritual life that is perfunctory, that's cold. You read a few verses, and you're bored with Bible study, and you come to pray, and you finally end up with, well, Lord, it's everything's all right between me and thee, and keep thee and bless thee in Jesus' name, amen, and I'll have a little longer tomorrow, but you don't. And you know very little what prayer is, and almost nothing of what true intercession is. And this, I say, is a mark of the iniquity of our private devotions, an absolute neglect in it, yes, even a sleepiness in it.
Someone once came to me and said, how can I stop from going to sleep when I'm reading the Bible and praying? I said, in the first place, move it from evening till morning. Go to bed thirty minutes earlier at night and get up thirty minutes earlier in the morning, and have it and not be sleepy at the word of God and not be sleepy in the midst of praying. If you turn to the word of God, you discover many, many times what iniquities there were in the midst of worship. Let me read you a verse from Amos, where God Almighty talks about what these people were doing in the midst of their worship. In chapter five, it is, in verse twenty one.
God is talking about the religious ceremonies. I hate, says God. When God says he hates something, it's time to listen. I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell incense in your solemn assemblies. Though you offer me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not accept them, neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs. Think of church music sounding like that in the ears of God. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs, for I will not hear the melody of thy vials, but let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream have you offered unto me sacrifices and offerings forty years?
And so on and so on, and he tells how he would have to send them into captivity because of this. Once more, turn over to Malachi chapter two. and God says, and now, oh ye priests. And you have to read it with a sneer because he's talking about these men who were performing the public acts of worship, and God says, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings. The very things which should have brought them nearer to God, God put such a curse upon them that they turned them farther from God. It was the iniquity of the holy things. God says, I will corrupt your seed and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts.
He's talking about the lamb, not the lamb they killed ordinarily every day, but the beast of the great feast of the atonement, or the Passover. God says to the priest, you kill the lamb, and when you kill the lamb and shed its blood, there inside the lamb is the unexpressed dung, which the priest takes out and puts in the box for the Kohathite to carry through the dung gate. God says, I'll take it and smear it upon your faces. You have not acted right by the blood of the Lamb, therefore, says God, I will give you the dung of the Lamb. I think we fail to understand what a tremendous thing it is to open the Bible. What a tremendous thing it is suddenly to come into the presence of the Lord and have the Holy Spirit speaking and ourselves not listening, so preoccupied with the gadgetry of our modern lives, so occupied with all of what we're doing and what our plans are.
Well, what are we going to do? Well, the only way whereby we have any right to approach God is to remember, thank God, that our great high priest is there and that we come to God through him, through the Lord Jesus Christ. We come unto thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. For this is our only possibility in what view of what we are by ourselves. Our worship, oh, what a horrible thing it is when examined under the magnifying glass to see what we really bring to God. Our own personal service, our own personal devotion. Oh, how right Murray M'Cheyne was when he said, my prayers must be cleansed by the righteousness of God, and even my repentance, I must repent of it, and my tears must be washed by the blood of Christ.
Now we go back. Thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, engrave onto it like unto the engraving of signet, holiness of the Lord, and it shall be upon Aaron's forehead. Now, says God, I know what that crowd of people is out there. I know how horrible all that mass of Israelites is outside the camp. I know how that even while Aaron was inside praying, some of them were saying, oh, why did we ever have to leave Egypt? Weren't there graves enough in Egypt? Why not have a captain and elect one and go back? We don't want to stay out here with this Moses if we only had the leeks and the onions and the garlic of Egypt. Why did God bring us out here?
Why didn't God smash that camp and kill all those people? Because on the forehead of Aaron it said, Holiness to the Lord. And the Lord was looking past all those people, and he was looking past Aaron to the great high priest who stands in the presence of God and is there today for you and for me. And this is the only reason whereby we can come boldly to the throne of grace, knowing what our worship really is, knowing what our service really is, knowing what our private devotion really is. We can approach him in the merits and on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ and the grace that God has manifest for us. How this reveals to us again what we are at our best.
We have to speak of the iniquity of our holy thing, or nothing good have I whereby thy grace to claim. And yet, you see, because Aaron had the golden axiom on his forehead, we can come in and say, in the words of Wesley's hymn, Arise, my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears, the bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears. Before the throne, my surety stands. My name is written on his hands. He ever lives above for me to intercede. His all-redeeming love, his precious blood to plead. His blood atones for all the race and sprinkles now the throne of grace.
Five bleeding wounds he bears, received on Calvary. They pour effectual prayers. They strongly plead for me. Forgive him, oh, forgive, they cry, nor let that ransomed sinner die. Yes, and on his head, our sanctification, holiness unto the Lord, for he stands between us and God. Between all that we are in ourselves, it is Christ who makes it possible that hearts that still have the old Adamic nature can come boldly onto that throne and be received without offending God, so that our hypocrisies and our slackness, our lukewarmness, so that our laziness, our emulation, our pride, our vanity, these things are not seen by God because he looks at us through his son.
The father hears him pray, the dear anointed one. He cannot turn away the presence of his Son. The Spirit answers to the blood and tells me I am born of God. Therefore, we come boldly, and even though we may be so deeply conscious of the iniquity of our holy things, we nevertheless look up to him and say, O Father, look not upon me in what I am, but look only in the fact that I am in the forehead of Christ for thee. Our Father and our God, we pray thee that the Holy Spirit may not allow us to shrug this off, that it may not be possible for us to say, oh well, that's a Bible message, we're corrupt, and then go on being corrupt.
Lord, we ask thee that thou shall probe deep, deeply in the lives of each one of us, and that there may be a great desire to know thee better, to love thee more, and above all, to avail ourselves moment by moment of the cleansing of the blood of Jesus Christ, that we may stand before thee and day by day bring unto thee more and more that which is purified through him. And we can look upon thee and look thee in thine holy eye and say, as Peter said, Lord Jesus, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love Thee.