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Bibleline Bibleline, here God’s Word on Bibleline, everywhere, every time. Here God’s truth on Bibleline. Welcome to Bibleline with Dr. Ralph Yankee Arnold, pastor of Calvary Community Church in Tampa, Florida. Clearly declaring the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the radio and the internet. Your regular prayers and monthly support make it possible for Bibleline to continue on the air. You can reach us toll-free at 1-800-576-3771. Online donations may be made by clicking on the donations link on the BibleLineMinistries.org homepage. We pray that you will enjoy our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ and that today’s first part of this two-part message will be a blessing to you and your family.

your Bible and turn to the book of 2 Peter chapter 3, 2 Peter in chapter 3. There’s a verse here that I kind of want to run by you a little bit and then try to give you an illustration of something that I hope will be a blessing to you. Anyway, it ought to be something for you to chew on for a little while. You know, sometimes you just give them a little milk, a little pabble them. And then sometimes you give them something to really chew on.

And it doesn’t mean you can always swallow everything the preacher gives you. But sometimes you have to take a verse over here, which is a knife. You take a verse over here for it. And you go back to that piece of gristle and you kind of cut it up a little bit. And if you can rightly divide it, it makes it easier to chew. So I try to do that. But I don’t always succeed. Some people get choked a little bit here and there.

And here in 2 Peter in chapter 3, down in verse 8, but beloved. Now he’s talking to those who know the Lord. There’s been people have been mocking those that believe that Jesus is coming. So he says up in verse 4, he says, where’s the promise of his coming? I mean, where is he at? Y’all been saying for 2,000 years Jesus is coming and he hasn’t shown up yet. And so there’s a lot of mockers out there. And sometimes I wonder if we don’t bring some of the mocking upon ourselves, but one of these days somebody’s going to hit it right.

Somebody’s going to have the right date. We’re always looking for the Lord to come back at any time. We don’t know exactly when He’s coming, but we know He’s coming. And He says, where’s the promise of His coming? For since the Father’s fellow sleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of evolution. No, the beginning of creation. Well, nothing’s changed. Everything’s the same. Well, that’s what they were saying. This was written 2000 years ago. This was right after Christ had already been here.

They were already saying stuff like that. And here we are 2000 years later. And it says down here that, verse 8, but beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing. One day with the Lord is of the thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but his long suffering toward us not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And so he says in verse 10, the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night.

But now that verse that says, and verse eight, one day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years of the day. Now it’s easy for us sometimes to try to figure out that, you know, with the Lord, time doesn’t seem to mean much. Because to Him a day is like a thousand years or a thousand years like a day. But we often talk about, you know, here it is a thousand years down here is like a day.

And so they’re going to be six days, six thousand years. Christ is going to come back and set up His kingdom upon the earth, and it’ll be the seventh day of the week. Six days? Whoo, they were moving on. We’re at the end of the sixth day. But I thought one time, wouldn’t it be strange that in the eyes of God, because I was wondering one day, God, how can you get so much done? Think of all the people that do all this praying.

And I will thank God you got to spend time with me because you got to think about me. If you think about me, you ain’t got time to think about nobody else. Because I am that important. And the Bible says, multitudes are His thoughts concerning me. So I mean, I thought, well, at least you got a good subject. He thinks about me. Well, then you’re probably thinking, well, God thinks about you. Well, if God’s thinking about all these different people, He got so much to do.

I wonder if God gets tired or bored with so much to do. And then I thought, well, what if God could take a day? A day and stretch it out until it was a thousand years long. But you and I won’t know He did that. And you and I can live our lives and we’re going through a natural life, but God can stretch a day into a thousand years. We have no problem thinking about him taking a thousand years and count it as a day.

Why not go the other way? Let’s just pretend for a second. Let’s pretend y’all live y’all’s normal life. You know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But God gave me the ability to have a thousand years to live that one day. So while you are here living normal, I would be very slow. You might even think I was dead and want to bury me, but I would just be slow. But what if you reversed it and everybody is moving their normal speed but I would be moving at supernatural speed.

And I could be a lickety split and move at the speed of light because you see, I’m going to take this and have a thousand years into a day. But have I got to move out and I would be able to run around you and do all kinds of things, mess up your hair, spit in your eye and you wouldn’t even see me do it. And you were, well how How did that happen? Who did that? And I thought, but this is awesome when you stop and think about time.

Now when you study the Old Testament, and it’s interesting how that God will use types in order to teach. Not everything God put together at one time. He has what we call progressive revelation. Revelation revealing things in a progressive way Little by little you see the Bible was not given to us all at one time But over the years Maybe 15 1600 years and God has given to us his word 35 to 40 different writers from all kinds of lights a Little here and a little there a little here and a little there yet it all comes together perfectly And he says there’s things that he has done for a purpose that you and I would not have always understood at a particular moment in time where God revealed it all.

You and I living at the time in which we do can understand more than people who lived at other times. The Bible makes this statement that in time passed that many of the prophets, as they studied the Word of God, they did not quite understand all the things about the sufferings and the glory concerning Christ because you see, they didn’t understand when all of this would happen. So even though they knew it was going to happen, they could not distinguish exactly how it would happen.

And so there’s things concerning this in the Old Testament. And 1964, I was in Shreveport, Louisiana, and I had designed myself a great big book. It’s about this thick, about this big. I still have that book to this day. And I rode on the front of it in gold on leather. I bound my own book. One of these days I’ll show it to you. I have on Biblical Studies by Ralph Arnold. I had been saved about three years. Bitty’s dad had taught me a lot about the Bible, but there’s so much I did not understand.

And on one of those pages, I drew a picture. Of the tabernacle in the wilderness, the tent, where God was going to meet with His people. You see, in the Old Testament, the Bible tells us that God wanted to work and walk and fellowship with man. But because of sin, it broke that relationship, that walk we had with God because of sin. When that was broken, it also broke the pureness and the blessings of the earth. So even the earth was cursed.

And then the relationship between individuals was all broken. So how to get man back to God? So God had devised a plan, and it seems like as you study it, It seemed like it takes forever. You studied in your testman how one man lived, and then he had a child. That man lived, and he got married, and he had a child. That man lived, and he had 12 kids. Then they go down into Egypt for 400 years. Now me, I am for moving a little faster.

I get bored quick, but God is not in a hurry. God is patient and he plans it all out. He works everything as though time, what is time? God got all the time in the world to make whatever he wants happen, happen, and to believe that God is in charge. But how can a man get to God? So men need to understand just how righteous and Godly and holy he is. And because there’s a sinful man, that sinful man cannot have direct access to God.

He had to have a mediator, somebody to go between him and God. Have you ever gone to see somebody about a job and you can’t get to the ball, you have to go to the secretary? And the secretary says, well, just have a seat and wait for a month. And she decides whether you get in or you don’t get in. And sometimes if you only knew somebody that knows somebody, they can get you in to see somebody of importance.

Well, you can’t get any more important than God. What if I was that individual that lived back then and I want an audience with God? Hey, I want to work with you. We need to have a meeting. But anyway, whenever you want to see how did they get the lesson in the Old Testament, I want to kind of give you a little picture. We’re going to turn this whole audience, the whole room here, into the tabernacle. This is the tabernacle in the wilderness.

Now the tabernacle in the wilderness, well, there was the court and then the holy place in the holy of holies. Three different sections of it. But the outer court from one end to the other was only about 150 feet long, 150 feet by 70 feet, 75 feet wide. So that’s not very large. It would fit inside of this room probably at the length of this. So we know that the outer court had railings around it and curtains and so forth.

And they were maybe about say seven and a half feet high. And when you came into the courtyard, there were certain things there and then they had the great big curtain up here and it went all the way back. And this part was 15 feet high with the curtains across it. And this curtain separated the outer court from the holy of holies. See, this was the holy place. So the tabernacle is really just two rooms, not counting the outer court.

And so this room was the holy place, and then there was another big veil, and there was another room. And in that room, it was about 15 feet wide, 15 feet long and 15 feet high. It was a cube. So it’s not a very big room. But that’s the place where God told Moses, I will meet with you there in that little room. Now that little room there was no light there. In the holy place, there was no light in here except for the candles.

Now we call it sometimes candlestick, but in reality there was no candles. It was not candlesticks because they didn’t use candles. They used olive oil. They were lamp stands. So it was a lamp stand with one maimin’ in the middle and three on the sides of it. And that was the light that was in the holy place. But can you imagine without the light in there, there was no way of any light getting into this room, or especially into that holy of holies, no light, because they had four different coverings that went over the top of this temple, this tent.

And they had the finest of linen. They had like badger skin over the top of it, and they had another kind of a skin over the top of that, and then they believed that there was another one of like a leather that could have been from, they said a badger or a porpoise or something that had really caused the water to rain off so that water wouldn’t get in and hurt anything. So, but it was totally dark. And Josephus’ book, he writes about the holy place and he talks about the veil.

And that veyola that guarded that holy place, well, it was about four inches thick, and they said that two horses, they could not rip that thing apart. That’s how thick it was and how strong it was. But let’s say if this was the out of court, and when you came in it, remember the priests were the ones that were supposed to teach the people the word of God, the ways of God to help them to understand what it all meant.

There is something they see with the visible eye. They can see the brazen altar when they first walk in and it is an altar that is made out of brass. And this thing is about seven and a half feet wide and long sits off the the ground, maybe four and a half feet. And that’s where they would put the animals that they were going to sacrifice. They call it a burnt offering. On that burnt offering, well, there were different kinds of offerings that they would be able to offer onto this burnt offering for a sacrifice.

There were what we call the sin offering. A sin offering was an offering that the people had to make because they sent against God. And then they had the trespass offering or what we call the guilt offering. You know, when you trespass against someone, you sin against somebody. And so there had to be an offering that you made on that level for that sin. And then there was also what they called the grain offering that whenever you brought in your grain, they would bring it in and the priest would take some of it and throw it on to the burnt offering and they would be able to eat the rest of it.

Remember, the priest didn’t have their own places in the sense there’s like a tribe with a pot of ground like that as a tribe. They lived off of the sacrifices that the people brought. So the people were supposed to bring these things and of course the priests wanted them to because that was how they lived. They would eat that which was cooked and offered to God as a sacrifice. Now if it was a burnt offering it was to be completely burnt completely consumed.

So there were offerings like that. There were some of the offerings where they would offer them in if there was one called the peace offering that once they had offered the sin offering and the guilt offering and made peace with God they could make a peace offering and then they were able to eat that and share in it. So there was all these different that was all in that that brazen altar and that’s why they had to to be offered upon their sacrifice.

And when they came in with that little lamb or whatever they wanted to offer, turtle doves, or whatever they was going to give, if they were poor, they didn’t have to give as much. Or as expensive of an animal. If they were very rich, more was required. Some had to give a bullet. Or a big cow, whatever. But. Many of them gave sheep, little lambs. And they would bring them, and the reason they had to be there for as long as they did is because they had corals outside where they had to put the animals, and they would watch and observe these animals and make sure that there was nothing wrong with them for four days they had to inspect these animals.

So as they inspected them and they were okay, then they would be able to bring them in and the person brought in their own little lamb or whatever it was. And then when they took and put them on the top of this burnt offering, they had four horns on different corners, not real horns, but things that you’d be able to tie the animal down on top of this big grape. And then they would place their hands up on the animal, and they would cut its throat and let the blood drain.

And so even children understood that sin, there’s a penalty. The penalty is death. And so these innocent little animals was because if you did not do this, you could die because of the law in Israel. You could die if you don’t offer the right sacrifice for the right sin. And there were many sacrifices that they had to make. Some of those sacrifices were made every day. And so the priests had rotation of when they would have to serve in the tabernacle or in the temple later on.

So as they would do this and they would have to make these various sacrifices and the priests would be able to eat these things. They became a teaching tool. And so many of the people who came only did it as a ritual and never saw the meaning behind it what caused it to work. Like people today can be baptized in water and never trust Christ as their Savior. True? People can join a church and they think they’re going to heaven now because they’re a member of the body of Christ.

If you never trusted Christ as your Savior, you’re not saved. You don’t go to heaven because you’ve been baptized in water. So many people are religious and yet lost. And the same thing then as it is now. And so they would be able to offer these sacrifices and as they offered these sacrifices and they would tie that animal down and they laid their hand on them. It was a way of transferring. Or as the New Testament says, your sins were being imputed to this animal as though this animal, this innocent animal is dying in your stead.

Now you and I today, we know that’s just a type of what Christ would do one day and this is exactly what He’s done. So after they have done that, then the priest, and only the tribe of Levi had the right to do this. So then they would be able to go to the other brazen labor. And it was a labor with water for the hands and water for the feet. I’ve been to Israel a lot of times, and I’ve watched enough Arabs even do this.

They have a place for their hands to wash, and they got a place for their feet to wash. Well, in the temple, it was for only the priest. So they would wash the blood off their hands. They even had to do it before they did the sacrifices. And so they had a ritual that they had to go through and they had to wear certain garments at certain time. They had to do everything just right. God laid it all down for them.

And so they would go to the labor and they would wash and keep themselves. And so as they went from that burnt offering and they would go over to the, the labor. Well, as they walk from there over to here before they could go into the holy place, they’d get dirt on their feet or sand on their feet. And when they did the offerings, they would be unclean. And so they would have to cleanse themselves. Now you and I know that in the New Testament, we We don’t need a complete bath, but because we get a little dirt on us as we go through life, we need to be washed by the washing of the water by the Word.

And so everything in the tabernacle was a picture of what Christ has done for us. You see, it was just a shadow, shadow of the real thing. That was not the real thing. It was only a picture, a pattern of something that was real in heaven. And God told Moses to make the one on the earth like the one that’s in heaven. And God gave them all the instructions on what to do. And so when they got to the big veil…

As though you had a big veil across through here. And see, this was not a very big section out here. Because you’re only talking about maybe 50 feet by 50 feet, because the rest of it takes up the rest of the difference. And then you have this great big veil that goes across through here, and they would go into this place every day, twice a day, every morning, every night. Because there was three main things in that room of what they were supposed to do.

Now there’s questions about whether or not the altar of incense was in the holy place or inside of the holy of holies. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’m working on it. But remember this, when they came from there to go into here, there was a big curtain across here. here. And the priest had to come in here, and many priests could do this. And they would come in and they would trim the lampstand. You see, the light inside of this place, if this ever became dark, it’s very difficult to see, because there was no light that could get in here.

So without the light inside of here, make it very difficult for them. So they had to keep the light burning. Now in Solomon’s day they had the dedication of the temple when they had built a literal stone temple that David had gotten all the materials but God will not allow him to build the temple. So Solomon was used by God to build the temple. later on because of anti-office epiphanies and about 170 BC, well he really desecrated the temple by going into the temple and offering a sacrifice of a pig and that made Maccabee.

Very mad, very angry. He rallied the Jews and they took it away from them and they got their temple back and so they went in to have a rededication. They wanted to purify the temple. And so when they wanted to rededicate the temple to God, they didn’t have enough oil to last for those seven or eight days that they needed. They relied, they only had enough oil for one day. And this is why sometimes it’s called the rededication of the temple, but it was called also the feast of light, or the feast of dedication.

It’s what they call Hanukkah today. They call it happy Hanukkah to you, the feast of life. It’s a time that you and I know, but they celebrated this because The oil lasted for eight days until they were able to purify the oil that they needed, the olive oil, because of the process they had to go through. So it lasted for the eight days and so they had a rededication. And this is what the Jewish people are still doing and celebrating even to this day.

But as you went into the holy place, there was the candle, as we call it, the lampstand. The lampstand is where you hear about Christ. I am the light of the world. You’ve been listening to Bibleline, a teaching ministry of Calvary Community Church in Tappa, Florida with Dr. Ralph Arnold. We pray that you were blessed by today’s message. Two of this teaching will conclude with tomorrow’s broadcast. If you have enjoyed our commitment to the clear gospel of Jesus Christ, you can reach Bibleline and pledge your support to keep us on the air in your area by dialing toll-free, 1-800-576-3771.

That’s 1-800-576-3771. To listen to today’s message again or to obtain a free download of any of our Bibleline programs, Just go to our homepage at BibleLineMinistries.org and click on the Radio Broadcast link. If you are in the area, we welcome you to visit us. The address for Calvary Community Church is 4811 George Road, Tampa, Florida, 33634. Our Sunday morning services begin at 10-30 and at 6 o’clock on Sunday evening. Live broadcasts of our services may be seen by clicking on the Calvary Community Church link at BibleLineMinistries.org.

Thanks for joining us on Bibleline, and now a closing thought from Pastor Arnold. Friend, one day it will happen. The trumpet will sound and we will be changed. Caught up to meet the Lord in the air. So live today and every day. Believing that the Lord is coming soon and just keep looking up.