The Ark and the Mercy Seat

Man routinely places the right above that which it celebrates. For example, communion above Christ’s atonement on the cross, the form of baptism above the life, the new life that it signified, the presence at worship above worship from within and in all our being and actions, and so on and one. The result is blasphemy. Thus, when David speaks against the sacrificial system, it is against any stress on ritual as sufficient in itself. He himself was faithful to the sacrificial system, because he held to the primacy of righteousness or justice. The centrality and the Holy of Holies and the ark of the law witness against formalism.

Moreover, when David says that God’s justice, or righteousness, is central to his being, hidden in his heart, he tells us that even as the ark and its law is at the center of God’s sanctuary, so too God’s covenant law is at the center of His own being, and should be at the center of ours.

According to Hebrews 9:4, the ark had besides the tables of the covenant, two other things: a golden vessel with manna and Aaron’s rod that budded, both were witnesses to the supernatural and providential power of God in the lives of His covenant people.

The cherubim, or cherubims as it is sometimes given as in our text, is the plural of cherub, and cherub has nothing to do with our modern notion of cherubs, little baby-like, angelic creatures. They represented heavenly creatures who are near to God. They were here represented in gold, and with their faces looking to the mercy seat. In Genesis 3:24, the cherubim after the fall barred the Garden of Eden and the tree of life from man. Their presence is imaged here, and it is an association with the covenant law and ark, and with the mercy seat, or propitiation, and it means that only in covenantal faithfulness to God can man be free from judgment.

On the Day of Atonement, the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, and he sprinkled blood on the mercy seat. According to Leviticus 16:14-16, “And he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy seat eastward; and before the mercy seat shall he sprinkle of the blood with his finger seven times. Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy seat, and before the mercy seat: And he shall make an atonement for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation, that remaineth among them in the midst of their uncleanness.”

The point in this ritual was to establish a barrier between God and His broken law on the one hand, and the people on the other, and the interesting fact that is rarely mentioned now a days is, that as he went and sprinkled the blood, it was in the shape of the cross.

Scripture refers to the ark in various ways. In Jeremiah 3:16-17, it is called the throne of God, whereas David, in 1 Chronicles 28:2 calls it God’s footstool, and David apparently has the same thought in mind in Psalm 99:5 and 132:7. A cloud of incense filled the Holy of Holies when the priest approached it, according to Leviticus 16:13. In Eiler’s words, and I quote, “This expresses the fact that full communion between God and man is not to be realized, even through the

medium of the atonement to be attained by the Old Testament sacrificial institutions — that, as is said in Hebrews 9:8, as yet the way to the heavenly sanctuary was not made manifest. The kapporeth rested on the mercy seat, on the ark, in which are the tables of the law, the testimony. This means that God sits enthroned in Israel on the ground of the covenant of law which He has made with Israel. The testimony is preserved in the ark as a treasure, a jewel. But with this goes a second consideration; while the law is certainly, in the first place, a testimony to the will of God towards His people, it is also a testimony against the sinful people,

a continual record of accusation, so to speak, against their sins in the sight of the holy God. And now, when the kapporeth is over the tables, it is declared that God's grace, which provides an atonement or covering for the iniquity of the people, stands above His penal justice.”

Well, there are two very strong declarations in this. First, the law of God is basic to biblical faith. If there is no regard for the law, there is no covenant. Second, man is in this covenant of God by His grace and by the blood of the atonement. In the atonement, we see the grace of God fully revealed in Christ’s work on the cross. Atonement, covenant, and law are thus, inseparable. The mercy seat is so important that the Holy of Holies in 1 Chronicles 28:11 is called the house, or place of the mercy seat. The ark and the mercy seat are very closely tied together in this text and elsewhere. Grace and law are thus inseparably linked in the covenant. Revelation tells us that God’s law even now judges the world to destroy those which destroy or corrupt the earth, according to Revelation 11:18, and then in the next verse we read, “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”

As aspect of Adam’s sin, and his will to be his own god and law maker, was in and is the desire to restrict meaning to what man declares it to be. Each man seeks to make the world his world, and to give the world a meaning he himself ordains. This means that any realm of meaning which transcends man is detested. True enough, philosophers routinely insist on some kind of meaning in the natural order, that this represents their mind projecting its own logic onto the world. Modern philosophy is very deeply given to man-made meanings. Ironically, now it is turning on itself, and in deconstructionism, a writer is said not to know the real meaning of what he himself has written. It has to be interpreted by the professors. Of course, we’ve had this same kind of deconstruction in law, and the thesis is that the framers of the Constitution and the framers of any law, legislators, did not really know the meaning of the law and therefore, the judges, the equivalent of the professors, must reinterpret its meaning, and ritualism is not different. The sacraments are routinely given very personal meanings with a disregard for God’s ordained meaning. The personal experience is sought without regard to God’s covenant law and grace, and His work of atonement in Christ. So the meaning of any rite begins with God, and our understanding of what He has said and what He has done is our personal experience. This is why, in the service of passover, the youngest male child capable of speaking and understanding would ask, “What mean ye by this service?” The experience was to be in knowing the meaning and applying it in one’s life, and this is why, in terms of that passover ritual, the early church had a chorus of small boys who recited the same line in the communion at the beginning of the service. “What mean ye by this service?” God-centered instruction was clearly stressed.

In terms of this, verse 22 tells us that God, from His throne, commands His people. This is essential to the communion between God and man. In this verse, communion is tied to the law and to atonement, and this broken link must be restored. As a result of the whole of modernism, with its subjectivism, its romanticism, people now seek the meaning of things pertaining to the faith, and the meaning of the rituals, of baptism, of communion, or anything else, and what it means to me. That reverses God’s order. What God declares it to mean must be the experience of understanding, of an enlightenment that makes our being rejoice. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto thee for thy word. We thank thee that thy word is true, that thy word is altogether righteous and just, and that thy word must be basic to our experience, it must color, govern, guide, shape our understanding, our thinking, our feeling, the whole of our lives. Make us joyful in thy word, and grant that it may always be a light upon our way to guide us all the days of our life. In Christ’s name, amen.

Are there any questions now with regard to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] It seems that, from what you’re saying, there is almost platonic element in the respect to which judges are held in contemporary society. Instead of a philosophy king we have a philosopher judge that pretty much controls our . . .

[Rushdoony] Yes, a very good point. We have people who feel that the meaning comes not from God, nor from the person, if it’s from the human level, who speaks it, but from themselves. So, the interpreters, whether in the academy or in the courts, have become the new philosopher kings. And, of course, in the realm of the faith, the purely personal experience. A new kind of Platonism. They become the locale of meaning. Yes?

[Audience] At what period in this country did it really begin, that men began to interpret the Constitution?

[Rushdoony] Very early. Very early. However, I think we can say it coincided with the rise of two things: one was experientialism and religion. Now, the Finney revival was a major break with orthodoxy in Christian history, because what Finney said was that a revival within Christendom was not the work of God and the Holy Spirit, but it was produced by technology, we might say. Methodology. If men applied the right kind of techniques, they could produce, infallibly, revival in any community. They would thereby be commanding God and the Holy Spirit. Well, that put the priority with man. In meant that new meaning continually came out of one’s experience. That type of thinking, in a number of ways, represented, well, romanticism in literature, which came into this country a little more tardily than in Europe, romanticism in religion. In meant also experientialism and that, as Oliver Wendell Holmes later was to say, the law is not logic but experience. Well, that was no improvement. Before that, the law was seen a human logic, now it became human experience. In neither case was it referred to God. So, after the 1820’s, this kind of thinking rapidly took over. There were evidences of it before, but after the 1820’s it began to predominate. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] During the formation of the Constitution, some of the founding fathers expressed a concern about usurpation of power among the co, what were going to become the co-equal branches of government, but I don’t remember ever reading anything about the usurpation of God’s power by government. Did any of them, to your knowledge, ever express any concern about that?

[Rushdoony] Yes, they did by avoiding the word “totally,” and Washington condemned it before they ever began. Sovereign and sovereignty, because they felt that belonged only to God, and on the fiftieth anniversary, that was the point the John Quincy Adams, a liberal of his day, expressed shock about that we had gone from a belief in the sovereignty of God alone to a belief in the sovereignty of state, or of the federal union, and to him, that was a reversal, a revolution that turned the whole meaning of things upside down. Yes?

[Audience] Don’t you think the collapse of some of the communist systems in middle Europe would have a salutary{?} effect upon the Americans in the sense that government loses some of its sacredness?

[Rushdoony] I hope so. I just read yesterday, Dr. Ivan Browning’s commentary on how foolish Americans are to think that all this represents a change in thinking. He doesn’t feel it does. Now, perhaps he’s overly cynical, I don’t know. He says the real problem is hunger, and he said at the end of the harvest in Kiev, Russian, hunger was great because there was no food, and he said this is true throughout the central European countries, and he said hunger has driven people to rebelling and to the collapse of the various orders, and he believed that hunger is going to hit the whole of the known world in a very short time, within two or three years.

[Audience] Well, wouldn’t that be just the sacredness of government?

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, it is. It is, but it’s not because they’ve grown in their thinking, but they had the horrors of mismanagement brought home to them. He gives a frightening picture of the future, and it’s hard to find fault with his analysis. At the same time also, he calls attention to the growing water crisis. How in France, the drought is so severe that the water supply of Paris is a month only, and it’s still not raining and no body seems to be alarmed. They believe that the water will always be there. So, there has been no step towards conservation, and among the Britons, in Brittany, they had a severe drought all summer, with excessive heat and now excessive cold and continuing drought, in an area which is normally quite wet. So, apparently it’s a worldwide picture according to Dr. Browning. That’s God’s way of destroying the sacredness of man’s planning, I think. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] In the denomination I grew up in, there was a reaction in my generation to formalism. The problem was that the church has abandoned the forms rather than restore the meaning.

[Rushdoony] Yes. First the forms become all-important, and then, because the forms are empty, they become abandoned. That has historically been the pattern. So, we are at the point where the forms themselves have eroded. Well, if there are no further questions or comments, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that though the vision of man gives us only a bleak and grim outlook, thou art on the throne. It is thy judgments which are being executed, and thy purpose in all these things is to destroy the pride and the evil of men, and to bring forth thy righteousness, thy truth, and to deliver thy people and to further thy kingdom. Give us grace to walk day by day, with out hearts fixed where our true joys are to be found, even in Christ Jesus, His kingdom and His word. Bless us to this purpose. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.