---

I. WE HAVE HERE THE VERY CORE OF THE SYMBOLICAL ORDINANCES OF THE JEWISH CHURCH. At this point all the interest of the dispensation is concentrated. The days of that people's life as a spiritual community all array themselves around that day, when their high-priest, their daysman — who represented their nation in shadow, as Christ, in substance, represents the world — entered that inner sanctuary with the incense of his people's prayers and the blood of his people's sacrifice, and received commission from the Lord God who dwelt between the cherubim, to lay the sins of the nation on a victim, who should bear them into the wilderness away. Here, then, is the focus of the spiritual power of the dispensation, I mean its power to order man's spiritual relations with all things and with God. And hither, to this mercy-seat above the ark, we are to look — if my principle, that this is a typical people, typical of you and me, be a right one — for those elements of the good word of God to the men of that dispensation, which relate it to the universal gospel of God to man and to all worlds — God's method of "reconciling all things to Himself."

II. LET US PASS WITHIN THE SHRINE, AND BEHOLD WHAT IT HAS TO REVEAL.

1. What is the supreme symbol here? The last, the highest, the crown of the whole, is the mercy-seat. And this appears to me to mean more, infinitely more, than a promise of forgiveness, upon certain terms. The fact that with the mercy-seat God completed and crowned the symbolism of the Jewish dispensation; that He only felt it fit to be His habitation and organ of expression when that mercy-seat was set there over the ark; that till then it was a mere shell of a dispensation — as Adam's body was a mere shell of a man until God had breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — but that when the mercy-seat was set, it became capable of entertaining the Divine glory, and became, in fact, inspired; this fact, I say, is the broad, grand declaration to Judaism of the essential nature of God. It was the utterance to that age, of the word which by ten thousand half-articulate voices has been uttering itself to man since the first days of the creation, and has now become fully articulate in Christ — God is love. The truth is the same for them and for us; the substance of the proclamation is the same; the difference lies here, they heard the word, and saw the glory, but "Hereby know we the love of God, because He laid down His life for us."

2. Beneath the mercy-seat, within its bosom, as it were, was the ark of the testimony, and in it the word of the law. The image here reveals a harmony — the tables of stone in the ark, the mercy-seat above it, crowning it, and the glory of the Lord enveloping the whole. The two ideas are inseparable — mercy and righteousness — when we connect them with the Divine name. "Mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other," in every manifestation of the love of God to man.

3. The third lesson of the symbol, perhaps the highest, is to be gathered from the contemplation of its unity. We have considered it in its parts, but it is essentially one. An ark, with a mercy-seat above it, the cherubim shadowing both, and the Divine glory, the light which was the sign of God's personal presence, bathing the whole. It tells us that mercy only crowns us fully with its benediction, when the Divine testimonies are hidden within the heart. Man is the true Shekinah. The glory shines from him when the Word is enshrined within him. "Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth." In Him it is no law of words addressed sternly to the understanding, but a law of life shrined lovingly within the soul.

(J. B. Brown, B. A.)

---

---

KJV: And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof.

WEB: You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two and a half cubits shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth.