The Sanctuary – The Better Sacrifice
The Sanctuary –
The Better Sacrifice
by
J. Wilfred
Johnson
July 7, 1986
Transcribed
from a C/D of the same title Nov. 5th, 2012
by
Steven Pond and
Mary Savoy
I wish we had
two hours today; this is one of the most profound messages in Adventism. I hope
that you at least look through the quarterly and got the details of the
foundation of this thing because I would like to build on that today. I don’t
want to spend too much time going through the details; I would like to give you
the keys for understanding this lesson. Keys which I feel we are urgently in
need of, but I haven’t heard them explained the way I find them in the books. I
think that Satan is at work trying to becloud the minds of Adventists so they
will not understand the message God gave to us to give to the world. And many
of us are moving backwards. Today I hope that we may move ahead.
What did God
give all of these gruesome ceremonies to ancient Israel for? What was His
point? Every time someone sinned they had to take an animal and slay it with
their own hands and the blood flowed and the blood had to be used in certain
ways and so what did He do this for? Day after day, week after week, year after
year, that sanctuary must have been so polluted that it would be almost
impossible to stand the stench. What was God doing? Let’s have a quick look.
Now, let me
give it to you. He was trying to teach those people the terribleness of sin,
the gruesomeness of it. What did the animal represent?
(A woman in the
group) Unintelligible (This meeting is actually a small Sabbath school
lesson given by Mr. Johnson in what sounds like the sanctuary of the church.
There are other groups meeting in the sanctuary as well as individuals talking
among themselves. All of this background noise makes it impossible to hear
individuals addressing Mr. Johnson with their comments and questions.)
(Wilfred) It
was Christ wasn’t it? Doesn’t it represent Christ? What was going to happen to
Christ because of sin? Nothing would have to happen to Him except for the fact
that God wanted to save sinners. If God didn’t care about sinners nothing would
happen, but God loves sinners, His love impelled Him. God wanted to teach those
people the awfulness of sin and what it does to Him.
Sister White
explains to us that the cross of Calvary is the revelation of the pain that
entered into the heart of God at the very inception of sin, and that pain has
endured all down through those years. The hurt, and the cross was to reveal
that hurt so that we would understand what God is suffering because He is
tolerating this multitude of wicked children of His who are constantly doing
mischief and paining His heart. You parents understand that don’t you, a little
bit? When is the pain going to leave the parents heart?
(A woman in the
group) Unintelligible
(Wilfred) When the children stop sinning. When they come in penance
and repentance and say, oh, please forgive me. I’ll never do that again. Well,
what about the sinner? That’s what God wanted to teach those Israelites. Don’t
keep on sinning because it keeps on hurting. Come out of it. And that’s why
once a year they have the atonement service to remind them that there is a time
when God is going to cleanse house, to cleanse the temple. And that’s another
thing I want to touch on, the temple. The aim of the Gospel is to get rid of
sin. The purpose of the creation of this world and its seven thousand year
history; six thousand years in which the demonstration takes place and the
seventh thousand years in which all the records are reviewed and they look it
over and they say, “It is good”. That what God did in the six-day creation, He
made it in six days, the seventh day He looked at it and He said, “It’s good”.
Now here is—the real one here is the real creation. The heart of the sinner is
to be renewed. There is to be a destruction, a
cleansing of sin, and a renewal of righteousness in the human heart. And Jesus
was the first-born of the new temple of God, the head, and He showed us how it
is to be done. And now He is calling for His people in this antitypical Day of
Atonement: please come for the cleansing of the soul temple. And what were they
to do on that day? They stood afflicting their souls, there were no sins
brought to the sanctuary, confessed individually, on the Day of Atonement. No
sin. They were not to sin on the Day of Atonement. They were to be afflicting
their souls and this was the day when the cleansing would occur. Now, do you
get the picture?
God today has
called the Adventist church to present the Sanctuary Message, and particularly
the Day of Atonement, which began in 1844, which some of our theologians are now
discarding. Oh, Sister White predicted it. Listen brother and sister, we are in the final
crisis, we’re in it, right now, and God says He is going to have messengers who
are going to call His people, call the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.
And brother and sister I am doing it right now, and God is raising people all
over this denomination, little pockets here and there and they’re speaking out. And God is now
taking the reins into His own hands because denominationally we haven’t yet got
it done, have we? We have thought in terms of going to the world with the Gospel,
and spread the Gospel, and we have had a thousand converts per day for over a
thousand days, the Loud Cry, don’t you realize that it is right in front of
you? It’s happening, but what’s the purpose of the Loud Cry? To bring people
in, but what is the ultimate goal? How long is God going to wait before He
comes? It says very plainly that Christ is waiting with longing desire for the
manifestation of the reproduction of His character, His perfect character in
His people. When the character of Christ shall be perfectly
reproduced in His people. I am quoting. Then He will come.
Now look, what
is holding up the second coming of Jesus? Is it getting the Gospel message to
the world? We could do that in two weeks. With the facilities in the world
today we could the Gospel message to the world in two weeks or maybe a month,
I’ll give a little. What’s holding up the coming of Christ? Seventh-day
Adventists have backed off from their responsibility. They have been beclouded.
They have become Laodicean. They are lukewarm. They think they are rich and
increased with goods and have need of nothing. Am I too hard on us? I’m one of
them. Is it true? What is the call? Repent, Repent. Buy of me gold tried in the
fire.
Have you read Malachi
chapter 3: 1? The messenger of the covenant is going to come suddenly to His
temple to purify and cleanse the sons of Levi. Have you read that? When does he
come to His temple? He came in 1844 to His temple, she says it. Shall I read
these statements? Oh, it takes so long to read them but are you going to
believe me if I don’t read them?
Listen, The
Great Controversy page 426. “The coming of Christ as our high priest to
the most holy place for the cleansing of the sanctuary brought to view in
Daniel 8:14; the coming of the Son of man to the Ancient of Days, as presented
in Daniel 7:13;” .... That’s for the judgment you know. .... “and the coming of the Lord to His temple, foretold by Malachi,
.... And she has just quoted Malachi 3 the one I just read to you. ....
“are descriptions of the same event; and this is
also represented by the coming of the bridegroom to the marriage,” .... You can
read about that in Early Writings,
the marriage of the Lamb to His saints in New Jerusalem, the New City of God.
These are .... “described by
Christ in the parable of the ten virgins,” .... Now those are all one and the
same thing. It started in 1844; it is not yet been because you and I have held
off. What have we been doing that we shouldn’t have been doing and what have we
not been doing what we should have been doing? Oh, I wish I had two hours and I
would read all this to you. The greatest work that can be done in our world is to glorify
God by living the character of Christ. That’s the greatest work that you can
do.
That
is to live the character of Christ. How are you going to live the character of
Christ? What have you got to live the character of Christ with? You’ve got your
will power, that’s all, just your will power and you can decide from now until
doomsday to go God’s route and obey all of His commandments and all that and
you’re going to flunk time and again. Have you tried it? Well, if you haven’t
tried it, try it, and you’ll find out. What’s the matter? Well. The load is too
heavy for us, but God says do it anyway and I’ll come
to your rescue. And how is He going to come to the rescue? And that zeroes
right in on our lesson. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission.
Now I’m going to be bold and give you some
keys here that you may not have heard before, some of you have but some of you
may not have. But they are in the books and if I had the time I could read it
right straight from the mouth of God’s prophet. The blood of Jesus Christ is the key to
victory over sin, and I bet you don’t understand that or do you? I have asked
many people to explain it to me, and I’ll be honest I haven’t had a single one
in all the years that I have been an Adventist ever explain that to me. And in
the lesson I think it says something about, well, this is one of the things we
just accept, it’s an axiom, just believe it. But that is not what God says.
God’s prophet says that if you lack wisdom, ask God. That’s what He says in the
Bible. And she says that God, I am not sure I can quote this statement exactly,
and all the conditions, because there are several of them and they overlap. But
God will in response to our prayer and our surrender reveal to us His mysteries
personally. She says that the mysteries of God are not mysteries because He
wants to hide them, but it is because of our own weakness. Maybe we are not
mature enough. You can’t explain certain things to children because they are
not mature enough, or ignorance she says. Now maybe the maturity we can’t do a
great deal about, although we can do something. Some people are more mature at
the same age than others are—you know. But we can do something about our
ignorance. We can get into those books and find out what God says. And do you
know what God says? God says that
the blood is the life, that’s what He says. So when Jesus
shed His blood He shed His life. Now what kind of life did Jesus have? Well
Jesus explained It, He says; as the Father has life in Himself even so hath He
given the Son to have life in Himself. Now He has shared His life with you and
me, but the life which He has shared with us is conditional life, and when we
die we give up the ghost, the spirit of life, and it returns to God who gave
it. But listen, Christ the Son of God—God had shared everything with Him. He
had given Him life in Himself even as God had life in Himself, and not a single
thing in this universe, not an atom was ever created that was not created
through the Son. The Bible says He created everything and without Him was not
anything made that was made. I’m simply relaying what God says, those are not
my words. Jesus said when one of them asked Him; show us the Father; Jesus said
well, have you missed that point? Don’t you really understand; that the Father
is in me and I am in the Father. The Bible says God is a spirit and Jesus said
a spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see me have. The Bible says God is
invisible He cannot be seen. Well, that stands to reason. I think there is more
than one reason. I think He is too big to be seen for one thing, like an ant
looking at the Empire State Building. The ant doesn’t see the Empire State
Building he sees just a little scratch on the wall down there at the bottom. Jesus said if
you have seen me you have seen the Father.
Now look, I can read a statement here which
says, and maybe I’ll do it—that Jesus is the temple of God. We talk about
the sanctuary you know, and it’s got to be cleansed and all that. God’s prophet
says that Christ is the true temple. Shall I read it? Incidentally, that is
what He wanted those Israelites back there to become, listen: The Lord covered
Him with His own glory, that’s Moses, that he might see the pattern and
according to it all things were made. Listen, it was Israel whom He desired to make His
dwelling place. Remember John chapter 14, where He says if you love me
keep my commandments and I’ll pray the Father and He will send you another
comforter which is the Holy Ghost. We will not leave you comfortless. We will
come to you and make our abode with you and abide with you forever. Do you
remember that? He wants His people to become His dwelling place as Christ was
the dwelling place of the Father, and through Him all things were done. Christ gave up
His life that it might be shared with His people. Listen, I’m going to read it.
So to Israel, whom He desired to make His
dwelling place, He had revealed His glorious ideal of character. The pattern
was shown him on the mount when the law was given on Mount Sinai. And the Lord
passed before Moses and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and
gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy with
thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression of sins. Listen now,
Israel had chosen their own ways they had not builded according to the pattern.
Now, is he talking about the literal sanctuary, did they not build that
according to the pattern? Yes, they built the sanctuary according to the
pattern, but what building is it talking about that they had not built according
to the pattern? They had not builded according to the pattern [Christ]. They
had chosen their own ways. But Christ, the true temple for Gods indwelling, molded every
detail of His earthly life in harmony with God’s ideal. Did God dwell in
Christ? Where was the temple in which God dwelt? Christ! Christ was the temple. Listen, so
our characters are to be builded for a habitation of God through the Spirit. That’s a
quotation from Ephesians chapter 2. It says the building is fitly framed
together and framed to be built up for a habitation of God through the Spirit. Do you get the
picture? What I am trying to show you is the true temple and unless we apply
the lesson that is in the Quarterly here, unless we apply that to our personal
situation today what profit is it that we study it at all?
God is waiting, longing to prepare you to be a
member in His new temple, the new temple in which Christ was the temple
originally, the soul temple of God. He laid down His eternal life, or else He
could not have died, He laid it down and I believe He did that in the heavenly
sanctuary before He came to this world because He didn’t exist as Christ in
heaven after He came here, did He? Was He still living up there? He left the
glories of heaven. What did He do? He relinquished His eternal life. He
voluntarily shed His lifeblood, the eternal Spirit of God that gave Him life in
Himself, do you get it? Or do you not? I can read you
statements that directly equate the blood of Christ to the life of Christ. When
you shed the blood you shed the life. When Jesus relinquished the eternal Spirit of
His eternal life He went to sleep just as you and I do when we give up the
ghost, but He gave up the eternal ghost and it went back to the father who gave
it. That’s
why when He said to His disciples I will pray the Father and He will send you
what? The Holy Ghost. Do you know what else she
explains? She says, Christ dwells in us by His Spirit,
It is the Spirit of Christ that dwells in us. The Holy Spirit of Christ is the
life of Christ; I can read that to you. I can read that. The Holy Spirit
is the life of Christ and that is what He prays the Father to send to you and
me in His intercession, there’s your sanctuary. What does He want to send down the Holy
Spirit for? Because He wants you to become a member in the new temple of which
He is the head. But the head can’t function very well without the body can it?
And that is where He is setting right now; waiting for you and me to respond.
Now, how do we respond? Cleansing the soul temple, the temple has to be
cleansed for the indwelling of the Spirit, and if you don’t cleanse it, He
can’t come because He can’t dwell in an impure temple.
Oh, I’ve got so many statements here I don’t
know where to start.
Listen to this one. Review and Herald April 25th
1893. “It is through the mighty agency of the Holy Spirit that the government
of Satan is to be subdued and subjected. It is the Holy Spirit that convinces of sin
and expels it from the soul by the consent of the human agent.” .... Won’t do it without your consent. Let me read on. .... “Through the
merits of Christ” .... And that is another thing that
needs explaining. ....” man may be able to exercise the noblest powers of his
being.” .... That’s his freedom of choice
.... “And expel sin from his soul.”
Note by rwb: Is it part of the merit(s) of
Christ that He gave His eternal life, His Holy Spirit, the soul of His life, the highest good, crowning gift heaven can bestow, to
indwell us, in order that we might overcome all sin and be regenerated back
into the image of God we were created in? Notice:
"Christ declared that after his
ascension, he would send to his church, as his
crowning gift, the Comforter, who was to take his place. This Comforter
is the Holy Spirit,--the soul of his
life, the efficacy of his
church, the light and life of the world. With his Spirit Christ sends a
reconciling influence and a power that takes away sin.
In the gift of the Spirit [HIS LIFE--THE SOUL
OF HIS LIFE], Jesus gave to man the
highest good that heaven could bestow....
The Spirit was given as a regenerating agency,
and without this the sacrifice of Christ would have been of no avail....
It is by the Spirit that the heart is made
pure. Through the Spirit the believer becomes a partaker of the divine nature.
Christ has given his Spirit as a divine power to overcome all hereditary and
cultivated tendencies to evil, and to impress his own character upon the
church." E.G. White, Review and
Herald Articles, May 19, 1904, vol. 5, p. 42.
“Christ had stooped to take upon Himself man’s
nature; He was to bear an infinite weight of woe as He should make His soul an offering for sin;
yet angels desire that even in His humiliation the Son of the Highest might
appear before men with a dignity and glory befitting His character.” E.G.
White, The Great Controversy, pp. 313, 314.
It should be recognized that the heavenly
Sanctuary sacrifice involving His HIGHEST GOOD, CROWING GIFT that heaven can
bestow, was/is best and most efficacious sacrifice made on man’s behalf. That
ETERNAL sacrifice paid the penalty for the wages of sin, which is eternal
death, as well as providing the CURE for sin. The sacrifice of the Son of Man
involved exceedingly more than His second death on the cross and three days and
nights in a tomb.
“Satan was exulting that he had succeeded in
debasing the image of God in humanity. Then Jesus came to restore in man the
image of his -38- Maker. None but Christ can fashion anew the character that
has been ruined by sin. He came to expel the demons that had controlled the
will. He came to lift us up from the dust, to reshape the marred character
after the pattern of His divine character, and to make it beautiful with His
own glory.” {DA 37.3}
"While Jesus
ministers in the sanctuary above, He
is still by HIS SPIRIT
the minister of the church on earth" (DA p. 166, par. 2), "Jesus is waiting to breathe upon
all His disciples, and give them the inspiration of HIS SANCTIFYING SPIRIT and transfuse the vital influence
from HIMSELF to
His people. They must act with HIS
SPIRIT, that
it may be no more they that live, but CHRIST that liveth in them. Jesus
is seeking to impress upon them the thought that in giving HIS HOLY SPIRIT He is giving to them the glory which the Father
hath given Him, that He and His people may be one in God" (MR vol. 2,
pp. 36,37), "Christ gives them the breath of HIS OWN SPIRIT, the life
of His own life"
(DA p. 827, par. 3) End note by rwb.
Don’t tell me that you cannot expel sin from
your soul. If you tell me that, you’re calling God’s prophet a liar! But you
can’t do it without the blood of Christ. The blood of Christ cleanses us from
all sin. And what is the blood of Christ? What does it represent I should say? His Spirit, His life. And I have other statements to show
that His life is His love. And when the Bibles says, when the Holy Spirit is
received it sheds the love of God abroad in the heart. Love is the motive power
of this universe. Love is the essence of the power of God. God is love.
Everything that was ever created was created by the power of love. Now, I won’t go
into the scientific details of that thing because I don’t understand them all.
But one thing I know is that there is no power in the human heart greater then
love to cause a person to do something. He will do things that he doesn’t want
to do and never would normally do when love takes hold, Am I right? And until the
love of God fills our hearts brothers and sisters, we are never going to submit
to the cleansing of the soul temple by cooperating with God and expelling sin from
our soul. I have the power to decide to stop sinning, I can do that, I am
not tied, unless the Lord removes His protection and permits me to be overcome
by Satan. But He promises He won’t do that. He said He would rather send every angel in Heaven to protect us than to permit one
of us to be overcome by Satan. If you don’t want to be overcome by Satan
brother and sister you don’t have to be. Exercise your will. Sometimes He puts
us to the test. Why? Because the only way you can build willpower and develop
strong character is like you do with a muscle—you’ve got to put it to the
stretch and exercise it, and that is how willpower and
character are built. But if you put your character to the stretch, your
willpower to the stretch, God has promised that He will pray the Father, and
when He sees His people there in one of those visions of Early Writings, He sees them there not ready, and things are
closing in, and that is right now, He pleads with His Father. He says Father,
My blood, My blood, My blood, My blood, four times and
a bright light comes from the Father to Jesus, and she explains that Jesus
receives from the Father to give to you every blessing from heaven that comes
through the agency of the Holy Spirit. I’ve got the statement right here. Are
you really interested in following through with what God has planned for this
Day of Atonement; the day in which we become one with God; the day in which we
become united with Him? The marriage is consummated before the close of
probation. That’s in Early Writings.
The head and the members are going to be married. The latter rain
of the Holy Spirit brings the full outpouring of the life of Christ to His
people and there will be one hundred and forty four thousand survivors after
this holocaust who will live without sin and stand
before God without a mediator. And that’s a demonstration; don’t get mixed up
on that, that’s a demonstration because the devil accused God of having a law
that couldn’t be kept. So Jesus came and proved that in simple humanity that it
was possible to live His law with the aid of the divine nature which God gave to Jesus to give us an example
of how it is done. And Jesus said, follow Me, take up
your cross, follow Me. And how many voices do we have in our church
today that say it can’t be done; it doesn’t mean that?
Oh brother and sister we’re in the time when
Sister White predicts that we are going to give up our major doctrines; we are
going to apostatize, and the
destruction of Jerusalem she says that took place back there, she says that’s
going to be repeated and what’s Jerusalem today? Oh, I don’t
like to say this, but what is Jerusalem today? His Church! His church. The day is
coming very soon now when the work of our church is finished. God cannot use it
any more; it’s done all that it can do as a church. And it will be an individual experience and
there will be little companies in isolated places, that’s
what the books say. And we are a lot closer then most of
us realize. Oh I wish that somebody would get something into our papers to wake
our people up, but everything is still Laodicean. I’m speaking the truth? I
wonder, have you watched your television in the last few weeks, the news I
mean? We’re there, we’re there, and when it hits it’s not going to be easy, it’s
not going to be easy, but you will either go up or down.
Now God says that these old ceremonies, these
rituals, some of which we perform in the church services and so on, we have our
communion service and all the rest of it, and I wonder how many people really
understand what that communion service is all about, where we eat the
flesh and drink the blood of the Son of God. I wonder what we understand about it. Do you
know what she says? The true manna which came down from heaven when He was
talking about that, she was commenting on John chapter 6 where Jesus
talks about this you know, and so many left Him, and they couldn’t swallow it
when He said that they had to eat His flesh and drink His blood or they
wouldn’t have any life in them, they didn’t like that so they left Him. She says the
true manna which came down from heaven is the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit. You must absorb
the life of Christ which He relinquished which went back to the Father and now
Jesus went to the cross and died the second death, the eternal death of the
sinner from which there is no hope of a resurrection. He forever
closed the door to regaining that eternal life that he had before. He could have
picked it up any time in His lifetime here on earth but in Gethsemane He made
His final decision. That’s why He sweat those great
drops of blood, He forever gave His life to you and me. And unless you
and I respond and come to build up the new temple He is left out there in the
cold. He
is waiting for His body temple to be built so that the marriage can take place
and the new body of Christ is complete. Now He dwells in His saints. The Father and
the son the eternal life Spirit of God will be in His saints. Don’t you
believe it? Listen, the promise is to the Laodicean
overcomers, and that’s you and me here, if we want to be. To Him that
overcometh will I grant to set with Me in My throne.
What a promise. Even as I also overcame and sit down where?
With My Father in His throne.
Do you realize what’s in that lesson today? Do
you realize what’s in there? I hope that the Spirit of God will touch your
thinking and some of the things I have said are only a tenth of what I could
have said, will inspire you to come clean with God and to share your faith with
others that we may soon find one hundred and forty four thousand people who
understand what God is doing and is willing to go with him so that He can
finish it off.
May the lord bless us to this end be my
prayer. In His name, Amen.
May you be
richly blessed by this transcription is our prayer
Note by Ron: I can’t thank Steven Pond and
Mary Savoy enough for transcribing these thoughts on how we may obtain eternal
life from tapes to the written word. May God bless them in all that they do for
His cause, is my prayer.
Follow on to Know the
Lord, November 9 (This Day With God)
Lord,
what wilt thou have me to do? Acts 9:6.
“Those
who are striving to be overcomers will be pursued by the temptations of the
enemy. Satan will tempt them to corrupt the principles which all must maintain
who would reach the high standard that God has set before them. Satan rejoices
when he can lead souls to follow mistaken ideas, until their names are blotted
out of the book of life and recorded among the names of the unjust. We can
overcome only in the way that Christ overcame—by wholehearted obedience to
every commandment of God. True religion is obedience to all the commandments of
God.
Every
soul who is saved must surrender his own plans, and follow where Christ leads
the way. The understanding must be yielded up to Christ for Him to cleanse and
refine and purify. This will always be done when we receive aright the
teachings of Christ. O, how much we need a more intimate acquaintance with Him!
We need to enter into His purpose, and to carry out His will, saying with the
whole heart, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”...
The
child of God is to reach out for higher and still higher attainments. He is to
confess every sin, that by his example others may be helped to confess their
sins and cherish the faith that works by love to purify the soul. He is to be
constantly on guard, never standing still, never turning back, but ever pressing
on to the mark of the high calling of God in Christ....
We
should keep ever before us the fact that time is short. Iniquity is increasing
on every hand. The righteous are set as lights in the world. Through them the
glory of God is to be revealed to the world. Keep ever before you the solemn
events of the future—the great review of the judgment and the coming of Christ.
You with your family are to prepare for that day....
Follow
on day by day to know the Lord, rejoicing that it is your privilege to say at
His coming, as you stand with His faithful, waiting children, “This is our God;
we have waited for him, and he will save us: ...we will be glad
and rejoice in
his salvation” (Isaiah 25:9).—Letter 92, November 9, 1911, to a husband and
wife.