I assure you, I am not going to go through Genesis through Revelation this morning, but I am going to start with Revelation. Turn with me to Revelation 1.
Look at this little verse that we have seen many times. The latter part of Revelation 1:5:
Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by His blood;
and He made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto His God and Father;
to Him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen.
When does that glory and dominion begin? Are we waiting for a future day in which the glory and dominion will begin? What do you think? Has it already begun?
Will the Lord ever have any more power in the earth and in the universe than He has right now? No. And it is very important for us to know that.
An alternate rendering in Revelation 1:6 is, “He made us a kingdom, priests unto His God and Father.”
Let us turn to 1 Peter 2.
Coming unto Him, a living stone, rejected indeed of men, but with God elect, precious,
ye also, as living stones, are builded up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood,
to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 12:22:
But ye are come unto mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to innumerable hosts of angels,
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,
and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect,
and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel.
Now, I have read that verse at least several hundred times, maybe, and I never cease to thrill when I read it.
Still in Hebrews, chapter 7.
For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of God Most High,
who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings and blessed him,
to whom also Abraham divided a tenth part of all
(being first, by interpretation, King of righteousness, and then also King of Salem, which is, King of peace;
without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life,
but made like unto the Son of God), abideth a priest continually.
Where was Salem? Jerusalem.
Verse 11:
Now if there was perfection through the Levitical priesthood
(for under it hath the people received the law),
what further need was there that another priest should arise after the order of Melchizedek,
and not be reckoned after the order of Aaron?
Verse 14:
For it is evident that our Lord hath sprung out of Judah;
as to which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priests.
And it is yet more abundantly evident that after the likeness of Melchizedek there ariseth another priest. Implied in this discourse, if you read it carefully, there arises another priesthood.
There is one more verse in the New Testament: 1 Corinthians 14, verse 31.
For ye all can prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.
“You may all prophesy.” Well, who does not get to talk? Who does not get to prophesy? You may all prophesy, one by one.
Let us turn to 2 Samuel 5, verse 6.
And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land,
who spake unto David, saying, Except thou take away the blind and the lame, thou shalt not come in hither;
thinking, David cannot come in hither.
Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion; the same is the city of David.
Now, we are considering the ark. This is number eight in our series concerning the Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the Testimony, the Ark of His presence, and the Ark of His glory.
David has finally become king, not only of Judah, but over all Israel. And the first thing he does when he becomes king is to take this stronghold, this elevated portion of what is now the city of Jerusalem, which had been in the hands of the enemy from the time the people first came into the land—a seemingly impregnable fortress.
Now, why was David able to do this when nobody else was able to do it?
Week before last, after I got home, I told my wife, “I am very sorry I did not get into more about David—the prophet, priest, and king. I feel like I left the best part of my message out.”
Lo and behold, last Sunday my brothers picked it up wonderfully, did they not? We had a splendid meeting in which two brothers brought up ideas concerning this aspect of the Lord and His position. It was excellent. But there is still a little more to be said about it, and it will surface, I am sure.
Saul was a king. Was Saul also a prophet? Yes, he was—no question about it. One time he prophesied all night, not wearing a stitch of clothes.
Was he a priest? What happened when Saul tried to intrude himself into the priesthood? He was cursed. He lost the kingdom.
Now, was it that God was just particularly jealous, or was He keeping so sacred this office, the priesthood, that Saul was not to intrude into it? You need to inquire very carefully. Why could he not?
David did. We read again and again of David offering sacrifices, taking even the priest’s ephod, and going before the Lord. Why could Saul not do the same thing? What was it that prepared David? He was anointed king just like Saul was.
Very important, is it not? He was the kind of man that he was.
Dear friends, I agree with the statement that was made last week: in order to rightly understand Christ, we must see Him as Prophet, Priest, and King.
But, as was already said here this morning, behind everything that happened in this earthly realm, there is a spiritual happening. Keep that in mind.
You cannot simply walk out and do something that pertains to the kingdom of God unless something has already happened that pertains to that very thing in the unseen realm of the Spirit, where God rules.
David finally came along having a unique position that no man had ever had before him—not even Melchizedek.
He was a prophet, a priest, and a king. As such, he was the one individual who, above all others in the Scriptures, typifies our Lord Jesus Christ, who is Prophet, Priest, and King.
But, you see, we are willing to spend a lot of time rejoicing in this unique position that the Son of God, the Son of Man, has. We would like to learn more about it.
But, you see, dear friends, there is only one way you can really learn more about it. That is to discover that this matter of being conformed to the image of God’s Son is a whole lot more than something that is deeply subjective, almost psychological and mystical, till it is beyond our reach and we do not really know what it is all about.
We read some Scriptures here this morning that were intended to substantiate the fact that being conformed to the image of Christ means more than just this. It means that we too have a kingship.
Let us read again in Romans 5, just so you will know where it is and go back and look at it every once in a while. Verse 17:
For if, by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one;
much more shall they that receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the One, even Jesus Christ.
Now, this kingship is not an official position; it is a life. And as we learn to live by that life, we discover God’s kingdom is real, and we are a kingdom of priests.
This reigning in life is something more than just poetry—nice things that Paul is saying to keep up our courage. You know, like this kind of religion practiced in our country now, growing and called Unity: you keep your mind on a lot of sweet, nice things, and you turn into that. It just does not work that way.
This reigning in life is a rather real experience that we come to as we learn that Jesus Christ is really on the throne of this universe, that He has a kingdom. We become His subjects, His vassals, His bond slaves, and in obedience and fellowship we find that that kingship is extended to us. No deity, but kings.
How about a priesthood? Yes, the Lord Jesus, the one Mediator between God and man, has a tremendous priesthood—not after the order of Aaron, but after the order of Melchizedek.
We could speak at length; that is a message in itself, to see what that order of priesthood really is like. But to bring it down into the most practical kind of terms for us, may we say, brother, sister: unless you know that you are a priest, unless you know everything that God gives you is to be shared with others, you will not really know the blessing of God.
Unless you, as a brother already said, learn to relate to lives—get right down into the grubby, nitty-gritty of other lives—and exercise your priesthood in the power of the Holy Spirit, you will not really know the blessing of God.
Why? Because we like to have people think well of us. We are afraid to talk to our neighbors about the Lord. We are afraid to make known where we work that we are practicing, serious, real Christians.
Consequently, we never have a chance to exercise these things. We never have a chance to get next to people and tell them of Christ, unless something flows out of us and makes its impact on their lives.
And I will say it again, friend: you will not know what it means to be a priest. You cannot have joy. You can sit in your involved, sanctified corner the rest of your days and read your Bible and pray, and refuse to touch lives that are in need at a very common, person-to-person level.
And you will just get stale. Your life will be stale, your testimony will be stale, your whole face will look stale. Everything you do and say will have a tinge of mold about it. The freshness, the glory, the joy will not be there unless you are a real conduit.
Boy, I meet a lot of people who know a lot about the Bible. It has been awfully good for a great number of years—I mean, they have literally known Jesus—but they turn people away, turn them away.
Well, about this matter of prophet: you know, we could get into a lot of trouble here.
My wife is not a window washer. As a matter of fact, I am telling on her. I do not know how often she gets to the windows—it is not very often. Once in a while I catch her at it, though, rubbing away.
Now, what if she said, “I am not a window washer; therefore, I will not wash windows”? Pretty soon, we would be living mostly out of doors, would we not, so we could get a sight of the fresh air and the things out there?
And that is what many of us are doing. We are saying, “Look, I am not a prophet; therefore, do not expect me to prophesy.”
Well, if she is out there washing windows, she is a window washer. Sorry about that.
When we are speaking for God, we are prophets. And I am sorry, that lets nobody out.
We all may prophesy, one by one. Many of us have been dumb for too long.
So these things—the fact that the Lord is our Prophet, Priest, and King—have to get right down to where we live. We are to be conformed to His image and to discover that now His prophetic priesthood, which some of us talk about, is something that Christians need to take up and make a reality.
Now, David, as soon as he had taken the stronghold, the next thing that he did was to bring the ark down out of Kirjath-jearim into Jerusalem. That was his step number two.
Now, because the Lord Jesus has really gone into the domain of death—an impregnable fortress—and released His captives, brought them out, there is a testimony. And that testimony is to be in the church, in Jerusalem.
David knew that the things he had on his heart and the vision that God had given him were impossible unless he got that ark out of the house of Abinadab in Kirjath-jearim and headed it down into Jerusalem. That was the next step. He knew that was tremendously important.
Now, friends, we have already talked about the fact that the Lord must be available to His people to meet human needs. Many of God’s real people know this, and they are blessed by it, but they get stuck there. They get mired there.
Did you know there is a greater need in this universe than human need? Well, most of the time, that is the need of the living God—for a testimony.
And the Lord is about to do something in this earth. He is doing something, and He is about to do something very great. I have no doubt.
Dear friends, that testimony, that ark, has got to be among God’s people, at least in a local expression in Jerusalem.
Last time we said the whole purpose of God and its full accomplishment hinges on this very thing. Some of us do not see it; others perhaps would not believe it if they did see it. Friends, sooner or later we will see, if we go on with God.
What do we mean by having this testimony in the church? What do we mean by having the ark in truth?
We have told you over and over that the two main things about this ark—yes, there was a mercy seat there, and that is part of it. Going out to men with the gospel, telling them Christ has died for sins: I do not care how wild you are, how horrible—in an instant of time your sin can be covered, and you can be in the presence of God simply by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ.
There was a mercy seat connected with that ark, but there were two other things more important. The glory of God was there: the real glory which we talked about in our psalm this morning.
All too many of God’s people are so worldly, so small, so limited, so occupied with things other than God, because they have never touched His glory. They do not know how wonderful He really is. They do not know how all-ravishing to the soul and spirit of man is the presence and glory of the living God.
The second thing is that where the ark is found, God is speaking. God has a lot to say.
All too many of God’s people are saying, “We have been justified. We have got everything settled. Therefore, we do not have to listen to anything that anybody says He has to say.” Oh, no. How wrong this is.
God is speaking among His people today wherever the ark is found. And we need to hear how important—how tremendously important—it is that the lives of God’s people, stagnant for so many years, defeated, neutralized, hear what God is saying, realize He is speaking to them, and respond to that speaking.
There will be tremendous results in our lives. So many of God’s people have been Bible students and taught over a period of years, and they have been neutralized.
Priests? Prophets? No—no anything else, either. They are completely neutral Christians.
Well, let me tell you right now: a neutral Christian has just taken his foot right on his head. He is only useful because he is proceeding, and the numerous things in the Word of God are working out in actual life.
So David brings the ark down into Jerusalem. Then, you know, a tremendous thing: David goes out to clear out the land of these people God had asked, three hundred years before, to be cleared out of the land. Then he does it—one battle after another. The fire of the Lord; the Lord says, “Go up,” without numbers, three to one or three hundred to one.
And then we read that Judah and Israel had peace. Judah, the southern kingdom including Benjamin, and Israel, the ten tribes of the northern kingdom, had peace; and every man sat under his own vine and under his own fig tree.
The land was completely cleared. The kingdom was established. And there was a useful period of time. Then what do you think David did? What do you think?
Well, I will tell you. While he was sitting around waiting for something to happen, he looked over his kingdom. He saw his strength, and he said, “I need to compare. Being a strong-minded, realistic, practical man, I would like to know how we number compared to the nations around.”
So Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel. Remember, all of that was a judgment of God. The plague was stayed by an angel at the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, right there in Zion.
Then, in 1 Chronicles 22:
Then David said, This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of burnt-offering for Israel.
And David commanded to gather together the strangers that were in the land of Israel;
and he set masons to hew wrought stones to build the house of God.
And David prepared iron in abundance for the nails of the doors of the gates, and for the couplings;
and brass in abundance without weight;
and cedar-trees without number: for the Sidonians and they of Tyre brought much cedar wood to David.
And David said, Solomon my son is young and tender,
and the house that is to be builded for the Lord must be exceeding magnifical,
of fame and of glory throughout all countries:
I will therefore make preparation for it.
So David prepared abundantly before his death.
And he called Solomon and charged him to build a house for the Lord God of Israel.
And David said to Solomon, My son, as for me, it was in my heart to build a house unto the name of the Lord my God.
But the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and hast made great wars:
thou shalt not build a house unto My name, because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in My sight.
Behold, a son shall be born to thee, who shall be a man of rest;
and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about:
for his name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quietness unto Israel in his days.
He shall build a house for My name;
and he shall be My son, and I will be his Father;
and I will establish the throne of his kingdom over Israel for ever.
David had purposed to build a house. He had asked Nathan if he should build a house. Nathan had said, “Do all that is in thine heart.” Then the Lord came to Nathan in the night and told him that David was not to build it. A man of rest would come after him, and he would build the house.
This is David, prophet and priest. He prepared abundantly. I figured it out once at thirty-five dollars an ounce. It was worth a lot more than that now, and this came to over six billion dollars.
Moreover there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and workers of stone and timber, and all manner of cunning men for every manner of work.
Of the gold, the silver, and the brass, and the iron, there is no number.
Arise therefore, and be doing, and the Lord be with thee.
David also commanded all the princes of Israel, all the leaders of Israel, to help Solomon his son, saying:
Is not the Lord your God with you?
and hath He not given you rest on every side?
for He hath given the inhabitants of the land into mine hand;
and the land is subdued before the Lord, and before His people.
Now set your heart and your soul to seek after the Lord your God.
Arise therefore, and build ye the sanctuary of the Lord God,
to bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and the holy vessels of God,
into the house that is to be built to the name of the Lord.
Listen: what is the sanctuary for? To bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord and the holy vessels of God into the house that is to be built for the name of the Lord.
Now, once the kingdom was established in David’s mind, then after some discipline—being told he might not build the house—after some human failure, as a matter of fact great human failure, when he thought he would number Israel, then the attention is turned to God’s house.
I know what some of you are thinking. There have been a lot of sermons preached in the United States of America that have started out this way, reading from Exodus:
And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them.
And that Scripture has immediately—and you will have to forgive me—been turned into a con game to extort vast sums of money from God’s people to build a new church building.
You will forgive me for using that word, “con game.” I am just trying to be honest. That is not what God is asking. That is not what He will have.
After the Lord Jesus established the kingdom, put all of our enemies under His feet, He already told the disciples:
I will build My church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
He made possible God’s house—something very different from a mere building on this earth.
Brothers and sisters, the Lord is in the process of establishing here among us, as His people, His testimony; getting us under His lordship; taking care of that great civil war that is inside every one of us until it is settled and Christ really becomes Lord.
Every power in heaven and in earth is subject to Him, and He has a name above all names. He is going to, and He is trying to, turn our attention to His house.
And it takes a spiritual revelation to see just what that house is. A lot of us think we know, but we really have not gone through the process of finding out how valuable and worthwhile it is.
You see, the ark in the tabernacle was a provisional kind of structure. It was moved from place to place. It never was very satisfactory.
Now God has taken all of these types. He found a man after His own heart. He has taken Jerusalem, Zion, the elevated portion. He brought the ark into a tabernacle there in Jerusalem. David had learned a lesson.
David right away wanted to build a house. God said, “No, you cannot build the house. Sorry, but you are just not the man.”
And some of us, you know, have come to the point where we see the need, and we have tried by our own means to help God build His house. And what has He said? “You cannot do it. You are just not the man. You are not the right kind of person.”
What is the answer to that? You give up? Have some transaction with Him, because He is out to change you into the right kind of person through whom He can build this house and establish His testimony in the earth.
But, you see, until we get to the place where He is really Lord, where His testimony is firmly established in our lives, instead of building the house and being a living stone fitted together with other Christians, we are just the very opposite.
That is the problem a lot of us are having. We are discovering just what the Adamic nature is. When we come into the house of God and try to fit in, we do not fit.
And when I do not fit in with Brother Dan, of course I go home and say, “You know, that brother—he is impossible, too hard to get along with. And, you know, the rest of those brothers and sisters up there, I have got their number too: a bunch of hypocrites. That is all they are.”
Brother and sister, let me tell you: nothing could be farther from the truth if I go home and say anything that sounds remotely like that, because I am discovering my own condition. If you are being built together as a living stone with others in the house of God, and in a sense it is a good thing to be there—if you at least come that far, you are making some real progress.
David could have gotten mad and said, “Well, okay, I will just take my wealth and I will spend it and do a lot of tremendous work in the kingdom. It will make my name remembered forever. When Solomon grows up, the house is his business.”
Did the Lord say so? That is not what David did. He said, “Solomon, son, I have got a word for you.”
He went out and got people from Tyre and Sidon to bring a lot of cedar and timber, cut it all ready, got the nails ready, brass without number—pounds and talents of brass without number.
And he took his own personal treasury: one hundred thousand talents of gold and one million talents of silver. And he said, “See all this abundance? This is not to enrich you as a kingdom. This is for the house of God.”
You know, dear friends, I have known people—not a few—who have seen and understood God’s house. The vision of the house was strong.
The moment they came to the place in our fellowship where they came under the dominion of the Lord, and they saw the kingdom, and they saw the Christ of God, and they saw that God’s need was for a house in which to put His ark, they had some enormous spiritual wealth—at least by my measurement it was enormous.
Dear friends, I know where those people are today. It is not in the house of God. And intermittently, over the past five years, the Lord has brought them into contact by letters or word of mouth or some other way—nearly all of them. And you know the thing that strikes me now is their extreme barrenness.
When God dispenses spiritual wealth to His people, He has one end in view: that that wealth should be brought into His house. It is for His house.
That is not our up-to-date modern Christianity as it is. You become a particular type of person, you take upon yourself certain ministries, you do certain things, and you rejoice in the Lord—and it all centers around your own personal place.
You know, as our brother told us today, the house does some very strange things. One of the hardest things is this leveling process. Oh, make no mistake about it: there is an order there. There is a real order.
We were just talking yesterday, three of us. What if that salt shaker on the table insisted on being a coffee cup? You poured it full of coffee, you had all that salt, and then tried drinking coffee out of that coffee cup.
Salty, bitter, terrible—just like the draught that the Lord gets from so many of our lives. He tries to get a cool drink of appreciation and love and worship and service from us.
This house, friend—this house has, first of all, mark this well because it is the easiest thing in the world to lose sight of it—it has, first of all, the satisfaction and glory of the Lord, the ministry to Him.
David had enormous wealth. God gave him that wealth because He knew that at the proper time David would make that wealth available for His house.
Some of us are getting some wealth. I thank the Lord to find out, one and another of our company, in whose lives there is building up some real, genuine, unmistakable spiritual wealth. And I am not just talking about knowledge of the Bible—a measure of Christ.
An unconscious response demonstrates that the basis of life is just something other than the old man.
And I warn you, brother, sister: if you someday get the idea that this business of the house of God, of related life, is just too costly, too painful, involves too much suffering, and you ought to be on in some ministry of your own where you can be a worker, you will find that taking that step will be the costliest of all. You will lose.
Oh, it will always be in the background of your life, a shadow, an intimation of glory. You will never lose that. But its practical outflow for the glory of the Lord, in ministry to Him, will have been lost. And I know of quite a number of lives in which this is so.
This house of God is not an optional thing.
Next time, when we look into Solomon and his building of the house, perhaps some of the things that I would like to have had time to say here this morning will come out reinforced by New Testament Scriptures.
So we see that God’s goal is for bringing His ark to rest. Just as we see it in Revelation 11:19:
And the temple of God that is in heaven was opened;
and there was seen in His temple the ark of His covenant.
Heaven is opened. You see God’s ark at rest in the temple that He built.
What He is doing now in the earth, in the church, is that He must have a house. He has just got to have a house. Nothing else will suffice. A loose, unrelated, unordered congregation of Christians, no matter how many of them are at work doing something for God, will not supply it.
God will show us that clearly, powerfully, from His Word, by His spoken Word, and by the revelation of the Holy Spirit through His Word, that this is what He must have. We kind of shut this up, and then we cannot go out and do a lot of other things, as though we were free-lance workers.
Friends, let me say again: the winding up of this thing, this dispensation, the finishing of the work of God in the earth, the bringing in of Christ, and the manifestation in glory of His worldwide kingdom are all dependent upon this.
Most Christians see the Ark of the Covenant, see its place in the temple that He is building, and overcome.
You see, these overcomers are not a tag you hang on people’s noses so they walk about saying, “I am an overcomer.” People who overcome are people who overcome—like the widow, really do overcome all of the hindrance, all of the drawback, all of the cost, all of the suffering, all of the humiliation, all of the seeming limitation that comes with being obedient to the heavenly vision that He gives.
Friends, I am not asking you to subscribe, nor am I merely asking you to follow some Scriptures I can produce from the Word of God.
And I do not have to anyway, because a lot of you see and are more zealous than I am, all over the world. But it is God’s heart and purpose and mind to make this and every other local company of His people a local expression of that.
What that means in practical terms—the great cost, consequent great blessing, shelter, protection, effectiveness, and just that real growing up in Christ—children cannot grow up without a household, do you know?
We will talk more about that next time. But I think the Lord has delivered our burden.