Interesting fact about this Temple, tradition has it the pattern given was intended to represent the journey back to the Garden of Eden. Presumably, you would enter the Temple from the east, and as you moved west toward the Holy of Holies you would be retracing the footsteps of Adam and Eve, eventually returning to Eden. It’s kind of an interesting concept really. Since the fall, man has been striving to obtain pre-fall status, and all along, the answers have been hiding in plain sight.

Peter Louis, in His video series, Back to the Garden, explains that the same sin that got Adam and Eve ejected from the Garden and kept us out is a sin rooted in perspective. When Adam and Eve heard the Lord walking in the cool of the day and fashioned their new wardrobe, God was calling out to the man, “Where are you?”. God was perfectly willing and able to meet with Adam in His sin. Mind you, He wasn’t okay with it, but it didn’t affect who He was, and it didn’t repel Him. He actually came looking for him. They needed to leave the Garden as a consequence of their sin and to prevent them from having to live that way for all eternity. God still met with Cain and Abel and they both presented offering to the Lord. After Cain Killed His brother in Genesis 4:14 he laments that His punishment was too great because God banished him from His presence. Think about it, verse 14 infers that before God punished Cain, Cain had been in God’s presence. They had been all in God’s presence post-fall, but it appears, at least at this point, that they are still in His presence.

Sin doesn’t repel God, in fact, it brings Him closer. God is as present with the woman caught selling herself to the crack dealer, if not more so, than He is with me in my tidy suburban neighborhood thinking I’m so together. Romans 5:20 explains why. God’s law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were. But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant NLT. To paraphrase, God gave the law to show the people they couldn’t possibly keep it, instead of repenting and turning to Him, they sinned even more. As God’s people were sinning up a storm, God’s grace overflowed. Again, not that He was okay with it, but He understood that the knowledge they acquired would continue to punish them by producing judgments they weren’t equipped to handle. He knew that it was His kindness that would ultimately lead us to repentance.

My point? We keep thinking we’re too dirty to be in God’s presence; that somehow, we have to clean ourselves up to be near Him. We judge others this way too. Yet, He has been leaving breadcrumbs since the fall, beckoning us to come to Him so He can fix all that’s gone wrong. Ours is a dilemma of perspective reinforced by the judgment of good and evil ingested by our predecessors. The reality is we need only rest in His finished work. There is no reason to retrace steps or perform rituals. His grace is sufficient for all of our wants, needs, and desires.