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The Mercy Seat

Exodus 25 records God’s instructions to Moses regarding the ark of the covenant:

  • 16 And you shall put into the ark the testimony that I shall give you. 17 “You shall make a mercy seat of pure gold. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, and a cubit and a half its breadth. 18 And you shall make two cherubim of gold; of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of the mercy seat. 19 Make one cherub on the one end, and one cherub on the other end. Of one piece with the mercy seat shall you make the cherubim on its two ends. 20 The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be. 21 And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I shall give you. 22 There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.

Francis Schaeffer comments:

This ‘mercy seat’ was the lid, the second part of the ark. A very important thing, this lid.

It was Luther, when translating the Old Testament into German, who first used the term ‘mercy seat.’ It is a beautiful, poetic phrase – but it also accurately communicates what the lid of the ark really was, a place of mercy. Yet if a person does not know the Hebrew word being translated, ‘mercy seat’ may confuse, because this word actually meant ‘the propitiation,’ ‘the propitiatory,’ ‘the covering’ – a covering not like a jar lid, but a covering in the sense of atonement…

The propitiatory covering was exactly the same size as the box. They matched. The atonement exactly covered the law. Here, I feel, is the balance we find in the New Testament – the balance of the character of God. God is holy…and God is love. Both must be affirmed…

Verse 22 contains the most important clause: ‘and there I will meet with thee.’ God did not meet the Jews at the level of the law. He met them at the level of the mercy seat. Undoubtedly, this is why Luther, loving the Lord as he did, called the covering the ‘mercy seat.’ He understood that this is where God meets everybody who is met by him.

–No Little People, pp. 112-113.

  • He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world (1 John 2:2).

Christ is the Mercy Seat of the world.

The Law was in the box. The Law was covered by the propitiation. The world seeks to find God in that box, that ark, the ark of the covenant, when it should seek him in another ark – Noah’s ark, the ark that is covered inside and out with the atoning pitch that keeps the waters of the flood out.

The box of the ark of the covenant suffocates and brings wrath. The Mercy Seat covers the demands and penalties of the Law. That is where God is to be found. You will not find his love in that box. You will not find his love at the level of Law. You must seek atonement, that is the place to find his love. And Jesus Christ is our true Mercy Seat, the place, make that the person, where God meets with sinners and communes with them in love. He covers sins (mercy), he communes with sinners (seat). He forgives and sits down at the table.

  • Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me (Rev. 3:20).

Thank God for the Mercy Seat:

  • Whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins (Rom. 3:25).

The Lord has written the promise of the resurrection…in every leaf in spring-time

The Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.

-Martin Luther, Watchwords for the Warfare of Life, p. 317.

  • Job 14:7 “For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. 8 Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, 9 yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.
  • Psalm 1:3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

Strength for Today

  • John 6:32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.

God gave the children of Israel manna, yet only enough to last each day, that they might trust in his provision each day, one day at a time. Jesus is the true bread which comes down from heaven to sustain and energize our souls. As we depend upon him each day for sustenance and power we find that, ‘The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness’ (Lam. 3:22-23).

The bread was fresh for the Israelites with each new day that they might depend on God and not the flesh. The mercies of Christ are fresh for us each day that we might depend on Christ and not the flesh.

As Martin Luther put it, we should live ‘as if Christ died yesterday, rose this morning, and is coming again tomorrow.’

The Doing of That in a Day, Which May Ordinarily Take a Thousand Years

I’m trying to compile some of my favorite George MacDonald quotes from C.S. Lewis’ anthology. That’s all I intended this to be, but then I began to think of quotes I read elsewhere that were related. Why not write them down in one place?

On Miracles:

Think of Jesus’ words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’ (John 5:19).

The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before…There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us…Indeed, the wonder of the growing corn is to me greater than the wonder of feeding the thousands. It is easier to understand the creative power going forth at once – immediately – than through the countless, the lovely, the seemingly forsaken wonders of the cornfield (George MacDonald Anthology, pp. 12-13).

To this add C.S. Lewis’ thoughts, building off of MacDonald:

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn the water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see…But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.

He continues,

God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say… ‘It is the laws of Nature.’ The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder working is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do what He sees the Father do…When He fed the thousands he multiplied the fish as well as the bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work.

Finally, he applies this principle to the Virgin Birth:

This time He was creating not simply a man, but the man who was to be Himself: the only true man. The process which leads to the spermatozoon has carried down with it through the centuries much undesirable silt; the life which reaches us by that normal route is tainted. To avoid that taint, to give humanity a fresh start, He once short-circuited the process…For what He did once without a human father, He does always even when He uses a human father as His instrument. For the human father in ordinary generation is only a carrier, sometimes an unwilling carrier, always the last in a long line of carriers, of life that comes from the supreme life (Essay on Miracles, from God in the Dock).

So then, for Lewis and MacDonald, miracles are God speeding up, or (to use Lewis’ words) ‘short-circuiting’ the process. In Jesus’ miracles he was effectively hitting ‘fast forward.’ He was breaking the speed limit of the so-called ‘laws of nature.’

As to the purpose of such miracles, Lewis cites a quote by Athanasius from On the Incarnation:

Our Lord took a body like to ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and captaincy of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.

Pure gold from MacDonald and Lewis.

But add to this Martin Luther’s take on Psalm 147:12-14 (which says):

  • Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! 13 For he strengthens the bars of your gates; he blesses your children within you. 14 He makes peace in your borders; he fills you with the finest of the wheat.

In his vocation man does works which effect the well-being of others; for so God has made all offices. Through this work in man’s offices, God’s creative work goes forward, and that creative work is love, a profusion of good gifts. With persons as his “hands” or “coworkers,” God gives his gifts through the earthly vocations, toward man’s life on earth (food through farmers, fishermen and hunters; external peace through princes, judges, and orderly powers; knowledge and education through teachers and parents, etc., etc.). Through the preacher’s vocation, God gives the forgiveness of sins. Thus love comes from God, flowing down to human beings on earth through all vocations, through both spiritual and earthly governments.

When we pray that God would give us our daily bread, he does so through the means of human agency, the same goes for many other areas. All of life is, therefore, a miracle in some sense. But the workings of natural and human agency are so common that God must short-circuit the process to shake us out of our unbelief and monotony – and this is what we deem as a true miracle.