Reflection:  God’s Mercy Seat          

‘Pure and unadulterated.’ We look for that sort of labelling on what we put into our mouths. But have you noticed how base and prolific are the expletives that come out? How low can we go? Our culture seems obsessed with profanity and impurity.

God is obsessed with purity. Inside the holiest place of the tabernacle atop the Glory Box sat a solid piece of pure gold. Gold – as pure a human conception as possible, moulded into two angels facing each other. (Interlock your outstretched hands and you’ll get the idea.) This man-made throne for God was not just itself holy, but the place to find holiness: a place of mercy*, a place to find, literally, a covering for impurity. Because filthy, we have not a hope in hell but for the mercy of God.

Once a year (and only once a year) on the Day of Atonement the high priest (who would have isolated for a week, kept prayer vigil through the nights, and bathed multiple times) in front of the anxious worshippers, would smoke up the temple with loads of incense so he wouldn’t see God-enthroned and die. Multiple times that day he bathed and dressed in flawlessly-pure robes and bloodied himself and the altars with sacrifices – atonement for himself, for the priests, then finally for the people, in the holiest place, at God’s golden Mercy Seat.

Prayer:  You knew we’d lose a sense of your holiness, God, without bloody reminders. We’re revisiting this scenario today but at the Mercy Seat of the cross. There you fulfilled your covenant to Moses to ‘bless all nations’ by reconciling me and the world to yourself through the blood of your son (2 Corinthians 5:19). Thank you for that ‘fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins; …[where] sinners, plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains’ (Hymn by William Cowper).

*God is often described as being enthroned above the cherubim (2 Kings. 19:15; Psalms 99:1)