Ephesians (Program #68) -The Church—the Expression of Christ

Through out Church history many items have been used by God to help His people to become close to Him and experience Him. The gifts of the Spirit, miraculous power, great teachings from the Bible with deep and profound doctrines are just few of the things that God had used through out the ages.

But while on one hand God has used these things, it must also be confessed that these things can and have been used by God’s enemy to distract God’s people from the very Christ that they are intended to bring us to.

Substitute for Christ are most often good things even spiritual things. But they are things, and not the very person of Christ Himself. Of this, we must be very clear and constantly on guard not to fall into such a temptation.

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Ezekiel (Program #20) – The Temple and Side Chambers

The gospel of John gives us the unforgettable picture of Jesus coming into the temple in Jerusalem. And in the display of the most righteous anger, the sight of God’s house being turned into a place of merchandise and commerce, He cleanses the temple – overturning the tables and chasing the peddlers away. Immediately following this comes a profound exchange between the Lord Jesus and the religionists. In John 2:18-21, “The Jews then answered and said to Him, What sign do you show us, seeing that you do these things? Jesus answered and said to them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then the Jews said, This temple was built in forty-six years, and You will raise it up in three days? But He spoke of the a temple of His body.” What makes this word so meaningful is that John clearly identifies Jesus as the real temple, the real house of God. This means even as we consider the temple in the Old Testament such as in Ezekiel’s great vision in chapters 40 to 48, we must realize that this is a type of the Lord Jesus Himself and of the church, the New Testament, the enlargement of God’s house.

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Ezekiel (Program #4) – The Four Living Creatures

Ezekiel is a book of figures or pictures that portrays spiritual things. For example in the beginning of the book, in the first 4 verses it says, “The word of Jehovah came expressly to Ezekiel the priest…And I looked, and there came a storm wind from the north, a great cloud and a fire flashing incessantly; and there was a brightness around it, and from the midst of it, there was something like the sight of electrum, from the midst of the fire.” These four items, the wind, the cloud, the fire and the electrum actually depict various aspects of how we experience God. God is like a wind to us, He overshadows and broods over us like a cloud; At times He’s a burning refining fire to purify us; and He’s also like a shining glowing electrum of gold and silver depicting His divine nature and Christ’s redemption. But if we genuinely experience God in these aspects, it will also produce something which we also come to today in verse 5, “And from the midst of it there came a likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: They had the likeness of a man.”

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