In this message we want to see the matter of the recovery of God's expression. In church history there was the time of the reformation. Today even some of the denominations use this term reformation in their name, such as the Dutch Reformed Church. Some people have called the reformation a kind of restoration. In our messages, however, for the Lord's move today, we like to use the word recovery. Recovery implies that something was there originally, yet was lost. So there is the need to recover the lost thing. This is the real meaning of the word recovery in the spiritual sense. If we know the Bible we could see that the Lord's recovery is not only in the New Testament, not only today, but that it was also in the Old Testament.
These two Testaments, the Old Testament and the New Testament, actually reveal the same thing. The Old Testament reveals the model of the real thing which will be covered in the New Testament. Augustine said that the New Testament is concealed in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is manifested in the New Testament. When I was a young man I heard this word, and I have been keeping it as a proverb to help me study and understand the Holy Word. It reminds me all the time that whatever is in the Old Testament will be in the New Testament, and whatever is in the New Testament was already in the Old Testament.
For example, the book of Exodus in the Old Testament mentions the tabernacle. In the New Testament the Gospel of John begins with the tabernacle (John 1:14), and the last book of the Bible, Revelation ends with the tabernacle (Rev. 21:3). John's Gospel says that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, and this Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:1,14). His dwelling among man was a kind of tabernacling. A tabernacle was dwelling among the human race. At the very end of the Bible, which is also the very end of John's writings, there is the New Jerusalem, which is the consummation of the tabernacle revealed in the entire Bible.
By this example you can see that the crucial things in the Old Testament are also in the New Testament. So the two Testaments reveal to us the same thing. The only difference is that in the Old Testament it is a model, and in the New Testament it is a reality. Sometimes in architecture people make a blueprint and then a model of the blueprint. Eventually the real building is constructed. The real building in design and in detail is absolutely according to the model. In the Old Testament we have the model, and in the New Testament we have the real thing.