The Bible is a precious yet mysterious book. Not only does it reveal God to us; it also speaks thoroughly about the relationship between God and man. In its pages we are told that God created man and that man must worship, love, and fear Him. God, we are also told, became our Savior by delivering us from our sins and from perdition. Most mysteriously, the Bible also reveals that this Creator and Redeemer is Spirit, and as such wants to come into us to be our life.
This last point is the hardest for us to grasp. Yes, we know that He is to be worshipped and obeyed as the Creator and to be believed in as our Savior and Redeemer. But to comprehend that He wants to enter into us to be our life and even our person is not easy.
We do have a life of our own. This life, however, is really only a picture of the true life, just as a photograph resembles us but does not have our life. The real life is God Himself entering into us. God created man in His image (Gen. 1:26-27) for the very purpose of entering into him. Man is God’s vessel (Rom. 9:21-23); God wants to be man’s content. Just as a glove is empty and meaningless, unless a hand becomes its content, so human life is also empty, unless man has God in him.
When we receive the Lord, He becomes our content and our life. We become one with Him. He is the life in us, and we are His living without. He lives within us, and for us “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit (1 Cor. 6:17).
This relationship we have with Him is hard to express in words. Thus in the Bible there are many types, or pictures, to convey the meaning of what would otherwise be abstract. The golden lampstand in Exodus 25:31-37 is one of these types.
In the Bible the golden lampstand has three stages. The first is the one in Exodus, the lampstand in the tabernacle. The second is in Zechariah (4:2-10), where God considers His people Israel as a lampstand. The last is in Revelation (1:12, 20), where the church is symbolized as a lampstand. God’s people, whether the true Israelites or the true believers, should be a golden lampstand.
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