I began this series talking about what a sanctuary meant and referenced Exodus 25:8
8 And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. Exodus 25:8 (NKJV)
I also referenced the two verses below.
1 O God, You are my God; Early will I seek You; My soul thirsts for You; My flesh longs for You In a dry and thirsty land Where there is no water. 2 So I have looked for You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory. Psalm 63:1-2 (NKJV)
4 One thing I have desired of the LORD, That will I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the LORD All the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD, And to inquire in His temple. Psalm 27:4 (NKJV)
We know from scripture that we can behold Him and in fact are called to do so (2 Cor. 3:18, 4:6). I am not suggesting we will all be taken up to heaven and have an experience like Paul or John. What I am suggesting is that we can choose to gaze upon Him in His sanctuary. There is a reason Revelation 4 is in the scriptures. He wants us to know what we are gazing into when we sit before Him and that it is not just on Old Testament (OT) prophetic experience.
While descriptions of the throne are not confined to the OT, what can we learn from some of them? For example Psalm 63. David wrote this in the wilderness when the temple of Solomon did not yet exist and David was not near the tabernacle of Moses. David had to be speaking of gazing into the real sanctuary in the eternal realm. Another example is what Ezekiel saw.
26 And above the firmament over their heads was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like a sapphire stone; on the likeness of the throne was a likeness with the appearance of a man high above it. 27 Also from the appearance of His waist and upward I saw, as it were, the color of amber with the appearance of fire all around within it; and from the appearance of His waist and downward I saw, as it were, the appearance of fire with brightness all around. 28 Like the appearance of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the brightness all around it. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. So when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard a voice of One speaking. Ezekiel 1:26-28 (NKJV)
2 Then I looked, and there was a likeness, like the appearance of fire–from the appearance of His waist and downward, fire; and from His waist and upward, like the appearance of brightness, like the color of amber. 3 He stretched out the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of my hair; and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the north gate of the inner court, where the seat of the image of jealousy was, which provokes to jealousy. 4 And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I saw in the plain. Ezekiel 8:2-4 (NKJV)
In the Ezekiel 1 passage above Ezekiel says what he saw was the glory of Yahweh. In the chapter 8 passage we have an almost identical description but Ezekiel says it is the Spirit. This is the only description I can find in scripture that describes the Holy Spirit in any detail.
What is my point in all of this? I don’t believe we should try to manufacture anything as we sit with Him. Yet whether or not we see or are aware of anything as we sit and by faith gaze upon Him we are entering into an encounter with this glorious One who is a consuming fire. If we faithfully chose to do so how can we not be changed?
