“Now when Moses went into the tent of meeting to speak with Him, he heard the voice speaking to him from above the mercy seat that was on the ark of the testimony, from between the two cherubim, so He spoke to him.” (Num 7:89)
The ark of the covenant was a box (albeit a very fancy one) that contained, amongst other things, the tablets of stone engraved with God’s contract with Israel. That contract was God’s promise to them that if they followed Him, He would abide with them. The lid to that box was called the mercy seat and it was adorned with likenesses of two angelic beings, cherubim, whose wings stretched out and overshadowed that box… and it was between those two cherubim that God spoke to Moses.
The New Testament tells us that all of these things were shadows of greater spiritual things (see Hebrews 8:5).
Every Jew knew – God’s seat of mercy sits on top of His covenant. Without the tablets of stone, there is no box, there are no promises, and there is no mercy seat. If you want God’s mercy, you have to accept His covenant, too.
We won’t look for the mercy and the forgiveness without first realizing the law that we’ve broken. Nobody seeks or understands forgiveness without the foundation of a law coming first. The more we learn of the life that we should be living, the more we properly see our failure to be good enough, the more thankful we become for the One that whispers, “I forgive you” from His throne of mercy.
For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. (Rom 7:22-25)
#Biblebites Matt. 4:4