Discover the profound messages in scriptural symbolism as we delve into the role of priestly garments and the Urim and Thummim in Biblical history. This episode unpacks the artistry behind the breastplate of judgment and the significance of its adorned precious stones, each carrying the names of the tribes of Israel. Understand the powerful metaphor of the heart in scripture and Aaron’s role as the high priest, a forerunner to Christ’s ultimate sacrifice, bearing the iniquities of the people.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I’m Nicole McBurney. Every weekday, we bring you the news of the day, the culture and science from a Christian worldview. But today, join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
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In Mesopotamia and then in Europe, they didn’t develop the wheel, which is really a shocking aspect of history. And as a result, they were severely disadvantaged when a clash of civilizations arose. So at any rate, I love the thought of these ancient Hebrews being so talented at things like jewelry. And regarding the Jews and jewelry… You know, online, if you look it up, they’ll say, no, there’s no connection at all. That’s ridiculous. But the prophet Joel, his name means the Lord is God. And some see, and I wouldn’t doubt, having read about it, of the origin of jewel, our modern English word jewel through its romantic roots, so to speak, going back to Joel. And if so, there very well may be a relationship between Jew and jewel and jeweler and jewelry. Basically focusing on God with what we today use as a J, but Yah or Jehovah. For in Him is the source of all beauty. Verse 12, and you shall put the two stones on the shoulders of the ephod as memorial stones for the sons of Israel. So Aaron shall bear their names before the Lord on his two shoulders as a memorial. So notice the importance to God of the identity of the nation of Israel, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac and then Jacob. God has these two covenant peoples in the Bible, Israel and the body of Christ. And the number 12 characterizes Israel’s kingdom. The number one characterizes the body. For Israel had 12 patriarchs, 12 tribes. Jesus said to the 12 apostles that there will be 12 thrones in the new Jerusalem. You will sit on the 12 thrones. You, each of his 12 apostles. And the New Jerusalem, we’re told in Revelation, has 12 walls with 12 foundations. And whose names are engraved on the 12 foundations? The names of the 12 apostles. We read in the book of Revelation. Now there are many different variations of theology that say all that is not literal. None of that is relevant. That’s all symbolic. But there’s so much of it. If we’re to say that all the details of Israel’s covenant that differ from the gospel of grace, if they’re all symbolic, then you take about maybe 20% of the Bible, including much of Ezekiel, much of the minor prophets, much of the major prophets, much of the first five books of Moses, much of the book of Revelation, much of the Gospels, and you say it’s all symbolic. Well, what is it all symbolic of? Well, it’s symbolic that God is nice and He’s going to do nice things for us. Because it pretty much loses all of its meaning. So the thousand year… on earth after Christ’s second coming that parallels the thousand years of the kingdom from David’s throne in Jerusalem until Christ’s first coming, that second thousand years where Revelation says there’ll be a thousand year kingdom, that’s all symbolic. That and 10,000 other verses, they’re all symbolic. Of what? There’s too much symbolism to put any meat to any of it. So, The fact that the number 12 is Israel’s number, and then for the body of Christ, the number is one. There is one body, one Lord, one baptism, not the many baptisms of Israel, as we read in the book, the epistle to the Hebrews, that there are many baptisms, as we see in the Mosaic law and in the Gospels, there are many baptisms. Plural. But for the body of Christ, Paul writes there is one baptism because there’s one body, one Lord, who is the one head over the body. So is Paul over the body of Christ? No, he’s not. Are the 12 apostles over Israel’s kingdom? Yes, they are. Because Israel’s kingdom is a political entity and the body is a living organism, not a political entity. And a living organism only has one head and that’s Christ. There’s no room for a second head for Paul. But in a political entity, you could have a king and you could have governors and you could have all this authority structure. But in the body, we don’t have that. Paul has no authority over us in the body of Christ. And by the way, he wrote 13 epistles. He didn’t write 12. That would be too much like Israel. He didn’t write 14, but he wrote 13 epistles where he never became one of the 12 apostles, but was the 13th, so to speak, or the apostle to the rebellious Gentiles. Verse 13. You shall also make settings of gold and you shall make two chains of pure gold like braided cords and fasten the braided chains to the settings. And now we read about the breastplate that we saw in the animation. You shall make the breastplate of judgment. So that’s an interesting name for this piece of clothing, almost like a soldier’s equipment. artistically woven according to the workmanship of the ephod, you shall make it. Of gold, blue, purple, and scarlet thread, and fine woven linen, you shall make it. So God calls this here the breastplate of judgment, partly because of two stones that are associated with it that we will talk about in a few verses from now. And so at times, it appears the high priest would be called upon to render judgment, and not unlike Israel’s use of casting lots, where God told them, now cast lots to figure out which of the 12 tribes will get which piece of land in Israel. And when the apostles needed to replace Judas, they cast lots, and the lot fell on Matthias. So on our website, we have about 10,000 pages. One of the top 20 most popular pages, it’s bizarre really, is our article on casting lots in the Bible. Because Christians all over the world, when they study the Bible and they see all this emphasis on casting lots, they say, why did God tell them to cast lots? It’s like drawing straws or rolling dice and see what comes up, and then that’s what you do. And so our article, we’ve covered it a few times in our Bible study, so I won’t get into all that, but it’s really become popular. One of our top 20 pages on our entire website showing biblically why God told the Israelites to cast lots. And today, if we take what we learn from that and apply it today, it helps, as the Bible says, keep the mighty apart. Because when two sons can’t decide how to split their father’s inheritance… It’s really wise to use some degree of chance in that final decision. So let’s continue. Verse 16, it shall be doubled into a square, a span shall be its length, and a span shall be its width. So in ancient Israel, weights and measurements, a span is the length. We talked about a cubit from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. A span was from the tip of the thumb to the pinky when the hand is spread out. And so think of that on the priest’s chest. So that’s the size of this breastplate. Verse 17, And you shall put settings of stone in it, four rows of stones. The first row shall be a sardius, probably a ruby, A topaz and an emerald. The topaz is a crystal. And the emerald we’re all familiar with. This shall be the first row. The second row shall be a turquoise, a sapphire, and a diamond. And diamonds are a creationist best friend. You have heard the atheistic story of the age of diamonds, that they’re about a billion years old. They came up from 100 miles or so beneath the surface of the Earth. That’s how much pressure. They say they need to make a diamond. They don’t understand the history of the Earth and the hydroplate theory, so the diamonds don’t have to come up from way down there. But they say diamonds are a billion years old. If that were true, then they’d have no carbon-14 in them because carbon-14 only lasts thousands of years, not millions. Yet diamonds have plenty of carbon-14 in them. It’s very hard to get some spurious material inside the middle of a diamond. How do you do that? A diamond is the hardest naturally occurring substance on earth. So a diamond is a creationist best friend showing that they’re only thousands of years old, as in fact is the entire earth and the universe that God made us in the recent past. So the second row has turquoise, a sapphire, and a diamond. The third row We’ll see jacinth here. That’s an orange or reddish-orange gem of zircons. And just a quick note about zircons, they’re also these amazing little crystals because they have helium in them, and they’re said to be a billion or billions of years old also. Everything, you know, everything’s got to be millions or billions of years old. It’s just the knee-jerk response. So they’re billions of years old, except that they’re loaded with helium atoms. And we know by laboratory measurements and laboratory tests that helium atoms being so tiny on the periodic table, helium is so tiny that it works its way out of everything. So if you have a balloon for somebody’s birthday and it’s real expensive and it’s made to float for a long time and it’s filled with helium, those helium atoms find their way out. They eventually get out. Those zircon crystals, if they were a billion years old, they wouldn’t be loaded with helium atoms. The helium would be gone, but they’re loaded with helium as predicted by creationists. And as then published, before the laboratory test to show how quickly helium escapes zircon crystals. So this third row. A jacinth, which is formed of zircons. An agate. That’s a mineral that has these amazing, vibrant bands of color. And an amethyst. So that would be a beautiful violet color quartz. Verse 20, in the fourth row, a beryl. So that could be orange or green gem. An onyx, again, as we saw above. And a jasper. So jasper, it’s not transparent, but it is opaque. And it has a brownish color. It’s a quartz. So all these precious minerals, they shall be set in gold settings. So this is what a jeweler does to a diamond. He sets a ring. The stone, the diamond in the ring, only of course these would be much larger than a typical stone in a diamond ring. Verse 21, And the stone shall have the names of the sons of Israel, twelve according to their names, like the engravings of a signet, each one with its own name, and they shall be according to the twelve tribes. So again, God’s focus on the identity of the nation of Israel and the 12 tribes and his reconstituting of the 12 tribes after the Babylonian exile. And he reconstitutes the 12 tribes and the Levites and the Aaronic priesthood. This is all important to him. And in the book of Revelation, again, the 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes, 144,000. It could, theoretically, it could all be symbolic. Or, there’s no reason that it has to be symbolic. We find out that the Bible is rich with meaning and that God has two covenant peoples, Israel and the body, and the reason He’s making a new heaven and a new earth is because Israel, they will inherit the new earth, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, that they will inherit the earth. Isn’t that something? Do we inherit the earth? We don’t inherit the earth. We’re citizens of the heavenlies. So the body of Christ, we’re all taught, and rightly so, no matter what kind of theology church we go to, that when we go to be with the Lord, we live forever in heaven, so then why make a new earth? Just for the animals? No, because the 12 apostles will be on the new earth with the new Jerusalem, and their names… Their names inscribed in the foundation of the walls of the New Jerusalem and the 12 thrones being in that New Jerusalem. The 12 apostles were real people. They were not symbolic. So when Jesus said to them, when He said to Matthew, or when He said to Thomas, that you will sit on one of these 12 thrones and ruling over… the kingdom of Israel, He was making a promise to an individual person about what they will be doing. It’s not symbolic. Verse 22, “…you shall make chains for the breastplate at the end, like braided cords of pure gold.” and you shall make two rings of gold for the breastplate, like we’ve seen in the animation, and put the two rings on the two ends of the breastplate. Then you shall put the two braided chains of gold in the two rings which are on the ends of the breastplate. And the other two ends of the two braided chains you shall fasten to the two settings and put them on the shoulder straps of the ephod in the front. Now, when we started these studies a quarter of a century ago, they were all audio. Today, we do them in audio and video. So if there is anyone listening to this on an MP3 CD or an audio download, and you think, hey, I didn’t get to see the animation, easily you could go online, go to YouTube, and just search for the things that we’re looking at. So search for animation, of the tabernacle, of the altar, of the Ark of the Covenant, of the priestly garments, of the ephod, and you’ll find all these simply. Verse 26, you shall make two rings of gold and put them on the two ends of the breastplate, on the edge of it, which is on the inner side of the ephod. And the two other rings of gold you shall make and put them on the two shoulder straps underneath the ephod toward its front, right at the seam above the intricately woven band of the ephod. They shall bind the breastplate by means of its rings to the rings of the ephod using a blue cord so that it is above the intricately woven band of the ephod and so that the breastplate does not come loose from the ephod. So God is the designer. He doesn’t want it to come loose. Here’s how I want you to do this. And look at His design of living organisms from insects to falcons, microbes to trees. How strong a tree is and an eagle’s beak. It’s astounding what God’s able to do. Spider webs are stronger than steel. Molecule by molecule. And human beings are beginning to use these things in manufacturing. Verse 29, So Aaron shall bear the names of the sons of Israel on the breastplate of judgment over his heart. when he goes into the holy place as a memorial before the Lord continually. And of course, the heart, wear this over his heart, the heart in the Bible is used as a metaphor to represent the person, your heart, to represent your soul, or your spirit, or the totality of the human being. So it’s a metaphor. So some atheists will make fun of the Bible and say, oh, your heart is just a pump. Well, that’s agreed. The heart is a pump. But it is the metaphor for when you have a strong emotional connection and you feel it in your chest because of the way that God made us. It’s as though this has gone to the core of your being. God could have made us so that when you see a loved one rescued at the last moment from what looked like certain death, and you get this incredible feeling in your toe. in your little toe. God could have made us like that. But it would send the wrong message, right? It’s like, well, you’re important to me, but not too important. But when you feel it in the core of your being, God recognized when He made us with all the hormones that go into a living human being, that this is how we could relate and understand the importance of the things that really matter. Verse 30, And you shall put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim, and they shall be over Aaron’s heart when he goes in before the Lord. So Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of Israel over his heart before the Lord continually. So this is a very unusual aspect of Scripture. There are passages about this Urim and Thummim like in 1 Samuel, when Saul, who’s in rebellion against God, he goes to inquire of the Lord, and the Lord did not answer him. It didn’t matter if he asked by dreams or by the prophet or by the Urim, God would not answer Saul. So this Urim and Thummim were used like the casting of lots for the high priest occasionally to be able to hear directly from the Lord. And again, I’d rather not get into all that, but we have a very popular article that’s helped a lot of people, so feel free to go online. It’s kgov.com slash lots, L-O-T-S. But God gave to Israel the use of the casting of lots so that occasionally, rarely, people He would supernaturally intervene and affect the outcome of the lots. But generally speaking, this was to promote humility so that every man didn’t think he had to get his way. I’m going to get what I want out of this situation. But humility, and the Bible says the casting of lots keeps the mighty apart because we learn that we can’t all get what we want. There may have been some of the apostles who would not have chosen Matthias because there were a couple guys that were both qualified. So they cast lots. And we see this in Numbers 27 that the priest could inquire of the Lord through the Urim and Thummim. We see it also in the book of Ezra and in the book of Nehemiah. So let’s continue. Verse 31, “…you shall make the robe of the ephod all of blue.” There shall be an opening for his head in the middle of it. It shall have a woven binding all around its opening, like the opening in a coat of mail. So this is not exactly like we picture a coat of armor of mail. That’s more recent European history, although some use goes back to maybe a thousand years after Moses. But it’s a garment. Maybe you might think that a soldier might wear this as part of his undergarment. But God says, so make this robe like this so that it does not tear. He’s the designer. Verse 33, “…and upon its hem you shall make pomegranates…” So those are images of fruit. “…of blue, purple, and scarlet all around its hem and bells of gold between them all around.” a golden bell and a pomegranate upon the hem of the robe all around. In other words, they’re alternating. And it shall be upon Aaron when he ministers and its sound will be heard when he goes into the holy place before the Lord and when he comes out that he may not die. So once a year, he would go into the Holy of Holies, and there is this legend among Christians which has no basis at all in ancient Hebrew writings or history that they put a rope around the high priest so that if he died in the Holy of Holies, they’d pull him out. It’s repeated constantly. There’s no basis of it. It’s imagined from this verse. The bells, you know, first, if the priest obeys God, the high priest, he’s not going to die. That’s first. So do what God says. And secondly, by the other priests around the temple and the tabernacle, hearing the high priest, the bells, and the Holy of Holies, if he’s in there for a prolonged period of time, they know he’s okay. So, They don’t have to worry about how do we get them out of there. Verse 36, you shall also make a plate of pure gold and engrave on it like the engraving of a signet, holiness to the Lord, which is separated to the Lord, holy. And you shall put it on a blue cord that it may be on the turban that is on the hat. It shall be on the front of the turban. And if it weren’t for man’s flesh, our tendency to sin, imagine how wonderful this all would have been. It would have been so great. Verse 38, and we’re almost done with the chapter. So it shall be on Aaron’s forehead that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things which the children of Israel hallow. in all their holy gifts. And it shall always be on his forehead that they may be accepted before the Lord. So what is this? Aaron bears the iniquity? Well, Jesus bore the iniquity of us all. On the cross, He became a curse for us, Paul wrote. On the cross, He became sin for us. So Aaron is the type of Christ as the high priest. So he’s bearing the iniquity of all this sacrificial system. Verse 39, “…you shall skillfully weave the tunic of fine linen thread…” You shall make the turban of fine linen and you shall make the sash of woven work. For Aaron’s sons, you shall make tunics and you shall make sashes for them and you shall make hats for them for glory and beauty. So you shall put them on Aaron, your brother, and on his sons with him. You shall anoint them, consecrate them, and sanctify them that they may minister to me as priests. And as we go on in the study, we will repeat what we’ve seen before, that God says Aaron and his four sons, he calls them by name, they will be priests, they will serve me forever. But then two of them don’t because God kills them because they’re wicked. So we’ll see. We’ll get into some of those details. And we have a manuscript that only three chapters are done. It’s called The Script. It’s a sequel to The Plot. And it is available from our office if you’re interested. And that gets into all those details. And we have a series on YouTube. You can see it’s called Chosen. It’s not what you think. But the chosen priest, the chosen prophets, the chosen kings, the chosen people, the vast majority of whom went to hell. Being chosen means that God is choosing you for a purpose, for a task, which may or may not be accomplished by you. Depends if you humble yourself and allow God to bless the world through you or not. Verse 42, and you shall make for them linen trousers to cover their nakedness. They shall reach from the waist to the thighs. And so again, the focus is on the covering, their shame, showing their spiritual need for God to cover us. Our clothing, it covers the base bodily functions. Animals don’t have a spirit. So they have no context. They have no heavenly perspective. from which to be embarrassed by their base bodily function. So they just do all their business out in the open. No problem. But God made human beings differently. Even liberals who like to brag that they have no standards, they have some standards. They still go into the bathroom when they’re at a conference. Even if it’s an outdoor conference. Verse 43, “…they shall be on Aaron and on his sons when they come into the tabernacle of meeting.” or when they come near the altar to minister in the holy place, that they do not incur iniquity and die. In other words, they need to obey God, the priest also. It shall be a statute forever to him and his descendants after him. May God bless you guys.
