Part 8

“I will give you treasures of darkness and hidden riches of the Secret Place, that you may know that I, the Lord, Who calls you by your name, am the God of Israel.”  Isaiah 45:3

“…He has consecrated those He has invited.”  Zephaniah 1:7b

We have been invited to enter into the Secret Place.  The King of kings and the Lord of lords desires to fellowship with us, to love on us, and to take our breath away.  Will we accept His invitation?  Oh my, but what will we wear?  What do we do to prepare to party with the Most High God?

The Tabernacle Dwelling (the Secret Place) is the gathering place where He may reveal His glory.  Remember what glory is:  A visible manifestation of an invisible reality.  When God gave instructions to Moses for building the Tabernacle, He had one purpose in mind:  He was creating a place where His Presence could actually come to earth to dwell with man. In Exodus 33:11 we read, “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.”  We are on a journey to the Tent of Meeting where God will speak to us face to face as a man speaks with His friend, and as His friend, He will hold nothing back from us but will lovingly offer us His glory.

As I said in earlier teachings, the Old Testament Tabernacle has many elements that directly correlate with Jesus and our lives today.  In the Most Holy Place, one of the elements we find is the Brazen Laver.  It was made of brass, and it was a large basin used for ceremonial ablutions (to wash away; the washing of one’s body or part of it as in a religious rite) in the ancient Jewish tabernacle and Temple worship.  The laver is symbolic to where we receive sanctification.  It is in the process of sanctification we receive Him as Lord.

Sanctification is the state of growing in divine grace as a result of Christian commitment after baptism or conversion; to make productive of holiness or piety; to set apart to a sacred purpose or to religious use:  consecrate.  (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary)     

“Now He (Jesus) had to go through Samaria.  So He came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph.  Jacob’s Well was there, and Jesus, tired as He was from the journey, sat down by the well….When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?’  (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)  The Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman.  How can you ask me for a drink?’  (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)  Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water.’  ‘Sir,’, the woman said, ‘you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep.  Where can You get this living water?  Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?’  Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.’  The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming down here to draw water.’”  John 4:4-15

As we continue on with the story we notice that this woman was an outcast.  She has had five husbands and is currently living with a man who is not her husband. Typically, women would come to draw water in the morning and in the evening, in the cool of the day.  This woman came at noon, probably to avoid the others who knew her reputation.  Also, she was a Samaritan (a hated mixed race).  No respectable Jewish man would dare speak to this woman.  But Jesus did.  Jesus is no respecter of persons – the Samaritan woman was an “outcast” due to her ancestry and her sins.  That didn’t matter to Jesus.  After He spoke with her, gently disciplining her for her past, she acknowledged who He was and then ran as fast as she could to tell as many people as she could find to bring them back to Him. 

These are all relevant facts for our journey to the Secret Place.  And notice this one element of the story that I had never seen before the Lord revealed it to me:  they were at Jacob’s Well.  Jacob’s Well was not spring-fed.  It was a well into which water seeped from rain and dew, collecting at the bottom.  The woman tells Jesus that the well (Jacob’s well) is deep.  What the Lord spoke into my spirit about this is that Jacob’s Well only received its water from One Source – God Himself, while other wells received their water from a spring, which had to receive its source from something else, etc., etc.  As we approach the place of washing (sanctification), we must recognize that we can only receive water, our sanctification, from One Source.  We cannot expect to receive our sanctification from someone else who will then pass it on to us – it has to be a one-on-one source, a one-on-one relationship.

The Well is deep, the Water is good.  Bathe yourself in the Living Water.  He will clothe us in His righteousness, preparing us for the Ball of our lives.

“I delight greatly in the Lord;
My soul rejoices in my God.
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation
And arrayed me in a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”  Isaiah 61:10