A Greater is Here

Let me just read to you the single verse, which is the springboard for this morning's message, titled,

A Greater Is Here. The Lord will be able to develop that as we go. This comes from 2

Chronicles chapter 30 and verse 22. And Hezekiah spoke encouragingly to all the

Levites who show good skill in the service of the Lord. Now this comes after this king had arranged for the greatest

Passover that Israel had known up to that time. Hezekiah was 25 years old when he became king, and his first order of business was to bring back proper worship of the

God of Israel to Israel. His father Ahaz had been a man of worship, but he had been a man of worship of other gods, and not the

God of Israel. And during his reign, the temple fell into disuse and the priesthood into disuse and even misuse.

When Hezekiah took over, the temple was a mess, and the priests had been marginalized.

Hezekiah's first order of business wasn't really business at all. It was Yahweh. It was worshiping

Yahweh. It was showing honor to his house, the place where his name resided. It was cleaning up the mess his father had made and bringing exaltation back to the

God of Israel. And this morning, I would just have us consider the priority that we place upon our worship.

Now, there's many kinds of worship. There's individual worship, which we must engage. There's family worship, which we must engage.

And there's corporate worship, which is my subject this morning, the priority that we give it. This verse

I read, and we're gonna look at some of the things that led up to it, though we're not gonna go through every verse of chapter 29 and 30, it shows

Hezekiah's priority and where he placed worship of God. He was the greatest of all the

Davidic kings, according to 2 Kings 23 -25, where we read, before him there was no king like him who turned to the

Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.

I believe the reason that he gets this great epithet in the scripture, where he follows the

Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, which is Deuteronomy 6 -5, which Jesus Christ himself said was the great command and the other is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I would argue that only Jesus Christ himself receives a higher commendation than Hezekiah in following the ways of the

Lord. The greatest of the Davidic kings turned to the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, able to lead therefore by example.

In fact, there's no one except Jesus, as I said, who's described anything like him. Hezekiah becomes the human epitome of the great command to love the

Lord your God in that way and your neighbor as yourself. Well, we're going to look at, as I said, this great

Passover, this great worship that Hezekiah re -instituted, that he started up again, he rebooted, if you will, in Israel.

And it's the reason I believe that the inspired author said there was no king like him, not before, not since him.

Nothing like a Hezekiah arose in Israel. And what I want us to think about as we develop this idea is a question.

And simply this, where do you place worship in your life? And as I said, there is individual worship.

We must open the scripture, we must read the scripture individually and pray to God on our own. We must pray with our spouses, with our family, engage family worship.

Those are all things that we must do. The subject this morning, though, is worship here.

Corporate worship, where we come together to sing the praises together of Jesus Christ, our Savior.

Where does that place in your life, I think especially of our Lord's Day, of our

Sundays, when we come together as we are even now? With all the things that might have distracted him, the good king saw first to this, to worship.

I would ask you this morning, are you prepared for worship today? Is worship a priority in your life?

I mean, it should be, it must be. If you're in Jesus Christ, he deserves all praise.

We have lives of worship to him. We do all things to the glory of God, do we not? That's what our catechism says, what our confession says, and what the scripture says.

Where do we place this in our priorities? How much time do we give it? How much preparation do we make in order to come here prepared to join with brothers and sisters in the

Lord Jesus Christ? Well, let me encourage you this morning, and perhaps bolster the importance that worship has for you by telling you, from the title of the message, and God willing, we'll be able to develop this, a greater is here, a greater than what

Hezekiah knew. A greater temple, a greater worship, a greater festival, prepared for you, excuse me, prepared for you by the greatest of all of David's descendants, greater than Hezekiah, who was the greatest of all those kings, but greater by far, infinitely greater than him.

Jesus Christ has prepared this place for us. Jesus Christ's blood has brought this, us, this church, our fellowship, into existence.

Where do we place it in our life? This privilege, this joy that we have of coming together as God's people in Christ Jesus, and together calling out

His praises. Where is that on your priority list? On your day planners? In your checkbook, even?

Where does the worship of Jesus Christ with God's people stand for you? Jesus Christ, the one of whom

Hezekiah could only be a signpost, pointing the way, and pointing and saying, as it were, keep going.

Keep going until you see Him. Well, let's look at this King Hezekiah, and the priority he placed in worship, and how he did this.

The three things he did immediately upon ascension to his throne. First, he saw to God's house. He saw to God's house.

That's 2 Chronicles 29, one through 19. As I said, we're only gonna take a verse or two in those as we develop this.

We're not gonna read the whole thing. But he saw first to God's house, which had fallen into disrepair under his father,

King Ahaz. He saw second to the proper worship of God. Once that house was prepared, what is it prepared for?

To worship the God whose name resides there. And that's the second half of 2 Chronicles 29.

And third, he brought back the Passover, and that's chapter 30. Now, wonderful as all these were, and they were wonderful, and the reason he's called the greatest of all the kings is because of these things, that he restored the temple, he restored worship, he restored the

Passover, a greater temple, and a greater worship, and a greater festival is here.

Not here for you to reach out to. Not here for us to go and find and bring in to us here.

Here, now, amongst us, as we are bound together by common faith in our one

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. There's a greater temple. There's a greater temple.

Chapter 29, verse three reads, in the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the

Lord and repaired them. We need to stop and think about this for a moment. As we think of the priority that we give to worship,

King Hezekiah, 25 years old, just became king, and he had a lot of things to worry about.

He had a lot of things to do, and primarily, he was being threatened by a very powerful, aggressive, and barbaric, violent nation called

Assyria. They were threatening the northern kingdom, which was Israel. You might recall that Israel had split under Solomon's son,

Rehoboam, into two nations, really. The 10 tribes going north, following Jeroboam, the two tribes with the

Levites staying south, and ever since then had been at enmity with each other. Well, those 10 tribes were under great threat from Assyria, which would be a great worry to this king.

We have the Philistines around him. They're a constant nuisance, tying up resources better used to prepare for the more dangerous

Assyrians, but the Philistines were no Assyria, and that's a worry worthy of all worry, a worthy of taking some kind of proactive course, right?

If we had those worries, if we were king, we might do a spreadsheet and do the pluses and minuses and figure out, okay, what's the first priority?

How are we gonna take care of Assyria? Where are we gonna go for a treaty? Where can we get the arms? What resources do we have to make a better armament, draft more men into the army?

We've got things to do. His counselors, when he became king, they must have advised him to do first things first, right?

Okay, young king, you're just getting started. Let's tell you what we have to do. Okay, we've got this

Assyria thing happening, and if Israel falls as they did about 40 years later, if Israel falls, excuse me, in his sixth year, not 40 years, in his sixth year,

Israel did fall to the Assyrians, but they must have come to him and said, well, let's take care of them.

Let's make an alliance with Egypt against Assyria. Let's make some weapons. Let's draft an army. Let's get something done.

We need to get going here, young king. And so his generals, his advisors had to have come to him and given him that kind of advice.

And we're all good, aren't we, at getting things done, at setting up our charts, setting up our day planners, laying out our priorities, and doing them, check, check, check, one, two, three, let's get going.

Seeing to tasks and accomplishing goals, which is good. It is good to get things done, is it not?

All through Proverbs, planning and accomplishing is highly commended, but where's the priority?

You know, we've all had our share of distractions in the last couple of years. So much so that I won't even really bother to name them in any detail.

We've all heard of, we've all seen, even in our own churches, how the distractions over the last couple of years can even cause divisions amongst brothers and sisters in the

Lord. We've all heard of churches that have been blown apart by the controversies over these fast -moving winds of change, leaving us feeling bewildered, helpless, and discouraged.

Could it be simply maybe an oversimplification?

That's a misalignment of the priorities. It's forgetting what really comes first in the church, what must come first in the church.

Well, Hezekiah leads the way. The temple needed attention. Assyria and all the rest of that can wait because the

Lord's house where his name resides is more important by far. This is a brief excursus.

I mean, can you imagine being one of his generals and coming to him and explaining the military situation?

And what does Hezekiah say? Well, that's good. Thank you for telling me we've got other things to do.

No, no, no, no. We've got an army to build up. We've got plans and strategies to get in place because these guys are coming.

No, generals. You sit over here for a while. Here's the priority.

Here's where this nation needs to go. Here's where I'm gonna lead. And it's the only place I'm going to lead. We're gonna restore

God's temple. The place where God's name resides, where He chose for His name to reside is gonna get cleaned up.

Verse three, in the first year of His reign, in the first month, He opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them.

He brought in the priests and the Levites and assembled them in the square on the east and said to them, hear me,

Levites, now consecrate yourselves and consecrate the house of the Lord, the God of your fathers, and carry out the filth from the holy place.

First priority is the temple. Now, this needs to remind us of somebody, doesn't it, whose first major act in public was a cleansing of the temple?

Well, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus Christ cleanses the temple after His triumphal entry to the temple, sort of towards the end of His life here on earth.

John takes that one incident and moves it to the second chapter. In John's gospel, it becomes his first public act.

Not that there are two cleansings. John does it for theological reasons. He moves it forward.

So if Hezekiah's first act is to cleanse the temple and get it ready for worship, it's got to ping forward to our

Lord Jesus Christ. I want us to think about this for a moment, about how the temple is something that Jesus Christ, in His ministry, by His death for our sins,

His burial and His resurrection, establishes this church and this temple. You know, we all love to remember in John chapter two, the wedding festival at Cana.

And what's the thing that Jesus did there that comes to mind right away? Well, He turned water to wine.

Remember, His mother comes to Him and says, they're running out of wine? He says, mother, what do I have to do with this?

And she goes to the servant and says, whatever He says, you do. And Jesus Christ turns the water in the people.

He turns the pots to wine. But there's a very important detail there that we don't want to pass over too quickly.

In John chapter two, verse 26, it describes those pots. And it gives us a detail, it says, they were used for the

Jewish rites of purification. Jewish rites of purification. Well, Jesus repurposed them for a reason.

He repurposed them to show that the temple rites of purification were coming to an end in Him and because of Him.

Water to wine's a miraculous sign of the bounty that we have in Jesus Christ. But more important was the obsolescence of the old rites, which were done at the temple.

You know, we might even go back further to John chapter one. I know we're going backwards here, but go back to John chapter one and think about this.

Do you remember when John the Baptist was baptizing in the Jordan? And that delegation is sent by the priests of the temple and they ask him these questions.

We won't go through them all. But they come and they say, are you this one? Are you that one? And what are you doing here?

And it summarizes in John chapter one, verse 25, after John declines all those, he answers negatively.

No, I'm not, I'm not. He says, then why are you baptizing if you are neither the Christ nor Elijah nor the prophet?

The question is, what do you mean? Taking upon yourself the cleansing meant to be done in the temple and by the priests.

Who do you think you are? This is what we're supposed to be doing, or at least those who sent us to question you.

And all this leads up to the Lord cleansing his father's house as his first public act in John's gospel, which in the 40 short years would have not one stone left upon another that was not thrown down.

So let's think about where we are in this place. We're blessed with beautiful grounds.

We have air conditioning this morning. We have heating. We walk on carpets. We sit on cushion pews.

Many churches rent their spaces or even use public school auditoriums and set up and take down every

Lord's day. Now compare us or compare them, our brothers and sisters, in places that are not quite as luxurious as this.

And set these in your mind's eye next to the temple that Hezekiah had cleansed.

He sent the Levites in to purify the temple and get it ready for worship, to get rid of the filth that his father

Ahaz had left. And so when it's done, it's returned to the glory that was Solomon's temple, one of the wonders of the world.

Compare our humble grounds to that. Compare brothers and sisters in the Lord that you know go to other churches where again, they might be using a high school gymnasium and having to set up and take down every morning.

Which is more impressive? Which looks greater? Which one would you like to be in?

Well, the greater temple is here. We worship in a greater temple than Hezekiah could ever have imagined.

The Levites cleaned it from top to bottom, it must have gleamed. It says the Levites were more upright in heart than the priests, and we could even say than even the priests in consecrating themselves.

You get the picture of this cadre of faithful men, these Levites just waiting for someone to turn them loose during Ahaz's reign when they were ignored for so long.

And the priests who they're supposed to serve somehow went along with it or passively let themselves be marginalized and set aside to let the temple fall into that kind of condition.

And you get the feeling of these guys just ready to be cut loose and clean that temple. And there's Hezekiah who says to them essentially, go.

You know, John 2 .21 says that when Jesus said he would destroy and raise the temple in three days, he was speaking of his body, the temple.

And they remembered it when Jesus rose from the days. And once he was resurrected from the dead, then they remembered the

Psalm which says, zeal for your houses, eat me up. And they knew then that Jesus, when he said that, he was speaking of himself as the temple.

And what is Christ? His body now is the church.

For we are the temple of the living God, 2 Corinthians 6 .16. His body, which is the church, he says to both the

Ephesians and the Colossians. Well, a greater temple is here.

This temple which I would have you even this morning, lift up higher in your priorities as a place of worship, as a place to prepare yourself for worship when you come here on Sundays.

A greater temple is here, a greater temple cleansed and made infinitely cleaner than those

Levites could ever have imagined. Not with formula 409, not with scrub brushes, not with sanitizing sprays, but with the blood of Jesus Christ.

His precious blood spilled on the cross his body raised up on the third day. The temple right here,

Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church is greater than the one that Hezekiah had cleansed.

It's been cleansed more completely. It's been cleansed more perfectly and more enduringly than any that ever was.

And this is where we have the privilege of worshiping Jesus Sunday in and Sunday out and even today.

Does that help you raise the priority of our corporate worship? God willing it does.

Because as great as that temple was, and it was great, it was magnificent looking and as clean as it was when the

Levites were done and it was clean, I mean, they did their job well. The verse we started with,

Hezekiah spoke encouragingly because they showed good skill. They cleaned it. Oh, brothers and sisters, you would not have found a single dust web.

There wouldn't be a grain of dust anywhere in that place when they were done. All the gold would have been burnished again.

Everything would have gleamed. A greater temple is here. You are sitting this morning and worshiping in a greater temple than anything

Hezekiah could have imagined. Because of the grounds? No.

Because of this building? No, we thank God for them and we sit in comfort. Do we not? But because of Him who brings us here.

Because of Him who when He rose from the dead, His body, the church, this temple, you are the temple of the living

God. Everything that the temple that Hezekiah cleaned, everything that that pointed to is done now in Christ Jesus our

Lord. This is a greater temple than anything they could have possibly imagined.

We have a greater worship here. We do have a greater worship after the temple was cleansed, what do you do?

What did he do? The temple is where God dwells with His people and where God dwells with His people,

His people worship. And there's a whole purpose of the church, there's a whole purpose of our very lives to worship

God our Father in the name of Jesus Christ His Son in the power of God the

Holy Spirit. And the second half of Chronicles 29, this is just what Hezekiah did.

The temple's ready. Okay, we got it done. Let's get to our other priorities.

Assyria, right? Gotta get to work, right?

We got military matters to take care of. We've got treaties to see if anybody will sign with us, right?

How many times we let these things in the world come up and mask us from the true priorities that we're supposed to have.

Verses 20 to 22, Then Hezekiah the king rose early and gathered the officials of the city and went up to the house of the

Lord and they brought seven bulls, seven rams, seven lambs and seven male goats for a sin offering for the kingdom and for the sanctuary and for Judah.

And he commanded the priests, the son of Aaron, to offer them on the altar of the Lord. There'd been this long drought after Ahazaz's reign and after that drought, the atoning blood of bulls and lambs was again being shed.

The temple, the instruments in there had been atoned for and now

Israel's sin could once more be atoned for. Hands were laid on the goats and had their sin symbolically transferred to them.

And the rest of the chapter has the Levites singing with all their might and mane and using the instruments and the instructions left centuries before by King David, Israel's poet.

Now can you imagine what that must have been like? You can read through the second half of 2

Chronicles 29 later this afternoon or this evening. These were trained men, trained voices gathered together finally after all this time in the house of the

Lord where they had just cleansed and they're able to once again sing probably from the

Psalms using David's worship book, Israel's poet, what a sight that must have been.

What a sound that must have been. 2 Chronicles 30, 27 says their voice was heard and their prayer came to God's holy habitation.

God heard their prayer, he heard their worship. It rose up to him. Can you imagine what that would have been like?

Can you just close your eyes for a second and compare what we just did as we sang the three hymns that led up to this sermon this morning?

And then use your imaginary ear and compare that to the sound coming from the temple with those

Levites in there and the lyres and all the other instruments, the harps that David had given to the temple centuries before.

And compare the two for a moment. Which is greater? Which would you think?

With our little church and with only a few of us having trained voices, do you know that we exceed the

Levites, trained singers that they were? We exceed them by far.

We exceed them by infinite distance. A greater worship is here in this greater temple that we now inhabit even this morning.

And why is this a greater worship? Because we worship God in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. They worshiped

God and they worshiped according to the prescriptions that God had given them, but they knew God as Yahweh. How God had revealed himself to them.

We know Yahweh as three persons. He's always been three persons.

He didn't become three persons when Jesus came. He's eternally three persons. God the

Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. But they didn't know that then. They worshiped according to the prescriptions that they had at the time.

And because we worship the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, by faith in that Son who came and died for our sins, whose blood was shed in order to establish this place, this temple, because of that, our worship exceeds them by far.

You know, I can hold a note if the rest of you can. All by myself, I cannot do it.

I have no trained voice. I took some singing lessons some years ago in case I would have to do this by myself.

Thank God I don't because I can't do it. And yet, my faltering voice, it stays on tune better than some of you.

Not to put you down, but it does. Your faltering voice is greater than all the

Levites combined because you can sing your praises, the great hymns of the faith that we have or recite the

Psalms because you know that it points to the one and only Savior, which is

Jesus Christ. And so, dear ones, as we lift up the priority of our worship,

God willing, as you lift up the priority of your worship, know this, your worship is greater than even this greatest worship that Hezekiah had.

Remember, he was the greatest of the kings. And here's one of the reasons, because of the worship that he engaged.

The writer of the Hebrews tells us, through him, through Jesus, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise, the fruit of our lips, that acknowledge

His name. Paul writes in Romans 8 .34, Christ Jesus is the one who died, more than that who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who is interceding for us.

There can be no greater worship than worship from the heart that calls out the glories of our

Savior, Jesus Christ. All creation, according to Romans 8 .22, is groaning together with us for the redemption that we will have in Christ Jesus, our

Lord. Lord, what is that going to look like? When we have that redemption, our worship in the church is the precursor to that glorious day.

The quality of our worship is not our ability to sing on key, or to do harmony, or the ensemble, wonderful as they are, gifts though those are to us, it is

Christ interceding for us and accepting our worship, bringing it, as it were, to the throne of God.

And if it's good enough for Him, and it is good enough for Him, it is pleasing also to God the

Father, who loves the Son, and loves those who are in His Son, those for whom He died.

So we all need to take heart, and we all need to raise this priority a bit, because a greater worship is here, in a greater temple.

The praises we lift up in Jesus' name exceed anything the people of old could have done. We need not pine away for that, as glorious as that must have sounded.

Ecclesiastes 7 .10 says, do not ask why the former days were better than these, it is not from wisdom that you ask this.

Greater temple, a greater worship, and a greater festival.

It's all greater. The temple was cleansed, and it was worship was restored. Hezekiah set his sights now on the

Passover. It's a forward ping, excuse me, he set his sights on the

Passover, as Israel's greatest feast only next to the Day of Atonement.

So what Hezekiah does when he plans on the Passover, is to invite

Israel, those 10 tribes that I mentioned before, to come to no longer stay separate, to come to the place where God's name is residing, to come to the temple that he had restored, that he had cleansed, to the worship that he had restarted.

He sends out this invitation, he sends emissaries out there to the 10 tribes of the north.

And it reminds us of Matthew chapter 22, Jesus' parable of the great wedding banquet, where the master says, go invite the guests, tell them that the feast is ready, and they're all to come.

Hezekiah sends messages north to Israel, as again, as this forward ping to our Lord Jesus Christ.

Chapter 30 verses six through nine says, so couriers went throughout all Israel and Judah with letters from the king and his princes, as the king commanded, saying,

O people of Israel, return to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, that He may turn again to the remnant of you who have escaped from the hand of the kings of Assyria.

Do not be like your fathers and your brothers who are faithless to the Lord of their fathers, so that He made them a desolation, as you see.

Do not now be stiff -necked as your fathers were, but yield yourselves to the Lord and come to His sanctuary, which

He has consecrated forever, and serve the Lord your God, that His fierce anger may turn away from you.

For if you return to the Lord, your brothers and your children will find compassion with their captors and return to this land.

For the Lord your God is gracious and merciful and will not turn away His face from you if you return to Him.

So many connections between Hezekiah and David's greatest son,

Jesus Christ, because like the parable, in Jesus' parable, they were mocked and scorned and the king's gracious invitation was insulted.

You remember in Matthew 22, when he said the king was furious, and he said, go out then and get, can we paraphrase, anyone you can find, and bring them to the feast.

We read in 2 Chronicles 30, however, some men of Asher, of Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem.

The hand of God was also undued to give them one heart to do with the king, and the princes had commanded by the word of the

Lord. Our message is much the same as Hezekiah's, is it not? We invite, we plead, we cajole, we weep, we try to get our loved ones, our children, our spouses to believe the gospel.

We invite friends to come to church to hear about the Lord Jesus Christ. We become all things to all people so that by all means, we might save some, as the apostle says.

But it's the Lord by whom the invitation is to be accepted. His spirit alone can change men's hearts, as He did here, where these two nations, really brothers together by blood, but so long separated in enmity with one another.

How can they come together and with one heart worship the Lord? Only by the work of the

Lord. What brings us together in this greater temple and greater worship? Only the work of the

Lord can bind hearts together, so diverse as ours are, from so many backgrounds as we come from.

And what brings us together here? A common faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, yes. But also the binding of the spirit in a marvelous, magnificent, and spiritual binding that makes us something deeper than just friends and just those who love the

Lord Jesus Christ. We are actually bound together in Him and by Him. And just as Israel was made one heart with Judah when they came, it is the

Lord God who sanctifies this place by binding our hearts together. Only He could have joined those men who had been apart for so long.

Only He could do this work amongst ourselves. It says in Ephesians, for He Himself is our peace who has made the both one and broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility.

And therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And if we have peace with God, how much more with each other?

You know, the chronicler tells us that since the time of Solomon, the son of David, King of Israel, there had been nothing like this in Jerusalem.

That Passover was the greatest Passover they'd ever seen. And the men who came together forgot their past bitterness.

They celebrated God's redeeming arm in the Exodus. Peace with each other because they had peace with God.

So in a greater temple, with greater worship, and we engage a greater festival.

And what do I mean by that? It's here to my right. It's the Lord's table, which we take every

Sunday after the morning worship. The Lord's table exceeds by far the

Passover that Hezekiah had. And that Passover is one of the reasons that the chronicler says he's the greatest of all the

Judaic kings. And yet, this is infinitely greater a festival than that could have been.

We've engaged a greater worship and we worship in a greater temple. And here's a greater festival.

What did they remember then? They remembered their deliverance from bondage to men. That's the Passover. We remember our deliverance from bondage to sin.

They recalled plagues poured down on Egypt. Do you remember the 10 plagues? And finally, the death of the firstborn?

And at Passover, the Jewish Passover remembers those 10 plagues one at a time. What do we remember when we engage this festival, the

Lord's table? We remember that plagues were poured down on Jesus Christ. The plagues that you and I deserve were poured down upon Him.

The wrath of God was emptied, not upon we who deserve it, but Him who knew no sin, who became sin for us, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is what we recall in our greater festival. The Jews remember that they passed from death on one side of the

Red Sea to life on the other. And in Jesus, we recall as we take this festival that we've passed from death and our trespasses and sins to eternal life by faith in our resurrected

Lord Jesus Christ. God turned away the sin, the sea, and made their way safe by a strong east wind.

And in Jesus Christ, He turned away our sins by a strong cross on Calvary. Well, there's one problem with their

Passover. They did it in the second month and not the first month as the law prescribed.

And you can read about that yourself. The Levites were busy cleaning the temple in the first month.

There's an allowance to take Passover in the second month in Numbers 9 -11, but they didn't quite meet the exception clause there.

And so Hezekiah prays in 2 Chronicles 30, in verse 18, he says, may the good

Lord pardon. May the good Lord pardon. The word in Hebrew is kapar, or cover. Yom Kippur, the day of covering, the day of atonement, the day when sins are covered.

He says, may the good Lord pardon, cover over everyone who sets his heart to seek

God, the Lord, the God of his fathers, even though not according to the sanctuary's rules of cleanness.

Isn't that a wonderful prayer? For this great king who cleansed the temple, restarted the worship, reinstituted the

Passover, all these things that would be pleasing to God. And knowing that it had been done incorrectly in some ways according to the strict rules, and he says, may the good

Lord pardon. May He cover over the sin of the people who engage this wrongly.

And do you know what God did? He declined. He did not cover.

He did not pardon their sin. And just as He did on the cross.

He didn't cover over our sin on the cross. He poured our sin out on Jesus Christ. Because He didn't just put a blanket over what we had done and how we had rebelled against Him as if He's not gonna notice them anymore.

No, He counted each one of our sins, not covered them. He counted each one of them against another, against Jesus Christ.

What did God do with Hezekiah? He declined to kapar.

He declined to cover over their sin. The next verse says, and the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people.

More than kapar, more than covering, He healed the people as He has us.

And the congregations we preach to, they come together to hear the gospel every

Sunday. By His stripes, we've been healed, not covered over.

Not since forgotten, ignored, winked at. Healed because Jesus Christ paid the full price

So by the sheer simplicity of the Lord's table and what it stands for, we magnify attention where the attention of old could never have been than this on Christ Jesus, who died for our sins and was raised for our justification.

A greater temple, a greater worship, and a greater festival. And God willing, this brings a greater priority of what we do each

Sunday to you. That we can raise it up in our day planners, that we can spend more time preparing ourselves to even walk in here and engage with others as we worship

Jesus Christ, because this is all greater. And finally, a greater than Hezekiah is here.

Do you know who that is? It's those who carry a greater message than Hezekiah's.

I mean you, Christian. I mean myself as pastor. I mean

Pastor Owens. When we declare the message of Jesus Christ, a greater than Hezekiah is here, not because we're more handsome, more intelligent, or anything over Hezekiah, but in the same way as Jesus Christ said, truly, truly,

I say to you, among those born of women, there has never risen no one greater than John the Baptist. Not because John the

Baptist was a better man than Nahum or Ezekiel or Isaiah, but because John the Baptist pointed to Jesus Christ and said, behold the

Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Because John the Baptist had a fuller message.

And you and I have a fuller message than even John the Baptist had.

Because we have, by faith and by the testimony of the scripture, the resurrection of that one to whom he pointed.

A greater than Hezekiah even is here. Not qualitatively better. We're not better men and women than Hezekiah was as a king or as a person.

We don't need to make that comparison, but because we have a fuller message. A greater temple, a greater worship, a greater festival, and a church filled with greater than Hezekiah because a fuller gospel message that sees the complete picture of the death and the burial and the resurrection of the

Lord Jesus Christ. We're greater because while they worshiped in a house of mortar and stone, we worship in a temple that Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things but into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf, amen.

Our heavenly Father, thank you for this day that we have and thank you for the worship that we're able to engage in the

Lord Jesus Christ and knowing that it is pleasing to you, Father, because we come to you by the faith in your

Son that you, Father, by your Spirit have given us to believe. So for this greater temple, for this greater worship, for this greater festival which we will soon,

God willing, take, we give you all the thanks and the praise and the glory in Christ's name, amen.