Three more reasons why the cleansing of the sanctuary is good news!
- The sanctuary is worth cleansing!
- The sanctuary is a gospel declaring network of truth.
- The sanctuary is alive with the presence of God.
Here are three more reasons why the cleansing of the sanctuary is good news. Each of these have to do with the cleansing part being good news.
REASON #4: JUDGMENT IS CLEANSING!
What comes to your mind when you think of judgment? The word has been hijacked by negative associations that are fearful and alarming. Psalm 34:25says, “Judge me, O Lord my God, according to thy righteousness.” Is that a prayer you would pray? Do you desire God’s judgment or hope hide from it? Daniel 8:14 presents judgment in a beautiful way. Judgment is referred to as “cleansing”. In dramatic acts of judgment like the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the conquest of Canaan, God was cleansing. He was removing evil that would have spread contamination.
Each of these final three reasons have to do with judgment. Where do we get judgment from Daniel 8:14? The word is not mentioned in the verse, but the concept is there. Daniel 7 and 8 present parallel lines of prophecy. We find that the judgment of Daniel 7 corresponds to the cleansing of Daniel 8.
| Daniel 7 | Daniel 8 |
| Verses 1-7 Four Kingdoms | Verses 1-8 Two Kingdoms |
| Verse 8 Little Horn | Verses 9-12 Little Horn |
| Verses 9-10 Judgment | Verse 14 Cleansing |
| Verse 11 Evil Power Destroyed | Verse 25 Evil Power Destroyed |
When the first angel of revelation 14 announces that the hour of God’s judgment has come (Revelation 14:7) it refers to this judgment before the second coming that Daniel 8:14 calls the cleansing of the sanctuary.
The cleansing work of judgment is intended to bring atonement between us and God. Atonement is the righting of the wrong of sin to reconcile us to God. It can be helpful to read it as at-one-ment. The cleansing of the sanctuary is a reference to the Day of Atonement. It is not surprising that the description of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 has a lot to say about atonement. More than 1/3rd of the verses in Leviticus 16 include a form of the word “atonement” (Leviticus 16:6, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18, 20, 24, 27, 30, 32, 33, 34). Notice the connection between atonement and cleansing in Leviticus 16:16-19.
Thus he shall make atonement for the Holy Place, because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses. No one may be in the tent of meeting from the time he enters to make atonement in the Holy Place until he comes out and has made atonement for himself and for his house and for all the assembly of Israel. Then he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord and make atonement for it, and shall take some of the blood of the bull and some of the blood of the goat, and put it on the horns of the altar all around. And he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, and cleanse it and consecrate it from the uncleannesses of the people of Israel.
Cleansing is a glorious reality of God’s judgment. Listen to verse 30, “For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins.” Who has a negative view of judgment now? Judgment is cleansing for the sake of atonement! It removes the sin that comes between us and our creator. Judgment for the righteous is vindication, deliverance, salvation, grace, atonement…and cleansing! This positive view of judgment is what causes the Psalmist to pray, “Judge me.” (Psalm 34:25).
REASON #5: JUDGMENT IS GOSPEL!
Judgment is sometimes portrayed as a dark, shadow side of an otherwise loving God. On one side he is merciful but on the other side he is just. One side we have the gospel and on the other side we have judgment. There is no such dichotomy. Judgment is the gospel.[1]
This distortion of judgment is vividly portrayed in the belief in an ever-burning hell. It is a horrific scene. But even among Seventh-day Adventists, who do not believe in an ever-burning hell, judgment has been wrongly portrayed as something other than love, something opposed to the gospel, something horrific. Some have made the doctrine of the Investigative Judgment into an Adventist version of hell. As if we might be saved in the end but we have to go through the hell of judgment in order to get there. We must be exposed before a picky God who is looking critically at every single sin in act or thought. Then we must stand before God without an intercessor. Even our art depicting the Investigative Judgment communicates this fearful perspective. It is a cold formal scene as indicated by the suit and tie. The hanging head suggest the emotional devastation we will have to endure. The Ten Commandments that face us, 5 times our size, remind us that we don’t measure up. Some of these portrayals of the Investigative Judgment have earned the doctrine the criticism that it is an anti-gospel heresy. But Christ is the center piece of the doctrine. The first 70 weeks of the prophecy are all about him. He is the High Priest who does the cleansing. When someone is judged to be redeemed, it is his righteousness that secures them that verdict. Judgment is gospel! We don’t have to choose between the investigative judgment and the gospel or between 1844 and the cross!
If I am going to say that judgment is gospel, I should define what I mean by gospel (and there are many different definitions). The word means “good news”. I am using the concept to refer to the good news of the saving work of Jesus by grace through faith. Judgment is part of that! Judgment is where God’s grace is displayed.
Judgment comes into the Bible narrative in the story of the fall. God’s love response to sin was to offer grace and pronounce judgment (Genesis 3:8-24). To not pronounce judgement would have been to perpetually tolerate sin. That isn’t love. This is why God prevented Adam and Eve from accessing the tree of life. He did not want sin to live forever. Ever since the fall God’s consistent response to sin has been to offer grace to the sinner and to pronounce judgment on sin. Judgment is not additional to God’s plan of redemption. It is not an exception to the gospel, it is central to it.
In the book of Judges we see an example of judgment that is in favor of God’s people. God’s people had turned against God and they were in a terrible situation with God (Judges 2:15). So God raised up judges to save them (Judges 2:16). That is what the role of the judge was, salvation. The judge was for the good of the people. Judges 2:18-19 previews a pattern that is repeated in the book of Judges. Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge… But whenever the judge died, they turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers…”
When the judge was present there was salvation. When the judge was no longer present there was corruption and defeat. The gospel requires judgment. Without it, the promises of the gospel are defenseless.
I served on jury duty in a remote Idaho ranching community. The case was like a scene from a wild west film. There was a rancher who worked the land that had been in the family for generations. There was a neighbor who knew nothing of ranching. He moved up from California and brought them city notions with him. Ranchers didn’t much care for that. There was a dispute over water rights. The Californian was mouthy and hard to reason with. One night he was drunk and came mouthing off to the rancher. The rancher, who was about 6’4” with broad shoulders and huge hands, punched him. He was on trial for assault. After hearing the full story, the jury found him not guilty, or at least they were convinced that the other man deserved it. How do you think the rancher felt about judgment? To him it was vindication.
If there lingers in your mind a concept that judgment is bad news, read the accounts of prisoners of war who have been detained without the privilege of getting their case tried in court. Consider those who live under communist regimes who have no benefit of due process. Without the privilege of standing before a judge there is no hope that your charges will be dropped. We are already in bondage. We are already guilty. Judgment is God’s due process to get our charges dropped! To the captive, judgment makes freedom possible.
Still, judgment is bad news… for Satan. Satan tries to flip the picture so that we think of judgment the way he should think of it, with dread. The verdict is what determines if judgment is good news or bad news. We already know the verdict of the judgment. God’s character will be vindicated, and his people will be redeemed!
God wants us to be pure. We know that he will “present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.” (Ephesians 5:27). Do verses like this make you nervous? Really, “without blemish”? These Biblical concepts of purity (Eph. 1:4; Col. 1:22; 2 Peter 3:14) have been portrayed in the Investigative Judgment in some anti-gospel ways. We have to get clean somehow. Do we need to try harder? The Investigative Judgment teeters on the fence between gospel and anti-gospel. Which side of the fence it lands on depends on how we answer the following question. Do we need to get clean in order to pass the judgment or is the judgment part of the process that cleanses us? It is Christ who is cleansing, who is, at this very moment, blotting out our sin and dropping our charges in the sanctuary! Judgment is Gospel!
Jude 24 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy.
REASON #6: JUDGMENT ENDS SIN!
Daniel 8:14 is an answer to a question. Daniel 8:13 is the question.
Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the one who spoke, “For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot?”
The question is “how long?” The context of Daniel 8 (and the whole book) is one of suffering. The characters in the story are waiting for deliverance from captivity, decrees of the king, fiery furnaces, and lions’ dens. The prophecies describe the suffering of those waiting for deliverance from the oppressive little horn power. It gets desperate to the point that the question is asked, “How long?” That is the cry of every suffering heart waiting for deliverance. How long is the question of the slave, the abused, the trafficked, the starving… the sufferer. It is the question Habakkuk cried when he suffered violence (Hab. 1:2) and David asked when he felt abandoned (Psalm 13:1). When martyrs asked this question, they followed it with the solution they were waiting for, judgment (Rev. 6:10). “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?”
Daniel 8:14 is the answer to the “how long” question. It tells us when suffering will be dealt with. The cleansing of the sanctuary is a climax in the narrative when the time every suffer is waiting for comes. Judgment is about ending the suffering. [2]
God will reverse suffering by bringing an end to sin. This us huge! Many belief systems teach the awesome truth that God forgives sin. But they don’t teach that he deals with sin. They don’t teach that sin comes to an end. Instead, they teach that sin and suffering live forever in a place called hell. One of the reasons I am a Seventh-day Adventist is that it is the only belief system I know of that teaches that God actually deals with sin. The cleansing of the sanctuary is part of the judgment process that deals with sin. On the Day of Atonement the High Priest is to lay both hands on the head of a goat to symbolically transfer the sin of the people onto the goat. The goat is taken outside of the camp and released into the wilderness. This goat is a promise that God will remove sin. He will cleanse the sanctuary. Right now, in the heavenly sanctuary, Jesus is building the case to justly destroy sin.
Cleansing includes destruction of sin and those who love it. This is where someone might say, “See there is a negative side of judgment.” I can’t call this negative. It is a positive thing to end sin. It is a good thing to bring an end to suffering. Both the atonement of those who love God and the destruction of those who love sin are loving acts of God. In a sense, God gives everyone what they want. Those who choose God get God. Those who choose sin and death get sin and death. The suffering is not allowed to continue.
The judgment that condemns sin and those who love it make possible a clean sanctuary for us to enjoy forever. It is judgment that makes it possible for every tear to be wiped from our eyes (Revelation 21:4) for sorrow and sighing to flee (Isaiah 35:10), and for us to live with God on a New Earth (a cleansed sanctuary) with no more curse (Revelation 22:3). God forgives sin and he also ends it.
The World Wants What God Offers
The world is crying out for justice! Injustice has always existed in our fallen world. The present culture in America is charged with a spirit of protest against the injustices it sees. The estimated cost of damages caused by riots in 2020 is higher than it has ever been in U.S. history at approximately 2 billion dollars in damage.[3] Most of these riots are linked to social justice issues. Between May 26 and August 22, 2020, there were an estimated 10,600 demonstrations in America, 7,750 of these demonstrations in connection with the Black Lives Matter Movement in over 2,440 different locations across all 50 states and Washington, DC.[4]
Regardless of your political persuasion, there is no doubt that there is an intense interest in justice. The culture is crying out for systemic change, climate change, racial justice, gender equality, immigrant and refugee justice, protection against elder abuse, equality in voting laws, environmental laws, education laws, and labor laws…
The world wants justice. But they don’t want God. Ironic, isn’t it? God’s justice in judgment is seen as harsh. It is used as evidence to argue that God is not love. But the world’s lack of justice is seen as wrong. What the world is crying for is what God offers. He is the only one who offers perfect justice for all. The world is looking for a substitute for what God already offers in the cleansing of the sanctuary. Many are unwittingly crying out for what God offers while simultaneously rejecting it. God’s just judgement is what our hearts are hurting for. If we saw God’s justice in the correct light, while other go to the street to riot we would go to God in prayer, crying out “How long?”.
You probably still have unanswered questions about the cleansing of the sanctuary, I do too. But one thing I don’t question is that the cleansing of the sanctuary is good news. Daniel 8:14 reminds us Jesus is currently cleansing us and the entire universe from the disease of sin and suffering… forever!
[1] Related articles by Jiøí Moskala Toward a Biblical Theology of God’s Judgment & The Gospel According to God’s Judgment
[2] Related Article The Compass Magazine The Death and Rebirth of the Investigative Judgment, Part 4: Reframing the Judgment – The Compass Magazine (I recommend the full series)
[3] https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/09/16/the-financial-cost-of-recent-riots-has-been-tabulated-n2576294
[4] https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/