Patterns

Whether you’re a seamstress making a dress, a carpenter cutting a counter top for a sink or a machinist making parts for a power plant, it is essential to have a pattern to guide you.  In car manufacturing a scale model or prototype is usually made of the new body design. 

Patterns are extremely useful, but they are representations of something but not the real thing itself.  Besides all types of physical patterns, we also see patterns in a person’s behavior that we give psychological names and patterns of symptoms that doctors may call a syndrome.

When the people of Israel came out of Egypt, God gave Moses very detailed instructions for building the tabernacle where they were to worship during their forty years in the wilderness.   In addition, there were many elaborate ceremonies of preparations and animal sacrifices that had to be carried out in precise detail.

In the New Testament we learn that all of these things were mere patterns of heavenly and spiritual realities that were revealed through Jesus in His crucifixion and payment for the sins of the world in His own blood.

Looking all the way back to creation, we see God in the very beginning saying, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.”   In some way, then, the first humans were an earthly representation of a heavenly pattern.  Even today, though badly flawed and weakened, we still bear His image in a distorted sort of way.

Have you noticed the stark difference between the patterns we use and the ones God uses?   Ours are of lower quality and usefulness than the things represented while His are of a higher order and far superior to the things of earth that they represent.  In His unfathomable wisdom He has purposefully built-in throughout His creation discoverable patterns to teach us truths about Himself and the unseen realities of the spiritual realm.

Take, for example, the seasons of the year.  They teach us in graphic display how life springs forth in all its glory from the seeming deadness of winter.  Then, there is the seed that must be buried and die in order to sprout and become a living, flourishing plant.  Both of these are clear illustrations of the new birth, passing from death to life that we may obtain by faith in Jesus, and, ultimately, our physical resurrection.  But my favorite pattern of the new life and resurrection in Christ is that of the butterfly, which has been transformed into a beautiful creature and set free from its lowly caterpillar state.

I could be wrong, but I would not be surprised to see some kinds of animals or animal-like creatures in Heaven, ones that are the pattern for earthly animals we know.   Horses are mentioned, for example (though it may symbolic), that Jesus and the “armies of Heaven” will ride on.  I have no Biblical proof, but expect to see creatures far superior and more beautiful there than what we can imagine.

Why even be concerned about such matters as “patterns?”   My point is that in everything around us there is a unity of God’s purpose.  He has taken great pains to reveal truth to us, especially the truth of Himself.  Some patterns are in plain view, others like the makeup of the atom are discoverable only through advanced scientific research.  No matter where we turn or how deeply we look, we will continue to find by His grace evidence of His design and illustrations of truth.

For Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us. – Hebrews 9:24