Imagine the One who can satisfy God making that satisfaction available to get us into Heaven!
In our minds, let’s see this beautiful ark. Ark in Hebrew is ’arown and can be translated chest. The ark was, in fact, God’s hope chest! All His hopes for a heavenly Home filled with a loving forever family were invested in one Person—His Son. Before the world ever needed a Savior, Christ covenanted with His Father to sacrifice Himself, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8), and by this could bring “many sons to glory” (Heb 2:10). When we read “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19), we see how, in Christ, God could say, “there I will meet with you, and I will speak with you” (Ex 25:22). The word used for Mercy Seat in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, is hilasterion, the same word used for “propitiation” in Romans 3:24-25, “being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith.” Propitiation means that Christ’s wrath-absorbing sacrifice was fully satisfactory to God. He is the Mercy Seat, where God can meet with us because of Christ’s shed blood. When we are satisfied with Him, through faith we are saved. The chest was made of pure gold that is discovered, like His deity, and indestructible wood that grows, like His humanity. It isn’t hard to see the layers in these verses: “God…has in these last days spoken to us by His Son [the incarnate One, like the acacia wood]…who being the [outshining] of His glory [gold on the outside] and the express image of His person [gold on the inside],…when He had by Himself purged our sins [the Mercy Seat where the blood was applied], sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb 1:1-3). Yes, Christ is God’s hope chest!