THE RIGHT OF ENTRY

     ’I will give thee places to walk among these that stand
     by.’—­ZECHARIAH iii. 7.

A WORD or two of explanation will probably be necessary in order to see the full meaning of this great promise.  The Prophet has just been describing a vision of judgment which he saw, in which the high priest, as representative of the nation, stood before the Angel of the Lord as an unclean person.  He is cleansed and clothed, his foul raiment stripped off him, and a fair priestly garment, with ‘Holiness to the Lord’ written on the front of it, put upon him.  And then follow a series of promises, of which the climax is the one that I have read.  ’I will give thee a place of access,’ says the Revised Version, instead of ’places to walk’; ‘I will give thee a place of access among those that stand by’; the attendant angels are dimly seen surrounding their Lord.  And so the promise of my text, in highly figurative fashion, is that of free and unrestrained approach to God, of a life that is like that of the angels that stand before His Face.

So, then, the words suggest to us, first, what a Christian life may be.

There are two images blended together in the great words of my text; the one is that of a king’s court, the other is that of a temple.  With regard to the former it is a privilege given to the highest nobles of a kingdom—­or it was so in old days—­to have the right of entree, at all moments and in all circumstances, to the monarch.  With regard to the latter, the prerogative of the high priest, who was the recipient of this promise, as to access to the Temple, was a very restricted one.  Once a year, with the blood that prevented his annihilation by the brightness of the Presence into which he ventured, he passed within the veil, and stood before that mysterious Light that coruscated in the darkness of the Holy of Holies.  But this High Priest is promised an access on all days and at all times; and that He may stand there, beside and like the seraphim, who with one pair of wings veiled their faces in token of the incapacity of the creature to behold the Creator; ’with twain veiled their feet’ in token of the unworthiness of creatural activities to be set before Him, ‘and with twain did fly’ in token of their willingness to serve Him with all their energies.  This Priest passes within the veil when He will.  Or, to put away the two metaphors, and to come to the reality far greater than either of them, we can, whensoever we please, pass into the presence before which the splendours of an earthly monarch’s court shrink into vulgarity, and attain to a real reception of the light that irradiates the true Holy Place, before which that which shone in the earthly shrine dwindles and darkens into a shadow.  We may live with God, and in Him, and wrap a veil and ’privacy of glorious light’ about us, whilst we pilgrim upon earth, and may have hidden lives which, notwithstanding