Heaven Is
Working on Something

The Tabernacle Was a Blueprint of Something Real

When God gave Moses instructions for the tabernacle in Exodus 25, he said something significant: “Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.” The earthly sanctuary was not an original design. It was a copy, a physical representation of something real that exists in heaven.

Hebrews 8:5 confirms this: the earthly priests served “at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven.” The whole sacrificial system, the priests, the offerings, the annual Day of Atonement when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies with blood, was a multi-century visual lesson in how sin is dealt with and how relationship with God is restored. It was preparation for understanding what Jesus would do, not just on the cross, but in the heavenly sanctuary afterward.

The shadow points to the reality. And the reality is Jesus, our great high priest, who entered the true Holy of Holies with his own blood, not for one nation, but for all of humanity.

An Advocate Who Has Been There

Hebrews 4:14–16 is one of the most personally significant passages in the New Testament. Jesus is our great high priest. And crucially: he is not unable to empathize with our weaknesses. He was tempted in every way, just as we are. He has been there. He knows what your life feels like from the inside.

Because of this, we are invited to approach God’s throne of grace not with fear or shame but with confidence. Not because we have earned it. Because we have an advocate who is presenting our case not based on our performance but based on his. On your worst day, Jesus is still your high priest, still interceding, still bringing your name before the Father.

This matters practically. It changes how you pray. It changes how you come to God after failure. You are not approaching a judge looking for reasons to condemn you. You are approaching a throne of grace, with someone standing there who knows your name and has already paid for your seat.

Think about what it means to have someone in your corner who already knows your worst moments and is still advocating for you. Not defending what you did, but standing with you. That is the picture. Jesus is not presenting your case to the Father by pretending the hard parts do not exist. He is presenting your case on the basis of what he has already done for you. His record, not yours. And that means no matter what you walked in with today, your access to God does not depend on how clean your week was.

Wheat and Tares: Trusting God’s Timing

In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a parable about a farmer who sows good seed. During the night, an enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. When the plants begin to grow, the workers notice the weeds and ask whether they should pull them out. The farmer says no: if you pull the weeds now, you will uproot the wheat with them. Let them grow together until the harvest. At harvest time, the reapers will sort them.

This parable speaks directly to the question of why God does not immediately separate good from evil, why the broken and the healing, the faithful and the faithless, grow side by side in the same field. It is not because God cannot tell the difference. It is because the sorting process, done prematurely, would cause more damage than it prevents.

The investigative judgment described in Daniel 7, books opened, cases reviewed before the final verdict, is God’s harvest process done with complete transparency. Every decision is an open book. The entire universe can examine the record. No one will be able to say that God acted arbitrarily. The wheat and the tares will be sorted, but not until the harvest is ready and the separation can be made without harming what is good.

There is something in this parable for how a community eats together. The field is mixed and God has decided to let it stay mixed until the harvest, which means the room you gather in is going to contain people at wildly different stages, some of them a mess, some of them not who they appear to be. Jesus knew that when he handed bread to the man who was about to sell him. A table that only admits sorted people is not the table he set.

It is worth naming what this means for how you treat the people around you. If God himself declines to do the sorting early because premature sorting damages what is good, that is a fairly direct instruction about how much energy you should be putting into sorting your neighbors, your family, or the person in this group whose life is currently a mess. That work is taken. It is not yours.