The Gold Wires of the Ephod
In Exodus 39:3 it is written, “And he made the ephod of gold, blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen. And they did beat the gold into thin plates, and cut it into wires, to work it in the blue, and in the purple, and in the scarlet, and in the fine linen, with cunning work” (verses 2, 3). The ephod was the principal garment of the high priest, and attached to it was the breastplate with its precious stones on which were engraved the “names of the children of Israel.” Onyx stones, enclosed in ouches of gold, with the same names engraven in them, were for the shoulders of the high priest, and these were also attached to the ephod, which was therefore the garment of priestly office.
The colours of the ephod bring before us glories and features of the Lord Jesus. Fine linen, which would form the basic material of the ephod, presents the Manhood of the Lord, and especially His righteousness, manifested in all the beautiful details of His life in this world. This is confirmed in Revelation 19:8, “the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.” When the Lord washed the feet of His disciples, as recorded in John 13, He was girded with a linen towel.
Blue is the colour of heaven, and in it we see the heavenly Manhood of Jesus. The human nature of Jesus, received from His mother, was pure and perfect, for He was born “that holy thing,” and He was “the holy, the harmless, the undefiled, separate from sinners” in His life while here below. Yet, though born of Mary, He was nevertheless out of heaven. The life in which He lived had never been seen here before. Every moment of that holy life was lived for the will and pleasure of God, and for the good of those around Him. His dependence on God was constant, His obedience even unto death was perfect, and His submission to God’s will complete. All this, with the carrying out of His Father’s will, even though it cost Him infinite sorrow and suffering, yielded unbroken delight to His Father, and ascended as a sweet savour without intermission.
Purple, the imperial colour of Rome, brings out the glory of the Lord as Son of Man, the One who will take up the kingdoms of the world, when they become the kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ. As King of kings, and Lord of lords, His sway will be universal, and this in the widest sense, for all things in heaven as well as on the earth will come under Him as Man in the coming day. The glory of the Son of Man will be public in the day of His kingdom, but faith perceives it now, as Stephen saw it, in the presence of His Father, and on His throne. The moral glory of the Son of Man shone brightly down here, but men could not see it unless the eyes of their heart were opened; and it never shone more brightly than when He gave Himself in death to glorify His Father (John 13:31-32).
Scarlet is the royal colour of Israel, and with this they clothed the Lord in mockery (Matt. 27:28), when they put the crown of thorns on His head, and bowed the knee before Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Those who thus mocked Him will yet see Him in His glory as King of Israel, and they will be compelled to bow the knee before Him, and from His lips they will receive the righteous sentence on their mockery, and on all their sins. He is indeed, Israel’s King, and God brought the Magi from the east, at His birth into the world, to say, “Where is He that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen His star in the east, and are come to worship Him” (Matt. 2:2). Soon the day will come when He will take the kingdom that the leaders of Israel refused Him when He came the first time.
Gold speaks of the divine glory of the Son of God. The gold for the ephod was beaten into plates, then cut into fine wires so that it might be worked into each of the colours, and be seen in every part of the ephod. Surely the Spirit of God is teaching us in this that we cannot view the Lord Jesus in any of these varied features of glory already considered without beholding His divine glory as Son of God. We can distinguish the perfections of the Manhood of the Lord Jesus, but we can never separate them from what He is as God’s own Son, the darling of His heart.
Each Gospel presents the Lord to us in some special feature, but not in an exclusive way. If Matthew specially brings the Lord before us as the son of Abraham, the Son of David, the One in whom all God’s promises to Abraham and David are fulfilled, and as God’s King, this feature is not exclusive to Matthew, for the Lord is seen as King in some part of the other Gospels. This is especially true of the divine glory of the Lord. John is the writer, chosen of the Holy Spirit to portray the divine glory of the Lord, to show Him as a divine Person in this world, but every other Gospel also shows the Lord as Son of God. Like the gold in the ephod, the fine wires are to be seen whenever we look at Him, for it is One who is God and Man who is seen in every movement of His life.
If then in Matthew the Lord is specially seen as King of Israel, the One of whom the scarlet speaks, He is nevertheless the Son of God, and this is seen in the opening chapter of Matthew, where it is written, “Behold a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His Name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” Simon Peter also proclaims this in Matthew, by the revelation of the Father, where he says, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). How delightful to the eye of the true believer to see the gold shine in the wire of the scarlet, to see that the One who is Israel’s Messiah and King is also the Son of God, God with us.
In Mark’s Gospel, where the Lord is portrayed as the true Servant and Prophet of God, the gold wire is seen in the very first verse, where the Spirit of God causes His servant Mark to write, “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” How blessed and wonderful that the Son of God should take a bondman’s form, and be found here in service to God, carrying out all the will of God for the blessing of men who had sinned against Him; but the Holy Spirit would never allow us to forget the divine glory of Him who had stooped so low in wondrous grace.
Throughout Mark’s Gospel, where we see the fine twined linen and the purple very prominent, with appearances too of the scarlet and the blue, yet in all we can trace, “curiously wrought”, in the divine workmanship of the inspiring Spirit of God, the strands of pure gold that bring out the divine glory of the Person of Jesus. In the perfection of His Manhood He sleeps amidst the storm, but the pure gold is seen when He rebukes the wind and calm ensues. All His miracles show the golden wires, also His words, as when He asked the people, “How say the scribes that Christ is the Son of David? For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The Lord said to my Lord…” (Mark 12:35-36). And when they had crucified the Lord, the golden wire shines out in the words of the centurion, “Truly this Man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39).
The blue of the Man out of heaven is most prominent in Luke, but the Spirit of God shows us His weaving of the golden wire in chapter 1, where the angel says to Mary concerning the holy Babe, “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest…therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:32, 35). What He is as Man may be distinguished from His Godhead glory, but they cannot be separated; the gold is divinely woven into the blue.
We cannot think of Him as God’s salvation, as spoken by the aged Simeon, or hear Him forgiving sins, without seeing the wires of pure gold that tell of His divine glory and Personal greatness. The same cunning workmanship of the Spirit of God is seen when He tells of the Son of God, as a true Man, fulfilling all righteousness, in being baptized, then giving us to listen to the Father’s voice saying, “Thou art my beloved Son; in Thee I am well pleased.” The raising from the dead of the widow of Nain’s son, and of the daughter of Jairus, show us more of the strands of the golden wire.
In John’s Gospel, the gold is most prominent, though the scarlet, the blue, the purple and the fine linen all appear. There the divine glory shines prominently on every page, the opening verses taking us back into eternity, where the Son is viewed in His own Personal and divine glory as the creator of all things, and the One who has life in Himself inherently. In Jesus we see a divine Person in Manhood, the eternal Word become flesh, that God might be revealed in His nature of love, and that the Name of the Father might be made known.
How brightly the gold shines in the miracles of Cana of Galilee, and in the Revealer of secrets at Sychar’s well. In chapter 5 all men are to honour the Son even as they honour the Father, and the Son quickens whom He will. All in their graves will hear His voice and come forth, and even now He gives eternal life to those who believe in Him, and He will raise them in the last day. If men seek to dim the shining of the gold, it but makes it shine the brighter, compelling Him to say, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
From every chapter of John’s Gospel we can see the shining of the pure gold, whether it be in His words that He received from the Father to communicate, or in the works that belonged to the Father. None but a divine Person could reveal what God is, only the Son could say, “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” When He speaks to His own, after His testimony to the world is over, and when He speaks to the Father Himself, the gold is seen in all its purity and glory. Rising from the dead, Thomas confesses Him as “My Lord and my God,” and the evangelist closes his Gospel with the words, “If they (the things done by the Son of God in this world) should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” In John it is not simply the strands of gold seen, not only the pure golden wire, but the plates of gold from which the wires were cut.
In the epistles of the New Testament, where testimony is given to the risen Christ, the divine glory is specially seen in such chapters as Colossians i and Hebrews i, which present many glories, and among them the creatorial glory of the Son. He is “over all, God blessed for ever” (Rom. 9:5); He delivers up the kingdom to Him who is God and Father, that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, “may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), and “being in the form of God” came down as Man to enter into death (Phil.2:6-10), an act of His own volition. The strands of gold are found interwoven with the colours of the ephod throughout the Pauline epistles.
As God’s High Priest, the Son of God wears the ephod in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and is “crowned with glory and honour,” having the priestly crown upon His brow on high, and the stones upon His breast and on His shoulders. Do we not see the pure gold in the opening verses, “Who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His Person, and upholding all things by the word of His own power…”? The Apostle Peter views Jesus in His glory as the One “ready to judge the quick and the dead” (1 Peter 4:5), and as saluted from heaven as the Father’s well-beloved Son, while in John’s 1st Epistle, He is the true God, and eternal life.
Only the Son of God could wear the true ephod, with its various colours permeated with the wires of gold, and how highly privileged the saints of this day are to be able, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to contemplate the manifold glories of the Son, to meditate upon the many offices that He fills, and to trace, in some feeble way, the divine glories presented to us in the Scriptures that are indicated in the wires of gold that were seen interwoven with the colours in the ephod.
R. 8.12.66.