Psalm 84: 1-2, 10
How lovely is Your dwelling-place, O Lord of Heaven's armies. I long, yes I faint with longing to enter the courts of the Lord. With my whole being; body and soul, I will shout joyfully to the living God.
A single day in Your courts is better than a thousand anywhere else! I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house of my God than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.
God Himself is the One I long for. His dwelling-place is glorious because He is full of Glory. He has placed His beauty into everything He has made, and given it all to us to enjoy: the sunrises and sunsets, the flowers of the fields, the beauties of the desert and the mountains. Every terrain has its own beauty, different from every other. And even every star and planet and asteroid is different from every other.
How much more beautiful and pleasant is His own Home. He gives us a taste of His Goodness on this planet, Earth, to whet our appetites for the glories of His Heaven, to which He invites us.
God is so good, so perfect, so pure that He cannot allow any impaired being to live with Him in His Heaven. Since each one of us is born as a "creature of wrath by nature" (Ephesians 2:3), God had to make the supreme sacrifice to send His own Son to remedy this problem. He gave all the sacrifices in the First Covenant (The Law) to show us what His Son would accomplish, because the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin (Hebrews 10:4), just cover it. So those who put their hand on the head of the lamb, which then was sacrificed, dying for the person's sin instead of the person, and its blood splashed onto the sides of the altar (Leviticus Chapter 1), could be forgiven, but could not enter Heaven, but went to Sheol, the place of the dead.
Jesus gave us a picture of this place, as having two sides, the paradise side and the fiery side we call Hell (Luke 16:19-31, the Rich Man and Lazarus).
Jesus told us that He didn't come to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17), so when we look at all the precepts in the Law, we can trust that Jesus fulfilled the letter of each one of these rules. Including that first sacrifice, the personal one, that each individual needed in order to even begin a relationship with God. Jesus is the Lamb of God, the perfect Sacrifice, whose blood is God's own Blood, shed on His altar, the Cross, to not only cover sins, but actually wash them all away!
So when we figuratively place our hand on the head of this Lamb, conferring our sins onto Him, admitting that we deserve the death He suffered; then His precious Blood washes away our sins, and makes us pure to be fitted to live with God in His Heaven. This is how much He loves each one of us. He is not willing that any of humankind should perish, but that every one of us would come to the place of repentance and let Jesus take our place in death (II Peter 3:9). When we have died with Him, then we will also live with Him (II Timothy 2:11), in His Resurrection life.
And then we will be clothed in appropriate clothing for God's perfect Heaven (Revelation 19:7-8), instead of the filthy sin-rags we have worn on this Earth (Isaiah 64:6).
If you have not come to the place of being able to admit that your personal sins earn you the paycheck of death (Romans 6:23), and let Jesus take your death as the perfect Sacrifice on His altar the Cross, then pray to God to grant you the gift of faith to believe in His Grace to receive the free gift of Salvation (Ephesians 2:8).
Then you, too, can long for that perfect, wonderful Heaven God has prepared for us.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
