The Call to the Altar: Exploring Altars from Eden to the Cross and Into Eternity
Phillips, Robert
Synopsis "The Call to the Altar: Exploring Altars from Eden to the Cross and Into Eternity"
For the first 79 verses of Genesis, man had direct, personal access to God in the Garden. Then that doorway closed — and altars began to rise in its place.Altars are not just places of sacrifice — they are places of exchange, portals where heaven meets earth, and once Eden closed, they became the next meeting place with God. Noah raised the first one outside the Garden; Abraham, Jacob, and countless others raised them across the wilderness after him, each mark of the same exchange with heaven repeated generation after generation until Jesus Himself became our altar — sacrifice, priest, and meeting place all at once. And we're still building altars today, almost daily, whether intentional or not — altars of fear, lust, greed, self-reliance, and more. When the New Jerusalem finally descends from heaven, we come full circle: no altar will ever be needed again.In the meantime, two questions remain. How do we identify and tear down the altars in our own lives — the ones built for our harm, often without our even realizing it? And how do we raise altars of worship and praise instead, the kind our own descendants might one day revisit, the way Jacob returned to his grandfather's altar at Bethel?Come with me, and let's take a look at all of this and more — a largely uncharted territory hiding in plain sight through nearly every book of the Bible: the altar.