When I was in elementary school, our summer mornings consisted of waking up and running out to the kitchen to see if the counting jar was on the counter.

The counting jar was the brilliant invention of my wise mother, who knew that if my siblings and I devoted our brains solely to VeggieTales and Marco Polo all summer, August would be quite a shock to the system.

The counting jar was simply that—a glass jar with different objects in it. Over the years, it held everything from paper clips to pencils to Legos, but my personal favorites were the M&M mornings. Next to the jar would be our handwritten worksheets, which usually asked us to estimate how many M&Ms were in the jar, count them, sort them by color, make a bar graph, and then, of course, eat a few. Which felt deliciously forbidden around breakfast time.

Simple as it was, Mom knew that counting M&Ms would not only keep my brain engaged over the summer but would also pave the way for me to understand broader principles. If I couldn’t sort or categorize or graph to this day, I would be pretty awful at reporting sales data and analyzing inventory in my job.

The M&Ms were tangible, physical, temporary. They were great training wheels, but they could only carry me so far when it came to the scope of what I would need to know. My education had so much more for me, and the M&Ms could only hint at the bigger world of pie charts and forecasts and educated guesses.

I find that we often learn that way—moving from tangible to intangible, from temporary to permanent, from shadow to reality. Our brains can grasp a principle better when we have an example. We understand a plan once we see a precursor.

I can’t help but think that God wrote the story of time in much the same way.

He knew that giving us the chance to wrap our minds around something physical but temporary would help us understand something spiritual and eternal. His plan to make man right with Him was revealed in stages, one intended to foreshadow the next.

Before Jesus came, God interacted with humanity under the old covenant, which was limited and temporary and earthly by design.

The Law was given to reveal imperfection but couldn’t bring about perfection. The sacrifices could cover sin, but they couldn’t take it away. The priests could go between God and the people for a time, but they themselves were flawed.

The temple housing God’s presence was a physical building on earth. The vehicle revealing God’s presence was a physical nation on earth.

The elements of His plan to restore fellowship with man were all there, but they were designed to be short-lived. The very nature of the covenant begged for something better.

And that was God’s intent all along.

He used physical things repeated over and over—lambs, blood, priests, commandments—to warm our minds up to truths beyond what we could see. He started small and then finished His own story by introducing us to the full reality.

Under the new covenant, the Law is now written not on stone, but on our hearts by faith. Jesus’ one-time sacrifice was sufficient to remove sin completely. Since He lived as God on earth, a man who never sinned, He is the perfect mediator between God and man.

The temple is now the bodies of believers instead of a building. The vehicle of His presence is now a spiritual nation made up of people from all over the world.

Physical became spiritual. Tangible became intangible. Temporary became permanent.

He set up a limited, incomplete system, to show us that He was the only one who could complete it.

He answered the demands of His own holiness with His grace. He satisfied His own judgment while offering us mercy. He did away with a precarious system full of shaky things like imperfect priests and insufficient sacrifices and replaced it with a Kingdom that cannot be shaken, made possible by a great High Priest and a once-for-all sacrifice.

The story of redemption begins and ends with Him. Hallelujah, what a Savior.

Despite its shortcomings, I’m glad for the old covenant. Its execution on earth helps me understand the reality of heaven, and the ways it was incomplete only make me more in awe of the ways I can relate to God now.

So as I wake up on summer mornings now to Excel charts instead of M&Ms and graph paper, I’m thankful that I also wake up to an accessible, approachable Mount Zion instead of a smoking Mount Sinai where the divide between God and me was so clear.

His whole plan is perfect—the transition from old to new, from physical to spiritual, from limited to eternal. May we be grateful for our place in the story.