March 23 – Exodus Week 12

As we follow God, he is present with us.

This week we’ll summarize roughly ten chapters worth of material on the Tabernacle, and we’ll do so by looking mostly at the purpose of the Tabernacle before connecting it and its purpose to Jesus. This is, in brief, to look at God’s overarching desire to dwell with his people and to see all that he was willing to do in order to make this happen, a truth that profoundly affects our daily life. For a more thoroughgoing (and nerdy) discussion of this big biblical plot line, check out Episode 3 of our Exodus Podcast.

We’ll start with God’s introductory comments about the Tabernacle, which God gave to Moses at the beginning of Moses’s forty days up on Mt. Sinai. Next week we’ll look at how everything fell to pieces among the Israelites while he was up there, but for now, we’ll simply note God’s preamble for the following six chapters that go into great detail about what the Tabernacle shall look like and contain. In 25:1-9, we see how the Tabernacle will be constructed through contributions from the people, and you already can tell the thing is going to be a work of art incorporating various precious stones, metals, even textiles. Give it a quick Google and you’ll have an idea of the Tabernacle’s appearance, which was essentially a mobile temple in the form of an elaborate tent.

We’ll skip a lot of the details given in Exodus about the Tabernacle and its construction, save for a quick question about why we think God was so specific about all these details. There’s much we could say about this—God loves beauty, God wanted the Israelites to treasure his presence, God insists on precise obedience, God wants his people to worship with all their senses, etc.—but one thing especially to focus on would be the specifications for worship, the altar and various furnishings and protocols for how sacrifices should be made and the Holy of Holies should be maintained.

You’ll see a quick mention of God’s presence in the midst of his people there in verse 8, but we’ll jump ahead to Exodus 29:38-46 to elaborate and see more clearly the purpose of the Tabernacle. In that passage, 38-42a talk about daily sacrificial worship while 42b-46 explain the Tabernacle as a place for God to meet with his people, speak to them, sanctify them, dwell among them, and reveal himself to them (“they shall know that I am the LORD their God”).

We might get lost in all the construction specifications and appearances, but this is the core thing we’re meant to see about the Tabernacle: it was a way for a holy God to dwell in the midst of an unholy people. Because of their sin, he could not dwell with them in an unmediated or unrestricted fashion (as we’ve seen the past few weeks in his rules about the people coming up on the mountain); thus his presence would remain behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies. And yet his call to his people to create this place of meeting reveals his desire to meet with his people.

We’ll then jump to John 1:9-18 to see how this desire reaches its fulfillment in Jesus, who also provides the solution to our unholiness. There we’ll see how Jesus’s incarnation is put in the same exact terms as the Tabernacle; God has come to dwell in the midst of his people. And this is no coincidence, since the Greek word in verse 14 for ‘dwell’ is from the same word for Tabernacle, such that it could otherwise be translated “to pitch one’s tent.” John was pointedly connecting Jesus’s arrival with the Tabernacle to show how Christ is the fulfillment of God’s desire to dwell with his people (cf. Heb 9:1-14). All of God’s efforts in human history, from the Garden to the cross to the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21-22, are about creating a people with whom he could dwell, going so far as to send his Son to die on the cross in order to make this happen.

We’ll use our last two questions to see how this truth impacts our lives. This can erode any assumptions about God being aloof, disgruntled, or otherwise bothered by the thought of being around us, and it can warm our hearts to feel his love poured out for us through Jesus (Rom 5:5). Fellowship with God; real, loving friendship with him—that is what you were made for! This can stir our hearts to worship, and reveal any hesitations we have due either to doubts about his love or to mislaid affections within us (ex. It’s great God loves me and all, but really what I want is _____). We could talk at length in our last question about how this might affect our daily lives, how we might freedom from things like pursuing approval from others, crafting a perfect identity for yourself, struggling to love your neighbor, or chasing empty promises, simply by knowing that, in Christ, God has desired our presence with him and secured it for all eternity.