“They are to make a sanctuary for me so that I may dwell among them. You must make it according to all that I show you – the pattern of the Tabernacle as well as the pattern of all its furnishings.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is God’s plan for His world? That’s an awfully big question for which there are more answers than we could hope to address in a single blog post. But when we begin to take stock of some big patterns we find in the Scriptures, we find ourselves able to say some things with a little more clarity and confidence than others. What we see here as God prepares to start giving Israel instructions for constructing a place for them to worship gives us a clue as to what at least one of God’s big goals is. Let’s explore what’s going on here together.

This is actually a topic I explored in more detail that we’re going to give to it here in a sermon from a couple of weeks ago. In fact, the blog kernel came first, then the sermon, and now I’m actually writing the blog. That’s all to say, I’m not going to give this a ton of time today. If you want the more detailed exploration that was paired with Hebrews 9, here’s the link to that post. What I want to do today is simply to recap that big idea and explore one more thing in this passage that I didn’t touch on in the sermon.

God tells Moses two things here that matter. The first is the reason for the tabernacle. As far as the people of Israel understood then, gods were generally not mobile. It wasn’t so much that they were confined to a particular space, but they were regional. They all had their spheres of power and influence, and they didn’t really go beyond those at all. The way a particular god’s territory of influence got expanded was when the people who worshiped it militarily conquered a neighboring people and imported the worship of their god into their new territory. In this sense, gods were all limited to what their people could accomplish on their behalf. Also, the gods all had physical bodies and lived in a physical place. Where exactly that was varied, but one of the main purposes of temples then was to provide a house for the god to live in. With the god dwelling among his people like that, the umbrella of his power extended over the community or land around the temple. The more powerful the god, the more powerful the umbrella.

That’s all how Israel would have thought about God in that day. Although they recognized Him as more powerful than other gods (most notably the gods of Egypt which He had just humiliated in His conquest of them), they didn’t think of Him as all that different from other gods. The idea that there were no gods other than Yahweh, that they were all just made-up figments of their worshipers’ imagination hadn’t developed yet. They weren’t capable of understanding it yet, and so God didn’t yet reveal that particular truth to them. That idea when it was introduced, was unique to Israel. All their neighbors and most people around the world at the time may not have worshiped all the gods, but they certainly believed they existed. The idea that your god was the only god would have been silly to them.

Because all of this was how Israel thought about gods, their God had to meet them where they were. As a result, He directed them to build Him a house. Did He need a house? Of course not. But the people needed Him to have a house in order to really grasp that He was with them, that His presence dwelt among them. This house, though, was different from the norm of the day. For starters, it was a tent, and not a formal building. As we will see, the tent had wooden walls, but it was a cloth top. It could be set up and taken down and moved to wherever they happened to be going. What’s more, the tent didn’t have an idol in it.

That was probably the most significant difference between Israel’s tabernacle (and later temple) and every other temple in the world. There was no body in it. That was on purpose. They needed to start making a break from thinking of God as having a physical form that could be worshiped. They needed to begin thinking of Him as spirit. That was going to be key to developing other correct thoughts about Him in the future as He gradually took them from where they were to where they were going. His goal, though, was to be among them to build a relationship with them. It was to help them understand that He was among them so they could think of themselves as building a relationship with Him. This was the beginning of what would be a very long process to the different, more developed, and better understanding we have of what that’s like today, but it had to start somewhere.

The other thing God told Moses here was that the whole project was to be done according to design. That design in all its detail is what we will get into starting tomorrow, and we are going to see this idea repeated over and over again throughout the description. God will remind Moses several times that Israel is to build the tabernacle according to the design he was shown on the mountain. Israel was to build this house, but God was the one who was going to design it. Yes, there were going to be some minor details left to them, but not many. This was a revealed project, not something Israel was coming up with on their own.

The reason for this goes back to what we were talking about just a second ago. If Israel built what they knew and understood how to build, it was going to wind up being basically like what everybody else had. That was how their minds worked. If God was going to get them to think differently than everybody else thought (and, just as an aside, the times Israel got themselves in the most trouble throughout their history within the boundaries of the Old Testament was when they started thinking like the people around them instead of the people God was creating them to be), He was going to have to direct the process step by step, including exactly what and how the tabernacle was to be built. He was making them to be different, but He was going to have to show them how to be different because they weren’t going to get it on their own. Keep all of this in mind as we go forward with looking at the actual plans from here.

This, friends, is the connection point for us. God still wants to be in a relationship with us, and He still wants us to be different from the people around us. To put some theological language on that, He wants us to be righteous and holy. Like with Israel, though, this is still not something we can come to on our own. He’s got to be with us and directing us if we are going to get it right. Thankfully, now, instead of having to go to a particular place in order to experience His presence, or waiting to hear from a particular person in order to receive His direction, through Jesus’ reconciling work, the presence of the Holy Spirit in us when we follow Him, and the Scriptures, we have access to all of that everywhere we go. We have the full version of what Israel was only prototyping, but God’s goals have always been the same. When we lean into Him and His direction, the outcome of blessing for us and for the people around us will always be the same as well.