“Now Moses took a tent and pitched it outside the camp, at a distance from the camp; he called it the tent of meeting. Anyone who wanted to consult the Lord would go to the tent of meeting that was outside the camp. Whenever Moses went out to the tent, all the people would stand up, each one at the door of his tent, and they would watch Moses until he entered the tent. When Moses entered the tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and remain at the entrance to the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses. As all the people saw the pillar of cloud remaining at the entrance to the tent, they would stand up, then bow in worship, each one at the door of his tent. The Lord would speak with Moses face to face, just as a man speaks with his friend, then Moses would return to the camp. His assistant, the young man Joshua son of Nun, would not leave the inside of the tent.” (CSB – Read the chapter)‬‬

The best relationships are our closest ones. That’s not the same thing as saying they are the easiest. The easiest ones are the most distant because those require the least of us. The closest relationships are often the hardest because when we get close we can see—and experience—each other’s faults and flaws in ways that cause inconvenience, frustration, and pain. But closer is better. Broken relationships are often distant. In this next part of the story, we see Israel experiencing distance from God. Let’s talk about judgment, relational distance, and why what we have in Jesus is so much better.

We spent several weeks slowly working our way through the description of the tabernacle. (When we come back to it in a few weeks where the text is largely the same, but the focus has shifted to its being built, we won’t take quite so long and will just emphasize the key passages.) God’s introductions to Moses for how to build it were incredibly detailed and specific. The whole purpose of the tabernacle was to be a place right at the center of camp where the presence of God dwelt among His people.

Just as Moses was preparing to go back down the mountain from receiving all the instructions from God, and to lead the people in building the elaborate tent, God told him what was going on back down in camp, and the whole process got short-circuited. Now, instead of a fancy tent right in the middle of camp where everybody could benefit from the presence of God, Moses has had to set up a tent out beyond the edge of the camp where he and Joshua, his faithful disciple, are the only ones to experience it.

This was not how things were intended to go. Now, instead of getting to experience God for themselves, the people all watch from their own tents as Moses goes out to experience him on their behalf. They would worship from where they were, but that was as close as they could get.

This is what sin does in our relationships. It creates distance. It creates separation. Closer is better, but sin makes it so we can’t be close. It makes us hide from each other. It makes intimacy impossible.

The thing is, though, that this was the people’s fault. God didn’t want this. This wasn’t His plan. The people chose to rebel and to make their own god to worship in eat was a truly, comically ridiculous move. I mean, just think about all they had experienced with God thus far. They had all seen the plagues. They heard the wailing after the final plague. They walked out of Egypt when they had once been stuck in slavery, and they did so without a fight. They crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. They had drank miraculously provided water. They ate miraculously provided bread every day.

They had encountered God day after day, and the first two things He told them when He finally invited them into a formal, covenantal relationship with them, they ignored and did the opposite. He said, “Don’t give your devotion to anyone else,” and, “you can’t capture my essence in an image, so don’t make any.” Those are pretty hard to mess up, yet that’s exactly what they did. They pushed Him away, and so now He has obliged. This was an act of judgment as much as it was an acknowledgement of reality.

And they really were missing out. Moses was enjoying for them the relationship God had wanted to have with all of them. This is what v. 11 draws out for us. God would speak with Moses face to face just like He was talking with a friend. When you want to have a meaningful conversation with someone you love, you don’t sit across the room from each other. You sit right up next to them so you can talk face to face. The Lord and Moses were close. Closer is better.

As much as we can sit back and shake our heads at Israel’s folly and its fallout, we experience the same thing in our own lives. We sin and separate ourselves from God. We pick a path through life that is out of sync with His character, and head off in a direction He isn’t going. This creates distance just like it would—and does—with any person.

We have something, though, that Israel didn’t. When Israel sinned, Moses kept going to God to hear from Him to be able to effectively lead the people. But the people couldn’t go with him, and he could only bring so much back to them. In fact, as we’ll see later, when Moses would come back from these experiences with God, his face glowed from it to the point that it made the people uncomfortable and he had to wear a veil to cover his face.

We don’t have a Moses who can go and experience God and come back to talk us about it today. We have something—or, rather, someone—better. We have Jesus. He does what Moses did. He goes to God on our behalf because we are too covered in sin to be able to make such a journey on our own. But instead of simply coming back and taking us about His experience, He invites us through Himself into an experience of our own. That is, He doesn’t merely experience God for us, He enables us to experience God for ourselves.

Because Jesus is fully human, He was able to effectively intercede on our behalf before God, offering His life for ours. Because He is fully God, the life He offered was perfect and without sin. It was an acceptable offering to pay the price our sin demanded. Now, having reconciled us to God, He takes us into Himself, bridging the gap as the ultimate God-man, so that in Him we can experience God. He enables us by His righteousness to get close to God. And closer is better.

So then, if you are feeling distanced from God, there is a way to address that. It doesn’t matter what the reason is either. They are all covered by the fix Jesus made available to us. You can go to Jesus in humble submission to Him as Lord, and He will bring you near once again. You don’t have to worry about making yourself good enough for this interchange. Jesus handles that part. All you have to do is to simply go to Him. Acknowledge who He is and what He has done, and He’ll take care of the rest. Don’t leave an experience with God in the realm of things you only hear about through others. Go to Jesus and experience the wonder for yourself.