Tag Archives: tabernacle

Dumb Denial of the Deliverer

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Stephen’s speech in Acts chapter 7. It’s long winded and ends abruptly. He seems to ramble then stops short, screams harsh accusations, beckons their hatred, and secures his own martyrdom.

What exactly was his point? For last words – and a fair amount of them – I’m not sure I’ve ever quite understood what he was trying to say.

After setting the stage for his argument, Stephen begins presenting evidence to the teachers of religious law. He begins with Joseph – technicolor coat guy – and presents three cases in the building of his accusation. From Joseph to Moses and from Moses to the tabernacle.

Joseph’s brothers took two trips to Egypt to buy food before they became aware that the guy supplying it was their brother. I know Egyptian garb likely made him hard to make out and he used a translator so they didn’t know he even spoke their language, but he was their brother, they spent a good bit of time with him on their first visit, and they did sell him to a group that was headed to Egypt to sell him off. Then there’s the whole dream hint. But none of this rung bells for the brothers. They didn’t recognize who he was.

Then there’s Moses. After having been raised in Egyptian affluence, he decides to check on his own people. Believing himself to be their rescuer (so says Stephen), he attacks an Egyptian to save a Jew. Israel, however, fails to see him as a deliverer and 40 years wandering in a sheep brigade follows. They didn’t recognize who he was.

On the second trip to Egypt Joseph’s brothers finally see their brother and deliverer. On his second attempt at delivery, Israel finally sees Moses as theirs.

Then there’s the tabernacle. There was a second one of those too. Two habitations of the God of Israel and we see a repeat of what the prior two stories displayed.

Joseph told his brothers not to quarrel on their way to go get their dad. Israel asked Aaron to find a new leader to take them back to slavery in Egypt. Even after two attempts to create a home among them for the God who would be their Deliverer, Israel insisted on man made rules to hold them in bondage.

Stephen was presenting the case against the religious leaders that Israel had a long history of failing to recognize their redeemers when they saw them. Specifically, they seemed to require a second sighting before even noticing. Then when they did, they tended to want to deny his deliverance and return to their chained and shackled ways every time.

Stephen’s point: you always seem to take too long to see what’s before you and, even then, you fail to fully embrace it.

Now Jesus is the fourth such case. He’s stood before you as Deliverer of your souls and you, again, recklessly refuse to recognize your Rescuer.

The beauty of Stephen’s message lies as much in how he makes it as in what it is. The obvious application: don’t miss Him. Don’t miss the encounters and continually and foolishly deny the Deliverer before you. We don’t just need rescue once. Every day is a battle between the wretched men that we are and the righteous ones He’s renamed us to be. Don’t be dumb, your Deliverer is near.

But there’s more than the obvious here. Stephen presented a case against a sect of people two thousand years ago that could be made against me today. And the evidence he used to win the day was a story ancient in even his own time and so inconceivably detailed and obscure that Broadway put it in technicolor.

Every word of Scripture is God-breathed. It is useful, beautiful, applicable, and worthy of our most ardent attention. For every story, interaction, detail, measurement, and genealogical listing, there is an apt word, an impassioned plea, an eternal truth. Joseph wasn’t just a dreamer in a bright jacket. Moses wasn’t just Charlton Heston’s inspiration. The tabernacle isn’t just a word padded cushion for our left hands while we read the Gospels. It’s all one glorious story. He will knock your socks off if you’ll sit and let Him tell it to you. Don’t be dumb, your Deliverer is near.

All That Press

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Why is it that the tabernacle gets so much scriptural real estate and yet I almost never turn to it in search of a life-giving, applicable, impassioning, and pertinent word for my day?

If every word is useful, alive, and God-breathed, there sure are a ton of words dedicated to an ancient mobile building that has long since ceased to exist. I, however, have never had the sense that if I just knew how many pillars were on the northern side of the tabernacle I would have a fire lit in my soul by the knowing. (It’s 20, by the way.)

I believe it’s because too often I’m looking at the tabernacle as a story not my own; as a word from somewhere else, for someone else. And a word that’s hard to break into at that. You have to work a little. You may have to think. For goodness sakes, Americans don’t even like European things because they come measured in metric units! Talk about hard to relate to – the metrics of Old Testament schematics long predate the metric system. If I were looking to make the intellectual investment and put the work in to understand what’s there, I fear I may find it isn’t really there for me anyway. All that press dedicated to the tabernacle was geared for some other time, place, and people.

I believe I’d be wrong on all accounts.

God inhabited the tabernacle after Moses set it all in place. God inhabited the temple after Solomon dedicated it. When Christ’s redeeming work tore the veil into the Most Holy Place, God issued an invitation to all who would come to be inhabited as well.

Much of the world long awaits the building of the third temple. For the Church, we aren’t looking for the construction of the third temple, we are on site for the construction of the second tabernacle.

The mobile tabernacle became the static temple and, at Christ’s death, the temple went back to being a tabernacle. On that first Day of Pentecost, tongues of fire lit on the Church and men and women took on a new identity as the new mobile housings of the Great God of All Creation. What had been singular buildings became numerous moving habitations.

On your own personal Day of Pentecost, you became indwelled by the Holy Spirit. You became the exact picture of that structure in the wilderness. God put His Name there. God declared His home to be where you were and are. He set His glory upon you.

The tabernacle is far more than someone else’s story. It is exceedingly more than a rendering of pillars, posts, linens, and lamps. It is a story of the place where God set His Name, dispensed His glory, displayed His power, and declared His Presence.

That place is you.

Out and In

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And He brought us out from there, that He might bring us in… Deuteronomy 6:23

The story of the tabernacle is one of a long and multifaceted process of the Lord taking Israel out and in that, through their own journey, we all might learn the concept.

He took them out of Egypt and the slavery that held them there.  He took them out of the yoke of that bondage.  He took them out of a culture of rampant paganism.  He took them out of the darkness of lives devoid of His presence. 

And He brought them into something altogether new. 

He brought them into freedom, into relationship, into the Light of a union with the One True God. 

Right off the bat, don’t you see why all those Torah verses matter so much?

From the beginnings of their story to the consecration of the temple that followed the journey and into the Holy of Holies made available by the torn veil at Christ’s death, there rings the constant chime of out and in.

In a walk through the tabernacle we see the Gospel truth of the lives God calls us out of and the hope He ushers us into.  At the bronze altar we lay down the old broken life of burden and shame and are welcomed by His perfect offering into new lives that arise from the ashes of a surrendered soul.  We have the opportunity and responsibility at the bronze laver to come out of a mentality of self-aggrandizing conceit and a belief in our own “goodness” and into an understanding and awareness of the depth of our depravity and our eternally profound need for a Savior and Guide.  From the lampstand we are called out of habits that seek enlightenment, wisdom, and answers from the limited span of human intellectual capacity and into a true knowledge of all that is good and true and right under the tutelage of an indwelling, all-knowing Spirit.  Upon the table we find we can walk out of lives of need and emptiness, of constant searching for fullness from the delicacies of this life among the temporal illusions of satisfaction the world has to offer and into an overwhelming overflow of wholeness provided by the filling of the Bread of Life Himself.  Upon the golden altar we find the personal, intimate, and inconceivable offering to leave behind lives of distant longing, intermediaries, go-betweens, and veiled, cloaked, and confusing translations and into a personal and ongoing conversation with the God who always listens. 

Then the mercy seat.  In this beautiful picture of the old creation we are called out of and the new and infinite hope we are called into the primary design and desire is to find ourselves here at His feet.  Out of longing for a seemingly eternally distant and unreachable union and into an intimate and life-giving relationship with an ever-present Father and Friend. 

In the story revealed through others lives long ago and far removed from our own we find a story so intimately near we can feel its heartbeat. 

We have been called out of darkness and into His glorious light.

Glory Glow

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As housings of the great God of the universe, we get the inconceivable distinction of radiating His renown to all who might encounter us. We get to trade in our tainted name and sullied stories for His almighty name and His eternally grand story. We get to move from objects of shame to objects of His desire. We get to enjoy a transformation from dirt, dust, ashes, and grime to beauty, splendor, riches, and perfection. We get to trade in our filthy rags for the bridal attire of the truly holy. We get to watch the cleansing miracle of stained black sin turning righteous pure white. God comes to dwell and brings all His glorious splendor with Him.

And unlike Moses with his veil of sadness–not attempting to hide the glow of his face but the sad reality that the glow didn’t last (2 Corinthians 3:13)–we get to see God light a flame with His tongue of fire and set this holy housing ablaze forever. And unlike Moses we aren’t meant to hide it anyway. We are His calling card. We are the ambassadors through whom God calls all man unto Himself. We have a Maker, we have a Saviour, we have an Owner, Master, and King and He has written His name on my forehead to claim me as His own. As His child I bear that name as a reflection of the One who wrote it upon my life.

The glow of His great glory–like an inferno sized tea light within the clear glass candle that is this fleshly abode–radiates through my life, love, and demeanor. I hold both the privilege and the responsibility of stoking that fire, of putting it on a stand amid the rooms that make up my days, of lighting the world in which I wander. It is His greatness I bear. It is His name I represent. It is His esteem, reputation, and honor my life is called to uphold and magnify.

His glory glow on my face. His renown on my lips. His praise on my tongue. His grandeur on the pages of my rewritten story.