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.