Introduction
III. JEHOVAH’S DWELLING WITH ISRAEL.
(1.) The Plan of the Tabernacle and its Holy Service. Chaps. 25-31.
INTRODUCTORY.
Jehovah has now ransomed his people from the house of bondage; has exhibited before their eyes the most solemn and awful displays of his eternal power, and of his superiority over all gods and men; has thundered from Sinai the ten words of the covenant, and has communicated to Moses, and through him to the people, a matchless body of laws to regulate the social and civil affairs of Israel. The next step is to establish a system of worship which will serve at once to centralize the religious interests of the people, and develop, by sacred services and symbols, the knowledge and fear of Jehovah. The pattern of a sanctuary that is to serve so lofty a purpose is here shown to have originated in the Divine Mind. Its great idea is that of a special sacred meeting place of Jehovah and his chosen people. The words by which the tabernacle is designated serve as a clew to the great idea embodied in its complex symbolism. The principal name is משׁכן , dwelling; but אהל , tent, usually connected with some distinguishing epithet, is also frequently used, and is applied to the tabernacle in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers more than one hundred and fifty times . In Exodus 23:19; Exodus 34:26, it is called בית יהוה , house of Jehovah, and in 1 Samuel 1:9; 1 Samuel 3:3, היכל יהוה , temple of Jehovah. But a fuller indication of the import of these names is found in the compound expressions, אהל מועד , tent of meeting, אהל העדות , tent of the testimony, and משׁכן העדות , dwelling of the testimony . The testimony is a term applied emphatically to the law of the two tables, (Exodus 25:16; Exodus 25:21; Exodus 31:18,) and designated the authoritative declaration of God, upon the basis of which he made a covenant with Israel . Exodus 34:27; Deuteronomy 4:13. Hence these tables were called tables of the covenant (Deuteronomy 9:9) as well as tables of the testimony . As the representatives of God’s most holy testimony against sin they occupied the most secret and sacred place of his tabernacle . Exodus 25:16. All these designations of the tabernacle serve to indicate its great design as a symbol of Jehovah’s meeting and dwelling with his people. One passage which, above all others, elaborates this thought is Exodus 29:42-46: “It shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your generations, at the door of the tent of meeting ( אהל מועד ) before Jehovah, where I will meet ( אועד ) you, to speak unto thee there . And I will meet ( נעדתי ) there the sons of Israel, and he (that is, Israel) shall be sanctified in my glory . And I will sanctify the tent of meeting ( אהל מועד ) and the altar, and Aaron and his sons will I sanctify to act as priests for me . And I will dwell ( שׁכבתי ) in the midst of the sons of Israel, and I will be God to them, and they shall know that I am Jehovah their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, that I might dwell ( לשׁכני ) in their midst I, Jehovah, their God . ”
The tabernacle, therefore, is not to be thought of as a symbol of things external and visible, not even of heaven itself considered merely as a place, but of the meeting and dwelling together of God and his people both in time and eternity. The ordinances of worship may be expected to denote the way in which Jehovah condescends to meet with man, and enables man to approach nigh unto him a meeting and fellowship by which the true Israel become sanctified in the divine glory. Exodus 29:43. The divine-human relationship realized in the kingdom of heaven is attained in Christ when God comes unto man and makes his abode ( μονην ) with him, (John 14:23,) so that the man dwells in God and God in him . 1 John 4:16. This is the glorious indwelling contemplated in the prayer of Jesus that all believers “may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that thou didst send me. And the glory which thou hast given me I have given unto them; that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one.” John 17:21-23. (R . V . ) Of this blessed relationship the tabernacle is a significant symbol, and, being also a shadow of the good things to come, it was a type of the New Testament Church or kingdom of God, that spiritual house built of living stones, (1 Peter 2:5) which is a habitation of God in the Spirit . Ephesians 2:22.
Most strangely have certain modern critics advanced the notion that this account of the tabernacle is a fiction of post-exile times, an invention of the priests to furnish a kind of holy historic background for the plan of Solomon’s temple and its successor. And so, too, the whole elaborate system of the Levitical worship, with the distinction between priests and Levites, is held to be a product of the times of the Babylonian exile. But no time in the history of the chosen people appears so well adapted to the formation of this system as the age of Moses; no person so competent to fashion and inaugurate it as that great lawgiver. For the discussion of this question of criticism, see our Introduction to the Pentateuch, especially pages 17-38.
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