Leviticus 24:6

6. Pure table It was overlaid with pure gold; the term “pure” may mean more than this, and bear something of the force which it has in Malachi 1:11. For its structure, see Exodus 37:10-16.

Before the Lord Not in the holy of holies, but in the first tabernacle. Exodus 40:24; Hebrews 9:2. This throws much light upon the significance of the showbread, or “bread of the face or faces.” The term “faces” denotes the presence not of the people, who were not admitted into the first tabernacle or court of the priests, but the presence of God. This view Bahr has elaborated with singular force and beauty. It is said in Exodus 23:21, that God’s name is in the angel of his presence, (face or faces.) The presence and the name may therefore be taken as equivalent. Both, in reference to their context, indicate the manifestation of God to his creatures. As the name stands for God himself, so the face, wherein a man’s individual personality is seen, stands for the person of God. To see the face is to see the person. The bread of the face is therefore that bread through which God is seen, that is, with the participation of which the seeing of God is bound up. Whence it follows that we have not to think of bread merely as such, as the means of nourishing bodily life, but as spiritual food, as a means of appropriating and retaining that life which consists in seeing the face of God. The bread of the face on the table in the tabernacle, the symbolic heaven, is an emblem of the heavenly bread. This points to none other than Jesus Christ. “For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.” After this synopsis of Bahr’s Symbolik we cannot forbear to add one beautiful and instructive emblem in reference to the position of the showbread, which was opposite the candlestick, (Exodus 40:24,) that its full light might fall upon it, prefiguring the precious truth that the Holy Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them to the believer.