Verse 4
4. Good for us to be here It was not a moment of terror but of bliss when Peter spoke this. Amid paradisaic company, and in an atmosphere of paradise, even amid this mountain forest something of the elevation of paradise fills his soul. Three tabernacles Three tents, booths, or camps. Peter does not say palaces, although he would have held palaces, whether of cedar, marble, or solid gold, none too good for such residents. But the rugged and woody sides of snowy Hermon afforded no implements for the building of such structures, and he proposes tabernacles.
Perhaps he intended a tabernacle not unlike that of Moses in the wilderness; the true purport of which was to be, as it were, the dwelling for the Shekinah, or divine presence. He will have these divine ones not disappear and go back to heaven or paradise. They shall remain there and make it a constant paradise. And there, rather than on Moriah, the temple-mount, shall be the divine presence.
Peter does not propose more than three tabernacles, though six persons are present. The three glorified ones are to be the residents, and for each an apostle for a servant.
The word tabernacle is derived from the Latin word taberna, a shop or shed. The tabernacle of Moses in the wilderness was a building of rectangular figure, about forty-five feet long, fifteen broad, and fifteen high, so constructed as to be taken down, transferred on the march, and again set up. It was a movable temple for God, which was enlarged upon the grandest scale upon a similar model, and completed in the temple of Solomon.
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