Five Days of Sensing God: A 5-Day Reading Plan by Mandy SmithExemplo

Day Two: Knowing God through Our Sense of Smell

Scripture: Exodus 30:1-10, 22-38

Exodus 30 contains God’s own recipes for fragrances to be used in the tabernacle. One is for the oil to anoint priests and the articles of worship—the tent, the table, the lamp stand—and to be used only for this purpose (I like the idea that the priests and tabernacle had a signature scent). The second is a recipe for incense to be burned every day, at morning and twilight, on a special altar. 

Several times throughout Exodus 30 God says that these fragrances are to be used in the tent of meeting “where I will meet with you.” I love the thought that God wanted a multi-sensory experience for the people to remember his presence. Those very specific fragrances of oil and incense would build in the memories of God’s people. They would know, just by the familiar smell, that this was a special place, would sink into the rich history of every other time they’d met with God in this way, in the same way that smells of Christmas foods draw us into deep memories. We connect with our former selves, and remember the many others with whom we’ve shared this experience. With one sniff, we are home.

While the tabernacle created a special opportunity for God’s people to engage with him in the wilderness, scripture often describes it as a microcosm of God’s creation—a way for God’s people to experience God’s vastness in close-up (Isaiah 66:1-2, Hebrews 8:5). While we might long for the long-gone multi-sensory traditions of the tabernacle and temple, we have an even better opportunity to engage God. Because we are invited to find him in all of creation, to experience the holiness of every experience as an experience of God. We don’t have to wait to go to a special place to experience a special fragrance as a reminder of God’s presence. Every fragrance can remind us of God.

While we may not necessarily enjoy every fragrance, just the existence of a vast array of scents in the world is a reminder of God. There is certainly a practical reason for some smells (bad food tells you not to eat it, for example) but there’s really no practical need for quite so many aromas in the world. Do we really need hundreds of different spices? Thousands of different herbs? When you think of the number of fragrances that come from plants alone—from their seeds, their fruit, their flowers, their leaves, their bark—it boggles the mind. Maybe God, in his delight for them all, just couldn’t stop himself. How can your experience of your sense of smell be an opportunity to receive God’s abundance?

Respond:

Reflect back on the past 24 hours of your life. How would your nose tell the story of it? Smell is so much a part of daily experience that we don’t often stop to reflect on particular smells for their own sakes. List all the smells you can remember encountering in the past day. Were they strong or subtle? Pleasant or unpleasant? Were they pungent or fresh? Floral or woody? Spicy or sweet? 

What emotions or memories did these scents evoke?

If you were going to design a signature scent that reflected your life, what three scents would you include? How can these ordinary experiences of fragrances, which you didn’t create, reveal God to you?