From Garden to Glory: 10 Days Through the Bible's Grand StoryChikamu

Day 6: A Dwelling Place for the King

I WILL DWELL AMONG THEM

God created Eden as a place where he could dwell with his people. Remember, they lived in such sweet closeness that Adam and Eve even knew the sound God’s footsteps made (Genesis 3:8)! Can you even imagine such a sound? When he expelled them and placed the cherubim at the entrance to prohibit their return, the greatest loss of Eden was that of being able to dwell with God (and he with us) in such close intimacy.

As we’ve seen, the Holy cannot dwell with the unholy—that is the great dilemma portrayed in Scripture. God is holy; we are unholy. God is faithful; we are unfaithful. But he longs to be with his people, so he is working all things together to make it possible for us to dwell in his presence again. The presence of God with his people—dwelling together—is a theme that we need to trace from creation to glory to truly understand where this story is headed.

After Eden, we read of several accounts where God occasionally descends to meet with selected individuals, although these encounters are always relatively brief and sometimes unexpected. But when we come to the second half of Exodus, we read of a giant step forward in God’s plan—the building of the tabernacle.

Starting in chapter 26 of Exodus, God gave the instructions for the building of the tabernacle. What’s important to notice is that the tabernacle was God’s idea, God’s plan, and God’s design. He established it for the purpose of dwelling in the midst of his people. In Exodus 29:45, we read, “I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God.” The next verse tells us that this was the reason he brought them out of Egypt: “They shall know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God” (verse 46).

This is the heart of our Father, and it changes everything when we know that the God of the universe loves his people and wants to be with them. The love of our Father is what drives the story of redemption forward—God wanting to be our God and to dwell with us.

We all have a deep longing to be loved. Some of us have experienced being loved well, and some of us have not. It is worth taking a moment to stop here and soak in the fact that God says to his people, “I want to be in your midst. I want to be with you because I love you so deeply.”

TABERNACLE

God used 13 chapters of Exodus to explain the rules and instructions for the construction of this new dwelling place, and then an entire book of the Bible, Leviticus, to give the guidelines for how to approach him in this place. Most of these were given for one of two reasons: to either remind them that he is holy, or protect them from that holiness because it’s serious business for the unholy to dwell in the presence of the holy. The freedom of Eden had been lost, but the desire of the Father to be with his children was not.

The tabernacle, no matter how tent-like it looked, was far more than a mere tent in the desert. It was a palace for God, the high King of heaven. He took this lowly tent as his dwelling place. This should astound us.

God is the one who “sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22) and whose “glory [is] above the heavens!...who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth” (Psalm 113:5-6). And yet, God told his people to take wood and animal skins, cloth and metal, and make a tent for him.