Exodus 25-27

What’s Happening?

God wants to live with his people. So God gives Moses blueprints for a building, called a “dwelling” or “tabernacle,” where he can be with the people he loves (Exodus 25:8-9). God gives Moses detailed designs meant to remind those who read about it or enter into it of the Garden of Eden—the place where God and his people once lived together.

In the central room, there is to be a golden chest covered with sculpted models of the spiritual beings that guarded Eden (Exodus 25:10-21; Genesis 3:24). This room is described first because it is in closest proximity to God. It’s God’s throne room; from it, he will be with his people just as he was with Adam and Eve in Eden (Exodus 25:22).

In the next room, God tells Moses to place a golden table and a golden candelabra. The table is made of expensive wood and overlaid with gold (Exodus 25:23-24). The expensive wood and gold are meant to evoke Eden, which the Bible describes as a dense forest of fruit trees with caverns of gold hidden beneath their roots (Genesis 2:8-11). Likewise, the candelabra is made of pure hammered gold and designed to look like the branches and buds of a tree (Exodus 25:31-39). The lamp is supposed to be continually supplied with oil so that its light never goes out (Exodus 27:20-21). And on the golden table, fresh bread is to be provided daily (Exodus 25:30). The flames and the bread are symbols of God’s eternal dwelling with his people. The fire continually illuminates the people’s needs to God, and God’s provision is always available in his daily bread.

These two rooms are to be framed with dozens of wooden planks overlaid with gold, then covered with purple, blue, and scarlet fabric (Exodus 26:1-29). There is also a sacred veil that divides the two rooms. The veil is covered in woven depictions of the same spiritual beings guarding God’s throne (Exodus 26:30-37). The wood and gold both literally and metaphorically thicken the Edenic forest. The dark fabrics embroidered with spiritual beings are designed to evoke the night sky and the division between the created world and God’s heavenly home. When priests eventually walk through this Tabernacle, they should sense they are moving through the dividing lines between our world and God’s. This Tabernacle is a thin space where God lives with and leads his people.

Directly outside the Tabernacle is a large bronze altar (Exodus 27:1-8). The altar indicates that entrance into the most intimate places of God’s presence will require sacrifice. It also represents an inversion of Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden. As they left, God killed an animal to cover their shame and nakedness (Genesis 3:21). But now, instead of sacrifice being a preparation for exile away from God, a sacrifice will bring people near God once again. Finally, surrounding both the Tabernacle and the altar are the outer walls of a courtyard made with decorations of silver and bronze (Exodus 27:9-19). The silver and bronze indicate a degree of separation between the outside world and God’s “golden” presence, where he is most intimately with his people.

Where is the Gospel?

God wants to live with his people. That’s why he created the earth. That’s why he gave Israel their Tabernacle, and that’s why he chose to live with his people in the person of Jesus (John 1:14). When God came into the world as a human, he reenacted what life was like back in the Garden. And where Jesus went, the abundant life, health, and vitality of that first paradise went with him (John 11:43-44). The blind saw light for the first time, bread and wine were miraculously multiplied, and even the weather became perfectly calm at his command (Matthew 11:5; Mark 4:35-41). In Jesus’ life, God’s golden presence lived with his people and began to restore Eden to earth.

But as the Tabernacle’s design suggests, the world can only enter God’s presence and experience Eden for themselves through sacrifice. Jesus offered himself as the sacrifice for all humanity to reenter Eden. By his death, he covered the shame and guilt Adam and Eve introduced to the world (Romans 5:12-21). As proof that this is precisely what his death accomplished when Jesus died, the veil that divided God’s throne from the world was torn in two (Matthew 27:51). Now there is nothing that can prevent us from moving past the bronze and silver of this world to living in God’s golden life-giving presence forever (Hebrews 6:19-20). Jesus tells us that God’s presence isn’t a place we go and visit but a person he sends to us, the person of his Holy Spirit. As God once sat on the throne in Israel’s Tabernacle, God now lives in us. Because of the Holy Spirit, we become the “thin space” where God lives with us and leads us wherever we go.

See for Yourself

I pray that the Holy Spirit will open your eyes to see the God who wants to live with his people. And may you see Jesus as the one who has provided a way for all of us to live with God forever.