The Dwelling Place of God | Exodus 25-31
Brian Hedges | March 5, 2023
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles this morning to Exodus 25. We’re going to be looking pretty broadly at seven chapters, Exodus 25-31. If I were to take the time to read it, it would take the rest of the service. I’m not going to read all of that text, but just a few verses here in a moment.
We’re actually talking this morning about the tabernacle, the construction of the tabernacle in the Old Testament, or rather the instructions that God gave the children of Israel for the tabernacle. I could guess that for many of us, when we hear that that’s the theme of the sermon, nothing sounds more remote, nothing sounds less relevant to the pressing needs and burdens and cares of our lives than thinking about the tabernacle in the Old Testament.
So I want to back into this passage by talking about the deepest longings of our hearts. All of us this week have felt stabs of longing, desire, hope. We have wrestled with feelings that we don’t know quite what to do with. We are people who live with a sense of exile. We’re longing for reunion with God, a return to the garden of Eden.
J.R.R. Tolkien, famous for his Lord of the Rings trilogy and other fiction, in one of his letters said, “We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it. Our whole nature, at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with a sense of exile.”
I think this is something that we all experience, even if we don’t have the name to put on it. It may be a sense of homesickness or nostalgia, as you think about happier times in the past, maybe longings to be reunited with loved ones or with home or thinking about memories from childhood. More often we feel it in the brokenness of our lives. We think of broken relationships, broken dreams, broken things in our minds and in our hearts, broken places deep inside of us that still are not fully healed.
We experience this in our longings for beauty and justice, peace and rest, harmony in relationships, real friendship, the sense of God’s smile on my life, my family, my community, and on the world.
We experience this in the desire to see suffering come to an end. As you think about cancer or Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s, you think about disease of any kind; or if you think about the war-torn countries of this world; or poverty, hunger, abuse, divorce, racism, slavery, human trafficking, abortion—all of the injustices and evils of the world, you consider those things and you feel deep in your heart a desire to see it come to an end and for the world to be whole again.
Whenever you feel those kinds of desires, what you are longing for Eden; you’re longing for paradise. You’re longing to be restored to the presence of God, you’re longing for paradise regained. It is that longing to which the tabernacle speaks.
Our text this morning is Exodus 25. We are in this series on the book of Exodus; it is the story of redemption in the Old Testament. As we’ve seen multiple times in this series, Exodus shows us the God who delivers his people (that’s the first half of the book) and the God who dwells with his people (that’s the second half of this book). In Exodus 25, having revealed himself in a mighty theophany of fire and smoke and cloud on Mount Sinai, and having entered into a covenant relationship with his people, God now delivers to Moses on the mountain the plan for the tabernacle. It will be the dwelling place of God on earth.
I’m going to read several passages from Exodus 25-31, and you can follow along on the screen so you can keep up with the verses. There are only about six verses here.
Exodus 25:1: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me.’”
Verses 8-9: “‘And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.’”
Then in Exodus 29:45-46 God says, “I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And 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.”
This is God’s word.
Now, in thinking about the tabernacle we could, of course, spend hours and hours trying to look at the significance of every single piece of furniture and how everything fits together. What I want to do is something a little different than that. I want to give you a broader biblical theology of the dwelling place of God, of which the tabernacle was one crucial manifestation, along with Israel’s temple later on. I could give you the whole sermon in one sentence, and here it is: The tabernacle shows us the way back to the garden by drawing near to the dwelling place of God through the ministry of a High Priest. That’s what Exodus 25-31 is about, and we can break that into three points.
Here’s the first.
1. The tabernacle shows us the way back to the garden
Now, that might be somewhat surprising for you to hear, that there is some kind of connection between the garden of Eden and the tabernacle. But recent scholarship has demonstrated this, I think beyond all question, and I want to show you some of the connecting links between Genesis 1-3 and Exodus 25-31.
It helps for us to understand the mind of the person in the ancient Near East, who viewed the world itself, the universe, as a cosmic temple for the gods. Certainly for the Jewish people, they understood that the world, the heavens and the earth, were the cosmic temple of God, and they viewed the garden of Eden in just this way.
There are many ways in which you can see the connection. Here are some examples. In Genesis 1, when God makes the lights in the heavens—the sun, the moon, and the stars—in Genesis 1:14-16, they are called lamps. That’s the Hebrew word that’s used; it’s the word “lamps.” It’s a word that’s used for the lights that are in the tabernacle that are called lamps, Exodus 25:6.
You have all kinds of garden imagery, of course, in the garden of Eden. You have the tree of life, you have fruit, but you also have gold and precious metals and precious gems. You have this river of life that runs through the garden. All of that language gets picked up later in the instructions for the tabernacle, and later the temple as well.
You can see that, for example, in Exodus 25 and 27. The tree of life that was in the garden of Eden gets represented by one of the pieces of furniture in the tabernacle, the menorah, or the golden lampstand. When you read the description of how this lampstand was to be built, it is something like a stylized almond tree. It’s a fruit tree; it looks like a tree. As that golden lampstand is in the inner court of the tabernacle, it represents something like the tree of life.
You have patterns in the numbers. So, there are seven days of creation in Genesis 1, and then in Exodus 25-31 seven times the passage says that “the Lord said to Moses.” In other words, the very instructions that are given for the different pieces of the tabernacle—the furniture or for the priesthood—it’s all structured in this pattern of seven statements or words from God.
You have the presence of the Spirit of the Lord in Genesis 1, as the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters on the morning of creation. In the same way, you have the Spirit of God who comes and fills and rests upon the artisans who construct and who build the tabernacle.
The role of Adam in the garden in Genesis 2:15 is to work and to keep the garden, and that’s priestly language. So, Adam was to function as something like a high priest in the garden of Eden. That very same language is used to describe the role of the priests in Numbers 3:7-8.
The work of creation, of course, ends in rest in Genesis 2. In the same way, the instructions for the construction of the tabernacle end in Exodus 31 with Sabbath requirements, where the people of God were to keep God’s Sabbaths.
In all of this what we are seeing is that the garden of Eden was a place that was centered around sacred space and sacred time. In fact, we could say that in the pristine beauty of creation all of time and all of space was sacred to God, because the whole world was a temple of God and Eden was God’s sanctuary. When God gives instructions for the tabernacle to the children of Israel, what God is doing is making a provision of sacred space, sacred time, as the people of God will come into his presence. The prophets understood this. Ezekiel 28 even calls Eden the “garden of God” and the “holy mountain of God.”
Then there are another couple of things that I think are really significant for our understanding. Do you remember that when Adam and Eve were banished from the garden of Eden—they were sent out of the garden in Genesis 3—do you remember what God did? He posted cherubim at the gates of the garden. The cherubim aren’t chubby little babies with wings, okay? The cherubim were angelic creatures that looked something like a sphinx. So, we think probably they had an animal-type body with wings . . . we don’t know exactly what they looked like, but certainly they had wings.
The cherubim are placed there, these fearsome creatures, and there’s a flaming sword turning every which way, and it’s to keep Adam and Eve from coming back into the garden. There they are at the eastern gate of the garden. We read it in Genesis 3:24, which says that the Lord God “drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”
From that point forward, human beings are living east of Eden. They are away from the garden, and they can’t get back in. The cherubim and even the way in which the tabernacle was set up according to the various points of the compass are communicating something important to us.
Let me show you a couple of diagrams. These come from L. Michael Morales’s wonderful book Exodus Old and New. He shows us how the garden of Eden had this eastward gate that was guarded by the cherubim—what I just described. You can see a drawing there of the cherubim with the flaming sword that would keep them from coming back into the garden to eat from the tree of life. So the human beings are sent east, out of the garden.
Now, when you read about the tabernacle, what’s very clear—this was always the case—when the tabernacle was to be set up, every single time the gate, the entry point into the tabernacle, was on the east. The same was true for the temple. You can see that the movement into the tabernacle, into the outer court and then the inner court, it was always a journey westward, back towards the presence of God. Of course, the tabernacle was divided into these three sections: the outer court, the inner court, and then the holy place, the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant is. What do you have on the ark of the covenant? You have cherubim, these guardians of the presence of God, and a thick veil dividing the inner court from the Holy of Holies. We read in this description in Exodus that the cherubim were woven into this thick curtain.
So when the high priest would come in and do his ministry in the inner court before coming into the Holy of Holies, he would always see the cherubim there. It was a reminder to him of the guardians of the presence of God.
All of this showing us something really important. Here’s the essential point to get from this first point: the only way back to the garden, the only way back into paradise, into Eden, into restored harmony and peace and justice and righteousness in the world, is through the presence of God with us. It takes God himself to bring us back to Eden. It takes God dwelling among his people. It’s only when God dwells with his people that we experience all those things for which we long.
That’s the picture that God is giving to the children of Israel in the book of Exodus, as he gives them the instructions for the tabernacle. The tabernacle is the way back into the garden, as they draw near to the dwelling place of God.
That leads us to the second point...
2. Drawing near to the dwelling place of God
I want you to see a couple of things about how the tabernacle is described for us and what it tells us about God’s presence. In Exodus 25:8 we read these words: “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.”
What is a sanctuary? It is a holy place. It’s a place that’s been set apart for God. This is one of the things the tabernacle is called; a sanctuary. It is a holy place.
Then in Exodus 29:45-46 God says, “I will dwell among the people of Israel and will be their God. And 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.”
Did you catch that? God here is saying, “The very reason I redeemed you and brought you out of Egypt in the first place is so that I could dwell among you.” The God who delivers delivers so that he can be the God who dwells. The tabernacle is the way in which he initially dwells with his people. The tabernacle is not only God’s holy place, it is also God’s dwelling place.
Also we could say—I’m drawing this from a commentary by Christopher Wright—the tabernacle is also the meeting place. It’s the place where Moses would meet with God. In Exodus 25:22 God says, “There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat [that’s the lid on the ark of the covenant], from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you.” God says, “I’m going to meet with you there.”
This place is called the "tent of meeting" It is the holy place of God, the sanctuary. It is the dwelling place of God, and it is the meeting place with God. In other words, this is the place, the sacred space on earth, where God’s presence dwells.
Now, the temptation for preachers in talking about the tabernacle is to start looking at every little detail and try to find some symbolic significance in it. Maybe you’ve heard sermons like that or read books like that. I recently read a book on the tabernacle, and it found significance I would say almost literally in every number and every color. If something’s blue, it represents something; if something’s purple, it represents something; and so on.
That’s not the approach that I want to commend to you. Instead, I think the furniture in the tabernacle is meant to communicate some pretty basic things about the presence of God with his people. I think we can boil it all down into two things.
(1) It shows us, first of all, the blessing of God’s presence. If you look at a map of the tabernacle (you can see one here similar to what you probably have in your study Bible), you can see that there were these three sections. The big square is the outer court, then you have the rectangle, and the first half of that is the inner court, and then the Most Holy Place or the Holy of Holies. You have these seven pieces of furniture.
Essentially, the closer you got into the Holy of Holies, the closer you got to the presence of God. The ark of the testimony was considered the throne of God. God is the one who dwells between the cherubim; he is the God who descends in this glory cloud, similar to how he did on Mount Sinai; and he speaks there from the ark of the covenant.
We could say—I mentioned this last week—that the tabernacle is meant to be something like a portable Mount Sinai, where there was this gradual access into the presence of God, with the Most Holy Place, where the ark of the covenant is, being the most sacred part of that structure. It’s there where God’s presence dwells.
The furniture in the inner court is really meant to just convey different aspects of the blessing of God’s presence.
You have this table with bread; sometimes it’s called the table of showbread, or the table of the presence, the bread of the presence. It was just meant to convey God’s communion and his fellowship and his sustenance of his people. He provided bread for them. The priests would eat these twelve loaves of bread once a week, a loaf for each of the tribes of Israel. It was to show God’s fellowship with his people.
You have the golden lampstand, and it symbolizes the light of God’s presence and stands there as something like a tree of life in the inner court.
Then the altar of incense seems to function (at least in part) as a way of veiling God’s presence, so that when the high priest would come in on the Day of Atonement he would sprinkle incense on this burning altar, and it would create a cloud of smoke, so that when he went through the veil he would not actually be able to see, because God’s presence cannot be looked on directly.
(2) That really leads to the second aspect of God’s presence: it’s not just the blessing of God’s presence with his people, it’s the danger of God’s presence with his people! Because, just like with Mount Sinai, the tabernacle here shows us that there is restricted access. It’s very limited. The people of God, the children of Israel, with sacrifice and with cleansing, they can come into the outer court, but only the priests can go into the inner court. And only the high priest can go into the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, and he can only do that once a year on the Day of Atonement.
This shows us the central, dramatic tension of the Bible. Here is a God who wants to dwell with his people in grace and mercy and in love, but this God is so holy that even when he seeks to dwell with his people, he cannot dwell with his people without sacrifice and without cleansing. That’s why in the outer court you have a bronze altar, the altar of burnt sacrifice, and you have a bronze laver or basin for washing. Every day the priests were to offer two lambs on the altar of burnt sacrifice, one in the morning and one at night. And every day the priests were to be washing their hands and their feet. Exodus tells us they had to wash their hands and feet lest they die. Why? Because this God, though he is gracious and merciful and loving, this God is so holy that he cannot dwell with the sinful people of Israel unless there is atonement and cleansing. There has to be sacrifice. That’s why we need the ministry of a high priest.
3. Through the ministry of a high priest
The tabernacle shows us the way back to the garden, as we draw near to the dwelling place of God through the ministry of a high priest. I want to read just a few verses of Scripture to you about the ministry of this high priest in Exodus 28:9-10 and 12. Listen to how it describes the priest. You have two whole chapters here. Exodus 28 is all about the clothing of the high priest, chapter 29 is all about the consecration of the priest. Listen to how the clothing is described in Exodus 28:9. “You shall take two onyx stones—” the last time we saw onyx was in the garden of Eden in Genesis 2.
“You shall take two onyx stones, and engrave on them the names of the sons of Israel, six of their names on the one stone, and the names of the remaining six on the other stone, in the order of their birth. . . . And you shall set the two stones on the shoulder pieces of the ephod [an apron that the priests would wear], as stones of remembrance for the sons of Israel. [Listen to this.] And Aaron [the high priest] shall bear their names before the Lord on his two shoulders for remembrance.”
This was central to the task of the high priest. He would come into the presence of God representing the children of Israel. He’s bearing their names, and he comes before the Lord. Fifteen times in Exodus 25-31 you have, “before the Lord.” This is the crucial thing. The priest is coming into the very presence of God—he’s before the Lord—and he’s there as a representative, as he makes a sacrifice for and he intercedes for the people of God. This is how God can be present with his people: only through the ministry of a priest.
Of course, brothers and sisters, this is pointing us to a much greater reality. The tabernacle foreshadows the temple that would come later, and all of this foreshadows and looks forward to Jesus Christ, who is our great high priest, who has offered a better sacrifice on the basis of a better covenant, and who has brought us into the presence of God.
The best commentary on the book of Exodus is the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, and I want to read to you Hebrews 8:1-6. The author says,
“Now the point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, a minister in the holy places, in the true tent that the Lord set up, not man. For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; thus it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. [Now listen to this in verse 5.] They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.”
The author here is saying that the tabernacle in the Old Testament is just a copy, a shadow of the true reality which is seen in Christ.
“For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain’ [Exodus 25:9]. But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises.”
We have a priest, we have a sacrifice; he is our final high priest who has made the once and for all final sacrifice, who actually brings us into the presence of God. Christ is the one through whom the dwelling place of God is made with men.
So the tabernacle shows us the way back to the garden by drawing near to the dwelling-place of God through the ministry of a high priest. All of this points us to Christ.
I want to conclude by making three applications. How do you take this information and let it rest with some weight on your heart so that it makes a difference in the way you live this next week? Let me give you three exhortations.
(1) Number one, recognize what you’re really longing for. Your heart is full of desires, of longings. As we saw at the beginning, we’re all longing for things. We’re longing for beauty, we’re longing for justice, we’re longing for peace, we’re longing for relationship, we’re longing for a sense of wholeness in our lives and in the world. The only way that wholeness comes is through the presence of God. What you’re really longing for is not just those things, but it is the God whose presence brings wholeness and restoration, peace and justice and righteousness to the world. Recognize that. Trace that longing, that sense of brokenness, that stabbing desire in your heart that causes you to feel discontent with the world as it is right now—recognize that for what it is. You long for reunion with your Creator. You’re longing for God, and it’s only as God makes his dwelling place with human beings, as heaven and earth are reunited, as this broken world once again becomes sacred space because God dwells among us; it’s only then that we will see the true desires of our heart fulfilled.
St. Augustine said it best. He said, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” Recognize what you’re really longing for.
(2) Number two, rest in the finished work of Christ as your High Priest. Jesus Christ is the one who has offered the complete and final and all-sufficient sacrifice. Listen to Hebrews 9:24-26.
“For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”
This is what Christ has done for us as our great High Priest. You remember that flaming sword and the cherubim guarding the gates, entrance barred to the garden of Eden? The great New England preacher Jonathan Edwards once preached a whole sermon on that. It was called “East of Eden,” and in the climax of the sermon, this is what Edwards said: “Christ undertook to lead us to the tree of life, and he went before us. Christ himself was slain by that flaming sword, and now the sword is removed. There is no sword now, and the way is open and clear to eternal life for those who are in Christ.”
That’s our hope. That’s the hope of the gospel. We have a priest who’s made a sacrifice, he’s taken that sword in his side, he’s taken the judgment we deserve, he’s borne that wrath, so that the way is open.
There was an Irish woman in the 19th century who wrote a beautiful hymn. Originally the hymn was called “The Advocate,” and it’s been revived in recent years. We sing it sometimes here. It goes like this:
Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea;
A great High Priest whose name is Love,
Who ever lives and pleads for me.
My name is graven on his hands,
My name is written on his heart.
I know that while in heav'n he stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart.
We have a priest, a priest who has borne our sin, has offered himself as the supreme sacrifice, and now is in the presence of God on our behalf, and he’s interceding for you, he’s praying for you. He’s bearing your name on his hands and on his heart.
Brothers and sisters, rest in the finished work of Christ. Trust in him. He is the one who brings us to the presence of God. He is the dwelling-place of God. “The word became flesh” and literally tabernacled among us, “and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
(3) Finally, number three, rejoice in the hope of Eden restored. When we think about the tabernacle (and the temple as well), we’re not only supposed to look all the way back to Genesis 1-3, we’re supposed to look all the way forward to Revelation 21-22. The Bible not only begins with a garden temple, it ends with a garden temple.
You can see it in Revelation 21:1-5, where John says that he sees “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Listen to this:
“I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’”
If you keep reading Revelation 21-22 you’re going to see that there’s a tree of life, and the leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations. You’re going to see that there’s a river of life. You’re going to see gems and stones and precious jewels. You’re going to see all of this imagery—it’s right there in the new Jerusalem, the city of God, the dwelling place of God on earth with man. Once again, heaven and earth made one. It’s reunion. It’s Eden restored. It’s paradise regained. It is the healing of all harms. It is the reversal of death and sin and suffering. It is that moment when "all the sad things become untrue" —to quote Tolkien again. It’s what you’re longing for.
Brothers and sisters, this is our hope, the hope of Eden restored, a world made new by the power and the presence of God among us.
Let me ask you, is that your hope this morning? Are you resting and trusting in what Jesus Christ has done? You can’t offer a sacrifice sufficient to cover your sins. You can’t clean yourself. The only one who can cover you and who can cleanse you and who can bring you back into the presence of God is Christ. He is the priest. He’s made the sacrifice, he’s replaced the temple, and he is the one through whom we have access into the very presence of God. Trust in him this morning. Let’s pray together.
Gracious, merciful God, how we thank you for this wonderful good news, this beautiful message that Christ has covered our sins at the cost of his own blood. Our priest has made the final and complete sacrifice. His work is finished, it is sufficient. Now by faith in him and through the indwelling power of your Holy Spirit we can be remade, we can be reborn, made new, sanctified, cleansed, made holy, and brought into the very presence of God. What a gift this is. What grace, that you, a holy God, would love your rebellious creatures so much that you would go to such lengths to make your dwelling place among us! We thank you, Lord.
We praise you, we worship you, and we ask you, Lord, to help us live in the hope of a world that will be made new by the power of Jesus Christ. We see the beginnings of it now. We have the foretaste of this through the work of your Spirit in our hearts, but oh how we long for the day when Jesus Christ will come! That day when we will be freed from sinning once and for all and when you will once and for all make your home on planet earth, and the dwelling place of God will be with man. Lord, we pray, hasten the day; come quickly, Lord Jesus.
We ask you that you would work in our hearts as we wait for your coming, so that we as your holy people, this kingdom of priests, would serve you and would love you, would worship you, and would represent you to the world around us.
As we come to the table this morning, may we come with a deep and conscious dependence on Jesus Christ and what he has done for us. May we be looking to him and not to ourselves. May we trust in his living and in his dying and his rising again as the basis upon which we come before your throne of grace.
We ask you, Lord, that as we come to the table you would minister to us by your grace, feed our souls with the living bread. May we taste and see that you are good. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
