If any of you are like me, you tend to get bogged down in the books of Exodus and Leviticus. Yes, there are some powerful stories of God’s deliverance. Yes, there are beautiful examples of God’s power and love. Yes, these are the books that outline the laws of God, the old covenant, the 10 commandments. But they also spend chapter after chapter giving instruction for the building of the wilderness tabernacle, a structure that was of temporary importance in the Old Testament, and of absolutely no importance to those of us under the New Covenant.
Or so we tend to think. But I firmly believe that there is a lesson to be learned for us today from every verse in the Bible, and so on the next time I read through the book of Exodus, I set out to discover just what those lessons might be. This 14-part series will be focusing on each of the major instructions given for the construction of the Sanctuary in the wilderness, and on what those instructions will mean for us today.
But there is a question that must be addressed before beginning to study each of the different parts to the sanctuary, and that question is this: Just what possible importance could the tabernacle in the wilderness be to us today?
God answers this question Himself: “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.“ (Exodus 25:8 NIV)
The purpose of the tabernacle in the wilderness was so that God’s presence could live among His people.
But we’re way beyond the tabernacle in the wilderness! There is no longer “a” temple. The New Testament tells us that God’s presence resides in our hearts:
“And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:22 NIV)
“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17 NIV)
No, God isn’t out to build physical temples. He’s out to build what I will coin, “heart-temples”!
But if there is no longer to be a tabernacle in the wilderness, if God’s temple has become our hearts, then we don’t need to pay attention to Exodus 25:1-7, right?
Oh, but we do! Though the physical building has become a spiritual one, the rules haven’t changed. The guidelines laid out to Moses in Exodus are packed full of valuable instructions for how we are to build our “heart-temples”! God’s instruction to Moses becomes His instruction to us: You are to make Me a sanctuary!
What about it friends? As we go through the next 13 lessons of this study, I invite each of you to resolve with me to take the lessons God outlined to Moses in Exodus to heart, so that we, together with God, can build the most beautiful “heart-temples” ever! For doesn’t God merit just that?
Please join us next week for Wilderness Instruction, Part 2: Freewill Offerings.
In His love,
Lyn
Lyn Chaffart, Speech-Language Pathologist, mother of two teens, Author and Moderator for The Nugget, a tri-weekly internet newsletter, and Scriptural Nuggets, a website devoted to Christian devotionals and inspirational poems, with Answers2Prayer Ministries.
(To access the entire “Wilderness Instructions” mini-series, please click here.)