Setting Up the Tabernacle

Exodus 39-40

            Finally, the tabernacle is completed to the Lord’s specifications. Moses finds it just as the Lord had commanded and sets it up for the first time. Note the time stamp: the tabernacle is set up two weeks shy of the anniversary of the Passover. Israel has been at Mt. Sinai for almost a year. It took them six weeks to get from Egypt to Sinai. According to 24:18, Moses spent 40 days on the mountain, so the golden calf incident happened about 3 ½ months out from Egypt. If my math is correct, it took the Israelites about eight months to prepare the tabernacle. I don’t know that that information is particularly important, but according to Numbers 10:11 the Israelites spent just short of a year at Mt. Sinai. I think it’s helpful to think of this as the time in which the Lord deprogrammed them from thinking like slaves and helped them learn to think of themselves as a peculiar people, holy to Him. It takes some time to learn to think differently!

            Much more important is the end of chapter 40, in which the cloud settles on tabernacle, an indication that the Lord has taken up residence among His people. The cloud is the means by which the Lord hides His glory so that He can be in the presence of His people without endangering them. (The holiness of God is incompatible with the sinfulness of humans.) Yet, at this moment, even the cloud cannot fully conceal the Lord’s glory. A very similar thing occurs when the temple is dedicated in Solomon’s day (about 500 years after Sinai). 1 Kings 8:11 says, “And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple.”

            Three things: first, we see again the significance of the tabernacle, namely, it was the place where the Lord was graciously present. Not just omnipresently present, but present specifically to bless. Second, in the history of Israel, Solomon’s temple was destroyed in 586 BC. It was rebuilt at the end of Israel’s Babylonian exile in 516 BC, but the Bible never talks about the glory filling that second temple. Third, the overpowering glory of the Lord makes our Christian experience all the more remarkable. Consider Ephesians 2:18, “For through him [that is, Jesus] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” Access to the Father—unmediated by priests, unafraid to be in His presence—because Jesus did what the sacrifices of the tabernacle were ultimately looking forward to. What scholars call “temple ideology” is huge in understanding the fullness of Biblical theology.