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When Is a House Not a House?

Having discussed several of the issues surrounding the tabernacle in Exodus, we're skipping way ahead to 2 Samuel 7, in which David proposes to build a temple for the Lord. By this time, about 400 years since the construction of the tabernacle, God had brought the Israelites into Canaan - the Promised Land - and had established them as a nation with their own territory. The people had demanded a king and received Saul, who was succeeded by David. David had fought many successful battles against Israel's neighbors to secure the borders and extend the kingdom. And now, says 2 Samuel 7:1, God had given David rest.

David had already built a palace for himself in Jerusalem and he compares it to the tabernacle and resolves to construct something far better for the Lord. Why should God live in a tent while David enjoys a cedar paneled palace (that place must have smelled great!)?

Oddly, the Lord does not allow David to move forward with his plan (2 Sam 7:12-13), but instead God offers to do even more for David than He has already done. Yahweh tells him, "The Lord himself will establish a house for you" (2 Sam 7:11). And He says, "Your [David's] house and your kingdom will endure forever before me [God]; your throne will be established forever" (2 Sam 7:16). Here David had offered to do something extravagant for God in response to all that the Lord had done for him (remember David started as a simple shepherd before becoming a renowned soldier and then king), but God's response is to refuse and offer to pour more blessing on David.

The story demonstrates the remarkably extravagant heart of our Lord. He cannot deliver enough blessing on those who love Him and seek His face. It reminds me of a little passage that Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us..." (3:20). The Lord is an abundant God who takes pleasure in giving in abundance to His children. It would be worth meditating on this for a while and see if it doesn't change our expectations of what God can and, indeed, wants to do.

The other bit about this story in 2 Samuel 7 that's fun to point out is a little word play that only kind of shows up in English. After David suggests this temple idea to the prophet Nathan, the Lord says, "Are you [David] the one to build me a house to dwell in" (2 Sam 7:5)? The word for "house" there is a pretty common Hebrew word: bayith. The word quite often simply means a physical house. But then in v. 11, God declares that He will build a bayith for David. And now the meaning starts to take new shape. Surely God does not intend to construct a new home for David; he's already got a palace. No, the context is clear, the Lord is going to establish David's line of kings. Now, bayith means something more like "dynasty."

OK, so cool, David intends to build a home for God, but God turns the tables and promises a legacy for David. Why get so pumped up about this? It really gets interesting in vv. 12-16. Check it out:

"When your [David's] days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house [bayith] for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever."

This is a key passage that is often taken, at least in part, to refer to the coming Messiah. That it is from David's line that the Christ will come to rule over the earth forever (Matthew 1 makes the connection in the genealogy of Jesus). But the Lord could also simply be refering to Solomon, who will take the throne after David. After all, it is Solomon who ends up building the temple (1 Kgs 6-8).

But I wonder if the same word play that we saw above is working here too. When the Lord says that David's offspring will build a bayith for Him, could he mean dynasty or legacy or reputation? Certainly Solomon does build a temple for Yahweh, in which the Lord did dwell (1 Kgs 8:10), but it is Jesus who establishes an eternal house - dynasty, legacy, reputation - for the Lord. And this forces us to ask: What kind of house are we building for our God?

The Glory of the Lord

Once we reach the end of Exodus, the tabernacle has been completed and something peculiar happens. Exodus 40:34-35 tells us, "Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle."

I don't know if I've ever seen anybody's glory before, but it must be pretty dense stuff if it keeps people from entering a room. It's probably worth taking a look to see where else this stuff shows up in the Bible and see if that gives us any clues to what this means.

"The glory of the Lord" shows up a couple other times in Exodus. In ch. 16, it manifests itself in the manna. In ch. 24, it surrounds the peak of Mt. Sinai, where Moses goes to talk with the Lord. The phrase shows up a handful of times through Leviticus and Numbers, but then we don't see it again until 1 Kings. After Solomon completes the temple, something very similar to Exodus 40 happens - the glory of the Lord fills the temple so that neither Solomon nor the priests could go in to do their work (you can read about it in 1 Kings 8 or 2 Chronicles 7). That seems eerily similar to this tabernacle episode. Ezekiel uses the phrase a few times. Ezekiel 10 is an alarming one, because in that chapter, Ezekiel has a vision of the glory of the Lord leaving the temple (that can't be good). Much later (ch. 43) Ezekiel sees the glory of the Lord returning to the temple (phew).

Whatever this glory of the Lord stuff is, there seems only to be a few things we can say about it for sure. First, it appears to look like a thick cloud. Also, it always seems to be hanging around wherever God is. Remember we talked about Yahweh "living" in the tabernacle or in the temple? I don't think it's coincidence that His glory fills these places as soon as they're completed. By association, we can also connect the Lord's blessing to the presence of His glory. This we discussed a few weeks ago too. Ezekiel mostly discusses the future exile that's coming for the Israelites (they'll end up being conquered and escorted to Assyria and Babylon). His vision of the glory of the Lord leaving the temple, symbolizes the Lord removing His protection from the people. The result: exile. The end of Ezekiel, however, discusses the opposite. It's a promise that exile isn't forever, that the Lord's blessing will return and with it the Israelites will return to their land.

This phrase doesn't show up too much in the New Testament, but something very similar appears in Revelation 21. Here's a chapter that we should all probably read seven times a day for a week and see if our perspective on the future doesn't become super hopeful. Revelation 21 describes the new creation and the new Jerusalem. There in John's vision is the city of God restored to its ideal state. And there in the midst of it is the glory of God, shining like a sun (Rev. 21:11, 23). There is everything just as it ought to have been all along with God in the middle of it. The city is not just well protected by the Lord, but it is a beacon to the world - perfect in every way.

From time to time, I imagine this for the local church, a place like Calvary Fellowship. I start to wonder what it might be like for God to come to our congregation so powerfully that we essentially have to stop doing whatever we might normally have done. Think of playing through a song like "Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?" and all of a sudden the air gets thick like a cloud and we literally have to stop singing and playing and all we can think to do is fall on our faces. I don't think we'd have to do it out of fear, although that would be a legitimate emotion at that point, but simply because the Lord is there with all of His goodness and love and we just have to soak it in. Remember, when the glory of the Lord fills the new Jerusalem, it's not a terrible thing, it's a wonderful occasion worthy of rejoicing. Can we hope and pray for something like this to happen for our people at Calvary someday? I will be.

Why All the Killing?

Between the point at which God gives the instructions for the tabernacle and the actual building of it, there's a story in Exodus that has often confused and troubled a lot of us. It comes in chapter 32, while Moses is on Mount Sinai getting instruction from the Lord. I guess Moses was up there for a long time, because the people fear that he's gone for good. It's at this stage that the people convince Aaron to help them build a golden calf - an idol that was probably similar to the many they would have encountered in their 400 years in Egypt.

Maybe this seemed reasonable: you've got to worship something (we all worship something) and this Moses character, who represents an invisible god (who ever heard of an invisible god?), seems to have disappeared so let's make something we can see and worship. I mean, that's what every other culture on the planet (not that the Hebrews would have known this) has been doing since the beginning. At any rate, that's what they do. They melt down all their gold and build a statue they can honor.

But here's where things get hard for us reading this today. A furious Moses comes down the mountain (I think his anger is justified - it would be like us walking into church on Sunday and finding everyone singing to Allah or Vishnu or something) and calls out, "Whoever is for the Lord, come to me" (Exo. 32:26). All the Levites come running and Moses instructs them to run through the camp and start "killing his brother and friend and neighbor" (Exo. 32:27). And they end up killing 3,000 people. And this is what many of us really don't understand: Moses then rewards them, saying, "You [the Levites] have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day" (Exo. 32:29).

What gives? Why should the Levites be rewarded for cutting down 3,000 of their own people? And why would the Lord bless this kind of thing? And for many of us Christians, this just doesn't seem to square with the New Testament. Jesus never killed anyone. Actually, the Bible says of Jesus, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" (Isa. 42:3; Mat. 12:20). We can be tempted to throw our arms in the air and give up on this Old Testament stuff. It's too wacky.

Let's take a look at why the Levites might have been rewarded and what it was that God gave them for what they did. We'll then address some of our questions about how this works with Jesus and the New Testament. The Levites were blessed, not necessarily because they killed their own people, but because their loyalty to the Lord superseded all other relationships they may have had. When they ran to Moses' side, they showed that their faithfulness to God was more important to them than their faithfulness to their families or their nation or their friends. It was this fidelity that Yahweh rewarded.

And what was their reward? Essentially, this one incident is the reason why the Levites became the priests in Israel. The tabernacle (God's traveling palace) had not yet been built, but when it was, it was the Levites who were put in charge. Numbers 1:50 describes their responsibility: "Appoint the Levites to be in charge of the tabernacle of the Testimony - over all its furnishings and everything belonging to it..." The Levites' zeal for the Lord at this early stage got them "promoted" to priestly status for the rest of Israel's history. Because they were faithful early on, God chose them to represent the people at his tabernacle and, later, the temple forever (This becomes all the more fascinating when we realize that a big portion of the priests' job description was to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people so that the Lord would hold back his judgment and forgive their sins).

Now, how does this fit with what we know about Jesus and a loving Father? A whole book could be written on the subject (and several have), but I'll just offer a couple of points. First, from the very start, the consequences of unfaithfulness to the Lord has been death. Adam and Eve experienced it (Gen. 3:3, 19, 22-23) and Paul wrote it down in a famous formula: "For the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23a). So for the Israelites to betray Yahweh in favor of a hunk of metal was deserving of death, especially after all Yahweh had done for them to bring them out of Egypt (Israel had probably crossed the Red Sea and escaped the Egyptians just a few weeks before this incident).

But now that Jesus has come, we might say, surely things are different. Well, yes and no. Yes: Jesus died on the cross to take on all the sin of the world, so that whoever places her trust in Jesus won't have to suffer God's consequences for sin. 2 Corinthians 5:21 puts it like this: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." And no: even Jesus expected that our fidelity to him be above our loyalty to anything else. In Matthew 12, Jesus refuses to leave his disciples to talk to his family (who thinks he's crazy) and calls his disciples his new family. Later, in Matthew 19:29, Jesus promises great rewards for those who choose to follow him at the cost of forsaking their families.

When it all boils down, we've really got to ask ourselves one question: what are our greatest loyalties? If we were forced to choose, who or what is at the top of our list? Even if it became a life and death circumstance, where is our allegiance? The Levites, as hard as that decision must have been for them, placed their hope in the Lord and were rewarded with the opportunity to serve with God on behalf of their nation forever.

The Boring Part of Exodus

How many of us have ever read Exodus 25-27, in which plans for the tabernacle and its components are laid out, and thought: "Who cares?" Why does the Bible spend three chapters detailing (and, man, are they detailed!) the blueprints for this tent? And then, why does the Bible essentially repeat itself a little later as it describes how it was constructed (chs. 37-40)? BORING!

To be honest, I thought so too for a long time until a few archaeological details were pointed out to me. Check this out.

Place diagrams or models of some of these pieces alongside ancient Egyptian paintings and relics and the similarities are obvious. For example, the tabernacle on the top looks an awful lot like this typical Egyptian temple just below it, which incidentally is very similar to a tent-like portable palace for Pharaoh. Or the Ark of the Covenant below seems to have been ripped right from what we know of ancient Egyptian arks, like the one underneath it.

What gives? A lot of secular Bible scholars would have us believe that Exodus is misleading. They would suggest that these plans for the tabernacle and the ark were not actually given to the people direct from God via Moses. These scholars would tell us that the Hebrews, having spent the previous 400 years in Egypt, were simply replicating Egyptian religion under a different name. I would suggest a different option.

When trying to explain to a new Christian or a nonbeliever the incarnation (you know, God become man in Jesus), it's helpful to think of it as God coming to meet us where we were. We wouldn't have been able to find Him on our own, so He made Himself human, something we could relate to.

The same applies to the tabernacle. The Hebrews had absorbed a lot of Egyptian culture during their 400 years of captivity there. By the time the Lord rescued them and brought them to Sinai this is what they knew: Pharaoh was Lord. To break this understanding, God used Egyptians models to speak through symbols the Hebrews would have understood. If Pharaoh had a traveling tent-like palace and he sat in the "holy place," then God's tabernacle would look the same and God would dwell in place of Pharaoh. The message: Yahweh is Lord.

So as the Hebrews received instructions for the tabernacle from Moses, imagine it slowly dawning on many of them: "Hey, this thing looks an awful lot like Pharaoh's mobile palace, but who's going to sit on the throne?" Then it gets filled by the glory of the Lord (Exodus 40) and it hits the people all at once and their framework for understanding the world has to turn around all at once.

This naturally raises quite a few questions for us today. What secular (or even religious) symbols are around today that point to other gods and how might they be reassigned to our Lord (Jesus, our Commander-in-Chief; Yahweh the CEO; etc.)? How can these sorts of bridges be used to help lead our congregation in worship? Are there symbols we often use in the church these days that seem outdated or incomprehensible today? Are there ways we can update them?

I Will Dwell Among Them...

As we continue to think about the theme of temples in the Bible, it takes a little while before we get to Exodus 25:8, where God instructs Moses, "Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them" (NIV). This is just before the Lord gives Moses all the instructions for how to build the tabernacle, which amounts to a kind of portable temple (it was portable, even if it basically took a whole tribe of people to carry its different components from place to place). This verse is short, but the promise within it is quite massive and worth a look.

The meaning of this statement becomes pretty packed when we start to ask what it means for God to dwell among His people. We've got to do a little digging, but it doesn't take long before it starts to come clear. Once more in Exodus does God say that He will dwell among His people in ch. 29:45. Here the idea of God living in the midst of the people is expanded: "I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God" (NIV). It's not that the Lord is saying that He will do two separate things - live with the people and be their God. He's essentially saying the same thing twice - living with the people is being their God.

But what does that mean, to be their God? Now here's where the concept starts to explode. In the Old Testament, there are 18 places where God makes this kind of statement, that He will be somebody's God. He first says it twice to Abraham in Genesis 17:7-8 as God promises to make a nation of him. He says it to the oppressed Israelites before He brings the plagues against Egypt - a promise of the Hebrews' deliverance (Exo. 6:7). Of course, we saw it in Exodus 29:45. Two times it shows up in Leviticus concerning God's faithfulness to the agreement He makes with Israel (Lev. 26:12, 45). We don't see the phrase again until Jeremiah, where it is several times spoken as a comforting word of God promising future blessings to the downtrodden and exiled Israelites (Jer. 7:23; 11:4; 24:7; 30:22; 31:33; 32:38). And in Ezekiel, the Lord uses it in much the same way - a promise of God's faithfulness (Ezk. 11:20; 14:11; 36:28; 37:23, 27).

In other words, "I will be your God" is language that the Lord uses to mark His covenant with His people. It is always a promise that God will be faithful to those who obey and serve Him. He offers protection and provision, peace and prosperity, so to speak. This is the effect of God dwelling in the midst of His people. Essentially, the offer of the temple is all of God's abundant blessing.

Perhaps you've already guessed what this means for us as we seek to lead the congregation into worship each week. When we look to facilitate a meeting between the Lord and His people, we are seeking to create an environment in which God can dwell. So while we worship, as God comes down to us and we reach out to Him, we're allowing for a connection to be made that has the potential to bring about all of the promised blessings of God. In our worship comes protection from the enemy, food for the journey, and anything else we may need for the mission to which He's called us. Referring back to last week's post, our periods of worship have the potential to establish a truly Eden-like place where all that we need for abundant life is present.

The Temple Eden

Before creation, God certainly had His dwelling in the heavens, yet Eden may be considered His first earthly home. After all, He did walk about the garden with Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:8). We may, therefore, consider Eden a sort of predecessor to the tabernacle and the Temple, the two definitive earthly homes of God in the Old Testament.

The Bible doesn't say a whole lot about what Eden looked like (I'm sure the writer of Genesis had other concerns), but there are a few characteristics we can pull out of the text.

Some aspects of Eden may seem rather insignificant, like the fact that it had four sides (Gen. 2:10-14) or that its entrance was on the east side (Gen. 3:24). These details become more important when we encounter the plans for the tabernacle at the end of Exodus (chs. 26-40).

There are, however, a couple of pieces that might appear more important. For example, Eden seems to have held everything that was necessary for life. Water was abundant (Gen. 2:10-14). Food was also plentiful (Gen. 2:9). Here, in God's home, in His presence, was everything that Adam and Eve needed for a full and satisfying life (we might assume, also, that the Tree of Life supplied life in abundance since by eating of it Adam and Eve procure everlasting life - Gen. 3:22).

It may also be worth noting that life in God's presence still required work. Adam was commanded to work the garden and care for it (Gen. 2:15). Although Eden may have been perfect in its relation with God, it still required maintenance and expansion.

This theme of God's dwelling places we will explore further down the road, but for now, let's see what we might learn from Eden, God's proto-temple. In God's home, we have all we need. In fact, there is life - the eternal kind of life - in His presence. And yet, there is still some kind of commission in God's presence. So as we enter worship of the Lord and seek to welcome His presence, we ought to expect to encounter a life-giving atmosphere. But that doesn't mean that we simply sit basking in that provision. Rather, we ought to expect directions to act on as well. When we gather for worship this week, let's look to absorb what we can of God's life-giving Spirit and also listen for His guiding for accomplishing His will.