SKENE 15: the Incarnation

Yes, God does indeed still want to dwell among his people and have fellowship with them. This has been his desire from the very beginning, from the sixth day of creation. In Eden, before the fall, man and woman could stand before a holy God naked and unashamed in unhindered fellowship, as God in person “walked in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen 3.8). But after the fall God came to them not in fellowship but in judgement, and the relationship was changed for ever. Nevertheless, God was still calling and seeking a people to be his own. Abraham was obedient to that call, and lived much of his life, as we have seen, as a tent-dweller in a foreign land, sustained by God’s promise of a future inheritance, so that he is truly the father of all who have faith in God’s word. The Israelites in the wilderness were sustained by God’s presence among them, but, as the Tabernacle has shown us, he was present but unapproachable. The Temple merely represented the same truth more splendidly and more permanently; but both were still just temporary measures until the unfolding of God’s perfect plan. This had been foreshadowed throughout the OT, but was finally announced by the Archangel Gabriel, not to kings or prophets or priests in Jerusalem, but to a teenage girl in a country village: “Behold, you will conceive in your womb, and bear a son, and you will call his name Jesus” (Luke 1.31). The angel also brings this message to Mary’s husband-to-be, the village carpenter, with the same instruction to “call his name ‘Jesus’”. This is recorded by Matthew, who sees this miracle of the virgin birth as the fulfilment of a prophecy by Isaiah: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they will call his name ‘Emmanuel’”. This name Matthew helpfully translates for those whose Hebrew is not up to it: “God with us” (Matt 1. 21-3, Isaiah 7.14). So once again, as in the garden of Eden, God comes among his people in person, though now in the person of his incarnate Son. It is John who, as it were, coins the term ‘incarnation’. He begins his gospel by describing Jesus as the co-eternal Word, and then, in verse 14, he writes: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” (AV – what else ?). But it is the verb John uses here, translated ‘dwelt’, that is our main concern: the verb ‘skeno’. This word is used only by John in the NT (its 4 other uses are in Revelation), and means, literally, to ‘pitch a tent’, or to ‘live in a tent’ – or a tabernacle. What a wealth of Jewish history and OT scripture John evokes by his use of this one word ! It reminds us of Abraham “living in tents” (Heb 11.9) in the land promised to him as though it were a foreign land; John has just said of Jesus that “he came to his own home, and his own people did not receive him” (v.11). It reminds us, too, of the Tabernacle, which, in a sense, embodied the presence of Emmanuel with his people in the wilderness; but they could only see his glory in a cloud which kept them at a distance, while for us, “God made his light to shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4.6). The God whose “eyes are too pure to look on evil” is incarnate in Jesus who was known as “the friend of sinners” (Hab 1.13, Matt 12.19). And it reminds us, thirdly, of the metaphorical use of ‘skene’ that we looked at a little earlier: the ‘flesh’ that Jesus ‘became’ was a human body which, like a tent, is only a temporary dwelling, and all too vulnerable to the ‘slings and arrows’ which life hurls against it – not to mention whips and nails. When God wanted to be with his people in the wilderness when they were literally living in tents, he too became a tent-dweller, and dwelt among them in the Tabernacle pitched at the crossroads of their encampment. But in the fullness of time, at the crossroads of history, God wanted all mankind, and not just the Jews, to be part of his family; all mankind live in tents, the tent of the human body, and so God, too, lived among us in such a tent – a tent which was torn apart and taken down long before it was worn out by the normal wear and tear of life.