SKENE 29: the grand finale?

What he hears is this: “Look ! The tent of God is with men, and he will pitch his tent with them”. It is easy to ‘overlook’ the first word here. The vision and the voice are clearly related: seeing and hearing must go together. If we just listen to the voice, we might get the impression that God is going camping again, and, in his desire to be with his people, is graciously pleased, as in the wilderness, to live in a tent. But, “look !”: this is some tent ! In “the first earth” the wilderness seemed to be symbolic of the curse under which nature groaned, the very antithesis of the garden which God gave man to live in. But this is a “new earth”, and the ‘tent’ in which God will dwell is a city, new Jerusalem, described in all its magnificence in 21.9 – 22.5, as John is given a guided tour by one of the seven angels. ‘Behold’ how our humble ‘skene’ has been metamorphosed, or transfigured ! It began life as just a tent, the dwelling-place of Abraham for much of his time on earth, as he journeyed around as a ‘stranger and pilgrim’ in a land that was not yet his own, sustained merely (merely ?) by God’s promise of a great inheritance. This Hebrews describes as “a city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God”, a city not-made-by-human-hands. What faith ! All the patriarchs, the writer goes on to say, died in faith, having seen the promises from afar. They were looking for a homeland, not the one they had left behind, but something much better, a homeland in heaven: God had prepared for them a city (Heb 11.13-16). So how has Abraham’s old tent metamorphosed into the new Jerusalem ? In this study, we have traced the steps of this transfiguration, the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ of the ‘skene’ from “the wilderness of this world” to “the celestial city”. First came the Tabernacle, a tent whose architect was God, bur whose builder was Moses; a tent that was two tents separated by a veil, a veil which protected God’s people from the unbearable brightness of his glory. The Tabernacle eventually put down roots and became the Temple, God’s house – but still a house divided. Then, “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us”; this was now the tabernacle in which God, in the person of Jesus, lived with his people, and died for them, for “in him the whole fullness of the Godhead makes his home bodily” (Col  2.9). The Day of Pentecost brought another metamorphosis: now God came to live among his people through his Holy Spirit, so that both the church collectively and each believer individually became the Tabernacle and the Temple. Finally, as we might think, Revelation takes us up to heaven, and shows us the tabernacle wonderfully transfigured, God’s people dwelling with him in glory, with no veil needed to screen them from its brightness. Surely this is the promised end, the grand finale, the heavenly city promised to Abraham? This city is described in greater detail in the next chapter of Hebrews (12. 22-4): “But you have come”, the writer tells his Jewish readers, “to Mount Sion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and thousands upon thousands of angels, the full assembly of the church of the firstborn, whose names are registered in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the justified made perfect”. Surely this magnificent tableau is the final scene of the drama of salvation – a grand finale indeed !