SKENE 6: the two-tent Tabernacle

This leads us to the next paradox of the Tabernacle: a holy God chose to live with a sinful people. Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4.8), and it was his love which led him to live among his people, and so to give them the assurance of his presence with them during their years in the wilderness. This was the purpose of the Tabernacle, but its pattern tells a different story. Scripture, indeed the same letter, also tells us that “God is light” (1 John 1.5), and that the darkness of sin cannot abide his presence. This solemn truth was reflected in the threefold lay-out of the Tabernacle: an outer court for the people, a holy place for the priests and their sacrifices, and a ‘holy of holies’ exclusively for God himself. Alec Motyer, in his commentary on Exodus, acutely observes that the gaps between the pillars of the entrances to these three sections of the Tabernacle became increasingly narrower, an arrangement which made this paradox visible. Motyer calls it a ‘dilemma’: “the provision of entrances, and yet the implicit erection of a sign that said ‘No admission’”. This arrangement he describes as “in keeping with the ‘thus far and no further’ regulations of the Tabernacle as a whole. But the unapproachable holiness of God was most visibly demonstrated by the curtain, or veil (‘katapetasma’) which separated the holy place from the holy of holies, or, as Hebrews puts it, the first tent from the second tent (9.2,7). Nor was this veil just for show, just a visual aid: it was, as it were, a safety-curtain. We read in Leviticus 10.1-2 how two of Aaron’s sons ventured behind the curtain and “offered unauthorised fire to the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (NIV). Exodus 39.1-21 had described in great detail the priestly garments made for Aaron and his sons, and Leviticus 8 recounts the lengthy ceremony of their ordination as priests. Yet even Aaron’s sons could not abide the awesome presence of a holy God – God who is light, and with whom there is no darkness at all. Once again, we may compare this incident with the events of Pentecost, when the fire of God’s holiness fell upon the disciples in their ‘tabernacle’, but instead of striking them dead it filled them with new life and power. This truth is emphasised even more remarkably, perhaps, at the very end of Exodus. For 6 chapters (25-30) Moses had received detailed instructions from God himself for the construction and furnishings of the Tabernacle, and for 6 more chapters, (35-40) Moses has carried them out to the letter. This is the Moses who spent 40 days on Mount Sinai in God’s presence, and came down from the mountain with his face radiant with God’s glory. This is the Moses who built a special tent outside the camp so that he could meet with God, ‘the tent of meeting’, and where “the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (33.11). Yet at the end of the book, when the Tabernacle was set up and fully furnished, so that it was now ‘the Tent of Meeting’, we read: “Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. And Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord had filled the Tabernacle” (40.34-5). Here, then, we see the paradox of the Tabernacle: it houses a loving God who wants to be among his people, but also a holy God who is utterly separate from them.