The ‘true tent’, then, is the heavenly ‘Holy of Holies’ before the throne of God. The ‘tent’ in this context must refer to the ‘second tent’ (9.7) beyond the veil, for there can surely be no heavenly equivalent of the ‘first tent’, the place of sacrifice, for in Christ the supreme and final sacrifice has been made, and all the paraphernalia of purification is now redundant, along with the whole tribe of Levitical priests – P 45’s for the lot of them! What, then, of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its rituals, described and prescribed in such repetitive detail in the Book of the Law ? Hebrews uses a cluster of similar words to refer to this ‘skene’, three of them in 8.5. The Levitical priests, says the writer, “are ministers of a sanctuary which is only an outline and a shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” – this last word being a shorter version of ‘Holy of Holies’, the ‘second tent’. He supports this statement by quoting the instructions given to Moses (Ex 35.40) when he was about to construct the ‘skene’: “See that you make everything according to the model you were shown on the mountain”. This is a typically bold stroke of OT interpretation. He infers from these words that Moses was not just given verbal instructions as to how to build the Tabernacle, but was also given some kind of vision of how the finished ‘skene’ should look – a model or a plan. Here, then, is another paradox of the Tabernacle: its structure is built according to a divinely revealed plan, with a first tent and a second tent separated by a veil, but it is itself a plan, or an outline, of the true tent in heaven, the Holy of Holies. The writer seizes on this detail of the Exodus account ( a detail, incidentally, also quoted in Stephen’s account of the building of the Tabernacle in Acts 7.44, which we will come to later), implying that Moses was shown a two-dimensional ‘outline’ of the Tabernacle, which then became a three-dimensional (and tripartite) structure on earth; but he then, as it were, reverses the polarity of this process to suggest that the three-dimensional Tabernacle is itself only an outline of the four-dimensional reality in heaven – if heaven has dimensions.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
SKENE 8: the Tabernacle and the True Tent
The ‘true tent’, then, is the heavenly ‘Holy of Holies’ before the throne of God. The ‘tent’ in this context must refer to the ‘second tent’ (9.7) beyond the veil, for there can surely be no heavenly equivalent of the ‘first tent’, the place of sacrifice, for in Christ the supreme and final sacrifice has been made, and all the paraphernalia of purification is now redundant, along with the whole tribe of Levitical priests – P 45’s for the lot of them! What, then, of the Mosaic Tabernacle and its rituals, described and prescribed in such repetitive detail in the Book of the Law ? Hebrews uses a cluster of similar words to refer to this ‘skene’, three of them in 8.5. The Levitical priests, says the writer, “are ministers of a sanctuary which is only an outline and a shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” – this last word being a shorter version of ‘Holy of Holies’, the ‘second tent’. He supports this statement by quoting the instructions given to Moses (Ex 35.40) when he was about to construct the ‘skene’: “See that you make everything according to the model you were shown on the mountain”. This is a typically bold stroke of OT interpretation. He infers from these words that Moses was not just given verbal instructions as to how to build the Tabernacle, but was also given some kind of vision of how the finished ‘skene’ should look – a model or a plan. Here, then, is another paradox of the Tabernacle: its structure is built according to a divinely revealed plan, with a first tent and a second tent separated by a veil, but it is itself a plan, or an outline, of the true tent in heaven, the Holy of Holies. The writer seizes on this detail of the Exodus account ( a detail, incidentally, also quoted in Stephen’s account of the building of the Tabernacle in Acts 7.44, which we will come to later), implying that Moses was shown a two-dimensional ‘outline’ of the Tabernacle, which then became a three-dimensional (and tripartite) structure on earth; but he then, as it were, reverses the polarity of this process to suggest that the three-dimensional Tabernacle is itself only an outline of the four-dimensional reality in heaven – if heaven has dimensions.
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