|
|
The Final Tabernacle Furnishings
The Final Tabernacle Furnishings Exodus 30:1-38 Key Verse: 30: For the past several weeks we have been thinking about the instructions God gave to Moses concerning the construction of a tabernacle where God could dwell among the Israelites. We also thought about the priestly garments and consecration of the priest who would serve Him there. What I learned as I studied these passages is that all of this points to Jesus. Jesus is God incarnate and He came to live or dwell among men. More than that He promised to dwell in each person who chooses to accept Him. As God promised the Israelites of Moses time to dwell among them if they constructed a tabernacle according to the plan that He gave them, so Jesus promises to dwell within those who choose to build a tabernacle in their hearts according to the plan that He has shown us. God’s gift of forgiveness and His promise to come live in our hearts is completely His one sided grace – there is absolutely nothing we can do to pay off our debt of sin. No matter how good of a life we try to live, we will never be able to cleanse ourselves from the sin that we have committed. Only God can do this and He did by paying off that debt Himself. He went even farther and promised to dwell in every person who chooses to accept His one sided grace of forgiveness. However, by choosing to accept His one sided grace, we also must choose to give up our old way of life and choose to live our life according to the pattern He has given us in Jesus. This pattern is extremely detailed and it goes against the pattern of the life that we used to live. In order to build the tabernacle in our hearts that God requires, we need to come to Jesus every day and ask for His help. We cannot build this tabernacle on our own, but God has promised that He will not abandoned us to complete this task by ourselves. He has promised to be there with us, to give us the strength we need to complete the task, and He has left us a detailed patterned that we can look to every day in the Bible. I pray that God may help each of us to study His detailed pattern for our life every day and build a tabernacle for Him to dwell in us through repentance and prayer. In today’s passage, we have the final details for the construction and consecration of God’s tabernacle. In this passage God instructs Moses to build two more pieces of ‘furniture’ for the tabernacle, conduct a census of the people, and to prepare a special anointing oil to be used to anoint the priests and all the items in the tabernacle and a special incense that is to be burned before Him every day. Once again, on first glance these instruction seem rather mundane, but if you look a little harder at them, you can see that they tell us a lot about God and what He thinks and expects from us. I pray that God will bless our study of this passage and open our spiritual eyes and ears so that each of us can accept one word in our hearts and go further in building our own tabernacle in our hearts for Him to dwell. First, the alter of incense (1-10) Chapter 30 opens up with God’s instructions for building another alter for the tabernacle. In chapter 27 God instructed Moses to build a larger alter that was to be made of acacia wood and overlaid with bronze. All of the utensils used in the service of that alter were also to be made of Bronze. This alter was not to go into the tabernacle itself, instead it was to be place in the courtyard surrounding the tabernacle, right in front of the entrance. This alter was to be used for the daily sacrificing of animals. This bronze alter was to be the focal point of the sacrificial system that God was to set up for the Israelites for the forgiveness of their sins and for their freewill and fellowship offerings to Him. This alter was a very important part of the Israelite community. The alter that God instructs Moses to build here is to be a much smaller alter and it would not be visible to the Israelite community at all. Like the other alter, this one was to be made of acacia wood, but it was only to be about one and a half foot square (about half a meter square) and three feet high (one meter high). The other alter was almost eight feet square (close to 2 meters square) and almost five feet high (just under a meter high). Unlike the large alter that was to go in the courtyard and was overlaid with bronze, this smaller alter was to be overlaid with pure gold. It was to have a gold molding constructed to go around it and have four small horns of gold placed at its four corners. The gold indicates the importance of this alter and suggests that it was not to be placed outside the tabernacle, but inside of it. Indeed it was to go inside the tabernacle and it was to go in a very important place. It was to be place right in front of the veil that separated the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place. The positioning of this alter suggests its importance. Let’s take a moment to think about the importance of this alter. This alter was to be an alter where incense was to burn continually before the LORD. God instructed Moses to instruct Aaron and his descendants to tend to this alter every morning and every evening when they attended the lamp. Just as the lamp was never to go out before the LORD, so the incense on this alter was never to go out. A fragrant offering of burning incense was to be always burning before the LORD. What did this burning incense represent? What it was intended to represent, I think, was the prayers of the people before the LORD. Just as the incense was never to stop burning, so the prayers of the people should never cease before the LORD. When I thought about this alter of incense and prayers never ceasing before the LORD, I thought about Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18. “Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” Paul says to pray continually because this is what God wants us to do. How many of us pray continually? Unfortunately I don’t and this often leads to serious problems in my life of faith. If I am not praying continually, then I am not following God’s plan for the building of His tabernacle in my heart. God’s will for me and for each of you is that we pray continually before Him. This is what it means for us to tend to the alter of incense that he wants us to put in the tabernacle that we build for him in our hearts. Prayer is not an option in a life of faith. It is an absolute necessity. This can be seen in the prominent location that God instructs Moses to put this alter of incense. The alter of prayer should be in the center of our hearts at all times and we must not let it go out. We need constantly tend to this alter. At the very least we should attend to it first thing in the morning when we start our day and in the evening just before we go to bed. God requires that we keep the incense of prayer always burning in our lives of faith. Second a census and a ransom offering for our life (11-16). Censuses in the Old Testament were a fairly common thing and this one in particular was needed. At some point it was clear that the Israelites were going to face some war. After all, they were going to go in and occupy land that was already occupied by other people. It would be unreasonable to assume that those other people would simple give the Israelites there land without a fight. Sooner or later the Israelites were going to have to prepare for these fights and one of the primary things a nation has to do to prepare for such things is to find out just what their fighting strength is. In order to do this Moses was going to have to count the men who were of fighting age and able to do so. In other words he would have to conduct a census. In this particular census that God commanded Moses to conduct, Moses was also to collect “a ransom for his life” from each of the men counted. The words, “a ransom for his life,” are very interesting. As I’ve mentioned many times before, there is no amount of money that we can offer to God to wipe out the debt we own for our sins. Simply speaking money cannot buy salvation; only God can give it to us. So I began to wonder what this ransom for one’s life was all about. Then I read on and discovered that this ransom, was a very small amount. I began to wonder if God thought that a man’s life was of so little value. However then I noticed that each person, whether they were rich or poor, had to pay exactly the same amount. Some of you might think that this is really unfair, after all, shouldn’t the rich have to pay more because they can. Humanly speaking, an especially in today’s world, this would be perfectly natural to assume, but God doesn’t look at human life the way we do. A rich person life is not worth more than a poor person’s life in God’s sight. They are wroth exactly the same. Furthermore, it is not the monetary value of a person’s life that God is interested in. What He is interested in is that a person is willing to come before Him and be counted in order to contribute to the work He has for His people. God wants our life, not our money. Each of our lives is just as precious as anyone else’s life before God. It does not matter if we are rich or poor, smart or not so smart, handsome or not so handsome in front of God. What matters is our willingness to come before God and offer ourselves for His service. If we do this, God can use us. As I said before, censuses were important in Old Testament times and they are still important today, but sometimes censuses were not a good thing. For instance, David once conducted a census in his old age and this really upset God. An account of this can be found in 2 Samuel 24. When I thought about why this offended God so much I realized that David was conducting the census to find out how strong he was militarily. By conducting the census David was not depending on God for his protection he was relying on his own military might. This made me think even more about this census that God ordered Moses to conduct. It is not the number of men that God is interested in and it is not even the caliber of men. As I’ve said it is simply the men who are willing to stand up and offer what little they have to God. God can use no what we think we have to offer. Third, the bronze basin for washing (17-21). The final furnishing that God ordered Moses to make for His tabernacle was a bronze basin that was to be used by Aaron and his descendants for washing themselves before they carried out their duties as the people’s ministers. This basin was to be made of bronze and it was also to go in the courtyard, outside of the tabernacle itself. God instructed Moses to place this basin right in between the alter and the tabernacle. Before Aaron or his descendants were to offer any sacrifice on the alter or enter the tabernacle they were to wash their hands and feet with water from this basin. Of course, this was just a ceremonial washing, because no water, no matter how holy, can wash away the filth of our sin, but it is a very important ceremonial washing. By doing this every time, before they did anything in God’s service, they were reminded that they were serving a Holy God. They were serving a God that could not be approached just any way they chose. They had to put on very special clothes and they needed to do what they could to make themselves clean. Likewise, we also need to do what we can do to make ourselves clean before we enter into God’s service. We mustn’t think that we can wash away our sins simply by taking a shower. However, God can wash away our sins if we come to Him with the right attitude. We need to go through a ceremonial washing every day because we need to serve God every day. Our ceremonial washing is repentance. Before serving God we need to ask for His forgiveness and sincerely repent. I am reminded of King David’s great psalm of repentance (psalm 51) after his sin with Bathsheba was exposed. David poured out his heart in repentance and asked God to restore to him the joy of salvation and create in him a pure heart and a steadfast spirit so that he could “Then [I will] teach transgressors your ways, so that sinners will turn back to you.” David knew that he needed to repent before he could do God’s work and teach other transgressors God’s ways. The same is true for us. Without repentance, our ceremonial washing before God, we can’t serve others and help them to know God’s ways. This washing is not a small matter before God. In verses 20 and 21 God says that Aaron and his descendants are to do this every time before they minister “so that they will not die.” God repeats these words twice to add emphasis and this tells the importance of washing ourselves before we attempt to serve God. Just like every other furnishing for the tabernacle of Moses time, this bronze basin reminds us of what we need to do if we are to build a tabernacle in our hearts where God can dwell in us. Fourth, the anointing oil and incense (22-38) There were two final things that God needed Moses to make to complete the tabernacle. These were an anointing oil that would be used to anoint everything in the tabernacle including the priests who were to serve there and the special incense that was to be kept burning before God all the time. Once again, God gave Moses very specific instruction concerning how these were to be made because they were to be used in the service of a Holy God. This anointing oil and incense was not to be used for any other purpose other than what God intended them to be used for. If you look over at Leviticus 10 you can see how seriously God took this prohibition of using the incense for a purpose other than He intended for its use. Nadab and Abihu thought that it would be ok to simple put some of this incense in their censors and burn it in front of the people. They did this with the intention of worshiping God, but they were trying to worship God in their own way and not in God’s prescribed way. This was a terrible sin in God’s sight and it could not be tolerated. God had to do something to show the people that this was not acceptable. What he did was very dramatic. God sent fire out of himself and consumed them. We also must keep in mind that we are not to serve God in any way that we choose. We are only to serve God in the manner that He commands us. God has not left us on our own to simply guess how we should serve Him in this generation. Like Moses and the Israelites of his time, God has set before us a very detailed plan of how we are to construct a tabernacle in our hearts for Him to dwell in. There is no piece of this plan that is too small or unimportant for God to care about. Everything must be done according to God’s plan and not according to what we think best. Following this plan is not always easy. In fact, in many ways it goes against the way we live or the way we want to live. Following God’s plan requires constant prayer and repentance. It requires diligence and a close attention to detail. In order to follow this plan we need Jesus’ help, we cannot do it on our own. Next week we are also going to see that it requires the help of other people as well. May God bless each one of us to follow his plan completely and construct a tabernacle in our hearts that he can dwell in. |
| 
|
