9: He Tents With Us

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 9. We are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series with a look at the tabernacle.

Hello, Father.

[00:08] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Diving into Exodus again, aren’t we?

[00:13] Stephanie: Indeed. But first, happy Easter season.

[00:15] Marcus: It is the Easter season.

[00:16] Stephanie: Yes. Pretty sure when this episode comes out, Palm Sunday has just happened, and Easter Sunday is coming. I mean resurrection Sunday. What a wonderful, glorious holiday. I love Easter, and I feel like a lot of times it gets kind of lost in bunnies and stuff. Which, spring bunnies, it’s very cute and I like it. It’s fine. But glorious Easter! Resurrection! Epic. Epic, epic!

[00:44] Marcus: Doesn’t get much more epic in the Christian life than Easter and resurrection. Yeah, that’s pretty much the foundation of the faith.

[00:54] Stephanie: Without it, we have nothing. So, yes, very epic. On that note, maybe for our icebreaker today, do you have a joyful Easter memory to share?

[01:11] Marcus: As opposed to a traumatic one? Actually, I think I’ve written about my traumatic Easter memories in some books somewhere. But my joyful Easter memories – as a kid, we did all the usual stuff. We boiled eggs and colored them and hid them and did Easter egg hunts. I remember we’d always get up for 6:00 a.m. Easter sunrise service, followed by donuts, and that was kind of the highlight of the thing.

And then we’d have another service, and then we’d go home and we’d have a really big meal. And so that was kind of what sits in my head, I think, of Easter and how we celebrated Easter. All that stuff went into it.

[01:52] Stephanie: I love it. And I’m grinning because of a conversation we just had with my brother, your son.

[02:00] Marcus: Yes.

[02:02] Stephanie: He’s like, “Wait, why did we stop this tradition?”

[02:08] Marcus: He’s like, “Wait, donuts were a tradition?” Yes, I get it. So he was not happy. I did not continue the donut tradition in our family.

[02:17] Stephanie: You know, when we talk about Easter traditions or just memories, the first one that tends to pop in my head is the Warner side of the family with Grandma & Grandpa Warner, and uncles, cousins, over at Tim and Linda’s house and having Easter egg hunts and doing the Easter story with Grandpa. And they had a really lovely sunroom. I just remember a bench – a window seat – that’s what I’m trying to say. They had a lovely window seat, and I would curl up on the window seat and listen to the Easter story. It’s a gentle, joyful memory.

[03:01] Marcus: Yeah, that’s true. My mom was very good at making sure that things like that got celebrated properly.

[03:07] Stephanie: Yeah, and it was fun to do it multi-generationally and all of that. So, Huzzah for your mother.  And donuts and everything.

[03:15] Marcus: My sister Gwen once said about my mom that one of her gifts was taking everything and making it more beautiful. She put a lot of thought into making sure that things were done well with a flare of creativity and a flare of beauty and decoration. It’s a nice home.

[03:33] Stephanie: Yes, very good.

Well, today we are talking about the tabernacle. Last episode, we were talking about the mountain and intimacy with God and so it’s only right that we continue in where the second half of Exodus has a lot to say about the tabernacle. Some people might skim over it, but it’s actually really cool. We’ve got Eden imagery. We’ve got the intimacy of having God. So, anyway, I will let you say what you want to say.

[04:09] Marcus: It is kind of funny. Now that you’ve got your master’s in biblical studies and you’ve been in all this stuff, we’re getting close to the point where I could interview you on this, and it might be more profitable. But I was thinking, it’s been 30 years since I was in the academic side of all of all this. It used to be my world that I kind of swam in, but now it’s like pulling up things from a different lifetime now and then about all the details. But it’s good for me. It’s okay. It’s like God’s reminding me, “You used to really like this. You ought to try to maybe do this a little more often.”

[04:48] Stephanie: And you’re still shockingly impressive. While I was going through seminary, my brother was going through undergrad, and there was a time where we were both taking Greek at the same time, and we would come to you and discuss Greek things, and you would just pull Greek right out of your head. You’re like, “Oh, well, it’s this grammatical principle,” and this thing and that thing. And Ben was constantly just flabbergasted, “How? I am in my third year of studying this and struggling with xyz, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, yeah. Off the top of my head…’?” So, anyway, you’re feeling the deficit, but it doesn’t show very often. You’re still very sharp.

[05:28] Marcus: I appreciate that. Here we are.

[05:31] Stephanie: Here we are. All right, so give us an intro into the tabernacle, the significance of it.

[05:39] Marcus: Yes, when it comes to the tabernacle, there are several layers of significance here. First of all, we tend to look at it, for most of us in America at least, like this riveting story of the Exodus, and then all of a sudden instructions on how to build a tabernacle. Then there’s a cool story about a golden calf and then more instructions about a tabernacle, and we’re like, “What is this? Why did God waste so much ink and space? There’s only so much… This made it into the Bible? Why is there so much space on it?”

Well, that is our first clue that this is important, right? There’s a lot of space given to this. One thing is that for the Israelites, this wasn’t just information. They were going to have to build this. They were going to have to live with it. This was going to be establishing daily patterns for the rest of their existence. But I think what it does is it shows us that God did all of these amazing Exodus events to get us to the tabernacle because the tabernacle is actually the picture of what God wanted when he created the world.

It’s the picture of what God wanted with the nation of Israel. It’s the picture of what God is doing with the church, and it’s the picture of what’s going to happen someday in the future. So that makes it pretty important, right? This is not a small thing because this is about God and man living together. And this is about the family being created, and the Tabernacle can be thought of as the family home.

We were just talking about what a lovely home environment we had at Easter. Well, God wants a lovely home environment to share with us, and the tabernacle is partly about that. Now there’s more, but that will get us started.

[07:21] Stephanie: It also makes sense in a way where we just came off of the marriage ceremony and so now it’s like we have a place to live together with that. We’ll get to some of the rules and Levitical things later, but God is holy, and how does this work with him being here? But for now, tabernacle is an intimacy. And it’s not on the fringes, it’s at the center of the camp. And it’s mobile, so it can go with them as they’re traveling.

[07:56] Marcus: Well, you think about it, God was already with them in this pillar of cloud. There’s a cloud right now. The cloud was up in the sky. It was up on the mountain. They could see the fire in the cloud at night. It was giving them shade from the sun during the day. But at this point in time, as the tabernacle is given, the cloud and the presence of God is sitting on top of the mountain.

And God’s like, “Not good enough. I actually want to be in the very center of the camp. So I want you to build this tabernacle.” And this cloud is going to, at the end of Exodus, fill this tabernacle. It’s going to come in and his presence will be there. And this tabernacle isn’t on the outskirts of camp. It is in the center and so everything is built around it. And so we see that it’s mobile, which means that God says, “We’re going to be on a journey together. We’re going to go on this together.”

It’s in the center, which is important to us, and it is this place of intimacy. And one of the things we find, too, is that there are all kinds of echoes of Eden in the tabernacle, from the way that the priest is dressed, the gemstones and the gold. These gemstones and gold are mentioned as being in Eden back in Genesis.

And so there’s this echo, like, “Oh, I’ve heard this before, that was in Eden,” to the fact that there is cherubim woven into the threadwork of the curtains in the tabernacle, to these big cherubim that are guarding the ark of the covenant, to pomegranates that are woven into the decorating. And all of these things are meant to invoke and remind people, this is the way we were originally meant to be. We are supposed to be God in the midst of us, God with us, us walking with God, having this kind of an intimate relationship.

[09:54] Stephanie: And we were talking last episode about how important the idea of how God is on the mountain is and how different cultures still have that idea of the gods at the top of the mountain and the gardens and such. And so we saw God invite people to the mountain with him, but now he’s like, “I’m bringing the garden back to you.” I mean, there’s a lot of that garden imagery in their midst now, and so that’s just one more, “No, this is different. I’m walking with you. You are walking with me.”

[10:31] Marcus: Yeah. And so this is the foundation of what we would call temple theology. Now, in evangelical circles, the temple theology gets lost on us a bit because it feels like that’s Old Covenant. We’re New Covenant. That’s something the Jews did. That’s not something Christians do. But temple theology is foundational to God’s purpose for creation and God’s purpose for the world, because it has to do with our walk with him and the idea that it goes from tabernacle to temple.

In both dedication ceremonies with the tabernacle and the temple, the cloud of glory comes and fills that place. In the New Testament, we are the temple and the Holy Spirit fills us. And so now what we see in the Old Testament is a little model of what’s going on with us. The church is the temple, and the Holy Spirit has filled the church. We individually, as Christians, are the temple, and God has filled us.

And we are told that in the age to come, the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters fill the sea. And the idea here is that it’s not just going to be this little group of people going through a desert with God’s cloud in the midst. This is what life on planet earth is ultimately supposed to be, and that is, the presence of God in our midst and all of us having free access to him.

And then Christ himself is described as tabernacling among us, being the one who came down, took on flesh like a tent, and then the Spirit of God in him, anointing him for the task of Messiah. So it just goes on and on and on and on. There’s almost no end to the temple theology we could unpack.

[12:23] Stephanie: I love how incarnational God is throughout scripture. He’s just constantly tangible and not just ethereal. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the tangibleness of God? He’s not just saying, “Here’s a tangible idol.”

[12:45] Marcus: No, the pagan approach to tangibility is idolatry, “Let’s make an idol that we can see and we can connect to.” God absolutely forbids that. Part of it is that when we reduce God to an image or an idol, he becomes smaller. I love J.B. Phillips’ old book from decades ago called Your God is Too Small. One of the things that happens whenever we create idolatry around our worship of God, we reduce God and he becomes less.

One of the reasons he absolutely forbids creating images of him is that he does not want us to reduce him. On the other hand, God doesn’t want us to think of him in almost like Plato terms, where, “Oh, we see shadows of God, but the reality is out there somewhere.” Instead, God wants to be very intimate with us, very present with us. There’s something very tangible about this, even from our creation of like, “Let’s gather out of the dust, let’s blow breath into the nostrils.” That’s very intimate. It’s very tangible.

It’s like, “Let’s walk together. Let’s get our feet dirty together. Let’s be in a tent.” There are smells associated with this. There is incense that has a very distinct aroma. In fact, the first sin that the priest got in trouble for was using the wrong incense. They said, “Oh, we can do better than this. Let’s create our own.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, there’s a particular smell God wanted associated with him.”

And even the sacrifices on the altar. Have you ever smelled meat on the grill? You realize there’s a certain aroma to that that is just really good. And so it’s like camping, and all of the things that go with that and all of the nature. God had created a very earthy sort of way of connecting with a very sacred experience, which I find very interesting.

[14:54] Stephanie: This is good. Do you want to talk more about the New Testament parallels? You already talked a little bit, but I know you’ve been really enjoying reading N.T. Wright.

[15:05] Marcus: Well, one of the things that N.T. Wright is big on is the idea that evangelicals have tended to emphasize that the gospel is our ticket to heaven and that the goal is to get to heaven. And he is really like,  “No, no, no! That’s missing the gospel entirely. The goal isn’t just to get to heaven. The goal is resurrected life.” And that is that Jesus, as the first born from the dead, the resurrected one, is the idea that God wants an earthy existence for us for eternity and forever.

There’s going to be a body, it’s going to be tangible, and that our hope and our goal is resurrected life on this planet, and that the picture of this throughout is very much related to the tabernacle and the temple and this idea that there is something earthy here in the temple or the tabernacle built by something otherworldly, which is this very presence of God and the cloud and the glory and all that goes with that.

And so he lays out kind of very clearly this picture of the Old Testament model being fulfilled in the New Testament church, being fulfilled in the New Testament Christian and being the anticipation of the age to come when we will have our resurrected bodies and it will all come to its fruition and God’s original purposes for creation will all come together.

[16:30] Stephanie: Huzzah!

[16:31] Marcus: Yes, the very definition of epic.

[16:36] Stephanie: Yes, we serve an epic God and an epic God who lets us be epic with him, which is amazing.

[16:45] Marcus: Well, it is one of the things, you know the word Koinonia? We talk about fellowship, but honestly, for most of us, fellowship means potluck or pitch in. It’s like we’re going to have a fellowship after service this Sunday. But what Koinonia really is talking about is partnership. And one of the things that’s amazing is God is constantly calling us into partnership.

Just to touch on this, this is another thing I found in reading N.T. Wright that jumped out at me was this idea about Koinonia as partnering and vocation, and this idea that there’s a verse that has always, often puzzled people that said that Paul says, “I fill up what is lacking with regard to Christ’s sufferings for the church.” People like “What? There is something lacking in Christ’s suffering. I mean, it was pretty bad suffering, right? Or you’re saying Christ’s atonement was incomplete.” That verse has puzzled people.

So what’s going on with the verse, basically, is this. That we live in a broken world that is still broken and there is still a ton of suffering. And one of the ways that God redeems this world is by allowing his people to enter into that suffering. And the Holy Spirit within us is now present in that suffering. And as we pray, and even not knowing what to pray, saying, “God, this is beyond me. I don’t even know how to pray for what’s going on right now.” We are now invoking the Holy Spirit’s presence into this mess, and that’s what God wants.

And so when he talks about filling up what is lacking, what he’s talking about is there is still more work to be done, and God is calling us to partner with him in bringing God’s presence into the broken, suffering parts of this world. And that is also connected to tabernacle theology, because one of the reasons for God’s presence to be in something this earthy is because the problems we’re dealing with are very earthly problems. And God doesn’t say, “Well, those don’t matter.” He’s saying, “I want to be right in the middle of all of that, and I want my Spirit to be in the middle of all of that. And so that means I need Christians who are in the middle of all of this.”

[19:04] Stephanie: That is a perfect ramp to where I was wanting to ask you next, which is, this is not just a lesson from the wilderness series, but the healing journey lessons from the wilderness. So what does the tabernacle teach us about God’s heart for broken people?

[19:22] Marcus: Well, I think one of the things it shows us is that we don’t have to be completely whole for intimacy to begin. It’s not like intimacy is this goal, that if I can get enough healing, then I can finally attain intimacy with God. I actually find it the other way around. And that is that I can begin to experience intimacy in broken areas of my life and now out of that, that part gets healed and now God can do a little bit more, and that gets healed and that can get a little bit more.

I think that what the tabernacle does is it reminds us of my heart, Christ’s home, and this idea that he wants to inhabit more and more of this space. He wants to claim more and more of it for himself. And the good news is, the more of it that he claims, the more of us get healed, and the more trust takes over in those broken places of our lives where it wasn’t there before.

I found that there are a lot of people who are just starting their healing journey who trust God more than I do in certain ways, in certain areas. And it’s remarkable because they’ve experienced healing in that area, so to the extent that they’ve experienced healing, their intimacy with God has begun and so now it’s a matter of just growing and expanding that experience of intimacy. And I do think that’s at the heart of tabernacle theology.

[20:52] Stephanie: Fabulous. Thank you.

I want to take a moment to remind everyone that if you have not already, sign up for our name-your-own-price online conference, happening April 13, with Dr. Jim Wilder, Dr. Todd Hall, and our own Dr. Marcus Warner. This is about the brain and the body and breakthrough. I think I said that backwards. The Body, the Brain and Breakthrough is the actual title.

But yes, it’s about all the things. Also, if you’re wanting to go deeper with the Breakthrough book that is available now and will be helpful on your journey of intimacy with Christ. So, yes, see links in the description.

All right, Father, any closing thoughts?

[21:34] Marcus: Well, can I give a closing thought on the Breakthrough book? Okay, because the number one question I get asked about this is, what’s the difference between Understanding the Wounded Heart and Breakthrough? Because I’ve got a book on emotional healing, why did I write another one? And the answer, basically, is that Understanding the Wounded Heart is meant to be a very specific journey to deal with a very specific aspect of this and the goal is to get you quickly into the healing journey and quickly into things that are going to make a difference.

Breakthrough is more like the big picture checklist of everything that needs to go on in an emotional healing journey. The idea here is this is more of the big picture of that journey so that if you’ve been on this journey for a while and it’s like, “I’ve already done some of these things. So is there something missing?” This is an opportunity to take kind of an inventory and say, “Am I missing something on this journey? Is there a piece that needs more attention?” It’s meant to give us a bigger picture than just understanding the wounded heart and so I just wanted to explain that.

[22:33] Stephanie: Yes, thank you. I know you’ve definitely gotten questions about that, so that’s helpful. All right, any closing thoughts on the episode?

[22:40] Marcus: On the episode? I come back to the fact that the book of Exodus, again, is like this love story, and God is the groom and Israel is the bride. First he rescues the bride, and then he marries the bride. And the tabernacle, in a sense, is now his home for the bride, and it’s where they are going to be able to spend time together and it is a very holy, very sacred thing.

Now, it also exposes something that we’re going to see in future episodes here, and that is that it doesn’t fix the inherent weakness that we as humans have. I find that even today, I’m an inherently weak, flawed person, even though the Holy Spirit lives in me. There is this ongoing tension between my flawedness, my weakness and God’s presence and how do we bring these things together?

Well, the good news is that what God is saying, “The more that my presence is the center and the less that this is about you following your fleshly desires, and the more that you bring those desires into submission to me, the better this is going to work.” So I find that every day of my life when I wake up and I start into my day, if I don’t consciously walk in the Spirit, I will default to walking in the flesh.

There’s a little bit of that tension that you see in the tabernacle and the Spirit of God living within us, and that is that every day of our lives, there’s a little bit of a battle, right? Which is, am I going to walk with God today and walk in the spirit today, or am I going to forget about that part of it and default back to walking in the flesh? And so I think that this is kind of at the heart of what this tabernacle theology is about.

[24:34] Stephanie: All right. I look forward to continuing. Thank you.

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