The Tent Where God Came to Stay

The ten good words had been spoken, and the people were still standing back from the smoking mountain when Moses climbed up into the cloud alone.

He stayed there forty days and forty nights. (That is about six weeks, and the Bible says Moses did not eat a crumb the whole time.) Up there, God talked to him about a tent.

"Have the people make a holy place for me," God said, "so that I can live among them. Make it exactly like the pattern I show you."

God showed him everything. A wooden chest covered in gold, with two golden angels on the lid, wings stretched over the top. "There, between the angels, I will meet with you," God said. A golden table for holy bread. A lampstand made like an almond tree in bloom, with seven lamps to burn all night long. Curtains of blue and purple and scarlet. And one heavy curtain to hang in front of the golden chest, closing off the most holy place.

He planned the clothes for Aaron, Moses' brother, who would be the priest. Twelve jewels would shine on Aaron's chest, each one carved with the name of a tribe of Israel. "When Aaron goes into the holy place," God said, "he will carry their names over his heart."

God even named the builders. "I have chosen Bezalel," he said, "and I have filled him with my Spirit, with skill for every kind of work." Oholiab would help him.

Before anyone picked up a hammer, there was trouble down in the camp, and Moses came down the mountain angrier than anyone had ever seen him. God still wanted to live among them, and at last the building began. Moses asked for gifts, and the people came with gold earrings and bracelets, blue yarn, goat hair, ram skins dyed red, and planks of acacia wood. They came the next morning, and the next.

The workers ran to Moses. "The people are bringing much more than we need!"

So Moses sent word through the camp: "Nobody bring anything more!"

(Try to think of another time anyone was told to stop bringing presents.)

On the first day of the new year, the tent went up. Moses stood up the golden boards, hung the curtains, set the chest inside, and lit the lamps. The tents of the twelve tribes stood all around it, with God's tent in the middle.

Then the cloud came down. It covered the tent, and the glory of the LORD filled it, so bright and so heavy that Moses himself could not go inside. At night the cloud glowed like fire. Whenever the cloud lifted, the whole camp packed up and followed. Whenever it stayed, they stayed.

But the heavy curtain still hung before the golden chest. Only the high priest could step behind it, once a year, carrying the blood of a sacrifice.

God's people carried the tent all through the wilderness. Much later a temple of stone took its place, with the same kind of curtain, and hundreds of years went by with God's people near him but never all the way in.

Then God came to live among his people in a new way, as one of them. He got hungry and tired and dusty, and he ate supper at the tables of people everyone else kept away from. On the day he died on a cross, the temple curtain tore in two, from top to bottom. The way in was open. His friend John wrote that God's Word became a man and pitched his tent among us, "and we have seen his glory."

Jesus was the glory, come to stay.