“…the tent of the meeting…”
Since the beginning of Creation God’s purpose has been to meet with his creatures. He enjoyed his daily meetings with Adam and Eve until the day of their fall into sin. Now they were hiding from God; the same God who made them.
Many years after that fateful incident, we see God initiating again another relationship. Now it was with the recently liberated people of Israel. God ordered Moses to build a tabernacle, a holy tent of meeting, where God and his people could meet again.
This building (and the temple later on) was considered to be God’s house. Nevertheless, you and I know that there is no house or universe for that matter, that can accommodate the Omnipresent God. But somehow God’s presence and his glory were in the Tabernacle.
The main purpose of the tent was to be a place of meeting between true worshippers and the Lord of lords and God of glory. Unfortunately not everyone could go into the Holy Place; a priest had to represent the people.
The Tabernacle or temple of God is now our own body. Jesus dwells inside our hearts, but we rarely “meet” with the Lord. We tend to take God for granted and dedicate the bulk of our time to the pursuit of the trivial and the temporal. Beloved, this is wrong; we must meet with Jesus daily.
The Israelites left the “Taverns of Egypt,” a place of sin and slavery, and now they had the opportunity to come to the “Tabernacle of Elohim.” God wants to meet with you today and every day. To Him it is a great pleasure and for us a necessity.
A. G.
