In Exodus 25:1-22, God commands the Israelites to take an offering from those whose hearts prompt them to give, which includes items such as gold, silver, bronze, blue, purple, and crimson yarns, fine linen, goat’s hair, tanned ram skin, fine leather, acacia wood, oil for lamp spices, anointing oil for fragrant incense, onyx stones, and gems. This offering is to create a sanctuary for God to dwell among them, illustrating the relationship between the people and God. Additionally, the text suggests that the offering is occasioned by the grateful hearts of the people, with multiple ways to express it.
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Transcript
00:00:13:15 – 00:00:41:13
Clint Loveall
Hey, welcome back. Thanks for joining us again as we continue yesterday, kind of set up a lot of introduction to this 25th chapter, which we look at some of the trappings of the actual practice of some of the faith. And so I would jump in today. The first thing we do here is this idea of the tabernacle, and these are less instructions for building than the fact of getting them.
00:00:41:13 – 00:01:19:03
Clint Loveall
So we’re not going to read all the way through all of this. But I will read some of this Lord said to Moses, tell this writes, Take an offering from all those whose hearts prompt them to give and you shall receive the offering. For me, this is the offering you shall receive from them. Gold, silver and bronze, blue, purple, crimson yarns, fine linen, goat’s hair, tanned ram skin, fine leather, acacia, wood, oil for lamp spices, anointing oil for the fragrant incense, onyx, stones, gems, etc. etc. and have them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.
00:01:19:35 – 00:02:00:30
Clint Loveall
In accordance with all that I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle and all of its furniture. So you shall make it. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. The idea that now with Egypt in the very distant past, the very, very far in the rearview mirror with the idea of moving toward the promised land, the idea of being in a new reality, Israel now God’s urging that God’s command begins to turn their thoughts toward what is the appropriate practice of faith, what is the appropriate response to what God has done?
00:02:00:30 – 00:02:26:20
Clint Loveall
And and we begin with this idea of a a dedicated space, a holy or a sacred. The word sacred means set apart a space that will be used to worship, to gather, and in God’s own words, that I may dwell among them. And, you know, Michael, we I don’t want to beat this into the ground because we we worked it over pretty good yesterday.
00:02:26:20 – 00:02:42:28
Clint Loveall
But there is something here to the idea that the people and God are going to work together to create a meeting space specifically for the relationship between them.
00:02:42:37 – 00:03:07:49
Michael Gewecke
Right? Yeah, that we we spoke about that yesterday. I agree completely. And I’m not going to go too far into this, but I think this does give us an opportunity to illustrate a deeper Bible study kind of point, because it’s likely if you look at this text, you come out thinking what? And also why like why these things?
00:03:07:49 – 00:03:27:19
Michael Gewecke
Why are they listed? What are the significant counts? And part of that is being a modern reader reading an ancient text, right? PA This is being a people at a certain time looking back upon the practices of another. But there is value in allowing an expert to speak to you. And just earlier today, Clinton, I were recording the podcast.
00:03:27:19 – 00:03:47:16
Michael Gewecke
They’ll come out on Thursday. So if you want to hear that conversation, it’ll come out Thursday. But we’re talking a little bit about Bible study, about ways and places you might want to go in the pursuit of your own Bible study. And this is just an example. And I wanted to show here my Bible commentator says about the color blue.
00:03:47:42 – 00:04:09:39
Michael Gewecke
It it’s significance not stated, but some in the history of the church has said that the heavenly character of Christ might be represented by that color. Then you have this idea of that. The color scarlet comes from this particular worm and the maggots are collected and blah, blah, blah. It says some say it’s the earthly aspect of the son of man.
00:04:10:22 – 00:04:41:15
Michael Gewecke
You keep going down to the fine linens. It’s usually white. Significance isn’t stated. Perhaps it represents purity and righteousness. The point just being even the best scholars look at these things and say, Huh, wonder what that means In some cases. Wonder what that even describes. And so instead of getting hooked on those details in a text like this, instead of, you know, diving deeply and trying to figure out everything, I think a few words of wisdom.
00:04:41:15 – 00:05:05:25
Michael Gewecke
One read through that text and just try to catch the basic ideas. Don’t get hung up on details that you understand. Start keep moving. And then if you’re interested, look up at the expert and see, you know, what has the church seen in that before? I think it’s striking here, Clint, that the early Christian church saw references of Jesus back into these tabernacle texts.
00:05:05:25 – 00:05:16:44
Michael Gewecke
And, you know, we’re not going to spend a lot of time working on that, but there’s more interpretive room than we often give it. And so just be aware of that when you’re reading sections like this.
00:05:16:44 – 00:05:47:31
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things here is in the sort of in the beginning, Michael, tell the Israelites to take an offering from all whose hearts prompt them to give. You know, that’s fascinating. We don’t have a command here. We don’t have I’m ordering you to give, right? We have an invitation from all whose hearts prompt them to give from all who were moved to give move to be generous, receive an offering.
00:05:47:56 – 00:06:30:45
Clint Loveall
And the offering here is is very broad. You could give gold, you could give silver, you could give leather. You could give, would you? I mean, there’s this idea, I think that is more interesting than the things themselves is that A the offering is occasioned by the grateful hearts of the people. And secondly, there are dozens of ways for them to contribute that doesn’t say just gold, it doesn’t say just this, that that for those whose hearts prompt them to give, there are multiple ways that that gift can be accomplished.
00:06:30:45 – 00:06:55:31
Clint Loveall
And, you know, I think that’s the kind of conversation that you can bring forward out of a text like this. We may not we may not have much need to talk about giving acacia wood or tan goatskin, but the idea of a grateful heart and multiple ways to express it is, I think, a place where the church could say, yeah, that that still rings true.
00:06:55:48 – 00:07:14:43
Michael Gewecke
You know, one of the ironic, I think I think it’s kind of funny things about a text like this is we we talk about the tabernacle about how amazing it is here that it says that God will actually dwell among them. That’s verse eight here. I think that’s really, really a powerful statement that God’s going to accommodate the people like that.
00:07:15:09 – 00:07:39:46
Michael Gewecke
But, you know, realistically, this is different in the church. You know, some churches do spend a great deal of time talking about the tabernacle and helping to illustrate how that is reflected later in the temple. And there’s some interesting theological historical things there for sure. But if you want to talk about broad culture, Clint, nobody cares about the tabernacle outside the church.
00:07:39:55 – 00:08:00:46
Michael Gewecke
Nobody cares. But interestingly, you turn to the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, and there’s an Indiana Jones movie about that one. And it’s one of those interesting things where you are sort of walking along normal biblical ground, things that are maybe a little hard to relate to. And then suddenly you get to the Hollywood section where people have spent time and they’re all worked up with opinions.
00:08:00:46 – 00:08:05:00
Michael Gewecke
And it’s funny how quickly that changes in the study of the scriptures.
00:08:05:02 – 00:08:32:47
Clint Loveall
There’s a sense in the scope of the whole story, Michael, where I think, you know, the tabernacle in some ways comes and goes. It’s important in the wilderness. And then once we’re in Israel, once we’re in Jerusalem now, Solomon builds a temple and the temple becomes hugely important in in the scope of the Israelite story. But the ark really is that way from the beginning.
00:08:32:47 – 00:09:00:12
Clint Loveall
I mean, there are multiple stories about the Ark of the Covenant throughout, not just Exodus, but throughout the rest of the Old Testament. You know, and you have here this idea that it’s it’s a acacia wood. It’s, you know, I’m not up on my cubits maybe maybe the Bible study Bible here, but it’s two and a half cubits long cubit and a half wide cubit, half high sort of rectangle.
00:09:00:12 – 00:09:22:33
Clint Loveall
It’s a box. It’s covered with gold. It has rings on it that are also gold. You put posts, poles through the rings and that’s how it’s carried. You may remember that there’s a really strange story about David trying to put the ark on a wagon and knocks and stumbling and someone, a man named Isaiah, touching it and being struck dead.
00:09:22:48 – 00:09:45:41
Clint Loveall
Well, that it was intended to be carried with these polls that go through these rings. Then there’s the idea of the mercy seat. There are these cherubim kind of these angelic type figures that are on top of it, and they their face one another. I don’t know. Michael, would it be possible to see if we could Google a quick picture?
00:09:45:41 – 00:09:45:51
Clint Loveall
Yeah.
00:09:45:52 – 00:09:46:24
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, we’ll bring.
00:09:47:16 – 00:10:27:23
Clint Loveall
In I mean, obviously it would be a guess. We don’t know exactly, but the ark becomes an extremely important relic or article of Israel’s faith. It is really it comes to be understood as a physical manifestation of God’s presence so that that in the ark there is the power of God. And in the temple, when the temple gets built, the Ark of the Covenant goes in to the holy of holies, the center part, and most secluded off limits, part of the temple.
00:10:27:23 – 00:10:59:58
Clint Loveall
Only the high priest can go in and he can only go in once a year on on the Day of atonement to throw blood on the Ark of the Covenant and to work toward the forgiveness of the sins of the people. And if you know, there is even one tradition that says that the high priest went into the Ark of the Covenant Room, the holy of Holies were there with a rope tied around his foot so that if he messed up and was struck dead, they could pull him out without anyone else having to go in there.
00:11:00:27 – 00:11:39:23
Clint Loveall
It’s not clear that that’s accurate, but it is a church legend, a tradition that comes from those days. But it’s hard to overstate the importance of the ark. You know, that that’s probably a very the craftsmanship on that looks like probably modern tools we do or don’t know if it would have been quite that finished. But that’s the idea you see there, the box, the wings facing each other, the idea of the mercy seat or the cover really on the top inside the ark, you’re going have the staff of Moses, you’re going to have some manna, you’re going to have the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
00:11:39:43 – 00:11:53:06
Clint Loveall
But this becomes it’s hard to overstate how sacred this object becomes to the people of Israel. And God here gives instructions for how it will be, how it will be made.
00:11:53:36 – 00:12:20:47
Michael Gewecke
Well, so Clint actually, it’s a thing like this ark here that makes it so difficult in the New Testament for the Pharisees and the Sadducees to get their mind around Jesus, because ultimately it’s things like this. And I’m not we’re not limiting it to the Ark of the Covenant, but here we have the physical presence of God. God promises to be present to the people in the midst of they’re carrying this thing with them in their journeys.
00:12:21:14 – 00:12:46:10
Michael Gewecke
And later you have Solomon. We have the temple. We’ve talked about these things. I think it’s difficult for us to get our mind around that. When Jesus says, I am God. This idea that Christians have come to call incarnate and that God has taken on flesh, that is such a radical departure from any history. There were places where God showed up and God promised to be with the people.
00:12:46:35 – 00:13:28:10
Michael Gewecke
But never before Jesus’s proclamation did anyone conceive of that God being human and so the Covenant? Yes. Is this sacred relic, this this sacred container that the people carry with them, the presence of God and the reminder of God’s faithfulness. But at the end of the day, it also to hearken back to our conversation yesterday about the tabernacle, I think one could make an argument that with all of its sacred importance, in some ways it became a kind of antidote to the people seeing Jesus and God’s revelation that advanced in the days after that.
00:13:28:16 – 00:13:37:04
Michael Gewecke
It’s another example where humans get fixated on the thing in front of us, and it keeps us from seeing the bigger story that God is working on.
00:13:37:13 – 00:14:00:57
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think the danger of a thing, even a good thing, is that ultimately it it can be misleading, It can draw attention to itself rather than the one to whom it’s supposed to point. And we’ll see that down the road a little bit. In the Book of Exodus, the people, you know, this quest to have a physical thing leads them to build an idol.
00:14:00:57 – 00:14:25:24
Clint Loveall
And and that happens. I don’t know what the the nearest Christian a now analogous item would be Michael maybe the Holy Grail. You know, for a long period of Christian history, there was this search for the cup of the Last Supper, the idea that it possessed spiritual powers, that it would, you know, extend your life or purge your sins.
00:14:25:53 – 00:14:52:34
Clint Loveall
Maybe the Shroud of Turin, the supposed cloth that covered Christ when he was buried. We have been interested in the church at times very much in relics and the yeah, the danger of the danger of a relic is that we focus our attention on the thing itself and not on the the one who the thing is supposed to represent.
00:14:52:34 – 00:15:16:21
Clint Loveall
And so that’s not necessarily the case in our text. But there, there is a danger in having even a very sacred, very powerful, very holy religious piece like the Ark of the Covenant. And at times Israel doesn’t know exactly what to do with it. That’s kind of outside the bounds of our text today, but it’s part of the story.
00:15:16:46 – 00:15:38:43
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And one’s got to remember that the mercy here is called the mercy seat. The cover. The mercy is in some ways keeping the people from seeing the power directly. There is a shrouding in the in this arc that is worth noting that in the same way that when Moses got up to the mountain, the mountain was covered with smoke.
00:15:38:43 – 00:16:15:59
Michael Gewecke
There’s this belief that one can’t see God, one can’t come into the presence of God’s power, certainly not without a deep sense of reverence and awareness, even of kind of holy fear. Here there is a kind of mercy of having that cover contained, that the human is in some ways mediated between that contact with God. And I think that that is another thing that Christians came to scandalously proclaim is that God removed that medium, God removed the middle when God sent his son.
00:16:15:59 – 00:16:28:03
Michael Gewecke
And you know that once again, we’re getting very nuanced with the saying of the Old Testament connected to the theology of the new. But yeah, this is what early Christians wrestled with when they came to these scriptures as their own.
00:16:28:03 – 00:17:04:54
Clint Loveall
Well, I think what’s interesting in a book like Exodus will see this very differently in, say, Kings and Chronicles, where they’re talking about the temple and things that won’t move. But here, the Tabernacle, the Ark, these are things designed to travel with the people. And so they reinforce this idea that God is present. And to some extent that’s part of the power they represent, is they move with the people as a an almost living reminder that the people are not alone, that they’re not abandoned.
00:17:05:00 – 00:17:37:28
Clint Loveall
God is with them. They take this ark with them and it represents God. They set this tabernacle up each and every time they move. And they now have a familiar year, a familiar space in a new place. And there is a you know, when we get to the temple, there’s permanence that the temple is not moving. But here in the Exodus story, which is all about the journey, you have all of the things that are going to be described are things that go with the people.
00:17:37:28 – 00:17:40:03
Clint Loveall
And I think that matters. I think that’s an important theme.
00:17:41:04 – 00:17:52:31
Michael Gewecke
I think you just named this episode familiar place, familiar space in a new place. I think that’s an unbelievably apt summary.
00:17:52:40 – 00:17:53:45
Clint Loveall
Maybe now.
00:17:53:45 – 00:17:54:09
Michael Gewecke
That’s really.
00:17:54:09 – 00:17:55:58
Clint Loveall
Good and built the tabernacle yet.
00:17:56:35 – 00:17:58:12
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, but the idea.
00:17:58:17 – 00:17:58:42
Clint Loveall
It’s a good.
00:17:58:42 – 00:18:15:59
Michael Gewecke
Faith though it’s a good place because the idea that the people find familiarity not in the location or view that they look at, but rather in the one who’s gone with them and these the symbols that point them to him. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah, that’s connected. All right. Well, friends, thanks for being with us.
00:18:15:59 – 00:18:16:35
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.
00:18:16:35 – 00:18:18:30
Michael Gewecke
I certainly would love to see you tomorrow.
00:18:18:46 – 00:18:27:09
Clint Loveall
Take care.