Day #257 - Moses’s Tabernacle

The Presence - A Devotional for living in Thanksgiving, Worship and Wonder

“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. You are to worship at a distance, but Moses alone is to approach the Lord; the others must not come near. And the people may not come up with him…” When Moses went up on the mountain, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered the mountain, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from within the cloud. To the Israelites the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire on top of the mountain. Then Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights.”

‭‭Exodus‬ ‭24‬:‭1‬-‭2‬, ‭15‬-‭18‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Photo by Laura Seaman on Unsplash

Have you ever been invited to an exclusive meeting?

What an honor to get an invite into an exclusive meeting. I have been given tickets or invitations to meet people that I really wanted to meet. To get picked and to get an opportunity that not everyone receives bestows such a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation.

Moses received one of the greatest invitations ever. He got invited into “the Presence,” the place of God’s glory that was in a cloud and looked like a consuming fire. Not everyone received this invitation. In this invitation Moses was going to receive the commandments on tablets of stone and then the instructions for the tabernacle. Moses alone got to dwell with God but He was about to get instructions for the tabernacle, God’s sacred tent, so that God could come and dwell with His people Israel.

There is so much to learn about “the Presence” and about God Himself from Moses’s tabernacle. These next several days we will be learning about the tabernacle with help from a great Bible teacher Ruth Specter Lascelle and her book, A Dwelling Place for God. We will learn about God, how the tabernacle points to Jesus Christ and how we can be His people of “the Presence.”

“The Sanctuary was prepared by the hands of God Himself and was not only a revelation from Him but also a revelation of Him. Here is where we meet with God face to face and learn to know Him, for in this Tabernacle story He is pictured in His fullness. It is the chief type in all the Scriptures for in it we find the most complete story of redemption. It was a ‘shadow’ of good things to come, containing the foundation of God’s plan for a lost world. Every detail, every bit of material, every color, dimension, position and every article of furniture has its special significance.” 1

The Bible is a unified story that reveals Jesus to us so that we can know God, the holy Trinity. The tabernacle will show us how to know God more. The more we know Him, the richer the time we have in His presence.

Lord, I want to learn to dwell with You like Moses and the people of Israel. Teach me from Your tabernacle. There is no like You. I want to live in the glory of Your presence. Thank you for sending Jesus to fulfill all that Moses spoke of that I might draw near as He did. In Jesus name, amen.

1  Lascelle, Ruth Specter; A Dwelling Place for God, p. 1.