Truth & Beauty, Part 1

Title: The Apologetic of Beauty
Text: Exodus 25-40

(Art in Exodus Slide)

The final 15 chapters of Exodus are, for the most part, dedicated to the design and construction of the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant, the priestly garments, etc…

Here’s a representative sampling of what you’ll find:

“You shall make a table of acacia wood. Two cubits shall be its length, a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold and make a molding of gold around it. And you shall make a rim around it a handbreadth wide, and a molding of gold around the rim. And you shall make for it four rings of gold, and fasten the rings to the four corners at its four legs. Close to the frame the rings shall lie, as holders for the poles to carry the table. You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these. And you shall make its plates and dishes for incense, and its flagons and bowls with which to pour drink offerings; you shall make them of pure gold. And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me regularly. (23-30)

What is God up to? Why this amount of detail? This is a part of God we don’t often think about. God the designer. And he’s quite insistent that everything be followed precisely. Look at vs. 8

And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.

And again at verse 40

And see that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain.

What should we make of this?

Broadly speaking, God is doing all of this because he plans to dwell among his people.

Look at vs. 1-7

The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me. And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece. And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it.

Illustration: Band Rider

Is all of this God’s rider? Does he need all of this in order to dwell with us? No.

Isaiah 57:15 says, “For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.

That’s where we get that song…
Oh great God of highest heaven, occupy my lowly heart.
Own it all and reign supreme, conquer every rebel power.

He doesn’t need a fancy place to dwell in. And elsewhere he says he isn’t all that impressed with the material wealth. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

So what is he doing? He’s building a system to support what theologians call “The Felt Presence of God.” Or the Manifest Presence of God. Or The Special Presence of God.

Obviously God is present everywhere at all times. But in his wisdom, he sometimes chooses to make his presence known in a more manifest or “felt” way.

And God routinely uses art/beauty to make his presence known to people. The pomp and circumstance and the angels in the architecture are for us, not for God. Everything he’s designing with Moses on the mountain is just a earthy copy of a heavenly reality.

Some of you might know that Shakespeare’s original venue, the Globe Theater, was a microcosm of the cosmos. The ceiling above the stage was painted like the sky (the heavens) and the stage itself represented earth. And then of course there was a trap door – which led to hell.

This is what God is doing with all of this art in Exodus. He’s creating an environment that signals deep spiritual things to his people through beauty.

I can see at least two implications for this.

Promise
Pattern

Promise

The final 15 chapters are all about God building out a stage if you will, in which to manifest his special presence to his people. And this is all happening while Moses is on the mountain. So in Exodus 32, the people are like, what is taking so long? And the answer is, “God is designing a beautiful thing for you.”

And you know, that’ll preach.

Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never-failing skill,
He treasures up His bright designs,
And works His sovereign will.

One of the trickiest things about sin is that it is very often adjacent to some legitimate desires. The people in the Golden Calf story are wanting some tangible evidence that God is with them. Now of course, their sin substantially disfigures that desire, but that’s the basic itch they’re looking to scratch.

And they read God’s absences as negative evidence. But in reality, God was working to give them the basic thing they desired – and his plan was way better.

They got graspy. They manufactured something. They did not wait upon the Lord. And so they got a little golden calf for their trouble.

God was going to give them this ornate liturgical system, with every detail accounted for. A sensory overload of truth and beauty.

Instead they're circling around a little idol like a bunch of savages. Totally debasing themselves.

So one point to make is that we ought to wait upon the Lord. We should not grow weary in doing good. We should know that by the time we first become away of some desire, some itch that needs to be scratched – God already has a plan well underway.

Pattern

There’s another thing to notice. Look back at 25:1

The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me. And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece. And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.

There’s a pattern at work here that continues all the way into the New Testament. As I was thinking about this, I started calling it The Dwell Pattern. I think there’s four steps to this pattern:

God discloses an intention to dwell with man
God directs the hearts of people to give in diverse ways
God works through people to build the thing.
God’s glory fills the structure

All of that is present in the tabernacle project.

God discloses an intention to dwell with man

Vs. 8 – And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst.

God directs the hearts of the people to give in diverse ways

Vs. 1 – The LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, that they take for me a contribution. From every man whose heart moves him you shall receive the contribution for me.

Vs. 2-7 – And this is the contribution that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece.

God works through people to build the thing

We see this mentioned in vs. 8 – “Let them make me a sanctuary…”

God fills the structure with his glory.

Here’s the final paragraph of the book of Exodus…

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. Throughout all their journeys, whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the people of Israel would set out. But if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out till the day that it was taken up. For the cloud of the LORD was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel throughout all their journeys.

So that’s the pattern, the Dwell Pattern. And you’ll see it when the temple is built. And you’ll see it when the temple is rebuilt.

But when we get to the New Testament, we have a couple of instances of this pattern that are pretty mind blowing….

Christ The Temple

In John 2:18 , Jesus has just finished clearing the temple of money changers, etc…

18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body.

Jesus is the temple. He is the dwelling place of God and man. And when we pull our biblical camera lens all the way back, we see the tabernacle pattern at work in the incarnation.

Remember our four rules…

God discloses an intention to dwell with man
God directs the hearts of people to give in diverse ways
God works through people to build the thing.
God’s glory fills the structure

God stuck to those same rules when bringing Jesus the temple into the world.

God wants to dwell with man

Isaiah 7:14 (which gets repeated again in Matthew 1)

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”

Immanuel – God with us.

What about rules 2 and 3: God stirs up people’s hearts to make contributions to the project, diverse contributions and he works through his people to assemble his structure. How does that show up in the incarnation of the Christ-temple?

Well that’s what the genealogies in Luke and Matthew are for. In the Ex 25 passage, God moves in the hearts of many people to make diverse contributions to build the tabernacle. All that happens in a matter of months. But when it came to building the God-Man, the Christ-Temple – he moved people over the course of several millennia.

This part gets lost. We lose sight of the orchestral beauty of God, the great composer and conductor of history itself – willing and working in the OT saints to accomplish his central purpose. We lose sight of God moving in Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Ruth, Tamar, Isaiah, etc…

Just as the Sinai Tabernacle was built by little fragments of faith – little mustard seed contributions of silver, gold, etc… So the God-Man was in some sense built by the little fragments of faith in the lives of the saints of old.

Jesus is in a sense a composite of his people. Indeed, that’s the message of Revelation 12. Look at Revelation 12:1-6 with me:

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth. And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it. She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which she is to be nourished for 1,260 days.

Who’s the woman? That’s not Mary. That’s the church represented as a mother. This not a new idea. Galatians 4:26, “The Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.”

DA Carson puts it:

Whom or what does she represent? Many have argued that she represents Mary because her child, after all, is snatched up to God and to his throne and ultimately rules the nations with an iron scepter (verse 5). But that’s a mistake. This is not Mary. This is, rather, the messianic community, whether under the old covenant or the new.

And obviously rule 4 is also followed.

John 1:14 – “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

So the same process God uses to build a tabernacle or a temple, was at work all along, on a much grander scale, to bring us Christ – who is God with us, the glory of God.

You might think that God would stop using that pattern once Jesus has entered the world. But we see Jesus using the same pattern to build his church.

God wants to dwell with man
God stirs up people’s hearts to make contributions
God works in his people to build the thing.
He then fills that structure with his glory

The church follows the same rules. The people contribute themselves. They become bricks in a spiritual structure in which God is pleased to dwell.

1 Peter 2:-5

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 2:19-22

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Summary:

So far we’ve seen a massive amount of time and space devoted to physical beauty, specifically the construction of an environment that will help people feel the presence of God.

A Promise
We’ve seen a promise in that. God knows what we need. Let’s be extra careful to wait on the Lord. To insist our blessings come from his hand. To understand that if we were to lose faith and manufacture our own solution, it would pale in comparison to what God has prepared for those who love him.

A Pattern
We’ve seen a pattern. God builds things a certain way. He discloses his plan. He works in people’s hearts to be generous and industrious. He works in them to do the thing. He fills the thing with his glory.

Friends, this same pattern is at work in your home and in your local church. God has assembled a group of specific people, each with their own baggage and blessings, and he moves in them to love one another, and be generous toward the Lord and one another, and moves them to serve and work, and then something emerges.

A home. A church. A local church culture. Etc…

And then he fills that thing with his glory.

Conclusion

Some might look at the development of God’s purposes over time, and conclude that the days of physical beauty are past. God has spiritualized all of that now in the New Covenant.

Nah. We’re still human beings. God still means to teach us about his glory with physical beauty. He’s still filling the world with his art every single day.

We still need to sing. We need melodic beauty to get the truth down into our bones.
We still need people to manifest God’s attributes in our life.
We still need art.
We still need beautiful spaces.
We still need to share our food with glad and generous hearts.

Listen if God wanted us to become gnostics, and completely separate ourselves from a religion that includes physical symbols, he would not have left us two sacraments that are full of sensory experience.

And here I speak of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

This is sensory data (beauty) that adorns a truth – God loves us.

Mark 14:22-24

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.