Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 25-27.

In today’s passage God gives Moses instructions for building the tabernacle.  He told Moses to make it exactly like the pattern which He showed him.  I have mentioned in previous years, and on other passages, that I do not usually get a lot out of passages which describe how things were supposed to look.  I started reading today’s passage thinking I was going to have to struggle to find what I wanted to write about.  Then I noticed something about the description of how they were supposed to put together the Ark of the Covenant.  Twice God instructs Moses to put the tablets of the covenant law into the Ark.  First, He tells him that he is to do so after the poles for carrying the Ark are installed.  Then a second time He tells Moses to put the tablets into the Ark after placing the cover on top of the Ark.  Specifically, God tells Moses to put the tablets of the covenant law, “which I will give you”, into the Ark.  At the central point of the tabernacle, and later at the central point in the temple which was modeled after that tabernacle, was to be the Ark of the Covenant.  And in the Ark was to be the words of the covenant law, etched in stone by God.  This was so important that God mentioned it twice.

Now what makes that important to us?  Well, as I read this I was struck that Paul wrote that we are now God’s temple.  The tabernacle, which was the model for the temple, was built according to plans which God showed to Moses of the heavenly temple. Just as the words of the covenant law were to be in the most central part of the tabernacle, so should God’s Word, and His words, be in the most central part of the temple which we have each become.  We each individually are God’s temple, and we as a group, as the Body of Christ, are God’s temple.  In both cases God’s Word, and God’s words, should be at the center of how we live our lives, and how we relate to each other.  It is so important that we should repeat ourselves in making sure that it is there.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.