The dwelling, from a tent to no temple at all

The reason God gives for the whole tabernacle project is six words long, and it is not what the size of the instructions would lead you to expect.

That I may dwell among them. Fifty chapters of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers describe the fittings; the purpose is one clause.

And notice what it is not. Not so that they may have a place to worship. Not so that the priests may have a function. So that I may live in the middle of the camp.

The nation pitched its tents in a square with the tent of God in the center. That was the arrangement, and the whole thread is God working out how to do that permanently.

Solomon builds the permanent version four centuries later, and at the dedication he says the honest thing out loud.

The heavens cannot contain You, much less this house. Solomon knows the building is not a container. He asks instead that God’s eyes be open toward it and His Name be there, which is a request about attention rather than architecture.

Then the thread does something that must have sounded like madness. It leaves the building.

John says the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us — the tent word, met in Week Three. Jesus stands in the temple courts and says destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up, and John explains that He was speaking of His body.

The same word, applied to a congregation of ordinary believers in a Greek port city with serious behavioral problems. Paul says it again in the next letter and adds the Exodus purpose clause almost verbatim: I will dwell among them and walk among them.

And the thread ends by removing the thing it began with.

No temple. Not because the sanctuary failed but because it succeeded — there is no need for a designated place of meeting when the presence fills the whole city and the dwelling is finally unmediated.

A tent in a desert. A house on a hill. A body. A people. A city with no temple in it.

And there is a warning folded into the thread that Israel learned the hard way. Jeremiah stood at the temple gate and told people to stop chanting the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD as though the building guaranteed the presence. Ezekiel then watched the glory leave it. A dwelling that God has departed is a building, and the people inside it were the last to notice.

Every stage is God getting closer.

Trace it: Exodus 25:8–9; 29:45–46; 40:34–35; 1 Kings 8:10–13, 27; Ezekiel 10:18–19 and 43:1–5 for the glory departing and returning; John 1:14; 2:19–21; 1 Corinthians 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Corinthians 6:16; Ephesians 2:19–22; 1 Peter 2:4–5; Revelation 21:3, 22.

The Hebrew word for tabernacle, mishkan, comes from a root meaning to settle or dwell, and the related noun shekinah — not itself a biblical word but a later Jewish term — became the standard name for the glory-presence. The English tabernacle is from Latin for tent.

Note the pronouns in 1 Corinthians 3:16. The you is plural: you together are God’s temple. Paul makes the singular application in 6:19 about the individual body, but the first and more emphatic use is corporate, and it is aimed at a church that was splitting into factions.

Ezekiel watched the glory leave the temple in stages — from the threshold, to the east gate, to the mountain east of the city — and chapters later watched it return by the same gate. The departure is one of the most sombre passages in Scripture and it explains why the second temple is never described as having the glory fill it.

Hebrews adds a strand this day only touches: the earthly sanctuary was a copy and shadow of the heavenly one, and Christ entered not a man-made holy place but heaven itself. The thread has a vertical dimension as well as a chronological one.

Look it upH4908 מִשְׁכָּן mishkan, dwelling place, tabernacle · H4720 מִקְדָּשׁ miqdash, sanctuary, holy place · G3485 ναός naos, sanctuary, inner shrine · G4637 σκηνόω skenoo, to pitch a tent, tabernacle

Note also which Greek word Paul chooses in 1 Corinthians 3:16. It is naos, the inner shrine where the presence was, not hieron, the temple complex generally. He is not saying the church is like the temple grounds. He is saying it is the holy of holies.

Where this touchesExodus 25:8; 40:34–35 · 1 Kings 8:27 · John 1:14; 2:19–21 · 1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19 · 2 Corinthians 6:16 · Revelation 21:3, 22. The seed, lamb, blood, tree, bread, water and the Name were the earlier threads.