Exodus 27 Commentary
We have the detailed design of the altar. Like the other components, a detailed model is given in a vision.
The courtyard is a much bigger space housing the altar. This is the outer court.
So we have a layered structure for the tabernacle. At the core is the Most Holy place. It is housed within the Holy place. The Holy Place is housed within the Courtyard.
We get the picture of four boxes. The smallest and most important box is within the second box – second both in size and importance. The second box is housed within the third and larger box. The third box is housed with the fourth and largest box. These are like nesting boxes.
Smallest box – Ark.
Second box – Most Holy place.
Thirst box – Holy Place.
Fourth and largest box – Outer court.
What makes the smallest box important is its content, which is the Law or the Word of God. Taking the Lord Jesus as the Word of God, we can easily see that without Jesus, there is no holiness, and the entire Tabernacle system becomes empty.
The entire worship system is based on the contractual terms found in the Ark. Without these terms, worship is useless. We can reflect on the middle part, the Holy Place. We notice that it has two components, (for now) namely; the table and the lampstand.
Interestingly both components are not important by themselves except for the items they hold.
Table: Bread of the presence (table), and Lampstand: Light powered by the oil.
These core components, Bread and Light, must be present continually for endless generations.
Jesus claimed to be both the Bread of Life and the Light. We can see that these seemingly unimportant details have far greater importance than they normally appear to represent.
Often, the thought is that the New Testament is fulfilling the Old Testament writings. But we think the most appropriate understanding is that the Old Testament is written to reflect the realities of the New Testament. The holy script follows a strict script. The script is written by the New Testament.
It is a movie about a real-life story, except this time the story is not lived until millennia later. The movie itself is real life in its raw form!
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