The mishkan in the wilderness, YHWH moving with his people, not yet permanently home, still pursuing the habitation the first letter declared. The presence real. The destination not yet reached.
Document 3 of 10
The Bet of Bereshit (the enlarged house in the first letter of the first word of the Torah) declared the destination. The creation of humanity in the tzelem (shadow or image) and demut (likeness or resemblance) of YHWH built the house in the shape of the one who would inhabit it. The neshamah chayyim (breath of life) was the first breath of the builder filling the house he built. But the full inhabitation had not yet come.
After the garden. After the condition of sleep, the separation from awareness of the one who built the house, settled over all flesh from Adam forward. After Avraham, after the covenant sealed in the dark while he slept, after Moshe and the exodus and the forty years in the wilderness, YHWH gave a specific instruction that reveals exactly where the house building project stood in the covenant history. And the instruction shows that YHWH had not abandoned the project. He was still building toward the inhabitation. He was just not there yet.
Exodus 25:8, Let them make me a mikdash (sanctuary, holy place) that I may shakan (dwell, settle, tabernacle) among them. Not above them. Not over them from a distance. Among them. YHWH still moving toward the house he declared in the first letter.
Exodus 25:8. YHWH said to Moshe (Moses), ve’asu li mikdash (let them make me a mikdash, a sanctuary, a holy place, a set-apart dwelling) veshakhanti betokham (and I will shakan among them, shakan is the verb to dwell, to settle, to take up residence, to tabernacle; betokham means among them, in the midst of them, not merely near them but within their community).
The word shakan (to dwell, settle, inhabit) is the root from which the word mishkan (the tabernacle, the portable dwelling structure YHWH instructed Israel to build in the wilderness) comes. The mishkan is literally the dwelling-place, the place of shakan, the structure built for the purpose of YHWH inhabiting it. And the instruction was precise. Acacia wood, overlaid with gold, specific dimensions, specific materials, specific arrangement. Not because YHWH is confined to a structure. Because the structure was a declaration, a visible sign to all flesh that YHWH’s intention had not changed since the Bet of Bereshit. The house was still being built. YHWH was still coming to inhabit it. The mishkan was the portable declaration of a permanent intention.
When the mishkan was completed and set up in the wilderness, Exodus 40, the cloud (anan, the visible presence of YHWH, the same pillar of cloud that had led Israel through the wilderness) covered the tent of meeting and the kavod (glory, the weighty, shining, overwhelming presence of YHWH) of YHWH filled the mishkan. The presence was real. The glory was real. Moshe himself could not enter because the kavod was so full. The house was inhabited, in the mode that the wilderness stage of the covenant story required. The builder was in the house.
The cloud covered the tent and the kavod (glory, the weighty presence of YHWH) filled the mishkan. The builder was in the house. But the house was still moving, portable, temporary, not yet at its destination. The inhabitation was real. It was not yet complete.
But the mishkan was portable. It was built to be assembled and disassembled, carried through the wilderness, set up in new locations as the covenant people moved. The house was real. The presence was real. The glory was real. And the house was still moving. The builder had not yet settled permanently. The destination declared in the Bet of Bereshit, the full, permanent, final inhabitation of all flesh, had not yet been reached.
This is the covenant trajectory that the mishkan represents. Not arrival. Approach. YHWH moving with his people through the wilderness toward the land, toward the permanent house, toward the moment when the portable structure of the wilderness would give way to something more permanent, and ultimately to the inhabitation that no structure built by human hands could contain.
When Shlomo (Solomon) completed the temple in Jerusalem, 1 Kings 8, the same pattern repeated. The ark of the covenant (the aron, the gold-covered chest containing the tablets of the covenant, the visible center of the divine presence) was brought into the holy of holies. The cloud filled the house. The kavod of YHWH filled the temple of YHWH so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud. The builder was in the house again, this time in a permanent structure of stone and cedar and gold, not a portable tent. The house was more permanent. The presence was the same.
But even the temple was not the destination. Shlomo himself said it in his dedication prayer, 1 Kings 8:27, but will God really dwell on the earth? Behold, the heavens and the heaven of heavens cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built. Shlomo understood that the temple was a declaration, not the destination. A sign pointing toward the full inhabitation that no structure of stone could hold. The builder fills every structure he enters. Every structure is too small for the fullness of what he is. The house being built for his habitation would have to be something the builder himself shaped, not cedar and gold but tzelem and demut. Not stone but flesh. Not a building but a body.
The mishkan and the temple together declare the same thing the Bet of Bereshit declared, YHWH is coming to dwell. He has not forgotten the house. He has not abandoned the building project. Every stage of the covenant history is another step in the approach of the builder to the house he intends to inhabit permanently. The portable house in the wilderness. The permanent house on the mountain. And beyond both, the house that Shlomo knew no stone structure could be, the tzelem, the living human form, the house built in the shape of the one who would one day fill it from inside.
The mishkan was portable because the destination was not yet reached. Every stage of the building project declared: YHWH is still coming. The house is still being prepared. The inhabitation is real, and it is not yet complete.
Mishkan (tabernacle, portable dwelling), the place of shakan (to dwell, settle, inhabit).
Exodus 25:8, let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.
1 Kings 8:27, the heavens cannot contain you, how much less this house.
The mishkan was real. The glory was real. The presence was real.
And it was still moving.
Every structure was a declaration, not the destination. The destination was always flesh.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams