How to build a Church II

How to Build a Church 2
EXODUS 26: 31- 27: 21

When I was a toddler in the latter part of the Second World War, family lore says that I used to watch the “fireworks” and the “bonfires” from my second-floor bedroom. These were actually bombs falling on the RAF airstrip that is now Birmingham International Airport and fires that during the bombing devastated the nearby city of Coventry, including its fourteenth-century cathedral. A decade or so later I visited the ruins of the cathedral at a time when a new cathedral was being built. Does God really want cathedrals? Wouldn’t there have been some better way of spending those resources in God’s name? The question was being asked again when we moved to Los Angeles and the Roman Catholic archdiocese was building its new cathedral. Wouldn’t the money be better spent on the poor? Why would God want a sanctuary like this one Exodus describes? Why would God have wanted to give such detailed instructions for its building? Why would God then have wanted these instructions for its building to be included in his book?

While the instructions concerning the sanctuary would be needed when it was being built, there would be no need to write them down. Putting them into writing made them available to people living long afterward. It is instructive to imagine people reading them as they read about the building of David and Solomon’s temple or about the Second Temple built after the exile, or as they took part in the building or planning of these. The First Temple was David’s idea, not God’s, and God had mixed feelings about it (see 2 Samuel 7). That relates to the sense in which sanctuaries exist for our sake, not God’s. We have noted that there were no sanctuaries in Genesis and no sanctuaries in the early decades of the church. Yet soon Christian congregations were building sanctuaries. God did not need special places to meet with people, but people did. Here in Exodus, too, God was meeting people where they were in their need (as physical human beings) for a physical place. There was a specific reason for God’s unease with David’s desire to build a palace for God, based on the fact that David himself had one. God liked being on the move rather than being stuck in one place. The instructions for building the wilderness sanctuary would remind people of this fact. This sanctuary was a glorified tent, not a glorified palace. The instructions keep incorporating reference to the portable nature of the dwelling’s elements. It could stay on the move, as the God who was accessible to people there would stay on the move. The temple was an imposing structure on the top of the hill in Jerusalem, towering above ordinary people. The wilderness sanctuary was a magnificent dwelling in the midst of the people in their encampment, on a level with them. When the temple had been burnt and devastated by the Babylonians, these instructions for the wilderness sanctuary would remind people of some truths about God and them that they perhaps needed to take more account of as they contemplated rebuilding it...