Tabernacle: A Place to meet with God

Moses is up on Mt. Sinai for 40 days, so the people are down at the base of the mountain, and they are on pause. They are waiting for him to come down and tell them what the Lord says. And what He tells Moses to tell them takes up most of the second half of the book of Exodus and shows how the Tabernacle points us to Jesus.

The Lord gives directions on how to use certain materials to make a holy place to meet with God (not necessarily made holy by the rare and expensive materials, but by the presence of the Lord). What kind of holy place? A tabernacle? It’s a word we don’t use much in English, from the Latin "tabernaculum", meaning a tent. Not a permanent structure, but a tent – a really special, holy tent.

He wanted them to erect this tabernacle so He could “dwell among them”. The idea isn’t that Almighty God can be contained in a tent, but that this would be a place where He would be present among His people. It was a physical place they could look to and know, “the Lord is with us.”

Let's look at Exodus Chapters 25-27.