1 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

2 On the first day of the first month shalt thou set up the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation.

The Israelites have now completed a great work, the creation of a beautiful tabernacle! It is incredible that they produced something like this having just come out of slavery and now living in the middle of the wilderness. Currently, the tabernacle is disassembled in its several parts, and now those parts need to come together in the desired form.

This again brings to mind the creation of the Earth at the beginning of Genesis. There, each day of creation was focused on its own element, each treated as an individual unit. But when we walk around the earth today, we see all these individual elements combined together in harmony. Land and water and animals and plants and stars and sun and people all overlapping in their systems and functions, all combined to the glory of God. So, too, the individually magnificent Ark of the Covenant, and brass altar, and golden menorah, and woven tapestries would all be assembled to one higher whole.

In the following verses, God will describe the correct order for all these separate parts to come together. This sequence would not only apply to this initial assembly, but every time that the Israelites traveled to a new destination and there reared the tabernacle. This repeated assembly is symbolic of how divine creation is not a singular event, but one that must be repeated and refreshed. We see this in God’s creation, where the elements of the earth are cyclically reassembled into the bodies of the new generation of people, animals, and plants. We see it in the hearts of the disciples that are continually refreshed, renewed, and recommitted as they toil through life’s distractions and sorrows.