5 And they spake unto Moses, saying, The people bring much more than enough for the service of the work, which the Lord commanded to make.

6 And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp, saying, Let neither man nor woman make any more work for the offering of the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing.

7 For the stuff they had was sufficient for all the work to make it, and too much.

I mentioned earlier that the Lord’s vision for the tabernacle was dependent on enough people willfully donating their possessions and time to make it a reality. He trusted that these people would come through, and as we see today, they more than did so. So great was the willful offering that they actually had to turn people away and prevent further donations.

It would seem that the people could have made an even greater tabernacle than what had been detailed. Perhaps the courtyard could have been bigger, perhaps there could have been two large sacrificial altars instead of just one, perhaps precious gems could have been incorporated into more of the architecture. But none of that was what happened. God had provided a vision, it was what it was, and it wasn’t going to be expanded further.

Indeed, simply adding more could have had a detrimental effect. When we reviewed God’s description of the tabernacle, we saw that everything seemed carefully chosen to be representative of an eternal principle. These symbolic lessons could easily have been obfuscated by simply throwing more stuff on top of it all.

There is a message here that while God does ultimately invite us to give our entire lives to Him, that doesn’t mean we are to exceed His parameters for any specific calling. In every moment, He will define what offering is proper, and it would be improper to do more. Take the law of tithing for example. I believe we are only to give a tenth as our tithe, no more and no less. Afterwards, if we feel like we’d like to contribute more to specific charities or ministries, we certainly may, but the tithe to the Lord itself has specific terms that we should not try to extend. It just is what it is, and it isn’t up to us to modify what the Lord has called for.