Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 40:34

34 Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.

It has been a long time to get to this point, but here we have the final step in the creation of the tabernacle. After weeks of planning and months of labor, after verifying and recording the correctness of all that was done, the Israelites have finished their work and turned it over to the Lord. Now, the Lord, in turn, descends, and His presence sanctifies the place. God takes the man’s vessel and makes it holy, which is a transformation that man could never effect on his own. Up until this point the tabernacle was just a beautiful building, but thanks to the Almighty’s touch, it is now divine.

This moment also calls to mind the story of Cain and Abel, and their offerings to the Lord. In this moment, Israel has made a good offering, like Abel, and God had respect to it. Recall that this wasn’t the largest offering that could have been made, Moses turned away Israelites who were trying to contribute more. The offering didn’t need to be the grandest, it just needed to be right, and the Lord has shown in this moment that it was.

This is a transformative moment in the history of the world. Once the earth was a paradise and God seems to have walked it in the flesh. After the fall of Adam and Eve, though, a separation was made. God ceased to have an abiding presence on the earth and became primarily a voice from heaven. He may have made the occasional appearance to Abraham or to Moses in the burning bush, but these were isolated moments, He still did not live among man. Now all of that changes. For the first time since the Garden of Eden, God has a home among the community, a constant presence among mankind. Heaven may still be God’s native dwelling place, but now a part of Him is able to be with the Israelites always.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 40:30-33

30 And he set the laver between the tent of the congregation and the altar, and put water there, to wash withal.

31 And Moses and Aaron and his sons washed their hands and their feet thereat:

32 When they went into the tent of the congregation, and when they came near unto the altar, they washed; as the Lord commanded Moses.

33 And he reared up the court round about the tabernacle and the altar, and set up the hanging of the court gate. So Moses finished the work.

The final element of the physical structure of the tabernacle was the water basin, which led directly to the preparation of the men who would serve there as priests. Interestingly, not only Aaron and his sons washed their hands and feet, but also Moses. Similarly, we heard in yesterday’s verses that he offered the first offerings upon the golden and brazen altars. Moving forward, we do not hear of him continuing to function in the role of the priest, but it seems that in this first instance he did.

My assumption is that Moses performed these rituals as the first priest, so that he could then transfer that authority and responsibility to Aaron and his sons. As has been previously discussed, it was as if Moses were the Lord, Himself. He was God’s approved representative, so he alone he was authorized to function in these sacred rituals. But after having once functioned in that role, and thus claimed them, he could then pass them on to others that the Lord had chosen: Aaron and his sons.

This idea is echoed by what verse 33 states: that “Moses finished the work.” Obviously, many hands were involved in the labor of creating the tabernacle, but all of them were only able to perform this service as an extension of Moses, who was the extension of God, Himself. Everything was fulfilled under the stewardship of Moses, and now he could hand its continuation to those who would remain after he was gone.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Forced to Fit- Part Two

Accepting God as He Is)

Yesterday I shared the observation that our culture raises us with certain preconceptions about what is good and ideal. When we then engage with the idea of God, we find aspects of His revealed character that do not comport with our preconceptions. Either we discard Him, try to make Him fit our own ideals, or sacrifice our own values to embrace His.

If we elect that third option, this will likely see us surrendering to a God that we don’t fully understand or agree with. Based on our unrecognized bias, we might think that God is sexist, or unmerciful, or discriminatory, or antiquated. But if we surrender to Him even so, living according to His word in spite of our uncertainty, in time we will see our secret prejudices for what they are, and be able to let them go.

A Dangerous Justification)

For those that elect the second option, to try and change God, they often justify it by saying that the ancient records of Him were biased by the culture of their time. The irony of this generational snobbery is obvious. If you accuse another person of misrepresenting God according to his bias, how do you know that you are not doing exactly the same?

Another justification might be that the description of God’s standards was appropriate for that time, but there is a precedent for it to be updated now. After all, we do not still perform animal sacrifices or abstain from eating pork, so why couldn’t God update His opinion on certain social constructs today?

However, this argument ignores the fact that all of the aforementioned changes were never instituted by popular vote, only by those who carried divine investiture from God, Himself. Jesus was God incarnate when he approved of his cousin John’s use of baptism, when he corrected the Israelite conception of the sabbath, and when he began the practice of the sacrament. The twelve apostles were divinely appointed by Jesus with his authority, and guided by revelation, when they changed the sabbath to Sunday, opened the gospel to the gentiles, called for an end to animal sacrifice, and approved the eating of previously unclean animals.

It is not the Christian view that we can change any of God’s commands or practices at will. We have not instituted the changes from Mosaic law to Christian values at random, or due to popular preference. Every change that we observe is founded in a heavenly mandate, not in popularity. In contrast, where is the divinely invested steward who declares God’s approval of our modern social ideals? Where is the heavenly vision that roots our “progressivism” in God and not the earth?

Rejection)

This leaves the final possible response to our personal ideals differing from God’s: rejection. We can say, “yes, the God of the Bible is that particular way, and I will never be okay with that, so I will reject Him.” This, at least, is a more honest response than trying to change the divine.

But to the person making this decision I would encourage them to consider the origin of your values. Are they not directly from the society around you? Are they not from the material, fallen world? Ideals based in the world are doomed to the same fate as all the rest of mortality. These ideals will go out of fashion, and those that lived by them will similarly perish and fade. It is the natural endpoint of every worldly path. If you reject the transcendent, transcendence will respect that decision and similarly abandon you. If you wish to have no more reality than materialism and popularity, then you will have no more than them, and you will die with them.

If, on the other hand, you wish to have a hope for life, and renewal, and the transcendent ideal, and ultimate truth, if you wish to belong to those things and be transfigured by them, you should only expect to do so by embracing a message and a perspective that transcends from on high. One that comes from an ancient God, whose long-standing ways you should naturally expect to contradict many of the messages in our modern, constantly changing world. If you reject that God, then you must realize you have rejected your only option for eternal life, and you must accept the nihilistic void in His place.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Forced to Fit- Part One

Prerequisites for the Divine)

We are a culture that approaches God by first establishing a foundation of worldly ideals that we believe in, and then trying to make Him fit them. We reject God or alter Him because He simply doesn’t match our modern presuppositions about what ultimate good is supposed to be.

Some require a God who isn’t patriarchal. Some require a God who doesn’t wage war on His enemies. Some require a God whose sovereignty doesn’t supersede our own authority. Some require a God who can be validated by scientific methods. Some require a God who is socially progressive.

In these cases, feminism or pacifism or individualism or materialism or progressivism are our first God, and for God to be God He must be in alignment with that first ideal, or He must not exist at all. He is forced to fit, or He is discarded.

This is, of course, an inversion of the proper order. When man recognizes that he has a different life philosophy than God he is supposed to change himself to conform with the Almighty, not change the Almighty to conform with him!

A Modern Lens)

Let us note that differences between God’s ideal and our own is inevitable. Even setting aside personal selfishness and flaws, our modern culture has been far removed from the Judeo-Christian ethic for a while now, and we have been immersed in that climate from before we had any understanding at all. Even if we were raised in a traditional, Christian home, it is certain that we have absorbed presuppositions that we are not even aware of, reasons why we feel that we cannot accept God entirely as He has been described to us.

I have never met the person who did not have some baked-in misunderstanding of the Lord, including myself. I have never met the person who did not struggle with some aspect of who God is declared to be. This is a common challenge that we all grapple with in one way or another. Indeed, we could make a case that most of our path of discipleship is simply us coming to terms with God as He is, surrendering our inclination to try and change Him, and choosing to change ourselves instead.

There is a little more that I wish to say on this subject, but I will save it for a second post tomorrow.

Posted on by Abe Austin

God is the Author and the Ink

Scriptures tell us that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. He is spoken of as being above us, but also within us:

Acts 7:49- Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?

John 17:23- I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

His work is simultaneously large and impressive, and quiet and invisible:

Exodus 19:18- 18 And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.

1 Kings 19:11-12- And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

God is beyond and outside of mortality but also woven all throughout it. We find Him in the stars and galaxies and universe that we reside within, but also in the molecules and atoms and photons that reside within us.

Many have referred to God as the author of our existence. This is certainly true, but it only speaks to half of who He is to us. I would add that He is also the ink upon the page. He takes the empty void and provides the disparity that gives meaning. He forms each letter, each word, and each idea. He is woven through every character and every plot point in the ultimate tale of victory.

God is the author and God is the ink. We are not only written by Him from above, but of Him from below. He makes the story, and He is the story. And we, being characters in that story, are both a part of Him and Him a part of us.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Being on the Right Side

I always thought that there were just two sides, one of right, and one of wrong. I thought all the world was black-and-white.

My perception on that has shifted, but not to the cliché that it’s all just shades of gray. Rather, I now see it as black, and white, and black again. It isn’t just one side good and one side bad, it’s bad on this side and bad on that side, with one narrow strip of good down the middle.

This means you can’t just run full speed from the ledge on one side, because there’s soon a ledge on the other side as well. It truly is a “strait and narrow way,” with a steep slope on either side, and once you start down those slopes, gravity will make it very easy to roll all the way to the bottom.

Being aligned with good and with God is therefore a very careful and deliberate work. No one walks His line by accident. We have to constantly check ourselves and reevaluate our positions against revealed truth as we make our way forward.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Obedient Dust

One of the greatest sins in modern culture is to submit to another. We have to be tough and independent; we have to stubbornly maintain our autonomy always. We go so far as to resent the very idea of God, because we don’t want to obey even Him.

And then? Then we die, and then we return to the dust, and then we go wherever God blows us. All the world forgets us, and no one cares how independent we thought we were, and we dance to God’s every whim anyway.

Independence is an illusion, obedience is inevitable.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Evil in God’s World

A Common Argument)

I have frequently heard the argument that if we have an all-loving God, how are tragedies and disasters a part of this world? I have addressed this issue in part with previous posts, but today I wanted to point out a fundamental flaw in the argument itself.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave this argument in an interview where he said, “Every description of God that I’ve heard holds God to be all-powerful and all-good, and then I look around, and I see a tsunami that killed a quarter million people in Indonesia, an earthquake that killed a quarter million people in Haiti, and I see earthquakes, and tornadoes, and disease, childhood leukemia, and I see all of this and I say I do not see evidence of both of those being true simultaneously. If there is a God, the God is either not all-powerful or not all-good.”

I find it interesting that Tyson’s public persona is entirely based around having a scientific mind, yet his argument is entirely unscientific. He jumps to a conclusion that is not at all supported by the premises. Here are the premises that he establishes:

  1. God is all-powerful
  2. God is all-good
  3. ???
  4. There is great tragedy in this world

And from these he draws the conclusion that the last premise is incompatible with the first two. But as it stands, the statements of God’s character and the state of the world live in isolation from one another. There is a crucial premise missing, one that would establish what the relationship between God and the world even is!

This is the fundamental flaw in all of these criticisms. They speak of the nature of God, and the nature of the world, but never establish what one of those has to do with the other. It is quite a leap to say that if God is all-good that He is required to enforce only good things on the Earth of today. Where did that notion come from? Why can’t God be all-good and not puppeteering everything that plays out in humanity?

The Perfect Earth)

One thing that Tyson did not explicitly say, but which I believe is implied in his argument, is that the missing link between God’s goodness and the state of the earth is that God created the earth. If God is perfect, and the original author of our existence, then why isn’t that existence perfect also?

But even introducing this to the argument doesn’t make it any better. Because if one is going to question why a perfect God did not create a perfect world, the obvious answer is, “well, according to our records…He actually did.” In the first chapters of Genesis, we read that God created a world where everything was “good.” There was no death, no sickness, none of the great tragedies that so distress us today. Thus, the expectation actually fit the reality at the moment of creation. God did give us exactly the sort of world that we would have expected Him, too.

But states can change. And man, not God, chose to introduce sin into this world, corrupted its perfection, and gave birth to the fallen earth that we see all around us. This is all made clear in the first three chapters of the Christian canon, so it doesn’t make sense to state that the Christian conception of God does not account for the disparity between His goodness and the world’s evil.

If one does not believe in the biblical explanation, so be it, but don’t claim that there isn’t any explanation. Indeed, this is one of the unique and compelling aspects of Christianity, that it not only acknowledges the dual nature of our existence but also provides one of the clearest, most explicit explanations of that division’s origin.

Of course, one might still be troubled by the disparity between the professed perfection of the Christian God and the suffering in the world, and one might feel that if God really is all-powerful, then He ought to be able to reclaim that fallen world. And to that I say, brother, have I got some good news for you!

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 35:29

29 The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the Lord, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the Lord had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses.

Over the last three days we read how every common man and woman, and every ruler had the opportunity to combine their various talents and resources to the building of the temple. No one was compelled to, but anyone whose heart was so moved would have a way that they could volunteer for this great work.

I mentioned earlier that God would have had the omniscience to know whether His people would bring forth sufficiently to fulfill His vision, but also, He would have had access to their hearts, being able to whisper into those that were devoted to Him, inspiring them to bring what they had. Thus, even as the people brought what parts that they could, they were doing so with the Lord burning in their bosom.

This is an important theme in the Bible, that God not only sets the standard, but inspires and empowers the fulfillment of it. He calls us to righteousness, then works within our hearts to help us live so, as well as makes atonement for when we fall short. It is not just God reaching from one side and man from the other to meet in the middle, it is God reaching from both sides, and man joining in on one half of that.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 35:20-21

20 And all the congregation of the children of Israel departed from the presence of Moses.

21 And they came, every one whose heart stirred him up, and every one whom his spirit made willing, and they brought the Lord’s offering to the work of the tabernacle of the congregation, and for all his service, and for the holy garments.

Now it was time for each individual Israelite to examine his situation and desire. Surely not all had enough to offer to the tabernacle. Surely some, too, could give but simply did not want to. They had no obligation to. The Lord had only asked for those who had the means and a willing heart, so this would be entirely voluntary or not at all.

But what if not enough people chose to make offerings and they couldn’t build the tabernacle? God’s plans depended on the willful involvement of these people, and they could very well let Him down. This is but one example in the scriptures of how God puts trust in mortal people, fallen as we are. In fact, God’s entire enterprise with the Earth, His plan to assimilate it into the Kingdom of Heaven, is dependent upon there being souls down here that are willing conduits for His work.

Of course, God does not require our help to persist as the Supreme Being of the universe. If we all abandoned Him, He would still be who He is, but He and we would exist in isolation from one another until we went extinct. But if, instead, there is to be an overlap of heaven and earth, it is going to require willful effort on both sides, and so God trusts in the good of people and we trust in the good of Him.