The Bible: a long book with many different components, many different moving parts. What is it, exactly? What’s the point? It’s my hope that this brief article can help explain to you the overarching plot of God’s great book.
The Bible begins with the claim that God created the heavens and the Earth. His ultimate creation is found in mankind, and He set up a system by which man could live in close proximity with Him. It’s not that God created and then left everything alone; God created so that He could spend time with His creations. From the very beginning, God’s objective has been clear! He wants to have fellowship with His creations, especially humans.
The Garden of Eden is the first representation of this. It’s a special location where Adam and Eve lived and God visited on a daily basis. A perfect place, a paradise in which God and man could meet together! But it was not to last, as Genesis 3 records mankind bringing sin into the world. No longer holy, how would they stand before God? No longer righteous, how could they be in His presence? So God casts them out of the land and appoints cherubim–a type of angel–to stand guard. Unholy man is not allowed in God’s presence.
That isn’t a really satisfying story, though. Man is exiled, and what? He can’t come back. Is that the end of our relationship with God? By His mercy, no, it’s not.
Skip forward quite a few years (I’m not sure the exact number). After Cain and Abel, after Noah, after Babel, after Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, you reach the book of Exodus. Exodus tells the story of God freeing Israel from Egypt to take them to a new place: the land of Canaan. On the way, He speaks to Moses around Exodus 25 and tells Moses of a certain plan.
God introduces what He calls the “Tabernacle”. That’s a fancy word that essentially means “a tent”. Israel is moving through the desert, camping in their tents; God wants His own tent so that He can live right down there with them. A tent is created for Him, and He moves in among His people. Or He would, but there’s a problem.
See, ever since Adam and Eve, people have sinned, looking righteousness in the face and turning away from it. And an unholy people cannot come into the presence of God, as established in the Garden of Eden! So how can God come back into perfect fellowship with man? …He can’t.
The Tabernacle is created for this purpose, to illustrate how far removed God and man truly are. God lives in the heart of the Tabernacle, but the people are only allowed in the courtyard outside! Priests can go inside the tent structure, but even they are only allowed in the outer room. God’s presence is too much, even for them. A large curtain, embroidered with cherubim, keep the priests separated from God. How can anyone seek to reenter His presence? There’s a reason the whole courtyard of the Tabernacle is dedicated to sacrifices and trying to give something back to God!
This whole fellowship thing doesn’t get any better when God is upgraded to a Temple, either. A permanent, beautiful building it might be, but man is no more holy then than they were before. In fact, in many ways, Israel took pride in the Temple and made themselves even more unholy than they already were! Jeremiah 7.1-11 illustrates the issue, that Israel thinks God won’t do anything to mess up His house. Ezekiel 8 is particularly poignant, as God shows one of His prophets how Israel has set up idols in the midst of the Temple itself. They were so convinced they were safe, that God’s presence was with them, that they acted as horrible, evil people! So in Ezekiel 10, God leaves them behind.
God wants fellowship with man, that’s been true from the beginning. But man doesn’t want fellowship with God, or at least, isn’t willing to sacrifice and pay the price for that relationship! But God is. History is the recounting of that. Eden didn’t work, the Tabernacle didn’t, the Temple didn’t either. Israel builds a second Temple in Ezra 6, but God doesn’t even show Himself near in that instance. No, He has a different plan. A more dramatic plan…
If God wants fellowship with man, He needs to be unified with man. Unified in righteousness: He can’t debase Himself down to man’s level, man has to be raised to His. Thus, in the proper course of time, God executes His true plan, the final solution to man’s unholiness: He decides to become man.
We Christians often talk about Jesus, saying that He’s the best there is. He’s the point of the Bible, the linchpin of history, or any number of other phrases to indicate His importance. Why is that? It’s because of this! That from the beginning of time God wanted to live with the people He created, and Jesus is the ultimate representation of that.
You don’t have to seek the lost Garden of Eden to find God anymore. Since Genesis 3, it’s been blocked off anyway: nobody was getting in to be with God. The Tabernacle was restricted: no going past the curtain. The Temple likewise, no one allowed to go before God directly! And Jesus is the solution to that.
No longer do we have to seek a particular location God dwells in; through Jesus, God has come out to meet us. The relationship isn’t restricted to a particular building anymore! Through Jesus, the work of God is relayed person-to-person. No longer is it that we have to go to one geographic area to get close to a building that has an ethereal spirit of some kind: through Jesus, we have access to God’s presence whenever and wherever we are.
Jesus is both God and man, the perfect and holy union between the two. Through Him and His work, we are allowed to draw near to God Himself. Jesus is symbolized as being the sacrifice we need to get to God, but also the holy High Priest who’s able to walk into God’s presence without restriction. And when He finished making that sacrifice before God, Matthew 27.50-51 tells us that His sacrifice rips open the Temple curtain. No longer are the cherubim curtains separating us from God, no: now we find the way to God is open to us all.
Through the work of Jesus, we can experience a direct relationship between God and ourselves. That’s the relationship God wanted from the beginning, and the very relationship that He created us for. What a wondrous thought, that God would put so much work into fixing what we broke! But that’s who God is: merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and truth.
Would you like to experience the blessings of restoring that relationship with God?
