The Tabernacle in the Wilderness

Ward R. Williams Ph. D. University of Minnesota

Inside this triangle was the space in which God was understood to dwell. Despite all this material representation of the truth, Moses and the Jewish spiritual leaders knew that God was a Spirit, and not to be represented in any material form.

The entire Tabernacle was based on the realization that the people were sinners, and needed an atonement for their sins. When God looked down on the Ten Commandments, the physical stones were intact, but their teachings had been broken over and over again by the people. This fact must be hidden from the view of God. On the Annual great Day of Atonement, the high priest went alone into the Holy of Holies, carrying in a basin the blood of a sacrificial bullock, which the priest splattered onto the Lid of the Ark. Now, God sees the blood, but not the broken law inside the Ark.

After entering the Promised Land the Tabernacle was set up with permanent features on a beautiful valley in Shiloh, 20 miles north of Jerusalem. It remained the center of Worship for 400 years until destroyed by the Philistines.

This is the meaning when John the Baptist cried out to the people at the Jordan River, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." On the Cross, the sacrificial Blood of Jesus was shed making an Atonement for the sins of believers in all time and all places. The symbolism of the Tabernacle was fulfilled at Calvary when Jesus cried, "It is finished". 

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"Balaam the son of Bosor - 1423 B.C.
loved the wages of unrighteousness."

Moses was still alive, but most of the people of the Children of Israel who had left Egypt were now dead. They had rebelled against Moses, and the Lord had "sent fiery serpents among" them, and many had died. This was when the Lord told Moses to make "a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole," and those that looked upon it, having been bitten by a serpent, lived. This was a type of Christ, who died on the cross for your sins and mine.

Then the Israelites, wishing to travel through the land of Sihon, king of the Amorites, not even drinking water from their wells, were refused passage, and Sihon and his people came out and fought against Israel-- and were soundly defeated! The same thing happened with Og, king of Bashan, and the Israelites were able to possess that part of the land that the Lord had promised to Abraham. Balak, the king of Moab, seeing what had happened to the two other kings, Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan, decided that