You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there anything here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages. Welcome to More Than Ink.
Today we continue the build of the tabernacle according to the plans and the materials God specified. And we know the materials were gold and silver and bronze, but some of that bronze came from a very unexpected place. And it surprises us. We'll see that today on More Than Ink. Well, good morning. This is More Than Ink, and I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we're so glad you're with us. And just one disclaimer before we get too far along in today's program, which we're excited about, but we all, we record these at home and you'll hear sounds in the background. We're having a windstorm. It's really quite something. You know, there's a wind gushing around and we have a wind chime out back that's ringing.
So if in a quiet moment where we're not talking too much, you hear that sound, it's not a sound effect. It's reality. It's in our house. So there you go. That's what we're up to today. Well, we are up to continuing the build of the tabernacle. We're coming near the end of Exodus.
Exodus only has 40 chapters and we're going to be in 37, 38. But this is the construction phase. We are, we had the instructions given to us and now we're in the construction of it all. And today we focus our attention on stuff, the furniture that goes inside, right, instead of the tabernacle itself.
Yeah. Last week we talked about the building of the ark and the table. So we're still in that in that holy place. And we're going to talk today about building the lampstand and the altar of incense. Yep, yep, exactly. So that's what we're about today. We're actually going to make what was specified. So if you're joining with us, we're in chapter 37 of Exodus, and we're going to come in at verse 17, which is where we start looking at the lampstand, which now where was the lampstand?
Let's remind ourselves. Well, the lampstand stands along the side of the holy place. And it sheds light. There's no other artificial light in there. It's the only source of light in that room. Because it's a light tight tent.
I mean, right. And it is a tall candelabra. The Hebrew word is menorah. And there are six, well, six branches, but seven lamps that shed light specifically in front of it, the word says. Well, let's make it and then we can talk about it a little bit. Okay. Because this is our this is our last visit with the lampstand in Exodus. So why don't you head us off here verse 17.
Okay. He also he being basilil, he also made the lampstand of pure gold, he made the lampstand of hammered work, its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes, its flowers were of one piece with it. And there were six branches going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of one side and three branches out of the lampstand on the other side. Three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower on one branch and three cups made with almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower on the other branch. So for the six branches going out of the lampstand, and on the lampstand itself were four cups made like almond blossoms with their calyxes and flowers, and a calyx of one piece with it under each pair of the six branches going out of it.
Their calyxes and their branches were of one piece with it. The whole of it was a single piece of hammered work of pure gold. And he made it seven lamps and it's tongs and it's trays of pure gold. He made it and all its utensils out of a talent of pure gold.
He made it it's done. It's there The whole thing was a single piece of hammered gold work and the thing stood how tall? Maybe six feet?
They think about man sized. But to give you an idea, talent of gold, they think is between 70, 75 pounds of talent as a measure. So just take gold and hammer it out until you make a lampstand. And you can hammer gold out very, very thin.
Really nice. So 75 pounds of gold, it would take two men to carry it for sure when they moved it around. But people just say, well, it was probably kind of man sized or slightly bigger. The model of the one that we've seen was certainly that big. Yeah.
In fact, yeah. And what we're talking about too is the fact that there's actually a photographic, well, not quite photographic, but when Titus came in and sacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, they went into the temple, took all this stuff out and they carted it away. And as part of a tribute to Titus, it was actually after his death at the time, they made the Titus arch, which still stands outside in Rome today.
And on the side of it, they made a picture of this, of carrying away the stuff. It's a carved bas-relief. It's a carved relief on this big arch. You can see it today. Go to Rome, ask for the Titus arch.
It's right there in Rome. And right there at the top of it on this relief is a picture of them carrying the lampstand. So you count the number of arms on it and you look how big it is.
It's about man size. That's a pretty good historical reference for what it probably looked like. Yeah. Probably a pretty good reference.
Yeah. So, so yeah, here's this, here's this lampstand. It's the only thing that yields light inside the tabernacle. And the tabernacle is, I mean, it's light tight. It's light tight. It's not like the tents that we have today.
This baby is light tight. So the, the entirety of the light inside there is from this lampstand. And it's, it's solid gold. In fact, the only other, the only other thing I can think of inside the tabernacle that was solid gold is the mercy seat. That was a slab of gold that was on top of the arc, but the arc was wood that was gold covered.
Right. And the altar of incense and the table were made of acacia and covered with wood. And covered, covered with gold. Yeah. And, and some of the poles are covered with gold. So there's a lot of things that are actually made of wood, but they're gold covered. And this is one of the few things that's actually solid through solid gold.
Yeah. So as it stood there, you know, I've always wondered before we leave it behind us, why aren't there 12 lights in there? And the reason I asked this is because it's an interesting question. It's because it's the 12 tribes of Israel. Why, well, why should there be one for every tribe?
Well, when you look in, for instance, in Revelation, early Revelation, you see the churches, which are, which are located in what is today presently Western Turkey. And, and there's, there's one light for every one of them. And there's seven of them. And there's seven of them.
Yeah. So, so I always wondered, I've always wondered why not, wouldn't it make more sense to be 12? So that in a sense, it symbolizes the fact that the 12 tribes of Israel shine the light into the world about who God is, but it's not at seven. Well, that's interesting now that you started down that line of thought, because there are, there are 12s represented in all kinds of things in the building of the tabernacle, particularly in the priests garments, the 12 stones, 12 names inscribed. But seven being that number that represents perfect completion, wholeness.
Yes. The fullness of creation. God works on six days, but rests on the seventh. But yeah, so I think that's it. It's more of a fullness thing. So in a way, when you see seven lamps on this stand, you don't think about the light coming from the tribe. You think about the light coming from God Himself. Right. It's the complete source of light.
Yeah, it's complete. And, and it's the only source of real light in the, in the stage and stuff like that. So, and in fact, we are, we're just now coming out of the holiday season at the end of 2022, which is also not only just Christmas and New Year's, but Hanukkah happens this time of year. And Hanukkah is actually called the festival of lights.
And it has to do with this lamp stand, this very lamp stand right here. And what they celebrate in Hanukkah, it was a couple hundred years before Jesus, but foreign nations had actually invaded Israel, taken over this place, and then they got pushed out. And that's part of what you read about. They got pushed out. And so there was the process of re-cleansing the temple. And they go through a lot of things to re-cleanse the temple. In the process, they scrounge around to find enough oil because these are oil lamps. You know, you have to pour oil into these seven lamps to make them work. They scrounge around and they don't quite have enough oil.
And yet they light them and they sort of cross their fingers and hope these last. And the miracle that happened there, which is a phrase that Jews use to this very day, a miracle happened there, is the fact that, that these lights continued to burn for eight days and they shouldn't have. There wasn't enough oil for that.
There wasn't enough oil, yeah. So that turned into a small celebration. And even during the time of Jesus, there's a documented case in one of the Gospels where he goes in during this festival of lights at the end of the year. But it's about this lamp stand. And this lamp stand is supposed to be burning all the time, not just when the priests go in and out, all the time. It's the perennial light of God.
And so that's this lamp stand. And the fact that it's pure gold, that kind of reinforces the seven number idea. This is light directly from God.
Gold is considered the purer metal in that sense, and very costly and kingly. So God provides light and it's complete and it's to the sevens complete for us. And here it lights the way for the priests to come in and out of the actual tabernacle and intercede for the people of God and meet with God. And it was the work of a priest to tend this lamp stand because the oil had to be replenished and the wicks would have had to have been trimmed and all of that. But I was thinking actually in a completely different line that as a student of the Word, I was curious where else the lamp stand shows up in the Scriptures. So if you do a concordance study on lamp stand, you're only going to find it in a handful of places.
You'll find it all over Exodus of course with every description in the building. It turns up again in 2 Chronicles when there's a description of the holiness of the work of the priest who have continued to serve the Lord by keeping his charge and taking care of the lamp stand, even when the people were turning to idolatry. Then it shows up beautifully symbolically in Zechariah when Zechariah has a vision in the temple of the lamp stand and he sees two trees, one on either side and he sees the oil and the lamps lit. And that's where this famous verse where the Lord says to him, not by might, not by power, but by my spirit says the Lord. So it's very evident then that the oil in the lamp represents God's Holy Spirit. Yes, yes.
Very, very clearly. I was just going to mention too as you were saying that picture came to my mind is the fact that this lamp stand is actually fashioned out of an almond tree, fashioned out of a tree. Right, made to look like a tree and flowering branches that shed the light.
Well, oh golly, there's some beautiful symbolism there. But then you're going to find the lamp stand show up again in the New Testament, although the lamps more. This is what Zechariah was doing when Gabriel appeared to him to tell him, your prayers have been heard, you will have a son. Speaking of Christmas. He will be known as John the Baptist, right?
He'll be the forerunner. And then it shows up again in Revelation, when we see Jesus at the beginning of Revelation walking among the seven lamp stands, which then we're told represent the seven churches. So this is probably an important idea, which might be one reason why there is so much detail. Yeah. Well, Jesus said, I'm the light of the world.
So there's some of that in there. Right. Okay, he didn't say, I'm the lamp stand, but he did say, I'm the light of the world. Later on, he said, you're the light of the world. Right.
And walk while you have the light that you may become sons of light. Yeah. Right. So this idea of light in the darkness is central to the message of the scriptures.
Yeah. And we are kind of jaded to the idea of how precious light is because we have it so easily. We flip a switch. We flip a switch and there's light, you know, but in the ancient times, light was I mean, that was a that was a precious commodity at night. But but the deal with light is that when when light comes into a place, it dispels the darkness for one thing, darkness cannot resist it. So in that sense, Jesus brings light and it cannot be resisted by the powers of evil. But when it comes in and it dispels darkness, it gives you an idea of how things really are.
So when when God comes in Jesus, or even in this, these passages, he's telling us like, this is the way things really are. And you may not see it. And in fact, you cannot see it without my light. So he illumines us, you know, we talked so much in Western civilization about the Enlightenment, which is several years ago. But this is the real Enlightenment.
This is the real Enlightenment. This is where the light came to shine on those who sit in darkness in the shadow of death. Well, that's where John begins his gospel. That's exactly right. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it. Exactly. So I boy go back now after we finish talking about the lampstand, you who are listening, go to the Gospel of John and read the first five or six verses, opening verses.
Wow. Yeah, suddenly this idea of the light shining in a dark place will take on a fresh significance. So it makes a lot of sense that as you come into the tabernacle and approach the Holy of Holies where God is, that you would be awash with 24 seven light because in the presence of God, there's light. And remember everything in that room is gold. Yes. So by candle light or a little oil lamp light in that dim rooms, it would have glowed in there with a warm it would have been pretty cool.
I would have loved to seen it. Did you have something you're going to do before we moved on? No, no. Okay, well, let's move on to the next thing that gets built. It's the altar of incense, which if you recall, in your mind's eye, it's placed right outside the veil. Just I mean, very, it's the piece of furniture that's closest to the ark, but there's a veil separating it. So let me read this for us in verse 25. So he made, he made the altar of incense of acacia wood and its length was a cubit that's 18 inches and its breadth was a cubit and it was square and two cubits was its height.
So see, it's, you can see this in your mind's eye. It's a table that's about 18 inches square on top and it's 36 inches high. It's about the height of your dining room table where how high that is. And so it's a little table is what it is.
Two cubits in height. Its horns were of one piece with it. He overlaid it with pure gold. So that's what we were talking about before the wood things covered with gold, its top and around its sides and its horns and he made a molding of gold around it and made two rings of gold on it under its molding on two opposite sides of it as holders for the poles which, which to carry it.
And he made the poles of acacia wood and overlaid them with gold. And then he also made the holy anointing oil and the pure fragrance incense and blended it as by the perfumer. So now we've got the altar of incense ready to go. And it was the job of the Levites or the priests to burn incense there daily. We read those instructions a few chapters ago and that incense, the fragrance of that incense again shows up in Revelation as the prayers of the saints rising up before God.
Yeah. And if you've forgotten, it's just such a cool picture. It's a word picture because as you think about our prayers, as we pray to God who symbolically is above us in heaven, our prayers go up to him. Well, incense does that. The incense burns. It's a very fragrant smoke and the smoke slowly trails upward into the air and goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up. So it's a beautiful word picture of what our prayers are and the fact that it smells really good. Smells sweet.
Really good. It tells us, and he says this explicitly in the word, our prayers are a sweet smell in his nose. I mean, it's like he just loves, he loves these prayers. And so it's placement so close to the ark is super important because the ark is the mercy seat that symbolically we talked about last time. It's where God sits on his throne. And so, but there's this, there's this cloth, this veil that separates us from coming into God's presence, but that veil does not get in the way of our prayers getting to God.
No, the fragrance would have penetrated. Exactly. So that's what's so beautiful about its placement and what it is.
It's a great picture. And here we've got it going. And plus, remember back in chapter 30, they gave them the recipe and said, you can only use it for this, right?
You can't use this anywhere else. Yeah. Big, big deal. Well, let's push on. Okay. The making of the altar of burnt offering. So now we're outside of the holy place. We just came out of the tabernacle. Right.
Okay. So he, Beitzalel, made the altar of burnt offering of acacia wood. Five cubits was its length and five cubits its breadth.
It was square and three cubits was its height. He made its horns on its four corners and its horns were of one piece with it and he overlaid it with bronze. And he made all the utensils of the altar, the pots, the shovels, the basins, the forks and the fire pans. He made all its utensils of bronze and he made for the altar a grading, a network of bronze under its ledge, extending halfway down. He cast four rings on the four corners of the bronze grading as holders for the poles. He made the poles of acacia wood and overlaid them with bronze and he put the poles through the rings on the sides of the altar to carry it with them.
And he made it hollow with boards. Yeah. Very important if you're going to transport this thing because it's big. I mean it's big.
It's almost eight feet square on top and four to five feet off the ground. It would have been really heavy. Yeah. Would have been really heavy. So that's why he says, you know, it was hollow.
That makes it a little bit easier. But it is completely clad in bronze. I mean there, when you look at it, you don't see acacia wood, you see bronze. Well, and the reason it had to be bronze, well for a number of reasons, but because they would build a fire in it and a whole burned offering would be burned on it. So that requires some significant heat.
Yeah. So you had to be careful exactly how you did this. So this was, this is the altar that you had to walk past as you headed towards the entry into the tabernacle. And we've talked many times before about how the message, in fact, of these offerings that are right at the entry of coming into God's presence. And the only reason you made offerings is because you're sinful. The offerings were all designed around that fact, around the fact of doing something with your sin. So it clearly represents again because of its placement and what goes on there is that because of your sin, that has to be dealt with before you can come near to God or come into his presence.
Somehow you have to deal with that. And that's in this courtyard. It's not in the tabernacle proper. It's on your way to the tabernacle.
So it clearly says that on your way to the presence of God, you got to deal with your sin. And that's what goes on here with this, with this very large burnt offering platform. And we're going to get to that again. We'll circle back to it when we get to the end of the book of Exodus when they actually perform the burnt offerings. But before we run out of time here, we need to press on to the last little detail in this section, which is making this bronze basin.
Listen for this detail. This is verse eight. He said, He made the basin of bronze and its stand of bronze from the mirrors of the ministering women who ministered in the entrance of the tent of mating.
That's a fascinating detail. So the bronze basin was required because there was a lot of washing, right? The priest had to wash and the animals had to be washed and those constant washing going on. So the bronze basin was there and associated with the bronze altar. But what about this detail about the bronze basin being paid from the mirrors of the women who ministered at the entrance of the tent?
Now there's a message in there. And this, by the way, is the only place that that's mentioned. It's the most interesting detail in the whole passage from my point of view. Who are these women and what do they do? We don't know.
That's one of the things. We don't know who these ministering women are. They're not specified anywhere in the previous stuff in Exodus we've seen. And I think the only other time that I can think of where they're referenced in the Bible is when Eli's getting old.
Right. Eli's getting old and his sons are misbehaving with the women who serve at the entrance of the tent. And then eventually gets them killed. But it says it's these women who ministers the same women. So that is in 1 Samuel 2 if you want to go and read that, read that passage. So we don't know much about them other than this.
They're ministering somehow. But they gave up their mirrors, which is polished bronze. It's not glass. It's polished bronze.
And they probably brought them out of Egypt. So they were bright and shining. And what do you use a mirror for? Right. Well, you admire yourself in it. You look at yourself. You look to see what you look like.
Right. You're preoccupied with yourself. As a matter of fact, in Isaiah 3, mirrors show up on the list of things that God says, I'm going to take these things away from you.
Your baubles, your nose rings, your earrings, your mirrors, your curled hair. Because people were so preoccupied with their own beauty. They were neglecting the beauty of God. And so as I sat and camped on this idea, I realized that perhaps what's being communicated here, you know, it's not specific. These were women whose hearts so stirred them, and we have women's hearts being stirred all the way through Exodus.
We'll recount that in a minute if we have time. But these women surrendered preoccupation with their own beauty. With themselves. For serving the beauty of the Lord. Exactly. Somehow at the entrance of the temple, people would have needed to make some sort of preparation. And you know, kind of historically, women are there when there's work to be done that requires cleaning, dressing, preparing, putting things in order.
Right, right. That's just the way women are constructed in large part. So I just was stricken by that idea that these women surrendered their mirrors. They weren't going to be gazing at themselves anymore. They were gazing at God. Well, and you know, when you come when you come to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, if you look around yourself, it's a spectacle. Yeah, it's beautiful. God has just done incredible things with tapestries and with colors and with, you know, with weavings and with gold-covered things.
I mean, it's spectacular. So in many respects, it's them saying from a wonderfully humble position that when you come here, we don't want you to look at us. We want you to see the beauty of God and not us. So we're not going to attend to ourselves that way by looking in mirrors. It's not about us is what this says. It's about God's presence. Well, and two things I just want to touch on before we wrap this up. And one is mirrors don't show up a lot other places in the Scriptures.
Right? Paul makes a reference to seeing ourselves in a mirror dimly until we see Christ face to face. But James makes an interesting comment about mirrors. And this is James 1, 22 and 23. He says, But prove yourselves doers of the word and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror. For once he's looked himself and gone away, he's immediately forgotten what kind of person he was, but one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty and abides by it, having become not a forgetful hearer, but an effectual doer. This man is blessed in what he does.
Right? So the law is like a mirror to him. It shows him something about himself shows us shows us what needs to be corrected, fixed, just like a mirror shows our imperfection needs to be changed. And we can go away and be changed by that encounter with the word of God.
And in this case, the mirror, the mirror symbol isn't one of vanity. It's one of understanding your true nature, and, and the sinfulness of your true nature. And James's point is, you know, what are you doing? If you look at yourself and you understand your true nature, because the laws reflecting like a mirror, and then you don't do anything about it, right? What are you thinking is what he's saying. So yeah, it's you're diluting yourself, you're diluting yourself. Yeah.
Why would you see what's there and not change in some kind of way? Yeah. So I, I also wanted to touch on the fact that women are very present in the whole Exodus account. Yeah.
Right. We have the midwives in the beginning, we have Moses mother, sister and wife all named and featured in the stories in which they appear. We have in this later part of Exodus, the women whose hearts stirred them to give offerings or to bring their jewelry, or to use their skills to weave.
We've talked about all of those. Oh, yeah. And here we have them ministering at the ends of the tent. So these women are very present in this story. Yeah. And even though women cannot be ordained as priests, you know, that was part of the rule. It doesn't mean that they're inactive in the world in the worship context, or the worship narrative is omitted, excluded in any way.
No, gosh, I think of Miriam and so much. I mean, it's just it's just it they're just not in the background. Yeah.
Well, that's what I was pointing out that women are central to the Exodus story from the very beginning. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so here they are as well. It's interesting in all these that we've been talking for the last two weeks about the builds going on. And it's pretty much just been repetition of stuff that we knew about several chapters back, back in chapter 30, and 25, largely, but, but this is the this is the first time I can think of in the last couple of weeks that as we're building it, he sneaks in one little item to say, you know, they're made out of mirrors. And I appreciate that the gold or the silver or whatever that they had brought out of Egypt recognized as valuable, but here, it's not gold or silver. It's it's bronze, but it's specific bronze, specific gift from these women whose hearts making a real statement Yeah, that that's what's fun about reading the word is that I suddenly turn a corner and go, wait a second. Yeah, what was that the mirrors?
What does that suppose? So that's really kind of fun. Well, we're out of time. And we're gonna come back next time and finish the outer court stuff.
And then also kind of sum up what the materials were that took to make the right official count. So we're coming near the end of the bill. So we're glad you're with us and join us next week as we continue it here on more than ink. There are many more episodes of this broadcast to be found at our website, more than ink.org. And while you're there, take a moment to drop us a note. Remember, the Bible is God's love letter to you. Pick it up and read it for yourself. And you will discover that the words printed there are indeed more than ink. This has been a production of Main Street Church of bringing it to you.
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