You learn a lot by teaching kids. I teach a few different groups of kids each week.
Every Monday morning, I teach a group of five-year-olds at a local YMCA. It’s incredible to bring the gospel to these kiddos for the first time. Most of them have never heard the gospel before (they didn’t even know who Adam and Eve were), but they love hearing about the love of God.
Twice a month I teach a group of three- to five-year-olds at our PreK Moms group at IBC. Although this is the most difficult group to teach (try captivating this age-group with a 20-minute theology lesson), I find the challenge invigorating and exciting.
Finally, I also teach 3rd-5th graders every Sunday morning at IBC. And it’s the content we’ve been learning in that class that I would like to highlight here.
At the very end of the book of Exodus, after God has laid out all the long, detailed instructions for building the tabernacle and after the Israelites have finished constructing the tabernacle, Moses finds himself unable to enter into it.
“And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle.”
(Exodus 40:35)
So it’s not surprising when the next book (Leviticus) begins with,
“The LORD called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,”
(Leviticus 1:1)
Moses is unable to enter this newly constructed tabernacle and can only communicate with the LORD from outside the tent.
The good news is that the next book (Numbers) depicts Moses inside the tabernacle speaking with God.
“The LORD spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting”
(Numbers 1:1)
So what happened?
At the end of Exodus Moses was unable to enter. At the beginning of Numbers Moses is inside communing with God!
What happened was the book of Leviticus.
The book of Leviticus is all about rituals and offerings that dealt with impurity and sin so that the Israelites could then approach near to the presence of God.
God’s holiness is dangerous, and not because it’s bad, but because it’s so good. God was putting into place instructions so that His people could meet with Him without dying.
God put safeguards into place to cover sin and impurity.
In the tabernacle, God is beginning to make a way that heaven (God’s space) and earth (human space) can be united once again as they were in the beginning (Gen. 1-2).
I like what Tim Mackie (Professor and co-founder of The Bible Project) says,
“The tabernacle was just the beginning of God’s invasion of human space. It was a small, limited pocket of heaven on earth that symbolized God’s intention to one day fill the earth with His presence and therefore with heaven itself.”
The ultimate invasion would come in Jesus, the Messiah. Praise God for His persistent love that chases us in our rebellion and refills our world with His presence that once filled and ruled in Eden.