Revival and Renewal

Our whole reward is seeing.

Augustine

An apple can assault you with its redness if you look at it long enough. At least, it has me. I’ve had times when I’ve been sitting, looking at a thing, and I’ve been struck with a fear at how it exists without me, at how it just is. I’m baffled by the sheer givenness of things, of the real world, of mountains, and bodies, and apples, and concrete, and ocean waves. 

Throughout my life I’ve been taught that the way to truth is through reason, by thinking through things, by deduction. It’s an assumption that thinking is the substance of knowing, that the rational soul is the real human, and that most of the stuff in this world is a mere distraction from the true knowledge. I’ve been taught to privilege the “spiritual” over the carnal, the immaterial over the material. The substance of true knowledge, by this line of thought, is summed up in Descartes’ famous phrase: “I think therefore I am.” The world, as it is, only holds knowledge as it is interpreted and rationalized by my intellect. 

But then I return to that apple, and I find it doesn’t fit in my thinking. I can try to explain its redness, how the human eye perceives the spectrum of colors, but there’s something about it that I can’t just think through. The longer I look at it the more real it feels real, a kind of real that is just different from thinking. I’m amazed at how it just sits there, undisturbed by the anxiety of this post-postmodern world. There’s a stillness in it, an aggressive stillness, perhaps even a spiritual stillness. 

What am I seeing? Beauty. Beauty assaults us, makes us uncomfortable, and presents us with a reality, not by cognition but by a kind of intuition. Beauty is the givenness of a thing, a fittingness, that signals something unmistakably true about reality. The beauty of a thing is at first a whisper, and then a shout, that life is about more than rationality, more than consumption, more than achievement. That there is something mysterious beyond us. The beautiful, once we have eyes to see, convinces us of a different truth than Descartes and our current obsession with subjectivity. It tells us that there is a world that is, outside of us, and this world is deeper, more mystical, and more wonderful than we realized. And we find, as we look and behold beauty, that we are in love with this reality, that we want to see more of it, to be brought higher by it. We want to follow it to its source. 

Maybe this all sounds crazy to you, but what I am describing is nothing more than the Christian practice of contemplation. For centuries Christians have recognized a certain givenness to the cosmos, a givenness and fittingness that we call beauty. The gospel, it has been said, is what liberates us to see this beauty amid the wilderness of this life. It is an invitation to recognize the purpose and hope of this world, to envision the divine intention of reality as God’s dwelling place, and to be led to praise the Creator of that reality as we await his coming. The gospel reveals to us that this world is, at its core, meant to be a tabernacle. “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Hosea 2:14).  

Beauty in the Wilderness 

One-third of the book Exodus is devoted to detailed instructions for how to build a tent that, all furnishings included, required “approximately one ton of gold, four tons of silver, and two-and-a-half tons of bronze.”^[1]From roughly chapter 25 until the end of the book (with detours into golden calf territory), we read what is essentially a catalogue of a divine art project. Whole swaths of description are punctuated by the refrain “and he made…and all the craftsmen made…and every skillful woman spun with their hands…as the Lord had commanded Moses.” 

This catalogue is important because of the function of this tent. In chapter 25, after the covenant had been affirmed, God tells Moses to take a contribution from the people of “gold, silver, and bronze, blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen, goats’ hair, tanned rams’ skins, goatskins, acacia wood, oil for the lamps, spices for the anointing oil and for the fragrant incense, onyx stones, and stones for setting, for the ephod and for the breastpiece. And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so shall you make it.” (25:3-9). 

This place, the tabernacle, was to be an image of the divine court. God was going to give Moses a vision of the brilliance and beauty of his presence and commission him to direct the construction of a kind of “copy of the heavenly things” he saw (Hebrews 9:23). The purpose of this sanctuary was that it would be the dwelling place of God in the chaos of the wilderness. In other words, Moses was to direct a process of making a vision of the heavenly life, a whole-sensory experience of what it would mean, not just for you and me to go up into the divine court, but for that divine court to be on earth.

My mind spins with connections when I read these chapters of Exodus. It first runs to the creation account in Genesis, where God himself “made” the whole universe, and topped it off with an “image” of himself to be his representative (that’s us). I see Eden, that first temple-garden, where heaven and earth melded, and humans walked with God in the cool of the day. My heart leaps when I read that Eden was situated near a land brimming with gold, bdellium (an opalescent resin used in incense), and onyx stones. That’s tabernacle imagery. 

My mind goes next to that last image in the Bible, when a loud voice exults “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with humanity. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3).  I see in my mind’s eye a place that is simultaneously a garden and a city, a forest of life that is also a city with walls of jasper and buildings of pure gold, streets that also flow with the river of life. With wonder I read that the city’s foundations are laden with jewels, jaspers, sapphires, emeralds, onyx, carnelian, chrysolite, beryl, topaz, chrysoprase, jacinth, and amethyst. This is staggering. It is too much for me. It is a vision of reality sanctified, of all things in themselves fitting in a brilliant display of glory, an exultant, extravagant, almost rococo grandeur. The natural world is brought into the fold, and there’s no tabernacle there. Better said, the whole world is a tabernacle. 

Now I go back to Exodus 25, and I’m surprised that I’ve never caught this. I’m beginning to realize that this divine art project recorded for us in the Old Testament has much to say in our world of mind over matter, of deduction, reason, and chaos. The tabernacle story has a truth in it that speaks volumes to our utilitarian understanding of the material world, the task of humans to create spaces that envision the divine life, and the purpose and value of art. It has correctives for our over-spiritualization of everything (or maybe our misspiritualization of everything). This story confronts our misguided notions of creativity, vocation, and beauty. And, most important of all, it invites us in our own wilderness places to create these visions of the beautiful, the divine life that is coming. 

So, the tabernacle has much to say. Over these next four weeks I’m going to try to listen. If you’re reading this, you’re along for the ride as I try to meditate on the depths of this oft-neglected narrative and what it means for our own work of creation during the chaos of this world. I hope that as you read, you might be encouraged to think deeply about reality, about the beauty that is this world, and what it might look like to create visions of the divine life in your wilderness spaces. 

Let’s look together. 

^[1] Alexander, T. Desmond, From Paradise to Promised Land: An Introduction to the Pentateuch (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 226.