Verses 1-17
The Method of Providence
We must never forget that all these instructions were given in a mountain and were to be carried out in a wilderness. These circumstances turn their execution into a Divine miracle. In the interpretation of the sacred record, bear in mind the circumstances. If you lose sight of the wilderness, you will not see the tabernacle; yea, though its glory a tender glory of beauty may gleam upon you and excite your imagination. If you detach the tabernacle from the sandy and dreary wilderness, you will fail to see all the mystery of light. The things belong to one another for instructive purposes. We do not let God have a fair place for building. We have turned the whole earth into wilderness, so that if he would build at all he must build under circumstances which act as a definite foil to every touch of beauty and every line of light Yet God will build in the wilderness as if it were a heaven. He will not be discouraged by the stones, the sands, the bleak surroundings. We could not work under such conditions; we should complain of the environment, asking with bitterness of tone, "Who can work in a place so dreary? and what is the reward for putting up in the wilderness a thing fit for the streets of the golden Jerusalem?" God builds everything with an eye to beauty. When he rounded off the earth and sent it flying in its appointed circuit, he blessed the little thing as a man might bless his child, and said with infinite pathos, "It is very good." Now that he comes to build upon it, we have spoiled it altogether, and if he were less than God he could not lay one stone upon another on a foundation so debased and spoiled as is now the earth under our devastating and unsparing hand. Behold, as otherwhere and everywhere, the tender goodness of God! He lets down his best things upon the earth as if it were a fit receiving-house, "He spared not his own Son." Having sent down law and priesthood, tabernacle, and ark, and prophet, and a long line of angel-visitants with messages struck in every key of eloquence, last of all he sent his Son. So there must be something in this little night-world we have never seen; there must be in the substance of things verily a mystery which, whilst it is acknowledged by philosophy, is known and esteemed infinitely by its Creator. The philosophers are quite right when they cannot see in what they term "phenomena" any reason for the wondrous revelation of Christ as the heart and image of God. There is nothing in phenomena worthy of the Cross, or fully explanatory of it; but God sees the heart of things, the innermost enfoldment, the sanctum sanctorum , that entity, that pulse, which is hidden from every created eye. Instead, therefore, of finding the revelation of the Gospel to be in excess of the phenomena, I will go further and say that God must find his own balance; he must put in the one scale what is equal to the other, and doing so, he does not degrade himself he lifts up the work of his hands and the purpose of his heart.
God would have everything built beautifully. What an image of beauty have we seen this tabernacle to be through and through, flushed with colours we have never seen, and bright with lights that could not show themselves fully in the murkiness of this air! He would make us more beautiful than our dwelling-place. He would not have the house more valuable than the tenant. He did not mean the worshipper to be less than the tabernacle which he set up for worship. Are we living the beautiful life the life solemn with sweet harmonies, broad in its generous purpose, noble in the sublimity of its prayer, like God in the perpetual sacrifice of its life? To answer such questions in the affirmative, or in any tone hinting positiveness, is to be building a life which will outshine the tabernacle, though it were outlined by the very finger of God.
Not only will God build everything beautifully; his purpose is to have everything built for religious uses. He will not have mere beauty of form, for in the creation of form he may perpetrate an irony that would distress his own heart. His meaning is that the form shall help the thought, that images appealing to the eye shall also touch the imagination and graciously affect the whole spirit, and subdue into tender obedience and worship the soul and heart of man. What can be more ironical and therefore to the spiritual mind more distressful than for the stone church to be more beautiful than the living temple? an organ out-singing the human voice? some spectacle appealing to the fleshly eye grander than the invisible revelation, seeking the attention of the inward vision of the soul? We are the worse for the beauty that is round about us if not the better. We cannot live under beautiful environments and circumstances without being debased by them, except we rise to their appeal and put all meaner things under our feet. It is a sad thing to become familiar with beauty, so familiar with it as not really to see its charm. It is an awful thing to have heard the Gospel so often as to feel weary under the appeal of its gracious thunder or its melting tenderness. We must watch our senses: they will victimise us if we do not; we shall be brought into a state of contemptuousness where we ought to be in a condition of worship. God, then, docs not build for mere beauty of form: he always seeks to help the worshipper. He builds altars. Whatever he touches he sanctifies. How possible it is to be living amongst beauty of landscape, of art, and beauty of every imaginable kind, and yet for the soul to sink into unresponsiveness, not seeing "sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, good in everything." That is irony; that is the contradiction which makes fools of men, a depth below even moral degradation, for in moral degradation there may yet remain a kind of intellectual flicker, a species of intellectual majesty; but in the other condition the whole nature is depleted, debased, diabolised. God does not build for the gratification of taste, otherwise he would subserve the interests of mere vanity. There are some who are still worshippers of the goddess they call Taste. Be it that a thing is in what they call taste, and they are satisfied. They will not ask whether the child is living or dead, if the form is preserved in beauty of outline. Taste has its right place.
The tabernacle as a work of art is never to be held in contempt; but we miss its meaning; all its Divine poetry is lost upon us, so long as we can merely admire it. To admire under such circumstances is to insult. The true admiration is worship; the true applause is forgetfulness of the thing itself, complete absorption in the thought it can but dimly express. When our souls are on fire, when our blood is aflame with the true zeal, our senses will be ordered back that our spirit may go forward and turn the wilderness into heaven and common bread into a type of the Lord's body.
God will not have the building put up as an expression of mere sentiment: otherwise, he would be assisting the cause of idolatry. Nothing will satisfy him but a recognition of the supreme purpose. What is the tabernacle for? for worship. What is the meaning of it? it is a gate opening upon heaven. Why was it set up? to lift us nearer God. If we fail to seize these purposes, if we fail of magnifying and glorifying them so as to ennoble our own life in the process, we have never seen the tabernacle. We have seen the thing which an artificer might have made a toy fit for a bazaar, but not the Church of God, the holy place, the Divine tabernacle let down amongst the dwellings of men. Herein is it for ever true that we may have a Bible but no revelation; a sermon but no Gospel; we may be in the church, yet not in the sanctuary; we may admire beauty, and yet live the life of the drunkard and the debauchee.
In all his building and God is always building he qualifies every man for a particular work in connection with the edifice. Verily, God leaves nothing to Moses! When Moses goes down from this mountain, he will go as an errand-bearer, a messenger; he will simply go to carry out instructions. Nothing has been left to his own invention; he will represent God. That is the true picture of all things. We have nothing to say, if we are true teachers, but what we have been told to say. God will tell every man the message which he wishes to have repeated, and every man will tell it in his own voice and in his own individuality of tone; but the message is God's, or it is not a message at all. No man has any right, in this kind of work, to address any other man except that right is founded upon his inspiration. There is no impertinence more intolerable than for any man to stand up and tell his fellow-men to be good, to repent, if so be he is delivering something which he attributes to the heat and zeal of his own imagination. The culmination of impertinence is in what is called the pulpit if any man shall stand up, and of his own morality tell other men to repent. The utterance must be Divine! it cannot be tolerated in the man, for we are so constituted that human nature would charge upon the man his own action as a contradiction of his speech, and would order him out to reconcile himself with himself before he found fault with the policy of the world. But when the preacher knows that he is preaching to himself, that he is putting into human utterance what he believes to be a Divine message, then though his life be before him as a mocking contradiction, calling him liar when he prays, and hypocrite when he preaches, he knows that he has not gone a warfare at his own charges, and that he is but the medium on which the infinite thought breaks into human speech. Not that the man will rest content with this. Whilst part of his supreme comfort may come to him along such lines, it will ever be his careful business with an industry that knows no relaxation to make his life equal to his speech. The point is that no teacher Moses, Aaron, Isaiah, Paul must stand up of his own motion to tell men to be better. Every man must speak that appealing word as the result of Divine inspiration and constraint. God qualifies every man for the work which he has to do. Aaron was not Moses, Bezaleel was not Aaron. Each had his own place, his own mission, his own work; each was Divinely chosen. When Bezaleel lifted the chisel he was performing a Divine purpose as much so as was Aaron when he went forth with his garment distinguished by all colours of beauty and eloquent with the chime of golden bells. The one man wants the other man. The work stands still till that other man comes in. Moses, Aaron, and the sons of Aaron, and the seventy elders of Israel, are all standing still till the man with the chisel comes in; looking round upon their incomplete number, they say, "There is some man wanting." That is the true ideal of unity. Division of labour is necessary to the very bond of unity. Each man must feel that he is Divinely called and inspired to do a particular work, and he must feel that the Church cannot move in its completeness until he is in it. Then the shepherd shall be as the king, the nurse shall be almost a mother, the lighter of the lamp shall have a distinct position as if he were in the family of Aaron, and the humblest toiler in the vineyard will erect himself in the solemn eventide and bless God that he has had some share in the day's varied toil. Who has courage to read the following words aright, and to apply them to the practical history of mankind?
"And I have filled him (Bezaleel) with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship" ( Exo 31:3-5 ).
Who can read these words as they ought to be read? How it makes ministers of God by the thousand! We have thought that Aaron was a religious man because of his clothing and because of many peculiarities which separated him from other men; but the Lord distinctly claims the artificer as another kind of Aaron. He will undertake to show a man how to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting stones, and in carving timber, and in all manner of workmanship. Who divides life into sacred and profane? Who introduces the element of meanness into human occupation and service? God claims all things for himself. When he hears man speak and woman sing, he says perhaps with a father's pride (we use human terms to express human thoughts) "Who hath made man's mouth? Have not I, the Lord?" When he sees the sculptor making a rock into an image of Moses, may he not say, "Who hath made man's hand, and given movement to his fingers and wrist? Have not I, the Lord"? Who will say that the preacher is a religious man, but the artificer is a secular worker? Who will say that one man is inspired, and another man found out his own way for himself? If he found a low way, a mean or shallow way, a way without perspective, and suggestion, and apocalyptic outlook and issue, verily he found it out for himself. But let us claim all true workers as inspired men. We know that there is an inspired art. The world knows it; instinctively, unconsciously, the world uncovers before it.
There is an inspired poetry, make it of what measure you will. The great common heart knows it, says, "That is the true verse; how it rises, falls, plashes like a fountain, flows like a stream, breathes like a summer wind, speaks the thoughts we have long understood, but could never articulate!" The great human heart says, "That is the voice Divine; that is the appeal of Heaven." Why should we say that inspiration is not given to all true workers, whether in gold or in thought, whether in song or in prayer, whether in the type or in the magic eloquence of the burning tongue? Let us enlarge life, and enlarge Providence, rather than contract it, and not, whilst praying to a God in the heavens, have no God in the heart. You would work better if you realised that God is the Teacher of the fingers, and the Guide of the hand. All service would look tenderer to you, richer and larger, if you could say when it is done, "This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful and glorious in wisdom and in power." A new solemnity gathers around me as I think on these things. The universe is steadier. The whole temple is lifted up to higher grandeur. Nature becomes a sublime totality. Prayer is clothed with broader meaning. Labour is churched and glorified. Art turns its chiselled and flushed features towards its native heaven. Sin acquires a deadlier blackness, and begs to be hidden in some deepening hell. Through all cloud and noise, all rush and strife, God's great trumpet clears a way for the commandments which represent his righteousness, and for the statutes which are to become songs in the house of human pilgrimage. Realise the unity of things. See the structural completeness of the whole idea of the universe and of life. Verily, "the tabernacle of God is with men upon the earth," and from the weariest wilderness of sand there is a straight path to the city whose streets are gold.
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