The mountain is smoking. The trumpet sounds, the lightning flashes, and the people stand far off, trembling. They go to Moshe (Moses) with one request: speak with us yourself and we will hear, but let not God speak with us, lest we die, Shemot, Exodus 20:18-19.
Most of us were handed this passage with its meaning already attached. A holy God and a frightened people need someone standing between them, and Moshe stands there. HaShem, the reading goes, approved the arrangement Himself. When Moshe retells that day in Devarim, Deuteronomy 5:28, HaShem says He heard the sound of their words, and the answer that comes back is that they have done well in all they have spoken. Every faithful pastor since belongs to that line, preaching what his teachers knew, and he can point to the text for it. The mountain gets a sermon and the tent gets another, and the two are rarely set side by side. Five chapters after the fire, the same voice says what it wants: let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them, Shemot, Exodus 25:8.
The speech in Devarim goes on with a wish: oh that they had such a heart in them, to fear Me and keep all My commandments always, that it might go well with them and with their children forever, Devarim, Deuteronomy 5:29. The way I take this, HaShem grants the request and, in the same breath, wishes them more. The voice they asked to keep at a distance heard what they said, and then asked for a place to live among them. Was the go-between a mercy for a people who could not bear the fire, or the first stone of a wall between them and Him? I do not know which it was for them.
In Shemot, Exodus 25:8, the word to carry is shakhan, to settle in and stay. The Hebrew has it as וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם, veshakhanti betokham, that I may dwell among them. Its noun is mishkan, the dwelling, the tent they were told to build. The people’s verb in that verse is make. His is shakhan, and the place He means to settle is the middle of them. As I read it, every board and curtain of instruction that follows hangs from that one clause. I follow the root through the rest of the Bible, and the gatekeeping with it, and near the far end there is a measurement. I came on it in Revelation, reading it in context, and I knew in my gut what it was. Nothing in the text announces it, and I would rather you come on it the way I did.
It took me three years of writing at this table and a study through Revelation before the gatekeeping story came clear, and it is still coming clearer. The smallest thing I can ask is ten minutes tonight with your own Bible open: Bereshit, Genesis 3:8, then Shemot, Exodus 25:8, then John 1:14, then Revelation 21:3, in that order.
The measurement waits in Breath to Dwelling: The Arc Nobody Preaches, with the road the root takes from the tent to the end of Scripture and the dated church documents on the go-between. The verses are laid out for you to check.
Your brother in the Way,
Sergio
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This is wondrous to me. I will surely make time to look into the sequence you have outlined. Todah!