Exodus 33:12-23, 40:34-38 "The End Is Glory" Scott Hoezee

Exodus is the grand theological sequel to the Book of Genesis. That's what I told you when this series began. I suggested that much that had run off the rails when sin marred God's creation in Genesis would begin to get set back on track in Exodus. Exodus is a cosmic drama with cosmic ramifications. That's what I told you throughout this series. Far from some little local drama from long ago and far away, the story told in this book ultimately affects everyone and everything in every place. Exodus finally is an answer to the Pharaoh's sneering, yet powerful, question, "Who is Yahweh?" That's what I told you in Exodus 5 and that's what I have repeated so very often throughout the past fifteen sermons we've had in this series.

A cosmic drama. The very fate of creation is at stake. The identity of God. The redemption of not just Israel but of all things. To put it mildly, all of that is quite a build-up for this book of Exodus. I've promised you the world, as it were, and have raised the stakes as to what this drama has been about all along. And so now, after all of that high-flung rhetoric over the course of these past months, we come to the climax of Exodus and what do we see . . .? God in a tent! Now, of course, there is far more going on in Exodus 40 than God under canvass, buttoned up in a tent like some L.L. Bean-clad hiker in the forests of the Upper Peninsula. Talking about what else this all means will be our main topic this evening, but as we begin, we should be honest enough to note that merely from the outside looking in, the so-called climax of Exodus could look downright anti-climactic!

Because think of this in terms of what today would be a satellite image of Israel. We've all seen those aerial views snapped by high-resolution spy satellites and the like, and so imagine that such a bird's-eye view could have been taken of the people in Exodus 40. What would we see? We'd see a rag-tag bunch of former slaves camping out in the middle of nowhere, their tent city looking about as tattered and hodge-podge as those refugee camps we've seen on TV from places like Rwanda and Iraq. We'd notice a harsh wilderness environment with the camp being surrounded by razor-sharp mountain rocks, hot desert sands, scrubby vegetation. It's a hardscrabble place where the people are, a far cry from the more lush environment of Egypt, watered as it is by the Nile River.

And in the center of it all we'd see a somewhat larger tent. It's neater and more clearly defined than the many other ramshackle canvass dwellings of the people, but still it's fundamentally just a tent. Even so, however, it's a bit obscured with what looks to be something like a cloud shrouding the tent and hovering over it. A casual observer would doubtless chalk this up to some meteorological quirk--just a bit of weather messing with the satellite's ability to snap a clear image.

But that's about it: a refugee camp smack in the middle of a rather undesirable location, the focal point of which seems to be little more than a foggy tent. If this really is a fitting conclusion to the Book of Exodus, we need to wonder a bit why. If this really can validate, and not render merely silly, the soaring claims I've been making about Exodus all along, then we need to wonder a bit how that is so. While we're at it, we may as well also ponder why the last half of this book is so clotted with chapter after chapter of rules and regulations followed by still more chapters that painstakingly repeat those regulations when we read about how the people carried them out. So, for instance, first we endure a long section about the proper height of a lampstand and then we read the whole thing over again when the people do indeed build that very lampstand. Scintillating it is not!

The first 20 chapters of Exodus are page-turners. The next 20 chapters are not. Why is that? Surely there were more efficient and streamlined ways narratively to convey both those rules and the people's fulfillment of them. Discovering why the author of Exodus elected not to shorten all of this up may be instructive to us as to what also our Christian lives are all about.

To begin let's look at Exodus 40 not as an isolated satellite image but as a piece in the larger narrative of the book. Where were we when this book began and where are we now? Way back in Exodus 1 we noted the apparent absence of God. It turned out, of course, that God was not at all absent but was present, working through the likes of the midwives Shiphrah and Puah to defy the Pharaoh and so help make Israel a mighty nation. Still, for 450 years God had not obviously been doing much even as the people languished in slavery. But now in this last chapter we see that we have moved from apparent absence to undeniable presence. The people have moved from emptiness to fullness. When God's glory cloud moved off Mount Sinai and into the Tabernacle, we arrived at a situation that was about as different from Exodus 1 as you could imagine. The first sermon in this series was titled "The Hidden God." In Exodus 40, however, God is no longer hidden but plain to see for all the people. They've come a long ways!

A second item to note is that the people who had been slaves are now free. A longstanding question in the opening chapters of Exodus was "Whom shall Israel serve?" Would it be Pharaoh or Yahweh? But now as the book closes we see a free people who have the chance to serve their God. Pharaoh had his question answered and learned the hard and deadly way what it meant to defy the God of Israel. God's good cosmos overcame Pharaoh's evil chaos.

Finally, let's recall the big creation theme that weaves all through this book. As the theological sequel to Genesis, we've been concerned about the fate of God's handiwork, of the very creation that was our primary focus this morning. Sin marred creation in Genesis--chaos threatened cosmos. The God who had walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day eventually had to pull back a bit. But now in Exodus 40 we see something that is quite wonderful: the dwelling of God is smack within the heart of the very creation! Cosmos is making a comeback. Pharaoh, who incarnated the forces of chaos, is gone and so God is able to return. God is not up in the mountains and he is certainly not a galaxy or two away. Now he's right over there, in that tent, as near to his physical creation as we ourselves are.

So the hidden God is now manifest. The enslaved people are now free to worship this God. And this God is now close to the creation he holds so dear. Yet all this goodness and divine closeness did not plop down out of a clear blue sky. Even once the Egyptians were washing up dead on the shores of the Red Sea, God did not in a heartbeat swoop down off the holy mountain immediately to set up shop in the midst of his people. Before the glory of Exodus 40 came the apparent tedium of Exodus 20-39. Why did God wait to enter into the midst of Israel? Why did there have to be first of all so many instructions and then second of all also that detailed obedience of the people?

There are lots of answers to that question but the main one I'd like to highlight this evening is that Israel needed to know that the purpose of the exodus from Egypt had not been to cut them loose to do whatever they wanted. They were not to huddle together to form their own national identity, write up a pledge of allegiance, design a flag, and so just in general forge their own manifest destiny. No, they were to be God's distinctive people. That's why the dimensions, shape, size, and outfitting of the Tabernacle were so very detailed. This would prove to be the most important structure ever built. This was going to become the theological center of the world. It was not something you simply threw together or built to suit your own aesthetic tastes. This is God's place and so he designs it himself.

As we have noted a couple of times in this series, scholars think that the Book of Exodus probably came into its more-or-less final form during the Babylonian exile, some five or six centuries after the events we read about in this book. In exile the people had a seventy-year chance to reflect on the cost of their unfaithfulness.

In fact, some of you may recall a chilling scene that we looked at a couple of years ago when we did a series on the prophecy of Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 11 we witness the reverse of Exodus 40. It's almost as though someone hit the Rewind button on the VCR, making the videotape of Exodus 40 run backwards. Because in Ezekiel's 11^th chapter he sadly watches while the glory cloud of Yahweh lifts up from the Temple in Jerusalem and heads back into the mountains. The people's wanton faithlessness, idolatry, and their overall breaking of the covenants made in Exodus caused the God who descended to Israel once more to ascend and so abandon his people.

The result was exile. The protection of God was lifted from Israel and the Babylonians marched right in and snatched the people, destroying God's Temple and ransacking the holy city in the process. So while sitting around the Babylonian concentration camps, a few theologians and writers realized what had gone wrong. When they finally got around to writing out the story of the exodus, they wanted to make sure to include not just the fact that God dished out long lists of regulations but also the fact that back then (as opposed to more recent times) the people obeyed. The result of that obedience was as mighty a blessing back then as their later disobedience had issued in a mighty punishment.

Again, the blessing of Exodus 40 is far more than God-in-a-tent. It is the return of Eden, the fellowshipping of the Creator with his creation and with his creatures. It is, as a matter of fact, nothing short of what had been all along, and still remains, God's goal in having made a creation in the first place; namely, so that God would have more creatures with whom to share his love and who would, in turn, love God back.

This is essentially the gospel. The apostle John knew what he was doing (and knew precisely which biblical chords he was sounding on his theological keyboard) when he shattered all reality in his opening chapter by saying, "The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us!" That's the Greek word John used in John 1:14: the word for tent, the word meaning to camp out. The Word of God, who is the Son of God who received the name Jesus, tented in our midst, full of grace and truth. Moses was told he could not see God's face and live, and so God hid Moses in the cleft of a rock. Allegorical biblical interpreters over the centuries have sometimes said that the rock that hid Moses was actually Christ himself. God the Son protected Moses from the splendor of God the Father but the day would come when the Son himself would reveal the splendor of the Father and when that day came, we would be able to see face to face. Not only do we now not die by virtue of seeing God face to face, we live! "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father" Jesus once told his shocked disciples. He still tells us the same thing today.

Indeed, the fact of Pentecost gives us something even more scandalously shocking to think about: we have now become mini-tabernacles of the Holy Spirit! As we thought about recently when looking at a few key portions of Romans, the apostle Paul reveled in talking about what it means that we are "in Christ" and that, therefore, Christ is in us. If we are baptized followers of Jesus, then the idea of God dwelling in the midst of his people takes on for us a personal meaning that is at once more glorious, but also more mysterious, than even the God-in-a-tent spectacle we see in Exodus 40.

Still, as for someone looking at a satellite photo of the scene in Exodus 40, so for us when we look in the mirror, so for anyone who bothers to take a good look at any one of us: it takes faith to see and believe that God is right here. I no more look like the dwelling place of God than that Tabernacle at Sinai looked like the most important place on earth. When I am walking through the mall, visiting an amusement park, or looking for the nicest tomato in the D&W produce section, I cannot tell just by looking around me who is a tabernacle of the Spirit. For that matter, neither can my fellow shoppers see this in me, as though I exuded a halo glow or something.

Sometimes when I'm out and about, clad in my denim shorts, my Princeton t-shirt, and my tennis shoes, I'll crack a joke, make people laugh, and then a few minutes later maybe someone will discover for the first time that I am a pastor. Often people respond by saying, "You don't look like a minister!" I've never done it, but probably what I should say in reply would be along the lines of, "That's nothing--what til you find out that I'm the dwelling place of the Most High God, too!" Saying that would likely sound merely arrogant, and probably not a little queer, but I'm here to remind each of you tonight that if you are a baptized follower of Christ Jesus the Lord, that's who you are, too.

The dwelling place of God is not a golden throne room, bathed in an amber light, and decked out with rich tapestries and curtains. More often than not the dwelling place of God is a tired looking tent in a desert wasteland, a carpenter's son from a small town, the gap-toothed Iowa farmer driving his Massey-Ferguson tractor across a field of corn, the flour-dusted face of the old woman lovingly making an apple pie for her grandkids, the harried CPA trying to get her columns of figures to add up, the awkward teenager making profession of faith and hoping no one in the congregation much notices the pimple under his chin. These are the latter-day tabernacles of God's Spirit!

Exodus 40 gives us God-in-a-tent, but there was so very much that led up to that climactic change-of-address on God's part. The people who wrote Exodus down did not want us to forget the bigger story and the faithfulness that led up to it all. This evening we also recall again all that led up to the gospel and to that big day of Pentecost that changed you and me from ordinary lumps of clay into tabernacles of the living God. It is a story that spans cosmic history, that involves the blood, sweat, and tears of God's only begotten Son. It is a story fragrant with grace and laden with truth.

And if you believe that old, old Story and are willing to savor and review and revel in its many details, then for you as for the people in the wilderness long ago, you know the one thing that is worth knowing more than anything else that has ever been or that will ever be: you know that the end is glory! Such knowledge ought to be enough to help sustain each one of us through the trials and terrors of this present age. We are not who we appear to be as perceived by the casual observer. We are glory-filled people whose end destiny is the glory of living forever in the presence of God. You wouldn't expect a modest tent in the desert to convey all that. The fact that it does reminds us once more that it is precisely in the ordinary places of life that our God most often meets us and fill us with his very Self. The end is glory, my friends. Thanks be to God! Amen.