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86 The Tabernacle that country on that first passover night. Had they not earned them during their four-hundred years of bitter bondage, when they had not been paid by the wicked Pharaohs of Egypt? Costly as was this «earthly sanctuary" for God to dwell among His redeemed people, yet silver and gold could not begin to pay the awful cost to the Son of God of purchas- ing with His own blood "the temple" which is His church, "a people for his name"! We were "bought with a price," the price of the blood of Jesus, God's sinless Son and our only Saviour! To hold communion with God, Israel's representative, the priest, had to go to the tabernacle. To have fellowship with the Lord, the sinner has to meet Him at the cross, where the Man, Christ Jesus, eternal God and perfect Man, has made possible sweet communion between a holy God and His redeemed children. There is no other Way Home. There is no other Way of access to the Father. "In Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. 2: 9) . And in Him alone sinful man finds justification and peace and righteousness and joy-forever! This communion between God and His children was made possible when the Son of God became Man. "For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham" (Heb. 2:16). In other words, when He came into the world to redeem His fallen creatures, He did not become an angel; Heiden- tified Himself with man by being born of the Virgin Mary. "Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver
The Tabernacle them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Heb. 2:14, 15). When God told Moses to make "a sanctuary," that He might "dwell" among His people (Exod. 2 5: 8), He knew that, "in the fulness of the time," He would "taber- nacle" among men in the Person of the Lord Jesus, and that He would build His church for «an habitation of God through the Spirit." Yes, all this was in the eternal pur- pose of the eternal God (Eph. 3: 11). Moreover, as Christ Jesus, our Lord, is "a sun and shield" (Psalm 84: 11 )- "a sun" for the dark days of trial and sorrow, "a shield" from the burning of "the burden and heat of the day"--even so Jehovah "spread a cloud" over Israel "for a covering; and fire to give light in the night" (Psalm 10 5: 39). May His Holy Spirit teach us today the glories of Christ as foreshadowed in "the tent of the congregation" of Israel, with the Shekinah Glory "in the midst." The Foundation-Sockets of Silver Exodus 26:19-25, 32 That the Jewish tabernacle was a type of our crucified and risen Lord, as well as a type of the "spiritual house" which is the true church (I Peter 2: 5), is seen in the very foundation upon which the boards which formed the walls rested. That foundation was made of silver, provided by the atonement money of the children of Israel. There were forty-eight boards which, securely braced together by bars, rested in sockets of this silver. Each board stood :firmly upon two sockets, :fixed in an upright position by two tenons which were placed into their respec- tive grooves in the silver sockets. As there were two sockets for each of the forty-eight boards and four sockets under
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