95 The Tabernacle them and held them in one firmly fixed dwelling place for Jehovah "in the midst" of His people. Likewise, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, composed of different members, is one household of faith, one body, one bride; and each member has a responsibility to his fellow-Christians. We are all, in a very real sense, our brothers' keeper. While the four short bars on the west, north, and 50uth were passed through rings of gold; yet the long, middle bar was made "to shoot through the boards from the one end to the other" (Exod. 3 6: 33). Thus it was invisible, even to the eyes of the Levites who erected this sanctuary; it was buried in the heart of the boards. It is a beautiful picture of the Lord Jesus, "whom having not seen," we love (I Peter 1: 8), the One in whom the be- lievers are united one to another. Verily He is "in the midst" of His own, unseen except to the eye of faith! And verily in Him we are eternally secure! His promise will never fail: "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand" (John 10:27, 28). It has been suggested that the ring is the emblem of love; and that the four outward bars that held the boards together remind us of the four outward tokens of that unseen bond of Christian unity and communion mentioned in Acts 2:42-"doctrine," "fellowship," "breaking of bread," and "prayers." When the doctrine of believers is true to our crucified and risen Lord, then we have sweet fellowship one with another, in Him, as we sit around the Lord's Table, and offer our united petitions to the Father in His all-prevailing name.
The Tabernacle
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Stripped of their natural beauty, robbed of every leaf and bough, these acacia trees were cut to the God-ap- pointed size and shape. And then they were overlaid with pure gold, a beauty not their own. What a picture of the child of God! When he gets a vision of Christ, he abhors himself, in all his earthly pride and self-glory. He is sep- arated from this Christ-rejecting world; for he has set his face toward that heavenly city, "whose builder and maker is God" (Heb. 11: 10). He is "in the world" but "not of the world" (John 17:13, 14). The axe is laid to the roots of all the false hopes and glories that had been his; and, if he is yielded to his Lord and Saviour, he lets Him shape and mold him according to His own divine pattern- for a life of service now and for eternal service and glory in the life to come. Having "put off" the "old man" he puts on the "new man" in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 4:22-24). He finds his satisfaction and joy in the things of God. He has been "crucified with Christ"; he is "risen with Christ"; he bas been made to sit with Him "in heavenly places" (Gal. 2:20; Col. 3:1, 3; Eph. 1:3). Having become a partaker of "the divine nature" in Him (II Peter 1 :4), he is given a glory and a beauty that only God can bestow, foreshadowed in the golden-covered boards of the taber- nacle. He has been "accepted in the beloved" Son of the Father. In the world, yet established upon the redemption that is his in Christ, the Foundation-Stone of the church his body is the "temple of the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. 3: 16; 6: 19). And thus he is a "living stone" in that temple not made with hands, eternal in the heavens (I Peter 2:4). Each board in the Jewish tabernacle stood upon its own sockets, even as every soul has to accept Christ as a per- sonal Saviour and Lord, in order to be saved. Yet the boards were bound one to another by the bars that united
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