THE TABERNACLE AND THE TEMPLE NO. 2

THE TABERNACLE AND THE TEMPLE NO. 2

I was thankful for your letter, but I deferred to reply to it until I could say something. I find a subject of the kind comes to one only by degrees, here a little, and there a little. I accept your distinction between the tabernacle and the temple. Do you see nothing more in the tabernacle of God than in the tabernacle of testimony? My impression is, that there is something besides the new Jerusalem in Paul’s words, “an holy temple in the Lord”. I do not say that it is in the millennium, but could it be fulfilled in the statement, “The tabernacle of God is with men”? Christ here was the temple of God, and it is in keeping with this that I think there must be hereafter more than the city. I do not mean the temple which will be set up on the earth during the millennium.

I agree with you that there is a present analogy to the assembly as the house of God, only we are more of the tabernacle character, for we have the heavenly Priest over the house of God — and the ark contains not only the law, what God required of man, but there was the pot of manna — a life suited to God, and Aaron’s rod — God’s chosen One.

^[p. 78] Your comments on Mark 8 are very interesting, that Christ is the “one loaf”, and that there must be two operations on the blind before there is divine sight. I had seen the necessity for the latter, but I had never taken the “one loaf” to signify Christ. I had remarked that He did not give them any bread. The whole scene of the chapter depicts the moral state of believers in this day. They would welcome any addition of Christ to Adam, but they refuse to discard Adam for Christ only. I find almost everywhere that Galatians 2: 20 is regarded as “standing”, and that it is not appropriated as the true experimental state of the Christian.

The enclosed is from ————. I have written in reply that the aspirations are beautiful, but that he cannot realise them except by the Spirit by whom we mortify the deeds of the body. It is faith which lays hold of God’s side and estimate of the cross, but it is the Spirit that makes good to me that which is true of me in the sight of God. Christians in general would say that faith makes it good, hence it is ours without the practical efficacy of the Spirit’s work in us, so that we should not fulfil the lusts of the flesh.