The Divine Dwelling Series

Introduction

Can I be honest with you this morning? To be fair, I hope you know I’m honest with you every Sunday morning. But can I be especially honest with you this week? When I looked at this passage at the beginning of the week, I really questioned whether we should do this passage at all. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with a Bible passage before. Before us this morning, we have a chapter that, to all intents and purposes, is about curtains! Curtains! What can we possibly learn about living for Christ? What can we possibly take away that’s useful from a chapter… about curtains? I’m not anti-curtains, don’t hear me wrong, unless you’re talking about 90s hairstyle curtains. Definitely against them. You know, curtains are great! If I didn’t say that, Rachel (who owns a curtain business) would not be happy! But don’t they belong in a book on interior design rather than a Sunday morning thinking about Jesus? This is about changing rooms, not changing hearts.

But do you know, as the week’s gone on, and I’ve looked carefully at this, I’ve become more convinced this stuff is really at the heart of so much that we see in the New Testament. I know that’s quite a statement, but I think you’ll see this morning it’s true. What’s pictured in these curtains, veils, and screens are some of the massive themes in Scripture. And they point us straight to the Lord Jesus and His work on the cross. Sorry, should have given a spoiler alert there! It’s reminded me that the scriptures are a goldmine of Gospel-filled goodness if we just take the time to read them carefully and think them through. I know I’ve set the bar quite high there, but let’s see as we go through. So first of all, we see…

A Covering, Containing Curtain (v1-14)

When I read this through the first time this week, I must admit, I did not even have a clue what this was really even describing. I think whenever I’ve read this before, my eyes have sort of glazed over. There are 10 curtains, no 11 curtains, no two sets of five curtains, no a veil, no a screen. Twisted linen, no scarlet yarns, no goats’ hair, no tanned rams' skins, no goatskins—that’s before we get to different translations! Goats’ skins, badgers' skins, fine leather, hides of sea cows, skins of dolphins. And that’s before we even get to the various dimensions! Four cubits, twenty-eight cubits, thirty cubits. What even is a cubit? So let me try and help.

Part of the issue is that it's only describing part of the whole structure—the tent which housed the holy of holies and the holy place. The outer court is not even touched here. It’s just the one tent. But that one tent has four layers of curtains on it, as well as a veil on the inside and a screen at the front. The breakdown looks something like this:

A layer of finely embroidered linen

A layer of goats’ hair fabric

A layer of tanned rams' skins

And a layer of probably goatskins (that’s the tricky one to translate)

The last two layers are sometimes counted as one. The reason you get different measurements is that as you put one layer on top of another, the layers need to be bigger. The first layer of embroidered linen would be about a foot and a half off the floor on two sides, presumably so it didn’t get damaged. The next layer, though, covered it and went right to the floor. A foot and a half is about a cubit, or 45 cm in metric—it’s the length between your elbow and the end of your fingers. So it differed slightly from person to person, and over time too. The loops and golden clasps are there to hold the curtains together so that the tabernacle may be a single whole. There were no gaps; there was no way to sneak in. Wholeness is a huge deal in the law, and the tabernacle was to be whole, complete, perfect.

But why were there any curtains at all? Why not just have it open? Well, it’s not just a weather consideration; it’s a "keep out" consideration. The curtains cordoned off the tent so that no one could enter. It contained the tent; it covered it from prying eyes. And from the outside, it would have looked very ordinary. The embroidered curtains lay within; they couldn’t be seen from the outside. The various layers made it waterproof, yes, but they also hid the wonders from the outside world. Imagine if someone came to live on your street, they bought a house, you never saw them, and they never opened their curtains. The message would be clear, wouldn’t it? Keep out! Stay away! Don’t come near! That was what it was like for the Israelites. God moved in among them, but the curtains remained closed. You never got to see inside. While God was among them, the message was stay away!