Top 12 of CiHD: #6

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

The next post in our series examining the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust is a teaching on the Tabernacle. I called it “Falling on Joyful Faces” — and you can find it here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to it? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

To be honest, I don’t have many ideas as to why this teaching made the list — let alone so high up. I do know this is one of my favorite lessons to teach in person, either in the classroom or on my trips in Israel. There is a built-to-scale model of the Tabernacle in the Negev desert and I love to take my students there. I know that it communicates well in person, but I never felt like written teaching was the way to go here. Maybe I’m wrong.

I also remember this post being shared by others more than usual. Many have pointed out that there is no science behind why something gets shared and some others do not — there is no correlation to quality of content — but I imagine those shares were a big part of the view count.

The only other idea I can come up with is that if people were searching the Internet for Tabernacle and Temple and their relationship to each other, this post would have shown up on the search.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

Obviously, this is one of my more “poetic” pieces, so it would be safe to say I hope people found inspiration and a compelling call to engage the missio Dei in the world.

I hope it challenged readers to pause and consider the reaction of the people. Growing up in the Church and being exposed to the Bible routinely had caused me to make some assumptions about God and His presence. I had picked up the idea that God is scary; when people meet God, they fall down terrified. Without a doubt, there are those instances in the Text. But with that being my go-to assumption, I read over instances like this one — so much so that I remember having to give serious thought to what it would have looked like to “fall on their faces in joy” when I first heard this teaching.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I would certainly point out how much the original lesson impacted me and provided the basis for my own teaching. I first heard this lesson in 2008 from Ray Vander Laan while we were spending time in the Negev desert. Later, I was able to revisit the lesson when it was produced by Focus on the Family in the That the World May Know series (Volume 10, “With All Your Heart,” Lessons 1–2).

If I could, I think I would have added more to the idea of the corporate “we” being the Temple of God. It’s a common idea and so I think I just assumed it at the end of my original post, but I would have been wise to let more of the Text speak there. I would have included passages from the New Testament like 1 Peter 2:4–5:

As you come to him, the living Stone — rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him — you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

I would have also included 1 Corinthians 3:16–17:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

Connecting this idea to Pentecost is a powerful way of reminding the readers that we all — as the corporate Body of Christ — are a new Temple, opened on that day. If we are familiar with how people responded to the grand openings of God’s other spiritual houses, it would be an easy assumption to make about how they ought to respond when they meet us. In order to make this point even more poignant, one could hear this idea of God using us as living stones as a call back to Isaiah 51:

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousnessand who seek the LORD:Look to the rock from which you were cutand to the quarry from which you were hewn;look to Abraham, your father,and to Sarah, who gave you birth.When I called him he was only one man,and I blessed him and made him many.”

It would be a powerful consideration to think about the qualities of Abraham and Sarah that we studied early in the series. If they are people of radical hospitality (referenced by Jesus himself!), it would give us an indication of the missional methodology behind the reaction of people who see the goodness of God and the enduring nature of His love.