Jesus in the Tabernacle II
The tabernacle instructions continue with a table made of the ubiqutuous Acacia, of tabernacle wood. This is again overlaid with gold with a moulding around the edge (Exodus 25). It also has rings to allow it to be carried with poles. The tabernacle furniture is not for touching in the course of being moved, only for touching for worship.
It has plates and dishes and flagons and bowls. And then the text moves on to the lampstands because these are instructions for construction, the instructions for use come later in Leviticus. We’re simply told that here the ‘bread of the presence’ is set before God. Or, more literally, put the face bread on the table always.
God’s presence is his face, that’s the Hebrew idiom. It’s Godbread. Bread that is in front of God. Bread that God looks at. The table sits just outside the holy of holies in the tabernacle section we usually call ‘the holy place’ or just ‘inside the tent.’
Making the Bread
Leviticus 24 tells us about the bread itself. It’s made of fine flour. Every week another twelve loaves are baked, one for each of Israel’s tribes. They are put on the table and the bread is from the people of Israel to God. Frankincense is added to each of the two piles of six loaves, as a food offering to God.
Does God eat it? No, Leviticus is specific, this is not food for a pagan god to eat but instead eaten by the priests, and only the priests. They can eat it only inside the holy place. There’s a whole line of the tribe of Levi who are the people of bread—the Kohathites (Numbers 4)—responsible for care for the table and its bread.
It’s not entirely clear but it seems like the idea is that the bread is baked on a Friday, placed on the table on the Sabbath, and then presumably eaten as part of the Sabbath rather than left there all week to go dry. Priests eat fresh bread in their worship.
It’s this bread that David ate when his men were hungry (1 Samuel 21) and that Jesus points to in order to explain that the Sabbath is for man, not the other way around (Mark 2).
Jesus the Bread of Life
Jesus called himself the bread of life (John 6). We are to feast on him in our worship. He is our spiritual sustenance.
But of course we can go further, what’s the connection between this bread and the Lord’s Supper? We usually compare the Supper to the Passover, but since the people of God ate each time they worshipped (Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 11) there is a sense that the church is mirroring the tabernacle: we eat the bread together.
Only priests eat, but now all the people are priests (1 Peter 2) and so everyone eats the bread. In the Old Testament, the table also bore the wine for the drink offering, which was poured out on the ground. No one drank wine. Now the priestly church not only eats bread but also drinks wine. We’ve moved from just the tree of life (the bread) to the tree of wisdom (the wine); because Jesus hung on the cursed tree to give us life we can now eat and drink. He is bread and wine to us, life and wisdom. We re-enact this every week in the Lord’s Supper
Our Bread
We shouldn’t miss though that the bread was the people’s offering to God. There is a sense of this in the Lord’s Supper, as meal of covenant renewal, but there are deeper images too. The people of God are a loaf (1 Corinthians 10). We are broken in suffering and then reunited as the torn loaf is eaten by the people, making them one. It’s our offering to God.
To move one step further, that means we can suggest that all of our tables are offerings to God. All of my bread, when served to another, is an offering first to the Lord. When we feed Christians we feed Jesus (Matthew 25). When the church feasts, she gathers before the face of God.
Ok, let’s level with you, I seem to pull everything back to us gathering around tables. Why? Because God meets his people at a table and feeds them. In the Old Testament we bring the bread, though there are numerous examples where God has really provided the bread. While echoes of that continue, as above, in the New Testament God brings the bread. Or perhaps it’s better to say that he is more obvious in his provision of bread, more direct, though it still must be baked by human hands. He furnishes us with a table that he lays himself on, he is our food. The Bible is a book about the hospitality of God, and hospitality always finds it heart in commensality, at the table.
We then live lives that do what church does, we lay our tables with a feast (notice that the tabernacle had fresh bread, serve fresh bread so people believe this is a feast) to invite our friends and then the world to. Church is centripetal, it gathers us to the table to be spun out, centrifugally, into the world.
Think of this every time you smell bread.
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