Jesus in the Tabernacle VIII
The last thing described in the tabernacle instructions in Exodus, is the bronze basin that sits in the courtyard. It’s a large basin made of bronze, on a stand, that is placed between the tent of meeting and the altar.
Essentially that means that as you enter the courtyard you first encounter the altar, then the basin, then the holy place of the tent. Inside the holy place you have the table of bread on the left, the incense altar in front of you, and the lampstand on the right. The most holy place is directly in front of you behind a curtain, containing the ark. Inside the ark is the tablet of stone with the ten words on it, some manna, and Aaron’s budding staff. That’s the tabernacle.
Why this basin, or ‘laver’? Exodus 30 says that it should contain water and be used by the priests to wash their hands and feet when they go into the either the tent or use the altar. If they fail to use it, they’ll die.
Before you enter the place of worship or before you make an offering to God you need to wash. Yes, this is baptism.
Baptism
In order to join the people of God—become one of the priesthood of all believers—we need to be washed. Baptism is this sign to us, of becoming part of the body of Christ. In order for us to ‘enter’ the church or to receive the benefits of Jesus’ sacrifice to us, we’re told to be baptised.
That way of framing it will seem odd to some, but I don’t mean that we’re regenerate at baptism. We’re saved by faith, then baptised, for all many Christians disagree on this point. However, in the Bible baptism is the normal response to our faith; we should think of it as part of conversion-initiation. There is no normal situation where someone is redeemed and then doesn’t get baptised. We can argue from the thief on the cross (Luke 23) that deathbed conversions and those who are unable to get baptised due to oppressive regimes are more than reasonable, but there’s almost no reason that its reasonable for someone in your church in the West to refuse to be baptised while claiming to follow Jesus. We should feel comfortable to talk about baptism as ‘becoming a Christian’ even if we don’t mean ‘becoming regenerate.’
We know who Christians are by their baptism. Romans 6 reminds us not to remember our moment of conversion, but to remember our baptism and therefore to not sin. For all I am theologically aligned with my credobaptist (believer’s baptism) evangelical friends, I think we have typically undervalued the importance of baptism in the Christian life. There is lots we can learn from paedobaptist (infant baptism) brothers and sisters.
The Sea
When the Temple is built, everything in the tabernacle is supersized. There are now ten lampstands and ten tables for bread. The basin becomes a bronze ‘sea.’
This is helpful to us in understanding the symbolism we’re supposed to get. We’re washed in the sea before coming into the presence of God, the sea stands outside the tent. In an earlier post in this series I mentioned that the tabernacle is a model of the world, flowing from the garden, to Eden, to the rest of the world, as Genesis 2 describes it. In the rest of the world we find the sea, which in Biblical symbolism is the place of chaos and death. It stands for chaos—or perhaps better, is the place of chaos—because that’s where the dragons live. The Lord makes them in Genesis 1, building the earth from primordial watery chaos, and then progression in the Bible leads us to eventually have a sea stilled like glass before the throne (Revelation 4) and then the new heavens and earth have no sea (Revelation 21). Chaos is diminishing and will end.
Yet we wash in its waters to worship. There is a hint of us remembering that even the chaos and its dragons/demons are subject to the will of the most high God, but mostly its baptism again. In baptism we pass through the waters of death into new life. It’s a story of death and resurrection with Jesus and with Israel at the Red Sea. We partake in that story, receiving Jesus’ victory without doing anything, to enter and worship God. We also remember that Jesus was baptised, perhaps even that was to assert his authority over the powers.
We wash to be cleansed, much like we eat bread and wine to be fed. God loves physical stuff. We can only worship God because Jesus has first gone through death on our behalf, because he has defeated the enemy and his legions, and because he has washed us clean from the stench of our sin. We get baptised so that we can feel that on our skin and remember it. Even that act is not us cleansing ourselves but receiving a gift from God.
This brings us to the end of our brief tour through the tabernacle, there’s much more that could be said, of course. If you’ve enjoyed this little series and would like to see more, do let me know!
Photo by Thierry Meier on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 