Exodus 37:1-9 God Everywhere
Exodus 37:1-9 God Everywhere Five Sundays in July, and I’m preaching from the five literary divisions of the Bible. In the New Testament the primary categories are gospels and epistles, and in the Old Testament, the divisions are the prophets, the “Writings,” a broad category which includes the wisdom literature, Proverbs- the source of last week’s sermon, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, as well as Job and Psalms and other books not included in the prophets or in today’s section of scripture, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. When we think Torah, our first thought is probably the lists of all the laws in these books. But perhaps a better way to consider the Torah is to understand it as the story of God’s creation of a people, particularly beginning from the call of Abraham and down through his descendants, through the passage of hundreds of years, to the time of Moses and his call, and the deliverance of an oppressed people out of Egypt; and then, their helpless situation in the desert for 40 years, dependent each day upon God. Here it was they became God’s people, where they received the Law, and where they made a great tent- the tabernacle- as a center of worship, and where they built an ark as the central focus for their life as God’s people. The ark, as our text describes it, was an ornate container, not large- less than four feet long, that held the stone tablets upon which God had inscribed the commandments.
[Show full text]