Psalm 15: Tent

David begins Psalm 15 by asking two questions of God, “Who shall abide (or sojourn) in Your tabernacle? Who shall dwell on Your holy hill?” We often explain the use of “tabernacle” and “holy hill” as generic expressions of God’s presence. We know that God is omnipresent, His presence is everywhere and yet the Scriptures show us that there is also a manifest presence of God. When God’s presence was in the holy of holies in the temple it was not contained there, God was everyone and yet He allowed His presence to somehow be tangibly present in that place. When God is “found” in one place He is not absent from another, but that does not diminish the fact that God does indeed allow Himself to be found, even to be felt. While God does want us to know and believe that He is everywhere at all times, He also desires that we realize that He has chosen to be with us.

Isaiah said, “Seek the LORD while He may be found; call on Him while He is near.” This was a statement of promise, not of panic. Isaiah was not warning us to seek God now because He might disappear later, it was a call to respond to God’s promise, to come close to the One who has chosen to come close to us. It’s the peace producing promise of God’s nearness, not the fear inducing threat of His absence. When David asked, “Who shall sojourn in Your tabernacle?” he used the Hebrew word for tent, he was calling back to Israel’s journey from Egypt and the tent that God established for Himself. Michael Wilcox wrote that we often read through this and miss the miracle of it. I believe we miss the revelation of God’s character found in it. It’s not that God contained Himself to a tent, but that God chose a tent for Himself at a time when His people were living in tents. This means that God dwelled among them. The tent of the Tabernacle, God’s house, was no different than their houses. God, long before the birth of Jesus, was already showing Himself as Immanuel, He was God with Israel, God in their camp, God living in a tent just as they lived in tents.

God’s presence in the tabernacle of Moses and then the tabernacle of David was nothing more than a sign, a type, a foreshadowing of the incarnation, of when the Word would become flesh and dwell (literally pitch His tent) among us (John 1:14). Before Jesus brought salvation by wearing the flesh of humanity, God’s Spirit had established God’s desire for nearness by dwelling in a tent just like those He was leading. While David asks, “Who shall sojourn in Your tent?” the true revelation is that God has sojourned to ours. Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws them”. He told the disciples, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen You.” One of His last announcements before His arrest was that He is the way, the truth and the life and no one can come to the Father except through or by Him. We are not trying to get to God, God has come to us, He has done all the work, He has done all the sojourning.

The good news of the miracle of the tabernacle is that we don’t have to ask how to get to God, but rather sit in the truth that God has come to us. He lived in a tent with the Israelites, then in a temple in Jerusalem. He became a man and walked among us, as one of us, and now we have become the tent of His Holy Spirit, where He literally dwells not just with us, but within us. Do we see how He turned the tables for us? He lived in a tent like us so that we could become the tent and He could live in us. Today, this means that the Lord is in your tent, whatever your tent may be. We often feel like we need to get to God, or that we need to call God to come to where we are, the miracle of the tabernacle is that God is always where we are. If you sit in sorrow, He sits with you. If you walk in strength, He is stride for stride with you. If you jump for joy, He is jumping right next to you. And if you weep in grief, He weeps too. He’s not just everywhere, He’s here. He is intimately present in singleness and in marriage, in rest and in work, in employment and in unemployment, in want and in plenty, in sickness and in health, in life and in death. He has not just opened His door to us, He has pitched His tent within us. When David asked, “who shall sojourn in your tent?” it’s as if Jesus said, “I will sojourn in yours!” We don’t have to make our way to God because God has made His way to us and if we have yielded or will yield to Him, He will make His home in us. Wherever you are and wherever you will be, please remember, that you will never be apart from God, because God is in your tent.