Exodus 25

v1-9: “Whatever is done in God’s service must be done according to his direction, and not in any other way.” Moses is given by God “particular directions” for building the tabernacle. He is not “to plan it according to his own intelligence or build it according to his own thoughts.”

v10-22: Into the ark was to be put the tablets of the Law. “This Law was a testimony to them, to direct them in their duty, and would be a testimony against them if they broke it.” The tablets were to be “carefully preserved” and this shows that we are “to make much of the word of God, and to hide it in our hearts,” as “the ark was placed in the Holy of Holies.”

v23-30: The bread placed on the table was “a thankful acknowledgement of God’s goodness to them, in giving them their daily bread, manna in the wilderness… and, in Canaan, the grain of the land,” as well as “a sign of their fellowship with God.” It is “a type of the spiritual provision” given to the church by the gospel.

v31-40: Churches “are golden candlesticks, the lights of the world, holding forth the word of life as the candlestick does the light.” Preachers “light the lamps, by opening up the Scriptures,” and the “branches of the candlestick spread in different directions, to show the spreading of the light of the gospel into all parts by the Christian ministry.”

Exodus 26

v1-6: The Tabernacle, this moveable tent, was the best way for God to reveal his presence among Israel, for it fit “with their present conditions in the desert,” as wherever they went, they had Him with them. God “adjusts his mercies according to our condition, prosperous or poor, settled or unsettled.”

v7-14: As “the outside of the tabernacle was rough, but its beauty was in the inner curtains,” so the believer in whom God lives “finest parts,” must “be those of our inner selves.” It is the “hypocrites [that] put the best side outward.”

v15-30: “Everything in the tabernacle was splendid and beautiful and just right… to give the minds of the worshippers a reverence of divine glory and to move them with the greatness” of the God who dwells with them.

v31-37: A curtain was made to be “a partition between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place,” forbidding anyone from entering in. This showed that the observance of the law would never “bring people to heaven.” We have boldness to enter into the Most Holy Place and approach God because the death of Christ has torn the curtain in two.