This book by Howard A. Snyder was written in 1975 and contains many valuable insights. The excerpt below explains sacrifice, priesthood and the tabernacle before and after the church was born. Highly recommended for those considering stepping away from institutional church.
Sacrifice, priesthood, tabernacle-all instituted through Moses in the Old Testament. Theologically, all passed away with the coming of Christ and the birth of the church. Historically, all passed away with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. They had become irrelevant, anachronistic.
And so the church was born without priesthood, sacrifice or tabernacle because the church and Christ together were all three. The church faithfully embodied this truth for more than a century, and overran the Roman Empire.
The great temptation of the organized church has been to reinstate these three elements among God’s people: to turn community into an institution. Historically, the church has at times succumbed. Returning to the spirit of the Old Testament, she has set up a professional priesthood, turned the Eucharist into a new sacrificial system and built great cathedrals. When this happens, a return to faithfulness must mean a return-in both soteriology and ecclesiology-to the profound simplicity of the New Testament. Usually, however, reformation in doctrine has not been accompanied by sufficiently radical reform in church structure.
The significance of the tabernacle must be singled out for special attention here-partly because it usually is not but primarily because it has significance for the church, for ecclesiology. Why should God be represented by a physical structure? Why a tent?
In the Mosaic covenant the tabernacle was the symbol of God’s presence. “Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex. 25:8). The central idea was God’s habitation with his people. God could not actually dwell in the hearts of his people because of their sin and rebelliousness; his habitation had to be symbolic. So God ordered the tabernacle built and laid it out to Moses in extravagant detail. It was to be made according to the blueprint revealed on the mount (Ex. 26:30; Acts 7:44; Heb. 8:5).
But for the church the tabernacle is fulfilled in the body of Christ, as we have seen. So the necessity of a physical tabernacle has passed away. Why? Because now God dwells with his people in the hearts and bodies of the believing community, through the inhabiting of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit “dwells with you, and will be in you” (Jn. 14:17), Jesus said. If one loves and obeys Jesus, the Father and Son “will come to him and make our home with him” (Jn. 14:23). “I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).
Clearly, the central idea of the tabernacle is God’s habitation, but in the New Testament God dwells within the hearts of his people, not just symbolically among the people. The veil has been torn in two; the stony heart transplanted with one of flesh. So the church is “a dwelling place of God in (or through) the Spirit” (Eph. 2:22).
There will also be an eternal, eschatological fulfillment of the idea of God’s habitation. For when John sees the holy city descending from God, the first words he hears from the throne are, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men” (Rev. 21:3, AV; compare Ezek. 37:27-28). This is the meaning of the holy city: God’s habitation eternally, spiritually, really and perfectly, with his people. Therefore naturally there is “no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22). And has this not ever been God’s design: a city without temples because God himself is its temple? Here all limitations of time and space have evaporated. God and man are in perfect communion. Eternally, there exists the fellowship, the koinonia, of the Holy Spirit.
So we see a threefold progression. First, God symbolically dwelling among his people in a physical structure called a tabernacle. Second, God actually dwelling within the hearts of his people through the Holy Spirit. Third, God dwelling eternally with his people, in perfect spiritual communion, in the age to come. The first reality points to the second, and the second to the third.
2 replies on “The Problem of Wineskins”
Just finished wine skins a few weeks ago, highly recommended here as well. It’s interesting to hear perspectives on what Jesus intended for his church to be that’s not so current, it makes me realize that there’s been a remnant, a true remnant, of what his intentions really were for many years, not just when I came across Violas Pagan Christianity.
So true