20240721 The Theology of Exodus
Almost all commentaries, Bible dictionary articles, and study Bibles speak at least generally of the theme of the presence of God as a hallmark of Exodus. But the idea of God’s presence is often articulated at least somewhat inaccurately in such sources. What most of them fail to note adequately, if at all, is that Exodus carefully presents not so much the concept of the presence of God as that of the limited presence of God.
The situation may be summarized this way: God shows himself to his covenant people by symbols behind barriers. He does not fully disclose himself in the manner that New Covenant believers look forward to as one of the great joys of heaven. Rather, he puts symbols of himself (a visible brilliance associated with his glory; the gold-surfaced ark of the covenant) behind barriers that keep his people from direct access even to those symbols, let alone to the very God of gods that they symbolize.
“Seeing is believing,” we say. But how can you see an invisible God? Idolatry tried to solve this challenge by means of the creation of statues and other depictions that were thought to represent a god or goddess. Even the Israelites tried it, though to their great dismay. The limitations of idolatry are evident in the fact that as soon as worshipers reduce God to association with/depiction by/inhabitation of a manufactured object, they have limited his greatness. Part of the genius of invisibility is that it does not place limits on God’s greatness. Indeed, it prohibits even the depiction of limitation of him by forbidding any likeness at all.
If God is omnipresent, he should not be given a shape that can be thought to confine him or concentrate him somewhere. Thus, for example, the ark of the covenant is introduced in Exodus as a place above which God may be met, but it is never said to be God’s footstool or throne or any such thing. That would place a kind of limitation on God that would be false and misleading theologically.
The genius of God’s self-disclosure via the tabernacle and its most precious content, the ark, is that the ark, like the tabernacle itself, was a container. It was not itself a representation of anything or anyone but was a place for containing the tablets and eventually some manna and Aaron’s staff, items that represented not a single person but a relationship between persons—between God and his people. This was signified primarily by the two tablets of the Testimony, or covenant, and thus the term the ark of the covenant is regularly employed. It was what was in the ark, not the ark itself, that revealed God to his people—and that was his word. Humans know God via his revealed truth, which, if believed and kept, has the power to solidify a relationship, essentially a family relationship, that will last forever.