The last parallel from the tabernacle is that it was where Israel worshiped. But now, Jesus Christ is in a sense the place where we worship. You recall that when he was with the woman of Samaria, there was a debate going on between the Samaritans and the Jews as to where one should worship. The Samaritans believed that worship was to take place on Mount Gerizim, while the Jews worshiped at the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus went on to say that a change is coming, and had now come in him.
Here is the fourth parallel. The tabernacle was the place where God revealed himself to Moses and the priests. They had a special name for it. They called it the Tent of Meeting, and the reason they called it this was because that is where God met with Moses. Moses received many revelations from God at the tabernacle. The way it happened was that the voice of God would tell him to go there, and then God would speak to him from out of the cloud. Here is the great God of the universe, actually communicating to Moses from the cloud. And yet it was incomplete. Even though God was meeting with Moses from this cloud, Moses still had a desire to see God, to experience his presence in a more direct way.
Second, not only was the tabernacle at the center of Israel’s camp, but it was also the place where the law of Moses was preserved. Moses was up on the mountain where he received the law from God. When he came down with the stone tablets the first time, the people had been departing from the Lord in the valley. In his great anger Moses broke the tablets. Then he went back up the mountain and the Lord gave him another. He came down and this time they were placed in the Ark of the Covenant, within the Most Holy Place of the Jewish tabernacle. The law of God was placed in the very center of the tabernacle.
John is not only writing to Greek readers, however; he is also writing to Jewish readers, and he has also written in a way that's meaningful for us as well. When he chose this term logos, he chose a word which was meaningful not only to the Greeks because of their philosophy, but to Jews as well because they had a high understanding of the power of the word of God, since, after all, that's the way God created things. When God created the heavens and the earth, God spoke and it came into being. So in using that concept, he has attracted the attention of the Greeks on the one hand, for whom it was a philosophical idea, and the Jews on the other, for whom it was a religious idea.
This week we are looking at verse fourteen of John 1, which speaks of this powerful idea of the Word becoming flesh. There are a lot of places in the New Testament that talk about the incarnation indirectly. Any passage that talks about who Jesus Christ actually is, identifying the divine Son of God with Jesus of Nazareth, is about the incarnation. But of all those texts, there is none in all the Bible that states the literal meaning of the incarnation more clearly than in our text.
