Who consecrates the tabernacle? (Ex 29)

I’ve been reading Exodus recently, and the ending of Chapter 29 stuck out to me.

For pages and pages (since Chapter 25!) God has been giving Moses exact and exorbitant instructions for how to build the tabernacle, what offerings to give upon it, who the priests are going to be, what the priests are going to be wearing. It’s the fanciest IKEA manual you’ve ever read. No expense spared. Everything is drowning in gold, silver, incense, myrrh, silk, fragrant oil, you name it.

What’s this about? The answer seems obvious: it’s to sanctify the temple! To make it beautiful enough and pure enough that even God could live there.

But right at the end of Chapter 29, in vv 43-44, there’s this wonderful twist:

… and the place will be consecrated by my glory. So I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar and will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. (NIV, emphasis mine)

All this work, and at the end of the day, it’s God who sanctifies his own temple? So why all the fuss? Well, it looks like the final two verses of the chapter give us the answer:

Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.

So on a cursory reading, it looks like God is telling them something extraordinary about the kind of God he is. He is not like the other gods, who demand this kind of worship to appease their pride. Nor is there, unlike the other gods, anything the Israelites could do to make a place habitable for him. That’s because there’s nothing the Israelites could do to cleanse themselves of their sin: only the ‘glory’ of God could do that. And indeed, God has no need of worship to puff up his pride, since his glory existed before the world was made, and human beings can do nothing to either add to it or subtract from it.

Instead of a vain god who seeks tribute, this is a Father God who seeks to ‘dwell’ (literally to ‘camp’) among his people. The God who has put into motion a rescue plan to pull the Israelites out of Egypt specifically for this purpose. As it was in the beginning, when God dwelt in the Garden with Adam and Eve. This is his mission. This is what he’s like. And he wants his people to know this, so that they can dwell together.