Here are details we have not had before. God, we may say, is seen lingering over His people, gathered to the one center on earth. Numbers is the book of journeying, for it was to be many years before the ark, the table, the. candlestick, the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt-offering, with all their furnishings, were to be set in a permanent abiding place. When “the camp setteth forward” (verse 5), “Aaron shall come, and his sons” — they, taken together, are a type of the Church of God, set to guard the name of Jesus in a wicked world.
The opening verses, however, (verses 2, 3, 4) mention first the sons of Kohath; theirs was to be the privilege of carrying the precious furniture of the Tabernacle, the things, which to the eye of faith, express the Lord Jesus in His blessed person and work; but here in these verses, it is their place always, to be before God in the place of His dwelling. This is the Christian’s true place, to abide with God, in communion, through the atoning work on the cross.
How God, even in these early shadows, guards His glory! Christians are apt to get careless, and indifferent to the claims of a holy God. There is nothing of that here, though the Tabernacle be a plain, simple structure, and the people full of failure in the midst of whom it stood. The fact that they were on a journey, and the home yet far away, did not alter God’s being among them in holiness and grace.
Let us, if we keep His Word honor Him by carefully following it, and as verse 5 begins the divine order with the ark and the veil, both of which tell us of Jesus, the God Man, let Us also begin our ways, our thoughts, with and from Him.
Each of the pieces mentioned, verses 5-14, except the last one, was to be covered with a blue cloth. Blue is the color of the sky on a clear day, and God has used it to bring to our thoughts the Lord Jesus Christ — the heavenly Man — “the Lord from heaven.”
Every article was covered with badgers’ skins, a type of the separateness from evil, which was in Jesus alone. The table of show bread, and the altar of burnt offering, were covered, the one with a scarlet or crimson cloth; and the other with a purple cloth. The first telling of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel; and the second of the glory He has won through death, the death of the cross.
In this chapter we have the counting of the number of the Levites from thirty to fifty years old, the full grown, able men. God counted on them for His service.
Does He not count upon all his children to serve Him? And shall we seek our own comfort, — we who are washed in the blood of Jesus, — and neglect Him?
The work for each is again plainly named in this chapter. It might be humble work, but nothing that God gives us to do for Him, should be too lowly for us to do.