We are rescued FOR His presence.
“Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.”
Exodus 25:8 (NIV)
“They will know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them.”
Exodus 29:46 (NIV)
When I’m in crisis, I am not thinking deep theological thoughts about what God might eventually do with my suffering.
I am thinking: MAKE IT STOP.
If I can muster a prayer at all from the bottom of the pit, it tends to be short and sophisticated:
Help.
Get me out of this, God. Rescue me. Fix it. Make the pain stop.
It’s only after the narrow escape—once I can breathe again and get even a little distance from the thing—that my brain starts moving beyond survival. I’m still reeling. I may still be angry with God that He allowed it in the first place. But eventually gratitude for the rescue makes room for harder questions:
What was that all about?
Why did I have to go through that?
And God, what could You possibly do with it now?
That’s roughly where I find the Israelites when I meet them in Exodus 25.
They’ve gotten out.
Now what?
Rescued From—and Rescued For
There is no question that God rescued Israel from slavery.
He heard them. He saw them. He knew.
At the burning bush, God tells Moses He has seen the Israelites’ misery, heard their cries, knows their suffering and is coming down to rescue them. Exodus 3:7–8 (NIV)
God cared. God intervened. God rescued.
But He didn’t rescue them only FROM something.
He rescued them FOR something.
And Exodus 29:46 tells us what:
“…who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them.”
Exodus 29:46 (NIV)
He brought them out so He could bring them close.
That stopped me in my tracks. Because apparently freedom from bondage wasn’t the final destination of the Exodus.
God was.
God says it before the plagues are even finished. Exodus 6:6–7 (NIV) describes two movements in God’s promise: He will bring Israel out from under Egyptian bondage, and He will take them as His own people and be their God.
There are two movements here:
I will bring you OUT.
I will take you TO ME.
And that changes the way I think about rescue.
Because maybe God hasn’t merely rescued me from the things that nearly destroyed me.
Maybe He has rescued me for His presence.
The God of the Universe Wants to Move Into the Neighborhood
By Exodus 25, Israel is camped at Mount Sinai, and God gives Moses detailed instructions for building the Tabernacle.
Then He explains why:
“Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.”
Exodus 25:8 (NIV)
The Hebrew word translated dwell is shākan. It carries the idea of settling, residing, lodging—taking up residence in a place.
It’s related to mishkan, the Hebrew word for the Tabernacle itself: a dwelling place.
In other words, God isn’t merely dropping by.
He isn’t making a celestial house call.
He wants to move into the neighborhood.
Actually, closer than that. He wants His dwelling place right there among them, at the center of the life of His people.
The Creator of galaxies wants to live in relationship with a bunch of recently liberated slaves wandering around the desert complaining about the menu.
What?!
This is one of those truths about God that I have known intellectually for years and somehow still find astonishing when I actually stop to think about it.
God wants to be with us.
The whole Biblical story is filled with His relentless pursuit of relationship with people who repeatedly run the other direction.
He pursues. We wander.
He calls. We resist.
He forgives. We return.
He gets us pointed in the right direction again, and eventually we come up with some exciting new way to screw it all up.
Wash. Rinse. Repent. Repeat.
Man, oh man.
Praise God for grace.
And He Doesn’t Wait Until We’re Fixed
Here’s the part that gets me.
God gives the instructions for the Tabernacle only about three months after Israel leaves Egypt.
Three months.
These people have barely gotten out.
They’ve crossed the Red Sea. They’ve encountered bitter water at Marah. They’ve complained about food. God has given them manna. They’ve complained about water again. They’ve fought Amalek. They’ve arrived at Sinai.
They are free.
But they have absolutely no idea how to live free yet.
Generations of slavery don’t disappear because you crossed a body of water.
And already God says:
I want to live among you.
He doesn’t say, “We’ll revisit this in five years when everybody has processed their trauma and developed some healthier coping mechanisms.”
He wants to dwell with them now.
Which is particularly astonishing when you know what’s coming.
While Moses is up on the mountain receiving instructions about how God will dwell among His people, the people down below are preparing to build a golden calf.
Talk about poor timing.
Or maybe that’s precisely the point.
They are frightened, traumatized, spiritually immature, complaining, inconsistent—and about to fail spectacularly.
And God is already designing His house in the middle of their camp.
God doesn’t wait for them to become a polished version of themselves before He desires relationship with them.
And thank God, because He hasn’t waited for that with me either.
Then God Gives the Newly Freed Slaves a Job
This part fascinates me.
God could have spoken the Tabernacle into existence.
He’s done that sort of thing before.
“Let there be light” worked pretty well.
Instead, Exodus 25 begins with God telling Moses to ask the Israelites to bring Him an offering:
“Tell the Israelites to bring me an offering.”
Exodus 25:2 (NIV)
Gold. Silver. Bronze. Fine linen. Skins. Wood. Oil. Spices. Precious stones.
Where in the world does a wandering population of former slaves get all that?
Egypt.
Before Israel left, God instructed them to ask the Egyptians for silver, gold and clothing. Exodus 12:36 says they “spoiled”—or plundered—the Egyptians.
Now, three months later, God asks them to bring some of it back to Him.
Think about that.
They have been hauling this stuff through the wilderness.
Gold sounds lovely until you’re the one carrying it across a desert.
And I wonder what it represented to them. Was it restitution? Proof that Egypt was really behind them? Security for an uncertain future? A reminder of everything they’d survived?
I don’t know. The text doesn’t tell us.
But I know what God eventually does with it.
He invites them to use what they carried out of their captivity to build something beautiful.
That’s where this story starts feeling uncomfortably personal.
What Did You Carry Out With You?
I have some things I brought out of Egypt, too.
Not literal gold earrings and silver bowls.
I have scars.
I have survival skills.
I have experiences I wouldn’t have chosen.
I have things I learned because I had no choice but to learn them.
I have strength I developed while trying to survive things I wish had never happened.
I have compassion for certain kinds of brokenness because I’ve been broken there myself.
Some of what I carried out felt awfully heavy in the wilderness.
Some of it still does.
And here is God saying:
Bring Me what you have.
Not because the terrible thing was good.
Not because slavery was secretly a blessing.
Not because suffering magically becomes okay if we can squeeze a life lesson out of it.
Egypt was still Egypt.
Slavery was still slavery.
But God refuses to waste what His people carry out of it.
The Skills of Slavery Become the Skills of Sanctuary
And it wasn’t only Egypt’s treasure that came out with them.
The people came out with skills.
Later, when construction begins, Exodus describes artisans, craftsmen, embroiderers, weavers and other skilled workers participating in the building of the Tabernacle.
Those abilities didn’t suddenly materialize at Sinai.
These people had lived their entire lives inside one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. Their labor had been used to build and sustain someone else’s empire.
Some made bricks. Others would have known textiles, metalwork, woodworking and other crafts.
Whatever their particular work had been, slavery meant their labor wasn’t really theirs. Their time wasn’t theirs. Their bodies weren’t theirs. Their gifts weren’t theirs to freely offer.
Pharaoh decided what they built.
Now God asks.
That distinction matters to me.
“…from everyone whose heart prompts them to give.”
Exodus 25:2 (NIV)
The God who freed them doesn’t immediately become another Pharaoh.
He invites them to participate.
Their hands, once used in service to oppression, can now build a place of worship.
Their creativity, once exploited, can now be offered.
Their skills, developed under circumstances they never would have chosen, aren’t discarded simply because of where they learned them.
God redeems those, too.
The skills of slavery become the skills of sanctuary.
I can’t get over that.
There Is Work to Do After Rescue
Sometimes after surviving something awful, I want God’s restoration plan to involve a blanket, snacks and several uninterrupted years of not being asked to do anything difficult.
And there is absolutely a time to rest.
God Himself will teach these former slaves about Sabbath—a concept Pharaoh certainly wasn’t big on.
But healing isn’t always inactivity.
Sometimes there is holy work to do not merely in spite of what we’ve been through, but with what we’ve brought out of it.
God takes people who have spent generations building for Pharaoh and says:
Now let’s build something beautiful together.
Not a monument to their trauma.
Not a shrine to Egypt.
A dwelling place for God.
Right there in the wilderness.
Something Beautiful in the Middle of Nowhere
I think that’s the image I’m going to carry with me from these chapters.
A wilderness.
A traumatized people.
A pile of things carried out of captivity.
Scarred hands possessing hard-earned skills.
And in the middle of all of it, God says:
Let’s build a place where I can dwell with you.
Maybe I have spent too much time asking God why certain things happened to me.
Maybe another question is waiting:
What did I carry out?
What experience?
What compassion?
What wisdom?
What strength?
What story?
What skill?
What treasure buried inside all that baggage?
And what might happen if I stopped carrying it around like dead weight and placed it into the hands of the God who rescued me?
Because He didn’t only rescue me from.
He rescued me for.
For freedom, yes.
For healing, certainly.
For purpose.
For service.
But underneath all of those things is something even more astonishing.
For Himself.
The God who heard Israel crying in Egypt didn’t simply want to get them out.
He wanted them near.
He wanted to dwell among them.
And somehow, impossibly, beautifully—
He wants to dwell with me, too.
