Just a friendly reminder that our God is amazing
My dear friend Vanessa encouraged me to commit to a “read the Bible in a year” plan with her when 2020 began. I’ve never completed a plan like this before. I’ve tried! Many times. All of my attempts start out super strong! But each attempt quickly fizzles out after about 3 weeks. However, as we both talked about our busy lives, we discussed the plain and simple fact that if we can keep up with our TV shows and social media accounts, we can keep up with a daily Bible reading plan – it’s all about priorities.
So we both made it a priority and are currently finishing up week 9! Woohoo! Praise God, that’s the longest I’ve stuck with something like this. The 5-day a week plan we are following has done an excellent job of pairing an Old Testament and New Testament passage together with Psalms thrown in every other day or so. Genesis was incredible. Exodus was mind blowing. Leviticus was…difficult, ha! But I cling to 2 Timothy 3:16-17 that says “ALL Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable…” That means each law about leprosy cleansing and other bodily diseases is in Scripture for a reason so it deserves my attention.
What I loved about reading through Leviticus is that we were reading the book of Hebrews alongside it. It was absolutely breathtaking to see the demands of the old covenant right up against the freedom of the new covenant. Reading through the endless and continuous work of the priests made the permanent work of Christ that much more incredible. To see the amount of animal blood required to atone for sins day in and day out in the book of Leviticus, makes my heart worship at the perfect blood of Jesus that atoned for my sins once for all.
The writer of Hebrews makes quite a few connections between the old covenant and the new covenant by saying the things of the old covenant “serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Hebrews 8:5). He again writes that all of the sacrifices, the priests, the tabernacle were “copies of heavenly things” in chapter 9 verse 23.
Those verses were still in my mind when I began reading the book of Numbers yesterday morning. My first thought when reading through chapter 1 was “Man there’s some inspiration for future son’s names…” (Zurishaddai Hopkins has a nice ring to it, don’t ya think?). My second thought when reading through chapter 2 was that it was interesting that God had such specific plans for the order in which each tribe would set up camp around the tabernacle. After my reading, I went to The Bible Project to watch their video overview on the book of Numbers to see if I had missed anything.
Boy, did I.
It wasn’t even discussed in the video itself, but the illustrator drew out what the camp would look like according to God’s commands. And honestly, you would have to be blind to miss it. Basically, God has his tabernacle at the center of camp with the Levites in their tents around it. Then he has 3 of the 12 tribes set up to the east, 3 to the west, 3 to the south and 3 to the north. Allow me to provide a rudimentary graphic below:
*Insert exploding mind emoji here*
Now let’s pause for some clarification. Is this an accurate picture of what the Israelite camp looked like? I don’t know for sure. Based on the text, you could make a very strong argument that it would end up looking like a box. Or maybe they created oblong shapes in their camps and from the sky it would look like a massive blob.
But the graphic I made is absolutely an option. Friends, I’m not one to put unnecessary emphasis on signs and wonders. But I am one to worship when God reveals another glimpse at how incredible he is. Everything we see in the old covenant is a shadow of the covenant to come. From the beginning of creation, so many things point to the glorious gospel we now hold.
In my humble observation of Numbers 2, what I see is yet another picture of God’s perfect plan pointing to the cross.
What are you studying these days? Have you gained insight you’ve never had before? Share in the comments below!
