“Now Moses used to take his own tent and pitch it outside the camp, far away from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting—of God with His own people…And so the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses returned to the camp, his attendant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent.”—Exodus 33: 7,11, Amplified
Sometimes, God can “show up” to us in the “tent” of church in a powerful, meaningful and intimate way, and though we’d rather stay, the “camp” of the world beckons. It would be great to be Joshua—to never have to be in a rush to leave the goodness of God’s presence. But for every Sunday when life’s demands—a job, a family reunion, the yard work that didn’t get done on Saturday because of the rain—require you and I to scoot out the door of the “tent” of church and back to the “camp” of this world to face them, there is good news in this passage.
That’s what happened with Moses. But being in the tent wasn’t a thing to check off his list. Even though he couldn’t stay, it was still his fuel for life. And the takeaway for us when life gets nuts and we have to scoot out the door of the tent is to remember and take to heart what Moses says a few verses later:
“If Your presence does not go with us,
do not send us up from here.”
It is good to remember that God’s presence is not trapped in tents or buildings. And on those Sundays when we reluctantly have to scoot, and even when we don’t, we can always take the songs, the prayers, the Word, the holy stillness and the holy roar of the tent—take them all with us into the craziness.
His Name is “God with us,” and God is and wants to be with us just as powerfully in the camp of life as He is in the tent of meeting.
Some things we can’t be reminded of enough.
“If we are to be effective in anything we do for the Lord, the Lord must be in the midst of it. Unless the Lord’s power is seen among us, we will be just another person who has religion. Unless we manifest His life to others, they will see only good behavior that is easily counterfeited by moral people.”—Os Hillman
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