Exodus 27

The LORD has just finished describing the inner things - the ark, the table, the golden lampstand. Now He begins with the thing met first: an altar of shittim wood, five cubits long, and five cubits broad; the altar shall be foursquare: and the height thereof shall be three cubits (v. 1). The placement matters as much as the measurements. This altar does not stand in the inner room with the gold; it stands out in the court, just within the one gate, in plain sight of everyone who comes.

It is the first structure a worshipper reaches. Before there is any drawing near to the holy place, there is the altar - the appointed spot where the offering is made and the blood applied. The chapter is teaching the order of approach before it teaches anything else: the way toward God runs through the place of sacrifice, and no one bypasses it. That order is a mercy, telling people exactly how to come in.

Twice in this section the LORD says overlay it with brass (vv. 2, 6) - and the whole altar and all its gear are of brass: all the vessels thereof thou shalt make of brass (v. 3), the grate is a network of brass (v. 4), the very pins of the court will be brass. There is a fittingness in the choice. Inside the holy place everything was gold, the metal of glory; here at the altar, where the fire burned hottest and the bodies of the offerings were consumed, the metal is brass - the metal that takes the fire and does not melt away.

Brass is what stands in the heat. So the altar where judgment fell, where the offering was given up entirely to the flame, was sheathed in the one metal made to endure burning. This is the place of fire, and it is built to bear it. The detail is quiet, but it says something true about what an altar is for: it is where the fire comes down, and where what is offered there is able to withstand it.

A whole cluster of tools is named: his pans to receive his ashes, and his shovels, and his basons, and his fleshhooks, and his firepans (v. 3), with a grate of network and four brasen rings (vv. 4-5), and staves to carry it (vv. 6-7). It would be easy to read past the list, but it tells its own story. Each of these has to do with the daily, unglamorous work of the altar: pans for the ashes that the fire leaves behind, shovels to clear them, basons to catch the blood, fleshhooks to handle the offerings, firepans for the coals.

Worship at this altar was not a single dramatic moment; it was constant, physical labour - ash hauled away, blood caught and carried, fire kept and fed. The God who gave the grand design also specified the ash-pans. Nothing about how His people would draw near was left to improvisation. And the staves and rings (vv. 6-7) make a further point: the altar was built to be carried. These are the furnishings of a people still on the move, not yet come to their rest.

The place of sacrifice travelled with them through the wilderness; the way of approach did not have to wait for a settled land.

The section ends on a phrase that has governed every instruction since the tabernacle was first commanded: Hollow with boards shalt thou make it: as it was shewed thee in the mount, so shall they make it (v. 8). The altar is hollow - a frame of boards, made to be filled and made to be carried. And it is made as it was shewed thee in the mount. Moses is copying, not inventing. On Sinai he was shown a pattern, and his task is faithful reproduction, down to the dimensions and the rings.

The repeated insistence on the pattern guards something important: this way of approaching God is given, descended from what was shown above, handed down rather than invented below. Worship here is people receiving a way that was handed down to them. That is a steadying thing to know. The way to draw near was not left for the worshipper to design.

Around the altar the LORD draws a boundary, and He draws it out of cloth: hangings for the court of fine twined linen of an hundred cubits long for one side (v. 9). The court is a hundred cubits by fifty, walled on every side with fine twined linen hung on pillars (vv. 9-13, 18). Two things stand out at once. First, the linen is white - clean, woven, the color of purity - and it rings the whole sacred space.

To stand outside and look at the tabernacle was to see a wall of unbroken white, the visible sign that what lay within was set apart, holy, not common ground. Second, the wall is fabric, not stone. It is a real boundary, unmistakable, five cubits high, but it is cloth on poles - a curtain, not a fortress. The holiness it guards is genuine, and it is not the holiness of a thing locked away forever.

The court marks the difference between the holy and the common without slamming a door. It says: this place is different, you cannot wander in heedlessly - and at the same time it leaves the question of the way in open, to be answered at the gate.

The construction is given in patient detail: the twenty pillars thereof and their twenty sockets shall be of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver (v. 10), and so around all four sides - all the pillars round about the court shall be filleted with silver; their hooks shall be of silver, and their sockets of brass (v. 17). Two metals do two kinds of work. The brass is below and bears the weight: the sockets that hold the pillars upright and take the strain sit in the dust and are made of the metal that endures.

The silver is above and adorns: the hooks that carry the hangings and the bands that ring the pillars catch the light. There is no need to press a hidden meaning onto every loop and socket; the picture they make together is plain enough. The wall around the holy place is built to stand - firm in its footing, every pillar set in solid brass - and it is built with care, banded in silver, not slapped together.

A boundary can be both strong and beautiful. This one was. Even the enclosure around the place of sacrifice was made to be looked at, and made to last.

For all the wall's hundred-cubit length, there is exactly one way through it. The east side is divided: fifteen cubits of hangings on one shoulder, fifteen on the other (vv. 14-15), and between them the gate of the court… an hanging of twenty cubits (v. 16). One gate, and it faces east, toward the rising sun and the direction from which a worshipper would come. The single opening is the heart of the court's design.

A person could not enter wherever they pleased, slipping in at whatever point of the white wall they happened to reach. There was a way in, and there was only that way, and it was unmistakable - a wide, bright, twenty-cubit opening in the plain white wall. The arrangement says two things at once, and holds them together. The holy place is not open on every side to careless approach; you do not come in just anywhere.

And yet the gate is real, and broad, and findable - the one who wants to draw near is not shut out but shown exactly where to come. The wall does not finally keep people away. It funnels them to the door.

The one gate is not plain like the wall around it. Where the court's hangings are unbroken white linen, the gate is a hanging of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with needlework (v. 16). These are the colors of the tabernacle's most sacred cloths - the same blue, purple, and scarlet woven into the veil and the high priest's garments, the colors of royalty and of the sanctuary.

So the one entrance is also the most beautiful thing on the whole perimeter. A traveller approaching across the plain would see a long white wall and, set into it, one bright panel of color, wrought with needlework, marking the way in. The beauty is invitation. The gate announces itself. It says, without a word, here - this is where you come, and what lies beyond is worth the colors. The way into the presence of God was the loveliest thing in sight, made to draw the eye and the feet of anyone who longed to enter.

The last command of the chapter turns from structures to a flame, and it begins with the people: thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light (v. 20). The light in the holy place is to be fed with the best the people can give - pure oil olive beaten. This is not the ordinary oil of the press but oil beaten by hand from the olives, the first and clearest yield, free of sediment, the purest grade there is.

And it is the whole congregation's charge to supply it. The light does not burn on the priests' private stores; all Israel keeps it lit, each one bringing of the pure oil so the flame never wants for fuel. There is a fittingness in the demand for purity. A clean, bright, steady light needs clean oil; smoky or adulterated oil would foul the flame and dim the holy place. So the people are asked for their best, for the light that stands before God.

Nothing common, nothing left over, nothing half-hearted is good enough to feed the lamp that burns in His presence.

The flame is not lit once and left; it is tended: Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the LORD (v. 21). The light is to burn through the night - from evening to morning - the very hours when darkness is deepest and people sleep. While Israel slept, the lamp before the testimony stayed lit, kept by the priests who trimmed it and fed it and watched over the flame. There is a deliberate witness in this.

The God of Israel does not slumber when His people do; the light in His house does not go out when the sun goes down. And the keeping of it is no short-lived arrangement: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel. Generation after generation, the same charge held - bring the oil, tend the flame, never let it die. The light that burned in the wilderness was meant to burn through every age that followed, an unbroken testimony, kept on behalf of all the people, that the presence of God among them was constant and awake.