The great cathedrals of the world have impressive facades with sculptures, artwork, often costly jewels and precious metals. Inside these artistic masterpieces are often paintings from the greatest masters along with sculptures where people line up simply to gaze at even for a moment. While the great cathedrals are aesthetically beautiful, whenever I have entered them they are like museums, often filled with the bones of dead men, and there is no presence of God in them.

We come to a section of Scripture where it is easy to glaze over. The designs are specifically described as to materials, dimensions, numbers of rings, etc. It would be worthwhile for everyone to take the second it takes to google image “the tabernacle” to get a sense of what it actually looked like. From the outside it was a very unimpressive structure. The tabernacle itself was the size of two typical bedrooms surrounded by a courtyard the size of a typical land plot, around a quarter of an acre (a cubit equals approximately 18 inches). Read how the tabernacle was covered, in Exodus 26:7, "You shall also make curtains of goats' hair, to be a tent over the tabernacle." Then in 26:14, we read, "You shall also make a covering of rams skins dyed red for the tent, and a covering of badger skins above that." Not exactly the outward appearance of beauty. Realize at this time there were beautiful and ornate structures built such as the pyramids in Egypt. But we read in 25:8-9, "And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show you, that is, the pattern of the tabernacle and the pattern of its furnishings." This building was indeed beautiful, more than anything else, since God would eventually dwell there. Fast-forward 1300-1400 years and we see the One walking the earth written about by the prophet Isaiah 700 years earlier in Isaiah 53:2, "For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him." The person of Jesus was born in humble surroundings to humble parents and lived His life in a humble, unassuming town called Nazareth. Though the world did not see His beauty, this was and is God incarnate, our Immanuel, meaning "God with us".

We, too, have our own tents called our earthly bodies. The amount of money spent on plastic surgery, etc is astounding at either trying to improve or maintain our earthly tents. Yet these are the tents which God gave us. It is a good thing to eat properly and exercise, but whether we are beautiful or not has nothing to do with this. We read in 1 Corinthians 6:19, "Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?" Our bodies, only if we have been saved (repented of our sins, then accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior), are transformed into little tabernacles for God, for God is literally within us in the presence of the Holy Spirit. God has not chosen us for our outward beauty as explained in 1 Corinthians 1:27, "But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are,". So as we reflect on God's tabernacle may we take a second to look at ourselves and ask ourselves whether or not our focus in our homes has been on worldly aesthetics or whether or not God is welcomed there. Likewise, may we stop and ask ourselves whether or not our focus is on our outward appearance, rather than being a vessel in which God in the person of the Holy Spirit can abide in and be welcome in. For this is where true beauty is.