NOTES for Exo 25:1-40
The ancient world was full of shrines, altars, and relics. All of this was connected in one way or another with the power possessed by the gods. A shrine was the place where a god lived; a relic was an artifact through which his power was manifested. The Jews too were to have a shrine of the same kind, at least outwardly.
With one essential difference, however: the chief holy thing of this shrine, replacing any artifacts, would be God Himself. His presence, the very presence revealed to Moses at Sinai. At first glance the difference does not seem very great, since behind the artifacts in pagan shrines there also stood the gods to whom they belonged.
In reality, however, the difference was fundamental. What, in essence, is an artifact, a sacred object? It is above all an instrument that a god was thought to use in order to manifest his power. There was much that was instrumental, almost mechanical, in this: the artifact in a shrine was understood as a kind of mechanism that made it possible, so to speak, to "switch on" divine power and put it to use.
To put it to use much as we switch on a light or turn on water today. Of course, the deity to whom the shrine belonged had to be honored properly, or the mechanism would not work, but after that everything proceeded more or less automatically. This was precisely the magic-mindedness that permeated pagan antiquity. Here, however, in the Yahwistic sanctuary, everything had to be different.
There was no place here for any magic-mindedness. Here there was only God's presence, in itself, and it became the chief holy thing of the people. The point was not only who was present in the sanctuary, but also that there could be no formalism, no automatic process, no autonomy in anything having to do with God's action.
First comes the meeting with God, communion with Him, and stable relationships; only then, from within those relationships and in their context, comes everything else: God's power, God's gifts, God's revelations. And most important, God's love. Pagan gods, as a rule, did not love their worshipers; the relationship there was more businesslike, and love was considered something too personal, too sentimental, and too human for relations with gods or spirits. The God of Abraham and Moses, however, from the very beginning creates the space of the covenant-union as a space of mutual love, the very love that will be fully revealed in the Kingdom with the coming of the Messiah.