NOTES for Exo 30:1-38
According to the description in the Book of Exodus, the Tabernacle had two altars: one for sacrifice and another for incense (“burning”). Incense was a reminder that the sacrifices offered in the court of the Tabernacle—and later in the Temple court—were only the outward side, a kind of shell, of what was taking place in the spiritual world at the heavenly Throne. As time went on, this Throne was revealed to the people ever more often and eventually became inseparable from Temple worship itself. No encounter with God in our world would be possible at all unless God, by His will, were present in His creation.
He did not simply create the world once and then withdraw and abandon it to its fate. He is constantly present in His world, sustaining its existence by His will. His will touches creation, and the point of that contact, the meeting point between God and the world, is revealed to us as the Throne seen by the prophets and hymnographers whose texts we find in the Bible. It later came to be called the Throne of Glory.
Without it, without this meeting point of God and the world, there would be no theophanies, no presence of God as it was revealed to Moses at Sinai and later to the people in the Tabernacle and the Temple, and no sacrifices, which in that case would lose all meaning. Sacrifices exist as a shared meal between God and human beings, and such a meal is possible only in connection with the revelation of God’s presence as it is revealed in the Tabernacle and the Temple. This means that communion with God itself would be impossible.
One could then only reflect on God and perhaps try to draw closer to Him by means of contemplative and ascetic practices. Yet none of this would in essence bring a person closer to God, for the gulf that separates us from Him can truly and actually, rather than merely conceptually, be crossed only from His side.
Incense and the altar of incense were intended precisely to remind a person that everything happening in the court of the Tabernacle or Temple was only a projection of what was happening at the Throne, which no human being could reach. The essential thing—the source and cause of everything occurring at the earthly altar—remains hidden behind a veil symbolized by the smoke rising from the altar of incense. This was an important reminder to everyone who might approach the altar without due reverence.