30:1-10
Cole describes chapters 30 and 31 as an appendix to the previous few chapters. They fill in various details to the description of the tabernacle that we have had so far. This starts with the Altar of Incense. We are back to the highest quality materials, with gold back on the inventory. This altar was to be placed “in front of the veil that is above the ark of the testimony”. It was to refilled with incense every morning. As well as proscriptions on what was to be done there are also prohibitions (30:9). We could perhaps draw a general lesson from this. Since incense was good, then someone may have thought that any incense offering was allowable, but this was not the case. In the same way there are those who argue that since love and marriage between a man and a woman is a good thing, then any sort of “marriage” is allowable. This is not the case!
30:11-16
“When you take a census ...” We know that one of David’s greatest mistakes was taking a census, this shows that taking a census was not automatically a bad thing! Each person was to make an offering of “half a shekel”. This would later become known as the temple tax. The offering was the same for rich and poor “to make atonement for your lives”. The cost of atonement is the same for all of us, regardless of our worldly status.
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