God Arranged It: Why the Sanctuary Still Matters
There is a word that theologians and seminary students wrestle with constantly, a word that carries far more weight than most people realize when they first encounter it. That word is formation. Formation is not about what something is. Formation is about how something became what it is. It is the process, the journey, the accumulated weight of experience that shapes a person, a people, or a faith.
And when you begin to read Scripture through that lens, everything changes.
Formation Is Always a Process
None of us became who we are overnight. The walls we build around our hearts did not appear in a single moment. They were constructed brick by brick through seasons of disappointment, through people who dropped us, through trust that was broken and never repaired. Formation works the same way in our spiritual lives. God does not produce mature faith in an instant. He produces it through a series of encounters, each one building on the last.
We see this pattern woven through the entire narrative of Scripture. In Genesis, God formed man from the dust and breathed life into him, as described in Genesis 2:8, where the text conveys that God personally and intimately shaped humanity and gave it life. Abraham did not simply wake up one day with unwavering faith. God spoke to him, led him out of Ur, and walked with him through decades of waiting before the promise was fulfilled. Isaac's faith was forged on the slopes of Mount Moriah, where he watched his father trust God for a provision that had not yet arrived. Jacob encountered God in a dream, a ladder stretching between earth and heaven, and he woke up a different man.
The pattern is unmistakable. God forms faith through experience. He does not ask us to believe in the abstract. He meets us in the concrete moments of our lives and reveals himself there.
From Individuals to a People
The book of Exodus marks a dramatic shift in this process of formation. In Genesis, God worked primarily through individuals. In Exodus, he begins to expand his covenant to encompass an entire people. The same sovereign power that protected Joseph in a pit and in a prison is now at work on a national scale, orchestrating plagues, parting seas, and dismantling the grip of a Pharaoh who thought himself untouchable.
What is remarkable about this is that God's sovereignty never took a day off. There was not a single moment in the life of Moses, from the basket on the Nile to the burning bush to the confrontation in Pharaoh's court, when God was not actively arranging circumstances. Moses was raised in the very house of the enemy so that he would not be intimidated when God sent him back to that same house to demand freedom for his people. Every detail was deliberate. Every seemingly random event was coordinated.
This is the nature of divine sovereignty. It does not operate only when we are praying or when we are in a season of spiritual awareness. It operates constantly, quietly moving people and circumstances into position so that when the moment arrives, the stage is already set.
The Israelites thought they were heading toward disaster when they found themselves trapped between Pharaoh's army and the Red Sea. What they did not yet understand was that God had deliberately led them there. Not because he wanted them to suffer, but because he wanted them to witness something they could not have seen any other way. He was forming their faith through a demonstration of his power that would anchor them for generations.
The Danger of Isolation
Before arriving at the central text of Exodus 25, it is worth pausing to consider something that the Israelites' journey reveals about isolation. When a person stays away from community long enough, their perspective begins to narrow. Problems that feel enormous in solitude often look different when surrounded by people who are walking in faith. Thoughts that go unchallenged in isolation can harden into distortions that are very difficult to undo.
In Luke 4, after forty days alone in the wilderness, Jesus himself returned immediately to the temple. He opened the scroll and reoriented his perspective outward, declaring that the Spirit of the Lord was upon him to preach good news to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, and set captives free, as recorded in Luke 4:18. If Jesus, the Son of God, returned to corporate worship after a season of isolation, the lesson for the rest of us is clear. The gathering of believers is not optional. It is a spiritual necessity.
God Arranged the Sanctuary
This brings us to the heart of the matter. In Exodus 25:8, God gives Moses a command that is deceptively simple in its phrasing: let them make a sanctuary, that God may dwell among them. The verse communicates God's desire to establish a specific, consecrated space where his presence would be localized among his people.
God did not need a building. He is omnipresent. He could have met them anywhere. But he asked for a sanctuary because he wanted a place with no competing distractions, a place where he alone would be the main attraction.
This is still his desire. The sanctuary is not merely a religious institution or a weekly obligation. It is the intersection of heaven and earth. It is the place where God has arranged for his people to gather so that he can speak to all of them at once, where one message can carry a hundred different personal meanings for a hundred different people sitting in the same room.
God had already provided for the building of the tabernacle before he ever asked for it. In Exodus 12, the Israelites left Egypt carrying the gold and silver of the Egyptians. God had arranged the provision before the need was announced.
He works the same way today. The breakthrough you are waiting for may already be in your house. The provision you are praying for may already be in motion. God, who knows the plans he has for you, plans for peace and not for harm, as Jeremiah 29:11 declares, has been thinking about your situation longer than you have.
Come to the Sanctuary
The invitation of Exodus 25 is still open. God is still arranging for his people to gather, still setting the stage, still coordinating what needs to come together so that his presence can move freely among those who seek him.
Come with expectation. Come as a participant, not a spectator. Whatever God is arranging in this season, you do not want to miss it.
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