Exodus closes here, on the plains at the foot of Sinai, with a people who came out of Egypt as slaves and now have a tent in their middle that God himself has agreed to inhabit. Moses is writing for a generation that needs to know two things at once: the holy God who thundered on the mountain has come down to travel with them, and yet even Moses — the man who spoke with God face to face — cannot walk into the room. The book that began with bricks ends with glory. The God who heard them in Egypt now lives on their street.

From the writers we read together

BibleProject

Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, biblical theology teaching project

Mackie and Collins read the Bible as a single arc in which heaven and earth, separated in Genesis 3, are slowly stitched back together. Eden was the first overlap; the tabernacle is the second. The cloud that covered Sinai in Exodus 19 has now come down off the mountain and settled on a tent the people can carry. The God who could not be approached on the peak is now traveling at walking pace with his people. That is the storyline in one image.

But the passage is honest about the cost of overlap. Moses cannot go in. The same glory that guides them by day and warms them by night also keeps the mediator outside the door. The tabernacle is good news and unfinished news at the same time. It will take a greater Moses, BibleProject keeps reminding us, to walk through that door — and to open it for everyone else. Exodus ends mid-sentence. The rest of the Bible is the sentence finishing.