He Put His Tent Where You Live

At six forty on a Sunday morning he is driving the wrong way down the same road as everybody else.

They are going one direction with the kids buckled in the back and a travel mug wedged in the cup holder. He is going the other, home, with the heater finally warm and the whole night still sitting on him. He lifts two fingers off the wheel at a car he half recognizes. The man in that car lifts two fingers back. Neither of them slows down.

Folded up in his visor there is a bulletin from a Sunday three years ago. He did not keep it on purpose. It got shoved up there with the insurance card and a fistful of receipts and it has ridden around with him ever since, going soft at the crease, and every so often it works itself loose and lands in his lap at a stop light, and he puts it back.

He ran the arithmetic once, with a pencil, on the back of an invoice, because he is the kind of man who would rather know than wonder. Four on, two off, and a swing week every fifth. Carry that rotation out across a year and it sets him free on a Sunday morning about twice, and both of those times he had been awake for nineteen hours and would not have been any use to anybody in a room.

You know the drive. Boots left at the door so as not to wake the house. The kitchen at that hour, with the light coming in low and level across the table the way it only does before seven. The kettle, or the pot, whichever you use. And you say something out loud to God standing right there, because there is nobody else awake to say it to, and because you have believed every word of this for as long as you can remember believing anything.

What you stopped saying somewhere in the third year is that you would get back to it. What you started saying instead, quietly, mostly to yourself, is that you used to be part of something.

The dwelling of God was a tent before it was ever a building

Hold this one for a minute. It carries load.

The first house God ever kept among human beings had no foundation under it. It had pegs and ropes and poles and curtains, and men carried it on their shoulders. When the camp picked up and moved, the dwelling of God moved with it. Nobody in that camp ever had to work out how to get to where God lived, because where God lived was fifty yards off and it had arrived there the same night they did.

That is a fact about God's habits and not a detail about ancient construction. Read the whole account and the pattern never once reverses. The people do not travel to the dwelling. The dwelling comes and is set down among the people, and it is set down in a wilderness, at a camp with no address, on ground nobody would have chosen.

So here is the pit, and most of us are handed it without ever being taught it. We picture God as located, and ourselves as out of range. The week becomes the distance. The rotation becomes the reason. And a man who has believed every word of it since he was nineteen ends up thinking of himself as a believer with no people, on the strength of a shift pattern printed off by a scheduling program.

You are one of God's people this morning, in the clothes you drove home in. Ezekiel 37:27 does not say God will summon them to His dwelling, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts that sentence off an ancient page and sets it down in a kitchen at ten past seven.

Here is what the prophet actually says, and the tent word is sitting right in the middle of it.

My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.Ezekiel 37:27

Tabernacle. Tent. Not a hall, not a site, not a place a man drives to when his schedule allows it. The word God chose for His own dwelling is the word for the thing you put up where you are standing.

You have the dwelling of God at your address, and nobody issued it to you at a door. That is written, plainly, in a book far older than the industry you work in, and the Spirit is what makes an old tent word land on a modern lease.

Read it again and watch who is doing the verbs

There are two halves to that sentence and God is the actor in both of them.

I will be their God. They shall be my people. Not: they shall assemble, and then I will be their God. Not: they shall be found in attendance, and on that basis I will count them in. He says what He will be, and then He says what they are, and the second half is His doing exactly as much as the first half is.

That matters more than almost anything else on this page, because it means the thing you have been trying to get back to was never a thing you got yourself into. Nobody walks into a people. A crowd you can walk into. A people is constituted, from outside, at a moment, and after that moment it exists whether or not any given member of it made it out of the house that day.

And consider who He said it over. A camp of former slaves with a poor record, no calendar anybody would call devout, and a running habit of getting it wrong in ways the text does not bother to hide. The tent went up in the middle of them anyway. Not as a reward for the week they had just had. As His own act, on His own ground, because He had said He would.

You were made one of His people, and you did not assemble a single part of it. He promised it in both halves of that one sentence, and His Spirit is the one who set you inside the second half.

Let me be exact about the ground, because vague comfort is worth nothing at six in the morning. You are among God's people on the ground of what God did: He took a people for Himself, He put His dwelling in the middle of them, and He had it written down so that it would still be standing when a man read it in a language Ezekiel never heard. That is the ground. Not a membership. Not a record of attendance. Not a rotation.

It is already settled, and your shift pattern was never consulted about it. The word settles it, and the Spirit does not put a settled thing back up for discussion.