The Offering They Had to Stop

As the work on the tabernacle got under way, the craftsmen put down their tools and went to find Moses. They had a complaint, and it is worth reading twice: there was too much. “The people bring much more than enough for doing the work that the LORD has commanded us to do” (Exodus 36:5). So a stop order went through the camp, and “the people were restrained from bringing” (Exodus 36:6).

Before we admire that, it is worth asking where the gold came from. These were people who had walked out of Egypt with their arms full: they “had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing,” and “thus they plundered the Egyptians” (Exodus 12:35–36). Not wages they had earned — spoil handed over by a God who had fought for them. The building was not their idea either. The LORD had said, “And let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst” (Exodus 25:8). He did not need a tent. He wanted to be near.

Sharper still: what the people brought were “brooches and earrings and signet rings and armlets” (Exodus 35:22) — the same sort of jewelry Aaron had collected three chapters earlier, when he told them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives” (Exodus 32:2), and cast a calf out of it. Between the two collections stands chapter 34, and the LORD passing before Moses to proclaim himself “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). The gold that had gone into an idol came back out for a dwelling place, and the only thing that had changed was that God had forgiven them.

That order is the whole point, and it will not run backwards. There is no levy in the chapter, no quota, no shaming from the front — only “everyone whose heart stirred him, and everyone whose spirit moved him” (Exodus 35:21), bringing what they had “as a freewill offering to the LORD” (Exodus 35:29), and still turning up with more “every morning” (Exodus 36:3). Nobody was paying off chapter 32; they were doing what forgiven people do with what is in their hands.

The tent wore out, as tents do; it was always a picture of something. John reaches for it deliberately: the Word became flesh and “dwelt among us” (John 1:14), where the verb means to pitch a tent — he pitched his tent in the middle of the camp.¹ And the offering that secured that dwelling was not brooches and earrings; he “entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12). Israel had to be restrained from bringing. He was not restrained — he gave until there was nothing left, and then said, “It is finished” (John 19:30).

So the money we give, the hours we hand over, the skill in our hands — none of it pays down a debt already settled. It is a freewill offering, made out of a sufficiency we did not create, to a God who has already come to live where we live. That kind of obedience has an older name — gratitude — and it runs downhill. We can bring whatever stirs our hearts, gladly and without measuring, because the accounting was closed long ago and the verdict on the materials still stands: it was sufficient to do all the work, and more.