“I delight greatly in the Lord; my soul rejoices in my God. For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of His righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”1 The New Jerusalem comes down from Heaven, from God, like a bride who is adorned for her husband and adorned by her husband! And the Lord dwells with them, among them, in their midst, as the Tabernacle stood in the midst of Israel. The old has gone, the new has come! “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come”.2 ‘Passed away’3 is a better translation than ‘gone away’. There are concepts of ‘transit and renewal’ embedded in ‘passed away” rather than thorough destruction. It also suggests the passage of time i.e. what was before and has now passed by, but without having the substance of what was there before being destroyed. John gets new insight into ‘how’ the great transformation from the old to the new is accomplished; Peter even is giving some more details of the process. As the old earth came from and consisted of water but was later consumed by water during the Flood, the New Earth will likewise come into existence through and by fire.4 The ‘elements’ will be ‘destroyed’, will transit and be transmuted by fire, and the earth and its works will be found, discovered and uncovered in their basic form.5 Fire refines and purifies.6 The Psalm says: “In the beginning You laid the foundations of the earth, and the Heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You remain; they will all wear out like a garment. Like clothing You will change them and they will be discarded. But You remain the same, and Your years will never end.”7 And then this awesome text follows: “The children of Your servants will live in Your presence; their descendants will be established before You”8— before God’s face, unveiled,9 because the Tent, the Tabernacle of God, is among—in the midst of—the people. A human being can then no longer die, when he sees God’s face,10 for death will be no more—is no more. A multi-dimensional reality!
As the Tabernacle was in the midst of Israel, God will likewise be among the people, among His nations. That Tabernacle stood in the middle of the tent camp in the desert, and the tribes of Israel were grouped in a set pattern around it.11 The tribe of Levi was close to it – with the Merarites to the north of it, and the Kohathites close to the south of it. Immediately to the east of it were Moses, Aaron and the priests, and immediately to the west of it the Gershonites. All these were a kind of first ring around the Tabernacle. Then, around them, were Asher, Dan and Naphthali (from left to right) to the north, Issachar, Judah (in the immediate direction of where the sun rises) and Zebulon to the east (from top to bottom), then Simeon, Reuben and Gad (from right to left) to the south, and, finally, to the west, from bottom to top: Benjamin, Ephraim and Manasseh. These four points of the compass probably correspond with the four ‘living creatures’:12 the lion to the east, the man to the south, the ox to the west, and the eagle to the north. However, in the Tabernacle in the Holy of Holies, and resting upon it was the pillar of ‘clouds and fire’ which is the Holy Presence of God, the Glory of the Lord, the Shekinah. What that Tabernacle stands for, and prophetically points to, comes in the Book of Revelation to complete fulfilment.
• It is also said of the Lord Jesus that He ‘tabernacled’ among men, John 1:14, ‘dwelt’ if literally translated from the Greek meaning ‘tabernacled’. He was amongst us then too, although at that time His Glory was shrouded, covered hidden.
• The Tabernacle prophesied of and testified to this also by all kinds of objects of wood, gold, silver and through the altars and the curtain materials and the construction and the layout of the Tabernacle complex.13 Moses had built it according to the ‘original’ plan as laid out in the Temple in Heaven. His Glory was visible sometimes when He walked around on earth.14 But very soon all coverings will be absent and we will see Him from ‘face to face’, as 1 Corinthians 13:12 says.
• A chemical element is a species of atom having the same number of protons in their atomic nuclei (that is, the same atomic number, or Z). For example, the atomic number of oxygen is 8, so the element oxygen consists of all atoms which have 8 protons. One hundred eighteen elements have been identified: the first 94 occur naturally on Earth, and the remaining 24 are synthetic elements. Iron is the most abundant element (by mass) making up Earth, while oxygen is the most common element in the Earth’s crust. Chemical elements constitute all of the ordinary matter of the Universe.
• However, astronomical observations suggest that ordinary observable matter makes up only about 15% of the matter in the Universe. The remainder is dark matter; the composition of this is unknown, but it is not composed of chemical elements. The two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, are the most common elements in the Universe.
• The history of the discovery and use of the elements began with primitive human societies that found native elements like carbon, sulphur, copper and gold. Later civilizations extracted elemental copper, tin, lead and iron from their ores by smelting, using charcoal. Alchemists and chemists subsequently identified many more; all of the naturally occurring elements were known by 1950.
• The properties of the chemical elements are summarized in the periodic table, which organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows (“periods”) in which the columns (“groups”) share recurring (“periodic”) physical and chemical properties. Save for unstable radioactive elements with short half-lives, all of the elements are available industrially, most of them in low degrees of impurities.
Bible References:
1.Isaiah 61:10 NIV 2.2 Corinthians 5:17 3.Revelation 21:1 4.2 Peter 3:5–7 5.2 Peter 3:10 6.Zechariah 13:9; Malachi 3:3 7.Psalm 102:25– 27 NIV 8.Psalm 102:28 NIV
9.Exodus 34:29–34 10.Exodus 10:28, 33:20 11.Numbers 2:31 12.Revelation 4:6–7 13.Hebrews 9:1– 10 14.John 1:14; Mark 9:3
