Hebrews 8:5 Commentary and Bible Study

Those priests that offered gifts according to the law served in a tabernacle that was set up on earth, and therefore by necessity symbolic and not intended to be the same as the one that exists in heaven. Two words are used to teach that the tabernacle and its furniture were less than the real thing; it was an example and it was a shadow. The word for example can mean copy, but clearly it could not be a direct copy of what is in heaven. What is in the spiritual realm of heaven cannot be directly copied into the earthly realm below. Rather, it is represented by means of symbols. The word shadow suggests the same thing. You look at a shadow and it only tells you a limited amount. It tells you the outline; it doesn't tell you the details. There is the outline of something which is casting a shadow. There's no colour in a shadow; there’s no shape. The object is in heaven and has a spiritual nature; the shadow which it casts is the tabernacle which God told Moses to build and it is related to that heavenly tabernacle and gives some indication of its nature, but it is not the same thing. The Old Testament worship was a representation, a teaching model, an instruction of something that God would do in the future, that God would bring about. It was a kind of promise or prophecy.‘As Moses was admonished’ – very firmly instructed by God – ‘when he was about to make the tabernacle, See [look to it, be absolutely sure] that you make all things according to the pattern [the model] showed to thee in the mount.’ The extreme importance of keeping this symbolism accurate is underlined by the instructions which God gave to Moses when he was about to make the tabernacle. Moses is told to make sure that he constructs everything according to the pattern or blueprint shown him by God. What God showed him was a pattern – a word meaning the impression made as when striking a die against a piece of metal. Every symbol was chosen by God. Moses was not shown the heavenly tabernacle and then left to work out for himself what would be an appropriate symbol for each element. No, what he was shown was types, already in symbolic form, symbols that were inspired and chosen by God himself, and shown to Moses for him to implement precisely as he saw them. The understanding to Moses from the very beginning is that what he was being told was not the real thing, but only a pattern. It was God who chose to identify the articles of furniture in the tabernacle and chose them to represent different aspects of the work of Christ. Heaven is not accessible to any mortal man; God must reveal it. For this reason Moses must not change anything which was intended to be a pattern of heaven.To go from the true tabernacle to the tabernacle which is an example and shadow of the heavenly requires a translation process, but it is God who does that translation. Only he can design worthy and accurate symbols of the reality in heaven. He is teaching us by these symbols about things which we do not yet understand, so it is obvious that he must design them and not us. The earthly tabernacle was God’s lesson about heavenly realities in terms of earthly pictures.