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Fall Asleep to The Ark of the Covenant _ Designed by God_ Lost for 2600 Years · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Somewhere on this earth, hidden from every eye, locked away
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  Speaker 1: from every hand, there may rest, according to traditions older
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  Speaker 1: than most nations, an object that once carried the living
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  Speaker 1: presence of God. It was built by a people wandering
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  Speaker 1: in the desert, with nothing but sand beneath their feet
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  Speaker 1: and faith above their heads. It split a river in two.
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  Speaker 1: It brought the walls of a fortified city crashing to
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  Speaker 1: the ground without a single sword being raised. Armies who
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  Speaker 1: stood against it were destroyed. Men who touched it without
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  Speaker 1: permission fell dead where they stood. For nearly a thousand years,
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  Speaker 1: it sat at the center of the world's most sacred room,
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  Speaker 1: behind a veil so thick and so holy that only
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  Speaker 1: one man on earth was permitted to approach it, and
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  Speaker 1: only once a year, and only after days of ritual purification,
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  Speaker 1: and even then he entered trembling. And then in five
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  Speaker 1: hundred and eighty six years before Christ, it vanished. No
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  Speaker 1: conker acclaimed it as a trophy, no ancient record described
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  Speaker 1: its removal, no tomb was ever found containing it. Two thousand,
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  Speaker 1: six hundred years of silence, what you are about to
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  Speaker 1: hear is the full story of the Ark of the Covenant.
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  Speaker 1: How God designed it with his own words, what human
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  Speaker 1: hands built it from, what ancient texts say was sealed
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  Speaker 1: inside it, what it did to those who came near it,
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  Speaker 1: How it disappeared from history without a trace, and where,
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  Speaker 1: according to some researchers, ancient traditions and sacred texts still
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  Speaker 1: alive to day. It may be resting at this very moment.
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  Speaker 1: Settle in, let the world outside grow quiet. This is
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  Speaker 1: a story that has waited twenty six centuries to be
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  Speaker 1: told in full. Chapter one, The desert and the Command.
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  Speaker 1: To understand what the ark was, you first have to
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  Speaker 1: feel where it came from. Not a palace, not a
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  Speaker 1: temple carved from marble, not a civilization at the height
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  Speaker 1: of its power. It came from the desert. It came
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  Speaker 1: from a people who had spent four hundred years as
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  Speaker 1: slaves in the most powerful empire the ancient world had
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  Speaker 1: ever known. Four hundred years of brick and mortar, of
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  Speaker 1: whips and quotas, of watching their sons taken and their
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  Speaker 1: daughters grow old under foreign skies. Four hundred years of
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  Speaker 1: a silence so long that many had begun to wonder,
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  Speaker 1: in the quietest hours of the night, whether the God
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  Speaker 1: of their fathers had forgotten them entirely, And then in
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  Speaker 1: a single night, everything changed. The plagues came, the first
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  Speaker 1: born died, the Pharaoh broke, and two million people walked
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  Speaker 1: out of Egypt, carrying whatever they could hold in their arms,
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  Speaker 1: moving toward a land they had never seen, led by
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  Speaker 1: a man who had spent forty years in the same
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  Speaker 1: desert they were now entering, following a pillar of cloud
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  Speaker 1: by day and a pillar of fire by night. Moses
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  Speaker 1: had seen the burning bush, he had heard the voice.
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  Speaker 1: He had stood on holy ground and removed his sandals,
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  Speaker 1: because the presence of God was so near that the
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  Speaker 1: very earth beneath his feet had changed its nature. But
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  Speaker 1: even Moses could not have imagined what was coming next.
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  Speaker 1: Three months after leaving Egypt, the people of Israel arrived
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  Speaker 1: at the foot of a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula.
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  Speaker 1: The mountain was called Sinai by some horeb by others.
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  Speaker 1: What it was called mattered far less than what happened there.
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  Speaker 1: The mountain smoked, it trembled, thunder peeled from its summit
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  Speaker 1: in waves that the people gathered at its base felt
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  Speaker 1: in their chests, not just their ears. Lightning moved across
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  Speaker 1: the peak in ways that no natural storm could explain.
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  Speaker 1: And the sound, the sound that the people of Israel
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  Speaker 1: described later as the sound of a great trumpet growing
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  Speaker 1: louder and louder without any human hand playing it. That
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  Speaker 1: sound drove the entire gathered nation backward in fear. They
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  Speaker 1: told Moses, you go, you speak to him. We cannot
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  Speaker 1: bear it. And Moses went up. He was on that
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  Speaker 1: mountain for forty days and forty nights, no food, no water,
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  Speaker 1: in the presence of something so vast and so holy
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  Speaker 1: that when he finally came back down, his face was
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  Speaker 1: radiating light, and the people were afraid to look at
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  Speaker 1: him directly. But what Moses carried down from that mountain
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  Speaker 1: was not only the Ten Commandments carved on stone. He
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  Speaker 1: carried instructions, detailed, precise architectural instructions for something that had
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  Speaker 1: never existed before in the history of the world, something
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  Speaker 1: that the God of the universe, the creator of every
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  Speaker 1: galaxy and every grain of sand, the one who needed
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  Speaker 1: nothing and lacked nothing, had chosen to ask a group
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  Speaker 1: of former slaves to build for him a dwelling place.
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  Speaker 1: Now Here is where you have to pause and let
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  Speaker 1: that land. Why would the God who made the heavens
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  Speaker 1: and the earth, the God who said in the Book
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  Speaker 1: of First Kings, that not even the highest heaven could
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  Speaker 1: contain him, why would that God ask for a tent.
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  Speaker 1: The Hebrew word used is mish khan. It means tabernacle,
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  Speaker 1: dwelling place, the place where one takes up residence, And
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  Speaker 1: the concept was not that God would be confined to it,
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  Speaker 1: but that he would meet with his people there, that
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  Speaker 1: there would be a place, a specific, physical, tangible place
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  Speaker 1: on earth where the gap between the divine and the
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  Speaker 1: human would be bridged, where the holy and the mortal
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  Speaker 1: could occupy the same coordinates, even if only for a moment,
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  Speaker 1: even if only through a veil. The ark was not
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  Speaker 1: the tabernacle itself. The ark was its heart. It would
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  Speaker 1: sit in the innermost chamber, the room called the most
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  Speaker 1: Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, behind the thickest curtain
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  Speaker 1: in the ancient world, in total darkness, surrounded by a
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  Speaker 1: silence so absolute that the priests who served in the
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  Speaker 1: outer courts were instructed to move quietly so as not
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  Speaker 1: to disturb what rested beyond that veil. But before any
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  Speaker 1: of that could happen, the object had to be built,
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  Speaker 1: and God was not going to leave the details to
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  Speaker 1: human imagination. Moses stood on the mountain and God spoke,
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  Speaker 1: and what God said was this recorded in the Book
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  Speaker 1: of Exodus, chapter twenty five, beginning at verse ten. Have
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  Speaker 1: them make a chest of acacia, would two and a
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  Speaker 1: half cubits long, a cubit and a half wide, a
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  Speaker 1: cubit and a half high, Every measurement deliberate, every material specified,
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  Speaker 1: every proportion chosen by the mind that designed the laws
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  Speaker 1: of physics, by the voice that called the universe into
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  Speaker 1: existence from nothing. This was not religious decoration, This was
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  Speaker 1: not ceremonial art. What God was describing was the most
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  Speaker 1: sacred object he would ever ask human hands to create,
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  Speaker 1: and he was going to describe it down to the
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  Speaker 1: last ring, the last pole, the last thread of gold.
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  Speaker 1: The people of Israel were camped at the base of
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  Speaker 1: the mountain, waiting. They did not yet know what Moses
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  Speaker 1: was being told. They did not yet know that the
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  Speaker 1: God who had shaken the mountain above their heads was
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  Speaker 1: now quietly methodically describing the dimensions of a wooden chest
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  Speaker 1: that would one day stop a river in full flood,
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  Speaker 1: bring down the walls of a fortified city and disappear
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  Speaker 1: from history in a way that twenty six centuries of
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  Speaker 1: searching have not been able to explain. They were waiting
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  Speaker 1: in the desert, The mountain was burning above them, and
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  Speaker 1: somewhere in the smoke and the fire and the silence,
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  Speaker 1: the blueprint for the most extraordinary object in human history
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  Speaker 1: was being spoken aloud for the first time. Chapter two
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  Speaker 1: Blueprint from Heaven, Exodus twenty five. When God speaks, he
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  Speaker 1: does not speak in generalities. That is one of the
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  Speaker 1: things that strikes you when you read Exodus chapter twenty
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  Speaker 1: five with real attention, not as a religious exercise, not
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  Speaker 1: as a cultural artifact, but as a document, a set
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  Speaker 1: of instructions delivered by a mind that knew exactly what
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  Speaker 1: it wanted, down to the material, down to the direction
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  Speaker 1: a piece of gold would face. Most people know the
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  Speaker 1: ark exists, very few have ever sat with the actual specifications.
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  Speaker 1: So let us sit with them tonight, slowly, the way
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  Speaker 1: you would sit with something that deserves more than a
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  Speaker 1: quick reading. The first material God named was a kasha
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  Speaker 1: wood in Hebrew, shit him. It sounds almost too humble
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  Speaker 1: for something this sacred. Would the same material human beings
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  Speaker 1: had been using to build fires and furniture and fishing
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  Speaker 1: boats since the beginning of recorded time. But this wood
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  Speaker 1: was not chosen arbitrarily. Acacia is one of the only
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  Speaker 1: trees that grows in the Sinai Desert with any reliability.
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  Speaker 1: It is extraordinarily dense, resistant to insects, resistant to the
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  Speaker 1: kind of rot that destroys softer woods. In years, in
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  Speaker 1: the landscape where the people of Israel were wandering, it
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  Speaker 1: was the most durable organic material available. God did not
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  Speaker 1: ask for cedar from the forests of Lebanon or fine
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  Speaker 1: olive wood from the groves of Canaan. He asked for
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  Speaker 1: the wood that the desert itself provided, the wood that
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  Speaker 1: the people walking through that desert already had access to.
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  Speaker 1: There is something quietly significant about that the most sacred
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  Speaker 1: object in the history of Israel was not made from
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  Speaker 1: something imported or impossible to find. It was made from
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  Speaker 1: what the desert gave them, as though God was saying
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  Speaker 1: from the very beginning, what I am asking for you
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  Speaker 1: already have. After naming the wood, God gave the dimensions
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  Speaker 1: two and a half cubits in length, a cubit and
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  Speaker 1: a half wide, a cubit and a half high, a
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  Speaker 1: cubit in the ancient Hebrew system measured approximately eighteen inches
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  Speaker 1: by most scholarly estimates, though some traditions place it slightly longer.
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  Speaker 1: Using the standard measure, the completed chest would have been
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  Speaker 1: roughly three feet nine inches long, two feet three inches wide,
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  Speaker 1: and two feet three inches tall. Let that image form
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  Speaker 1: slowly smaller than most people imagine. When the mind pictures
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  Speaker 1: the arc shaped by centuries of art and more recent
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  Speaker 1: decades of film, it tends towards something enormous, something the
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  Speaker 1: size of a military transport case or a stone sarcophagus.
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  Speaker 1: But the actual arc, if the measurements are taken at
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  Speaker 1: face value, was closer to a large traveling chin, something
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  Speaker 1: two strong men could carry without great difficulty, assuming they
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  Speaker 1: were not required to touch it directly, which, as we
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  Speaker 1: will come to understand, they were absolutely not. The next
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  Speaker 1: instruction changed the nature of the object entirely. Overlay it
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  Speaker 1: with pure gold, both inside and out, not gold paint,
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  Speaker 1: not decorative gold leaf applied to the outer surface alone.
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  Speaker 1: The Hebrew text implies a substantial covering of pure gold
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  Speaker 1: on every surface, internal and external, so that when the
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  Speaker 1: work was finished, no wood would be visible anywhere. The
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  Speaker 1: acacia frame would be completely enclosed. What any eye would
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  Speaker 1: see at any angle from any direction would be gold,
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  Speaker 1: only gold. Imagine what this required of people living in
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  Speaker 1: desert tents. These were former slaves who had walked out
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  Speaker 1: of Egypt with what they could carry. They had no
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  Speaker 1: permanent workshops, no established trade rooms, utes, no city infrastructure
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  Speaker 1: of any kind, and yet they were being asked to
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  Speaker 1: produce goldsmithing at a level comparable to the finest craftsmen
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  Speaker 1: of the most artistically sophisticated civilization on Earth. There is
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  Speaker 1: a reason this was possible. In Exodus chapter twelve, before
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  Speaker 1: the final plague fell on Egypt, the Israelites had asked
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  Speaker 1: their Egyptian neighbors for articles of silver and gold, and
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  Speaker 1: the Egyptians, in the grief and desperation of that night,
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  Speaker 1: had given them what they asked for. The text says
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  Speaker 1: the Israelites plundered Egypt not with swords, with open hands
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  Speaker 1: and the quiet permission of a people who wanted them gone.
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  Speaker 1: They had been carrying the raw material for the ark
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  Speaker 1: since the night they left. God continued his instructions. Cast
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  Speaker 1: four gold rings, he said, and attach them to the
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  Speaker 1: fore feet of the chest. Then make poles of acacia wood,
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  Speaker 1: overlay them with gold, and insert them through the rings
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  Speaker 1: on either side of the ark to carry it. These
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  Speaker 1: rings and poles were not decorative, they were structural, and critically,
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  Speaker 1: they were permanent. God's instruction was explicit, the poles shall
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  Speaker 1: remain in the rings of the ark. They shall not
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  Speaker 1: be removed. The reason becomes clear when you understand what
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  Speaker 1: the poles were for. They existed so that no human
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  Speaker 1: hand would ever need to touch the ark itself during transport.
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  Speaker 1: Those who carried it would grip the poles, never the chest.
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  Speaker 1: The poles created a buffer, a kind of living boundary,
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  Speaker 1: between the concentrated holiness of what the ark contained and
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  Speaker 1: the ordinary mortality of the human beings tasked with moving it.
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  Speaker 1: This was not a ceremonial nicety, as the story of
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: a man named Uza will make devastatingly clear. That boundary
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  Speaker 1: carried consequences that no good intention could override. But the
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  Speaker 1: poles and the rings were still only the container. The
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  Speaker 1: most extraordinary element of the ark's design was its lid.
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  Speaker 1: God called it the atonement cover, or in older translations,
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  Speaker 1: the mercy seat in Hebrew, the caporet from a root
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  Speaker 1: word meaning to cover to a tone to make reconciliation.
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  Speaker 1: It was to be made of pure gold, not gold
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  Speaker 1: covered wood, as the chest itself was pure gold, a
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  Speaker 1: single piece hammered and shaped from solid gold, measuring exactly
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  Speaker 1: the same length and width as the chest beneath it,
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  Speaker 1: so that it sat over the opening like a perfect seal.
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  Speaker 1: And on top of this golden lid at each end
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  Speaker 1: two figures were to be formed cherubim. Here it is
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  Speaker 1: worth pausing because the word cherub has been so thoroughly
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  Speaker 1: softened by centuries of European religious art that it barely
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  Speaker 1: resembles what the Hebrew Bible describes. The Cherubim of scripture
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  Speaker 1: are not the soft, round faced infants with small wings
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  Speaker 1: that appear on greeting cards and chaper ceilings. The cherubim
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  Speaker 1: that appear elsewhere in the Biblical text, particularly in the
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  Speaker 1: visions of the prophet Ezekiel, are beings of such overwhelming
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  Speaker 1: presence that the prophets who encounter them fall immediately on
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  Speaker 1: their faces, foreface wings that sound like rushing water when
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  Speaker 1: they move, eyes covering their entire forms, a presence so
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  Speaker 1: dense that Ezekiel's description of them fills multiple chapters and
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  Speaker 1: still feels incomplete, like a man trying to describe a
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  Speaker 1: color that has no name. These are the beings God
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  Speaker 1: asked to be formed in gold and placed on the
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  Speaker 1: lid of the ark. They were to face each other,
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  Speaker 1: their faces turned downward, looking toward the mercy seat. Their
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  Speaker 1: wings were to spread upward and outward, arching over the lid,
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  Speaker 1: creating a canopy of hammered gold above the place that
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  Speaker 1: God then identified with a precision that even now is
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  Speaker 1: difficult to fully absorb. He said in Exodus twenty five,
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  Speaker 1: verse twenty two. There above the cover between the two
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  Speaker 1: cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law,
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  Speaker 1: I will meet with you the space between the outstretched
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  Speaker 1: wings of two golden cherubim. That was where God said
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  Speaker 1: he would be. Not in the sky above the desert,
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  Speaker 1: not on the summit of the mountain, though the mountain
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  Speaker 1: had served its purpose, not in some abstract, immeasurable dimension
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  Speaker 1: of divine infinity, in a specific, physical, locatable space between
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  Speaker 1: the wings above the gold, inside a tent pitched in
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  Speaker 1: the sand. The theological weight of this is not easy
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  Speaker 1: to hold all at once. The God who spoke the
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  Speaker 1: universe into existence from nothing was choosing to locate his
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  Speaker 1: communicative presence in a space that could be measured with
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  Speaker 1: a cubit rod. He was accommodating himself to the limitations
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  Speaker 1: of the human beings he had made, meeting them not
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  Speaker 1: in infinity but in inches, not in eternity, but at
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  Speaker 1: a specific address that a person could walk toward. An
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  Speaker 1: address in the desert, a tont a chest of wood
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  Speaker 1: and gold, and between the wings the presence that had
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  Speaker 1: shaken a mountain. The instructions were complete. Now someone had
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  Speaker 1: to build it. Chapter three, The craftsman Bezelel, filled by
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  Speaker 1: the Spirit. His name appears without fanfare, in the middle
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  Speaker 1: of a long passage about construction materials and sacred furniture,
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  Speaker 1: in a book filled with the names of patriarchs and
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  Speaker 1: pharaohs and leaders of nations. The name Bezelel arrives almost quietly,
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  Speaker 1: almost as an afterthought. But do not let the quietness
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  Speaker 1: deceive you. What God says about this man and what
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  Speaker 1: God does through this man, is unlike almost anything else
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  Speaker 1: in the first five books of the Bible. Because God
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  Speaker 1: does not call Bezelel to lead an army, or delay
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  Speaker 1: a prophecy, or negotiate with a foreign king. God calls
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  Speaker 1: Bezilel to make things, to make things beautifully, to make
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  Speaker 1: things faithfully, to make things that would carry more meaning
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  Speaker 1: than the materials they were made from. His full name
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  Speaker 1: was Bezilel ben Uri ben Her from the tribe of Judah.
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  Speaker 1: His grandfather was her who had stood beside Moses during
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  Speaker 1: the battle against the Amalekites, holding up the arms of
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  Speaker 1: the leader when exhaustion made them fall. The family had
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: already demonstrated what faithful support looked like. Now the grandson
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  Speaker 1: was being called to something different, something that in the
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  Speaker 1: history of how God speaks to people and through people,
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  Speaker 1: stands nearly alone. God said in Exodus chapter thirty one
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  Speaker 1: that he had filled Bezelel with the spirit of God,
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  Speaker 1: with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge, and with all kinds
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  Speaker 1: of skills to make artistic designs, for work in gold
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  Speaker 1: and silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to
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  Speaker 1: work in wood, to engage in all kinds of crafts.
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  Speaker 1: The spirit of God poured into a craftsman. In every
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  Speaker 1: other instance in the early books of the Hebrew Bible,
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  Speaker 1: where the spirit of God comes upon a person, that
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  Speaker 1: person is called to some form of leadership. Military action, prophecy.
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  Speaker 1: The spirit comes upon judges who will deliver Israel from
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  Speaker 1: its enemies. The spirit comes upon kings to confirm their anointing.
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  Speaker 1: The spirit comes upon prophets so that they can speak
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  Speaker 1: to powers they have no earthly authority to address. But here,
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  Speaker 1: for the first time in the recorded text, God fills
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  Speaker 1: someone with his spirit for an entirely different purpose. Not
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  Speaker 1: to lead, not to fight, not to speak, to make.
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  Speaker 1: This is not a footnote in the story of the Ark.
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  Speaker 1: It is a declaration embedded in the text that beauty,
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  Speaker 1: true beauty, beauty in the service of holiness requires the
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  Speaker 1: same divine resource as leading armies and delivering nations. That
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  Speaker 1: the hands of the craftsmen, when they are doing what
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  Speaker 1: they were made to do, are being guided by the
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  Speaker 1: same spirit that rested on the greatest leaders of Israel.
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  Speaker 1: Bezeleel had grown up in Egypt. He had almost certainly
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  Speaker 1: watched Egyptian craftsmen at work his entire life. Egypt, in
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  Speaker 1: the second millennium before Christ, was the artistic center of
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  Speaker 1: the known world. The burial chambers of the pharaohs contained
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  Speaker 1: gold work of extraordinary precision. The temples along the Nile
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  Speaker 1: were decorated with painted reliefs so carefully executed that scholars
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  Speaker 1: study them with reverence twenty five centuries later. If Bezelel
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  Speaker 1: had grown up watching all of this, he had been
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  Speaker 1: surrounded since childhood by some of the finest craftsmanship in
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  Speaker 1: human history. He had seen what human skill alone could produce.
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  Speaker 1: Now God was asking him to produce something that would
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  Speaker 1: surpass it. Not in size, the ark was modest compared
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: to the great ceremonial objects of Egypt, not in spectacle alone,
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: but in meaning, in what the object would carry, in
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: what would happen in its presence. He did not work alone.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: God also called by name a man named o Holia
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: ben Ahissemach from the tribe of Dan, to work alongside Bezelel,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: and beyond these two a community of craftsmen and craftswomen.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: People the text describes with a phrase that does not
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: translate perfectly into English, but means something close to wise
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: hearted people whose skill was not merely technical, who understood
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: that what they were making was not furniture, was not
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: art for its own sake, was not a monument to
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: human ability. It was a meeting place. When Moses came
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: down from the mountain and told the people what was needed.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: Something happened that has few parallels in the history of
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: any large undertaking. The people gave, not because they were
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: taxed or commanded under threat, but willingly, morning after morning,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: day after day. Gold came, silver came bronze, and acacia. Wood,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: and ramskins dyed red and fine linen in blue and purple,
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: and scarlet, oil, and spices and precious stones. The giving
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: did not slow down. Eventually, Bezelel and Oholiab went to
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Moses with an unusual problem. The people, they said, are
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: bringing more than enough, more than enough for everything the
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Lord has commanded to be done. Moses sent a message
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: through the camp, no man or woman is to make
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: anything else as an offering for the sanctuary, and the
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: people were restrained from giving more. Let that breathe for
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: a moment. Former slaves, people living in desert tents with
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: no permanent homes and no certainty about where their next
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: meal was coming from, giving so much toward this one
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: thing that their leader had to command them to stop.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: They were not giving to an institution, They were not
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: paying a religious tax. They were giving toward the place
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: where the gap between themselves and God would be closed.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: And the generosity of that giving tells you something about
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: the depth of the need it was trying to meet.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: And so Bezelel worked in the desert by the light
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: of oil lamps in the hours before dawn, in the
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: long evenings after the camp had grown still. His hands
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: moved across gold and wood and thread, hands trained by
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: everything Egypt had taught him, and filled now with something
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Egypt never could have given him. He hammered the Mercy
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: seat from a single piece of pure gold. This is
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: technically remarkable, even by the standards of modern metal working.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Creating a flat, uniform surface of those dimensions from solid
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: gold without casting it in a mold using tools available
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: in the ancient Near East requires a patience and precision
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: that most modern craftsmen would find humbling. Bezelel worked without
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: a mold, with hammers and fire and hands that the
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Spirit of God had set apart for this purpose. He
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: shaped the two cherubim from the same piece, continuous with
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: the lid, their wings rising and spreading, their faces turning
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: toward each other, as though they had always been there
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: waiting in the gold for Bezeleel's hands to find them.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: He overlaid the chest inside and out. He attached the rings,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: he inserted the poles, every detail exactly as God had
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: spoken it on the mountain. When it was finished, it
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: was not a masterpiece in the way that word is
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: usually meant. It was an act of obedience rendered in gold.
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: It was the answer a people gave when God. God
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: said I want to be near you, and they said,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: tell us how the ark was finished? Now it had
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: to be filled Chapter four. What was placed inside? There
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: is a moment in the construction of any sacred space
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: when the building stops and the meaning begins. The walls
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: are finished, the roof is in place, and then some
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: one carries something through the threshold, sets it in the
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: center of the room, and the space becomes something it
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: was not before. For the Ark of the Covenant, that
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: moment came when three objects were placed inside, three objects
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: in a chest roughly the size of a large traveling trunk,
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: in the holiest space in the ancient world. God chose
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: to preserve three things. Not a library, not a treasury
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: of accumulated artifacts, not a museum of the patriarchs. Three things,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: and each of them tells a different layer of the
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: same story. A story about who God is and what
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: his relationship with Israel had already cost. The first object
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: was the most significant, two stone tablets, flat inscribed, carried
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: down from the peak of Mount Sinai. On these tablets,
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: written by the hand of God, were the Ten Commandments,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: the foundational law of the covenant between the Creator and
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: the nation he had chosen, the ethical and spiritual structure
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: of an entire civilization, pressed into stone by a force
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: no human instrument had applied. But here is the detail
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: that most retellings overlook, and it changes everything about how
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: the tablets should be understood. These were not the first tablets.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: When Moses came down from the mountain the first time,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: forty days after ascending into the presence of God, he
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: could hear the noise of the camp before he could
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: see it, and when the camp came into view, what
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: he saw stopped him cold. The people of Israel, the
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: same people who had trembled in terror when God's voice
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: thundered from the peak, had built a golden calf. They
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: were dancing before it, attributing to a statue of their
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: own making the miracles that the Living God had performed
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: on their behalf. Moses threw the tablets to the ground,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: and they shattered. The tablets that God himself had written
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: on smashed at the foot of the mountain. And then
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: God told Moses to cut two new tablets and come
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: back up. And God wrote the commandments again, not because
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: the law had changed, but because the relationship was not finished,
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: because the God, whose writing had been destroyed in an
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: act of human rage, was willing to write it a
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: second time for a people who had already proven they
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: were capable of breath taking faithlessness within weeks of receiving
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: the law, they were now breaking. The tablets inside the
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: ark were the mercy tablets the second attempt, the tablets
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: that existed because God had said, after everything, come back up,
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: I will write it again. Every time a priest entered
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: the tabernacle and drew near to the ark, the object
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: at the center of that encounter was a pair of
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: stone tablets that existed because God had been willing to
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: start over. The mercy seat above them was not decorative.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: It was a theological statement made visible in gold. The
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: second and third objects require an honest pause because the
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: ancient sources described them slightly differently, and that difference is
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: worth acknowledging rather than smoothing over. The letter to the Hebrews.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: In the New Testament, chapter nine and verse four describes
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: the Ark as containing a golden urn holding the Manner
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: and Arron's staff that had budded along with the stone tablets.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: This is the most complete description of the ark's contents
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: in the entire Biblical record, and it places all three
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: objects inside the chest. The older texts of the Hebrew
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: Bible are somewhat less precise on this point. Exodus chapter
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: sixteen describes the jar of Manner being placed before the testimony,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: meaning in the presence of or near the Ark, rather
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: than explicitly inside it. Numbers Chapter seventeen describes Aaron's staff
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: being placed before the Ark as a sign. Some scholars
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: read these as describing objects kept inside the ark. Others
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: read them as objects kept directly in front of it
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: in the most holy place. The distinction between inside and
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: immediately before may reflect different stages of the Ark's history,
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: or it may reflect the difference in perspective between two
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: kinds of writing, one historical and one theological. What is
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: not in dispute is that these objects were kept in
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: the immediate presence of the Ark in the most holy
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: place as permanent witnesses to specific moments when God had
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: acted in ways that no human explanation could account for.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: The manner was among the most extraordinary of those witnesses.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: For forty years in the Sinai Desert, a substance appeared
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: on the ground each morning, white and thin, tasting like
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: wafers made with honey, providing exactly what the people needed
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: for each day. The name they gave it manner was
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: a question in Hebrew. It means simply, what is it?
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: The question became the name of the food that sustained
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: two million people for four decades in one of the
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: most inhospitable landscapes on Earth. It did not keep when
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: the people tried to store it against tomorrow's need, it
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: spoiled by mourning. It was designed to be gathered fresh
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: each day, a daily act of dependence on a God
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: who had said he would provide, and each morning it
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: was there. The jar that entered the ark was the
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: one exception, one portion preserved beyond its natural lifespan by
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: divine instruction, sealed as a permanent record that the provision
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: had been real. Long after the generation that had gathered manner.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Each morning was gone, the jar remained a physical object
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: that said without words, he was faithful, then he is
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: faithful now. Aaron's staff carried its own testimony. Aaron was
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: the brother of Moses and the first high priest of Israel.
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: His staff, an ordinary shepherd's stick in its original form,
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: had already been used by God to perform several of
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: the plagues in Egypt. But the event that elevated it
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: to a place of permanent, sacred significance happened in the
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: desert during a rebellion led by a man named Cora.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Corah challenged the leadership of Moses and Aaron. The earth
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: opened and swallowed the rebels, but the grumbling did not
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: end with Corah's death, and so God gave a test.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: Each tribal leader brought a staff with his name written
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: on it. Twelve staffs were laid in the tabernacle over
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: night before the ark, God said the man he had
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: chosen would have his staff sprout by mourning twelve dead
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: sticks of wood. In the morning, eleven were unchanged. Aaron's
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: staff had not merely sprouted. It had budded and blossomed
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: and produced ripe almands. Over night a detached piece of
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: dead wood lying in a tent in the desert had
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: produced full fruit in a single night. The question of
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: divine appointment was answered in the language of the natural
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: world turned impossible. God told Moses to put Aaron's staff
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: back before the Ark as a sign against the rebellious,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: so that their grumbling would end. Three objects. Then the
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: tablets written twice, because God was willing to start over.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: The bread that fed a nation in a landscape where
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: nothing grew, the dead wood that bloomed when God said
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: it would, each one a record of a moment when
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: divine faithfulness had shown itself in the face of human failure.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: To Together, they formed the most extraordinary archive ever assembled,
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Not an archive of human achievement, an archive of a
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: God who stayed. This is what the Ark carried into
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: the most holy place. This is what the mercy seat covered.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: This is what the Cherubim faced wing to wing in
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: the silence of the Room of Gold. And this is
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: what would begin now to move. Chapter five, The Ark moves,
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: fire Cloud and the first journey the Tabernacle was finished
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: on the first day of the first month of the
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: second year, after Israel had left Egypt. The text of
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: Exodus records the completion with a restraint that feels almost
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: architectural in its quietness. Everything was in place, the courtyard,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: the altar, the lampstand, the table, the basin, the curtains
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: and the coverings, and the poles and the clasps, and
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: at the center of it all behind the veil, the
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant, with its mercy seat and its
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: cherubim and its three objects of sealed memory. Moses entered
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: and examined the work, and then the cloud came. It
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Lord filled the tabernacle so completely that Moses, the man
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: who had spoken with God face to face on the mountain,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: who had been inside the cloud for forty days and
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: forty nights, could not enter. The presence was too dense,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: the glory too immediate, not gradually, not partially, not as
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: a subtle warmth or a quiet spiritual impression. The cloud
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: covered it, and the glory filled it, and Moses stood
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: outside because there was no room inside for ordinary human movement.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: The presence had arrived. From that day forward, the cloud
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: became the compass of the nation. When it lifted the
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: peace broke camp and moved where it settled. They settled
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: when it remained. They remained for two years at Sinai,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: and for thirty eight years of desert wandering afterward. This
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: was the rhythm of two million lives, not the calculations
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: of generals or the seasonal patterns of nomadic migration. The
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: cloud moved, and they moved. The cloud stopped, and they stopped.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: The ark traveled at the center of this movement, but
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: not in the middle of the column, where a precious
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: object might naturally be protected. It traveled in front. The
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: Book of Numbers, chapter ten describes the order of march precisely.
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: When the cloud lifted and the trumpets sounded, the tribes
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: moved out in their assigned sequence, but before any of
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: them out ahead of the entire nation, the ark went
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: first three days journey ahead of the people, the text says,
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: to find them a resting place. The most sacred object
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: in Israel's possession was sent out into unknown territory before
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: the people who carried it, not sheltered behind walls of soldiers,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: not protected in the center of the formation, where risk
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: was lowest. It led. It went first into the desert,
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: into the unmapped, and the unknown moving ahead, so that
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: what came after would find what had already been prepared.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: And when the arks set out, Moses spoke, the words
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: are in numbers, Chapter ten, verse thirty five, and they
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: are not gentle, Rise up, Lord, may your enemies be scattered,
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: May your foes flee before you. And when it rested,
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: he said, return Lord to the countless thousands of Israel.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: These were not quiet prayers. They were declarations spoken aloud
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: at the moment of departure and the moment of arrival.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: Every single time the Ark moved, announcements that what was
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: being transported was not passive, not ceremonial, not simple, embolic
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: in any diminished sense of that word. What was moving
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: through the desert was active, was present, was capable of
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: scattering enemies the way wind scatters smoke. The Levites from
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: the clan of Kohath who carried it understood this, and
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: they carried the weight of that understanding in every step.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: Before any movement, the priests entered the most Holy Place
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: and covered the ark with the great veil that normally
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: hung between the two sections of the tabernacle, then a
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: layer of fine leather over that. Then a cloth of
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: solid blue over the leather. Only then, fully covered and
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: completely concealed, could the Cohathites approach, and even then only
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: through the poles. They slid the golden rods through the
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: golden rings, and lifted from beneath Their hands never touched
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: the chest. The text of Numbers, chapter four, verse twenty
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: states the consequence of the alternative, with a brevity that
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: would have silenced any Levite who heard it. They must
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: not go in to look at the holy things, even
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: for a moment, or they will die. Even for a moment,
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: not sustain transgression, not deliberate sin. A momentary, unguarded glance
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: at the uncovered ark could end a life. The people
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: who moved the ark through the desert did not treat
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: these instructions as religious formality. They had seen what happened
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: when the sacred was approached carelessly. They were very careful,
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: in the way that only people who have already seen
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: the consequences of carelessness can be careful. And so the
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: ark moved, lifted on its poles, covered in its layers,
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: carried through the Sennai and the Negev and the Transjordan
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: by Levites who walked with their hands on golden rods
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: and their eyes fixed forward, bearing the weight of the
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: most sacred object on Earth, through forty years of desert
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: that the faithlessness of one generation had turned into a
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: lifetime of wandering. Forty years generations were born and grew old,
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: and died in the desert. The men who had stood
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: at the foot of the mountain when it thundered, who
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: had eaten manner on the first morning it appeared, who
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: had left Egypt with gold from their Egyptian neighbors and
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: hope for a land they had never seen. Those men
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: did not reach the promised land. They died in the wilderness,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: as God had said they would. But the Ark did
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: not die. The Ark waited. It rested in the tabernacle
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: wherever the cloud had settled. It led when the column moved.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: It carried its three objects of sealed faithfulness through every
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: year of the long wandering, through every season of human
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: failure and divine patience, through forty years of a story
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: that was, always, despite its darkness, moving in one direction forward.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: By the time the wandering ended, most of the people
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: walking behind the Ark had known anything else. They had
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: been born in the desert, They had grown up following
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: the cloud. The promised land was not a memory to them,
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: but a promise, something spoken about by parents and grandparents
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: with the mixture of longing and grief that belongs to
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: people who have been given a vision of something they
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: themselves will not reach. Their children would reach it. And
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, the cloud
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: settled and held. The land was visible across the water,
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: but the Jordan, swollen with the snow melt of harvest season,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: ran fast and deep and wide, pushing against its banks
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: with the kind of current that could take a man
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: off his feet and not give him back. There were
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: no boats that could carry two million people across a flood,
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: but there was the ark, and the ark had not
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: been carried through forty years of desert to stop at
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: a river. Joshua gave the order. The priests lifted the
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: poles on to their shoulders. The column formed behind them,
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: and for the first time on the western side of
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: the journey, the ark moved out ahead of everyone else.
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: The priests walked to the edge of the water, and
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: then they kept walking. The moment the feet of the
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: priests who carried the ark touched the edge of the Jordan.
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: The water up stream stopped flowing. It piled up at
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: a town called Adam, far to the north. The water
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: downstream continued toward the salt sea until the river bed
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: between them was dry. The priests walked to the center
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: of that dry river bed and stood there holding the
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Ark on its poles, while two million people crossed over
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: on ground that minutes before had been the bottom of
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: a river in flood. Children, elderly animals, flocks, all of
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: them walking across the Jordan on dry ground, while the
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: priests stood motionless in the center, holding the poles, waiting
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: for the last person to reach the other side. When
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: when the crossing was complete, the priests walked out of
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: the river bed behind them, the water returned. Forty years
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: of wandering had ended, The promised land had been entered,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: and the first thing that had crossed the Jordan was
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: not a soldier or a commander or a tribal elder.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: It was the Ark. It had gone first, as it
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: always did. Chapter six. Power unleashed Jordan, Jericho and the
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: terror of God. The city of Jericho had been watching
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: from its walls, thick enough that houses were built into them,
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: high enough that the watchmen could see for miles across
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: the Jordan Plain. The people of Jericho had seen what
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: happened at the river. They had watched the water stop.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: They had seen two million people walk across a dry
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: river bed where a flood had been running the day before.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: They had seen the priests standing motionless in the center
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: of that dry bed, holding something on poles, something covered
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: in cloth, something that the entire procession organized itself around,
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: with a reverence that the watching soldiers on the walls
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: had no framework to explain. The text of Joshua Chapter
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: two records that the inhabitants of Canaan had already heard
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: about Israel before they arrived. Word had traveled across forty
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: years and hundreds of miles about the night the sea parted,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: about the plagues that had brought the most powerful empire
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: in the world to its knees, And when those reports
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: had reached Canaan, the text says, their hearts had melted.
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: That was forty years before the Jordan crossing. Now they
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: had watched the Jordans stop with their own eyes. Joshua
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: chapter five records that when all the kings west of
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: the Jordan heard how the Lord had dried up the
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: river before the Israelites. Their hearts melted, and they no
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: longer had the courage to face them. Jericho shut its gates.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: The city locked itself tight because of the Israelites. No
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: one went out and no one came in. The gates
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: were barred, the walls were manned. The city prepared for
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: the kind of prolonged military siege that fortified cities of
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: the ancient Near East were specifically built to survive. They
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: had walls, they had food stores, they had water, they
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: had everything a city needs to outlast an army camped
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: at its gates. They were ready for an army. They
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: were not ready for what came instead. Joshua received his
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: orders from God on the plane outside Jericho, and the
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: orders were unlike any military strategy in recorded history. No
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: zeger engines, no tunneling, no scaling ladders, no assault on
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: the gates, no conventional engagement of any kind. March around
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: the city once a day for six days, seven priests
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: carrying trumpets made from rams horns, walking before the ark,
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: armed guard ahead of the priests, rear guard behind the ark.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: Circle the city once each day and return to camp.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: Do not shout, do not say a word, let no
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: sound come from your mouths. On the seventh day, march
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: around seven times, and then the priests will sound a
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: long blast and the people will shout. For six days.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: This is what Israel did every morning, the column formed,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: the armed men, the seven priests with their rams horned trumpets,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: their low, continuous sound carrying across the plain, the ark
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: on its poles, moving at the center of everything, and
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: then the city encircled in silence, and then the return
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: to camp. Think about what those six days looked like
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: from the walls of Jericho. Day one, the entire army
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: of Israel circles your city in silence and goes back
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: to their tents without attacking. Day two, the same day,
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: three day, four day, five day, six six mornings of
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: watching this procession form and circle and dissolve. Six evenings
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: of the soldiers on the walls, looking at each other
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: and trying to determine what kind of strategy this was.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: Six nights of a city locked inside itself, unable to
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: go out, unable to come in, waiting for an attack
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: that kept almost arriving and then retreating. What they could
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: not see from the walls was what was moving at
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: the center of the procession. What they could not know
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: was that the covered object on the poles was the
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: same object that had stopped the Jordan, the same object
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: whose presence had in other times and other places done
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: things that changed the shape of the physical world. On
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: the seventh day, Joshua gave the order to march seven times,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: seven circuits of Jericho, the rams horns sounding throughout all seven,
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: and after the seventh circuit, after the priests gave one long,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: sustained blast on their trumpets, Joshua called out to the people, shout,
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: for the Lord has given you the city. The people shouted,
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: and the walls fell, not crumbling gradually from one end
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: to the other, not weakened first by the sound waves
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: of the trumpets. Over six days of circling, the walls
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: of Jericho fell, and every man charged straight in because
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: there was no longer anything between the army of Israel
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: and the city they had been circling for seven days.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: The ark had not been used as a weapon. It
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: had been present, and in its presence what should have
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: stood fell. But not every demonstration of the Ark's power
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: was about victory in battle. Some were about something harder
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: to sit with something that has troubled honest readers of
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: the Biblical text for as long as the text has existed,
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: something that forces a confrontation with the nature of holiness itself,
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: with what it demands, and with what it costs when
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: those demands are not met, even by someone whose intentions
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: were entirely good. The story of Uza. By the time
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: it occurs, the Ark has been living in a town
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: called Kiriath Jerim for twenty years, following an episode involving
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: the Philistines that we will come to in a moment.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: David has become king of Israel. He has made Jerusalem
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: his capital, and he has decided that the Ark must
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: come to the city at the center of his kingdom.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: The procession that sets out from Kiriath Jiim is joyful.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: David is celebrating with all his might. Musicians are playing
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: liars and harps and tambourines and cymbals and trumpets. The
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: entire house of Israel is moving together through the roads
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: of Judah toward Jerusalem, and the mood is one of
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: national restoration, of something sacred being brought back to its
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: rightful place. But the Ark is not on poles carried
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: by levites. It is riding on a new cart pulled
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: by Oxen. This detail matters more than it appears to
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: God had been explicit in the Book of Numbers about
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: how the ark was to be transported the levites, the
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: poles the rings, not as a suggestion, not as a
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: preferred method that could be adapted to circumstance, but as
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: a command. The poles existed precisely so that no human
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: hand would need to touch the chest itself. The cart
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: was not the commanded method. It was faster and more
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: practical than having men carry the ark on their shoulders
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: for the entire journey from Kyriathgirrim to Jerusalem. It made
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: organizational sense. It may have borrowed from the method the
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: Philistines had used when they returned the ark years earlier.
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: It was not what God had said. When the procession
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: reached the threshing floor of Nakon, the Oxen stumbled, the
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: ark lurched on the cart. A man named Uza, walking
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: beside it, each doubt and took hold of the ark
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: to steady it. His intention, by any reasonable human standard,
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: was protective. The ark was about to fall. He prevented
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: it from falling. What he did would have appeared to
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: every observer in that moment as a reflexive act of care.
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: The text says that God's anger burned against Uza because
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: of his irreverent act, and God struck him down, and
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: he died there beside the ark. This passage has disturbed
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: sincere and thoughtful people for as long as it has
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: been read. It disturbs careful people to day. A man
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: reaches out to protect the ark from falling and dies
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: for it. What kind of God does that? The text
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: does not call Uzah wicked. It does not describe hidden sin.
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: What it describes is something about the nature of holiness
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: that resists reduction to human categories of fairness. The ark
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: was not a religious object that could be a probe
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: on the basis of good intentions. The method God had
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: prescribed for its transport was not ceremonial decoration. It was
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: a living boundary between what the ark was and what
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: human beings are in their ordinary condition. Crossing that boundary
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: carried consequences. That the boundary existed precisely to prevent A
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: high voltage electrical line does not adjust its danger based
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: on the intentions of the person who touches it. The
• 51:28
  Speaker 1: ark was not electricity, but the principle the text is
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: pressing toward is similar in structure. The holiness of God
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: is not negotiated by human motivation. It is what it is,
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: and the prescribed method for approaching it was not a
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: religious formality. It was protection for the human being as
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: much as for anything else. David was devastated, and then
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: he was afraid. The text says he was afraid of
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: the Lord that day, and he asked, how can the
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: ark of the Lord ever come to me? Rather than
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: continuing to Jerusalem, he had the ark taken to the
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: house of a man named obed Edom, where it remained
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: for three months. During those three months, the Lord blessed
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: the household of obed Edom and everything he had. The
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: same presence that could kill could also overflow into abundance
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: for those who received it with reverence. The same fire
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: that burned Uza warmed the house of obed Edom. When
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: David heard about the blessing on obed Edom's household, he
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: went back for the ark. This time, the Levites carried
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: it on their shoulders. This time, the poles were used.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: This time, David stopped every six steps and offered sacrifices.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: This time, the prescribed method was followed with a care
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: that had not been present on the first attempt, and
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: this time the Ark reached Jerusalem without incident, with David
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: dancing before it in the streets with all his might,
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: his joy uncontained and entirely unperform. But before the Ark
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: arrives in Jerusalem, in our telling, we need to go
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: back to the episode that explains how it ended up
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: in Kyriath Jerim at all, Back to the darkest chapter
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: in the Ark's early history, Back to the moment when
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: Israel made a decision that revealed a profound misunderstanding of
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: what the Ark actually was. The Philistines were the dominant
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: military power along the coastal plain of Canaan, technologically sophisticated,
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: politically organized, and militarily formidable in ways that the tribal
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: Confederation of Israel struggled to match. During the period of
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: the Judges, the two peoples existed in chronic conflict along
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: a contested border. After a devastating Israelite defeat at a
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: place called Affhek, in which four thousand soldiers died, the
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: elders of Israel made a decision. They sent to Shiloh,
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: where the tabernacle was located, and brought the Ark of
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: the Covenant to the battlefield. Their reasoning was not unreasonable.
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: On its surface. The Ark represented the presence of God.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: If God was with them, they could not be defeated.
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: If they brought the visible sign of God's presence to
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: the battlefield, surely the outcome would change. When the Ark
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: arrived in the Israelite camp, all Israel raised such a
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: great shout that the earth shook. The Philistines heard it
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: across the plain and were afraid. They knew the stories.
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: They said to each other, a God has come into
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: the camp. They recognized that what they were facing had
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: dimensions that no military calculation could account for. They said,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: who will deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods?
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: And then they fought anyway. Israel was defeated. Thirty thousand
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: soldiers died, The two sons of Eli, who had escorted
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: the Ark to the battlefield were killed, and the Ark
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines. The Ark
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: had not protec died Israel because Israel had not been
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: directed to bring the Ark into battle. They had brought
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: it on their own initiative, as though it were a talisman,
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: a lucky object, a device that could be deployed to
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: guarantee divine favor, regardless of the condition of the relationship
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: between the people and the god the Ark represented. The
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: Ark was not a guarantee. It was a presence, and
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: presents cannot be commandeered. The Philistines brought the Ark to
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: the city of Ashdod and placed it in the temple
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: of their god, Dagon, beside the statue as a trophy,
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: demonstrating that Dagon had defeated the god of Israel. The
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: next morning, the priests of Dagon found the statue lying
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: face down on the ground before the Ark. They set
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: it back up. The morning after that, the statue was
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: faced down again. This time the head and both hands
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: had broken off and lay in the doorway. Only the
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: body remained upright. And then the people of Ashdod began
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: to die of a devas eighting plague, tumors, afflictions, death,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: moving through the population with a speed that the Philistines
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: had never encountered. They moved the Ark to Gath. The
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: same plague arrived, they moved it to Ekron. The people
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: of Ekron protested when the ark arrived, saying they had
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: brought it to kill them and their people. Seven months
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: the ark was in Philistine territory, seven months of statues
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: falling on their faces, and plague moving from city to city,
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: and the Philistine priests and diviners consulting urgently about what
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: to do. Their conclusion was clear, send it back. Send
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: it back with gold, five gold tumors and five gold rats,
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: one for each of the five Philistine rulers, and for
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: the plague that had consumed their cities. They built a
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: new cart, placed the ark on it with the gold offerings,
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: hitched two milk cows that had never been yoked, shut
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: their calves away so the cows would have every natural
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: reason to turn back, and pointed the cart toward Israel.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: The cows went straight toward Israelite territory, lowing as they walked,
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: turning neither to the right nor to the left. They
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: stopped in a field at beth Chemesh, and the people rejoiced.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: And then some of the people of beth Chemesh looked
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: inside the ark. The text records that seventy of them
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: died because of it. The same boundary, the same consequence,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: not enemies, not conquerors Israelites, people who had just watched
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: the Ark return from captivity, and who in the joy
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: of the moment, forgot that proximity to the sacred was
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: not the same as permission to approach it, however they wished.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: The people of Beth Schemesh sent the Ark to Kyrieth Jerim,
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: and there it stayed for twenty years in the house
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: of a man named Abinadab, tended by his son, until
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: a young king named David decided that the city he
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: had built deserved the presence that had been at the
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: center of Israel's story from the beginning, and brought it home.
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven, Jerusalem, the Ark finds its home. Jerusalem in
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: the time of David was not the city that history
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: would remember. It was not yet the city of the
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: Great Temple, with its courtyards of polished stone, and its
• 58:21
  Speaker 1: cedar walls, and its gold that caught the morning sun
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: and could be seen from the surrounding hills. It was
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: not yet the destination of pilgrims who would travel weeks
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: to reach it, singing the songs of Ascent as they
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: climbed the final approaches, their hearts lifting with each step
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: toward the hill. Where the presence of God rested. It
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: was when David captured it from the Jebucytes, a hilltop
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: fortress strategically brilliant, nearly impregnable by the military standards of
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: its time, but modest by the standards of the great
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: cities of the ancient Near East. David chose it as
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: his capital, precisely became as it belonged to no single
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: Israelite tribe. It was neutral ground, a city he had
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: taken himself that he could make the center of a
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: unified kingdom without appearing to favor one people over another.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: He called it the city of David, and then, after
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: the failed first attempt and the three months of blessing
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: on the household of obed Edom, he brought the Ark there.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: The second procession was different from the first in every
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: way that mattered. The Levites carried it, the poles were used,
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: and David stopped every six steps and offered sacrifices, a
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: rhythm so deliberate and so unhurried that the journey from
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: Kyriathjirrim to Jerusalem must have taken a very long time.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: But David was not in a hurry. He had already
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: learned what happened when the prescribed method was treated as optional.
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: This time, each step was honored, each moment of movement
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: was acknowledged with an offering, and David danced. The text
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: of Second Samuel, chapter six describes it without restraint. David
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: was wearing a linen ephod, a simple priestly garment, rather
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: than his royal robes. He was dancing before the Lord
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: with all his might, not the controlled, dignified movement of
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: a king in a formal procession, something more abandoned than that,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: something that his wife, Michal, watching from a window above
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: the street, found embarrassing enough to provoke her contempt. She
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: said to him afterward, how the King of Israel has
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: distinguished himself to day, going around half naked in full
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: view of the slave girls of his servants, as any
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: vulgar fellow would. And David's response reveals something essential about
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: who he was and what the Ark meant to him.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: He said, it was before the Lord who chose me,
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: rather than your father or any one from his house,
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: when he appointed me ruler over the Lord's people Israel.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: I will sell before the Lord. I will become even
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: more undignified than this. What Michal saw as humiliation. David
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: understood as the only appropriate response to the presence of
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: the God who had made him king. The Ark was
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: placed inside a tent that David had prepared for it
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: in the city of David, not the original tabernacle, which
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: still stood at Gibeon, but a new structure, a dedicated
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: space in the heart of his capital. While David turned
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: his attention toward what he believed would be the next
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: chapter of the Ark's story, he called the prophet Nathan.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: He said, look at this, I am living in a
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: house of cedar, while the Ark of God remains in
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: a tent. He did not frame it as a proposal.
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: He framed it as an observation that implied its own conclusion.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: He had built himself a palace of cedar, the finest
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: building material available in the ancient world, brought down at
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: great expense from the forests of Lebanon, and the Ark,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: the dwelling place of God was in canvas, the same
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: kind of portable structure it had occupied in the Sinai Desert.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: While the king lived in cedar, God lived in a tent.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: Nathan told him to proceed. The Lord is with you.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: That night God spoke to Nathan in a dream. The
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: response that came was unexpected. God said, are you the
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: one to build me a house to dwell in? I
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: have not dwelt in a house. From the day I
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: brought the Israelites out of Egypt to this day. I
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: have been moving from place to place with a tent
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: did I ever say to any of their rulers, whom
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: I commanded to shepherd my people, why have you not
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: built me a house? Of cedar? Read that slowly, the
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: God who had given precise architectural instructions for the ark,
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: who had specified every cubit and every ring and every pole,
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: was now asking whether he had ever requested a permanent house,
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: not with anger, not with accusation, with a question that
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: contained inside it an entire theology of divine presence. I
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: have been moving. I have been in a tent. I
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: have been portable present in the desert and at the river,
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 1: and on the battlefield, and in every place where my
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: people have needed me to be. Did I ask for stone?
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: The implication was not that a temple would be wrong.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: God immediately told Nathan that David's son would build it,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: that the permanent house David envisioned would be constructed only
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: not by David's hands. But the question God asked first
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: is a window into something about the nature of the
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: divine presence that permanent architecture, for all its beauty and
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: its theology, can obscure. God is not domesticated by buildings.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: The tent was not an embarrassment awaiting correction. It was
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: a statement about a God who moves with his people,
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: who cannot be permanently fixed to any coordinates that human
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: construction has established, no matter how magnificent. God then told
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: Nathan why David specifically could not be the builder. David
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: was a man of war, he had shed much blood.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: The temple would be built by his son, a man
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: of peace. The very name that would be given to
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: that son, Solomon, carries inside it the Hebrew word for peace, shalom.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: David accepted this, and then he spent the remaining years
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: of his life preparing for what he could not do himself.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: He gathered cedar and stone, and iron and bronze in
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: quantities the text of First Chronicles describes as almost incalculable.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: He organized the levites and the priests into their divisions.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: He drew up the plans, plans he said the Lord
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: had given him for every room and every courtyard, and
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: every piece of furniture, including the final resting place of
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: the ark. He gave everything to Solomon. Then David died.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: Solomon inherited a kingdom at peace and a father's unfinished
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: vision and a set of architectural plans drawn by divine instruction.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: He had the materials, the work force, the political stability,
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: and the mandate. He began to build. The temple Solomon,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: constructed on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, took seven years to complete.
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: Its dimensions were modest by the standards of the great
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: temples of Egypt and Mesopotamia, approximately ninety feet long, thirty
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: feet wide forty five feet high, but its beauty was
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: not about scale. The interior was lined entirely with cedar
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: carved with gourds and open flowers in relief that covered
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: every surface. The cedar was overlaid with pure gold. The
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: floor was covered with gold. The olive wood doors were
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: carved with cherubim and palm trees and open flowers and
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: covered with gold. There was not a single stone visible anywhere.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: Inside the completed temple, every surface was either cedar or gold,
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: and at the end of the building, behind the final curtain,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: was the room that the entire structure existed to protect
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: and honor, the Most Holy Place, a perfect cube thirty
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: feet in each direction, walls of gold, floor of gold,
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: and inside it two great cherubim carved from olive wood,
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: each fifteen feet tall, their wings spanning the entire width
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: of the room, from wall to wall tip to golden tip.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: Beneath those outstretched wings, in the absolute darkness of the
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: innermost room of the most magnificent building Israel had ever constructed,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: was where the ark would rest. When the temple was finished,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: Solomon assembled the elders of Israel in Jerusalem. The priests
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: lifted the ark from the tent David had pitched for it,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: still on its poles, still carried by levites on their shoulders,
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: still transper bought it exactly as God had commanded on
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: the mountain. They brought it into the most Holy Place
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: and set it beneath the wings of the great olive
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: wood cherubim. The poles extended outward, and their ends could
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: be seen from the Holy Place in front of the
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: inner sanctuary. The text notes this as a detail worth preserving,
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 1: as though the visible ends of the carrying poles were
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: a reminder even in the permanent temple, that this object
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: had been carried, had traveled, had led a nation through
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: a desert and across a river, and into a land
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: it had never seen. The priests withdrew from the Holy Place,
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: and the cloud filled the temple, the same cloud, the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: same presence, the cloud that had filled the Tabernacle at
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: its completion in the desert, that had led the column
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: through forty years of wilderness, that had descended on the
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: tent of meeting when Moses entered to speak with God.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: The cloud filled Solomon's temple with such completeness that the
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: priests could not perform their service, could not enter, could
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: not stand in it. The glory of the Lord filled
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: the house. Solomon stood before the gathered congregation of Israel
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: and spread his hands toward Heaven. He prayed. The prayer
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: he prayed at the dedication of the temple is one
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: of the most remarkable documents in the entire Biblical record,
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: and what makes it remarkable is its honesty. Solomon had
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: just spent seven years building the most magnificent religious structure
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: his civilization had ever produced. He was standing at its dedication,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: with the cloud of divine glory so thick inside it
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 1: that his own priests could not enter. And what he
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: said before anything else was this, but will God really
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: contain you. How much less this temple I have built?
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: Will God really dwell on earth? The man who built
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: the temple asked, at the moment of its dedication, where
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: whether God could fit inside it? Not as false modesty
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: as the honest theological recognition that the temple, for all
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: its cedar and gold and carved cherubim, was an accommodation
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: to human need, not a solution to divine limitation. That
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: God did not need the building. Israel needed a place
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: to face, a direction to orient their prayers, a location
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: where the covenant between God and his people could be
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: made visible in stone and wood and gold. The ark,
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: in the most holy place, beneath the wings of the
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: great Cherubim, in the darkness behind the vale, was the
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: heart of all of that. It had come from a
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: mountain in the Sinai Desert. It had traveled through forty
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: years of wilderness. It had stood in a dry river
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: bed while two million people crossed over around it. It
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: had circled a city until the walls fell. It had
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: survived captivity in Pelistia and brought devastation on every city
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: that tried to keep it. It had waited in Kyriath
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: Jerim for twenty years until a king came dancing through
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: the streets to bring it home. And now it rested
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: in a room of gold, in a city at peace,
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: in a kingdom, at the height of its glory, beneath
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: the wings of Cheribim that spanned the width of the room,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: in a silence so complete that the world outside could
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: not reach it. For one extraordinary moment, everything was in
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: its right place. The presence was in the city, the
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: king was faithful, the temple was finished, the law was
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: in the ark. The ark was in the most holy place.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: And the glory that had once been too dense for
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: Moses to enter the desert tabernacle had filled a room
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: of cedar and gold and rested between the wings of
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: Cherubim that a craftsman had carved in the olive wood
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: of the hills of Judah, the closest the ancient world, ever,
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: came to what the prophets called shalam, not merely the
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: absence of conflict, the presents of everything oriented correctly toward
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: its source. David had danced in the streets. Solomon had asked,
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: with honest humility, whether the God of the universe could
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: fit inside the house he had built. The cloud had
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: answered by filling the room until no human being could
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: stand in it for one moment, before the fractures began,
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: Before the kingdom divided and the idols returned, and the
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: prophets started speaking in minor keys, and the people stopped listening.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: The ark was home, and the long, patient, terrible darkness
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: that was coming took its time, but it was already
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: on its way. Chapter eight, The Long Silence from Solomon
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: to five hundred and eighty six before Christ. There is
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: a particular kind of silence that falls over great things
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: when they begin to be forgotten. Not the silence of
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: the desert, which is alive with wind and the distant
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: sound of things moving in the dark. Not the silence
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: of the most holy place, which was dense with presence,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: thick with meaning, The silence of a room where something
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: enormous was resting, and knew it was resting. This is
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: a different silence, the silence of neglect, the silence that
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: accumulates when people who should be paying attention begin to
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: look elsewhere, when the extraordinary becomes familiar, when the sacred
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: becomes furniture. After Solomon, the Ark almost disappears from the
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: biblical record. For nearly four hundred years, the most significant
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: object in the history of Israel is mentioned almost not
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: at all. It sits in its room of gold, behind
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: its veil of finest linen, and the centuries pass over
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: it like weather. The river continues to flow, the sun
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: continues to rise, and somewhere behind the curtain, in the
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: most holy place, the chest of acacia and gold, and
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: the three objects of sealed memory rest in darkness that
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: no one is disturbing. This silence is itself a kind
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: of evidence, evidence about what was happening to the people
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: the ark had been built to serve, and to the
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: relationship between those people and the God whose presence the
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: ark represented. The decline began within Solomon's own lifetime. Solomon,
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: who had prayed with such theological clarity at the temple's dedication,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: who had asked whether God could fit inside the house
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: he had built. Who had stood in the smoke of
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 1: the divine glory and spread his hands toward heaven did
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: not finish well. The Book of First Kings records that
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: as Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: other gods. He built high places for Kemosh, the god
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: of Moab. He built high places for Molek, the god
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: of the Ammonites. He followed Ashtarith, the goddess of the Sidonians.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: The man who had stood in the cloud of divine
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: glory at the temple's dedication, was burning incense to gods
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: of stone and wood before his life was finished. The
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: kingdom split after Solomon's death. Ten tribes went north under Jeroboam,
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: forming the Kingdom of Israel. Two tribes remained in the south,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: forming the Kingdom of Judah with Jerusalem and the Temple.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: The Ark stayed in Jerusalem, but the unified kingdom, at
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: the height of its power, was gone within a generation
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: of its greatest glory. Jeroboam, fearing that if his people
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: kept traveling to Jerusalem to worship, their hearts would return
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: to the House of David, established his own religious centers.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: Two golden calves placed at Bethel and at Dan, the
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: same idolatry that had provoked Moses to smash the first
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: tablets of the Law, performed again by a king whose
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: political instincts overrode whatever faith he may once have had.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: The golden calves again in the south. The kings who
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: followed Solomon ranged from the genuinely faithful to them catastrophically wicked,
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: with most of them falling somewhere in the complicated middle
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: that most human lives actually occupy. The ark remained in
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: the temple, but the life the temple was meant to house,
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: the living relationship between a covenant God and a covenant
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: people grew strained and intermittent, and under certain kings almost unrecognizable.
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: The worst of those kings was Manasse. He came to
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: the throne of Judah when he was twelve years old
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: and reigned for fifty five years, the longest reign of
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: any king in Judah's history, and in those fifty five years,
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: by the accounting of the biblical record, he did more
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: damage to the covenant relationship between Israel and God than
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: almost any other figure. He rebuilt the high places his
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: father Hezekiah had torn down. He erected altars to bal
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: He made an ashera pole. He bowed down to all
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: the starry hosts and worshiped them. He built altars to
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: foreign godds in both courts of the temple. He sacrificed
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: his own son in the fire. He practiced divination, and
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: sought omens, and consulted mediums and spiritists. And then the
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: text records something that, in its brevity, is more disturbing
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: than everything that came before it. He took the carved
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: asher a pole he had made and put it in
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: the temple. An idol, a carved pole dedicated to a
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: Canaanite fertility goddess, placed inside the building that housed the
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant, the building that Solomon had asked
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: at its dedication whether God could fit inside the building
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: whose inner room the cloud of divine glory had filled
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: so completely that the priests could not stand in it.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: Manassa brought a carved idol into it. We do not
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: know precisely where he placed it, whether in the outer
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: courts or the inner sanctuary, or in proximity to the
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: veil itself, but the act of bringing any idol into
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: the temple of the Lord was a violation so complete
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: that the prophets of that generation spoke of it as
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: something that could not simply be undone by the next
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: reforming king, no matter how sincere and there was a
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: reforming king. His name was Josiah. Josiah came to the
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: throne at eight years old after the assassination of his
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: father Amon. By the time he was twenty six, he
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: had begun a thorough reformation of religious life in Judah.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: He ordered the temple repaired. Workers were sent in to
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: clear out what had accumulated through decades of neglect and desecration.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: During the repairs, a book was found. The high priest
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: Hilkiah found the Book of the Law in the temple.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: Most scholars believe it was some form of Deuteronomy, either
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: the complete text or a substantial portion. It was brought
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: to Josiah and read to him. When Josiah heard the
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: words of the Law, he tore his robes because he
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: understood immediately that his nation had not been living according
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: to what he had just heard, that the requirements of
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: the Covenant, whose tablets rested inside the ark behind the
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: curtain at the end of the hall, had not been followed,
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: Perhaps for generations. Perhaps the scroll had not even been
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: read by the people who were supposed to be living
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: by it. Josiah launched the most thorough religious reformation in
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: Judah's history. He burned the ashera pole, he demolished the
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: high places, He desecrated the altar at Bethel. He reinstituted
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: the passover, which the text says had not been observed
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: since the days of the Judges. And then there is
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: a passage in Second Chronicles, chapter thirty five that rewards
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: careful reading. Josiah said to the Levites, who instructed all Israel,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: put the sacred ark in the temple that Solomon's son
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: of David, king of Israel, built. It is not to
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: be carried about on your shoulders. Put the sacred ark
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: in the temple. Why did Josiah need to say this?
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: If the ark had remained up disturbed in the most
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: holy place since the day Solomon's priests had carried it there,
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: if it had sat behind its veil for four hundred
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: years without being moved, why would a reforming king need
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: to instruct the Levites to put it back in the temple.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: The implication that scholars and rabbinic commentators have discussed for
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: centuries is significant. It suggests the Ark had been moved,
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: removed from the most holy place at some point, perhaps
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: during Manasse's reign, perhaps during an earlier period of religious crisis,
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: possibly relocated to protect it from the desecrations being brought
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: into the temple courts, possibly hidden by priests who understood
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: what was about to happen and could not bear to
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: see the most sacred object in Israel's possession exposed to it.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: Josiah's instruction to put it back suggests it was not
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: already there when he began his reformation. This single verse
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: opens a question that has never been fully closed. If
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: the Ark had already been moved before the Babylonian destruction,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: then its absence from the Babylonian inventory begins to look
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: less like a sudden catastrophe and more like the conclusion
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: of a process that had begun decades earlier, less like
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: a theft, and more like a concealment that had already
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: happened before the enemy arrived. The prophet Jeremiah was active
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: during Josiah's reign and for decades afterward, through the final
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: years of the Kingdom of Judah. His book is saturated
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: with grief, with the sustained anguish of a man who
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: saw what was coming and could not stop it, and
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: could not make himself stop saying so. In chapter three
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: of his book, in a passage that remains one of
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: the most counterintuitive things ever written about the Ark of
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: the Covenant, Jeremiah records a prophecy that deserves to be
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: read with full attention. In those days when your numbers
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: have increased greatly in the land, people will no longer
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. It
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: will never enter their mindindes or be remembered or missed,
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: nor will another one be made. Read that again, the
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant, the object Israel had organized its
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: entire religious life around for centuries, the object in whose
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: presence rivers had stopped and walls had fallen, The object
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: that represented the dwelling place of God among his people,
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: the most sacred physical object in the history of the
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: Hebrew faith, will not be remembered, will not be missed,
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: will not need to be replaced. Jeremiah is not prophesying loss.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: He is not saying the Ark will be taken and mourned.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: He is saying that in the age he sees coming,
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: the Ark will become unnecessary, not because God's presence has withdrawn,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: but because the nature of the relationship between God and
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: his people will have changed so fundamentally that the physical
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: object which housed and represented that relationship will no longer
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: be needed to do what it was made to do
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: in those days. He continues, Jerusalem itself will be called
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: the throne of the Lord. All nations will gather in
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem to honor the name of the Lord. Jeremiah was
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: writing this in the decades before the fall of Jerusalem,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: watching the Kingdom of Judah stumble toward its end, with
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: the slow, terrible certainty of a man who has seen
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: what is coming. And he was telling the people that
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: the Ark, the anchor of their religious identity for five
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: hundred years, was going to pass from the center of
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: their story, not because it had failed, because it had
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: pointed towards something that would not need it any more.
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: The end came in five hundred and eighty six years
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: before Christ nebucud Neza, king of Babylon, had besieged Jerusalem,
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: before he had taken Daniel and other Judean nobles to Babylon.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: Years earlier, he had placed a puppet king on Judah's throne.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: When that king rebelled, nebucud Neza returned. The lasted approximately
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: eighteen months. The food in the city failed, the walls
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: were breached. King Zedekiah tried to flee through a gap
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: in the walls at night and was captured on the
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: plains of Jericho. His sons were killed before his eyes.
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: Then his eyes were put out, so that the last
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: thing he ever saw was the death of his children.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: He was taken to Babylon in bronze shackles. Jerusalem was burned.
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: The temple that Solomon had built, the House of cedar
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: and Gold that had taken seven years to complete, The
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: building that the cloud of divine glory had filled at
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: its dedication, was set on fire by Nebuchadnez's commander and
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: burned to the ground. The articles from the temple were
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: inventoried and removed to Babylon. The Book of Second Kings,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: chapter twenty five records them with the careful specificity of
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: a military accountant. The bronze pillars, the bronze sea, the
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: movable stands, the pots and the shovels, and the wick trimmers,
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 1: and the sprinkling bowls, and the dishes, the silver and
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: the gold, item after item catalogued and carried away. The
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant is not in the list, not
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: one mention, not a single reference to its capture, its destruction,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: its removal, or its fate. In the most detailed accounting
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: of the temple's plundering that the Biblical record contains, the
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: single most important object in the entire temple is absent
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: from the inventory of what Babylon took. This absence is
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: not a small thing. Nebucadnezza was not modest about his conquests.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: Babylonian royal records from his reign are detailed in their
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: accounting of what was taken from defeated peoples. The gods
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: and sacred objects of conquered nations were displayed in Babylon
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: as trophies, demonstrating that Babylon's gods had proven superior to
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: capture the sake tred object of a defeated people was
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: the ultimate symbolic victory. Nebucadnezza had every reason to list
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: the ark prominently if he had it. He does not
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: mention it because the evidence strongly suggests he did not
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: have it. Where was it the ark that had been
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: carried through forty years of desert, that had stopped the
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: Jordan and brought down Jericho, and survived captivity in Pelistia,
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: and traveled to Jerusalem on the shoulders of dancing levites
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: while a king abandoned his royal dignity in the street.
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: Was gone before Babylon arrived, or during the chaos of
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: the final siege, or by the hands of someone who
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: understood what was coming and acted before it arrived. Gone
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: from history and into the silence of that disappearance. Across
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: twenty six centuries of searching, three theories have stepped forward,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: each one grounded in something real, each one pointing in
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: a different direction. None of them resolved Chapter nine, The
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: Three Great Theories. The silence left by the Ark's disappearance
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: has never been comfortable. Human beings do not rest easily
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: with the absence of things that matter at the deepest level,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: and the arc matters has always mattered in a way
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: that goes beyond archaeological curiosity or historical interest. It represents
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: something that people across cultures and centuries have recognized instinctively,
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: even without being able to name it precisely. The possibility
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: that the gap between the divine and the human can
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: be bridged, that the God who made everything might choose
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: to be present in a specific place at a specific
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: time in a way that a human being could walk
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: toward the loss of that object, or its concealment, or
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: its transition to a place beyond ordinary human access has
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: generated some of the most sustained and serious investigation in
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: the history of both religious scholarship and archaeologic logical exploration.
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: Three theories have emerged as the most substantial. Each is
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: grounded in actual historical documents and actual chains of reasoning
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: that serious people have found compelling enough to follow for decades.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: Each deserves to be heard honestly, with its evidence and
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: its limitations both held in view. We begin in Africa.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: The first theory takes us south, deep south, across the
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: Sinai and into the highlands of East Africa, to a
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: country whose national identity is inseparable from a claim so
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: ancient and so specific that it has shaped its culture,
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: its art, its religious practice, and its political history for
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: more than two thousand years. Ethiopia says it has the
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: ark not as a legend that has softened and blurred
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: over time in the way that legends do. As a definite,
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: present tense geographical claim. The Ark of the Covenant is
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: in Ethiopia. It is in the city of Aksum, in
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: the northern province of Tigrai, in a treasury building adjacent
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: to the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. It
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: has been there, according to this tradition, for a very
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: long time. It is guarded by a single monk chosen
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: for life, who alone among all living human beings, is
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: permitted to see it. The story that explains how it
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: came to be there is contained in a document called
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: the Kebra Nagast, meaning the Glory of Kings. It is
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: one of Ethiopia's most sacred national texts. In its current
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: written form, it dates to approximately the fourteenth century of
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: the Common Era, though its authors claimed it drew on
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: traditions far more ancient than the writing itself. As with
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: all such documents, the gap between the claimed events and
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: the surviving text is something that historians take seriously, and
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: we should note that clearly. The story begins with the
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: Queen of Sheba. Her visit to Solomon is recorded briefly
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: in First Kings, Chapter ten. She came to Jerusalem to
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: test his wisdom with hard questions. She was overwhelmed by
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: what she found. She gave Solomon gifts of extraordinary value,
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: and the text says Solomon gave her everything she desired
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: and asked for. She returned to her own country. The
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: Hebrew text says nothing more. The Kebra Nargust says considerably more.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: According to the Ethiopian tradition, the Queen of Sheba, whose
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: Ethiopian name is Makkada, returned home carrying Solomon's child. She
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: gave birth to a son she named Menelik. When Menelik
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: came of age, he traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father.
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: Solomon received him with great joy, But Menelich chose to
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: return to Ethiopia rather than remain in Jerusalem, and according
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: to the Kebra Nargust, before he left, the ark came
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: with him. The text frames this not as a simple theft,
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: but as something closer to a divinely permitted transition, the
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: ark going willingly by God's direction to the nation that
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: would keep it safe through the long centuries when Israel
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: would lose its land and its temple and its covenant fidelity.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: Whether that framing reflects historical reality or theological interpretation shaped
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: centuries after the event. We cannot verify independently. This is
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: church tradition and religious narrative, not corroborated historical record, and
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: it deserves to be understood as such. What is historically
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: verifiable is that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has maintained this
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: claim with complete confidence for many centuries, that the religious
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: culture of Ethiopia shows remarkable parallels to pre exilic Israelite
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: practice in ways that suggest real historical connection at some point,
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: and that the tabot, a replica of the ark that
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: every ethiopia An Orthodox Church possesses and processes with great reverence,
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: reflects a tradition of arc centered worship that has no
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: obvious parallel in other Christian traditions. The writer Graham Hancock
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: investigated the Ethiopian claim extensively in the late nineteen eighties
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: and published his findings in a book titled The Sign
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: and the Seal. Hancock approached the question as a journalist
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: rather than as a believer. His conclusion was that the
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: Ethiopian claim deserved to be taken more seriously than Western
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: scholarship had generally been willing to take it. He found
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: the historical and cultural evidence suggestive enough to consider the
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: claim plausible, while stopping well short of certainty. The limitation
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: of the Ethiopian claim is fundamental and cannot be set aside.
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: The Guardian Monk cannot be visited, interviewed, or asked to
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: allow any form of external examination of what he protects.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: One person alive who could, in theory, provide direct evidence
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: is inaccessible by design, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: made clear that this will not change the claim. However,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: sincerely held, however deeply embedded in a culture and a
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: faith that have maintained it for centuries, rests on the
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: testimony of an institution, rather than on any evidence that
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: independent observers have been permitted to examine. Ethiopia believes. Ethiopia
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: has always believed. What the Guardian Monk tends in that
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: treasury in Axum may or may not be the original
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: Ark of the Covenant. No external source can currently confirm
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: or deny it. That is the honest position, and it
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: should be held honestly. The second theory keeps us in Jerusalem,
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: it keeps us underground. The tradition that the ark never
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: left Jerusalem, that it was hidden beneath the city before
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 1: Babylon arrived, and remains there still is not modern speculation.
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: It is rooted in some of the most respected texts
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: of Jewish religious law and scholarship, maintained by serious authorities
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: within the Jewish tradition for more than two thousand years.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: The Talmud, the great compilation of rabbinic discussion and legal
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: reasoning that forms the foundation of Jewish religious practice, contains
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: within the Tractate Yoma, a tradition associated with the school
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: of Rabbi Eliezer. The tradition holds that Josiah, the Reforming King,
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: hid the Ark before the Babylonian destruction. He placed it
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: in a chamber prepared for it within the structure of
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: the Temple itself, a concealed space beneath the temple complex,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: where it has remained ever since. The reasoning is internally consistent.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: Josiah had received prophetic warning through the Prophetess Hulda that
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: disaster was coming upon Jerusalem and Judah. He could not
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: stop the kat catastrophe, but he could ensure that the
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: most sacred object of the Covenant was not caught in it.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: He could remove it from the path of what was
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: coming before it arrived. This reading also provides a natural
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: explanation for the verse in Second Chronicles that we examined
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: in the previous chapter, where Josiah instructed the Levites to
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: put the ark back in the temple. If Josiah later
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: moved the ark into a hidden chamber as part of
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: his preparations for the coming siege, the sequence of events
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: makes historical and theological sense. Moses Mimonodes, the great medieval
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: Jewish philosopher and legal authority whose rulings remain foundational to
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: Jewish practice to day, confirmed this tradition as received wisdom.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: He wrote that Solomon, when he built the temple, anticipated
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: that it would one day be destroyed, and therefore constructed
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: a place to hide the ark in the deep passages
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: beneath the Temple mount. It was in these passages that
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: Yossiah hid the Ark, along with other sacred objects, before
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: the Babylonian army arrived. This is not a fringe tradition.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: My Monodis is not a marginal figure. His confirmation that
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: the ark was hidden in tunnels beneath what is now
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: called the Temple Mount carries the weight of the Jewish
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: scholarly tradition behind it. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: thirty five acre platform on which Solomon's Temple and later
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: the Second Temple stood, sits on top of a bed
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: rock of limestone that has been carved and tunneled and
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: chambered over thousands of years of human activity. Systems, drainage channels,
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: passages of various periods, some documented, some known to exist
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: but never formally explored. Israeli law does not permit archaeological
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: excavation beneath the Temple Mount, and the reasons for this
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: are grounded entirely in political and religious sensitivity, rather than
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: any desire to conceal what might be there. The site
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: is home to two of Islam's holiest structures, the Dome
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: of the Rock and Alaxa Mosque, and any excavations significant
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: enough to locate a hidden chamber would require physical intervention
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: in bedrock that three of the world's major religions regard
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: as among the most sacred ground on earth. The political
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: and religious complexity of this reality makes systematic investigation extraordinarily difficult,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: perhaps impossible under current circumstances. This is why the question
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: of whether the ark rests beneath the Temple Mount cannot
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: currently be answered by archaeology, not because the will to
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: know is absent, not because the technology for detecting underground
• 1:36:46
  Speaker 1: chambers does not exist, but because the ground in question
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: sits at the intersection of religious claims and political realities
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: that make the necessary investigation practically impossible to undertake. The
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: tunnel beneath the Temple Mount, if it exists and contains
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: what the Rabbinic tradition says it contains, has not been
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: found because it has not been seriously looked for with
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 1: modern methods, and it has not been seriously looked for
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: because the ground above it cannot be disturbed. The ark
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: may be resting forty feet beneath the people who walk
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: across the Temple Mount every day in a chamber sealed
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: for twenty six centuries, waiting for circumstances that do not
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: yet exist, or it may not be there at all.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: The honest position holds both possibilities without forcing a resolution
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: that the evidence does not currently support. The third theory
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: takes us east of Jerusalem, across the Jordan Valley, to
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: a mountain that carries an extraordinary weight of memory in
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: the Biblical story, Mount Nebo. This is the mountain where
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: Moses stood at the very end of his life, and
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: looked across the Jordan at the land he had spent
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: forty years trying to reach. God had told him he
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: would not enter. He had struck the rock at Mehrabah
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: when he had been told to speak to it, And
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: for that act, despite the burning bush and the mountain,
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: and forty days in the cloud, and his face shining
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: with reflected light, he would see the land but not
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: set foot in it. He stood on Mount Nebo and looked.
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: The text says God showed him the entire land, all
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: of it, from north to south. And then Moses died
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: on the mountain, and God buried him, and to this
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: day no one knows the location of his grave. The
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: connection between Mount Nebo and the Ark comes from the
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: Second Book of Maccabees, a text included in the Catholic
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: and Orthodox Biblical canons, though not in the Protestant or
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: Jewish canons. This distinction in canonical status is worth noting honestly,
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: as it affects how different readers weigh the source. Chapter two,
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: verses four through eight records a tradition that Jeremiah, guided
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: by a divine oracle took the tent of meeting, the
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: ark and the altar of incense, and had them carried
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: to the mountain where Moses had gone up to see
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: the inheritance that God had promised. On Mount Nebo, he
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: found a cave, and he brought those things inside and
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: blocked up the entrance. When those who followed him came
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: back to mark the way, he rebuked them. He said,
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: the place shall be unknown until God gathers his people
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: together again and shows mercy. Then the Lord will disclose
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: these things, and the glory of the Lord and the
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: cloud will appear as they were shown in the case
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: of Moses. The place shall be unknown until God gathers
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: his people together again. This is not a prophecy of
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: permanent loss. It is the description of a deliberate concealment
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: with a specific condition attached to its end. The ark
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: is hidden, it will remain hidden, and then when God
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: acts to gather his people in the way the prophecy describes,
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: it will be disclosed, not found by archeologists, not excavated
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: by technology, disclosed by God at a time of God's choosing.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: In the context of events that the prophecy frames in
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: terms that go far beyond what human initiative could accomplish. Jeremiah,
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: as the figure responsible for the Ark's concealment, makes historical
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: sense in certain ways. He was in Jerusalem during the
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: final years before the Babylonian siege. He had been receiving
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: and delivering prophetic warnings about the coming catastrophe for decades.
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: He had the prophetic clarity to see what others refused
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: to see, and the priestly access as a priest from
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: the priestly city of Anathos to the Temple complex and
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: its most sacred objects. If any one in Jerusalem in
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: those final years would have understood that the end was
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: genuinely coming and that something needed to be done about
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: the Ark before it arrived, Jeremiah is a historically plausible candidate.
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: Whether the account in Second Maccabees reflects actual events or
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: represents a later tradition developed to explain the ARC's disappearance
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: within a theological framework cannot be determined with certainty from
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: the available evidence. What can be said is this, Mount
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: Nebo is a real mountain in modern day Jordan, rising
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: approximately eight hundred metres above sea level on the eastern
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: edge of the Dead Sea. Plateau. Its limestone bedrock contains
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: natural cave formations. It has never been comprehensively excavated. A
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: sealed cave of the kind described in Second Maccabees hidden
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: in terrain that has not been systematically searched, is entirely
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: consistent with what the geology of the region actually offers,
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: and the condition attached to the disclosure in the Second
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: Maccabee's account places this theory in a category that no
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: archaeology alone could resolve. The text is not saying look
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: harder and you will find it. It is saying it
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: will be found when God decides to show it, when
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: God gathers his people, when the glory and the cloud
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: appear as they appeared to Moses. The place shall be
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: unknown until then. Mount Nebo keeps its silence in the
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: morning light, and twenty six centuries have not been long
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: enough to break it. Three theories Africa Underground, Jerusalem, a
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: sealed cave on a mountain east of the Jordan, Each
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: one grounded in something real, each one pointing toward a
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: different kind of answer, each one limited by evidence that
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: does not yet permit certainty. None of them resolved, all
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: of them alive and somewhere to night, in a location
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: that twenty six centuries of searching have not identified. Either
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: the most sacred object in human history is waiting in
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: silence for a moment that has not yet arrived, or
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: it passed out of the material world by means that
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: left no trace, and the story of what it pointed
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: toward continued without it. The next chapter suggests that the
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: second possibility in the first may not be as different
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: as they appear, because there is one more place where
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: the ark appears in the Biblical record. It is not
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: in Uxum, It is not beneath the Temple mount It
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: is not in a sealed cave on a Jordanian mountain.
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: It is in Heaven, and it has been there all along.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten what the Book of Revelation says. There is
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: a moment in the Book of Revelation that most people
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: pass over too quickly. It arrives in chapter eleven, at
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: the end of a passage describing two witnesses and a
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: seventh trumpet, and the announcement that the kingdom of the
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: world has become the Kingdom of the Lord and of
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: His Christ. The language surrounding it is vast and cosmic,
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: the kind of language that belongs to the ending of
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: things and the beginning of other things that have no ending,
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: lightning and thunder and an earthquake and a great hail storm.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: And then in verse nineteen, almost as a parenthesis, almost
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: as a detail that the author includes without pausing to elaborate,
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: these words appear. Then God's temple in Heaven was opened,
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: Seven words at the center of that sentence that have
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: been sitting in that text for nearly two thousand years,
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: largely undisturbed by the debates about Ethiopian treasuries and temple
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: mount tunnels and sealed caves on Jordanian mountains. The ark
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: of His Covenant in the Temple in Heaven seen, not lost,
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: not mourned, not searched for, saying present there. To understand
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: what this means requires stepping back to the Letter to
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: the Hebrews, written decades before Revelation, which addresses directly the
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: relationship between the earthly tabernacle that Moses built and the
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: reality that tabernacle was designed to represent. In Hebrews Chapter eight,
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: the author quotes the instruction God gave Moses on the
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: mountain make everything according to the pattern shown you on
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: the mountain. This instruction, the author of Hebrews, argues, reveals
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: something fundamental about the nature of the tabernacle and everything
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: in it. Moses was not given an original design. He
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: was given a pattern, a blueprint for a copy of
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: something that already existed. The earthly Tabernacle, with its ark
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: and its mercy seat and its cherubim and its precise measurements,
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: was built to correspond to a heavenly reality that preceded it.
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: The earthly was a shadow of the heavenly, a reflection
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: of something that existed in the presence of God before
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: any human hand had shaped a piece of acacia wood.
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: Hebrews Chapter nine develops this further. The earthly most Holy
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: Place was a copy and shadow of the true sanctuary
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: in heaven. The high priest who entered the earthly most
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: Holy Place once a year was performing a ritual that
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: pointed beyond itself toward a greater reality, in which a
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: greater high priest would enter a greater sanctuary and accomplish
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: something that the yearly earthly ritual could only illustrate. The
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: earthly ark was always a copy of the heavenly ark,
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: the mercy Seat where God said he would meet with Moses,
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: was always the earthly reflection of something that existed in
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: a dimension that the Sinai Desert could not contain, and
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: that Solomon's Temple, for all its cedar and gold, could
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 1: not adequately represent. When the earthly ark disappeared, what disappeared
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: was the copy. The original had never moved, and in
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 1: Revelation chapter eleven, the original is what John sees. The
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: Temple in Heaven opened, and the Ark of the Covenant
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: was visible within it, Present because it had always been
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: present in that location, undamaged because no army that has
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: ever marched on Earth could reach it, unchanged, because it
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: exists in a dimension where the processes of decay and
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: loss that govern the material world have no jurisdiction. The
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: disappearance of the earthly arc begins to look different in
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: this light, not like a catastrophe that God failed to prevent,
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: not like a tragedy that left the story of the
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 1: Covenant permanently diminished, but like the removal of a copy
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: when the original is secure, like the burning of a
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: map when the destination itself is not in danger. The
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 1: map served its purpose. The destination remains. The earthly Ark
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: was the most extraordinary physical object God ever asked human
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: hands to create. Its power was real. The things that
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: happened in its proximity were not symbolic performances. The river stopped,
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: the walls fell, the men died. The presence that rested
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: above the mercy Seat was not metaphorical, but it was
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: always provisional, always pointing beyond itself, always bearing witness to
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: something that it could represent, but never fully contain that
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: it could reflect, but never be. Jeremiah had said it,
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: in the days that are coming, people will no longer
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: say the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord. It
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: will not enter their minds or be remembered or missed,
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: nor will another one be made. And then he said why,
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: because in those days, Jerusalem itself will be called the
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: throne of the Lord. All nations will gather in Jerusalem
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: to honor the name of the Lord. The Ark housed
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: the presence of God in a room accessible to one
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: man once a year, trembling with incense, smoke around his face,
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: and bells on the hem of his robe, so the
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: people outside could hear whether he was still alive. The
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: Ark made the presence of God available in the most
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: carefully restricted way imaginable, because the people in whose midst
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: it lived were not yet able to receive it any
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: other way. The Letter to the Hebrews describes what changed.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: It says that when Christ entered the Most Holy Place,
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: he did not enter a man made sanctuary that was
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: only a copy of the true one. He entered Heaven
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: itself to appear before God on our behalf. And the
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: veil of the Temple, the thick curtain that had enforced
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: the boundary between the Holy Place and the Most Holy
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: Place for a thousand years, was torn from top to
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: bottom at the moment of the crucifixion, not from the
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: bottom upward, as a human hand tearing it would tear
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: it from the top downward, from the direction of Heaven.
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: And then Hebrews chapter four, verse sixteen draws the conclusion
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: that would have been unthinkable to any priest who had
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: ever served in Solomon's Temple, or the Second Temple, or
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: any sanctuary in the history of Israel. Let us approach
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: the Throne of Grace with confidence, the Throne of Grace,
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: the mercy seat, the caporate, the golden lid of the Ark,
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: where God had said he would meet with his people,
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: the place that one man could approach once a year,
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: at the cost of his life if he approached it wrongly.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: Approach with confidence, not because the holiness has been reduced,
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 1: not because the requirement of purity has been abolished, but
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: because the high priest who has entered the true sanctuary
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: has made a way that the earthly priests could only illustrate,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: and the access their yearly ritual pointed toward has become
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: available in substance to every human being who has ever lived.
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: In Revelation chapter eleven, the Heavenly Temple opens and the
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: ark is seen, seen in the context of the seventh Trumpet,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: the announcement that the kingdoms of this world have become
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: the Kingdom of God, seen at the moment when what
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: has been hidden begins to be made fully visible, when
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: what has operated in shadow begins to be revealed in substance,
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: when the provisional gives way to the permanent, and the
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: copy is no longer needed because the original is present
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: and accessible to all. The ark is not lost. It
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: is where it has always been, in the place that
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: the earthly, most holy place was built to represent in
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: the Temple in heaven above the mercy seat, between the
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: wings of Cherubim that are not made of hammered gold
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: and acacia wood, but of something that the language of
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: the material world does not have adequate words for, and
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: the presence that rested between those wings, the presence that
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: Moses could not enter the tabernacle to receive because the
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: cloud was too dense, the presence that drove the priests
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: out of Solomon's temple at its dedication because the glory
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: was too complete. That presence has not diminished, has not retreated,
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: has not been reduced by the centuries of human faithlessness
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: that preceded the Ark's disappearance from Jerusalem. It is as
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: near to night as it was on the day the
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: cloud filled the tabernacle in the desert closer. If the
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: letter to the Hebrews means what it says, as near
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: as a turned heart, as available as a whispered word
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: spoken in the dark. The ark may be in a
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 1: treasury in Axum. It may be in a chamber beneath
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: the temple mount. It may be in a sealed cave
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: on the slopes of Mount Nebo. It may have completed
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: its purpose as a copy when the original made the
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: copy no longer necessary. But what it contained, and what
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: it pointed toward, and what it housed imperfectly and provisionally
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: for a thousand years of Israelite history is not in
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: any of those places. It is here. It has always
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: been here. We have just most of us, most of
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: the time, forgotten to look. Chapter eleven. The Ark and
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: Ye why it still matters to night? It is late
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: now the world outside has grown quiet in the way
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: that only these hours allow. The sounds that fill daylight,
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: the movement and noise and insistence of everything that demands
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: attention when the sun is up, have softened and receded,
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: And in that quiet something becomes possible that the noise
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: of the day makes difficult. The question not the archaeological question,
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: though that question is real and unresolved and worth returning
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: to in the daylight hours when the mind is ready
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: for it. Not the historical question of what happened in
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: five hundred and eighty six years before Christ, when the
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: temple burned and the inventory of what Babylon took was
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: recorded without the Ark's name in it. A different question,
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: a quieta one. Why does this story matter to you
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: tonight in the dark, because it does matter. You are here,
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: which means something in the story of the Ark, reach
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: past the historical curiosity and the archaeological mystery, and touched
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: something that you may not have a precise name for,
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: something that recognized itself in the story. Even if you
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: have never stood in a desert, never carried anything on poles,
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: never drawn a curtain back in a room of gold,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: that something is worth paying attention to. The Ark was
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: built because human beings cannot live easily with the sense
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: that the sacred is absent, that the gap between the
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: divine and the ordinary is unbridgable, that the God who
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: made everything is also infinitely unreachable, present in the structure
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: of the universe and the laws of physics and the
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: complexity of a living cell, but absent from the specific, personal,
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: daily texture of individual human lives. The Israelites who gave
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: more gold and silver and fine linen than Moses could use,
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: were not giving toward a religious institution. They were not
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: paying membership dues. They were giving toward a place where
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: the gap could be closed, where they could walk through
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: a courtyard and know that at the end of it,
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: behind a curtain in a room of gold, God was present,
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 1: not metaphorically, not in the diffuse sense that God is
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: everywhere and therefore is also here, in the sense that
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: here specifically is where to look. Human beings have always
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: needed that we still need it. The Ark was the
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: ancient world's answer to the need for a weare, a location,
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: an address for the divine presence that the human mind,
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: which operates in space and time and cannot easily hold
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: the infinite, could orient itself toward a place to face
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: when you prayed, a direction to go when you needed
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: to close the gap between what you were and what
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: you sensed you were made for. This is why the
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: search for the Ark has not diminished in twenty six centuries.
• 1:56:00
  Speaker 1: This is why the Ethiopian claim continues to draw serious investigators.
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: This is why the rabbinic tradition about the tunnel beneath
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: the Temple mount has been maintained by some of the
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: most rigorous minds in Jewish history. This is why the
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: story of Jeremiah hiding the Ark in a cave on
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: Mount Nebo has been preserved across millennia in a text
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: that some Christians regard as scripture and others regard as
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: important tradition. The search for the Ark is the search
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: for the presence, and the search for the presence is
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: not a peculiarity of the ancient Near East. It is
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: something that cuts across every cultural boundary and every century
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: that human beings have lived through. People across cultures and
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: across time have felt the pull of the same longing
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: that built the Ark in the first place, the sense
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: that there is something more than the visible, the persistent
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: intuition that the material world, for all its reality and beauty,
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: is not the whole story. The experience in moments of
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: great joy or great sorrow or great stillness, of something
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: near that cannot be fully named. That longing is not foolishness.
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: It is not primitive superstition that modern people have outgrown.
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: It is one of the most consistent and least explicable
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: features of human experience across every culture that has ever
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: been documented, the sense that there is a presence and
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: that the gap between that presence and ordinary human life
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: can be crossed. The Ark was built to close that gap.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: But here is what the full arc of the Ark's story,
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: from the blueprint on Sinai to the disappearance before Babylon
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: to the vision in Revelation's open temple reveals about the
• 1:57:43
  Speaker 1: nature of that gap and what actually closes it. The
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: ark was never the destination. It was always the direction.
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: The mercy seat was where God said he would meet
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: with his people, but the meeting was never about the gold.
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: The ark was there, but the presence that lived at
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: that address was not confined to it. The same cloud
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: that rested in the most holy place led the column
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: through the desert. The same God who spoke from between
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: the Cherubim had spoken from a burning bush before any
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: bush had been built or any gold had been hammered.
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: When the ark disappeared, the address disappeared, the presence did not.
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: Jeremiah understood this. The prophet who watched the Ark's earthly
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: story approach its conclusion was also the man who wrote,
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: in chapter twenty nine of his book Words, addressed to
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: a people who had lost everything, who were sitting by
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: the rivers of Babylon, unable to sing the songs of
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: Zion in a foreign land, surrounded by the ruins of
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: every physical structure around which their religious life had been organized.
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: He wrote to them, when you call upon me and
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: come and pray to me, I will hear you when
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: you search for me, you will find me. If you
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 1: seek me with all your heart, I will be found
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: by you. Not when you find the ark, I will
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: be accessible again. Not when the temple is rebuilt. The
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: presence will return when you call, when you pray, when
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: you seek with all your heart. The loss of the
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: Ark did not change the terms of access to the
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: God the ark represented, because those terms had never been
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: exclusively architectural. The ark was a gift to human limitation,
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: an accommodation to the need for a ware and a
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: direction and a visible sign. But the God it pointed
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: toward had always been reachable by the direct route, by
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: the honest prayer, by the person sitting in the late hours,
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: in the quiet, aware of the gap and willing to
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: say so. This is why the Ark still matters to night.
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: Not because finding it would restore something that is currently broken,
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: not because a discovery in Aksuom or beneath the temple
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: mount or on the slow hopes of Mount Nebo would
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: grant access to a presence that is currently unavailable. But
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 1: because the story of the Ark is the story of
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: what God has always been doing in relation to human
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: beings who sense the gap and want the distance closed
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: he has been closing it. From the blueprint on Sinai
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: to Bezeleel's hands in the desert, to the cloud filling
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: the tabernacle, to the Jordan stopping, to Jericho falling to
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: the glory filling Solomon's Temple, to the veil torn from
• 2:00:31
  Speaker 1: top to bottom, to the Ark scene in the open
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: Temple of Heaven. In Revelations final vision, the entire movement
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: of the story is in one direction, not a way toward,
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: not the presence retreating behind more layers of veil and
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: restriction and ceremony, the Presence moving closer, more available, more directly,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: accessible to more people in more places, at more moments,
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: until the final chapters of Revelation. Disas describe a city
• 2:01:01
  Speaker 1: in which there is no temple at all, because the
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: Lord God Almighty is its temple and the glory of
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: God illuminates it, and there is no need of sun
• 2:01:10
  Speaker 1: or moon, because the presence that the Ark housed for
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 1: a thousand years in a dark room behind a curtain,
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: has become the light by which everything is seen. The
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: Ark's story ends not in a sealed cave or a
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: guarded treasury or a tunnel beneath an ancient mountain. It
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: ends in a city where there is no need for
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: it any more, because what it pointed toward has become everything.
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: You are here to night, because something in you knows
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: the gap and wants the distance closed. Maybe you have
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: known it your whole life, that sense of something missing,
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: something that the noise and motion of ordinary days covers over,
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 1: but that the quiet of these hours makes hard to ignore.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: You do not have to find the ark to find
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 1: the god the ark was built to represent. The veil
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: has been torn, the way is open. He is as
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: close to you right now as the quiet you are
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: resting in. He found you before you started looking. Chapter twelve,
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: closing Meditation, Rest in the mystery. Let the story settle now,
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: Let it move from the thinking mind to somewhere deeper,
• 2:02:21
  Speaker 1: somewhere below the place where questions form and evidence is
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: weighed and conclusions are reached. Let it sink into the
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: part of you that does not need everything resolved before
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: it can rest. The desert is very still at this hour,
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: in the Sinai where the ARC's story began. The night
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 1: comes down on the sand with a completeness that city
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: nights never achieve. The stars in the desert are not
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: the stars that most people know. There is no ambient
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: light to soften them, no haze to reduce their number,
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: no competing brightness to make them seem fewer than they are.
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: They cover the sky from her rizon to horizon with
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: a density that makes the darkness between them feel almost secondary,
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: almost incidental, almost a space that the light has simply
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: not yet reached. Bezalel slept under those stars on the
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: nights when the work was done, and the camp was quiet,
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: and the lamps had been trimmed, and the poles were ready,
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: and the rings were set, When the mercy seat was finished,
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 1: and the cherubim faced each other with their wings spread
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: wide over the gold, he lay down in the desert,
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: and the stars were above him, and the God who
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: had filled him with the spirit, looked down at what
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: those filled hands had made. It was good, not perfect
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: in the way that perfection is sometimes imagined as flawlessness,
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: as the absence of all limitation, But faithful, true to
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 1: the pattern, true to every instruction that had been spoken
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: on the mountain, built with the materials the desert provided
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: by a man, man who had learned his craft in
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: a foreign land and offered it in service to the
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: God who had set him free. That faithfulness has a
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 1: weight to it, even now, even across the centuries, even
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: in the quiet of this particular night. Think of the Jordan.
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: Think of the priests standing in the dry river bed,
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: their hands on the golden poles, the weight of the
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: ark resting across their shoulders, while two million people crossed
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: the ground that had been the bottom of a flood
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: around them. Think of the moment just before their feet
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: touched the water, the river running at full flood, the
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: other side visible, the crossing impossible by any means that
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 1: ordinary life provides. And then the step, not after the
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: water stopped. The water stopped because of the step, because
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: feet moved forward before the path was visible, because the
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: priests had carried this presence far enough to know that
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: where the ark led, the way opened. There are moments
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: in every life that feel like the edge of a
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: flooding river, where the other side is visible, and the
• 2:05:08
  Speaker 1: water between you and it is too wide and too
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: fast for any calculation to cross. Where everything that experience
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: and reason and ordinary courage has given you is not
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: enough for what is standing in front of you. The
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 1: priests did not have a plan that made the crossing possible.
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: They had the poles in their hands and the memory
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: of a God who had already done things that plans
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: could not account for, and they walked into the current,
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: and the current gave way. Think of Jericho. Six days
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: of walking in silence around something that every military calculation
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 1: said was impregnable. Six evenings of returning to camp with
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: the walls still standing, Six mornings of forming the procession
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: again without being able to point to any visible evidence
• 2:05:58
  Speaker 1: that anything was changing. Six days of faithfulness that looked
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: from every outside perspective like nothing at all. And on
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: the seventh day, the seventh circuit, the long note on
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: the Ram's horn, the shout, and the walls that had
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: been standing before the first footstep fell when God said
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: it was time, not because the walking weakened them, because
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: the presence at the center of the procession had already
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: accomplished what the walls were built to prevent, and the
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: falling was just the visible moment when what had already
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: happened in a deeper dimension became visible in stone and dust,
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: and the sound of a city suddenly without its defenses.
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: Think of the Mercy Seat. Think of the space between
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: the wings of the two golden Cherubim, the space where
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: God said he would be, the space that one trembling
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: priest could approach once a year, in smoke and silence
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: and fear, carrying blood and incense and the accumulated need
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: of an entire nation. Think of what it means that
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: the approach is no longer once a year. Think of
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: what it means that the veil was torn from the top.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 1: Think of what it means that the Letter to the
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: Hebrews says, approach with confidence, the same throne, the same presence,
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: the same holiness that killed Uzar for touching the ark carelessly,
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: and brought down the Philistine cities and drove the priests
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: out of Solomon's temple at its dedication, not diminished, not
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: made casual or easy or less than what it was
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: in the desert and the river, and the room of
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: gold made available. The mystery of the Ark is not
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: finally about where the acacia chest is resting, whether it
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: waits in a treasury in Axom, or a sealed chamber
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: beneath the temple mount or a cave on the slopes
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: of a mountain where Moses once stood and looked at everything,
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: he would not enter. The chest is not the resolution.
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: The resolution is what the chest was built to house.
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: And what the chest was built to house has not
• 2:08:02
  Speaker 1: been sealed in any cave, or guarded by any monk,
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: or buried beneath any ancient ground. It was present before
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: the chest was built, speaking from a burning bush in
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: the desert to a man who had taken off his
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: sandals because the ground beneath his feet had changed its nature.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 1: It was present during every year of the Ark's journey,
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: not confined between the Cherubim, but filling the cloud that
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 1: led the column, and the fire that lit the night,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: and the bread that appeared on the ground each morning
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 1: in a landscape where nothing grew. It was present in
• 2:08:37
  Speaker 1: the long silence after the Ark's disappearance, speaking through prophets
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: and poets and the letter of Jeremiah to exiles beside
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 1: a foreign river, and through the quiet intuition of ordinary
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: people in ordinary places who turned their faces in the
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: right direction and found that what they were looking for
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: had been looking for them. It is present now in
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: this room, in this quiet, in the particular stillness that
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: these hours have made available to you. You have traveled
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: to night through nearly four thousand years of history, from
• 2:09:11
  Speaker 1: the smoking summit of Mount Sinai to the dry bed
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 1: of the Jordan, from the fallen walls of Jericho to
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 1: the Golden Room at the center of the most magnificent
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: building Solomon's kingdom could construct. From the burning city of
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem in five hundred and eighty six years before Christ,
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: to a treasury in Axom and a tunnel beneath the
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: Temple Mount and a sealed cave on the mountain where
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: Moses stood and saw everything he would never walk into.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: And at the end of all of it, the question
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: the story has been building toward from the first instruction
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: God spoke on the mountain is not where is the Ark?
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 2: It is where are you? Not geographically, not physically, but
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 2: in relation to the presence that the Ark was built
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 2: to represent and point toward and make accessible to human
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: beings who needed a wear and a direction and a
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: visible sign. You are right now, in the late hours,
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 2: in the quiet, exactly where you need to be. You
• 2:10:14
  Speaker 2: do not need to go to Ethiopia. You do not
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: need to stand beneath the Temple Mount, you do not
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: need to climb the slopes of Mount Nebo in the
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 2: early morning light. The distance between you and what the
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 2: ark pointed toward has already been closed by means that
• 2:10:31
  Speaker 2: make your geographical location irrelevant. The veil has been torn.
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: The presence is not behind it anymore. It is here.
• 2:10:41
  Speaker 2: It is as near as your own breathing. Let the
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: desert settle into silence. Now, let the Jordan run quiet
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 2: between its banks in the dark. Let Bezilel sleep beneath
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 2: his stars, his hands still the work done, the gold
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: cooling in the night air of the Sinai. The mystery
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 2: rest where it has always rested, in the hands of
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 2: the one who designed it, and filled it, and traveled
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 2: with it through every year of its long journey, and
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: will in the fullness of time, bring every hidden thing
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 2: to light. You are held to night, more held than
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 2: the levites who carried the poles across the Jordan, more
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 2: held than the tablets of the law sealed inside the
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 2: chest of Acacia and gold, more held than the manner
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 2: in its jar, preserved against all natural expectation as evidence
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 2: that the provision was real. More held than you know.
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 2: The story is finished for to night, But the presence
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 2: the story points toward does not finish. When the story does,
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 2: it stays rest Now the morning will come, with its
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 2: questions and its searching and its ordinary light. And when
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: it does, everything told in the dark to night will
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: still be true.