Sanctuary. It’s a word with wildly differing meanings. When I Googled  “sanctuary,” I found a sci-fi website, a classic rock record label, a golf course near Denver, a night club in Atlanta, an elephant refuge in Tennessee, and a William Faulkner novel. After sifting through four pages of Google entries, I finally came to one that gets at the word’s ancient meaning. On a website of the Christian Reformed Church I found this: “Making Space for God.”
 
  A lot is implied in those four words—both about God and about human beings. If He is indeed God, why does He need anyone to make space for Him? Can’t He make His own space? Has He left Himself at the mercy of human whims? If so, do humans somehow control God? And if that is so, is He really God after all?

 But “making space for God” is exactly the idea found in the Bible’s earliest use of the word. As Moses sat sheltered on the upper slopes of Mount Sinai, after receiving the ten commandments, God said to him, “And let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8, NKJV).

God’s relationship with His people during this time was difficult. They were an illiterate mob that had recently escaped 400 years of Egyptian slavery. Multiple generations had been treated no better than work animals. The Israelites simply lacked the minds to comprehend God. He had miraculously delivered them from Pharoah’s tyranny, but they could not understand what had happened to them.

So God set up a series of object lessons to rebuild His chosen people’s understanding. Chief among the object lessons was this ornate tent in the desert. Because they could not understand infinity, God instructed them to craft a real place—a specific spot in the desert sand—where they could begin to get the picture. That sanctuary was God’s local address for that time and place.

If you spend much time reading in Exodus and Leviticus about the sanctuary in the wilderness, and what happened in and around it, you can see it was designed to make people think twice about being in the presence of the King of the universe. The “fear of God” was a real experience back there in the desert.  But it wasn’t only that; the sanctuary was also evidence that God wanted to be close to them. Remember, He said its purpose was so that He could “dwell among them.”

It has always been difficult to hold on to both these ideas at the same time—God as (a) infinite, awesome power and (b) friend. How do you fully grasp the one idea without losing your grip on the other? That’s the challenge for finite minds trying to understand the infinite.

So time passed, and fifteen hundred years after the Israelites built that wilderness sanctuary, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Mary was His mother and God was His Father. Thus, He was the unique God-Man.

Matthew, quoting Isaiah, called Jesus “Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” At that point in history—the point at which our modern calendars finish their countdown and begin counting the years forward—God’s relationship with humanity changed. His presence was no longer represented by an address; He was personally present, in the flesh!

With the coming of the Messiah, it became truly possible to understand how the infinite, Almighty One could be our Friend. There is no better way to grasp this reality than simply reading the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Isn’t it interesting that Jesus came in a way calculated not to overwhelm people. He did not come as a monumental divine show of force. Rather, he came as a carpenter of Nazareth. The result was that most of the religious leaders of His day failed to recognize that He was the Messiah.

This gets back to the questions I asked earlier: Why does God need anyone to make space for Him? Has He left Himself at the mercy of human whims? As a matter of fact, He has done just that. Today, He does not overwhelm us with His power (He has now become so retiring that some are even able to deny His existence). God now seems much more interested in friendship than in exercising power. He offers us the opportunity to choose to make space for Him in our lives.

Paul wrote, “We are the temple of the living God. As God has said: ‘I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people’ ” (2 Corinthians 6:16). In the last portion of that text, Paul is quoting from the book of Leviticus, where we find so much about that original sanctuary in the Sinai desert. And what is Paul’s point? Just this: We—not an ornate tent in the desert—We are now God’s temple on earth. In effect, God is saying to each of us, “Make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell with you.” God’s sanctuary is now us—if we choose.

So you and I have a choice to make. Will we create a sanctuary in our own lives—a special time, a special place, intentionally shutting out the stresses and demands of our daily routines? Will we create our own personal, meditative sanctuary where God can come often to dwell with us? Will we make space for God?

B.W.