How Lovely is Your Dwelling Place!
Deuteronomy 33:12
Of Benjamin he said, “The beloved of the LORD dwells in safety. The High God surrounds him all day long, and dwells between his shoulders.”
This is too far-reaching a comment to make in a format as brief as this, but the overwhelmingly grand truth whispered here in Deuteronomy 33:12, and in other Old Testament Scriptures like it, causes me to muse on the way in which God, through the 1,500 years of biblical progression, inverted His approach between the Old Testament and the New. Here’s what I mean. Throughout the Pentateuch, the life of faith has generally been orchestrated through obedience to a set of prescribed ceremonial rites, civic duties, and sacrificial obligations. That is, as a rule, God has revealed Himself to His people through various forms of physical sacrament as it were—sacrament meaning ‘signs’—certain operations at certain times and in certain places that give members of the Mosaic commonwealth a means of drawing nearer. Almost every spiritual truth has been accompanied by a physical, observable symbol.
Fast forward to the New Testament though, especially beginning with the Spirit’s descent at Pentecost, and the rule of the life of faith is inverted, faith being seen not as much through public ordinance and ceremonial operation but through internal sanctification. Which is why Paul could speak of faith as a sort of ultimate freedom from the law, and why Christ summed up the whole law in two commandments, ushering His church of pilgrims not into a similar terrain of outward circumcision, but into a circumcision of the heart by faith. Yet, whether God reveals Himself through pillars of cloud or principles of doctrine, whether through concrete rites or abstract parables, all are reflections of His invisible and glorious face.
Moses’ description here that “The High God dwells between your shoulders” reads more like a Pauline line from Philippians or something out John’s first letter to beloved children, not something written in an age of tabernacles and priestly ordinance. But that’s why it’s so wonderful to read, isn’t it?! Because it reminds us that even in an age where God met His people through tents and golden arcs and sanctuaries and pillars of cloud, He yearned to dwell between men’s shoulders—in the hearts of His people—because He’d fashioned our hearts for that purpose from the beginning.