THREE MOUNTAINS OF PROPHETIC PRESENCE

THREE MOUNTAINS OF PROPHETIC PRESENCE 

Psalm 125:2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem, So the LORD surrounds His people
There were three mountains surrounding Jerusalem and they were Mt. Zion, Mt Gibeon and Mt. Moriah. Upon each of these mountains at one time or another there was either a tabernacle or a tent or a temple for priestly and congregational worship and sacrifice for Israel. Mount Moriah and Mt. Zion were so close as to blend into one mountain and Mt. Gibeon was about a one-hour walk to the west. We are going to look at when these places of worship existed on those mountains and how they got there, and today we will be focusing upon the tabernacle of David which was really a tent and not as structured as the tabernacle of Moses on Mt. Gibeon or the temple of Solomon on Mt. Moriah. The story of David’s tent (the tabernacle of David) has significant meaning for the Church today regarding the prophetic fulfillment of times of an abundance of the presence of God in and upon his people before the return of the Lord Jesus to the earth.

James quotes a prophecy in the book of Acts regarding the restoring of the presence and power of the Spirit that will come in the end days to God’s people. 
Acts 3:20 … And he will send you times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord and send Jesus Christ back to you as appointed. For he must remain in heaven until the final restoration of all things spoken through the prophets…
These times of refreshing of the presence of the Lord are linked to the final ingathering of God’s people on the earth amongst all the nations and there is a special mention of the ‘Tabernacle of David’ that will be rebuilt at that time. Reading on in ch.15
Acts 15:16 In that time I will return, and I will rebuild the tabernacle of David that has fallen; I will rebuild its ruins, and I will restore it so that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the people who are called by my name, says the Lord, who makes these things known from of old.’

I mentioned the Tabernacle of Moses. God commanded Moses to build that in the wilderness – it was about the size of half a football field with an outer curtain fence and with an inner tent of two chambers called the Holy place and the Most Holy Place. Joshua ended up taking the Ark and the tabernacle across the Jordan River and set it up in Shiloh where years later a foolish incident occurred where Israel took the Ark from the Tabernacle Just before the rule of King Saul, thinking that would give them victory. The Ark was stolen by the Philistines who were judged by God for doing this by having boils and tumors break out on their skin, so the Philistines finally abandoned the Ark and sent it back to Israel where it sat disregarded for 20 years in a place called Keriath Jearim. The Tabernacle of Moses finally ended up on one of those mountains surrounding Jerusalem, Mt Gibeon, but without the Ark of the covenant. 
David became king after Saul and early in his reign God put it in his heart to gather Israel together to bring back the stolen and then discarded Ark of the presence of God and he brought it back and set it inside a tent on Mt. Zion as the tabernacle of David, where it stayed for forty years as the place of worship and rejoicing. Meanwhile the Tabernacle of Moses on Mt Gibeon remained as a place of sacrifice for sin and priestly offerings but it never again housed the Ark of the presence of God.  
Unlike the elaborate Tabernacle of Moses which had three compartments – the Outer Court, the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place (where the Ark used to occupy).
David radically departed from tabernacle worship with its blood sacrifices for sin.
David's Tabernacle had only one compartment, the Most Holy Place - and there was no veil! Priests could offer sacrifices of praise and incense and attend to the showbread and the lighting of the candles but there were no blood sacrifices, and everyone could come freely to that tent to praise and worship the Lord – men, women, musicians and singers.
The ark of the presence of God was finally placed in Solomon’s Temple on Mt. Moriah by king Solomon after David had died. David had wanted to build a permanent glorious temple for the presence of God and God refused him and said that his son Solomon would build it. But David amassed materials, including stones, timber, and precious metals for its construction and also provided Solomon with the detailed plans and design for the Temple that God gave to him, and stones were being shaped in the nearby quarry. 
So the preparations for the Temple overlapped with the ongoing praise and worship and close fellowship with the presence of God in David’s Tabernacle. When Solomon began building the Temple he attended the tabernacle of Moses over on Mt. Gibeon for sin offerings and feasts just as Israel had been doing for all those years but without any experience of the presence of God in the Ark. And when Solomon’s Temple was completed the Ark was moved from David’s Tabernacle into the Holy of Holies of the Temple with great rejoicing and celebration.

I believe that the prophecy that James quoted in Acts about the rebuilding of the Tabernacle of David was referring to the days in which we now live as God’s people who have been made alive by the Spirit of the Lord, because God has put it into our hearts in these days as he did with David to seek after the presence of the Lord. And God has been releasing through the Holy Spirit in recent years the liberty and freedom of praise and worship that David saw in his Tent of God’s presence. In those times David wrote beautiful psalms and spiritual songs to the Lord which we still sing today.

And just as in the other tabernacle on Mt. Gibeon there were rituals and sacrifices but no Ark of the presence of God, this speaks of certain expressions of institutional Church (not all) or ideological religious activity that is not exercised to seek the life and liberty and truth of the Holy Spirit which burned in the early church and somehow fell away. 

And at the same time as those two tabernacle expressions were being seen – Moses Tabernacle on Mt Gibeon and David’s Tabernacle on Mt Zion - we see that stones were being quarried nearby for Solomons Temple. We are those living stones experiencing in these days the chiseling of God’s transforming dealings upon our lives. We are living stones being shaped in such a way that we will fit together relationally and functionally as his spiritual Temple to contain and express the life of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. 

Solomons temple was the final dwelling place of God upon the earth and is symbolic of a Church that will be made ready for the return of Jesus. There is symbolism of the two numbers that are repeated in the dimensions of this Temple which are the number 10 and the number 120. The number 10 speaks of the finality of the work of trials and testings of faith upon our lives (The 10 trials of Deuteronomy 8, 10 days waiting Acts 2 etc) and the number 120 (end of all flesh Genesis 6 and Acts 2) speaks of the end of human effort and the release of grace in the expression of Jesus through our lives. 
The Temple porch was 120 cubits high (2Chronicles 3) and was overlaid with gold, which speaks of the nature of God. There were 10 lampstands of gold instead of one in the tabernacle of Moses, and there were 10 tables of 12 loaves of showbread instead of one – that is 120 loaves of showbread speaking of the fulness of order and government (12) and communion and relational unity. This is the future promise of the expression of the final dwelling place of God’s people before he returns - relating in unity together in the earth - and we can look forward to the days when by the grace of God that gathering of God’s people all over the globe will emerge. Let God put it into your heart as he did with David to seek after the presence of the Lord and wait inh is presence and let him speak to you. One thing I give people assurance about is - God will answer that prayer. Amen