Giving Our Time, Talent, and Treasure with a Joyful Spirit (Interpretation)
Giving Our Time, Talent, and Treasure with a Joyful Spirit (Interpretation)
a commentary on Exodus 35
Thank you, Lord, for this day. May it be used for your glory!
Good morning everyone and welcome back to this week’s Biblit, part 2!
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First, I want to apologize. I planned to get this interpretation Biblit out yesterday, but I had a delay with other things piling up. And I wanted to make sure I had non-distracted time to dedicate to writing this.
As such, I will get this out today, and I’ll send the application out tomorrow 🙂
Also…sorry to do this, but I will not be recording these 2. Taylor and I are out of town and I don’t have my mic, haha!
Anyways, let’s jump back into Exodus 35
Interpretation
The interpretation here is actually pretty quick. I, personally, noticed 2 really cool things I wanted to point out from this passage.
Sabbath Rest
Lately, we’ve been talking a ton about the Sabbath rest in these Biblits. Maybe this is actually God’s way of telling me to take more time to rest.
But we’ll get to that tomorrow.
I do want to point out one cool thing here, though.
We talked in previous Biblits about how when God was giving the Tabernacle instructions, there were a lot of parallels between that and Creation.
If you remember, we said that God gave something like 6 instructions and then the 7th instruction was for Israel to rest on the Sabbath. Perfectly paralleling Creation.
We also talked about how the whole point of the Tabernacle was for God to dwell with His people, something that He hasn’t done since Creation and Eden.
And here in Exodus 35 we see the same kind of parallelism. If we look at Creation, from God’s perspective, He worked 6 days and rested on the 7th. From Adam and Eve’s perspective, they were created on the 6th day. So their first day on earth was a day of rest. Resting in the Lord was how life for them began and how each week began.
In Exodus 35, we see a similar pattern. God spent several chapters describing the instructions for the Tabernacle. Then He talked about he importance of the Sabbath.
Here in Exodus 35, we start with the Sabbath, and then after we will see Israel actually following the Lord’s instructions and build the Tabernacle.
Both sides of the narrative are very similar. One side is God giving instructions, the other side is Israel following those instructions. But both narratives are centered around the idea of resting in the Lord on the Sabbath.
I think that’s so cool!
Cheerful Givers
The rest of Exodus 35 is just an amazing picture of Israel’s cheerful generosity.
We see them willingly give up all their possessions. Because they understood that all those possessions were gifts from God in the first place.
It all belonged to God; they were just the stewards.
Then we also see people give up their time to learn new skills in order to bring about the creation of the Tabernacle. In order to do the Lord’s work.
Finally, we see 2 individuals specifically called out as being chosen and gifted by God to be able to build and teach others to build.
All in all, we see this beautiful picture of Israel as cheerful givers. And they gave it all, their time, talents, and treasures.
Such a turn around from a few chapters a go!
And with that, we’ll actually call it a day!
I told you, short and sweet! Tomorrow we will dive into some application; although, I’m sure you can already see how these 2 points can apply to your own life, haha! Talk to y’all then!