As the priestly army carrying out the holy war, God's chosen and redeemed people bore with them God's dwelling, the tabernacle of the testimony with the ark of the testimony. This indicates that in the church life today we are bearing God's testimony with God Himself. Upon our shoulder we not only have God's dwelling place but also the dweller, God Himself. As long as the church bears the testimony of God, the church is God's dwelling place. Actually, the dwelling place of God is the testimony of God. Today, this testimony of God, this dwelling place of God, is upon our shoulder.
The tabernacle of the testimony signifies God's chosen and redeemed people built up with Him as His dwelling on the earth (the church in the New Testament).
Here we would point out that, spiritually speaking, the history of Israel and the history of the church are one. The history of Israel is a prefigure, and the history of the church is the reality of the prefigure. This means that what is recorded in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers prefigures what is recorded in Acts and in the Epistles.
The ark of the testimony signifies Christ as the center of God's economy among His chosen and redeemed people. Today we have the ark among us; that is, we have Christ with us in a personal way.
The testimony signifies the law, which is a portrait of what God is. Because the testimony, the tables of the law, was put into the ark, the ark was called the ark of the testimony.
The tabernacle with the ark was the testimony borne by God's chosen and redeemed people. During the years in the wilderness, the children of Israel, who were more than two million in number, did not do anything except take care of God's testimony. They did not engage in commerce or work to make a living. God cared for their living by sending them manna and by giving them water from the rock. For a period of forty years, God's people, with the Angel of Jehovah taking the lead, camped and journeyed in the wilderness. In the eyes of the nations, the children of Israel were wasting their time. Likewise, in the eyes of the worldly people, we in the church life who have given ourselves to bear and to care for the testimony of God are also wasting our time. In the sight of God, however, it is actually the worldly people who are idle and who are wasting their time (Matt. 20:3). Others may think that we are wasting our time, but we in the Lord's recovery are happy to use our time to care for and to bear God's testimony.
In this message we have seen a bird's-eye view of the book of Numbers. According to this view, Numbers is a record of God's chosen and redeemed people being formed into a priestly army to fight for God and to journey with God so that they may be prepared by God to possess the all-inclusive Christ as the good land.