The Ark being separated from the tabernacle was a very abnormal situation. The Old Testament shows that the children of Israel took the tabernacle or the temple as their center. From the time the children of Israel built the tabernacle, they considered the tabernacle to be their center. Their encampment, their move, their worship, and their warfare all took the tabernacle as the center, but the tabernacle took the Ark as its center. The Ark is a type of Christ as the center of God’s testimony. The presence of Christ was with the Ark. Without the Ark, the tabernacle was something with a form but without the reality.
The history of the church repeats the history of the Old Testament. In the desolation and decline of the church, Christ has left the formal church and has been separated from it as if He has been captured. In the beginning the church preached a living Christ. However, even during the time of the apostles, the decline of the church began. Some rose up to preach “a different gospel” (Gal. 1:6-7), “destructive heresies” (2 Pet. 2:1-3), and the teachings of the antichrist (2 John 7), and they forsook the apostle and his ministry (2 Tim. 1:15). Revelation 2 and 3 show that the church became so desolate that she forsook her original condition and deviated further and further. When Constantine became the Roman emperor, he legalized Christianity and made it the national religion, and he appointed the overseers of the city of Rome to be the leaders over the entire church. As a result, the church became weaker and was defeated; she lost the testimony of God and became divided so that she could no longer satisfy God’s requirement but could only maintain an outward service in formality.
In the New Testament age, like the tabernacle, the church is the dwelling place of God on earth. Whether in work, service, worship, or fighting, the children of God should take the church as their center. Moreover, the church must take Christ as her center. In the ancient days, the tabernacle needed the Ark inside, and the Ark needed the tabernacle outside. If Christ is in a certain place today, the church must be there, and if the church is in a certain place, Christ must be there. Christ is the life and the content of the church, and the church is the living and expression of Christ. Christ and the church are one and inseparable. The church tells out the Christ who was despised by men but exalted by God and glorified before God (2 Cor. 4:5; 1 Pet. 2:9).
After the passing away of the apostles, the church continued to fall and go downward because of the Nicolaitans, who changed the universal priesthood ordained by God into a clerical class. Later the church imitated the way of the children of Israel by setting up one man to rule over them as their king so that the church looked more to a human leader than to Christ the Head. As a result, many sects were brought forth. When the church degraded and became a worldly organization, the presence of Christ was no longer in the church. Consequently, the formal church had only human ways, doctrines, opinions, criticisms, and judgments. There was no longer the word of God, the riches of Christ, or the authority of God. Instead, there were evil people who captured the children of God into the world. According to Revelation 2:13, even Satan, the prince of this world, set up his throne in the church! Everything was in desolation and corruption.
After the church degraded and became a worldly organization, she was gradually formed into the Roman Catholic Church with a Judaistic hierarchy of overseers. She allowed the deep things of Satan to be brought in (v. 24), and she tolerated the teachings of Jezebel, thereby bringing in confusing heresies, including the committing of fornication and the eating of idol sacrifices (v. 20). The Roman Catholic Church is condemned by God; hence, God calls to His people, saying, “Come out of her, My people, that you do not participate in her sins and that you do not receive her plagues” (18:4).
The Reformation took place when Martin Luther came out of the Roman Catholic Church to recover the open Bible and teach the truth concerning justification by faith. However, at the same time, the Reformation was utilized by many earthly governments to serve their political intentions. Because of the ignorance of God’s people, the Reformation was turned into a movement in which the church and the world were united to oppose the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, state churches were brought forth. They imitated the practice of the Roman Catholic Church and became a union of politics and religion. This was the initiation of Protestantism. Later some people saw that the state churches were wrong, and they received new revelation before God. Based on the revelation they saw, they established the so-called private churches. Both the state and private churches had a name that they were living, but they were dead in the eyes of the Lord (3:1b). In the beginning they had the Lord’s blessing, but they were not completely delivered out of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, they adopted the organizational way of the Roman Catholic Church to maintain the blessings which they received. Consequently, like the Roman Catholic Church, they had an outward form without the inward reality of Christ.
In both the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations there are the people of God who worship the Lord, but the “Ark” is no longer present. They have lost the inward reality of Christ, and all that remains is an outward form. The center of the tabernacle was the Ark, and the center of the church is Christ. The people of God should be with Christ. After Solomon ascended to the throne, he went up to Gibeon to offer sacrifices, “for the Tent of Meeting of God was there, which Moses the servant of Jehovah had made in the wilderness. However David had brought up the Ark of God from Kiriath-jearim to the place that David had prepared for it, for he had pitched a tent for it in Jerusalem” (2 Chron. 1:3-4). After Solomon saw a vision in the night and received wisdom, he left the empty tabernacle in Gibeon and returned to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices before the Ark (vv. 5-6).