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    To assure the people of his continual presence, God instructed them to build him a dwelling place, a holy tent or tabernacle, a home for his abiding presence. No longer did Moses go up on Mount Sinai to meet with God; God came down in the midst of the camp, covering the tabernacle with a cloud and filling it with his presence.

    The men of Aaron’s family were chosen to serve as priests, and God selected Aaron to be the first high priest—the man charged with interceding for the unfaithful people with their faithful God. The men in Aaron’s family handled all the details concerning worship, sacrifices, and the tabernacle itself, including the symbol of God’s presence —the holy box called the Ark of the Covenant.

Happy is the person whose sins are forgiven, whose wrongs are pardoned. Happy is the person whom the LORD does not consider guilty and in whom there is nothing false. When I kept things to myself, I felt weak deep inside me. I moaned all day long. Day and night you punished me. My strength was gone as in the summer heat. Then I confessed my sins to you and didn’t hide my guilt. I said, “I will confess my sins to the LORD,” and you forgave my guilt. For this reason, all who obey you should pray to you while they still can. When troubles rise like a flood, they will not reach them. You are my hiding place. You protect me from my troubles and fill me with songs of salvation. PSALM 52:1-7

    Specific holy days were scheduled each year. One of them was the Day of Atonement, an annual time of remorse and repentance, a time to cleanse the soul. On that day Aaron killed a young goat and offered its death as a substitute for the death that all the people deserved. The ritual called for him to take the blood of the animal into the holiest place in the Tabernacle, the place of God’s presence.

    Aaron would also take a live goat and confess over it all the sins of the people—all their failures, stubbornness, forgetfulness, and their outright defiance of God. Then the scapegoat was led into the desert, never to be seen again, symbolically taking the sins of the people with it. All this was designed by God as a way to cleanse his unholy people and keep them in relationship with a holy God.

Reflection: God knew his people would have trouble living up to his standards and would set their own markers far short of their agreement with him. Without the priests constantly bringing the people back into relationship with God, without the annual holy days and daily sacrifices reminding the people of their failures and God’s blessings, without leaders like Moses, this burgeoning nation would never remain faithful.

    Sin — our failure to be what God created us to be — separates us from God. But God has continually made a way for us to come back to him and to commune with him, because nothing is more important to the Father than his relationship with his children.