The Precious Metals
“And this is the offering which ye shall take of them; gold, and silver, and brass” (Ex. 25.3). God says to all His redeemed people: ‘I want you to come and contribute something’, and we are going to see that there is meaning in the materials which God prescribed for the building of the Tabernacle, What is the spiritual meaning of gold, silver and brass, and shittim wood? and for what reason has God demanded those materials? We shall examine, one by one? the materials required by God.
Gold speaks of the divine nature. All that is done must be done, not with human wisdom, but with the wisdom of God. We all need divine wisdom, divine strength, divine knowledge. And God has provided these in His Son (1 Cor. 1.30). So, when we do things according to the divine plan of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are gathering gold for His Sanctuary.
How easily we can preach for the sake of money! How readily we pray, just to show how well we can pray! Many times we do things just to show that we are very good, very righteous or very charitable. Once I was staying with some Christian friends and they had family prayers every morning and evening with their servants. I thought that they were very good, but one day one of the servants told me: ' Only when guests come we have family prayers; when the guests go away again we have family prayers no longer! ‘If we do these things simply for men to see, God will not accept what we do. What ever we do for God, according to the divine plan and in the power of the divine nature, gathers gold for His building. It is our privilege in this way to bring the gold of the New Creation into the Heavenly City.
Silver speaks of redemption. You recall how our Lord was sold for 30 pieces of silver. That was the price of a slave. Our Lord was sold for the price of a slave by His own disciple and He gave His very self that we might become His property. The chief priests gave only 30 pieces of silver for Him, but He gave His own life-blood to save us. Wherever you see silver in the Tabernacle it speaks of redemption, of the price our Lord paid to save us.
When we are born again, we become the “purchased possession” of the Lord Jesus Christ. Our spirits and our bodies now belong to Him. We are “bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6.20). Now I can no longer say that my hands, my feet, my lips, my eyes are my own. They belong to the Lord Jesus Christ because He has purchased me, and bought me by His own Blood (1 Pet. 1.18-19).
Our bodies are the temples of His Spirit (1 Cor. 6.19). That is why we must glorify God with them, through our dress, our habits, our manners, our speech (1 Thess. 4.4- 5; 1 Tim. 2.9-10). That is the pure silver. When I see silver in any part of the Tabernacle I am reminded that my body and my spirit have become the purchased possession of my Lord, and now I cannot dress as I used to do. Now I cannot waste my money upon worldly things, and upon worldly glory. Now, I must glorify my Lord through my dress, manners and ways.
We do not need to use worldly means to make ourselves beautiful, nor to waste our time or money on them. His holiness and His purity expressed through us surpass all other beauty (1 Pet. 3.3-4). As we glorify our Lord in this way, we are gathering, unknown to us, that material of silver which will be used in heaven for heaven's Creation. It is the privilege of every believer thus to bring silver to God's House.
The brass speaks of judgment. You remember that our Lord spoke to Nicodemus of the brass serpent in the wilderness (John 3.14; compare Num. 21.9 and 2 Kings 18.4). The people began to murmur in the wilderness, so fiery serpents were sent to punish them. Then Moses was commanded to make a serpent of brass, that those who looked on it might live (Num. 21.5-9). Alas, at a later day, the people began to think that there was some magic in the serpent of brass, so they began to burn incense to it, and in the end the same serpent had to be broken to pieces and thrown away (2 Kings 18.4).
But in that serpent God revealed His divine purpose. The Old Serpent, the Devil, was always bringing in rebellion, and it was because they listened to his voice, that they murmured. Those who looked on the serpent of brass, acknowledged thereby that they themselves were under judgment and that it was the devil who was responsible for their disobedience and death. God had to deal with him in judgment before they could be delivered from his power. It is Satan, the serpent, who is constantly stirring us up to trespass against God. The Lord Jesus Christ said: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3.14). As Son of Man, in our stead, our Lord died on the Cross—the place of the judgment and the curse—in order to judge Satan and to punish him who had been troubling us by making us disobey and go against God; by His Cross our Lord Jesus has defeated our enemy. He has crushed him, and through faith we have the victory in Him.
So brass speaks of judgment—that judgment which fell upon the serpent at the Cross when the Lord Jesus died. That is why they used brass for the altar—not gold, but brass—because the Lord Jesus Christ took upon Himself our punishment and overcame the devil. So, now we cannot glory in ourselves. We can only glory in the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ.
If we would die to the world, it is only by the Cross that we can so die. Nobody can die to worldly pleasures and worldly enjoyment by his own power. Paul says, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world” (Gal. 6.14). We cannot now glory in anything but the Cross, because by the power of the Cross alone we conquer the world, and by the power of the Cross alone we conquer temptation. So, through the brass, God was saying: ‘O man, never try to conquer sin or temptation by human effort, or by human energy or will-power. You will never succeed.’
For 40 years the devil had been working in the hearts of the people in the wilderness and defeating them every time. Only when they realized that it was the devil, and that he must be judged, did they get the victory. And that is how you will get victory also. You will never conquer your temper, or your weakness, by religious exercises, by reading or by fasting or by prayer, nor yet by your own effort and will power. You will conquer them in one way only; by your identification by faith with the Lord Jesus Christ in His death, burial, resurrection and exaltation.
The more we understand how the Lord Jesus Christ judged, defeated, and confounded the devil on the Cross, the more we rejoice in the hour of temptation because of the victory that is ours in Him. In this way we gather the brass which God requires for the Sanctuary.
Every material required by God has some spiritual meaning, and all is found in Christ. Gold speaks of the divine nature; the silver of that price of redemption that our Lord has paid for us; while brass speaks of the judgment which our Lord had to bear on our behalf. All of us are commanded to gather that material, and bring it to Him.