Bible Dictionaries
Tabernacle

　　(ἡ σκηνὴ ἡ ἀληθινή), which the Lord pitched, not man’ (Hebrews 8:2), entered within the veil, has won for every Christian the right of personal access to God. Holding, like the most enlightened Israelites before him, that the Mosaic ordinances were no more than Divinely appointed ceremonial forms, and asserting the spiritual ineffectiveness of the whole ritual, even of the supreme sacrifice of the Day of Atonement, he declares ‘the first tabernacle’ (Hebrews 9:6; Hebrews 9:8), though made in all things according to a heavenly pattern (ἐσκήνωσεν) among us (John 1:14). As God once dwelt, in visible cloud and flame, among His people, so Christ has sojourned among men, who have beheld His glory, which in this instance is the spiritual glory of a perfect manhood.

　　3. The author of the Revelation depicts the final state of Messianic happiness in the words: ‘Behold, the tabernacle (σκηνή, that the former has even been thought of as a transliteration of the latter’ (C. Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers2, Cambridge, 1897, p. 44). That was no more than a linguistic fancy, Shekinah being really derived from the same verb as mishkan, ‘tabernacle.’ But the Messianic promise is partially fulfilled in an intenser realization of the Divine Immanence in the world, where ‘earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God’ (E. B. Browning, Aurora Leigh, bk. vii. line 844 f.), and a modern mystic declares that ‘there is but one Temple in the world, and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than this high form. Bending before men is a reverence done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven, when we lay our hand on a human body’ (Novalis, Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, London, 1872, ii. 216). Cf. St. Paul’s words, ‘ye are a temple ( and Encyclopaedia Britannica