I am currently reading Lamb of the Free by Rillera. A substantial read and I am on my third reading of it. It is the most consistent challenge that I know of that pushes back against a substitutionary view of the atonement (and beyond that of the most common ‘penal substitution’). Most recently in Chapter 5 where he moves from Old Testament material on sacrifice to the New Testament I was very taken by how he holds together the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. In simple evangelical theology we can be forgiven for thinking that the life of Jesus is simply a prelude to his death, and the resurrection proof that his death is sufficient.
The aspect that stood out for me was the description that Jesus was the ‘mobile holiness’ of God present on earth. As such he confronted and overcame the effects of the power of death, such as healing, casting out demons and raising the dead (and commissioned his disciples to do likewise) and then in death he confronted death itself which could not hold him captive. Living and dying ahead of us rather than for us in a substitionary sense. [An aside Paul uses the same language for the resurrection in relationship to believers as he uses for the cross. If Jesus died so we do not have to die then he was raised and thus we will not be raised!!! OOOPS!!]
A few days ago I posted concerning David’s desire to build a ‘house for God’. Here is the biblical text:
Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, ‘Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’ (2 Sam. 7:5-7).
The mobile God… Jesus described his own body as a Temple – destroy this Temple and I will raise it up in 3 days, speaking of his own body… The Temple the location that God never requested; in John’s Gospel we read that he ‘dwelt among us’, using a very specific Greek verb σκηνόω – to dwell in a tent, to pitch a tent, to ‘tabernacle’. Mobility – the restoration of the tabernacle.
Post Pentecost – ‘Go’. Mobile not static. We are in process, there is a restoration of mobility. The way God always was and desired to be.
Thank you for sharing this—it’s stayed with me over a few days .
The framing of Jesus as the mobile holiness of God struck something deep. It names what so many systems try to contain: that God never asked to be housed. Not in cedar, not in prestige, not even in the theological structures we often inherit.
Your reference to σκηνόω in John 1:14 really landed—
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
That verb—to tabernacle, to pitch his tent—is so deliberate.
Not “take up residence” in a way that suggests permanence or institution.
But to dwell as movement.
It echoes the wilderness God—the One who never requested a house of stone,
who moved with his people,
and who keeps choosing tents over thrones.
Jesus didn’t just show up to die.
He tabernacled. He entered into space and pain and hunger and ache with us.
He was presence before he was sacrifice.
He healed, re-membered, cast out, and restored
before the cross was visible—
not as prelude, but as protest against the systems of death already at work.
And when death did come,
he didn’t substitute himself in a closed system.
He entered death to unmake its grip.
Resurrection, then, isn’t the receipt for a payment.
It’s the liberation of the human story from the grave—a story he lived from inside the wound.
And then Pentecost: Go.
Mobile again.
No curtain. No fixed altar. No temple project.
Just wind, breath, presence.
It leaves me asking—not in a way that feels like challenge,
but more like recognition.
Because for me, this isn’t something I’ve arrived in.
It’s something I run at speed to keep up with—
the ongoing movement of a God who won’t be stilled,
who still tabernacles,
and still pitches tents in places we were told were too broken for holiness.
Thank you again—for the clarity, and for holding space for movement.
I wonder—what else begins to unravel when we let mobility shape not just our theology, but our belonging?
Also…second thought ….
that phrase from 2 Samuel 7:
“I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt…”
What struck me as I lingered there is how easily this verse can be co-opted to imply that God’s tabernacled movement was just a temporary arrangement—a provisional season until something more “permanent” could be built. As if mobility was fine for a time, but eventually God needed a proper home. That reading can make it sound like the Temple was God’s goal all along, and the tent was just a transitional tool.
But that’s not what the text actually says. And I don’t believe that’s what God is doing.
There’s no suggestion that the house was his idea. In fact, God’s response sounds more like a quiet protest. Not just, “I never asked for that,” but something closer to, “I don’t dwell that way.” There’s a boundary being named. A refusal. A reorientation of presence. The God who liberated his people didn’t descend into the city to take up royal space—he moved with them. In a tent. In fire. In cloud. He didn’t enthrone himself—he pitched his tent among the traumatised.
That matters. Especially for those of us who have lived inside systems where “the house of God” was a site of harm. Where permanence and structure were used not for presence, but for power. Where platform was protected at the expense of people. For those of us whose bodies were harmed while someone preached in the next room, it matters deeply to hear God say, “I never lived there.”
This isn’t just about architecture. It’s about allegiance.
God’s presence is not synonymous with institution.
He aligns with tents.
With wilderness.
With bodies on the move.
Not because mobility is less,
but because mobility refuses empire.
Because it refuses to be enthroned where trauma is sanctified.
So when God says to David, “Did I ever ask you to build me a house?”, he’s not playing coy.
He’s issuing a correction. A holy no.
And that no is not just for David—it’s for all of us who have been told that God lives where power sits.
He doesn’t.
He lives with those who are still walking.
He pitches tents in grief spaces.
He tabernacles with the disoriented.
And he will not be housed by systems that displace his people.
It’s not a temporary phase.
It’s who he’s always been
Thanks Heidi… and we could certainly explore why (and how) the Temple was destroyed. In it all has to be a coming of age of the people of the Spirit… Like Paul says ‘the law until…’ – ‘the Temple until…’
And still we love to ‘house’ God. Even stronger that give God a house but we will put you in a ‘house’ where we can domesticate / colonise the Spirit.