E. G. Sewell on the Tabernacle (1)

In 1886, the same year that Meta Chestnutt came to Nashville to begin her studies at Peabody, E. G. Sewell, coeditor with David Lipscomb of the The Gospel Advocate magazine, based in Nashville, published two front-page articles that gave a symbolic interpretation of the biblical tabernacle.

Sewell began by establishing the tabernacle's New Testament counterpart. Not surprisingly, he identified what Protestants had favored for hundreds of years: "That the Jewish tabernacle, in many of its leading features foreshadowed the church of God, is admitted by all." From there, he submitted that the second room, the Most Holy place, should be understood as "a figure, or type of heaven," with "the divine presence upon the mercy seat to foreshadow the eternal presence of God himself in that blessed abode." The first room, or Holy Place, is "a type of the church of the living God on earth." This stood to reason, because in the same way that one entered the Holy Place before going further into the Most Holy Place, so one enters the church before finally reaching heaven. Consequently "all the articles of furniture" in the Holy Place "and the acts performed here are figurative of the worship of the Lord's house on earth."[1] This orientation--with the Most Holy Place as heaven, the Holy Place as the church on earth, and area outside the tent as preliminary--provided the template for Sewell's biblical exposition.

Table of Shewbread

The remainder of Sewell's first article interprets the symbolic meaning of two items in the Holy Place: the table of shewbread and the candlestick. "The table," he wrote, "foreshadows the Lord's table in the church of God on earth." In the same way that the twelve loaves were replaced every week, so it is that every week, Christians are to partake of the Lord's Supper. And in the same way that the priests removed the loaves each Sabbath day, so there is a "specified time" for Christians to observe the Lord's Supper, "the first day of the week." Sewell emphasized that just as divine directions were not to be neglected by the Old Testament priests, "so the breaking of the loaf must not be neglected by the children of God now in the congregations of the Lord." In fact, fidelity to the will of God should, if anything, be stronger in the Christian age. "While the Jewish priests cold only consider the table and shewbread as a formal ordinance, Christians can now see in the broken loaf of the Lord's table an emblem of the actual, real body of the Son of God that was broken, mangled upon the Roman cross, that poor sinners might live."[2]

Notes

[1] E. G. Sewell, "The Tabernacle," Gospel Advocate 28 (January 27, 1886), 49. See also "Temple Building," Gospel Advocate 31 (August 21, 1889), 536, where Sewell writes that the tabernacle "was figurative of the church of God, the spiritual temple on earth now," and "Information Wanted," Gospel Advocate 31 (October 2, 1889), 631. For a brief biography, see David H. Warren, "Sewell, Elisha Granville (1830-1924)," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 680-81.

[2] Sewell, "The Tabernacle," 49.