Ark of the Covenant

RICHARD P. VERRALL

The significance of the ark as a type of divine protection becomes apparent at three distinct periods of Hebrew history. First, Noah and his family are saved from the flood in an ark of gopher-wood; second, Moses is hidden from Pharaoh for three months in an ark made of bulrushes; and third, the Israelites are guided through the wilderness of sin by the ark of the covenant.

It must be remembered that prior to their emancipation from Egyptian bondage, the children of Israel had lived for four centuries in the land of Goshen. It is probable that they there learned and adopted many of the pagan customs which prevailed so generally in Egypt. After crossing the Red sea, instead of attempting to elevate these recently emancipated slaves to a plane of spiritual worship at a single bound, Moses was wise enough to begin at the kindergarten of religious instruction. Through divine inspiration it was made apparent to him that the thought of the people could best be developed by gradual stages of mental discipline. In this respect Moses did what all wise and successful teachers of children have always done, he led human thought along the line of least resistance, from the known to the unknown, from symbol to idea.

In the thirty-first chapter of Exodus it is related that the Lord filled "Bezaleel the son of Uri" with wisdom and understanding "in all manner of workmanship," in order that he might make the ark and the tabernacle according to the pattern revealed to Moses on the mount. The ark was remarkably similar in appearance to the sacred shrines used on Egyptian festal occasions. Thus the children of Israel were only ready to elevate their thought one degree at a time in the scale of spiritual ascension.

From that time onward, the presence of God among the Hebrew people was identified with the ark. It was kept in "the most holy place," in the inner sanctuary of the tabernacle, and it was carried by the priests before the people when they journeyed or made war. Like the brazen serpent, however, it eventually became a national fetish, and it finally disappeared altogether, about the time of the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. During the seventy years of captivity in Babylon, and for five centuries after, the Jews had to bear the intense humiliation of believing that they had lost their most sacred national treasure. As a matter of fact, however, their real loss was not of the symbolic ark, the need of which they should long ago have outgrown, but of the spiritual idea of God's ever-presence, for which it had stood merely as a symbol.

The eternal coexistence of God and man was never quite lost sight of by the seers of Israel, even when the hour seemed darkest. Such spiritual thinkers as Daniel and his three companions in captivity, and later Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, helped to illuminate the firmament of human consciousness and to prove that the divine idea, when once conceived, is never entirely without a manifestation. Later, the advent of the gospel, with its spirit of healing, not only fulfilled the Mosaic law, but abolished its symbols. The ark was now revealed as a living presentation of Immanuel, "God with us." This higher manifestation of the Christ, or Saviour, while expressed by the human Jesus, was in reality incorporeal and spiritual. To those who still limit the Messiah to the person of Jesus, the Christ has not yet come; but those who recognize in his teachings the word of God, of Life and Truth, have the Comforter promised by Jesus, and this Comforter is now leading mankind into an understanding of all truth.

In her definition of "ark" in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mrs. Eddy interprets it as "the understanding of Spirit, destroying belief in matter;" also as "God and man coexistent and eternal" (p. 581). This sense of the word completely annihilates any remaining necessity for a type or symbol, and reveals the spiritual idea, or word of God, in its pristine purity. The demonstration of man's oneness with God in divine Science, redeeming mortals from sickness and sin, is the acme of true religion. This proof that the same Mind may be in us "which was also in Christ Jesus," is surely the second coming, and this coexistence of God and man, according to Mrs. Eddy, is the true "ark," which she says, on the page above quoted, "indicates temptation overcome and followed by exaltation."

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