The Tabernacle—Outside the Camp

Spurgeon uses the incident of Moses pitching the tabernacle outside the Israelite camp — after their golden calf idolatry drove God's presence from the center — as a picture of the believer's necessary separation from the world, arguing that genuine seekers of God must go outside not only the camp of the openly profane and the thoughtlessly careless, but also the camp of the merely moral, the merely religious, and even the nominally church-going, since God's tabernacle is not to be found among those who have adulterated worship with human invention, kept back parts of God's Word, or made peace with worldly motives while wearing Christian labels. He then honestly catalogs the inconveniences this separation entails: the cost of public confession, the loss of friends and family approval, coldness from fellow Christians who call earnestness fanaticism, the false charge of bigotry, and the burden of being watched and held to a higher standard — but insists that none of these should deter a true disciple, just as David went to fight Goliath alone while his brothers sneered, and that sensitivity to being watched ought to function as a check on sin rather than a reason to avoid commitment. He closes with four arguments for going outside the camp: for your own joy (worldly Christians are miserable Christians), for your own growth in grace, for the Church's sake (it has always been the distinctly separate men who have saved the Church in every era of reformation), and most urgently for Christ's sake, since He was driven from the camp and crucified by it, and it is a strange loyalty that seeks the smiles of the world that put him to death.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on  February 10, 1861.