Theopedia

Ark of the Covenant

“There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.”

— Exodus 25:22 (ESV)

Definition

The Ark of the Covenant was the gold-covered wooden chest that held the tablets of the Ten Commandments, built at God’s command for the wilderness tabernacle (Exodus 25:10-22). Its lid, the mercy seat, was overshadowed by two golden cherubim and formed the earthly seat of God’s presence among Israel (Exodus 25:22); once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest sprinkled sacrificial blood there to atone for the nation’s sin (Leviticus 16:14-15). As one of the Old Testament’s ceremonial ordinances, it prefigured Christ, whose atoning work it typified and who has now fulfilled and superseded it.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession does not name the Ark of the Covenant itself. Its chapter on the law places the Ark’s furnishings within a broader category: the ceremonial laws God gave Israel, containing “several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits,” all “appointed only to the time of reformation” and “abrogated and taken away” once Christ, “the true Messiah and only law-giver,” had come.1

The mercy seat, the Ark’s golden lid, is one of the ordinances this describes. Gill identifies Christ as “the antitype of the mercy seat which was a lid or cover to the ark of the same dimensions with it, in which was the law, and prefigured Christ, as the covering of the transgressions of it by his people, from the sight of avenging Justice.”2 On this reading, the Ark illustrates the confession’s own point directly: a physical, temporary ordinance whose purpose was to point away from itself, to the atonement Christ alone would accomplish.

Biblical Basis

Exodus 25 describes the Ark in detail: a wooden chest overlaid with gold, roughly a cubit and a half wide and high and two cubits long, carried by gold-ringed poles so that no hand needed to touch it directly (Exodus 25:10-15). It held the stone tablets of the law, and later a jar of manna and Aaron’s budded staff (Exodus 16:34; Numbers 17:10; Deuteronomy 10:5), earning it the alternate name “Ark of the Testimony.” Its lid, the mercy seat, was flanked by two gold cherubim with outstretched wings; God told Moses he would meet and speak with him there (Exodus 25:22), and it was there, once a year on the Day of Atonement, that the high priest sprinkled sacrificial blood to atone for Israel’s sin (Leviticus 16:14-15).

The New Testament’s own vocabulary ties the mercy seat to Christ’s atoning work directly. Gill points out that the Greek word Paul uses for Christ in Romans 3:25, “whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation,” is “the same which the Greek version of Exodus 25:21 and which the apostle, in Hebrews 9:5 use of the mercy seat; which, with the cherubim upon it, and the ark, with the law therein under it… formed a seat for the divine Majesty; and which was an emblem of his mercy and justice shining in the atonement made by Christ, which this exhibited to view.”3 The connection runs through the vocabulary itself, not just the imagery: the same Greek word names both the mercy seat and Christ’s own propitiation.

Historical Development

The Ark’s biblical history runs from its construction to its disappearance from the biblical record. Moses had it built for the wilderness tabernacle (Exodus 37:1-9), and the Levites carried it ahead of Israel through the wilderness (Numbers 4:5-6; 10:33-36), over the Jordan (Joshua 3:14-17), and around Jericho (Joshua 6:6-12). The Philistines captured it in battle and, after suffering plague for keeping it, returned it seven months later (1 Samuel 4:3-11; 5:1-6:1). David brought it to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:12-19), and Solomon installed it in the temple’s Most Holy Place (1 Kings 8:6-9). No biblical text records what became of it after that. Post-exilic Scripture already anticipates its absence: Jeremiah says that in the age to come Israel will “no more say, ‘The ark of the covenant of the LORD,’” and that it will “not come to mind, nor shall it be remembered, nor shall it be missed, nor shall another one be made” (Jeremiah 3:16).

Gill, writing on the ceremonial law generally, explains why the Ark was never meant to last: its ordinances “were only shadows of good things to come by Christ; when he, the Sun of Righteousness, arose, these shadows fled.”4 Calvin makes the same point about the ceremonial law as a whole: it “behaved in time to perish and vanish away; whereas the Gospel, inasmuch as it exhibits the very body, is firmly established for ever.”5 Charnock, surveying everything else God let lapse alongside it, the lost pot of manna, the ceased Urim and Thummim, the temple’s diminished glory, places the Ark specifically in that list: “Even the ark of the covenant, the symbol of his presence, and the glory of the Lord in that nation, should not any more be remembered and visited.”6

Objections and Responses

The Ark’s unrecovered disappearance means God’s presence departed his people. If the Ark was God’s earthly throne, and it was lost without being replaced, a reader might conclude God’s presence left Israel along with it. Charnock argues the opposite: the loss was by design, part of God’s own plan to move his people from ceremonial, place-bound worship to something more spiritual. “God never intended that sort of worship to be durable,” he writes; the ceremonial ordinances were “only typical” and “must naturally expire and be insignificant in their use, upon the finishing of that by the Redeemer, which they did prefigure.”7 On this reading, God signaled the change in advance rather than being caught off guard by it.

The mercy seat’s blood sacrifices actually atoned for sin, apart from Christ. Calvin answers this from Hebrews: “the blood of beasts did not reach to the conscience; that the law was a shadow of good things to come, but not the very image of the things” (Heb. 10:1).8 Gill’s own language makes the same point from the other direction: Christ is the mercy seat’s “antitype,” meaning the mercy seat itself was only ever the picture, not the reality it pictured.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 3. ↩

  2. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VI, chap. 7, “Of the Pardon of Sin.” ↩

  3. Gill, book VI, chap. 6, “Of Propitiation, Atonement, and Reconciliation, as Ascribed to Christ.” ↩

  4. Gill, book IV, chap. 5, “Of the Abrogation of the Old Covenant, or First Administration of It.” ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), book 2, chap. 11, “The Difference Between the Two Testaments.” ↩

  6. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), 1:218, “Discourse IV: On Spiritual Worship.” ↩

  7. Charnock, 1:217-18. ↩

  8. Calvin, Institutes, book 4, chap. 14, “Of the Sacraments.” ↩

  9. Gill, book VI, chap. 7. ↩