There's a kind of museum exhibit roped off behind glass, a recreated room you can look at but never enter. The writer of Hebrews walks his audience through a room exactly like that. He describes the tabernacle in loving detail, the lampstand, the table, the ark holding the manna and Aaron's budded staff and the tablets, then stops himself: we cannot speak of these in detail. He wants them to notice the architecture instead. Two rooms, and a curtain between them. The priests entered the outer room daily, but the inner room, where God's presence dwelled, admitted one man, one day a year, and never without blood. The closed curtain was itself a message from the Holy Spirit: the way in is not yet open. And the deepest limit of all, the old sacrifices could clean the hands but never the conscience. Everything was stamped with one word: until. Until the real cleansing came.

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