Meaning of CAMPSITE

The "camp" was a common expression for Israel in the wilderness: the tabernacle in the center and the twelve tribes, each in its designated place, arranged around it constituted the camp.

Everything was ordered by God, and each tribe had to pitch their tents in the places designated to them (Num. 2).

As would be expected, Moses, Aaron, and the priests were closest to the door of the tabernacle, and the Levites surrounded the other three sides.

Certain impurities excluded those who contracted them until they were purified, and many things had to be carried outside as unworthy of the place in which God dwelt.

When the camp itself was defiled by the golden calf, Moses “took the tabernacle, and set it up far outside the camp, and called it the Tabernacle of the congregation.” It was not really the Tabernacle, because it had not yet been erected then.

The word means "tent," and it was undoubtedly a tent anticipating the Tabernacle, taken significantly outside the camp, to show that the dwelling place of God could not be where an idol was, for it is added, "and anyone who sought Jehovah went out to the tabernacle of the congregation that was outside the camp” (Ex. 33:7).

The bodies of animals whose blood was brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin were burned outside the camp (Ex. 29:14; Lev. 4:11, 12; Heb. 13:11).

Related to this is the fact that Jesus also "suffered outside the gate" (of Jerusalem, which then responded to the camp); Above all, the exhortation to Christians is based: "Let us therefore go out to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach" (Heb. 13:12, 13).

The entire earthly religious system adapted to the natural man, like the Judaism of old, now responds to the "camp", which Christians are exhorted to abandon.

Religious systems that have their recognized place in the world are in contrast to the heavenly and spiritual character of the church of God.

The camp of the saints and the beloved city in Rev. 20:9 refers to the nation of Israel in a scene that takes place at the end of the millennium. There is no “camp” for the church on earth.