Mirror Mirror on the....Basin?

Try to imagine going through your day-to-day life without using mirrors. In the morning when you get ready, in the closet when you try on your outfit, on your vanity when you put on makeup, in the bathroom when you need to freshen up for your date, or in your purse when you need to check to see if there is food in your teeth. Sounds like a rough life to me. We depend on mirrors a lot. 

As women, we all have a love-hate relationship with mirrors. They reveal our flaws yet allow us to fix our flaws...or at least try to cover them up. They help us make those "life-altering" decisions and answer life's "crucial" questions...this shade or that shade? This dress or those pants? Top knot or curling iron? Too much bronzer? Did I get all my face wash off?

Mirrors in and of themselves are helpful. Who wants to walk around with dirt on their cheek? But mirrors, coupled with vanity or insecurity, become idols. Mirrors reveal our faults, making us feel sorry for ourselves. Mirrors reveal our beauty, causing us to pridefully gaze at our face a little to long.

Mirrors reveal our size, our blemishes, our hair style, our skin type, and our outward beauty but only God's Word reveals our true beauty: Christ in us. 

I get so excited when I find hidden stories within the Bible--those verses that we often overlook so we miss out on valuable lessons.

He made the basin of bronze and its stand of bronze, from the mirrors of the ministering women who ministered in the entrance of the tent. Exodus 38:8

The Lord gave Moses specific instructions for building His dwelling place--the tabernacle. God even filled the people with the skills and knowledge to complete His house with perfection. The "ministering women" regularly met at the tabernacle door to intentionally worship. These women were known for their devotion, zeal, and piety. It was costumery for the women to bring "looking glasses" or mirrors to the tabernacle (us girls always travel with a mirror).

But this hidden verse says that these women willingly gave up their brazen mirrors to be used within the tabernacle. The women may have offered their mirrors to surrender their sin, obsession with self, in order to better serve the Lord. Or, the women may have willingly sacrificed their possessions to provide Moses with the materials needed to make the basin. Either way, these spiritually influential women renounced the world by offering their mirrors to the Lord. By giving up their mirrors, they surrendered their vanity and pleasure.

The basin of mirrors "signified the provision that is made in the gospel of Christ for the cleansing of our souls from the moral pollution of sin by the merit and grace of Christ, that we may be fit to serve the holy God in holy duties" Matthew Henry

The women's donation did not go to waste. The mirrored basin served to cleanse the priests upon entering the tabernacle. The mirrors in the basin reflected the priest's dirty spots so they could remove them before presenting themselves to the Lord. James 1 describes God's Word as a looking glass. The Bible reveals our sin so we can get rid of it. But we cannot remove sin our own. Mirrors and basins may clean our face, but the gospel cleanses our soul. Jesus' death permanently cleansed our hearts so that we can continually enter God's presence with full confidence that He will accept us.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. James 1:23-25

May we treasure what the Word of God reveals more than what our bathroom mirror reveals. We are not defined by our weight, height, color, or skin. It is so easy to let our outward appearance consume our thoughts and actions especially since it is something we can control. We can eat better, try expensive products, bleach our teeth, color our hair, straighten our curls, or scrub our skin but none of that will give us the self-confidence we so desperately crave.

True beauty (the way God defines it) is completely independent from outward appearance. God's Word reveals our beauty not a mirror. True beauty is Christ in us. Although nothing much to look at, Jesus is the most beautiful human that ever walked the earth. The more we become like Him, the more beautiful we become.

For he grew up before him like a young plant,and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him....But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53:2,5

Just as we approach a mirror with the intention to change something about ourself, we must approach the Bible with the intention to change something within our heart and life. 

May we willingly give up ourselves, our vanity, our pride, our insecurities, and our idols to serve the Lord with a pure heart. Let us never allow self-obsession to get in the way of God's Kingdom work. Since the gospel makes us clean and the Bible makes us more like our beautiful Savior, may we put serving God above our own wants...just like the ministering women of the tabernacle.

☎︎

The Girl Next Door