The Cherubim and the Way Back

by John Wiertzema

There is a detail woven into the temple that most of us have walked past a hundred times without stopping on it.

It is in the curtain — the great veil that hung between the holy place and the room behind it. The fabric was blue and purple and scarlet and fine white linen, and worked into the weave, embroidered into the threads themselves, were two figures. Not flowers. Not vines. Not the palm trees and open blossoms carved into the woodwork elsewhere in the house. Angelic beings. Cherubim — the same kind of beings Scripture stations, at its very beginning, just outside the gate of a garden.

We notice the famous pair easily enough: the two of gold above the ark, their wings stretched toward each other over the mercy seat, the image illustrated in every child’s Bible. The pair in the curtain we tend to file under decoration — ornament, part of the architecture rather than part of the story. But they are not decoration. They are the same beings, doing the same work they were given the moment the man and the woman were sent out of Eden. And once we see what they are doing, the whole temple begins to read differently. So does the cross. So does the strange, deliberate detail three of the Gospel writers all refused to leave out.

We began this series with the world as a temple — a cosmos built as God’s house, a garden for its holy of holies, and a man set within it, near to God without a veil between them. This essay follows what happened to that nearness. Because the dwelling that began as wide as the world did not stay open. Somewhere between the garden and the tent of skins, the way in was guarded. And Scripture, far from passing over that quietly, takes deliberate care to tell us who was set to guard it.

The Guardians at the Gate

The cherubim enter the story at the worst possible moment, and Scripture pauses to place them there on purpose.

Genesis 3 has reached its end. The man and the woman have eaten from the tree, the judgment has fallen, and the chapter closes on exile: “He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24). Read it slowly and notice what the text does and does not say. It does not say the way was destroyed. It says the way was guarded. In the middle of one of the most devastating scenes in all of Scripture, the narrative takes a moment to tell us precisely who is standing at the threshold, and what they are there to do.

This matters, because guarding is not the same as closing. To close a way is to end it. To guard a way is to defend it — and a defended threshold implies, by its very existence, that there is still another side. The flaming sword and the cherubim are not a wall sealing the garden forever. They are sentries posted at a door. The way back is real. It is simply no longer open.

And the guardians are not generic. Cherubim are a specific order of heavenly being, and across Scripture they keep specific company. Wherever they appear, they appear near the throne, near the glory, at the boundary between divine and human space. They are not messengers sent out into the world the way other angels are; they are stationed at the seam where heaven and earth meet, attending what is most holy and keeping it from careless approach. That is their vocation. At the east of Eden, that vocation is given its first and clearest expression. They are placed to guard the way back into the presence of God.

Hold them in mind, because Scripture is not finished with them. It is going to return to these same beings, at the same kind of threshold, doing the same job — and it is going to do so with such precision that the return cannot be an accident.

Woven Into the Curtain

Move forward through the long middle of the story — past the flood, past Babel, past the patriarchs and the four hundred years in Egypt and the sea that opened — and you arrive at Sinai, where God gives Moses the design for the tabernacle.

It is worth feeling the sheer scale of these instructions. The tabernacle is the largest single architectural description in the Bible: Exodus spends chapter after chapter on it, every cubit and clasp and color specified, then narrates the construction again at nearly the same length, as though the building of God’s dwelling among His people were too important to summarize. And buried in that immense set of instructions are two appearances of the cherubim — two, and only two, and their placement is the whole point.

The first is the one everyone pictures. “And you shall make two cherubim of gold … on the two ends of the mercy seat … The cherubim shall spread out their wings above, overshadowing the mercy seat with their wings, their faces one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubim be” (Exodus 25:18–20). Two figures of hammered gold, standing over the ark in the innermost room, their faces bent toward the place where God promises, “There I will meet with you” (Exodus 25:22). This is the image on the diagram in the back of the study Bible. Most of us who know anything at all about the temple know this much.

But Exodus does not stop with the ark. One chapter later comes the second appearance — the one almost no one mentions. “And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen. It shall be made with cherubim skillfully worked into it … And the veil shall separate for you the holy place from the Most Holy” (Exodus 26:31, 33). And when the construction account comes around, the instruction is repeated rather than assumed: “He made the veil … with cherubim skillfully worked into it he made it” (Exodus 36:35).

Read that again, because the wording is exact. The cherubim are not painted onto the curtain. They are not hung beside it. They are worked into it — embroidered through the linen, part of the fabric’s own structure. The veil is not a plain partition with some figures added for beauty. The veil is, in part, made of cherubim.

Which leaves the tabernacle with two sets of them. One set in gold, three-dimensional, standing over the mercy seat inside the Most Holy. And one set woven into the curtain at the entrance to that same room — the very veil the high priest must pass through to reach the gold ones. Two sets. Two locations. The same beings.

And here is the question the architecture quietly poses, and that we so rarely stop to ask: why?

The Same Beings, a Different Posture

If the cherubim on the veil are decoration, the question has no answer. The text could have called for palm trees there, or pomegranates, or open flowers — the patterns that adorn the woodwork elsewhere in the house. It does not. It calls for cherubim, specifically, and it does so more than once: in the instructions, again in the construction, and again centuries later when Solomon builds in stone. Scripture is making certain we cannot miss them. Whatever they are doing, the text refuses to let it pass as ornament.

So look at where the veil hangs. It stands between the holy place — where the priests serve daily, where the lamp-stand burns and the bread of the Presence is set out — and the Most Holy, where the ark rests, where the glory dwells, where the high priest may enter on one day of the year, with blood, and only with blood, and only after careful preparation. The veil is the boundary between the space where Israel may serve through its representatives and the space where God dwells unmediated. The veil, in other words, is the threshold.

Now set that beside Genesis 3:24. Where were the cherubim placed there? At the threshold of holy presence, to guard the way back. The cherubim woven into the veil are doing the same work, in the same kind of place, that the cherubim at the east of Eden were doing. The tabernacle is not only a tent for worship. It is Eden re-staged in liturgical form — the garden rebuilt as a building, the guarded threshold rebuilt as a curtain. And the high priest who passes through that veil on the Day of Atonement is being shown, in his own body and once a year, what it would mean to walk back through the very threshold humanity was driven out of.

That is the first half of the observation. The second half waits on the other side of the curtain.

The high priest passes the embroidered guardians and enters the Most Holy — and finds two more cherubim. The gold pair, over the mercy seat. The same beings again. But look closely at how they are arranged, because the posture has changed. The cherubim at Eden were placed to bar the way. The cherubim in the veil stand guard at the threshold. But the cherubim over the ark are not barring anything. Their wings are spread over the mercy seat; their faces are turned inward and down, toward the place where God says He will meet His people. At the veil, they are guardians. Over the ark, they are attendants.

This is the part that, once seen, is difficult to unsee. Scripture is telling a story with the cherubim themselves, simply by where it sets them and how it turns them. To reach the second set, you must pass through the first. The beings who bar the way in Genesis are the same beings who frame the meeting-place in Exodus — and between the two stands a curtain you may cross only by blood, only by representation, only on the one appointed day. The same guardians who keep the way also wait at its end. The threshold and the meeting-place are watched over by one order of being, in two postures, and the distance between those postures is the entire drama of how a sinful people may come near to a holy God.

Once that registers, the layout of the whole sanctuary begins to speak with a coherence that was always there and easy to miss. The threshold of holy presence is not a vague religious mood. Scripture places specific beings at it, the same kind in the same role at every reappearance. The way back is real, and it is guarded rather than closed. But the guarding is in earnest. And what it would take for that guarding to be set aside — Scripture has not yet said. It lets the pattern build first.

The Pattern Holds

About four hundred years after the tabernacle, Solomon builds the temple in stone, and the pattern does not loosen. It deepens.

The instructions are scaled upward. The Most Holy becomes a perfect cube, twenty cubits in every direction, overlaid throughout with gold. The cherubim over the ark are still there — and Solomon adds two more, enormous figures carved from olive wood and overlaid with gold, standing some fifteen feet tall, their outstretched wings reaching from one wall of the cube to the other (1 Kings 6:23–28). And the veil with its embroidered cherubim is still there too; the Chronicler records it plainly, that Solomon “made the veil of blue and purple and crimson … and worked cherubim on it” (2 Chronicles 3:14). From the tent in the wilderness to the house on the hill, across centuries and a change of materials, the cherubim hold their two stations: woven into the threshold, and stationed over the place of meeting. The architecture of Eden is kept alive in the architecture of worship.

And the room those cherubim filled was a garden. We saw earlier in this series that Israel’s temple was carved to look like one — but it is worth seeing now what the carving set side by side. Solomon paneled the walls, inner room and outer, with carved cherubim and palm trees and open flowers, and cut the same three figures into the olive-wood doors that closed off the Most Holy (1 Kings 6:29, 32, 35). Cherubim, and palm trees, and flowers — guardians stationed among growing things. And when the ark was carried in, it was set down beneath the outstretched wings of the great cherubim, sheltered under them (1 Kings 8:6–7). Picture what an Israelite who knew his Scripture would have seen from that doorway: a garden worked into the walls, and standing all through it, the cherubim. He would not have needed it explained. He had read Genesis 3. He was looking at the garden humanity had been driven out of — and at the very beings set to guard the way back in.

And so for the better part of a thousand years, every faithful Israelite who came up to the house of the LORD knew something, even without ever putting it into words: that what was inside was guarded. The way back to the presence was real, but the way back was defended — and defended by the same beings who had stood at the gate of the garden since the beginning. That is the conviction built into the stone. That is the architecture Jesus walked past every time He went up to Jerusalem.

Which brings us, as it was always going to, to the cross.

The Veil Tears

Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree on remarkably little in how they arrange their accounts. They agree on this.

All three record what happened at the very moment Jesus died, and all three record it with nearly the same words. “And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:50–51). Three writers, working independently, each refusing to leave out one particular detail at the climax of the most important scene they will ever describe. If the curtain were only a curtain, this would be a strange thing for all three to insist upon. Why would the torn fabric of a partition be the detail none of them could omit?

Because the curtain is not only a curtain. The curtain is the threshold, and the cherubim are woven into it. And the way it tears tells us who tore it. The text is careful: from top to bottom. Not from the bottom up, where a man’s hands could reach. From above, downward, beyond any human grasp — and the grammar holds the same testimony, for the curtain was torn; no one is said to have torn it. The guardians at the way back were not removed by Israel, nor by Rome, nor even by the high priest, the one man permitted to pass them once a year with blood. They were torn from above, by the God who had set them there in the first place. And what tore them was the death of His Son.

This is not an aside dropped into the narrative. It belongs to the whole shape of the scene. Matthew sets the torn veil among the loud cry and the earthquake and the split rocks and, in the verses that follow, the opening of tombs — a moment with cosmic dimensions, the seen world registering what has happened in the unseen. Across the entire Old Testament, Scripture has been showing us what that curtain was for: the cherubim, the threshold, the way back guarded. And now, in the death of Jesus, it shows us what it costs to tear it.

Through the Curtain, That Is, His Flesh

Decades later, a letter circles back and says out loud what the Gospel writers were content to describe.

The book of Hebrews was written by someone who had clearly turned the temple over and over in his mind — its architecture, its priesthood, its single guarded room. And he names what happened at the cross with a precision that leaves no doubt he understood the veil: “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, … let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:19–22).

Read what he does with the curtain. The way into the holy places runs through the curtain — and then he tells us what the curtain was: that is, through his flesh. The body of Jesus is the veil. His death is the tearing. The threshold humanity could not cross for thousands of years is opened not by going around it but by going through it — through Him. The cherubim woven into that curtain are torn the moment He yields up His spirit. Not relocated. Not retired. Torn. The way they guarded is the way that has now been opened.

And this is the move the whole thread has been building toward — the move that is, in small, the discipline my book How Scripture Speaks About the End is written to teach. That single line in Matthew, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom,” is not an arbitrary flourish. It is the conclusion of a thread Scripture began in Genesis 3, developed across Exodus 25 and 26, set in stone in Solomon’s temple, and held faithfully for a thousand years. The line lands the way it lands because Scripture spent the whole Old Testament teaching us to feel its weight. You can read the crucifixion without ever seeing the thread, and many do; the scene is still moving. But once you have followed the cherubim from the garden to the veil, the torn curtain is no longer merely dramatic. It is articulate. Scripture is saying something exact: the way back, guarded since the garden, has been opened by the death of the One the guardians were always waiting to see.

And notice where Hebrews actually lands the point. Not in a description of the ruined curtain, but in an invitation: let us draw near. The whole long architecture of distance — the rings of restriction, the single day, the blood, the guarded threshold — resolves into two words spoken to ordinary people. We may come near.

The Way Back

So the way back into the presence of God is open, and it was opened from His side, not ours. Not by our effort, not by our sacrifice, not by our blood — by His. The cherubim who kept the way are silent now, and their silence is not the silence of sentries who have abandoned their post. It is the silence of a post fulfilled. The way they guarded has been opened; the presence they kept is now offered.

This changes something very concrete about how we come to God. When we draw near to Him — in prayer, in weakness, in grief, in plain gratitude — we are not standing outside a curtain wondering whether we have done enough to be let through. The curtain has already been torn. From the top. By Him. For us. The confidence Hebrews speaks of is not confidence in ourselves; it is confidence in what His death already accomplished at the threshold.

There is one more thing to say, and I will say it lightly, because its fuller weight belongs to the next essay. The torn veil opens the way back — but it does not yet bring the dwelling of God to fill all things. There is a not-yet folded into this opening. Scripture looks ahead to a day when the threshold is not torn but gone, when the dwelling of God is no longer guarded at all, because there is no longer anywhere that stands outside it. The way has been opened; the dwelling has not yet expanded to its final measure. That is the trajectory the next essay walks. For now it is enough to see what the torn veil opens — and to walk through it without flinching.

So the next time you read the account of the crucifixion — Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23 — pause when you reach the line about the curtain. Do not read it as a detail. Read it as a destination. The cherubim woven into that veil had been waiting for that line since the third chapter of Genesis. Every high priest who passed through them had been pointing toward it. And the death of Jesus had earned it. The curtain was torn from top to bottom. The way back is open.

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