Filled With the Spirit to Build: What Exodus 31 and the Science of Skill Acquisition Reveal About Every Athlete in Raleigh Who Wants to Be Great

By Eric Johnson | CrossFit Full Armor | CrossFit Gym in Raleigh, NC

“See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills — to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze.” — Exodus 31:2–4

Most people read Exodus 31 and pass over it quickly.

It comes between two of the more dramatic moments in the Israelite narrative — the receiving of the law and the catastrophe of the golden calf. Bezalel does not part a sea or receive commandments on a mountain. He builds things. He works with his hands. He is described in terms that sound almost mundane compared to the thunder and fire of the surrounding chapters — a craftsman, filled with wisdom and skill, assigned to construct the tabernacle.

But look at the language God uses to describe what He has given Bezalel. He has filled him with the Spirit of God. Not inspiration in the vague motivational sense — the Spirit of God, the same language used for the most significant divine encounters in the Old Testament. And what does that filling produce? Wisdom. Understanding. Knowledge. And all kinds of skills.

God filled a craftsman with His Spirit and the result was skill. Not just vision. Not just desire. Actual, developed, practiced, applied skill in specific domains. Exercise science has spent decades studying exactly how that kind of skill develops — and what it found is one of the most theologically interesting bodies of research in all of sports science.

The Gift Is the Beginning, Not the End

In 1993, a psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson published a study that became one of the most cited and most debated papers in the history of performance research. Studying violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music, Ericsson and his colleagues found that the factor most predictive of elite performance was not innate talent, natural ability, or genetic gift. It was accumulated hours of a specific kind of practice — what Ericsson called deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is not simply repetition. It is not showing up and doing the same thing you already know how to do. It is practice specifically designed to push into the edges of current ability — focused, effortful, targeted at specific weaknesses, with immediate feedback on performance. Ericsson found that elite violinists had accumulated approximately ten thousand hours of this kind of practice by the time they reached the top of their field. Average violinists, who had put in similar total hours of playing, had spent far fewer of those hours in deliberate practice. The difference was not the time. It was the quality and intentionality of the practice within the time.

The gift opens the door. Deliberate practice is what you do once you walk through it. Bezalel was filled with skill — and then he built, day after day, with his hands.

This finding has been replicated across domains from chess to surgery to athletics. The athletes who reach the highest levels of their sport are almost universally distinguished not by superior raw physical gifts — though gifts matter and are real — but by the quality and intentionality of the practice they accumulated over years. They did not simply have more talent. They did more with the talent they had.

Exodus 31 is describing exactly this. God filled Bezalel with wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and skill. But then Bezalel built. The tabernacle did not appear because Bezalel was filled with the Spirit. It appeared because a man filled with the Spirit went to work — cutting, shaping, designing, refining, applying his God-given capacity to real materials in the real world over real time. The filling was the gift. The building was the practice.

What Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge Actually Mean

The three words God uses in Exodus 31 before the word skills are not synonymous and the distinction is worth sitting with. Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge describe three different cognitive relationships to a craft that modern skill acquisition research has independently identified as the three stages of expert development.

Knowledge is the foundational stage — the accumulation of information about a domain. A novice athlete learns what a deadlift is, what positions the body should move through, what muscles are involved, what errors to avoid. This is knowledge. It is necessary and it is the beginning. But it is not competence.

Understanding is the intermediate stage — the integration of knowledge into a coherent mental model that allows the practitioner to make sense of what they observe and predict what will happen. An athlete with understanding does not just know the positions of the deadlift — they understand why those positions produce force efficiently, what happens to the system when positions break down, and how to read another athlete’s movement and identify what is limiting their performance. Understanding allows transfer. The athlete can take what they know in one context and apply it intelligently in another.

Wisdom is the expert stage — the intuitive, embodied, often pre-conscious application of understanding in real conditions under real pressure. The wise craftsman does not think through each step of the process. The knowledge and understanding have been internalized so deeply that they express themselves automatically, fluidly, in response to the specific conditions of the moment. This is what sports scientists call automaticity — the point at which skill no longer requires conscious attention because it has been encoded so deeply in the motor system that it runs beneath awareness.

Bezalel had all three. God filled him with the full spectrum — from foundational knowledge through integrative understanding to practical wisdom. And then God added skills — the physical, embodied, hands-on capacity to translate all of that cognitive development into actual work. The tabernacle required every layer. So does athletic excellence.

The Myth of the Natural

One of the most damaging ideas in sports culture is the concept of the natural — the athlete who simply has it, who doesn’t need to practice the way other people do, whose performance is an expression of raw gift rather than accumulated work. This idea flatters the gifted and discourages the ungifted, and it is not well supported by the research.

What looks like natural ability in an elite athlete is almost always the invisibility of accumulated practice. The movement that appears effortless has been repeated thousands of times until the effortfulness was trained out of it. The decision that looks instinctive was made correctly enough times under pressure that it stopped requiring conscious deliberation. The gift is real — it sets the ceiling on what practice can produce — but the gift alone does not produce the performance. The practice produces the performance. The gift just raises the ceiling on how high practice can take you.

Ericsson’s research found something else that is worth naming here. The type of practice matters far more than the amount. An athlete who practices for ten years by doing what they are already good at — drilling strengths, avoiding weaknesses, staying comfortable — does not accumulate ten years of deliberate practice. They accumulate one year of deliberate practice repeated ten times. The repetition without intentional challenge produces maintenance, not development. The skill does not grow. It consolidates at its current level and stays there.

God did not fill Bezalel with finished work. He filled him with the capacity to do the work. The doing was still required — every day, with every tool, in every detail of a tabernacle that had to be built right.

All Kinds of Skills

The phrase that closes God’s description of Bezalel is significant in the context of athletic development. He filled him with all kinds of skills. Not one skill. Not a narrow specialty. All kinds — the full breadth of craft required to build the tabernacle from its architecture to its furnishings to its priestly garments to its ceremonial objects.

This breadth is not incidental. The tabernacle required it. A craftsman who could only work gold could not build the tabernacle. A craftsman who could only design could not construct it. The scope of the project required the scope of the skill set, and God provided both.

Athletic development that produces durable, complete performance follows the same principle. The athlete who develops only their dominant quality — the sprinter who never trains strength, the lifter who never trains mobility, the soccer player who never develops their weak foot — becomes brittle at the edges of their specialty. They are extraordinary in one domain and limited everywhere that domain touches another. The complete athlete, like the complete craftsman, develops all kinds of skills even when some of them are less natural than others.

This is the principle behind CrossFit’s ten physical skills — cardiovascular endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, and accuracy. No one of these is the whole picture. All of them together describe the athlete who can do anything the physical world requires. Training all of them, deliberately and consistently, is the practice of building all kinds of skills. It is the athletic equivalent of the tabernacle — a complete structure, built right in every dimension, that cannot be accomplished by excellence in one area alone.

Filled and Then Built

The sequence in Exodus 31 is worth holding onto. God filled Bezalel first. Then Bezalel built. The filling preceded the work but did not replace it. The Spirit of God did not construct the tabernacle. Bezalel did — with the hands God gave him, the mind God filled, and the skills God developed in him through whatever years of craft preceded his appointment to this specific task.

Every athlete reading this has been given something. A body with specific capacities, a nervous system with specific tendencies, a set of physical gifts that are genuinely yours and genuinely given. The question Exodus 31 asks is not whether you have been filled. The question is what you are building with what you have been given.

At CrossFit Full Armor in Raleigh we take this question seriously. The programming here is designed to develop all kinds of skills — strength, power, endurance, speed, agility, coordination — because we believe that the full expression of what God put in you requires the full development of what He gave you. The benchmark system exists because skill development without measurement is guesswork. The coaching exists because deliberate practice without feedback produces repetition, not improvement. The community exists because Bezalel was not the only craftsman God appointed — He filled Oholiab too, and gave him gifts of his own, and they built the tabernacle together.

You were filled with something. Come build with it.

The gift is the beginning. The practice is the stewardship. The building is the worship.

— Eric Johnson, CrossFit Full Armor