I learned about the following insight before and it has always amazed me. Did the Israelites have an idea why all the specifics about the consensus, the formation of the tribes, why the raising of banners was necessary? Probably not. Again, we might not understand, we might not see God’s plan, but He has one. Obey, and be a blessing.
I’ll just paste this here:
From spiritandtruth.org
Using the populations given for the four camps, the ratios of their relative sizes would have been: Judah (1.0); Reuben (0.81); Ephraim (0.58); and Dan (0.85). Assuming the Levites encamped in a square and a uniform width for each camp extending strictly outward in the four cardinal directions, the view from above, as Balaam saw it (Num. 23:9) may have resembled a cross:
Camp of Israel
This assumes a uniform width for each camp—which cannot be known with certainty. If the boundary between each camp was taken to be on a diagonal (e.g., northwest, northeast, etc.) then the formation of the camp would have not been that of a cross. Even so, this does not adversely affect our main point—that the camp of Israel is a shadow of the heavenly throne.