Reading: Leviticus 8-10, Psalm 32
Hey, we’ve made it through a month of reading the Bible! Thanks for reading along with me so far. Looking back, I hope you begin to see there are some repeated themes in the story- the human problem, that we are not who we think we are, that God will make all things new. Today we get to the fourth of these themes. These four will continue to weave their way through the story for a very long time to come, and are worth remembering and reminding ourselves of any time we look at the story the Bible tells. There is a fifth theme, but we won’t get to it for quite a while, so we won’t deal with it yet.
God begins today’s episode by calling all of Israel together to witness the installment of Aaron and his sons as priests. We covered this when we read the instructions for the priest’s garments and their ordination, but it’s worth thinking back on. The priests were the intermediary between God and the people. The tabernacle was set up as a kind of throne room of God, a new creation inside the old one, where God and humans could be together, if only under extremely specific circumstances. Now God is getting Aaron and his sons prepped to be those humans.
Recall that the book of Exodus ended with Moses unable to enter the tabernacle- the glory of God was too intense for him to endure. And throughout almost all of the ordination rituals, Moses and Aaron remain outside the tent. They spend a great deal of time at the entrance to the tabernacle and at the alter, but it is not until almost everything is done that they venture towards the tent that God has been speaking from. They follow God’s directions exactly, and then Moses and Aaron are able to go into the tent. When they come out, Aaron gives the people a blessing, God’s glory appears, and God consumes the offerings on the altar. The people, understandably, freak out a little bit.
This is a big moment! The people have built the tabernacle, followed all the instructions Moses was given on the mountain, and now they have a priest who can enter God’s presence and make atonement for them. All the other sacrifices and rituals depended on this working. The high priest has to be able to go into God’s presence, bearing the guilt of the people on his shoulders and carrying the judgment of God on his heart, or everything else is for nothing. Only the high priest actually interacts with God directly, so if he can’t go in, nothing works. But now he can go in. Aaron, who so far hasn’t come off super great, has finally gotten there on following God’s direction.
But you really don’t expect it to end there, do you? When it comes to Israel, who struggles with God and man, nothing it that simple. Nadab and Abihu, the elder sons of Aaron, mess it all up. Now, we aren’t told a whole lot about the incident- only that they offered “unauthorized fire” before the Lord, and that God burned them up for it. The Bible has an annoying habit of given what seems like excessive detail on things we are bored by, followed by almost no detail on matters of much more interest. But those details are not what matter to the story. What matters a great deal is what follows: God speaks directly to Aaron, and tells him to make a distinction between the common and the holy, the clean and the unclean, the pure and the impure. God invited the priests into his presence, the beginning of the new creation. For the common uncleanness and impurity of the human problem, this world is dangerous. Nadab and Abihu brought those into the presence of God, and they were destroyed. God’s admonition to avoid wine and strong drink might clue us in to what their offence consisted of, though we don’t really know for sure. They had gone through all the correct rituals, and the correct preparations. They had the title, the status, the position. They were in. But being in is not what matters in this story. They had treated the holy as common, and it cost them their lives.
The last piece of this little drama is how Aaron and his other sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, respond to the deaths of Nadab and Abihu. God tells them to continue their work at the tabernacle, and not go into mourning in the traditional way. They are now holy, and death is not holy. Moses gets some more distant relatives to do the burial, and Aaron’s sons go on with their ordination at the tent. But they do something just a little bit off. There was an offering, a goat offered for the sins of the people, that they were supposed to eat, so they would bear the iniquity of the people. But they didn’t eat, they burned it all instead. Moses gets upset at them, but Aaron intervenes, telling Moses that given the events of the day, would it have been right for them to eat it? And Moses approves of their actions.
What just happened? Eleazar and Ithamar didn’t follow instructions. Shouldn’t that have led to their destruction? Well, we finally meet the fourth great theme of the Biblical story, one that will grow in importance as the story goes on. Eleazar and Ithamar didn’t eat the offering because it was holy, and given the events of the day they were not. Their motives mattered: they were making a distinction between the common and the holy. And God approved of them, because while man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart.
Tomorrow God gives instructions that expand on the distinctions between the common and the holy. Keeping this distinction in mind will be key in understanding why there are so many laws about skin disease and bodily fluids. You ready?