Reading:
Exodus 32:1-6, 15-29; Malachi 2:4-6; 3:1-3; Numbers
4:1-3; Luke 3:23.
The
matter of the priestly service or ministry of the people
of God, the service of God in terms of priestliness, is
one which has been on my heart for a considerable time
now. We will introduce the subject with a very simple
consideration of what I am going to call the
'belovedness' of Christ, in this particular connection -
His priestly ministry.
In the
passages which we have just read, to which a great many
more could be added, two things are quite clear. One,
that the Lord's people are called to be a priestly people
- that is their vocation; two, that in that function they
are peculiarly precious to the Lord. You cannot read the
many passages in the Scriptures about the Levites without
being impressed by that one thing, that they are very
precious to the Lord. The last reference to them in the
Old Testament, which we have read, indicates that. There
is a tone of very real endearment in the words of the
Lord about Levi at that point. At the end of the story of
the Old Testament, after all that has taken place through
the years, the Lord looks right back to that day of which
we read in Exodus 32, and speaks of how precious and
valuable the Levites became to Him, so much so that He
entered into a covenant with them, a covenant of life and
peace. "My covenant was with him of life and
peace".
THE PRIESTLY MINISTRY OF CHRIST AND THE
FATHER'S LOVE
And you
will notice the connection between the statement in
Numbers 4:3, that the active Levites started their
ministry at the age of thirty, and the statement that
Jesus was likewise thirty years of age when He began His
public ministry; indicating not only in itself, but by
other features which we shall notice, that His ministry
was essentially a Levitical, that is, a priestly,
ministry. We all believe that, and we know how much is
made of that, especially in the letter to the Hebrews.
But notice that that statement in Luke - 'Jesus...when he
began... was about thirty years of age" - follows
immediately upon His baptism and the opening of the
Heavens, and the Father's voice and attestation:
"Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well
pleased." There is something about the Lord Jesus,
just at this point when He takes up His priestly
ministry, which draws out the love of the Father for Him
in these affectionate expressions. It is true that He was
the Son, and therefore He was beloved of God as His Son,
but I believe there was a particular connection between
His beginning of a priestly ministry, and this expression
of the Father's love and appreciation for the
preciousness of this upon which He was entering. That is
the point of our concentration just now - the
'belovedness' of the Lord Jesus, and so of the Levites,
as entering into the meaning of Christ's ministry in
terms of priesthood, precious to the Lord.
I
suggest to you, dear friends, that the thing that you and
I need, and perhaps more than anything else desire, to be
assured about, is: What is there, peculiarly precious to
the Lord, into which we may be brought, in which we may
be found, which may be entrusted to us! What we really
are seeking for all the time is: What is it that the Lord
wants more than anything else? What is it that is more
precious to the Lord than anything else! Can there be
something in the life of God's people corresponding to
this 'belovedness' of Christ! It is very important to
know that. There are many things that may be of value,
but they may be of comparative value. What we want to
know, what we must know, is: What is that which the Lord
really looks upon as most precious to Himself, which will
serve Him to the greatest value! The Lord Jesus received
the assurance that the Father's love, appreciation and
valuation were focused upon Him, just at the point when
He stepped out into His public ministry. It is a great
thing to start any work or move out into any service on a
basis like that, is it not! Just think of what strength
there would be if we had absolute assurance that that to
which we were committed was something of tremendous value
to God!
As we go
on in our Christian lives and in our manifold work for
the Lord, we find that time is a great sifter. Trial,
testing, adversity and suffering, and all the things
which come to bear upon us, very often make us raise
seriously the question of values. 'Is it worth it! Is it
justified! Does this really matter! Is this of such
importance!' From time to time we are forced to ask,
'Now, what does it all amount to, after all!', and it is
then a great delivering and confirming thing to have the
answer: 'This is precious - of very real value - even of
supreme importance to the Lord'. It was the
starting-point of the Lord Jesus in His life-work - His
belovedness to the Father, not only in His Person and
Sonship, but in the thing to which He was committing
Himself.
It is
very important to know, and it is not wrong to say, that
we can be brought into that belovedness. The Levites,
representing God's thought for all His people, came into
that in a very real way. The Lord let it be known right
through the centuries that they represented something
very valuable, very precious to Himself. "My
covenant was with him of life and peace".
AN OPEN HEAVEN
Then you
notice that when the Lord Jesus began at the Levitical
age of thirty, the one thing that marked that beginning
was the opened Heaven. The Heavens were opened. Now look
back again at Exodus 32, and you see that that is exactly
what is there. Moses, receiving the law and the testimony
on Sinai in communion with the Lord, came down from the
mount. The Lord had already told him what was happening
down below, but Joshua did not know. Joshua was always a
man of war, and any noise to him sounded like war, and
when he heard the sound from the camp he interpreted it
as war. His spirit rose to the occasion for fighting, but
Moses said, 'No, that is not war - I know what that is',
and he came down and saw, and took it all in.
Moses
stood in the gate, and Israel became divided into two
parties. On the one side, Heaven was closed. No doubt
about it, Heaven was closed to them that day. It was
doom, judgment, darkness, exclusion; they were set aside,
cast out. Heaven was no longer open. On the other side of
Moses were the Levites, and the open Heaven was with
them. On the basis of their action, their decision, the
open Heaven was their inheritance that day, and from that
time onward theirs was the ministry of the open Heaven.
Levitical ministry is the ministry of an open Heaven, and
the opened Heaven is the sign and seal of the
preciousness of that to the Lord. To be living, walking,
working, in the good of a Heaven opened, is the mark of
preciousness to the Lord. No judgment, no exclusion, no
doom, no darkness, no wrath, but an open Heaven - the
inheritance of the Levite, and the inheritance of the
Lord Jesus, the greatest of the Levites.
Do you
grasp the significance and importance of that! We are
talking about service. Forget for the moment the terms in
which we couch the message - 'levitical' and 'priestly'
sound very ecclesiastical, very formal - and just think
about the service which is precious to the Lord. That
kind of service means the service which corresponds to
the Lord Jesus, that pre-eminently marks the Lord Jesus.
It has the seal of God upon it, that this is something
supremely precious to the Lord; and the seal is that you
have an open Heaven. That is, the way between you and God
is wide open: there is no shadow, no cloud, no
interruption: the course is clear between God and
yourself, and yourself and God. If it is not like that,
the service will be hard going, always under a sense of
Divine reservation, that the Lord is not really with you
as you feel He ought to be.
THE MARKS OF THE MINISTRY
An open
Heaven, and "My covenant... with him of life and
peace". What is the mark of this kind of ministry?
What is the mark of a people standing in such a position,
such a relationship with the Lord under an open Heaven?
(1)
Life
Well, it
is always with this twofold characteristic. First of all,
life is being ministered all the time. Look at the whole
history of the work of the Levites. We shall perhaps say
more about that later. Their whole ministry was one of
maintaining life, keeping open the way of life,
ministering life. But for them, death would have set in:
they were the bulwarks against death. They were the
channel of life from Heaven to the people of God, and I
suggest again that the real test of the service that is
precious to the Lord is not 'size', not many things that
men think to be the marks of success, but whether there
is a ministration of life: is life being ministered, is
life being poured out! is the one thing of which you are
conscious in that ministry the presence of life? It is
not just a matter of our understanding the terms and the
phrases and the language and the teaching, but our
recognition of life.
And what
do we want apart from that, and what do we want more than
that? Is it not that that the people of God need, after
all! Oh, for life! It is life we want, we must have life
- give us life! We cannot live without life! And the
Levites were the ministers of life. Christ, the great
Levite, was the Minister of life; and real service to the
Lord is that we minister life - not that people come
necessarily into a great range of truth, a vast amount of
knowledge and information that is purely intellectual or
mental, but that they have life ministered to them. That
is the seal of the real service of God.
But when
you come to think about it, that, after all, is the whole
matter. It is summed up in that, and - because of the
preciousness of this kind of service into which you and I
are called - in the 'belovedness' of Christ. Oh, what a
wonderful thing! That is something that we cannot talk
about; we can only feel and sense. If it might be that
the Lord should be able to look toward us with deep
appreciation and say 'beloved', in recognition that there
is something in our lives, in our service, in our
ministry, of very, very great account to Himself; that
there might be transferred to us something of the
belovedness of His own Son.
(2)
Peace
"And
peace." Was it peace for those people who broke
loose on that day? No, in the very deepest sense it was
war. It was war between them and God, and between God and
them. No peace with that. But the covenant of life over
against their death, and of peace over against their
controversy - or God's controversy with them - the
covenant of life and peace was with Levi. Peace: it is a
wonderful thing to be in the place where God is
satisfied, and your heart is at rest. That place is in
Christ.
GOD'S JEALOUSY OVER THE LEVITES
Now,
because of the value of that to God, see how jealous He
was over the Levites. It is a long story of Divine
jealousy concerning their place and ministry. God was so
jealous about the Levites, as to their rightful place,
and the ministry which was entrusted to them, that some
of the most terrible things in the history of Israel
happened when the Levites were not given their place and
their portion. This book of Malachi is just full of that.
Glance through this short book, and note how many times
reference is made to priesthood and Levi. You will find
that the whole thing really focused upon that. And what
is the trouble! Oh, everything is wrong in Israel at the
end. It is a wretched, miserable story: everything is
breaking down, everything is wrong, there is nothing
happy at all. And why? The Levites are not in their
place, the Levites are not functioning, and the Lord's
people are not giving the Levites their portion and the
Lord is so jealous about that, that everything else is
allowed to go wrong.
But the
conditions that obtained at the end had occurred
repeatedly in the past. You recall the tragedy in the
case of Uzzah and the ark. The Lord smote Uzzah, so that
he died. Why? Because the Ark had been put upon a cart,
when the Lord had prescribed that it should be carried by
the Levites. The Lord is very jealous. Dear friends, it
does matter, does it not, whether the Lord is jealous for
us - whether the Lord is ready to stand by us, to uphold
us, to be with us, to let it be known that "he that
toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye" (Zech.
2:8)! There is something in that - to have the Lord on
your side, to know that God is jealous over that to which
you are committed, and fiercely jealous over it, that the
Lord is not going to let it be set aside, the Lord is not
going to let it be overlooked. Even if, in all innocence
and in all good motive and good will, as with David and
his cart, the principle of the Levites is forgotten, is
overlooked, the Lord does not overlook it. This is
something which is pre-eminent with the Lord, God is
jealous for something; and what matters is that we are in
that something for which God is jealous. Oh, to have the
jealousy of God on our side in the work to which we are
committed!
Now, the
history of the Levites is a long and varied and mixed
history. They were not always in good condition; they
were not always in their right place, position and
function. Sometimes they were incapable of ministering
simply because they were involved in the bad state of the
people of God. Sometimes they themselves were out of
adjustment. It is a long and painful history. But what I
want you to notice is this, that even in the last
recorded phase of that history - a long history in which
there are many dark chapters - even in the last phase, as
we see it in Malachi, God has not given them up. The last
word about them is that He will "purify the sons of
Levi", after all. He has not abandoned them; He has
not given them over. The Lord has made a covenant, and He
is standing to it.
But it
is not always a matter of the people. Here it is a matter
of the ministry. There is some ministry which is of this
kind, which has this importance and value in the sight of
God. There is a particular kind of service to the Lord to
which He is peculiarly committed, and, while those who
are connected with it may change, may sometimes go wrong,
the Lord is jealous for this thing, and He is not giving
it up, He is not casting it aside. If that had been His
way, where would the ministry of the Lord be to-day?
Think of the Dark Ages, even of Christendom. Think of all
those periods in this dispensation when things have been
in a deplorable state, and the Lord has seemed to have
little or nothing of this kind. But the Lord has never
given it up, and He never will. The last chapter of the
Old Testament sees the Lord coming back to it again. He
is committed to it. It is a great thing to know that
there is that which is of such importance to the Lord
that if we come into it, we shall find God persisting in
spite of failures, of weaknesses, of imperfections, of
days of darkness, of seeming eclipses. God is going on
with that thing.
There
are things to which God has not committed Himself. There
are those things which God has left, from which He has
withdrawn; but there is that concerning His Son to which
He has committed Himself, which He will never give up, no
matter what happens. If we ask what that is - in a
phrase, it is priestly ministry. We have to learn what
priestly ministry is.
THE CHASTENING OF THE SONS OF LEVI
There is
chastening connected with it. "He will purify the
sons of Levi". Yes, chastening. But let us always
keep a broad line between judgment and chastening. The
Devil always tries to wipe out that difference, and
interpret all chastening as judgment. Judgment is for
rejecters of the Lord; chastening is for the accepters of
the Lord. The form of the judgment may seem to be exactly
alike for unsaved and saved: you cannot see any outward
difference. The unsaved may suffer physical judgment for
sin. The saved too may suffer physically - yet this is
not judgment, but chastening. One is destructive, the
other is constructive, and God's dealings with Levites
are always on the constructive principle. Remember that.
There may be suffering, there may be the fire purging and
purifying, but it is always constructive. God is just
using these ways to secure that upon which His heart is
set.
SATAN'S HATRED OF LEVITICAL MINISTRY
This has
been but an introductory word, but note one thing before
we close: the hatred, the Satanic hatred, of this
Levitical ministry. When Jesus began He was, as we have
seen, about thirty years old, that is, of Levitical age,
indicating that the ministry He was beginning was
priestly ministry - the open Heaven attesting that this
Person and this ministry were peculiarly precious to the
Lord, beloved of God. What came next! The wilderness and
Satan. And what was the point of assault! The very point
upon which God had focused everything - the
'belovedness'. 'My Son, My Beloved'. "If thou be the
Son..." He might just as well have said, 'lf Thou be
the Beloved' for that was the point of the thing. 'If you
are beloved, if you are so precious to the Father...'
"If thou be the Son..." Satan hates not only
this Person, but this thing, Satan is not only against
the Person, but he is against the ministry; and the one
thing that he will always try to do, in order to cripple,
destroy or nullify that ministry which is so precious to
God, is, if we may put it this way, to becloud the
belovedness.
Do you
not realize how Satan is all the time trying to make you
believe otherwise than that God loves you, that you are
beloved of God! It is often the last thing that we can
believe, is it not, that we are beloved of God! Satan is
always busy from every angle to try to becloud our
belovedness. If he cannot do it by direct assault, he
does it by suggestion, by insinuation. Or he will do it
by trying to cause us to slip up, make mistakes, go
wrong, and then bringing upon us accusation, saying, 'You
are no longer beloved of God'. His devices and his
efforts are countless and unsearchable, with the one
object, as with the Lord Jesus, so with those who are
with the Lord Jesus as the sons of Aaron, as Levites, of
somehow bringing a cloud, raising a question, over this
preciousness to the Lord.
I use
the word again because it is a good word and gets us a
bit off our beaten track - the belovedness of Christ,
transferred to His fellow-priests or His Levite sons, the
beloved. Let Satan get in there and he has destroyed
everything. If there should be one reading these lines
who has lost the assurance that God loves him, you not
only know the unspeakable misery of it, but, what is
more, you know how you are put out of service - you know
quite well that you would not attempt to serve the Lord.
It is no use - you are paralyzed until you know and are
assured that the Lord loves you. If you have lost that
assurance, you have lost your testimony, you have lost
your ministry, you have lost everything, and that is the
chief work of the Devil. Paul says: "he hath made us
accepted in the beloved" (Eph. 1:6, A.V.). That is
the belovedness of Christ transferred to those who are in
Him. Do not believe the Devil. "Evil company doth
corrupt good manners" (1 Cor. 15:33) and if you have
a talk with the Devil, and listen to him, your whole
conduct will be affected and coloured by that. The one
object the Devil has in view is to raise a question, nay,
to establish in you a question, as to God's love and your
belovedness to God - that is, personally.
And then
he is after something more - he is after your ministry.
You see, on that day when the Lord Jesus stepped out to
His ministry, the Devil stepped out too, and said, 'Not
only will I raise a question, if I can, about His
relationship with God and God's relationship with Him,
but by raising that question 1 will destroy this
ministry, if I can, right at its birth'. You and I are no
use to God if we have a question about either His love
for us or His love for that to which we are committed. If
we have any doubt about that, we are finished. This sense
of what I have called 'belovedness' is essential, not
only to life, but as an assurance and rest in service. It
gave encouragement to the Levites to go quietly,
assuredly and restfully about their work, and so they
did. Day after day, by day and by night, they went on
quietly with their ministry. To go on quietly,
persistently, assuredly, in peace, all rests upon this -
the recognition that that into which I have been called
by God is of infinite value to Him, and because I am
called according to His purpose, I am beloved of God.
That is
a simple word with which to begin, but it is basic to
everything. May I just sum it up like this! The Lord is
calling us to something which is not a comparative thing,
but an absolute thing: which is not just something that,
well, the Lord likes and will bless, but is that upon
which all His heart is set, which means more than
anything else to the Lord. May our hearts reach out for
that in these days, and may the Lord show us what it is.
This is an extract from chapter 1 of the book "The Spiritual Meaning of Service" originally published in "A Witness and Testimony" Magazine, Mar-Apr 1955, Vol 33-2.