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 3 - "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 today? 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, 'If 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 paralysed 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 I 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.