Exodus 28:1-2 “Next, have your brother Aaron brought to you from among the Israelites, along with his sons Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar, to serve Me as priests. Make holy garments for your brother Aaron, to give him glory and splendor.”
God is setting up a hereditary priesthood. If you are a Bible scholar, you know that two of the men mentioned here, Nadab and Abihu, later get drunk and offer profane fire and wind up being struck dead for their horrible deed. But God has excellent reasons for having a hereditary priesthood, as Dennis Prager describes in The Rational Bible: Exodus, in an essay entitled “The Benefits of a Hereditary Priesthood.”
Prager makes the following points:
1. Unlike societal leaders who are given political and military power, priests are to have no power. Their role is to serve to help the community come closer to God.
2. By making the priesthood a hereditary institution, the chances for corruption entering the religious leadership of the nation are reduced. Simply put, no one can buy or force his way into the priesthood. (By comparison, when Jeroboam rebelled against Rehoboam, King Solomon’s son, he set up his own altars and established his own priests.
2 Chronicles 11:13 – 15 “Moreover, the priests and Levites from all their districts throughout Israel stood with Rehoboam. For the Levites left their pasturelands and their possessions and went to Judah and Jerusalem, because Jeroboam and his sons had rejected them as priests of the LORD. And Jeroboam appointed his own priests for the high places and for the goat-demons and calf idols he had made.”)
3. Priests don’t have to worry about popularity. They never have to run for election or re – election. That means that the priests should be true to God alone.
Prager goes on to make the point that every religion must have certain basic tenets that are unshakable. “While democracy is indispensable to civil society, it is irrelevant to (and potentially even destructive of ) religion. When religion becomes democratic, it ceases to be religion…A well – known Jewish joke relates that when Moses descended with the second set of the Ten Commandments, he announced, “Israelites, I have good news and bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is adultery stays.”)
Prior to Moses, Abraham had functioned as a kind of high priest. Moses also functioned as a high priest; however, now the responsibilities of carrying out the sacrifices shifted to Aaron, his sons, and their descendants.
APPLICATION: We might feel a bit sorry for the young men who were to be priests but who might not have felt like it. We want to feel that we have complete control over our choice of careers, but is this really true? Although there are those in industrialized countries who have choices, for others around the world, their circumstances determine their means of livelihood. If your father is a peasant farmer in rural Africa, it may be difficult for you to break out of that mold. And economic down turns from the recent pandemic have forced people to abandon the careers they thought they would pursue and to find new means of supporting themselves.
At the same time, the priests would raise their sons to accept the priesthood as a holy and precious calling. Those priests who truly loved God would pass that love on to their offspring.
Sometimes our parents have more input into our careers than we realize. Both my parents desperately wanted to become doctors; neither was allowed to do so. When I became a doctor, I fulfilled my parents’ dreams as well as my own. Was this a bad thing? No. My parents hoped to contribute a doctor to the world, and they succeeded. The priests would hope their sons would continue to minister to the Lord. This desire was both worthy and admirable. As we raise children, we should ask ourselves how we are encouraging them and inspiring them to fulfill the calling that God has on their lives.
PRAYER: Father God, thank you that you call each of us to fulfill the gifts and abilities you have given us. Help us to be ever – mindful so that we will treasure our calling and that of our children. In the mighty and precious Name of King Jesus. Amen.
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