The law provided a full ritual for the induction of the High Priest into his office and for the consecration of all the priests to their work. Their robes of office, their various dress on all occasions, are detailed with great minuteness.——The law also provided specially for their subsistence. A portion of various sacrifices fell to them as their perquisite. The great expense of the entire ritual service, including the cost of the animals offered for the people at large; the support of the priests, and to some extent of the Levites, was provided for by law in the tithes; the poll-tax of a half-shekel from every man of Israel; and from various other sources.
In the ultimate settlement in Canaan, forty-eight cities with their suburbs were given to the Levites. They were thus distributed among the entire population of Canaan both east and west of the Jordan, and if true to their mission would fill a very important sphere in both the civil and the religious life of the nation. Of their civil and judicial duties I have spoken already. They were also teachers of religion.——Their suburban territory would afford them a small amount of land for cultivation; but the divine plan was that they who served at the altar should live from the altar. While religious services were conscientiously performed and the religious spirit was in due strength, both priests and Levites would be comfortably fed and clad. Idolatry and religious declension would cut their supplies short.
The careful reader of those portions of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers which give the plan of the tabernacle, the ritual of the priests and Levites and the minute detail of numerous sacrifices and offerings and purifications, will not need the suggestion that in many respects the interest and the value of these details have mostly passed away. Of prime importance in that age; vital to the proper construction of the tabernacle; vital to the due consecration of priest and Levite and to their instruction in duty; entirely essential to the ends of a ritual system which was to be the religiouslaw of a great people—they were all in place then and were indispensable; but in most respects this interest and value have long since ceased. Whereas in the time of Moses not one word of this minute detail was superfluous, not one point could be safely omitted; now, it may be passed over with only brief notice. Few will care to read all its particulars.
Yet two points deserve remark:
1. That this very minuteness of detail is the strongest evidence of the genuineness and antiquity of these books. They were certainly written at the time of the events they record. They never could have been gotten up in any age subsequent to the events. The specifications for the tabernacle and for all its furniture had a purpose then; but could have had no purpose to justify such minuteness after the construction was finished. It would be the supremest folly to forge such documents ages after the events had passed. No man in his senses ever attempts such a forgery. Men never submit to such labor without an object; and the case precludes the possibility of any object after the tent was built and after the ritual was fully understood and wrought into established usage.
2. While these minute details neither require nor reward particular investigation in our day, yet taken in whole they are pregnant with great moral lessons for all time.
(1.) There was a perpetual inculcation of cleanliness, external purity; and the most careful avoidance of whatever was defiling. The ceremonial washings and cleansings, the removal from the camp, or as the case may be, the seclusion from the court of the tabernacle for a term of purification, occur frequently. By a natural law of mind, sin is associated with uncleanness; crime is defiling. Hence, with almost infinite pains the Lord was impressing upon his people the great idea that their God who deigned to dwell among them “was of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” He could not abide with them save as they kept themselves clean and pure.
(2.) On every hand we note the most solemn inculcation of care, thoughtfulness, consideration, especially in their religious worship, and the most impressive warnings against a rash and inconsiderate spirit. Hencewine was forbidden to the priests when about to go to the altar (Lev. 10: 8–11). It seemed that God could have no patience with the thoughtless and irreverent. At whatever cost, the fear of the Lord must be impressed upon the people—else all effort for their religious culture would be vain.
(3.) Their great thanksgiving festivals; their numerous thank-offerings; their vows; their required tithes—all concur in this one idea—the recognition of God as the Giver of all blessings, their great personal and national Benefactor. No pains was spared to impress and enforce this great truth. The long course of God’s redeeming mercies toward their nation; the rescue from Egyptian bondage; the miraculous supplies of bread and water forty years in the desert; the gift of the goodly land of Canaan;—these were the staple facts of their history which God sought to engrave upon the national heart and to work into the living thought of the thousands of Israel. By every hopeful appliance their religious system was shaped to keep alive and intensify these feelings.
(4.) More important than all the rest were the great moral lessons set forth by the perpetual presence of atoning blood. The Israelites were never allowed to forget that they were sinners, and that their approach to God must always be through the blood of atonement. No day might begin, no day might close, without the shedding of animal blood—the sacrifice of an innocent animal’s life. The great days were great because of the multiplication of these sacrifices—evermore distinguished and memorable for the rivers of blood that flowed; for the struggles and throes of the dying; for the sprinkling of blood, blood, BLOOD, all round about the hallowed altar, toward the unseen Presence within the most holy place, and upon the assembled hosts of Israel.——It may cost us a few moments’ effort to reproduce those scenes before our mind’s eye so as to take in their full significance; but this effort to comprehend that ancient ritual would bring its reward. What a demonstration it would be in proof that “without the shedding of blood there is no remission”! that God never looks propitiously on guilty sinners save through the bleeding sacrifice of his crucified Son! As bearing upon the great questions—the fact and the nature of the atonement—this bloody ritual has a most vital and impressive significance. No questions of deeper and more vital import can ever arise than such as these: Was the death of Christ expiatory? Was his blood shed for the sins of men? Did he lay down his life, an innocent victim, that the guilty sinners who place their hands upon his sacred head and there confess their sins may live and never die? In a word, was his death foreshadowed and its true significance pre-intimated by the bloody offerings enjoined in this Hebrew system?