Leviticus 10

Quite an interesting account today - two of Aaron's sons, the recently anointed priests, offer improper gifts to God... and are punished. It just occurred to me that the only times in the Bible where God directly kills an individual or small, specific group are when they are people who were supposed to be His: either Israelites or Christians. We have these two men in Leviticus, Korah and his followers a little later on, a man who reached out and touched the Ark of the Covenant in David's time, and Ananias and Saphira in the early church period. I'm sure there are others, but all the ones that come to my mind share that common thread. I'm not sure what they means, but perhaps it should serve as a warning that while God is loving He also has rules and expectations for us that we need to respect and obey - especially since we as His followers have been entrusted with the knowledge of what we should and should not do.

Leviticus 9

From the text today it sounds as though the ceremonies surrounding the Tabernacle and the beginning of the priests' work is drawing to a close. One thing that occurred to me while reading this evening was that maybe some of the complexity in the offering system was actually God meeting a 'need' of the Israelites. When all He asked was that they follow Him out of Egypt and not worship other gods, they failed. Maybe they needed more pomp and ceremony that they could focus on. After all, they would have doubtless seen the Egyptians making all manner of sacrifices to their pantheon of gods - maybe the expectation of such things was culturally bred into them at that point. I could be completely off base here: maybe God had symbolic or other reasons for the requirements He put in place.

Exodus 24

During this early part of the history of Israel, there are a lot of accounts of God revealing himself to His people - and this chapter has one of the most vivid descriptions of that yet. Seventy of their leaders, along with Moses, Aaron, and his sons, "saw the God of Israel" (verse 10, NET) and all of the people saw God's presence "like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in plain view" (verse 17). I think I mentioned this a few posts ago, but I cannot wait to get such a glimpse of the Lord; it is a great comfort and joy to know that is awaiting me someday.

Exodus 9

Today the plagues on Egypt go from bad to worse. The ones recounted in the last two chapters were quite annoying, I'm sure - but not overly destructive or deadly; the ones in this passage are quite the opposite.

The Israelite slaves must have really been a key component of the Egyptian economic structure for Pharaoh to have stood up to all of this in order to keep them. I would say that I wonder what it will take to get him to budge, but we will see soon enough.

On an interesting side note, the last plague (hail) seems strange to me. Obviously hail can be quite damaging by itself, if in a large quantity and good-size chunks, but the storms God used must have been something really special. In addition to the hail itself, there was rain and thunder - which are quite reasonable - and fire (Ex 9:24). The mere fact that fire rained down is remarkable enough, but the fact that it accompanied hail and rain seems quite miraculous. Of course God can do that, but I wonder if it might actually be a reference to something like lightning. If they didn't have a word for such phenomenon at the time (perhaps it was not common in their climate?) it would seem feasible to call that fire.