"Levi: A Kingdom of Priests" 1 Chronicles 6:1-81 Sunday Evening Worship Service

First Chronicles chapter 6 describes the tribe of Levi.

1 Chronicles 6 · chapter mention

1 Chronicles chapter 4 described the tribe of Judah and taught us that the promise of salvation comes to the world through a king.

1 Chronicles 4 · chapter mention

That God is going to bring his redemption to the world by giving a promise, and he gives his promise to certain people, and they would pass it down, leading to the King, Jesus Christ.

Chapter 5 taught us that that promise comes with power, but it is power through the promise, and that you cannot hold on to the kingdom by your own strength, you do not hold on to the kingdom by your own birthright.

The kingdom comes to people who receive the promise, not to those who try to muscle their way in, and not to those who feel that the kingdom is theirs by divine birthright.

There are those who are born into, to make it more New Testament-y, there are those that are born into a Christian family and think that they are going to heaven when they die because of who their parents are or because of they grew up in church for goodness' sake.

Haven't you seen all the awana patches?

That is not how one inherits the kingdom.

It is not about what you do.

You cannot muscle your way into the kingdom in that sense.

In fact, the the line on the way to hell will be populated with those who say, Lord, Lord, didn't I do this in your name and that in your name, etc.?

That is the lesson of 1 Chronicles chapter 5.

1 Chronicles 5 · chapter mention

Those who thought it was theirs by birthright, namely Reuben, and those who thought it was theirs by strength, namely Gad.

Both of them lost it.

Tonight in chapter 6, we see what sustains the kingdom, namely worship.

Birthright doesn't get it to you, strength doesn't get it to you, but the kingdom is marked by worship.

Marked by worship.

Now, the background of 1 Chronicles chapter 6 here is Ezra chapter 8, which is another Old Testament genealogy.

1 Chronicles 6 · chapter mention Ezra 8 · chapter mention

I'm not going to drag you to Ezra chapter 8 because I love you.

Ezra 8 · chapter mention

Ezra chapter 8, though, perhaps you'll remember it.

Ezra 8 · chapter mention

It is when all of the exiles were coming back.

Ezra had started work on the temple, and they were coming back, and he had all of the exiles that are returning.

This is after the Babylonian exile, so everybody's coming back out of captivity.

And Ezra had them muster, so to speak, on the side of the river and line up by tribes to count them.

And he starts counting them off.

And of course they had intermarried in Babylonian exile.

And you know, the tribes often represented the land they had in Israel.

In exile, they didn't have any land, and so the tribal demarcations were starting to get pretty blurry.

But Ezra is surveying the land, so to speak, in Ezra chapter 8 and realizes that they have no priests.

Ezra 8 · chapter mention

There is nobody from the tribe of Levi.

Can you imagine?

Nobody from the tribe of Levi.

They're bringing back all the exiled people and they forgot to bring priests.

It's like having a game night at your house, and all your friends come over and you realize that you don't have any actual games.

It's like going to a tailgate party before a college football game and realizing you opened the cooler and nobody brought Coke Zero.

I mean, why bother?

That's Ezra chapter 8.

Ezra 8 · chapter mention

They gather around and there is no Levites.

So Ezra sends messengers back to Babylon to shake the trees and see if they can find any.

Twenty miles away.

They went all the way to what's modern-day Baghdad, really, in the geography of Ezra 8, and they come back with 40 Levites.

Thousands of people.

They got 40 Levites.

And that was enough to get the temple worship back going again.

Why do they need Levites?

Well, because God required them.

That's the history of the tribe of Levi.

And some of the chroniclers writing his genealogy, he's including Levi here.

He's going through all 12 tribes, but Levi gets the longest treatment because the priests are essential to worship.

This chapter seems long, but it is not random.

It is long, but it is put together to remind you of Ezra's oversight that you need a priest to worship.

The kingdom is sustained not by God's power, but by his presence among his people.

And we had that lesson foreshadowed last week in chapter 5, because remember in chapter 5, they started to lose the kingdom when they stopped going to worship.

That's when it started to drift.

They started to lose the kingdom when they stopped worshiping.

They stopped crossing the river.

Gad and Reuben did.

They stopped crossing the river to go to the temple.

They lost their priests.

They started worshiping idols instead.

You know, nature abhors a vacuum, but so does worship.

As they stopped filling their worship with the true God, what cropped up in its place was all the false worship, the idol worshiping.

And so they lost the lands.

They got taken away into exile.

And so having traced Reuben and Gad and even Manasseh, the half-tribe, one of Joseph's two sons, all the way through their exile, we now jump into the tribe of Levi.

Levi begins in verse 1 with Levi.

That's an appropriate place to start.

The person Levi teaches us this.

It'll be our heading.

The person Levi teaches us that this whole tribe is scattered to serve.

That Levi is scattered to serve.

Levi was one of the twelve sons of Israel.

Levi's full brother was Simeon.

They had a half-sister, Dinah.

And Dina, or Dinah, however you say it, was raped by those in Shechem.

And Simeon and Levi plotted revenge.

There were rightful ways to get revenge.

There was rightful ways to exert justice.

They didn't do one of those.

Instead, if you remember, they we covered this back with the tribe of Simeon, but they gathered together.

The brothers did, and they tricked those who assaulted their sister, and they basically promised them, if you all get circumcised, we can't, it's against our rule to take revenge on somebody who's circumcised, so you all get circumcised, and then we'll be at peace.

And so the men all circumcised themselves, and while they were bleeding and recovering, Simeon and Levi pounced and slaughtered them.

Now you have to admit there's a certain amount of irony to that attack, isn't there?

There's a certain amount of ingenuity to it.

There's a certain element of it, a small element of it, that is in fact virtuous, and that part is going to crop up again tonight.

But God rebuked it because they had taken something that was given to them as a sign of covenant worship, namely circumcision, and they twisted it into a wartime ploy.

They took that which was holy and they used it for their own revenge exploits.

And that was going to be judged by God.

In fact, the judgment came when Jacob starts giving the promises to the 12 tribes.

When Israel gives the promises to the 12 tribes, you would think that the promise would go to the firstborn, Reuben, but it doesn't because of his sexual misconduct.

We looked at that last week.

It falls past Simeon because of what he did in this instance.

And now we look at what happened to Levi.

Back in Genesis 49, you don't need to turn there, but bottom line is that the promise that Israel gives Levi is that the kingdom is not going to pass to him, that he's going to be scattered.

Levi, because of what he did, is not going to get land.

They're going to be scattered.

Now that's a sign of judgment.

Being scattered is a sign of judgment.

Not having a land, a sign of judgment.

The other eleven tribes, they all got land.

Even Simeon got lands.

Remember, Simeon's land, because of his punishment, was surrounded by Judah.

That's because in Judges, Simeon latched onto Judah.

And in Joshua as well.

Well, Levi, it's going to go out, play out a little bit differently with Levi.

Levi gets the same kind of curse because Levi and Simeon were together in this.

And to see the next thing that happens, you jump into, I'm going to read a couple of the names here.

The sons of Koath is going to, the sons of Levi split into three groups.

There's three lines here: Koath, Gershon, and Mary.

And that's in verse 2.

We're going to track one of the lines here, the children of Amram, which was Aaron, Moses, and Miriam.

So this is the line that's going to lead Israel out of captivity in Egypt.

It's very interesting.

Why did God choose somebody from the line of Levi to lead them, not somebody from the line of Judah to leave them?

I don't know if you've ever wondered that.

The answer here is because they're going to be led by priests.

Remember, when they cross the Jordan River, it is the ark that goes first.

It's not a king that goes first.

They don't have a king yet.

That's a big part of the narrative in the book of 1 Samuel.

1 Samuel, they don't have a king.

So it wouldn't make sense in that sense for God to choose somebody from Judah to lead them out of Egypt.

They did not have a king.

God was their king.

The promise of Judah was a future-looking promise.

They were supposed to be people of worship, and so it makes sense that a Levite would lead them.

Now the Levites are not designated for worship yet.

They are designated for to be scattered, but not quite for worship.

So God raises up Aaron, Moses, Miriam, the sons of Aram, Nadab and Abihu.

They got smoked, remember?

Offering strange fire before the Lord.

Nadab and Abihu had all the prerogatives, all the blessings of covenant worship.

They were brought up onto the mountain with Moses.

When Moses went up to the mountain, you know, they said nobody can touch the mountain.

If even an animal touches it, it should be stoned.

Nevertheless, Moses brought with him some people as witnesses, and Nadab and Nabihu were among them.

They saw the glory of the Lord descend on Mount Sinai.

They saw the law given to Moses.

They had a front row seat to God's glory.

But then when it came time to act on it, they offered strange fire before the Lord.

Fire the Lord didn't command them to offer.

They got anointed as priests, they put on the fancy robes that had jewels on it.

Sometimes the depictions of this mute what they looked like, but not so.

I mean, they had breastplates, which is jewels, sparkling, shining, colorful, wearing around a big censor, big staff, golden, probably, with smoke coming out of it.

I mean, this is this is a thing.

And they're parading themselves up and down the streets on their way to the temple for worship, and they bring with them fire that God did not offer, that God did not command.

That becomes a paradigm of what strange fire means.

The expression strange fire means exactly that.

People who know the Lord, not outsiders, people who know the Lord that are approaching worship, but they're approaching worship in a way God did not command.

That's Nadab and Abihu, and they get smoked, and that becomes a like a line, a rule for the Levites is that if you're going to be a people of worship, you worship in the way God commanded.

You worship in the way God commanded.

So that happens.

Verse 4, Eliezer fathered Phineas.

Eliezer fathered Phineas.

Phineas kind of stands in for all of Levi.

You know how sometimes a family has one guy that represents the family really well, like all the strengths and weaknesses of the whole family are wrapped up in him?

That's Phineas.

When there was sexual morality going on, and Moses said, Who's going to judge for, who's going to judge these people and punish them for the sexual morality?

Phineas drew his spear and just ran people through.

This stands in for Levi because going back to Mount Sinai, when Moses comes down from the mountain, do you remember with the law?

He comes to the fire, and there is all the Israelites dancing around the fire, worshiping a golden calf.

Moses is gone for five minutes.

Maybe it was 40 days, I don't know.

But he comes back and they're dancing around the golden calf.

And do you remember what everybody says?

Everybody's like, well, we didn't know you were coming back, as if that makes it any better.

Like you got caught.

It's the parents who come home, and the high school kids are having, you know, a raging party at the house.

And you're like, what are you doing?

And the kid says, We didn't expect you home today.

That does not help.

That was Aaron.

And Aaron, of course, remember what Aaron says?

He says, You know, Moses, you know how these people are.

They're so obnoxious.

Like they pushed me and said, Please make idols.

And Aaron's story unravels right away.

Remember, Aaron says, Moses, they pushed me and said, We really need idols because we don't know where Moses went.

Aaron says, I didn't know where Moses went either.

So I said, Okay, I'll make you idols, but first you have to give me all your gold.

That's honestly what he said.

He makes himself out to be so passive, like I had nothing to do with it.

Okay, yes, I did go around and collect everybody's gold.

That did happen, yes.

And yes, I made it into a giant golden cow and said, worship this.

That also happens, but let's not play the blame game.

Well, Moses is ready to play the blame game.

Remember, Moses said, That's it, it's over, you're all gonna die.

He gets all Israel together, and then he says, Whoever stands with me and the Lord, come stand next to me right now.

And do you remember who responded?

Only the Levites.

Everybody else, it doesn't mean everybody else was pro-idol worship.

I imagine everybody else was very much pro-neutrality.

Pro, like, let's see how this is gonna play out.

This is a Moses and Aaron fight.

Let's see how this goes down.

We don't need to take sides yet.

Not everybody is worshiping the golden cow.

Certainly there was this idea that they could play neutral.

We don't need to choose sides.

After all, the the embers are still smoldering.

It's too early to choose if we're gonna back Moses or back Aaron in this whole thing.

It's Exodus 33, verse 26.

Moses said, Whoever is for the Lord, come stand with me.

Only the tribe of Levi responded.

They understood that neutrality was not an option for them.

Do you see why this is kind of a strength that goes back to the person Levi?

He understood in a war between good and evil, he's gonna be on, he's gonna be against evil.

Notice that the worshiping of the old cow was even led by other Levites.

But the Levite tribes had family and national ties.

We set them aside, we will serve the Lord and do his will.

And when they come to him, this is the first ordination.

They come to him and Moses says, Strap your swords onto your sides right now.

I ordain you, it's the word ordain.

I ordain you in the service of Yahweh.

Now go and kill your brothers and your neighbors.

That's what he said.

And they went out and they killed thousands of people.

Thousands.

And they come back, and Moses says, You are now servants of Yahweh.

And he's gonna bestow a blessing on you.

That was the moment Levi became the tribe of priests.

And it was through revenging the Lord.

And so God sanctified them.

Notice that that personality or whatever, I don't want to overly psychologize it, but whatever was going on with Levi, where he used circumcision to ambush those people and slaughter them to revenge, it was it was mostly bad.

But there was some element of righteousness in it.

That's what is cultivated in the tribe of Levi, when they strap on their swords and they go to war for the Lord.

Moses, in fact, tells him, You're consecrated as a priest at the cost of your brothers.

At the cost of your brothers.

Ahitu, father Zadok, he also was that kind of warrior.

He sided with David in David's battles, ended up ministering in the temple.

There's others here as well.

Zadok fathered Ahamas, Ahamas fathered Azariah, Azariah, who's another warrior noted in the book of Samuel.

Johan fathered Azariah.

It was he who served as the priest in the house that Solomon built in Jerusalem.

So you're in 1 Kings now.

Azariah, and you get through the list of other people.

Some of their names are similar.

They're repeated.

Verse 12, you have another Zadok again.

This is the Zadok that's in the book of Kings, not Samuel.

Jehosadak, verse 15, he was the one who went into exile.

So that little line there we read, verse 6 through 15, follows you from the wilderness.

It's not every person, of course, it's jumping generations here, but it's following the key people, the key priests.

And notice it's mixing priests and warriors because that's the Levites.

That's the Levites.

They were very much scattered to serve.

God took their priesthood and as a blessing to them, scattered them through the nation.

He turned their curse into a calling.

So the first example of this is going to be atonement.

He calls them to provide atonement.

He calls them to provide atonement.

And you see that in verses 1 through 15.

We kind of just went through that.

That takes you all the way to exile.

But if you jump down to verse 49, it picks it up again.

And we'll go back and look at other stuff.

We're back with Aaron.

I'm trying to piece this together more or less chronologically.

But genealogies are hard to do that because you trace somebody down and you start over with their brother and you're going back again a thousand years or whatever, 500, 600 years.

So that's what's happening here.

We followed the line all the way through the king, all the way to exile.

But now we go back to Levi, verse 16.

Gershem, Koeth, Marie, these are the sons of Gershem, and now it's starting to track the priests.

This is the line of Levi.

God made them priests.

So I want you to see how what was meant as a curse, their scattering, becomes transformed into a blessing as they're made priests.

Because they don't have land, that's going to mean there's priests all over the land.

If the priests had land, you'd have to travel to them in order to worship God through a priest.

Yes, you can worship God in your heart, that's true.

But God can only truly be approached through a priest.

You have direct access to God by faith and through prayer.

But overarching picture of the Bible is that you can only go to God through a priest.

So yes, they can pray wherever they are in Israel, but if they want to truly worship God, the access is granted by a priest.

If the priests were in one geographic location, they would have to travel there.

And the Old Testament makes clear that was not God's design.

All the requirements in the Old Testament that require travel, there's always exception clauses.

Like you need to go and present your offering in the temple, then the exception clause, unless you can't get to Jerusalem, then you can pitch a tent in your, you know, in your own property and have friends over and have the sacrifice there.

It wasn't meant to be a burden.

If you can't bring your sacrifice to the temple, go ahead and offer it in your own yard with friends.

And worship God with people you know and you love.

That's all over the Old Testament.

God facilitates that by having the least, the Levites, sprinkled like salt, really, all over the land.

All over the land.

Well, one of their functions was to make atonement.

This is what the tribe of Levi excelled in.

Theirs was the uh the priestly work that would offer the sacrifices before the Lord.

Verses 49 to 53 kind of follow this, and we'll we'll skip down uh towards the end there.

These are the sons, verse 50, these are the sons of Aaron, Eliezer his son, Phineas, his son, Abishhua his son.

This is the line of priests.

Ahitab his son, another Zadok here in verse 53, his son, and Ahimaz, his son.

These are the priests.

Zadok is a uh represents righteousness, and so it's a common name that is passed down to the people.

Now it's worth asking yourself, why does God need to be approached through priests?

And I mentioned that this morning in the introduction, but this goes back to the garden.

When Adam sins, he could not go back to walking with God just because he realized he sinned, which he did, remember?

He was called out, hiding behind the fig tree, hiding from God, which is a silly move to hide from God.

God calls him.

Adam recognizes he sins because God said, Who told you you sinned?

Or who told you you were naked?

And he says, and you know, he's exposed here.

There's no doubt that he's a sinner, and yet God does not say to you, just keep walking with me, no.

Rather, there is a narrow door to walking with God, and it comes through atonement.

And you can't present atonement for your own sin because you, in that sense, are the sinner.

All right, so you can't, you know, you can't really present atonement for yourself.

And so God kills the animal and covers Adam with the skin of the animal.

This becomes a model for atonement.

And this is played out time and time again.

Noah comes off of the ark and he's going to sacrifice animals.

It's kind of a priestly work.

But when Noah himself sins, remember he's drunk and pass out or whatever, when he himself sins, somebody else has to cover him.

He, in that sense, he can't cover himself.

It's talking.

It's sin language.

He can't cover his own sin.

It's required that somebody else do it.

And this is a pattern.

When Abraham approaches God through sacrifice, Abraham doesn't have a priest.

He's alive before the priestly line.

And so do you remember what God does?

He puts Abraham to sleep, and God offers the sacrifices in Abraham's vision.

It's God himself who does it.

Pointing forward to a day when there will be another priest.

Even when Abraham wants to offer God the spoils from battle, God presents him with Melchizedek, a priest without beginning or end.

He's not from Levi, of course, he predates Levi.

The point is the priestly pattern was already there.

Once the twelve tribes are set up, the priestly work will come through Levi.

God will be approached through sacrifice.

The Passover land will be killed.

The scapegoat will be sent out.

The other scapegoat will be killed.

There is going to be a pattern of sacrifices, of shedding of blood for sin.

Nobody can just walk into heaven and walk into God's presence.

You have to be ushered in.

Heaven is a place where you need a reservation and you don't have a phone number to make it yourself.

You need somebody else to make the reservation on your behalf.

That's the idea.

That's why Hebrews chapter 9, verse 18 says, even the first covenant could not be established without the shedding of blood.

Hebrews 9:18

The old covenant could not be established without the shedding of blood.

Hebrews 9, 22.

Indeed, under the law, everything is purified with blood.

And without the shedding of blood, there is no what?

Forgiveness of sins.

It's impossible.

And so the author of Hebrews says this is why it's necessary for the copies of heavenly things to be purified with these rites.

The things on earth are a copy, a pattern of what's in heaven.

And they have to be purified by a priest with blood.

The idea is that the priest is the one who ushers you into worship through sacrifice.

He provides atonement.

And so look at the genius, the brilliance of God's plan here.

Levites will be scattered everywhere in Israel as a punishment to them.

But the flip side of that is they are eager, they are eager to kill at the very least.

Make them the priests.

They love righteousness, they'll shed blood, make them the priests.

And you think you know it's eager to kill is overstated.

Have you ever seen like a goat or a sheep or a bull slaughtered?

It is not clean and it is not easy.

It takes some strength and it makes some people sick even watching it.

They can't imagine it.

Some people say, I can't eat anything that I see killed.

Okay.

You wouldn't be a good priest.

I mean, the job of a priest was half butcher.

The Levites had no such queasiness.

And so God makes his people approach him through priests, but then gives them priests everywhere.

And those priests provide atonement.

They provide atonement.

Secondly, they lead in worship.

This goes back to verse 16.

They lead in worship.

The sons of Levi, we get another line of the sons of Levi, Levi here.

But I want you to skip down to verse 31.

These are the men that David put in charge of the service of the song in the house of Yahweh when the ark rested there.

They ministered there.

In the place of the Ten of Meeting until Solomon built the house of the temple.

They become the chief worshipers.

Listed in the chapter is Haman, Asaph, and Ethnum.

These are three authors of Psalms.

They wrote many of the psalms in this list.

I won't go through the whole list there.

You see Ethan hiding down there in verse 44, though.

But the Asaph is back in verse 39.

Those three guys, Herman, Esaph, and or Asaph and Ethan or Ethanim, they wrote so many psalms.

Heman wrote Psalm 88, Asaph wrote Psalm 50, Psalm 73 through 83.

And when you read these Psalms in light of who they were, they're Levites that wrote Psalms.

That's kind of cool.

When you read the Psalms in light of what they were doing, ushering God's people into worship, the Psalms all have this kind of flavor to them.

Psalm 73, as for me, my feet almost stumbled.

It's a psalm you probably have, many of you have memorized.

As for me, my feet almost stumbled until I went into the house of the Lord.

That's Levite worship right there.

You're most desperate, and what do you do?

You respond by going to God's house.

By going to God's house.

Ethan wrote Psalm 89.

Psalm 89 is tied to Solomon's court.

It's a psalm that's wrestling with the Davidic covenant.

It's a psalm that says God promised he would never cast off David, and then he cast off David.

That he would never let Israel go into exile, and then he sent Israel in exile.

But it ends resting in the promise of a better priest and a true king will come.

By the way, we won't prance through all of 1 Chronicles, but in chapter 15, you see these same three guys, and they're there playing symbols, which I think are, I don't know, clashing things, right?

I don't know what Old Testament symbols were, but probably.

And then in chapter 16, you see that Hermann is playing the trumpet.

So these guys are psalmwriters, musicians, and loud instruments, too.

I just like that they're loud.

They were appointed once the ark found rest, verse 31 says.

So once the ark finds a place to rest, then you need people to worship.

It's atonement that leads to worship.

And it's not an arbitrary connection.

I mentioned this chapter is long, but it is logically sequenced.

First, you need the priest to provide atonement.

The priests grab onto the promise that came before them.

So Jack in chapter 4, God gave a promise that the king is going to come.

So the priests latch onto the promise.

The priests then usher people in through faith in the promise through atonement.

And then what's the result of that?

Worship.

So if you want to put it in chronological order, it's promise.

Priest provides atonement, and then you respond in worship.

That's the significance of the order of this genealogy here.

They led the followers of Yahweh into worship.

This is how you maintain the promise.

Remember, the promise came to Judah, not to Reuben and Gad.

Reuben and Gad tried to hold on to it in different ways.

They lost it.

How does Levi keep it?

You know, it's Levi didn't really go into exile.

Granted, it's because they had nothing to lose.

But they didn't lose their land because they had worship, and you can't be exiled from worship.

You can't be exiled from worship.

So Levi has a huge advantage.

The promise secures the throne.

The ark in verse 31 is placed where it belongs, and the Levites come and give stability to the nation through worship.

And finally, presence.

Presence.

The Levites provide atonement, they provide worship, and they provide presence.

We've kind of covered on this already, but you can look down at verse 49.

Aaron and his son made the offerings in the altar and the burnt offerings and the altar of incense for all the work of the most holy place.

So it begins in Jerusalem.

Then you see the sons listed again, and it's going to trace the line of atonement down.

And then in verse 54, now it's going to start to chart the land.

So atonement in verse 49 leads to the territories they settle in in verse 44 with all their borders.

You can go all the way this all the way to the end of the chapter, it's describing where all the families of the Levites ended up, and it's covering all of Israel.

They are everywhere.

That was strategic by God.

Notice by the end of the chapter, what was meant as a curse has become a full-on blessing.

Not just a blessing to the Levites, but a blessing, a blessing to Israel.

Before the singers could sing, before the Levites could serve, there had to be atonement.

But once there's atonement, the Israelites are spread around.

The Levites are spread around.

Levi has no land.

Instead, they just have almost a ubiquity to them.

They are in every part of the country so that everywhere you're never far away from worship.

This decentralizes access to God.

It decentralizes it.

You don't have to make a pilgrimage.

You can make a pilgrimage and they will.

That's the Psalms of Ascent, but you don't have to to get to God.

You need atonement to get to God, but not a pilgrimage.

Plus, the Levites were the ones that were giving instruction about the law.

So in God's design here, you have the Levites everywhere, which means you have sacrifice everywhere, access to God everywhere, also instruction on the law everywhere.

And it said, well, like people like priests, right?

One commentator says that Israel becomes, or the Levites become like Israel's nervous system.

Whenever there starts to be corruption anywhere in Israel, it hits the Levites because they're everywhere.

They have no territory.

All they had was their presence.

And that couldn't be taken by Assyria.

So God protected Israel through promise.

He provided them with privilege, which they forfeited, and then he provides them with access to worship through atonement, which comes through Levi.

For you to have a true king, you need a kingdom.

You need a kingdom for the king to be in.

That's the line of Judah.

You need a priesthood, that's the line of Levi.

Without Levi, David's throne would just be political.

If you take the Levites out of Israel, you just have a political thing.

That's what you'd have.

Without Judah, Levi's worship would float around untethered to any truth.

This chapter in Chronicles knits the worship of the true God and the temple together with the priests.

Levi's whole story is about a tribe that owned no land, whose inheritance was the Lord Himself.

Every other tribe had an inheritance, not Levi.

But God turned that into a blessing to usher others into worship.

But obviously, every Levite that swung a censer before his face was pointing, that censor was pointing at something beyond the Levites, and every Levite understood that.

God's worship did not ultimately rest in the temple, it rested in heaven.

Now, Hebrews 7 makes this argument explicit.

It's implicit in the Old Testament, even the genealogy, it kind of takes you all the way to the pasture lands in verse 81.

That's where it lands, the pasture lands.

There's no true, there's no king at the end of chapter 6.

So that's what I mean by every time a Levite swings a censer, it's pointing beyond him.

He knows it's pointing to a true priest that's going to come later.

But Hebrews 7 makes it clear.

In Hebrews 7, the author of Hebrews says the Levitical priesthood was by design incomplete.

It had to keep being repeated.

Aaron's sons would do all the sacrifices today, and you know what they do tomorrow?

More sacrifices.

When Jesus comes as the high priest from Judah, he's not from Levi, he's from Judah, but he is also a priest.

He's a high priest that is above the tribe of Levi.

He's not from Levi, he predates Levi, he's from the line of Melchizedek, but he is the priest that brings Levi to fulfillment.

He ends the repetition.

Jesus, in a sense, was like a Levite.

He's wandering from his land.

He was raised in Nazareth, which was not belonging to the line of Judah.

He grew up in a place that wasn't his.

In that sense, he's like a Levite who's scattered.

Most of his ministry was in Galilee.

Most of his ministry is where Napptali dwelled, not where Judah dwelled.

But he predates Levi as well.

In Israel, every place would have a Levite city nearby.

But to worship God, the priest provides atonement.

It's repeated all the time.

In the New Testament, this is all done away with.

The priesthood is fulfilled in Christ, he provides the final sacrifice.

You still need a priest to access God, but Christ is our high priest.

And we have a priest not like the Levites, he's perfect, holy, sinless, and undefiled.

The Levites were not like that.

The Levites were men of compromise and covered in blood.

Jesus was not those things.

He was not compromised.

He did not come enacting a vengeance on his enemies, but rather laying his life down as a priest greater than Levi.

Reuben had land, Gad had armies, Levi had the Lord.

As Christians, we have that same promise as well.

The Christ dwells in us.

We don't need a Levite because we have Christ and He opens the door to heaven.

Lord, we're grateful for Jesus Christ and the promise that he gives us.

Our true high priest, the final sacrifice, it does not need to be repeated.

We have access to heaven because you have opened the door through Jesus Christ.

We're so thankful for his priestly work.

The blood of the altar was sprinkled from the cross that he could declare to telesti, it is finished.

His blood made atonement and opened the door to heaven.

So all who come to you come through the Son, and all who come through the Son come because the Spirit draws us.

And all who are drawn by the Spirit, He draws us in full assurance because the blood of the sacrifice has cleansed our consciences, purified us from dead works, and made us fit to serve the living God.

We're grateful for the promise of Christ, the promise of Levi fulfilled in Christ.

He is our true high priest.

We give you thanks in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMS.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.