Leviticus 10:1-11; All-Consuming Flame

Okay, if you have your Bibles, turn to Leviticus ten.

Which is if you find the Psalms, hang a left.

Gotten to Genesis, hang right.

I had mine marked earlier and now I've lost it.

Here we are.

Okay.

Hear God's word.

Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censor, and they put fire in it, and they laid incense on it, and they all they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded.

And the fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.

And then Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord has said.

Among those who are near me I will be sanctified.

And before all the people I will be glorified.

And Aaron held his peace.

And Moses called Mishael and El Zaphon, the sons of Uziel, the uncle of Aaron, and he said to them, Come near and carry your brothers away from the front of the sanctuary and out of the camp.

And so they came near, and they carried them in their coats out of the camp, as Moses had said.

And Moses said to Aaron and to Eliezer and Ithamar his sons, Do not let the hair of your heads hang loose, do not tear your clothes lest you die.

And wrath come upon all the congregation, but let your brothers, the whole house of Israel, let them bewail the burning that the Lord has kindled.

And do not go outside the entrance of the tent of meeting lest you die, for the anointing oil of the Lord is upon you.

And they did according to the words of Moses.

And the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying, Drink no wine or strong drink, you or your sons with you, when you go into the tent of meeting, lest you die, and it will be a statute forever throughout your generations.

You are to distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the clean and the unclean, and you are to teach the people of Israel all the statutes that the Lord has spoken to them by Moses.

This is the word of the Lord.

Father, as we come together today, we know that there is no other glory that consumes like fire, no other power that can raise the dead.

We stand before your presence this morning, asking that you would be our teacher, O Holy Spirit, and that the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts will be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

Amen.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Proverbs tells us.

In Deuteronomy, Moses teaches God's word to the people, and I'm quoting here, so that they might fear him.

The psalmist declares that God will fulfill the desires of all of those who fear him.

Luke tells us that God has mercy on those who fear him.

Samuel the prophet tells a repentant Israel, only fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all of your heart, for consider what great things he's done for you.

But if you still do wickedly, you shall be swept away, both you and your king.

Only fear the Lord and serve him.

Fearing the Lord.

I I often uh like that I like to ask my students in classroom settings when we come to this section, either in Proverbs or elsewhere in the Bible, to do this word association with fear as it pertains to this phrase, the fear of the Lord.

Okay, I tell them, tell me what comes to your mind when you hear the phrase fear of the Lord, because it's such a rich word and phrase.

It's one of those phrases in the Bible that I think contains multitudes within it.

Here's the Ginalette Tencent definition of fear.

All right, so I don't bury the lead.

Fear is a God-saturated consciousness that informs and shapes the entirety of your being and your existence.

The fear of the Lord is a God-saturated consciousness that informs and shapes the entirety of your being and your existence.

But when I asked the students to bring their ideas about the fear of the Lord to the table, you can guess the typical lists and categories that they bring.

And all of them are right in their own way.

Someone will inevitably say reverential awe.

I've heard that a lot.

Um, respect, someone else will chime in.

Honor from another student.

Worshiping the Lord, that comes in as well.

And all of these ideas are normally kicked around in the class, and all of them, in one respect or another, they're right.

But one association with the word fear that's more often than not left out in this little classroom experiment of mine is the obvious answer.

Fear.

Real knee knocking, stomach churning, goosebump-inducing fear.

The kind of fear that stops you in your tracks and makes speech difficult.

And when the Bible speaks about the fear of the Lord, which is again a broad and a thick concept, it certainly includes within its frame real fear.

So think of this this morning: the reality of God's being, transcendent in glory, unparalleled in beauty, completely distinct and other in his holiness, unmatched in his power.

All of those attributes of the being of God that we confess, they can and they should floor us.

God's otherness can arrest us and it seizes us when we're in his presence.

Or as the psalmist said in the Psalms of Ascent, if the Lord had not been our side, we would have been swallowed up alive.

So I appreciate hearing this morning from Chris the danger of doing a sermon on Leviticus in a church that's not my home church.

I have been in a study in Leviticus all year with my Sunday school class at uh at our church, St.

Peter's.

Nothing like emptying out a Sunday school class by telling folks you're gonna speak on Leviticus.

So I think we can all come clean this morning and admit that it's not a book that's at the top of our list.

In fact, I often think when you make these New Year's resolutions, this is the year.

I'm gonna read the Bible from beginning to end.

And Genesis got through it, Exodus, pretty good.

The end got a little weird.

Leviticus, ow.

Back to the Psalms we go, right?

But within the Jewish and the Christian interpretive tradition, Leviticus is high theological ground.

In fact, some would call it the highest ground in the Old Testament.

It's interesting, the other place that they often think of as the highest within both Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions is the Song of Solomon.

I'll leave that to the side.

For all of its strangeness, the book leans pretty hard into the dynamics of our life before God.

Here are Leviticus pressing questions.

How in the world can human beings be in the presence of a God who is holy, who's free from sin, untouched by the uncleanness of a fallen world?

Here's another question.

If God's presence is the only condition for life, and that is a major theme of the entirety of the Bible, if remaining in God's presence is the only condition for life, then how can sinful and unclean humans find themselves in God's life-giving presence?

Leviticus is a big deal.

But I'll admit, it is also a strange pot of soup, and not for the faint of heart.

There's a lot of killing, there's a lot of blood, there's a lot of sacrificial details that can easily get lost on us.

I was thinking about it this morning, I didn't really planned on it, but I was thinking in this new space that I've never been in before, except for this morning.

Remarkable.

Can you imagine in your holy imagination this being the tabernacle precinct back in the ancient world?

And here you come as families together, as little domestic households, and here's the dad that brought in the sheep or the lamb or the goat, and hearing all the animals in here, and now it's your turn.

And you come up to the altar.

And I don't know if you know this or not, but you've read Leviticus 1, the burnt offering, which is the chief sin offering.

Here comes the father, and the father kills the animal, right, with his family, and then the priest collects the blood from the killing of the animal.

Can you imagine that in here this morning?

And then they take the bowl of the blood to the altar that's right outside of the tent of meeting, and they rub blood on the corners of the altar.

There's some blood there and there, and then they pour blood out onto the side of the altar and to its front, and then they splatter the altar on the side with more blood.

What a scene! That is wild.

So all this blood, all this slaughter, all of the senses being engaged, there's smoke that's rising, there's smells that are sweet and offered to the Lord.

It's a powerful scene.

And Leviticus wants you to know that God has made a claim about us and about himself.

God has made a way for us to be in his presence.

But here's the major catch.

But they must come into God's presence the way that he instructs them, or they better not come at all.

To put it in other terms, if you find yourself in God's presence on your own terms and not on God's terms, then you might get swallowed alive by the flames of his presence.

It's heavy.

It's actually terrifying.

Which brings us to our very fun reading this morning of Nadab and Abihu.

Now, I say that in jest because it's not a fun reading, it's a hard reading.

But the chapters that preceded Leviticus 8 and 9, that is that is rich and joyous.

It's meant to be rich and joyous.

All of these details about the various sacrifices in the first seven chapters: the burnt offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, cereal offerings, peace offerings, all of those details unfold into this moment of initiation with the tabernacle in Leviticus 8 and 9.

And it is joyous.

Here comes Aaron with his four sons.

And even on my way in this morning, I found on my Spotify some reading of the Bible.

And I said, read to me Leviticus 8 and 9 on the way to Faith Presbyterian this morning.

And all the details about Aaron and his sons standing and Moses wrapping them in their vestments and putting the miters on their head and the umen and the thumen on their chest.

And the whole thing was dramatic and large at scale.

God was consecrating this tabernacle, consecrating his priests for his service.

God was making a way for his people to be with him, and it was joyous.

At the end of chapter 9, if you ever read this, Aaron emerges from his priestly duty.

So what had he done?

He had offered a sacrifice for him and for his children.

They're atoning for themselves by the blood.

And then they turn to the atoning work for the people.

And when he's done, it says Aaron comes out and he blesses all the congregation.

Can't you imagine it?

The Lord bless you and keep you.

The Lord make his face to shine upon you.

The Lord be gracious unto you and grant you his peace.

And then it says that Moses and Aaron go back into the tent of meeting, the scary place, into the very presence of the living God.

And then they come out from the tent of meeting again, and they bless them once again.

The Lord bless you.

The Lord keep you.

The Lord give you peace.

The whole event in Leviticus 8 and 9 is momentous, it's moving, it's filled with drama, and it excites every sense that you have.

And right after, this is at the end of chapter 9, right before we get to the scary stuff in 10, right at the end of chapter 9, it says that after Moses and Aaron had blessed them a second time, the glory of the Lord appeared.

God put his own divine and premature or stamp of approval on the whole event by giving them a manifestation of his presence, his glory.

And then brace yourself.

Fire blows out from the tent of meeting and consumes all of the sacrifices on the altar in one fell swoop.

And the Bible says, when the people saw it, they shouted for joy, and they fell on their faces.

Blood is life itself.

Life is in the blood, God says.

A life for a life.

And he offers them the life-giving force of sacrificial blood so that they could be in his presence.

And he didn't let the golden calf debacle, which could have derailed the whole covenantal experiment.

He didn't let it destroy them when it could have, but made a way to himself on the basis of his own mercy and his own character.

And the people see God's presence manifested in the form of his glory, and they're overwhelmed with joy, overwhelmed with thanksgiving, fall on their faces, worship the God of the living, who just put his own redemptive stamp on the moment by the presence of his own glory.

The Lord is dwelling with his people.

This is what we refer to as his Shekinah glory.

He is dwelling among us.

So I don't want to be sacrilegious this morning.

But this is the most incredible church picnic in the history of the world.

And in the blink of an eye, we move from chapter 9 with the terrific, with the remarkable, with the wonderful.

We move from the terrific right into the tragic in the blink of an eye.

Something goes terribly wrong.

All of the awkward feelings you might sense of being in a moment that moves from joy to terror in a second is the feeling that I think you're supposed to experience canonically reading Leviticus 8, 9, and 10.

Can I read it to you one more time?

You've heard it.

Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took the censer, the little bronze bowl that they had, and they put a coal in it, fire in it, and then they laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.

And then fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died right there before the Lord.

And then Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord has said among those who are near me, I will be sanctified, I will be glorified.

And Aaron didn't say a word.

They took strange fire, unauthorized coals, maybe unauthorized incense.

And the same flame that just a few verses earlier had elicited great joy on God's gathered people now consumed nadab and abahu in one moment.

And it is intended to be terrifying.

Well, let me make this more complicated for you this morning, if you don't mind.

And then I get to leave.

That's part of the blessing of coming in and leaving.

We really don't know the exact nature of Nadab and Abihu's offense.

Some suggest that they were inebriated.

Maybe they had drank a little bit too much at the party that was going on.

Because in the verses beginning at verse 8 here in chapter 10, Moses warns Aaron and his sons, don't come into my presence inebriated.

If you're going to come and do priestly duties, you keep the ripple to the side.

Don't do that.

So he warns them, but maybe.

Some suggest that the incense itself was the problem.

They offered something that wasn't in accord with God's recipe for incense.

Others, I think actually the dominant few others, suggest that they actually offered the wrong kind of coals.

But the truth be told, we're not certain the exact nature of what they did wrong.

We also don't have any reason, and this is the harder part probably, to assign rebellious or recalcitrant motives to Nadab and Abihu.

You know, like two deacons on the side of the church smoking cigarettes before they go in to offer something up.

I just don't think that's the scene.

In fact, I think we're kind of safe, on safe ground, to assume that their motivations were probably noble.

Like Uzzah.

Do you remember that other terrifying scene in the Old Testament?

Where they're bringing the Ark of the Covenant back into Jerusalem, back into the temple.

They bring it on a cart when they were supposed to bring it on poles, and that was already a little bit off.

But as they're bringing the Ark of the Covenant back on a cart, they hit a pothole in the road, the cart tips a bit, and the Ark of the Covenant is about to fall off.

And Uzzah, motivated, we might assume by good motivations, moves to stop it from falling, and everyone watches him fall to the ground dead.

That's Uzzah right there, the dead guy.

What we do know about Leviticus 10 is Moses makes one matter very clear.

The incense that they offered was, and I'm quoting here, not what God had commanded.

They came to God in their own terms, on the basis of their own worshiping ingenuity.

And in a moment they were consumed by God's powerful presence.

Horrifying.

Leviticus 10 3, which is a clarifying verse in the whole setting.

And I'm going to give you a, I'm sorry, a little bit of a gentle translation on this.

I might read Leviticus 10 3 this way, slightly different than the reading you see in your bulletin.

In drawing near to me, I will sanctify myself.

So that the whole people will honor me.

In other words, Moses, let Aaron know that I won't allow anyone to solely my presence by coming to me on their own terms.

I will preserve my honor and my glory in the face of humanity, Moses.

Moses, remind the priests that their jobs are near the flame of my being.

And they better come to me the way that I authorize them, or I would advise them not to come at all, as they carry Nadab and Abihu's bodies out.

The whole thing's got a kind of miraculous feel to it because they're consumed by fire.

And did you read what it said?

And yet carried out by their tunics.

Like, how did the tunic survive the flame?

I'll leave that to you.

And one of the most telling, and truth be told, disturbing phrases in the whole of the book, this last line and verse three, the Bible says, and just think about the pathos of this scene.

Aaron did not speak.

First two sons, the sons and the previous chapters had been with him in the joyous celebration of the initiating rite of the whole tabernacle.

I mean, if you read Leviticus 8, it's and the way in which it's set up here, the blood that was put on their ears and their toes to sanctify them as priests before the Lord was probably still there.

And here Aaron sees his own sons consumed by the flame.

And the Bible says he didn't say a word.

And then God gets very serious in the rest of these verses, we won't dive into it, where he says, And the rest of you, brothers, don't you rip your tunics.

Don't mourn.

You can let all the people outside mourn.

I've set you apart to a duty.

And you better do what I'm telling you to do now because you're anointed, otherwise, you'll meet the same flames.

That's in there.

The same flames that elicited joy in the two verses before it in chapter 9 is the selfsame flame that now consumes Nadab and Abihu in a single moment.

I am the Lord your God, and I will preserve my holiness so that my honor persists before all people.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Knee knocking, stomach churning, goosebump inducing fear.

And this story in Leviticus 10 is not the only one like it in the Bible.

I already mentioned Uzzah to you.

Can I tell you another one?

That Martin Luther said is the strangest section in all the Bible?

Turn with me, if you don't mind.

If you have a Bible, you're reformed people, you've got Bibles.

Exodus chapter 4.

Exodus 4 · chapter mention

Some of you might not even remember that these verses are in the Bible.

They're so bizarre.

I mean, just think about where we've been in Exodus.

Back in chapter 3, this former son of Pharaoh is now out in the middle of the desert marrying a woman named Zipporah, Jethro's daughter, seems as happy as a lark, now no longer under the guise of Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and he sees a strange sight, the Bible says in Exodus chapter 3.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

And in one of the most understated lines in all the Bible, Moses says, I must go see this strange sight.

Sounds like Sinai, that is consumed by, notice this here, a flame, which is the presence of God's being manifest in material form.

A flame that can consume, but also a flame that can give life.

And here's a tree that's wrapped up in a flame and it's not being consumed.

So here Moses comes to this thing and he says, What is this?

And as he draws near, the Lord speaks to him from the flames and says to him, Take your shoes off, Moses, you're on holy ground.

We're all in the language here of Leviticus.

All of this is wrapped up in similar motifs and ideas.

Take your shoes off, bow before me, Moses, you are on sanctified, holy, uncommon space.

You're in my presence.

And so what does the Lord say to Moses?

I've heard the cries of my people.

You know it's great.

One of the best chapters in the Bible.

I've heard the cries of my people, Moses.

I've heard their cries of oppression.

Want you to go and deliver them.

And then Moses asks the big question.

It's a question, by the way, that Jacob asked back in Genesis 32.

Another weird text.

Didn't plan on this, but this is the Sunday morning of weird texts in the Bible.

Here's another one.

Did you know?

I know you all know this, Jacob wrestled with God and had him in a full Nelson.

Even medieval Jewish interpreters are like, that cannot be God.

That must be the demonic presence of Esau or protector of Esau.

That can't be God in a full Nelson.

Here he is by the river Jabok wrestling with the God of Israel, refusing to let go.

And then God changes his name and says, You're no longer the wily one, Jacob, you're now the one who has striven with God.

You refuse to let go of my promises, Jacob.

By the way, that's our whole Christian life.

I'll leave that to the side.

I'm refusing to let go of your promises, God.

Even if you are the adversary, I refuse to let go of your promises.

And then Jacob volleys to serve right back over the net.

Okay, you just changed my name.

What's your name?

Remember that?

And you remember the Lord's not so kind, non-velvet glove response?

Here's my paraphrase: none of your business.

Don't ask that question.

And when you bring Genesis 32 into conversation with Exodus chapter 3, it's almost as if the Lord is saying, Jacob, you're not the one to raise that question.

Exodus 3 · chapter mention

I'm waiting for another figure, a redeeming figure, a prophet, unlike any other prophet in the history of my dealings with humanity, until I reveal to you my son.

His name is Moses.

And he's going to ask me the same question, and I'm going to give him an answer.

And so Moses asks, What is your name?

And the Lord says, I am who I am.

I will be who I will be.

You'll know my name and the significance of my being, so that you can relate to me and worship me and go back to this space again and again.

When you see me break the back of Pharaoh and redeem my people, when you see me kill his firstborn son and redeem my firstborn son, you will know who I am.

I will be who I will be.

It's that Moses that we're talking about that we read in the next chapter when he's on his way to Egypt, ready to meet Aaron along the way to get his help partner to go and do their ministry together against Pharaoh and the Egyptians.

We read these crazy verses.

And at a lodging place on the way to the way, verse 24, the Lord, the one that he just met in the tree, met him and sought to put him to death.

That's odd.

And then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin, and she touched Moses' feet with it and said, Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me.

So let him alone.

The Lord let him alone.

And it was then that she said, A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.

Next verse.

Then Moses and Aaron met and went along the way as they went to Egypt.

What?

What just happened?

Out of nowhere, God tries to kill Moses.

And apparently his wife Zipporah was carrying a traveling circumcision kit because she pulls out her kit from her purse and circumcises her son, poor fella, on the spot.

Takes the blood from the circumcision, and in the same language of Exodus 12, with the lintels and the doorpost, attaches or attacks or presses the blood onto his feet.

And when the Lord sees the blood, just like he will with his people in due course, he passes over Moses.

It's crazy.

It's strange.

It's terrifying.

I have a colleague at Beeson who's retired now, who I miss dearly.

His name was Robert Smith.

Robert was our preaching professor for years, and he had an experiment that he would do with students where he would put in different Bible texts in a bowl, and they were all the hard ones.

Judah and Tamar, Genesis 38, the rape of Dinah, right?

I mean, Bathsheba, Absalom, all these hard texts in the Bible.

And he would just put them in a piece of paper, and the students would have to choose one of those texts and then preach a sermon on it.

They were all horrified by the experiment.

It was a living legend among Beson students.

And I had one student, um, I remember very well, his name is Josiah.

This is about three or four years ago.

And he drew out of the pot Exodus chapter 4, verse 24, and following.

Exodus 4:24

The circumcision blood, God tries to kill Moses, if you didn't know that story.

And so he said, I'd like to come and talk to you about it.

And I said, Come on, Josiah, come by.

So he comes by the office, and I love these moments.

These are fun moments with students.

I've been in this text, I've wrestled with it for some time.

But like, what do you got?

Like, what insights are are coming to you?

And he starts sharing about the Jewish and their Christian interpretive traditions, and he gets into the Hebrew and the use of Nagab, right?

All that stuff.

Fun, fun, fun.

But when it was all over and he's done talking, he said, okay, Josiah, so when you preach a sermon, what's going to be your big takeaway?

What are you going to give?

And I'll never forget.

He paused and he said, The idea that I can't get away from is that God is dangerous.

And I thought, oh, that's so hard.

And yet it's so true.

Ask Moses.

Ask Uzzah.

Ask Nadab and Abihu.

God is dangerous.

And he reveals himself to his people in the flames.

And those same flames can cause great joy.

But those flames can also swallow you alive.

So can I leave you with three thoughts this morning and then I'll be done?

And I'll make it fast.

Number one.

Our God remains enthroned above the cherubim.

And he refuses any attempt to domesticate him or to bring him under our control.

He refuses that.

There's a tendency among Christian theologians in the church, and the tendencies are not in contradiction to one to the other, they're understandable given the nature of the Bible and human need.

The one tendency is to take the complex things of God and to try to make them palatable and understandable, more accessible.

We need to do that.

There's another tradition, especially within the medieval church, and I think there are certain reformers that are like this as well, whose tendency is in the other direction.

More difference, more otherness, more beauty, press more toward transcendence.

Instead of turning away from the flame, we've actually got to turn toward it.

More emphasis on the creator-creature distinction.

More of a claim that the first verse of the Bible may lay the kind of theological rules of the whole game.

In the beginning, God alone created the heavens and the earth.

So that the creation is distinct from the creator.

So that we recognize that the God of the living is sufficient unto himself.

He's in need of nothing external to himself to make his godness become more godlike.

He's complete, he's full, transcendence, beauty, goodness, truth.

All of that is in him and is him in its totality and in its otherness.

We can't domesticate that.

Our tendency, my tendency, is to want to bring God under control, something that we can manage.

But when you go to the tent of meeting with Nadab and Abihu, when you take a little journey in the wilderness with Moses on the way to Egypt, when you're walking beside Uzzah on the way back to Jerusalem with the Ark of the Covenant, there's one resounding truth that continues to press on us, namely, God cannot be tamed ever.

Think about this movement in the book of Job, which I heard y'all talked about last week.

It's incredible.

All these middle chapters of Job where Job is playing the naive lawyer.

I don't know what else to call him.

We love Job 1 and 2, Job.

That's braveheart Job.

That's good stuff.

But boy, naive lawyer Job, give me my moment in court.

Let me prepare my brief, my opening and closing arguments before the God of the living, to bring my case before him and let him know the mistakes that he's made.

And then what do we get in Genesis 38?

We get Job being offered his day in court.

And here's how the Lord begins these speeches that are both meant to humble Job and justify him at the same moment.

Where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Your desire to domesticate me, Job, to bring me under some sort of constraint of your knowledge base, or under the constraints of your experience, Job.

Where were you when I brought somethingness out of nothingness?

Our God is a consuming flame.

His beauty and his transcendence and his holiness is always, and hear this, dear friends, and will eternally be other.

In a million years from now, when we're gathered together on that shore, worshiping in the new heavens and the new earth, he will offer us more.

In 10 million years from now, when we're still there in the new heavens and the new earth, we'll be discovering more of God's beauty, more of God's joy, more of God's truth, more of his goodness.

He offers the infinity and the plenitude of his being to us, and he will do it forever.

We can never exhaust God.

Never.

Number two.

Now getting a little bit more to the rub and letting two and three kind of relate to one another.

Here's point number two.

Number one, God cannot be domesticated, He is other.

Number two, and here's a big one for us in the church today, even for card-carrying evangelicals like you and me.

We come to God in the ways in which God authorizes, or we don't come at all.

In other words, our tendency to get on the Christian train and look for insights and goodies on the Christian train outside of the holy scriptures themselves, which reveal to us our Lord Jesus.

And outside of the tradition of the church, that seeking to understand those holy scriptures for the sake of worshiping God in Christ truly and rightfully, the danger is always present.

And one of the things that you find as an insight, like a red thread through the Christian tradition, from Augustine to Thomas Kramer and Calvin into the 20th century, those theologians that we claim to be on our team, if I can use that language, they will always say something like this: that the Bible, in its weirdest and most difficult parts, says better and truer things than the best of our thoughts and our ideas.

Leviticus 10 and 7 and 8, and the weirdness of Leviticus 3 is more important in light of the totality of Scripture than the best Christian author that you can't wait to read tomorrow morning in your quiet time.

And you fill in the blank, whoever that is.

I've got my blank filled.

The scriptures are better.

Our tendency always, when left on autopilot, is to project our own selves onto God.

That's our tendency.

And what Scripture's over against this does in the life of the church is it's constantly correcting us by putting us to death and making us alive so that our speech and our prayers and our ideas and our direction recognize that all things come from God and all things are returning to God.

We come to Him the way in which He authorizes, or we do not come at all.

Which relates to the final point.

How in the world can we be near the flame at the tent of meeting and not be consumed like Nadab and Abihu?

It seems like it's a real possibility.

And that presses on you and me the beauty and the profundity of the gospel once again.

Psalm chapter 2, which is a psalm that's got its fangs in me, is a psalm that comes as a pair with Psalms 1 and 2.

Psalms 2 · chapter mention

Psalm 1 begins this way: How blessed is the one that doesn't walk, stand, or sit with the ungodly, but their delight is in God's law.

And on his law, they're meditating day and night.

They can't get enough of it.

They want God's instruction.

They know that they are not their own best resource.

The blessed person, the happy person, the person living within the grain of the universe, the person that knows that they're living under God's smile and in the conditions of genuine human flourishing.

That person loves God's word.

They love it.

They want to be shaped by it.

And that person also, last verse of Psalm 2, says this how blessed are those who find refuge in God.

Psalm 2 says that God sits on a throne and he laughs at the nations that conspire against him and his anointed one.

You do not want to hear the God of the living laughing at you.

You do not want to be near the flames that can consume you.

So where in the world is their safety in the midst of the consuming flames?

And the answer is in the flames.

And I can only find refuge in the flames one way.

I come in Christ, or I don't come at all.

And when our Lord Jesus bursts through the tomb with his body ascended before the Lord, so that, and this is really important, friends, so that his body is raised now, incorruptible, and is now brought into the very life of God.

Jesus is a human now, corporeal, corpuscular, bodied.

Your whole salvation turns on that.

How in the world can I be in the flame of God's presence and the fallenness of my humanity?

And the gospel answer to that is if your faith is in Christ, are you ready, friends?

You're already in the flame.

You're there now, safe and secure.

So that the very flame that can consume is the flame that provides for you warmth and heat and infinite comfort and delight.

The very things, truth, goodness, beauty, transcendence, bliss, the very things that could overwhelm you and consume you, for those that are in Christ and in the flames will be the eternal gift that God gives you for your ultimate delight and joy.

Where do I find refuge from the flames?

Only by turning in toward them.

But I can only come in Christ, or I can't come at all.

And oh Lord, bless these things to our hearts and our minds, we pray.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.