The Same Fire
For seven chapters Leviticus has described its offerings in the abstract. If anyone brings a bull, if anyone brings flour, if anyone sins without knowing it, here is what happens. Chapter 8 is the first time we watch any of it done, by named men on a particular day, and chapters 8 through 10 are the only sustained story in the first half of the book. The system has been explained, and now it goes live.
Chapter 8 is the ordination of Aaron and his sons. Moses washes them, dresses them, anoints them, and offers three animals on their behalf, and the chapter keeps closing its steps with the same phrase, "as the LORD commanded Moses." Nothing is improvised. The Hebrew idiom for ordaining a priest is to fill his hand, and the narrative acts it out when Moses places the fat, the bread, and the thigh in Aaron's hands and waves them before the LORD (8:27). The priest stands at his own ordination holding what he did not provide.
Then there is the blood. The first animal's blood goes on the horns of the altar and is poured out at its base. The second animal's blood is thrown against the altar's sides. Then comes the ram of ordination, and Moses puts its blood on the lobe of Aaron's right ear, the thumb of his right hand, and the big toe of his right foot, and does the same to each of his sons (8:23). For most of a chapter the blood has gone on furniture, and now it goes on a man. The text never explains the three places, and we should not invent more than it says, but the plain sense is hard to miss. What he hears, what he does, and where he walks, the whole man is marked before he serves.
Chapter 9 is the eighth day, and Aaron's first act as priest is to kill a calf as a sin offering for himself (9:8). He cannot make atonement for anyone else until atonement has been made for him. The people's offerings follow in a new order. Chapters 1 through 5 taught the sin offering after the burnt, grain, and peace offerings, and now it comes first, so the day moves from cleansing to consecration to a shared meal. Then Moses and Aaron go into the tent of meeting together, which matters more than it looks, because Exodus ended with Moses standing outside that tent, unable to enter (Exodus 40:35). When they come out and bless the people, the glory of the LORD appears to everyone, "and fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces" (9:24).
Chapter 10 opens on the same day. "Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD." Read that beside 9:24. The fire comes from the same place, and the sentence opens with the same words. A few verses earlier it consumed the offering while the people shouted, and now it consumes the priests.
People have guessed at the offense for centuries. Perhaps the coals came from somewhere other than the altar, which is where Aaron is later told to get them (Numbers 16:46). Perhaps the brothers had been drinking, since the next command God gives forbids wine in the tent (10:9). The text confirms none of it. It gives one clause: fire "which he had not commanded them." The word translated unauthorized is zara, which means strange or foreign, something that belongs to someone else, and older translations kept it as "strange fire." God had commanded both fire and incense. What made this fire strange is that it was theirs, brought on their own initiative on the very day God had shown that He supplies the fire.
Think of a king and his subjects. In a king's house the king sets the terms of approach, and the consequence of ignoring them is his to set, not ours to find proportionate. Nadab and Abihu were not strangers who wandered in. A week earlier they had been washed, clothed, anointed, and marked with blood. Less than a year earlier they had climbed Sinai with Moses and the elders, seen the God of Israel, and eaten and drunk in His presence, and "he did not lay his hand" on them (Exodus 24:11). Hardly anyone in Israel had been nearer to God than these two men, and that is the point Moses makes: "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'" (10:3). Leviticus was never a manual for managing God's absence; it teaches a people how to survive His presence, and the ones closest carry the most weight. Then comes one of the most restrained sentences in Scripture: "And Aaron held his peace." He has just watched his two oldest sons die, and the narrator reports his silence without interpreting it. We should leave it where the text leaves it.
It is fair to hear all of this and conclude that God is dangerous. He is, in the way anything with that much power is dangerous, and He is also perfect in how He uses that power, which makes Him the safest being there is. The chapter shows it before it ends. Moses finds that Aaron's surviving sons burned an offering they were supposed to eat, and he is angry. Aaron's answer is grief and a question: "such things as these have happened to me! If I had eaten the sin offering today, would the LORD have approved?" (10:19). And Moses approves. The chapter that began with two priests dying for bringing what God had not asked for ends with a priest departing from the procedure and being accepted. What separated Aaron from his sons was the question. He was afraid of acting without God's approval, and they had acted as though they already had it.
Luke tells a story like this one near the beginning of Acts. The church is new, Barnabas has just laid the price of a field at the apostles' feet, and a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira do the same with their land, except that they keep part of the price and present the rest as the whole. Peter tells him, "You have not lied to man but to God" (Acts 5:4), and he falls dead. His wife follows three hours later, young men carry them both out, and "great fear came upon the whole church" (5:11). The sins differ. Ananias lied, and Leviticus never says Nadab and Abihu did. But both couples brought something of their own making into the presence of God, fire in one case and a story in the other, just after He had come to live among His people.
If Acts stopped there, we would have every reason to keep our distance. Three chapters earlier, though, the fire came again. When God opened His house in the wilderness, fire fell on the altar, and when Solomon dedicated the temple, fire came down from heaven and consumed the offerings (2 Chronicles 7:1). At Pentecost it came a third time, and it did not land on an altar. "Divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them" (Acts 2:3), ordinary people in a house in Jerusalem, and nobody died. Peter explains that Jesus, "being therefore exalted at the right hand of God," has "poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing" (2:33), and Hebrews adds that He sat down at that right hand after He "had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). The fire did not become safe. The offering changed.
So the question of Leviticus 10 still belongs to us, and not only to the people who lead. Peter calls the whole church "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9), which means the privilege that once belonged to one family now belongs to every believer, and so does the weight. Hebrews says "we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus," and invites us to draw near "with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water" (Hebrews 10:19, 22), the washing and the sprinkling of Leviticus 8 spoken now over everyone. Confidence and presumption can look alike, since both walk right in. The difference is whose offering they come under. Nadab and Abihu came with fire they made, and we come under the offering God made.
That is what Sunday is. We do not gather because we feel like it, and we do not come to hand God something we made in the hope that He likes it. We come loyal to a God who has given us everything, under the offering Christ has already made. Read Leviticus 8 through 10 this week, and before anything else, read 9:24 and 10:2 side by side. Then read the opening verses of Acts 2. Come Sunday ready to meet a God who is holy fire, and who has made a way for us to stand in it.
Chapter 8 is the ordination of Aaron and his sons. Moses washes them, dresses them, anoints them, and offers three animals on their behalf, and the chapter keeps closing its steps with the same phrase, "as the LORD commanded Moses." Nothing is improvised. The Hebrew idiom for ordaining a priest is to fill his hand, and the narrative acts it out when Moses places the fat, the bread, and the thigh in Aaron's hands and waves them before the LORD (8:27). The priest stands at his own ordination holding what he did not provide.
Then there is the blood. The first animal's blood goes on the horns of the altar and is poured out at its base. The second animal's blood is thrown against the altar's sides. Then comes the ram of ordination, and Moses puts its blood on the lobe of Aaron's right ear, the thumb of his right hand, and the big toe of his right foot, and does the same to each of his sons (8:23). For most of a chapter the blood has gone on furniture, and now it goes on a man. The text never explains the three places, and we should not invent more than it says, but the plain sense is hard to miss. What he hears, what he does, and where he walks, the whole man is marked before he serves.
Chapter 9 is the eighth day, and Aaron's first act as priest is to kill a calf as a sin offering for himself (9:8). He cannot make atonement for anyone else until atonement has been made for him. The people's offerings follow in a new order. Chapters 1 through 5 taught the sin offering after the burnt, grain, and peace offerings, and now it comes first, so the day moves from cleansing to consecration to a shared meal. Then Moses and Aaron go into the tent of meeting together, which matters more than it looks, because Exodus ended with Moses standing outside that tent, unable to enter (Exodus 40:35). When they come out and bless the people, the glory of the LORD appears to everyone, "and fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces" (9:24).
Chapter 10 opens on the same day. "Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD." Read that beside 9:24. The fire comes from the same place, and the sentence opens with the same words. A few verses earlier it consumed the offering while the people shouted, and now it consumes the priests.
People have guessed at the offense for centuries. Perhaps the coals came from somewhere other than the altar, which is where Aaron is later told to get them (Numbers 16:46). Perhaps the brothers had been drinking, since the next command God gives forbids wine in the tent (10:9). The text confirms none of it. It gives one clause: fire "which he had not commanded them." The word translated unauthorized is zara, which means strange or foreign, something that belongs to someone else, and older translations kept it as "strange fire." God had commanded both fire and incense. What made this fire strange is that it was theirs, brought on their own initiative on the very day God had shown that He supplies the fire.
Think of a king and his subjects. In a king's house the king sets the terms of approach, and the consequence of ignoring them is his to set, not ours to find proportionate. Nadab and Abihu were not strangers who wandered in. A week earlier they had been washed, clothed, anointed, and marked with blood. Less than a year earlier they had climbed Sinai with Moses and the elders, seen the God of Israel, and eaten and drunk in His presence, and "he did not lay his hand" on them (Exodus 24:11). Hardly anyone in Israel had been nearer to God than these two men, and that is the point Moses makes: "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'" (10:3). Leviticus was never a manual for managing God's absence; it teaches a people how to survive His presence, and the ones closest carry the most weight. Then comes one of the most restrained sentences in Scripture: "And Aaron held his peace." He has just watched his two oldest sons die, and the narrator reports his silence without interpreting it. We should leave it where the text leaves it.
It is fair to hear all of this and conclude that God is dangerous. He is, in the way anything with that much power is dangerous, and He is also perfect in how He uses that power, which makes Him the safest being there is. The chapter shows it before it ends. Moses finds that Aaron's surviving sons burned an offering they were supposed to eat, and he is angry. Aaron's answer is grief and a question: "such things as these have happened to me! If I had eaten the sin offering today, would the LORD have approved?" (10:19). And Moses approves. The chapter that began with two priests dying for bringing what God had not asked for ends with a priest departing from the procedure and being accepted. What separated Aaron from his sons was the question. He was afraid of acting without God's approval, and they had acted as though they already had it.
Luke tells a story like this one near the beginning of Acts. The church is new, Barnabas has just laid the price of a field at the apostles' feet, and a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira do the same with their land, except that they keep part of the price and present the rest as the whole. Peter tells him, "You have not lied to man but to God" (Acts 5:4), and he falls dead. His wife follows three hours later, young men carry them both out, and "great fear came upon the whole church" (5:11). The sins differ. Ananias lied, and Leviticus never says Nadab and Abihu did. But both couples brought something of their own making into the presence of God, fire in one case and a story in the other, just after He had come to live among His people.
If Acts stopped there, we would have every reason to keep our distance. Three chapters earlier, though, the fire came again. When God opened His house in the wilderness, fire fell on the altar, and when Solomon dedicated the temple, fire came down from heaven and consumed the offerings (2 Chronicles 7:1). At Pentecost it came a third time, and it did not land on an altar. "Divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them" (Acts 2:3), ordinary people in a house in Jerusalem, and nobody died. Peter explains that Jesus, "being therefore exalted at the right hand of God," has "poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing" (2:33), and Hebrews adds that He sat down at that right hand after He "had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). The fire did not become safe. The offering changed.
So the question of Leviticus 10 still belongs to us, and not only to the people who lead. Peter calls the whole church "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9), which means the privilege that once belonged to one family now belongs to every believer, and so does the weight. Hebrews says "we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus," and invites us to draw near "with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water" (Hebrews 10:19, 22), the washing and the sprinkling of Leviticus 8 spoken now over everyone. Confidence and presumption can look alike, since both walk right in. The difference is whose offering they come under. Nadab and Abihu came with fire they made, and we come under the offering God made.
That is what Sunday is. We do not gather because we feel like it, and we do not come to hand God something we made in the hope that He likes it. We come loyal to a God who has given us everything, under the offering Christ has already made. Read Leviticus 8 through 10 this week, and before anything else, read 9:24 and 10:2 side by side. Then read the opening verses of Acts 2. Come Sunday ready to meet a God who is holy fire, and who has made a way for us to stand in it.
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