Wednesday Evening
February 16, 2005
Leviticus 10:1-11
“ The Tragic Tale of Nadab and Abihu”
Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III
If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Leviticus, chapter ten. In Leviticus 1-7 we have a description of the various sacrifices that were to be brought willingly, joyfully, voluntarily from the people of God to the Lord at the tabernacle as an expression of thanksgiving, desire for communion with God, a sense of the forgiveness of sins by the provision of God through the sacrificial system, and fellowship, and the various other things that were entailed in the sacrificial system.
Then in Leviticus 8-10 we see the ordination of the priests; the consecration of them to the service of God. And so there’s this flow, this motion from the last chapters of Exodus where the tabernacle is prepared, where the people of God will experience the focal point of the presence of God with Israel. And then, the sacrifices are described and the priests are prepared, and in those three motions we see the people of God prepared in a unique way to come into God’s presence, to commune with Him, to experience nearness to His holiness.
And this chapter that we’re going to look at tonight is in fact the last of the chapters in the section in Leviticus about the ordination of the priesthood, and it is a tragic morality tale. At the very outset of the priestly work, at the very outset, immediately upon the ordination of these priests the very sons of Aaron fail to do what God had commanded the priests to do. And God means it for a lesson. Moses tells us that in this very passage, but God Himself tells us and Aaron that from His own lips in this passage as well. In the time we have left to us tonight, let’s look to God’s word, and let’s look to Him in prayer before we do so.
Lord God, we thank You for Your word tonight as we come to this passage. We sense its tragedy. We know its story, and it’s one of the stories that stands out from the Book of Leviticus. It may be one of the few passages that many, many Christians know that come from the Book of Leviticus. We recognize when we read it that we are on holy ground. This is Your word; it’s a word of warning, so we pray that we would heed that word, heed the warning, look to Christ and flee to Him. We ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
“Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, ‘It is what the Lord spoke, saying,
‘By those who come near Me I will be treated as holy,
and before all the people I will be honored.’’
“So Aaron, therefore, kept silent. Moses called also to Mischael and Elzaphan, the sons of Aaron’s uncle Uzziel, and said to them, ‘Come forward, carry your relatives away from the front of the sanctuary to the outside of the camp.’ So they came forward and carried them still in their tunics to the outside of the camp, as Moses had said. Then Moses said to Aaron and to his sons Eleazar and Ithamar, ‘Do not uncover your heads nor tear your clothes, so that you may not die, and that He may not become wrathful against all the congregation. But your kinsmen, the whole house of Israel, shall bewail the burning which the Lord has brought about. You shall not even go out from the doorway of the tent of meeting, lest you die; for the Lord’s anointing oil is upon you.’ So they did according to the word of Moses.
“The Lord then spoke to Aaron, saying, ‘Do not drink wine or strong drink, neither you nor your sons with you, when you come into the tent of meeting, so that you may not die—it is a perpetual statute throughout your generations—and so as to make a distinction between the holy and the profane, and between the clean and the unclean, and so as to teach the sons of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them through Moses.”
Amen. And thus ends this reading of God’s holy word. May He add His blessing to it.
It’s a solemn passage. It’s a sad passage. You can’t read this passage without feeling for Aaron. But you also can’t read this passage without realizing that God is dangerous. His holiness is dangerous to those who treat Him lightly. We’re at the outset of the outset of the establishment of the ministry of the priests of Israel. Two priests, sons of Aaron, carelessly do what God had not commanded. On their own initiative they take unauthorized fire into the house of the Lord. They take in incense, which had not been commanded to be used in the service of the tabernacle on the great altar, and they lift it up to the Lord, and they die.
The passage before us tonight has three very clear parts. There is the description of that event in verses one and two. That’s the first part of the passage. Then in verses 3-6 you see the explanation of what God had done and Moses’ exhortation to Aaron and the other priests. That’s in verses 3-7. And then, in verses 8-11 you see another exhortation, but this time it comes from the lips of God Himself to Aaron. Let’s look at this passage briefly tonight.
I. The event.
First, let’s look at the event. Here we are told Nadab and Abihu offer “strange fire” before the Lord. And commentators debate about what exactly they did, and what exactly does “strange fire” mean, and we don’t have time to go into all the options that are set forth, but suffice it to say if you look at verse 1, in the very final [words] of verse 1, Moses tells you what it was, essentially, that they had done wrong.
This passage doesn’t say that their motivations were wrong; it doesn’t say that they were insincere; it doesn’t say that they were openly contemptuous of God and they were trying to do something that was dishonoring to Him deliberately. It says, if you look at those final words, that they brought this “which He had not commanded them.” In other words, it was not that they did something which He told them not to do, but they did something which He had not told them to do. And you say, ‘Isn’t that being a little pick-y, Lord? I mean, there’s no word saying ‘don’t bring that kind of incense into My tabernacle.’ Isn’t that being a little over-scrupulous?’
But, you see, the principle that Moses sets down here is that we are to approach God only as God commands us to approach Him. We’re to worship God according to His expressed commands. That is how He is treated holy.
There are many ministers in churches that call themselves “Christian” today, where the minister will say, ‘Oh, you can approach God any way you want. Jesus Christ is not necessary to approach God.’ You see, the Lord God will not hear that, for He has appointed His Son as the way, and the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by Him. And those ministers are speaking and saying something no different than Nadab and Abihu’s going into the Lord’s presence in a way that He had not commanded when they tell their people that there is some other way into the presence of God. And there is an attitude in our culture today to speak and treat with God in a trivial fashion. We think that the Lord will “cut us some slack”. And this passage reminds us of the holiness of God, and the seriousness with which He treats His holiness.
Can you imagine it? He has spent days giving Moses commands for how the tabernacle is to be built, and how its service is to be conducted. And these priests, before those services can even officially begin, have already violated those principles. Do you realize where Israel would have gone from there, had there not been an immediate divine response against that disobedience?
And so, here is this sad, sad, tragic event: the sons of Aaron themselves consumed with fire, perishing. And you say, ‘Oh, but yes, that’s the Old Testament.’ But do you remember how Hebrews 12 ends? That great passage that says that “we have not come to Mount Sinai, but we have come to Mount Zion.” Do you remember how it ends? Hebrews 12:29: “For our God is a consuming fire.” And you have to wonder...you have to wonder if the author of Hebrews is thinking of this passage.
And you notice that these aren’t barbarians; these aren’t pagans, these aren’t notorious sinners who have been stricken by the wrath of God. These are priests. And there’s a message for us in there, to be sure: that God is only to be approached as He has commanded, and especially that means for us as Christians that we only approach Him by His word and through Jesus Christ. And when ministers tell us that there are other ways, they are giving us the counsel of Nadab and Abihu.
II. The exhortation to Moses.
Now there’s a second thing that we see here, and you see it in verses 3-7: this explanation from Moses, and this exhortation to Moses. And it’s really quite extraordinary. Moses, first of all, comes and (in verse 3) explains that the deaths of Nadab and Abihu are the consequence of their failure to respect the holiness of the Lord. Listen to what he says:
“Moses said to Aaron, ‘It is what the Lord spoke, saying, ‘By those who come near Me I will be treated as holy, and before all the people I will be honored.’’”
Can you imagine how it would have been to have been called upon to deliver that piece of pastoral directive from God to a man who had just lost his sons? ‘Aaron, you need to understand that the reason this has happened is your sons have not honored God as holy, and God is showing to the whole congregation that He will be treated as holy.’ It is stunning to think of Moses delivering those words to his bereaved brother.
But then, the rest of the counsel gets even more extraordinary. He then directs Nadab and Abihu’s cousins, the sons of Aaron’s brother, non-priests, to carry them out in their tunics out of the front of the sanctuary and outside of the camp. No priests are to carry them out of the tabernacle area, because those priests have already been anointed before the Lord; and furthermore, he goes on in verses 6 and 7 to tell Aaron and Eleazar and Ithamar that they cannot publicly mourn the death of their son and brother. And you want to say, ‘Lord, that is so cruel...you’re telling a father, and the brothers of these men that they cannot publicly mourn the loss of their sibling and child.’ But you see the reason: Moses explains it. For them to uncover their heads, and to tear their garments, and to cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes, would be to call into question the just judgment of God. And so Moses says, ‘Let me tell you, Aaron, the whole of Israel will mourn your sons, but you will not.’ Can you imagine having to deliver that word to Aaron?
And that is why, by the way, we’re told at the end of verse 3, “So Aaron, therefore, kept silent.” You see, that’s Moses’ way of saying that Aaron took his counsel. He was obedient to the directive which Moses had given that he not publicly mourn. You see, God’s ministers are to be radically devoted to His holiness and glory. One of the things we learned in Leviticus 9 is that the ministers, not simply in what they taught, but in their lives, were to show the people of God what devotion to God is, what consecration to God is. Their teaching was not to be disembodied from their lives. And for these men to disobey God in this open and public way required a radical response of justice from God, because God’s ministers are to uphold His glory and justice in every event of life.
Many years ago there was a very liberal pastor of a large congregation in the hometown where I grew up. He eventually became the chaplain at a university. On the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, on the day that C. S. Lewis died, on the day that Aldus Huxley died—in November of 1963, his daughter, Carol, was driving home from Richmond where she was pursuing a doctoral study. She was beautiful, she was brilliant; and somewhere in North Carolina at a cross roads someone ran a red light and killed her instantly in a car. And that pastor just went into a spiritual tailspin, and week after week in the pulpit of that large evangelical church, he railed against God! And he would mock anyone who would dare to say that what had happened was the will of God. He hated that. He wrote a book in which he mocked anyone who dared say that these tragic events of life was within the will and providence of God. And you know, he was doing exactly what Nadab and Abihu did, in not upholding God’s glory; and he was not following Aaron’s example of upholding the glory of God, even in the loss of his own sons.
And again you say, ‘But that’s the Old Testament.’ But I want to remind you of something. Do you remember when Jesus called those disciples in Matthew 8:21,22? “And they said back to Him, ‘But Lord, I have to go and bury my father.’” And do you remember what Jesus said to them? “Let the dead bury the dead. Follow me.” Do you see how radical the call of discipleship is? And that’s exactly what Moses is explaining. That’s how radically devoted these priests are to be to the work, to the ministry, to the service to the glory of God, that even in the death of his sons, Aaron is not to mourn, because God’s glory is at stake.
III. The exhortation from God to Aaron and his sons.
Now there’s one last thing. And there’s this exhortation from God to Aaron and to his sons: “Do not drink wine or strong drink...” (verse 8). Now this is a strange exhortation. It just comes out of nowhere. What’s going on? God Himself addresses Aaron now, and He instructs the priests not to use intoxicating drinks while they are involved in the tabernacle service, and in fact, He threatens them with death. And don’t you think that they didn’t listen, in light of what had just happened to Nadab and Abihu! But then He explains, if you look at verses 10-11.
Why is it that they’re not to do this? Because it’s priests’ work to show in their lives the difference between clean and unclean, between holy and profane; and it is their work to distinguish between those things as offerings are brought into the sanctuary. Their minds must be fully engaged in the worship of God, and nothing must detract from that; and, therefore, they are not to take of intoxicating beverages. There these ministers are called to discern the difference between the holy and the profane, and furthermore—look in verse 11—they are called to teach God’s word. They’re “to teach the sons of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them through Moses.” And in order to do that, they must be fully engaged. Nothing must take the edge off of their mental and spiritual commitment to the worship of God. God expects, you see, the full mental engagement of these priests in the work of worship, and they are in their words and their lives to teach the people of God His word.
Now, my friends, these are solemn, solemn words. They remind us of the holiness of God. They remind us of the consecration which is required of those who are put into God’s service. They remind us how we must give ourselves wholly—not just our emotions, but our minds, the totality of ourselves—to God in worship.
And again, you may say, ‘But that’s the Old Testament.’ And I tell you that Peter says that you have been made a kingdom of priests to serve your God. So, when you come, you come by His word, and you come by the Lord Jesus Christ, and you treat Him as holy.
Let us pray.
Our Lord and our God, we are humbled and brought to the very dust by the passage before us, for we know the defections of our own hearts. We ask, O God, that for Christ’s sake You would forgive us, and that You would always make us to be faithful to come to You by Your word and by the Lord Jesus Christ, and to give our selves to you as a living sacrifice, which is our spiritual service of worship. And we give you the praise and the glory, for we ask these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Would you stand for God’s blessing?
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.