“Then he said to Moses, ‘Go up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of Israel’s elders, and bow in worship at a distance. Moses alone is to approach the Lord, but the others are not to approach, and the people are not to go up with him.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Everything has to start somewhere. The nation of Israel as we know it throughout the rest of the Old Testament period and to at least some extent on through to today started with the events of this chapter. What we will look at over the next few posts is the covenant ceremony in which God made things official with the people. It’s an interesting affair, to say the least. Right here at the start, though, something caught my attention that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the chapter. As we prepare to talk about God’s officially bringing the people of Israel into a new covenant relationship with Him, let’s talk for just a minute about human leadership and failure.

I remember in college first discovering Ravi Zacharias. Because I was a member of my church in college and played in the praise band, when I would go home for a weekend, I would get up early on Sunday mornings in order to be back in time for our 8:30 service. Three hours is a lot of time to occupy when you’re by yourself, so I listened to a lot of CDs and Am radio.

One Sunday morning as I was scanning through the AM channels to see what I could find, I came across a preacher with an Indian accent who was delivering an absolutely incredible message. It was designed to draw you in by preaching to your head, but then he made a turn an went right for your heart. I was hooked. I tried to listen to him every Sunday morning as I streaked my way through the country on my way back to school. Sometimes the station wouldn’t come in very well, but as often as it did, I listened to it every single time I drove.

I became a huge fan of Ravi. I found more and more of his messages to listen to. I bought and read a couple of his books. He was incredible. And I wasn’t alone. Ravi had a hugely popular ministry that reached millions. He was one of the most eloquent defenders of the Christian faith in the world, and an expert at showing not only why Christianity is unique in comparison with all the other religions in the world, but a better worldview choice to make.

Fast forward several years. Rumors started to spread that some woman was suing him for sexual harassment and assault. I didn’t put much stock in the reports at first (to my shame). Neither did anybody else (to theirs too). This was just somebody who was trying to make a name for herself by taking down a famous preacher. The case fairly quickly was resolved and disappeared. A few years later, though, another report came out alleging similar things but on a bigger scale. By this time, Ravi was dying of cancer, and so the broader evangelical community didn’t do much with the accusations until he passed. Then they started to look more closely. What they found wasn’t good.

You can google all the grisly details of the case, but the summary version is that Ravi was a serial sexual predator and a scumbag. He had been essentially living a double life for years. While he was leading thousands of people to embrace the reasonableness of the Christian faith, he was pursuing a path behind the curtain that suggested by his behavior at least that he didn’t believe a word of it. He was a sexual addict who used his reputation and influence to feed his habit at the expense of many, many victimized young women. The global apologetics ministry that bore his name was gone within a year. Today, no one talks about him at all except like we are here: as a cautionary tale and a reminder of the absolutely vital nature of integrity and accountability, especially for leaders.

The people mentioned in this little section that kicks off the next part of the Exodus narrative were the who’s who of Israelite leadership. You had Moses, of course, but then came Aaron, his brother, and Aaron’s two oldest sons who were being prepared to follow in their father’s footsteps as the high priests of the nation. Then you had 70 of Israel’s elders. These would have been the most highly reputed men from among the twelve tribes. If they weren’t willing to sign on to what God was wanting to do with and through the people, the rest of the nation wasn’t going to follow. These were the people God needed to have not only on board, but actively leading the charge to bring Israel into the relationship He was forming with them. They needed to be the ones actively demonstrating their faithfulness to the whole project if the rest of the nation was going to be willing to get in on the action themselves.

And yet…

All of these people failed and failed rather spectacularly. Aaron let the people talk him into making them the golden calf idols and told them that these idols represented God. That happened while Moses was still up on the mountain receiving the law from the Lord. The ink of the covenant wasn’t even dry, and he was already leading the people astray. He would later try to make a power play on Moses’ position with their sister Miriam. Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, were put to death by God Himself in rather dramatic fashion the same day they were confirmed as priests because they committed a brazen act of disobedience right in front of the people. The 70 elders of Israel would have been the ones giving the people permission to participate in Aaron’s idolatry. They talked them out of going into the Promised Land on the first go-round after the negative report of the spies. They sanctioned the grumbling and various other rebellions the people tried to launch against Moses and the covenant they had agreed to with God. Moses himself disobeyed God publicly and wound up not being the one to actually lead the people into the Promised Land when the day finally arrived. In other words, all of these guys failed. A lot.

And yet here they were going up to the mountain with Moses to participate with him in what we will see was a powerful worship experience. They all shared a vision of God’s throne room together. God was the one to specifically direct them to be chosen for all of this. Why did they abandon the covenant? Why did God choose them in the first place?

The short answer is that we don’t know. He chose them because He did. He chose them because they were the leaders of the people and He understood that He needed to work through the leaders they had established for themselves if He was going to get them on board with what He was trying to do. Once He had a relationship with them established, He could start to impact their leadership a little more directly, but even then, the leaders He raised up often failed and failed in spectacular ways.

I don’t know that I have a particularly insightful point to make by any of this. It’s just an observation that Israel’s leaders failed them. A lot. All of them. Over and over and over again. So do our leaders. Even our religious leaders. Especially our religious leaders. And we fail with them. We sometimes fail because of them. Occasionally we fail in spite of them, but that’s a good bit rarer. If we look to human leaders to provide more than good leadership (and often not a whole lot of that), we are going to wind up profoundly disappointed.

Well, does this mean we should just reject the idea of human leadership entirely? No, I don’t think that’s the right solution here. Anarchy always fails. We will eventually bring order to ourselves, trading freedom for security and stability if we have to. We always do. And, the consistent pattern we see in the Scriptures is that God works through human leaders. He does this in spite of their failures. Sometimes He does it right through their failures. He can do that because He’s that powerful and good and wise. He’s more powerful and more good and more wise than our failures no matter how great they are.

I think the real point here is that while we should absolutely look for, celebrate, and even submit to good and godly leadership, we should never elevate it to a position that it wasn’t ever meant to have. While we should accept the good examples of people who are inviting us to follow them as they follow Christ, we should never forget that they aren’t Jesus. We should go in assuming that leadership failure is a distinct possibility. That doesn’t mean we embrace an unhelpful cynicism. But it does mean we never lose sight of who our real example is; of who our real leader is. When a leader falls, we mourn the kingdom’s loss, we offer compassion and grace, but also justice and accountability, we minister to that leader’s family who is likely going to be left to pick up the pieces, but then we get back on the path and keep following Jesus knowing that He’s never surprised, and He always has a plan. When we follow Him first and foremost, we’ll never be lost.