“You are to make an embroidered breastpiece for making decisions. Make it with the same workmanship as the ephod; make it of gold, of blue, purple, and scarlet yard, and of finely spun linen. It must be square and folded double, nine inches long and nine inches wide. Place a setting of gemstones on it, four rows of stones: The first row should be a row of carnelian, topaz, and emerald; the second row, a turquoise, a lapis lazuli, and a diamond; the third row, a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; and the fourth row, a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper. They should be adorned with gold filigree in their settings. The twelve stones are to correspond to the names of Israel’s sons. Each stone must be engraved like a seal, with one of the names of the twelve tribes. . .Whenever he enters the sanctuary, Aaron is to carry the names of Israel’s sons over his heart on the breastpiece for decisions, as a continual reminder before the Lord. Place the Urim and Thummim in the breast piece for decisions, so that they will also be over Aaron’s heart whenever he comes before the Lord. Aaron will continually carry the means of decisions for the Israelites over his heart before the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How do you figure out what God (or the gods, if you prefer) wants? That has been a question plaguing humanity since time immemorial. And we have come up with all sorts of ways to answer it. Some have been fairly simple and direct. Others have been entirely more complicated. Many have even crossed the line into being downright nefarious. The goal, though, has always been the same: to figure out what God wants so that we can live in light of that. For Israel, part of the answer to that question was the breastpiece. Let’s talk about this next part of the priestly garments.

The breastpiece was essentially a decoration on the ephod. We have a little better idea what this would have looked like thanks to a more detailed, but also simpler to understand description than the ephod received. This was not a breastpiece that was going to serve any kind of a protective function. It was ceremonial and decorative. It was also symbolic. It was symbolic of the passion Aaron (or the high priest more generally) was to have for the people, and also symbolic of his role in discerning the will of God for the people to be able to follow. Let’s explore both of these and their implications for us today.

If the ephod was to serve as a reminder to the priest of the weight of serving the people, the breastpiece was to remind him to love the people. The ephod placed weight on his shoulders. The breastpiece set the names of the people over his heart. The priest was to be passionate for the people he was serving. He was to love them. How else could he serve them effectively and adequately represent their interests before God? And he was to love all the people equally. One tribe was not to get favor or preference that the others did not receive. He was priest to all of them at the same time.

There are two connection points here for us. The first is specific; the second more general. First, if you are someone who serves a church in a ministerial capacity, you have to love the people you are serving. I know it seems like that should be able to go entirely without saying, but let’s make it plain all the same. Speaking as a pastor, while this work is unavoidably a calling, it is also a means of employment and compensation sufficient to provide for my family.

You know this when it comes to your own job. When you have done some work long enough, you eventually get to the point that you cannot imagine doing something else. Your skill set has gradually developed such that you are really good at this one thing. The thought of doing something else brings with it all sorts of questions and fears. Could I even do it? Would I want to? Could I still provide for my family? Unlike many other places of employment, though, serving as a minister brings with it a level of uncertainty that other occupations don’t carry. If you cross or upset the wrong person in a congregation, you can quickly find yourself out of a job and facing the unnerving prospect of having to scramble in order to make ends meet. And yet and again, this is a calling from God. As a minister you ultimately serve Him, not your church. Because of this, there is a constant temptation to get priorities out of place in order to bring more security and stability to your employment status.

When all of this happens, a passion for the people can become a casualty of these misplaced and disordered priorities. Yet if we lose sight of the utter centrality of loving the people we serve, the people Jesus Himself loves and gave His life for so that they might have life, we run the risk of losing sight of the reason we are called to this in the first place. So, we must never forget why we do what we do: for the love of Christ expressed toward a particular group of people. The people are the thing, not the job. Or, to put that another way, the people are the work. So, pastor, don’t forget to love your people. There is no substitute for that. Jesus loves them even when they are unlovable. Jesus loves you even when you are unlovable. That’s your standard. You love Him and love them, and He’ll take care of the rest.

The second piece of symbolism here is one that starts and ends the description of the breastpiece. It was to be a means of decision making for the people. This decision making function seems to have been fulfilled by the Urim and Thummim. While there is some speculation about what exactly these were, the truth is that we don’t really know. Our guess is that these were some sort of stone set. One may have been black and the other white, but we don’t have direct confirmation of that. These two stones were likely a means for casting lots. Various ancient cultures used the casting of lots as a means of determining what their gods wanted. The Urim and Thummim seem to have been an effort on God’s part to meet the people where they were in order to communicate with them in a way they understood.

Casting lots would have worked about like it sounds. The priest would have put some sort of question (with a binary set of possible answers) before the Lord, and then would have done some sort of a blind draw. Whichever stone was produced would have been taken as the answer. Ancient peoples put quite a lot of stake in their gods’ ability and willingness to impact the outcome of exercises like this that we look at today as little more than random chance. The idea is captured in Proverbs 16:33: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

The belief undergirding this practice on Israel’s part was that God is totally and perfectly sovereign over His creation. There is nothing that happens that He does not cause or at least allow to happen. Now, of course, this brings to mind all sorts of uncomfortable questions for us today. There’s not much evidence in the Scriptures that the ancient Israelites were bothered as much by the implications of divine sovereignty as we are today. They operated within a more general cultural worldview framework that was a great deal more comfortable with accepting the will of God (or again, the gods) for good or for ill than we are today.

More generally, though, the idea of essentially rolling a set of ancient dice to figure out what God wants seems silly to us. And it should. While God absolutely could have used that in the past (and still could today if He so desired), He doesn’t communicate with us like that anymore. In fact, we have a record of what was almost certainly the last time those methods were used in Acts 1. When the apostles were determining who was going to take Judas’ spot as one of The Twelve in the wake of the resurrection and before the day of Pentecost, they narrowed their candidate list down to two options and cast lots to decide which one God was directing them to install. A few weeks later the Holy Spirit arrived in dramatic fashion, and we haven’t needed to cast lots to figure out what God wanted since.

Helping the people discern and live within the will of God was one of the priest’s main roles in ancient Israel. Today, we don’t need a priest for that. Jesus Himself promised, and we see the disciples experiencing the fulfillment of this promise in Acts 2, that He and the Father were going to send the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, to dwell in the hearts of believers. He would give us all the direction we need; we only have to seek it. And how do we know what the Spirit has to say? Prayer, Scripture, and the church community are the three main ways.

The Spirit’s communication with us through prayer is unavoidably spiritual. It’s hard to explain how this works beyond getting a sense of the answer to some query that we are pretty sure didn’t come from us. This shouldn’t often be taken on its own and without further confirmation. This is whether the Scriptures and the church community come into play. An answer to some query from the Spirit will never contradict the Scriptures. Ever. If it does, then it wasn’t from the Holy Spirit. With this general sense through prayer and the apparent confirmation of the Scriptures, the third check is to bring the matter before the church at some level. This could be nothing more than having a conversation with a fellow member of the body whose maturity we trust about the matter and getting his or her thoughts. It could also be bringing the question before the whole body and getting the counsel of the group. Either way, if the church agrees with our prayer-directed, Scripture-confirmed understanding, we are safe to operate as if we are correct. If the church disagrees, then we are wisest to go back to the drawing board on the matter. It may be that God is directing us toward some end anyway, but we had better double check and even triple check if the church doesn’t agree. That could be the means by which God is helping us to refine our understanding.

So then, what we have here in the end is yet another reminder that while the old covenant doesn’t apply to us directly because of the fact that it has been fulfilled and replaced by the new covenant we have in Christ, through the lens of Christ, we can see how God was establishing patterns that He still uses in His engaging with and directing us today. God hasn’t changed. He won’t. And because of that, we can rely on Him explicitly through Jesus. Thanks be to God for this wonderful gift.