“This is what you are to do for them to consecrate them to serve me as priests. Take a young bull and two unblemished rams, with unleavened bread, unleavened cakes mixed with oil, and unleavened wafers coated with oil. Make them out of fine wheat flour, put them in a basket, and bring them in the basket, along with the bull and two rams. Bring Aaron and his sons to the entrance to the tent of meeting and wash them with water. THen take the garments and clothe Aaron with the tunic, the robe for the ephod, the ephod itself, and the breastpiece; fasten the ephod on him with its woven waistband. Put the turban on his head and place the holy diadem on the turban. Take the anointing oil, pour it on his head, and anoint him. You must also bring his sons and cloth them with tunics. Tie the sashes on Aaron and his sons and fasten headbands on them. The priesthood is to be theirs by a permanent statute. This is the way you will ordain Aaron and his sons.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I remember attending my uncle’s graduation from med school when I was growing up. It was actually a pretty cool deal. The speaker was a guy who had climbed Mount Everest and barely survived about whose experience they later made a movie. What really stood out to me, though, was that toward the end of the affair, they had all the graduates say the Hippocratic Oath together. Then, whoever was leading the ceremony pronounced them all doctors. Their schooling was absolutely necessary, of course, but the ceremony was the key to their being officially considered doctors. We have always made things official with ceremonies. The next part of the tabernacle cycle in our Exodus journey describes the ceremony by which Aaron and his sons would officially be made the priests of Israel. There is once again a lot of detail here, so let’s take it a bit at a time and see what kind of positive sense we can make out of it.

If you just sit down and try to read this chapter without any other idea of what’s going on, you are likely to wind up either bored or confused or both. There are references here to things that don’t get fleshed out until later on in the story and even later on in the Pentateuch. There are cultural and religious symbols that don’t make a ton of sense without at least a bit of background research. And there’s just so much detail through all of it. What you need to do to help is to keep the big idea in mind. And the big idea here is that before Aaron and his sons could serve as priests, filling the role God had called them to, they had to be formally installed to the position.

This installation process included a couple of parts. The first part was that they had to be consecrated. That’s a theological word that we don’t use everyday, so let’s unpack it right quick. To consecrate something is to formally designate it as holy or sacred. It is to set it apart for divine service of some kind. All of the various implements of the tabernacle and even the tabernacle itself would eventually be consecrated through a series of rituals that included sacrifices and sprinkling them with a special anointing oil (whose exact formula will be given in a couple of chapters). Right here we are seeing what the process will be to consecrate Aaron and his sons. I should note that all we see here is a description of what the process would be. The actual process itself gets described in even more detail in the opening chapters of Leviticus.

The biggest part of consecrating Aaron and his sons was offering the sacrifices that would formally cover over their sins before God. They were sinful just like everyone else around them. What made them different though, was the fact that they were going to be tasked with drawing closer to God’s presence than anyone else in the nation. Because of this, it was all the more important to make sure they were able to stand before God, drawing near on the people’s behalf. They were going to be representing the people before God, doing what the people could not practically accomplish on their own. Accordingly, over the course of the chapter here, we will see a variety of sacrifices and offerings described. These were all aimed at atoning for their sins in various ways so they were clean and pure and able to be in God’s holy presence.

The second part of the installation process involved officially dressing them in all the priestly garments whose descriptions we worked through a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, you can’t do a job unless you have on the right uniform. God directed the people very specifically in the creation of a priestly uniform. If they were going to serve as God designed, they needed to have on the right uniform. As we talked about, the uniform was designed the way it was both so that the priests looked the part, but also because of the spiritual symbolism each part carried.

Let’s be honest: This was a lot of effort the people had to go through just to be able to appear before God. Because of the way the people thought about God and the world in general then, none of this would have been boring or seemed repetitive to them. The whole process would have been solemn and laced with great tension as they waited with baited breath to see if God was going to accept their offerings and allow the priests to enter into His presence on the people’s behalf. But for us looking back through the lens of the new covenant and some 3500 years’ worth of history, it’s hard not to roll our eyes and bit, and skip to the next exciting part of the story.

There’s a reason for this. We don’t need all this pomp and circumstance any longer to get into God’s presence. Reading just this part of the chapter, can you appreciate for a moment just what a relief that is? We don’t need any of this because Jesus took care of it all for us. He made Himself the sacrifice we had to offer. He lived a perfect life and so wasn’t ever separated from God’s presence in the first place. He stands before God on our behalf. When we put our trust in Him, accepting Him for who He claimed to be, and give Him His rightful place as Lord of our lives, we can enter into God’s presence through Him. We don’t need anyone else but Jesus. He did it all for us so we can experience it all in Him.

Now, we still have ordination ceremonies for those we set aside to serve God in special ways that go above and beyond what most people have the time and capacity to do. I went through one myself. These don’t serve the same function as Israel’s priestly ordination process, though. They are about checking a person’s theological beliefs and understandings in order to make sure they are not only knowledgeable, but knowledgeable in the right ways. These are also where we publicly recognize them as able to serve in their position. But in terms of our getting before God and experiencing the weight and wonder of who He is, we don’t need them at all. We have Jesus for that. And thank goodness we do.

Over the next two weeks, we are going to work through the rest of the ordination process to see how the whole thing unfolded. As we go, look for the ways the various parts and pieces of it pointed toward the fulfillment that Jesus would one day bring to the whole affair. Look too for the reasons we have to be all the more grateful for Jesus and His ministry before the Father on our behalf. Our faith may not need to be hitched to the Old Testament to be worthwhile, but a proper and healthy understanding of it helps us to appreciate the gift we have in Christ in a fuller, richer, deeper way. Let’s see if we can grow that together even through a chapter like this one.