“This is what you are to do for Aaron and his sons based on all I have commanded you. Take seven days to ordain them. Sacrifice a bull as a sin offering each day for atonement. Purify the altar when you make atonement for it, and anoint it in order to consecrate it. For seven days you must make atonement for the altar and consecrate it. The altar will be especially holy. Whatever touches the altar will be consecrated. This is what you are to offer regularly on the altar every day: two year-old lambs. . .I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar; I will also consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. And they will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt, so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The old covenant was complicated. There were all kinds of rules and regulations to keep. If you touched the wrong thing at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you had to be made clean which required time and sacrifices to deal with. If you sinned, that required more sacrifices which meant more time and money lost. It was all just a lot. No one could have remembered it all. The average person was reliant on the priests to help them know what to do and when which gave the priests a ton of power. And everybody knows how well priests with lots of power tend to do. It worked for what it was, but it wasn’t ever intended to be God’s final plan. It did point to it, though. As we finish up our discussion of the ordination process, let’s talk about where it was pointing, and what we have today.

The last part of the description of what would be the process for ordaining the priests gives us a kind of summary statement of all the rest of it. If you were to read just from v. 35 to the end of the chapter, you would have a pretty good sense of what the rest of it is about. They were to offer sacrifices to purify everything and everyone involved in the operation of the tabernacle complex, but especially the altar and the main tent itself and the priests. And in the end, the whole thing would be considered holy. Not only would it all be holy, but it would be able to make other things holy too.

Whatever touched the altar would be consecrated, God said. That meant two things. First, the altar conveyed God’s holiness in a powerful way. It enabled the people who interacted with it properly to come into contact with God’s holiness. Second, anything that came into contact with it had to be given over completely to Him. Whatever animal touched it was to be dedicated to Him as an offering. The average people were not to touch it at all. Only the priests who had been through all the various purification rituals had that right and privilege. They did the work on behalf of the rest of the people.

But keeping the people right with God wasn’t simply a one-time event. There were to be sacrifices and offerings made at the altar and in the tent of meeting every single day. In fact, God really emphasizes the daily nature there in v. 38 when He says it is all to be offered “regularly” and “every day” in the same sentence. The section I skipped there gives a list of what this daily sacrifice was to consist of. It involved two young lambs, a gallon of flour, a half gallon of oil, and a half gallon of wine. Like I said earlier, keeping the old covenant was a lot. This daily sacrifice was about reminding the people of their constant and ongoing need for God. It was to offer a regular covering for any sins they might have committed since the previous day in order to keep them in good standing before Him.

And in the end, that standing with God and His presence with them was what the whole thing was about. He wanted to dwell among them. He wanted to be in a relationship with them. He wanted them to properly understand who He was. He wanted to be their God. That is what we can’t lose sight of here. God didn’t have to do any of this with or for them. He didn’t have to give them a pathway into a relationship with them. He didn’t have to accept their sacrifices as a covering for their sins rather than either delivering them over to judgment immediately or else simply leaving them to rot in their sins. He could have just as easily left them to their own devices at which point they would have probably never existed as a people in the first place.

But He didn’t because that’s not the kind of God He is. He wanted to be in a relationship with them because He loved them. More than that, as He told Abram when He started this whole process about four hundred years before this, He wanted to have a relationship with the rest of the world as well. He was going to achieve that relationship through them. He was building a relationship with them so He could have a relationship with the rest of the world through them. All of this was just the first step in that process. And it was going to be a long process.

Today, we live way at the other end of the process. Our gratitude for this fact should be immense and profound. The writer of Hebrews helps us to understand how and why this is. He examined the old covenant through the lens of the new so that we can see how much better we have it today. We don’t have to do all of these sacrifices. We don’t have to make all of these offerings. We don’t have to worry about keeping all of these laws. The very fact that they had to be offered again and again every day means that they weren’t ever really accomplishing their goal which was to totally cleanse the people from their sins. But it wasn’t time yet then for God’s ultimate answer to the problem. That came with Jesus. He made Himself the one sacrifice so that we can enjoy God’s presence in a way the Israelites here never could. He took all of the complex rituals and regulations and made them all very simple: just receive Him.

God’s desires, though, never changed. He still wants to dwell among us. He still wants us to know who He is. He still wants to be our God. In Christ, we can have all of that and more. We can have unfettered access to Him. We can have Him involved in our lives each and every day giving us guidance and encouragement and hope. We can have Him helping us to understand how to live in such a way that we enjoy life to its absolute fullest. And we can have all of that without going through all the pomp and circumstance Israel had to engage in. We can simply go to Jesus and He’ll take care of the rest. Be grateful today for what God has given. Receive the grace He has made available. Live the life that is truly life.