Dedicating the temple to God. Quite the ordeal. Full of ceremony. Blood and oil on everything.
Why? Because this is the place where God would live. This is the place on the earth where the physical presence of God would dwell. All the dreadful holiness. All the divine power and love embodied in one place.
Kind of like the Holy Spirit in us... just without the blood and incense and oil.
In his book Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis retold the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. The central character, Orual, struggles against a primitive and irrational religion. The religion is full of dark and "holy" things. The ominous temple is filled with a heavy incense and pidgins are sacrificed. And the blood is throne on a massive hideous stone icon that represents the god. When Orual becomes queen, she adopts the prettier, cleaner religion of the Greeks. She constructs a beautiful Hellenistic statue next to the ruddy stone phallus.
In a revelation at the end of her life, Orual is struck by how little comfort the beautiful statue gives people. People flock to the holy fear caused by the dreadful stone. There is comfort in the terror. Something bigger and more wild than them.
Are we missing something in our churches? A holiness? A divine terror? When churches look more like Baby Gap then the blood smeared tabernacle of the Old Testement do we lose something?
I know that we are in the age of Grace. Blood was shed for the final time on the cross. Jesus is the lamb that all the other lambs pointed to. I get that. But how am I supposed to "Fear the Lord" (cause it's the BEGINNING of wisdom) when the only lesson I learn is that Jesus is my homeboy?!?
Is there a way to create the gravity of the ceremony of Leviticus 8 in the church? I mean look at the next to last verse... "do this so you don't die!" We, the church, are a royal preisthood. How do we translate this into our churches in this age of grace? In this day of jeans and t-shirts and iPhone Bibles and mini crackers and grape juice in thimbles...
How do I translate this into my life?
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To understand how to fear the Lord today,is to understand what the Biblical word "fear" means.In strongs "Heb." #3372 in your context it means "reverence",and in the "Grk"#5379 "to be in awe of" or to rever".As I {we}stand before God I stand in awesome reverence of His Magesty,that is the fear that God desires from His children today.
ReplyDeleteDo we really want to go back to the tradition of sheading the blood of animals,or is the sheading of Christ's Blood sufficent?I choose to be in Awe of Gods N.T.plan of redemption. U.D.