Dedicating the Levites (Num. 8:5-16)

12/16/2008 9:52 AM

SPIRITUAL DIARY

My Worship Time                                        Focus:  Dedicating the Levites

Bible Reading & Meditation                        Reference:  Numbers 8:5-16

            Message of the verses:  “5 ¶ Again the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 6 “Take the Levites from among the sons of Israel and cleanse them.  7 “Thus you shall do to them, for their cleansing: sprinkle purifying water on them, and let them use a razor over their whole body and wash their clothes, and they will be clean.  8 “Then let them take a bull with its grain offering, fine flour mixed with oil; and a second bull you shall take for a sin offering.  9 “So you shall present the Levites before the tent of meeting. You shall also assemble the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, 10 and present the Levites before the LORD; and the sons of Israel shall lay their hands on the Levites.  11 “Aaron then shall present the Levites before the LORD as a wave offering from the sons of Israel, that they may qualify to perform the service of the LORD.  12  "Now the Levites shall lay their hands on the heads of the bulls; then offer the one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering to the LORD, to make atonement for the Levites.  13 “You shall have the Levites stand before Aaron and before his sons so as to present them as a wave offering to the LORD.  14 “Thus you shall separate the Levites from among the sons of Israel, and the Levites shall be Mine.  15 “Then after that the Levites may go in to serve the tent of meeting. But you shall cleanse them and present them as a wave offering; 16 for they are wholly given to Me from among the sons of Israel. I have taken them for Myself instead of every first issue of the womb, the firstborn of all the sons of Israel.”

            The process that is described above must have taken a lot of time perform because there were 22,000 Levites who had to go through this process of being dedicated to the Lord for service in the tabernacle.  God chose the Levites to serve Him by working with the priests at the tabernacle instead of taking the firstborn male of all of the children of Israel, and this went back to when the death angel of the Lord killed the firstborn of the Egyptians right before Israel left Egypt.  These 22,000 Levites were set before the Lord and all of the leaders of the other tribes put their hands onto them to dedicate them to the Lord and they were sprinkled with water and then probably after the ceremony they had to shave all of the hair off their bodies and wash their clothes.  There were both a burnt offering and a sin offering sacrificed at the time of this dedication, the burnt offering for dedication to the Lord and the sin offering to care for the sin.

            Dr. Wiersbe points out three things that can be learned from this ceremony for believers in the Church age.  The Lord was the One who chose the Levites to perform the duties at the tabernacle, and He also equipped them and consecrates them just as He does in the body of Christ today.  God is the One who chooses the leaders and ministers in the Church today and He also gifts them with certain gifts that He chooses for them in order to serve the Lord and the people in the church, which is the second principle.  The third principle comes from where the Levites camped, which was around the tabernacle in order to protect it from invaders, and the leaders in the church are also to protect the flock from outside and inside invaders who want to destroy the local church.  Paul warned the leaders at Ephesus about this in Acts 20:28.

            Spiritual meaning for my life today:  This is a good reminder that God’s Holy Spirit is the One who has given me the gift or gifts that I have in order to serve the Lord and also those in His Church and I truly believe that one of my gifts is to teach, for God has given me a desire to teach those who are new believers or young believers in our church some of the fundamental things they need to learn from God’s Word.

My Steps of Faith for Today:

1.     Give myself to the Lord for service, worship, and to be transformed by the renewing of my mind.

2.     Ask the Holy Spirit to search my heart.

3.     Learn contentment.

4.     Ask the Lord to guide my path today.

5.     Put on my spiritual armor, the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of the Gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit.

Memory verses for the week           :                                               Romans 6:5-13

6.     For if we have been united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection,

7.     knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin,

8.     for he who has died is freed from sin.

9.     Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him,

10.  knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again, death is no longer master over Him.

11.  For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God.

12.  Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

13.  Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts,

14.  and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.

12/16/2008 10:39 AM