Friday, Nov. 15
Numbers Chapters 17 and 18 Click here to read
Chapter 15 continues the story from yesterday’s reading, with God confirming his favor on Aaron (and his descendants).
If you think back to the very beginning of God’s rescue of his people from Egypt, it all started with God supernaturally turning Moses’s staff into a serpent to prove that he was with Moses. Now, many years later, God again transforms a walking staff as proof of calling.
We then return to rules about sacrifices, with the emphasis this time being on the sacrifices that are available to the priests and their families.
At first glance this sounds like a good deal for Aaron and his line. Their work in the Tabernacle, while gory and demanding by our standards, was less demanding than the lives of most of their countrymen. The rest of the people not only had to slaughter the animals they ate; they also had to raise them.
But there was a price to be paid.
In verse 18:20 we read, “The Lord said to Aaron, ‘You will have no inheritance in the land, nor will you have any share among them; I am your share and your inheritance among the Israelites.”
The priests did not have the assurance of owning land, and the sacrifices they lived off of had to be eaten within a day or two. To borrow a phrase from Jesus, they had no opportunity to lay up treasures on earth. They had to live out faith in God’s daily provision.
Today’s meditation also speaks about wealth. Proverbs 13:8 says, “A person’s riches may ransom their life, but the poor person cannot respond to threatening rebukes.”
An aspect of poverty that’s easy to underestimate if you haven’t lived it is the way wealth affects confidence, which is something the writer of the proverb understood.
Poor people have less capacity than wealthy people to stand up for themselves or, as the proverb says, “respond to threatening rebukes.” Both “poor” and “wealthy” are relative terms that don’t come with a dollar-figure definition. A front-line assistant manager of a fast-food restaurant wouldn’t meet any textbook definition of wealthy, but is in a more secure position than the part-time staff they supervise.
That may seem like a digression from Numbers or Proverbs, but this is how we learn to put scripture into action: consider its implications on our real-life world.
Proverbs brings a reminder that financial insecurity reduces a person’s ability to respond to threats. Numbers tells us that the priests, the people closest to God, are to be deliberately kept, not wanting, but in a state of constant dependence: deliberate insecurity.
Much later when Jesus speaks of storing up treasures in heaven rather than on earth, it’s easy to look at the “treasures in heaven” part without noticing the sacrifice of security required.
In passages like these we can start to understand why Jesus told the rich young man he had to sell all he had and give it to the poor; it wasn’t about giving more to the poor as much as about forcing the man to replace his dependence on wealth with dependence on God.