We walk on a foundation of individualism and suck in the air of postmodernism, thick with the heavy dew of multiculturalism. Absent today are the ties that bind. Never before has a generation so desperately needed the local church, the communion of saints, to help them follow Jesus. God has been faithful to preserve this place of authentic community in our culture. The Word says we have a duty, responsibility, and obligation to our neighbors, especially those in the household of faith (Luke 10:29–37; 1 Tim. 5:8). We may yearn for the freedom to express ourselves with the aid of social media, but we’re not truly free unless we’re responsible to a community. That’s what the apostle Paul taught in Galatians 5:13. Freed from sin by Christ through His death and resurrection, we’re free to love one another. The church affords us the opportunity to love and serve in a way social media never will.
I respect church leaders who abstain from social media. Yet I see no reason we should neglect the remarkable possibilities for teaching and leadership offered by instant, unrestricted communication to willing audiences. Still, I expect over the long term that tweets, status updates, and blog posts will pale in influence compared to our everyday, tangible pursuit of holiness and love with the support of our local church.
“The favor of the people may be won by some brilliant action,” de Tocqueville wrote, “but the love and respect of your neighbors must be gained by a long series of small services, hidden deeds of goodness, a persistent habit of kindness, and an established reputation of selflessness.”
“Whoever is truly humbled — will not be easily angry, nor harsh or critical of others. He will be compassionate and tender to the infirmities of his fellow-sinners, knowing that if there is a difference — it is grace alone which has made it! He knows that he has the seeds of every evil in his own heart. And under all trials and afflictions — he will look to the hand of the Lord, and lay his mouth in the dust, acknowledging that he suffers much less than his iniquities have deserved.”
A mystery in Paul’s writings is not normally something “mysterious,” still less a whodunit. It is a truth or a doctrine which in some measure has been kept hidden in previous generations, and now with the coming of the Gospel has been disclosed and made public. Sometimes the Gospel itself is treated as a mystery; more commonly, some element of the Gospel is labeled a mystery.
Our only saving grace is this: it is God’s grace. It is the grace that He has given us in the gospel. In the whole history of Christianity there has never been a church that did not need the gospel in absolutely the most desperate way. And now we come to the twenty-first century, in which God has called us to live for Christ in increasingly post-Christian times. To that end, we offer everything we are and everything we have for His service. The church for the twenty-first century is a church that confesses its sin and trusts in the crucifixion and the resurrection and the intercession of Christ as our only hope of salvation.
Most Christians have listened to testimonies that relate how some man or woman lived a life of fruitlessness and open degradation, or at least of quiet desperation, before becoming a Christian. Genuine faith in the Lord Christ brought about a personal revolution: old habits destroyed, new friends and commitments established, a new direction to give meaning and orientation. Where there was despair, there is now joy; where there was turmoil, there is now peace; where there was anxiety, there is now some measure of serenity. And some of us who were reared in Christian homes have secretly wondered if perhaps it might have been better if we had been converted out of some rotten background.
One of the ways God talks about the future is… well, by simply talking about the future. There are places in the Bible where God predicts, in words, what will happen: he talks about the future. But he also provides pictures, patterns, types, and models. In these cases he establishes an institution, or a rite, or a pattern of relationships. Then he drops hints, pretty soon a cascade of hints, that these pictures or patterns or types or models are not ends in themselves, but are ways of anticipating something even better. In these cases, then, God talks about the future in pictures.
Before they began their duties for the first time, the Levites were set apart by a ritual God himself established to “make them ceremonially clean” (Num. 8:5–14). The details need not concern us here. What we shall reflect on is the theological reasoning God gives for ordering things this way.
One of the most attractive features of David is his candor. At his best he is transparently honest. That means, among other things, that when there is an array of things going wrong in his life he does not collapse them into a single problem.
From Sinai on, the Levites are treated differently from the other tribes: they alone handle the tabernacle and its accoutrements, from them come the priests, they are not given a separate allotment of land but are dispersed throughout the nation, and so forth. But here in Numbers 3, one of the most startling distinctives is portrayed.
