It should never amaze me that our God is a God of redemption. But still it does. Every time it does. Because who does things like that? Who really chooses the weak and makes them great? And yet His word is filled with these very stories. Ours is not a story of the great always being great and the weak always being weak. It is also not a story of perseverance and the exceptional spirit of success inherent in man. Ours is a story of weakness, of failure, inevitably over come by God through man. And this is what makes what we believe so amazing and so other than. Because we believe in a God who is so wholly other than that His ways make absolutely no sense and yet His way is always perfect. It is a story about Him and not about us. And that is what makes Him The God.
The redemption of the Levites is an amazing truth that clearly speaks to the perfection of our God. The tribe of Levi begins with a curse upon their head. Put in place by Jacob because of their wrath and uncontrollable anger we are told the Levites have such a passion but it inevitably results in death and destruction. And isn't it just like our God to claim them as His own. While God tells Moses that He is claiming the first born from all the other tribes He is claiming the entire tribe of the Levites as His own. And the Levites then are set apart to serve the Lord. Their job is to take care of the tabernacle. They manage the sacrifices and the security, They sit before the Lord and represent the people to Him. They are no longer their own but they become servants of the Lord.
And so it is no surprise when we meet John the Baptist and it turns out he is of the Levite tribe. How perfect it is that the one chosen to cry out that the Lord has come to earth is also one that God has chosen from the days of Moses. It should also come as no surprise that after Jesus has departed and the early church is formed and for the first time in history we have people who are called Christians we hear as Peter addresses them that they are "a royal priesthood." See it all seems so trivial when taken in separation. We have a bunch of Christians running around with a phrase that gets so abused that we are all part of the priesthood. We are all priests in the Kingdom therefore we don't need anything or anyone especially a church or a church body. But in the context of the truth of it all our perfect God chose the Levites and called them His, they became the servants of His church. And now He has called us out of darkness, not into a place of individual privilege but into a place of servant hood. A place of privilege too deep for words. We are His priests, we are His servants. He wants our everything and in return He is our everything. That is His plan, that is His way.
