When I was in college I attended my first congregational council meeting. I didn't grow up in the church, so this kind of thing was completely unfamiliar to me. This church was part of a small denomination, and many of the people in the meeting were voicing concerns about all the new people coming into the church, because people coming in from the outside would inevitably bring some unwelcome changes. Not necessarily bad changes, but unfamiliar changes, things that would affect the culture of the church. They were worried that the church they'd lived in all their lives would become an uncomfortable place because of the influence of these “outsiders.” And, to be honest, I was one of these outsiders and, like many others, had been welcomed with open arms into the church and was glad to be part of the community; these, on the whole, were good people who were just worried about what was going to happen in the future, about the church they'd known all their lives becoming a place where they no longer belonged.
But the apostle Paul had a very different experience with people who had a similar concern. In Acts 22, he's been arrested by the Romans in Jerusalem (because the Jews were trying to kill him) and as he's being taken to the barracks, he asks to be allowed to speak. When the crowd hears him speaking in Hebrew they become attentive and everything goes well at first. But then he says “After I had returned to Jerusalem and while I was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw Jesus saying to me, 'Hurry and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.' And I said, 'Lord, they themselves know that in every synagogue I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. And while the blood of your witness Stephen was shed, I myself was standing by, approving and keeping the coats of those who killed him.' Then he said to me, 'Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles'” (Acts 22:19-22).
They had been listening attentively, but when he mentioned reaching out to the Gentiles they started shouting “Away with such a fellow from the earth! For he should not be allowed to live.” Why did they react so violently to these words? Why was this so repellant to them? They saw themselves as God's chosen people, with everyone else in the world on the outside, to be despised and avoided. “God has chosen us, not them, and He wants us to remain pure and not be contaminated by outsiders.”
The thing is that their concerns are rooted in truth; Israel had often gotten into trouble because of their contact with other nations, but they got into trouble because they allowed these nations to influence them and pull them away from worshiping God. God's intention was not that Israel be completely isolated and apart from other nations. He wanted them to influence, rather than being influenced. Israel's calling was to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
Being a kingdom of priests means that they are to do for the world what we see Moses doing for them in these verses. The world is in trouble because of its rebellion against God, but that doesn't mean that He's no longer concerned about all these people who've rebelled against Him. As He says in these verses, “all the world is mine.” The people listening to Paul have lost sight of this reality.
So what does Moses' priesthood involve? First, it involves receiving a message from God. The message is not primarily addressed to Moses himself. He'll certainly benefit from listening to the message, but the message is not primarily addressed to him; it's a message that he is called to deliver to the people of Israel. Receiving a message and being attentive to what God wants to say to His people is a part of his priestly calling.
His priestly calling involves receiving a message, but since this message is not addressed primarily to him, he needs to go on to deliver this message to God's people. But delivering messages from God to people in rebellion against Him is very often not a positive experience. Several years ago, a pastor said to me, “preaching is the easiest thing I do all week.” This man loved talking about himself and his vision for the church, and he didn't feel bound by the need of discerning a message from God's Word. Delivering a message from God is a stewardship, not an opportunity to talk about whatever one finds appealing or “sharing what's on my heart.”. And doing this, listening to God's Word and delivering a message from Him, is not always a positive, easy thing.
Jeremiah didn't want to be a prophet at all, but God called him to that work anyway. And after years of faithfully delivering the messages God gave him, Jeremiah said to the people, “For twenty-three years, from the thirteenth year of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah, to this day, the word of the Lord has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened” (25:3). In human terms, his ministry was a failure, and he felt like he was not achieving anything most of the time.
Then Moses, after receiving a message from God and delivering that message to the people, is also called, as a priest, to stand before God on behalf of the people, to represent them before God: “So Moses came and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. All the people answered together and said, 'All that the Lord has spoken we will do.' And Moses reported the words of the people to the Lord.” Part of this priestly ministry involves intercession, standing before God on behalf of others. So these three things: receiving a message from God, delivering that message to the people, and then speaking to God and representing the people before Him, are all part of what it means to be a priest. And connected with this is also being not only to be a kingdom of priests, but a holy nation, which means a people set apart for God and His purposes. This is what the people listening to Paul got wrong. They thought they were people called to belong to God apart from and above others, when they were called to belong to God and represent Him on behalf of others.
God says these things to Israel, but many centuries later, Peter says this to the Church: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:9-10). Peter was a strict Jew. When he received a vision with all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds, along with a voice saying, “Get up, Peter, kill and eat,” he responded by saying “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean” (Acts 10:13-14). God repeated the vision three times, to prepare Peter to go to the home of Cornelius, a Gentile, something that was simply unthinkable to his first-century Jewish sensibilities. But now, years later, he addresses the Church, including its Gentile members, in terms that had previously belonged only to Israel. Our calling, as the Church, is to be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.
But this kind of thing doesn't just happen automatically. I like listening to Jeff Brown in the morning on 93.7 The Bus, and he has a bit about stuff he's found while he was looking for other stuff. It's one of my favorite things to listen to in the morning next to Boneheads in the News. But becoming people who act as priests to the people around us is not the sort of thing we stumble into while we're going about other things. We need to be intentional in cultivating a life that is consistent with our calling to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
One of the first things we need is an awareness of what God has done for us. God says to Israel, in Exodus, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself” (v. 4). We need to cultivate an awareness of the great things God has done in bringing us to Himself. Especially when we've been going to church all our lives, hearing these things over and over again, they can seem commonplace. We start taking them for granted and forgetting what it cost for us to be reconciled to God. When that happens, we need to take ourselves in hand and meditate on God's Word; take a short passage (rather than trying to read several chapters) and read it over and over, letting it sink in. And as it starts to sink in, respond to God with prayer and thanksgiving. Sing a hymn or a worship song if you want, but take time to allow your heart to be warmed in God's presence, to remember what God has done to reconcile you to Himself.
In the Parable of the Pharisee and Publican, the Pharisee is unfit to fulfill a priestly ministry because he's unaware of what God has done for him. He's too occupied with what he has done, and is doing, for God: “Lord, I thank you that I'm not like others.” There's no room left in his heart for gratitude over the things God has done. I've probably mentioned these words by John Newton before. He was a slave trader early in his life, but then God had taken hold of him. He became a wonderful pastor, but he never lost sight of what he had been before he experienced God's grace. He wrote the hymn Amazing Grace: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me,” and he was intensely aware of what God had done to redeem him from his former way of life. Near the end of his life, he said “my memory is almost gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Jesus is a great Savior.” The apostle Paul, early in his ministry, said he was the least of the apostles (1 Cor. 15:9). A little later in his life, he said he was the “least of the saints,” the least of God's people (Ephesians 3:8). And then, nearing the end of his life, he called himself the “foremost of sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). The more we see of God, the more aware we are of our sinfulness. Paul was equipped to carry out his priestly ministry as an apostle, because he was intensely aware of what God had done for him.
Then we need to “go up to God,” as we see Moses doing in this passage. A pastor friend of mine was out fishing once and the guy he was with said, “I don't need to go to church; God speaks to me right here.” He responded, very wisely, I think, “really; what does He say to you?” Of course, the guy didn't know what to say. God can speak to us anywhere, but the reality is that He usually doesn't speak to us unless we make a definite effort to seek Him in the places where He makes Himself known.
Moses is going up to God to receive a message for God's people. But if he went up into the mountain and then distracted himself with all kinds of entertaining things to pass the time, to make the experience easier, it's likely that he would not hear from God. Going up to God, in the way that Moses does here, involves attentiveness to Him, paying attention to His Word. There are so many distractions in our culture right now, and it's difficult for us to pay attention to anything for any length of time. But if we want to hear from God we need to cultivate an attentive spirit and be willing to ignore the distractions that clamor for our attention. As God says to Jeremiah, “When you search for me, you will find me, if you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Being a kingdom of priests, entering into the priesthood of God's people, requires sustained attentiveness to God and His Word.
Make a plan to spend time with God in prayer and in His Word regularly. There are lots of good devotional guides out there that can give you a good start. Follow this with reading a chapter or so in the Bible, maybe pray a Psalm, and then use a book of written prayers to help guide your prayer time (A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie, is a good place to start, but there are lots of others out there). Have a definite structure for the time; you can always change it when you want, but if you have a structure in place you don't have to make a decision at the time about what you're going to do. You just enter into the time and offer your prayers to God. Sometimes He will meet with you and you'll feel refreshed, and other times you'll just go through the things you have in place. But in both cases what you're doing is of value and you are preparing yourself to enter into the priestly ministry of God's people.
And then, as people who are pursuing God and are attentive to His Word, we also need to make an effort to order our lives in obedience to His Word. The words, “you shall be my treasured possession” are connected to the condition “if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant.” God's desire is that His people respond to Him in loving obedience. Jesus says the same thing in the New Testament: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever” (John 14:15-16). If we understand truly what God has done for us, we will want to show our love and gratitude by increasingly living under His Lordship.
I spent a few years in the ELCA, and I found that they were very nervous about words like “discipleship” and “obedience,” because they thought these ideas would undermine justification by faith alone. The bishop of the Allegheny Synod at that time admitted this to me. He took exception to some things I had said about discipleship in a sermon and said “we Lutherans get uneasy when we hear the word 'discipleship,' because we worry that it will undermine the gospel of free grace.” But Jesus is clearly concerned that His followers respond to Him with loving obedience; this loving obedience is not the foundation of our acceptance before Him, but it grows out of that acceptance. And that growing obedience, rooted in our gratitude for what God has done in redeeming us and granting us free access into His presence, is part of what it means to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
We who by God's grace and mercy have been called into the Church of Jesus Christ are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that [we] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9,10). May God, in His infinite mercy, enable us to increasingly live in the light of the priesthood to which He has called us.
