Leviticus 21: Be Respectful

Leviticus 21 gives some special directions to the priests of Israel. While there are a lot of things in this chapter, I want to highlight one verse in particular.

Lev 21:6  They shall be holy unto their God, and not profane the name of their God: for the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and the bread of their God, they do offer: therefore they shall be holy.

For the record, to profane basically means to disrespect something. The priests are not supposed to disrespect the name of God because they bring the sacrifices before Him. There are other passages in Leviticus that talk about their condition that your heart must be in to be the one that actually offers the sacrifices to God.

Lev 10:1  And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not.

Lev 10:2  And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD.

Lev 10:3  Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spake, saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace.

If you remember these two guys, they died because they were irreverent.

Now, to make this applicable to today, we need to remember that we are capable of speaking directly to Jesus who speaks on our behalf before God.

1Ti 2:5  For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;

In a way then, we need to make sure that we come to prayer with the respect it deserves. Of course, after everything that God has done for us, He obviously deserves our respect to begin with. However, this verse in Leviticus 21 stood out to me as particularly important because it referred to priests. Today, we don’t need a human intermediary like the Israelites did; we can talk directly to Jesus who relays our message to God, so we should have as much respect as the priests did when they approach God in the tabernacle.