Seize the Moment – Day 556
A Set-Apart People!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Friday, September 24.
Do you ever feel like you don’t fit in with the world or its standards?
Numbers 1 records the census of Israel’s warriors, which were the men twenty years of age or older and able to go to war (2-3). There were 603,550 fighting men listed in verses 20-46. If you add the rest of the Israelites, you have a very large camp.
But these numbers leave out a very important people—the Levites. Numbers 1:49-51 communicates a very different standard for the Levites as compared to the other tribes of Israel:
Only the tribe of Levi you shall not number, nor shall you take their census among the sons of Israel. But you shall appoint the Levites over the tabernacle of the testimony, and over all its furnishings and over all that belongs to it. They shall carry the tabernacle and all its furnishings, and they shall take care of it; they shall also camp around the tabernacle. So when the tabernacle is to set out, the Levites shall take it down; and when the tabernacle encamps, the Levites shall set it up. But the layman who comes near shall be put to death.
The Levites were a set-apart people on purpose—God’s purpose!
The Levites, which included the priests, were different because they were not counted for military service because they were to transport the tabernacle and all that went with it and ensure the proper observance of the Israelite religious system.
Additionally, the Levites were different because they did not live out with the other tribes. They camped around the tabernacle to form a safety buffer around the sacred things of God to protect the community from the wrath of God (53).
Seize the moment and realize that as a Christian God has set you apart on purpose as His royal priesthood— “to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1:5).