Leviticus 6:9

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"Command Aaron and his sons." Lev 6:9

This is a notable instruction. Aaron and his sons were priests, and might therefore be supposed to be beyond official regulation or personal obedience. God has no priests or other officers whom he has made independent of himself. The commandment of God is exceeding broad, including "the armies of heaven and the children of men." Theologians are only safe guides in proportion as they can point to the direct commands and institutions of Heaven. A theologian without the Bible is the most enormous of all wicked pretences. The priest is simply an interpreter, a helper, a stronger brother in the commonwealth of spiritual society; when he ventures to speak in his own name the Church should stop its ears or drive him away from the pedestal which he unworthily occupies. God never gives up the Church, as to its education and progress, to the entire control of men, how great soever in office. If the priest cannot do without commandment, how can the people? If priests have to obey God, are the people exempt from obedience to the will of Heaven? The weaker may learn their duty from the stronger. If Aaron required continual inspiration and command, surely those of us who are of lower grade and smaller capacity cannot be sustained in our spiritual health and force except by the word of God. There is a strong temptation to invent new commandments to establish new institutions to conduct experiments upon human credulity to modify the arduousness of religious discipline, but whenever a prophet or a priest arises to tempt the soul in these directions he should be instantly called upon to prove his authority by the law and the testimony. There cannot be two Bibles in the Church: in other words, there cannot be two sources or centres of authority. Nor is any man at liberty to use private interpretation in the unfolding of the divine word. Language is a common property; language has one key of interpretation; when the discussion becomes one of merely pedantic learning it is of really no interest to the great common heart of the Church; the words or laws of God addressed to the general people are so simple and direct that the heart instantly recognises them. The priest may have the power of reading them so as to invest their very utterance with new nobility, but it is not in priestly elocution or in any artifice of man to change the internal and solid meaning of the divine command. Any man can get at God's meaning if he is prayer-fully determined to acquaint himself with it.