Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 38 · February 7
Aaron Held His Peace
“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.”
Two young men die on the floor of the sanctuary, and their father is forbidden to mourn. Then the sentence quoted here arrives, and it sounds like management explaining policy over the bodies. If it does not trouble you, you have not read it slowly. Nadab and Abihu are Aaron's sons. Their funeral is carried out by cousins. Their father stands there in his new priestly clothes, on the eighth day of his own ordination, and is not allowed to tear them.
Be exact about what the text gives and what it withholds. It gives: they 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. That last clause is the charge. Something was done in the holiest room in Israel on the authority of the two men doing it.
It withholds everything else. What made the fire strange is never said. People supply it anyway: the wrong censer, the wrong hour, coals from the wrong source, drink, since the ban on wine for priests arrives nine verses later and looks suggestive. The text draws no line between those verses and neither should we. Filling that silence is how the chapter becomes a rule about whatever the preacher already dislikes.
What is given as explanation is one sentence about proximity. I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified. The chapter before ends with fire coming out from before the LORD and consuming the offering while the people shouted and fell on their faces. The same fire, a day later, in the same place, doing something else.
The mourning is not cancelled either. It is moved: let your brethren, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the LORD hath kindled. The nation weeps. The anointed priests carry on, because the anointing oil of the LORD is upon you.
And Aaron held his peace. No answer reached him that day, and none is recorded reaching him later. Take the warning as it stands. Nearness to God has never been a safe posture. The people who work closest to holy things are the likeliest to start handling them as equipment.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 38 is Family Name (2 Corinthians 6:18).