The Holiness of God

I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to Leviticus, chapter 10. As Mike mentioned in the prayer, I have had the last two weeks where I have not been in the pulpit, so sometimes when you come back to the pulpit, you have to knock a little bit of rust off, but you also come back with a little bit of a fire to preach again.

I don't like going too long without preaching because I enjoy it, and so I hope I don't hold us for a double portion today, especially since we have such a big responsibility after church that we're going to be gathering to take apart all the things in the restrooms and narthex to redo our floor this week.

So if you didn't remember, we do need help after church, so please keep that in mind if you're able to stay. And I do want to thank the elders for giving me an opportunity to begin this writing project that I have been working on.

I am now five chapters into a book that I am working on and hope to, by the end of the summer, have my manuscript completed. So I would ask you to continue to pray for that and looking forward to the next steps, which the editing process is kind of a difficult part of once you've written everything and you've poured your heart out and somebody comes back and tells you, well, you need to fix this.

Well, that sometimes is a lot to take. So I pray for you, ask for your prayers as I look forward to that. As we often do here at Sovereign Grace, we will take a short break over the summer from our normal exposition of the text.

It is our, it has been my custom all these years of preaching to preach through books of the Bible, but as it is with me and perhaps with you, sometimes in long expositions, it's good to take a step away and look at something else just for a season so that your mind does not become somewhat less focused on what you're doing.

Sometimes you need to look at something else just for a moment so that when you come back, you're reinvigorated and refocused. So for the next five Sundays, we are going to look, including today, we're going to look at the subject of holiness.

The Series on Holiness

We're going to look at holiness in three specific ways. We're going to look first at the holiness of God. That will be today's message. Next week, we are going to look at our holiness in Christ. We call that positional sanctification, that Christ has made us holy.

And that's what we're going to talk about in next week's sermon. And then for the three sermons following that, we are going to look at practical daily holiness, which will include a message about how we ought to live our Christian lives.

What is the Christian walk supposed to look like? What does daily holy living look like? And what did the early church teach us? We'll be in the book of Acts looking at that. And we're going to look at the holiness of the marriage bed.

What does a holy marriage look like? And you say, why would you choose that? How often have you noticed in our bulletin that we pray for marriages in this church? We need to know what the Word of God says about husbands and wives and how we ought to be living our lives together, encouraging one another's sanctification in Christ as we walk through this life together.

So that's the preview of the next month of sermons. And I look forward to preaching them, and I hope you look forward to hearing them. That being said, I want to read our text for the morning, and then we will pray and begin the series officially.

Nadab and Abihu and the Sanctity of Worship

So let's stand together, and we're going to read Leviticus chapter 10, verses 1 -7. The passages will be on the board as well as you can follow along in your Bibles. Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer, and put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.

And fire came out from before the Lord, and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, This is what the Lord has said, Among those who are near me, I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified.

And Aaron held his peace. And Moses called Mishael and Elphiphan, the sons of Uziel, the uncle of Aaron, and said to them, Come near, carry your brothers away from the front of the sanctuary, and out of the camp.

So they came near, and carried them in their coats out of the camp, as Moses had said. And Moses said to Aaron, and to Eleazar, and Ithamar, his sons, Do not let the hair of your heads hang loose, and do not tear your clothes, lest you die, and wrath come upon all the congregation.

But let your brothers, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning that the Lord has kindled. And do not go outside the entrance of the tent of meeting, lest you die, for the anointing oil of the Lord is upon you.

And they did according to the word of Moses. Our Father and our God, we come to you in Jesus' name. We thank you and we praise you that we have the opportunity to again stand before you and hear your word.

And I pray, O God, as I seek to give an understanding of the word, that you would keep me from error, because I am a fallible man. I am capable of preaching error, for the sake of your name, for the sake of my conscience, and for the sake of your people.

May you keep me from that. And Lord, as I preach your word to your people, may it be as a dying man to dying men. May it be with the urgency, do this calling. May we understand that what we learn from your word is meant to instruct us, to teach us, to sanctify us.

And Lord, I pray that you would sanctify us today by your word. Sanctify them by thy truth. Thy word is truth. And Lord, if there be those today, and I am certain there are, who have not yet trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ, who find themselves outside of salvation, Lord, that today they would hear of this God who both strikes and comforts, who both humbles and transforms, whose word is truth.

May they hear of your holiness. And Lord, may it change them. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ and by the power of your spirit. Amen. In about the year 2006, I was sitting in a pastor's conference which was hosted by Ligonier Ministries in Lake Mary, Florida, which is about two hours south of here.

I had just recently been introduced to the doctrines of grace a couple of years before that, and I was beginning to research and discover the beauty of reformed theology. And I was also at that same time being exposed to many wonderful preachers, men that I had heard on the radio like Dr. John MacArthur.

But also there was this man, a Presbyterian, who pastored there in Lake Mary, whose name was R .C. Sproul. And I met him at that conference. I remember very specifically he was a big fan of football, so he asked me how the Jaguars were doing, and the answer to that is never good.

But I remember that particular conversation very well, and we had a nice interaction, and he was a very kind man. But during that conference, I had an opportunity to hear him preach a sermon on the holiness of God.

And after the sermon, I went and purchased his book by the same title, The Holiness of God, and I came home and I devoured that book. And since that conference, which now is 20 years ago, I have not only found that book to be a book that I return to often, but a book that I find myself giving out.

I'll buy it just to give it away. And it has had a profound impact on my ministry and how I understand God, and I do believe that everyone should read it. People often ask me, Pastor, what book other than the Bible do you think every Christian should read?

And there are classics. I think we should all read The Pilgrim's Progress. Things like that are wonderful, but I think that everyone should read The Holiness of God, because R .C. really exposes what is so lost in much of modern evangelical thought, and that is understanding this God who we say we worship, understanding who he is in his very nature.

The holiness of God is often the aspect of God's attributes which is most ignored, and we know it is ignored because of the way people approach God today. People approach God with such flippancy, with such arrogance, with such a low understanding of who he is.

You can tell simply by the way they behave as they come to worship God. Just this morning, I'm opening up my phone to look. There was a girl, had made a video on her phone, posted it on Facebook, where she was talking about all the little pet names that she gives God as she is going through her makeup, doing her makeup, and she says, I talk to God while I'm doing my makeup, and I give God nicknames like I would give my boyfriend.

Now she is young, and there is some grace to the ignorance of youth, and we want to be not too hard on her, but her attitude is not unique. The attitude of approaching God without recognizing that you are on holy ground, that you are dealing with a holy God is so common in evangelicalism, it is so rampant among people, that we find ourselves wondering, are we even really worshiping at all?

And so, for today's message, while I was tempted to preach Isaiah 6, and don't think you're going to get away without me mentioning it, because I love Isaiah 6. Isaiah 6 is the preeminent passage on the holiness of God, but I found myself wanting to go again to Leviticus chapter 10, and I want to say, some of you may remember, I preached this not too long ago, I think it was just a year or two ago, I preached Leviticus 10, and you might say, well, is he just repeating for the sake of repetition or something, or is he being lazy?

I promise you, neither of those is true. It just so happens that on this subject, this is one of those texts that reminds us of the God who we worship, and it causes us to be confronted by His holiness.

This is one of those texts that many modern scholars don't even want to deal with, especially those that may have a more liberal bent to their theology. They come to passages like this, and they either explain the way, well, this is just Israeli mythology, or Israelite mythology, or something like that.

They don't want to deal with the truth of what this teaches us about God. Or some go even further, they'll say, this actually exposes an error in God's character. There are those who say that even Jesus had failures, and Jesus had to be corrected like the Syrophoenician woman, when Jesus went and said to the Syrophoenician woman, I'm not going to give the food of the children to the dogs, or it's not good to give the food of the children to the dogs.

And the woman said to him, oh yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. Many people say that was a woman who corrected Jesus. Jesus was never corrected by anyone, because Jesus was never wrong.

Neither is God wrong when He strikes down the sons of Aaron in this passage. Neither is He being capricious or arbitrary. Neither is He allowing a demonic side to show through, as some theologians have said.

This demonstrates the demonic side of God. How dare you to even suggest that God has a dark side. Everything God does is light, yet we cannot stand the light. We are those who hide ourselves from the light.

Know what it says? Jesus came, He was the light of the world, and men loved what? The darkness rather than the light. The reason why we have trouble with Nadab and Abihu is because we tend to sympathize with the sinner rather than the holy.

We tend to find ourselves more in their favor than His. And I understand why, because we too are sinners. It is easy to sympathize with those with whom we share guilt, but God is not looking for our sympathy.

He's not even truly looking for our understanding. He wants us to know who He is, who He truly is. And He's not asking for our approval. We have so painted God as a wisher. Oh, I wish the people would come to me.

Oh, I wish they would come and ask of me. I wish they would come and bow down to me. No, God is not a wisher. God is a commander. God commands, repent. God commands, turn. God commands, come. God commands, kneel.

And we are not those who easily submit, but rather we are those who stand and shake our fists in the sky when we don't get what we want. And so we come to Leviticus 10, and we find two men who it doesn't maybe seem that they did that much.

It doesn't maybe even seem that what they did was even that bad. And yet, when you understand the context of what has just taken place, what you learn is these two men in flippant arrogance shook their fist at the creator of the universe, and God did not blink.

You have your Bibles open to Leviticus. I want you to go backwards one chapter, if you would. I want to say I'm so thankful for both brothers who preached, Brother Andy and Brother Mike, the last two weeks.

Brother Mike last week took us through a tour of Exodus, which was wonderful and beautiful. I don't have time to do that today. Because here's the thing about Leviticus. We love Genesis, right? There's a whole ministry dedicated to answers in Genesis.

Like they have a whole theme park, right? You're never going to find answers in Leviticus theme park, right? Like that's not going to happen. There might be an Exodus theme park that comes up with some of the wilderness things that happen.

But Leviticus is much more difficult. In fact, most people when they start their annual Bible readings, they'll get through Genesis pretty quickly. They'll get through Exodus pretty quickly. And then it's like hitting the parking brake.

Like the whole car comes to a stop right around Leviticus 1. And you're like, okay, everything just changed. This is now a book of standards. It's a book of rules demonstrating how God is to be worshipped.

And this is the thing I want you to understand. Leviticus is about how God will be worshipped. God gives over and over from chapter 1 to chapter 9. This is how this offering is going to be done. And this is how you're going to do it all the way down to what parts of the entrails of the animals you're going to take out and what you're going to do with them.

I went back and read it this week and I was like, man, the kidneys and all these things are mentioned over and over. You're going to do this with the kidneys. You're going to do this with this. You're going to do this with that.

It's over and over. It's just this constant repetition. Do it this way and no other way. This is the way I'm commanding you to do it. Then we get to chapter 8. And in chapter 8, Aaron, who if you remember was Moses' brother, this was who Mike preached on last week.

Aaron, the brother of Moses, had two sons, Nadab and Abihu. And in chapter 8 of Leviticus, they are consecrated as the priests. Aaron, the high priest, and then his sons as priests. And Aaron is given this tremendous outfit that if you walk through chapter 8 tells you everything that he put on, all the turban and the crown and everything that went with it.

He was... I mean, let's just be honest. It wasn't a three-piece suit, but it was nice. He had this beautiful garment which was meant to distinguish him as the priest. And they took the blood of the offering and they put it on his ear and on his thumb and on his big toe.

This was demonstrating, sanctifying him by this blood, setting him apart for this job. Then in chapter 9, they perform the sacrifice. And I want you to read at the end of chapter 9 what happens as the sacrifice is made.

This is chapter 9, verse 22. It says,. Then Aaron lifted up his hands towards the people and blessed them. And he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings.

And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting. And when they had come out, they blessed the people, and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. Verse 24 is the key. And fire came down out from before...

Excuse me, not down. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces. You understand, the offering has been made.

And God, in demonstration of receiving the offering, has seemingly by his own fiery hand reached down and taken it. We know of other places in Scripture where the fire of God is unleashed, such as when the prophets of Baal were having their prophet contest.

And there was the calling down by the man of God of fire from heaven. It burned up not only the sacrifice, but also the water, licked up the water, everything. The other day I was watching a video on lightning strikes.

And I saw some of the most amazing lightning strikes caught on film. And one was a oak tree, probably 10 or 12 feet in diameter. Six or seven men couldn't put their hands all the way around it. It was this huge oak tree.

And the lightning hit the oak tree and it didn't split it, it exploded it. You know, because an oak tree becomes different trees as it goes up. I have one in my yard that goes in different directions.

And all of them went in different directions. The lightning hit right in the middle and boom! It was like they were all laid like dead men. This fire, bam! Knocked the tree apart. And I can imagine that when the fiery hand of God took this offering, when the fire came out from the Lord and took the offering, it was no less as powerful in that moment.

And it says the people shouted. Now I don't think they shouted like we shout in church. Amen! I don't think it was that. I think it was more like a scream, a screech. I don't think it was mere reverence or mere excitement.

I think it was the fear of the Lord which captured their heart. It says they fell on their face. We don't fall on our face unless we have a reason. The fire takes the offering. Now all of this is prior to the situation with Nadab and Bahu.

I'm telling you this story to let you know this should have gotten everyone's attention. This should have told them in this moment this is a God you don't play with. And when He tells you to do something, do it His way.

This is not a place for creativity. This is a place for subjectivity, to be subject, not creative. This is a place to be subject, not to do it your own way. God has commanded you to do it this way, therefore do it this way.

And God will receive it. God received it. Now Nadab and Bahu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, and laid incense on it, and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord. The King James Bible calls it strange fire.

Some of your translations may say profane fire. I actually, in this context, I like the word in the King James, strange fire, but I do know that it can be a little difficult because we think of strange as something that is obscure if we see like a strange picture or a strange image.

But the word strange here is indicating something that is out of place. Like when my children, I teach them when they go out in public, you don't talk to strangers. That doesn't mean just that a person looks strange.

Because sometimes strangers are the most handsome and nice people, like Theodore Bundy, who was a serial killer in the 80s. He was a handsome man. He was known as a man who was very charismatic, but he was still a stranger.

He was still dangerous. He was not the right man. He was the wrong man. He was the dangerous man, but he looked good. So the word strange here does not indicate that what was in their censers looked weird or looked strange.

What it means is it wasn't the one that God had commanded. We know that because the very next verse, we are given an interpretation divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It says, unauthorized fire before the Lord, or strange fire before the Lord, which the Lord had not commanded.

That's what it means. That's what strange fire is. God has given all of these other offerings to be brought. Here they bring an offering that God has not commanded, therefore it is strange. Now could we also say that it's unauthorized?

Yes, that's why it's strange. And could we also say it's profane? Well, yes, it's profane because it's strange. It's not the right one. It's not the one God commanded. And fire came out from before the Lord.

Just for a moment, if you look back at verse 24 of chapter 9, and fire came out from before the Lord, it's the same phrase. Verse 24 of chapter 9 says, an offering was put up and fire came out from the Lord and consumed the burnt offering.

Now it says, and fire came out from the Lord and consumed them. Nothing has changed except what is consumed. The same fire that accepted the offering in chapter 9 has now rejected the offering in chapter 10 by consuming the men who have made the offering.

And it says, and they died before the Lord. Nothing is said of Aaron's response. But we can assume his countenance was shock and horror. We can assume perhaps that he may be even buckled in his knees as he witnessed this.

And why we can assume that is because the very next verse, Moses says to Aaron, not Aaron said anything. Aaron doesn't speak, at least not recorded. But Moses says to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said.

Among those who are near to me, who draw near to me, I will be sanctified. And by the way, you'll learn this more as we go through this series. Sanctified means to be made holy or to be seen as holy, to be recognized as holy.

So if you read verse 3, it could be read this way. Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord has said. Among those who draw near to me, I will be recognized as holy. The one who draws near to me will recognize that I'm holy.

And before all the people, I will be glorified. I will be sanctified. That means I'll be recognized as holy. And I will be glorified. I will be exalted among the people because I am holy. What does it mean to be holy?

I've said it several times this morning, but I have not yet explained holiness. What is it that God is here saying through Moses to Aaron, who is in his nostrils, breathing in the stench of his charred son's flesh?

What is it he's saying? These two men were charged with the responsibility to go before God. And the one who draws near to me will recognize that I'm holy. What is holiness? God's holiness, I would argue, and I agree with Sproul on this, I believe it is his defining attribute.

We discuss God's attributes often. God's attributes. There are entire books written about God's attributes. We can talk about God's omnipotence, all power. We can talk about God's omniscience, all knowing.

We can talk about God's omnipresence. He is all places at all times. We can talk about God's justice and his wrath. We can also talk about God's love and his mercy. And the Bible describes all of them to us in various ways.

But there is no other attribute of God. There is no other characteristic of God that we are told is proclaimed to the highest degree except his holiness. I said I wasn't going to preach Isaiah 6. I'm not, but I do want to remind you of Isaiah 6.

In Isaiah chapter 6, the holy man of God sees the Lord high and lifted up, seated on his throne. The train of his robe fills the temple. Smoke fills the temple. He sees the Lord, and around the Lord are the seraphim.

The seraphim are these creatures that the Bible describes to us as having six wings. With two, they cover their face. With two, they cover their feet. And with two, they flew. In the presence of God, they do not look upon God.

They cover their face. In the presence of God, their creatureliness, which our feet represent our creatureliness. This is why when Moses was before the fiery bush, he said, Moses, take your sandals from off your feet for the land on which you stand is holy land, holy ground.

Take those sandals off. Expose your creatureliness before me. Here, they hide this. They hide their feet. They hide their face. They fly. And they say to each other over and over and over again, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.

The whole earth is filled with his glory. Notice they don't fly around and say love, love, love, mercy, mercy, mercy, or even wrath, wrath, wrath. No, they say holy, holy, holy. For our God is a holy God.

Holy means to be set apart, to be distinct, to be special, to be unique. But I think the best description, again, this is from Dr. Sproul, is that God is other, that he is other. Because the scripture over and over says there is none like unto him.

What is he like? He's other than anything else. He is not like anything else. This is why people, when we talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, people say, I don't like it that there's nothing in which we can compare the doctrine of the Trinity.

I say, does it not surprise you, and why should it surprise you, that the God of the universe, with whom there is none like, would be unlike anything else? So there's nothing else in all the universe that's one essence in three persons.

Of course there's not, for God is holy. He is other, and therefore, if we treat him as anything less than what he is, that is the gravest of sins. Because we have now looked upon this God who is greater than all, and we have diminished him.

I want to say this about Nadab and Abihu. We sympathize with them because we are sinners. But we ought not for a moment think that God was wrong. Because they knew what to do, and they did it not. And in that moment, they shook their fist at the king of the universe.

And when we shake our fist at the king of the universe, he does not wink. Now, many people would hear this text, and I'm not going to go all the way down to where I read, but it is important because it's going to go with what I just said.

Just understand that they called men to take their bodies, to take them out and bury them, and there's a time of mourning among the people. Aaron's not allowed to mourn. I'm not going to go into that right now.

There's a lot more to that. It doesn't really go with what I'm saying. That is a sad situation though. Aaron is told, do not mourn. Go back and read it. Spend some time with it this week. Again, you're in this position.

You will not. They can mourn. The people will bewail, but not you. But what I want to do now is I want to show you something very important because one of the most common responses to passages like this by evangelical Christians is to say, yes, but that was the God of the Old Testament.

And we now are in the New Testament. We're under grace. And therefore we almost, it's like they're saying we have a different God. I mean, there are some people who believe that the New Testament God is different than the Old Testament God.

Marcion was one of the earliest heretics of the church and his entire belief was that the Old Testament God was a evil demiurge. And Jesus came to represent the true God and that they are two different gods.

But I want to show you something. And this is where I know I won't get to really explain everything that maybe I would want to in detail. But most of you know the story. Go with me to Acts chapter five.

I think this comparison is often overlooked but needs to be made. Because remember Acts, this is the birth of the new covenant church. This is the birth of the people of the way, which is what they were called early on and then became Christians.

They were called Christians at Antioch, but they were first called people of the way of Jesus, the people of Jesus. Right? And this new community of Jesus followers has just sprung up. And it is a community that's teaching what Jesus taught and preaching what Jesus taught.

And we have this experience among the people of God, which I, in my mind, I just feel like this. Let me go back. I don't like the word feeling. I don't feel things. I think things. Let me say that. People, I feel.

No, we need to think, not think with our feelings. So forgive my need to correct. I feel like I need to correct that. We always say that. I believe, I think, what we're seeing here is we're seeing the same thing we see in Leviticus 10 because what we have is we have the introduction of God's holiness being shown to the people of God in an instant, and it causes them to stand in fear.

Read with me. It says, But a man named Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property, and with his wife's knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet.

But Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own?

And after it was sold, was it not at your own disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God. When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last, and great fear came upon all who heard it.

The young men rose and wrapped up and carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in not knowing what had happened, and Peter said to her, Tell me whether you sold the land for so much?

And she said, Yes, for so much. But Peter said to her, How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.

Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. Then the young men came in, and they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard these things.

Now, this scenario is probably common. Most of us have heard that text before, and I do feel like I need to give a little bit of context, maybe if you haven't heard. In the early church, which was suffering greatly under the Jewish people, because most of the early church, most early Christians, and we're talking the first few decades of the church, it was mostly Jewish converts to Christianity, and many of those Jewish converts were now suffering at the persecution of their own families, who were now willing to have them be excommunicated.

They were excommunicated from the synagogue even during the life of Jesus. If they believed in Jesus, they weren't allowed to go to synagogue. And now they have been, many of them, put in a situation where they're without families, without homes, without gainful employment.

And so we have this situation where the church has begun to pool its resources. This is not necessary to say, but I'll say it. The early church was not communist, and they were not socialist. You say, well, why?

You said they shared everything. They did it voluntarily. Communism is not voluntary sharing, and it's not good. Not the sermon, but I'm happy to talk to you about it later if you want. Voluntary sharing is when people come together in a time of need.

This was. And we read in the previous chapter, we read in chapter 4, at the end of the chapter, that Barnabas, you remember Barnabas? Barnabas had sold a piece of property and given the money to the church.

The text does not make the connection, but I'll make this connection. I believe that that inspired Ananias and Sapphira, because they saw somebody else give a large gift to the church. And I imagine there was probably some form of accolade that came with it.

Thank you, Barnabas, for that wonderful and very generous gift. And they liked the idea of getting the accolade, but they weren't ready to make the sacrifice, so they contrived this idea. Well, maybe we can look like Barnabas without having to be like Barnabas.

We can sell our property and we can give a portion to the church, but we'll hold back some for us that they'll never know. And it won't hurt nobody. They get a little, we get a little, we get the pat on the back, everybody's happy.

Understand this and please recognize this. Ananias and Sapphira did not die because they didn't give the money. Read the text. Peter says, right away, he says, One, nobody asked you to sell it. That's why we know it wasn't communism or socialism, because it wasn't forced.

He said, nobody told you you had to sell it. And nobody told you you had to give all the money. Was it not yours to do with what you will? And even after you sold it, wasn't the money to dispose of as you saw fit?

If they would have brought in 50 and said, we're giving you half, it would have been no problem. It wasn't the amount of the gift. It was their willingness to lie in the face of God. And it's the same God that wasn't willing to accept strange fire from Nadab and Abihu.

And in that moment, God demonstrated that He is the same God. If you follow the narratives, they're amazingly similar. Both brought an offering that was rejected. Both involved two people that were family members.

Both were struck down immediately. Both recount their bodies being carried out. Both events startled the community. And both happened during times of major change in the economy of God. The time with Ananias and Sapphira was at the beginning of the New Testament.

And the time with Nadab and Abihu was at the beginning of the Mosaic Covenant. Both of these began at a time of major change within the economy of God. And God is showing, yes, the economy of God has changed, but God has not.

I am interacting with you in a new way. I mean, we know that. The veil of the temple was worn and written into. Right? What was that showing? It was showing the old system's done. The old system, the system that Moses was introduced.