God loves beauty. Gold, silver, jewels, fine craftsmanship…The wilderness Tabernacle was embroidered and bedecked with the best that those humble, recently freed slaves had to offer. (Perhaps I should say with the best that they had liberated from their former masters.)
Consider the uniform of the high priest. For his outer layer, he wore a gold crown, shoulder pieces of carved onyx, a gold breast plate covered in jewels and attached to a multicolored, embroidered tunic with gold chains. Beneath that he wore a blue robe fringed with golden bells and little, cloth pomegranates. If all of this wasn’t flashy and extravagant enough, would that you could see what he wore next to his skin!
Plain, white linen. That’s it. Simple, clean, and beautiful.
The high priest wasn’t elected. He didn’t run for office or volunteer. Out of all of Moses’ cousins, some of whom wanted the job badly, God picked Aaron for his purity of heart and attitude of service. Hebrews 5:1-2 says that the high priest wasn’t a proud man. Although his successors weren’t always like him, Aaron was a kind and merciful man of the people. Like Moses, he was a simple man who would have been as happy ministering to slaves as leading the worship of an entire nation, and this is what God found most beautiful about the man he chose to be high priest.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if the one looking on can see past everything you’ve built up on the outside to fool the world? God knows you, and your gold and jewels can’t fool Him.
God loves finery, but what He loves most of all is an obedient & merciful heart.
Is there someone you know (or knew) who exemplified this spiritual ideal of inner purity?
Everything that Yeshua (aka Jesus) & the Apostles taught
Come with me as I draw out the connections that are so often missed |
Beautiful post that reminds us to “real” with G-d because he sees our soul and knows who we are. We can’t hide from him.