God's Carny (Numbers Chapter 8)

In Numbers 8, God claims the Levite tribe of Israel to be His own possession, dedicated wholly to Him as helpers in the work of the tabernacle and assistants to Aaron and his sons, the priests. These Levites didn't perform the actual offerings, or sacrifice the bulls, that was the job of the priests. But they did all of the hard work: setting up and taking down the tabernacle, herding animals, crowd control, dumping out the ashes from the incense bowls. We can safely say that a Levite was God's carny.

The analogy isn't stretched that much, they even set up and took down a giant tent in the desert!  If God wanted to have a Tilt O' Whirl or  Zany Zipper, the Levites would have operated the rides.

A carny is usually among the dregs of society, an outcast, somebody with a past more checkered than the Daytona 500, felons definitely encouraged to apply. Genesis 34:25-31 and 49:5-7 are all the resume that the Levites needed for the job position.

But the Levites were not any worse than the other tribes of Israel.  The entire nation of Israel was a bunch of misfits, grumblers, rebels, and whiners (to be blunt).  Randomly point your finger to any verse in Exodus and you're very lucky to not have somebody moaning that the porridge is both too hot and too cold at the same time.  Flip eyes-closed to any passage in the Old Testament and God is probably either about to bring Israel to the woodshed, or Israel is returning from the woodshed, backside smarting.

And before us Gentiles get too smug, sneering down our "holier than thou" noses, it is clear that the Israelites were not worse than the rest of the nations.  All of humanity is in the dregs, bottom of the barrel. We all are cast out from the garden, wanderers in an alien land, orphaned from our Father in Heaven.  Every one of us. Sure, we might not have teeth missing, tats, an original Iron Maiden jeans jacket,  and a mobile home in the Bellis Fair Mall parking lot 2 weeks out of the year.  But which one of us would like the innermost recesses of our minds broadcast 24/7 for the world to hear, or thought bubbles to appear over our heads for the world to see? Not me because sometimes it's uglier than the Bearded Lady.    If not outwardly, then at least in our inner man, all of us are carnies.  It's even appropriate that the apostle Paul urges us to avoid the sins of the flesh.  In the Greek it's the sins of the "sarkikos" the carnal nature.

Romans 7:14 "For I know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin."

Good news is that once we are saved, God justifies us and sanctifies us as we put off the old man, put to death the sins of the flesh,  and put on the new man in the likeness of Jesus.   But it is entirely by God's work and grace in us that we have any hope of renewal.

So for any human being to occupy even a cotton candy stand in the carnival of God's kingdom is a huge score.  Give me a push broom next to the eternal Fun House or Hall O' Mirrors and I'm good.   It's a promotion. Or, as Jesus put it in Matthew 11:11 "I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."  Anybody up for some bumper cars?

Genesis 5-6: The Image of God

In Genesis 5, the Bible says that God created man in the image of God and then Adam had a son in his own likeness.    The genealogy that follows in this text seems to be like an avalanche, started with one small rock rolling down a scree slope.  God created Adam.  Just one soul created, a single solitary stone, barely a pebble.  Then Adam had a son in his likeness, Seth, and the small rock kicked loose another.  And then another, and another. And then a the trickle became a rockfall and then a landslide.  But as sin took hold, the image of God was covered with the ugliness of rebellion.  The repeated refrain in Genesis 5 "and then he died" is a horrible drum beat, a deep bass pounding that carries the heaviness of God's sorrow for the corruption of man's sin. Adam lived 800 years and then he died.  Seth lived 912 years and then he died.  Enosh lived 905 years and then he died.  Kenan lived 910 years and then he died.  Without sin's corruption, the Bible would have read:  Adam lived.  Seth lived.  Enosh lived. Kenan lived.  Period.

God's image has never been erased from people, but thousands of years of ugliness and tarnish obscured what lay below the surface.  Until Jesus.  From Adam to Jesus, thousands of years passed, and millions of souls perished with the image of God marred. Not destroyed but certainly defaced, sometimes beyond recognition.  Until Jesus.  With the Second Adam, the image of God was restored, and in Jesus we see the fullness of the Godhead, we see the Truth, the Light, the Life.  We see love, mercy, grace undiluted.

And with the redemption by Jesus' blood, our sin and stain is washed away, so that the image of God is restored in us.  First in our justification, the one-time forgiveness and cleansing when the Holy Spirit filled us.  And the image of God is being restored in us through our sanctification, the daily and life-long work of God perfecting us, continuing His work in our lives until our death.  And finally, the image of God is ultimately restored with our glorification when we're given a new body, an incorruptible body free of sin and death.   On that day, we will fully reflect the truth of God, we will shine and live in the light, our life will be eternal, and we'll enter completely into the fellowship of His love.

When we read the genealogies, there's an interesting progression.  The first people lived a really long time, almost 1000 years!  But eventually sin took hold, wormed it's way deep into our souls.   But not only our souls got corrupted, but the depths of our genetic makeup. Into the adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine of our DNA (the "seed of man").  And so the lives that once 10 centuries long were rapidly shortened from decay to 1 century (Gen 6:3).   I picture a telescoping downward, so that the life God meant to be eternal, shrank to nearly a point, a tiny span cut short by death.

It's interesting that the blood of Jesus is able to cleanse our souls, but not able to cleanse our bodies.  We're forgiven, but sin has penetrated so deeply into the physical stuff of our bodies, that the only fix is for God to destroy our bodies and give us new ones. Genesis 6:5 captures this:

The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

Even the very stuff of earth has been utterly defiled by sin (Leviticus 18:25, 28).  So that God must burn the earth up, roll the heavens like a scroll, and make a new heavens and earth.  It illustrates the terrible power of sin:

1. The power of sin to corrupt all flesh for all time.  I wonder if sin seeps into the minuscule regions of microscopic space between the atoms of our bodies.  If we could "see" sin and peer into a cell of our thumb with a very high-powered microscope, would it be there, next to a gluon or muon, sneering back?  (Out of necessity, Jesus escaped the contamination of sin by the virgin birth.)
2. The power to corrupt the rest of creation.  Creation groans to be free from the bonds of sin.  The order of animals have been corrupted and made savage.   Just like man must die in order to be fully redeemed, the natural creation must die, be consumed in order to be rid of sin and corruption.

But the power and horrible magnitude of sin, also magnifies the saving power and redemption of Jesus.  By His blood I am made clean.  But not just me, the mounding heap of sin of all people for all time was atoned for by his blood.  Occasionally we hear in the news of atrocities beyond imagination.  Acts that are entirely repulsive and sickening.  But there are thousands of years where such acts have been committed millions of times.  The mass of sin could not begin to be weighed.  Yet Jesus bore it all on the cross.  I think that we'll spend eternity trying to understand the agony Jesus endured on behalf of a fallen world He so loved. 

By this sacrifice, the image of God is restored in us.  By His love beyond compare we are born again in the likeness and image of God.