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A Priesthood made ready for the future
Art Katz
 

A message spoken at a Prophetic School, 2004
 

Part 01 (of 3)
 
We have looked at one or two aspects of the levitical function and the Aaronic priesthood in the past, but I want to begin to look at the expression of the priesthood in the future. There is an Ezekiel temple. In chapter forty and from there on, it talks about the configuration of such a temple, its lineaments and its proportions. It is given in such remarkable detail that it is hard to imagine that this is just an allegory, but in fact something actual that will exist in the redeemed Israel. Some believers have a difficulty with that because it talks about the restoration of sacrifice performed by priests. So, does it meant that such a ministry invalidates the once and for all sacrifice of Christ, or does it memorialize it?

Just as the history of sacrifice prepared Israel for that Lamb that would come, without spot, and whose blood would be shed as a once and for all, it is possible that a sacrificial ministry would be resumed in the millennial Israel not to replace that sacrifice of the Lamb but to be a memorial and reminder, to bring us back to a deepened appreciation of what has been given. It will not be its substitute.

I have heard estimable men of God say ‘No there cannot be another temple, There cannot be a resumption of sacrifice’, because they hold so jealously the sacrifice of Jesus as the Lamb of God. But they are forgetting that in the same way that previous sacrifice pointed to that once and for all, resumed sacrifice can point back to the once and for all as a memorial and as a reminder. It will detract nothing from the efficacy of that sacrifice but rather enhance it.
 
This means that there has to be a priesthood that performs it. I am therefore directing your attention to Ezekiel chapter 44 and to the last chapters of the great prophet. Ezekiel is a prophet of judgment and of restoration, like Jeremiah and Isaiah – those prophets that did not withhold themselves from bringing the oracle of God that spoke of a future judgment of such severity of expulsion and exile are exactly the same prophets to whom the privilege is given to speak of restoration and return. If you withhold yourself from the one, you will be denied the privilege of the other. If you do not want to speak of hard things, you will not be able to speak of glorious things. We have here a wonderful example in their obedience, that because they did not withhold the word of judgment, God did not withhold from them the word of restoration in remarkable detail by which the book of Ezekiel is concluded.
 
In chapter 44 verses 5-8, it talks about the House of the Lord: “And Jehovah said unto me, Son of man, mark well, and behold with thine eyes, and hear with thine ears all that I say unto thee concerning all the ordinances of the house of Jehovah, and all the laws thereof; and mark well the entrance of the house, with every egress of the sanctuary. And thou shalt say to the rebellious, even to the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: O ye house of Israel, let it suffice you of all your abominations, in that ye have brought in foreigners, uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary, to profane it, even my house, when ye offer my bread, the fat and the blood, and they have broken my covenant, to add unto all your abominations. And ye have not kept the charge of my holy things; but ye have set keepers of my charge in my sanctuary for yourselves.”
 
The index of Israel’s condition is always to be located in the condition that prevails in the temple and with the priesthood. God has not forgotten that in the age of Israel’s apostasy a great abomination had taken place in the holy place. The priesthood had been made a profession by men who had no Aaronic qualification at all, and was politically awarded as a plumb to those who played the game. They trafficked in the holy things. And God has not forgotten. There will be a penalty, an enduring penalty for those who have allowed that desecration, because to allow the house of God to be defiled, to be profaned, is to slur God and to cheat the nation of a standard by which its own testimony is to go forth to the nations.
It is interesting that where Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers was in the court of the Gentiles. He said: “My house should be a house of prayer for all nations”. Instead of going to any other aspect of the temple where he might have displayed the same kind of protest, that God is now sounding, he went to the place of the court of the Gentiles, because there the faith of God, the purposes of God, the very nature of God itself was being profaned by turning the holy thing into a business. “You have made my house a house of merchandise”, therefore you have robbed the nations of the one kind of thing that would have established their sanctity.
You have denied them the thing that had to have its origin with you and which would have been an example and model to the nations lest they would fall into the things that are profane. For the priest shall teach the people, the nations, the difference between the sacred and the profane. But if priests themselves become profane, become money-lenders and money-changers and turn sacrifice into a form of profit, then what can be hoped for.
 
This is what the Lord is lamenting and condemning. “You have not kept the charge of my holy things; but ye have set keepers of my charge in my sanctuary for yourselves.” – served your purposes. We can say something like this today. Worship is serving the purpose of men, serving the purpose of church meetings, establishing an atmosphere conducive to enjoyment – but it is not worship. Anything which is not exclusively for God and serves the purposes of men by whatever name it is called is ipso facto no longer worship. Worship is exclusively a priestly service unto God, for His benefit, His blessing, His delight and His honoring, or it is not worship at all. But in our time, I think I can safely say, worship has become a business. Worship leaders and worship teams. Churches are noted for their worship, that is to say, their enjoyable music. Worship as a means to be uplifted. When it has the purposes of man in mind, it is desecrated.
 
We are guilty now of the same sins as Israel was then. “You have set keepers of my charge in my sanctuary for yourselves”. What is ‘for yourselves’ is no longer priestly nor holy. In verse nine: “Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, No foreigner, uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, shall enter into my sanctuary, of any foreigners that are among the children of Israel.”
Circumcision of the flesh is the critical sine qua non, the absolute vital necessity for any approach to God. You cannot come before Him in your flesh. We were reminded that the priest could not even ascend to the altar to make sacrifice by steps, but rather by a ramp. Lest in lifting their leg to the next step, that something of their flesh would be seen in the parting of their garments in order to raise their leg to go up on steps, there for a ramp was prescribed that they could go up in a gradual ascent, that no flesh would be revealed.
Would to God that we had this kind of sensitivity. It would affect everything. God abhors flesh, especially in the holy place. And nowhere is flesh more conspicuous than in the holy place. We might get away with it in casual fellowship, but to seek to serve God in the flesh or to use the flesh, our own carnal minds, heart or will in what we think is serving the purposes of God is desecration.
 
Verse 10, “But the Levites that went far from me, when Israel went astray. . .”
Isn’t that remarkable? The same core of people who stood at Moses’ side, subsequently themselves erred and turned from that place of consecration and allowed the temple, the thing that they should have guarded, to become a court in which the uncircumcised trafficked for themselves. God has retained a memory of that and is now pronouncing a judgment that these Levites will never again be allowed minister unto Him. The violation is so profound. They are millennially and eternally cut off from ultimate priestly service but will have a more limited jurisdiction. Why? Because the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable, without repentance, so He cannot remove altogether the levitical calling.
He will limit it in such a way as to always remind them of the historic error and to remind us to walk before God rightly and in a priestly demeanor. We cannot not allow any flesh in the holy place, or any misuse of the holy place for our ends however much we say “In the name of the Lord”. In fact, to incur the phrase ‘In the name of the Lord’, when our own purposes are being served religiously is itself desecration, is itself the very height of profanation. Better that you had not used that phrase than you should use it so as to justify some activity of yours, in the flesh, for your self, but you think that somehow it is redeemed by invoking His name. No, by invoking His name you have deepened the profanity, you have deepened the desecration.
 
These are remarkable things for our instruction upon whom the end of the age has come. It is wonderful to look back to the past and the origin of priesthood and to gain some sense of what that meant. How else shall we walk out our own Melchizedec calling unless we understand the constituent elements that distinguish priesthood, a certain kind of mindset. Even when we read that after all of the preparations for the priesthood and the washings and the sprinkling of blood, the putting on of the vestments and the use of the anointing oil which can only be made according to prescription – “and you shall make no other like it, nor shall you pour it on man’s flesh” – all of that is rich in instruction. Having served all that, before they could begin their service, they waited seven days at the door of the tent of meeting. As we have noted earlier; seven is the number of completion.
 
If there is anything that yet remains after all of the sprinkling of the blood and after all of the requirements that would have reduced any human impulse to get into the act and to use God’s holy calling as a place for self-aggrandizement, the last thing is seven days of waiting. If there is any itch to be seen in service, to be acknowledged, to be recognized, that would in any way contradict what priestliness means it would die during those seven days – and this in front of the door to the tent of meeting. All Israel is being instructed by the example of the priesthood before them, which is exactly the purpose of priesthood.
God did not think it elaborate that of the twelve tribes He took one and gave them a function of priesthood only. They were not to engage in merchandising or farming. Their sustenance came by those who brought their offerings. They had no inheritance in the land. God said: “I am your inheritance”. These are a separated presence in the midst of the twelve tribes to affect the conduct, the attitude and the respect for the God of Israel, whose sanctity is maintained and preserved by one entire tribe – the tribe of Levi. And in the same way Israel itself as the nation of priests and light unto the world is to serve that same purpose for the nations. Israel is the center, by its example, to model for the nations what ought to be its attitude and conduct towards God as it is exhibited by this priestly nation in its midst.
 
The levitical tribe, in the midst of the twelve tribes when they set up their tents, there was the tabernacle of God in the midst, the priesthood and the eleven tribes around it, as an example to the whole nation. But the nation itself is intended by God to be an example to the nations. And, as I think I at one time suggested, there is a deep underlined cause of anti- Semitism that the nations intuit without any biblical knowledge and have a resentment for Jews who have failed to be to them what God had intended.
Something organic is amiss and wanting in the divine provision of God for the nations, that a people called Israel would be a nation of priests and a light unto the world. In the absence of that priestly service, the world languishes in darkness and its darkness is called light. It is suffering from every malady and everything is askew, because a priestly nation is not in its midst serving its function. There is a resentment for that failure.
 
If that is a root cause of hatred of the Jew, out of resentment for failed priestly ministry, what then is the answer? The answer is the Jew coming in to his destiny and calling and being to the nations what God intended that he should. Instead of resentment and hatred called anti-Semitism you will have Gentiles washing their feet, bearing their burdens, hewing their wood, drawing their water and being to them a supportive people appreciating and glorying in the grace of God that has come through a people restored to their calling of which they will be the beneficiaries. The nations will be changed just by this ministration that teaches them the difference between the sacred and the profane.
What does it take to maintain this difference in yourself as priest? How do you keep alive the sense of the holy? How do you recognize what is profane: that which contests against the holy and seeks to threaten it, if not eliminate it and parades as virtue, as rectitude and right, as being moral?
 
It is one thing to recognize apparent evil, but real discernment makes a divide between what is good and what is perfect. Anyone can understand blatant evil, but a priest is so acutely honed to appreciate and to maintain the holiness of God that he flinches and instantly recoils at anything that purports to be virtue, purports to be clever, purports to be right and to be desired as good, because he knows that that is the deepest threat to that which is holy. Therefore, he will find himself in painful condition, sitting in a charismatic congregation where everyone is having a ball, where everybody is singing and laughing at the top of their voices and he is strangely churned up on the inside. Something is grievously amiss. The worship is hollow, it is not being directed to God. It is serving human, religious purposes and he cannot go along.
I am saying all that to say this: This is not a stamped out religious calling of a priest, flagging a title, dressed in proper attire. This is something to be nurtured, even jealously guarded, because evidently the Levites, who were called to this and who served a specified purpose, lost it so grievously that they allowed or participated with the uncircumcised and allowed them even to come into the holy place to perform their traffick in the very place that God had reserved for Himself as sanctuary, the place of his dwelling and the place of his presence.
 
That is how far priests can fall. When they fall they fall grievously, if they do not maintain the sense of the holy and are able to discern the things that are profane that threatens it, things that parade as good. You will not be understood, you will be looked upon as something unreal. “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you go along? Everybody else is worshipping the Lord in this way. Why are you sullen? Why is your face downcast? Why can’t you participate?” And you are not able to explain yourself.
We are not talking about some light thing but an ultimate thing, because if that is lost there is no hope. If this is not maintained, what else can we expect – the sanctity of God to be acknowledged, revered and maintained – if the priest fail in that function. As the priest, so also the people. God is ploughing deeply regarding this theme to insert something into our inner man, lest we pick this up as a nice thought and entertain it for a while and then succumb and fall back again into the lassitude that governs the many. We must maintain our distinction as a Melchizedec priesthood. If we do not maintain it, nothing else can be hoped for? If we suffer that loss, what can the Church be to Israel? How shall it move Israel to envy, to jealousy, by what means, if it itself has become profane?
 
Verses ten and eleven. “The Levites that went far from me, when Israel went astray, that went astray from me after their idols, they shall bear their iniquity.”
The key element is the relationship with the Lord. They kept their title. They seemed outwardly and externally to function, but they went away “from me”.
“Yet they shall be ministers in my sanctuary, having oversight at the gates of the house, and ministering in the house: they shall slay the burnt-offering and the sacrifice for the people, and they shall stand before them to minister unto them.”
There is a place for them, but it is in the outer court. It has its focus in the maintenance of the buildings, in the cutting up of the sacrifice. They can hew and hack, but they cannot come up to me. They are O.K. for the externals, but I am not going to allow them to minister unto me. They have forfeited that by their sacrilege. I am not completely abandoning them, I am giving them a function of a kind that is outward, in the outer court. It is a necessary function, but the highest function will be denied them.
 
Verse twelve. “Because they ministered unto them before their idols, and became a stumbling-block of iniquity unto the house of Israel; therefore have I lifted up my hand against them, saith the Lord Jehovah, and they shall bear their iniquity.”
The wages of sin is death. There is a consequence. God may forgive, but there is a consequence that remains. “They shall not come near unto me.” Look how jealous God is for himself. Is this because our God is egocentric and jealous for his person? Or is it because He knows that if He is desecrated. . . if men loose or have never had the sense of Himself, that which is the foundation of the Church brought by the apostles and the prophets – not some technical posturing, that they know the principles by which the Church is established or its problems are resolved. The foundation they laid is God himself. They came, trailing clouds of glory with them. They bring the sense of God, because they come to the Church out from the holy place, from a place of communion in the knowledge of God. Even when they are not explicitly speaking of those things, they are still communicating the underlay, the tremor of God – the sense of Himself.
 
That is why one speaking from Paul is to leave men eternally without excuse. When he was on Mars hill, confronting the intellectuals and the philosophers, ‘some clave to him in belief and others would hear him again in this matter’. They did not need another occasion. One occasion with Paul was so much the testimony of God that not one of them who heard him was able to stand without excuse. They all saw him and what he really represented. Yet they dared to move against him; “What shall this babbler say, this Hebrew, this guy in ordinary garb who seem so ordinary and undistinguished from a Greek philosophical perspective. He has not the elaborate grades and education of civilization. After all, he is just a Hebrew.” But what he said was given of God; “The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked; but now he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent.”
“Certain men clave unto him, and believed.” Isn’t this an interesting statement? Why do the Scriptures not say ‘Some believed his message and were saved’? No, they clave unto him because the man is the message; he is the thing in himself. This is the genius of what is apostolic, what is prophetic, what is priestly. It is not an adornment, it is not a title, it is not a ‘take on and put off’. It is something wrought by God in that one who is called, whose profoundest function is to communicate the sense of God as God. That is the priestly call.