And bring thou near unto thee Aaron thy brother … that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.- Exo_28:1.
Aaron the saint of the Lord.- Psa_106:16.
He is called of God, even as was Aaron.- Heb_5:4.
Aaron's place in religious history is more distinctly measured, if we consider the great office to which he was called. He was the first of a long line of men who were at the head of what was for ages the only true religion in the world. He was the first of the high priests of the chosen people. That he was to be consecrated to this new office, and how he was to be consecrated, was a matter of special revelation to Moses; and in this Aaron illustrates the principle, which is as applicable to Christian as to Jewish times, that, as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “no man taketh the honour unto himself, but when he is called of God, even as was Aaron.” Moses, indeed, inaugurated him; but in this Moses acted, not as the civil ruler of Israel, but as a mediator between God and His people, as the immediate organ of God's revelation of His will; so that in the view of later Israel, Moses as well as Aaron was among His priests, just as Samuel was among those that call upon His Name. If Aaron's consecration was of itself calculated to awe the mind of Israel, it was followed by high sanctions of his office which would have done so still more. His own sons, Nadab and Abihu, died for offering strange fire on the altar; and Korah's ambitious and selfish rebellion against his authority was visited with swift and unsparing punishment. No high priest in later days could occupy so great a place as did he who was the first of all; and when Aaron died, Israel, during the thirty days of mourning, must have felt that the greatest of Israelites but one had been withdrawn from sight.
1. Aaron was invested with the high priest's office although it was well known to the world that he had been guilty of compromise, that his was a vacillating spirit. A man rejected by the State as unfit to be a leader by reason of his vacillating spirit is by that same State selected to be the head of a religious community within its own pale! Is there not in this picture an inartistic element, a breach of consistency which mars its beauty? We can understand that a stone once rejected should afterwards become the head of the corner, provided its rejection were found to be a mistake; but that a stone which was once rejected and which is still known to possess the defect attributed to it should be made the head of the corner-this is surely the fault of the builder!
We cannot explain this apparent lack of proportion, as some do, by insisting on the difference of qualifications requisite for a leader in the State and a leader in the Church. It is surely wrong to say that the ideal statesman could never become the ideal pastor without a fundamental change of character. The same qualifications are needed for both, and Aaron succeeded in the priesthood, not because he had failed as a leader of the people in civil affairs, but because he had added something to his former qualifications. The faculty of bending to the will of others no doubt helped him to a certain extent in his priesthood as it would have done in any other walk of life; but that alone could not have fitted him for his high office. This same characteristic had already worked to his undoing in the incident of the golden calf, and it is not to be supposed that it would now constitute itself his chief virtue, unless some fundamental change had taken place. The explanation of Aaron's fitness for the priesthood must then lie elsewhere.
The essence of the priest is that he should believe himself, however humbly and secretly, to be set in a certain sense between humanity and God. He is conscious, if not of a mission at least of a vocation, as an interpreter of secrets, a guardian of mysteries; he would believe that there are certain people in the world who are called to be apostles, whose work it is to remind men of God, and to justify the ways of God to men. He feels that he stands, like Aaron, to make atonement; that he is in a certain definite relation to God, a relation which all do not share; and that this gives him, in a special sense something of the Divine and fatherly relation to men. In the hands of a perfectly humble, perfectly disinterested man, this may become a very beautiful and tender thing. Such a man, from long and intimate relations with humanity, will have a very deep knowledge of the human heart. He will be surprised at no weakness or frailty; he will be patient with all perverseness and obduracy; he will be endlessly compassionate, because he will realize the strength and insistence of temptation; he will be endlessly hopeful, because he will have seen, a hundred times over, the flower of virtue and love blooming in an arid and desolate heart.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, From a College Window, 217.]
A select few had built a little Meeting-house at Ecclefechan, thatched with heath, and chosen them a Priest by name John Johnston,-the priestliest man I ever under any ecclesiastical guise was privileged to look upon. He, in his last years, helped me well in my Latin (as he had done many); and otherwise procured me far higher benefits. This peasant union, this little heath-thatched house, this simple Evangelist,-together constituted properly the “Church” of that district: they were the blessing and the saving of many: on me too their pious heaven-sent influences still rest, and live; let me employ them well. There was, in those days, a “Teacher of the People.” He sleeps not far from my Father (who built his monument) in the Ecclefechan Churchyard; the Teacher and the Taught: “Blessed,” I again say, “are the dead that die in the Lord. They do rest from their labours, and their works follow them.”2 [Note: Carlyle, Reminiscences, i. 40.]
2. At the outset it certainly does seem remarkable that immediately after Aaron's great sin, and almost as though it had not occurred, God's fore-ordained purposes were carried out in Aaron's consecration to the office of high priesthood. The explanation lies in the fact of Aaron's repentance. The fall and the repentance made him one who could “have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity.” Not the fall alone, but Aaron's repentance, made him fit to bear the high office to which God had called him.
Aaron's inward piety is attested by the blossoming of his rod. It was not the symbol of the official priest that was so honoured: the rod of the mere official never buds. It was the rod of a good shepherd of souls, the symbol of a spirit which was greater than office. The rod of the false priest is hard and dry; it may rule the devotees because it terrifies them. But the rod of the true priest is in flower; it wins through tenderness, it rules through its beauty of holiness. Aaron won the title of “saint of the Lord,” not through his office, we may feel sure, but through the worth of his spirit, his readiness to give back to God what was God's. This appears still more strikingly in the narrative of his staying the plague: “He stood between the dead and the living.” He ran, at the word of Moses, into the midst of the plague-stricken congregation, waving the incense, and making atonement for the people. Had he been a mere priest, he would have been courting death to stand there. As well might a rescuer go with naked lamp to the exploding coal-mine as an unworthy priest stand, in God's hour of wrath, to intercede for stricken souls. The mother who has sinned cannot pray for her child in the day of anguish; the minister who has been unfaithful cannot intercede as he should for those who go astray.
John Foxe used to declare that both he and his people had got much more good of his sins than ever either he or they had got out of his good works.1 [Note: A. Whyte.]
3. The hallowed dignity of the high priestly office of Aaron, great and honourable in itself, appears yet more so when viewed in the typical relationship which it bore to the priesthood of Christ. There were certain obvious differences between them, and in these differences marks of inferiority on the part of Aaron and his successors in office, which it became necessary to render prominent in New Testament Scripture, on account of the mistaken and extravagant views entertained regarding the religion of the old covenant by the pharisaical Jews of later times. For this reason, the priesthood of Melchizedek had to be exalted over the priesthood of Aaron, as foreshadowing more distinctly some of the higher and more peculiar elements of the Messiah's priestly function. But there was still both a closer and a more varied relation between the priesthood of Aaron and that of Christ. For it was a priesthood exercised in immediate connexion with the tabernacle, which the Lord had Himself planned, and chosen for His holy habitation-a priesthood which, in every feature of its character and calling, in the personal qualifications required for it, the vestments worn by it, the honours and privileges it enjoyed, and the whole train of occasional as well as of regular ministrations appointed for its discharge, had a divinely-ordained respect to the better things to come in Christ. All were, indeed, but shadows of these better things; yet they were shadows bearing throughout the form and likeness of what was hereafter to be revealed. And it cannot but be regarded as a high honour assigned to Aaron, that he should have been constituted the head of an order which had such lofty bearings, and was to find such a glorious consummation.
Once, when his servant read in the Psalms the verse, “I have sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever,” Luther said, “That is the most beautiful and most glorious verse in the whole Psalter; for herein God holds forth this Christ alone as our Bishop and High Priest, who Himself, and no other, without ceasing, makes intercession for His own with the Father. Not Caiaphas, nor Annas, nor Peter, nor Paul, nor the Pope; He, He alone shall be the Priest. This I affirm with an oath. ‘Thou art a priest for ever.' In that saying every syllable is greater than the whole Tower of Babel. To this Priest let us cling and cleave. For He is faithful; He has given Himself for us to God, and holds us dearer than His own life. When we stand firm to Christ, there is no other God in heaven or on earth but One who makes just and blessed. On the other hand, if we lose Him from our heart and eyes, there is no other help, comfort, or rest.”
Our Lord's Priesthood, it seems to me, is almost invariably treated as though it were after the order of Aaron and not after the order of Melchizedek. In the Mosaic symbolism the Lamb is the symbol which represents the Priesthood of Christ in the days of His flesh. The High Priest in the Mosaic ritual is a subordinate figure, not the Central, which is the Lamb. The Priesthood of our Lord, i.e., of the glorified Christ, which is the Priesthood of the Christian dispensation-the ministration of Life unto holiness, in contrast with the old dispensation, which was of sin unto death-is after the order of Melchizedek, the special characteristics of which are power, signified in royalty, and permanence, signified in inherent nature of Sonship, and exercised in Benediction-for the fulfilment of the promise or gospel preached to Abraham that through his seed all nations of the earth should be blessed. The purpose of the Priesthood of the Lord is the fulfilment of the Divine will in the Salvation of the world, which purpose is affected through the exercise of inward judgment, which in the Christian dispensation is declared to be unto victory, i.e., unto the utter condemnation of sin, and the salvation to the uttermost of the sinner. The sphere of the Lord's judgment is the heart, and the complete sanctification of the heart is the work of the Fire-Baptism of the Holy Ghost. The Priesthood of our Lord now-i.e., in the day of His Glory, when He, the Son of Man, is sitting on the Throne of His Glory-is no longer, as in the days of His flesh, on behalf of man towards God, the Priesthood of obedience to the Father's Will as our elder brother-but it is on behalf of God towards men, ministering to us the blessing of the Spirit of Holiness, whereby we are reconciled in heart and mind unto God, and made Holy even as He is Holy.1 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, xvi.]
