James Nisbet Commentary - Numbers 16:8 - 16:11

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James Nisbet Commentary - Numbers 16:8 - 16:11


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KORAH’S REBELLION

And Moses said unto Korah, Hear, I pray you, ye sons of Levi,’ etc.

Num_16:8-11

I. The sin of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram was this: they were discontented with the arrangement made for public worship by the choosing out of Aaron and his family to be priests. The argument they used was a very plausible one, because it depended upon the great truth of the Lord’s being with all His people, consecrating and sanctifying them all, making them all in a certain sense holy to the Lord, in a certain sense priests.

II. The Mosaic history is a continual witness to the tendency which there was in the Divinely appointed order to become a caste, a perpetual record of the ways in which God was counter-working that tendency. The Aaronic family was appointed to offer the sacrifices; it was to show that God Himself was the Inventor of them. Woe to it if it tried to persuade the people that it was the inventor of them or could make them more acceptable!

III. Korah and his company were the assertors of a popular maxim.—But unhappily that popular maxim would have been destructive of the people, would have been fatal to their moral, political, spiritual, freedom. Korah would have asserted for himself and the other families of the tribe of Levi the privilege and right of offering sacrifices. Dathan and Abiram would have claimed that privilege and right for all the tribes. There was a lie in the words. They at once introduced the principle of which sacrifice is the renunciation, the principle against which the family of Aaron was the permanent protest.

IV. Since it is the tendency of a mere national organisation to become exclusive, to assert the dignity of birth or the sacredness of property above the dignity and sacredness of humanity, the business of the priest in each land will be especially to protect it against this danger. The priest presents Christ’s finished sacrifice for the whole human race—for rich and poor, high and low. He must expect to go down alive into a deeper pit than that which received Korah and his company if he shows that wealth, honours, distinctions of any kind, are the objects of his search, not remembering that he that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’

—
Rev. F. D. Maurice.

Illustration

‘Blessed is the man whom Thou choosest, and causest to approach unto Thee, that he may dwell in thy courts.’ Oh, that the Lord would so put his Holy Spirit upon us as to show that we are His, and that we are welcome to approach into His inner shrine! That which these conspirators demanded from a mere spirit of jealous rivalry, we ask because the love of our heart craves for nearness. How wise it was on the part of Moses to pass the controversy off himself and Aaron, and on to God! They that sin against God’s servants do in reality sin against the Master, and He will vindicate them and avenge their wrongs. It becomes us to separate ourselves from those who notoriously sin against the Lord, that we be not involved in their sin and fate. The message is a perpetual one, “Come ye out from among them, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.” ’