I invite you to take your copies of God's Word this evening and turn with me to the end of Leviticus 9. And we're gonna be starting in verse 22 of Leviticus 9 and going to the end of chapter 10. The end of chapter 9 really goes with all of chapter 10 to provide the context for what's happening. So Leviticus 9.22 through the end of Leviticus 10. Then Aaron lifted his hand toward the people, blessed them and came down from offering the sin offering, the burnt offering and peace offerings. And Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of meeting and came out and blessed the people. Then the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people and fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat on the altar. When all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces. Then Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, put incense on it, and offered profane fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. So fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord. And Moses said to Aaron, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, by those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy, and before all the people, I must be glorified. So Aaron held his peace. Then Moses called Mishael and Elzaphan, the sons of Uziel, the uncle of Aaron, and said to them, come near, carry your brethren from before the sanctuary out of the camp. So they went near and carried them by their tunics out of the camp as Moses had said. And Moses said to Aaron and to Eleazar and Ithamar, his sons, do not uncover your heads nor tear your clothes lest you die and wrath come upon all the people. But let your brethren, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the Lord has kindled. You shall not go out from the door of the tabernacle of meeting lest you die, for the anointing oil of the Lord is upon you. And they did according to the word of Moses. Then the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying, Do not drink wine or intoxicating drink, you nor your sons with you, when you go into the tabernacle of meeting, lest you die. It shall be a statute forever throughout your generations that you may distinguish between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean, and that you may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the Lord has spoken to them by the hand of Moses. And Moses spoke to Aaron and to Eleazar and Ithamar, his sons who were left, Take the grain offering that remains of the offerings made by fire to the Lord, and eat it without leaven beside the altar, for it is most holy. You shall eat it in a holy place, because it is your due and your sons' due of the sacrifices made by fire to the Lord. For so I have been commanded. The breast of the wave offering and the thigh of the heave offering you shall eat in a clean place, you, your sons, and your daughters with you. For they are your due and your sons' due, which are given from the sacrifices of peace offerings of the children of Israel. The thigh of the heave offering and the breast of the wave offering they shall bring with the offerings of fat made by fire to offer as a wave offering before the Lord. And it shall be yours and your sons' with you by a statute forever as the Lord has commanded. Then Moses made careful inquiry about the goat of the sin offering, and there it was, burned up. And he was angry with Eleazar and Ithamar, the sons of Aaron, who were left, saying, why have you not eaten the sin offering in a holy place, since it is most holy? And God has given it to you to bear the guilt of the congregation, to make atonement for them before the Lord. See, its blood was not brought inside the holy place. Indeed, you should have eaten it in a holy place, as I commanded. And Aaron said to Moses, look, this day they have offered their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord, and such things have befallen me. If I had eaten the sin offering today, would it have been accepted in the sight of the Lord? So when Moses heard that, he was content. Let's pray. Our Father, when we contemplate your holiness, If we contemplate it rightly, we recognize what a weighty thing it is to come into this place to worship you. Sinful creatures coming before this holy and awesome and perfectly pure God to offer him worship. And we pray that as we worship you through the preached word this evening, that your spirit would be present both with the speaker and with the listeners. And that what you intend us to learn from this passage would be learned tonight by believer and unbeliever alike. And we pray that if there are any here who are yet apart from Christ, that by the end of this message, that they would be so convicted that they would cry out to Him for their salvation. And it's in His name we pray these things. Amen. I want to start tonight with a few questions for you, and I'll resist the temptation to ask for a raise of hands for your answer. You can just answer them internally. How many of you, when you saw that tonight's sermon text was from Leviticus, thought, yes? How many of you thought, when you saw that the sermon text was Leviticus, thought, oh. How many of you, when you come to the book of Leviticus and your personal devotions, are excited for it? How many of you, when you come to the end of the book of Leviticus in your devotions, are excited to move on to a different book of the Bible? Well, I think it's common Christian experience to not particularly look forward to studying Leviticus. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, but I think for the most part, we don't particularly look forward to this book with a great deal of excitement. And I'll confess that Leviticus is not my favorite book to read. We know that God is the author of Leviticus. Moses was the human author, but we know that God was the ultimate author. So it must be important and it must be a profitable book. But if we're honest, well most of us, maybe all of us, will confess that we struggle to understand why all these details of the sacrifices and the ceremonies are important for us as new covenant believers. Now there might be more than one reason why we struggle with the book of Leviticus. One example may be that we feel like our non-Jewish background prevents us from understanding some of the details of Leviticus, and that a Jewish believer would have some insight that we don't. There may be an element of truth to that. But I think that the main reason for our struggle with the book of Leviticus is that we tend to get tunnel vision when we read it. We get so focused on the individual sacrifices and the ceremonies without understanding or forgetting that we once understood what the overall point of the entire book is. Now it's not that the specifics and the details of Leviticus are unimportant, that's not it at all. But we can very easily get frustrated or confused or perhaps even bored if we forget what the overall point is. It's similar to what Pastor Alpheus pointed out about the book of Revelation. We can get so zoomed in on the details and we forget, why did John write that book? Well, we need to understand why Moses wrote this book of Leviticus. And one specific point where we may get confused when we read Leviticus is a passage like the one we read tonight. Does it seem like God is being pretty harsh in immediately killing with fire two priests who offered incense incorrectly? Does that seem harsh? Now we know that God is not unjust, but for some of us, this kind of passage may make us feel a little bit uncomfortable. So if you liken Leviticus to a dense forest, when we're walking through that dense forest of Leviticus and we're stopping to look at the individual trees, maybe the sin offering, the burnt offering, the peace offering, the heave offering, whatever that is, and when we read that we may scratch our heads, a heave offering, what in the world is that? What we need when we're zooming in on those individual trees in the forest of Leviticus is we need a GPS device to help us know where we are, where it fits in the overall forest of Leviticus and where it's all leading us to. And if we don't have that, we're likely to get lost and perhaps even throw up our hands in frustration and quit. Well, there's a couple of texts in the book of Leviticus itself that serve as a GPS device. And one of those texts is found in our passage tonight. And it's verse three of chapter 10. where Moses tells Aaron, this is what the Lord spoke, saying, by those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy, and before all the people, I must be glorified. If we're gonna understand the events in our passage tonight, and really if we're gonna understand the entire book of Leviticus, we have to have some sort of understanding of Leviticus 10.3. Now before we dig into this verse and to the rest of our passage, I just wanna tell you where I'm going tonight. First of all, we're gonna look at Leviticus 10.3 and we're gonna see how it helps us understand not only our passage tonight, but the whole book of Leviticus. And then we're gonna spend the rest of our time looking at the actual historical events that occur in our passage and how they apply to us today as New Covenant believers. Now I have a three-point outline for our study. You're probably not surprised by that. Point number one is what I'm calling this the foundational truth of God's glorious holiness. And that's Leviticus 10.3. And I'll repeat these as I go through the sermon. Point number two is the display of God's glorious holiness. And point number three is the effects of the display of God's glorious holiness. Point number one then, is the foundational truth of God's glorious holiness in Leviticus 10.3. Now we need to start by defining terms. What does the word holy mean? When God says, by those who come near me, I must be regarded as holy. What does that word mean? Well, it fundamentally means set apart. Pastor Timothy already alluded to this in the first part of our service. It means God is separate. He is completely set apart from us, from his creation, and specifically, It means that God, his set apartness means that he is completely untainted by sin and he cannot tolerate sin in his presence. And that's fundamental to an understanding of the book of Leviticus. We'll get into that in a minute. But that's what holiness fundamentally means. Completely set apart, untainted by sin. Now what does the word glorified mean when God says before all the people I must be glorified? Well the Hebrew word for glory, and Pastor Timothy alluded to this a few weeks ago in one of his messages, it contains the idea of weightiness or heaviness in it. So if we wanted to roughly paraphrase what God is saying here, We could say it like this, that God is saying, in my being, I am set apart from the sinful people of Israel, and they must see to it that they treat me that way, especially when they approach me, and that they attribute the greatest weightiness and seriousness to me. A shorter way of saying it is that God's holiness is heavy. God's holiness is weighty and it is glorious. Now we see this in two of the great heavenly worship scenes that we see in scripture. Probably the two most famous heavenly worship scenes we see are in Isaiah chapter six and Revelation chapter four. Now we're not gonna turn there. But do you remember what the heavenly beings in both of those chapters are crying out before the throne of God? What are they saying? They're both saying, holy, holy, holy. They're not saying love, love, love. They're not saying justice, justice, justice, or mercy, mercy, mercy. They're saying holy, holy, holy. Now why is that what they're focusing on? It's because God's holiness, his set-apartness, is so fundamental and weighty that it is the attribute that consumes their minds and hearts when they're in the direct presence of God. And we, brethren, are never to forget that God is utterly apart from us. Yes, the second person of the Trinity was incarnated as a human being, but if we start letting that affect our understanding of his separateness from us, then we've mixed his human nature and his divine nature, and we can't do that. Christ still has a fully divine nature, and the incarnation does not change the fact that God is completely set apart from anything sinful, and in his essence, he is utterly different from us. Now, how does this verse act? How does 10.3 act as a GPS to all of Leviticus, including our specific text tonight? We need to think just for a minute about Israel's history up until the book of Leviticus. Back in Exodus, God had delivered Israel from Egypt. That's what Exodus means. God exited them from Egypt, if you want to think of it that way. And then he initiates a covenant with them at Mount Sinai, and he gives them the law. He has them build the tabernacle, and then at the very end of Exodus, God's glory fills that tabernacle. That's how Exodus ends, and then Leviticus picks up. But also in Exodus we see that the Israelites clearly demonstrate that they are a disobedient and a sinful people. They grumbled against God almost as soon as God delivered them from Egypt, they start grumbling and complaining. And then in perhaps their most heinous sin in Exodus, the golden calf incident. When Moses is up on Mount Sinai getting direct commands from God, immediately the people start worshiping a golden calf. So it's been clearly demonstrated that God is initiating a relationship with a rebellious and a sinful people. Now here's where the book of Leviticus comes in. For the Israelite, the primary purpose of the book of Leviticus was to teach that God is gloriously holy and that he must be treated as such, especially when approaching him to be in his presence. Now, what does that entail? What are the details of that? Well, it entails all of the sacrifices and the priestly ceremonies that we see in Leviticus. If this gloriously holy God, who cannot tolerate sin in his presence, is to have this sinful people draw near to him, there must be atonement for their sin, and it must be in exactly the way that God prescribes it's going to be done. Not only must there be atonement, But Israel doesn't have the freedom to decide how that atonement's gonna happen. That's up to God. And we'll see that this is the focal point of our text tonight a little bit later. This very concept is the focal point of our text. Now this issue of God being treated as holy also entails all the various laws we find in Leviticus that govern Israelite behavior. Not only does Israel's sin need to be atoned for, but they must live holy lives before God. Their lives must be set apart from sin. One of the other GPS texts, if you want to call it that, in Leviticus, you can find in Leviticus 11, and you can find it in Leviticus 19, where God says, you shall be holy, for I am holy. And Peter picks up on that in his first epistle, where he applies that to new covenant believers. You shall be holy, for God is holy. This is not just an Old Testament concept. This is for us too. Now as new covenant believers, Leviticus teaches us the exact same thing that it taught the Israelites with a key difference. And that key difference is that we have a much, much fuller understanding of who all those sacrifices and ceremonies were pointing towards. And it was Christ. When we read Leviticus, we also are to understand that our sin must be atoned for before this glorious God. And it must be atoned for in exactly the way that God prescribes it's atoned for. And that's Jesus Christ. And then we are to live holy lives before this God who has provided our atonement. Leviticus may look like a mysterious and a difficult book, but the fragrance of Christ and his gospel absolutely permeates Leviticus. Yes, it is hidden somewhat in shadows and symbols and types. But similar to a room that's full of wonderful perfume behind a closed door, if you stand outside that door, you're still gonna smell that perfume. And if you're looking for it, you will see Christ in the gospel everywhere in Leviticus. Believer, do you want a bigger and better grasp of the magnitude of what Christ did for you? Well then read Leviticus, and every time you come across a sacrifice, remind yourself that Jesus Christ fulfilled every single one of those, and those were offered for hundreds of years throughout Israel's history, and Christ fulfilled every single one of those, and more. That's the magnitude of what Christ did for you. Now we may not be able to fully grasp all of the details of the typological elements in Leviticus, but if we keep this big picture in mind, it's gonna help us understand and appreciate this book in a much greater way, including our passage here tonight. So, as we move on in our outline, let's keep in mind this fundamental truth of God's glorious holiness. That is the foundation for everything else we're gonna talk about tonight. It's the foundation for all of the events that happen in this passage. So point number two tonight is the display of God's glorious holiness. And the display of God's glorious holiness happens in two places. It happens in verse 24 of chapter nine, and then it happens in verse two of chapter 10. First of all, look at verse 24 of chapter nine. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat on the altar. And then verse two of chapter 10, so fire went out from the Lord and devoured them, Nadab and Abihu, and they died before the Lord. First of all, let's look at what these two verses have in common. What they have in common is a consuming fire. God displays his glorious holiness in a consuming fire. Now the word consumed, this is the way the New King James translates it, the word consumed in verse 24 of chapter nine and the word devoured in chapter 10, they're the same word in the Hebrew. So in both verses, God's glorious holiness comes down in fire. The difference being that in one verse, it's coming down in God's pleasure for a properly offered sacrifice. And in the other verse, it's coming down in God's displeasure and judgment. And throughout the Bible, fire is associated with the special presence of God, both in grace and in terror. Let me give you just a few examples. We're not gonna turn to any of these. Exodus 3, verse 2, the burning bush for God's self-revelation to Moses, God present in fire. Exodus 13, 21. God is going to come to Israel in a pillar of fire to guide them at night. God's presence in the fire. Exodus 19.18, that's on Mount Sinai when God is initiating the covenant with Israel and giving them the law. Mount Sinai is going up in smoke because God has descended on it in fire. Deuteronomy 4.24, Moses is talking about God's jealousy and Moses calls God a consuming fire. He warns Israel. And the author to the Hebrews picks up on this and quotes this in Hebrews 12, when he's warning his readers against apostasy, he warns them that our God is a consuming fire. So again, this is for new covenant believers as well. This is not just for the old covenant people of God. And then 1 Kings 18, that famous incident of Elijah on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal, Elijah lays that bull on the altar, pours all the water on it, and God sends fire down to consume it. So this is a fairly frequent thing in the Bible that God shows himself in fire. But now let's look at the differences between these two instances in our passage. First of all, let's look at God's display of his holiness in his pleasure in verse 24 of chapter nine. God's consuming fire came down in this verse because he was pleased with the sacrifices that Aaron and his sons had offered. Now, Leviticus 9 and 10 are significant because this is the official inauguration of the Levitical priesthood. Now, this is not the first time sacrifices have been offered, but this is the official inauguration of Aaron and his sons being the priests of Israel. And Moses and Aaron had followed everything that God had commanded them to do in this inauguration, and they had done it by faith. They were not just following the external rituals. So God expresses His holy pleasure by coming down in fire and consuming the sacrifice that they had offered. But we need to keep in mind that the ultimate reason for God's pleasure here was not in the sacrifices themselves. The author of Hebrews, in Hebrews 10, repeatedly reminds us that it was not possible that any of these animals could take away sin. If you want to understand Leviticus better, read the book of Hebrews, if you haven't picked up on that already by how many times I've referred to it. God's pleasure in these sacrifices was not in the sacrifices themselves as dead animals. It was in what they pictured. They pictured what God's Son was going to do many, many years later in his future perfect sacrifice. And in Ephesians 5 verse 2, Paul says that that sacrifice was a sweet-smelling aroma to God, which means that Christ's sacrifice pleased and satisfied God. And that is the basis on which God took pleasure in the Levitical sacrifices when they were properly offered. Well, now let's turn our attention to the display of God's holiness in his displeasure in verse two of chapter 10, where fire goes out and consumes Nadab and Abihu. And the question that may be in our minds is what exactly did Nadab and Abihu do here to bring God's holy judgment on themselves? Well, the text simply tells us that they offered profane fire, which the Lord had not commanded. God had given very specific instructions for exactly when and how to offer incense to him, and Nadab and Abihu did not follow these instructions. They did something different. You can write this text down and look at it later. In Exodus 30 and verse nine, God explicitly prohibits strange incense from being offered, which means incense that God had not commanded. God explicitly told them, in effect, if I didn't command you to offer it, you don't offer it. And Nadab and Abihu violated this. Now some commentators also believe that drunkenness was involved here because in verse nine, God tells Aaron, do not drink wine or intoxicating drink. You or your sons with you when you're doing your priestly duties. To compound their sin even further, Nadab and Abihu had just witnessed God coming down in fire to consume a sacrifice that was done according to his command and in which he was pleased. And then they turn right around and they do something different. But even greater, to aggravate their offense even further, these two men were among 74 select people who saw a glorious physical manifestation of the being of God on Mount Sinai. Turn with me to Exodus chapter 24. Exodus chapter 24, and this just, this aggravates their sin even further. And I'm just gonna read, I'm gonna read verse one, and then I'm gonna read verses nine through 11 of Exodus 24. And this is in the section where God is initiating the covenant with Israel. Now he, that is God, said to Moses, come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and 70 of the elders of Israel and worshiped from afar. Now skip down to verse nine. Then Moses went up, and also Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel. And there was under his feet, as it were, a paved work of sapphire stone, and it was like the very heavens in its clarity. "'but on the nobles of the children of Israel "'he did not lay his hand. "'So they saw God, and they ate and drank. "'Nadab and Abihu had eaten a covenantal meal "'in the presence of God, and they had not been consumed. "'They were one of the very few that had that privilege, "'and then they turn around and presumptively "'offer a sacrifice that God had not commanded.'" They dared to approach God in a way that God had not prescribed, and that is their fundamental sin in this passage. The sin is not in the incense in and of itself as incense. The sin is that they dared to approach this most glorious holy God in a way other than what God had told them to do, especially after the privileges that they had enjoyed previously. And given this and God's holiness, that foundational truth in verse three means that God's judgment on these men was not overly harsh. It was fully deserved by what these men had done. One of the most profound implications of God's holiness for sinful human beings, and if you don't hear anything else I say tonight, hear this, we cannot approach God in any way other than what he has ordained and revealed. In a courtroom, the accused does not get to approach the judge in any way that that accused person sees fit. There are rules of that courtroom that that defendant had absolutely nothing to do with putting in place, but he has to follow those rules if he doesn't want to be held in contempt of court. And in an infinitely greater way, if sinners are to have any kind of audience with the God whom they have offended, God is the one who sets the terms of how that relationship is going to happen. And the sinner has no other option. And this is where the offense of true biblical Christianity really plays out. What's the most famous verse in the Bible? John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever, everyone loves that word. That's the inclusive part of the gospel. And it truly is inclusive. Whosoever, what are the next words? Believes on him. That's the exclusivity of the gospel. And what it means is John 14, six, where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, the life, and no one comes to the Father, but by me. It means consciously approaching God through the mediation of Jesus Christ alone, no other means. What was the purpose of all those Levitical sacrifices? The incense, the priesthood, the tabernacle, the ceremonies, et cetera, et cetera. What was the purpose? Was that just a set of rules that God gave Israel to follow temporarily until Jesus came? Was that all they were? No, that's not all they were. They were pointing to Christ himself. Remind yourself of this when you read Leviticus. When God prescribed certain very specific things for Aaron and his sons to do in their priestly office, he was giving them a picture of Christ himself and the work Christ would do mediating between his people and God as the only means of sinners approaching God. God was foreshadowing John 14.6 in the book of Leviticus. And this means that when Nadab and Abihu decided to do something different from what God had prescribed, what they were in effect saying was, nah, there's another way, there's another way. Which was a repudiation of Jesus Christ himself. So their judgment was well deserved because that was their sin. Well that's the display of God's glorious holiness in his pleasure and in his displeasure. We've looked at the foundational truth of God's glorious holiness. We've looked at the display of God's glorious holiness. Now let's look at the effects of the display of God's glorious holiness. First of all, again, we're gonna look at it in his pleasure in verse 24 of chapter nine. What was the effect of this display of God's glorious holiness on the people? Second half of verse 24. When all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces. And this is reminiscent of the Mount Carmel incident in 1 Kings 18. What happened when God sent fire down to consume Elijah's sacrifice? What did the people do? They said, the Lord, he is God, the Lord, he is God. They worshiped just like the people here did. And among regenerate Israelites, Israelites who had true faith, this worship would have been driven by two main factors. The first factor would have been a reverential fear of God. Wouldn't you fear if you would just witness that fire come down and consume that animal on that sacrifice? But the second element would have been a sincere gratitude to God that his fire had consumed that sacrifice and had not consumed them. If they really understood who they were, they would have understood that that fire should have consumed them, but it consumed the sacrifice instead. And brethren, when we gather here for worship on the Lord's Day, are our hearts motivated to worship by those same two factors? Let me ask this. Do we see God's holy fire today consuming a sacrifice? Well, not literally, but we should by faith when we behold Christ, by faith on the cross. And when we behold Christ on the cross by faith, what we should see is all the terrors of God against us as sinners poured out on Christ as God was pleased to consume that self-sacrifice. And that should cause us to fall down in worship, both in reverential fear because of God's awesome holiness displayed against sin at the cross, and in sincere gratitude because his holiness consumed our great sacrificial lamb, and it didn't, and it will never, consume us who believe on him. And we should never ever get over this. We far too easily get over the fact and forget that the reason we're here every Lord's Day worshiping is what happened at Calvary and fulfillment of all the Levitical sacrifices in this book. Well now let's look at the effect of the display of God's holiness in his displeasure. And that's really the bulk of Leviticus 10, starting in the last sentence of verse three down to the end of the chapter, it's really more or less the effect of the display of God's holiness in his displeasure when he consumed Nadab and Abihu. Now look at the last sentence of verse three. It's just five simple words, so Aaron held his peace. Now this is a truly remarkable sentence that should make us stop and think. Put yourself in Aaron's shoes. Two of your children have just committed an offense against God that is so heinous that God killed them on the spot for it. and their dead bodies are getting ready to be carried out of the camp by your relatives. How do you react? How would I react? How did Aaron react? Well, he reacted in an exemplary way. He holds his peace because he believes that God is so holy with the utmost weight and seriousness. Now Aaron, he's a mere man. He is no doubt in grief-stricken shock right now. But he recognizes that God was right and just in what he did to his two sons, in vindicating his holiness. And Aaron silently submits to what God had done. Now look at verses six and seven. Moses specifically forbids Aaron and Aaron's other two sons from grieving. Look at verse six. When Moses speaks to them, he says, Now the people of Israel are to grieve. They're going to see Aaron's cousins carry Nadab and Abihu's dead bodies outside the camp. The people of Israel are to grieve, but Aaron and his sons, the priests, are specifically forbidden to grieve. Now why is this? It's because they are in the midst of a God-ordained ceremony and their official function as priests, as mediators between the people and God, because of how holy God is. And they are to demonstrate that the holiness of God far outweighs even the loss of a child. And brethren, that we would hold God in such a high and reverent esteem, that we would be able to submit to whatever griefs He sends our way because we have learned that He is holy and He's right and He's just in whatever He does. Now that doesn't mean that we don't grieve. We are not Old Covenant priests foreshadowing the work of Christ. We don't hold that same priestly office. Even though Peter calls us priests in the New Covenant, it's not the exact same thing as what Aaron and Eleazar and Ithamar were. But it does mean that we reverence and we glorify our holy God even in the midst of the grief, whether it's the death of a loved one or even the lesser griefs of life. So that's the first effect of the display of God's holiness and his displeasure, reverent silence before God's ways. The second effect is righteous zeal for God's commands. And this is verses 12 through 15. We're not gonna read back through this, but this is where Moses is going through the details of what Aaron and his remaining two sons are to do in their priestly duty. We've already looked at verse nine, where God is prohibiting alcohol in the performance of priestly duties, so as not to cloud their judgment. But now in verses 12 through 15, Moses is reminding Aaron and his sons what exactly they still needed to do in order to complete the ceremony according to God's exact commands. Moses and Aaron have just witnessed firsthand the judgment of God on people who do not approach him in the prescribed way. And it's a motivation for them to carefully follow God's commands. Now it's not the only motivation, but it is a motivation. The third effect of the display of God's holiness in his displeasure is pure motives in the sight of God. And this is verses 16 through 20. This is the incident where Moses investigates what happened with the goat of the sin offering. He gets angry at Aaron and his sons for burning it instead of eating it. Aaron gives Moses a reason why, and Moses is content. What's happening here? We may have read that and you think, what in the world is going on? Why did Moses get angry? Well, we need to understand a little bit about the sin offering. If you go back to the beginning of Leviticus 9, you can do this on your own time, you'll see that God, through Moses, had told Aaron to offer a young bull as a sin offering for himself as the priest. Aaron would kill that bull, he would put its blood on the altar, he would burn its insides on the altar, and then he would take the rest of the bull outside the camp and completely burn it, destroy it with fire. And that would atone for Aaron's sin, the sin of the priest. which was an indication that God never intended the Levitical priesthood to last forever. It was imperfect because the priests were imperfect. But later on in the ceremony, Aaron was to kill a goat as a sin offering on behalf of the people to atone for the sin of the people. And back at the end of Leviticus 6, you have to do a little hunting through Leviticus. Back at the end of Leviticus 6, we learn that after a sin offering on behalf of the people was offered, the priest who offered it was to eat the remainder of it. He was not to burn up the whole thing. Part of it would be offered and burned up, part of it would be eaten by the priest, as long as the blood of the goat had not been brought in to the holy place. And it might feel like we need a flow chart for that. I hope that made sense, because this sets the stage for why Moses is angry here. Moses wants to know what has happened with the goat that Aaron had offered for the people's sin. And Moses discovers that even though its blood had not been brought into the holy place, Aaron and his sons had not eaten it. And Moses is understandably angry, because this is a deviation from what God had commanded them to do, and they had just seen two priests killed for deviating from what God commanded them to do. But Aaron's response to Moses in verse 19 for why they deviated from this shows that Aaron understood that God was ultimately after the heart motivations and not ultimately after the external ceremony. That's not saying the ceremony was unimportant, but ultimately God was after the heart. And Aaron understood this. Look at verse 19. Aaron said to Moses, look, this day they have offered their sin offering and their burnt offering before the Lord, and such things have befallen me. If I had eaten the sin offering today, would it have been accepted in the sight of the Lord? So when Moses heard that, he was content. Now commentators differ a little bit in their opinions as to what exactly Aaron is saying here. Some of them think that Aaron is saying, even though I cannot show it externally, my internal grief is so deep right now that I cannot eat that goat with the proper thought that it requires in the presence of God. My heart is in no place to do this. God would not accept it. Others believe that Aaron is saying that because his two dead sons had been intimately involved in all these priestly ceremonies, that he feared that they had contaminated the sin offering and if they ate it, that contamination would spread to them and God would not accept it. Now whichever of these interpretations is correct, Moses is satisfied with Aaron's response because he understood that this deviation from God's command of what to do externally was not motivated by Aaron making up his own way to get to God. It was motivated by Aaron truly wanting to honor God in his heart and not just externally. Aaron understood the spirit of the command, not just the letter of the command. And this leads us into the final applications of this passage for us tonight. For believers that are here tonight, the fire of God's holy wrath would have consumed us like it did Nadab and Abihu had it not been for our substitutionary sacrifice, like in verse 24 when God's fire consumed the burnt offering. So be motivated to live holy lives because of what Christ did for us. Be motivated to live holy lives, both in the letter and in the spirit of God's commands. As we just saw, Moses being zealous for the letter of God's command, Aaron being zealous for the spirit, understanding that God was after the heart, not just the externals. Our salvation from the wrath of God, brethren, ought to motivate us to conform both our external obedience and our heart attitudes to the principles and the commands of Scripture. And I want to apply this to one specific area, and it has to do with corporate worship. Now this passage, Leviticus 10, and it could be that this is where y'all thought I was gonna go with this text tonight originally. This is one of the classic texts that we use in defense of the regulative principle of corporate worship. If you don't know what the regulative principle is, what it means is that God regulates our corporate worship. What it means is that we only do what God explicitly commands and shows us is to be done in a New Testament church. We don't just look and say, well, God didn't explicitly forbid us from doing this, so therefore it's okay to incorporate in our worship. We only look for those things that God explicitly shows us we need to do in our corporate worship. And the reasoning behind that is in verse one of Leviticus 10, it says that the Lord had not commanded them the fire. It doesn't say that God disallowed that specific fire they offered, it just says God didn't command it. And that is a legitimate application of this text because God is holy, God must reveal to us how we are to worship him. If we made it up, it wouldn't be acceptable to him because we're sinful, he is holy, he is perfectly pure. But we need to be careful that we don't fall into the trap of thinking something along these lines. Well, here in our church, we see in the New Testament that we are to pray, in our corporate worship, we're to pray, we're to sing, we're to read scripture publicly, we're to preach, and we're to observe the Lord's Supper. Those are the only elements of our corporate worship here, like the New Testament reveals, and therefore, God must be pleased with our worship. And brethren, if we think like that, we have missed one of the primary applications of our text tonight. Remember that all of these ceremonies in our text, they pointed to Christ. So when Nadab and Abihu came up with their own thing, they were effectively trying to bypass Christ. And it wasn't just an external thing that they did wrong. It was a matter of the heart in approaching God. And brethren, when we worship according to the regulative principle, The most fundamental part of the regulative principle of worship is that we must worship through the mediation of Jesus Christ. As we worship him externally through those simple means on the Lord's day, we need to be conscious of the fact that we must offer those elements of worship to God through Christ. And it's because we are still sinful and God is still holy. Does your mind wander, ever wander when we sing, when we pray? Does it wander tonight during the preaching? Does it wander during the scripture reading? Do we ever come in here unprepared to worship God? That's because we're still sinful. And because God's still holy, we must have the mediation of Christ, even for believers worshiping God. And if we don't do that, if we don't have that in our minds, God will not be pleased no matter how externally pure our worship may be according to the regulative principle. Yes, we need to be externally reverent and externally treat our God as being gloriously holy, but the only way to do that internally in our hearts is through Jesus Christ, through his mediation. Never forget the Church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 11. They were partaking of the Lord's Supper as part of their worship. Christ commanded it, they were doing it, but their hearts were in such a wrong place in 1 Corinthians 11 that God severely disciplined them for it. Even with death, that's what the Apostle Paul says. God still takes his worship seriously. And so let us always truly worship God in our hearts through Christ. Remember what Christ told the woman at the well. Worship is in spirit and in truth. The Father is seeking such to worship him. For unbelievers here tonight, if there's anyone here apart from Christ, What the text has to tell you is this. God's weighty holiness is terrible news for you in your current state because you have not come to him on his terms. He has explicitly revealed repeatedly in scripture that the only acceptable way to come to him is by coming to the foot of the cross of Jesus and trusting in Christ alone to be the substitute for the wrath of God against you for your sins. And if you're an unbeliever, then what you are doing tonight is you are standing before this gloriously holy God in a manner that he has not prescribed, just like Nadab and Abihu did. And if this does not change before the day of your death, the fire of God's holy wrath will consume you as it consumed them. God will be glorified, and he will be seen as holy in his judgment on you. Your rebellion against him, your refusal to come to Christ, he will still be glorified through you. But it is in a way that you don't want it to be. Whether you're offering the profane fire of your own works or the profane fire of just plain old indifference and you just simply don't care, you will be consumed. That is the Leviticus 10.2 path. Continue standing before God in a way of your own making and you will be consumed. But I want to remind you of Leviticus 9.24, that fire came out from God thereto, but it consumed the sacrifice and it did not consume the sinful Israelites who were standing there. And that is a powerful picture of the work of Christ. When Christ hung there on the cross and he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? God's gloriously holy wrath was consuming Christ's sacrifice in the place of everyone who ever had and whoever would place their faith in him repentantly. So the question for you tonight, unbeliever, is which will it be for you? Are you gonna continue ignoring God's prescribed way of approaching him and in the end be consumed, not by temporal fire coming down out of heaven, but by eternal fire in the pit of hell? Or will you savingly believe that Christ Jesus was your substitute as he hung there and was consumed by the fire of God's wrath on the cross, and then will you fall down and worship him like the Israelites did in this passage? And I would plead with you to cast yourself on Jesus as your substitute. Think of how thankful those Israelites would have been who stood there and watched that fire burn that sacrifice once they realized that it should have been them laying there on that altar. And if you will cast yourself on Jesus, that will be you as well. You will realize that that should have been you. but it doesn't have to be because he has an open invitation to whoever will believe in him will be saved. And God's holiness then, which stands against you right now, God's glorious holiness is against you right now, but through Jesus Christ, it can be for you both now and for all of eternity. And I want to leave you with Isaiah 57 verse 15. Listen to this. For thus says the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place with him who has a contrite and a humble spirit to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite ones. That's what God will do for you if you come to him in that way tonight. Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you for all the pictures that you gave us in the book of Leviticus. Not just to teach Israel, but to teach us. And we thank you that Christ himself fulfilled all of those and that we are on this side of Christ's sacrifice now that we can look back and see so clearly what was harder to see in Old Covenant days. And we thank You, we praise You, Christ, for all who are here tonight who believe that Christ is our substitute, that He absorbed that consuming fire of the wrath of God in our place, and we pray that there are none in this room who will experience what Nadab and Abihu did. It's in Jesus' name that we pray these things. Amen.