nice clothes

Read Exodus 28 and Matthew 22

And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother for glory and for beauty. Ex 28:2

What was it about Aaron that made him qualified to be the high priest? What did he do to deserve the honor to wear the magnificent garments of the high priest?

Of the many personalities we read of in the Scriptures, Aaron didn’t seem to have much of a personality. Initially his job was merely to speak the words that Moses was to speak because Moses didn’t think of himself as an adequate speaker. Twice he fell victim to peer pressure and joined with others in doing really bad things.

I think the lesson we learn from Aaron is all about clothes.

A typical high priest during Aaron’s time in that region of the world performed his intercessory religious rites naked. Aaron wore multiple layers of beautiful bejeweled clothes when he went before God for the people. Underneath everything was an undergarment specifically worn to cover his “naked flesh.”

I love wearing clothes. I was swimming with my grand kids last summer when Isaac stopped and looked long and hard at my chest. “Papa,” he said. “What are all those red dots on you?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. “Your mommy’s a nurse. Maybe she would know.”

He kept looking. I put on my t-shirt. I knew what his next question was going to be. He would want to know about all those little brown moles on me, each one with a hair coming through the middle.

The effects of sin and all its deteriorations pervade our world and ourselves. Yet as Believers we are told that we are a nation of priests. Rev 5:10.

Who do we think we are to imagine we could ever come into God's presence to intercede for anyone? How presumptuous to say to anyone that we will pray for them with the idea that God would listen to us.

But as Believers we come to God, like Aaron, fully clothed, beautifully clothed in the righteousness that comes to us through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In one of the wedding feast parables, we read of a man who came to the feast without a wedding garment. The king asked the man how he got in without a garment and he had no answer. The king then commanded, “Bind him hand and foot and cast him into outer darkness.”

On the face of it, this parable seems incredibly (and arbitrarily) sever. But in reading it more closely, we learn the wonderful truth that all of us who come into the presence of the King come in not of ourselves, but we come clothed in the garments provided for us by the Bridegroom, the Son of the King Himself.

Question: What inhibits you from fully realizing your role as a priest--as an intercessor for others before God?