The Israelites have been in the desert for two years, and now God tells Moses to "take a census of the whole Israelite community, by their clans and families, listing every man by name, one by one". God already knows how many people there are, and he knows who and where and how old they are, so why bother? Well maybe He wants the people to know. Maybe He wants them to be more aware of each other. It's easy to look out at the world and see a mass of people, but our attitudes begin to change when we name them "one by one". That's why war memorials list the names of the dead. And it's why we need to engage with people as individuals. But maybe I'm oversentimentalising things. Maybe it was purely practical. God had already instructed the people to look after the vulnerable, and they could only do that if they knew who and where they were. In the same way, we need to get to know our communities so we know how we can best serve them.
God then appoints a man from each tribe to help Moses with the census. These sorts of administrative duties can feel trivial and unexciting, and I suspect they are often left to whoever's not doing anything else. I also suspect that the person left doing them often feels inferior to the person doing the big upfront obvious stuff. The big Hollywood film star is more important than the guy who photocopies the scripts, right? Wrong. If the objective is making a film, then the man with the photocopier is just as important as the leading lady. Without him, no one knows what they're doing and the film doesn't get made. It's the same in the church. The friendly face at the door is just as important as the minister speaking at the front, and the person who sorts out the rotas is just as important as the singer leading the congregation in worship. After all, if the church isn't welcoming, no one will come back; and if no one knows what's going on, no one will come at all. We are all valued and we are all valuable.
And so Aaron and his helpers conduct the census and find there are 603, 550 men over the age of twenty, not counting the Levites. Add in the women, the children and the Levites and there must have been well over a million. That's a lot of people living in the desert, but God takes care of every single one of them. He's a safe pair of hands.
After the census, God tells Moses and Aaron to organise the Israelites according to their tribes. The Tent of Meeting and the camp of the Levites are to be set up at the centre of the encampment, with the tribes of Judah, Isaachar and Zebulun to the east, the tribes of Reuben, Simeon and Gad to the south, the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh and Benjamin to the west, and the tribes of Dan, Asher and Naphtali to the north. This may sound like God was dividing the Israelites and breaking up the community, but I don't think that was the point ofthe exercise. I think the key is in the last sentence of this section, where we are told that "this is the way they set out, each with his clan and family". This was about keeping the Israelites together by strengthening familial relationships. The Israelite nation was far too big at this point to be treated as a single entity. People would get lost or go unnoticed, and it would be impossible for everyone to know each other. Arguments and divisions would soon arise and the community would fall apart. Splitting the people into smaller family groups would have made it easier to generate a sense of belonging, and this would have held the people together. It's important that we recognise our place in the world in its widest sense, but it's also vital that we look at building relationships and smaller communities where we are.
I can't remember if I touched on this before, but God has previously said that all of the the firstborn of the people of Israel belong to Him. He has already made provisions for redeeming the firstborn children, but now He says that He will accept the Levites in their place. There are 22,273 firstborn males and 22,000 Levites, so God takes for Himself all of the Levites, plus 5 shekels for each of the remaining 273. The Levites have already been set aside for God's service, so He doesn't really gain anything from this arrangement. It is however much kinder on the people, as it means families do not have to give up their children. God asks only for what is His by right, but even then He thinks of us first.
Finally, God moves on to the role of the Levites. The Gershonites were to be in charge of the care and transportation of the materials of the tabernacle, the Korathites were to take responsibility for the ark, the lampstand, the altars and the holy objects, and to the Merarites fell the task of looking after the framework of the tent as well as the posts, pegs and ropes. These roles were passed down from generation to generation, and so all members of the Levite tribe were born into a particular service. They didn't have much say in the matter. In the same way, the place and time into which we are born and our circumstances thereafter will determine to a large extent what we can do. Often that can feel frustrating, and we can wish things were different, but God knows us and He knows our situations and He plans accordingly. Those plans may be clear from birth as they were for the Levites, or they may be revealed later as they were to Moses, but they are laid out from the start and they are our own personal birthright.
No comments:
Post a Comment