Good old Jacob had 12 sons, and there are 12 names listed here identifying 12 families. But Levi was one of the 12 and he isn’t listed..what’s going on?
In short, Jacob’s son Joseph is getting a double portion. There should be one tribe that traces it’s genealogy back to Joseph, but there are two. Manasseh and Ephraim were both sons of Joe, and each of them is now a whole tribe. That would make 13 tribes, except that God instructed them not to count the Levites. All of the property is broken into 12 sections, and the Levites get none. What? How is that fair?
The Levites receive the tabernacle as their inheritance. When the tribes camped the tabernacle was inside the perimeter of the Levite camp. They literally set up the whole way around it. You couldn’t get to the tabernacle without going through the Levites. God did that to protect the whole nation. The Levites were specially trained on how to come into contact with God. They practiced holiness day after day. They wore specific clothing, took part in specific rituals and followed a very rigid set of rules. When everyone was packing up their own tent and gathering up the animals, the Levites were disassembling and carrying the tabernacle. No one else EVER touched it, only the Levites.
It was an honor so great, that receiving it meant that you didn’t need anything else by way of inheritance. That’s what God said.
As we will read a little later on, within the Levites there were specific jobs assigned by God. Not just anyone could disassemble. Certain groups wrapped the holy items and other groups carried them. Everyone had specific jobs down to the family level. What we see described here is the national level, with whole clans moving in a certain order.
The key thing that I notice today is that God is a lover of symmetry and order. There are people who are geniuses at mathematics who say that everything in life follows some sort of mathematical pattern. I don’t know anything about that, but the concept doesn’t seem strange to me when I realize that the Creator spent this much time arranging how people walked across the desert.
What do I learn from all of this? What lesson can we extrapolate from what we observe? I see families with set locations in camp, rallying around family banners, moving in a certain order, each with specific jobs… this seems like a picture of the body of Christ. I mean, the Church and all believers, not God’s actual body. The Holy Spirit gives each of us gifts and abilities, and within those abilities we have specific jobs. If I have the gift of administration and I belong to Levi, I might be recording the number of holy items used in the tabernacle, or counting the offering. But that same gift is being used differently for someone in the tribe of Dan, where it might be used to organize shepherds and layout grazing patterns. The point is: God has a plan and a purpose for each one of us, and for everything we do. some have observed that when the nation of Israel was camped (or moving) they were assembled in a cross formation. That would be just like God to do that.
In our church we are “discovering” ministry families. Those are whole groups of people who have different ministries within a common area. In a slightly smaller church we would only have one ministry in a particular area…but as we have grown there are several. All use the same tools and furniture, most involve the same group of workers, but each has a different outcome, or product. What we are learning is that God has a plan and purpose for each of us, and when we work according to His purposes there is symmetry, order and beauty.
Faithfully,
PR