Numbers 8:5-18 “Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: … (9) And you shall bring the Levites before the tabernacle of meeting, and you shall gather together the whole congregation of the children of Israel. (10) So you shall bring the Levites before the Lord, and the children of Israel shall lay their hands on the Levites; … (14) thus you shall separate the Levites from among the children of Israel, and the Levites shall be Mine. (15) After that the Levites shall go in to service the tabernacle of meeting. So you shall cleanse them and offer them like a wave offering. (16) For they are wholly given to Me from among the children of Israel; I have taken them for Myself instead of all who open the womb, the firstborn of all the children of Israel. (17) For all the firstborn among the children of Israel are Mine, both man and beast; on the day that I struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt I sanctified them to Myself. (18) I have taken the Levites instead of all the firstborn of the children of Israel.”
When God instructs His people to lay hands on one another something always takes place in the spirit. In the portion of scripture quoted above we see the children of Israel being instructed by God to lay their hands on the Levites. So why did the Lord do this? The reason given by the Lord was that He had chosen the Levites to serve Him in the tabernacle. In this passage our Lord told the children of Israel that He had already sanctified to Himself all their firstborn and they belonged to Him. Instead of having the firstborn of every family in Israel come and serve Him in the tabernacle however, as a matter of practicality He had taken the whole tribe of Levi in their place. And so because the Levites were now standing before the Lord in their place, the Lord instructed the children of Israel to lay their hands on the Levites. In other words the firstborn of Israel had already been anointed by God for service to Him. And so when the children of Israel laid their hands on the Levites God transferred that anointing from Israel to the Levites. From that moment on the Levites carried that anointing for service to God. I want you to notice that the Lord had already chosen the Levites for Himself, i.e. they had already been separated to God for service to Him. The Levites did not take this service on themselves and the children of Israel did not appoint them to this service, God did. God then required the children of Israel to acknowledge in the natural, i.e. through the laying on of hands, that which He had already declared done in the spirit. When the children of Israel laid hands on the Levites God caused a separation to take place in the spirit realm, and from then on the Levites were separated to the service of God. In the kingdom of God there are different levels of separation unto Him. The reason for that is because there are different offices that the Lord has put in place in His kingdom, and each office has its own purpose as ordained by God. Only those whom God separates to an office can stand in that office. As we have seen in the above passage, under the Old Covenant the Levites were separated from the rest of the children of Israel to serve the Lord in His tabernacle. But then from among the Levites there were the descendants of Aaron who were further separated to serve the Lord as priests (Exodus 28:41). And then from among the priests there were those who were separated even further to serve as High Priests before the Lord (Hebrews 5:1-10). Judgement always fell quickly on any who presumed to stand in an office that God had not separated them to stand in. To illustrate that point to us there is the account in scripture where Korah and his fellow Levites presumed to stand in the office of priest to which the Lord had not separated them, and God judged them with fire (Numbers 16:1-50).
Michael E.B. Maher
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