According to what is revealed in chapter twenty-nine of Exodus, the priests need to have their hands filled in order to serve God. Their hands should be filled with the fat of the ram of the peace offering, bread, cakes, and wafers. When a priest has his hands filled with the sweetness and riches of Christ, he is different from others. They are empty-handed, but he has his hands filled. As a result, he is sanctified, set apart, from the common people. Furthermore, he has the riches of Christ with which to serve God as a priest.
The way to sanctify a saint to serve as a priest is to fill his hands with the riches of Christ. Before a believer is sanctified in this way, he is already a saint. Consider the situation with Aaron. He had experienced the Passover, he had been saved from the judgment of God, and he had been delivered from Pharaoh’s tyranny and from the usurpation of the world. Furthermore, he had crossed the Red Sea, enjoyed the heavenly food and the living water and received a divine education at Mount Sinai. He had also experienced many things in the wilderness. Truly he was a saint, one who was saved and brought out of Egypt and one who had experienced the things of God in the wilderness. This was true, of course, not only of Aaron, but of all the children of Israel as well. They had been brought out of Egypt and had come to the mountain of God to be trained by Him. Then the Lord told Moses that certain of God’s people were to be sanctified to be priests. This indicates that it is not sufficient merely to be a saint. After becoming a saint, we need to be sanctified so that we may serve as a priest to God.
Being sanctified to serve as priests is different from enjoying Christ as the Passover or as the manna. Also it is not the same as enjoying the Spirit of Christ as the living water. This sanctification involves something in addition to all these precious experiences. This means that it is something in addition to the Passover, the manna, and the living water. As we have pointed out, it is not ordination or consecration, but the filling up of our hands with the riches of Christ. It is very important for us to see that in order to serve as priests, we need something in addition to the enjoyment of Christ as the Passover, the manna, and the living water. Oh, may we all see this!
When I saw this matter in Exodus 29 years ago, I was very happy. Truly it was a great light. I have no way to express how happy I was to see the way to serve God as a priest. During the first twenty-five years of my Christian experience, I knew that we believers were priests, but I did not know how to serve God as a priest in a practical way. But from studying this chapter under the Lord’s enlightenment, I began to see the way. How happy I was! How I rejoiced in the Lord’s mercy in showing us the way to serve as priests! The way is to have additional experiences of Christ, experiences in addition to the Passover, the daily manna, and the flowing of the living water.
When I was a young Christian, I heard that Christ is our Passover and our manna. I was taught that He is the rock that was smitten to flow the living water. But I was never told that, according to Exodus 29, we need additional experiences of Christ in order to serve as priests. This chapter reveals that we may experience Christ as the bull, as the rams, and as the cakes and wafers. In this chapter we see three different kinds of cakes. By experiencing Christ in the way presented in this chapter, we become the serving priests in a very practical way.
Actually, it is little wonder that among today’s millions of Christians very few actually serve Him as priests. In the past, how much have you served God as a priest? Before I received light through Exodus 29, I thought that I was serving as a priest when I visited a saint in his home, or when I helped to clean the meeting hall. Eventually, I came to see that such visitation and cleaning are a Levitical service, not a priestly service. Priestly service is a matter of offering Christ in a detailed way directly to God. The preciousness of chapter twenty-nine of Exodus consists in the fact that it reveals the way for us to be priests.