Fat or Skinny Priests?

February 17, 2009

Today's Reading: Leviticus 6-7 and Acts 7

As I was reading Leviticus, I saw something that I sort of ignored before. The priests have to eat. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t see any record of any sort of salary given to the priests. I suppose God could have appointed a certain amount for them, or some places to live, or something. Most of the commandments seem to be oriented about the work of the priests.

It’s like they live in the Star Trek Universe or something, and no one seems to have a life outside of Starfleet duties. As I recall, no one seemed to ever worry about money, and if they were paying the rent, it wasn’t like we ever saw where they were living.

Perhaps this is what it meant to be, really, to be a priest. That you are completely sacrificed for what you do, and so you don’t worry about where you live. In fact, when it really comes down to it, the only thing you really need to survive is food.

It sounded like the priests had a lot of food. If you read Leviticus, there are specific instructions about what offerings are to be eaten, and what is not to be eaten. As far as I know, these are the only Scriptures that state how the priests were taken care of.

However, here is the thing: their source of food was dependent on the people’s sin and guilt offerings. Don’t you think that it would be a little scary to be a priest? I mean, if you think the present state of the economy is bad now, try having the state of your food being determined by how sinful the kingdom is?

In other words, if the people were actually living the pure life that people should have been living, there would be no sin and grain offerings, and the people would have starved to death.

And, if sin was just abounding, then the priests would have so much to eat that they all would have been fat.

I once heard that all economy is based on scarcity. Like what makes a diamond valuable is the fact that there are so few of them. If there was a lot of diamonds, then they would be worth as much as glass.

So, if sin is scarce, then the priests had a little famine going on. In short, the way this system was set up was there would have to be sin for the priests to live. I suppose if the people were holy, the priests would have to find another line of work.

Perhaps this was the idea, that we could overcome this system that was in place. I’m glad Jesus is here for all this. Let’s just hope that the ministers of God will have something to eat and somewhere to live in the perfection of heaven.