NOTES for Lev 10:1-20

The story of the “strange fire” is revealing in its own way: once again it clearly demonstrates that, when worship is concerned, it is not simply a matter of ritual. It is a matter of sacred space, and that space has its own laws and logic. Even merely remaining within it is subject to this logic. Nadab and Abihu quite clearly wanted to make a sacrifice—the very prescribed sacrifice that priests offered on that same altar.

But the result was completely unexpected for them and wholly unlike what they had anticipated. Outwardly, everything looks as though these men had violated a certain rule that permitted sacrifice only to certain people after specific purification and other rituals.

In reality, however, the problem lies first of all in those who offer the sacrifice themselves, in their spiritual condition. Unlike ordinary space, sacred space responds directly to the spiritual condition of a person entering it. This is not, of course, because it possesses some special magical properties, but because its very mode of existence is defined by God’s presence directly rather than indirectly, as in the ordinary space of the fallen world.

If, in the fallen world, the response to a person’s spiritual condition is usually either indirect or entirely absent, in sacred space it follows immediately, because there a person, wherever he may be and whatever he may do, comes face to face with God. The same is true of the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world: in it, as in sacred space, at every moment and in every place one comes face to face with God. If what happened to Nadab and Abihu does not happen to us every minute, it is only by the mercy of the King of this Kingdom. Before God, everything is always real and serious—a truth whose discovery cost God’s people dearly.