NOTES for Lev 10:1-20
The story of the "strange fire" is revealing in its own way: it demonstrates once again, vividly, that when worship is involved, this is not simply a matter of ritual. It is a matter of sacred space, and there its own laws and its own logic apply.
Even simply remaining in it is subject to this logic. Nadab and Abihu quite obviously wanted to offer a sacrifice, the very prescribed sacrifice that the priests offered on that same altar. The result, however, proved completely unexpected for them and not at all what they anticipated.
Outwardly, everything looks as if these people violated a certain norm that permitted sacrifice only to certain people after precisely defined cleansing and other rituals. In reality, however, the problem lies first of all in those offering the sacrifice themselves. In their spiritual state. Sacred space, unlike ordinary space, reacts directly to the spiritual state of the person entering it. Not, of course, because it has some special magical properties, but because the very mode of its existence is determined by God's presence directly, and not indirectly as in the ordinary space of the fallen world. If ordinarily in the fallen world the reaction to a person's spiritual state is either mediated or absent altogether, then in sacred space it follows immediately, because here a person, wherever he is and whatever he is doing, finds himself face to face with God.
The same is true of the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior: in it, just as in sacred space, at any moment and at any point one finds oneself face to face with God. And 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 serious: a truth whose knowledge came to God's people at a high price.