NOTES for Lev 10:1-20
Today we read one of the many stories about the collision between God's holiness and human sin. The sin of the unfortunate Nadab and Abihu, of course, is not improvisation at all, but irreverence before the sacred. They decided to try what was "forbidden" - why not? - and it turned out that one truly must not experiment on God. The prohibition against priests drinking before entering the tabernacle belongs to this same point.
For modern people, reverence, the "fear of God," is a genuinely difficult problem. This fear either turns into "human fear" - distrust and a wary attitude toward God - or it comes into conflict with our ideas about freedom and love: why show reverence if He loves us so much? Yet it turns out that the fear of God, love for God, and joy in God are expressions of one and the same thing: an encounter with His holiness.