The Fire on the Altar Was Fed By Priests

Before anything else: it is still burning in you.

I say that first because you are going to spend this whole article expecting a charge, and there is not one, and if I leave the true thing to the end you will read the rest of it from underneath something.

You are not reading an article about a fire that went out. There is no such fire. You would not have looked this up at half past eleven at night if there were nothing in you to be worried about.

He is forty-five, and it is a verse that has him.

He found it about two years ago, in a stretch when he was already low, and it went into him like a splinter and has not worked its way out. He has looked it up perhaps two hundred times since.

The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.Leviticus 6:13

He reads it as an instruction. It has the grammar of one. And he knows what happened in his own life over about six years, which was not dramatic and had no scandal in it, just a steady giving out of something that used to be there.

So the verse says never, and his went, and there is no way round that arithmetic, and he has done it several hundred times looking for a way round.

Read the verse either side of it

I want to show you what is immediately before your splinter, because you have been reading verse thirteen on its own for two years and it does not stand on its own.

And the fire upon the altar shall be burning in it; it shall not be put out: and the priest shall burn wood on it every morning.Leviticus 6:12

And the priest shall burn wood on it every morning.

There is the fuel, and there is who carries it. The whole command about the fire never going out is addressed to the priesthood, as a duty of the sanctuary, and the wood is brought by a man in office every morning as part of his work.

It is not addressed to the individual worshipper about the state of his own heart. It was never a verse about a private interior flame, and the person bringing a sacrifice to that altar was not the one responsible for whether the fire was in.

You have been reading a duty of the priesthood as a charge against yourself. That is not me getting you off a hook; Leviticus 6:12 puts the wood in the priest's hands as his morning work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old sanctuary regulation and lays it beside a man who has looked up the next verse two hundred times.

Who your priest is

Now take it forward, because this is where it stops being a technicality and starts being the answer.

The letter to the Hebrews spends chapters on one point: there is a priest, and He is Christ, and He does not hand over. The old priests died and were replaced continually; this one has an unchangeable priesthood and lives forever to make intercession.

So ask the question your splinter has been asking for two years, but ask it properly. Whose job is the wood?

It is the priest's. It has always been the priest's. And your priest has never once missed a morning, has never been off duty, has never handed the rota to you, and is at that altar continuously.

You are not the priest of this altar, and the fuel was never carried up the steps by you. The written word gives the wood to the priesthood and gives you a High Priest who does not leave the post, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that true through six years of a man watching something go down.

And I want to say the plain thing about those six years, because you have been prosecuting them. It was not scandal and it was not rebellion. It was tiredness and work and a marriage that took repairing and a father who died badly, and none of that is on any list of sins, and dry feeling is not one either.

You are not standing in the wreckage of your own discipline, and no verdict has been drawn up about those years. Scripture puts no condemnation on a person who is in Christ, with no clause about a low decade, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping the coals through the whole of it.