I have made a reasonably strong case that I should just shut up about the Bible.  But I’m not going to do that.  Measurements made from or to relative coordinates aren’t completely useless if one knows the position and velocity of those coordinates relative to one’s own.  So if I were to continue to pontificate without reference to my own position and velocity I would be guilty of the same kind of troublemaking I accused us philosophical types of perpetrating.  I’ll try to be careful from here on, however, to point out where I’m coming from and how that might impact the truth that I have found in the Bible.

My journey back from atheism as a philosophical and legalistic young man began for all practical purposes with a stoned insight: “I always lie.”  I played with that statement in a hallucinogenic fog in my mind for a long time.  If only that statement were true, I thought, the ancient religious concept of repentance might have some real, tangible validity.  A narrow shaft of light began to pierce the darkness.  If I, in fact, had always lied and then stated that fact honestly, confessed my sin, it would be the first truthful thing I had ever said and a doorway to a whole new way of life.  But the darkness returned again, because there was no way I had lived consistently enough to have always lied.  Surely sometime by sheer accident or mere coincidence I had told the truth.  So in my case even my confession was a lie and just further proof of how hopeless my situation had become.

“Hey, man, gimme another hit o’ that, will ya’?”

Still that little crack in my armor, that almost insignificant stream of light, was apparently enough to do the trick.  Atheism is hard work and you shouldn’t try to do it stoned if you really intend to maintain your faith.  Of course, as I hinted earlier, I cared less for my atheism than I did for the naive Christian faith which had preceded it.

Eventually I want to get back to the expansion of context I started in Solomon’s Wealth and continued in A Monotonous Cycle:  “So Solomon, the third king of Israel, the richest and wisest king not only of Israel but of his generation, according to the Bible, became the fulfillment of God’s unheeded warning to Israel about kings, this same Solomon who was named Jedidiah¹—loved by the Lord—by God himself.”  I mentioned then that Solomon being both the fulfillment of God’s warning about kings and loved by the Lord was not unlike Solomon’s wealth being both a fulfillment of a promise of God and Solomon’s direct disobedience to God’s requirements for the kings of Israel.  But before I look into the circumstances when God named Solomon Jedidiah, I want to step back even farther to the first time God appeared to the Israelites in the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

In Exodus 25-31 God gave Moses explicit instructions how to make the Tabernacle—essentially a portable place of worship—and all its furnishings.  In Exodus 36-39 the Tabernacle and its furnishings were made according to the divine plan.  Chapter 40 detailed how and when to set everything up.  Leviticus 1-7 described the offerings and sacrifices to be carried out in association with the worship of Yahweh in the Tabernacle.  Chapter 8 told of the ordination of the priests, Aaron and his sons, over a seven day period according to the plan specified by God.  Chapter 9 explained how the newly ordained priests began to minister the offerings and sacrifices God required on the eighth day.

The end result of all this step-by-step devotion to God’s instructions was a worship service with a phenomenal payoff: …the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people.  Then fire went out from the presence of the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat parts on the altar, and all the people saw it, so they shouted loudly and fell down with their faces to the ground.²

In the midst of this excitement, Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his fire pan and put fire in it, set incense on it, and presented strange fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them to do.  So fire went out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them so that they died before the Lord.³  There is no indication that Nadab or Abihu intended to offend God.  On the contrary, it seems that their crime was nothing more and nothing less than exuberant religious innovation.  The penalty was immediate death.

Even after everything I’ve written I’m tempted to get in line behind Friedrich Nietzsche and say, “God had nothing to do with this.  From Moses on down this is nothing but a bunch of ignorant Israelites who couldn’t tell the difference between the presence of the Lord and a lightning storm!”  And I’m tempted to say this, not because I want to be an atheist, but because I’ve seen the look in my children’s eyes when they asked me, “Why!?”

Addendum: January 27, 2021
Tables comparing Leviticus 9:23; 9:24; 10:1 and 10:2 in the Tanakh, KJV and NET, and the tables comparing Leviticus 9:23; 9:24; 10:1 and 10:2 in the Septuagint (BLB and Elpenor) follow.