“ 1And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 2Command the children of Israel, that they bring unto thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamps to burn continually.3Without the vail of the testimony, in the tabernacle of the congregation, shall Aaron order it from the evening unto the morning before the LORD continually: it shall be a statute for ever in your generations. 4He shall order the lamps upon the pure candlestick before the LORD continually.”
(Leviticus 24:1-4)
The lamps must always be kept burning. The law for this was shown before in Exodus 27:20,21. It is repeated here, probably because it now beginning to be put into execution. The people were to provide oil (Leviticus 24:2), and this, as everything else that was to be used in God’s service, must be of the best, pure olive-oil, beaten. It was probably double-strained. This was to cause the lamps to burn. All of our English copies read it lamps, but in the original it is singular (Leviticus 24:2–to cause the lamp to burn). It is then plural in Leviticus 24:4–he shall order the lamps. The seven lamps made all one lamp. Why is this important? Because the blessed Spirit of grace is represented by seven lamps of fire before the throne (Revelation 4:5),( 1 Corinthians 12:4).
The priests were to tend the lamps; they must snuff them, clean the candlestick, and supply them with oil, morning and evening (Leviticus 24:3,4). It is the work of the ministers of the gospel to hold forth that word of life, not to set up new lights, but, by expounding and preaching the word, to make the light of it more clear and extensive. Also considering that we are the vessel in which the Holy Spirit dwells, we as priest, should tend to this vessel.
Notice the elements of this passage: Pure olive oil brought by the people was to be the fuel which produced the light of the candelabra. It was to burn continuously and was never to go out. It was especially to be burning at night. From evening to morning Aaron was responsible to keep the light going because then, of course, this was the sole illumination of the tabernacle. And the light was to be placed on the golden candlestick.
What does all this mean? If you are familiar with these beautiful symbols of the Old Testament you can easily interpret the passage.
- Light is very often represented in scripture as truth. God has given us a mental faculty, a rational abilityto think, to explore, to search out, to investigate, to study and correlate and relate one aspect of life to another. The whole functioning of the mind is designed to produce truth.
- Notice that the light (THE truth) is produced by the oil, and oil is, in Scripture, a symbol of the Holy Spirit. So here is truth produced and made known by the Holy Spirit; in other words, truth revealed by God. That is to be the governing faculty in man. That is where we are to get our basic understanding of who we are, and where we are, of what life is all about, and what the world is here for, and how the universe functions. All this is to come from the mind illuminated by the Spirit.
- The light is to be held up by the golden candlestick, and gold is always the symbol of Deity.
All this is a marvelous picture of how believers are to function in the world. We are to start with the mind taught by God to see life as God sees it. Most of the problems which come into our lives originate because we don’t do this. We all tend to come and sit and listen to truth from the Word of God on Sunday, which explains what life is like, how people are to live, what we are to do, and how we are to react to the situations which confront us, and we all pay attention and are helped and stirred and nod our heads in agreement, but on Monday morning we go back to our business, our shop, our kitchen, our homes and family relationships – the ordinary circumstances of life – and we forget all about it! We revert to natural thinking and start acting again like everybody else around us.
But the whole purpose of the services we attend is that we might be governed not by natural thinking, but by a mind illuminated by the truth which God reveals about life – which is the way it really is.
There is probably nothing more desperately necessary for Christians today than that we personally and individually expose our minds and thoughts to the revelation of God’s truth and consistently practice looking at life as he tells us it is, not as the world or our feelings say it is – and that we take his teaching seriously. To fail to do so is what gets us confounded and confused and acting out in the flesh.
Our flesh will deceive us into thinking that what we can rationalize is truth. But God’s thoughts are so much higher than ours and we must be willing to surrender our finite knowledge to God’s infinite knowledge. We don’t need to add to or take away from what God says or instructs in the Bible to suit what we feel is the right way it should be interpreted. Instead let’s decide that God knows exactly what He meant to say. We are the created. He is the Creator. Face it, He knows more than we do. We can rely on being guided by His truth and His Spirit.
God, His light of Truth and His Spirit – it is all represented here in the oil, the light, and the candlestick.
From pbc.org and Mathew Henry Commentary
