God saved us to make worshippers of us. Thus, the obsession of a regenerated heart should be to bring God a pleasing offering in view of his mercy. But how do we know what will please him? We search the Scriptures. When we do, we find that the Lord loves His own Word. Throughout the Bible, worship is filled with God’s Word read, sung, confessed, prayed, preached, pictured in sacraments and responded to with tithes and offerings. We dare not come to God in corporate worship on any terms but his own.

For 13 summers, Timothy Treadwell lived alone and unarmed among the bears of the Alaskan wilderness. He got closer to the creatures than anybody ever dared. He petted them, sang to them, wrestled with cubs, and even swam with them in salmon choked rivers. His bravery, or foolishness, earned him national celebrity. During one interview he declared, “I will not die at their claws and paws. I will fight. I will be strong. I will be master.” But Treadwell was wrong and in the fall of 2003, his life came to a grizzly end when he was devoured by one of the bears he thought he knew so well. Treadwell’s fatal error was that he forgot. He forgot that grizzlies aren’t teddy bears. He forgot to respect them. He forgot to fear them. And because he forgot, he lost his life.
Nadab and Abihu, the men at the center of an alarming account in Leviticus 10:1-3, made a similar mistake. They forgot that the God they worshiped is a roaring lion (Hosea 11:10) and an all-consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29). They forgot that the Lord’s way is in the whirlwind and the storm and that the mountains quake and hills melt before him (Nahum 1:3,5). They forgot that while God is good, he is far from safe. They forgot that the God of the Bible is holy and heavy. We are prone to make the same mistake. The world, the flesh, and the devil conspire to make us lose sight of who God is and how he deserves, no demands, to be worshipped. Passages like Leviticus 10:1-3 disabuse us of any carnal notion that we may approach God on any terms but his own.
Taking a closer look, we see that this short, sordid tale is wrapped in the yellow tape of a crime scene. There, at the foot of the altar of incense in the holy place of the tabernacle lay two charred, smoking bodies. What happened here and why? To answer these questions, we’ll need to exegetically analyze the crime scene.
The Culprits
Nadab and Abihu were the eldest of the four sons of Aaron, the high priest of Israel and brother of Moses. Nadab and Abihu were unspeakably privileged men. In Exodus 24, they were invited by God himself to accompany Moses, Aaron and the 70 elders of Israel up to Sinai’s summit where they beheld the glory of God. The saw the sapphire pavement beneath Jehovah’s feet! What’s more, they had just been ordained to serve as priests beside their father. While good Presbyterian ordination services can sometimes stretch two hours, they can’t hold a candle to the ordination service of a Levitical priest which lasted 7 days. On the 8th day, the entire congregation of Israel, well over one million strong, gathered around the tabernacle to witness the dramatic birth of the Levitical priesthood: “And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out they blessed the people, and the glory of the LORD appeared to all the people. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces” (Leviticus 9:23–24).
By understanding who these two men were, their proximity to the Lord, and their privileged position in Israel, we can begin to grasp the gravity of their crime. And what was that?
The Crime
In the preceding chapters, we find Moses preparing the tabernacle for opening day, careful to follow the Lord’s instructions to the letter. We find a precious refrain echoing throughout this section: “as the Lord commanded.”
“And Moses did as the LORD commanded him, and the congregation was assembled at the entrance of the tent of meeting” (Leviticus 8:4).
“And he set the turban on his head, and on the turban, in front, he set the golden plate, the holy crown, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus (8:9).
“And Moses brought Aaron’s sons and clothed them with coats and tied sashes around their waists and bound caps on them, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:13).
“But the bull and its skin and its flesh and its dung he burned up with fire outside the camp, as the LORD commanded Moses (Leviticus 8:17).
“He washed the entrails and the legs with water, and Moses burned the whole ram on the altar. It was a burnt offering with a pleasing aroma, a food offering for the LORD, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:21).
“And Moses took the breast and waved it for a wave offering before the LORD. It was Moses’ portion of the ram of ordination, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 8:29).
“But the fat and the kidneys and the long lobe of the liver from the sin offering he burned on the altar, as the LORD commanded Moses” (Leviticus 9:10).
But in Leviticus 10:1, something goes horribly wrong: “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them.”
What do you picture when you hear the words “strange fire”? Maybe you think of green or blue flames? Or perhaps you see something like what Moses saw in Exodus 3: a fire burning without consuming fuel? What made Nadab and Abihu’s fire strange is that it was unauthorized. God never commanded them to bring it.
In Exodus 30 we read that the altar of incense stood in the Holy Place, before the curtain into the Holy of Holies. Priests were commanded to burn fragrant incense upon this altar, morning and evening, as a picture of the prayers of God’s people ascending to heaven. Not just any incense would do. God gave Moses a specific recipe: “Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each shall there be an equal part), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy” (Exodus 30:34-35). What’s more, he demanded that this holy incense be used exclusively in worship and threatened bootleggers with exile. Perhaps God’s recipe bored Nadab and Abihu? Maybe they wanted to spice things up in the Tabernacle and try something new? Whatever the reason, they brought God incense that He had not commanded. They brought him strange fire.
To many of us, that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine: you call your favorite pizza place and place your order: “I’d like a pizza with ham, bacon, pineapple, and extra cheese.” Then you wait 30 minutes, your mouth watering, your stomach growling. This is your favorite pizza. The flavors blend together perfectly! You can’t wait to devour it. But when the pizza guy shows up and you open the box, you see something very different than what you ordered: black olives, slimy tomatoes, broccoli, blue cheese, spinach, and celery. Yuck! You look to the pizza guy and say, “Hey buster, this isn’t what I ordered. Didn’t you hear what I said?” The pizza guy shrugs and replies, “You never said you didn’t want these toppings. I thought you’d like them.” Now, is that a pizza you’d pay for? Wouldn’t you be offended by the hubris of the delivery guy? How much more then, does God, who is infinitely high and holy and separate from sinners, have the right to determine precisely how he wants to be worshipped by those he created and redeemed for his own glory?
We find this regulative principle of worship beautifully articulated in the Westminster Standards: “The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations & devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture” (WCF 21:1).
Nadab and Abihu teach us not to worship God on our terms but on His. He is not our guest on Sunday, we are His. All too often, discussion and debate about worship swirls around the question: “What do I like?” But one question ought to dominate all liturgical conversations: “What does God like?” “Does the God that made us and saved us by the blood of his Son, not have the right to regulate His own worship? Does our loving heavenly Father not have the authority to instruct His children in heavenly worship?”
God saved us to make worshippers of us. Thus, the obsession of a regenerated heart should be to bring God a pleasing offering in view of his mercy. But how do we know what will please him? We search the Scriptures. When we do, we find that the Lord loves His own Word. Throughout the Bible, worship is filled with God’s Word read, sung, confessed, prayed, preached, pictured in sacraments and responded to with tithes and offerings. We dare not come to God in corporate worship on any terms but his own. Because the consequences are real.
The Consequence
“And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD” (Leviticus 10:2). Bishop Hall said, “It is a dangerous thing, in the service of God, to decline from his own institutions; we have to do with a God who is wise to prescribe his own worship, just to require what he has prescribed, and powerful to revenge what he has not prescribed.” Dangerous indeed. As Nadab and Abihu sinned by fire, so they died by fire. So terrible was their sin in the sight of God that he demanded Aaron’s family members to drag their burnt bodies outside the camp and forbid them from mourning their deaths (Leviticus 10:4-7). In Numbers 3:4 and 1 Chronicles 24:2, we are reminded that Nadab and Abihu died childless. God blotted out their names from Israel.
It is a dangerous thing to draw near to God on any terms but his own. It was dangerous for Uzzah who was stricken down dead by the Lord for putting his hands on the ark to keep if from falling onto the ground (2 Samuel 6:1-7), because, as Jonathan Edwards said, Uzzah’s believed “his hands were cleaner than the dirt under his feet.” It was dangerous for King Uzziah who, in his pride, played the priest and offered incense himself. For this, the Lord struck his face with leprosy and he lived out the rest of his days alone (II Chronicle 26:16-21).
“Yes,” you might be thinking “that’s just the wrathful God of the OT. The God of the New Testament isn’t like that!” Really? What happened to Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to the Holy Spirit? (Acts 5:3). What happened to Herod when he refused to glorify God? (Acts 12:2-23). They were slain. Why did Paul urge the Corinthians to approach the table of the Lord in a worthy manner? “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:29-30). If that sounds harsh to us, may I suggest it is because, like Nadab and Abihu, we take God too lightly. We forget his character.
The Character of God
It’s hard to imagine the searing pain Aaron must felt on this dreadful day. God took not one, but two of his boys. In the midst of that unspeakable heartache Moses came to his brother, with a word from God: “Among those who draw near to me I will be sanctified” (Leviticus 10:3). This word “holy” is taken from the Hebrew word cadosh which means “to separate.” God isn’t ordinary. He is sacred. He isn’t our fellow creature. He is our Creator.  We are weak but he is mighty. We are a vapor but he is eternal. We are ignorant but his wisdom is unsearchable. We are finite but he is infinite. We are always changing but God is immutable. We are vile and corrupt but God is sinless and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16). His eyes are too pure to even look upon evil (Habakkuk 1:13). God is not like a man that he should lie (Numbers 23:19). God is so holy, he made Moses remove his sandals and the seraphim veil their faces in his presence. Berkhof said, “God’s holiness ought to awaken in man a sense of absolute nothingness, a creature-consciousness… leading to absolute self-abasement.” But Nadab and Abihu forgot that God is to be consecrated and instead treated him as something common. They forgot that God is holy. And they forgot that God is heavy.
“Before all the people I will be glorified” (Leviticus 10:3). This word glorified means “to be regarded as heavy, substantial.” In other words, God will not be taken lightly by his people. He’s not just a bumper sticker, keychain, Facebook status, or an item on your to-do-list. He is immeasurably weighty and infinitely significant. He is the Ancient of Days robed in light. He is the Son of Man whom the wind and the waves obey. At his word kingdoms rise and fall. The earth is his footstool. He holds the swirling galaxies of endless space in the palm of his hand. He hung, numbered, and named the stars. In him all things live and move and have their being. He holds the keys of death and hell and one day, every soul will stand before and face the judgement. But Nadab and Abihu forgot that God is heavy and instead treated him like something light. They forgot that He’s glorious.
We would spend less time debating about the hows of our worship if we spent more time discussing the Who of our worship. Jesus was consumed in the flames of God’s hatred for our sins on the cross so that we might be made acceptable to a holy a heavy God. Jesus suffered alone, outside the camp, so that we might have bold access to the throne of grace and the Father’s everlasting embrace. Even now, he who made us by the word of his powerful word and saved us by his powerful grace intercedes for us that we might worship God on earth as he is worshipped in heaven. Even now, the Father is seeking those who would worship him in Spirit and in truth. May he find such joyful, obedient worship in our hearts.
Jim McCarthy is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor-elect of Trinity PCA in Statesboro, GA.
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Written by Michael A.G. Haykin |
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
We study the history of God’s people to see what God has been doing in the world, and so praise him for his mighty acts in the past, and trust that he will display his power and glory afresh in our day.

How We View History
In Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey, one of the characters, Catherine Morland, states that history “tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.”1In many respects, this statement is a good reflection of the contemporary Western attitude towards history. Generally speaking, men and women in the West rarely think of going to history for wisdom or direction or encouragement. History, at best, contains interesting and entertaining bits of trivia. But wisdom? No, that’s found by looking to the present and to the future. Yet, a popular Russian proverb warns: “He who dwells on the past loses an eye; but he who forgets the past loses both eyes.”2
It should also be borne in mind that the area of the West in which we are living, namely, North America, is even more allergic to the study of history than places like Europe, because there is less stimulus in the surroundings of North American culture and society to arouse historical curiosity. Of course, there are places like the old quarter of Quebec City that are rich in history, but certainly they are not as many as in other parts of the world.
Tragically, this attitude towards history is also characteristic of far too many Christians. Like their culture, they are in the grip of a euphoria that places ultimate value on that which is new and innovative. This mentalité inevitably involves a dislike of the past. Whatever value the inheritance from the past may have had for its own day, much current church wisdom would have us believe that that value is now so diminished that it can easily be discounted in any reckoning about how to do church. Not only is this mentalité folly—we have no idea of where we are going if we do not know where we have come from—but it is at heart a clear manifestation of worldliness! As what follows will show, however, it is vital for Christians to care about church history.
History Has Meaning
Men and women are historical beings immersed in the flow of time. One cannot escape the effects of history. Even to think ahistorically for any length of time is a considerable task.
Not only is it important for the individual to realize his or her historical nature, but it is also essential for the community, especially the Christian community. For the Christian community, history is the stage on which the drama of redemption is being displayed—at the beginning is the Fall, at the end is the Last Judgment. In between, the most crucial event of all, the entry of the eternal God into time as a man, Jesus Christ, the Word incarnate. From the perspective of the New Testament, the incarnation is the culmination of the history of salvation sketched in the Old Testament.3 The incarnation proves beyond a shadow of a doubt God’s interest in history, for it initiated a history of salvation that embraces not only Israel, but the entire world.4
From the Christian perspective, God is undoubtedly active in history. And it is right and proper to study history for that reason alone. Though it is impossible to trace in detail his footsteps across the sands of time after the eras covered by the Scriptures, it is blasphemous to deny that he is at work. His work may often be hidden, but it is biblical to confess heartily that he is providentially guiding history for the glory of his name and the good of his people.
Learning from the Past
But there are other good reasons for studying what we call church history, the history of God’s new covenant people. It has been said, “A wise man learns from his mistakes; a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others; a fool learns from neither of them.” Here, then, is one of the more obvious reasons for studying church history: to learn from the mistakes of the past. Again, to cite the words of a famous proverb: “He who does not remember the past is doomed to repeat it.” Thus, for example, we can study the configurations of fourth-century Arianism that denied the full deity of the Lord Jesus to help us win those who have bought into the heretical views of Christ maintained by modern-day Jehovah’s Witnesses.
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In the face of the liberal peril, what should evangelicals do? A first step is to “encourage those who are engaging in the intellectual and spiritual struggle” (146–47). The intellectual battle must consist of both articulating and defending Christianity. Against those who focus solely on the propagation aspect, Machen suspects an anti-intellectualism underlying this approach, which he decries. While granting that the proclamation of the gospel might have sufficed historically,[9] given the juncture in which the church currently finds itself, Machen opines that “the slightest avoidance of the defense of the gospel is just sheer unfaithfulness to the Lord” (147).

Part 1: Historical Context and Summary of Machen’s Argument
To give a brief sketch of the historical context in which Machen addressed the church, I focus on two leading proponents of the type of liberalism against which Machen battled—namely, Adolph von Harnack and Albrecht Ritschl.
Adolph von Harnack’s Husk and Kernel
In his What is Christianity?, Adolph von Harnack decried Christianity as an institutionalized religion of dogma, an institutionalization and dogmatization that had corrupted the early church as evidenced by its councils and creedal formulations.[1] In its place, he advocated a religion of the heart: the way of life that Jesus himself had taught. His method in arriving at this liberal articulation of Christianity was that of distinguishing between the “kernel” and the “husk”: the kernel being the permanent, pure essence of Christianity, and the husk being its temporal/ historical, (often) corrupted expression. As von Harnack presented the kernel, “In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul—the whole gospel is expressed” (Lecture 4).
Amalgamating these ideas, von Harnack’s liberalism consisted of three tenets.[2] First, “the kingdom of God and its coming” (Lecture 3). Specifically, “The kingdom of God comes by coming to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals. God Himself is the kingdom. It is . . . a question of . . . God and the soul, the soul and its God” (Lecture 3). The flavor of a de-institutionalized and non-dogmatic, subjective Christianity is well pronounced.
Second, “God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul” (Lecture 4). This tenet set the stage for von Harnack’s affirmations of (1) the Fatherhood of God, a principle he affirms is true of all human beings everywhere, not just of Christians in their churches; and, flowing from it, (2) the brotherhood of all humanity, again a principle that he would not restrict to followers of Jesus Christ. Because God the Father unites to himself all human beings as his children, the infinite value of their “ennobled” soul is underscored (Lecture 4).
Third, “the higher righteousness and the commandment of love” (Lecture 4). According to von Harnack, Jesus’s constant denunciation and overturning of the Jewish religion of his day established Christianity as an ethical religion freed of “self-seeking and ritual elements” that could be reduced ultimately “to one root and to one motive—love” (Lecture 4). Such love “must completely fill the soul; it is what remains when the soul dies to itself. In this sense of love is the new life already begun. But it is always the love which serves, and only in this function does it exist and live” (Lecture 4). Accordingly, this third tenet
combines religion and morality. It is a point which must be felt; it is not easy to define. In view of the Beatitudes, it may, perhaps, best be described as humility. Jesus made love and humility one. . . . In Jesus’ view, this humility, which is the love of God of which we are capable . . . is an abiding disposition towards the good, and that out of which everything that is good springs and grows. (Lecture 4)
Christianity as a moralistic religion of humble love is emphasized.
In his summary, von Harnack offers “the three spheres which we have distinguished—the kingdom of God, God as the Father and the infinite value of the human soul, and the higher righteousness showing itself in love—coalesce; for ultimately the kingdom is nothing but the treasure which the soul possesses in the eternal and merciful God” (Lecture 5).
Albrecht Ritschl’s Lived Faith
Similar to von Harnack, in The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation,[3] Albrecht Ritschl bemoaned the traditional exposition and understanding of “the Christian faith [as] some imperfect form of theology, that is, some system of ideas of God and humanity” that is far removed from religious self-consciousness—particularly that of the original/apostolic Christian community (3)[4]—and worship of God (210–11).[5] For Ritschl, Christianity is not a doctrinal system, but a lived faith in community.
Like von Harnack’s focus on the kingdom of God as love, Ritschl emphasized “the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God, which [is] the correlate of the conception of God as love, denotes the association of mankind—an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible—through the reciprocal moral action of its members” (284). Emphasizing “the community,” Ritschl distinguished between the church and the kingdom:
The self-same subject, namely, the community drawn together by Christ, constitutes the Church in so far as its members unite in the same religious worship, and, further, create for this purpose a legal constitution; while, on the other hand, it constitutes the Kingdom of God in so far as the members of the community give themselves to the interchange of action prompted by love. (290)
By the community’s loving action comes about the revelation of the truth that God is love: “The creation of this fellowship of love among men, accordingly, is not only the end [purpose] of the world, but at the same time the completed revelation of God Himself, beyond which none other and none higher can be conceived” (291). The church, the kingdom of God, and love are interwoven as the summum bonum of existence, and this supreme good is known by the people of the community not rationally or dogmatically, but only as they relate to it.
Faith in God’s providence is an essential feature of Ritschl’s agenda:
For that unified view of the world, the ruling idea of which is that of the supramundane [spiritual, heavenly] God, Who as our Father in Christ loves us and unites us in His Kingdom for the realization of that destiny in which we see the final end [purpose] of the world, as well as the corresponding estimate of self, constitutes the realm within which come to be formed all such ideas as that all things and events in the world serve our good, because as children of God we are objects of His special care and help. (617–18)[6]
To members of the community, God promises to his providential care, which they know not theoretically but by personal experience (618).
In summary, both von Harnack and Ritschl proposed a liberal form of Christianity that (1) distanced itself from doctrine and institutionalism and re-envisioned it as living the way of Jesus; (2) conceptualized God as Father of all human beings (in the same way he is Father of Christians); (3) focused on the kingdom of God as his rule in human hearts and as related to the idea of God as love; (4) prioritized human experience over objective norms like Scripture and theology; (5) emphasized the common community or brotherhood of all human beings, whose souls are of infinite value; (6) appealed to the providence of God and his particular care for all human beings for their good; and (7) highlighted moralistic religion and the ethic of love.
This brief sketch of two leading theologians provides some of the context into which Machen stepped and directed his Christianity and Liberalism.
Machen’s Response to von Harnack and Ritschl
Specifically, in his seventh and final chapter, Machen treats the church.[7] While affirming that both Christianity and liberalism are “interested in social institutions” (133), Machen underscores the significant difference between the two religions’ notion of sociality. Reflecting the sentiments of P. T. Forsyth—“the same act which sets us in Christ sets us also in the society of Christ. . . . It puts us into a relation with all saints which we may neglect to our bane but which we cannot destroy”[8]—Machen insists, “When, according to Christian belief, lost souls are saved, the saved ones become united in . . . the brotherhood of the Christian Church” (133). For Machen, this is a far cry from “the liberal doctrine of the ‘brotherhood of man’ . . . that all men everywhere . . . are brothers” (133).
Nuancing his statement, Machen acknowledges that such a doctrine contains some truth: in the sense of creation, all human beings are creatures of the one Creator and are of the same nature. Accordingly, Christianity “can accept all that the modern liberal means by the brotherhood of man” (133). But Machen points to a different “Christian” notion of brotherhood: in the sense of salvation, only those who are rescued from sin by Jesus Christ constitute “the brotherhood of the redeemed” (134).
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