When we are “put” somewhere we don’t like or don’t find comfortable, it can be tempting to ask for a change of location. But what if God wants us in that very place to advance the gospel?

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.Philippians 1:12
I am writing this reflection from Gifu in central Japan. I am here for the 7th Japan Congress on Evangelism, a gathering of Japanese church and ministry leaders and missionaries. In advance of this Congress, a survey was carried out to get an up-to-date picture of the state of the church in Japan. The findings were published in May, and humanly speaking there is cause for real concern. The number of believers remains at less than 1%, the church and its pastors are aging and the future is not looking bright. If there ever was a time for leaders to come together to think about evangelism in Japan, then it is now.
While it is good and helpful to get facts and figures about the state of the church, however, we must not allow those to be the only things we consider. I am currently writing devotions for my Japanese church on the book of Philippians, and last week was considering verses 12-14 of Chapter 1. Paul is in prison, in chains, because of the gospel. I wonder how the Philippian believers were praying for him. Perhaps they were praying that he would be released quickly. After all, the Philippian church knew from personal experience that God could indeed open prison doors (Acts 16:25-28). It would make sense that they would want Paul to be released so that he could continue his work of sharing the good news about Jesus in various towns and cities.
Paul’s perspective, however, is quite different. He reassures the Philippian believers that what has happened to him, namely the fact that he is in prison, has actually served to advance the gospel. The word “advance” here means to move forward, overcoming obstacles in the way. Some people no doubt saw Paul being in prison as an obstacle, something getting in the way, but Paul says that instead it has advanced the gospel.
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The author of Hebrews labors throughout his sermon to show that Jesus is the great and perfect high priest of our faith. Through becoming flesh and tabernacling among us, Jesus was tempted in every way that we are yet never yielded to sin. Thus, while we can rejoice that He is able to sympathize with our weakness, we also rejoice that He does not share in our weakness of sinning. He had no need for a seven-day consecration ceremony with seven slaughtered bulls as sacrifices to cover His sins. Instead, His very purpose in taking on human flesh was to be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. 

William McEwen once wrote:
As the sun paints the clouds with a variety of glorious colors, which in their own nature are but dark and lowering vapors exhaled from the earth, so when the Son of righteousness arises, even the carnal ordinances and commandments of the law, dark and earthly as they seem, are gilded by His beams and wear a smiling appearance. By His kindly influence, who is the light of the World, the most barren places of the Scripture rejoice and blossom as the rose.
What portion of sacred writ is more apt to be perused without edification and delight than what relates to the Levitical priesthood: the qualifications of their persons, their apparel, their consecration, and the different parts of their function? And indeed it must be confessed a very hard task to reconcile with the wisdom of God the enjoining such numberless rites, purely for their own sake. But when we consider that Aaron, and his successors, were figures of our Great High Priest, we must acknowledge that these injunctions are neither unworthy of God nor useless to man but are profitable for doctrine and instruction in righteousness.
In the text before us, we find God’s instructions regarding the garments and the consecration of the priests who would serve in tabernacle. As we approach these multitude of descriptions and details given here, may McEwen’s words prove true. As we view these words in the light of their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, may we see the glory and the beauty of God in them like the painted clouds at sunset.
For Glory and for Beauty 28:1–43
Verses 20-21 of chapter structurally transitions the instructions that Moses received from the inanimate objects of the tabernacle onto the priests, who were very much a living, breathing element of the whole tabernacle complex. However, we will consider them alongside verses 38-44 of chapter 29 towards the end of this study.
Verse 1 of chapter 28 makes it explicit for the first time that Aaron and his sons are to be set apart as Israel’s priests. Just as with Moses himself, with Noah, with Abraham, with David, with the prophets, and the apostles, Aaron did not the mantle of leadership for himself; it was bestowed upon him. And the same pattern ought to continue with leadership in the church today, especially when considering the two biblical offices of elders/pastors and deacons.
Verses 2-5 then sets the subject for the rest of the chapter:
And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him for my priesthood. These are the garments that they shall make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a coat of checker work, a turban, and a sash. They shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother and his sons to serve me as priests. They shall receive gold, blue and purple and scarlet yarns, and fine twined linen.
Notice that the gold and the colors that were used to make the priests’ garments reflect the gold and the colors that were used for constructing the tabernacle. At its most basic level, the priests, and the high priest in particular, were displaying the glory and the beauty of the tabernacle through their garments. Since the ordinary Israelites could not enter the tabernacle to see the beauties and glory within, the garments of the priests were as though the inside of the tabernacle was coming out to be among the people.
Indeed, many elements of the high priest’s garments were for the comfort and benefit of the people of Israel. Upon the shoulders of the ephod, which is like a large apron, were two onyx stones that each had six of the tribes’ names written upon them, so that the high priest would bear their names before the LORD on his two shoulders for remembrance. The golden bells that hung from the hem of his robe were constant reminder to the Israelites that the high priest was at work, making intercession for them before God. The signet upon his turban, which read “Holy to the LORD,” was a reminder that their high priest had been consecrated for service to Yahweh and was accepted in His presence as their representative.
Of course, the garment piece that receives the most attention in the text is the breastpiece that was to be attached to the ephod. It held twelve precious stones, one for each of Israel’s twelve tribes, and it also held the Urim and the Thummim. No one knows what these things were exactly, but they are what made the breastpiece the breastpiece of judgment. They were later used by men like Joshua and David to prayerfully discern God’s will over particular matters. Douglas Stuart rightly notes:
Theologically, the Urim and the Thummim represented something on the order of last resort appeals to God for guidance—not individual guidance but national guidance on matters that would require the agreement and concerted effort of the whole people. The people’s first resort was supposed to be obedience to the written covenant since the written covenant constituted the most basic or foundational guidance, generally and perpetually applicable, that they possessed. The second resort would be to listen for direct divine guidance through the word of God from a prophet, something that God occasionally, but not necessarily regularly, gave them. The third resort would be prayer, seeking to understand how best to take a national direction of some sort, the Urim and Thummim would be drawn from the breastpiece pouch and examined for God’s answer to the people’s prayer. (Exodus, 613)
The Urim and the Thummim are one of the many ways in which God spoke to our fathers long ago, but as Hebrews 1:1 teaches, those former methods of discerning the will of God have passed away with the coming of Christ, who as God’s Son gives us the full and complete revelation of God. But neither should we use Scripture as a modern Urim and Thummim.
Most fundamentally, the priests’ garments were a reminder of their task before Yahweh on behalf of the people of Israel. They were clothed with the colors and designs of the tabernacle, but they also bore the names of the tribes of Israel. They ministered in the court, presiding over the sacrifices made at the bronze altar but also entering into the tabernacle itself. The priests were mediators, working daily between both heaven and earth, consecrated to Yahweh but representing the people.
That They May Serve Me  29:1–37
Speaking of consecration, the ceremony of consecration is described in 29:1-37. Again, we should keep in mind that this is not the description of Aaron’s actual consecration but rather the instructions that Moses was given for how to consecrate Aaron and his sons into the priesthood.
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Losing Our Religion is a complicated book, and readers will find much to agree and disagree with, as I did. It offers a fascinating, personal, raw, and at times puzzling look into our recent and ongoing struggles with faith, politics, culture, and loving—or at least co-existing with—our neighbors.

Around twenty years ago as a graduate student, I attended a gathering in Princeton organized to kick off a campaign for a federal marriage amendment. That gathering included a Who’s Who of socially conservative academics, pastors, and activists. I had just settled down in my seat at a table near the back of the conference room when I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see Princeton University’s Robert P. George, who whispered to me with a sly grin—channeling Jesus in Mark 14—“Friend, come up to the higher table.”
I followed Professor George to a table near the front of the conference room and sat down only to look around and see that on my right was Charles Colson and on my left was James Dobson. I don’t really remember much about the conversation, but for a starstruck young evangelical raised in the ’70s and ’80s by parents who had Dare to Discipline and Born Again on their bookshelves, this was like sitting next to evangelical royalty.
Much has changed in twenty years. Colson passed away in 2012. Dobson is still active in many ways but has understandably slowed down in his 80s, and is perhaps most known in recent years for characterizing Donald Trump as a “baby Christian” in 2016. The evangelicalism that they did so much to define in the last fifty years, following figures like Billy Graham and many others, is embattled, lively, marginalized, shrinking, or unrecognizable, depending on whom you ask.
I begin this book review in such a personal fashion in part because Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America is a very personal book. I also begin this way because if you were to ask me before 2016 who would most likely be the next Charles Colson for politically conscious and devout evangelicals, I would have said Russell Moore.
As I noted, much has changed.
Russell Moore currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the evangelical mainstay magazine Christianity Today, originally founded through the efforts of Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry. He hails from the Southern Baptist (SBC) stream of evangelicalism, having served in senior posts at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and as the president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). He is a gifted preacher and an incisive and insightful academic.
At my first tenure-track job working among many SBC friends and colleagues at Union University, we hosted Moore twice, once to mark an anniversary of George’s Making Men Moral, and the other to speak on marriage at a conference honoring Colson after he passed. If you follow those links to the audio and video of those remarks respectively, you’ll better understand how remarkable a speaker and thinker Moore is, and how close the family resemblance is to his elder brother in the evangelical faith, Chuck Colson. While Moore was at the time a big fish in the Southern Baptist pond, he transcended those boundaries, working with Christians in other traditions and crossing over into secular venues as well.
Today, Moore is no longer part of the SBC, and Southern Baptist views on him range from mildly sympathetic to hostile to vitriolic. Losing Our Religion is in part an account of this falling out. It aligns with much of our national narrative of the epistemic and cultural fracturing that may not have started with Trump’s election in 2016, but was certainly exacerbated by it, followed by the summer of George Floyd, and the compounding stress of the Covid-19 pandemic and our governments’ (federal/state/local) medico-political responses. Add to this tumultuous mix the scandalous sexual abuse epidemic rampant in so much of evangelicalism (and elsewhere), and one has the proverbial perfect storm. Moore’s writing here then is something of a memoir and a testimony, in good evangelical fashion, taking us back to the heartfelt and fervent faith of his youth and through what can only be described as a painful and poignant break-up with the religious tradition that nurtured and raised him. Moore only occasionally names names (Jerry Falwell, Jr., for example), and often cites anonymous comments shared with him by his fellow churchgoers. But SBC insiders will recognize the specific scenes and acts—and actors—in the last few years of SBC drama.
There has been something of a cottage industry of publications on the status of evangelicalism. Some are defiant and fiery defenses of what has become the status quo. Others are more sociological or historical accounts that treat evangelicalism not as a spiritually inspired and genuine (if imperfect) movement, but a political, cultural, or even racist and sexist ideology masquerading as religious. And then there are the “ex-vangelical” accounts of many who were raised in evangelical homes, but have come to leave either that version of Christianity or Christianity itself. Fortunately, Moore’s book fits none of these categories.
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