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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The blue screen of death. We’ve all experienced it. You’re plugging away on a paper or trying to load a website and whammo, your computer is toast. A few minutes and a hard restart later, you’re back up and running, but not without consequences. You might have lost your train of thought or part of what you wrote. Ironically, I experienced the blue screen of death writing this post!
Covid-19 was a cultural blue screen of death. Work, school, and church rhythms were all disrupted, and as a result everything changed. People’s connection to church shifted or ended completely. Nearly every pastor I’ve spoken with affirms lower church attendance today than eighteen months ago.
The blue screen of Covid, it seems, made everyone re-think just how important church is.
A Replacement for Church?
More than a handful decided that other spiritual practices can take the place of church. Jen Hatmaker recently shared about a conversation she had with her therapist where she came to the realization that “church for me right now feels like my best friends, my porch bed, my children, and my parents and my siblings. It feels like meditations and all these leaves on my 12 pecan trees. It feels like Ben Rector on repeat. It feels like my kitchen, and my table, and my porch. It feels like Jesus who never asked me to meet him anywhere but in my heart.”
Others have decided to cut themselves off from church due to their frustration with what they perceive the church to be. This thread of tweets between Laura Chastain and Andrew Novell captures the spirit of those who feel disappointed by the church.
Whatever the stated reason, at its core this exodus from the church stems from a lack of understanding of the true heart, function, and mission of the church.

Written by William E. Boyce and K. J. Drake |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The pew Bible has a valuable place. It is a celebration of the gospel, the triumph of the early church, and the spirit of the Reformation. And for a generation of digital burnouts, the pew Bible helps us connect with a crucial truth: that salvation is physical, tangible, earthly, and available for all.

Do pew Bibles matter? Churches of all styles have had to ask this question in recent years. The increase of church plants using secular spaces for worship means that church planters must contemplate the extra weight, hassle, and expense of providing Bibles for their congregants each Sunday. The rise of technology means that many congregants come to church with merely their phone for a Bible. On top of those societal factors, the pandemic forced most churches to remove pew Bibles for a season, leaving room to reevaluate their utility in worship.
But these questions are not just theoretical; they can be profoundly personal and pastoral. Recently, I (Billy) had the opportunity to worship in the pews with my kids. As a pastor, my preaching schedule rarely affords me the opportunity to spend the entire service with my family. So it was a special treat to watch my kids interact, not only with the liturgy, but with the liturgical tools around them. What grabbed my attention most was this: at some point, each of my four kids (ages 5.5 through 11.5), took out a pew Bible for personal use.
So, we must ask: in this post-COVID, post-modern, post-literate, technological, consumer society, do pew Bibles matter? Does the connection between the Word and the form of accessing the Word matter? Is something lost when we depend on digital media for our Scripture consumption? Is projecting the Scripture passage onto the screen adequate for whole-person and whole-church discipleship and mission, or can a case be made that pew Bibles are an essential part of making God’s Word accessible for all?
Part 1: The Accessible Word: Christian History
The physicality and accessibility of the Word of God is a continual theme across Christian history. From the Scriptures themselves through the Early Church and Reformation, there has been a constant mandate for spiritual leaders: make God’s Word physically accessible. God’s people are a people of the book.
In Deuteronomy 17, for example, Moses makes an odd requirement for Israel’s future king: “he shall write for himself in a book a copy of the law … it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the LORD by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them.” (Deut 17:18-19) Such a bookishness was unknown as a requirement of the Ancient Near East ruling class, and yet before all things — military power, courtly procedure, or administration — the king ought to write by his own hand the Law of God. For the king, the Word was to be accessible.This theme recurs throughout Scripture. The biblical authors presume that meditating on the Law, which is the precursor to actually obeying it, requires the external composition of a literary work. Oral culture was not enough; God’s spoken Word needed to be written and re-written as a whole, in order to be absorbed (e.g. Deut 6:9; Jer 30:2).
This focus on the written text has been a prominent feature of Christianity throughout the centuries. One of the key characteristics of early Christianity, according to scholar Larry Hurtado, was its unusual bookishness. The early Christians were committed to making God’s Word physically accessible for others, going so far as to eschew dominant forms of producing texts by using the codex, rather than bookrolls or scrolls. Says Hurtado,
The bookroll was the prestige bookform of the day, and so, if Christians wanted to commend their texts to the wider culture, especially the texts that they read as scripture, it would seem an odd and counterintuitive choice to prefer the codex bookform for these texts. Indeed, it would seem like a deliberately countercultural move. … It certainly had the effect of distinguishing early Christian books physically, especially Christian copies of their sacred books.[1]
This shift had several advantages. First, because of the cheaper production of the codex, more physical copies of Scripture could be produced. The codex made the sacred Scriptures more physically available to the people of God. Second, the codex form allowed for greater ease of study and cross reference as opposed to the cumbersome nature of the scroll. In God’s providence, this widespread availability of the codex empowered later Christians to more accurately translate and further propagate God’s Word. Indeed, the widespread historical attestation of Scripture — far more than any other classical text — owes to the early church’s commitment to the accessible Word.
This emphasis on the availability of the Bible is shot through the Reformation as well.
As Luther was hiding in the Wartburg, avoiding the wrath of the emperor and pope, he turned his attention to translating the New Testament in German, which would definitively shape the national tongue. Luther’s motivation was to make the very words of the Lord accessible to Christians: “Neither have I sought my own honor by it; God, my Lord, knows this. Rather I have done it as a service to the dear Christians and to the honor of One who sitteth above, who blesses me so much.”[2] William Tyndale, the famed English Bible translator, is said to have aspired, according to John Foxe, “If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than [a learned Catholic theologian] did.”[3] As these few examples show, the Church has a historical commitment to making Scripture available in written form. The accessibility of Bibles is a venerable part of Christian history.
Part 2: The Accessible Word: Phenomenology
At the same time, pew Bibles make a valuable contribution to the experience of worship. Without pew Bibles, something is tangibly missing from our liturgical space. As we see constantly in the Old Testament, and reaffirmed through the Reformation, liturgical space has a catechetical effect. The physical things in our worship space teach us about God and about the anticipated experience of worship.
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