Numbers 8:23-26

The Levites; from twenty and five years.

Service

I. The service God demands of all levites.

1. Burden-bearing.

2. Singing.

3. Study of the law, “Search the Scriptures.”

4. Attendance on the ordinances of the sanctuary.

II. God demands the service in our prime. “From twenty and five.”

III. God demands this service when it can be most easily rendered. He suits the burden to the back. All He asks is, that we shall do what we can. (R. A. Griffin.)

The Divine Master and His human servants

I. The necessity of fitness for the divine service. In learning any handicraft or trade, years are spent under instructors; for the practice of law or medicine men must have special training; and is it not important that they who engage in religious services should be qualified for such services?

II. The variety of employment in the divine service.

1. An encouragement to persons of feeble powers and narrow opportunities to try to do good.

2. A rebuke to those who plead inability as an excuse for their indolence in religious service.

III. The care of the great master for his servants. Conclusion. This subject supplies--

1. Encouragement to enter into this service. “Come thou with us,” &c.

2. Encouragement to persevere in this service. A glorious reward awaits those who patiently continue in well-doing. (W. Jones.)

Age and youth in relation to service

1. They were to enter upon the service at twenty-five years old (Numbers 8:24). They were not charged with the carrying of the tabernacle and the utensils of it till they were thirty years old (Numbers 4:3). But they were entered to be otherwise serviceable at twenty-five years old--a very good age for ministers to begin their public work. The work then required that strength of body, and the work now requires that maturity of judgment and staidness of behaviour which men rarely arrive at till about that age : and novices are in danger of being lifted up with pride.

2. They were to have a writ of ease at fifty years old; then they were to return from the warfare, as the phrase is (Numbers 8:25), not cashiered with disgrace--but preferred rather to the rest, which their age required, to be loaded with the honours of their office, as hitherto they had been with the burdens of it. They shall minister with their brethren in the tabernacle, to direct the junior Levites, and set them in; and they shall keep the charge, as guards upon the avenues of the tabernacle, to see that no stranger intruded, nor any person in his uncleanness; but they shall not be put upon any service which may be a fatigue to them. If God’s grace provide that men shall have ability according to their work, man’s prudence should take care that men have work but according to their ability. The aged are most fit for truths, and to keep the charge; the younger are most fit for work, and to do the service. “Those that have used the office of a servant well, purchase to themselves a good degree” (1 Timothy 3:13). Yet indeed gifts are not tied to ages (Job 32:9), but “all these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit.” (Matthew Henry, D. D.).