High Priestly Garments and Working Steel

The robe is to be on Aaron as he ministers, and his sound will be heard when he enters the Holy Place before the Lord and when he leaves, so that he does not die… These [linen undergarments] must be on Aaron and his sons when they enter the tent of meeting, or when they approach the altar to minister in the Holy Place, so that they bear no iniquity and die. It is to be a perpetual ordinance for him and for his descendants after him.

— Exodus 28:35,43

My first thought when these verses were pointed out to me was of some sort of hazmat or biohazard suit. The sort of thing you’d wear to protect yourself from ebola.

My second thought was that this metaphor would have God in the place of ebola. That seems quite wrong, theologically, so I went with the image of a steelworker instead.

Molten metal can range from 1,200°F to 6000°F. Early industrial steelworkers (for example, in Carnegie’s 19th century steel mills) had minimal safety gear, perhaps just two layers of wool long-johns, but later steelworkers wear layers of FR (flame-resistant) clothing, an apron (sometimes), hood, gloves, and steel-toed boots, all engineered to protect against flames and splashes of molten metal and reflect heat. Depending on the era, clothing would be made of leather wrapped in wet burlap, or asbestos, or aluminized Kevlar capable of withstanding 3000°F of radiant heat and 1100°F of direct contact. Some walking surfaces could be hot enough to melt rubber, so steelworkers could wear wooden shoe guards around their boots for further protection. Melters at the furnace itself would wear cobalt-colored melter’s glasses to let them look directly at molten iron to check its temperature. All of this is to deal with the fact that steelworkers work daily with forces and energy far too powerful for humans to withstand unaided.

Photo by Francisco Fernandes on Unsplash

Reading the Old Testament, it seems that this is an accurate metaphor. God wanted to, and chose to, dwell with his people and walk among them as their God (Lev. 26:11-12). To show this, he placed his presence in the tabernacle and the temple, even though (as Solomon said when dedicating the temple) “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that” Solomon built (2 Chron 6:18). Yet God’s power, holiness, and glory, when encountering human sin and frailty, are simply not safe. No one could see God’s face and live (Ex. 33:20); even hearing him speak or seeing his messenger brought fear of death (Deut. 5:24-26, Jdg 6:21-22). When God came down onto Mount Sinai to deliver the Law to Moses, anyone who touched the mountain would be executed; otherwise, God would “break out against them” (Ex. 19:12-13,24). Mishandling the ark of the covenant, which symbolized God’s throne within his dwelling place of the tabernacle or temple, resulted in death (Num 4:5, 20; 1 Sam 6:19; 2 Sam 6:6-7). Even the chosen high priest could only enter the most holy place, the place in the tabernacle or temple where the ark of the covenant was kept, once a year. There’s a story that the high priest would tie a rope around his ankle when entering the most holy place so that, if he was struck dead by God’s holiness, his body could be safely dragged out; this is apparently a myth from the Middle Ages, but the Bible does record several priests and would-be priests who died because they failed to properly follow the rituals laid out in the Law.

Read within this light, the rules regarding the priests’ garments in Exodus 28 and the rituals for consecrating priests in Exodus 29 make more sense. The different elements of the high priest’s clothing - a breastpiece of gold and semiprecious stones, an ephod of woven gold and cloth with engraved onyx stones, a robe decorated with golden bells and pomegranates made of yarn, a turban with an engraved golden plate - have symbolic importance (some of which may be unclear now), but besides any specific symbolism, the details of the precision, artistry and expense that went into the garments served to demonstrate the care and value needed to properly approach God in his holiness.

Reading the Old Testament gives me the impression that the priests were closer to the long-john-clad laborers of Carnegie’s day, one mistake away from disaster, than to the drilled, carefully protected steelworkers of today. This is probably an unfair impression, since tabernacle and temple worship continued for roughly one thousand years, and we see mostly low points from its early days.

It does, however, bring us to the New Testament. Christ, as our great high priest, fulfills perfectly the role which Aaron and his descendants did with fear and trembling.

More than that, Christ let us “confidently approach the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:16). What the high priest could do only once a year, painstakingly clothed in his safety gear, at the earthly representation of God’s throne, we can now do with freely and confidence at the throne of God itself.

More than that, we’re told to clothe ourselves with Christ (Rom 13:14, Gal 3:27). It’s as if the high priest’s safety garments are turned inside out - instead of dressing up to protect and isolate ourselves from God’s holiness and power, God enables us to dress up as Christ, the image of God. As described by C.S. Lewis, “If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course… you are not being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek.” As outrageous, perhaps, as thinking we could sculpt a suit of molten steel. But Lewis continues, explaining what it means to put on Christ:

A real Person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has… Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares in His power, joy, knowledge and eternity. (Mere Christianity, p. 146-147, 149)

This gets at a truth which we sometimes neglect in Western evangelical churches. We describe salvation and the Christian life as being freed from sin, receiving the promise of eternal life, and being sanctified to be more moral people. And it is all of these things - but not just these things. 2 Peter 1:4 says that we will become “partakers of the divine nature.” Orthodox Christians refer to this as divinization. It’s not that our fundamental nature is changed, that we cease being humans and become divine; instead, through union with God, we are suffused with his grace and holiness. Orthodox Christians use the analogy of a metal in fire; it doesn’t stop being metal, but it’s suffused with the fire’s energy, like molten steel, radiating light and heat to all around it.

A Eulogy for Monoliths

I have an Atlas Obscura desk calendar. Each day, it showcases a different location around the world: sometimes a natural wonder (such as Hierve el Agua, a massive rock formation in Mexico that resembles a waterfall), sometimes unique wildlife (such as the blue ghost fireflies of North Carolina), sometimes human art (such as the House of Mirrors, a private house decorated entirely in mirror mosaics by Italian-Kuwaiti artist Lidia al-Qattan, or Decebalus’s head, a 140-foot-tall mountainside carving of 1st century Romanian king), sometimes just odd bits of local culture (such as a Manhattan collection of items salvaged from trash, kept in the second floor of a garbage truck garage). Each day offers a little glimpse into the variety, beauty, creativity, weirdness, and wonder of earth and its inhabitants.

Photo by Quentin Melson

The Georgia Guidestones are not, to my knowledge, part of my Atlas Obscura desk calendar, but they easily could be. Built in 1980 by a pseudonymous “Robert C. Christian,” representing an anonymous and mysterious group, they’ve been called “America’s Stonehenge.” They consisted of six granite slabs, weighing a total of 237,746 pounds, and are believed to have been intended as a message to survivors of a nuclear war. They were intended as a compass, calendar, and clock and contained the following guidelines in seven different languages:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Since their unveiling, they became a tourist attraction (drawing roughly 20,000 annual visitors) and the target of significant speculation (including a documentary) as to their purpose and their anonymous creators’ motivation. They’ve also become the subject of various conspiracy theories; maintaining a world population under 500 million could perhaps be tractable after a nuclear holocaust, but ”guiding reproduction“ evokes dark memories of eugenics and racism, and Christians such as Kandiss Taylor, 2022 Georgia Republican candidate for governor, have alleged that they’re Satanic and related to the New World Order.

On July 6, an unknown perpetrator set a bomb that destroyed one of the six slabs and heavily damaged the capstone. The remaining Guidestones were dismantled for safety reasons. The motives of the attacker are unknown, but it’s likely that they were spurred by the accusations of Satanism and New World Order.

I feel that the world is a bit poorer for their loss. I am, of course, opposed to Satanism, and I do believe that there are malign spiritual forces active in the world. But I believe that Satan is rarely so obvious as to engrave his guidelines on tourist-attraction granite; the consumerism, tribalism, and pressures to compromise one’s ethics and beliefs that permeate modern American society are much greater threats for most of us than eugenics. And, if the Guidestones were intended to promote the New World Order - if they were part of a conspiracy of global elites to establish a totalitarian world government, as understood by some interpretations of the Book of Revelation - then any effort we might make to stop God’s prophecy seems rather misguided. I might even go further and, rather than opposing them, respond with “Maranatha!” (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20); I’m not exactly looking forward to the end-times tribulations as understood by many Christians, but I’m very much looking forward to Christ’s return, and it seems that we may have to pass through the one to get to the other.

These particular conspiracy theories are pretty easy to dismiss. But there’s a deeper consideration here. There’s a strain of Christianity that’s especially attentive and alert to spiritual forces of darkness, to sinister hidden motives, to political or social actions that seem innocuous but may be the first steps toward an evil end. And we should be on guard against such things (1 Pe 5:8, Eph 6:12, 1 Cor 10:19-20, etc.). As James Sire writes in The Universe Next Door,

The New Age has reopened a door closed since Christianity drove out the demons from the woods, desacralized the natural world and generally took a dim view of excessive interest in the affairs of Satan’s kingdom of fallen angels. Now they are back, knocking on university dorm room doors, sneaking around psychology laboratories and chilling the spines of Ouija players. Modern folk have fled from grandfather’s clockwork universe to great-grandfather’s chamber of gothic horrors… While spirit activity has been constant in areas where Christianity has barely penetrated, it has been little reported in the West from the time of Jesus. Christ is said to have driven the spirits from field and stream, and when Christianity permeates a society the spirit world seems to disappear or go into hiding. It is only in the last few decades that the spirits of the woods and rivers, the air and the darkness have been invited back by those who have rejected the claims of Christianity and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (p. 166, 168, 3rd ed.)

There’s a lot to unpack and evaluate there, and the topic of how we interpret and understand spiritual activity in Bible times and ours is far too involved to get into here. But this sort of “direct,” explicit spiritual activity is not, I think, the greatest risk in modern America. Modern culture instead seems to de-spiritualize, depersonalize, and homogenize everything. We’ve gone from family-owned stores where proprietors and shoppers knew each other, to store chains where we interact with minimum-wage workers whose upper management have done their best to make them interchangeable, to (post-pandemic) curbside pickup and deliveries, as if even the minimal interaction of the check-out line is too inconvenient. We can travel two thousand miles cross country—an unthinkable distance in earlier history—and eat at restaurants and stay at hotels barely different than where we left. Internet and cable TV news lets us obsess over words and pictures from people in other states and cities who we’ll never interact with, while the decline of local news means we often know more about current events in Ukraine than in our own communities. So many facets of our existence—our interactions online, our viewing and reading habits, our purchases—are quantized and aggregated and turned into grist for corporations’ efforts to optimize their efficiency and profits. Social media collapses the distances between people—everyone’s talking to each other all the time, with little space to be alone or to be different or to agree to disagree. Our culture wars further collapse the distances and distinct spheres that people used to operate in; Yuval Levin observes,

Our culture war plainly lacks boundaries. Every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields. Not only in politics but also in schools and universities, in corporate America, in our places of worship and places of work, in civil society and in our private lives, online and in person, there is often just no getting away from that intense, divisive, and rigidly partisan struggle.

It may sound like I’m bemoaning the decline of Western civilization or pining for a lost past. That isn’t my intent. There are many wonderful benefits of our modern economy, technologies, and conveniences; our culture has improved in some areas even as it struggles in others; past times and cultures have dealt with their own sins and struggles; and, as Christians, this world is not our home regardless.

But, precisely because every culture deals with its own sins and struggles, I want to be aware of this one. I want to celebrate the creative, the quirky, the weird. I want to be reminded of the variety and uniqueness of other people, countries, environments, and cultures. I like pausing my workday of developing and debugging software code to read a bit of whimsy or wonder from the Atlas Obscura calendar on my desk. I like living in a world where people can use their God-given gifts, abilities, and resources to create Internet sites and optimize check-out lines but also carve 140-foot statues of Romanian kings and erect mysterious monoliths in Georgia. And sometimes the results may seem wasteful or weird or questionable, but we can question the bad while still thanking God for the good.