Leviticus 9

After Aaron and his sons hang out around the tent of meeting for seven days, they get to perform--you guessed it--more sacrifices. However, this time, the Israelites are to offer a sin offering, a burnt offering, and a fellowship offering to accompany the offerings of the priests. A lot of the content of this chapter repeats what's been said before; you can even sense a bit of "sacrifice procedure" fatigue in the author when he writes, "He brought the burnt offering and offered it in the prescribed way" (verse 16). I guess he figures that after all the meticulous details and repetition, the reader should know how to sacrifice burnt offerings by now.

One detail that I'm sure has been mentioned before but I just caught now is that Aaron washes "the internal organs and the legs" before he burns them (verse 14). I guess that kind of make sense--even though it's all going to be incinerated anyway, you want the body parts to be clean before you offer them to God--but I do wonder why this passage specifies just the internal organs and the legs. What about the head, torso, and other flesh?

After God sees that no one screwed up (that will happen in the next chapter), He reveals His glory to everyone: "Fire came out from the presence of the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the fat portions on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell facedown" (verse 24). First, a note to all grammar pedants: Here we have a sentence starting with "and." If it's good enough for the Bible, it's good enough for me. (OK, I'll admit that I have traces of a grammar pedant in my blood, at least as far as formal writing is concerned. But even I think that if you use the grammatically correct "It's I" instead of the colloquial "It's me," you sound like some conceited character from a fantasy novel or video game.)

More to the point, most everyone's awed by fireballs. At Disney's California Adventure theme park, there's a show called World of Color, consisting mostly of colored water fountains and images projected on mist screens. But at a couple points in the show, these flame jets start going off, and that's when everyone oohs and aahs. (On cold nights--and yes, I know California never truly gets "cold"--the jets also provide some welcome warmth.) And when the segment ends with a towering pillar of flame shooting to the heavens, everyone inevitably cheers and applauds. We're all pyromaniacs at heart. The Israelites are no exception, shouting for joy and falling prostrate before God and His ultimate flamethrower.