The Submitted Servant

Numbers 20:22-29

We have traveled many days with Aaron. We have watched his life and his faith mature. Was he perfect? Far from it. Aaron helped build the golden calf, he, along with his sister Miriam, opposed Moses, and he also disobeyed God when he and Moses were commanded to speak to the rock to bring water from it. However, in spite of all his failures, he ended his life a completely submitted servant of the Lord.

God tells Moses to get Aaron and his son Eleazar and take them up the mountain because Aaron is going to die. We see nothing in scripture to make us believe that Aaron argued or complained about God's choice for his life. He just obeyed. God blessed him for his obedience by allowing him to see the priesthood passed on to his son. Aaron died knowing that his son was going to be greatly used by God. He was also allowed to tell his family goodbye, and Aaron knew exactly where he was going. He was going to be "gathered to his people".

We can see through Aaron's life that God is much more concerned with our current faith than He is with our past failures. We can also see that submission to the Lord is the greatest mark of maturity.

How about you? Is your life submitted to the Lord? Are you to the point in your relationship with Him that you can truly say, "Lord, whatever you choose for me, I submit myself to it". Or do you spend much of your time complaining over what the Lord has chosen for you?

Today, ask God to grow you into a totally submitted servant. There is truly no greater mark on a believer's life.

"He had not, in the highest degree, the qualities of insight, promptitude, energy, and firmness for which Moses was pre-eminent: but he excelled his brother in the passive virtues of patience and endurance. Under the stunning blow which deprived him of two of his sons in a moment, no word of reproach escaped his lips; while on the occasion of the Korahitic rebellion he waited, with a quiet and becoming dignity, until his pre-emenence had been established, and then he used his priesthood in making intercession for the plague-stricken multitudes... His character shines most brightly at 'the evening time'; and to him we may apply the poet's words, 'Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.' We forget his faults as we see him ascending so quietly the hill on which he is to be gathered to his people."
William M. Taylor, Moses: The Law-Giver