The Oil and the Perfume

We are, in these verses, very far from the presuppositions of our time. In verses 25 and 31-32, the anointing oil is called holy. In verse 29, it sanctifies things and persons to whom, by God’s command, it is applied. They are then set apart for God’s purpose. Again, the perfume or incense is also called holy. In verses 35-36, and 38, to make the identical oil as well as the perfume or incense, for any other use than the worship of God is forbidden, and the offender, we are told in verses 33 and 38, must be excommunicated. The term perfume is applied both to the oil and to the incense.

Well obviously, modern thought feels very uneasy about these statements. There is a related verse in Leviticus 2:13, “And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with salt, neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to be lacking from thy meat offering, With all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.” Now, modern churchmen usually think of our Lord’s emphasis here as purely spiritual, but our Lord, in Mark 9:49, says, “For everyone shall be salted with fire and every sacrifices shall be salted with salt.” Obviously, we’re bypassing something here in our modern outlook.

Salt was added to offerings other than wine and blood. It was, according to Maimonides, added to the incense. This is what tempering in verse 35 refers to: salting. There is a reference to this in Ezekiel 43:24. That is, the salting sacrifices. The term covenant of salt appears not only in Leviticus 2:13, but also in Numbers 18:19 and 2 Chronicles 13:5. A covenant of salt means communion. Partaking of a man’s table and salt is an ancient sign of communion, of community, of a bond of peace.

Pure incense, together with the anointing oil, represents not only prayer as a fragrant arising to God, but also communion with Him. In other words, by limiting biblical meaning to things spiritual, we are forgetting that in the smallest detail, our faith is applied to things material. It belongs to the material world. We cannot be exclusively spiritual without sin.

Another function of the cloud of incense, according to Leviticus 16:12-13 was to cover the mercy seat, God’s throne, with a thick cloud. Man was forbidden to assume that he could ever attain to a total vision of God in any sense, so that even the high priest who approached it could only see it dimly. To presume that man can have a total knowledge of God, that the creatures, small and comprehensible, can ever fully comprehend God is an unpardonable arrogance.

The ingredients of the anointing oil or the perfumed oil were myrh, sweet smelling cinnamon, sweet cane, cassia and olive oil. Given the formula of verses 23-25, a large quantity could be made. Estimates run, depending on how the measurements were read, from 37 to 100 pounds of oil each time it was made. The incense was made of stacte, the origin of which is still unknown; onycha, from a marine animal of the Red Sea; galbanum, a resin from the, a plant of the fennel family; and frankensense, made from several spices, species of shrubs and trees. Whereas the anointing oil, the perfumed oil, is called holy, the incense, also perfumed, is described in verse 36, as most holy. The oil and incense were set apart for sanctuary use, but the oil was also used to mark a place as holy. Thus, in Genesis 28:18, Jacob anoints the rock where he had seen the vision of angels. God refers to this in Genesis 31:13.

The ban against adulterating the oil and incense forbids alterations of any kind, either to cheapen or to improve either item; the perfumed oil or the perfumed incense. Men are prone to imagine that God will settle for less, or to also believe that they can improve on God’s requirements. Whoever touches the anointing oil without authorization became at once either holy or dedicated to God, which as in the case of Uza, in 2 Samuel 6:7, could mean death.

The reference in verses 23-24 to the shekel are to a particular weight, not a coin. Some see this shekel of the sanctuary as being a third of an ounce, and a hin as being less, a bit less, than a gallon. The oil and the incense are holy because their function is a holy one. Incense is said to possess antiseptic properties. No one has tested it of late, but it does have an emotional impact on worshipers.

The anointing oil represents the gift of the Holy Spirit. Paul refers to this when he speaks of us being anointed by the Spirit in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22. There is a reference to this also in 1 John 2:20. Annually, there had to be a sacrifice of atonement for the altar and the anointing of the altar. U.Z. Rule very ably explained the reason for this, and I quote, “By a comparison of Exodus 30:10 with Exodus 39:36-37 and Leviticus 16-20, it would appear that the people’s uncleanness and their transgressions not only brought guilt upon themselves but clave as uncleanness even to the holy things. So they could not be accepted as vehicles by which service might be rendered to Almighty God. The holy things, themselves became, if we may coin a word, deconsecrated, and therefore, atonement would be needed to restore their impaired sanctity, so jealously was the holiness of the covenant worship guarded. Now the atonement would have to be by the blood of a sin offering, and the mode of its application would have to be as indicated in Exodus 30:10, that is, to the horns of the altar of incense once in the year. This being so, this yearly recurring atonement at the altar of incense was a very important part of a continuous national worship, being necessary for its continued acceptance.”

Now, in the modern churches, it is too often assumed that, with salvation, the problem of holiness is settled. Both church and persons are seen now as consecrated, and this is certainly true. There is nothing here that contradicts that. What the annual Day of Atonement did was to stress an annual purging of all things that deconsecrate us and our churches. In the Christian calendar at one time, Lent, in part, served the same purpose. Anointing required a looking to God and the determination of one’s being by the Holy Spirit. It is our empowering. Peter said of Jesus, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power, who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.” The churches, both Catholic and Protestant, believe that they began with God’s empowers, and that their credentials are impeccable. Well, the credentials of our ancestors may be very remarkable, and our own standing some years back, but the need for reconsecration and the counteracting of the deconsecration of our lives by our false priorities requires us to renew our dedication and our priorities regularly.

But this barely touches the meaning of the oil in the Bible. In a prophetic Psalm which hails the coming Messiah as the great king, we are told, Psalm 45:6-8, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre. Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.” The anointing of persons and things sets them apart for God’s use. The term used by the Reformers for this in the lives of all of us is vocation. While serving God in any and every line of work has penalties in a fallen world, it also means that God’s vocation for us is also our oil of gladness. It is our way of holiness. This points, of course, to something I’ve referred to before, a very great evil that developed within the Reformed community in the last century. Colbrugianism{?} it was called. The idea that once you were saved, your sanctification went to a certain point and stopped right there. So, it was one act at the time of your salvation, and it meant stagnation. It helped kill the Reformed community. It has never fully recovered from its impact, and this is why things as well as persons need renewing.

In the modern era, two rival doctrines of holiness are at war. One has its origins in Rousseau, William Blake, and some of the Romantics. This view is held to the holiness of the natural man and the environment. Alan Ginsberg in his writings has insisted on this natural holiness, specifically, of homosexuals, the insane, the lawless, and so on. The world of Christian law and faith is at war against this natural holiness, and of course, these people are at war against us. The environmentalists see all nature as holy in itself, and thus, it has to be protected against exploitive man, as against the supernatural man, the God incarnate, Jesus Christ. This school of holiness wants the return to natural man, uninhibited and free to do as he pleases, and to a restored natural world freed from man’s exploitations. The whole of environmentalism is intensely religious. It believes in the natural order and in natural man. Not surprisingly, the writings of the Marquis De Sade have been much used by many in this school of thought.

But as against this, Christianity declares that this natural man is fallen. He is totally depraved, and that the natural realm is also fallen and needs to be restored, to be placed under the dominion of man in Christ. Fallen human societies, as well as the world around us, tend, together with our own imperfectly sanctified nature, to deconsecrate us. Reconsecration thus, is an ongoing part of sanctification, and this is why, at the very heart of the faith in the sanctuary, the oil and the incense functioned to set forth reconsecration continually. They were a reminder that even the most holy place, let alone the most holy people, are subjected to the deconsecrating forces of the world, and that reconsecration is both physical and spiritual.

Well, this text is not a popular one in our time, and this has been true for some generations, because abstractionism and spiritualization have become so prevalent. We have had, in modern philosophy, a direction that has militated against the world of matter. We have returned to the Greek presupposition that sin does not concern what we do with our bodies, but what we do with out minds. What happened with De Cartes was a new movement in philosophy which said that the autonomous mind of man was all-important, central. Little by little, the world of God and nature was discarded, culminating in Emmanuel Kant who said the real world is not the world out there but the world in our minds, and Hegel said that the rational is the real, and that the triumph of the evolving nature of being is the triumph of the spirit. Hence, he wrote on the phenomenology of the spirit, and that Darwin was a child of Hegel’s thought. What did this do? It led to the abstraction of meaning from the material world as a realm of the spirit, a realm of the faith, and the unity of mind and body was destroyed.

But God would regard things so material and sensual as perfume in oil and in incense as religiously important, is alien to the modern mind. We live in an era infected by the dogma of evolution, so that men look from primitive matter to the realm of pure spirit as the goal of evolution, a la Hegel. The result, at best, is a very warped perspective. It leads to a depreciation of things material. It leads to a disrespect for the fact of the unity of the mind and body. The only reason that the natural world is exalted by these people is because of their hatred for man, not because of a love of nature. It is interesting that Thoreau, the guru of all nature lovers, found one thing in nature. Himself. Himself. As he looked at it, he saw an image of himself in all his supposed purity and spirituality, and some of the most amazing statements ever written by Thoreau reflect that perspective. It was his way of hating man. He despised those around him, made it clear in his writings. He accidentally set fire to the woods he supposedly prized, and laughed that the people in Concord thought it so serious a matter. So much for his love of nature, for his love of the woods.

What we have in our contempt for mankind manifested by these people is ultimate a contempt for all things. God, in His word, tells us that because the sanctuary itself must be routinely and regularly reconsecrated, that we are in a world that is fallen, and with all our being we need to reconsecrate it, that all things including the world around us need improving, that the natural world no less than man is fallen, and those who oppose our faith are saying, “We are not fallen and the world is not fallen. You, who hold this opinion, are the evil ones, the fallen ones.” This is why this text is so important. It insists on the continual reconsecration and the progressive conquest of all things by the reconsecrated world, man, and all things beginning with the sanctuary. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, thy word is truth. Thou hast made all things including ourselves, and thou hast called us to bring all things into thy kingdom to reconsecrate all things and make them thine, beginning with ourselves. Bless us in this task. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Is there any connection between this text and the prohibition that some earlier religion groups had against their women using perfume {?}

[Rushdoony] Against the use of perfume by women? Oh yes! It’s part of the same anti-material impetus. Something terrible about having regard for things material. Enjoying food, enjoying perfume, enjoying the world around us, and it has led to, in some people over the centuries, despising the body and abusing it, despising everything around us and trying to attain an impossible spirituality.

[Audience] Well, I guess my question goes more to the idea that perhaps in formulating perfume, there was an attempt to copy this formula from the Bible and the fear that those who used it would be cut off from their people.

[Rushdoony] Yes, excommunicated.

[Audience] Yeah, I mean was that their concern of earlier religious groups that had this prohibition?

[Rushdoony] The concern was this was God’s order, man could neither improve on it nor detract from it, because people have routinely tried to be holier than God. Over the years, I’ve encountered people who have taken a variety of stands on a variety of things whereby they are going to improve on what scripture says, and the result is always spiritually disastrous. You cannot be holier than God. Yes?

[Audience] Talking about the separation of mind and body, it’s interesting that Freud, who was a physician, never once spoke or wrote about his physical illness.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s true. Freud went so far that more than a few of his followers have been faced with very serious physical ailments and have attempted to explain them away in terms of mental problems. It has, in some instances, been very disastrous. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] This consecration here is limited strictly to the tabernacle and the priests.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] I wonder how we get from that to what you were speaking about, the necessity for reconsecration of all of us, of all things. Is that in Christ?

[Rushdoony] No, that was in going to the sanctuary and that was the purpose of the high priestly blessing of the people which we have in Numbers: “Lord bless thee, the Lord make His face to shine upon thee, the Lord be gracious unto thee and grant thee peace.” The whole purpose of that was reconsecration. That’s the meaning of a benediction. That’s the meaning of worship. So, by requiring all males to present themselves to the sanctuary three times a year, that was mandatory, they went there to be reconsecrated, they were to go home and reconsecrate their families, and of course, the annual Day of Atonement, and the observance of that was again, the reconsecration of all. So, reconsecration went from the sanctuary to the priest to the people, through the fathers.

[Audience] Do you know what stands in the way of the priest then? What’s the conduit through which this holiness comes?

[Rushdoony] Today the conduit is not very different. It is still from the sanctuary from the church, and it is still through the heads of households to their children, and to the world around them, to their calling. There has to be a continual reconsecration, and this is why, of course, we have weekly worship. Are there any other questions or comments? If not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, it is good for us to be here. We need thee every hour. We need thee day by day to be refreshed, to be renewed, to be reconsecrated as to thee. Reconsecrate us by thy Spirit, by thy word. Make us whole in Jesus Christ. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.