Playing with fire!

Christian Schonbein was a chemistry professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in the mid-1800's .When Schonbein married, his bride discovered that her husband liked to tinker with chemicals. Sometimes his experiments would fill their home with the stench of rotten eggs or worse. Eventually Mrs. Schonbein said “no more chemical experiments in the house”!

Schonbein promised to abide by his wife’s rules--a promise he didn’t keep. When his wife went out for most of the day, he would sneak bottles of chemicals into the house and conduct experiments--then, after he was done, he would open doors and windows to air the house.

Once, while his wife was out, Schonbein conducted an experiment in the kitchen and accidentally spilled a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids on the tile counter. He grabbed his wife’s cotton apron from a hook, mopped up the spill with it and hung the apron up to dry.

When his wife returned, everything was just as she had left it. Schonbein had erased all evidence of his forbidden experiment. He was elsewhere in the house when he heard his wife scream. He quickly found out why she was screaming: her apron had spontaneously ignited!

When he had mopped up the acid mixture with the cloth apron, Professor Schonbein had accidentally invented a substance now known as nitrocellulose or guncotton--a highly flammable and explosive substance. In disobeying his wife’s wishes, he had invented a new chemical substance.

In the book of Leviticus we meet the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu. Aaron was the very first High Priest, and is an Old Testament picture of Jesus Christ, our Great High Priest. These men joined their father in the priest-hood, and were privileged to, when everything was done as the Lord commanded, experience a manifestation of the presence of God.    
  

Leviticus chapter 9 records an awesome moment for the wandering Hebrews, when God sent fire from heaven which consumed an offering of several animals that had been made as a “sin offering” for the fledgling nation. One can imagine the pride that Aaron must have felt, seeing his sons so intimately involved with such a powerful event… but then his sons decided to do a little bit of experimenting…. “And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it, and put incense on it, and offered strange fire before Jehovah, which He had not commanded them. And there went out fire from Jehovah and devoured them, and they died before Jehovah.” Leviticus 10:1-2 MKJV    

To our way of thinking, this is surely an “over-reaction” by God to the relatively minor sin committed by Nadab and Abihu. We may think, “God is unfair,” or “cruel.” Perhaps Aaron felt this way as he watched Nadab and Abihu die. The Bible doesn’t tell us what strange fire is, but it was clearly not something that God approved of!    

There are other stories in the Old Testament that speak of the swift judgment of God; Miriam, the sister of Aaron, did nothing more than criticize Moses, yet God judged her and struck her with leprosy (Numbers 12). What of Uzzah, who reached out to steady the ark of the covenant as David was returning it to Jerusalem--and for merely touching the ark, he dropped dead (2 Samuel 6). In the New Testament, there is the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who were slain for lying to the Holy Spirit and pretending to be more generous donors than they were (Acts 5).

The sin of these two priests was not committed in ignorance. It was an act of willful presumption. They assumed that they could offer “strange fire” and that God wouldn't notice/care, even though He had said He would. They insisted on their own way instead of God’s way.

There are several lessons to learn from Aaron’s sons’ demise… perhaps the most important is this--Whenever we try to offer God our self-righteousness and our self-will, whenever we stop relying on the life He gives us as a free gift and start relying on our resources, we are offering “strange fire.” And God does not receive “strange fire”--He rejects it instantly.