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3/19 Reading Portions: Exodus 30; John 9; Proverbs 6; Galatians 5
Exodus 30:36
“You shall beat some of it very small, and put part of it before the testimony in the tent of meeting where I shall meet with you. It shall be most holy for you.”
SMALL
Our prayers, it is said in Revelation’s fifth and eighth chapters, rise before the throne of God as smoke from burning incense. David also expresses this:
Let my prayer be counted as incense before You, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice! Psalm 141:2
Here in Exodus, YHVH God gives Moses the recipe for incense— sweet spices of various kinds to be beaten small and blended by the perfumer. Jesus, in His earthly ministry, was the ultimate Incense given as a sweet aroma ascending before the throne of heaven. Christ’s soul was crushed, bruised, pulverized to dust when He suffered God’s wrath as He hung upon Calvary’s tree. Isaiah’s prophesied of Him,
But He was pierced for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; Isaiah 53:5, emphasis added
Again, the Holy Spirit emphasizes through the prophet:
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush Him; He has put Him to grief. Isaiah 53:10, emphasis added
The words “crushed,” and “crush,” are from the Hebrew root דָּכָא (da-KHAW), which means:
“…beat to pieces, break (in pieces), bruise, contrite, crush, destroy, humble, oppress, smite.” Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance
Indeed, this was the wrath of God. Because of Christ’s righteous life imputed to us, because of His holy prayers replacing our weak, pathetic, and often selfish prayers, and because of His perfect, atoning, and fragrant Sacrifice, our prayers, by faith in Jesus’ person and work, are heard of the heavenly Father. In Christ, our prayers are also like holy incense. Taken from the sweet spices of our daily circumstances, sometimes these fragrant odors of our providential blessings are, to us, overwhelming, too powerful for us to endure. These spicy situations, which God works together for good (Rom 8:28), may even sometimes seem to us undesirable. Yet the heavenly Father gives them to us to bring us to a place to commune with Him. In the lives of the heavenly Father’s children, there is nothing small or insignificant. Because the command was given to beat the spices into fine powder, the smallest situation or circumstance in our lives is no inconvenience to our almighty God. Our Father receives every prayer of ours in Christ as a sweet aroma before His throne. His answers to those prayers, whether yes, no, or wait, are always good, holy, and abounding with love and grace. Hallelujah! What a Savior!