Aaron's Leadership- Part 2

I wrote yesterday of one of Aaron's glaring weaknesses, but today's post highlights one of his finest moments. In Numbers 15-16, some rogue groups are rebelling and beginning to take people with them. God responds with a plague that is wiping out thousands, but God also provides instruction for how to stop this devastating plague. And in Numbers 16:48, this is written of Aaron:

he took his stand between the dead and the living, so that the plague was checked.

This for me is such a profound statement. I know that it describes literally what Aaron did- by taking his censer with the incense on it, he literally prevented the plague from continuing. But I can’t help but make the connection between this event and what I am reading in The Hole in our Gospel. Years ago, the big buzz word, coined by Promise Keepers, was ‘stand in the gap’. But this image of standing between the dead and the living is also a moving image- of literally standing between life and death and preventing the spread of death. And reading a book on poverty and how preventable some of these things that are causing 26,000 people to die each day is quite sobering. The author paints the picture of 100 jets crashing each day- that’d cause quite an uproar. And yet the equivalent of that die each day and we sit on the sidelines and do nothing. Or at least I do. So I am challenged and moved by the actions of Aaron to stand between the dead and the living and to check the plague.