Joshua 13:14, “To the tribe of Levi alone Moses gave no inheritance. The offerings by fire to YHWH God of Israel are their inheritance…”
Joshua 13:33, “But to the tribe of Levi Moses gave no inheritance; YHWH God of Israel is their inheritance…”
Short Thoughts:
In Christ, “YHWH God of Israel” is our inheritance, and we enjoy this inheritance as we feast by faith on the offering of the Son made to the Father in the fires of the Spirit (Hebrews 9:14).
Long Thoughts:
What’s interesting here is to see something of what it actually means for YHWH to be the inheritance of the Levites. Here—and you see this same thing throughout the Pentateuch as well—we see that it means, at least in part, that the offerings made to YHWH (specifically probably the food offerings, Deuteronomy18:1, but it seems tithes etc. are in view as well, Numbers 18:20ff), the offerings made to YHWH are their inheritance. In other words, for the Lord to be one’s inheritance means that what is His—at least in part—is theirs. He brings them into the privileged place of His own fellowship and allows them to eat at His own table, as it were. To feast at YHWH’s table and to have YHWH as an inheritance are mutually entailing concepts, you cannot have or enjoy one apart from the other.
We might say that to be an heir of YHWH is to be feasted on the abundance of His own house and to drink from the river of His own delights (Psalm 36:8). But the Levite’s experience of these things—as with the priestly system as a whole—was only a shadow of the good things to come (Hebrews 10:1). Ultimately the priestly tribe of the Levites points ahead to the priesthood of all God’s people that would be imparted to them by virtue of their union to the True High Priest, Jesus Christ.
As priests of God in Christ, we too share in and feed on the offerings by fire made to the Lord….except the offerings that we feed on are one, namely, the supreme and true offering of Christ Himself, whose death on the cross in the fires of love and wrath was the reality toward which all the “offerings by fire” pointed (Hebrews 10:8-10). Yes, as the Levites fed on the offerings made to YHWH, they were prefiguring the Church of Christ who feeds by faith on that Final Offering, the flesh and blood of the Son of God (John 6:53ff), offered up to the Father through the Spirit (Hebrews 9:14).
In Christ the Levitical privileges of feeding on the sacrifices given to the Lord and of having the Lord Himself as inheritance come together in a single harmony because, in Christ, YHWH God gives Himself to us as our all satisfying inheritance as we feast by faith on the crucified and risen Son. Only when our souls feed on this “Offering by Fire” do we know the One True God as He truly is and receive all that He is for us and so have eternal life (John 6:56-58, 17:3). Ultimately the Feast and the Lord are one and the same realities…..God Himself—the Son—is the Abundance of God’s house, and God Himself—the Spirit—is the River of his delight, and to receive God as inheritance is to come to Him as True Food and True Drink (Isaiah 55:1-3). In Jesus, YHWH God is our inheritance in a way and to a degree that the Levites could never have imagined
