"3 These are the generations of Aaron and Moses at the time when the Lord spoke with Moses on Mount Sinai.2 These are the names of the sons of Aaron: Nadab the firstborn, and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar. 3 These are the names of the sons of Aaron, the anointed priests, whom he ordained to serve as priests. 4 But Nadab and Abihu died before the Lord when they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord in the wilderness of Sinai, and they had no children. So Eleazar and Ithamar served as priests in the lifetime of Aaron their father."
Numbers 3:1-4
James Denney has a notable passage in a sermon on the Temptations of Jesus, entitled 'Wrong Roads to the Kingdom', which underlines this lesson very graphically: 'There is al- ways a tendency in the Church to trust to methods which appeal rather to the senses than to the soul, or which are believed to be reaching the soul though they never get past the senses. How tempting it is to trust such impressions, as though the coming of the kingdom were real- ly secured by them. No doubt such things make an impression and have an influence; but they are not the influence and the impression through which that kingdom of God can come for which Jesus lived and died. How little He had of all that the Churches are tempted to trust in now. How little there is in the gospels about methods and apparatus! .... The trust of the Church in other things is really a distrust of the truth and unwillingness to believe that its power lies in itself, a desire to have something more irresistible than truth to plead truth's cause; and all these are modes of atheism. Sometimes our yielding to this temptation is shown in the apathy which falls upon us when we cannot have the apparatus we crave, sometimes in the complacency in which we clothe ourselves when we get it and it draws a crowd. This is precisely the kind of crowd which Jesus refused to draw. The kingdom of God is not there, nor is it to be brought by such appeals. It is not only a mistake, but also a sin, to trust to attractions for the ear and the eye, and to draw people to the church by the same methods by which they are drawn to places of entertainment. What the evangelist calls 'the word' - the spiritual truth, the message of the Father and of His kingdom - spoken in the Spirit and enforced by the Spirit, told by faith and heard by faith - is our only real resource, and we must not be ashamed of its simplicity.'