Numbers 19:1-4 — And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, This is the ordinance of the law which the Lord hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke. And ye shall give her unto Eleazar the priest, that he may bring her forth without the camp, and one shall slay her before his face: and Eleeazar the priest shall take of her blood with his finger, and sprinkle of her blood directly before the tabernacle of the congregation seven times. 

This is the start of the passage about the mysterious ritual of the red heifer. I wrote about this ritual for purification in January last year. It’s a strange process — a “chok”, a “decree beyond understanding” of which God says, “Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 18:5)

Today, I don’t want to focus on the oddity of the ritual, but on the way it illustrates God’s wonderful attention to detail.

Did you ever wonder about Numbers 19:4? Why does it identify Eleazar as the one to carry out the purification? Isn’t Aaron the High Priest? Well yes, exactly. You see, the ritual involves the touching of the ashes of the heifer — making the officiating priest ritually impure. Having the high priest’s deputy officiate avoided the risk. It’s all in the details …

There are many examples that I could have drawn on to illustrate God’s precise attention to detail. I could start with the very act of creation. I’m really not smart enough to debate this but scientists tell me that there are 50 numbers that have to be be just right — or we just wouldn’t be here! Go find someone smart to explain things like the universal constants (Boltzman’s constant, Planck’s constant, and gravitational constant); the mass of elementary particles (pion rest mass, neutron rest mass, electron rest mass, unit charge, mass-energy relation); and fine structure constants (gravitational, weak interaction, electromagnetic, and strong fine constants). If even one of those numbers — whatever they are — was even slightly different, there would be no creation!

God is not sloppy — and that means we shouldn’t be either! Moses told the Israelites, “Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee.” (Deuteronomy 6:17), and in Psalm 119:4 David prayed “Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts diligently.” — “Commandments, testimonies, statutes, precepts …” These are all words that speak of the precise will of God.  A striking instance of the weight God places on precise obedience is given when Saul was rejected from the kingship for the sin of not following precise instructions before the battle with the Amelekites. Samuel’s rebuke was “And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” (1 Samuel 15:22)

There’s an old saying that “the devil is in the details” … The truth is that God is in the details — in all things and at all times.