In a sense, though, Korah was right. All the congregation was holy. Israel, after all, were the people of God, they were all set apart, marked by covenant. Delivered from slavery, led through sea and desert, fed and nurtured in wilderness, they all came to the foot of Sinai, and all were made the people of God. They were made holy by God’s gracious covenant and set apart in their accountability to the law.
But in the truest sense, Korah’s words weren’t right at all because a priest is a priest, and a Levite is a Levite. Here is Paul’s metaphor of the people of God as a body writ large. Korah is like a foot that rages because he is not an eye. Then as now, God had decreed different functions and callings within the covenant community. As people of His presence, who possessed the Tabernacle, Korah and his rebels had failed to learn one of the primary lessons of that tabernacle–all holiness is not equal. Indeed, there is the holy place, but then there is the most holy place.
For this reason, Korah’s rebellion was ultimately against God, not against Moses and Aaron because holiness is ultimately a statement about God, not about us. If holiness means set apart, then we as creatures, wandering and weak, must be set apart. We do not set ourselves apart. We do not declare ourselves to be holy. He who is holy must make us holy. He must set us apart. And if we are in Christ, we are set apart. To strive for position, to look at another’s calling and burn for it is to rage against what God has set us apart to be. Korah and his rebels could swing their censers and chant their prayers but that did not make them priests. They were forever and always Levites.
In our time, we must embrace the times and places God has called us to and set us apart for. It is God who raises up and casts down. It is God who sets the boundaries and hours of our days. And to say with David that the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, is ultimately a statement of faith in the goodness of God more than it is a statement of actual position or actual wealth.
In the economy of grace, whatever we are or whatever we might be never comes from striving. We must remember this–we all nurse the heart of a rebel, a rebel that looks at grace and makes law. In the end, the ground swallowed Korah and his rabble whole. We could see in this simply God’s judgment, or we can see in it the end of all striving in the economy of grace. If we do not embrace our position in Christ, if we do not celebrate not only our redemption, but the place and the time we will all be swallowed whole in our striving.