Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 3-4.

Having completed the census of the men twenty years and older of the rest of the tribes of Israel, God commanded Moses to take a census of the Levites.  However, this census was to be of the males one month old or older.  Once that was done, God commanded that Moses count all of the firstborn sons of all of Israel.  According to the count there were 22,000 Levite males a month or older and there were 22,273 firstborn males in all of Israel.  Since God had saved the Israelites from the loss of their firstborn in the plague which led to them being able to leave Egypt, He counted the firstborn as His.  He took the Levites as His in place of the firstborn sons.  This is a place where once again the account runs counter to the idea that this was written later.  I would think that if this account was not based on an actual event that the counts of total Levite males and total firstborn males would have matched up exactly to “reveal” God’s great power in so arranging things.  Once arrangements had been made to redeem the firstborn sons of Israel one month old or older who were in excess of the number of Levite males one month old or older, God commanded Moses to count all of the Levite men between the ages of thirty and fifty.  These were the men who would be serving to maintain the tabernacle and its furnishings.  I think this provides us with a model we should seek to emulate.  While we should not exclude those older, or younger, than that thirty to fifty age range, we should seek for the bulk of the work of the Church to be done by those in that age range.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.