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The first and most superficial aspect of death is that it is the close of an earthly career. What kind of career was it that was brought to a close when Aaron died? First of all, there could be no question as to its prominence. Aaron shares with Moses, though as a subordinate, the glory of having ruled and shaped the course and conduct of his countrymen at a time of unexampled difficulty, at a time pregnant with the highest consequences to the religious future of the world. But Aaron's place in religious history is more distinctly measured if we consider the great office to which he was called. He was the first of a long line of men who were at the head of what was for ages the only true religion in the world. He was the first high priest of the chosen people. Office, however, and position is one thing; character is another; and, if it is here that we find a great difference between the brothers, we must first of all remind ourselves that Aaron is called in Scripture "the saint of the Lord." He must have had a great background of those high qualities which go to make up the saintly character, if he also had defects which are recorded for our instruction. Aaron was morally a weak man. He had no such grasp of principle as would enable him to hold out against strong pressure. Nor is it inconsistent with this that Aaron could display obstinate self-assertion on inopportune occasions, as when he joined his sister Miriam in murmuring against Moses. This is exactly what weak people do; they give way when true loyalty to duty would teach them to resist, and then, haunted by the notion that they are weak, or at least that the world will think them so, they indulge in some form of spasmodic self-assertion which may remind us of the ungainly efforts that invalids will sometimes make to show that they are not quite so ill as their friends may think them. And now the end had come. Moses and Aaron both knew that Aaron would die. It may have been that some hitherto unsuspected disease had shown itself in the constitution of the old man; it may have been, as has been suggested, that a sand-storm in the Arabah had withered up his decaying vitality. That Aaron would die might have been known from observation, as God often speaks to us through the wonted changes of the world of nature. But Aaron and Moses also knew why Aaron was to die, and why on Mount Hor. If we knew enough, we should all of us know that there is a reason in the Divine mind for the hour at which, as for the means by which, every man and woman departs this life. We all are interested in ascertaining as exactly as we can the physical reason of the death of those relations whom God in His providence removes from our sight; but behind the physical reason there is a moral reason, if we could only know it; and we may say, with confidence, that, in the eyes of God, who is the perfect moral Being, the moral reason accounts for much more than the physical. Sometimes a life is prolonged to do one single piece of work which no other would do as well, and as soon as that work is done, that life is withdrawn. Sometimes a life is cut short because it has forfeited the particular privilege which an extension of some months or even weeks would bring to it, and this was the case of Aaron — "And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in Mount Hor, by the coast of the land of Edom, saying Aaron shall be gathered to his people, for he shall not enter into the land which I have given to the children of Israel because he rebelled against My word at the waters of Meribah." Aaron's share in the sin of Meribah was due to the same want of firmness which, as we have seen, was a feature in his character. The sin of Meribah was, in the first instance, the sin of Moses, when the people murmured at the want of water, and Moses, worried no doubt by their perverseness, in the very act of relieving them betrayed, both by what he said and by what he did, a temper unworthy of his high office, so that he did not sanctify the Lord God in the eyes of the people. As a later Psalmist reflects — "The people angered God at the waters of strife, so that He punished Moses for their sakes, because that they provoked his spirit so that he spake unadvisedly with his lips." As for Aaron, he not only did not check Moses, he acquiesced in what he must have known to be dishonourable to God; and this in a man with his spiritual responsibilities was a grave failure of duty. Much more, Moses bad forfeited that high privilege, but then the work which Moses had to do in the world was not yet done. But Aaron's appointed work was done, and there was no reason for delaying his summons. And here we are led to reflect on a subject which too often escapes notice. Many men, probably the majority of those who do not incur eternal loss, yet do from some flaw in the character, from some warp or weakness in the will, fall, more or less, greatly short of what they might have been, of what natural powers and spiritual endowments and religious and other opportunities might have made them even in this world; and if here, then also hereafter, even if by God's mercy in Christ we reach it, it may be to fill a lower rather than what might have been a higher place, but for some compliance with what conscience condemned, but for some act or some omission which has left upon the soul and the character that lasting impress which survives death. There is much to be noticed in the account of the close of Aaron's life, but nothing is more worthy of our notice than his deliberate preparation for it. He did not let death come on him, he went to meet it. The last scene was as much a matter of duty, a matter of business, as his consecration to the high priesthood Ah I death, surely, is like a mountain-top for the survey which it gives to life, and the deserts through which we have wandered, and the barriers which have checked our progress, and the hopes, bright or dim, which have cheered us on, and the feebleness and the fear of man, and the self-seeking, and the petty vanity (if nothing worse) which have spoiled so much that God meant for Himself, standout in clear outlines above the haze of the distant past. Doubtless it was with Aaron as with any man who retains, along with a conscience that has not been seared, the free exercise of the mind's powers in those last solemn moments which precede the greatest of all changes — doubtless, it was with him as with others upon whom their position and work in life have entailed great responsibility for the real and lasting happiness or misery of their fellow men. At such times the simply conventional no longer satisfies. At such times standards of conduct that are natural to human sanction are seen to be no longer applicable, the mental eye sees through and beyond the phrases which inclination or passion have hitherto interposed between it and the past. It sees the past more nearly, not as self-love has wished it to be, but as it was. At such times the higher a man's place in the government, or the social fabric of the state, or in the hierarchy of the Church, the more sincerely must he breathe the prayer, "If Thou, Lord, shouldest be extreme to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it?" But time was passing. The last moments were now at hand; so Moses, acting, as we know, under Divine instructions, stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his son. There was, no doubt, a two-fold motive in this act of Moses. It showed, first of all, that the office of the high priesthood did not depend on the life of any single man, that God was watching over the religious interests of His people, that His gifts and calling were, as the apostle says, "without repentance, without recall," and that He provides for the due transmission of those spiritual faculties which have been given that they may sustain the higher life of man from age to age. But it also reminded Aaron personally of the solemn truth of the utter solitariness of the soul in death. Not more than any other man can a high priest retain the outward position, the valued symbols, of his great office. He, too, shall carry nothing away with him when he dieth, neither shall his pomp follow him. Death strips us of everything save that which, so far as we know, is by God's appointment strictly indestructible. Our undying personality and that type of character which acts and habits and the use or misuse of the supernatural grace of God have, for good or for evil, wrought into its very texture — this is indeed for ever ours. All else is, like the sacerdotal robes of Aaron, to be abandoned, at the place where, at the moment when, we lie down to die. It was all over. Aaron had closed his eyes, and Moses buried him where at this day a Moslem shrine, constructed out of the ruins of some earlier and finer edifice, still bears his name. It was all over, and like a procession returning from a funeral without the one object which had formed its chiefest interest, Moses and Eleazar, so we are told, came down from the mount. What were their thoughts about Aaron? Where was he now? "Aaron," so runs the phrase of Moses, "was gathered to his people." What does the phrase mean? It is used alike of Moses and Aaron. Does it describe only the interment of their bodies? But in either case their bodies rested at a distance from their people, in a foreign soil. Surely, it points to a world in which the bygone generations of men still live, a world of the existence of which God's ancient people were well assured, though they knew much less of it than we. That world beyond the grave is no doubt presented with different degrees of clearness in the successive ages of Old Testament history. The age of the patriarchs is marked by strong and distinct faith in it. In the days and teaching of Moses it is more kept in the background, probably because the imagination of Israel was still haunted by the imagery of the underworld of the dead, as the Egyptians had conceived of it. In Job and some of the Psalms it is the subject sometimes of anxious discussion, sometimes of strong and undoubting faith. In the prophets it comes prominently forward as the promised Messiah, heralded not merely as an earthly ruler, but as a deliverer from the consequences of sin. In Ezekiel and Daniel we already meet with the resurrection of the body; in the writers after the captivity this doctrine goes hand in hand with a distinct faith in the immortality of the soul. We cannot doubt that, as Moses and Eleazar made their way down the western side of the mount on which Aaron was left, their thoughts were not only or chiefly centred on the tomb which enclosed his body; they followed him into the assembly of the spirits of the dead, they followed him with their sympathies, with their hopes, their prayers, even though around that world on which he had entered there still hung a veil for them which has been, through Christ's mercy, removed for us. The Old Testament is sometimes a foreshadowing of the new, sometimes its foil. If Aaron was stripped of his sacerdotal robes on the eve of his death, Jesus our Lord was never more a priest than when He hung upon His Cross, and offered Himself as a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. If Aaron's dust still lies somewhere among the rocks of Hor, awaiting the summons to judgment, Jesus is indeed risen from the dead, "and become the first fruits of them that slept," nay, He has already, He has here, "brought life and immortality to light" through His gospel, He has taught us that there is a life which through His grace we may live, and the beauty of which our hearts cannot but own, while yet that life does but mock us if it ends at death, if it does not last, if it does not expand, hereafter. Be has shown us how this life may be, if at present it is not ours, and in possessing it we are already and most assuredly "more than conquerors" of death "through Him that loved us."

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: Take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up unto mount Hor:

WEB: Take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up to Mount Hor;