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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Leviticus

Okay, I realize that I'm posting things like crazy. I'm sorry if you are trying to keep up and you can't because you are actually doing something right now in your life. For me, my boss called again today and told me I didn't need to come in to work. Therefore, I finished Leviticus. So here are my notes.

The first and most obvious thing about Leviticus is that it is a bunch of laws. Laws that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. Seems boring, right? Not at all! There is so much packed in here that it was awesome to see it all. Right off the bat I noticed the word "atonement," which is basically paying for some wrong you did to make it right. That word shows up 52 times in the 27 chapters of this book. That's pretty repetitive and pretty telling. It's very cool to see how ingrained in the Israelites' minds it was that if they did something wrong, it needed to be payed for. We don't really get that. If we did something wrong, then it must be someone else's fault. We'll sue someone or insurance will pay for it or something, but there's no way I'm paying for it. That was a certainty for them though. Not only was it a certainty that a wrong must be atoned for, but it must be atoned for by a perfect sacrifice. Over and over and over again, God says the animal sacrifice must be without blemish and the grain offering must have no leaven (which Jesus even refers to in a parable, meaning sin- Matthew 16). So they knew from the time they were little that for their sin to be atoned for, they would need a perfect sacrifice. Foreshadowing is so cool!

Another thing that is very cool is this year of Jubilee in chapter 25. Basically, if I understood right, it happens every fifty years, and it is a freeing of everything. All debt is erased; slaves are freed. It says they will proclaim liberty. Something that was in this passage that surprised me was the fear of the Lord. In the context of joy and jubilee it says "you shall fear your God (v. 17)." God equates fearing Him with joy? That was very interesting to me. Fearing God shows up four other times in the book, and then there is an entire chapter that just makes you tremble, but I'll wait to talk about that.

The backbone of the whole thing is still the glory of God and making His Name great. Repeatedly He reminds them that He brought them out of Egypt "in the sight of the nations." He tells them the purpose of the laws: "For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy (Lev. 11:45)." It's obvious. He has made them His people to show the nations His greatness. So He is giving them laws to make His nation like Him. They will see that He is holy, different, set apart. There is a passage in here that makes me cringe and rejoice at the same time. It is God telling the people how to deal with this son of a Israelite woman and Egyptian man who blasphemes God, they say "the Name." All the other punishments have been clean and straightforward. "Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death (Lev. 24:17)." But they go into so much detail on this.

"... and the Israelite woman's son blasphemed the Name, and cursed... Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 'Bring out of the camp the one who cursed, and let all who heard him lat their hands on his head, and let all the congregation stone him. And speak to the people of Israel, saying, Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death."

Wow! God does not take the profaning of His name lightly. I feel like that goes hand in hand with everything He has done to this point being all about His glory in the nations.

Now what everyone knows is coming- more on God's control. Hey, I'm not gonna write it if I don't see it. The problem is I keep seeing it everywhere. There are a few places in Leviticus where it shows that God is controlling what happened. More on how He brought them out of Egypt and how He will give them children or make them barren. Just a few things like that. But it blows up in chapter 26. In this chapter God tell the Israelites what blessings He will give them for obedience to His law and what punishments He will give them for disobeying His law. I'm not going to write the whole thing out because it is ridiculously long. But this is a link to it: Leviticus 26. I'll just list off some of the things He say He will do.
Make it rain so crops grow, make it so they don't get attacked in their land, remove harmful animals from their land, make their enemies fall in front of them (5 chase and defeat 100, 100 chase and defeat 10,000, etc.), make them have more babies, and keep their stored food better for longer.

Those are just some of the things God will do if they follow His law. Now listen to the flip side. He will make them panic, give them diseases that make their eyes rot and hearts ache, keep their crops from growing, give their enemies victory over them, make them flee when no one is chasing them, make the ground hard so they can't harvest it, make wild animals come kill their children and livestock, send an epidemic of diseases to kill them all, make it so they can't bake bread and when they do it won't fill them up, turn them into cannibals so they eat their children!, He Himself will devastate the land, make their hearts faint, make them scared and flee at the sound of a leaf blowing and while running make them trip over each other, and make them rot away in the lands of their enemies.

So yeah, there you have it. If that doesn't convince me that God is in control of what is happening, I don't know what will.

Good stuff in Leviticus. I was a little bored at the beginning, but the atonement kept me interested and then it really got good at the end. A lot packed in there. Any discussion is welcome. I'd like to be able to talk about what I've read and, as always, let this be a challenge to you to read and learn more about who God is from His Word.

To God be the glory,
Mitchell

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