Leviticus 15-18 Not Just Old Laws

This was new stuff the Israelites were hearing.  God was creating a people to call His own, vastly different from the people of Egypt where they’d been living and from the people of Canaan where they were headed.  Both of these peoples had elevated personal pleasure to a religion and in the process they’d begun to make their own gods.

I thought about what it would have been like to hear this for the first time, especially after seeing how God had taken the lives of Aaron’s sons – men who might have one day become high priests.  There’d be no doubt that He was serious about all this and powerful enough to carry out any promise He’d made for disobedience.  Suddenly, an individual’s private actions begin to impact those around him, and he has a duty to self-disclose his own uncleanness in order to protect those near to him not just from that uncleanness, but particularly from what God might do to them for being made unclean from that individual and not even knowing it.  That elevates confession to a whole other level!

My sidebar picked up on a very important concept related to this:

“The strongest protection a marriage can have … is in the attitude of the partners towards the marriage and toward each other.  No one – absolutely no one, male or female – who has vowed faithfulness to another human deserves sexual satisfaction outside the marriage bond.  Yet self-centered people have justified their sin by the premise that sexual satisfaction is somehow their right – because God made them this way and they can’t help it … But in fact, the marriage vow subordinates one’s individual satisfactions in all areas to one’ marital partner – declaring publicly that sex is less important than one’s spouse, less important than the health of the relationship.  Sexual satisfaction is no longer a right, but a blessing, a gift of the relationship to its partners … He who worships anything of himself is a candidate for extra-marital sex.  His marriage is vulnerable.  His desires have become his PRIVILEGES.  So long as he is his own god, he feels himself free to obey nothing and no one but himself.”

God’s partnership with the people of Israel was like a marriage and He demanded and deserved absolute faithfulness in return for all His blessings.  Through all of these rules, He was transforming His people from selfish self-worshipers into people who would subordinate their own desires to their love for HIM.  These aren’t old don’t-apply-to-non-Jews rules.  They are basic to our own accountability to God for those times when we are tempted to put ourselves ahead of Him.  We have to come to a point where we throw out the thought that we deserve privileges, and instead see how freely and undeservedly God blesses us instead.

Father, feelings of entitlement don’t come from You.  Help me to immediately cut off thoughts that I feel entitled to allow myself to thing.  They can’t be from You.  Instead, make me keenly aware, as You did here for the Israelites, of how my own uncleanness affects those around me, and how it impacts my ability to worship and to serve You.

Your Brother In Christ,

Gary Ford