Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 22-23.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

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When I started reading this I struggled with seeing meaning in it for me and other Christians today.  Then I was struck by a phrase that is repeated throughout the passage, “I am the Lord who sanctifies you.”  The first couple of times it says “them” instead of “you”, but the message is the same to me.  That led me to look to the context for those phrases, and each time I saw one of its variants, I saw God commanded the people to not do something so as to not profane that which is holy.  In order to gain meaning from that we need to make sure we understand what the word “holy” means.  So, here is the definition which I found for holy: “Belonging to, derived from, or associated with a divine power.”  As a Christian, the only divine power which I recognize is YHWH (I will usually say God, but for this context I thought it was important to specify).  At the end of chapter 22, the passage reads, “you shall not profane my holy name, that I may be sanctified among the people of Israel. I am the Lord who sanctifies you,  who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the Lord.”  This references the most important holy thing which we should not profane, God’s name.  However, as I read this I realize there is another holy thing which we should not profane, which almost all of the laws were given in order to keep us from profaning.  That things is ourselves, and our fellow human beings.  Each and every human has been made in the image of God.  This means that they are, in principle, holy.  We should treat ourselves, and our fellow human beings as holy.  Jesus died on the cross in order to restore the holiness which we profaned by the sins we have committed.  Jesus died on the cross to sanctify us, and our fellow human beings.  Let us not once more profane ourselves, nor let us profane others by treating them, or viewing them, as less than holy. 

I want to make a note that I have found one thing which the ESV does that I disagree with.  They translate the Hebrew normally translated as “fast” (that is to abstain from food) as “afflict”.  So, in chapter 23 verse 27 it says, “and you shall afflict yourselves” rather than, “and you shall fast”.  Then in verse 29 it says, “For whoever is not afflicted”, rather than, “whoever does not fast”.  I understand that they are trying to reach the deeper meaning of humbling oneself and one’s dependence on God, but I think that this fails to accomplish that.  The fact that in our society we fail to view a fast with the spiritual attitude implied in these verses (and others which refer to fasting) cannot be fixed by using a word which does not include the idea of abstaining.  I want to add, that since most other translations use the English word “fast”, people will probably make the proper connections.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 19-21.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

During my video reading the passage I commented on how verse 21 in chapter 20 was the reason that John the Baptist confronted Herod about Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, according to Mark.

I really like the way this passage is laid out (recording the passage in a video really helped me realize that).  It starts out by telling the people of Israel, and I believe us, to be holy because the Lord our God is holy.  Then throughout the passage it repeats regularly after giving a commandment, “I am the Lord your God.”  This repetition reminds us that we should obey these commands in order to be holy as God is holy.  For me, the centerpiece of the commands to be holy as God is holy starts in chapter 19 verse 9 where God tells the Israelites not to reap their fields right up to edge, nor to gather the gleanings after the harvest.  Those were to be left for the poor or the foreigner temporarily living among them.  This reminds me of a saying I have heard about business today, “Don’t leave money on the table.”  However, this is the opposite of that saying.  This passage says that when we have a successful business, we should “leave money on the table.”  We should not attempt to squeeze every last dime out of our business dealings.  We should leave room for those less fortunate than ourselves to support themselves.  A little further into the passage it says to pay out the wages of a hired worker at the end of the day.  Again, this reminds me of a practice which many companies have adopted where they delay paying invoices  in order to gain a small advantage from interest.  This is another example of “Don’t leave any money on the table.”  Again, God tells us that we should “leave some money on the table.”

What I wrote above is something I have seen for quite a few years in this passage.  The lesson being, do not build your economic success on the economic failure of others.  In fact, use your economic success to leave opportunities for others.  However, there are other lessons here: don’t be partial to the poor and don’t defer to the rich and powerful.  Instead judge righteously.  Another one being: don’t slander others.  Then the one which jumped out at me in verse 17, do not hate your brother…but reason frankly with your neighbor.”  This means listen to what people say about why they believe what they do.  Use reason to explain why you hold a differing viewpoint and allow them to do likewise.  All of these are summed up in in verse 18 of chapter 19, where it says, “but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”  As Jesus tells us in the New Testament, that is the second most important commandment.  That last sentence, “I am the Lord,” contains a reminder of the most important command, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”    This is what it means to be holy as the Lord our God is holy.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 16-18.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

I mentioned in my video recording of me reading this passage that the word Azazel used in this passage is not used anywhere else in the Bible and that it’s meaning is unclear.  Even the etymology of the word is unclear.  The last time I looked into the meaning of the word I found that scholars had no good idea about its Hebrew roots that would explain its presence here.  However, when I looked it up today, I found a reference which suggested that Azazel derives from the Hebrew word for goat, “ez”, and the Hebrew word meaning to go away, “Azal”.  So, by that thinking, azazel would mean “the goat that goes away”.  I would note that at the time when Leviticus was first written down, Hebrew had no method of denoting vowels.  So, perhaps the word was originally “ezazal”.   If this interpretation is correct, the idea behind the goat being sent to Azazel would be that the people of Israel were sending their sins away to never be seen again, that they were distancing themselves from their previous sins.  I like that way of looking at it, because we also should distance ourselves from sin.

This passage also contains the laws concerning sexual practices which God calls abominations.  The passage includes that a man shall not have sex with another man, but it’s almost a throw away.  The way I read this passage, the author seems to think that the other sexual sins it lists before that are more likely to be passed over as “OK”, and they are most definitely NOT OK.  At the end of the passage it says something about the sins it lists here that I do not believe it says about other sins.  It says that the people of the land to which God was leading them practiced these sins and as a result the land vomited them out.  This harkens back to what God told Abram in Genesis 15, where He said that “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”  I also want to note that towards the end of this list of sins which are an abomination to God it mentions sacrificing children.  Sacrificing children is the only non-sexual sin in this list of abominations.  I want to reiterate that this passage says that sexual sins will cause the land to vomit out the people living in it.  Among the sins listed here is that which Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 5, where he says that it was reported to him that a man among them was committing sexual immorality of a kind not even tolerated among the pagans.

In fact, Paul’s prescription in 1 Corinthians is the same as the one here, anyone who practices such abominations shall be cut off from their people (I will note that in 2 Corinthians Paul told them to accept the man back after he stopped committing that sin).  So, here, and in the New Testament, we are to distance ourselves from sin.  Paul carefully points out that the distancing applies to those who identify as being of the people of God.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 14-15.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

I noticed that the cleansing ritual for a person who was cured of leprous disease contained the priest placing some of the blood from the sacrifice on the cleansed person’s right ear, right thumb, and right big toe, then doing the same with some of the oil of the offering.  Which is similar to that done during the ordination of priests.  As I noted when I wrote about the ordination of Aaron and his sons, placing blood and oil on the ear, the thumb, and the big toe has significance.  I am going to express the significance in a slightly different way today from when I covered the ordination.  The right ear here reminds the person who was cleansed to dedicate his ears to listening to the word of God.  The right thumb reminds the person to  dedicate the work of his hands to serving God.  The right big toe reminds the person to dedicate their feet to walking in the path of righteousness which God has shown them.  This reinforces the lesson that we should dedicate ourselves to listening to God’s word, to using our activities to serving Him, and to walking in the path of righteousness on which God guides us.  This is not something just for “special people”, but for everyone.

I am going to do something here I usually refuse to do.  I am going to take a lesson out of the description of what to do with a house which has a “leprous disease” (probably a reference to mold) in its structure that is not intended in the text as I read it.  If there is “disease” in the walls which appears to go deeper than the surface, the priest is to close up the house and wait seven days.  At the end of those seven days, the priest is to examine the house, if the “disease” has not spread, the priest knows that the house is not actually diseased, the thing observed is just discoloration.  However, if the discoloration has spread, the house has a problem and the priest is to remove the stones where the disease is, and scrape off all the plaster, then replace the stones with clean stones and replaster the house.  I am going to say that we should treat ourselves the same way with regards to sin.  If there is sin in our life (if we are like the house when the priest returns to discover that the discoloration has spread) we should cut out the part of us which has the disease and replace it with something clean.  We should take extreme measures to deal with sin in our lives.  If that means giving up friends who encourage us to sin (even if it is only that we find ourselves sinning when we spend time with them), we should cut them out of our lives and replace them with other people with whom we can become friends.  If that means giving up activities which lead us to sin, then we should replace those activities with activities which will not lead us to sin.

And now to tie these two thoughts together.  If we dedicate our ears to listening to God’s word, and our hands to working in service to God, and our feet to walking in the path of righteousness, we will not become once more “unclean” by sinning; we will not need to tear something out of our lives to remove the sin from it.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Leviticus 8-9.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Reading this I realized how much work the initial consecration of the tabernacle and its furnishings with their utensils at the same time as the consecration and ordination of Aaron and his sons must have been.  Moses needed to wash Aaron and his sons, then dress them in the priestly garments.  After that he needed to anoint the tabernacle, all its furnishings and their utensils, Aaron and his sons, and their priestly garments.  That was just the beginning of the day.  Next Moses offered up the bull of the sin offering, followed by the ram of the burnt offering, and finally the ram of ordination.  Only after doing most of this last offering, that of the ram of ordination, were Aaron and his sons able to begin assisting Moses.  I have trouble comprehending just how much work this must have been for one man to accomplish.

On to another point.  For years I have read this passage where it says that as part of the ordination process Moses took some of the blood of the ram of ordination and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear, the thumb of his right hand and the big toe of his right foot, and then did the same thing for each of Aaron’s sons.  I never thought much about that.  It was just a strange ritual that was part of the ordination of priests.  Today, I realized that the symbolism of this was important, but wasn’t sure what it was.  So, I looked it up and I really like the symbolism.  The significance of placing a bit of the blood of the offering on the right ear is that Aaron, and his sons, and the priests who followed after them, need to dedicate themselves to listen to God and pay attention to what He says to them.  The significance of the right thumb is that they need to dedicate their actions to doing God’s will.  Finally, the significance of the big toe is that the priests need to walk in righteousness, need to follow the paths which God guides them on.  We as believers are to be priests before God.  Therefore we should take this ordination process to heart and dedicate ourselves to listening to God’s Word (that which we read in the Bible, that which we hear preached by God’s servants, and that which the Holy Spirit speaks in our hearts), dedicate our actions to serving God with purity and dedication, and dedicate our walk to following the path of righteousness which Christ has revealed to us through His life.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 5-7.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

I always notice right away when I read today’s passage (I notice it right away because it is right there at the beginning) that God tells the Israelites that it is a sin to fail to provide testimony to what you know when there is a public investigation of a matter (assuming that you are aware that the investigation is taking place).  In the past I have glossed over another part of the same set of commands, where God tells us that making a rash oath to do something is a sin.  It does not matter if the oath is to do something evil or to do something good.  God tells us that we commit a sin when we make a rash oath no matter what we promise to do.  In fact, it is just as much of a sin to make a rash oath to do something good as it is to make such an oath to do something evil.  So, we should never commit ourselves to do something with reckless haste.

I fond another thing from this passage interesting.  When it talks about the priests actually offering the grain offerings and the burnt offerings, and that portions of them are intended to be food for the priests, it says that whatever touches the priest’s portion becomes holy.  I think that this is where Paul gets the idea behind what he writes in 1 Corinthians 7 that a believer who has an unbelieving spouse should not divorce them if the unbeliever is willing to continue to live with the believer.  Paul says that the unbelieving spouse will be made holy by the believer.  I think that this passage we are reading today, combined with what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians, gives us insight into the way in which we as believers, who are made holy by our faith in Christ, can make holy the people around us and the places where we live and work.  We can transform them into holy people and holy places.  First, let me touch on how this influences the people around us.  As we live our lives according to the dictates of God, we will see those around us changing their behavior for the better in response to the Holy Spirit’s presence within us.  This does not happen because we are better people than others.  It happens because the Holy Spirit lives within us and is present wherever we go.  And because the Holy Spirit is within us, He makes every place we are holy, transforming it into something which more clearly expresses the holiness of God.

*while there is an element of truth in my title, it is not fully true.  My explanation above is a bit more nuanced than my title.

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