Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 26-27.

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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As I was reading this passage, I had trouble connecting with it until I got to where God warned the Israelites what would happen to them if they abhorred His rules when He said, “Those who hate you shall rule over you.”  This led me to think about the quotes I keep hearing from politicians which imply that they hate the people over whom they govern.  Which led me to think about the things God promised to those who do as He commands, and His promises to those who reject His commands.  He promises that those who walk according to His statutes will have a surplus of food and will live in peace.  While those who will not listen to His commands will suffer disease, famine, and be overrun by their enemies.  Then I look at history and at civilizations which thrive, and civilizations which fall.  When I look at those which thrive, often I see a civilization where the people strive to do God’s will.  Then I look at those which fall, and I see a civilization where people abandoned doing God’s will.  And if I look a little closer at the thriving civilizations, I see people with flaws, people who strive to do God’s will, but have shortcomings and places where they fall short.  If the people look at where they fail to do God’s will and seek to correct their actions, the civilization continues to thrive.  Unfortunately, sometimes people look at the ways in which their forebearers fell short of doing God’s will and blame God for those failings.  Then instead of trying to do what their forebearers got right AND correct where they failed to do God’s will, they reject the idea of being obedient to God.  Since their forebearers were striving to do God’s will, they conclude that their shortcomings were also God’s will and therefore it was their attempt to do God’s will which led them to do wrong.

I wrote all of that, and there are flaws with it because it is difficult to apply the commands God gave for the establishment of the ancient nation of Israel to today.  In fact, the most important part of this is where, after the people have fallen so far from God that He has left them to rot in their enemies lands because of their iniquities, God says that if the people confess their iniquity, humble themselves, and turn back to Him, He will remember His covenant with Jacob.  So, while all of this is directed at the people of ancient Israel, it applies to us today.  If we turn from God, He will bring hardship on us to discipline us, to show us our sins, to try to guide us back to Him.  Those hardships will get worse until we turn back to Him and correct our ways.  Confess your sins to God, humble yourself, and turn back to Him, and He will bless you.

Lord, I confess that I have sinned against you, that I have not disciplined myself to work at doing your will, that I have failed to love you with all of my heart, and all of my mind, and all of my will, and all of my strength.  Pour your Spirit upon me and strengthen my resolve to do better at serving you.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 24-25.

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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As I was reading in this passage where it talks about the punishment for assaulting and injuring someone (“eye for eye, tooth for tooth”) I noticed that it said “You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God.”  Now my first thought, and probably yours, was “the penalty is the same for a foreigner living among you as it is for a native.”  And that is true, but there is another side to this.  The penalty for injuring a foreigner living among them was the same as for injuring a native.  So, we have two sides to this.  You could not inflict a heavier penalty against a foreigner living among you, who did not have people who would stand up for him and protect him from excessive punishment, AND you were subject to the same punishment for injuring that person who did not have people to demand justice for him.  This harkens back to Leviticus 19:15, where it says not to be partial to the poor or defer to the great (rich and powerful) in court, which I wrote about the other day.  The same principle applies here.  The law is the same for everyone.

Then later in today’s passage, while talking about the rules for the year of jubilee, it talks about not taking advantage of the poor among us.  It says that we should help those who have become poor and cannot maintain themselves.  We should not seek to profit from them, but lend them money without interest, and sell them necessities without taking a profit.  Along with that are some complicated rules for slavery which seem to carry on the theme of treating those who are part of the people of God well and caring for them.  We are to remember that they too are servants of God, not of us.  We must be careful not to treat them ruthlessly.  In his letters, Paul can be interpreted as extending the rules for God’s people to all people, since we desire that they accept Christ and thus become adopted into God’s family.

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

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.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

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.