THE PLAN
Every Monday I will post the reading for the week ahead. It will be about 10 chapters a week. You might want to read a chapter or two a day, and catch up at weekends. If there is a verse that especially spoke to you, a question that you have, or a thought that struck you, please share it with your fellow travellers by making a comment.
5 comments:
Took my cue from 10:10. The Lord is teaching His people the difference between "unclean" and "clean". That's what all the lists of what is clean and what is unclean are about. But why, why, why? Then I hit 11:45. Or rather, it hit me. The Lord called His people out of Egypt to be their God, that they would be like Him, that they would be holy. And in all the lists of clean and unclean the Lord is shaping a people who start to get what holiness means. If you were brought up on those lists, wouldnt you have a very clear sense that life is not about doing whatever you want, but there is right and wrong, there is clean and unclean, there is what everyone else does and there is what the Lord's people are to do. And why does He call us to be unlike all other people? Because He is unlike all other gods. Praise Him.
Just reading chapter 13 about all the skin diseases and cleanness/uncleanness. With the help of Google it made me v grateful for 1 cor 6:11 - you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
Reading Leviticus 13-14… One of the loveliest scenes in the recent film ‘Risen’ comes towards the end where Jesus touches and heals a leper. If anyone else had touched the leper, they would have become ritually unclean i.e. the ritual uncleanliness would have flowed from the leper to the person who touched them. But Jesus is different. When Jesus touches the leper, the direction is reversed; his cleanness flows to the leper.
There seem to be so many things that could make a person unclean!! And so many of them were intrinsic to life. It seems you couldn’t avoid becoming unclean at one time or another. That must have made the people terrified to go anywhere near God. But God makes clear provisions by which they could become clean again, and if they followed those, their uncleanness was only ever temporary and generally short-lived. So, paradoxically, the severe words of these chapters must ultimately have become a source of reassurance and confidence for them, enabling and encouraging their approach rather than deterring it.
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