I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I had been using One Year Bible Online, but it was time for a change.

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

    Once a year, the high priest was to conduct a ceremony of cleansing for all of the people of Israel. It is instructive how this was to be done. First, the high priest needed to make two sacrifices for himself. Then he must sacrifice a sin offering for the people. As part of both of these sacrifices he must purify the Most Holy Place and all of the Tabernacle. Once he has done this he places his hands on the head of the scape goat and has it driven into the wilderness. I think the scape goat gives us an interesting metaphor. We need to drive our sins from us. We need to drive them out into the “wilderness”. It is not enough to repent of them. It is not enough to make restitution for them. We must drive them away from ourselves into a “place” where we will not go to retrieve them. In this passage the scape goat was a metaphor, although one which was carried out literally. When I say that we must drive our sins away from ourselves, I am not talking about resurrecting this metaphor (or something similar). I am talking about a psychological process whereby we recognize the damage and danger of our sins and do not make excuses to continue them.

    After describing the yearly ritual for purifying the people of Israel the passage goes on to describe a list of sexual sins that are to be avoided at all costs. I am not going to list the sexual sins listed. I want to note that homosexuality is on that list, as is bestiality. However, those sins are the last ones on the list. I read this and it tells me that there are a lot of sexual sins about which we should be more concerned than homosexuality or bestiality. The point here is that we should be equally concerned about all sexual sins. I think we have a tendency to focus on the sinfulness of those sins to which we are not tempted. When we do that we are getting it exactly backwards. We need to focus on the sinfulness of the sins by which we are tempted.