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

Today’s passage begins with God repeating His command to worship only Him and not worship idols, images, or objects.  Immediately following this He repeats His command to keep the Sabbath.  These two repeated commands precede what I see as the core of this chapter.   First, God tells the people of Israel, and us, that if they follow His decrees and are careful to obey His commands, He will grant them peace and make them fruitful.  On the other hand, if they, or we, reject His decrees and refuse to follow His commands, He will bring suffering upon us.  How the passage tells us what God will do to those who reject His instruction tells us a lot about why God has given us the commands He has given us.  God says “I will break your stubborn pride.”  Then a little later He says, “If you do not accept my correction,…”  Reading between the lines indicates that God gives us the commands and instructions which He gives us because they are in our best interests.  The good things which God promises to do for us if we obey His commands are the natural consequences of following such a course of action.  The initial punishments which God threatens us with if we fail to follow His commands are designed to turn us from our negative actions before it is too late to avoid the negative consequences of those actions.  If we do God’s will, good things will come to us, because that is the way God made the world to work.  If we reject God’s will, and refuse to follow His instructions, bad things will happen to us, because that is also the result of the way in which the world is designed.  Just as a good parent will punish a child who does things which might cause the child permanent harm before those actions result in permanent harm, so does God punish us, hoping that we will turn from our evil ways before we suffer permanent harm.

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.

As I was reading today’s passage, I was struck by this phrase: “the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.”  Immediately, I though that we should learn from this and remember it as we live our lives in this world.  Everything which we have belongs not to us, but to God.  Wherever we reside in this world we are foreigners and strangers.  Our home is the kingdom of God, not whatever nation of this world we reside in.  While I do not believe we could implement the Year of Jubilee in today’s economies, we learn an important lesson about how we should treat our possessions from it.  Our possessions are not really ours, sooner or later they will return to God to be given to someone else.  In the meantime, we should be willing to give them up in order to serve God, which may be by serving our fellow man.  Part of what made me go there with today’s passage was another phrase in this passage, “Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the Lord your God.”  We should never even consider trying to find a loophole, or a way to twist the rules, in order to get one over on others, in order to advance our own interests at the expense of another.  The lesson of the Sabbath Year and the Year of Jubilee is that God will provide for us and we need not take advantage of others in order to satisfy our needs.  Let us remember that the Lord is our God and use all that He gives into our care to bring honor to His name.

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.

God established seven festivals for the people of Israel.  They were to be celebrated as assemblies.  There were seven events when the people of God were to assemble together in order to worship God.  This tells us that it is important for the people of God to gather for worship and fellowship.  In fact, it tells us that worship cannot be completely separated from fellowship with the people of God.  It is not possible to be a faithful Christian in isolation.  OK, that is an overstatement.  One could be a faithful Christian if one was isolated from other Christians by being thrown in jail, or being stranded somewhere where there are no other Christians, but one cannot be a faithful Christian if one chooses to not fellowship with any other Christians who are in one’s vicinity.  Now when considering the festivals we tend to adopt a few misconceptions about them.  The first misconception is that we think of them as annual events, because we often forget that the first assembly named was the Sabbath, which is weekly.  That tells us that we should meet with at least a few of our fellow people of God on a weekly (or near weekly basis).  We need time spent in fellowship and worship with our fellow believers on a regular basis.  The second misconception is that we tend to think of these assemblies as times of celebration.  This is mostly true, but the Day of Atonement was a somber day of fasting to consider the ways we have fallen short of the holiness to which God has called us.  So, we should get together with other people of God on a regular basis in order to worship God and fellowship with each other.  Most of the time those assemblies should be joyous, but occasionally they should be somber reflections.  In both cases, our focus should be on 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 19-21.

My thought when I read today’s passage was that the rules laid out in this passage were about the first command God gave Moses  in this passage for the Israelites: “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” 

• Respect your father and mother
• Observe the Sabbath
• Do not make metal gods for yourselves
• Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge, but love your neighbor as yourself

All of these are about being holy.  I could list many more of the commands given here which are about being holy, but I think you can read them for yourself.  Later in the passage it says this, “‘Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord, who makes you holy.”  That tells me that God was not telling us that keeping His commands would make us holy, because He made us holy.  Rather, God is telling us that He has made us holy, and as a result we would do these things.  The holiness which God has given to us will lead us to act in this way.  When we find ourselves failing to keep these instructions we realize that we need to turn to God and request that He pour out His Spirit and power to make us 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.

As with the previous several days’ passages, when I began this passage I thought I would have nothing.  However, when I came to the part about the scapegoat, I was reminded of research I did a few years ago because so many people now say “escape goat” instead of “scapegoat”.  When I did that research I discovered two interesting things.  The first is that “scapegoat” does indeed derive from “escape goat”, so substituting “escape goat” for “scapegoat” is not really wrong.  The second is that the word translated as “scapegoat” is “Azazel” (or, as close to that as transliteration of Hebrew allows).  Now the Hebrew word Azazel is not used anywhere else in the Bible, so we don’t really know what it means, or even to what it refers.  I am not a Hebrew scholar, but after reading multiple commentaries on this, it seems that Hebrew allows for several different understandings of the script which would be translated as azazel.  The most common of those understandings would be that it is a name (probably of an individual, but possibly of a place).  The only other place that Hebrew word is used is in ANY ancient manuscript is the Book of Enoch, where it refers to a demon.  The problem with saying that is what it means here is that it appears that the writer of the Book of Enoch was inspired by his understanding of this passage to make that designation, rather than using the word as the name of a demon of which he was otherwise aware.  Nevertheless, it appears that a literal translation of the passage is that one of the goats is chosen for YHWH and the other is chosen for Azazel.  Then the goat chosen for YHWH was to be sacrificed before the Lord as a sin offering.  The goat chosen for Azazel was to be presented alive before the Lord.  Then Aaron, and his successors as high priest, was to lay his hands upon the head of this goat and confess all of Israel’s sins, placing them upon the goat.  The goat was then to be sent into the wilderness to Azazel (or perhaps sent into the wilderness of Azazel).

All of the above set me to thinking about what the commands regarding the scapegoat would mean if we translated the goat we call the scapegoat as being the “goat for Azazel” where Azazel is a proper name.  Dualists (those who believe that there is are two Divine Beings, one good and one evil) would take this as support for their position.  I am not a Dualist.  However, perhaps Azazel was a name for Satan, the Adversary.  Satan is the one who stands before God and tells Him that in order to be a just God He must condemn us for our sin.  Looking at it this way, I see this ritual as the High Priest offering the blood of the first goat to cover the sins, then loading them onto the head of the second goat and sending them to Satan, saying, “These sins have been covered by the blood of the sacrifice.  I am sending them to you as the people of God no longer need to carry them.  They have been forgiven.”  This foreshadows the way in which Jesus covered our sins completely.  In a manner, He covered both roles by offering His blood as the sacrifice while taking our sins upon Himself.  Then going into the country of the dead and delivering those sins unto Satan, to be burned in the eternal fire alongside Satan.

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