This weeks Bible challenge readings start with God striking dead Aaron's sons for offering incense other than in the way that God commanded. It moves on to a whole bunch of rules about what the people of Israel can and can't eat - that form the basis of the Kosher dietary laws that are still used today. It goes from there to lots of rules about dealing with leprousy. And then a whole bunch of rules about not mixing unlike things (crops, fibers etc).
We move into the book of Numbers and get the duties of priests and redeeming a first born son and then dividing up of lands.
Most of these chapters will engender one of two reactions - 1. Yuck!! 2. Huh??. Most of these chapters recount a God that seems very different than the God that we know or rules and practices that make no sense to us today.
One of the things that reading the Old Testament reminds me of is how far God has moved his people over thousands of years. The point of most of these chapters was to outline for the people of Israel what it meant to be God's people - how to be holy (which means set apart for God) and how important it was to be holy.
You see, we don't remember how radical the rules of the God of Israel were for their time. This was an era when most God's demanded human sacrifice for most sins and that the standard response to injury by others was to destroy your enemies and their children and their livestock and everything they owned.
God was moving the people of Israel away from that - a few steps on the road that leads to Jesus and love your neighbor as yourself - but they couldn't go all the way down that road at the time of Leviticus. The thing that is most important to God is that his people are different, and even more importantly are seen to be different. So holiness in all things - even the minor things of life - is the goal and because this is a time of communal life - having unholiness in the community undermines that - so there are strict rules about excluding the unholy from the community.
What would it look like if we strove for our whole lives and everything we did to be set apart for God?
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