Sixty Days: Day Fifteen

Yesterday's Reading:

• Leviticus 8-15
• Psalm 53-56
• Isaiah 53-56
• Matthew 25-26
• 2 Corinthians 1-2

Reading Time:  60 minutes

Today's Reading:

• Leviticus 16-22
• Psalm 57-60
• Isaiah 57-60
• Matthew 27-28
• 2 Corinthians 3-5

Reading Time:  1 hour 10 minutes

Leviticus has a lot of rules.  The Psalmist talked about his enemies quite a bit.  Isaiah often preached hard messages to a careless people, but he usually followed them with messages of hope.  That hope is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and keeps us going through hard times.

That's a summary of today's 20 chapter jaunt through the Scriptures, but my mind is drawn back to Moses, and all those rules and regulations and instructions and laws and commandments and requirements.  I'm thankful for the Gospel which assures me Jesus not only fulfilled the righteous requirements of the law, He paid the price for my punishment with his own precious life.  But I wonder, why did God feel it was necessary to lay down all those laws in the first place?

Why was God concerned about the thread content of our clothing, or whether or not we planted two crops in the same field, or why does it matter if we kill a cow and her calf on the same day, or cook a goat in its mother's milk?  Why didn't he want the hair at our temples cut, or the corners of our beards trimmed?  I'd be out of luck on that last one anyway, since I cannot grow even decent whiskers.  My five o'clock shadow is four days late.  I can understand the moral laws.  I can even see why the dietary and cleanliness laws were necessary.  But I'm uncertain how a cotton-polyester blend is offensive to God.

Then I realize, it was never about the mixed threads or the mixed crops.  It was about divided hearts.  God wants our whole heart, undivided, undistracted, unobstructed in following Him.  The rules are not necessarily about the things ruled.  They were about our obedience.  Will you obey the Lord, even when you don't have the answer to WHY He requires it?

We are a liberty-loving people.  Come and take it!  Don't tread on me!  Give me liberty or give me death!  Tomorrow is even the anniversary of the writing of the Star Spangled Banner, a national anthem written about a flag that was defiantly still there.  And we don't like a lot of rules infringing on our person or our privacy.  Seat belt laws.  Smoking laws.  Speeding laws.  Soda pop laws.  Who does Bloomberg think he is, anyway?

But God had a reason for laying down the Levitical Law.  It was about keeping His people separate from those who didn't serve Him.  It was about protecting them and defending them against the lawless incursions of heathen society.  It was about preserving them against the moral decay of culture and civilization.  It was about reserving a people for Himself--holy, blameless, and yes, obedient.

Even with all the regulations regarding sacrifice, we are repeatedly told throughout Scripture that our obedience is more important than our gift.  Our heart is what God wants, and He wants it to be a heart that follows Him.