Introducing Deuteronomy

            The word “Deuteronomy” means “second law,” so the title of the book gives us some sense of what we’re in for.  We can expect three things in this book.  First, there will be some recapitulation of the specific laws that Israel is supposed to follow (especially in the middle of the book).  The second and third things we can expect are related to the fact that Deuteronomy takes the form of an extended pep talk, as Moses prepares to hand leadership over to Joshua and to steel Israel for the coming task of conquest.  So, the second thing we can expect in Deuteronomy is a review of Israel’s recent history, especially in their interactions with the Lord.  (That’s what we see in ch. 1, our reading for today.)  However, the third thing we see is that this retelling of their history is not just for historical knowledge but to motivate them to obedience and faithfulness to the covenant the Lord made with them.  For these reasons, we’ll see that the book of Deuteronomy is a bit more pointed in its presentation than we have seen.  So, let's try not to read it as, "Here we go again."  Let's try to read more as, "Let's get going!"

Settling

            Reuben and Gad were ready to settle.  They saw the land on the east side of the Jordan, observed that it fit their needs very well, and were ready to stake a claim.  Moses sees it as an act of rebellion:  it’s just this refusal to fight that caused the 40 years in the wilderness!  A compromise is struck, and the fighting men of God and Reuben will fight alongside their brothers, but they will take as their inheritance the land across the Jordan.

            Seems to me that there’s a bit of connection to Christians and the Church.   Too often, we have a hard time thinking past our own interests.  You see it in discussions over worship:  I like this style, I like that style, I’ll stake my claim here, and you all do what you want.  You see it in a sort of Sunday only attachment:  “As long as my spiritual needs are met, I guess I don’t have any responsibilities to the Body beyond that.”  You can probably come up with other examples, but it’s late and I’m tired.

            Of course, thinking only of one’s own needs undermines the unity with which the Lord has knit us together in the Body of Christ.  It’s the kind of misalignment that can really damage what the Lord has in mind for His people.  The letter to the Ephesians is a sort of manifesto on Christian unity and in it we are brought to together and called to build each other up in word and deed.  Can’t hardly do that if you’re content to have your own needs served! 

            Israel was called to be a people who all together showed forth the power of the Lord and who all together demonstrated a national life that testified of their oneness in Him.  The Church bears a similar call.  True, we’re stripped of the national aspects, so we don’t have to conquer lands militarily.  Nor are we bound by the Mosaic laws.  But we are called to be a people who through our love and our oneness demonstrate what it means to be made in the image of a loving, forgiving God.

            So, even if we have found a land that suits us, let us never lose sight of the greater people to whom we belong and to whom we are called to live in support and service.

Structuring Time

            Once again, we have a listing of Israel’s ordinary worship:  daily sacrifices, Sabbath (weekly) sacrifices, and annual festivals.  (We’ve seen this before!)  I think there’s an important lesson here, namely, humans thrive on structure and order.  Now, obviously, a person who is too structured, too rigid, isn’t healthy, but maybe we don’t think often enough about the fact that a person who is too unstructured isn’t healthy, either.  With our children, we’ve practiced it this way:  there is a usual, expected pattern—bedtimes and waking times are regular, meals are at about the same times, there’s a pattern for homework and for evening routines.  Within that usual, expected pattern, we can make exceptions as circumstances arise.

            We observe the same phenomenon in Israel’s worship and we see it arise very quickly in the early church.  Acts 2:46 tells us that the earliest Christians gathered everyday in the temple and presumably in homes, too.  In the first generation, they were setting aside the first day of the week as their special day of worship (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10).  By the mid-2^nd century, Melito of Sardis is able to talk about an annual celebration of Easter that is a well-established custom already.

            We all mark time.  Financial sorts are dominated by quarters and fiscal years and tax seasons; parental sorts are often driven by school calendars.  I’d like to just suggest today that we should make a little more of an effort to have our lives structured around the church calendar.  It’s no biblical command, that’s for sure.  But letting the rhythm of our weeks flow into and out of Sunday might change the way we see ourselves, and taking seriously the rhythm and flow of the church’s calendar, flowing into and out of Easter, might also have that same sense.  (It’s one of the reasons I have tried to tie several elements of our new Faith Crossroads children’s ministry to elements of the Church Year—for instance, first communion at the outset of Holy Week, so the newly communing can partake at the height of our year.)

            Here’s a challenge for you:  if Lenten midweek services or Holy Week services aren’t part of your customary practice, let this be the year you make them part of it.  Ash Wednesday is just two weeks from today; Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter are in the offing.  What a great time to let your time be structured around the celebration of the central facts of your faith!

New Numbers/New Leader

            As the people of Israel complete their 40 years in the wilderness, the Lord plans for their impending conquest of Canaan.  In today’s reading, Numbers 26-27, He first orders a new census of the fighting men.  Lutheran Study Bible has this note regarding the census:

In the following list, the numbers in parentheses are from ch. 1, allowing easy comparison of the change Israel experienced during the wilderness wanderings.  Reuben, 43,700 (46,500); Simeon, 22,200 (59,300); Gad, 40,500 (45,650); Judah, 76,500 (74,600); Issachar, 64,300 (54,400); Zebulun, 60,500 (57,400); Manasseh, 52,700 (32,200); Ephraim 32,500 (40,500); Benjamin, 45,600 (35,400); Dan/Shuham, 64,400 (62,700); Asher, 53,400 (41,500); Naphtali, 45,400 (53,400); all of Israel, 601,730 (603,550).  Despite living in the wilderness and the experience of several plagues (chs. 11; 14; 16; 25), Israel’s population had dropped only 0.3 percent.  However, the tribe of Simeon suffered great loss, 63.5 percent of their male population.  This was likely due to persistent unfaithfulness, as specifically described in the idolatry of Baal of Peor (25:4).  The tribe of Ephraim suffered greate losss (19.8 percent), but their brother-tribe, Manasseh, experienced the greatest growth (64 percent).  Judah remained the strongest tribe.

Attentive readers will remember that Judah was the son of Jacob who received the birthright and the blessing, so it makes sense that they would be the strongest tribe.

            Interestingly enough, the reason for the new census is for the impending distribution of land, not for purposes of military conquest.  Israel’s strength is irrelevant as long as she is doing the Lord’s bidding; as long as she does the Lord’s bidding, He provides the military victory.  Also interesting is the fact that, in a hugely patriarchal world, daughters are given a chance to receive inheritance.  (How much impact this had in terms of the real, day-to-day life of Israel can be debated; you don’t give up on patriarchy all at once!)

            Finally, we see God’s judgment on Moses reaffirmed:  he will not enter the land of promise because he ‘failed to uphold the Lord as holy’ at the waters of Meribah.  However, the Lord continues to provide for Israel’s leadership, and Joshua is designated heir-apparent in the presence of the priest and of the whole congregation.  Given Israel’s checkered history with honoring their leaders, there’s no need to take chances about Joshua’s credentials.  (On a tangent, that’s one of the reasons that Lutherans emphasize ordination for their pastors.  That kind of leadership is not exercised in private, nor does a private call qualify one for the office.  The office is public, therefore the declaration of election to that office is public.)

The Curious Case of Balaam

            A long, powerful, bewildering reading today!  Balak, king of Moab, is frightened of the sheer magnitude of the people of Israel.  He fears he can’t defeat such a horde militarily and summons a mysterious—what?  a shaman?  a prophet? a diviner?—Balaam’s never really described.  Balaam, though, consults with the Lord, the God of Israel.  Apparently Balaam has at least some knowledge of Israelite religion, but he seems to communicate with the Lord in ways unlike Moses—through divination and augury.  At first, the Lord tells him not to go; then, the Lord allows him to go.

            There’s the first question this reading raises.  If the Lord allowed him to go, why did the angel of the Lord block his path and threaten to kill him?  We have to read between the lines here, but it seems as if the Lord is testing Balaam to see if he will do what is right and good.  After all, the Lord has already told him not to go.  But when Balak’s messengers come a second time, Balaam sure seems to want to go with them.  Balak’s offering good money!  That seems to be a theme throughout the readin:  Balaam really wants the payday!  Why else would he go with Balak’s men and why else would he attempt to curse them three times?  I suppose a decent analogy might be a parent who tells his child, “Here’s what I really want you to do.  But you choose if you’ll honor that.”

            Lutherans put it this way:  God doesn’t tempt us to go evil, but He may test us to see whether we’ll choose the good.  That can get pretty complicated as we try to sort through how the failure to do good can often lead us to choose evil.  But it seems to be the case with Balaam.

            A second bewilderment is the repeated relocation of Balaam to try the cursing again.  By my count, they made 21 altars at three separate sites.  Why?  Lutheran Study Bible suggests that Balak thinks Balaam is intimidated by the sheer magnitude of Israel, so in the second instance, Balak insists, “You’ll only see a small portion of them,” and in the third instance, Balaam looks toward the wilderness, perhaps not looking at Israel at all.  That may be the case.  I suspect that part of the story is that ancients conceived of deities as localized.  So, by moving Balaam around, Balak is hoping to move him outside of the Lord’s circle of influence—close enough to pronounce a curse, far enough away to not be influenced by Israel’s God.  Neither Balak nor Balaam seem to know whom they are dealing with!

            A third thing that bears commenting is the content of Balaam’s eventual oracles, especially the third one.  Considering how much trouble Israel has given the Lord up to this point in the story, it’s a little surprising to hear how Balaam describes Israel.  He notes that he is seeing things as the Almighty sees them, and he describes Israel as lovely, prosperous, and powerful.  We read Numbers, and we see in Israel a stiff-necked people.  The Lord looks at Israel and sees a stiff-necked people whom He continues to delight in!

            It’s good to know that the Lord can see us both as we really are—sinful, stiff-necked, broken beings—and as He has declared us to be in Christ—forgiven, restored sons and daughters.

God is No Pragmatist

Numbers 20 often befuddles us.  After all, the story is pretty straightforward:  Israel needs water, God provides water.  All that Moses does is to strike a rock instead of speak to it, and for that he is told that he will never enter the Promised Land.  I don't know about you, but to me that seems a little out of proportion.

Several things present themselves to help me get my head around the incident.  Let me just ponder the most important one: Moses is Israel's leader, and leaders are always held to a higher standard.  That's the responsibility of leadership.  After all, if a person wants the ability to influence people for good, they need to be aware of how easy it is for them to influence them for ill, too.  Leaders, by the nature of their position, can set good or bad examples, with consequences far beyond their apparent meaning.

Here's an example.  I grow up in the shadow of Nixon's Watergate scandal.  Now, on the surface, it's kind of small potatoes:  a bothced break-in and a badly conceived lie.  But the ramifications have been enormous--the hastening of an entire era of lost confidence in institutions and authority.  (I'm not saying Watergate is the only event that undermined our confidence, but it surely helped that loss of confidence get rolling.)  How do a minor crime and a lie have that kind of impact?  When they're perpetuated by the leader of the free world!  If the President does that sort of thing, it sets an example for lesser government officials and for all sorts of people in power that power can be used for personal benefit.

Anyhow,  leaders--in the world and in the church--are held to higher standards, and this is especially true in Moses' case.  If God's favorite can so casually disregard His Word, surely everyone else can, too!  So, parents, bosses, pastors--everyone in authority ought to recognize that they wield that authority to lead on God's behalf, and with that responsibility comes responsibility.

Honor Your Leaders

            Numbers 16-17 remind us that bad times and bad news often create crises of leadership.  After all, Hosni Mubarak managed to rule for 30 years, but food shortages and inflation finally created conditions in which his leadership couldn’t be sustained.  I follow any number of friends in Wisconsin on Facebook, and many of them are up in arms about Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposals:  lost tax revenue means lost services and benefits and people don’t want to take that lying down.  (I suspect we’ll see the same sort of things around here in the next week or so when Gov. Snyder presents his budget.)

            I don’t have a horse in any of those political examples, I’m just trying to point out that bad times lead to shaken confidence, especially in leaders.  Now, Israel had had a bad run.  Tired of their time in the desert, in the cusp of entering the land the Lord had promised, they found themselves heading back to the wilderness.  Now, we know that they were heading back into the wilderness because of their own problems—complaining, lack of faith, etc.  But Korah managed to cast it in terms of Moses’ poor leadership:  “Who are you?”  The Lord answers that question with an earthquake and fire, but still the people grumbled and blamed Moses for the disaster.

            What ought we learn here?  First, we might learn to take Jesus’ advice and look at the log in our own eyes before removing splinters from someone else’s.  Korah (and a great number of Israelites) should have considered that the reason they were heading into the wilderness was their own failure to honor the Lord by going into Canaan.  Second, we might learn to look take a more honest appraisal of ourselves:  did Korah really think he could have brought about a different result than Moses?  I find that it’s much easier to criticize and complain than it is to offer solutions that work.  (I don’t like how the cost of health care has risen over the last 15 years, but, as a matter of honest appraisal, I have no idea how to fix it.)  Finally, this kind of reading might make us consider the ways that the Lord has told us to honor our leaders—whether secular (Rom. 13; 1 Pet. 2) or spiritual (1 Tim. 5).

All Too Human

            One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Lionel Blue, a reform rabbi and a British broadcaster.  He said, “An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, ‘We Jews are just ordinary human beings.  Only a bit more so!’”  I like it because Israel was called to be a representative race; they were to model what lives in the image of God should look like.  And, boy, did they ever!  Called to be the Lord’s unique people, they were often human in a much-too-Adam kind of way.

            So, here they are, the recipients of God’s promises, delivered from Egypt, led through the Red Sea, confronted by the Lord on Sinai, named His holy people, granted a great deal of instruction about what it meant to be His holy people, living around the Tabernacle—in which their God graciously stooped to dwell.  And that’s all within 18 months!  Now, they send scouts into the land this God had promised, and the spies say, “It’s nice, but we can’t afford it.”  Imagine a rich uncle who says, “I’m going to give you a house.  I’ve picked out a nice 4,500 square foot one for you, and it has everything your family could ever want in a house.”  Would you say, “Sorry, I don’t think you can afford the house you promised”?  I don’t think so.  I think you’d take the house and say thank you.

            Not Israel!  They don’t think that the God who drowned the army of Pharaoh in the Red Sea can evict a few troublesome Canaanites.  No wonder God is so ticked off!  It’s not like He did His mighty acts of salvation so long ago.

            So, here we have Israel behaving just like the rest of fallen humanity—only a bit more so.  They can’t quite commit themselves to the Lord and His ways—just like Adam and Eve couldn’t, just like the generation of Babel couldn’t, just like we often can’t.

            Then, they do the natural thing (humanly speaking).  They decide to get it for themselves.  How human is that!  We don’t believe that God can get it done, but we believe that we can.  No wonder we seem to spend so much time ‘in the wilderness.’  It’s in the wildernesses of life that we finally give up on getting stuff done for ourselves and learn what it means to rely on the promises that God has made us, promises that find their focus in Jesus, who is everything Adam was supposed to have been, who is everything Israel was supposed have been, who alone demonstrates a heart living completely on the promises of God.

Sharing the Burden

            I’m old enough to remember the administrations of five U. S. presidents.  Reagan was, of course, the oldest man ever elected to the Presidency (he was just shy of 70 when he began his first term).  Everyone knew he was old; he even promised not to use Mondale’s youth and inexperience against him.  Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, however, were not quite as old when they took office:  Bush 41 was 64, Clinton was 46, Bush 43 was 54, and Obama was 47.  Ok, so I know some history.  What’s the point?  Did you ever notice how much these men aged in office?  Do an internet search—before and after—the office took a toll!

            Moses knew something about the burden of leadership.  “These aren’t my children,” he fairly shouts.  “I didn’t conceive them, and I can’t be responsible for them.  You do something with them!”  You can understand the frustration:  according Numbers 9, they were only about a year out of Egypt.  So far, there had been griping about water and food (Exodus 15-16), cowardice at the foot of Sinai (Ex. 19), idolatry (Ex. 32), and the loss of two of the first five priests for writing their own rituals (Lev. 10).  Add to that the daily burden of administering a truckload of people, and you have a leader who is heading for a breakdown.

            This is not the first time Moses has flirted with burnout.  At the start of this little adventure, Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, had told him that he needed help (Exodus 18:13-26), and it says that Moses set up a system to adjudicate cases.  However, here, a little more than a year later, Moses needs the same advice.  The Lord places His Spirit on 70 elders of Israel.  It’s as if the Lord is saying, “Look, I placed you in charge, but you don’t have to do everything.  I can give the gift of my Spirit to whomever I want.”

            There’s lots to see here, and one of those things is that leaders too often carry their burdens all alone.  Moses certainly did!  He didn’t share his burdens with anyone else and He forgot that the burdens were already the Lord’s.

            It’s not just leaders, either.  Most of us forget that the burdens are the Lord’s:  He is the one who has promised to work them all out for our good (Romans 8:28).  Perhaps we should from Moses the importance of turning our troubles over to the Lord—especially those things that are simply beyond our control.  And many of us don’t do a very good job of sharing our burdens with Christian friends.  I don’t know quite where it came from, but American Christians at least sure seem to have bought into a myth of ultimate self-sufficiency.  (I can’t tell you how many times over my ministry I’ve visited a sick person who’s having a hard time accepting help.  They explain themselves with a shrug of the shoulders and the statement, “I’m the one who helps others; I guess I’m just not very good at taking help.”)  What unnecessary burdens we bear!

            Moses needed to learn to trust the Lord and to trust others to help him.  Many of us could learn those same lessons—before we become like an American president, old and worn before our time!

How Does God Guide?

            I notice two things in Numbers 10.  First, I couldn’t help but be a little jealous of the clarity that Israel seems to have had.  After all, where the cloud of the glory settles, that’s where you go and set up camp.

            I’d love to have that kind of guidance!  What I seem to get is a struggle to choose wisely based on advice of Christian friends and the principles that can be discerned in the Scriptures.  (Even then, notice that little word ‘discern’!  Sometimes the Scriptures themselves don’t seem all that helpful.)  How do we make God-pleasing choices when we are confronted by an uncharted future, no clear path, and two or more possibilities each of which could be understood in some ways as God-pleasing and in other ways as not-so-God pleasing.

            There are lots of decisions like that:  live and work here or there?  This school or that one?  Keep on with this activity or try something new?  An example from my own life is when I have had to consider Calls to other churches.  On the one hand, it’s God’s call.  Going would certainly be God-pleasing.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a test and the Lord actually values faithfulness and perseverance over newness.  I can find Bible passages to support both sides.  And maybe what I think is God’s leading to try something new is really just a desire for a new field because I want to get away from past mistakes or to undo parts of my history that will influence me no matter where I go.

            Oh, to have the cloud of the glory leading me to just where I need to go!

            However, at the end of Numbers 10, there’s an odd little story.  The camp is on the march and we find out that Hobab, Moses’ brother-in-law has been staying with them.  (Remember Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, had joined them in Exodus 18.)  Hobab decides that this would be  good time to return to his own affairs and Moses begs him to stay with them, telling him, “You know where we should camp in the wilderness” (10:31).

            Well, perhaps things aren’t so clear for Israel as we thought!  Yes, the cloud of the glory is leading them, but they still need the help of a wise and experienced friend to get them to the specifics of a site.  It seems to me that part of the wisdom the Lord calls us to is the wisdom to recognize the general directions He leads us in, to embrace His guiding presence in Word and Sacrament, and to seek the counsel of wise friends who might know more about the lay of the land than we do.  The Scriptures do provide guidance, but it’s not a ‘do-this, not-that’ kind of guidance so much as a ‘I-value-this-sort-of-character’ guidance.  We have the assurance of God’s presence in His Word and Sacrament, even when we are struggling with decisions.  And it’s good to remember that serious decisions are often best made in community, since our decisions often affect others and since the Lord often offers His guidance under the guise of Christian friends.

Downright Neanderthal or Downright Liberal?

            Leviticus 24:17-23 and Numbers 5:11-31 seem really harsh, even unjust.  In the first passage, we have the famous ‘eye for an eye’ passage.  What did one wag say?  “If we trade and eye for an eye, we’ll all go through life half-blind.”  It just seems kind of primitive.  If ‘an eye for an eye’ seems kind of primitive, Numbers 5 seems downright Neanderthal!  A woman is to be hauled before the priest if a ‘spirit of jealousy’ overcomes a husband and he suspects her of adultery.  Wow!  What about him?  What if he’s just a suspicious jerk?  What if she suspects him of adultery?  And the prescribed ritual smacks of the Salem witch trials. . .

            So, what shall we do with this kind of thing?  Here’s a case where we must be sensitive to the original historical context.  If modern ears hear ‘an eye for an eye’ as ridiculously vengeful, we have to re-tune those ears to the ancient Near East.  The ‘eye for an eye’ regulation in its original paragraph and in its original setting is a limitation on the amount of retribution that can be collected.  So, if you punch me in the eye, the Lord will allow me to punch you in the eye.  But I can’t gouge out both of your eyes, no matter how angry I am.  The original intention is to protect the guilty party from overly harsh punishment.  (Notice, too, that this regulation is for Israel under Moses’ covenant.  It might be good advice for all sorts of governments, but it’s specific to Israel as a nation.  In the New Testament, Jesus overturns it, Matthew 5:38ff.)

            The same thing is true with Moses’ regulation about divorce and testing for adultery.  In an oppressively patriarchal world, a man can’t just have his wife stoned (Lev. 20) on a whim—at least not in Israel.  In Israel there had to be proof of sin.  So, short of catching her in flagrante delicto, he had to go through a whole process to prove her faithlessness.  The system discouraged false or casual accusations.  So, while it seems unjust to us, in its context, this regulation is almost liberal in its provision for and protection of a woman from the whims of her husband.

The Numbers of Numbers

            I spent way too much time this morning sorting through the various ways that people understand the number in Numbers.  Some argue for a literal numbering, that is, that Israel at Sinai had around 600,000 fighting men and a total population of some 2 million people.  Others say that the word of ‘1,000’ ought to be taken as a ‘military unit’ with the result that Israel numbered between 20,000 and 100,000 fighting men and maybe 400,000 total people.

            There’s no one explanation that will make everyone happy.  Fortunately, it seems to me that the question is finally beside the point.  As I read Numbers 1, there are two underlying themes.  First, no matter of if Israel numbers 2 million or ‘just’ 400,000, the Lord is clearly providing—miraculously—for a lot of people.  (For comparison’s sake, Tulsa, OK, has a population of about 400,000 and Houston, TX, has a population of about 2.2 million.)

            Second, this is a census of fighting men.  Notice that the total population is speculation; only the men above 20 who are able to go to war are counted.  Notice also that Numbers opens at the end of the encampment at Sinai.  Israel has been at Sinai 11 months, and now they are beginning preparations to journey to and enter the land that the Lord had promised them.  Numbers is the story of the journey to that land, the refusal to receive what the Lord had offered, and the delay and judgment that refusal brought.

            The overall lesson, then, seems to be along these lines:  1) Israel had sufficient strength for the task at hand.  2) Moreover, she had evidence of the Lord’s provision and His promise to enter the land on their behalf.  3) Unfortunately, either of those facts was able to overcome Israel’s doubt and disbelief.

            How about you?  Are you underestimating how the Lord has equipped you for the tasks of the day?  Are you embracing His promises, made certain in Jesus’ death and resurrection, so that you have the confidence to follow Him wherever He leads?

Distinguishing the Particular and the General

            We’ll encounter this same difficulty in Deuteronomy, but Leviticus 26 is one of those chapters that can really be warped as we try to move from text to application.  Simply put, these words of blessing and of punishment are spoken to Israel, as part of the Mosaic covenant; we are not part of Israel, under the Mosaic covenant.

            This means that we cannot read them in terms of works-righteousness.  That is a serious temptation when we’re dealing with ‘if-then’ language.  It takes very little imagination to go from “If you walk in my statutes . . .” to “God’s blessings—including redemption and everlasting life depend on my obedience.”  The New Testament completely disallows that kind of thinking for the child of God.

            Perhaps a greater, more insidious, temptation is to try to apply these words to the conditions in the world today.  We hear it often enough, “If our country just returned to God, then good things would follow.”  But, look, these words are specific to Israel, as part of the Mosaic covenant.  Is the Lord sovereign over all the nations? Yes.  Is He alone able to send rain in due season?  Yes.  Do believers in every nation rightly look to Him for blessing?  Yes.  But has He specifically tied His blessing to national obedience for any nation other than Israel under the Mosaic covenant?  I don’t think so.  Rome had an incredible 500-year run, and for much of that peak time they considered Jews and Christians alike at least an annoyance or even a danger.

            There is much in the will and mind of God that is simply inscrutable.  Without clear words from Him addressing us specifically, it becomes dangerous to extrapolate from our conditions to some idea about how we could change our conditions by our own efforts and dedication.  Apart from that, Christians need to recognize that they do not live in Israel under the Mosaic covenant.  Why God raises and humbles the nations and when He chooses to do that is up to Him.  We have a calling.  It is to be salt and light in the world, irrespective of where we live in that world.

            Let us be careful about generalizing words intended for a particular time and place.
--reposted from February 9, 2011

Israel's Holidays and Ours

            Israel celebrated—ok, Israel was supposed to celebrate three great feasts each year.  I say ‘supposed to’ because 2 Kings 23:21-23 leaves the impression that Passover was missed pretty often.  True, you can read it two ways:  either Israel hadn’t celebrated the Passover in almost 600 years, or, more likely, they hadn’t celebrated it particularly well in 600 years.  Either way, these festivals apparently didn’t dominate Israelite life like the Lord intended.  (On the other hand, there is evidence of faithful observation in at least some eras of Israel’s life, as, for example, in the lifetime of Jesus, Luke 2:41-42.)

            Anyhow—three great feasts:  Passover, Pentecost (Feast of Weeks), and Atonement/Booths.  Passover commemorated the Exodus out of Egypt.  Pentecost was a harvest festival.  Booths commemorated the time in the wilderness.  The marking of time in this way reminded them of God’s provision:  He had brought them out of Egypt.  He led them to a land of milk and honey, in which they would have enough.  And He had preserved them in the wilderness.  The festivals pointed to God’s grace and reminded them of His faithfulness.  And, of course, they had their weekly Sabbath, which the Lord explains two ways:  first, as a reminder of His creating work, and second, as a reminder of their former toil as slaves and their present freedom.

            One thing that interests me is the way the Lord used those Old Testament holidays as a sort of template for His ‘main’ event.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that Jesus’ crucifixion coincides with the Passover—after all, most of us have heard that story told every Lent for years and years.  I suppose one thing that is surprising is that Jesus’ death is not connected to the Day of Atonement.  (Given the course of later theological thought about the death of Jesus, that connection would make sense.)  Passover, not Atonement—what might that mean?  While we probably don’t want to parse these things too finely, the emphasis in Jesus’ death is perhaps more to the ‘release from oppression/freedom’ side than the ‘atonement’ side.  That is, it may be more about death’s oppression and the slavery of sin of the human race than it is about ‘how an individual gets right with God,’ although I am certainly not excluding the latter!

            Then, 50 days after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit is specifically tied to the feast of Pentecost.  So, at least part of the significance of the pouring out of the Spirit in Acts 2 seems to be that God provides freedom and fullness (harvest) for His people, even as they find themselves without ‘a land of their own’ in this present, evil age.

            In terms of pattern, at least, it’s interesting that the church, from those earliest days, kept these things going.  They celebrated from the earliest days a ‘sabbath.’  (The Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, was transposed to Sunday, the day of resurrection, but it’s still a weekly celebration of God’s mighty acts of salvation.)  The first annual holiday the church recognized was Easter, followed quickly by the annual celebration of Pentecost.  Apparently the church recognized that she, too, needed the structured reminders of who she was, to Whom she belonged, and what He had done to make her what she was!

From Holiness to Holiness

            Today’s reading covers 3 chapters in Leviticus, but I want to comment on just one—Leviticus 20.  Very often we struggle to find the logic in these passages, that is, we don’t always see how one topic leads to another.  However, I think we can discern the connections in this chapter.

            First, in the regulation forbidding child sacrifice (Leviticus 20:1-9), there’s a significant term, namely, that worshipping Molech, one of the gods of the Ammonites, is the same as prostitution.  ESV points it a little more pointedly, “whoring after Molech.”  The phrase is used again of those who pursue mediums and necromancers.  One of the aspects of idolatry is that it involves a betrayal of the Lord’s trust on the same level as the breach of trust that adultery causes in a marriage.  That is, it desecrates the holy bond between the Lord and his people.

            This sexual/marital image of idolatry, then, leads to the next section—Leviticus 20:10-21.  In that section, we find detailed regulations regarding the sorts of sexual relations that are disallowed among the Israelites.  There are issues of kinship—both consanguinity (being a close blood relative) and otherwise.  There are issues of homosexuality.  There are issues of bestiality.  Just as idolatry involves an adulterous breach of trust with the Lord, so also the sexual ethics among His people are to be marked by faithfulness and self-control.  Unlike the popular message of our cultural revolution, Leviticus does not accept, “If it feels good, do it.” Instead, Leviticus wants to say, “You are a human, not an animal.  You are made in the image of a holy God.  Therefore, control your appetites.”

            Finally, we come to the third section:  Leviticus 20:22-26, especially verse 26, “You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own” (NIV).  Just as idolatry has a sexual/marital overtone, and just as sexual ethics have a connection to God’s holiness, so the holiness of the Lord undergirds the regulations for holiness among God’s people.  (Not incidentally, one should note that Jesus says almost the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount.  “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

            So, it is important that we see our lives under the category of God’s holiness.  He created us in His holy image, created us to reflect His goodness to the world.  In Jesus, He recreated that holy image and renewed His call that we should reflect His grace into the world.  From the holiness of God, we see that we are called to holy dedication to the Lord (Matthew 22:37), and from that holy dedication we are called to holy live (Romans 12:1).

The Heart of the Thing

            In Leviticus 16 and 17, we come to the heart of the book.  By God’s own declaration, Israel is His holy people (Ex. 19:6).  By their own actions, they are faithless idolaters (Ex. 32).  How will a sinful people, with sinful leaders, participate in the holiness of their God?  They will participate in that holiness through atonement: lesser sacrifices that we have already read about and the great day of atonement described in ch. 16.  The meaning of so many blood sacrifices is explained here, too.  “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11).  Follow the logic:  the wages of sin is death (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 6:23).  The life is in the blood.  Putting to death and pouring out the blood equals a substitution:  in this case, an animal’s death where a human ought to have died.

            However, there are two limitations to this system.  The book of Hebrews notes, “According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper” (Hebrews 9:9).  Further, the writer of Hebrews also notes that the sacrificial system had to be repeated year after year and day after day (Heb. 9:25-26)  Or, put it another way:  the death of a bull or a goat or a dove can’t repay the debt incurred when man sinned.  These thing are only foreshadowings of the great atoning sacrifice—the once-for-all death of Jesus.  Here in the one who was fully and perfectly human and fully and perfectly God there is the atonement that was needed, the Life that alone could count for all lost human lives.  If we hope to understand Leviticus at all, we have to see the cross behind it.

Skin Diseases, Discharges, and the Wasting Sickness of Sin

            The Christian reader, especially after so many centuries, must surely scratch his head in bewilderment over aspects of Leviticus.  What do childbirth, skin diseases, ‘discharges,’ and menstruation have to do with one another?  Why do we care about them?

            I feel a little repetitious here, but two things help us sort through this regulation.  First, Israel was to be God’s treasured possession (Ex. 19:5).  The old King James Version translated that Israel would be God’s peculiar treasure.  That may actually help.  Israel was to be unique among the peoples of the earth, because she was uniquely the Lord’s.  So, the Law’s almost obsessive concerns are indications of the detail with which that particularity was marked off.

            Second, I noted a few days ago that the Law is concerned with issues of life and death.  Discharges of blood—even from something as blessed as childbirth, deep skin diseases, menstruation—they all look like symptoms of death.  Death is the consequence of sin; God’s holy people are to be characterized by His holiness; therefore anything that reminds of death doesn’t fit with them.

            There is a deeper thought here, too.  Sin is not just skin deep.  Sin is not a discharge that defiles for a moment and gets healed.  Sin is a wasting disease that corrupts the very character of humanity and leads us inexorably to death.  The very detailed regulations about dealing with these things help us see that sin is not easy thing to handle:  it is even harder than keeping straight on all the Levitical practices.  Indeed, it’s impossible to remove all the corruptions of sin.  So, the Levitical practices again pull the Christian ahead to Jesus, who alone is clean, who alone is spotless, who alone is deathless, and they pull us ahead to the fact that He died anyhow to heal the uncleanness that so burdens our race.

Approaching God

            In Deuteronomy 4:24, the Moses warns the people of Israel not to forget the covenant the Lord made with them, and he declares, “Our Lord is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”  Nadab and Abihu found that out the hard way.  The scene is like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the fire of the Lord going out from the Lord and destroying them.  The whole thing seems pretty harsh, especially the bits where Aaron and his surviving sons (notice that Leviticus points out twice that they’re the surviving sons) aren’t allowed to mourn them or attend to their burial.  It’s this kind of thing that gives God a bad name.

            On the other hand, the Lord describes Himself as a consuming fire to make this point:  His holiness marks Him as completely different than our fallen race.  Sure, the Lord walked with Adam in the cool of the evening, but that intimacy was destroyed in Adam’s rebellion.  When Adam was banished, no human could enter God’s presence again—especially on human terms.

            Part of the significance of the tabernacle was that God in His mercy had provided a way in which sinful humans could approach Him and receive not judgment, but mercy and forgiveness.  Nadab and Abihu wanted the presence of God on their own terms, and a holy God would not stand for that.

            We can’t have God on our terms.  He’s not Santa Claus that He must bring us presents when we are good.  He’s not our man Friday to be at our beck and call.  He’s not our therapist that we might justify our behavior to Him and find a non-judging presence.  He is the Lord God Almighty, and He is the Lord, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

            To know the God who reveals Himself in the Bible is to hear His judgment that says we are poor, miserable sinners.  And it is to hear His grace, as St. Paul beautifully puts it, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).  He continues to provide a way into His presence and it is through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf.  Trying to approach Him any other way but through this merciful gift is sure to result in the same fate that Nadab and Abihu suffered . . .

Priestly Privilege

            It struck me in today’s reading (Lev. 7-9) that Aaron and his priestly sons received portions of a lot of the sacrifices offered in the tabernacle.  They, and they alone, were allowed to eat them.  There is the exception of the peace offering, which formed the basis for a communal meal.  That makes sense, because it was intended to establish what we know as the “communion” effect of the Lord’s Supper, that is, the peace offering was intended to establish peace with fellow members of the people of Israel and with God.

            Now, these two things got me thinking about the Lord’s Supper.  I wonder what Jesus had in mind when He established it?  I think we’re probably supposed to think two things.  First, the Lord’s Supper pretty clearly brings forward the OT peace/fellowship offering.  Paul calls it a ‘participation/fellowship’ in the body and blood (1 Cor. 10:16), and he talks about the Lord’s Supper in a way that takes seriously that eating the Body forms us as ‘the body’ of Christ.  So, it’s a communion in the sense that just as we are united with the Body and Blood of Christ, we are also unified with one another at the altar in the mystical body of Christ.

            A second thought occurs to me, too.  Under the Mosaic covenant, only the priests were allowed to eat the majority of the sacrifices.  Now, in the New Testament, all Christians are called priests and kings.  So, I wonder if this is in the background of the Lord’s Supper, too, that, once, this sort of holy-making meal was the privilege of only the few, but, now, it is the privilege of all of God’s people—declared holy through faith in Jesus and maintained in their priestly holiness through their participation in the Lord’s Supper.