This post is part of my ongoing series of writing down my thoughts on the Bible passages I read each day. Some days I hope to have great insight that the Lord gives me, and many days, I will likely struggle through the text and not know what to write down based on what I read. My hope and prayer is that as I make this a habit, just as I did daily writing for so long, that I will improve on my ability to read and understand the passages I’m reading. Please keep in mind that many of these posts may be published late at night or with little time studying and simply be my first thoughts after reading. This is in no way a commentary that one should use to discern the Bible, but my own personal thoughts.
Perks of weekends are you can get caught up on all the reading you’ve been slacking on. In truth, I’ve read a few of these chapters of Leviticus over the last week or so, but I didn’t have a lot to say about them, so I’ve held off. I did, however, get behind by about 5 chapters. This is why I’m really happy to have this blog to keep me accountable. In the past, if I had gotten this behind, I likely would have either gotten discouraged and stopped altogether, or at best might have started back up with the plan but a week behind schedule. This way I have an incentive to get back to where I wanted to be, trusting past me to plan what is best for future me.
There were three things that mainly stood out to me as I was going through the last 20 chapters. By no means does it cover all of it. The three things were: Blood is important, rules are helpful, and God must like to party because he likes making ceremonies.
Over and over, there seems to be special importance paid to the blood of animals and humans as it talks through the sacrifices through this book. It says at one point:
“For the life of every creature is its blood: its blood is its life. Therefore I have said to the people of Israel, You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood. Whoever eats it shall be cut off.”
Blood is such an interesting thing that almost every living creature has a complete dependence on. I don’t know anything of the science of blood, but how interesting is it that this blood, as it says, is literally the life of animals (not to mention us). Blood is extremely important and it once again gives significance to Jesus blood being spilled on the cross in the new testament.
As I was reading through so many of these rules and commands that God is putting in place, instead of feeling like he was restricting this new people, instead it seemed like he was giving them guidance on how to setup this new nation after they had all been in slavery for 400 years. God is not a God that’s trying to restrain us from good things. Just the opposite, he wants to give us the best things possible, and when he gives us commands, it’s because those help guide us to what those things are.
Lastly, just a quick observation is that he seems to create a lot of traditions and festivals/ceremonies. So many times that he says “don’t forget this. In fact, do this ceremony so that you don’t forget it.”
It’s almost like he knows us humans so well and knows that we’re going to forget unless we have something to remind us. Looking forward to completing Leviticus.