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.

“…If you do…blessings. If you don’t…curses…”

As I was talking to a friend last night about my readings in Leviticus (she has also been reading through it), I was realizing that as I was going through Leviticus we were seeing God lay down the law for someone to achieve salvation. That’s not quite the truth, but that kind of an idea.

As you go through Leviticus, there is law after law, ceremony after ceremony, etc. None of them are bad. In fact, some of them are either done today without us even realizing, or they would make the world a much better place if we added them in. God was showing this people how to create a free people after being in slavery for 400 years.

So in a way, God lays out all these rules and laws and says “If you keep them, then you’ll have blessings…but if you don’t keep them, then you’ll have curses.”

It was more simple than it has ever been. It was literally all laid out for them to follow…but wait, we are sinful humans, and they couldn’t keep all the laws, so they have sacrifices to pay for those sins. But then they stop doing that. Eventually, as we go through these books, we see them drop more and more of the law until they’re straight-up worshiping other gods.

We as humans like step-by-step approaches on how to achieve things ourselves, but every person who wants to spend an eternity with Christ must come to the realization that they cannot, and never will achieve salvation through their own works. If you try, you will fail, and you will spend an eternity paying for it.

Stop trying to achieve something you can’t achieve, and accept the gist that you were freely offered.