Leviticus Pt. 2- The one where Laura talks about the bad news and the good news…
MAN IS SINFUL AND GOD IS HOLY
I used to love to play with magnets. They weren’t so easy to come by when I was young; they didn’t exactly sell them at the local stores near me. Delivery from Amazon was about as far into the future as a transcontinental highway was to my grandma when she was a little girl. My exposure to magnets was limited to the few times a year we were allowed to pull them out and play with them in science class. When we did, I would ignore all of the cool things the other kids would build with them, which usually consisted of long chains that would wind around the table picking up magnetic dust and paperclips like it was a gaggle of Gen X’ers rushing to get in line at Starbucks on the first Pumpkin Spice Latte day of the year.
Nope. I didn’t care how long my chain was or how many pieces I could manage to keep attached when I lifted it and let it hover vertically above the black phenolic resin-topped lab tables. The laws of attraction didn’t fill my particular cup of tea. As a young fan of Hulk Hogan wrestling matches, Star Wars space battles, and epic stories of conflict that were found inside masterfully crafted shows of the Saturday morning cartoon variety (yes, Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, I’m talking to you), I much preferred the joy of watching the magnets do what they did best- repel each other like two siblings in the back seat of a Chevy Citation on the second day of a long road trip.
But what does the heartbreaking rejection of one magnet to another have to do with the third book of the Bible, you ask?
Well, I think God told Moses and Aaron about a hundred million times (only a slight counting exaggeration) in the book of Leviticus, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy,” or some variation of those words. By the time you get to that statement for the hundred thousandth time (also an example of hyperbolic numeracy), it’s like, “Okay, God. I get it.” But did I really?
God is holy.
It’s such a deceptively simple thing.
God is holy. I am not.
We’re like those magnets that repel each other. God is so holy that he cannot be around anything as dirty as sin. And as a human, I am drenched in it. I don’t think it’s really possible to see how sinful we truly are until we compare ourselves to God’s holiness. It’s like those commercials where a zealously smiling guy in a dentist’s smock holds up an image of teeth, and you think, “Those look great!” Until another image appears beside it of truly white teeth, and suddenly the original picture looks surprisingly yellow. We do the same thing. 1 John 1:8 says that if we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves. But lying to ourselves is something we tend to be really good at, isn’t it? At least, I am very good at it. We may think, “I’m a good person. I don’t do all those terrible things I see other people do. I look great.” When in reality, I’m just those yellow teeth that may appear okay when you don’t look too closely.
You get that very idea driven into you throughout Leviticus. It’s made evident in all of the procedures and rituals and sacrifices that have to happen to make a person unblemished enough to spend even moments sitting outside the room that held the Seat of God within the tabernacle. And they had to be performed with such precision- exactly as directed without deviation. One wrong move, and… Woosh! You were toast. (Yes, I’m talking to you, sons of Aaron.) With each step of the process, I can only imagine how humbling it must have been for the person to know all the things he would have to do to not stink of his own sin. In many ways I think our modern faith has the potential for a false sense of entitlement since the work of Jesus has made our communion with God so very easy in comparison.
The good news is that if God wants something, He tends to make it happen. If sin separates us from God, and God wants to commune with us (And He does want to be with us. Like, for real.), then there has to be a way for us to be cleaned up. Just like those magnets. There is a way for them to become compatible. Permanently. There’s something that can be done that will make it so those two hunks of metal will happily draw together like the rest of the magnets that sit criss-cross-apple-sauce and sing Kumbaya around the camp fire roasting marshmallows until they’re charcoal on the outside and ooey gooey on the inside- the only right way to roast a marshmallow. It’s actually quite simple. The polarity of one of the magnets simply has to be reversed. More on how this happens in a later post where I will attempt to access my limited memory of elementary school Earth Science. (I hope you’re willing to grade me on a curve when I get there, Mrs. Satterfield.)
From the moment man sinned and declared, “Yay! Apples!” God could have just wiped us from his memory and let us go along our not-so-merry way (or snapped His fingers and done away with us altogether). Though the wage of sin is death, He didn’t leave us to play out that very tragic story. Instead, He took action. And it was something only HE could do. Me trying to wipe away my own sin is like a mechanic trying to clean a dirty window with a rag soaked from his last oil change. A magnet can’t change its own polarity, either. It has to be acted upon by an outside force. Something has to be done TO it, in the same way Someone outside of us must act upon us.
The fact that while we were still enemies, God took the time to set a plan in place to bring us back to Him at all is so very mind blowing. His desire was to bring us into right standing with Him- to permanently reverse our polarity instead of trying and trying to force something as unnatural as a holy God communing with a people brimming with the very sin he repels. So we could live. So we could be with Him. Love like that just doesn’t make sense to me. But it makes sense to Him. Humbling, isn’t it? He loved me. Little ole’ me. Enough to make an effort. The Creator of all that is and was and will be acted on my behalf when there was absolutely no reason to do so other than His love for me. Understanding the amount of grace that lives within that decision- well, I am so very grateful.
The people of Leviticus didn’t know it at the time, but the Law He gave them was just the beginning. In the end, His plan would be the perfect one. It would use the very system he sets up in this third book of the Bible. We know that the system introduced here was not simply an elaborate and temporary cleaning system. It was teaching Israel (and ultimately us) about substitution, atonement, priesthood, holiness, and the need for a mediator. To truly be fulfilled, this system would require a perfect sacrifice. But I’ll save all of that for a different post.
Next Time- GOD HAS ALWAYS WANTED US TO KNOW HIM