Oh, how much joy I glean from being in your word my God and my king. My soul is at peace when it rests in you and the word you have given us. I had no idea that Leviticus would be rich, and that I would enjoy it just for what it is, but I do God. We are able to read what you said to the Israelites that explained to them how to be your people in the world, and it holds true today, the means of being your own people, the ways we are to interact with our culture and deny it when you cal us to and the way that we are to love the aliens and sojourners because we were aliens until we became your citizens.
Consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am the lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord, who makes you holy. You never call us to be anything that you yourself do not intend to make us. This is the work of the gospel in our little lives, making us holy because you are holy.
I am the lord, you say over and over again. The laws and the warnings and the punishment for disobedience are peppered with a few things that you say to explain to us why you have made things the way they are
I am the Lord your God.
I make you holy.
I brought you out of Egypt to be your God.
Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.
I have set you apart to be my own.
Leviticus may at first seem like it is just lists of laws, but these simple, deep statements are made over and over again throughout the laws, causing me to ask God to show me what he means by these words, why he chose them, and how I can be what he wants me to be: holy like he is holy. It is clear that something unbelievable is intended through the laws. The laws are not warning from punishment, they are means by which we are invited to be something that we as humans could never on our own: like God. C.S. Lewis, in the Problem of Pain talks about the fact that our complaint is not that God loves us to little but that he loves us too much. If he did not care very much about us, he would let us stay as we are, broken and sinful, moving farther and farther away from him. But he loves us the way an artist loves his masterpiece, he will continue to work on it, unrelenting, unsatisfied with anything less than his own glory. We can say that we wish he would leave us alone, but it would be less love that we would desire, not more.
I have set you apart to be my own, he says, and I will do all that is necessary to make you holy, just as I brought you out of Egypt. I am the lord your God. We are left with no room to wonder who will be the sanctifier. Our main job is to obey. To yield to the work that he is doing to make us like Him.
In first John it is written that we are Gods children now and what we will be has not yet appeared but we know that when he appears we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.
How unbelievably consistent this is with the message of Leviticus where God’s choosing of us to be his children has already been done, the covenant made, the promise sealed. Our actions cannot taint or change our son and daughter statuses. Once the adoption has gone through we are his. And yet, the work is not complete because one day we will be exactly like him when we see him as he is. The way that God dwelled with the Israelites was painful, every day they were reminded of the loss through their idolatry and the fact that God could only dwell in the temple. Through Christ, we are the temple. The Spirit dwells in us. And yet we are still looking forward to the day when we will be purified as he is pure and that we will be one with him.
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