With this understanding in mind, why do we sometimes doubt that God knows best? Why do some people feel that God's instructions in the Bible are restrictive, petty or designed to "spoil our fun" ? Once we know the love and care of God, there can be no doubt in our minds that the things He asks us to do or not to do are only for our protection and well being.
Reading through the book of Leviticus, it strikes me that some of the instructions the people knew as "laws" were actually more like a manual of preventive health care. We need to remember that this was a people who had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years, and probably didn't know the first thing about living a healthy lifestyle and protecting themselves from disease.
So when God told them (chapter 7 vs 14 - 17) that the meat from the sacrifice could be eaten on the first day and leftovers eaten on the second day, but anything remaining on the third day should be burned up and shouldn't be eaten.... He wasn't seeking to deprive them of food, He was protecting them from food poisoning. These people lived in a hot, desert-like place; they lived at a time in history when they couldn't pop their meat into the fridge to keep it cool; a time when food wasn't pumped so full of chemicals and preservatives that a sausage can sit on a shelf for three months and still look exactly the same. This instruction was probably primarily to protect the people's health. Verse 18 sounds harsh to us: if you eat the meat on the third day, you'll be punished for your sin. But a closer reading of the verse reveals the truth behind it: long before manufacturers started putting "best before" dates on their products, God was warning his people that contaminated meat would give them a terrible stomach ache, or worse; that disregarding God's instructions could have natural, but painful consequences.
I remember when I lived in Africa, a teenage boy who had been on an outreach with us set himself the goal of reading through the whole Bible. At a weekend camp, we got into conversation over a meal time, and he was very excited about what he had been reading in Leviticus. "It's totally amazing," he said. "God told us stuff thousands of years ago that the scientists are only discovering today." He was referring in particular to Leviticus chapter 15. In my Bible, the chapter heading says, "Bodily Discharges." Yuck! It doesn't particularly entice you to read further, does it?
But we were living in Southern Africa at a time when the AIDS statistics were scarily out of control. Some of our ministry was with child headed households: kids who were raising their siblings alone because both of their parents had died of AIDS. No wonder this young man was blown away to discover that God had already told us thousands of years ago what it took an AIDS epidemic to teach us today: bodily fluids carry disease. All that stuff about blood and semen and other body fluids making people "unclean" was nothing to do with strange religious ritual and all to do with protecting the Israelites from spreading an epidemic throughout the camp. Yes, some of the instructions (like the sacrificing of pigeons) were about recognising God's hand in cleansing and healing people in a day where there were no hospitals to take them to. But other instructions (like taking a bath and washing your clothes) were basic primary health care.
The book of Leviticus, strange and complex as it sometimes seems to modern readers, is full of stuff like this. God was giving people instructions for their own wellbeing, but they needed to trust Him in that and follow His instructions to the letter. In our modern world, we sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that we know better, that we're too technologically "advanced" to follow God-given instructions that we don't understand the reason for. Maybe the scientists, psychologists and sociologists of a future generation will have the same reaction as that teenage boy in South Africa when they realise they are discovering things in the 21st Century that God already told us thousands of years ago.
Let those of us who know the Lord be the first to trust that He truly knows what's best for us.
