Learning from Leviticus

Some people aim to read through the whole Bible in a year. I don’t usually make that a specific goal for the year, but my pace of reading is such that I usually make it through the entire Bible in 15 - 18 months. So it happened, as we began this new year, that I found myself in Leviticus, one of the books that didn’t get read through in 2016. 

A friend asked me why I bother with Leviticus. “I always miss it out,” she said. “It’s just full of old Jewish laws.”  Well, it’s true that Leviticus (which means “about the Levites”) contains a lot of instructions for the early Israelites as they took their first steps in becoming a nation that was the people of God. But does it have any insights that are of value to us who live more than three thousand years later? 

Obviously, a main contribution of Leviticus is the way the Jewish sacrificial system points ahead through time to the sacrifical death of Jesus on the cross. But what else does Leviticus have to offer to the believers of the 21st century? In seeking to answer that question, I’m took time to blog this month on some of my own reflections from the book of Leviticus.  Beginning  on 6th January and continuing through till today, you'll find nearly twenty "levitical" blog postings here for the month of January. Do email me if you have further thoughts and insights to add to these reflections. And may God bless you as you read this ancient book.

The greatest blessing of all

Leviticus 26 is a sobering chapter because it lists the blessings that will result if the people are obedient and faithful to the Lord... and the horrendous consequences if they are disobedient and hostile towards Him.

The most severe consequence is that of completely losing their promised land and going into exile in the land of their enemies. Yet even that is for a good purpose and outcome: the restoration of the land. If the people are no longer there, the land can make up for all the neglected and ignored sabbath years, so that it becomes fertile and ready to be fruitful again when the people return. And the other purpose of the exile is the restoration of the people. As the shock of exile pushes them to recognise and confess their sins, the humbled people will recognise that God has not rejected them and is right there to renew His covenant with them. It's a mind-blowing thought that what appears to be a horrible and cruel outcome is actually evidence of God's kindness and unfailing love - His heart to see both the people and the land restored and renewed.

The flip side of the sober warnings in this chapter is the long list of blessings that will result if the people are obedient. Much of it is what you would expect of a people whose all-powerful God is watching out for them, protecting them and providing for them: rains in season bringing abundant crops, safety from wild animals, victory over their enemies...  But the greatest blessing of all is found at the end of the list, in vs 11 - 12:

I will live among you and I will not despise you; I will walk among you. I will be your God and you will be my people.
There is no greater blessing than the presence of God with us. Knowing this, it's striking that God did not make the loss of His presence the greatest penalty for the people, but limited it to the loss of their land. Even amidst the people's disobedience and failure, even in exile, God sought to be with His people and to restore them. What a touching picture of the heart of a Father who loves and cherishes us.

Finding harmony...

People who know me well are aware that I've been known for much of my life as a "dog person." I'm one of those people who instinctively stops to speak to dogs in the street and enjoys interacting with them.  But when it comes to my usual reading material, I haven't particularly made a point of reading any "dog stories," and so it was kind of interesting over this past Christmas to acquire three dog books that have been fun and inspiring to read. One was the story of someone who rescued an abandoned border collie (my favourite breed) and trained him to be a wonderful sheepdog on the farm. Another was the touching story of a young woman whose personal despair at her gradual descent into a world of darkness (congenital blindness) was turned around when a wonderful guide dog came into her life.

I haven't always been able to have a dog of my own, due to the circumstances of being an overseas missionary, but when I have had a dog, I've always enjoyed training it and seeing its canine intelligence in action. So perhaps it's hardly surprising that this was one of the possible solutions that jumped to mind when I found myself confronted with some ambiguous health news.

In a recent blog post (see 21st January) I was bemoaning the frustration I sometimes feel when arthritis and fibromyalgia cause me to have nagging neck pain, uncomfortable feet or weakness in my thumbs. I can clearly remember, some fourteen years ago, when the blood tests came back and I was given the diagnosis that I had osteoarthritis with fibromyalgia: one of my doctors there in South Africa sat me down and gave me a rather sobering little talk about not feeling overwhelmed if a time came when I had to make decisions about the kind of wheelchair that was the best choice for me, or if I had to put special attachments on the taps of my kitchen sink.

I remember going home that day, getting onto the internet and researching "assistant dogs"and "service dogs" to find out what sort of options were available. While the doctor was not telling me that I would definitely reach a point in life where restricted mobility made a chair or scooter a necessity, he wanted me to be aware of that possibility, so that I wasn't derailed by it if my condition progressed in that way. I remember thinking, "Well, if there's any chance that I might end up with severely limited mobility, I want to make sure I at least get a dog out of it."  I knew that border collies, with their sharp intelligence, are often trained to carry out dozens of tasks for owners who are unable to do certain things for themselves. Fourteen years later, I'm very thankful to the Lord that I still have good mobility (despite the pain) even if I don't yet have my dreamed-of border collie :-)

And so I'm looking forward to beginning reading the third of my three "doggy books" this weekend. It's the story of a young woman who had been very physically active - even climbing Mount Everest - before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 28. To make life even more challenging, one of her three children was diagnosed with autism shortly after that. "Finding Harmony" is the story of a remarkable dog that helped this family through one of the darkest times in their lives. I'm looking forward to it because it's the story of a dog trained to be an assistant, and I've long thought that it would be stimulating to know more about that, or even to have some involvement in helping train that kind of dog.

The title of the book, although referring to the dog's name, is also very meaningful to me in another way: finding harmony. I realise that so many of life's difficult circumstances - whether loss and bereavement, illness and disability, childlessness, unemployment, or some other challenging personal or family situation - could so easily upset the fragile balance of our lives and send us spiralling into discouragement and despair. It is so important that we learn how to find peace and harmony, even amidst circumstances where we see no way out and realise that perhaps there will never be a nice, tidy, miracle solution. Our challenge as believers is to know how to stay close to the Prince of Peace and draw on His stability amidst our difficulties and limitations. As I referred to in that previous blog post, we will truly discover that, "His grace is enough" and His strength is made perfect amidst our weaknesses.

The real meaning of jubilee

In modern society, the word "jubilee" has become synonymous with "anniversary." We celebrate a monarch's diamond jubilee when she has been on the throne for sixty years, or an organisation's golden jubilee when the movement has been in existence for fifty years.

In the Bible, there was so much more than that to the understanding of jubilee. Yes, it happened after 50 years (after seven cycles of seven) but rather than being only about partying, it was very clearly about returning, redeeming and releasing.

Returning referred to land that had been sold to someone else. The assumption here is that people probably wouldn't be selling their land because they wanted rid of it, but rather because their economic situation had prompted them to sell. Perhaps they had fallen on hard times and needed the money they'd get from selling the land. Perhaps it was because a man only had a few children and didn't need so many crops; or perhaps he mostly had daughters and didn't have enough manpower to work the fields. Whatever the reason for selling, God ordained that in the fiftieth year, all the land should return to its original owner and all the people should return to the land that had belonged to their ancestors.

In a sense, this shows God's mercy to future generations by protecting their inheritance. If a father or grandfather had been a poor steward or a negligent farmer, or had been overtaken by misfortunate and forced to sell some land to make ends meet... somewhere along the line, the inheritance would come back to his descendants, so that future generations weren't doomed to poverty with ever decreasing amounts of land.

"All the land belongs to me," said the Lord, and it was never to be sold on a permanent basis. People were allowed to redeem their own land if and when they had the money. And even if they were never able to buy it back, the land was nevertheless returned to them in the year of jubilee. The clear principle was that no one should seek to benefit from another's misfortune - not on a permanent basis - because God is a God of justice and compassion. Laws about how to decide the selling price made sure that both buyer and seller were treated in a just way.

Jubilee was not only about returning and redeeming property, but also about releasing people. It was not only the land that was returned in the year of jubilee, but also the people who had ended up in slavery.

There must be no heavier feeling than knowing that you have nothing left of any value except yourself. Even in modern movies, the sign that a woman is at rock bottom is often when she realises that turning to stripping or prostitution is the only way she can get food to feed her children. It's a known fact that in some Asian countries, people break their own children's legs, so that the crippled child will elicit more sympathy when begging on the street.

God wanted His people to be servants of the Lord and not slaves of another person. (Leviticus 25: 42 and 55) But sometimes it happened that a person saw no hope of economic recovery and so he was forced to sell himself or another family member as a slave. Even when this happened, there were laws that required the slave to be treated with dignity. If a family managed to come up with sufficient money, they were allowed to redeem the person at a fair price, based on what a worker would earn in the market place. But even if that didn't happen, the year of jubilee meant that a time was coming when all slaves were to be released. Even a person who had been born in slavery was to be set free with his parents when the year of jubilee came around.

So jubilee represents so much more than a big celebration to mark an anniversary. It was a landmark year that tangibly demonstrated the character of God: a God of mercy and compassion, a God who protects our inheritance, a God who redeems us from enslavement, a God whose heart longs for us to be set free. That's what jubilee was really about.

Total dependence

Having previously described festivals that the Israelites were to celebrate in particular months every year (see this blog post) Leviticus moves on in chapter 25 to describe instructions for special years. The first of these, described in verses 1 -7, is the so-called sabbath year. 

Every seventh year, the fields were to be left unplanted and the vines unpruned. From a purely pragmatic perspective, leaving the fields fallow for a year is a good agricultural principle, allowing the soil to "rest" and recover its goodness. Here again, we see that God is giving the people instructions for their own good. Uninterrupted cultivation over many years would have brought them to a situation of decreasing harvests.

But beyond the purely practical aspect of good farming practice, the sabbath year law promoted, and possibly tested, the people's dependence on God. What did it feel like to begin a new farming season knowing that you weren't going to harvest any crops that year? The people had to trust that the surplus from the previous year, or the previous six years of crops, would be enough to carry them through this seventh year. They had to trust that God would still bless and protect their livestock. They had to relax and expect that what the land produced on its own would be enough to sustain them. (Although they weren't intentionally planting and working towards harvest, they were allowed to eat anything that the land produced by itself.)

In fact, the sabbath year didn't only push them to trust God for the year itself. Because they were instructed not to store up any of the crops that happened to grow that year, they were also taking a step of faith and dependence for the following year, the first one in the next cycle of seven. Everything would start from scratch, and they needed to believe that God would bless them with a good harvest that year; that He would be as faithful to them in the next seven years as He had been in the previous seven. The command not to store the (meagre?) produce of the seventh year was protecting them from falling into a poverty mentality and depending on their own efforts rather than on God.

As Christians, we need to learn to live with this same attitude of trusting dependence. How do we strike the right balance between working hard and saving for the future (which are also principles clearly commended in scripture) and still living a life of joyful dependence on God? What are our modern equivalents of this sabbath year principle?

Respecting God's name...

Most of Leviticus is kind of a legal manual: lists of laws and instructions for the people. Only occasionally is there narrative, a story of something that actually happened, and one of these times is in the middle of chapter 24. It's the account of a man who blasphemed the name of the Lord with a curse. (vs 10 - 16) As the story unfolds, we discover that blasphemy (using God's name in a disrespectful way) was one of the crimes punishable by death in those days.

That's a sobering thought if we consider  how often the name of the Lord is used as a swear word in films and TV programmes nowadays. It has become so much a part of our media-saturated, social-networking culture, that it can be very easy even for Christians to be shaped by the culture around them and to use God's name disrespectfully without even realising it.

About a year ago, when speaking to some younger children about the ten commandments, I suggested to them that one of the most obvious ways we can obey the third commandment and be careful not to misuse God's name is to be conscious not to fall into the habit of exclaiming, "Oh my God!" - as we see modelled for us on so many reality TV shows. 

In western culture, no one will stone us to death if we speak God's name in a wrong way nowadays.... but what a pity if our carelessness in this matter brings sadness to the heart of God and dulls our spiritual sensitivity to His voice,

Don't forget to remember

A whole list of the festivals in the calendar of the early Hebrews, chapter 23 of Leviticus highlights the value that God places on remembering and on celebrating. Remembering and thanking God for the things He had done for them - historical things like the escape from Egypt, and ongoing things like the yearly harvest. Some were solemn occasions like the day of atonement, and some were probably "fun," like when the festival of shelters allowed the kids to do "camping" for a week and celebrate with much joy.

God knows how important it is for people to have times of celebration, and we instinctively know it ourselves. That's why we celebrate things like birthdays and wedding anniversaries. It's why many of our cultures have introduced other celebrations such as mothers' day, fathers' day, and even grandparents' day. Yes, we could be cynical and chalk it all up to a money-making strategy by the card manufacturers, but the truth is that it's nonetheless important for us as human beings to be able to celebrate the people and events that bring meaning to our lives.

We'd do well to consider how we can build remembrance and celebration into our own lives - perhaps beginning with things like Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and some kind of thanksgiving... but also extending it to commemorate specific things that God has done for us as individuals, as a family or as a church. How sad if God-given celebrations are allowed to pass like any other day, or are so secularised by our modern society that they become more about our own indulgence than about the goodness of God.

What things do you want (or need) to remember, and how can you celebrate them in a meaningful way this year?