FACT: Leviticus is the hardest book in the world for me to get through…I have never had enough appreciation for it and it has been the death of my attempts to get through the entire Bible in a year several times in a row.
It makes me a bit crazy and I am not sure that I will ever really get it, BUT my commitment is to somehow get something meaningful from it everyday…we shall see!
FACT Again: Who knew that reading the Bible could make you hunger? (literally, not just spiritually?) Seriously, I am starving tonight (probably because it is nearly two in the morning) and reading about all of the grain offerings and of the breads and crackers given to God actually made me hungrier…strange and totally irrelevant information…my gift to you!
Anyway…the only way to truly find meaning in the book of Leviticus is to spend some time actually studying the meaning behind the laws and practices. They tend to make more sense that way.
Leviticus 1 goes into a lot of gory detail about how exactly one is supposed to perform a burnt offering. It discusses what to do with the blood and how to wash the animal’s insides. It is very clear on what a priest was to do in order to transform a living animal into a pleasing aroma to God. Rather than simply being grossed out by this, I researched it a bit, and it is actually really cool.
The idea behind an actual “burnt offering” was that it was a gift given to God simply for the purpose of giving him a gift. It was not given in order to pay for a sin or to redeem someone or something. It was given simply for the purpose of pleasing God.
This is actually an amazing concept that we very often loose track of as Christians. We get lost in the midst of trying to do the things that God has commanded and asked us to do, that we do not often take the time to simply please God. We do not often say to ourselves “I just want to make God happy right now” instead we often act out of fear of falling short or of making God angry. The burnt offering reminds us that there is a time and place to simply surrender to God in order to please him. There is a time to simply make God happy for the sake of making God happy.
Something else about a burnt offering: The animal offered had to be without defect. God didn’t want
Application: All of us (me too) are very good at giving God our cast offs. We give him the leftover time, money and life that we do not have a better use for.
It is incredibly rare that we give him our very best as a gift simply for the sake of pleasing him.
The challenge is to give the absolute best parts of our lives to God…simply for the sake of making him happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment