Year 1, Day 109: Leviticus 20

Telling the Future vs. Telling the Truth

Okay, I’m going to start Leviticus 20 with a bit of a rabbit trail, but then I’ll come back to topic.  There is a very good reason why I am very adamant about defining a prophet as a person who “speaks God’s Word to his contemporaries” and not a person who “has the ability to predict the future.”  Look at Leviticus 20:6 and Leviticus 20:27.  Both of those verses talk about mediums, necromancers, or spiritists – depending on how you translate the Hebrew words contained within.  Each of these words speak to the process of seeing the future – most of which was done by trying to contact someone dead who could tell you what was going to happen.  The dead were thought to be able to know the future because once a person was dead they weren’t bound by time.  That’s a gross over-simplification, but good enough.

God is very clear in these verses and elsewhere in the Bible.  Knowing the future is something God does, it is a product of the divine.  To know the future – or claim to know the future – puts a person on a level with God.  The prophets would have never stooped to such a means!  The prophets were not people who uttered their speeches so that we could know the future.  That line of thinking is simply abhorrent to God according to God’s law!

What the prophets did was talk to their contemporaries.  They gave warnings where necessary.  They gave praise where deserved.  They gave encouragement where needed.  That was the role of God’s prophet.  The prophet was not a “fore-teller” but rather a “forth-teller.”

Now don’t get me wrong.  We do have words uttered by the prophets that do come true well into the future.  Jesus fulfilled many prophecies in the Old Testament.  But these prophecies were not fulfilled because some ancient human could see into the future.  The prophecies were fulfilled because the Holy Spirit took the words that were uttered in ancient days – and had a legitimate fulfillment in those ancient days – and added a new layer of interpretation to them!  In a sense, what this claim is making is that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies in the Old Testament in a way that even the Old Testament prophets could never have predicted! 

This doesn’t make their fulfillment any less significant.  In fact, it makes it far more significant.  Which of the following is actually more amazing?

1.    A God who forces the future to play out exactly as He wills, gives a vision of that future to a person hundreds of years beforehand, so therefore when the future happens exactly as He said it would it is really because there was never any option for it to happen any differently – or –

2.   a God who is capable of speaking truth in one generation and who is powerful enough to make that true statement in history even more true in the future regardless of the circumstances that mankind has been able to bring about through their own free will?

From my perspective, the second is far more amazing.  A god who predict what will happen and then forces history to play out in that manner is not really God but a manipulator.  There is nothing amazing about a God who forces everything to happen so He can be proven great.  Rather, a God who can take anything the world puts forth and use it to show His greatness is substantially far more amazing to me!  A God whose truth is true regardless of what humanity does is someone worth following!

Personally, I find the God who forces events to happen a little unfamiliar.  The God I know is the God who takes life as it happens and is able to work it out to His plan.  The God I know is a God who doesn’t force His will so that He can be right but rather the God who takes human freedom of will and is still powerful enough to make His truth appear in spite of human free will and human sinfulness.  This is one very good reason why God hates mediums, necromancers, and people who attempt to predict the future.  Only God is able to take reality and weave His ways into it in such a way as to bring about His truth.

Back on Topic

Okay, now that my little rant against seeing a prophet as a “fore-teller” is over, let’s come back to the rest of the passage.  Believe it or not, this whole chapter is essentially based on one topic: adultery.  The first third of this chapter deals with spiritual adultery.  We know God is a jealous God.  We know that God doesn’t want to share His people with the world – at least not in terms of allegiance.

So when we hear about God speaking about Molech (and other gods elsewhere in the Bible) what is really going on is adultery.  God wants us for Himself.  When we follow other gods, we are adulterous to that relationship.  When our hearts yearn for things that are not God, we are no different than a married person yearning for someone to whom they are not married.  We call it adultery in terms of sex; we call it adultery in terms of spirituality.  In that perspective, all of us are guilty of adultery – spiritual adultery.  At the very least, every single one of us are all guilty of adultery against God.

That leads us back into physical (or sexual) adultery.  We may not all be guilty of physical adultery.  But I think the prior paragraph explains a bit of how we can understand and forgive those who are guilty of the sin of physical adultery.  This neither makes it right nor excuses the behavior, certainly.  But the thought process is essentially the same.  For the record, this is really true about all sexual sin – which is what this middle third of the chapter is about.

Just as people are not always spiritually faithful, people are often interested sexually with things that are not a part of a healthy and godly sexual relationship.  Of course it is wrong, but the thought process is the same.  We want that which is not good for us more than that which is supremely good for us and even divinely appointed.  The urge to desire things that are not ours (spiritually, sexually, or in any other form) is strong within us.  Thank God that He forgives and teaches us to also forgive!

Then in the last third of this chapter we have the call to be holy once again.  We are to be separate.  We are not to “whore” after the things of the world as the Canaanites “whored” after Molech.  We are not to “whore” after the knowledge of the future as the spiritists, mediums, and necromancers did in the past.  We are not to “whore” after worldly possessions when the things from God are the only things that will truly bring happiness.  We are to be separate from the world.  Our hearts are not to yearn for the things of this world, but for the things of God.  Unfortunately, that is a very rare quality these days.  Churches and synagogues are full of people who say they believe in God but their hearts are anywhere and everywhere else.

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