Theological Commentary: Click Here
Leviticus 21
is a very interesting chapter. In this
chapter we have all kinds of rules and regulations for the priests of
Israel. At first glance, it seems like
only those who embody perfection and who surround themselves with perfection
can be near the Lord. Just in case you
are curious, if you are taking this message away from these verses, it is
certainly understandable. However, I
think it is the wrong message to take.
Remember
what God has been telling us about Himself in this whole book. God is holy.
That means God is different. He
is separate. He is not like the world.
In this
light, God doesn’t want His priests to have a worldly mentality, either. He wants His priests to go through life
making choices for the right reason – even for righteous reasons – and not
because it’s easy or the expected thing to do.
God wants us to put thought and consideration into our actions and their
consequences. He wants us to be
concerned about our purity and our spirituality.
As I read
through the commentary that I wrote six years back, I found a challenging
thought along these lines. The thought
was this: the greatest evil is the corruption of the greatest good. Now, I might argue with that and say that all
evil is evil and there is no greatest evil.
But that is really an argument of semantics and it misses the real point
of what I’m talking about here.
As high
priests to God, we need to be careful about what we do and the choices that we
make. As God’s priests, our corruption
carries weight and consequence. As God’s
priests, our actions and the consequences that they bring speak to the people
around us. We should take these things
into account as we look to make our life available to God to use as He sees fit
to use.
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