Tag Archives: Holy Spirit

You’re Sick! Get To The Doctor

Posted in Daily Devotions: Chapter by Chapter by

Sick

Today’s Devotion: Leviticus 13

Before the invention of remote controls, I would fight my way for that television dial every day after school to watch Little House on the Prairie. There was something about Laura Ingalls Wilder (Melissa Gilbert) and those braids that made me nuts – I loved that show. I used to imagine what it would be like to get sick back in those Little House days. Poor Doc would pull up in his fancy carriage and wrap a wet, white cloth over their foreheads and pray. He was limited in what he could do without a modern-day, high tech, super sterilized surgical practice.

Going back hundreds of years to the days of Moses. Reading Leviticus 13 reminded me of Doc, but in this chapter the mighty physician was the Priest. Wow! Talk about wearing many hats. The thing is that the book of Leviticus is a book about sin and God is showing us that Leprosy and running issues of the flesh shows the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the effect of sin in action.

No man ever went wrong overnight. Leprosy did not kill in a day—it is not like a heart attack. The leper’s life was a walking death. Just so, the sinner is also dead even while he lives. It is obvious from these passages that the raw flesh is the old nature which was judged on the cross. When it manifests itself in a believer, God must judge it. The flesh can never please God; only that which the Holy Spirit produces in the life of the believer is acceptable to God.

Two things jump out at me in Levitius 13. The number of times you read the word “Isolation or Isolated” and the phrase, “The priest will pronounce him clean.” This is sin! Sin isolates us from God and is a growing, disease that corrupts our lives. While Christ covers that sin and pronounces us “Clean!”

Oh Friends. What a glorious story of hope buried between the ‘not so obvious’ message hidden in Leviticus chapter 13. It’s a beautiful picture of what Christ has done for us and the gruesome hopeless, loneliness, isolated, withdrawn, lost place we will be without Him. It’s a perfect day to check your spiritual temperature and recognize who your Holy healer is.

Picture Perfect

Posted in Daily Devotions: Chapter by Chapter by

bread

Today’s Devotion: Leviticus 2

Bread. My parents had an eight track tape that I remember listening to called, “The Best of Bread.” My favorite song on that album was the song, “If.” The first line of that song was, “If a picture paints a thousand words, than why can’t I paint you. The words will never show, the you I’ve come to know.”

The offerings in Leviticus speak of the person of Christ and of the work of Christ. The burnt offering in chapter 1 was a picture of Christ in depth as well as in death. The meal offering reveals the humanity of Jesus in all its perfection and loveliness. Somehow, some way, the song lyrics I haven’t heard for decades comes back to me and reminds me of my relationship with Christ, “The words will never show, the you I’ve come to know.”

Perhaps that is what God is doing in this book. He’s trying to take the picture of his son Jesus and describe him, or paint a picture of Him, in a way that we can conceptualize who He is. He’s complex and no one ever walked this planet who what like Him. How do you put that into words. Then to put another twist on it, “It’s prophesy!” This was written thousands of years before Jesus even came to earth.

This is evidence of the trinity – God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I used to get all hung up on this, “How can God be three persons in one?” God created the earth and then Jesus shows up and then the Holy Spirit enters the picture?… NO! They were there all along. God is revealing them to us in the Old Testament and Leviticus 2 is describing it here.

Have you ever imagined trying to explain Christ to someone? Sure there is the Sunday school version, “All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart and you’ll go to heaven,” but it’s not that simple is it?

God is using a word picture and this chapter happens to be a meal offering that God is describing. There is no shedding of blood, so that alone makes this one different and there are two important aspects of this offering: the ingredients which are included and the ingredients which are excluded. Essentially it is the picture the perfect humanity of Christ.