When we're in doubt, it might be that we're looking in the wrong direction and settling on the wrong answer that we think is the only answer, instead of considering all of the possibilities. I rest in this one absolute and it affects all of my reading of scripture: God is love.
If you've been reading along here, I'm sure it's self-evident that I'm not a Bible Scholar. I'm a Bible reader. I don't read Hebrew or Greek. But I do read God's word as a believer, a believer who thinks God still speaks through His inspired word often in spite of us. He still speaks. For me the question isn't do I understand it. The question is - am I listening?
So what you'll find here is what I hear. Make of it what you will. And let me know what you hear.
I have a daughter who reads the Bible with such a wonderfully sensitive heart. And the sentence I've just penned is really the answer to her questions. But she comes across this passage regarding God's punishment of the rebellious in today's reading and it makes her pause:
"You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters." [Lev. 26:29]
It makes me pause, too, as well and should. Does this sound like a God of love? Yes. Because it's written in the context of so much love.
It's written in the same chapter of Leviticus that says: "If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me...." [Lev. 26:27] The brutal warning comes toward the end of a long, long series of warnings. It is a warning to a person who hasn't rebelled just once but continues to rebel against God. But - and hear this amazing, amazing thing - it's also written to someone, though in continual rebellion, who God is still ready to forgive as He always is. "But if they confess their sins and the sins of their fathers... I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land." [Lev. 26:40-42] It is in the same chapter of Leviticus in which God assures us that He is with us in this beautiful and poetic passage:
"I will put my dwelling place among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people." [Lev. 26:11-12]
And in an early chapter of the same book:
"I am the Lord, who makes you holy...." [Lev. 22:32]
So much assurance that God will do for us what we can not do alone...if we trust and search. And my daughter's question predisposes that there is a God, that He means what He says, that I should obey Him and that I want to serve Him. She is searching for a God of love. And I trust and know that He will find her.
Often in our questions are our greatest statements of faith. Lord, forgive us our unbelief.
My post last year from this date.
No comments:
Post a Comment