Welcome to the Love and Context podcast, engaging in unscripted conversations with your hosts,
Ben and Spencer.
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Without further ado, let's dive right in.
Welcome to the Love and Context podcast.
I'm trying to say this in a soothing, relaxing tone for you today.
I like NPR.
Is it working?
Yeah, I guess not.
Hey, welcome to the Love and Context podcast.
Glad you're here.
I'm Spencer, not Ben.
I'm Ben, not Spencer.
Glad you can make it.
We're going to continue on our way through Leviticus.
Leviticus.
We are in Leviticus.
And the last couple of weeks we talked about what is the purpose of Leviticus?
What is this offering system, the sacrificial system?
Last week we talked about what is the priesthood?
What is the goal of the priesthood?
What is the role of the priesthood?
And also how does that carry into the idea of the modern church with leadership and their
responsibility to equip the saints for service?
We added some important context to speaking truth in love.
And so if you're a person who tends to use that phrase, I would just maybe encourage
you to go back and listen to last week's episode.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
I had somebody say that they listened to our stuff and they just jumped right in the middle.
And I was like, what?
You can do that.
I was like, but it's weird because we reference things that we talked about already.
So you may be like, what?
Yeah.
Let's see.
References or resources for today.
So D Thomas Lancaster, we're still talking about what about the sacrifices?
I'm going to add another book that he wrote called Paul's Epistle to the Galatians because
I want to reference it a little bit in talking about the works of the law today.
And it's a great read.
It's much more academic though, and much longer than what about the sacrifices.
Additionally, we're going to always recommend the Bible Project, Aleph Beta, which is Rabbi
David Foreman.
The Baymott podcast has some material, though they didn't spend as much time in Leviticus.
I'll tell Marty that he needs to fix that and he spends more time in Leviticus.
And those are some good resources for you.
Yeah.
Today, we're going to be talking about works of the law versus the moral law.
Yeah.
And specifically, what is the purpose of the law?
What does the law actually do?
Right.
And I think one of the good places to start with this is you need to understand the law
and the laws that are written here in context against the current laws of the surrounding
areas.
And we're not going to dive too deep into exactly what those laws were, but you need
to understand it in context against those current laws because there is a contrast there.
There's a huge contrast there.
Just like if you were going to compare laws from Congo, Central Africa to the laws of
UK, England.
I don't know the laws of any of those countries very well, but I imagine they're different.
I imagine they're different, right?
If you're going to compare laws of two different countries, you have to note that those countries
are going to have different laws for different reasons.
And so in the same context here, we want to view what is being written as the law in Leviticus
in contrast against the laws of the surrounding nations of the day.
So placing Israel in a context, we have to understand that when God gives a law, what
is his purpose in giving the law?
Yeah.
It's going to be to speak into the context that they're in.
Yes.
Not the context we're in.
And so we have to understand the purpose of the law, not necessarily the specific law.
And you know what?
Let's just jump right in on a few of them because I think it's going to be really helpful.
There's a group of laws that I'm going to call hygiene laws.
So it says if you have a discharge from your body, if you throw up, you get secluded for
seven days from the assembly.
Then you go and see the priest and he says, if you're still sick, then you go and spend
seven days more and then he's actually going to pronounce you as well and we're able to
rejoin the assembly.
Now we look at that law and in our context, first off, we typically don't call being sick
discharge from the body.
There's probably a medical person out there that's exactly what they call it.
But I can tell you that Benjamin does not call it that.
And maybe Spencer does, but Ben does not.
When I hear discharge from the body, my mind goes to worst case scenario.
Yeah.
Blood.
It just goes to being very sick to where something's coming out of one end pretty rapidly.
I'm not going to go into more detail than that.
Yeah.
We're going to try to keep it not so gross.
But given that the world is three years removed from a global pandemic where we talked about
secluding so the E-Action don't spread sickness around to a bunch of different places, which
by the way is generally a pretty good rule.
If you're sick, don't go to somebody else's house.
These are common sense things that make a lot of difference.
Now why is that significant that God is actually bringing this into the Israelite people?
Because this isn't a regular practice of the cultures.
They would actually just be sick and they would be moving around and all these things,
they wouldn't seclude their people.
Or every time somebody gets sick, they would seclude them and then they would just perish
away from the community.
God is having a way to take care of the infected person and also preserve the integrity of
the community.
Because they're going to be wandering in a desert.
For Pastor Nick's wife, the desert is real hot.
She comments every time I say that, so I'm just going to do it again.
It's real hot and there's not medical resources available.
And it's not just that hygiene.
There's ones about skin disease.
Chicken pox is something that kids get when they're little.
And we don't think about it being super dangerous.
But if you're an adult and you get chicken pox, you can actually get real sick.
And so you actually have to be really careful when you get these types of things.
We forget living in a society where there's 15 clinics and a hospital.
Getting sick is actually not a big deal for us.
Correct.
For the most part, now there are times where it is a big deal.
I want to just be clear on that.
But for the most part, if we get sick, we can take care of it.
You get a headache, you take aspirin.
Yeah.
We have medication for it.
If it gets to a point where it doesn't seem like it's going away, there's clinics, there's
hospitals.
There's treatment for most things out there nowadays.
This is not a society where that was an option.
And a lot of the quote unquote medical options weren't actually that helpful.
Go read some of the...
This is actually a fun one.
Go read some of the medical textbooks and what they were recommending at the founding
of America.
Oh, it's so funny.
Yeah.
Some of the things that they were recommending to do is I could go back in time and go be
a part of that society and I'm like, no, we're not going to try to remove bad blood.
No, we're not going to stick leeches on them.
No.
You know what I mean?
And that's not to judge them.
That's the place they were.
And so we're not placing a judgment.
So God is giving them some laws.
We look at them as laws and we look at them as oppressive.
And so that's why sometimes the word law is insufficient, because that's not necessarily
representative of what's actually going on.
God is giving them some instructions that are meant to bring life to them.
Which by the way, is what laws do for our life in general.
Sin being the archery term that we missed a mark.
We were shooting for something and we missed it and we fell short or however you want to
describe that.
What did we fall short of?
Life, what God calls us to be.
The very nature of our identity.
And we were like, hey, I'm going to take and do for myself.
We talk about Genesis 3.
I'm going to try to define for myself good and evil.
It actually produces death in my life.
Which by the way is what Romans is talking about.
That when you invest in sin as a Jew or a Gentile, the result of that, the wage that
you are paid from that is death.
But the gift of God, something you can't earn is actually eternal life, a qualitative life
spent with God.
So the law and the words in the law are actually meant to bring life.
They're meant to turn Israel into a more ethical, healthy, functional society that's capable
of putting a story on display.
And just to piggyback on the hygiene thing just a little bit, and I just want to reemphasize
this, a lot of the hygiene laws were just very practical for their day.
Very practical for their day.
Just like we in America have some basic hygiene like expectations.
There's no written law saying that you have to shower every day.
But if you don't shower every day and you don't wear a deodorant and you don't do a
few things like that, you're probably going to smell.
And it's probably not good, and it's not good for you.
And you were talking about surrounding nations and how it has an impact.
So with hygiene, let's talk about something kind of related to that, kind of not.
So there's a lot of sexual things mentioned in Leviticus, right?
Fathers don't have sexual relations with your children.
So very practical things where you'd be like, no, duh, right?
And we talk about bloodlines, we talk about hereditary design, like all these different
things that geneticists will tell us about, biologists will tell us about, that if you
intermingle blood of very similar families, you're going to end up with some very messed
up genes, right?
In Egypt, that's not necessarily going to be the case.
Their laws are completely different, right?
And so God actually speaks into that to teach them how to be different.
And he says, these are things that are not acceptable.
And he uses words like, this is detestable, you're going to be put to death.
And once again, we got to look around ceremonial language and what actually happens, right?
Because a lot of the language is meant to illustrate, hey, these things bring death.
Which on a very real level is true, because if you inbreed inside of your community, you're
eventually going to have genes that go nowhere.
Yeah.
And so a lot of these laws, and we're going to have a podcast episode later on Leviticus
called The Weird Ones.
I think it's actually our next episode.
It's our next one.
I'm actually very excited for it.
But a lot of these laws are just, we look at them as, oh yeah, it's very simple.
This is very basic.
But it's actually very counterintuitive to what they would have known.
We just got to keep that in mind.
Yeah, exactly.
And it's like people are, when they read this, one of the places where they mentioned that
this law is very oppressive to women, it talks about the menstrual cycle and how long they
need to seclude because they're unclean.
And I was like, here's the deal.
It's not sinful because we've talked about how unclean is not sinful.
It's just unclean.
That process is not an easy process.
It's just not an easy process on a woman.
It's not an easy process from the level of sickness.
I was like, because if it's not dealt with properly, the woman and the people around
them can get very sick because you're dealing with blood.
And blood can make people very sick.
And so a lot of those laws are actually built around preservation of women, not subrogation
of women.
I just want to tell you a really funny story.
There is this article I read a while back as a Christian guy who's like, hey, I'm going
to follow the Levitical law for a certain period of time just to see what it was like
type thing.
His wife, it was her time of the month.
And so he did something or said something that she got frustrated about.
So she went and sat on every surface in the house.
She was practicing like, modern day hygiene.
She went and sat on every surface of the house.
And then she's like, all right, now it's all unclean.
Have fun standing.
That's pretty funny.
Man the petty side of it.
That's so good.
Yeah.
So like on a very practical side, if this law, which we would interpret, I think that
a lot of people would interpret, they're like, oh man, they're making it hard for women because
they're having to be taken away from society.
I was like, except it's actually about preservation of women.
It's like making sure that their health stays in order, that they're not being abused by
the system.
And if they're following the law, like the community can't just leave them behind because
they're taking too long, right?
They can't shortchange their health.
They're actually being kept in line by this law.
And this law is meant to actually preserve them, take care of them, build them up.
And I was like, I don't know if you actually know, but Levitical law is actually very pro
women in a world that wasn't.
Yes.
It's not going to seem that way because you read it through the 20th century American
lens.
The law is subverting expectations for people constantly about roles of women and how they're
supposed to be treated.
It's almost like it's a partnership and we're not supposed to do it alone.
And just side note, majority of the laws of surrounding nations didn't even have laws,
didn't have good laws around how women were supposed to be treated.
And if they did, it was a position of fear, not a position of showing your devotion to
God.
Yeah.
So that's like sexual laws, that's purity laws, that's talking about hygiene.
There's a lot of laws that encompass that.
Now the other one that shows up very frequently when people talk about Jewish law is food.
Yes.
I think one of my favorite quotes when Marty and Brent Billings are talking on Baymah podcast
is they talk about the cup of bacon, right?
They keep talking about, they went to this place and there was a cup of bacon and they're
like, oh, there's a Gentile item I've ever seen on a menu.
And so every time I think of dietary laws, I think of a cup of bacon.
I'm with you, that sounds great.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually.
So one of my favorites, so when I was, at one point I was working for a company and
they are based in Illinois.
And so I went for training at their home office.
And the first night before we had our training, I went to the menu and I recognized that I
was in like the mid America.
The reason I recognize it is the first appetizer listed was deep fried bacon.
And I was like, America, you know what I mean?
You're like, let's go, I'll take four of those please.
Yeah.
The food laws are interesting because we often look at these as really restrictive, but they're
really not.
Once you actually dive into it a little bit, again, let's just, let's just make sure context
is where it needs to be.
Refrigeration was not a thing, right?
Okay.
Pristine kitchens, not a thing.
We're talking about cooking food over a fire probably.
Or a boiling pot.
Boiling pot or something like that.
Like we're not talking about, we don't have the controlled stove environments that we
have today.
Yep.
And it's around a campfire as you're roaming the desert.
Yep.
Around the campfire as you're roaming the desert, there's probably dust getting in on
your food, stuff like this too.
And so the idea around some of these laws is actually to keep you healthy is all it
is.
Like he said it nicely, but it's so you don't die.
Yeah.
So you don't die.
Take pork, for example.
We've been picking on bacon.
I like bacon.
I had bacon for breakfast this morning.
But take pork, for example.
Pork is a meat that you have to cook thoroughly all the way through.
And even when I cook pork, which I love pork, but when I cook it, I have a thermometer and
I am sticking that thermometer in the pork to make sure it's getting up to about 160
degrees internal.
Otherwise, there's this fancy thing in pork called botulism that you can get.
Makes you incredibly sick.
And if you didn't have a hospital, you'd probably die from it.
Yeah.
And guess what they did not have?
Hospitals.
Theometers.
They did not have thermometers.
They did not have great controlled cooking environments.
The other thing that they probably were short on was actually good kitchen utensils.
It's not like they knew, okay, if I cut a one inch slab of pork and I cook it for X
amount of time on each side, the internal temperature is going to get up to whatever.
They didn't know that.
So what God does is he lines out, he's, hey, don't eat pork.
Because this is actually a risk to your health.
Right.
If you actually engage in this and all the other nations are like, ah, pork chops.
They're great.
That's actually, once again, book of second opinions.
They said that.
That's sarcastic in case anybody didn't know.
But they're like every other nation is eating pork and they're looking at me like, oh, we
want to eat pork.
Except you don't because you're literally taking your life in your hands potentially
when you eat pork.
Literally.
Yeah.
If it's not prepared right, you could die.
Yeah.
I don't know if you also know this, not just pork, but let's talk about seafood.
You know what happens when you cook crab incorrectly and eat it?
You get real sick.
What happens when you cook prawns incorrectly and eat them?
You get sick.
What happens when you eat shrimp incorrectly and eat them?
You get sick.
Now, did God say that they couldn't eat anything from the water?
No, he said that they couldn't eat specific things from the water that would kill you
if you ate them incorrectly.
They'll make you sick.
Yeah.
And the point here is like when you run into Peter in the book of Acts, God says, he brings
out the food, he says, take and eat and kill.
And Peter's, I can't do that because I'm Jewish.
Don't tell me something's unclean that I've made clean.
Now, we take that as a hundred percent God is telling him that what you think is unclean,
the Gentiles, is actually where I'm working.
And I think that's a perfect application because you have the four corners and four being a
Gentile number referencing reaching out into the community.
Hundred percent on board with that.
But from that point forward with the Gentiles, why is it not a big deal for them to eat pork
and for them to eat the crab and all those different things?
Because science has actually progressed at that point.
People aren't dying constantly from pig and from crab.
Now, there's probably some person who's going to be like, actually on a general level.
Yeah, we're talking general level.
So if you look at like the cooking practices of them being in the desert during the Levitical
law and cooking practices during the Roman occupation, vastly different.
During the Roman occupation, you actually had the you actually had stone wood fire ovens.
You could control heat a lot more.
You could get a something cooked well rounded in an oven.
You could get bread to raise rise more evenly.
All these things versus back that day.
I love that you said back that day.
Let's back that day up.
Yeah.
Versus back in that day.
Yeah, Leviticus.
It was different.
Yeah.
You didn't have those things.
All right.
So what we're not saying is that Jews should stop or should start eating pork.
No, right.
That is not what we're actually saying.
If you are a Jew who follows Jesus, you have a call on your life to put God on display.
In fact, we're about to just start talking about this because Gentiles have a different
call on their life than Jews do.
We serve the same God, but we put God on display in different ways.
The Jews are responsible for preserving the history and preserving Torah and helping us
understand the story that we've been grafted into.
The responsibility of the Gentiles is to take that story, incorporate it and translate it
to the nations.
Yes.
Well, we put God on display in different ways.
So we told you last week we're going to be getting into Galatians.
Okay.
So Galatians has often been a book that I think people have used to talk about why you
shouldn't be Jewish and you should be a Gentile.
Yes.
Why Levitical law no longer applies for Jews.
The problem is Paul was a Jew observing Torah, writing to other Jews that observed Torah
and God fearing Jews.
So if he's making that statement to them, it's weird.
So let's talk about what was actually happening in the book of Galatians in this area of Galatia.
So you have three groups of people.
You have the brothers, which are the natural born Jewish people.
You have the children of Abraham who are people who have become part of the nation through
conversion.
And then you have God fearing Gentiles.
Okay.
This is the Jewish church we're talking about at this point.
Paul comes through and he has been preaching to them faith through Christ alone.
This is the crux of the matter that's going through the book of Romans, the book of Galatians
and many of the other letters that Paul is writing.
People are struggling with this thing.
Do you have to be a Jew to follow Jesus?
And Paul has made this argument repeatedly that faith and salvation is found in faith
in Jesus Christ alone.
That it is faith in the faithfulness of Jesus Christ that is actually what saves you.
And he quotes back from Abraham and he says that Abraham had faith and it was credited
to him as righteousness before the law came.
So circumcision can't be the thing that actually makes you holy.
Now why Paul is so amped up in this book is because he came through and he delivered the
good news.
The believers in the area, the God fearing Gentiles received Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Their lives passed from death to life.
They have been redeemed by the blood of Christ.
They are now a new creation.
And then other Jews from Jerusalem came and said, oh, but you need to actually go through
the rites of circumcision and take on the works of the law or else you're not going
to get to participate in the kingdom of heaven to come.
So here's the issue that Paul runs into because he says, are you so quickly abandoning what
I gave you?
He says, if you go now after you have already said Christ has changed me, walked me from
death to life and you say, but in order to achieve this, I have to observe the works
of the law.
Then the sacrifice of Christ was worthless.
Now notice what he's not saying.
He's not saying the works of the law are worthless.
He's saying the works of the law could never produce the righteousness of God.
They were a means of putting God on display.
Now one of the reasons I think this is really important, there's actually a few people who
have talked about this.
There's some really popular people on various social media, things that are Bible scholars,
and they say that there is no differentiation between the moral law and the works of the
law in the Levitical law.
That's somewhat incorrect because in the time of Paul and Jesus, there is a series called,
there is a statement called Mixa'atay al-Tarraq.
It is the works of the law and it's widely understood in Jewish culture to be those things
that you do that make you inherently Jewish.
For example, not eating pork.
Being circumcised, not wearing blended fabric, like these things, wearing tassels on the
end of your robe.
There are things that made you inherently Jewish that when you ran into someone, you're
like, oh, you're a Jew.
You belong to Yahweh.
You look different.
And Paul says these are not the things that justify you.
Now notice the things he's not talking about is everything in the law, which I think is
a tendency of what we American Christians tend to do.
We say everything in the law.
No, he's not talking about the Ten Commandments.
He's not talking about the way that we treat neighbor.
He's talking about the specific things you do to make yourself Jewish.
And there's a great application just today for this because in the law, there's these
things that are listed out, right?
Not eating pork, not eating shellfish, not wearing blended fabrics, tassels on the end
of the robes, et cetera, right?
To where when people encounter you, they're like, we know who you are.
Now we're called to put on Christ in our lives.
Gentiles.
Yep.
Us as Gentiles are called to put on Christ on our lives.
And when we say yes to Jesus and His work and the work of the Holy Spirit is in us,
we produce the fruit of the Spirit, which is supposed to lead us to a spot where when
people encounter us, they're like, oh, we know who you belong to because it's in Galatians
that Paul actually talks about the fruit of the Spirit.
Glad you caught that.
Yeah.
That was a little sarcasm jab there for Ben.
That's what's going on here is Paul is saying, hey, like he's drawing a parallel that the
Jewish people that are in Galatia would understand and applying it to Jesus and what it looks
like today.
That's such a great segue too, because so the Jews have a specific way they're supposed
to put God on display, right?
Yeah.
They look different.
Now I also think that they act in such a different way.
So we're talking about the moral law where they don't commit murder, don't commit adultery,
like these types of things that were very common among all the cultures, right?
But Jesus is even going to speak some context into that for the Jews and for us, I believe
too.
In the New Testament, he's going to say, you ever did said that I say unto you, so you
have heard it said, do not commit adultery, but I say unto you not to even look at a woman
so as a lust after her.
That is a rabbinic way of saying you always heard this, but it was always supposed to
lead to this.
So don't commit adultery was always supposed to creating you to be the kind of person who
didn't cheat on your spouse or to look at somebody lustfully.
Do not murder was always supposed to produce in you to be the kind of person who didn't
call people idiots or write them off or respond in anger.
These are the things that they were supposed to produce in you.
Jesus didn't up the ante.
He says this was what it was always supposed to do in you.
So now we as Gentiles, when we put on the fruit of the spirit, this is the natural way
that we show we followed Jesus and we actually put him on display for the nations.
So that when people run into you and me, they say, why are you different?
And I get to tell the story of why my God is different.
He's holy.
He's separate from anything that they understand because in the place of anger, he produces
peace.
In the place of hatred, he produces love.
In the place of systematic breakdown, he produces fulfillment because that's who he is.
He's the God who has a thousand times more compassion than he has anger.
And putting Christ on display, oftentimes, growing up in the church, I was always told
these big grandiose ways to do that, right?
Like through, like I was told like different street evangelism tactics, like all this types
of stuff.
And then as I've walked with Jesus, I've learned that it's the little things.
It's the little things.
Like one of my goals, just to give you an example of my life, one of my goals every
time I fly is to make the TSA agents laugh because I've seen how other people have treated
them, right?
And I've seen people yell at them, get frustrated.
I've seen people, just side note, we live in Alaska.
We fly a lot.
Alaskans fly a lot.
Yeah.
We're not connected to the rest of the state, so you got to fly.
Yeah.
So you got to fly.
So like we're on a plane.
We're on planes quite a bit.
Incidentally, if you're wondering about the TSA, he has been arrested multiple times.
I'm kidding.
I have not, but I've seen how those people have been treated.
And so my goal every time I see him is to make him smile, make him laugh, show a little
bit of Jesus to him, right?
Not in big ways, right?
Just about a week ago, I was coming through the airport and the TSA agent, the person
in front of him was not very kind, nice, was frustrated about some stuff.
And this was in the lower 48.
So I get up to the gate and the TSA agents, you tell us, okay, here's another person.
And I just struck up with a basic conversation.
Yeah, I'm going home to Alaska.
And she's, oh, I've always wanted to be there.
And then I just cracked the joke.
I was like, oh, winter is the best time to come.
You want to come in winter.
She just lost it.
She was just like, she's okay.
That was good.
And then after that, as I'm walking away, she's like, thank you for that.
Like it's the little things that can put Christ on display to brightening up someone's day.
And so when we're talking about this love, patience, kindness, gentleness, we're talking
about the fruit of the spirit.
It doesn't need to just be displayed in big grandiose fashion all the time.
Sometimes those are good, but it can also be displayed in the little things.
Hey, can I, hey, can I buy the stranger behind me a cup of coffee?
Can I do those things?
My wife accuses me of grand romantic gestures.
It happens frequently.
Like, that's just something that I like to do.
But one of the things is if I only did those things in my relationship, does my wife really
know that I love her?
Or when I do the dishes and clean up after the boys and massage her feet because her
feet are sore and make the bed and ask her about her day, sit at the table with her to
eat.
These are all things that I do on a regular basis to put on display how I feel about her.
Now if that's true about my wife, how much more true is that about God?
When you put love on display in the way that you treat people, especially people you disagree
with, you put the heart of God on display.
Last week we talked about what's the role of priesthood to be a conduit of mercy from
God to the world.
This is the exact same thing.
The law, the works of the law, what we put on display is meant to actually put God on
display.
The moral law is meant for us to align our character with God's.
When we start to really live into the 10 words of God and it starts to actually permeate
our existence.
It changes everything.
It puts, it changes everything.
And not just in your heart, but in the atmosphere you live in.
I think one of the reasons we struggle as a church in general with the law is because
we look at Torah and I'm talking about Genesis 3 Deuteronomy, through a lens of God is mad
at us.
We've talked about this a lot, that a lot of times we start the story in Genesis 3 and
it starts in Genesis 1.
We see an angry God rather than the fact that God is working through humanity to redeem,
that he has infinite patience as he's working with people.
The golden calf happens, but he also restores them.
This is happening over and over again throughout the book.
And if you assume that God is mad at you, you're going to read these and assume that
they're meant to bring fear in your life or obedience or else.
What if God was who he says he is?
What if he's actually love?
And these things that he's telling us to do, these things that he's telling to be a part
of our life actually produce in us something that's actually worth having.
What if God actually knows what he's talking about?
And when you read Leviticus that way, I think you're going to come away with a completely
different conclusion about what this book is about.
So God created us.
He knows how we're designed.
He knows how we're wired.
I hope so.
You're right.
When you make something that you dearly love, you know how it's designed.
You know how it's wired.
You spend time with something, you know how it's designed.
You know how it's wired.
Do you think he knows what's best for you?
I'm going to digress with an analogy that's probably not the best, but it's what's in
my head.
So your ADHD moment, folks.
Every time I drive old cars, just because I do, I drive old beat up cars.
The car, it usually takes me about a year to get to know the inner workings of the car
because every car manufacturer is a little different.
Takes me a little while to get to know the inner workings of a car.
And then when that car come, when I end up getting a new car, it takes me a little bit
of time to get to know the inner workings of that because I do all my own maintenance
on my own cars.
It takes a little bit of time, right?
God designed us, he knows the inner workings of our heart and he set this in motion, those
scriptures in motion so that we can draw closer to him because he knows us and he wants us
to know him.
That's what's happening in Leviticus right here.
It's not like here's a bunch of rules and if you don't follow the rules, shame on you.
It's like, hey, I know what's best for you.
And I know some of you probably, as I said, no, I know what's best for you, might've jumped
to Jeremiah 29, 11, where God says, hey, for I know the plans I have for you.
That verse is actually placed in the context of despair, depravity, enslavement.
They're about to go into captivity in Babylon.
Yeah, they're about to go into captivity in Babylon.
They're about to experience some of the worst years of their lives.
And God says, hey, but I'm here.
I know the plans I have.
I know the plans.
I actually have plans to prosper you, not to harm you.
Yeah.
Because in that moment, it's really easy to see some harm and not realize that God's meaning
to prosper you.
In the very next verses after Jeremiah 29, 11, it says, in those days when you pray,
I will listen.
If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me.
I will be found by you, says the Lord.
I will end your captivity and restore your fortunes.
I will gather you out of the nations where I set you and bring you to your home again
to your own land.
Oftentimes I hear Jeremiah 29, 11 quoted just as that one verse, but there's a part in there
where it says, and if you seek after me, I will be there.
I am with you in this time.
And if you seek me, I will answer your prayers.
And tying that back to Leviticus, when we're looking through Leviticus, this is what the
Lord's doing is he's saying, hey, here's some practical ways you can seek after me.
Here's some practical ways you can honor me.
Here's some ways you can put me on display.
Yeah.
And so we're going to try to abandon that mentality that God is mad with you.
Okay.
Now, I'm not going to say God never gets mad about things.
I don't think that's true.
I think that there's definitely examples in scripture, especially when you are abusing
your power over somebody else.
God gets a little bit annoyed about that because you've actually stepped out of the story and
you become the opposite of the right story.
But if God is speaking truth and love and goodness into your life, let's maybe assume
that this doesn't necessarily, it wasn't spoken to a 20th century American church and that
what's happening here, God is bringing life and he's actually promoting a different kind
of existence for the church of Israel at that point.
We see that as the scriptures progress that more and more there's more liberation that's
happening, freedom that's happening as they serve and follow God.
It's almost like the law is meant to align us with who God is, bring us into proper relationship
with him so that through his spirit, we can move everywhere and see his kingdom come on
on earth as it is in heaven.
Yeah.
So good.
Yeah.
So do drop us a line here, loveandcontest.gmail.com.
Next week we are going to be talking about the controversial ones.
We're going to talk about some of the laws that people get up in arms about.
It's gonna be so fun.
Yeah.
And so excited.
And it's going to be a lot of fun and we'll see if that ends up getting most of our views
or at least most of our hate mail maybe.
That's all right.
Bring it on.
You can find us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, on Instagram, on Facebook.
We're a lot of different places.
Ticket a talk.
Yeah.
Ticket a talk goes the clock.
That's where you can find us.
Uh huh.
And you can always email us at loveandcontest.gmail.com.
And also Spencer did set up a website for us, loveandcontest.org.
That's a wrap for today's episode.
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Pickles.
Chicken.
Spicy, spicy chicken pickles.
I was thinking like how you know you pickle like things like.
Oh you're thinking about pickling chicken?
That'd be disgusting.