Today's Reading - Leviticus 24-27
Background
In addition to some final items, especially the Sabbath years and the Jubilee year, the key in today's reading is the delineation of the blessings of obedience and the curses of disobedience - very similar to Deuteronomy 27-28, in chapter 26. The book concludes with more miscellaneous laws and a description of how the tabernacle of the Lord would be funded.
Devotional - Blessings or Discipline?
There is little doubt what Leviticus 26 meant to the Israelites; it is about as plain as it gets. God called his people to put him first and to honor him with their lives (verses 1-2). He then set forth a series of blessings that would come to the nation if they walked as God commanded (3-13). They would see prosperity as their crops produced abundantly and they would be protected from harm. The power of God would work through them and their enemies would flee before them. Best of all, God promised his presence and power to dwell among them. He would be their God and they would be his people. All they had to do was to obey.
But, in verse 14, things turn dark. As God would bless his obedient people, he would also discipline them for their disobedience (14-39). First, he would remove all the blessings he had promised for obedience. If that did not bring them to repentance, he would multiply their suffering, over and over again. As God once had brought ten plagues on Egypt he would bring repeated and escalating disaster on his people in retribution for their sins.
But God is still a gracious God. His discipline is always designed to restore and rebuild the nation he loved and had chosen as his own. No matter how far down the path of sin they went, God promised them he would renew his grace and goodness to them whenever they would repent (40-45).
Unfortunately, this passage became a sad prophecy of the future of Israel. They followed the path of sin far more than they walked in the ways of God. God was amazingly faithful whenever Israel was obedient, but those times were rare. They experienced much more of God's discipline than his blessing.
How should we apply these to our lives today? Some would discount these principles completely because we are in an age of grace and have been accepted in Christ. God no longer brings such discipline on believers, they say, because of the finished work of Christ. That ignores the admonitions of God's word to walk in holiness and the warnings of Hebrews, of Revelation 2-3, and many other places. God still disciplines errant believers, even if the form has changed.
Israel's blessings were physical and temporal. Our blessings are often spiritual and eternal. But the fact is that today, as in the days of the Old Testament, God pours out blessings on our lives when we walk in obedience to him and he disciplines us in love when we disobey.
Our relationship with God is based on the work of Jesus Christ on the Cross, not on our own works. We are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. But our daily experience of the blessings of Christ does depend on our walk of faith. If we would experience joy and peace and contentment and other such mercies, we must walk in obedience. When we eschew the ways of God and live in sin, there are consequences - the hand of God disciplines his children in love. Too many Christians walk in sin and ignorance of the ways of God, yet still expect God to give them everything they need or want.
Faith brings us into an eternal relationship with God. But obedience is the key to the daily experience of all the goodness of God.
Father, may I walk daily in obedience to you that I might experience all the blessings of life! Your goodness is beyond compare.
Think and Pray
Give thanks that your relationship with God is based on the work of Christ, not on your own fidelity!
Remember, though, that your obedience does bring blessing and that God will discipline his disobedient children.
Do you presume on the grace of God in believing that you can both ignore holiness and walk in the daily blessings of God?
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