Author: Norm

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 17 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. After 400 years exposed to a variety of Egyptian religious practices, the Israelites must now radically reform their own practices. Common to the religions of the day included regular sacrifices anywhere and everywhere to the multitudes of gods all around them, cultic sexual practices as well as blood drinking. The people…

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 16 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. Between the people and God there was a curtain. Once a year the priest was to go behind that curtain with blood, to cover the sin of the priest and the people. The message was plain: we do not and should not have the confidence or arrogance to assume that we…

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 15 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. Another day of cleansing laws. Verse 31 seems to summarize the point. ‘You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.’ The plain sense of these words is that our being…

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 14 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. OK, I admit it, I am getting tired of these readings. What an elaborate system of dealing with the disease, and of getting clean. I get that the disease were dangerous, but so much ritual and sacrifice to be declared clean – with guilt offerings, sin offerings, burnt and grain offerings….

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 13 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. This chapter addresses very practical hygiene and health issues for that time. The practice of quarantine was the best treatment for these otherwise community-devastating diseases. Communicable diseases (like measles, smallpox, scarlet fever) are in mind here. And mildew would be a health concern in damp climates and seasons. No other ancient…

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 12 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. [Luke 8:43-44] According to the reading from Leviticus [see also Leviticus 15:25-33], this woman would have…

SCRIPTURE: Leviticus 11 OBSERVATION/APPLICATION: 1. ‘Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”) [Mark 7:18-19] Why does God declare some foods unclean? Why does…

These notes are taken from the New International Version Bible Commentary: Leviticus 11:1 – 15:33 The Levitical laws of cleanness symbolized spiritual cleansing and set Israel apart from the surrounding nations. The spiritual and the hygienic reasons for the laws are remarkably valuable in the area of public health. In general they protected Israel from bad…