Bible in one year, day 63 Leviticus 11:1-12:8; Mark 12:13-27; Psalm 30:1-7 Leviticus 11:1-12:8… Again, this all seems very strange to us… The Israelites couldn’t eat rabbit (rabbit pie being one of my favourites, by the way) or bacon (or any meat from a pig for that matter). They couldn’t eat eels, for example, though who would want to! I believe they eat seagull in places like Iceland – Israelites couldn’t do that! And the issue is that, by eating such creatures, they become unclean. Now, what does that mean? It means that they were in a state where they couldn’t come into God’s presence because they had done something that was unacceptable in his sight. It does seem strange to us because Jesus took all our ‘uncleanness’ on the cross so all things are ‘clean’ for those in Christ, as we shall discover when we get into Paul’s letters. But, at this time, this was how it was. But even though these rules and regulations about what you can and can’t eat and about how long a woman must wait after giving birth and so forth seem very restrictive and over the top to us, God has not given them just for the sake of it. God has given these regulations to the Israelites because he wants them to ‘be holy, because I am holy.’ Who are we to know God’s mind and decide what he should see as clean and unclean? But, whatever he has decided, he wants us to know because he wants us to be like him: holy! And, actually, just as God wants us to be like him, don’t we want to be like him too? God wants me to be holy but I want to be holy too. God wants you to be holy. Do you want to be too? Mark 12:13-27… You can almost see the Pharisees and the Herodians getting all smarmy and trying to sweet-talk Jesus in order to try and trap him and get him killed. He’s caused them such trouble by now that they are desperate to get rid of him. But Jesus answers their question in such a way that it shuts them up and amazes them. And that should always be how we feel when we encounter Jesus: amazed! His answer is actually so simple but, if you’re honest, could you have come up with it on the spot like that? Jesus wisdom is clearly divine. And then we have this little passage that dispels, if you ask me, a lot of our romantic, quaint notions of heaven. The Sadducees didn’t believe there was any life after death anyway, so the fact they’re asking this question shows that they’re up to no good. They site a Jewish custom that tried to ensure that a woman would have children. If her husband dies then his brother is to marry her. And the Sadducees cook up this scenario where this happens seven times over. ‘At the resurrection whose wife shall she be,’ they ask. Now, we often think that, in heaven, we’ll meet all our loved ones again and catch up with old friends. But Jesus tells us here that earthly relationships don’t function in heaven – she won’t be anybody’s wife. Instead of being recognisable as Jonathan, or whoever, we will ‘be like the angels.’ There’s a wonderful thought. And the Sadducees are ‘badly mistaken’ for thinking there’s no resurrection in the first place. The fact that God showed up to Moses in the burning bush and was clearly at work in the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob shows that God is not about death but about life, and life eternal at that. Psalm 30:1-7… God saves… that’s what he does. When this guy was struggling in the depths, God lifted him out. When he was sick and called out to God, God healed him. Though he was weeping in the night-time, God brought him joy in the morning. That’s what God does – simple as that.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:57:48 +0000
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