Leviticus 20: 22-27, “Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other people. Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine. A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.”
The foundation of the contract between the Lord and Israel when they went into the Land was that they were to keep His commandments. We know that statutes are the same as commandments when we read Gen 26: 5 (“Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”) Hebrew poetry uses parallelism to make a point. That is, the poetry often repeats a phrase using similar language, having a similar meaning. Israel needed to be reminded that they were in a contractual relationship with the Lord as long as they had sovereignty over the Land. They were there to be a shining example to all the other nations of the fact that the Lord God is loving, gracious, merciful and generous. As long as Israel were living in the context of their relationship with the Lord they would act as beacon to the rest of the world, drawing others to the Lord. As long as Israel were in the Land it was a Land flowing with milk and honey but when they were forced out of the Land it became barren and largely uninhabited while it waited for the Israelis to return. Later the Lord would say, “Even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt: For they went and served other gods, and worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given unto them: And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book: And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day. The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut 29: 24-29) During the church age there are people from every nation on the earth who say that the Lord has driven Israel from the Land because they have sinned against the Lord. However, one day, the Lord will give Israel complete sovereignty over the Land again and they will look to the Lord and no one else.
(The view expressed in this blog are my own and should not be taken as inspired in any way.)
No comments:
Post a Comment