Hey everyone,
How’s it going? A few announcements. Tomorrow there will be a special screening for a movie on North Korea, “Crossing” at Parker Adventist Hospital this Friday at 5:30pm. http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk03100&num=3411. The movie will be playing in the basement (ground floor) conference room C/D-next to the cafeteria entrance.
Secondly, I forgot to mention a policy change for our EM. Our EM Core has decided that all future EM events will be ALCOHOL FREE. We wanted to make sure that alcohol would not become an issue at official church functions. Feel free to ask me any questions about this. Here’s today’s devotion:
Thurs, Feb 4th – Leviticus 11-13
All of us are unique in the fact that we all have different levels of cleanliness that we are willing to tolerate. For some of us, we are extremely clean and cannot stand anything dirty. For others, we can deal with extremely levels of dirt. I remember one time visiting a group of college students and I had to go to the bathroom. When I looked at the bathroom in the dark, it looked OK but when I turned on the light, there was a layer of brown film covering the bathroom sink.
Today, we examine the passage that specifically deal with food regulations and being ceremonial clean or unclean. You will notice in these chapters that God was very intentional in what His peopl would eat and wouldn’t eat. Why did God place such regulations? First, it was a way in which the Jews would be set apart from the rest of the nations. The surrounding nations really didn’t have any rules with eating and they would do some very disgusting things such as drinking the blood straight from an animal and even eating other humans. The Lord would call His people to show uniqueness in this aspect of their lives. Also, we must remember that there weren’t things such as freezers and ziplock bags back then and it was easy for disease to spread thru contamninated food. The Lord would know this and would protect His people thru these rules as well.
In the later chapters, it goes into the whole aspects of skin diseases. Again, this was a means by which to keep disease from spreading amongst God’s people. But these rules would also point to the greater reality of sin. In the greater perspective we are all unclean b/c of our sin and the problem is that we can make ourselves clean. It is only the precious blood of Jesus that can wash our sins away so that we can be CLEAN in the Lord’s sight. Praise God for His grace and favor on us.
Take care guys and God bless!
SDG,
P Ben