Message: In Leviticus 24 two men got in a
fight and one cursed God. God told Moses to take the man outside the camp and
have everyone who heard him curse come out, lay hands on his head and then
stone him to death. Then there were instructions about how to punish someone and
make restitution if they were to kill an animal, injure someone or kill
someone. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. As I read these words, I
felt the overwhelming heaviness of the law and I felt so relieved that we don’t
live under that. It also reminded me that we easily forget the cost of our sin
because we didn’t pay for it and we weren’t there to see Jesus pay for it. When
we sin against people we sin against God and because we know our sin is covered
we don’t truly feel the weight of what it cost to make our restitution. We
might feel bad about it (if we have any kind of heart) but we usually don’t
want anyone else to make us feel bad about it. If we actually had to think
about the weight of having to prepare our own restitution or endure a
punishment, and then saw Jesus go in our place every time we sinned I think we
would be a lot less careless about our sin, and a lot more intentional about
our obedience. I hear a lot of Christians who love to talk about grace try to
also insert “karma” as part of a belief system and it doesn’t make sense to me.
Karma is a Muslim belief system of how to get to heaven because they don’t
believe that Jesus paid for sin. They live their lives trying to keep an
unknown tally on their “good deeds” vs their “bad deeds” in the hopes that it
will all balance out so they can go to heaven. It’s the same “eye for an eye,
tooth for a tooth” judgment that the law carried, only it’s the idea that an
outside spiritual force will inflict this punishment upon sinners. If we
believe that Jesus was the final restitution that paid for all sin, we are not
only freed from making our own restitution for sin, but we no longer have the
right to carry any kind of expectation that those who offend us should receive punishment
either.
Command: Treat our sin as something that costs
more than we are able to pay, because it is.
Promise: Grace is the beautiful promise that
we are all enjoying because Jesus paid what we couldn’t.
Warning: If we don’t understand the cost of
our sin, and internalize the weight that should have been our responsibility,
we will treat grace like a cheap gift.
Application: If I’m honest, I struggle through
reading Leviticus but today the weight of this really hit me. We don’t have to
prepare sacrifices, and endure punishments like this for our sin because Jesus
took it for us. We know this academically, but since we have never been
required to do these things before in our lives, we don’t understand the actual
relief of responsibility that we have and how much our part affects other people.
As I was reading about all of the clean and unclean situations where people had
to stay quarantined until they were pronounced clean I also felt the weight of
what they went through under the law. This wasn’t even for sin issues, it was
just for regular life things like coming into contact with a dead person or
animal, or having a period. I related this in just a small portion to what a
hassle this COVID virus has been. We have to clean everything we touch, wear
masks and be conscious of who we are around. I had a coworker who had to miss 2
weeks of work because her temperature was 99 degrees one day. She never got
sick but she had to worry about being around other people just in case. People
going through this pandemic are stressed out by the worry and the measures we
all have to take to keep not only ourselves,
but other people protected. This may be just a tiny bit what it was like to
live under the law. What if we had a sudden guarantee that someone had come in
and rid the world of this plague? Can you imagine the relief? This is just a
tiny example of the relief we experience because Jesus did rid the world of the
plague of sin. My challenge to myself is to contemplate everything I do as if I
had to live under the law and see how loose I am with applying “grace” in order
to delay my obedience and roll around in my sin a little longer.
