I have a confession. I’ve avoided reading many parts of the Bible, mainly the Old Testament. It’s not that I haven’t tried. I’ve committed myself to reading it from start to finish and always end up giving up somewhere between Genesis 33 and Exodus 13. I get bored, I lose my place, I don’t understand anything that I’m reading. But mostly I quit because I have a hard time reconciling that God of the Old Testament with the Christ I know in the New Testament. I get skittish around Bible stories that don’t fit the God I want to believe in. I don’t always trust that the God of the Old Testament is a God that I will love and adore as much as the Jesus I know in the New Testament. As a result I avoid much of the Old Testament. But I am a youth pastor now (or something like it) and I am embarrassed to admit that many of my students have a better knowledge of the Bible than I do. So 2010 is the year that I started a Bible reading plan. Usually I have a little Old Testament and a chapter in the New Testament and maybe a Psalm thrown in there for good measure. It’s a doable amount (less doable is the 3-5 days of catch up I end up doing when I continually get behind…but alas, I’ve got no one to blame but myself).
I’ll never forget the sense of accomplishment I felt when, at the beginning of February, I finished Exodus! I’d never gotten that far before! I understood why I’d never made it to that point before; God was protecting me from the pages and pages dedicated to the description of the tabernacle. In an earlier time, that might have put me over the edge. But I persevered. I powered through. And I was rewarded with…Leviticus. Oh Leviticus. My eyes hurt just thinking about it. But, in some beautiful foresight made by someone smarter than me, my Bible reading plan had me reading Leviticus along side Acts. Thank you Jesus.
I loved reading Leviticus alongside Acts. I love Acts. I love the bold faith, the crazy miracles, the energy of the Holy Spirit. But I appreciated both Acts and Leviticus more when I read them together. As I read list after list of what was clean and what was not in Leviticus, God lovingly brought me back to what He told Peter in Acts 10:15- “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” As I read page after page about sin offerings and guilt offerings in Leviticus, I realized through Acts just what Jesus’ death did. In the times before Christ’s life and death people had to make atonement and pay for their sins. They had to kill goats and drain the blood and do all sorts of other gross things. Christ’s death has taken that away. Goats and bulls and lambs do not have to die anymore. Christ paid the price! He freed us from the tiring game of evening up the score. Without Leviticus I never understood just how chained to this cycle of sacrifice and atonement the Jews were. It was a profound moment at Caribou coffeehouse when I realized the full weight of what Christ was freeing the Jews from on that cross and the extent of how life changing that message would have been to the people in Acts.
Leviticus shows me the depth and detail of the law and Acts constantly reiterates how Christ took all that away. It is not through the law, through circumcision and keeping Kosher that we are saved. It is through the grace of Jesus. Leviticus showed me grace in a new way. And so I plug along through the Old Testament, riddled with questions and wrestling to understand who God is in the midst of mind numbingly detailed rules and people being wiped off the earth in a moment because of their failure to obey. I realize that I need to study the Old Testament because I need to know who God really is and trust that I will still really like Him on the other side of it. And revelations like the ones I received in Leviticus and Acts are helping me to do just that.
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