Today's Bible In a Year Passage passage: Leviticus 21-22; Revelation 1
In Leviticus 21 it mentions in verses 7, 13-15 about how important it is that the priests marry virgins, to keep pure. The importance of keeping sexually pure is one thing our society laughs at today. This is one thing that Christians need to stress the importance of to our youth, even though the world around us doesn't take thin seriously.
At the end of both chapters, after God gives the Israelites rules to follow, He reminds them that He is God and that they (and us) should obey, follow and respect Him. He has made these things special and has made us special. He brought the Israelites out of Egypt in order to be their God.
In Revelation 1, John starts out by saying that this revelation is from Jesus Christ, and God gave him this revelation to show us what must happen soon (v1), and then goes on to say there's not much time left (v3). Maybe we need to have more urgency in accomplishing what God wants us to do?
This is a good reminder for me. As I near being 40 yrs old, in my mind I'm still 25 and think I can physically do anything at the same speed and recovery time as I used to. But when I'm honest with myself, I know that those days are in the past. They seemed to fly by so fast and without warning. I don't want that to happen to me spiritually.
Tomorrow's Bible In a Year Passage passage: Leviticus 23-24; Revelation 2
3 comments:
I appreciated Bob Deffinbaugh's summary of these two chapters in Leviticus....
What is it, then, that God wanted to teach the priests in these two chapters? First, He wanted them to know that He is the One who makes men holy, who sets them apart. It was not that the sons of Aaron were better or more worthy than the other Israelites, or that they “tried harder.” It was simply that God sovereignly chose to set them apart from others, to perform a special task. Second, He wanted them to know that in order to perform their task they had to remain undefiled, and thus they had to avoid those defilements which others might have been free to contact. God did have a higher standard for His priests, because they had a sacred task—that of making offerings for the people, because they had a higher privilege, and with it came a higher responsibility.
Note John's reaction to witnessing the glory of God - he felt at His feet as though dead. This is one of the reasons I'm rather skeptical about all the "gone to heaven and come back books". None of them even come close to having this sort of reaction from being in the presence of God - which is, of course, what heaven is. God's glory is truly overwhelming. Anyway who has ever received a vision of heaven in the Bible is absolutely overcome. We know and believe that God's glory is overwhelming, but to actually experience it ourselves would be incredible. John must have never been the same.
This verse stood out for me: 8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
It's hard to wrap my head around this. We serve an awesome God.
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