We’ve all heard the phrase “You are what you eat.” After reading Leviticus 11, you begin to realize that maybe that phrase has been around a little longer than you think.
God was teaching His people in the wilderness that just because He has given us the freedom to do whatever we want doesn’t mean that we should. God wanted His people to know which foods should be considered clean and which should be considered unclean (11:47). God had a few good reasons for giving the people this restricted diet.
- To ensure His people stayed healthy. The forbidden foods were usually scavenging animals that fed on animals that were already dead, which means that disease could be transmitted through them.
- God wanted to visibly distinguish Israel from other nations. The pig, for example, was a common sacrifice of pagan nations.
- God wanted to avoid objectionable associations. For example, the creatures that crawled along the ground make one think of serpents, which is often associated with sin (think the Garden of Eden).
God was fairly direct and detailed with foods the people could eat, even going so far as to forbid them to touch some of the unclean animals (11:8). God wanted His people to be completely separated from the things He had forbidden because He knew what the consequences could be. Often times today we find ourselves in similar situations.
How many times do we talk ourselves into something with the rationalization that we are technically keeping a commandment? God was trying to protect His people (and us today) from getting into situations where they would be tempted to sin, situations where they might “technically” be innocent but really….they had sinned.
As we’ve seen in the previous chapters, God is also teaching us how to worship, and here God is showing His people the importance of not merely showing up, but being prepared to worship! God goes over quite a few instances where people may have sinned (even accidentally) and needed to be made right with Him (“cleansed”) before they could rejoin the community in worship. The same applies to us today. We cannot just live any way we want all week long and simply “show up” in God’s presence for an hour each week. No! We should prepare ourselves by confessing our sins to God, making ourselves right with Him (and anyone we’ve wronged, if possible), and live with anticipation of the joy that comes from being in God’s presence with other believers.
As you can see, there is a lot more in this chapter than just a list of food the people could and couldn’t eat. God sums it up for us:
44 For I am the Lord your God. You must consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. So do not defile yourselves with any of these small animals that scurry along the ground. 45 For I, the Lord, am the one who brought you up from the land of Egypt, that I might be your God. Therefore, you must be holy because I am holy.
Right there God is giving us a key understanding of all the rules and regulations in Leviticus. God wants us, as His people, to be holy—set apart, different, unique—because He is! God knows that we only have two options in this world: To be set apart and holy, or to make compromises and become corrupt.
God wasn’t just giving instructions to the Israelites in the wilderness, He is also calling us, as Christians, to be holy (I Peter 1:15). Just like the wanderers in the desert, we should strive to remain spiritually separate from the enticements of the world, even though we encounter them every day. We should be examples to those around us, not compromise and try and “fit in” or “be cool” with them.
It’s not easy, and God knows that! God doesn’t expect us to go it alone, He is there with us every step of the way. And, because of Christ’s sacrifice for us, we “are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.” (Colossians 1:22). With Christ, we can really and truly live IN the world and not be OF the world!
Encounter: How can you live for God without walling yourself off from the world?
Some references borrowed from the Life Application Study Bible (NLT) 2nd Edition published by Tyndale House Publishers.
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