Grains of Sand

Google Images One of the most daunting tasks of reading through the Scriptures and trying to apply them to life is what to do with passages like Leviticus 15. In my Bible, the title of the chapter is “Discharges Causing Uncleanness.” Yippee! The bottom line for the Israelites was that anyone suffering a bodily discharge was unclean for a proscribed period of time and anything touched by that person or discharge was also unclean. At the end of the period of contamination sacrifices had to be made but until then that person was not allowed to coming to the Tent of Meeting. Verse 31 states: “ You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so that they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them. ” Before going back to this statement, I want to pause at a New Testament story that highlights just how terrible the consequences of this particular commandment would have been. Matthew 9:18-22 tells us about a woman who dar...

Google Images Water. Ecologists warn that we are abusing it and that one day that abuse will come back to haunt us. In some parts of the world, lack of the vital resource has left millions of people struggling for life. It would be hard to drink too much of it, but most of us drink too little. We bathe in it, flush it, swim in it, and generally assume that it will always be there for us. Water is essential to life. Washing, to the Jew familiar with the law and the traditions of the religion of his ancestors, symbolized purification. It had always had a place in the practice of religion, from the cleansing rituals of the priests before they entered the holy places to the bitter water drunk by the woman suspected of adultery. Amazingly it took more modern generations a long time to realize just how important washing was to the prevention of disease and contamination. It wasn’t until the 1800s that physicians began to make the connection that the Bible had always illustrated through i...