Today’s Reading: Leviticus 8-11, Psalm 110, Hebrews 4
Oh, Leviticus. The book a Leviticus is the blueprint and the guide for the Levitical priest of the Hebrew to follow as a guide. Each piece and each word in Leviticus had to be done to precise letter. The most important things were in the details of each of the words. As a child, I remember reading through the first several books of the Bible, I was always confused. I did not understand why such detail was made for each chapter. As I grew up, I was able to understand how these precise details were the things that were needed for the children of Israel at the time. This is part of the Old Testament, to give us precise direction because we need this attention and direction for our life.
The specific information that we receive from Leviticus is similar to that of the understanding of time. We have to be given precise information about time for our minds to grasp the abstractness of God. God has allowed us to understand time, so that we can understand him better. In our most recent developments we can get time down to the trillionth of a second. At the beginning of the 1900s we could give time down to a second. At the beginning of the 12th century, we could get time down to portions of a day.
It’s in these details that we are able to have some foundation and clarity of our purpose. It is in these details that we understand God‘s work in us better. When I was a young adult, I had an understanding of how to digest the word of God. The understanding goes like this: the word of God is like a Thanksgiving feast, the first day you were eating so much and trying to digest it all. The following day you can have the leftovers. Then the following week you can boil the bones and the meat to make a soup. Each time that we are digesting the word of God, sometimes we get so much from just the overall text. Then we can get down to the sentences and paragraphs and phrases. Then we get down to a single word that speaks to us on a profound level.
Sometimes we can run through life at such a breakneck pace that we do not understand and see the details of our life. This past week my youngest daughter brought home a project that she had worked on for several weeks in class. As part of our routine, she leaves her class work on the dining room table for me and my wife to review and to look over. This particular project was about her. It was a non-fiction, biological sketch of herself. Now, I typically review these things and glance over them and put them away. This time, I reviewed it a little bit more closely. And when I reviewed it, the text touched my heart so much that I became very emotional. The above picture that you see for today’s post was the one that she had drawn. Each of the figures that she has drawn shows each person in our family, their age, and the things that they love most. If you look at the one under each one, it shows something different. But under the picture for me, her father, it shows that the thing that I love most is her.
Lord, allow us to be able to be in tune with how you show the specific details in our life. Lord, allow us to be open to the whisper, the vapor, the flowers that are in our life. Allow us to be where you want us to be influencers to others as you have been influential to us through the small details.