Skin Disease - The Levites

It's so hard to read Leviticus every time I try. It's so many pages full of rules regarding offerings and the priests and which offerings are required for every specific instance. I just read two chapters of the Bible that pretty much only focus on irritations on the skin and whether or not the person with the irritation is clean or needs to be kept in confinement to determine whether or not they are unclean.

The first thing that comes to mind is "Thank God for Jesus!"

Aaron would have been so frustrated with me when I brought my two doves for my guilt offering and my cake without yeast as my sin offering and my spotless young ewe for my celebration offering. There's no way I could have kept track of all of those things! Plus, with the amount of sin in my life, my flock would have needed to have a very serious reproduction rate!

So, I'm very thankful that Jesus came in and took the place of the need to slaughter animals as offerings to God. It's much easier to just remember to give my first 10% every paycheck in order to give God the firstfruits of my labor. (PS. If it's the firstfruits, then it comes before taxes, otherwise it's the secondfruits)

When I read these areas of the text I have to sit around for a while asking myself and praying about how this could possibly be relevant to me today. Usually, I just tell myself how thankful I am that I don't need to bust out Leviticus every time I sin to figure out my offering, but instead can just repent through Christ. Today was a little different though. The text continued to refer to the depth of the skin irritation on whether or not it was clean or unclean. Then discussed a little bit about whether it had healed or not, and healed "white" (a scab) skin was considered clean.

I think the depth of the irritation is the depth of sin in our lives. Multiple times the text refers to white skin on the surface only as being clean. That white skin to me is the new skin over an area where a boil or a cut occurred. The skin is healing, therefore the person, although they sinned, is clean. The sin was not able to penetrate, but instead was forgiven and the person is clean.

The text also referred to irritations that were deeper than the top layer of skin. Sometimes those people had to go into confinement for 7 days to see whether or not the disease spread or became healed. I believe that this is referring to the times in our lives when we're caught up in sin. We aren't clean yet because we haven't asked for forgiveness and may still be living in the sin, but maybe it still hasn't completely pulled us away from God, so only time will tell whether or not we fall away or seek healing. After those 7 days, the priest needs to inspect the person again. If the disease has spread, the person is unclean, but if it is still there and not spread - back into solitary confinement. If the skin is white, the person is clean.

If the disease ends up growing from the depths of the skin and spreading into the skin of the whole body, that person is considered unclean and must stay outside the walls of the city in order to separate the clean from the unclean. These would be the people who fell into sin and allowed the sin that entered their lives to take over to the point where it leads them to death.

The great news in all of this is that even when we have a little disease or irritation on our skin, we can still be considered clean. Whether or not we had a disease and now have white skin, or we never had any skin issues at all - both are considered clean. There is no differentiation! One is not considered more clean than the other. The person without white skin was not given more freedoms or more love or more opportunities than the other person. That means that God sees us all the same - whether we have been striving for Christ-like perfection our whole lives, or if we came to Him with scars and scabs from our past - we all look the same to Him!

Don't be ashamed of the scabs and the scars. But, make sure that when disease strikes, you don't let it take over your whole body. Allow the scab to bring healing and remain clean inside the walls of the city.