Saturday 4 May 2013

Saturday Reading: Leviticus 11:44-47

Key Verse: Leviticus 11:44
44  For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Devotion:
When we read through the first books of our bibles we begin to get a picture of a people who had a very strict set of laws to live by. Those same laws are what our modern laws are based upon with our worldly view on life wiping out many of the laws that include keeping God in our lives because man thinks that he should not be bound by religion. But when we study those same laws that were written so many years ago they are all based upon the fact that man should be listening to God.

Modern society has all but wiped out that fact: Listen to God because He created everything and it is because of Him that man is still alive. If we had been left to our own devices then we may well have wiped ourselves off the face of the earth already; instead God has made us a promise that the world (including us) will continue to exist until He deems it necessary to end it and make a new earth for us to live on.

These laws have been and continue to be a test of people’s obedience. Right from the first law given to Adam and Eve we have been given choices and we have failed in those choices, choosing chaos and evil over righteousness. Those laws are set so that we can choose to deny ourselves the desires and lusts of our bodies and follow God’s rules instead. Those laws were primarily to keep the people of Israel apart from the corrupt world around them so that they would not fall into the same pits as the rest of man had already done. If you want proof of man’s ability to destroy himself then look at every nation and see how they have failed until they have embraced God’s laws; in part of in whole.

Some of these laws may seem very alien to us nowadays because they were aimed at the people of Israel at that time, but when we look at how they were constructed and how they had to be applied, we can learn a whole lot more about how we should apply God’s laws into our lives today. God wants us to live our lives with Him and not against Him. He continues to make sure that those laws are taught generation after generation so that we can understand our heritage and try to figure out that the only way we will survive is by listening to Him. But it still is our choice…

Points to Ponder:
Do you trust the law of the land?

Do you trust God’s law?