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LEVITICUS 14–15; PSALM 36

Week 7, Day 1

Rabbis taught that the command for holiness had both a positive and a negative aspect. The positive is the Imitation of God. The negative means withdrawing from that which is impure and abominable. So Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair said, “Heedfulness leads to cleanness; cleanness to purity; purity to holiness; holiness to humility; humility to dread of sin; dread of sin to saintliness; saintliness to the possession of the Holy Spirit.” Such, surely, is the mood of these chapters. Their lengthy, patient list of regulations having to do with leprous diseases and with bodily discharges should be seen as the efforts of a people to avoid anything that might defile them. And they remind us again that there is often a close link between physical and spiritual defiling.

So many of the conditions of temporary uncleanness were “until the evening” (15:18, 19, 21, and so on). For the Hebrews, the new day began when the sun went down. Persons who had been unclean for a day could retire at night with a sense of purity; they began their new day at sunset with a sense of freshness and peace. When the Apostle said, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26), he was working on the same principle. The mind and spirit, as much as the body, ought to be clean as we begin a new day by entering the sleep that will have so much to do with how the following morning will be experienced.

PRAYER: I want all of my person—body, mind, and spirit—to be clean in your holy sight, that I may truly please you. Amen.

We’d do well to remember, in the spirit of Leviticus, that there is often a tie between physical and spiritual defiling. List some examples from your experience or observation.