Leviticus 13:18–23
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We live in a therapeutic age, which is another way of saying we live in a dishonest age. We have exchanged the priest for the therapist, the confessional for the couch, and the diagnosis of sin for the language of brokenness, trauma, and dysfunction. The modern world wants a God who is a divine butler, a cosmic affirmation machine, but it has no room for a God who is a holy physician, a God who diagnoses, isolates, and cuts out spiritual disease. And so, when we come to a passage like this one in Leviticus, our first impulse is to dismiss it as part of an arcane and irrelevant purity code. We think it has to do with primitive hygiene, not theology. The laws concerning leprosy in Leviticus 13 and 14 are not primarily about public health. They are a detailed, physical picture of a far more serious spiritual reality.