Leviticus 15:31–33
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We like our religion to be abstract, spiritual, and above all, clean. We prefer a God who stays in His heavenly throne room, concerning Himself with lofty thoughts and ethereal principles. But the book of Leviticus, and particularly a chapter like this one, drags us down to earth with a thud. We are confronted with a God who is intensely interested in bodily discharges, seminal emissions, and menstrual impurity. Our modern sensibilities are tempted to blush, to skip over these passages, or to dismiss them as part of a primitive hygiene code that we have long since outgrown with the advent of indoor plumbing. But to do so is to fundamentally misunderstand the God we worship and the world He has made. This is not about hygiene, though God's laws are never unhygienic. The central, earth-shattering reality of the Old Covenant was that the transcendent, holy God of the universe had pitched His tent, His tabernacle, right in the middle of Israel's dusty, noisy, and very messy camp.