Life Journal Reading
February 27, 2017We are in a kind of “rough Patch” in our Life Journal reading. On the one hand, we have lived through Leviticus, but now we face Numbers. Sounds like a rather strange thing for a pastor to say, but there you have it. In fact, I quote Pastor Jack Hayford, who said: “all Scripture is inspired, but some are more inspiring than others.” I want to take this chance and encourage you to “slug it out” – for two reasons:
1)
Everything
you read in the Bible really is inspired.
God put it there on purpose. There
is no limit to what God could have included and there is no way to know what He
left out and why. At the end of John’s
Gospel he said:
Even the three years of Jesus’ earthly ministry cannot be completely accounted for. God picked and chose and instructed His scribes (writers) what to include. God chose Leviticus, Numbers. God even had Moses write Deuteronomy – a recap of those books. We may not see the sense of why they are there, but we need this information.
2) If with need this info, then the Holy Spirit is going to make the why clear – sometime. It is important to remind ourselves that when we read “those” books it was written for our instruction, and what takes place is either an example to us, or it is a symbol of something. The Tabernacle is a copy of what is in heaven – the same is true for the Temple. We are not required to keep the Law to earn our salvation, but our lives function better the better we are able to keep it. Thankfully, Jesus met the requirements of the Law, so we don’t have to make a sacrifice everytime we sin. It is for our own good to obey the Law.
Understand, it is widely accepted that a few books are difficult to read and apply to our lives. I believe God understands this too, and so we get a kind of “spiritual credit” for doing it, even if we just do it for Him. I guess you could think of it like eating your veggies. You may not like them, but they are good for you.
Posted by Bill Killion.
I am the Pastor of Greater Life Church, Elko, NV. Husband, father, grandfather, regular guy who happens to believe that Jesus has great plans for all of our lives and we need cooperate with Him in order to see those plans happen.