I think I actually *enjoyed* reading Leviticus!

*GASP*

Who enjoys Leviticus? On the surface, it is a book of rituals and requirements that mean nothing to us as Christians. However, I think deep down it is a story that truly tells of God's love for us!

Our God is a holy God. Because of His holiness, our sin separates us from Him. Today, because of Christ's sacrifice, we can approach Him in grace and forgiveness. However, before that sacrifice, He had to make a way for His people to come into His presence. Because "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), forgiveness required a blood offering. Christ came as the perfect and holy sacrifice – without sin or blemish – that fulfilled that on our behalf. However, before He came, God still wanted fellowship with His people, and so He set out very detailed guidelines that would allow them to fellowship.

See, it's a picture of grace. He could have just turned His back on the people as a lost cause until Jesus came and died on the cross, but He didn't. Instead, He provided them with guidelines that would allow them to come into His presence and "be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy." (Leviticus 20:26)

And today, as I was finishing the book of Leviticus, it all came together in chapter 26. In ten stanzas, God speaks to the Israelites and lays out the blessings of obedience and the curses of disobedience.

He starts:

Verses 3, 4: "If you walk in My statues and keep My commandments, and perform them, then I will give you rain it its season, the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit."

Verse 9: "For I will look on you favorably and make you fruitful, multiply you and confirm My covenant with you."

And then He lays out the consequences for disobedience, and in five consecutive stanzas they get worse and worse:

Verses 14, 17: "But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments...I will set My face against you..."

Verse 18: "And after all this, if you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sin."

Verse 21: "Then if you walk contrary to Me, and are not willing to obey Me, I will bring on you seven times more plagues, according to your sins."

Verses 23, 24: "And if by these things you are not reformed by Me, but walk contrary to Me, then I also will walk contrary to you, and I will punish you yet seven times for your sin..."

Verses 27, 28: "And after all this, if you do not obey Me, but walk contrary to Me, then I also will walk contrary to you in fury..."

But see, it doesn't end there...

Verses 40 – 42: "But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, with their unfaithfulness in which they were unfaithful to Me, and that they also have walked contrary to Me...if their uncircumcised hearts are humbled, and they accept their guilt – then I will remember My covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham. I will remember; I will remember the land."

I heard someone say the other day that they felt like the God of the Old Testament was a God of wrath and anger, and He seems like a different God than the God of the New Testament. But I don't think that's true at all. Our God is unchanging. Even in the Old Testament, He was a God of grace and mercy, of love and redemption. His desire was for His people to come to know Him, and although He did punish them and show His righteous anger, it was always in the hope of drawing them back to Him.