Day 59 – Lev 11-12; Mark 7:1-13

Lev. 11-12

This business of clean and unclean is laborious!  And I must admit, as with most of the other very detailed laws, I do not understand it.  Something did occur to me this morning, though, that I had not ever thought about before. Many years prior to this point in the wilderness, Noah took a bunch of animals on a big boat.  He took two of every unclean animal and seven of every clean one.  But not only had the law not been given at that point, the Jews weren’t even a people yet.  So what did Noah know of clean and unclean animals? 

I suspect there is much we don’t know about what God communicated to the population prior to Moses.  At the start, everybody was technically “God’s people”, and we know that sacrifices were made to God before they were laid out in the law.  We also see instances throughout Genesis where leaders of foreign nations know and even fear God. 

So perhaps the “giving of the law” in Leviticus was not really the “giving” of the law, but rather a reiteration of how things were supposed to be that people had fallen away from (and had possibly all been taught at some point).  God took and set apart one man and one line of his descendants to make them His and restore them to holiness in a world that had, once again, fallen away from Him.  And, once again, this solidifies in my mind how the Jews themselves are a representation of all of God’s people; a picture of His plan of salvation and redemption for all who belong to Him.

Mark 7:1-13

And speaking of clean and unclean…we revisit the story of the disciples eating without washing their hands.  The law we just read in Leviticus is pretty specific about the whole cleanliness thing, so what gives?  My thought is this – all that washing of garments and hands and whatnot was more of an outward expression intended to create mindfulness of an inner condition.  So maybe the washing before eating, for instance, was meant to remind the people to be grateful and humble before their Great Provider.  Just thinking. 

Jesus makes it very clear that washing your hands does nothing to make you clean (as He mentioned in this passage in Matthew, it is what is in your heart that makes you clean or unclean).  So the point of all the strict details must have somehow been for awareness of the heart condition.  Clear as mud?  It sounds a little better inside my head…