Thoughts on Leviticus 3 & Colossians 4

Today’s reading: Leviticus 3; Colossians 4

Thoughts on Leviticus 3

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but it is significant that no offering to Yahweh is left out in the tabernacle. This is the kind of thing that would have been meaningful theological messaging to the Israelites, but is easy for us to miss because it is pretty divorced from our context today.

But leaving food/offerings out for the deity was a very common part of the worship and placatation of deities in the ancient near east. The gods they were worshiping were present in the temple, and so they left their sacrifices to be consumed or used by the god in the temple.

With Yahweh though, He Himself was not present in the tabernacle. Yes, His presence dwelt among the people in the tabernacle, but this was very different from a god like Dagon or Baal, who would inhabit the idol in the temple and be discreetly present in that place. The messaging here is that Yahweh is greater than that and cannot be contained and is not constrained to one place. If they are going to get their offering to Yahweh, they have to burn it and the offering will ascend in the smoke to the heavens where Yahweh is.

Just this simple aspect of how He organized the sacrificial system said a lot to Israel about the God they were dealing with, especially as compared to the gods of the nations around them. Yahweh is not simply one god among many, but is completely other than those lesser gods over the nations.

Thoughts on Colossians 4

My thoughts this morning on Colossians 4 are more about the letter as a whole, but it’s the content of chapter 4 that takes me to this.

Right belief drives right action, not the other way around.

Colossians 3 is pretty practical, but it’s also very generic and relatively short. It’s clear there were no glaring issues of sin or practice that Paul wanted to address, meaning the practical issues are not what led him to write this letter. Chapter 4 also has very little practical instruction before moving into greetings and such to close out the letter.

What this tells me is that it is chapters 1 and 2 that are why Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians in the first place, and that was calling the Colossian church back to a firm footing on the gospel. As we saw a couple days ago, they were being led astray by empty philosophical arguments to beliefs and practices not rooted in the gospel itself. And at the end of chapter 2, Paul even says that, while these things appear to have wisdom, they have no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh, meaning they are not going to lead them to a more godly life/lifestyle.

If they, as individuals and as a community, are to grow and mature in Christ, it is not through submitting to these baseless external controls, religious festivals, pagan practices, etc., that it is going to happen, but it is through a deeper and more accurate grounding in Christ.

So many Christians (myself included) tend to approach sin functionally. We look for ways to control it, minimize it, or otherwise function ourselves out of it and into a more righteous way of operating that we would label “spiritual maturity.” But no matter how effective (or not) we are at controlling the flesh, if the underlying issues of belief and faith that are leading to that sin are not addressed, the best we can hope for is that we can successfully quell the specific sin we are “targeting,” and it will just come out in some other area and some new sin instead. If we are to truly grow in righteousness and mature into Christlikeness, that has to start with a deeper understanding of truth; the truth of who we are in Christ, and the truth of how God has created us to function that we are disbelieving as we chase after the illicit fulfillment of sin.

So that’s my takeaway from Colossians 4. Because Paul wraps up so quickly, and the only thing he really settles on in this letter is where they are being led astray, the most important thing is not the sin they were committing, but the false truths they were believing that led to and/or facilitated that sin.