Thoughts on 2 Timothy 4 & Leviticus 15

Today's reading: Leviticus 15; 2 Timothy 3-4

Thoughts on 2 Timothy 4

What kind of teaching do you want to hear?

Paul's admonition to Timothy at the beginning of chapter 4 to teach the Word is based on the fact that a time is coming when people will not be interested in sound teaching, but just in having their ears tickled by teaching that suits their own passions.

I'm not sure what Paul was thinking of or foreseeing when he wrote those words, but I can't help but look around and see a lot of that today, both in and outside the church.

I'm sure there are others with a much broader view of things than I have, but just looking at the way things have changed in my own lifetime is telling. Mine is maybe the last generation that will ever have had to rely on physical encyclopedias to write a paper for school. I was in school for that window of time where, during elementary school we only had paper encyclopedias in the library, then in middle school electronic encyclopedias were becoming common, then in high school we could use electronic sources for papers but still had to have our points backed up by printed sources, and then by the time I got into college paper sources were no longer required.

The availability of information has exploded in the last few decades, but that has brought with it its own set of issues. What we read in an encyclopedia could be trusted and treated as fact, at least so far as the academic community understood the facts at the time of publication. The problem is though that people have carried that same trust and treatment over into the internet where anybody can post anything they want without concern for source or truth, with the result that if you don't like the "facts" as you find them with one source, there are five other sources with the "facts" as you do like them.

This approach to reality and truth is clearly problematic, and it has spilled over into the church.

To be clear, I am not, right now, talking about people who don't hold the Bible as a source of truth. I do believe there are good reasons to take the Bible as the true and inspired word of God, but that's a post for a different day. What I am talking about today are individuals and churches that believe and/or start from the bible but are more interested in their own conclusions out of it than they are with what it actually has to say. People who have decided beforehand what is or is not true, and then read their truth into the Scriptures, or simply ignore the "inconvenient" parts of the Scriptures in order to focus on what they have already decided is true and important.

As this kind of thinking and teaching becomes more pervasive, I think the important question each of us needs to reckon with is, "Who is the source of truth in my life?"

If you are a Christian, as you run into difficult, uncomfortable, or inconvenient truths from the Bible, what are you going to do with them? Do you hold your own thoughts and feelings as the ultimate source of truth and decide to either ignore or manipulate the Word of God to "conform" to your own will, or do you accept that you are a fallen created being and your creator has the unique right to declare truth?

If you are a pastor or teacher of the Word, as you run into difficult, uncomfortable, or inconvenient truths from the Bible, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to skip over those passages so you don't have to risk losing members by teaching something controversial in today's culture, are you going to ignore the context of the passage so you can make it sound a little more palatable than it might otherwise be, are you going to reject the inerrancy or authority of Scripture so you can say whatever you don't like is not actually from God, or are you going to stand on the firm foundation of revealed truth and boldly declare even the most inconvenient or uncomfortable truths as the truths they are?

Paul warns Timothy that this is coming, and whether what we see today is what Paul envisioned or not, I think it is safe to say we are in the midst of a time when people are more interested in having their ears tickled by teachings that suit their own passions than in engaging with difficult truth. So in the midst of such a time, what kind to teaching are you looking for? Whose truth are you most interested in, your own, or the Lord's?

Thoughts on Leviticus 15

I don't have much to say on Leviticus 15 this morning, but there is one important thing I want to point out because it is something that I often see misconstrued by Christians who just don't know the Old Testament all that well, and that is the distinction between uncleanness and unrighteousness.

Being unclean does not equate to being sinful. I have mentioned this already in posts as we are reading through Leviticus, and we have seen that even certain priestly activities, directly commanded by God Himself, would make the priest unclean, so we necessarily cannot be saying that to be unclean is to be in a state of sin.

If you were unclean you were not allowed to enter into sacred space, but there is a lot of theological messaging wrapped up in that concept, some of which teaches about God, some of which is to mark Israel and their worship of Yahweh as distinct from the nations around them, etc. So you have ideas like wholeness; that God is the author of life and created humanity perfectly, but brokenness came as a result of humanity's rebellion against Him, so to be clean and to have access to sacred space required being whole and healthy. This was why skin conditions (Leviticus 14) would make you unclean when you had open wounds, but you were declared clean if your entire body was covered but you had no open sores. To be un-whole does not make you unfit for salvation, but it does make you unfit to enter into sacred space because God is a God of wholeness and life.

In a similar way "discharges" of various kinds from your body in Leviticus 15 make you un-whole for a period of time as well, and therefore unfit to enter into sacred space. 

I am belaboring this point because, historically, there has been some pretty extreme theology that has become mainstream in parts of the Christian church at times, going back to a failure to distinguish being unclean and being sinful. And when you take everything that could possibly make you unclean, and decide that each of those things is sinful, and then try to map that back to the sinless life of Jesus, or to Adam and Eve pre-Fall, or to other people/actions, you end up with some pretty weird theology with no real root in the Scriptures other than that they would be the logical outworking of uncleanness being equivalent to unrighteousness.

That's all I really wanted to say about this chapter. If we are going to think well about the Scriptures, we have to let them communicate. Even if we, today, don't have much of a concept of cleanness/uncleanness/sacred space, that does not mean we can map our understandings of what makes us fit/unfit for salvation onto what made individual Israelites ritually fit/unfit to enter into sacred space and worship in the tabernacle.