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Hearing God Speak through His Word

"But the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word
in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast, and bear fruit with perseverance."
-- Luke 8:15 (NASB)

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Leviticus 13:1-3 • The Priest as Inspector

Posted Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 12:12 am

"Then the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 'When a man has on the skin of his body a swelling or a scab or a bright spot, and it becomes an infection of leprosy on the skin of his body, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests. The priest shall look at the mark on the skin of the body, and if the hair in the infection has turned white and the infection appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is an infection of leprosy; when the priest has looked at him, he shall pronounce him unclean.'"
    —Leviticus 13:1-3 (NASB)

Relax. I'm not going into any gross, medical details. Chapter 13 of Leviticus is filled with such examples and I just took the first one for the sake of discussion of how this all might actually apply to the modern, New Testament Christian walk. How could this possibly be relevant today? In the concept of "inspection".

I believe that Leviticus is replete with application for today's Christian. After all, the New Testament identifies us as "priests", (Revelation 1:6; 5:10;  20:6) so what better guide than Leviticus—"the priests' book"—to shed some light on what that means. If we look past the literal tasks of handling the sacrifices and running the tabernacle, we can see that there are some general expectations associated with a priest's job description. Chief among them is "inspector".

Leviticus 13 details a wide variety of situations that boil down to the fact that something may or may not be wrong with a person, their clothes, or their abode, and someone needs to determine the truth. It comes down to the simple, biblical question, "Is it clean or unclean?" Priests didn't just do this regarding a person's physical health, but was the primary teacher of God's Word so everyone would learn what is "clean" versus "unclean". It wasn't just a teaching about food and sacrifices and diseases, but behavior, doctrine, and spiritual faith. Using things such as the different diseases collectively known as "leprosy", animals, and the like, the Word of God extended the examples to enable everyone to discern whether or not a doctrine, teacher, or spiritual movement was of God or not; whether it was biblically "clean" or "unclean".

The most important lesson that stands out to me in this regard, is that it has become politically incorrect to "inspect"—to put teachers, movements, and their respective doctrines under the test of God's Word—in order to pronounce whether or not they're biblical. See…right there, by using "biblical or not", I temporarily gave way to political correctness by finding a much nicer way of substituting "clean" or "unclean".

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world."
    —1 John 4:1 (NASB)

You see…it's not just a wild stretch I'm making in the application of Leviticus for today's Believer; it's a biblical requirement affirmed in BOTH Testaments. Don't be shy. When it comes to all the books, magazines, web sites, videos, television, and even all the teachers, preachers and scholars who come before us in every media form imaginable, "test the spirits to see whether they are from God". Be like the priests of old and be an inspector.†††

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