The Letter

One of my favourite bands (namely, in the metal genre) is For Today. I always used to hate metal as a music style, but when I was introduced to these guys and a few other bands that are like them, I realized that the Lord is really working through their music in some sweet ways. Young people who feel rejected by the church (and the world as a whole) are coming to these guys' concerts, and they're getting healed from physical ailments, they're getting saved, baptised, and sent out to preach Christ's Lordship and Kingship to this broken world. These guys are changing lives.

That's a group I can support!

Today, I was listening to a video of Mattie Montgomery, the lead singer of For Today, preaching to a group of people. He started talking about the Bible and how it fits into our relationship with our God. Here's a bit that he said that stuck with me:

If I was going to come visit you, and I wrote you a letter, and in it I said that I was going to show up next Thursday at 8 PM, and I am going to be wearing a blue hoodie. Then, you get the letter and think, "Okay, Mattie is going to come. Next Thursday at 8 o'clock he's going to be wearing a blue hoodie".  

Then, in order to be sure you didn't miss me, you started studying that letter very intently.  You started memorizing the letter, and you started telling other people about the letter to make sure you got the details of the letter in you. So then, Thursday at 8 PM comes. I get off my plane and expect to meet you, but you're too busy studying the letter I sent you to pay attention to me. So I'm left outside the airport waiting for a ride to arrive. We had a bunch of things planned, and we were going to do all these amazing and awesome things together—all of which I talked about in the letter. But you were so obsessed with the letter I sent you that you missed me. 

That's what we do with the Bible. He gave us a letter that points us to Him.
The whole point of what He's done is to get us to a point where we can walk with Him and talk with Him — to have a relationship with him.

He really, truly, wants to have a relationship with you, to spend time with you, and to bring hope to a broken world with you.

The Royal Priesthood - An Invitation to Liberation

I'm the kind of person that really likes the New Testament and doesn't tend to  spend much time in the Old Testament. This is partly because I sometimes have trouble understanding parts of the Old Testament, more than I tend to with stuff from the New Testament, and partly because I just enjoy the New more. Because of that, I've been trying to get into some more of the Old Testament these last few days/weeks. I've been coming across lots of amazing stuff, some confusing stuff, and once in a while, some things that are just plain weird. The last few days I was in Leviticus, and I came across some stuff that I loved, and wanted to share.

If you've never read it, Leviticus is the third book in the Bible, and it's full of rules, regulations, and instructions that the people of Israel were supposed to follow in their worship of Yahweh. It can be a little... dense... at times. But there's some gold in there if you dig into it, which I've been trying to do a little lately.  Jesus said that He didn't come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. That means that everything in Exodus through Deuteronomy was fulfilled, and therefore points towards Jesus—both the crazy and amazing stuff, and the boring and weird stuff. So, I want to know what some of that stuff is!

One of the things that I came across and was thinking about when reading through Leviticus was the role of the priests in the system that the Law describes. It's fascinating!

If you were a priest in the Old Testament, there were some super strict limitations you were under. You had to be of a particular bloodline—specifically, you had to be a Levite and a descendent of Aaron; you were restricted in who you could marry, and what your social life could look like (whose funerals you could attend, what kind of haircut you could have, etc.). In Leviticus 21 there are even more restrictions listed. Here they are:

“Speak to Aaron, saying, None of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles. No man of the offspring of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the LORD's food offerings; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God.

One of the things I love about the Bible is that Jesus's life changed the way that the Old Testament affects us. Once, these things were restrictions—only certain people who fit into the box could experience Yahweh's presence—but when Jesus came, He established a brand new system. Let me show you what I mean.

The Bible says that Jesus lived a sinless life, and so He followed the Law perfectly during His life on earth. What's interesting about this, is that there were a few laws which He was a little bit... well... "funny" with. One of these is the law concerning uncleanliness and people with skin diseases. Under the Old Testament law, if you touched someone with a skin disease (like leprosy or certain rashes), you received the uncleanliness of that person. Legally speaking, you were the same as them, until you were cleared through ceremony.

Now, when it came to this law, Jesus played by different rules. In Luke 5, it says there was a leprous man that came up to Jesus, and asked Jesus to heal him.
What did Jesus do? Verse 13 says that He "stretched out His hand and touched Him".
By the Old rule of doing things, Jesus became ceremonially unclean! But is that what happened in reality? No. The leper was healed and became clean.

Instead of causing Jesus to become unclean, the opposite was true. The unclean was made clean!

What's this have to do with the priests mentioned before? Well, Jesus liked to play by different rules—better rules—than how the Law had been interpreted for centuries. In 1 Peter, It says that we, His Church has become "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession", and Hebrews talks about how He's been made chief priest of a new priesthood, that supersedes the Old Covenant priesthood.

That leads us back to Leviticus 21.

In the Old Testament, you had to be physically perfect if you wanted to be a priest for Yahweh. However, in the New Testament, because of what Jesus did, He brings us into His priesthood, and makes us perfect so we can be His! In 1 Peter 2, it says that His wounds have healed us. When He died for us, He paid for us to be perfectly spotless and without blemish.

That means that the limitations we read about in Leviticus 21 about who can be a priest in the Old system are in fact promises and invitations to liberation to us who are the Royal Priesthood in the New system.

Do you have sight defects? Once, if you needed glasses to see properly, you couldn't serve the Lord. Now, you can serve the Lord because your perfect eyesight has been bought with Jesus's blood.
Injury in your hands, feet, or back? Before, if you had anything wrong with your body physically, you were disqualified from the Lord's work.
But we don't play by those rules anymore! 

We who belong to Christ are now part of a New Priesthood. Our imperfections are not disqualifiers from His presence anymore, because Jesus has paid the price to set us free from them, and free into His perfection.

I thought that was cool.