It seemed a bit harsh to me, at first, that if someone was unclean and ate of the sacrifices that they should be completely cut off from Israel (Lev. 7:19-20). What if that person didn't have time to go through the whole ritual before being there at an appointed time? What if something happened on the way? I could think of a half dozen excuses why this might happen. Was it necessary to completely shun them?
But then I began to think of the full implications of such actions. God had commanded that no person who had touched uncleanness take part in the sacrifices. Period. Being clean before the Lord was a condition of sacrifice. Everyone in Israel knew this. So no matter what had happened prior to a sacrifice, one who had touched uncleanness had a perfectly good excuse to abstain, and no reason not to. It struck me: this isn't really an issue of being ceremonially clean before the Lord, but a matter of the heart. God wanted people to be clean before they came to Him; uncleanness and sin were the very things that separate us from God. Making sure one was ritually and spiritually clean was a part of the preparations for sacrifice and worship before the Lord. It was a matter of the heart being right. Could you really say that someone who heedlessly went forward with sacrifice before being cleansed truly had a heart right before God? If they were were completely ignoring His commandments? I don't think so. It was necessary to be ritually cleansed, not only to fulfill the Law, but to prepare the worshiper for worship.
How many of us do that today? How many of us actually take a moment to cleanse and purge ourselves of our sins before standing up to sing in church? Before partaking in communion? Offering? Listening to the sermon? All of these are forms of worship. All of these are part of the things we do in order to focus on God and to attribute to Him His worth. Have we ever taken so seriously the preparation to meet our Lord in worship? What would it look like if we did? How many of us would need to step back from worship in order to deal with some things that needed to be cleansed from our lives, from our hearts? And are we truly worshiping God if we allow sin to fester in our hearts, disregarding His command to be clean before Him? This bears some serious thought, because while the answers seem obvious, they're not necessarily pat, are they?
Tomorrow's Reading: Leviticus 8:1-36
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