Instructions on offerings

Reflections based on Leviticus 1:1–17.

In the latter part of Exodus, God continues to give instructions to the Israelites on what is necessary for Him to dwell with them. In an amazing act of humility, He tells them that He will come and dwell with them in the Tabernacle that He instructs them to erect in the campsite. One of the Hebrew words used in Exodus to describe the Tabernacle tent is miqdash, which means holy place. God also instructs them to set apart priests to work in the Tabernacle. Leviticus starts with God speaking to Moses from the Tabernacle about the types of offerings the people should give. The whole of Leviticus is centred around God’s holiness – the very word holiness is mentioned more times than anywhere else in the Bible (152 times)! 

To our modern eyes, Leviticus seems like a blood-filled, strange book. But just think – God had taken up permanent residency with the Israelites so they needed to continue to consecrate themselves. If they wanted to continue to enjoy His favour and presence then, as we see in this first chapter, blood had to be shed. As God said to them in Leviticus 11:44, ‘consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy.’ In order to approach their holy God, the people’s sin had to be atoned for. This first chapter of Leviticus talks about the burnt offering, while the subsequent few chapters cover the other four types of offerings. In each one it is the perfection of the sacrifice that was so important – and by laying hands on the sacrifice the priest was transferring peoples’ guilt to it. This all points towards the final sacrifice that was to come: Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Prayer: Loving God, just as blood sacrifice was a way of atoning for the Israelites’ sins thank You that Your Son provided a way for us to be saved. Help me never to take that for granted. Amen. 

Commandments to live by

Reflections based on Exodus 20:1–20.

In amongst the cloud and fire, God spoke directly to Moses, giving him the Ten Commandments to take back down to the people. So often these are viewed as a list of rules to live by — if we manage to keep them all in our own strength then somehow we will be holy enough to be allowed to call ourselves Christians. However, as Phil Moore points out in his book Straight to the heart of Moses, the timing of when God gave the commandments is critical. He didn’t give them to Moses when he met him at the burning bush and sent him as His messenger to the Israelites in Egypt. They were given after God had saved them. They were given to show them how they should respond to the salvation God had provided for them. 

Far from a standard that we need to live up to, the Ten Commandments, and indeed the whole Jewish Law, can be seen as a measuring stick of holiness. God uses them to convince Israel – and us – that there is nothing we can do in our own strength to make ourselves spiritually holy. 

Interestingly, when Jesus walked the earth He referred back to the Ten Commandments, sometimes even going further than they do (for example, v14 talks about not committing adultery; in Matt 5:28 Jesus says if a man even looks at a woman lustfully he has committed adultery). No, these commandments are not things for the Israelites – and us – to strive to do. They are to convince us all of the need to accept God’s salvation — and holiness. Indeed each commandment says ‘You shall’. We can read this phrase as a barked order – or a loving promise. Which do you think God meant? 

Prayer: Father, while You lovingly revealed to the Israelites ways in which they could commune with You, I cannot be holy without accepting Your gift of salvation. I do so again today. Amen. 

A holy nation

Mount Sinai

Reflections based on Exodus 19:1–25.

We looked previously at Moses’ song of praise to God for delivering the Israelites. After crossing the Red Sea, they travelled for weeks until they camped at the foot of Mount Sinai. It was on this mountain that God would speak to Moses about why He had rescued them. He had chosen Israel to become ‘a holy nation’, not because of anything they had done but because He had made a covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15). God wanted a nation that would represent Him on earth, which He could teach His ways to and, ultimately, be the nation that our Saviour would be born out of. 

In later blogs we will be looking at the various laws, commandments and sacrifices, which God instructed Moses that the people needed to adhere to. To us it can seem incredibly confusing and yet we need to understand the reason they were necessary.

In Exodus 29:46, God says, ‘They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them.’ Just ponder that phrase for a moment: ‘So that I might dwell among them.’ Isn’t it incredible, that the holy God of heaven and earth longed for relationship with His people?

We will look at the elaborate lengths that God went to in order to bring Israel close to Himself until the appointed time when His Son would be sent. As a perfect, holy being, God cannot entertain sin of any kind: laws and sacrifices were the way in which Israel was able to enjoy God’s presence. We can see in Exodus 19 that God instructed Moses to consecrate (make holy/dedicate) the people so that He could appear to them in cloud and fire.

Reflection and prayer: Reflect on the amazing lengths God went to in order to dwell with His people, then spend some time thanking Him that, through Jesus, He has made His home in you.

Our response

Do we have clean hands and a pure heart?

Reflections based on Psalm 24:1–10.

Technically I am still on leave as my kids aren’t back to school until Monday, but I wanted to sneak in another devotional so here it is 🙂 Spending time considering God’s holiness – and how we are called to be holy too – is a great way to start the New Year. This psalm affirms that God is totally sovereign, but when we consider David’s comments about who is allowed into God’s holy place, we can be stopped in our tracks, much as Isaiah was. If we are honest, who in this world has clean hands and a pure heart? Who has never lied or allowed a false idol to be a part of their lives? 

These verses can be extremely sobering, which is only right, as we need to assess ourselves honestly. This psalm was probably used in corporate worship – I have read that verses 7–10 were used as a re-enactment. The people would call for the temple gates to be opened up, and the priests inside would ask ‘Who is this King of glory’. The group outside would answer ‘The Lord strong and mighty’ etc. Verses 9–10 repeated the process before the temple gates were swung open. All of this symbolised the people’s desire to be in God’s presence. Do we have this desire, and are we willing to humble ourselves before our holy God?

Meditation: Why not meditate on this psalm and consider your heart response this weekend?

Full of praise


Reflections based on 1 Samuel 2:1–11.

Hannah’s prayer is like a song of praise. She talks about how holy God is, but also how He has been her Rock. She celebrates the fact that it is God who is sovereignly in control of what happens, and how He has been in charge since the time He set the world in motion. But just think about the context of this prayer for a moment. Hannah had endured many years of being barren, and being taunted by her husband’s other wife who had children. In the temple, as she poured out her sorrow to God, the priest thought she was drunk! But she had continued to be faithful — and so was God. 

When she had her son Samuel, she remembered the promise she had made to God to dedicate him to His service (see 1 Samuel 1:11). She set him apart by dedicating him at the temple and leaving him there with the priest. Imagine that — giving up the one thing you had been desperate for for years. But her prayer, from today’s reading, is uttered as she leaves her son there. I find that both incredible and very challenging. Somehow, Hannah understood God’s holiness and sovereignty, understood that He orchestrated events throughout history. She had humbled herself before Him and rested in the knowledge that she could trust Him. While she had undergone considerable personal pain over the years, she had seen events with a wider perspective — and God honoured that. Hannah would go on to have more children, and was also able to watch her son grow up ‘set apart’ to be a prophet in Israel, in the service of kings. Is there something you need to trust God for today?

Prayer: Heavenly Father, how humbling to be reminded how Hannah, even when she had given up someone so precious, focused on Your holiness and faithfulness. Help me to learn from her example. Amen. 

I know this post hasn’t happened on the usual Wednesday of the week – my apologies. I will also be taking a break from posting over the Christmas break. So I just wanted to say have a wonderful Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Woe is me!


Reflections based on Isaiah 6:1–8.

Isaiah describes the vision of God seated on His throne that he was given at the time of his commissioning to be God’s prophet. It echoes much of the wording in Revelation 4, which we looked at previously: the opulence, angels calling out God’s holiness again and again. I am always fascinated by the image of God on a throne with the train of His robe filling the whole temple. 

What is striking here is Isaiah’s response, seen in verse 5. By coming face to face with God’s holiness, he instantly recognises his spiritual ‘dirtyness’. There is no way he can measure up before such a holy God, so he cries out ‘Woe is me!’. He is about to be commissioned to take God’s unpopular word to the people of Israel and coming face to face with God undoes him. Surely this should be our response too as we think on His holiness? 

Look at what God does though — He sends a seraph (a type of angel) to Isaiah with a burning coal to touch his lips and tell him that his sins are forgiven. It isn’t the coal that cleanses him — only God can do that – but that painful cleansing process was necessary both to encourage Isaiah that he was the right person to be God’s messenger, and to also make him ready for his commission. He was being ‘set apart’ (interestingly, what the word ‘holy’ means). We too must accept God’s cleansing processes in our own lives in order for us to be His messengers to this world.

Isaiah was given this vision of God’s holiness in a time when spiritual and moral standards were at an all-time low – sound familiar? We need this type of arresting vision of holiness for ourselves in order not to be dulled to the spiritual decline in our own culture.

Prayer: I am sorry Lord that so often I just don’t see how far our society has travelled from You. Thank You for this reminder that only You can cleanse us from our sin. Amen. 


A right response

Reflections based on Psalm 96:1–13.

This psalm may well have been written by David, as it sounds similar to a hymn of praise he wrote in 1 Chronicles. It is a call to the people of Israel to declare the majesty and wonder of God to all the nations surrounding them. It is all about worshipping God because of ‘the splendour of his holiness’ (v9). As in previous passages, we see various attributes of God listed, such as His glory, splendour and majesty. What is interesting is how the psalmist tells the earth to ‘tremble before him’ in verse 9. This is another aspect of God’s holiness: it should cause us to honour Him with a reverential awe.

God’s holiness is absolute – and His wrath, or judgement, comes out of His desire to preserve that holiness in the world. However, this sort of language is not fashionable these days; we don’t often talk about wrath, judgement and awe very much, do we? And yet, even back in the 1960s, AW Tozer recognised that when we allow human trends and opinion to colour our understanding, then we lose something of our understanding of holiness/God. In his book The Knowledge of the Holy, Tozer said: ‘The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men… With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine presence.’

How fully we worship God is based on our knowledge and understanding of Him – we are called in today’s reading to reflect on how awesome God is and to ‘ascribe’ or give Him the kind of worship that He deserves. Why not give over some time to do this today?

Prayer: Lord, forgive me that I don’t always seek to understand Your character more fully. I see how it informs my worship. Help me to take the time to learn more about You. Amen.

Acknowledging God’s greatness

Reflections based on Exodus 15:1–19.

The song in Exodus 15 was written after God miraculously delivered His people from the Egyptians by parting the Red Sea for them and then allowing the water to gush back over those pursuing them. Moses begins by worshipping God for what He has done, describing how He ‘hurled’ Pharaoh’s army into the sea. But he goes on to talk about what it is in God’s character that caused Him to act as Israel’s salvation. He is saying through this that God’s mighty acts reveal His majesty, power and holiness. Look, for example, at verse 7: ‘In the greatness of your majesty you threw down those who opposed you.’ The language that Moses uses reveals how incredible his God is – that with a simple blast of His nostrils the water was parted. Verse 11 states that there is no one – no god – like God, and later verses talk about how the surrounding nations will hear of what God has done and tremble. Interestingly, Moses also affirms the belief that God will lead His people to His ‘holy place’ (see v13).

God’s holiness can be seen reflected throughout the passage: in His destruction of Pharaoh, His hatred of sin and His wrath against those who refuse to turn from it and His faithfulness in rescuing His people.

This song was written for the whole of Israel to sing. It was a way of honouring God for His rescue – a way of giving thanks for His glory. Israel’s God-fearing leaders often led the people into offering God a holy, consecrated song or prayer. Even today, home-grown worship songs and prayers can help local congregations to thank God for the specific ways He has revealed His holiness to them.

Prayer: Thank You Lord that all Your actions reveal Your holiness. Help me to take the time to recall how You rescue and keep me, and then give You praise and thanks for doing so. Amen.

 

The spirituality of the 1920s

I love Fiona’s Poppy Denby Investigates series, and have interviewed her and had guest posts from her when each new book has come out. Having already asked her about how she goes about writing a series, I asked whether she would come up with an idea for a guest blog, so that I could help her celebrate the latest title: The Cairo Brief. I wasn’t expecting what she sent through, but here is a fascinating explanation as to why she decided to include a séance in the book…

“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, you might see and hear things that have no apparent explanation. Do not… I repeat, do not… try to apply a scientific mind to them. […] There are some things you need to take on faith. The metaphysical world is one of them…” Lady Ursula at the start of a séance in The Cairo Brief, book 4 in the Poppy Denby Investigates series.

 

I spent my early Christian years in a community that treated even the slightest whiff of the occult – even comic depictions of it – with immense suspicion. I remember as a teenager walking out of the film Beatle Juice because I feared the devil would get his clutches into me. When I discovered that Arthur Conan Doyle was a leading spiritualist, I burned my treasured copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes; something that to this day I regret.

Since those fearful times in the 1980s my faith has changed, and the paranoia about a demon behind every bush has all but gone. This does not mean that I do not believe in the reality of satanic forces in the world – and I still won’t watch a full-on horror film such as The Omen – but my views on how those satanic forces operate, and whether or not they can ‘get their clutches into you’ if you read or watch certain things, have matured.

Nonetheless, I’m aware that there is a broad spectrum of views on this in the Church and that it would be prudent, in a book from a Christian publisher, that my editor and I pause to consider whether or not the depiction of a séance would be appropriate. We both did. 

Firstly, séances were a marked cultural expression of the time. From the mid-1800s to the early 20th century, the spiritualist movement was in its heyday. For some it took the place of conventional religion with spiritualist churches (starting in the USA) soon spreading around the world. Academics and leading literary figures – like Arthur Conan Doyle – attempted to prove the existence of the paranormal, using quasi-scientific methodologies. Then there were those who didn’t take it very seriously at all, simply going along with the ‘fashion’ of playing occult parlour games.

Like my heroine Poppy – and many others of the time – Arthur Conan Doyle had lost loved ones during the war. It was as a result of that that he started trying to contact the dead, and, along with his second wife Lady Jean (an automatic writer), began leading séances. This was useful for me as one of the recurring themes of the Poppy Denby books is the dark shadow cast by the Great War and how individuals and society have been cut to the core by the horrors it unleashed.

The second reason we decided to include the séance was that the rise of alternative spiritualities in the 1920s was a result of the loosening of power of the established Church. That was something that I have been exploring through all of the Poppy Denby books. Poppy, the daughter of Methodist ministers, questions what it means to be a Christian in the new ‘modern’ world.

The post-WWI years saw the breakdown of cultural Christianity and the increasing separation of Church and State. As the State’s role as a provider of education, healthcare etc grew, the Church’s social function – as a welfare institution – began to diminish. As suffrage expanded to include the lower classes, the power they had to demand the government meet social needs meant that the Church no longer had a clearly defined role to play. People began to ask: ‘What, actually, is the point of church?’

http://www.world-war-pictures.com

Faith became an issue of personal choice. That’s why the evangelical movement did so well; because it was down to the individual and their ‘personal relationship with God’. In my Poppy books, the heroine is set adrift from Church as an institution and needs to re-align her faith. Is it a personal faith? Is it a family faith? Is it a communal faith? What role does a God of love have to play in a world blighted by horror?

The Twenties was a decade where God’s credibility was being challenged. It was no longer a matter of ‘we believe because the church tells us to’, it was: do ‘I’ believe it? People were increasingly emboldened to turn their backs on religious faith by the growing understanding of science, which some believed gave a legitimate alternative to the question of how the world came to be. People were no longer just asking ‘what’s the point of the Church?’ But: ‘what’s the point of God himself?’ In the 1920s universal suffrage put political power into the hands of individuals. The question of whether to believe in God or not was now in their hands too.

And so we have Poppy going into a séance. What will she make of it? Will the devil get his claws into her? Will she think it’s all a bit of harmless fun? Or, is something more serious, and ultimately, more sinister going on…? You’ll have to read it to see.

Fiona Veitch Smith is a writer and university lecturer, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her 1920s mystery novel The Jazz Files, the first in the Poppy Denby Investigates Series (Lion Fiction), was shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger award in 2016. The second book, The Kill Fee, was a finalist for the Foreword Review mystery novel of the year 2016/17. Book four in the series, The Cairo Brief, has been shortlisted for the People’s Book Prize, which you can vote for on the prize’s website. For more on the series visit www.poppydenby.com 

Going natural

 

Last Sunday, our church hosted six baptisms. It was a beautiful service, in which we joined with another church that had asked if they could share our baptismal time as they have no facilities to baptise people. We were delighted to do so. As one of the young people about to be baptised shared their story, I knew I had to ask her afterwards if she would be happy for me to post it as part of the Unmasked: stories of authenticity blog series. I’m so pleased she said yes, as she has a real way with words, and an important message to share…

I started my relationship with God when I was 17. I remember my exact prayer.

“Dear God…what am I doing here? How is this my life? How is this my journey? What do I have to do to change it? Who do I need to become to make sure I am never in this place again? Never this scared again? Never this alone?”

I got my answer from him in one simple word.

Mine.

I promised him on that day that I would try everything in my power to be who he wanted me to be. Who my family wanted me to be. Who I wanted me to be.

And I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into.

Six years later, I thought I’d finally figured it out. That I was finally on my way to knowing exactly who I was and putting that 17-year-old lost girl behind me.

But then it happened. A whisper of a comment about something so trivial no one would ever predict or understand the impact.

“You should let your hair go natural.”

I know. So simple. So un-exciting. But it kept coming up and after a couple months of uncertainty I suddenly got filled with the confidence to do it. So, I cut half my hair off and let my ‘fro-fly-free’ knowing full well it would not look beautiful or curly for probably years.

What I didn’t know was that I was in fact entering a whole new stage of that promise I had made at 17. That what I thought was a simple cosmetic choice was actually a deep dive into who I saw I was versus who God has always seen.

It took a week before it hit me.

A week of looking in the mirror not liking what I saw but constantly trying to reassure myself that “it’s ok, it’s just the beginning of the journey” … “it’s ok, you’ll be beautiful again one day” … A week of trying to get my fringe to stay down instead of sticking out of my forehead like a unicorn horn.

It was a tireless, relentless week of everyday routines I had to do to make sure that my ‘big decision’ didn’t result in my hair breaking apart and falling down around me. Needless to say, by day seven it had all caught up to me in waves. I was crying. Insistently. I thought, “Dear God. What have I done? Why am I suddenly so insecure? Why do I feel so exposed? Didn’t we put that 17-year-old girl to bed and move on?”

And that’s when the truth caught up to me.

It was never really about my hair. This story I’m telling you is not about my hair. It was about recognising the identity I have in Christ and appreciating the beauty in it, not the shame.

God took something he knew was precious to me (my hair), something I didn’t realise defined who I was – made me feel confident, beautiful etc – and gave me the inspiration and encouragement to make it authentic. To stop hiding it, covering it or forcing it into a submissive unhealthy state and to just let it be. To not look at all the damage, all the things that I hate, all the negatives and to focus on what it can be. What it will be if I continue to do all the things I know I need to do to it every day.

God showed me that’s how he sees us. How he sees me. When he looks at me, he doesn’t focus on all the things that are wrong with me. On all my mistakes, on all the things imperfect about me, on all the ways I know I annoy him. He sees who I can be. Who I will be if I continue to keep my focus on him and do all the things I know I need to do, every day.

I am not perfect. I am messy and tangled and frizzy and stubborn and difficult and it’s going to take a lifetime of constant battles, deep treatments, late-night routines and daily regimes before I start to look like the person God sees. But we’ve started the journey now. I made the promise at 17 and now I’m ready to honour that commitment and enter that new stage side-by-side with the person who has never left me. Who has now and always has looked at me, and seen something beautiful. Something worth the trouble.

So, to whoever is reading this, I want you to know. You are beautiful. You have always been beautiful. And you will be beautiful all the days of your life. Because you were fearfully and wonderfully made.

Nicole is a 23-year-old working in a start-up in Croydon with other young 20-year-olds. She says: “Either I have a passion for seeing things grow from the ground up or I am a sucker for pain. Either way, I know my desire to push through high-pressure situations comes from a family background of basketball, performing arts and athletes. I love to write, love to sing, but most importantly, I love being a child of God!”