You Shall Keep My Judgments: A Meditation on Leviticus 18

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God.

After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: 

and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: 

neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.

Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: 

I am the LORD your God.

Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: 

which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD...

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: 

for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you:

And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, 

and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.

Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, 

and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, 

nor any stranger that sojourneth among you:

 (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, 

which were before you, and the land is defiled;)

That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, 

as it spued out the nations that were before you.”

Here in the West, we live in a time of lawlessness.  Our politicians are known to bribe and be bribed, while dodging through collusion and intrigue the same laws they use to convict their opponents in court... by judges they appoint to be as politically partisan as themselves.  Our captains of industry skirt laws in how they pay taxes, treat their workers, pollute the environment, or pay off politicians for preferential contracts or tax schemes.  The leaders of our land across every sphere of influence are known for their lack of integrity, their self promotion, their graft, and their debauchery.  We have come to a time where our top two political candidates for the highest office in our land are either guilty of federal crimes that have incarcerated others for decades, or debauched self-aggrandizers of defective intellect-- and the distant third place candidate is a libertine pot-head.

Of course, this should not surprise us; they are a reflection of ourselves, and our nation's people.  From the lawlessness of the Black Lives Matter protesters who burn, murder, and loot their own communities, to the violently corrupt police who oppress and torment the people under their protection; from campus protesters who riot for "safe spaces" from which they may attack those who disagree with them, to college administrations who protect rapists over their victims for athletic or institutional advantage; from communities which refuse to challenge the drug trafficking and crime which corrodes their neighborhoods into cesspools of violence and despair, to city officials and developers who use imminent domain laws for their own advantage to seize the people's property and sell it to their wealthy friends; from the corners of every bar and club and campus where the Sexual Revolution has been idealized into rampant promiscuity and the mutual use of human beings for debased gratifications, to the industry of infanticide which harvests billions of dollars to clean up the messes of abused and debased people while even harvesting the organs of their murdered children for sale; from the sexually insatiable who cannot or do not distinguish between male and female, young or old, beast or human, as the objects of their disordered passions, to the multi-billion dollar industry of pornography which ceaselessly promotes and encourages every conceivable abuse and debasement of the human person, propped up on an international sex slavery trade which steals and destroys children for the vicarious pleasure of innumerable voyuers; from Christians who live ever more like the degenerating culture around them, to church hierarchies who protect abusers over their own people, preferring power, privilege, and prestige over the duties of their hallowed offices; from California to New York, Texas to Illinois, Florida to Washington, and every place in between, we have shown ourselves a lawless people, the fruits of which rot round about us, polluting the land in which we were planted, and rising like an offensive stench of decay before the Creator of us all.

To the lawless, the frightening curse of God comes through the Law of Leviticus:  the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.  We are not the first people to live in this place, or any other place for that matter.  Nations, cultures, and entire civilizations have come and gone in the preceding millennia, some more and some less noble than ours.  And while our enlightened modern minds may pay little heed to ancient warnings about consequences to our actions, the Law of God is written into the very fabric of creation-- into the very people we are and the land upon which we live-- and it is inescapable.  We may think that we can with impunity alter the rules of existence, the order and logic which the God of the Universe crafted into every living and material thing, but we only delude ourselves like every fallen civilization before us.  We are given freedom to follow so many other peoples and nations over the irrational cliffs into oblivion, to be vomitted out of the land in which we pollute ourselves and everything we touch, but this is not what our Creator desires for us.

While the Law of God should quite literally scare the hell out of us, it is not His last Word to our broken and fallen race.  His Law remains true, and those who ignore it, do so at the peril of their own extinction.  But God has known our weakness and our frailty, our death in our trespasses and sins, and rather than leave us to suffer and die under the just consequences of His Law, He has sent us His only begotten Son to rescue us from the calamity of our own making.  Into a corrupt and debauched Palestine two thousand years ago, Jesus came to show us a divine love which would conquer our sin and death, retrieving us from hell and the power of the evil one through His Cross.  Into every twisted and deformed successive generation He has continued to come through his Word preached and believed, that all who would repent of their egregious sins against His holy Law (written not only in the fabric of nature and every person's own being, but most fully revealed in His sacred Scriptures) and believe in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of their sins, would receive forgiveness and eternal life.  Rather than death, destruction, and extinction, our God and Savior pleads with us to bring us life and salvation, redemption and mercy, compassion and love.  It is not His desire that any single person would be lost, let alone entire nations, cultures, and civilizations.  Rather His great love for us shown through His Son bears witness that He desires all mankind to be saved.

It is certainly true that we live in dark times, where evil is called good, and good is derided as wickedness.  From the leaders of the land to the workers in the fields we are a fallen people, with the evidences shown forth in our thoughts, words, and deeds.  To us, in our time and our place, to our 21st century American nation, culture, and civilization, the Word of the Lord comes in mercy and truth.  To the politicians, the executives, the lawyers, the doctors, the philosophers, the theologians, the electricians, the engineers, the architects, the mechanics, the farmers, the artists, the musicians; to the old, the young, the working, the retired, the student, the teacher; to the religious and the irreligious, the atheist and the theist, the Muslim and the Buddhist, the Methodist, the Lutheran, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Baptist, the Pentecostal, the Presbyterian; to every person with ears to hear, the Word of God calls all to faith and repentance, and to the salvation won for them in the Cross of Jesus Christ.  To you and to me, on this precipice of our personal and collective history, the Law and Gospel of the Lord of all Creation speaks His Word of redemption, mercy, and grace.  Before us beckon only two destinies-- one of life, faith, hope, and love, the other of death, despair, hatred, and destruction.  Hear His Word calling to you now in this your moment and place; repent, believe, and live.  Amen.