Hey everybody. Welcome back to the dermatologist's favorite edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. I guess. Hello, Leviticus. Yeah, this is an interesting one today for sure. This is not one that is going to be as as evident in our miss. We're not dealing with lepers colonies, but it's something they were facing and something they were dealing with, and it's in the Bible. It's up next in our Bible reading, so we're gonna deal with that as well as Matthew 26. But Pastor Rod. Everybody wants to know. They're asking, how much money did you win on the Super Bowl this past weekend? Dude, I banked. Did you? I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. Betting and I nailed it. So I am now Who won again? You know that team, that one, the team, the Seahawks, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. The Seahawks, they won. Yeah. Actually, I could have remembered that. Yeah. I just didn't want to No, that's fair. That's fair. Clearly we didn't wager on things. Hey, interesting question though. It came up, we were just talking as a staff together, just for fun playing the lottery, buying a lotto ticket. Doing something like that and then taking your winnings and giving to the church. Something that's, we would say yes, no, or yes, with qualifications. We would never, let me put it this way, we would never encourage you, Hey, we're setting up and tearing down. We could really use a facility as a church. Hey church, we want you to go out and everybody play the lottery. That's, you're never gonna hear us ever say anything even remotely close to that. But what are maybe some of the complications that we would face with something like that? There's at least a few at the top of my mind that would be problematic. And the first one is greed. If you're trying to get more money and you're doing so in a fashion that is not backed by work, you're probably veering into the territory called greed. Second one would've to do with stewardship, whether or not it's a right use and a wise use of your money, in which case you're simply testing the Lord by. Putting your money out there and saying, Lord, it would be good if you gave me this amount of money and I could use it for these things and perhaps even give some to the church, wouldn't that be a good thing you're testing the Lord, which Jesus says you shouldn't do. Scripture says, as a whole, you shouldn't do that. Both Old and New Testament and the the stewardship of your wealth is probably not best served by gambling. Now lots of people have debate, debated this for different reasons. Gambling as testing the Lord in with a greedy heart is one thing, but gambling and we're just gonna use a common vernacular just to, for fun, for entertainment purposes. I'm on a cruise with my spouse. We're having a good time. We bet a hundred bucks and over the course of eight hours. We could have spent that same a hundred dollars on the dinner, but we decided to do this instead. It's more fun, it's engaging. We had a great time doing the penny machines and all those things. Is that any different? What would you say to that? I think that the context is important there. I think, like you said, your motive is important there. I don't think there's a cross the board, you can never do this. You can never sit down and play a hand of poker. You can never, put a coin in a slot machine and pull the handle. I, I think when it. It grips our hearts when it becomes something where it's leading to poor stewardship. I think when it becomes something where it's about the love of money rather than it is, or even just the thrill and that thrill even becomes an idol in our hearts then we've got a problem. I think one of the other issues with the lottery, a lot of people talk about how it's perpetuating poverty because a lot of the people that play it are people that can't afford to play it. Yeah. Well, from the state side especially. Yeah. Yeah. State lottery's, one that. Praise upon people that are vulnerable, right, who are looking for a leg up on their financial situation, and this is the easiest way that they can score a buck. Yeah. And scripture speaks to that, you alluded to it. It's Proverbs 1311 says, wealth that's gained hastily in other words, it's gained speedily fast. Like winning the lottery will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. So if you look even, there's plenty of other passages that we could point to, especially in the book of Proverbs, about the importance of working and saving and accruing over time and how much more value there is there because you appreciated that much more. Rather than, Hey I struck a lot of big and then you're not as wise with how you're gonna spend that money. Not across the board, but just generally speaking. So that's why you're not gonna hear us say among other reasons, Hey, go play the lotto 'cause we want a building. If somebody wins the lottery, should they. Give to the church off of what they live, what they win. I don't know, man. What would you say to that? I wouldn't, we joke about Sure. But just don't tell us. It'd be really hard to not know that though. It would be hard if, if somebody was just like John Deere average. Yeah. And suddenly they'd give us $500,000 and we're like, Hey man. Notice you've been driving a nicer car lately, right? Notice that you bought a new house, right? You just gave us a lot of money. Should we ask you why, right. Are you part of a drug deal? I, yeah, man, I, so this goes back to the question, if I can say. With a clear conscience, I can receive this money because I trust that the way that he got it, what he wasn't intending to be greedy. It was for funds value and Okay. The Lord gave him a ton of money. All right. Well, I don't necessarily wanna say no, but there does feel like a check in my soul that says there's something that's just not quite right about that. And if that's the case, then why should we encourage anyone to do it in the first place? Yeah. I think so much of it is pernicious. It's similar to drinking. Drinking's not expressly prohibited in scripture. In fact, in some cases it's encouraged as long as you don't get drunk. And I think this is some, somewhere in that same grade territory where you can play it. But as long as you're not, your heart's not invested in it more than it should be. And only really you would know that, right? And even then you may not know that there are lots of people who play this lots or play gambling apps for sports betting and people to go to Vegas all the time hoping to make their big break. And people all the time get sucked into it. Like a vortex that's just pulling you under. And these guys know what they're doing. They're capitalizing on human psychology. And because the whole edifice, the whole system is predatory, it's hard for me to feel like this is a good thing in any, right. So even though the money might be purely gained, it's still blood money in my mind. There's a taintedness to it, so I'm not saying it's wrong. You hear me? I'm struggling with this because it feels like it's on the. Edges of, well, it's not wrong, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily righteous. Right. The heart motive plays such a big part of it, and yet I know we can be deceived easily. So you can say, well, my heart's clean. I just did this. I'm, I got a clean conscience. Okay. But is there any chance that you're being deceived by these things? Yeah. And I think that's a possibility. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And we don't wanna be complicit in that or. You use? Yeah. To your point, your term, you use blood money in that too, so Yeah. I'm with you. So all that to say, there it is. We weren't, pastor Rob wasn't gambling or betting on the Super Bowl this weekend. And I didn't, Nope, I do. I, Kristen and I did place a couple dollars with 50 bucks actually. We went on a cruise and that's why the illustration came up. We went into a cruise and we spent 50 bucks and I think I lost it in a matter of 30 minutes. Yeah. If even that's him. I'm like, you know what, we're gonna turn around now. We're done. Were you were you wearing your dice shirt? While you did that, man, the lot is cast in the lap, but it's every decision is from the Lord. You remember that buddy? Yes. That is a biblical verse. Hey, let's jump into Leviticus chapter 13. Just one chapter today. One chapter tomorrow. Today we're dealing with laws about leprosy or just skin diseases in general. It's not all gonna be about leprosy, but it is gonna be all about diseases that afflict the skin and what happens here and these. This is important because of what was at stake for the nation. They were a nomadic people at this time. They're traveling from area to area. They're living in close quarters with one another in these communities. We're gonna get to eventually how the camp was supposed to be arranged. Somebody with a skin disease could do severe damage to the entire wellbeing of the community. And so the instructions are given here to make sure. That these people that were afflicted with these things would go to the priest. And it's interesting that God gave them a parameter, gave them a way to diagnose the severity of this. If it was something that was just recoverable, then the person could. Make their offerings, they'd be acceptable. They'd be brought back in. But if it was truly shown to be something lepar, then they were unclean and until they could be made clean and there was a lot of question whether that would ever happen, they had to live outside of the camp. They had to live outside of the community. We're gonna get to the fact that Jesus is gonna heal lepers. We've seen that, I think in Matthew. We're gonna see that in Mark here in a little bit here. And it's just amazing that Jesus did that by touching them because these people were cast out, they were pariahs from the entire community because they represented a threat to the community as a whole. And I can't help but read this and think of the concept of sin that the whole thing with leprosy, and we're gonna see this in chapter 13 and as well tomorrow, that they were concerned about is did it go deeper than the skin? Was it something that was an. Internal problem rather than something that was just an external problem. And if they could tell that this was something that went deeper than the skin, that was when this person was a threat, that's when this person had a serious disease. That was a danger to the community as a whole. And without over spiritualizing Leviticus 13. I do think one of the applications for us to think about here is just the danger of sin the danger of sin in my life, the danger of sin. In my life to the community of the church that I'm a part of and how damaging that can be to my brothers and sisters in Christ. And we're not gonna take somebody with sin and put them outside the community and say you have to say unclean, unclean, unclean. But man, there's a threat there and that person needs to be cleansed. And the way that cleansing happens is through the blood of Jesus Christ or through repenting from that sin and being restored to the community. So, again, I don't wanna oversize Leviticus 13, but I we're not dealing with a lepers community. I think that's one of the things we can take away here. I don't think it's over spiritualizing it at all. In fact, I would argue that the primary play that God has here is that he's using leprosy. And by the way leprosy has a more technical term today. We use it in a very specific way to talk about a certain skin disease or collection of skin diseases. But what we have here is likely something more, a far broader, and this doesn't mean God was wrong. This just simply means that the language to use to describe these things was different back then. As we progress as a society, as we grow and change, we get more and more sophisticated. In certain fields of study, particularly that of medicine. Medicine obviously has a lot more language to describe some of these things. So when it says leprosy, it's using a word that has a general sense of some kind of skin disease. It's not leprosy as we understand it today. This is likely a collection of other diseases that would encompass a lot more than what we understand is leprosy that said. When God speaks to Israel about these things, remember we're talking about the book concerning the Levites. This is about ritual purity, about how you approach God. And so physical fitness had implications for your spiritual fitness. God used their physical person to say, you see, one person is able to come to me when they're physically appropriate to do so. And you're gonna see more later on about other parts of your physicality that will make you unclean and therefore unfit to approach God. This was meant not to say that there's a certain Class A person or who's only only this kind of person is good enough to approach God. But it really meant, I think, to speak to our spiritual state. And therefore, something like leprosy is highly significant because of its transmit ability. It's easy to infect you and others around you. It has implications for the community. And if you notice verses 45 through let's call it 46 here. The lepers person who has a disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out unclean. Unclean. He shall remain unclean as long he, as long as he has a disease, he's unclean, shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp. This is effectively ritualized death. He's mourning the loss of his life because effectively he's lost it. And this is exactly parallel to sin. This is, I think, why this is here. It's not because God cared that much about leprosy. He did. He cared about his people. This was meant to protect them and to guard them from spreading disease easily. But beyond that, the richer meaning I think I, I can't see a better one than to say sin spreads. It kills, it affects the community. You have to do everything in your power to make sure that it doesn't infect others. And in fact, because it's a disease that can be. Fixed apart from some intervention. I think this speaks to our need for someone to heal us of our own skin disease, our own heart disease rather, and that ultimately comes to Christ. Leviticus 13 points us to Jesus. Yeah, I love that. 13, 12, by the way you mentioned there's various diseases that are spoken of here. This may be confusing at first, but he says if the lepers disease breaks out in the skin so that the lepers disease covers all the skin of the disease person from head to foot, then the person shall be clean. That seems a little bit. Opposite of what we would expect. He's got this disease all over his body. How is he then clean? And the likelihood is that this is a, again, about the surface, this isn't something that's internal. It's showing itself more as a pigmentation change of the coloration of the skin or something like that, that's brought about by some sort of disease. That's why the person's clean, because it's not a transmittable disease at that point with that person. So just in case you're going, wait a minute, if he's got it all over his body, why is he clean? Then that seems like a, an oxymoron. That's why that one is provided. But I agree with you. I think that's a great way to look at this and see Jesus here in Leviticus 13. Let's go to Matthew chapter 26. Matthew chapter 26 for our New Testament reading as we pick up in verse 20. And we read on together through verse five. Four. So Matthew 26, verse 20 through 54. We are in the upper room at this point with the disciples. Jesus is eating the Passover meal. And again, why that's significant is because this is going to give us the timeframe because from here he's going to go out and he's gonna be in the garden of Gethsemane. This is going to be Friday. He's gonna be arrested on Friday. He's going to be tried early Saturday morning. He's going to spend the day in, I'm sorry, backup. He's gonna be arrested on Thursday. He's going to be tried early Saturday morning, he, or Friday morning. He's gonna be crucified on Friday. Spend the grave day in the grave on Saturday and then rise again on Sunday. But this is the Passover meal and that's the point that I was just very confusingly making here. And it's a key time marker for us and understanding what's going on. But Judas fate is sealed here but woe to the man. To whom or whom the son of man is betrayed by. It would've been better for that man had he not been born. And so Judas is going to be identified by the Lord. I think God and His grace is keeping the disciples from really understanding everything going on at this point. That's why nobody stands up to stop. Judas. Judas is going to then go out and do what he is called. What he is. Set in his heart to do. In the upper room we see the institution of the Lord's Supper, what we, which we observe as communion. And here the Lord breaks the bread and he pours out the blood of the covenant, which is the wine that they're drinking there. And this is meant to cause the remembrance. And that's what the Apostle Paul is gonna pick up on in one Corinthians chapter 11, which is why we read about it every time we take the Lord's table together as do this in remembrance of me. Just for clarity's sake here. The drink that he's drinking we assume is not real blood, correct? It's not trans substantiated into something else. Correct. We don't believe this is the true flesh of Jesus. This is not his actual flesh that's being broken. It's not his actual blood being poured out. There is a Christian line of thinking that says, when Jesus says, this is my body poured out for you, this is my blood, that he's actually. Meaning that he's being literalistic. And this actually fits in nicely with what we were asked about earlier, whether you can take anything Jesus says at face value. And of course the answer to that is we take everything Jesus says. Absolutely. How does he mean us to understand that? And Jesus is really good at using different literary devices to communicate his meaning When he says, this is my blood. He doesn't mean literally this is my blood, his blood's in his body. What he's communicating is, this represents my blood. Mm-hmm. It's probably a really safe way to see that even though he technically says, he literally says, this is my blood. He doesn't literally mean that. Literally he's meaning this is symbolic of my blood. And that's why we as Protestant Christians we, most people believe that it's symbolic. It's not trans substantiated into the actual blood and body of Jesus. Yeah. After this, Peter's gonna be with Jesus and he's gonna promise I'm gonna follow you to the end. And Jesus predicts his denial saying, you're gonna deny me three times before the rooster crows. And then from here they go into the garden, the garden of Gethsemane. There Jesus is going to pray three times, and I think that's notable for us. Three times he's gonna go to the heavenly. Father and he's gonna pray that the cup might pass from him. And that's significant for us because it shows us something about the Trinity. When Jesus, when the second member of the Trinity took on human flesh, human nature, he gained or took on a human will in concert with his divine will. And so you see as part of the God man in the flesh, these two wills operative right here, you see the human will of Jesus in the garden praying, not my will, but your will be done. That has created a lot of controversy in the church over the ages, throughout church history, but I think the garden. Is a very clear depiction here where we see that in his humanity, Jesus, per he possessed a human will. And yet in his perfection, he always submitted that will to the Father. And so we see an example of that even though he's praying three times. This is not Jesus rebelling against the Father. This is Jesus. Setting an example for us to be able to pray and even pray about things that we are thinking, are an inevitable conclusion. I think Jesus knew what was gonna happen here and yet he still went to the Father. And yet in the end, he was willing to follow the father's will and to submit himself to the father's will. And so he does that here in the garden. Yeah. We do see that Jesus is here truly man, and he's also truly God in his manhood and his human humanity. He didn't want to go to the cross and we would understand why. But in his deity, he did it because he was a submissive son of the father. Yeah. It's interesting because you're right, I didn't realize how much blood was spilled for this. I mean, I did. I didn't. But I've been reading lately on church history, and this has been one of those things that took several hundred years for the church to agree upon. Now, it doesn't mean that they were confused, it just meant that finding the right language to talk about Jesus took time. Yeah. We're entering into new territory. It's like I was saying earlier as we progress we gain new language to describe things better. If you're a chef. You have a lot more language tools available to you to talk about how to prepare a certain dish. I only understand low heat, medium heat, high heat boil, no boil. I understand that for theologians and for Christians, it's not too dissimilar. You might be a novice Christian and you take you time to learn some of the language, but the Christian Church grew in her understanding of who Jesus was. And there's things like this where you see Jesus really wrestling with what was gonna be next. Now in his di, his divinity. He knew he, he was gonna go to the cross, but in his humanity, he struggled. And I appreciate that because it means Jesus was tempted in always as we are yet without sin. And it's because of that, that I can now take comfort in who my great high priest is and go to him when I, myself feel weak in the next section here. I think building on that idea, we see not only his will and his submission of his obedience, but also his self-control because Judas comes up to betray him. Jesus says to him, friend, do what you came to do. Judas goes on and betrays him. Peter again is John identifies and tells us that Peter did. It draws the sword and cuts off the ear of the servant of the high priest. This is a man named Malki. Jesus is gonna stop this and he says, do you not think that I can? Appeal to my father who will at once send me more than 12 legions of angels. But how then should the scripture be fulfilled that it must be so? So here I think we're seeing that self-control of the son who was just a moment ago praying, father, if there's any, will let this cut past for me. Here you see him demonstrating that self control in that restraint by not calling for the legions of angels, which he's saying, I could. I could do this. It's at my disposal to do it. But obeying the father is better in this situation. So I'm gonna tell my urge, I'm gonna keep my urge submissive to the will of the father here. He also self-consciously in verse 54 says, I'm doing this 'cause I wanna fulfill the scriptures. I'm submitting to the father's will because this is going to fulfill all that I'm here to do. This is Jesus' self-awareness and saying, I'm doing what I'm doing because God commends me to do this. He calls me. I'm here on a mission. I'm not just, I'm not just an example. I'm not just providing you a good moral. A good moral guidance to follow after I am self-aware in my fulfillment of what scripture has called us to do. And I love that because Jesus is a man of the word. We saw this earlier in Matthew chapter four, when the devil accosts him. He doesn't respond with, well, shoot, go away. He responds with the word says, or it is written is what he says multiple times. I love this. Jesus is a man of the word. Yeah. Well, hey, let's pray and we will be done with this episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. God, I pray that you would. Keep us from sin that we would have such a revulsion to sin, that we would think of it like we just read about with leprosy in Leviticus 13, that she would keep us from entertaining it or thinking that it's no big deal, that we would see it as something that is dangerous and that we would be cleansed from it. The only way possible, which is through the blood of Jesus Christ, whether that's through faith and repentance, and Jesus for forgiveness for the first time. Or through coming back in repentance to him as believers, knowing that we need to lay our sin down at the foot of the cross and find that forgiveness on a regular basis. We want to, even as Pastor Rod was just saying, men and women of the word as well, just as our savior was. So help us to have that mindset as well as we study your word day by day. We pray this all in Jesus name. Amen. Keep bringing your Bibles and tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Bye y'all. Bye.

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