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We began this journey with the words of Jesus to his disciples as recorded in the gospel of Matthew and verse 20 in Matthew 28 says: “teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” That means to know and understand what it is that we are to do as we live our lives today, the church was to teach all those things that Jesus had given them to teach so that those who would come later would know what it was what our God wanted from us in the way of Holy Living.

This of course includes those things that came in the Law that God gave to His people, part of that law was the holiness code and I thought it might be helpful to us if we knew what that was and how it affects all the world today. The Jewish people were originally tasked by God to spread the word of God to all people, it did not happen, but that is another story for another blog. For now we know that God’s plan was for Jesus the Christ to come and live a sinless life under the code that he established, and then to die and be raised from the dead to pay for our sins and to seal the covenant of eternal life in the presence of God. This also requires that those who wish to live eternally in the presence of God believe that Jesus was the once for all sacrifice that was required to meet the penalty of death for sin.

So let us begin with Leviticus 18:4 and 5 where God says: Lev 18:4-5 NKJV “You shall observe My judgments and keep My ordinances, to walk in them: I am the LORD your God. (5) You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them: I am the LORD.”

Beginning with verse 6 we find law regarding sexual mores, basically it talks about having relations with near relatives, in other words incest, and that it is forbidden. This section ends with verse 18.

Lev 18:6-8 NKJV ‘None of you shall approach anyone who is near of kin to him, to uncover his nakedness: I am the LORD. (7) The nakedness of your father or the nakedness of your mother you shall not uncover. She is your mother; you shall not uncover her nakedness. (8) The nakedness of your father’s wife you shall not uncover; it is your father’s nakedness.’
Lev 18:17 ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, nor shall you take her son’s daughter or her daughter’s daughter, to uncover her nakedness. They are near of kin to her. It is wickedness.
Lev 18:18 Nor shall you take a woman as a rival to her sister, to uncover her nakedness while the other is alive.’

The term “uncover” means to have sexual relations with the person. These are all sins of incest God had started by pointing out that these sins were what the people had learned in Egypt and would see in the land He was going to bring them to, what we refer to today as Israel. Note that verse 6 speaks of having sex with you father or you mother, in all the other verses it speaks of women who are your blood relatives, or in-laws. Also you might notice in the last two verses that if you are married to a woman, you may not have sex with her daughter, nor shall you have sex with her sister. God covered all the bases with this sexual perversion stuff as we will see in the next section.

In verse 19 God says, when a woman is in her time of bleeding, what we now call a period, which is a natural thing, you are not to have sex with her. Then there is the idea of adultery, in verse 20 God says you are not to lie carnally with your neighbors wife.

Our God set up a way of life for us, and it is expected that we will live according to what our God has set up as the laws of the universe, (natural law), and of course in this world in which we live it seems we fully care not for natural law, but rather we do what we want because it gives us pleasure.

Today we glorify abortion as a woman’s choice, unwanted babies are to be thrown away, aborted as if they were just an infection that was being removed to return the mother to health. Lev 18:21 “And you shall not let any of your descendants pass through the fire to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God: I am the LORD.” Molech was the god of the Ammonites, and parents were to come to the city of Hinnom there the idol/statue of Molech had an opening in the back and a fire would be kindled there. The parents would then place their first born baby on the arms of the statue, and they were not allowed to show any emotion as the baby died from the extreme heat. A drum was beat so that the cries of the child were not heard. Next is one of the things that many people are unwilling to obey, and yet it is honestly in the law that God has given to us that we may live lives free from sin.

Lev 18:22-24 NKJV You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. (23) Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion. (24) ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you.’

As much as those who find themselves with these tendencies and therefor hate those who point out that it is sinful to live out this sexual lifestyle, it is God’s word that speaks of it as being a sexual sin. It is no more of a sin that having an affair with a neighbor, or stealing money from someone or any of the other sins that we humans are so fond of pursuing, the bad thing that I see is that it is a sin and therefore is wrong in the sight of our God and leads to eternal life in the darkness of hell.

Admittedly we Church folks can get our indignation in an uproar over this sin, but it seems we don’t have a problem with adultery, or stealing from our company when we need some paper for a project we are involved in, or any of a dozen other sins that we commit daily. We talk about victimless acts, we think no one gets hurt but of course there are many victims of these sins, your wife or husband when you commit adultery, your wife or husband when you decide you are homosexual and leave your spouse to live with your partner, you think your spouse doesn’t get hurt? If you are a heterosexual person and have an affair, do you think you are not hurting anyone? What happens when it is found out? Your spouse and the spouse of the other person, or the families of both of you are hurt by your infidelity. There is no such thing as a victimless act, every action has ripples that affect those around it.

Try throwing a rock into a pond and watch the ripple effect, or like an earthquake under the sea, when it happens then there is a movement of water, sometimes catastrophic called a Tsunami. Sin is like that, whatever you do that is against God’s law has an affect on others and on yourself as well. If nothing else, you need to know that when you go against God, you are an enemy of God, that will cause ramifications into eternity. God does not consign you to hell, you do so by disobeying the natural law that God has proclaimed. I know, I was once an enemy of God myself, and until I came to understand that I was an enemy of God I thought everything was just fine. Hey, I thought I was having a good time, even when hung over the next morning, even when I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before.

When I finally realized what I was doing to myself and those around me, when I realized that my life was heading for disaster. When I heard the gospel and knew that I was a sinner and came to Christ for forgiveness and became a follower of Jesus, then I was saved and my life changed. I certainly will not claim to any sort of perfection, but I do try to live as Christ has for me to live and I know that when all is said and done, I will end up in eternity in heaven and not in hell.

I do hope you will read these chapters, as they give a map to a way to live as Christ would have you live. These are not difficult as they are natural law, law set in motion by God at the creation of the universe. We have decided that we know better than God, but I have to say, I have not heard of any scientist making something out of nothing. I know they have figured out how to clone an animal but all the work they have done on gene therapy and stem cells have created problems and with stem cells, the healing has come not from infant cells but from adult cells.

Chapter 19 speaks about rules for everyday living again starting off with I am the Lord.
Lev 19:1-3 NKJV And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, (2) “Speak to all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them: ‘You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. (3) ‘Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and keep My Sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.

Now I know that it is not always easy to revere our parents, many of us have grown up with parents who abused us mostly in verbal, or physical punishments that left scars on our bodies. Interesting though is the truth that it was also that way in the time of Moses and the time of Jesus and down through the ages to today. Though it is difficult, we must love our parents just as we must love our neighbor, in that way they may realize that they too need Jesus as savior and Lord. We must, as Christians, know that God has a plan and even though we don’t understand it, or even know what it might be, God does, and things will work to good for those who love the Lord.

Verse 19:4 says “Do not turn to idols, nor make for yourselves molded gods: I am the LORD your God.” The second of the 10 commandments says the same thing. In this world of ours, we have many idols, political persons, movie stars, musical persons, baseball, football and of course, money, power, looks, pornography, and the many gods of this world. We are told that we are not to have anything in our lives that comes between us and God. In the history of the people of Israel we find that they too had many gods and that they abandoned the worship of I AM to worship the local gods. When they became a people who worshiped the local gods, they also left the path of God, and became apostate, God then allowed them to be taken off into captivity. This happened to Israel many times over centuries, finally the Romans sacked Jerusalem and sent them into the rest of the world, for almost 2000 years. Yet they are today a secular nation and soon again there will be war over the land, the hatred for the people called Israel is beginning to cause great strife in many places in today’s world. God is still working to save his people from their sins.

We too, have been mightily blessed in this land by God, and we are now an apostate nation, we claim to be Christian, but we do not live as Christian people. We too follow the gods of this world, beauty, fame, fortune, power as well as perversions and sorry to say, legal murder of innocent lives, almost 60 million since Roe v Wade. God said that his people were not to sacrifice the children to Molech, yet they did that, and today we do it to the idol of “choice”.
Verse 11 of Leviticus 19 says: “You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another.” The eighth commandment of the 10 commandments says that you shall not steal as well. The ninth commandment says: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” However, our government steals from us, by taxing our earnings, and our commerce. They take from working people supposedly to give to the poor, yet the poor continue in poverty and the ones who get the money are the government. The richest area in the nation today is the area around Washington D. C., please note it is not D. C. itself, for the people who are the rich, the politicians, the lobbyists and contractors don’t live in D. C. but rather in the counties in Virginia and Maryland. Congresspersons and Senators make exorbitant amounts of money that we the taxpayers are taxed to maintain their lifestyle. The money goes to these people not to the poor.

Our President lied to us, dealt falsely with us in order to pass his ordinances and laws to take even more money from us to give to the lobbyists, to corporations who support him and the rest of the political class. I remember when people did not need a pile of contracts to buy a car, I watched my father in the 1950’s buy a car, on a simple handshake with the dealer. When the car was ready for pickup he paid for it and again shook hands with the dealer and left with the car. Today it takes half a day to get approved for credit, then fill out the paperwork and sign all the copies that have to be signed, then wait while the dealer processes it all. The reason is lawyers have taught us we cannot be trusted to tell the truth. So many of us no longer do tell the truth. Yet we call ourselves Christian.

How often have you picked up a box of paper clips from your place of employment and taken them home, or maybe some staples, or paper for your printer at home. Your excuse being, my employer won’t even know its gone, they have plenty of it anyway. That too is stealing, and lying, and dealing falsely. Yet we call ourselves Christian.

You see, God wants us to live by his rules. We Christian people have decided to live by our own rules, and have become Christian in name only. Like politicians we say one thing and mean another, trust is no longer a way of life, rather we lie, cheat and steal, it has become a way of life in this country. We pervert the law, of man and of God, so that we can live as we please. We have decided that we really don’t need God, we can make our own decisions and live our lives as we choose. In the process we have cheapened life itself, we are content to let others work, while many of us just sit around and enjoy our food stamps and welfare checks. Thinking the government will take care of us, when in reality it is the working class the laborer and the business owner that is paying the government, and the government then says they are helping the poor. Lies all around, theft all around. We used to be proud to work, and to do a good job at whatever we did, no longer true.

We are an apostate nation, and God will not continue to bless us, like the Israelite of old, we too are cruising for a bruising. We have already experienced a black eye, when the enemies of God and man took down the World Trade Center. When will America wake up and return to God? I think it is not going to happen until we are defeated by our own pride and by an enemy that our government won’t even acknowledge.