So I was having this crazy dream right before I woke. Modern day Old Testament times and Jesus and myself are taking down the pagans. Well, Jesus was taking down the pagans. I was building a sandcastle temple made out of mashed potatoes. Anyway, Jesus flew over to these dudes fleeing him, spoke a handful of words, they turned to run and he blasted them. Jesus came over to be and in my destruction of my mashed potato sand castle, I struck up a conversation with Jesus on why we must go around killing all these people and isn't this in contradiction to his New Testament teachings. And then my alarm went off. But my brain kept working.
Note: I am not a theologian and I really know nothing. My in-depth biblical knowledge and church history knowledge is nothing I would ever say is my strong suit. But I like to think and my brain as a bunch of thoughts happen and the point of blogging about things I have no real knowledge of his so I can talk things out and question my perspective of thinking publicly.
So that crazy weird dream leads to me to thinking about the Jewish law and how it relates to both modern christianity and modern Judaism. Or more to the point, because you couldn't ever attempt to keep the whole law in our modern society, why Judaism doesn't work without Jesus. I will probably offend people with this blog and that's not my attempt in writing, and I apologize. But I feel like this is something that I never hear discussed and I think as Christians we should really be talking about how Judaism fits into out lives. Christianity comes from Judaism and Jesus was a Jew so this is kind of important.
I will say that when I mention the law, I am talking about the Levitical law. Let's be honest, there's a lot of crazy ideas in the book of Leviticus. You would never think about obeying probably two-thirds of Leviticus. We can't stone people in the year 2010. We might want to but we couldn't. We'd go to jail. The excuse, I was just obeying the Jewish law wouldn't work in court.
But I can't really tackle this from a Jewish perspective. I'm not Jewish. I don't know how things work. Do they still making sin offerings to atone for their wrong doings? Are their still ceremonial cleansings? I don't know. But the thought in my head is that without Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice for our sin, and without him making atonement for our sins, and the clear lack of being able to uphold even a third of the law, can you be a "good Jew" in the year 2010? Just a thought.
Anyway, there's another side that I started to thinking about while I was running. And that is how the law fits into Christianity and if we haven't misinterpreted our freedom from the law.
Paul said that the law makes us aware of sin. So without the law, we wouldn't know we have a need for forgiveness. And this thought popped into my head; Maybe I need to be following the law a lot more then I am. This isn't the first time I've pondered this. Whenever I read through Leviticus I have this thought. I mean, it's in the bible. And of course I know that the argument comes to mind that it's there so we can see what Jesus freed us from. And that's awesome. I'm super glad that Jesus came and freed us from the Law and I don't have to stone my neighbor for stealing my donkey. But what if I need to be striving to live in accordance with the law? I mean, just a what if.
I love my freedom from the Law. I'm a freedom guy. I exercise my freedom all the time. I'm super glad Jesus came. Yay Jesus. But it's an interesting mind exercise to think about what I would have to do to try and living my life to accordance with the whole law. And I think maybe this is the crux of why the thought comes to mind. Because I think we take that freedom for granted. Because we don't have to live our lives by the Levitical law. Most of us never have and never will and will never give it a second thought because really, it's irrelevant to us. No one could do all those things and in the year 2010, you'd go to jail for most of them. And so we take that freedom Jesus has brought us and we put it into our 2010 perspective and go from there.
I've started to read the bible with two views. One is it's relevance to me and how I can apply it it to my life and how the word of God and it's commands affect me. But I've also tried to read it in context of the audience it was written for. The purpose of the New Testament letters was to reach a certain group of people, who had a certain group of issues. My limited knowledge is a hinderance in this most of the time but I think if we don't think about the intent of why things were written, we miss out on a lot of the importance in the scriptures. I miss out on a lot of things in the bible if I don't give them some perspective first. Because their are too many kings in the old testament that I just don't really care about (you feeling me on this?) God's word is full of interesting stuff and full of applicable stuff, but it's also full of a lot of stuff I find boring. And that's where context helps me through it. Because sometimes it feels like the bible wasn't written for me. And in part, it wasn't.
So what's the point? Well, there is no point. If you ever read this blog you know there's no point. I start somewhere and then drift to ending that has nothing to do with where I started. And like I said, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but that makes it all the more important why I talk about it. Christians need more dialogue about stuff that's not talked about in church all time. And I'm just trying to opening up the dance. Here's a point:
God is great, Freedom is awesome, and I'm crazy.
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