I know what you are thinking. For someone who has wanted to go to Africa so much for so long, you’d think she’d have prepared a little more. I did. I watched The Lion King, and then in league with the wisdom of Steve Carrell in the movie Dan in Real Life, I planned to be surprised. Before you start to think that I get all my ideas from movies, I also bought a hefty supply of deet, three boxes of peanut butter granola bars and a blank journal. So you can also say that I planned for the insects, Montezuma’s revenge a l’Africa, and being moved to a new level of the soul while passing my suns and moons in Africa. As soon as the Nyquil wore off.
It wore off somewhere between the sun’s last ribbon and the roosters’ first crows. That morning Charnelle drove me into Boma to show me what Hai-Kilimanjaro was. Boma is something in between a town and a village—not your typical series of straw/dung huts but it's hardly a thriving metropolis, either. It has two streets and one grocery store, but more life and color packed into those streets and that store than Times Square on St. Patrick's Day.
Since it was Friday, it was market day, and what would have otherwise been a rocky field next to the hotel was a montage of colors throbbing with music and movement. Those who weren’t singing their own songs had radios playing American and British music beneath the vibrant rumble of spoken Swahili. And all the color belongs to the women, who wear brightly colored traditional skirts and outfits called ‘kangas’ wrapped over their regular skirts or pants. With James Blunt playing in the background, Charnelle helped me barter for a red, gold and black kanga.
That night we played UNO with some of the African staff who are soon going to be leaving for outreach in Rwanda and Zanzibar. One of the students who arrived the night before me put a little cultural zest into the game by adding a slew of rules from Norway, his homeland. They do things with skips and reverses that were never intended for UNO, let me tell you. In between bloodbaths one of the natives, named Tzipporah, began asking me about my family and how I grew up. I told her my mother had six kids and she threw her head back and laughed richly, “Ahahhaha! Your mother is African!” (That’s a compliment, Mom).
It wasn’t only her laughter that was rich. After I told her some about my family, Tzipporah began telling me who she was in a way quite unlike a person has ever revealed herself to you before. Tzipporah showed me herself through describing God and an interminable wealth of trust that is not even daunted by the monotony of Leviticus. Leviticus. My least favorite book of the Bible. Or should I say, my driest book of the Bible. If you're human, it's probably also your least favorite, driest book of the Bible. Tzipporah, by contrast, was not intimidated or turned off by the repetitive Old Testament law and the precise directions for the building of the Tent of Meeting. I could hardly believe it when she said, “I was reading in the book of Leviticus, and it spoke to me…” What else can Africa do to people? Hearing out of Leviticus, that is rich, I thought.
Tzipporah kept going: “In Leviticus, God is very specific, Jory,” her accent drew out the last syllable of my name. “He tells his people exact rules for everything—how to eat, how to dress, how to clean themselves. When He gives them instructions for the Tent of Meeting, He is very specific. It is the way He leads them in this book, is by telling them specifically what is good and pleasing to Him. But God also leads us in ways that don’t seem so specific, yeah? Just because God hasn’t been specific, you cannot trust that He is not leading you. He is. He is just working another way.”
I have often times questioned God in my life, wondering why He leads the way He does and, at times, if He is even leading. What does it mean to be led by God? How do we know when He is leading? Clearly, not everyone gets writing on the wall or a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. In my mind this begs the question of why God would be so specific at particular times and nonspecific other times.
Ironically, after stepping back to confront this question when all the gloves are off, I believe that the answer is in Leviticus.
Don’t worry—I’m not going to go off on a 3000-word tangent about the appropriate procedures for cleansing after pregnancy. We don’t need to go that deep to get a clue about what God is after. In actuality it may be far simpler than that. Just looking at the headings above each section of the book tells us a lot. The Burnt Offering. The Grain Offering. The Fellowship Offering. The Sin Offering. Firstfruits. Offerings were an Old Testament way of bringing people into pure fellowship with God. With the coming of Jesus, they were given a new way to restored relationship with God through grace. But while offerings may be confined to Old Testament law, the point of relationship is not. When something stood in the way between pure fellowship with a perfect God and a sinful man, God ordained various offerings to restore the purity of the man and bring him back into fellowship with God. Leviticus is one of the books with the most detail regarding restoring this fellowship spoiled by running from what simply kept their noses clean and their sandals buckled.
Perhaps this is what Leviticus, the book that literally has regulations on mildew, is ultimately saying to us. Ever had bad blood with someone? A friend in middle school, a guy on your rival football team, a parent or brother or sister or the idiot driver in front of you who goes at a snail's pace in the fast lane and, God forbid, doesn't use their blinker to change lanes?
Perhaps these are starter analogies for Leviticus and its obnoxiously detailed pedestal of do's and don'ts. It's the difference between bad blood and Eden-esque freedom from what wasn't in Eden to begin with. And let's face it, regulations about mildew, contagious skin disease, incest and more are hardly a big kibosh. They're what a lot of people consider the a mark of first-world perks.
What then seems to be God's biggest wet blanket, the book of Leviticus, thus sounds more like an ancient infrastructure model for eschewing a lot of third-world problems and a code for leaving bad blood behind. In this book, God’s degree of specification in His directions for offerings, for cleanliness, for eating, for the place of worship, pertain to the state of the heart. God didn’t give the Israelites these instructions because He was a ritualistic God determined to flaunt His supremacy to a mortal people. He gave them specific instructions because He was concerned with the relationship His people had with Him. Were they close? Were they far? Did they have pure hearts for His heart? Did they desire to give love and choose life? (Deut 30:15-16)
If you continue to follow the first five books of the Bible and note what God tends to be specific about, a quasi-disturbing pattern regarding our role in knowing God’s plan reveals itself. The pattern is that all the things God is specific about have to do with purifying the desires in our hearts in order to have a full relationship with Him. How many people have I met along the way who gave up on God because their ‘religion’ wasn’t following their idea of God’s plan? And because they felt that knowing God’s plan was inseparable from their reason to believe, they reasoned God's existence out of the picture, too.
In the same breath, how many times do we judge God by questioning what He isn’t doing because we see no value in what He is doing? Leviticus is 27 long chapters of God giving specific instructions on how to be in an authentic, open state of heart before Him. And this is the key to the question. God can't be blamed for writing a bad operating manual. Depending on whether you believe in creation, however, you maybe can tease Him about the comprehension capacity of those reading the manual.
This is very good writing and very deep.
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