Day 191: Bodily Uncleanness 1

Today's Connected Passages: 

• Leviticus 12:1-8; 15:1-33; 22:1-16 
• Numbers 19:1-22; 31:13-24  
• Deuteronomy 23:9-14 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Canon Connected, where we read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections of the Bible. Thank you so much for joining us here on day number 191 of the Canon Connected. And today we are starting a two-day study that ends a six-day study. Hope that's not too confusing, but on the idea that in the Old Testament, God considered some things, even many things that are odd to us today, to be clean or unclean. And as I've said many times, I don't apologize for the repetition because I think it's important to remember these sort of things, that God is trying to teach his people, you know, about his nature as not just a clean, as in, you know, physical dirt, but a pure God, pure morally. And so God, as he often did, wanted his people to have physical reminders of spiritual realities. It's not just that God had his people practice circumcision just to be different from the nations around them, but because circumcision was a physical reminder of a spiritual reality that God wanted them to cut away the sin from their heart. And so that is something I think it's important to remember as we talk about, you know, the skin diseases a few days ago and then the last couple of days, the food that they were not allowed to eat. And now today, as we get to perhaps, and not even perhaps, truly, this is the um the uh the most uncomfortable of all of these topics because it does talk about you know bodily uncleanliness in ways that are, you know, it can be considered vulgar, you know, to our modern ears, especially in the context of like a church. And I would definitely think, you know, within that context, um, most of the time it should be that way. We don't want to overlook or disregard any parts of the Bible. The goal of this plan was not to read through the Bible in a year, primarily. That was a secondary goal. We're just looking at connections, but I did try to get every every passage in the Bible so we can't just discard this. But these kind of things I'm I'm sure are not very common, you know, to to preach on because of again how how uncomfortable it can be to talk about them, because of how plain they are. I mean, one of these passages they literally talks about using the bathroom, and that is again something that Christians typically just don't talk about, you know, especially in mixed company or especially with kids around. Um and there are times though where again, I feel like the world around us is made so many things not vulgar because they'll talk about anything that I think it's actually good sometimes for Christians to have, you know, those kind of you know, standards of what constitutes, you know, being coarse or crude or vulgar. But since God talked about it, we can't see it in though and just in those terms. So even though this is an odd topic and even in a way that is perhaps even more comfortable uncomfortable than like Sodom and Gomorrah, as uncomfortable as those passages were, um, and even some of the things that happen in the book of Judges because they're violent and they're gross in a different sense. But we cannot just disregard these things because again, God is telling his people, you know, that they, and again, this is more than just a handful of verses. It's a series of passages in the Old Testament that when it comes to things about their body and particularly discharges, that they had to have again laws about how they were supposed to respond to those things. And it very similar to the skin diseases, there were times they were even supposed to be removed, you know, from their people. So they could be cleansed, they could be purified from it. And again, as with the skin diseases, even though some people were judged expressly for with leprosy because of their sin, a lot of times people weren't. We can see that in Jesus' day. And these things are so natural to us, but again, I think generally speaking, after studying it, these these sort of things were not supposed to be a part of original creation. They are punishments, you know, in one sense, uh, for for the general sin of mankind, things that were never supposed to be a part of Eden or the perfect world. And so we're inflicted with them, just as we're as inflicted with the sin nature. And so cleanliness and uncleanliness is not always an issue of sin and not sin. There are so many things that are, again, just physical reminders of the spiritual, you know, uncleanliness around us. So God still asked his people, okay, again, to go through purification rituals when it came to these sort of things. But we're also going to see, again, strongly tomorrow, how the physical reminders did ultimately, even in the Old Testament, a lot of times the New Testament will show these fulfillments in more practical ways. But the Old Testament speaks about cleanliness and uncleanliness bodily, as we read today, through the prophets in the Old Testament. And just as a little preview, if you haven't looked ahead, Isaiah 64, all of us have become like one who's unclean, and our righteousness is as filthy rags. You may know what that means, but it ties in directly to this. And the prophets repeatedly go back to this sort of language to communicate the idea that we are sinful, even if the things here aren't inherently sinful, they represent the sinfulness of humanity, and so they required being rituals of purification and cleanliness. And uh, and of course, again, a lot of times it was just, you know, if to be sanitary, all right. It was just because, again, they didn't have soap and running water, okay? They didn't have germx. So the people who who were gonna prepare food may have dealt with these sort of things during the day. So, you know, God cared about their health, but he also, I think more foundationally, he cared about them understanding purity, cleanliness in regards to sin and how we are, again, by nature, from birth, sinners. And we have repercussions all around us, even through bodily discharges that that reflect that the uh the unnatural world that we live in now compared to Eden. And so, but I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. This one's a little m a little uncomfortable for me, even talking through a podcast, and not nearly as it would be if I were preaching at a church on Sunday, if I can be quite honest. But um, tomorrow we're gonna get to more of the spiritual applications, and they will help to crystallize this, in my opinion. They'll help us to understand this. Why was God doing this? I mean, these strange things to us in 2026 or beyond, um, about why they were so important that they did, you know, purify themselves ritually over things that are just so ordinary and banal, and even some things that are considered vulgar to modern ears, um, especially those of us raised in churches. So tomorrow we will, again, we'll get to the second half of this, and I think it'll make a lot more sense about the importance of these things. Uh, because even as crude as it is, God used these things to f as illustrations. Isaiah 64. We'll start with that tomorrow. So come back and be with us again tomorrow, as on the issue of bodily uncleanliness and the broader issue of clean versus unclean in the old testament, pure and unpure. And the way Jesus even talked about those things in the Beatitudes. Um, we're going to continue to read the connections, see the connections, and study the connections. Thank you.