As the days in quarantine continue for most of us, I am hearing similar words from friends and colleagues across the country: drained, down, Zoom-ed out, weary, exhausted, sad, struggling.
The psychological toll of the lockdown hasn’t received the same coverage as the physical toll of the disease (and understandably so), but both are real, and both matter for those of us who desire to walk by faith and not by sight. The hardest part of a trial is not knowing how long it will last.
A. J. Jacobs in his book Thanks a Thousand, says this, “It’s a Tuesday morning, and I’m in the presence of one of the most mind-boggling accomplishments in human history. This marvel I see before me is the result of thousands of human beings collaborating across dozens of countries. It took the combined labor of artists, chemists, politicians, mechanics, biologists, miners, packages, smugglers, and goatherds. It required airplanes, boats, trucks, motorcycles, vans, pallets, and shoulders. It needed hundreds of materials—steel, wood, nitrogen, rubber, silicon, ultraviolet light, explosives, and bat guano. It relied upon ancient wisdom and space-age technology, freezing temperatures and scorching heat, high mountains and deep water. It is my morning cup of coffee.”
I’ve been reading Leviticus. In Leviticus Holy God is present. Not present is some vague, purely spiritual way but really present in such that his holiness overwhelmed every aspect of everything they did.
Leviticus is intense; worship was exact and invigorating and terrifying. Even the most ordinary parts of living had significance – what you ate, what you said, what you touched, whether you kept a promise, got sick or got better, had a good season at work – everything mattered because there was no mystery, no grey area, Holy God was present. People were either clean or unclean. The “clean” could live close to and within the boundaries of the Holy Presence and the “unclean” were forced to stay away, outside the camp. Every action in every life carried some immediate consequence because every action was exposed to the Holy Presence of God that occupied the tent and overwhelmed the people.
Reading Leviticus makes me wonder if I have misappropriated the grace of Jesus. Was the Old Covenant replaced with a new one so that the Holy Presence of God would be lessened or removed altogether? No, it wasn’t.
Freedom from ritual does not mean freedom from significance – at least it shouldn’t. So, I fear there is something too different about our faith versus the people living around the tabernacle; something too informal, too tolerant, too lazy, too unafraid. We must be convicted about having allowed our world to become so secular that we numb ourselves to what should be obvious consequences of the sins we commit and drown out the message of God, his Words, his statutes.
Are we scared for the future, or are we excited about the possibilities of reaching a lost world with the hope of Christ? Let us be the people that start the new revival, that ask to be laser focused on our mission to be salt and light. Let us be led by God’s Spirit to love God, love people and to make disciples.