Leviticus 11-13

OK, gross.....hairs and pus and boils....ewwww.  You may be tempted to skim, but the basic theme here is that God cares for His people and essentially is teaching them Health in the Desert.    These people are camped for two years at the base of Mt. Sinai...they are desert nomads....there are no doctors.  They have left Egypt where pagan practices were done, and they are headed to Canaan (the Promised Land) which at that time was inhabited by pagans.   The key verse in today's reading is Leviticus 11:44-45

I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy.  Do not make yourselves unclean by any creature that moves about on the ground.   I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God, therefore be holy, because I am holy.

This is the first time God refers to himself this way.  Holy means separate.......he wants to prepare and teach them.  We have the Bible, the people of that time were LIVING it...they had nothing to read (perhaps they didn't even know how to read!).

I love what the NIV study notes say:

In order to worshp,  people need to be prepared.  There were some acts of disobedience, nome natural acts (such as child birth, mentruation, or sex) or some accidents (such as touching a dead or diseased body) that would make a person ceremoially unclean and thus forbidded to participate in worship...so Unclean did not necessarily mean sinul or dirty...in some cases he made a distinction between His worship and the popular worship of gods and godesses.

Also, lots of pagans used animal sacrifices.  The designations clean and unclean were used to define the kind of animals the Isrealites could and could not eat.  There were several reasons for this restricted diet:  1)  to ensure the health of the nation.  The forbidden foods were usually scavenging animals that fed on dead animals; thus disease could be transmitted through them.  2) to visibily distinguish Isreal from other nations.  The pig, for example, was a common sacrifice of pagan religions 3) to avoid objectionable associations.  The creatures that move about on the ground were reminiscent of serpents, which often symbolized sin.......

NOW,
we have Jesus (thank God!!)

Check out Mark 7: 14-23:

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, "Listen to me, everyone, and understand this.  Nothing outside a man can make him "unclean" by going into him.  Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him "unclean".  After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable.  Are you so dull? he asked.  Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him "unclean"?  for it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.  In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.  He went on What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean.  For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.  All these evils come from inside and make a man unclean.....

So, go on and eat a pig or a soft shelled crab!  But now you set yourself apart with how you follow Christ.......what comes  "out of you"?