Leviticus 14:54 This is the law for all manner of plague of leprosy, and scall.
This has been an extraordinary year by any metric, and most of us have taken up habits we have never had before. For instance, there is the habit of wearing masks. Few people wore masks in the past, but now almost everyone does. I have hardly been at a place in the world this fall where masks were not part of the protocol. We are all washing our hands with antibacterial soap now. People should be washing their hands anyway, and it is amazing how many adults don’t seem to care about washing their hands when the time is appropriate.
I had a friend at church recently who said, “Hey, you just got back from revival meetings. Are things normal yet? What are they like on the road?” I replied, “Well, they are generally the same.” But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I considered “normal” is radically different than it was before. I had a Sunday through Sunday revival meeting out west and all but four of the services were online. We had a great meeting, but it was very different.
So, the COVID protocols have altered our thinking. That is largely what the book of Leviticus is for. It was to alter the thinking of people who had been slaves but now were free, of people who had been in Egypt but now were headed for Canaan, and of people who thought of themselves as perhaps a ragtag band of families but now were the Children of Israel. There is a lot about hygiene in the book of Leviticus, but it is not merely a book about physical hygiene, staying clean; it is really a matter of spiritual hygiene.
Now physical hygiene is important. Imagine if you went and spent a month in the wilderness with the people in your church or your school. Can you imagine all the protocols that would need to be put in place so that people wouldn’t catch typhoid or some other disease from living in such a way? So, the protocols in Leviticus were important physically for hygiene, but they pointed toward a bigger picture.
Leviticus 14 is all about leprosy. The Bible says in verse 54, “This is the law for all manner of plague of leprosy, and scall.” I’m not exactly sure what scall is, but it doesn’t sound healthy. Verse 57 clarifies, “To teach when it is unclean, and when it is clean: this is the law of leprosy.” It is very telling that they did not call for a physician for a case of leprosy; they called for the priest. That was because God was trying to teach His people through physical cleanliness something about His own moral purity and about man’s naturally sinful nature.
The bottom line is that our conditions are contagious. If I have COVID or leprosy, people will say to me, “Stay away!” The fact of the matter is that if COVID is contagious, my attitudes are at least as contagious and probably more so. Our attitudes, actions, thinking, and words are all important because none of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself. We serve the living and holy God, and we ought to do so in such a way that we would be happy for our children to follow our example and that our friends would be encouraged by what we do.