God's Rule Book

I have not entered everyone’s favorite part of the Bible: the rules. Half way through Exodus Moses receives a great deal of rules from God on how to carry our worship services and live in a community. After that we get to Leviticus which reads like the manual people read before working in a nuclear reactor. Then we get to Deuteronomy in which Moses goes over the law once again for old time’s sake.

While this is certainly very dry material, it is extremely important in that it signifies a major change in God’s relationship with His people. Before this God had a pretty loose relationship with man. He chose to speak with a  select few and judged their faith based in His commands to them, which mainly involved following His order. Now God is introducing the concept of a formal religion, a set of rules to follow in order to be accepted by Him.

The amount of rules is staggering; sure I’ve kept quite a few, but there are still hundreds that I have broken over my 20 year existence. Here God lays out the requirements for what it takes to enter in communion with Him. He is perfect, and so we as people are imperfect and thus cannot be with Him while we suffer through our imperfections.

When God created man He had one rule, and that basically was don’t find out what good and evil are. Now man knows what good and evil are, and God gives us these rules so that there may be no room for interpretation. Because of Adam we are forced to play the game, and God just gave us the rule book. It’s a game we can’t win though, as the Bible continues and God strives to reunite with His creation He finds that there is one last way, and that requires the ultimate sacrifice.

For now we are given the rule book, God wants us to be with Him, well here is what we have to do. It is not that simple though, and that becomes all the more evident as the Bible unfolds.