2/20/22 Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18 “Your Total Bill: Nothing!”

18 Feb 2/20/22 Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18 “Your Total Bill: Nothing!”

2/20/22     Lev. 19:1-2, 9-18    “Your Total Bill: Nothing!”

For those of you who have listened to me a lot these past few years, you know that I like to go back into my past for examples. One of the reasons for this is that I was so unwise that I made a lot of mistakes which make for good stories.  I will be the first to tell you that I am not much wiser today.  I think that we are all like this to a certain extent.  We all have stories to tell of our younger years.  The children who are watching, you will remember some of the things you do now, maybe even today, for many years ahead, maybe even 50 years.  That is a long time.  One of the reasons that we remember is that the past of ours will help us deal with the future.  This is why the study history in school is important: we don’t want to repeat the mistakes that our nation has already made.  Today, we are going to look at a reading from Leviticus.  Can you imagine this?  I’m going to stand up here and list all of these laws and try to make them interesting.  If you read your Bible then you know that this is one of those books that we have a tendency to skim instead of read.  That is ok.  There are a couple of tough books to read in the Old Testament.  But these books and the Old Testament as a whole are very important to us because they help to shape the New Testament and our lives today.  I would like to take about three things from our reading and try to see if they are relevant in our lives today.  The results might be surprising.

I would like to begin with a story from Harry Mabry about a man who has just arrived in heaven and is met by St. Peter.  Remember that this is just a story.  The man wants St. Peter to give him a glimpse of hell so he could appreciate heaven even more.  This St. Peter did.  In Hell he saw a long table as far as he could see loaded with the most delicious food ever with people all lined up ready to eat who were starving to death.  He asked St. Peter how this could be?  St. Peter told him that the people were required to eat with 4 foot chopsticks and there was no way they could reach their mouths with these chopsticks so each person was dying of starvation.  They returned to heaven and the man found the same scene with the long table loaded with great food and the people with 4 foot long chopsticks.  The difference was that around this table sat people who were happy and well fed.  The new arrival asked, “Why are all those in Hades starving to death and all these people here are so well fed and happy?”  St. Peter replied, “In heaven we feed each other.”  This has everything to do with our verses 9-10 today.

The poor have been with us for centuries and centuries and will continue to be with us far into the future.  This law was first given to the Israelites well over 3000 years ago.  There was no welfare or government assistance in those days.  If you were a widow with no sons, you were in big trouble.  You could go from one day where everything is fine and you are wealthy to the next day where you had no husband or son and you were destitute.  If you were crippled or in some way incapacitated, you still had to fend for yourself and make a living.  God realized that He had to help the least of his people so He sent them these laws of harvest so that the poor people could eat.

In the New Testament Jesus talks of taking care of the widows and the poor.  The people of his time had forgotten their own laws and Jesus reminded them.  One of the things that the officials of Jesus time were great at was the selective application of their own laws that they seemingly held so high.  They held them high as long as they benefitted from them.  It was a very corrupt system.  It was very much like our system in this country.

I think that we really fall short in our world today.  I am going use a little exaggeration as I say that we don’t take care of our poor and needy.  Our idea of helping the poor is to pay an exorbitant amount of taxes to let the government do the job.  They in turn hire 10 times more people than necessary and pay them twice the free market rate so they can administer what little money is left to the needy.  Then they pay the needy so much that you would have to be crazy to want to get a job and get off of welfare or food stamps or any of the other programs.  I want to qualify this by saying that there are many people who are really unable to fend for themselves but I’m not talking about the truly needy.  I’m talking about able people who just won’t work.  If you want to pay me a fair wage for sitting at home and doing nothing, I will sit there and watch my new color TV set and eat fine food forever.  The system is broke.  One of the things we like to do as a society is pay someone else to do this kind of work so we don’t have to do it ourselves.  We don’t like to get our hands dirty.  This is not what we are being told here.

I am going to continue my exaggeration, if it is an exaggeration, to make a point and say we should take back all of our government welfare responsibilities.  We should eliminate the Dept. of Welfare, the Dept. of Education and other departments like housing.  We should reduce personal taxes by 2/3s and implement a flat tax.  Then we would have to, have to tithe our income to our churches and let the churches deal with these things without all of the red tape the federal government imposes on us.  Even if we did these jobs in a poor manner in the private sector, they would be done a lot better than they are now.  It is up to us to take responsibility for our poor and quit passing the buck to a corrupt government system.  Jesus didn’t say, “I want governments to take care of the poor.”  He said he wanted you to take care of the poor.

The next part of this reading I want to talk about comes from verses 11-16.  These verses really refer to various kinds of stealing from each other.  This is basically how we want to treat each other.  I would like to zero in on one that we don’t like to talk about because we all do it to some degree.  We all lie or have lied at some time.

Obviously we have had a great problem with this for a long time or God would not have mentioned over 3000 years ago.  The Bible doesn’t really tell us too much about the lying that went on in those days but it must have been there.  If we take a look at other religions, we find that they are pretty much all against lying.  There are even some that say that they cannot lie to people of their own religion but they can to anyone outside their religion.  But this is not what God says.  He says not to lie, period.

Now before many of you dismiss this as not that big a deal let me explain.  There have been studies done where over 90% of the people surveyed lied.  Most of these people think that they would lie only about small things.  However, 86% lied to their parents, 75% lied to their friends, 73% to their siblings and 69% to their spouses.  Now I’m not the world’s most intelligent man but I think that this leaves not very many of us who don’t lie and if we are lying to these people I just named, then we are lying about some pretty big things.

Ok, so you still disagree with me.  How about this?  75% of students in a high school survey said that they engaged in serious cheating.  Half of them plagiarized work they found on the internet.  All these things are bad but the worst was that 50% of the students surveyed thought that copying answers for a test wasn’t even cheating!  What in the world are we teaching our children?  Don’t even let me get started on how poor our school systems are!

And Satan is a very patient being.  He has got all the time in the world in his view.  He will wait.  Lying, cheating and robbing a neighbor are all bad things that have a cumulative result.  What I mean is that if you tell a little lie and think you get away with it today, there is a tendency for you to tell another one.  This keeps on going with the small white lies until you soon realize that you can tell bigger lies and you don’t get caught.  Then they get bigger and bigger until you are part of the statistics that I just read.  Sometimes you have to tell two lies to cover one up.  You become one of the 75% of people who lie all the time.  As long as you are not caught, it is ok.  But it definitely is not ok!

The problem with this is that you do get caught and you don’t even know it.  Jesus knows every lie that you tell, whether you know Him or not.  He knows.  You cannot hide from Him.  This is a reason why Jesus is so important to our children.  Like we do in our Sunday schools every week, we are to be teaching the ways of Jesus to our young.  We are pretty much a believing group of people, so think about this.  The reason that many of you don’t tell many lies is that at some point in our childhood, you told a lie and got caught by a teacher or our parents or someone who was important to us.  By whatever method they used, you discovered, probably the hard way, that lying was not something that you did.  God was working through these people to instill a lesson in you.

Now think of all the children in our country who have never known Jesus and have grown up and had more children who are even farther away from Jesus who think that lying is the thing to do.  We decided decades ago that Jesus was no longer important or relevant so we don’t have to follow His teachings.  As a country we have been sliding farther and farther into Satan’s abyss.  The cumulative effect of all this is that today I cannot tell people the truth because I might hurt someone’s itty bitty feelings.  This is pure garbage!

But I’m going to risk being an enemy of the state because you will not get this kind of teaching from me.  All these behaviors listed here in Leviticus of the Old Testament are wrong.  We need to remember that Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law of the Old Testament but to fulfill it.  These things that were wrong then are just as wrong today and you need to be told this.

Just to illustrate this a little I would like to ask you a couple questions.  Do you like people to lie to you?  Do you like people to cheat you?  Of course you don’t.  That is the whole point of this and many other laws that we find in Leviticus.

Our secular world looks at all of these laws and then they tell us that we have too many rules so they will not even try to follow them.  They will call us all kinds of names because we believe in the Bible and try to live by what it tells us.  What the secular world doesn’t realize is that these are not rules at all, not in the sense that we have to follow them.  It is our choice to follow these rules.

In the early days God gave the Israelites these rules, not so they could follow them to the letter and be saved but so that they could live better lives.  If you look at dietary rules, we find that most of the foods they were not supposed to eat are foods that you have to be careful with or you might get sick.  You could even die.  Today, we have found safer ways of preparing some of these things, others we still don’t eat.  So if you want to be sick, eat these foods when they are not prepared right.

The same can be said about lying and cheating and the rest of the moral laws.  If you don’t mind people lying and cheating you, then go ahead with these things and have a rotten life.  But if you want the best life that God can provide for you, then do what He says and don’t lie or cheat.  Don’t commit adultery.  Don’t covet your neighbor’s things.  Do the things that God wants you to do.  We find ourselves today in a world where if something feels good then we think we should do it.  If we think an alternate life style is good then do it and throw away the Bible. It doesn’t matter if it is right or wrong.  But I’m saying these things will catch up to you.

How do you know that these things are from God?  All you need to look at is verse 2 that says, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”  Then in verse 18 we close this reading as God says, “I am the Lord.”  God tells us that we should be doing the things He says.  Look at His track record.  We all have hearts and lungs and circulatory systems that work.  In the summer we see all kinds of plants and animals.  We really don’t know why or how any of these things work but they do.  The world functions.  In His making these things I would say that God has never made a mistake.  Never!  Therefore I don’t think that any of these guidelines or rules of life are wrong either.  They are right and you should follow them.  Don’t lie.  Don’t cheat.  Don’t steal.  God loves you so much that He has given you great alternatives to all these vile behaviors.  Don’t pick and choose the laws you want to follow!  Choose God to rule your life and let Him help you with all of these things.  That is all He wants and that is all He has ever wanted.  Choose Jesus and live!

In Rev. 21:8 we read, “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars–their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”  Jesus Christ went to the cross to save you from all of these things.  He hung there and had the most horrific death for you; so that you don’t have to lie and cheat.  This is the price that Jesus paid for your sins; a huge price, His life.

Bledar Valca tells the story of a mother who found under her place mat one morning at breakfast a bill made out by her small son, Bradley, aged eight—It said, Mother owes Bradley: for running errands, 25 cents; for being good, 10 cents; for taking music lessons, 15 cents; for extras, 5 cents. Total; 55 cents.  Mother smiled but made no comment. At lunch Bradley found the bill under his plate with the 55 cents plus another piece of paper neatly folded like the first. Opening it he read—Bradley owes Mother: for nursing him through scarlet fever, nothing; for being good to him, nothing; for clothes, shoes and playthings, nothing; for his playroom, nothing; for his meals, nothing. Total: nothing.  Jesus tells us the same things.  And thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.