March 6

Let's take a minute to breath a collective sigh of relief... Today is the last day reading the Law!

There are three things that stood out to me today:

(1) God will bless you for obeying His law.

(2) God will punish you for disobeying His law.

(3) When you disobey, if you repent, God will remember the covenant He made with His people.

I found that reading the law can be a bit overwhelming, particularly when you get to the part where God says He will bless those who obey and punish those who disobey. If I had to put myself into a category of either obeyer or disobeyer, without a doubt I would be a disobeyer. With regards to God's law, I will fall short of His standard every time. There are a lot of laws that we read over the past couple weeks, and there are a lot that I could easily obey. But if I disobey one law even one time, then I have fallen short. I am a disobeyer. That means I deserve to be punished by God. (Yikes.) The blessings of God that are listed in Lev 26:3-13 are amazing. These verses are full of good and perfect gifts that God wants to give His people... but it saddens me to know that none of us deserve them because we are all disobeyers.

Thankfully that is not all there is to it. Thankfully, God knows how disobedient we are and wants to give us an opportunity to come back to Him. He knows that we can't achieve holiness and perfection without His help. He knows we can't obey the entire law all the time. The good news is in Leviticus 26:40-42: "But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers—their treachery against me and their hostility toward me, which made me hostile toward them so that I sent them into the land of their enemies—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land." 

I will never stop being amazed at God's mercy. Lev 26:14-39 lists all that we deserve for falling short of God's holiness. But because of His mercy, He will always give His people a chance to repent (confess our sin, turn in the opposite direction, and walk away from it). Give thanks to Him for the mercy He shows to us when we deserve judgement. When we deserve punishment, He will always show us the path to receive His blessings!