Wed.’s Devo - Seeing Clearly

Read: Leviticus 19:1-20:21; Mark 8:11-38; Psalm 42:1-11; Proverbs 10:17
God gives great priority to respecting your heritage and observing his Sabbaths. Respecting your parents goes so much deeper than the parents that raised you. It encompasses your whole posterity that have gone before you. Every family has a mandate and a purpose on the earth just like the tribes all had special talents and positions to fulfill in their time. This is what we pass to the next generation. Our DNA is very powerful as adopted parents find out. It would help us to research our families past, to find our future. We can spiritually clear the path for the next generation to walk on by doing research into our past.
The Sabbath has to do with our sabbath rest in the Lord and in the future. We have to know who we are tp be able to rest in peace.
The other laws are self-explanatory and help us know how God wants us to treat one another. They are basic laws on loving one another as we love ourselves.
God hates mixture. He does not like it when we pollute what he has made with our own ideas. God is just, and will avenge the poor and helpless.
He also loves the land and it is important to him how we treat the land. It works for us, so we need to give it a Sabbath rest just as we need a Sabbath rest. We can see what a Sabbath rest does for us by seeing what it does for the land. It allows the land to replenish itself . We have no nutrients in our food because we have worked the land every year and don’t allow it to replenish itself.
It is interesting to read the punishments for the different sins. A big misnomer in the Body of Christ is the statement that “Sin is sin”. Clearly, sin is measurable by its consequences. Some sins are punishable by death and others by punishment and others by being cut off from the community. We are doomed to die spiritually by any sin because all have sinned… but, once we are saved, sin is under the blood. But…we still face the consequences of our sin on earth, even though in heaven we are righteous. So, sin is not the same. God talks about sins that are spiritual adultery which have to do with worshiping or depending on a demon spirit and not Him. This causes spiritual death. Sexual sins in the Old Testament had to do with intimacy and represent intimacy with the Lord in the New Testament. To put your trust in another god will not save you. To repent and chose Jesus to be your lover, will save you.
In Mark, Jesus got so disgusted with the Pharisees because they wanted him to show them a sign that he got into his boat and left. This was Jesus marveling at their unbelief. How many signs did he have to do?
Jesus also marveled at the lack of depth of his own disciples. He told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees meaning the false doctrine and all they could think about was natural things. Jesus would never worry about not having bread because he had modeled to them how easy it was to produce bread. He was talking much deeper than their stomachs. Just like when he told him his destiny to die and rise from the dead. They couldn’t think past their own preconceived idea about how the kingdom was going to come.
The way they saw spiritually was demonstrated in the blind man who Jesus prayed for. When Jesus touched him the first time he could see, but not clearly. That was the disciples. When Jesus touched him the second time, he could see clearly. Clearly, the disciples needed another touch.
Lord, thank you for the reminded that when we can’t see clearly, we just need to magnify you larger than what we can’t see and then we can see better. Let us look through your lenses and not ours.