Leviticus 20

Idolatry was not allowed in Israel. It was not to be a nation where individual conscience ruled. It was not a land where travelers with different religious traditions had the freedom to worship God in their own way. The Lord, the God of heaven and earth, had expressed His sovereign power by taking this small territory and announcing that He was giving it to a chosen people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Visitors would be welcome there, but not to worship foreign Gods. The Lord insisted on this.

Certain foreign religious practices were worthy of special mention as having nothing to do with the way of life in Canaan under God's reign. One of these practices was the religious offering of your children to be killed before a pagan deity. For those who participated in these practices, offering their children to the god Molech, the penalty was death. Where the person was foolishly spared by their clan, the clan too became implicated in this evil.

The death penalty was also required in the case of an Israelite who turned to the occult in order to communicate with demons or with the dead in an effort to uncover the secret things that belong to the Lord. To be put to death was to be cut off from the assembly of Israel on earth. The people of God were to imitate His holiness. These prohibitions were important for the safety of the Lord's people. The one who cursed father and mother deserved death. This was also the case for the one engaging in prohibited sexual practices. In the case of consensual sex prohibited by the Lord's statutes, both parties were to be put to death.

There might be some practices that would carry a penalty less than death, and there was some ambiguity about the sanction in certain cases, yet this much was clear: a guilty party in matters of sexual misconduct had to “bear his iniquity.” This was a different world than those places where the expression of personal passions was seen as a virtue. The consequences for lack of self-control in Israel were very serious. In one case it might mean that those involved would “be cut off from among their people.” In another it was simply said that they would “bear their iniquity.” In yet another those who were in the wrong would “die childless.” All of this would be an affront to those who believed in their right to do whatever they chose to do with their own bodies. The Israelite was never told by God that he owned his own body. He had been bought by God out of the land of Egypt through the blood of the lamb. He was not his own.

The land that the Lord was giving to Israel was described as holy and alive. It was a land that was capable of vomiting out the people in it. The behavior of the people could sicken the land enough to expel them from living there. But if the people would be holy as God was holy, they would live in perfect peace with the land.

The land was a good land, but it was a land for those who lived in imitation of their good God. To enjoy the land's milk and honey the people needed to live in accord with the statutes of heaven's God, and not according to the customs of the nations.

The holy God of Israel had separated His people from the peoples of the other nations. Therefore they needed to eat a certain way, and worship a certain way, and think about the future a certain way, as people who trusted the word of their God. They could not live according to pragmatism, finding by trial and error those things that they judged to work best. They could not live by democracy according to the will of the majority. The land would not put up with that. They could not live as anarchists or as radical libertarians, where the choice of each individual or group was allowed the most free reign. They lived as children of God in God's house, on God's property, according to God's rules.

The alternative to this pathway of radical obedience to the Lord was to be cut off from Israel. Israel was the kingdom of God. This was not up for discussion. It was the Lord's fact, regardless of what Israel thought about it, or what any of the surrounding nations thought regarding the land, the people in it, or the God that they worshiped.

When Jesus came to save us, He came preaching and teaching the kingdom of God. The kingdom that He established with His death and resurrection was not just from Beersheba to Dan. It was the kingdom of God's reign over heaven and earth. Like Israel under the law, it would have to be a place where God's word was the last word. It was a kingdom of those who had been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, a people who had been bought for a price.

But it was also a kingdom where obedience would be granted to the people in fullest measure at just the right time as a gift. We do not see that yet in ourselves, but those in heaven experience it now, and all God's children will experience it one day, for Christ has won this with His life and death. The church should live as the kingdom of God in accord with the full New Testament word today, but we long for the fullness of the kingdom in our hearts and in the new land of a renewed heaven and earth where we will live at peace with God, with one another, and even with the land.