The Patience of God

I'm currently reading the book of Leviticus for the first time and am struck, as many have been, by the complexity of the laws and instructions that are so famously contained therein. Impressions include: the holiness of God, the foreshadowing and power of Christ's sacrifice, the admonition "'Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy."

But one also notes the great patience of God. The Israelites believed they could fall out of favor with God over things that are incomprehensible to our way of thinking. Like menustration. And the reason is that they believed blood (and other bodily fluids) were a life force, a sign of mystery since God is the author of life, and therefore the loss of blood (life) meant you had to have your life restored by God, by a sin-offering.

Their belief that sickness was caused by their personal sin (or their fathers) was also something that was eventually corrected by Christ, after many generations of false belief. This is a long, evolutionary process of working with His children where they are, with infinite patience, in pointing them to the direction they should go. And so the modern mind, with its desire for speed and efficiency, is at odds with God's. No surprise there. One thinks, "why not correct their vision sooner?".

God is, of course, outside of time which is difficult to contemplate, but one is even tempted to ask in relation to this: "is hurry evil?". There was recently a "Good Samaritan" study that measured responses to a person lying hurt on a sidewalk. Who would stop to help and who would not? It turned out that it wasn't the most religious. Much more banal than that. The ones most likely to stop were simply those not in a hurry. Those who weren't late to somewhere.