The Only Clean Place
We have said that man is the unclean creature. And we have heard Peter told to call no person unclean. So which is it — are we unclean, or are we forbidden to say so?
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Never Only Animals
A sheet full of unclean animals comes down out of heaven, and Peter reads it as being about people, not pork. The New Testament keeps treating the unclean creatures as a kind of language — and Christ did too.
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The Measure Turned Around
We file the clean and unclean laws under “forbidden foods.” But open Leviticus, and most of the system isn’t about the menu — it’s about the body. Turn its own measure around, and it points somewhere we didn’t expect.
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Not the Destination
The food laws plainly changed — plants in Eden, every creature after the flood, clean and unclean at Sinai. If God never changes, what do we make of that? It turns out none of the stages was the destination.
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He Kept Reaching
The leper wasn’t the only one. Again and again Jesus crossed the line the law drew around the unclean — the leper, the bleeding woman, the dead — and every time, it was the uncleanness that gave way, not him.
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What He Was Willing to Touch
A leper begs to be made clean — and instead of healing him from a safe distance, Jesus reaches out and touches the untouchable. That one choice quietly overturns a word most of us were sure we understood.
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A Bridge Language
Words are only one of the languages we speak. A look at symbolism as the bridge between words and reality — and at one symbol, death, sounding the same note at every level, from a garden to the Holy of Holies.
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The Key of Knowledge
Before the tree, Judas went back to the temple — and the men who held the key of knowledge handed him a wall instead of a door. A look at the key that opens or locks, and whose hand finally holds it.
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A Danger of Knowledge
I catch myself reaching for the verse, the correction — the thing I know that they apparently don’t. A look at the danger Paul names: knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
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Both Eyes Open
Close one eye and the room goes flat. Reading and study are the two eyes we bring to the Bible — and the depth is in the two together, not in either alone.
