131_Divine warnings Lev 26 1-13 “You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the Lord your God. 2 You shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary: I am the Lord. 3 “If you walk in my statutes and observe my commandments and do them, 4 then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. 5 Your threshing shall last to the time of the grape harvest, and the grape harvest shall last to the time for sowing. And you shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land securely. 6 I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid. And I will remove harmful beasts from the land, and the sword shall not go through your land. 7 You shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. 8 Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand, and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword. 9 I will turn to you and make you fruitful and multiply you and will confirm my covenant with you. 10 You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall clear out the old to make way for the new. 11 I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. 12 And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. 13 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves. And I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. Not long ago, a farmer in the Midwest shared his brush with disaster. It was a dry summer, and rain had been scarce. His irrigation system kept things growing, however. One morning, walking through his field, he spotted a tiny leak from a minute crack in the irrigation system. “I’ll fix it later,” he thought. Days passed, and the crack widened. By the time he returned to fix it, the pipe was ruptured and half the field was parched. He lost half of his crops. Regretfully he admitted, “I was warned. I just didn’t take it seriously.” Warnings—whether from a leaking pipe or the quiet voice of conscience—are meant not to condemn but to protect. God, in His goodness, warns us because he longs to preserve us, and not destroy us. In Leviticus 26, God speaks tenderly but firmly to Israel. This chapter is both a trumpet and a shield—it announces danger, so that the people can take shelter in Him. God had made a covenant with Abraham, a glorious, unilateral promise: to give him offspring, land, and a blessing that would bless the world. In Genesis 15, we see this covenant vividly enacted.

130_The Year of Jubilee Lev 25:8-22 “You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. 9 Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. 10 And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. 11 That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. 12 For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field. 13 “In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. 14 And if you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. 15 You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee, and he shall sell to you according to the number of years for crops. 16 If the years are many, you shall increase the price, and if the years are few, you shall reduce the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. 17 You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord your God. 18 “Therefore you shall do my statutes and keep my rules and perform them, and then you will dwell in the land securely. 19 The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and dwell in it securely. 20 And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ 21 I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years. 22 When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating some of the old crop; you shall eat the old until the ninth year, when its crop arrives. It was a dusty summer afternoon when a middle-aged woman walked into the small church office. She looked worn out—not just from the heat, but from life. She had just served a prison sentence, lost her home, and hadn’t seen her children in years. She sat down across from the pastor and softly said, “I don’t expect to be forgiven. I just need to know if there’s any place in this world where I can start again.” Her words echo the cry of millions. They long for a second chance, a chance to undo what has gone wrong and start a new page. Whether it’s a burden of debt, a broken past, or a long string of bad choices, we need a reset. And that’s exactly what God

129_The sin of blasphemy Lev 24:10-16 Now an Israelite woman's son, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the people of Israel. And the Israelite woman's son and a man of Israel fought in the camp, 11 and the Israelite woman's son blasphemed the Name, and cursed. Then they brought him to Moses. His mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. 12 And they put him in custody, till the will of the Lord should be clear to them. 13 Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 14 “Bring out of the camp the one who cursed, and let all who heard him lay their hands on his head, and let all the congregation stone him. 15 And speak to the people of Israel, saying, Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. 16 Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. The sojourner as well as the native, when he blasphemes the Name, shall be put to death. In 2015, an airliner flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. The investigation revealed that the crash was deliberate. The copilot, Andreas Lubitz, had long suffered from depression and was declared unfit to fly, but concealed this from the airline. In his darkness, he planned to crash the plane, taking not only his own life but misusing his privileges to kill those who trusted him. He violated their confidence and his own honor, turning the flight into a mission of destruction. Indeed, when an entity that represents righteousness and trustworthiness is perverted into a travesty of itself, devastating consequences occur. And nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the sacred Name of God. Leviticus 24:10–16 recounts a serious moment in Israel’s journey. A man born to an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father got into a fight with another man in the camp. During the quarrel, he blasphemed the Name of the Lord. Far from being a slip of the tongue, this was an act of open defiance and contempt. God’s response was the command to stone the man outside the camp. Witnesses were to lay their hands on his head, putting the guilt of hearing such words where it belonged - on the blasphemer. Then the people were to carry out the terrible execution. To modern ears, this looks like an overreaction. But the man’s guilt did not lie in his words, it was in his sabotaging all that Israel stood for. The preceding verses speak of the pure oil for the lamp, and the shewbread - 12 loaves made of fine flour. The emphasis was on purity—beaten and strained olive oil without impurities, and flour ground fine and sifted to remove coarseness. Why? Because the holy place was a reflection of who God is. He is pure. To deliberately defile the tabernacle would be to misrepresent who God is. In ancient times, a person’s name represented their essence. To defile the Name was to defile the One who bore