The One Year Bible - Day 202

We read today about some of the items made for the temple by Solomon and the one I was struck by was called "the sea" and was a massive bronze bowl which could hold 16,500 gallons of water! The priests used this as their means of ritual washing before they offered service in the Temple. It would be easy to use parallels in the spiritual world for what 'washing' means to the Christian but I have been challenged recently to ask what this meant physically. My opinion is that God is not a God of formality and religious liturgy rather than a practically minded and spiritual God. If we ask therefore what it meant to be clean before God to the priests, we can ask what dirt is or perhaps what it might be. Is it possible that if the priests hadn't washed and took a significant amount of bacteria or viruses into the Temple, that the reaction that would occur in the presence of a Holy Almighty God might well cause these priests' death? We can easily read that God requires us to do certain things otherwise in some way He will 'punish' us but this does not match up too well with a loving God who is aware of our weaknesses, so we need to ask therefore what God is asking of us and it must relate to His ultimate will which is that we come back into a relationship with Him and must throw away everything that hinders. The question is, what about this uncleanliness hinders?