Our passage today begins with a law the Lord has already spoken of at least twice before. "Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it." (Leviticus 19:26a) We did a fairly detailed discussion of this law on Day 53 and Day 54, in case you missed it and would like to take a look at it. We won't go back into all those details again in today's study since we have so much material to cover.
"Do not practice divination or seek omens." (Leviticus 19:26b) The Israelites are coming from several centuries in Egypt divination was practiced. They are going to the promised land where the tribes of Canaan practice divination. The Lord's people are never to engage in such activities and this is good advice for every era because there is nothing to be gained and a lot to lose by dabbling in the occult, even when we think we're only doing it for entertainment purposes. God's people should not be visiting palm readers, crystal ball readers, tarot card readers, tea leaf readers, or anything of the sort. God's people should not be consulting horoscopes or having their astrological charts done or using Ouija boards. Our lives are to be guided by the word of God and by the Holy Spirit within us. If we need to know anything about what's coming up in the future, our God is more than able to warn us of approaching danger or to prepare us for a great blessing. I can think of a number of times when God warned me to avoid a certain situation or a certain person, and it always became clear later on why He gave this warning. Other times He's told me ahead of time that something I've been praying for is about to happen soon. But we are to have nothing to do with any form of fortune telling. In most cases we're just wasting our money and receiving useless information in return; the fortune teller is putting on a show and giving us whatever message he or she thinks we want to hear. In some cases there are people who actually do possess a talent for divination, but as Acts 16 proves to us, this talent is supplied by the powers of darkness. It does not come from God. It comes from demonic forces. (We are not to confuse fortune tellers with prophets of the Old Testament; prophets sought the Lord for guidance. They didn't use occult practices to obtain answers.)
Seeking omens is also forbidden to the people of God. In modern times we would refer to this as looking for a sign. Anyone who knows me knows this is what I always say about signs: "When you're looking for a sign, everything looks like a sign." There are occasions in the Bible when the Lord tells people to be looking for a sign, but in those cases He tells them exactly what the sign is going to be that He intends to send to them. For example, the Lord told the people through the prophet Micah that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. Where was the Lord Jesus Christ born? In Bethlehem, though this was not His hometown, but due to the Roman emperor calling for a census for the purpose of taxation, Joseph and Mary had to travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census even though she was due to give birth at any moment. Another example of the Lord providing a sign is what He said to the people through the prophet Isaiah, which is that the sign that the one who will be known as "God With Us" had arrived was that He would be born of a virgin. Jesus' mother Mary became pregnant while she was still a virginal, unmarried young woman. Anyone who claimed to be the Messiah but who was not born in Bethlehem and who was not born of a virgin was to be discounted as a candidate, which is why the Lord provided these signs and so many others regarding the identity of the Messiah.
Now we must contrast the types of signs the Lord gives with the types of signs people like to choose for themselves. For example, someone very close to me who is a devout Christian will comb the yard looking for two or more four-leaf clovers when seeking a "yes" answer from the Lord. I was surprised to hear that. That is not the way the Lord intends us to seek His will. He intends us to spend time in His word and in prayer. He intends us to lean upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit who will make us feel uneasy about things that are wrong for us and who will make us feel at peace about things that are right for us. If we seek answers outside of these methods, we are probably just going to end up doing what we feel like doing. We are going to be led by our own desires instead of by the Lord's will. We are going to interpret seeing a rainbow as a sign the Lord is saying yes to something, or we'll interpret seeing a cloud pass over the moon as a sign the Lord is saying yes to something, or we'll decide that having a butterfly light on us as a sign the Lord is saying yes to something. You see where I'm going with this? When we look for a sign, everything looks like a sign. Unless the Lord Himself gives us a specific sign to look for, we must not go around seeking signs. We must not make up our own criteria of what constitutes a sign.
The Israelites are not to do what the people of Canaan do and they are not to look as the people of Canaan look. "Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord." (Leviticus 19:27-28) These two verses are closely connected with verse 26 because they have to do with occult practices. Cut hair was used by some ancient cultures for fortune telling. I am not sure exactly how they went about it, but I assume it involved interpreting whatever pattern formed when cut hair was cast on the ground, much like a person might read tea leaves or might read the pattern formed after "rolling the bones" (casting chicken bones, for example, out of a pouch onto the ground or onto a table).
Pagan people sometimes expressed their grief by cutting themselves deeply enough to leave scars as a memorial for the person who died. Or they might cut themselves and rub dye into the wounds to form a tattoo commemorating the person who died. The Lord commands the Israelites not to adopt such practices. Believers are not to "grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope". (1 Thessalonians 4:13) The pagan peoples mutilated themselves because they didn't think they would see their loved ones again or because they didn't think they would see their loved ones again in a recognizable form they could interact with as they did on earth. But God's people know that we have a glorious eternity ahead of us in which we will be reunited with our believing loved ones who have gone on before. God's people know we will recognize our loved ones and they will recognize us. We will still be able to walk and talk with them just as we did in this life, only we'll be doing it in immortal bodies like Christ's, and we'll never be separated from our loved ones again. If the Israelites were to cut and tattoo their bodies in grief for the dead, it would be making the statement that they never expect to see them again. It would be as if they don't believe in an eternal soul or a future in which they will be in the presence of God and reunited with their loved ones. The Israelites are never to give the impression that they share the pagan beliefs of the idolaters around them.
So is it a sin to get a tattoo? Also, is it a sin to get a tattoo in memory of a loved one who has died? We see those quite frequently these days, don't we? I think we have to take verse 28 in the context of the time period and the culture for which it was written. During the era in which Leviticus was written, tattooing was a pagan practice. To tattoo oneself in that era was to look just like an idolater. God didn't want His people being confused for idolaters. He also didn't want His people drawn into this practice because as soon as they adopt one pagan practice they are going to fall into the temptation to adopt other pagan practices. In our day tattoos are common in many cultures and have become very mainstream in our own culture. If we see a person with a tattoo we can't conclude that person is an unbeliever, but in the days when Leviticus was written, a tattoo on a person absolutely meant they were not a believer in God. It meant they worshiped false gods, but not the one true God. But the connection is no longer there in our day between tattoos and idolatry, at least not in the mainstream culture of the United States, and I've actually seen many tattoos that are Bible verses. It's my personal opinion that you are not breaking the law contained in verse 28 if you go out and get a tattoo, not unless your tattoo is of something ungodly. I don't have any myself but I don't believe you're sinning if you have a tattoo that isn't an image of something sinful or that doesn't contain words that are sinful.
Join us tomorrow as we conclude Chapter 19.
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