In Leviticus 26 the Lord spends twice as long talking about discipline as He does about blessing. In the first portion of the chapter He made some beautiful promises regarding the immense blessings He wants to pour out on Israel in the promised land if she will be faithful to Him. But human nature being what it is, we have a tendency to be satisfied with mediocre living. Perhaps the people would have been content with lukewarm worship and average blessings. The Lord wants them to understand that lukewarm worship won't cut it in this fallen world filled with temptations and trials. Lukewarm worship won't make them who they were created to be: victorious, joy-filled, Spirit-filled children of God. Lukewarm worship won't bring into their lives such abundant blessings that their cups run over continually, and God wants people's blessings to run over so those blessings can overflow onto others and help bring them into the family of God. The Lord has to spend twice as long speaking about discipline as He did about blessings because, unfortunately, human beings are often more motivated into right living by a reverence for discipline than by a reverence for God from whose hands all blessings flow.
The Lord has already mentioned several levels of correction that the people will have to pass through if they become unfaithful to Him and continue being unfaithful in spite of the corrective steps He takes. If they continue to resist repenting and turning back to Him, He says: "If in spite of these things you do not accept My correction but continue to be hostile toward Me, I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over. And I will bring the sword on you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands. When I cut off your supply of bread, ten women will be able to bake your bread in the oven, and they will dole out the bread by weight. You will eat, but you will not be satisfied." (Leviticus 26:23-26)
The Lord already promised to provide the people with more than they need and to grant them good health and many children and to give them peace from their enemies---if they remain faithful to Him. If they do not remain faithful to Him, He will not abandon Israel but He will discipline her harshly with war, illness, and famine. Though she may break her covenant with Him, the Lord will never break His covenant with her. The discipline itself is a form of faithfulness on His part because its purpose is to turn her back to Him, not to destroy her.
In yesterday's passage the Lord said that if He must send famine they will have to fear the wild animals, for in times of drought even the wild animal kingdom is affected, and in their hunger the wild animals will lose their fear of man in order to fill their bellies and the bellies of their young. If a famine is severe enough, some people will be able to ignore their qualms about eating human flesh. There have been many accounts throughout history of humans resorting to eating their dead when a famine is so severe that nothing can be found to eat. If Israel forsakes the Lord so utterly that He must bring a famine of this magnitude upon her to get her to repent, her citizens will end up doing things they could never have imagined themselves doing. "If in spite of this you still do not listen to Me but continue to be hostile toward Me, then in My anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters." (Leviticus 26:27-29)
We find this very thing happening in 2 Kings 6 when the king of Haram lays siege to Samaria, the capital city of the ten northern tribes of Israel. Due to the siege no food supplies can be brought into the city, plus there is a drought on so that nothing is growing inside the city walls, and the citizens are suffering from starvation. A woman brings a legal case to the king of Israel and appeals to him to rule in her favor. To his horror, the case goes like this: the woman and her neighbor agreed yesterday to cook and eat this woman's son and that today they would cook and eat the neighbor's son, but the neighbor has hidden her son. The woman appealing to the king wants him to force her neighbor to produce her son for consumption. Scholars are divided in their opinion as to whether these women's sons had already perished from starvation before they decided to eat them or whether the deal was that they would kill their sons and then eat them. The son who is said to be "hidden" may have already been dead from lack of food and his mother may have buried him in a secret location to prevent his remains from being desecrated. The text is not clear and we do not know whether these sons (likely infants or small children) had already perished or if the women's deal was that they would kill their children.
Another time in the nation's history when some of the citizens eat their dead is when Jerusalem is under siege by Rome in 70AD after the Jewish uprising in which the Jews attempted to free themselves from Roman rule and occupation. During the siege the famine was so great that the historian Josephus states the people were driven to eating their dead.
There are other times and other places when this type of cannibalism has occurred in the world. If you want to google a list of these cases you will find a list far longer than you might expect. One well known American example of this type of cannibalism involves the group known as the Donner Party. The Donner Party was a group of American pioneers traveling to California who became trapped by heavy snows in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the winter of 1846-1847. Members of the group of eighty-seven persons began dying off and the survivors resorted to eating first their animals and then later to eating the dead in order to keep from dying themselves. Only about half of them survived the harsh conditions of that winter. Many of them refused to discuss the cannibalism that took place because it is human nature to shrink back from even the thought of such a thing, much less the actual practice of such a thing.
I had intended to conclude our study of Leviticus 26 today but we needed to spend some time discussing verses 27-29 and the fulfillment of those verses which occurred later in Israel's history. We needed to see why the famine that results from disobedience could lead to cannibalism. We also need to think about the fact that the depraved actions of man don't start out as unspeakable acts that suddenly occur out of nowhere but that they begin with small acts of disobedience.
The Lord began Chapter 26 with a reminder to the people that He is the Lord---the only God---and that He alone is to be worshiped. He reminded them that He---and no other God---rescued them from slavery and mistreatment in Egypt by mighty wonders performed by His own hand. If the people start to feel less respect and love for the One who rescued and loves them, they will begin committing acts of disobedience. These acts will start out small but will grow in magnitude as time goes on and as their hearts grow harder toward the Lord. What we are seeing in Chapter 26 is a progression in the severity of sin and a corresponding progression in the severity of discipline. The Lord doesn't discipline minor infractions with war or famine. He disciplines minor infractions with appropriate measures, usually by first appealing to the person's conscience with an intense feeling of guilt which is one of the ways the Holy Spirit ministers to us. But if our resistance to repentance grows, the hardness of our hearts grows, and we can fall into deeper and deeper sin. The deeper the sin, the harsher the consequences. This is why we find the Lord saying in this chapter, each time man reaches a further step down in his sin and depravity, "if you still do not listen to Me".
The Lord doesn't want to bring discipline on any person or on any nation. He wants us to repent as soon as the Holy Spirit shows us we've gotten off track. If we immediately listen to the Holy Spirit and are sorry for our sin and confess it to God and repent of it, we can often escape God's discipline altogether for the wrong thing we did, although there may be some natural consequences of this world that we'll have to face for our mistake. But if we keep ignoring the Holy Spirit, and if we keep hardening our hearts against the guilt we feel, we'll fall further and further from our relationship with God and we'll fall into deeper and deeper levels of sin. This means the discipline we'll eventually face will be far worse than that which we'd have had to face if we'd repented at some earlier level of disobedience. The Lord, like any good father, wants to reward obedience. He doesn't want to have to administer discipline. But He wouldn't be a good father if He didn't correct us when we go off course. He'd far rather us have to endure unpleasant circumstances than to have us become complete reprobates and ruin our lives and perhaps even ruin the lives of those around us through our actions. God would not be a good father if He didn't discipline His children. He also wouldn't be holy and righteous if He didn't judge the sins of those who are not His children---the unbelievers of this world who have rejected Him and who continue to reject Him. A God who won't stand by His laws and enforce His laws is not a God to be worshiped.
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