October 30th

Leviticus 5:14-7:10, Mark 10:32-52, Proverbs 6:12-19

Worship is important to God and to us. It helps us relate to God and it helps us talk to Him. Today we continue with the sin, guilt and many other different kinds of offering. And we also revisit a story from Matthew when James and John want the seats next to Jesus so they can talk with him forever.

In Leviticus, behind all of the regulations about offerings there lies the fact that worship is very important and the Israelites were trying to get it right. Although we don’t go into all this detail, there are still a lot of things that go into Sunday morning worship (like songs, prayers for other people, a reading from the Bible, a sermon and perhaps few other things) which we would not want to miss out. No different to us, worship had to take a certain shape, they just went into massive detail when they wrote it down. It may be hard for us to read but it is just the people of Israel making sure that worship is done right.

Moving on, the fact that we are re-reading a particular story leads us to an important fact about the Gospels. When we look at the Bible there are four separate Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) but we don’t necessarily realise that three of them are very closely linked. The writers of Matthew and Luke actually used the Gospel of Mark as one of their sources.

John tells us right at the end of the Gospel that if all the facts of Jesus’ life were written down “even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” (John 21:25). So in trying to write the Gospels, the writers used a number of sources to help them narrow down what to actually write. The writing of the Gospel was also an act of worship to Jesus and the writers wanted to get it right. This means that it sometimes seems as though we are reading stories again but as with any eyewitness report, they vary slightly depending on who remembers what. In Matthew Mrs Zebedee asked the question and in Mark James and John asked.

Our worship is reading the Bible in a year, even when it is tough going. So we plod on through and try and do it right.