Letting God Look At You (Leviticus 24)
Letting God Look at You
Leviticus 24 — and the signpost buried in the middle of the book everyone gives up on.
Letting God Look at You
Leviticus 24 — and the signpost buried in the middle of the book everyone gives up on.
I got lost a lot as a kid. My dad once took me to Dodger Stadium when I was five — field-level seats, the works — and somehow, by the third inning, I had drifted up to the fifth deck, perfectly content. After that, my dad taught us his whistle. A sharp, unmistakable sound he could send across a campground or a stadium. I still remember a summer in the woods, just past our campsite, getting turned around. Panic starting to rise. And then his whistle cutting through the trees. A signpost. I knew which way home was.
Some signposts are sounds. Some are a slide show on a Sunday morning, reminding you what God has already done. And some, it turns out, are buried in the middle of Leviticus.
We're starting a new series called It Was Always About Grace. And I know — Leviticus is usually where Bible reading plans go to die. You ride Genesis on a wave of dreams and plagues, you survive Exodus, and then everything stops. Sacrifices. Rituals. Blood in places blood was not meant to be. So God plants a signpost — a picture image — right in the middle of the book.
Leviticus 24 describes the heart of the tabernacle. The seven-pronged lampstand — the menorah — burns continually. Across from it, a table holds twelve loaves of bread. The priest's daily job is to trim the lamps so the light shines forward, onto the loaves. That's it. That's the picture at the center of Israel's worship.
The bread is the people of God — twelve loaves for twelve tribes. The light is God's presence. So the image is this: God places His people in front of Him, and He shines on them. Every single day. No hoops. No transactions. The whole thing is God saying, come sit in my presence, and let me look at you.
It matches a prayer from a couple chapters earlier — the High Priest's Blessing in Numbers 6. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face to shine on you. The Lord lift up His countenance on you. Notice that's not Lord, give them what they want. It's may God lift up His gaze toward you. The blessing is just God looking at us.
That blew me up the first time I sat with it — because it's the exact opposite of every other ancient temple. In Mesopotamia and Greece and Rome, you went to look at the god. There was a statue of Dagon, or Marduk, or Zeus. You brought a sacrifice. You tried to manipulate. Religion was a vending machine: enough coins in, enough miracle out.
Israel turns it inside out. There's no statue, because we are the image of God. Genesis 1. The image was already in the room the moment you walked in. So in this temple, you don't go to look at God. You go so God can look at you.
I think of us as angled mirrors — built to receive God's reflection and bounce it out into the world. The trouble is my mirror is cracked. Yours is too. The image we throw is fuzzy. The only way to get refinished isn't to white-knuckle our way to a better person — it's to walk into His presence and let Him look at us until the cracks start to soften.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, the company meets Galadriel and finds out very quickly that she is the one looking at them. Her gaze pulls every secret to the surface. Psalm 139 has the same charge — Lord, you have searched me, you know me, even before a word is on my tongue you know it completely. That can be the most comforting prayer in the Bible or the scariest, depending on what you've been hiding. Either way, the gaze is the point. He sees us. And He doesn't see us to shame us. He sees us to renew us.
So my invitation this week is small, and worth more than it sounds. Five minutes a day. Open the Bible. Play a worship song. Sit on the back porch. Pray one line: God, would you look at me? Let Him in. Let the cracks come up. Let Him do whatever quiet work He wants to do.
And if you're like me and you forget — put a signpost in your way. My family did this last month. We drove out to (yes, this exists in Morgan Hill) the rockery, picked out six river stones, and painted them as a family. They sit under the lemon tree by our front door now. On the hard days, those rocks remind me God's grace got me here. On the days I'm tempted to think it was all me, they remind me it wasn't.
A sticky note on the mirror. An alarm on the phone. A painted rock by the door. Whatever it takes. Just don't miss the invitation buried in the middle of Leviticus.
The lamp is lit. The bread is on the table. He's waiting to look at you.
