Leviticus 22: Why Should We Do What God Tells Us to Do?

I like how Leviticus chapter 22 ends.

Lev 22:31  Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the LORD.

Lev 22:32  Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the LORD which hallow you,

Lev 22:33  That brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD.

I like the ending because it really tells you everything you need to know about the situation. In writing, we talk about the 5W’s. In other words, who, what, when, where and why. We can find all that out from this passage.

Who: Obviously, we are talking about our relationship with God. Everything that is in the first-person in these verses refers to God, and everything in the second person relates to us.

What: We are supposed to keep all of the commandments of God and basically make sure that we honor Him in all we do.

Where: The place isn’t necessarily hammered down, but we know that God brought the people out of Egypt. He brought them out because that was all part of His plan for history. From that, we can expand the vision that this verse really refers to anywhere that God would put us.

When: Verses 31 and 32 are written in the future tense. We need to continue to do all of these things into the future simply because they should not go obsolete.

Why: We need to do all of these things because God is who He says He is. “I am the Lord” comes up in each of these verses, so I think that it is pretty obviously very important.

When you break down a few verses like this, I think that you often times find the why selection turns out looking just about the same. Why do we need to do everything that the Bible commands? The basic answer is that when you believe that God is who He says He is, everything else falls out naturally from that conclusion.