1'Now when anyone presents a grain offering as an offering to the LORD, his offering shall be of fine flour, and he shall pour oil on it and put frankincense on it.
2'He shall then bring it to Aaron's sons the priests; and shall take from it his handful of its fine flour and of its oil with all of its frankincense And the priest shall offer it up in smoke as its memorial portion on the altar, an offering by fire of a soothing aroma to the LORD.
3'The remainder of the grain offering belongs to Aaron and his sons: a thing most holy, of the offerings to the LORD by fire.
I am so grateful that I get to do this blog every other week. And I am grateful for the weeks that Verna blogs and I get a break! Verna, I know, feels the same way that I do about it. What a blessing for us both! However, it is a challenge and takes prayer and time and thought each morning. It's especially hard when I don't have a clue what that particular chapter means. Thankfully, there are godly people in googleland who have freely posted excellent articles for just about every question I have. Today, I was particularly puzzled by Leviticus 2 and all this stuff about the grain offerings and quickly found an in depth discussion of the chapter by Bob Deffinbaugh (on www.bible.org). The information was clearly written so that I could easily follow and understand his argument.
What I understood from the Leviticus 2 article by Mr. Deffinbaugh is that the grain offering represented sacrificial giving of your precious resources, not associated with sin because only blood of animals could cover the sin issue. In addition, grain was not readily available to the Israelites as they traveled around the desert. So the only grain they had was what they carried away from Egypt and probably in the form of seeds for planting when they arrived in the promised land. If someone brought that precious seed to offer to God, it was not something that could be easily replaced. Therefore, this represented a great sacrifice of love and devotion to God and required a trust that God would supply more seed when it was needed.
In the past, when my husband and I were young and broke all of the time, I saw God supply over and over again just when things were desperate. However, now that we are comfortable financially, I have never really gotten the idea into my head of giving to the point that I was again in that desperate place before God. I can see from past experience the value in dependency on God and of giving out of my poverty and not just my abundance, but I am a long way from walking this way by faith.