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Our text in Leviticus chapter 14 is one of those scriptures that is easily passed over in casual reading, but when you actually stop and think about what God is saying sort of makes you say "whoa, wait a minute." God is giving the law of Moses to the children of Israel and instructing Moses and Aaron in various procedures and situations that will come up once the children of Israel have crossed into the Promised Land. God had taken the children of Israel out of Egypt and He had promised to give them a land with houses that they did not build and vineyards that they did not plant and they would get those things by overcoming and spoiling the Canaanites who already dwelt in the Promised place. And since the children of Israel had never governed themselves before, God laid out all sorts of laws and regulations to help them live holy in their new home.

If you were here Sunday night, then you will remember that I used the first part of this chapter as our text and I preached on the cleansing of the leperous person. Leprosy was a dreaded, contagious, and fatal disease in those days and so God spent several chapters dealing with how to determine whether or not a person had leprosy or simply a harmless skin condition. If a person had leprosy in those days, then they were banished from society until they either died or God perchance healed them. If they were healed they had to go through an elaborate ritual of cleansing that God outlined in the first part of Leviticus chapter 14. In the second half of this chapter, the part that we began with our text, God began to give instruction for when leprosy appeared in the walls of a house. If a mold or some type of "leprosy" appeared in the house, then the person living in the house was to go to the priest and say "I think that there is something growing in my house." (Sort of reminds me of our bathroom in college after a few months) The priest would evacuate the house and determine if it was leprosy or just a harmless mold by taking out a few bricks or stones which were covered with the spots and leaving the house for seven days. If the leprosy came back, then the house walls had to be torn down, carried outside the city and burned and the house had to be rebuilt.

All of this was to teach us about our lives today and the symbolism is not what causes you to go "whoa." Throughout scripture, the "Promised Land" represents the Holy Ghost. The scripture teaches us that when you receive the Holy Ghost, your body becomes a "temple" or "house" in which the Holy Ghost dwells. Leprosy always represents sin, and the priest represents Jesus Christ. What God was trying to teach us was that even after we are serving God and filled with the Holy Ghost in a promised place and in a fleshly "house" that we did not build but just inherited from Adam, that there may be things in our life that are sinful that we do not even realize is there until they show themselves outwardly. Have you ever been in a situation and all of a sudden you were jealous or angry or depressed, and you were surprised at yourself for acting that way and you couldn't explain it? There was something there and you did not even realize it until it came to the outside. You reacted from what was on the inside and by the time your brain caught up, you were thinking "what am I doing?" This scripture gives us hope in those situations, because if you suddenly see leprosy come to the outside, then you can go to the high priest, Jesus Christ, and ask Him for help. Don't run from Him like Adam and Eve did, but go to Him and be honest. Tell Him, "God I didn't know these things were in my 'house' and I need help getting them out." Repent to Him and the scripture says that He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. He'll even help rebuild your spiritual house if that's what needs to happen. We serve a merciful God!

That's a nice lesson on God's mercy hidden in these scriptures, but where is the part that grabs your attention and makes you stop and wonder? It's found in our text in the 34th verse. God says:

God is speaking here, and He tells Moses and Aaron, "when you are living in the houses in the promised land, and I put the plague of leprosy in a house...!" Wait a minute, you mean God is the one who put the plague of leprosy in the house?! There's the surprise that easily missed.

Put yourself in the Israelite's shoes for a moment. You are a young man and you have been born in the wilderness. From the time you were a little boy, they have told you that God was going to give you a home and a house and land and a place to settle for the first time in your life. No more pitching and unpitching a tent. No more eating the same bread every morning, but you will have all the grapes and olive oil that you want, and fresh milk and eggs, and steaks (they didn't eat pork, so NO bacon) every morning. You stand faithful with Joshua and march around Jericho and then go faithfully fight, risking your life, to capture the promised land. Your reward is that you and your family get a nice house that was built by the Canaanites and a vineyard and land that is already cultivated, and you move in, and life is wonderful. Until... one day you look up in the corner of your house and there appears something that looks suspiciously like leprosy. You panic, and as soon as you can, you go find the priest and tell him about it. He reaches back, takes out the scroll of Leviticus and turns to the part that we read this morning as our text, and says "yes, God said that this would happen from time to time, but luckily we have some definite guidelines to follow. You and your family have to move out for 7 days and move back into the tent. We need to go remove the part of the wall that is leprous. AND if it continues to spread, we must totally tear down the walls and rebuild. Oh, and by the way, the scripture here says that GOD is the one who sent the leprosy in the first place. If I am that Israelite, then I am thinking "God what sort of blessing is this?"

Even today, that phrase that "God sent the plague of leprosy" isn't quite clear at first glance. The book of James says that God tempts no man to sin. That when we sin, we are drawn away of our own lusts. God does not force people to sin or even put them in a situation where they are tempted to. According to scripture, neither does the devil. We human beings create our own temptation and our own unholy desires. When you sin, you created the environment for sin to grow. Adam and Eve were in the perfect world, with a perfect relationship with God and yet Satan did not start talking to Eve until SHE began to hang around the forbidden tree and look at and wonder about what it would be like... . Don't blame God for your sin, because He tempts no man.

But if that is true and if it is true that leprosy represents sin, then why did God say that "He sent the leprosy into the houses." I found the answer and it lies in a little bit of information from history. As the children of Israel came into the land, the Canaanites became scared when they heard about the fall of the great city Jericho, and so the Canaanites began to hide their treasure that was important to them -- their idols of silver and gold, the jewelry and such that they used to worship their false gods -- they buried them in the WALLS of their houses, hoping to one day come back and fight for their homeland and when they reconquered their houses, they could dig back in the walls and get out the important stuff. So some of the children of Israel were living in houses, trying to serve the one, true God and unknowingly had idols and such within their homes. That was clear violation of God's law which said not to bring anything that was an abomination into their homes. Idols and the worship of other gods was a clear abomination. So when this was the case, God caused leprosy to appear on the outside of the walls, so that they priest would come and dig in the walls. When they began to tear out the walls, they would find the idols and silver and gold and such and remove them and their lives would be holy.

I want you to realize the important lesson that God is trying to teach us here. The person living in the house had no idea that the idols were there or that there was sin in their house. Yet, because it was there, God would not bless the family and COULD not bless the family. They were living under a curse and did not even realize why. If God would have blessed the family anyway, and perhaps by chance in a remodeling they would have found the idols, then perhaps they would make the assumption that idolatry wasn't such a big deal to God after all, "I mean, He blessed us with this stuff here."

There is an element of false Christianity that I want to confront here today and expose it for the lie that it is. Some people have the attitude that "I don't really want to study God's Word completely, because if I don't know about it, then I don't have to obey it." With all due respect, that's "hogwash." God will not bless a lifestyle that is contrary to His Word. God will not bless sin. God will not bless actions that contradict a principle in God's Word. If you have an area in your life that does not line up to the Word of God, then God will not bless it REGARDLESS of whether you know about what God's Word says or not. REGARDLESS of whether you know that the situation that contradicts God's Word is there in your life. REGARDLESS of whether or not you have identified it, God will not bless it, because He is holy and just and cannot lie and so God blesses and moves according to His written Word. What you don't know can hurt you!

Some people think that if they ignore a subject that they will not be held accountable for it. That's a lie from the pits of hell. You will be judged according to everything in this book when you step into eternity, whether you know it or not. Don't you want to learn more about it? Don't you want to be certain of exactly how the Apostolic Church baptized? Don't you want to check out EVERYTHING that the scripture commands you to do to be saved? The scripture instructs us to "make our calling and election sure." In other words, make sure that you are living according to this book. But, if your eternal state really hinges upon what this word says, then why isn't it more of a priority in your life? Why isn't church more important than work or rest or whatever? The scripture says that there is a way that "seemeth right unto a man" but that it's "end leadeth to destruction." You can't live your life by what you "think" is right. You can't live your life by what feels good. Because doing that is leaning on your own understanding. And that way leads to destruction.

But don't think that I am merely preaching a sermon on judgment. And don't tune me out yet. You see when the scriptures say that "God sent the leprosy" it is not saying that God brings forth sin in a person's life. The leprosy was already there in the house hidden in the walls, and all God was doing was revealing it on the outside. Bringing the leprosy to the house may have SEEMED like judgment to the man who had to move out and rebuild his house, but it was actually an act of MERCY. God wants you to be blessed so much and He desires for you to be saved so much, that He is willing to bring to the surface, evidence of what is wrong deep inside. The leprosy on the outside of the wall was just representative of the spiritual leprosy that was hidden within! That is why God will not bless someone's life that is living in sin even if they do not know that it there. That is why God will cause say your marriage to fall apart and have difficulty if you are doing things against the Word of God -- whether you know what it is or not. It is His mercy and His desire to bless you that causes the plague to become obvious on the outside. He knows that if He doesn't allow things to get so bad that they become obvious that something is wrong, that you will never dig deep enough to realize the root of the problem is some philosophies, and ways of living, and traditions, and motives, and idols, and actions buried deep within that are contradictory to God's Word. And if you never identify the situation, then He will never be able to bless you like He desires in His great love and mercy. So God allows situations to become "leperous" and bad not to hammer you or to hurt you, but so that you will began to seek out the truth so that He can bless you. The leprosy is just representing the sin that was already in the house that is holding back what God really wants to do in your life. God sends it so that you will be able to discover the cause of the curse, and then have the choice whether or not to remove it.

I'm preaching to some of you who feel as if you have been fighting against God. And in a sense you are. You try to get ahead and yet it seems that you cannot bring the blessings that you desire and the relationship with God that you want on your own. It seems as if you can't get to the next level. It seems that you can't get total deliverance. The reason that you are so frustrated is because you have leprosy sent from God in your life that is trying to tell you that there are some changes that need to be made on the inside. God is revealing outwardly, that there are some things in your life that need to be removed and burned. The scriptures say "if God be for us, then who can be against us?" But turn that around and you find the sad place that many luke-warm Christians choose to live. "If God be against you, then who can be for you?" You get God on your side, when you choose to obey and live according to His Word. But to reject what the Word of God clearly teaches, no matter what the excuse, and no matter if you have ever taken the time to study it or not, is to get God fighting against you. Is to get God bringing the leprosy in your house. Is to get God stirring things up in that area of your life. Why does God bring the leprosy? Not because He hates you, He doesn't-- He loves you. He came to earth and died so that you could be free of the many things that you are holding on to. He gave His very life and His very word so that you could choose to walk a different path and choose eternal life. God WANTS to be on your side. He WANTS to fight for you. BUT He will NOT bless unrighteousness. He cannot lie and go against His Word, so He is willing to make the areas of your life that are against His Word miserable and a "cup of trembling." He brings the leprosy, so that you will hopefully run to Him and ask for help from His Word in getting it out of your house. In the process, He knows that you will discover things that you did not even know were there that were causing a curse, and then you can choose to remove them from your life and be so blessed of God that you cannot even imagine!

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In our other text, we read about Saul's, who would later become the Apostle Paul, conversion. The actual story of Saul's conversion is found in Acts chapter 9, but several times in Paul's life, he retold part of the story while preaching. Often when he was retelling it, he would give additional information that is not found in Acts chapter 9.

The basic story was this: Saul/Paul was a young Pharisee, which was the religious order that rejected and crucified Jesus Christ. Saul was the young star and most promising up-coming Pharisee. He was smart. He knew the Old Testament scriptures. He had sat at the feet of the finest teachers of the law that were available. He was probably at least 30 years of age and had spent his entire life studying the way of the Pharisees. He could argue scripture with the most learned scholars of the day.

Everything changed when Saul stood and listened to the sermon of Stephen, a powerful young preacher who was on trial for preaching that you had to follow Jesus to be saved. Saul stood and listened as Stephen preached the scriptures and was there for the dramatic ending, when Stephen identified Jesus Christ as the one, true God and the older Pharisees held their ears and then began to pick up stones and throw them at this man of God until he was killed. As he walked away with Stephen's prayer of blessing on his killers still ringing his ears, Saul had to make a decision. He had heard the truth of the message of Jesus Christ. Saul did as so many do when they hear the preaching of an Apostolic preacher and chose to stick to his traditions and teachings of men. In fact, this experience caused him to hate the Apostolic church so much that he began to persecute them with venom. The scriptures and history combine to tell us that he put many of these Spirit-filled, baptized in Jesus' name believers in prison. He then got the authority to kill them. When many of the believers fled from Jerusalem, Saul went and got permission to travel a few hundred miles north to the city of Damascus where there was supposedly a large Apostolic, Jesus-name church. Saul was going to arrest them and drag them back to Jerusalem to be killed.

But as they neared the end of their journey to Damascus, God got actively involved. The scriptures say that a bright light shone from heaven a great voice rang out from the sky "Saul, Saul, why do thou persecutest me?" Saul fell to the ground blinded, but hearing the voice, and asked the one question that had probably been bothering him since Stephen' sermon. Looking up at the sky, where he knew that the scriptures said was only one God, Saul asked "who art thou, Lord?" The answer stunned him: "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest." Saul had been sincere in what he thought was the right way to live, but he had been sincerely wrong! The voice went on to instruct Saul to go on into Damascus, and when he tried to stand and get his bearings, he discovered something that chilled him: he was completely blind. In our text, Saul said that it was the "glory of the light" that had blinded him.

How remarkable it is that the same Jesus that had healed so many blinded eyes and caused them to see, would here cause blindness! The miracle worker had produced the sickness! That seems almost a paradox to us until you realize that actually Jesus did not simply cause blindness just to curse Saul, but that the outward blindness was representative of the spiritual blindness that had been inside Saul all along. Jesus did not actually strike Saul with blindness, but just brought the blindness to the surface. He brought the leprosy to the outside. He allowed the outside to reveal the inside. The man who had forever taken pride as a Pharisee, that he was "illuminated" and "walked in all the true light of the scriptures" had to admit that he was really blind and had blinded himself to the reality of the message of Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Church and the sermon of Stephen. Saul had to admit that he had allowed his tradition to blind him to the simple truth of Christ's teaching and God's Word. But everything changed the day that Jesus brought the blindness to the forefront.

Can I preach to you that you can blind yourself to the truth of God's Word. You can make yourself believe anything, even a lie, if you will let yourself. But only believing the truth of God's Word will save you! Jesus said that "man cannot live by bread alone, but by EVERY Word of God." What you don't know can hurt you. And it was not the intent for Saul to stay in his blindness forever. In fact, God sent a minister, a preacher, to preach to him what he should do. That minister prayed for him, that preacher told him that he needed to receive the Holy Ghost. That preacher baptized Saul in the name of the Lord Jesus (Acts 22:16). And when Saul did those things, the blindness dropped off. The curse of the leprosy was removed. When the traditions that were binding up the flow of blessings in Saul's life were done away with, and he truly obeyed the Word of God, then God endowed Saul with an anointing and a power in his life that he had never even imagined was possible with the Pharisees. God used a man who had been the Apostolic Church's true enemy to reach more people than any single man in the Book of Acts! Why? Because Saul was willing to stumble through the blindness of tradition and obey God's Word and do it's God's way.

Man's traditions and religions have blinded many people today to the truth of what God requires. Preacher after preacher get up every Sunday morning and lead people through the sinner's prayer that does not in itself save anyone and leaves lives unchanged. Preacher after preacher baptize people without calling on the name of Jesus and follow man's tradition that was developed in the 381 A.D. a full three centuries after Jesus Christ walked the earth by saying "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost" and never actually saying that name, the name of Jesus. Many people have done away with water baptism entirely. Even more preachers will stand today and say that the Holy Ghost is just a symbol and all you have to do is say that you "accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior" and you are alright, and "all that Holy Ghost stuff was for back then."

But my question to you is, what will you do with Acts chapter 2? It was the birthday of the true Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. There were 120 people in a room and they were already baptized in the name of Jesus. The Holy Ghost fell on them and they ALL began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance. In other words, when they received the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God took control of their tongue and caused them to speak in a language that they did not understand and had never studied. This caused quite a commotion in Jerusalem, but as a crowd gathered that was amazed by the sight of 120 people speaking in far away languages, Peter stood up and began to preach to them about Jesus Christ. In verse 37, of Acts chapter 2, the crowd was moved by his preaching and asked "what must we do?" Peter answered them with verse 38: Repent, be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Thousands obeyed Peter's message that day and repented of their sins, were baptized in water with the preacher saying "in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" and then received the gift of the Holy Ghost just as the 120 had done with the Holy Ghost having the same effect on them by causing them to speak in other tongues. I'm preaching to some people today that, like Saul, you are blinded by men's traditions of what it takes to be saved, and God has sent a preacher to you to point out what the Bible actually says.

Every time in scripture someone received the Holy Ghost, they spoke with other tongues as the Spirit moved through them. I've heard some people try to say that the tongues were just for the Day of Pentecost so that the onlookers could understand the message in their native tongue. It is true that many of the onlookers recognized the languages, but then Peter stood up an in ONE language understood by everyone preached a sermon. The tongues were not just sent so that they could understand. I've heard people say that it's just an added gift, but Peter and Paul preached it as something you MUST do to be saved. I've heard people say well, that was only for the Jews on that particular day. But the same Holy Ghost outpouring happened to the Samaritans in Acts chapter 8. The same Holy Ghost outpouring happened in Acts chapter 10 on non Jewish people YEARS later. Decades after the Day of Pentecost, Paul ran into some disciples of John that had been blinded by their tradition and had not been completely converted. Turn with me to Acts chapter 19:

These men were rebaptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and then received the Holy Ghost just as the 120 did on the day of Pentecost. In fact, Peter mentioned in Acts chapter 2 that the promise of the Holy Ghost was for everyone and even those who would come after:

God is still filling people with the Holy Ghost today!

What about water baptism? Did you know that EVERYTIME someone was baptized in scripture, they were baptized "in the name of Jesus?" In Matthew 28:19, when Jesus was giving the commandment, "baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" there was no one actually standing in the water. He was giving the disciple commandments on how to baptize, and every time they obeyed this scripture, they baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. They knew that the NAME was Jesus! Acts 4:12 says that it is the only name given to us for salvation! The fact that most people preach differently doesn't mean that they are right, when they contradict the Word of God! Jesus, Himself, never baptized anyone (John 4:1-2)! The disciples did all of the baptism. They knew how He wanted them to baptize!

And what about repentance? Peter did not tell them to say a sinner's prayer or "confess the Lord Jesus with their mouth." He told them "to repent"

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Close by contrasting the reaction to the blindness to the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

God has revealed truth to you so that He can bless you further! He wants you to move to a closer relationship with God! How will you respond to the truth? Like the men of Sodom and Gomorrah by continually trying to keep moving forward in blindness, or by Saul who repented of his errant beliefs, was baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, and received the Holy Ghost and allowed God to take him to a level to which he had only dreamed?

So many people today live in their blindness and fulfill the scripture:

But we must fulfill the scripture of the wise man:

God is willing to identify the areas that are wrong in your life, so that you will build a spiritual house that will make it for eternity! The greatest act of mercy is when God "sends the leprosy" to the surface.