I make my plans, but God directs my steps

The most important message I picked up from today’s readings overall is I make my plans, but God directs my steps.

My primary takeaway from each of the passages was this:

• Leviticus 3 & 4:  This is where we got the template for church rituals that we still perform today. 
• Luke 3: John the Baptist begins his ministry, announces the coming of Jesus, and then baptizes Jesus.
• Psalms 47: “For Yahweh, the Most High, is glorious, the great king over all the earth.”
• Proverbs 16: “The human heart may plan a course, but it is Yahweh who makes the steps secure.” 

Leviticus  3 & 4 focuses on the rituals of the communion sacrifice and the sacrifice for sin. Until I became a Catholic, I did not understand the significance of these passages. They struck me as a far away accounting of the ways in which the Israelites did things thousands of years ago, with little relevance to the way we do things now. However, as a Catholic, I see this ritual performed week after week in the mass, minus the sacrifice of the animals and burning them on the altar.

Leviticus 1 & 2 foreshadow the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross in his crucifixion. Leviticus 3 & 4 describes the ritual of penitence combined with the eucharist. Each week we come together, say the penitential prayer, and then partake of the body and blood of Jesus as a way to remember that he already took care of this for us, once and for all, forgiving us of our sins. The first time I realized this while in the mass, it occurred to me that the way we do things in the Catholic church is still very much the same way the early church did things in their meetings, providing us with a relatively unbroken tradition of worship that is two thousand years old for the Christian church and over three thousand years old for Judaism. The rituals of the mass are not arbitrary.

I was raised a United Methodist, and even in the monthly communion service in that tradition I see the remnants of the traditions and practices described in Leviticus 1 through 4.

The order of the mass, and the order of the communion services in the major Protestant denominations, is not arbitrary. Everything in the service has significance and is designed to point us back to the cross and beyond.

In Luke 3, we meet John the Baptist as he begins his ministry, announcing the coming of Jesus, and then baptizing him. In verses 5 and 6, Luke quotes the prophecy from Isaiah that foretells the coming of John the Baptist. Once again, we see that the old testament cannot be properly understood without the new testament, nor can the new testament be properly understood without the old testament.

Psalm 47 is about the greatness and glory of God. In these verses (as in most of the Psalms), God is anthropomorphized as a king. However, the message of these verses is that God (in whatever form we imagine him) is order itself, and indeed the highest order, deserving of our respect and reverence, and all glory and honor. He is the Creator of all that is.

Proverbs 16 brings us yet another litany of instructions for right living. However, the part that stands out to me the most, every time I read this section, is verse 9: “The human heart may plan a course, but it is Yahweh who makes the steps secure.” The whole point of the Proverbs is to show us how to live a life that is in alignment with the intentions God has for us, in harmony with the natural laws of the Universe, and which will also cause us the least amount of pain and strife. No one gets a perfect life that is free from distress, but we can minimize our discomfort and disappointment if we align our goals with those of God, and behave ourselves.

The way to do that is outlined in the Proverbs. Nowhere does it tell us what vocation we should seek to follow–that’s up to us. St. Ignatius believed that our truest desires–those things that we are passionate about–reveal what our vocation should be. In the movie “Chariots of Fire,” Eric Liddell expresses this to his sister after church one day, explaining to her why he felt so compelled to run in the Olympics, when he says, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” It was St. Ignatius’ belief that our truest desires are actually God’s desire in us and for us. It’s the way we live out our little part in God’s vast and unknowable plan. As so many people say today, if we love doing something so much we would probably do it for free, that is the work we should be doing.

But the way in which we approach the work we do and the way we live our daily lives is outlined in the Proverbs. And while we may follow our truest desires, and make plans for ourselves, we can never know the outcome. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, we only need to see the next step of the staircase.

That’s what I got out of it. What did you get out of the readings today?

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This post is part of the series, “Read the Bible in a Year.”

To see other posts in this series, go to the Chronological Index of Read the Bible in a Year Posts.