Try­ing to catch up on the read­ing on the One Year Bible plan: I’m
two days behind. That’s a point where it’s easy enough to catch up but
anoth­er day or so becomes hard to catch up. The whole point of this for
me is not to read the Bible in bursts or even to get through the whole
thing in a year, but to devel­op the lifestyle habit of dai­ly scripture
reading.

I’m in Exo­dus 30 now and the Lord is giv­ing Moses a list
of very spe­cif­ic laws. In 30:17, he spec­i­fies how Aaron and the
priest­ly caste must wash their feet every­time they come into the
Taber­na­cle and gives the what else: “or they will die!” Then God makes
the law firm: “This is a per­ma­nent law for Aaron and his descendants,
to be observed from gen­er­a­tion to generation.”

I’m read­ing a spe­cial One Year Bible,
where all of the dai­ly read­ings are grouped togeth­er. There’s not too
much com­men­tary and I tend to skip it but the edi­tors did feel the need
to address the laws of the Old Tes­ta­ment head on and asked in one
side­bar “Do we need to fol­low these laws today?” The answer was yes and
no: “The moral law is still to be fol­lowed… The cer­e­mo­ni­al laws no
longer need to be fol­lowed because of the final sac­ri­fice for since has
been made by Jesus.”

God very clear­ly says in Exo­dus that the
laws he’s giv­ing are per­ma­nent. I don’t real­ly read much wig­gle room in
there. Priests need to wash their feet… and kill a cer­tain num­ber of
lamb every year… and splat­ter the sac­ri­fi­cial blood around the alter a certain
way and… I know Jesus is the new law, etc., but still it’s kind of
fun­ny how literal-interpretation Chris­tians will shrug off a direct and
per­ma­nent order from God. It seems obvi­ous that the religious
tra­di­tions in the Bible dif­fer great­ly, as do the mod­ern lens we bring
to them and the two cen­turies of shift­ing Chris­t­ian prac­tices we’ve
brought to them.

Does any­one hap­pen to know if there’s any reli­gious group still try­ing to fol­low the details of the Mosa­ic Law? I won­der close do cer­tain Ortho­dox Jew­ish groups get?