the leopard vs the leper
Posted by jaked | Filed under so i was thinking the other day...
so in church saturday night we were singing “Jesus paid it all” and in the song is the lyric “Lord now indeed i find, thy power, and thine alone, can change the leper’s spots…” (1:28 in the video) and i realized that up to this point in my life i had always sang it “can change the leopard’s spots…” you know a leopard… bit cat covered in black spots, can run really fast, the print of which can make even the most manly of men look like a dork, or ‘panther padres’ to those who know scientific animal jargon. it just always made sense to me, you can’t change the spots on a leopard… they’re genetic. but at the same time, leprosy, in Bible times at least, was an incurable disease, an instant death sentence… much like getting bit by a zombie in almost any zombie movie. so i had to get to the bottom of things… who was right, me (being pro cat thing) or elvina hall (the person who wrote the lyrics to “Jesus paid it all”)
so my first, and last, stop was to go to the source of all knowledge, google. i had remembered something in the old testament about one or the other (the cat or the disease, i couldn’t really remember which) so i did a handy dandy google search, and being bias and whatnot of corse i search changing a leopard’s spots first. and i was right… in jeremiah 13:23 it says:
can the ethiopian change his skin
or the leopard his spots?
then also you can do good
who are accustomed to do evil.
there i had my proof. me 1, miss hall 0. the Bible wasn’t talking about a skin disease it was talking about the panther padres, the smallest of the “big cat” animal family. but to be fair i proceeded to google about changing leper’s spots and found this. in luke 4 Jesus is officially beginning his ministry and he starts by causing a stir at his local synagogue. Jesus read’s a section of scripture from isaiah which really turned some heads. he goes on to talk about things that occurred during the old testament including the mention that at the time there had been zero healing of leprosy save for one. naaman was the only person up to that point who had ever been healed of the disease and he wasn’t even a decedent of israel.
so as i pondered this and what the late miss hall had written about in her song it really hit me. we’re both right. jeremiah was speaking about our inherent desire to do evil. like it or not we are all morally corrupt people. we’ve all blown it at least once and deep down inside there’s something that just desires doing wrong. so is that it? are we all just doomed to do evil? thankfully no but jeremiah compared this inward desire for wrong doing to that of both an ethiopian being unable to change their skin color and a leopard being unable to change his spots, no matter how hard he scratches. all of the above are genetic. from our skin color (or spots in the big cat’s case) to our desire to do wrong, they all come from up the genetic gene pool, and for us that goes all the way to the top. our first parents sinned against God; they wrongly thought that they could live life on their own, in effect functioning as their own gods. because of this we’re separated from the living God, death entered paradise, and with it arrived such things as murder, war, oppression, and door to door vacuum salesmen. (it’s ok i can make fun of that, i did it for two weeks) and just like how the leopard can’t change his spots and the leper was unable to cleanse himself of his disease, we are unable to cleanse ourselves of the hold of this sin in our life… at least not by ourselves. this is where Jesus stepped in… Jesus has both the ability to heal people of leprosy and other diseases but he also has the power to forgive sins.
so as i was able to think through this it really made me grateful that JC’s working in me to stomp out the desire to do wrong… and also thankful that i don’t suffer from a skin eating virus… like this guy.
what do you think?
