My seven year old boy, Josiah, reads a chapter from the Old Testament each morning and then tries to explain to me what he understood. Then we talk and pray about it.

This morning he read half of Leviticus 13, the chapter on what to do if you contract leprosy. He prayed, "Dear God, help people not to get leprosy."

His prayer shows how difficult it is to understand the application of many Old Testament passages. Very often reading just a single chapter will not answer the question of application. One has to see the chapter in light of God's purpose for the book, and the book in light of God's plan of sending His Messiah. Then it makes vivid sense.

One Sunday morning I spoke for college students on this very topic and told them in all honesty that one of the reasons we don't know how to apply the Old Testament is becuase of laziness. Yes, we need pastors, preachers, and theologians to make these things more clear, but often we don't want to take the time required to understand what God is saying in the text before we jump to a premature application.

But that just doesn't work in the Old Testament. When God says, "But if the bright spot remains in its place and does not spread, it is only the scar of the boil; and the priest shall pronounce him clean" (Lev 13:23), where do you jump to? It requires diligent labor to understand what God is saying and then to know how this applies to the contemporary Christian living 3500 years later!