Feeling Like Outcasts

Feeling like Outcasts

Women With Leprosy

Read: Leviticus 13:45-46

The young woman sat on the bench with her head hanging down. The park bustled with people jogging, families picnicking, and friends laughing, but the woman didn’t notice. Two weeks earlier, her world had turned upside down when she’d tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Should I tell my family and friends? she debated. She needed all the support she could get, but she also dreaded their reactions. Would they avoid her? Would they act as if she were contagious? Dealing with the symptoms would be bad enough without being treated like an outcast.

In Bible times, a diagnosis of leprosy struck fear in people’s hearts. Lepers knew that they would become outcasts. In the Bible, leprosy refers to a number of serious skin diseases. Since some of them were extremely contagious, people who exhibited such symptoms had to be isolated from the rest of the population. Lepers had to warn anyone who came close to them by crying out, “Unclean! Unclean!” Women with leprosy faced a grim future—they would know the anguish of being cut off from family and friends as the disfiguring disease slowly destroyed their bodies.

Ever since sin entered the world in the Garden of Eden, we are all born as outcasts. Our inherent sinful nature cuts us off from the God who created us to have an intimate relationship with him. Jesus’ death on our behalf freed us from the terrible diagnosis and grim future that Satan had planned for us. When we accept God’s gift of salvation, nothing can ever make us outcasts in his eyes again. In Bible times only the priest had the authority to declare a person cured, or clean. Similarly, only God has the authority to declare someone clean from sin. After he does that, even if the world treats us as outcasts, nothing will ever separate us from his love.

I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love.

Romans 8:38