Leviticus
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Intro
Bible reading plan...
Before we get into our sermon, I want to show you a couple of pictures. Tim Noble And Sue Webster...
SHOW PICTURE 1
SHOW PICTURE 2
They are taking something that we would normally regard as useless and not only showing its beauty but are trying to send a message.
One guess as to the message they are trying to send with that second picture…it’s called whitetrash and is the collection of six months worth of trash from just one two-person household.
Why do I show you that? Well, today, we are going to be going through the book of Leviticus. Now, I’m not saying that you or I think the book of Leviticus is trash…not at all. But, I am saying that for many people, they steer clear of it because of how it reads.
Leviticus is in the genre of Law Code.
It is the equivalent of you picking up the United States annotated code of justice and reading it. Not only that, but the claim of the Bible is that we should read it because it can change our lives.
And yet, its full of some crazy rules about things that we don’t even do anymore. Should we do them? What of Leviticus, if any, applies to us? Why does it talk so much about bodily fluids and animals you can’t eat…and honestly wouldn’t want to even if God had called them good? Am I a priest? And if so, should I be coming by your house to inspect for mold or to look at that weird rash you’ve developed in the underside of your arm?
If you’ve been reading your Bible reading plan this week, raise your hand if you recall hearing about the fatty lobe of the liver? What the heck even is that and why is it burned on some sacrifices and not on others?
All of those are valid questions and while we will get to a few of those, perhaps what is most important is for us to adjust our perspective and shine the proper light on Leviticus so that you can understand it properly for yourself. That’s why I showed you those pictures.
To adjust our perspective we actually have to journey across three different books really quickly.
First open up to Exodus 40 and we are going to look at verse 35...
35 Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.
So that is how Exodus ends…remind them about the long drawn out process of building the tabernacle and God’s presence coming to dwell with them only for Moses to not be able to enter.
Leviticus begins this way:
1 Then the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,
I wan’t to highlight a detail in that verse we are prone to miss…next slide:
Leviticus 1:1 (NASB95)
1 Then the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying,
From is telling us that God is in the tent and Moses is not…But…look at how the book of Numbers begins:
1 Then the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying,
Did you catch it? Here look again:
Numbers 1:1 (NASB95)
1 Then the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting…
Leviticus begins and Moses is still unable to enter the Tent of Meeting and yet by the beginning of Numbers (the very next chapter in Israels story) Moses is inside the tent speaking with God.
Leviticus is about how this changed.
Now, that is the proper angle from which to view Leviticus, but in order to shine the right light on Leviticus, we have to talk about the concept of Holiness.
Holiness is primarily about uniqueness.
I think a lot of times, we want to make holiness about some sort of moral purity. Do Eiffel tower is not all of Europe bit…it is a part of it, not the whole thing.
God is utterly unique amongst all other things. Everything else shares at least one common attribute with everything else…everything is related to one another because anything that isn’t God has been created.
When I think about holiness, I like to think about the sun.
Is the sun good? Yes…explain light, warmth, energy, and plant food...
Is the sun safe? NO!…explain cancer, heat stroke, burning alive if you are too close to it.
Can you just hurl a snowball at the sun and expect it to be ok? NO!
This relationship between the goodness and safety of God’s holiness is the problem that Leviticus is addressing in what I like to call The Holiness Dilemma.
The Holiness Dilemma is the problem created when sinful and impure humans try to come into God’s holy presence.
God redeemed his people out of Egypt and came to be with them so that they might have life, and yet, we can’t exist in his presence. That’s how the story ends.
Check out this story from Leviticus chapter ten which gives us a dramatic example of the holiness dilemma on full display:
1 Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them.
2 And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord.
3 Then Moses said to Aaron, “It is what the Lord spoke, saying, ‘By those who come near Me I will be treated as holy, And before all the people I will be honored.’ ” So Aaron, therefore, kept silent.
Ya’ll these were priests of God. They had been given instructions about how to enter into God’s presence which they had, in some way, completely disregarded and it cost them their lives.
Do you guys know who Marie Curie is? Do Marie Curie bit…someone showing her how to deal properly with radiation…lived between the 1860’s and the 1930’s…died of a condition related to her radiation exposure
The book of Leviticus solves the Holiness dilemma for the Israelites and because we have that same hope of being with God one day, it is in this that it points our eyes to the solution as well.
So, let’s get started with our:
Story Overview
Story Overview
For those of you who like symmetry, the book of Leviticus is amazing! The book is tracking three basic themes from which we have to derive our understanding of its message.
Leviticus is tying the themes of RITUAL, PRIESTHOOD, and PURITY together into a single unified story.
You may have read Leviticus and thought it was anything but unified. It seems all choppy and disjointed and yet, as I have already explained, with the right angle and light, it is beautiful.
Here, look at how it is arranged. LEAVE SPACE IN THEIR NOTES FOR THEM TO DRAW THIS.
Do seven parts on the board:
Outermost (chapters 1-7 and chapter 23-27) are about ritual.
Next in (chapters 8-10 and chapters 21-22) are about the priesthood.
The innermost sections (chapters 11-15 and chapters 18-20) are about purity.
That leaves one section right in the middle (chapters 16-17) that ties all three of these themes together beautifully around the Day of Atonement.
Ritual
Ritual
Chapters 1-7 detail Israel’s sacrificial system with 5 different sacrifices to be performed for different reasons.
There are two freewill offerings that are given in thanks to God and three sacrifices that are done because of sin, guilt, and obedience. See the handout for more detail on those.
God gives Israel these sacrifices to ensure ongoing relationship with Him and right relationship with their fellow man.
This is the basis of the whole law. When pressed by a lawyer to reduce the law into its most basic tenets, Jesus says it is these two things: To love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. It’s how the ten commandments are broken down, its how the rest of the law is broken down. Even the sacrificial system is centered around these two concepts.
I get so many questions about these sacrifices. Why did they do them that way? You may have wondered this week while you were reading this, why there was so much detail given in this.
We have to understand this law code against the backdrop of the pagan nations surrounding Israel. These nations also offered sacrifices and yet, the prescriptions given were not nearly as detailed. Most importantly to note, and don’t miss this, the outcome of their sacrifices was not guaranteed. Not for Israel though. God is giving them a perfectly clear plan to know when they are right with Him and when they are forgiven. There was no guessing whether or not some capricious god was going to be dissatisfied with your sacrifice or not. God was giving them a guarantee of their forgiveness and His love for them. This certainty fundamentally changed the way they were to think about their God.
I often think about this in regards to religions who base their salvation off of works. How do you know you have done enough? The most brutal and existential question for a Mormon missionary is: “How do you know when you’ve knocked on enough doors to get into heaven?” The answer will always be…you don’t. God didn’t want his people living in this kind of mental state so He gave them a clear list of instructions on how to properly relate to Him and their fellow man.
Chapters 23-27 detail the seven feasts and festivals to be observed annually by Israel.
I am not going to go into detail about all of these. This would be its own seven week series just by themselves. For that reason, I have given you another handout to include in your commentary you are building that give more detailed information about these. Please hit me up if you have any questions about them.
What is of primary importance to remember when thinking about these, though, is:
These feasts were intentional moments of rest designed to relive aspects of God’s work and blessing in the past so that Israel would be more thankful and trusting in the future.
Passover is a perfect example. God gave Israel instructions for the sacrificing of the lamb and the eating of the meal back in the book of Exodus. It was that ceremony and symbolism that God used to redeem Israel out of slavery. God instructed the Israelites to eat the same meal in the same way every single year in remembrance of what God had done to redeem them so that Israel would continue to trust in God for redemption in the future.
So that’s Ritual. Next is
Priesthood
Priesthood
The first section dealing with the Priesthood is in chapters 8-10 and gives instructions regarding the ceremonial and ordination requirements for the priests.
In this section, we read some things like this:
23 Moses slaughtered it and took some of its blood and put it on the lobe of Aaron’s right ear, and on the thumb of his right hand and on the big toe of his right foot.
and this:
7 Moses then said to Aaron, “Come near to the altar and offer your sin offering and your burnt offering, that you may make atonement for yourself and for the people; then make the offering for the people, that you may make atonement for them, just as the Lord has commanded.”
From this section we are meant to understand:
The priests are going to represent the people before God and must be ceremonially pure and forgiven if they are to come into God’s Holy presence to do that.
Here is the idea: Coming into God’s presence is no small thing. There is this enormous list of purification and ritual required for someone to enter into the Tent of Meeting to offer sacrifices. Because this would have been impossible for every single person in Israel to accomplish every time they needed to make atonement for their sins, God chose representatives who could act on their behalf.
The priests possessed the purity and sinlessness that the people did not and this enabled them to represent the people before God. This is the whole idea of consecration/ordination: to be set aside for a specific purpose.
The second section about priesthood is in chapters 21-22 and is about the moral purity requirements of the priests.
The idea being communicated in this section is that:
The priests are going to represent God before the people and must match the character, holiness, and moral purity of the God they are representing.
Look at how that makes sense of things like this:
8 ‘You shall consecrate him, therefore, for he offers the food of your God; he shall be holy to you; for I the Lord, who sanctifies you, am holy.
Did you notice that the priests are to be holy to the people. Why are they to be holy…only God is supposed to be holy…only he is utterly unique and yet here that word is being applied to the priests. Its because the priests are representing God’s presence through their life and actions before the people.
What about this verse?
21 ‘No man among the descendants of Aaron the priest who has a defect is to come near to offer the Lord’s offerings by fire; since he has a defect, he shall not come near to offer the food of his God.
READ
Did God have a problem with people who had a disability? No! It wasn’t wrong in the slightest to have some form of disability but it was wrong to set yourself up as a representative of God’s presence because God has no defect. Its imagery and symbolism meant to give a visible representation of the invisible God and his attributes. Don’t miss this. God’s greatest attributes, love, grace, justice, and power can only truly be seen in the hearts of people but because we are incapable of seeing into the hearts of people, God uses the metaphorical representation of physical perfection to communicate a spiritual truth. I’m going to read that last sentence one more time.
Lest we think of this as some random rules from the God of the Old Testament that don’t apply to us today (like surely God doesn’t still think this way) let me read you something out of the New Testament:
34 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
35 “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Jesus had just finished washing his disciples feet. Like the bowl and towel were still sitting in the corner that Jesus used to wash his Disciples nasty feet with. I can just imagine him pointing to it as he says…love one another just has I have loved you. Ya’ll, the imagery has changed by the concept is the exact same. How do we show the world who Jesus is and that we are His people? We love the world proactively the way Jesus did. You are not truly a representative of Jesus if you are defective in this fundamental concept of service and worship.
So that is priesthood…now on to the really fun stuff:
Purity
Purity
The first section of purity in chapters 11-15 deal with ceremonial purity.
Some of your Bibles may use the words clean and unclean and the other half of you have Bibles that use the words pure or impure…same concept.
This section covers laws about the food you eat. It also deals with skin diseases that can make you impure, molds, fungus, bodily and reproductive fluids, and dead things.
The idea is that when a pure thing comes into contact with something impure, the pure thing becomes impure.
What is perhaps most important to remember about ceremonial purity is that it is not sinful or wrong to be impure. What is wrong is coming into God’s presence in an impure state.
Do the dog waste and expensive car bit...
The second section of purity instruction is in chapters 18-20 and deals with Israels moral purity.
There are laws about sexual purity.
14 ‘You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s brother; you shall not approach his wife, she is your aunt.
This seems like some pretty intuitive stuff…don’t sleep with a blood relative or other family or animals for that matter and yet all of this was totally open game for Israels neighbors.
24 ‘Do not defile yourselves by any of these things; for by all these the nations which I am casting out before you have become defiled.
There are laws about justice and caring for the poor.
9 ‘Now when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest.
10 ‘Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the Lord your God.
and
13 ‘You shall not oppress your neighbor, nor rob him. The wages of a hired man are not to remain with you all night until morning.
Does that mean we all need to be getting paid daily? No, it just means that most of the people of that time were on subsistence living and the money they were paid would probably be used to buy food for their family on the way home. To hold back a workers wages was a system of oppression and injustice that Israel was not to participate in.
There are laws regarding worship.
3 ‘I will also set My face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given some of his offspring to Molech, so as to defile My sanctuary and to profane My holy name.
Or
6 ‘As for the person who turns to mediums and to spiritists, to play the harlot after them, I will also set My face against that person and will cut him off from among his people.
Here is the idea:
While all sin is deadly and has no place in God’s presence, there are certain types of immorality that hurt more than just the offender and often become generational in their negative effects.
Finally, to wrap everything together right in the center is:
The Day of Atonement
The Day of Atonement
Chapters 16-17 detail the ceremonial Day of Atonement that tie Ritual, Priesthood, and Purity together in one unifying act.
Explain the two goats…one sacrificed to atone for the sins of the people over the past year and the other has the sins of the people pronounced over its head and is sent out of the camp. The sinless animal is killed while the sin laden animal is set free. The other picture being given is that the peoples sins are being removed from them and sent away forever.
Now…how many of you have ever participated in a Day of Atonement sacrifice? No hands should go up for that haha. Why not? Why don’t we end each church service today with an animal sacrifice? Why don’t I look at your scaly skin diseases? Why do I not inspect your houses for mold? Why didn’t we put blood on Adam’s earlobe and on his big toe the other night we held his ordination service? For this answer, we have to talk about our
Study Concepts
Study Concepts
Over the course of this year, you are going to learn an inductive Bible study method called the Principlizing Bridge.
Now, I’ve actually already been teaching you aspects of this Bible study method already and you didn’t even know it. While I can’t explain the whole thing, I am going to show you an overview of the whole process today so you can get it in your mind and so I can communicate today’s study concept.
Draw principlizing bridge on the board and explain…pay particular attention to the river and covenant. Things from the new testament carry almost directly over...
We must be mindful of which covenant every text we read falls under.
While the principles of truth may carry over, the way in which they apply to us is changed depending on which side of the resurrection we are reading.
Perhaps the best thing is just to look at a couple of examples as we see our:
Pictures of Christ and the Gospel
Pictures of Christ and the Gospel
Listen to what the book of Hebrews in the new testament says about this shift between the old and new covenant. The old covenant being that which we have just seen in Leviticus and the New covenant being that which was instituted after the resurrection of Jesus.
7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second.
8 For finding fault with them, He says, “Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, When I will effect a new covenant With the house of Israel and with the house of Judah;
9 Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers On the day when I took them by the hand To lead them out of the land of Egypt; For they did not continue in My covenant, And I did not care for them, says the Lord.
10 “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel After those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws into their minds, And I will write them on their hearts. And I will be their God, And they shall be My people.
11 “And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen, And everyone his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ For all will know Me, From the least to the greatest of them.
12 “For I will be merciful to their iniquities, And I will remember their sins no more.”
13 When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to disappear.
Becoming obsolete? Does that mean ritual, priesthood, and purity no longer apply to us? No! It just means that we relate to those things differently on the other side of the resurrection. Look at what I mean:
Christ is pictured as the fulfillment of all rituals.
23 Therefore it was necessary for the copies of the things in the heavens to be cleansed with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.
24 For Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us;
25 nor was it that He would offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the holy place year by year with blood that is not his own.
26 Otherwise, He would have needed to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now once at the consummation of the ages He has been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.
27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
28 so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.
The perfect sacrifice has come in Jesus. Everything done by the Israelites was just a shadow of what was to come in Jesus. Don’t miss this:
All of the Old Testament rituals only had power in retrograde: that is to say, they could only cover over past sins committed…each year there had to be more sacrifices made. Through Jesus, ALL SINS were covered.
Do you know why we don’t sacrifice animals anymore? The same reason you don’t use Chuck-E-Cheese bucks to bail yourself out of jail. Chuck E. Cheese bucks had value when you were seven trying to purchase a spider ring, but they have no power to buy your freedom from Jail. We don’t make animal sacrifices because, now that Jesus has come, we have true freedom…not merely the foreshadows of freedom.
Christ is pictured as the perfect and final priest representing God to us and us to God.
23 The former priests, on the one hand, existed in greater numbers because they were prevented by death from continuing,
24 but Jesus, on the other hand, because He continues forever, holds His priesthood permanently.
25 Therefore He is able also to save forever those who draw near to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.
26 For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens;
27 who does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself.
28 For the Law appoints men as high priests who are weak, but the word of the oath, which came after the Law, appoints a Son, made perfect forever.
1 Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens,
2 a minister in the sanctuary and in the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man.
3 For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices; so it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer.
4 Now if He were on earth, He would not be a priest at all, since there are those who offer the gifts according to the Law;
5 who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle; for, “See,” He says, “that you make all things according to the pattern which was shown you on the mountain.”
6 But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.
Those other priests continually had to make sacrifices for themselves because they were imperfect representatives. And on top of this, they died....there was an end to their ability to mediate between mankind and God. Not Jesus though…his priesthood is forever and it is perfect this passage says.
Jesus tells his disciples this in John 14:9-10
9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
10 “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.
There is no more perfect representative of God to mankind than Jesus because he is God.
And get this, if you have chosen to follow Jesus, you are now a representative of God to mankind according to second peter chapter 2. How do you think God shows his nature, his love, his mercy, his grace, his justice, his kindness, his power, and his forgiveness to mankind? Most often he desires to display his nature through His people. Through Jesus our high priest, we are all a kingdom of priests.
Finally, we see:
Christ is pictured as the purity which cleanses us of our impurity.
Look at this amazing passage in Matthew chapter 8
1 When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed Him.
2 And a leper came to Him and bowed down before Him, and said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”
3 Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.
4 And Jesus said to him, “See that you tell no one; but go, show yourself to the priest and present the offering that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”
Explain the radical nature of the pure touching the impure and making it pure...
Go on to explain Acts 10. The gentiles were seen as unclean and yet Jesus declared them clean through the Gospel to whoever would believe.
AND THAT IS WHY THE BOOK OF LEVITICUS IS GOOD NEWS…BECAUSE AT EVERY TURN IT IS POINTING OUR EYES TO THE SAME SOLUTION TO THE HOLINESS DILEMMA…ITS JESUS.
INVITE THE TILLMAN CREW UP TO PRAY OVER THEM.