Leviticus--An Introduction

(no text for today)--this is simply some preliminary commentary on my part before starting to study the book of Leviticus together.

---

For those that were loving our time in the New Testament, don't worry, we're going to get back there eventually, but remember that about two-thirds of the Bible is Old Testament.  While we've dealt with mostly "historical narrative" in the Old Testament so far, this book is different--VERY different.  It reads more like reading statutory code in a law book along with engineering schematics and maybe some instruction manuals while you're at it--all stuff that most people find really bland and boring, but it's not!  If you know what you're looking for and why you're looking for it, then the information in those kinds of books can be really useful and maybe even exciting.  We've been studying a lot on how things got broken starting in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, but up until this time, God hasn't given man a really good answer on how they are supposed to deal with the issue of sin.  Man knows that he sins, and it seems clear that man understands something about blood sacrifices being needed to pay for sin, but are there certain sins that are worse than other sins and require a bigger or more valuable sacrifice?  Does God hold us guilty for things we do accidently or only those things we do on purpose? God tells us we need to come and worship Him and we've studied a lot about the Tabernacle that God have Moses instructions for at the end of Exodus, but can a man just come any way that he wants and worship God in any way that he wants, or does God assign the places, times, and methods of worship?  Is worship something that happens only in a particular place at a particular time on a particular day of the week or does God require more than that from us?  And ultimately, what does this tell us about God and where can we see Jesus in all of this (I promise you that He's there in all this as we've talked about already in the book of Hebrews).

The word that I want you to focus on as an overarching theme for this book is "holiness."  While I know that every attribute of God is perfect and is 100% what it is and they are all in balance with one another, if someone had to make me pick one attribute of God that I felt was most important to know and understand (and the one that we probably understand the least about), I would choose the holiness of God.  It is the one attribute I can think of that ties all the other ones together and is descriptive of every other attribute and is one of the things that we can say about God that we in no way can say about ourselves.  It is the holiness of God that helps us to realize that He is God and we are not and that we are in need of salvation.  It is the holiness of God that puts separation between us and God and prevents us access to God's presence as sinners, and it is the holiness of God that helps us understand why there is one Way to God and only one Way to God and why we can't just come any way that we want to.

This book is written to the tribe of Levi (that is why it is called Leviticus) to give them instructions on how to perform their priestly duties.  We will see some repetition of things we've already read in Exodus as it pertains to sacrifices and materials for the Tabernacle, but we're going to see additional instructions for the right way to care for these items.  The materials used the first time would not last forever, and it was important for someone to always be trained and ready to make new materials and instruments for the LORD's service as things broke down, wore out, fell apart, etc.  This is one of the roles that the Levites had--not all of them were priests.  Some were custodians, others were musicians, still others were responsible for raising the animals that would be used for sacrifice--each clan and family had their own duties and roles so that all the work was divided up among them and everyone knew that they were supposed to do, and no one questioned their role.  (Does this sound at all like what we studied in 1 Corinthians with each member of the Body of Christ having a particular gifting and function that has been given by the Holy Spirit?)

We're also going to see a lot about sacrifice--not just blood sacrifice, but there will be a lot of that in particular as well.  Leviticus shows us that there is a high price to pay for sin, even incidental or accidental sin.  In fact, nearly the whole book of Leviticus deals with incidental or accidental sin.  Pay attention as we go through and think to yourself about if the things being described happened "accidently" in your life or if they happen voluntarily or willfully.  Then ask yourself if the Law here actually provides any atonement for "high-handed" sins of rebellion like that.  We're specifically going to get to some passages in Leviticus that people to this day question about how people could worship a God like that because the penalty for high-handed sins was death, but we know this to be true from the book of Romans as well.  Romans 6:23 tells us, "The wages of sin is death."  And we learned that in Genesis 3, "...for the day you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil], you will surely die."  Even death doesn't seem to satisfy the scales of justice though as there is a debt against an infinitely holy God (there's that word I told you to watch out for) that requires an infinitely high cost to pay and not even our own lives are valuable enough to pay that debt, nor is the blood of all the lambs and goats in all the world.  There is going to be a need for a Better Sacrifice--the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

We also learn a lot of rules in Leviticus that have to do with might be called healthcare.  Along with taking care of the Tabernacle, it was the role of the Levites to take care of the people as well.  They were not "doctors" per se, but but they were in charge of enforcing rules about cleanliness (again, that comes back to the idea of holiness) and it might be fair to call them "health inspectors" that would check people to see if a person needed to be put in isolation, when they could come out of isolation, if a building had a type of mold that required the building to be condemned and torn down, and even what kinds of food were acceptable for people to eat and not eat.  This was all part of God's rules that made the people a holy people set apart for Him, but they were all rules that were meant for the good of the people and to protect them from disease, even if they didn't understand that.  While we are not under the punishment and curse of the Law anymore, there is nothing wrong with following these rules if you want to--we're free not to and there is nothing wrong with eating shellfish or bacon now as long as it's cooked correctly, but even modern-day doctors agree that they couldn't come up with a better dietary code and health codes to tell people--especially people at that time--to live by in order to promote good health and protect the community from disease.  So, we'll see a lot about the ideas of "clean" and "unclean" (again, this comes back to the idea of holiness) and this will sometimes be used to reflect an issue of sin that makes a person unclean, but the best way to think about the word "unclean" in this book is "out of bounds" or "off-limits."  This book is setting up boundaries and statutory code and saying there are lines that should not be crossed--even accidently, and definitely not intentionally.

I don't usually offer this much preliminary commentary to a book, but there's a lot of bias against this book in particular that people might wonder if it's even written for us in the Church today and what we could possible learn from it, especially since the cross dealt with much of this.  Well, ask yourself what about those who have not come to the cross for cleansing yet?  What is the system of justice they are under?  What was the tool that God used to prepare the hearts of His people to show them that there needed to be a better way?  The gospel is here all throughout the book of Leviticus and as we study the different parts of the Tabernacle, the different sacrifices, and even the different feasts, I hope to show you that Jesus was the fulfillment of all of it.  Yes, there are still ways in which we can look at this book and learn much about God and about ourselves and where we can see the work of Christ that was fulfilled on our behalf, and we can look backwards with hindsight and say "Oh, THAT'S what God was doing and trying to get the people to understand....." as we can see how all of it pointed to the person and work of Christ--especially His substitutionary atonement on the cross.