Leviticus The Book of Worship : Kyle Yule

Lesson Transcript

So maybe this year, uh, you were ambitious and decided to read through the New Testament or the whole Old Testament and New Testament together in the year, or whether that's what you do every year, or you just decided on a whim to do that.

And so you're making it through your, your Bible reading plan, and, and you woke up whenever it was this week, last week, today, and you just got done with Genesis and Exodus, and you wake up all sleepy, get up, go get your cup of coffee in the morning, sit down at, at your table, and you open up, see where you're at. Leviticus, chapters one to three. Well, it's Leviticus. That's not as long as Genesis was. Maybe it only be like six days or two days or whatever. And you look, ten days.

Well, maybe I can just skim through this. A lot of this doesn't even apply to me anymore. And all the sacrifices and the purity laws, you know, kill this animal this way and offer it this way. And if I find mold in my house, I just have to destroy my house. And if I find mold on my clothes, I just have to get new clothes. And if I give, if my wife gives birth to a baby girl, she's unclean for twice as long as if she would give birth to a boy. If I can't even eat pork or lobster, no tattoos or weird haircuts.

And then there's some festivals I have to follow. And, oh, but there's that one day, the, the, the one day, the day of atonement. That's so important because it foreshadows Jesus's death on the cross, and we can pull a lot from that. And so I'll make sure to read that and, and to cover that and understand it. And then after that, I can kind of just skim through it and kind of just get to the next book. And I feel like that was how I viewed Leviticus for the longest time.

And talking with some people, that's how I feel like the majority of people view Leviticus. It's this mindset of all of those laws and rules. It was just way too much. Like, how could anyone follow all of these? And God didn't really expect his people. It was just a burden for on them. And yeah, just to show them, you know, that they can't live up to his standards and so they need him.

And so today I want to give an overview of Leviticus because for the, the next three weeks I get the opportunity to teach Sunday school. And I hate breaking tradition, but we're going to switch to from Exodus or Genesis to Leviticus. Um, and so the title of my message today is Leviticus, the Book of Worship.

Because when I look at how this book was supposed to be read and kept when God gave it to them, this view of Leviticus, that it was too much of a burden for people to follow, and it was all these laws that God just loaded on his people, this isn't the mindset or the way that I see the righteous people from the Old Testament see it. In fact, I see people chasing after the law, after these things, and wanting to live by them, as David says, that he delights in the law of the Lord.

And the prophets are constantly calling people back to them so that they can have a life with God because this is how they worshiped God. We see this really amazing experience in Nehemiah, especially when they just get finished building the wall after it was destroyed, and they stand up there, and for the first time in chapter eight, they hear the law. And what comes after that is a time of rejoicing and repentance and teaching.

And the, the Levites come out and they teach these people how to apply all these things to their lives. And it's this beautiful, um, picture of how what the law was, was meant to do in these people's lives. And then to add on to that, I believe Jesus had a deep respect for the law. In fact, I would say that he liked David, delighted in the law.

For when he came down on his sermon on the mount, and he said he did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it, meaning Jesus didn't want to just stand up there and trash the law about how it, it was, wasn't that great, and it did all these things. He wanted to perfect it, to fulfill its potential, because he understood that the heart of the law, sorry, because he understood the heart of the law.

And so before we go any further, I just want to take a brief moment to look at the background and how merciful God was by giving the people Leviticus. Okay. So I know you all know this, but we're just going to recap. So God's people are in Egypt. They're enslaved to Pharaoh, and they're being mistreated. And God says, I'm going to raise up a person, Moses, to set you people free. And so Moses comes through, and he shows the, the Egyptians and, and the Israelites all of these amazing wonders and miracles.

And Pharaoh keeps, keeps telling him, oh, okay. And then he changes his mind, and he keeps him enslaved. And then it leads to this last, this last thing, this last plague, the, the Passover, where they go out, they're told to slaughter the lamb and put it on their doorpost. And then this angel comes over and kills all the firstborn of those that the blood was not on. And Pharaoh finally says, that's it. And he casts them all out of Egypt. He says, get out of here, uh, go worship your God.

And so they hurray, they leave. And as they start going, Pharaoh changes his mind, and he sends people after him. And yet God is faithful again. He leads them to the, to the Red, the Red Sea. And Moses stands there, and he parts the Red Sea, and the Israelites go through, and then the waves come in, and they, he, he saves them from, from slavery in Egypt again.

And then he protects them from harm, and he gives them food and drink, even though through all of their complaints and moanings and, and all this, um, being unsatisfied, and, and yet he still gives them food, and he still gives them drink. And then three months, they get to Mount Sinai. And Moses goes up to speak to the Lord, but something happened. These people forget about God. Not just forget, but they turn their backs against him.

They build a golden calf, and they worship it, bowing down, and they, they sacrifice to it, and they say, this, these are the gods that led us out of Egypt. God gets really angry, and he tells Moses what's going on. He's like, I'm going to start over. Moses intercedes for them, and he goes down, and he purges the people of those who were against the Lord. And he goes back up, and he meets with God. And what does God do?

This is amazing because this shows how merciful and loving and long-suffering the God we serve is. Instead of God just dwelling up on the mountain for the rest of the time, looking down at a people who are stiff-necked and go by the way of their hearts, he decides that he's going to come down to earth and dwell among his people.

How easy would it have been for him to just keep the same thing, to just stay up there on the mountain, have somebody come up and, and receive instruction from him, and then go back down and tell it to the people? But no, he decides that he wants to dwell with his people. He sees that they need him, and that his presence is going to be a reminder. So he works with them. Not just that, but he makes Aaron, the person who was the one who built the calf and sacrificed to it.

He makes him the high priest of his tabernacle. And this in itself is an amazing image of Jesus, in that God came down to earth to dwell with his people, to show them the way to life and to give them the opportunity to live in harmony with God by obeying and following Jesus's law. All we have to do is follow his laws that he sets forth for us and to search out his heart, and we can dwell with God in presence through the intercession of our perfect high priest.

And so how does God interact with his people through this book? Because I believe the book of Leviticus is all about this. But it's very easy to put this into a vacuum and just read through Leviticus and say, well, that was for the Jews. I don't need to apply that to my life anymore. I don't have to follow all those laws. Right? And while that is true, God no longer requires us to keep the law of Moses, which should include things like the dietary, ceremonial, purity, and all the other laws that pertain to that.

He does require us to keep the spirit of the law, for I believe that has not changed since the beginning. This, that is, we are to keep the weightier matters of the law, such as love and justice and faith and mercy, the ones that require us to evaluate our hearts, not just our outward actions.

And I think that we could make a case that this is what God has always cared about, from all of those before the law was given to David, who ate the showbread that was forbidden in the law, and yet God seemingly justified it, to the priests on the Sabbath days who worked, to Elijah who made an offering on Mount Carmel outside of the tabernacle, which was also forbidden.

In the Maccabees, we see that they decided that they were not going to keep the Sabbath, and they were going to defend themselves, and they were rewarded. And seemingly Jesus and all of the people around him who broke the purity laws, and yet God was okay with it. Why? Because these people, in their instances, they were following the heart or the spirit behind why the law was given, not necessarily the letter of it. These people were living a righteous life.

However, I think we can still look at all of the dietary, purity, ceremonial, and other laws that seem odd, and we can learn something from them. After all, they are in the Torah, or literally the teaching or instruction. And as Paul tells us in 2 Timothy 3:16 through 17, that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

And I think that's why God tells Moses to follow the commands that he gives him exactly. And I believe he does this not because God is controlling or that he just wants his people to do what he says without reason, but I believe it is like he says in Hebrews, a shadow of spiritual things to come. Moses had to follow the law exactly because the law was a foreshadowing of the life of Jesus, or it was a tutor.

It was intended to help discipline and guide the Jews so that when the Christ came, they could follow him into the perfect faith. Just as Moses led his people through the wilderness with the law, he had to stop before entering into the promised land. That was for Joshua, or if you're reading it in Greek, Jesus. He led the people into the promised land. The law of Moses was given to lead people to Jesus.

And I can say that without a doubt, my view of how I interpret the Old Testament has changed greatly because I look at those things as shadows of Jesus all throughout the Old Testament. And you're reading through, and things just keep jumping all over the place. And I feel that it is greatly connected, my Old Testament with my New Testament.

And so when I was younger, we had this thing where during the summer we would all come to my grandparents' house, and, um, all my aunts and uncles would come up from wherever they lived. And I had aunts and uncles and cousins who lived in Florida, and they would come up, and we didn't really get to see them all that often. And so there, I remember this one time, we were very little, and we decided to tent camp outside of my grandparents' house in their front yard.

And they owned greenhouses, and so there was the parking lot over here, and they had a light that kind of illuminated that for the whole night. And so we were way over on the other side, but you could kind of still get some of the light from, from the parking lot light. And we're in our tent camping, it's kind of late at night, and I hear something rustling outside.

And I didn't really think anything of it because they were kind of, and then it kept coming, and it sounded like it was getting closer and closer and closer. And I started to get a little uneasy and roll around a little bit. And then it was like right outside of our tent, and it was like brushing up against the side of it and pushing it a little bit, making all these scary noises and grumblings and growlings. And my heart started to beat really fast, and I laid really still. It was really quiet.

And here I could see the shadow of it kind of pass along the side of the tent. And then it got in front of the light, the parking lot light that was to the greenhouse. And here it was my dad. And instantly everything became very clear that they were just playing this joke on us. And all of my fears went away, and I could understand what was happening. And I feel that is how the Old Testament coincides with the New Testament.

When we see things through the light of Christ, we can see all of these shadows come to perfection and come to a greater image of what they were really, truly meant to be. And this makes me ultimately think of Jesus when he was and his disciples, when he was on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24. And Jesus tells them that all of the things concerning him, starting with Moses, and he explains them.

And it also reminds me of Paul in Colossians 2:17 when he says, in regarding to the dietary laws, the new moons and the Sabbaths, that they were a shadow of things to come. And so this begs the question, what were the shadows of, and how were they shadows? Because I believe they were shadows of Christ and his followers and the kingdom of God and how we are meant to live in it. But how? So today I want to just light a fire in the hearts of you all so that we can pull things from the law. But why Leviticus?

Well, I have a couple of reasons for choosing Leviticus. The first is that I've learned to love Leviticus. And I don't know if I can get, if we can get to a point that Leviticus is our favorite book. But my goal is that when we are having conversations with people about our faith or talking with other Christians, that we can take and look back at Leviticus and pull all of these spiritual things to the forefront of our mind and apply them to our, to our lives and into our conversations today.

And much like the New Testament authors and the early Christians did when they were evangelizing, Paul uses this type of language many times throughout his letters. For example, when he says to offer our bodies as living sacrifices in Romans, John the Baptist uses it when he refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

And I believe it will greatly help us connect with Hebrews much more because Hebrews is saturated with the language of the law and Leviticus and the temple and the tabernacle. And if we are familiar with it, we will be able to connect better with what scripture is trying to teach us. From what it looks like through Paul's letters to the Gentile Christians, they were familiar with it. In Corinthians, Paul references Leviticus. Peter references Leviticus.

And when we read through the early Christians, you see that they are pulling from all over the law. And if we want to know the whole character of God, we must look at the whole story. The second is because I think Leviticus holds a very relative and important key to how God's people are to live. From when Moses was given these laws at Mount Sinai to the Israelites, to us today as followers of the true kingdom, we see many ways that we should be living and how we are to be worshiping God.

In Exodus 40:29, it's like the very last paragraph of Exodus. Moses gets done constructing the tabernacle. He gets all of the stuff, he builds it, it's all ready to go, and says that the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. And Moses could not go in. He wasn't allowed to enter this thing that he just built. Imagine that.

Zach, you just get done building a house or doing something at a house, and you put the finishing touches in, you step back outside, and you're about to go walk in and look through and see the work that you've just done. And here comes this car racing up. And these two people get out and they run over and they run into the house, and the person comes over and they're like, "Hey, you're not allowed in." Like they want to go look at the house and you can't go in and look at the work that you just did.

That'd be kind of disappointing, like to not be able to look at what I just built. But then we fast forward to Numbers 1:1, and Moses is in the tabernacle of testimony, and it says the Lord is speaking to Moses. And so what happened? How is it that in Exodus, the last chapter, the last paragraph in Exodus, Moses can't go into Numbers where he was in the tabernacle? And there's only one logical thing. Leviticus happened. The way that Moses got into the tabernacle was through Leviticus.

And that for me is a major reason why to study this book. Because if this book contains the principles of how Israelites could dwell with God, and I want to dwell with God, I believe this book contains the way that we today can do just that. How we as Christians can live in the presence of God, but it requires following the laws God puts into place, not the Levitical laws, but the spirit behind those laws, the ones that Christ brings forth. And we will see that in Leviticus, God teaches his people self-restraint.

No longer can they do what they think is best in their own eyes. God puts a cap on the flesh. He gives them laws and rules that stop people from doing what the nations around them are doing. However, it wasn't the end. Jesus fulfills this by establishing a more perfect law, a law that doesn't just restrain, but puts to death the appetites of the flesh.

So when God says in Leviticus 24:19 through 20 that anyone who injures his neighbor shall get the same retribution on himself, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. But then we see that Jesus takes it further and requires that his followers live to a higher standard of godliness by telling them that we should not even resist the one who does evil, calling us to a life that does not fight evil with evil.

And I believe that if we can grasp and understand Leviticus, it is going to piece together the Old and the New Testament. There's a lot of times, like I had said, where Jesus, Paul, and Peter and other apostles use language that is directly correlated to the law, or more specifically Leviticus. And I believe that if we see how it is being used in Leviticus and throughout the Old Testament, we can see how this more relates to us.

It unlocks why God gets mad at the Israelites when even though they were following all of the laws, he still gets angry with them. And it's the whole backdrop for the prophet of Isaiah and many others when he says in Isaiah 1:10 through 15 that the offerings and sacrifices that they were offering were abominations to himself, to God, because they, as the whole nation, were living in sin and forsaking the Lord, yet they were still following the letter of the law.

They were keeping the Sabbaths and the holy days and the new moons. So how should we look at the book of Leviticus? Because the New Testament authors make it very clear that God does not require us to live by the law of Moses anymore. However, I don't know if the law in itself ever saved anyone, if they were missing the heart behind why the law was given. So today I believe it is the same, except that our focus is not on the letter of the law, but on the spirit.

If we look at the heart of Leviticus, then we unlock how the Israelites were able to meet God through the tabernacle. And therefore, looking at it through the lens of Christ, through the light of Christ, we can see that how we can meet God through his Holy Spirit, and we can harmonize it with what Micah and Hosea and Jesus say, that God desires mercy and not sacrifice.

Because at the heart of Leviticus, behind all of the sacrifices and offerings, behind all of the dietary restrictions and the purity laws and the ceremonies and the festivals, they all boil down to two things: to love your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and likewise to love your neighbor as yourself.

And so when we read through Leviticus, we should be keeping that at the forefront of our mind, that the entire book of Leviticus can be summed up and was meant to bring people to love God and to love their neighbors. And so what is there to learn? So today I just want to take a couple quick glimpses at some of these points. We can see a type of Jesus not only in the Day of Atonement, but in every single sacrifice, in the burnt offerings, in the peace offerings, in the trespass, in the grain offerings.

There are little glimpses of how he has fulfilled them all. We can find him being foreshadowed as the high priest. We can see that Jesus is in the Day of Atonement, not just in the one goat, but in both. We can see how to be pure in heart throughout the book of Leviticus. We learn how to treat our neighbors. We learn that when we go against what God orders, it's a result of death. And that even if we are priests or living under his law and we go against it, we can still be killed.

We learn that God forbids us to consume blood, and we learn why. We learn what it means to rely on God from the Sabbath in the sabbatical year and the justice of God from the year of Jubilee. We get to look forward to the return of Jesus and our future in the feast days. And there are many, many more that we can dig into, and I hope that we can. And to just go a little bit deeper on a few of these points, I want to bring out the wisdom of God through the law.

I was reading a book that Origen wrote on the homilies of Leviticus, and he brings this out in response or in concordance with Leviticus 4:2 through 3, which is about the sin offerings. Origen says this: "You see therefore the dispensation of divine wisdom. It sets up as priests, not those who could not sin in any way, otherwise they would not be human, but those who ought indeed to imitate that one who knew no sin, to offer sacrifices first for their own faults and then for the transgressions of the people.

But what is to be most admired in this kind of priest? Not that he may not sin because that is impossible, but that he knows and understands his own sin." This is amazing because it should produce a high priest or a priest that can relate to the people that he is offering sacrifices for. He should never look down on them because he knows what the people are going through. He knows what it's like to be human.

And so when they come to offer their sacrifice, the priest should take it and he should look at them and say, "I know what that is like. I can sympathize with you." And then he can go and offer it to God.

And now we can compare this with what Hebrews says in Hebrews 4:14, where it says, "Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession, for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in our time of need." This is amazing that Jesus, our high priest, knows our temptations. He became human so that we can come boldly to him. But not just that, because he is greater than the Old Testament priests, where they could only offer sacrifices. Jesus offers victory and power. Our high priest defeated death.

He lived a perfect life so that when we can come to him in our weakness, in our temptations, he can offer us a way out. He offers us help through his mercy and grace to overcome. Through his atonement, we receive his power. Something else is that nowhere in the law does it give a sacrifice for intentional sin, only for sins of ignorance and unintentional sins.

And this is important because this shows that with all of the sacrifices that we can look at, that were commanded in Leviticus, there was never just a trade-off or a quid pro quo of, "Well, I'm going to sin, and when I do, it'll be okay because I can just go and offer a sacrifice and God's going to cover it up. And so then I can go and sin and do whatever I want and just go and offer a sacrifice." The sacrifices were meant to be offered by a person who is living by the laws of God with a blameless heart.

And when it is pointed out that they have sinned, they want to make things right with others that they've hurt and with the relationship with God. We see how God uses Leviticus to bring out the genealogy of Jesus. In Leviticus 19:9 through 10, that's the passage where he says that, "God, just read it. When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, nor shall you gather the gleanings of your harvest.

Also, you shall not glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather every grape of your vineyard, for you shall leave them for the poor and the resident alien.

I am the Lord your God." And this should remind us of a story, the story of Ruth in 2:2, where she goes and says, "So Ruth, the Moabite woman, said to Naomi, 'Please let me go to the field and glean heads of grain after him in whose eyes I may find favor.' And she said to her, 'Go, daughter.' And then she left and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers." And so Ruth went and gleaned in the field because of the law of Leviticus.

She was a foreigner in this land, and Boaz saw her, and he noticed how she was a good woman and she was disciplined and she wanted to seek God. This also shows that God cares about the people who are poor. He wants his people to help provide for them and the alien in the land through his people. An amazing foreshadow of kingdom Christians today who are called to love and show no partiality.

This is what brings people in, what attracts them to God, is by the way that his people interact with each other and with those who are not a part of them, but are aliens. God wants his people to care for the aliens because they were once an alien in a foreign land. And he renews it in their minds by instating the feast of tabernacles in Leviticus 23:39 through 43. And this is where they, every year, they're to go out and they are to be part of the feast, is that they're to build these little booths or tents.

And so they go out and they pick all these green things and they build little tents outside of their house. And for a whole week, they just sleep in these tents. Imagine someone who walks into the tribe, into the promised land, and sees these people who have these perfectly good houses, and they're just right outside of their front door sleeping in these green tents. And you go up to them and ask them, "Why are you doing this?" And they tell you, "Well, we were once foreigners in a land.

We were once sojourners, and God provided for us. He provided every step of the way." It says that he made it so our shoes and our clothing did not wear out. And to remember that, that that was our past, we do this every year. But God has provided. And then it harmonizes with what Peter tells us, that we are to be sojourners and pilgrims in this land and that this world is not our home.

And so I would just like to offer some closing thoughts in that we see in the heart of Leviticus, it comes down to how we love God and how we can love our neighbor. It shows us how do we live holy lives and what kind of witness are we showing to the world. We see that even though we do not have to follow the letter of the law, we are still to follow the spirit of the law.

And lastly, we see that by reading and understanding Leviticus, we can connect with the New Testament authors when they use phrases and examples that point back to this book. And I believe it'll greatly deepen our love for God and for others.