Bible Survey - Leviticus
Randy Peterman · Feb 23, 2014
Bible Survey, No. 08
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926418371974

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So this morning, we're going to take a look at Leviticus. And I have to confess that when I got Leviticus as my book I had to teach, I was not looking forward to it. It was like, oh no, Leviticus. And the thing about Leviticus, I'll share a short and brief story.

When I was about 13, I was at a junior high youth group in Carson City, Nevada, and a couple guys came as guest speakers to our youth group, and they tried to tell us how we needed to be under the law, and we needed to fulfill the law. That struck me as odd. I was 13 and in all honesty I knew almost nothing about God's word but something about that seems slightly strange and so I flipped open Leviticus and well there's no masking it so in Leviticus chapter 16 here as I flip to it. I'm so much faster on my computer than I am on my paper book here.

Well, in Leviticus 16, I'm sorry, 15, not 16, it talks about emissions and people having open wounds and things like that. And I remember opening it up and looking at that and showing it to the guy who is the speaker and saying, this says that if there is a seminal omission, this is really awesome to say in front of my 11-year-old daughter, that that person is unclean for the day, what do we do with that? And the guy was really not sure what to do with that. And he said, I'll need to get back to you with that.

But Leviticus, as a book, in God's word, covers a lot of diverse material. And I've, of course, gone to the junior high story first, so we can only go up from there, right? But as I was studying this book, I actually found myself going, man, there's some really cool stuff that God outlines in the book. And the other thing I thought was an unexpected result is I actually found certain parts of Leviticus to be refreshing. And so as we go over that this morning, hopefully you will join me in that opinion of the book. Leviticus follows Exodus, as you probably are aware of if you've ever memorized the order of the books of the Bible. And the reason it does so is that at the end of Exodus, does anybody know what happens at the end of Exodus? Anybody remember? Discussions? Thoughts? Moses leaving Egypt? Well, after they've left Egypt, God establishes the tabernacle at the end of Exodus. Well now that you've got a tabernacle, you've got to have people run on it, right? That's the next step.

So Leviticus comes in and it continues on. You can tell Moses is still writing as the author, as he's compiling things. It continues on and it goes straight into burnt offerings. We don't get a preamble We don't get kind of a transitional anything. It's just like, and now sacrifices. And so it goes over a lot of material there and covers the sacrifices.

I'm going to draw your attention to something, but we're probably not going to go into it in full detail. The first part of your handout is most of the lesson that we're going to talk about. And the second part of your handout is an outline of the book of Leviticus. It is a, I will say it's a rough outline. I hand constructed this myself. So as I was going through Leviticus, I wanted to read the whole thing and go through it.

So I can tell you 27 chapters is a lot to take in. So if you've got questions about things as we get into the details, There may be some things that we'll have to say. Let's dig into that some more. But I promise to have a better context than the guy who was the guest speaker. Let's start at the top of the handout, though.

Leviticus really shows us that God knows mankind. The book goes into great detail. It has part of the law, the 613 laws in it. It covers legal code, like moral and ethical and actual law for the culture. It talks about culture itself and how the culture of Israel should be, as well as it reveals God's understanding of mankind as a sinful creature who loves loopholes.

There are parts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, when we get into that, where God articulates the law and he makes long lists of things that you shouldn't do that cover all the nuances and angles. I've discovered that at least as I've observed humanity and so also myself, I'm certainly not excluding myself from this, that if you give somebody a set of rules, they will find all of the chinks, all of the holes in the rules. Oh, you said we can't do that?

One of my favorite memories of teaching a Bible study several years ago at the Anderson's house was April Shutt, this was before she was married, she was sharing stories of her brother, Matt, who was going to Bob Jones University in Florida, which is super rigid and legalistic. If you ever want to find out what legalism looks like in the United States, they're the place to go. You can just go and watch and be like, wow, I'm glad I don't live under that. has an incredible sense of humor, and every opportunity he had he would go and do something that was fully within the rules, but completely ridiculous. He still could find the exceptions, he could find ways to be absurd and funny and ridiculous, but it was all within the loopholes so that he never got in trouble.

I will save you the opportunity to go talk to Al or April and ask for stories. I won't give specifics because they're long and many and we don't have that much time. But loopholes. Leviticus covers a lot of loopholes. Leviticus addresses sin head-on and holiness head-on.

How many times in your own walk have you wrestled with feeling like maybe you weren't holy or righteous? I got head nods. That doesn't show up on the recording so I always just say it out loud. The truth is that as humans we often feel like we're not holy, right?

And we are not if we compare ourselves to God's righteousness, but God has resolved that in Christ and we'll get to that in the lesson. What's the purpose of the law? Let's ask that important question and we'll get into that continued as we go into Deuteronomy. What's the purpose of the law for Israel? Stan? Okay, it's a teacher. We do see that in the New Testament. Anyone else have any thoughts on the purpose of the law for the nation of Israel?

Well, it seems to allow a path to God. That whole set of laws allowed them to come into the presence of God. So it did definitely create an opportunity for them to rectify their relationship with the Lord and seek relationship with Him. The purpose of the law primarily was to separate Israel from the nations around them. If they were God's people they needed to stay God's people. They needed to not be flirting with the Gentile and pagan ideas that were constantly surrounding them.

And so when we look at the rules and the laws that are in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, what we find is that there's weird stuff that we go, why would that matter? Like, who really cares if you eat lobster? Well, It's part of what God is setting in place so that their diet would be different, their clothes would be different, their worship practices would be different, so that they could be focused on Him, and not the Gentile garbage that was going on around them.

And a part of Leviticus addressed that very, very specifically, and some parts of it are a bit more broad. So separation or segregation was actually very intentional in part of the law. Next section we've got here is key theological concepts. Leviticus draws attention to God's holiness, his glory, his presence, and his desire for relationship with mankind. The purpose of the law has always been for separation of Israel from the Gentile nations surrounding it.

No eternal salvation could be offered by adherence salvation is by faith alone. So no one by observing the law in Leviticus would be saved. You could be Jewish, you could have been circumcised on the eighth day, you could have done all kinds of law-based things and you wouldn't have been saved. What do you have to do to be saved throughout all of scripture? You have to have faith. You have to believe in what has been revealed up to that point in time in history. So salvation was still requiring faith.

The Jews, however, when we get to the time of Christ, does anybody know some of the beliefs that the Jews held that were not in Scripture regarding salvation and being a Jew? The Jews at the time thought that Abraham actually was going to be sitting by the gates of hell to make sure that no Jews got in.

Just because they were Jewish. It's not in Scripture. We won't find that if you read your Bible. It's not there. But the tradition was Abraham had the bloodline for salvation, which is really stinky for me because I'm not Jewish. I was like, oh no, now what do I do?

So salvation is definitely part of the question when we address the law. But the law was not for salvation, it was given to set boundaries for the Jews in the land with priests and a tabernacle or temple. So that's important. Strong restrictions are put in place to keep bloodlines clean and pure and prevent incest and sexual impurity. That's actually not something we think of as theological, but for the Jews it was very theological. So that was a big deal.

We tend to think of bloodline purity or incest kinds of things as being fringe in our culture today. You don't marry your cousin, you marry someone who's a distant relative based on certain things. We have state laws in place And every once in a while you'll see a Jerry Springer episode where somebody has married their closer relative or something like that. But as a whole, that's a rare scenario, right?

But up until this time, that wasn't uncommon. Who did Abraham marry? His half-sister, Sarah. And that was okay, it was before the law. But we tend to think it's not a big deal. Why would you delineate that? Well, it's because God said, okay, now we're going to establish some serious laws around this. Well, you could go as far as saying that the DNA was corrupt. So if you marry a close relative, you'd be perpetuating whatever mutation had crept in. Yeah, the potential of... You could go through things like that. Yeah, the entropy of DNA as you intermarry like that.

So yeah, lots of theological concepts for sure, but let's take a look at those theological concepts in the light of Christ and Leviticus. We'll probably close by doing kind of a brief overview of the outline of Leviticus, so that we'll do this in slightly backward order. Of all the things that I wanted us to walk away from, it was the things about Christ and things we can walk away from in a church, rather than having made it all the way through a long outline that's several pages long and then not get to the meat. So, Christ and Leviticus. Leviticus starts off with the sacrificial system, the burnt sacrifices and offerings that were to be offered before the Lord. But Christ is the ultimate sacrifice.

If we look at Leviticus 1.3, and I've got that right here in front of me, so I'll read it out loud.

If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer it a male without defect. He shall offer it at the doorway of the tent of meeting, that he may be accepted before the Lord. And of course, the tent of meeting was replaced by the temple later on, when the temple was instituted. But Leviticus demands a spotless offering. Of course Christ was a spotless offering.

There were three There's the Holy of Holies, there's the Tent of Meeting, which is the outer area, and then there's the general congregational area, as I understand it. So they would come in and they would bring their offerings, and they were to be brought there. But the priests were the ones that were to go into the sacrificial area. It was outside of the Holy of Holies.

There's two things. One, that John was all for fellowship. So he wanted that done where the people fellowshiped, which was at the end of the meeting. The second thing was that he wanted it public, just like the pronouncement of faith is supposed to be a public pronouncement. So this sacrifice was also supposed to be a public presentation, not a private one.

Yeah. This was very public, and I think it's kind of interesting, if we get a chance, and I hope we will, as we go through the outline, there's going to be some very blunt parts of what the law covers, the sins that you're recognizing, and the sacrifices that you have to do as a result of those sins.

You're going to publicly haul an animal through the camp, take it You might have to wait in line, because let's face it, if you've only got so many priests and so many doorways to the tent of meeting, there's going to be a line. And then you're going to present your animal. And in a few cases, you're going to participate in the ceremony.

And so it's going to be very public. It's going to be right there. So for our egos, what's your thought of that? Immediately when I say that, you're like, oh no, I'm going to have to be out in public. But you're out in public with people doing the same thing. So you're all offering sin offerings.

It's not like, oh, this guy never offers any sin offerings, he must be getting it right. No, he's being cheap maybe, but he's certainly not getting it right. But Christ was definitely the spotless lamb. Now, how is it that Christ was the spotless lamb? This is just an important rabbit trail that I think we should revisit as often as possible. Stan?

Well, in 1 Corinthians 2, it says that he came in the likeness of man, but he was in the image of God, so he was spotless. He didn't have the sin nature that man has. So by virtue of the virgin birth, that was an important detail, he did not carry Adam's sin into the equation.

And in 1 Peter 1.19, as it has there in the handout. First Peter 119, but with precious blood as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ. So Christ is described as spotless. He didn't carry the sin of Adam and he came down and he lived a life of obedience. Now how did he live the life of obedience that pleased God?

Did he live out the law? What does the scripture say? Just rabbit trailing again. Well, he said he didn't come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it. Okay, but how did he live out the things that fulfilled the law? How did he describe his relationship with God? whatever the father willed, that's what he did. So he constantly looked to the father for the moment by moment carrying out of his act of faith and obedience. He fulfilled the law, but he did so by relationship, not by memorization of 613 rules.

Stan? I was just thinking a little bit earlier that back then, since it was a theocracy, the people were GC, God-correct. Today, it's no longer a thought, a theocracy, but it's kind of mixed. And so we're supposed to be PC, politically correct. So, which is easier? Being politically correct or being in a theocracy where you're God-correct? Politically correct is more malleable.

It's interesting that you think of what Jesus said. You have heard it said. You shall not commit adultery. He said, but here's what it really was for. And he kept pointing back to out of the heart these things and not out of some outward observance. And he and the Pharisees tangled a lot of times over the outward versus the attitude. They had memorized all the rules and created rules around the rules to make sure that they never got to them. So I've got to be a good guy. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty crazy.

So Christ was the sacrifice and he was the spotless sacrifice. The next thing in Leviticus 16.10, God actually says you are going to pick two goats and one will be a sacrifice and one will be the scapegoat. So Christ Christ was a type of the scapegoat. The interesting thing about the scapegoat is they would hold the goat, the priest would put his hand on the head of the goat, and the priest would say, this is a confession of all the sins of Israel, even the ones we don't know about.

Because how can you offer sacrifices for sins you don't know about? They didn't. There was a shortcoming of of the system, not in God's side, but in mankind's side. Because we're forgetful, and ignorant, and blind. And so the scapegoat was given, they put the priest with his hand on there, and then they'd send the scapegoat off out into the wilderness.

So when Christ came, Isaiah 53.6 tells us that Christ had all of the sins cast upon him. All of them, the ones that were known about and the ones that were unknown, Christ had those cast upon Him. But they didn't cast them out in the wilderness. I guess there's a variation there. But all the sins were cast upon Him. The purpose was the same.

That's actually a really big deal if you think about in your own life. How many times have you sat down, realized, okay, I'm not abiding, and you think, I'm going to, you know, have kind of a repentant heart and attitude, and you think, I hope I didn't forget anything. How about the times when you sin and you didn't know it? I mean, you don't know it, so that's a problem.

You can't go back and confess it. But the Lord knows, and he dealt with those things fully in Christ as the scapegoat. Christ's holiness, the holiness of God's people was core to the tenets of the book of Leviticus and the law as a whole. The people couldn't keep the holiness requirements. I mean, that's probably not a surprise, right? At least for me. Maybe you all are much more holy than I am. But of my own account, I fall short, right?

But Christ comes and He is the holiness of God embodied. And so, if you've got your Bibles, turn to Ephesians 1.4, where we'll read about Christ's holiness. So this is us being in Christ actually, but it's because of His holiness.

Ephesians 1.4, just as He chose us in Him, in Christ, before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love. And that has to happen only because of His holiness, because we're identified with Him in that. The Levitical process and the culture that came with that showed off man's lack of being holy, but the amazing thing is it did show God's holiness.

If you have the right attitude about a circumstance, what's the result of your response to that circumstance? If you are missing a piece of context, you respond to it often either incorrectly or negatively or ignorantly. But if you look at the law and you realize it's a revelation of God's holiness, then at least for the Jews at the time living in this, while they would have their sins shown to them, they would be able to see, but we serve a holy God who wants a relationship with us, which is the right response, rather than, we are not good enough and God is always mad at us, which is probably the wrong way.

When I was young and my parents were disciplining me, I remember thinking, this is not fair. My daughter's looking at me, she's going, yeah, I felt that way before. This is not fair, but it is fair, it's just. God is fair and just and he brought forth a system so that righteousness could be elevated in the right context. And Christ was definitely holy and righteous. Alright, Christ is the tabernacle.

The tabernacle was the dwelling place of God on earth within the time-space continuum. And I'm sorry, I reference the time-space continuum somewhat often, and I apologize for the weirdness of that, but It actually has a theological purpose. Is God bound by the time-space continuum? Head nods no. God dwells outside the time-space continuum and created the time-space continuum. But since God is not in it in the same way that we are in it, He injects Himself into it in certain ways and times.

So the tabernacle was a place where God's presence showed up. And as we go through the outline a little later on, as we go through the outline of the book, we'll actually see God shows up in a really magnificent way, which I think would have been cool to watch. I'm glad to be a New Testament saint, don't get me wrong, but it would have been cool to see God show up in this way. It would have been pretty remarkable. But Christ was the dwelling place for God as well, wasn't He? He was God Himself. And He came down and walked the earth.

John 1.14.

If somebody would turn to John 1.14 and read it out loud instead of me, I'd appreciate that. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw His glory, glory of the fully begotten, and the Father full of grace and truth.

So before there was isolation, God would show up. He would be in the tabernacle or the temple, and only the priests would go into the Holy of Holies. Now God shows up in person, in the flesh, and dwells among men, and shows God's glory. It's a pretty powerful difference, wouldn't you say? Does the presence of the Lord still dwell on the earth today, the Holy Spirit, through us? That means that all of us, get to be that radiation of God's glory on the earth. So the next time you get in an argument with a friend or a spouse who's a believer, just look at them and go, wow, that person is still the presence of God on this earth.

See how that changes your attitude about an argument, huh? So the tabernacle was representative of what Christ would become. How about Christ as the priest? Was Christ from the tribe of Levi? We've been going over this in the Hebrews lesson, so I'm hoping somebody remembers. Was Christ a Levite? No, he wasn't. But he was still a priest.

If we look at Hebrews 4.14, we still see that Christ was a priest and a mediator between God and man.

And because of that, Hebrews 10.19, and I'm going to turn there instead of the 4.14, Hebrews 10.19, we as believers reap the benefit of his priestly duties.

In 10.19 it says, Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which he inaugurated for us through the veil, that is, his flesh, And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water." Now, does that sound like the attitude that the Old Testament Jews got to have about approaching God in the Holy of Holies in the temple?

Where's all that boldness? Boldly draw near. No, I don't think so. How about I bring an animal and hope we don't screw this up? We'll let the priest do that. Okay, so Christ as a priest, not only did he inaugurate a different priesthood, but he brought about the result that causes us as believers to not have anything that separates us from God. And we can draw boldly close to the Lord. So Christ is a priest, and we don't normally think of him that way. How many times do you hear about Christ being a priest just in Christian conversations? So for me, I've appreciated that for a while, having been exposed to it in different places, but it made me think as I was doing this study that, man, we don't really talk about Christ as a priest, and that's something that I probably should spend more time, first of all, studying, and then just, as the Lord brings the opportunity in conversation, just encourage one another with that. Is it strange to think that we would encourage one another with Christ as a priest? He's our Savior, but He's also a priest on our behalf.

And then the last one we've got here in this section of the handout is Christ is the blood. And what's the significance of blood in the sacrifice system? We can go all the way back to Genesis 3 if you want. What's the significance of blood? The scripture says the life is in the blood. The life is in the blood. Stan? And the rule was a life for a life. A life for a life, okay. So that's from Noah in Genesis and also is reiterated actually in Leviticus. So Christ is the blood.

Romans 5.9 tells us that Christ's blood, the life of the sacrifice, justifies the believer before God. But it was his blood that was offered that was significant in atoning and paying for sin. So when Christ was on the cross, what did they do to confirm he was dead? They pierced his side, and the water and the blood flowed separate, showing his death.

Colossians 3.3 speaks to our identification with Christ, and I'll turn there because I haven't actually felt like I've done a good job teaching God's Word unless I've hit Colossians 3 at least once.

Colossians 3.3 says to us, For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. And then in 4, When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. But it was because the lifeblood of Christ was spilled that the atonement was made.

And the blood of the animals was poured out on the altar. The thing I often marvel about is the amount of blood that would have been involved with the slaughtering of the animals. And then just the amount of animal carcasses that you have to deal with, even if they're burnt in the sacrifice process. The priests had a lot of duties that involved dealing with the animals, but the blood was definitely part of it. They have all this burning sacrifice.

That's outside the holy place? Just outside the altar? Yeah, it was on the altar. And the thing is that depending on the kind of sacrifices, some of them the animals could be used for food for the Levitical tribe, the tribe of Levi. And so not all of it was going to be just burned to a crisp. Some of it would have been used for food, depending on the type of sacrifice that was there.

Was that altar set right outside the door? Yeah, so it was in the inner chamber, but not in the Holy of Holies. The Holy of Holies was inside of that, so there's three layers. So you have the outer courts, the inner courts, where the tent of meeting was, and then the Holy of Holies.

So we have Christ as the blood. So the next thing I wanted to get into, since we're talking about the law, we have to make sure, since we're not under the law, is there anything useful in the book of Leviticus that we can look at for believers? Obviously we just tied in some foreshadowing, if you will, or some type of Christ that was recorded in the context of Leviticus. But none of the laws, and the laws of Leviticus as a system for holiness, apply to the believer.

Can obeying the law make you holy before God as a believer? Why? What if I was really, really good at following these? How much more righteous would that make me before God? I have the righteousness of Christ. That's God's righteousness. That's not like Paul's righteousness or some other saint that's like, they were really good. No, that's God's righteousness and it's been put on our accounts. So I can't be more righteous. Doing more of the law will not make me more righteous, it will just make me more annoying. And we don't need a more annoying Randy, just ask my wife. So observance of the law isn't useful to us.

There are principles that we can observe about God's character. God's holiness is declared in the law. So we can see there's characteristics of God in this that we can learn about him. We can learn about his righteousness. We can learn about his knowledge of mankind. He didn't just know us hypothetically. He knew us really well. By the time we get to Leviticus, we've got several thousand years of human history. Stan? It also says in the minutes that that ceremonial system is basically for the unintentional sin, right? There's part of it, yeah. Right. It's generally for unintentional sin.

So that talks a lot about the principle of attitude. And, you know, if you're going to be talking about what's in the law and how it pertains to us today, I think that's a primary concern. The attitude that you have Because that's what God was speaking to with the Israelites. Don't be rebellious. Don't act doing things you know you shouldn't be doing. Things like that. Attitude and motive are a really serious piece of contention between mankind and God. Ready? Yeah. I'm looking at a different offering.

You have a peace offering and a guilt offering. First you get rid of your guilt and then you have a peace? A peace offering is also called a thanksgiving offering. It's used interchangeably. As I was doing the outline, I just happened to use that term. A peace offering is just a thank offering to the Lord. The guilt offering was totally for the remission of sins. Just arbitrarily, I think I'll give thanks as a peace offering. Well, let's say you had a blessing in your life and you recognize this is a blessing from the Lord. Then you may take some offering to Him and just be thankful. And so that the peace offering or the thanks offering was not because you had... The guilt offering was actually assumed by that time. So that's how that played out.

The last sentence I've got on that paragraph under application for believers is, if anyone tells you we're still under the law, a cursory reading of Leviticus should clear up any confusion. And then I've got a list here of elements that are in the law that really just cannot apply to the believer.

So you don't get to pick and choose very easily, because you kind of run out of the whole deal. We don't have priests any longer in the Church. I mean, I could concede to you that the Catholic Church has people that they call priests, but it's not the same. So we don't have priests in the church any longer, so we can't seek the priests for guidance on skin conditions. There's an entire chapter on skin conditions in Leviticus, and you go to find out if you have leprosy or not, or if you've just got a rash, or eczema. Right now I have eczema, but I don't need to go to a priest to do that, I actually just know I have eczema.

But we can't go to the priest for that and deal with atonement. We don't get wave offerings because we don't have priests. We don't get scapegoats because we don't have priests. And general representation before God as unholy and separated people. We don't get that either. Did I say holy and separated? I meant unholy and separated people.

During the peace offering, that's where the individual could be involved. You bring your sacrifice and then they would give you some of the pieces and you would wave them before the Lord at the altar as part of the process. Part of the peace offering is a wave-off. Yeah, the waving of some of the internal organs to the Lord in gratitude.

It's weird to us because we just don't do that. We have barbecue, that's the closest thing. Didn't that have a lot to do with their crops and stuff when they came in? Yeah. Because that was a Thanksgiving for a good year and good crops and so they would give some of it back to the Lord and that was the way of offering. That was a piece of it, yeah. When there was something that went really awesome, you'd thank the Lord for it. Depending on the offering, because you could do a grain offering that was not involving internal organs, and they do that differently.

So we don't have priests, we don't have a tabernacle, so we don't have a sacrificial system. Without a tabernacle, you really can't do the sacrifices. Where's the tent of meaning? There isn't one. You can't do the sacrifices. We don't contribute oil for the lamps to be burning continually.

Israel had to do that. They had to manually crush the olives and gather the oil and bring the oil to the tabernacle to keep the lamps lit 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Well, they didn't have 365 days in their calendar. But they would go constantly be bringing...

I actually, for one of the other classes, and I didn't look it up, but for one of the other classes, there was a reference to the olive oil for the lamps and I being a nerd I actually looked up how much olive oil was produced by an olive and the problem is I could only find modern non-manual crushing techniques but it would have taken tons like 24 tons of olive oil of olives to produce the olive oil for all of the lamps in the tabernacle for a year. And that was based on estimations because all I could find was mechanical olive oil making. But that's a lot of olive oil to have to generate and we don't have to do that. When was the last time you went to the store and bought olive oil to bring to Holly Hill so that we could have the lamps lit? Even if you didn't have to make it by hand.

Stan? It certainly did keep those people's minds on God. The fact that there was a God and that there were requirements. It was very real in day to day. Another thing, when was the last time after church we went out and stoned somebody because we found out they were in sin? I'm glad no one's found out about all my sins. I'm sure I'd have been dead a long time ago.

I won't lie. We don't do that anymore. We don't limit our diets to restrict consumption of foods such as bacon and lobster. I'm sorry, I used the word comestibles in the handout. It's a word I know, and I didn't have to look it up in the thesaurus, and for some reason I typed it in there. But we can eat bacon, and I praise the Lord for that every time I eat it. And we can eat lobster. And there's all kinds of restrictions about you can't eat this and you can't eat that. There's also restrictions on insect consumption. which I've never heard anyone complain about.

Jew, Gentile, across the board, First World America doesn't worry about that. We also don't celebrate the year of Jubilee. Every 50 years, every seven year cycles, they'd have the year of Jubilee, and then all your debt was forgiven. So if you had accumulated debt to anyone in Israel, before the year of Jubilee. At the year of Jubilee, your slate was clean. Reset was the big easy button. And you didn't grow and harvest. You lived off the previous year's provisions. And you just celebrated God's provision for the nation of Israel every 50 years.

That's not an entirely bad idea. But it's set... If you imagine a mindset of... I'm just going to say this in modern terms, a capitalistic mindset. You're trying to gain wealth, you're trying to develop, and then God says, hey, every 50 years, you're going to take a break. And you're not going to do all of the capitalistic-y sort of things that you're used to doing.

That's a pretty big deal. So culturally, the Lord mandated for them some things that would cause them to take a break and give pause and focus on him no matter what. So every seven years they would have to lay a field fallow and so every seven times seven years, so 49 years, would then mark the 50th year which would be the year of Jubilee. So, that was pretty awesome.

But we don't celebrate that as believers, and we're not under that in the law any longer. Instead of the law, the believer is called to live by the Spirit. Galatians 5.16 and 25 tell us that we will live out the holiness of God by abiding, by walking in the Spirit. And we also know that nothing can separate us from the love of God. There's a section, and I'm not sure how much of the outline we'll get through, but there's a section in the book of Leviticus that talks about the curses of disobedience to God that Israel could expect. How many of you spend a lot of time worrying about the curses that we can expect as believers if we sin?

There are zero. The Lord may discipline us. He may take us out early. We may earn early retirement, but we don't get told that we will be cursed. He disciplines us because he loves us, but he promises curses for Israel. Hey, here's some curses you get if you screw up.

Oh boy. We don't worry about that. We look at Romans 8, 38-39 knowing that nothing can separate us from the love of God. So let's take a look at this outline. We'll get through as much as we get through. And stop me if you've got questions, things you wish I hadn't said, whatever else, and we'll talk about it.

So Genesis 1 starts off with the sacrifices. And he talks about the processes that would be involved with the herds and the bulls. And then he moves on to, because it has to be the male, right? The male sacrifice, so it is a bull, not the cow. Verses 10-13 talk about the flock, if it's a goat or a sheep. 14-17, from the feather, if it's a bird. And there are certain kinds of birds that are acceptable and certain kinds of birds that are, everything else that's not in this small subset, not good, don't bring that. He doesn't mention chicken, which is one of those things where it's part of our diet, but that's actually not part of their diet.

2.1-16 actually goes in detail for a whole chapter on the grain offerings. So one whole chapter for the animal sacrifices and one whole chapter for the grain offerings. Peace offerings in chapter 3, some of those were from the herd and some of those were from the flock. the guilt offerings. The guilt offerings, that's the one when you get caught in a certain kind of sin. And so it lists the kind of sin you did, and then it lists the kind of offerings that are acceptable. Oh, you did this? That's a cow. You did that?

We can do a sheep. If you're poor, Because let's face it, not everybody can afford cows and sheep and different kinds of fox. They may bring in certain kinds of grain because they know they have access to that, or certain kinds of birds. Yeah, Mary and Joseph brought an offering of does. That's right. That would have shown us the financial state they were in. It's like, we got some birds. Okay, so they weren't rolling in dough. Joseph was not a super successful contractor yet.

So we have the guilt offerings and how they come. And the thing that I noticed that was kind of interesting is the guilt offerings first for the priest, then the guilt offerings for the nation of Israel, then as a whole, the nation of Israel, then the leadership of Israel, and then the individual coming down to the common person.

And then offenses and atonements for those specific offenses. How do you deal with sinning against holy things? Because there are things that God had set aside as holy and you could have hopefully unintentionally, but done him anyways, you could have violated the holy things. And then there were responses to how you dealt with that. And then guilt offerings in chapter 6, 1 through 7.

Guilt offerings for deceit. We talked earlier about publicly bringing your offering. That's an awesome one. Oh, look, he's bringing the deceit offering out in front of the camp. That's a good one to own up. Plus you owed 20% to the person you deceived. bonus. You screwed up, you got found out, now you got to offer the sacrifice and you owe the person full retribution plus 20%.

That was the second bell like we're supposed to stop. I want, I'm going to just scan through here and highlight a few things that I think are significant. One of them is after Aaron is anointed as a priest, the first thing that happens after they anoint him as a priest and initiate the the tabernacle, is his sons offer strange fire. Well, no, I'm sorry, the first thing that happens after that is God shows up in his glory, and fire falls from heaven and consumes everything that's on the altar. That's the thing I was talking about earlier that would have been pretty awesome to see. Fire falling from the sky, everything on the altar is cleared off. That's pretty impressive. That's God saying, hey, just in case you were wondering, I got this covered. Then after that, Aaron's sons think, that was awesome.

And they went to downtown Denver, got something that was now recently legalized, and burnt strange offerings before the Lord, and the Lord consumed them with fire. So that was unfortunate. I'm sorry, he didn't consume them with fire. He killed them, and then they were taken out of the camp and burned.

So then God has to deal with Aaron. Aaron immediately after this does something that steps outside of the bounds of what God had set in place for the law for the Levites. Moses has to come confront him, and Aaron says, I'm in mourning. I lost my sons. And Moses says, OK, you get a pass. So that's right here in the middle of the book for the Levites. They're already screwing it up, and it's round one.

Then we get into dietary restrictions in chapter 11. You can eat this, you can't eat that. Certain birds are off limits. Bats, don't eat bats. Good to know, right? Birthing restrictions. How long is a woman unclean after she has a boy is different from how long she's unclean after she has a girl. I think that's kind of funny. It wasn't funny for the women, but it's funny now. So that's there.

We get some health and hygiene rules in Chapter 13. fourteen laws of the priest's interaction with lepers. So the priests were supposed to diagnose leprosy and then they brought that into now you have to check the lepers every year. Maybe they'll get healed if God cures them and blesses them, they'll be healed and so they're dealt with. It's interesting that they didn't just deal with the people, but the houses. Yep, they went into the houses. So if you had mildew and rot, the priest had to come and clean that up and inspect the whole chapter there.

In 15 we see all the discharges and the seminal emissions and all that fun stuff. That had to be a fun thing to have to deal with on a regular basis. Then in 16 we get Yom Kippur. We have ceremonies regarding the yearly going into the Holy of Holies and how God wants to have His holiness represented.

You get the scapegoat and all that's in there. We're going to skip down all the way until 23 where it says God's calendar. God actually outlines the feasts. Observe the Sabbath, observe the Passover, observe the Feast of Unloved Bread. the Feast of the Trumpet, the Feast of Atonement, and the Feast of Booths. And he goes into detail and says, this is the time you will do it, and these are the processes that you'll go through when they come around.

Then in 24, we see a man whose dad is Egyptian and his mom is Jewish, and he curses God. He curses the name of God. And so they put him in prison for a second. Moses talks to God, and God says, kill him. He used my name in vain. That's not cool. And I'm sure God didn't say that's not cool, but he is stoned to death. And so they get to implement this law right away.

God lays out the year in chapter 25, the year of Jubilee and the Lang, the seven year fallow growth cycle. And then in the last part of the the book he goes over blessings in 26, blessings and curses depending on if you're obedient or disobedient, and then in 27 it talks about evaluation of people for debts. as they're working up until the year of Jubilee. awfulness. That's the only word I can think of. It was wicked, yeah.

And you compare that to Israel. It actually has the law, and it's got our name, and it's absolute, and there is order. Stone people, that they screwed up, and you know, the sacrifices and all that. But if you compare... Yeah, it was very civilized. Yeah.

We've got people waiting at the door, so I'm going to pray real quick, and we can keep talking after that. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just This week remind us of who we are in Christ and what a blessing it is to be in Him as a result of being able to observe the law. Thank you for the refreshing look that you give us in your word about your holiness and your righteousness and your provision in our lives. We thank you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.