Sunday, June 10, 2012

Sacrifice and Sanctification

Leviticus
Welcome! Today we continue our series entitled Law and Grace, looking at the book of Leviticus as a whole. As I explained last week, the reason we are going through the Law is that it helps us to better understand grace, and in the second half of this series we will go through the book of Galatians, using what we have learned in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy to better understand and appreciate the incredible gift of grace we have received through Christ.

Leviticus is a big book; we could spend many weeks exploring it. My approach this week is to first give a general overview of the book, and then say a little about each chapter, focusing on what people of the Law really had to do and, also, explaining how these things are hints of Christ.

The name “Leviticus” comes from the Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament into Greek made a few hundred years before Christ. Leviticus means “of the Levites,” and the Levites were set apart to serve as tabernacle caretakers and priests. A significant portion of Leviticus focuses on what the Levites were to do in their service to God.

Leviticus picks up where Exodus left off. Here is a very brief summary of Exodus: The Israelites have been freed from captivity in Egypt, crossed through the sea, led by the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, seen God miraculously give them water and food, including the manna, and been given the Ten Commandments and more regulations on Sinai. Through much of it they were doubting and complaining, and at the time they were receiving the Law they were worshiping a golden calf they had made. There were major consequences for this sin, but eventually, a second set of commandments were given Moses on Sinai and Moses brought them down, this time to a people who were at least outwardly obeying God.

The Israelites were also given detailed instructions for making a tabernacle and its contents, a place where sacrifices would be made and God’s Spirit would reside. The Israelites followed these instructions, and I mentioned last week how it is often easier to follow “outward” commands than it is to give your heart and follow God inwardly. Exodus ended with the glory of the Lord filling the tabernacle.

The first part of Leviticus involves the Lord calling Moses and giving him additional instructions from the Tent of Meeting, the tabernacle. These instructions, for the first 17 chapters, primarily deal with rules and regulations for sacrifices to God. You couldn’t just worship God any way you wanted, because God is holy. In fact, the holiness of God is a mostly unspoken theme that runs through the entire book of Leviticus. These chapters describe five different offerings that were to be made to God; three of these were what I will call “sweet” offerings, sweet in smell or taste, and two had to do with sin and trespass. Some of these offerings were of animals, but not all of them. Regarding the offerings of animals, Leviticus 1:2 says this:
Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When any of you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock. If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he is to offer a male without defect. He must present it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting so that it will be acceptable to the Lord. He is to lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. – Lev. 1:2-4
Several very important principles are revealed here. First, offerings were in fact offered, not taken. In other words, offerings were to be voluntarily given. It didn’t have to be this way; God could have just taken offerings by His force, but that was not what this was about at all. Man had exercised his free will when he disobeyed God, and he was to likewise exercise his free will to make it right in this manner prescribed by God. God never forces us to love Him or obey Him; He seeks people who give Him their hearts, people who choose to trust Him and live for Him.

The second principle revealed is that it is to be an offering without defect. These were the most desirable animals in the flock; these were the ones you wanted to keep around, to breed. From a human standpoint, it was illogical to sacrifice these; common sense would dictate that you sacrifice the ones that were most defective, but God would not accept these. Note that the perfection of the sacrifice was a symbol of the yet-to-come truly perfect sacrifice of Christ. It was also costly; I think the requirement of giving up such a valuable animal challenged people to rely not on their worldly wealth but instead on God.

A third principle I see here is based on this curious requirement that the one making the offering is to first place his hands on the head of the animal before it is given up for sacrifice. Symbolically, laying your hand upon the sacrifice was a transference of self so that the animal was dying in your stead. Certainly the one making the offering would have a powerful emotional experience at that moment, realizing that a living creature without sin would need to die in your place so that you could be able to enter into right relationship with a completely holy God.

The fourth principle I see is that of atonement. In the Old Testament, the word for atonement is kaphar which literally means to cover over. This is in contrast to the New Testament term for atonement which refers to putting sin away; that is, the sacrifices of the Old Testament only covered over sin; the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ took our sin away! How thankful we should be that this is the case!

God has always desired that we walk in fellowship with Him. God’s holiness has always required that something be done so that we could be in fellowship with Him, and in the Old Testament it was this sacrificial system, where each sin was covered over with the death of an innocent unblemished animal. It became our substitute, taking upon itself the consequences that we deserved. Again, this was an imperfect system, a temporary system, pointing to the much better day, our day, in which the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ in our place removes our sin and completely restores our fellowship with God.

So Leviticus Chapter 1 deals with the burnt offering, one of the “sweet” offerings. Fundamentally, it was an offering of consecration, of restoring one’s devotion to God. The desire of the person was that he could glorify God; he would begin this process with the burnt offering. The person would bring the animal to the priest, lay hands on its head, and then slay it. Not the priests, but him, himself (Lev. 1:5). The priests would bring the blood and sprinkle it on the altar. The person would cut it up, and the priests would put the pieces on the altar and burn them up completely.

How many of you like the smell of barbecue? This is what we are talking about! The one offering the animal would smell these wonderful smells but not get to eat any of it. The animal was completely “wasted” (from a human point of view).

Leviticus Chapter 2 describes a second “sweet” offering, the grain offering, sometimes called the meal offering. The basic idea is here:

When someone brings a grain offering to the Lord, his offering is to be of fine flour. He is to pour oil on it, put incense on it and take it to Aaron’s sons the priests. The priest shall take a handful of the fine flour and oil, together with all the incense, and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the Lord. The rest of the grain offering belongs to Aaron and his sons; it is a most holy part of the offerings made to the Lord by fire. – Lev. 2:1-3

Again, we have talked about barbecue; now think about baking bread, or pizza – another wonderful smell! There were several variations allowed in preparation, but there were a few common requirements. First, no yeast or honey could be used. No yeast, or leaven, because it has always been symbolic of sin; note that what yeast actually does is break down the food; it is literally a kind of rotting. This had no place in an offering to God, any more than a blemish on an animal. Honey was forbidden, perhaps, because it would create an artificial sweetness; in any case, it would mask the true aroma of the flour and oil. Another requirement is that there had to be salt used as well. Salt in scripture is symbolic of a preservative and as a revealer of truth; both of these were quite appropriate in a sacrifice. The offering as a whole was symbolic as an offering of service; the one making the offering was basically re-committing their life in service to God instead of service to self. It could also be an offering of first fruits, acknowledging God’s good hand in the harvest.

The third type of “sweet” offering is described in Leviticus Chapter 3, the fellowship offering, sometimes called the peace offering. The fellowship offering was an animal offering, but unlike the consecration offering, some of the meat was cooked as food, not burnt up completely. The fellowship offering was to restore one’s fellowship with God. The idea, symbolically, was that the one making the offering and God would “share” in the food. There was a deep understanding, a tradition, a cultural belief, in many ancient cultures that sharing a meal with someone linked the two of you together. Physically, this was true in a sense, because you both had part of the same meal in you after you ate, and as they say, “you are what you eat.” This is why a person would never share a meal with their enemies, because they did not want to become one with them to any degree. This is also behind the rules that Jews had even at Jesus’ time about refusing to eat with any non-Jews. To eat with another was to fellowship with him in a deep way; and this makes even more poignant the many times that Jesus ate with people, and who He ate with, even “tax collectors and sinners”. Symbolically, Jesus was eager to fellowship with anyone willing to fellowship with Him.

Chapters 4 through 6 describe two more kinds of offerings. For each of the first three offerings, there are verses in Leviticus that describe them making a sweet aroma unto God; that is not true for these latter two types of offerings. These two kinds of offerings are for restoring one’s relationship with God after sinning. One of these is called the sin offering, and the other is called the guilt offering, or trespass offering. The sin offering is introduced in the beginning of Chapter 4:

The Lord said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites: ‘When anyone sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands — Lev. 4:1-2

There are two kinds of sin, unintentional sin and intentional sin. This chapter deals with unintentional sin. Note that unintentional sin is still sin. Ignorance of the law or ignorance of one’s actions is no excuse. That is true in every modern legal system, and it was true of God’s law. In this case, hands were again laid on the animal prior to slaughter, and the blood was put on the altar, but the fatty parts were the only parts burnt up on the altar. The rest of the animal – good eating meat – was taken and burnt outside the camp. By the way, even the first type of offering, where the entire animal was burnt up, the skins were removed first, and could be made into clothing or other items by the priests; but in this case, even the skins were burnt up outside the camp. Even this detail points to Christ, who did not die at the Temple, but outside the “camp,” outside Jerusalem, at “the place of the skull.”

With Chapter 5 and the first part of Chapter 6, we begin to get into specific offerings for specific types of sins. Not speaking up when you know something and are asked to do so, touching things unclean, and taking oaths, each of these was sin. Also mentioned were defiling any of the Lord’s holy things or violating any of the Lord’s commands (including those in Exodus). The first step was to confess the sin, and the second was to bring an animal for an offering, the sin offering.

As explained in the first part of Chapter 6, if the sin involved deceiving another person, an additional required step was that he make full restitution; actually more than full restitution, adding an additional fifth of the value. The offering in this case was the trespass offering. Unlike the sin offering, the meat could be eaten by the priests. The rest of Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 give additional details about the five kinds of offerings, the burnt offering, the grain offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, and the fellowship offering.

Leviticus 8 describes special offerings for the ordination of Aaron (who was descended from Levi) and his sons as priests. They put all the specially made garments on Aaron and then anointed everything in the tabernacle with oil. They also anointed Aaron’s head, and dressed up Aaron’s sons. Next was a sin offering, a bull, and Aaron and his sons laid their hands on its head before it was slaughtered. Note that Aaron and his sons were sinners like everyone else, and thus, needed the sin offering before they could begin their priestly duties. (Only Christ was a high priest who never needed any offerings made for His own sins, because He, and He alone, was without sin.) Then there was a burnt offering, consecrating Aaron and his sons, and a special ordination offering, and then they waited eight days at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting before beginning their duties.

Leviticus 9 describes the beginning of the priestly ministry. Now they made burnt offerings and sin offerings for the people. Again they began by first having Aaron make a sin offering for himself. They then went through the various offerings, and Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting. Here is how the chapter concludes:

When they came out, they blessed the people; and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. Fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the fat portions on the altar. And when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell facedown. – Lev. 9:23-24

And they all lived happily ever after, right? Wrong. Every indication is that Chapter 10 immediately follows Chapter 9. What happens? Two of Aaron’s sons put fire in their censers, adding incense, and offering fire to the Lord their own way, not in obedience to the specific demands for sacrifices. The result is that fire went out and killed them. We don’t know what Aaron’s sons were thinking – perhaps they just wanted to improvise. Perhaps they wanted to draw some attention to themselves. Perhaps they were drunk! I say this because a few verses later, seemingly out of the blue, God warns Aaron and his sons to never have alcohol when they go into the Tent of Meeting. We don’t really know. But if we think God is harsh, we fail to understand the holiness of God. Our sin separates us from God. Our God is a consuming fire. Only the righteous can stand before Him and live. For us, Christ is our righteousness; it is certainly not in us, any more than it was in Aaron’s sons. At that same time God also told Aaron the following:

You must distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean, and you must teach the Israelites all the decrees the Lord has given them through Moses. – Lev. 10:10-11

And so part of the role of the priests was to be teachers, to instruct the Israelites laws about holy versus common, clean versus unclean, and the other decrees they were to follow. A detailed description of these rules begins in the following chapter.

Leviticus 11 gives detailed rules about what creatures may be eaten and what creatures may not be eaten, which are clean and which are unclean. The wording is interesting in that in multiple places it says “unclean for you.” That is, the dietary laws are not pronouncing judgment on the entire world, but only on the Israelites. They are to be a people set apart for God, and one way in which they are set apart is with regards to what they were allowed and not allowed to eat.

Leviticus 12 discusses women and their purification after childbirth, and Leviticus 13 discusses skin diseases, specifically, although not mentioned by name, leprosy. Leprosy was a serious disease, and it could be spread. And so an additional role of the priests was to examine skin abnormalities and declare them as clean or unclean. There were specific procedures to follow after that. For someone who had leprosy, their life was a difficult one:

The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp. – Lev. 12:45-46

These rules continued into Christ’s day; the lepers Christ spoke to lived in this manner. The purpose was to protect the rest of the people. Now, Leviticus 14 focuses on healing from leprosy. A priest served as a kind of health inspector, looking at the situation and declaring it clean or unclean. Now the strange thing about all this is that leprosy was incurable. Not so strange, if you look forward to Christ. Christ healed lepers! And the lepers were instructed to basically give the priests the opportunity to exercise Leviticus 14 and declare these people cured. It is fascinating that a whole section of the law was basically untested, unused, until Christ “broke the rules” and healed something that was incurable. The issue of mildew, by the way, is also dealt with in chapters 13 and 14, and Leviticus 15 continues the health theme, dealing with people with various kinds of bodily discharges. Jesus healed these too, by the way.

Now we don’t have the time to go into the depth I wish I could go into here, but Leviticus 16 focuses on the Day of Atonement. The summary of the chapter is this:

This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the Israelites. – Lev. 16:34

Once a year, on a particular day, the high priest would enter the holy of the holies, the most holy place, past the veil, or curtain. This was a day of rest for the people, but a day of a lot of work for the high priest. If I have counted up everything in this chapter correctly, I come to about 30 animals he had to deal with in one way or another, plus five baths! On this day he did not wear the special priestly garments, but a plain linen garment. First he made offerings for his own sin, and then he made offerings for the sins of the people. As we know, this is highly symbolic of Christ, who entered the most holy place and sacrificed for the sins of the people once for all with His own body, with His own blood. So many details are symbolic – for example, the fact that the high priest on this day had to work alone. He would go to the most holy place and sprinkle the blood of a bull, and then he would also sprinkle the blood of a goat. Interestingly, there were two goats, the one that was sacrificed and another that was sent away into the desert. Prior to being sent away, the high priest would lay hands on its head and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites. Symbolically, the goat would be carrying away the sins of the people. Christ fulfilled the roles of both goats – He sacrificed Himself for our sins, and He also carried away our sins.

In Chapter 17 God decreed that the Tent of Meeting was the only place for sacrifices. There were also regulations given forbidding eating blood. By way of explanation, it says,

For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. – Lev. 17:11

Again this points to Christ; He couldn’t save us by just hanging around for us, or doing a ceremony, or something like this – He had to give up His blood; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.

Now my title for this message was Sacrifice and Sanctification. Everything up until this point has focused on sacrifice; the remainder of Leviticus primarily focuses on sanctification. There is a repeated phrase that appears beginning in chapter 18. In fact, if I have counted correctly, it appears 54 times in chapters 18 through 26. What is the phrase? I am the Lord.  A significant number of these times, it is part of the larger phrase; I am the Lord, who makes you holy. And this is what sanctification is all about. God wants His people to be holy. God is a holy God, and the unholy simply cannot be in His presence, because to be with God, one must be holy as He is holy. Romans 7:12 says,

So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. – Rom. 7:12

The commandments in chapters 18 to 27, then, are about how to be holy, so that we can have fellowship with God. The sacrifices were how the Israelites repaired their relationship (a temporary system fulfilled by Christ), but the laws were about how to be holy, to be righteous, to be good.

In chapter 18 God deals with holiness with regards to intimate relationships. Incestuous relationships are forbidden as are adulterous relationships and relationships with anyone other than someone of the opposite sex. In chapter 19 you see a restatement of some of the 10 commandments, as well as miscellaneous other laws. Some deal with the poor – for example, one is to leave the edges of your field un-reaped so that the poor may gather from them. In this chapter it also says to love your neighbor as yourself, and in fact, many of the laws can be summarized with this statement, just as Jesus affirms in the New Testament. As we spoke about briefly last week, the laws cannot be easily separated into ceremonial versus universal laws; they are mixed together. For example, a law forbidding the practice of divination is immediately followed by a law about how to not cut your hair in certain ways. The way to understand the Law is that it was a complete set of rules for the Israelites to follow. As for us, we are Christians; what we need to follow we can find in the teachings of Christ and the rest of the New Testament. But all Scripture is valuable for study – there is great benefit in reflecting on the Law, all of it.

Chapter 20 deals with punishments for breaking many of the laws already described, plus a few new ones on various topics. Chapter 21 and 22 provides detailed rules for the proper conduct of priests, chapter 21 primarily on the priests’ conduct, and chapter 22 on what are and are not acceptable sacrifices.

Leviticus 23 lays out in one place the seven special days, holy days: the Sabbath, the Passover, Firstfruits (a festival at the start of harvest in which a sheaf of the first grain is waved before the Lord), the Feast of Weeks (a holiday a week of weeks after Firstfruits), the Feast of Trumpets (a day commemorated with blasts of a ram’s horn), the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles (a holiday celebrated by living together in booths). Each of these holidays has their fulfillment in Christ. As for the Sabbath, we enter our rest in Christ, Hebrews 4. As for Passover, Christ is our Passover Lamb, I Cor. 5:7. As for Firstfruits, Christ is the firstfruits of those that slept, I Cor. 15:20; that is, we are His harvest, and He is the first who is resurrected into life; we will follow Him. As for the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles, these are yet to be fulfilled, but we get glimpses of how Christ will fulfill these in the Old Testament prophets and in Revelations as well as prophecies in other New Testament books. The bottom line is that He will fulfill them when He returns.

I am running out of time, but let me briefly summarize the remaining chapters of Leviticus. Chapter 24 begins with how oil and bread are to be provided continually, the oil so that the lamps at the Tent of Meeting burn continually, and the bread to be set out in two rows, 6 loaves per row, Sabbath after Sabbath. The second part of the chapter describes rules for those who blaspheme the Lord; they should be stoned outside the camp. Recall that Jesus was accused of blasphemy, as was Stephen in the Book of Acts, who was in fact stoned.

We have seen rules for keeping the Sabbath in Exodus. Chapter 25 of Leviticus describes a Sabbath year (once every 7 years) in which the fields are to have a year of rest, and the year of Jubilee (once every 7 Sabbath years, the year following, making it once every 50 years) in which everyone is to return their own property, if property had been leased, and those who sell themselves as basically indentured servants are freed.

Leviticus 26 is divided into two parts. The first part describes rewards for obeying God’s commands, and the second part describes punishments for disobedience. I do note that the second part is about twice as long as the first part! And the final chapter of Leviticus focuses on vows and dedications of items to the Lord.

Whew! That’s a lot of information! How do we put it all together? What do we take away from it?

Again, we can separate Leviticus into two parts: Chapters 1-17 that focus on sacrifice, and Chapters 18-27 that focus on sanctification. Within the chapters on sacrifice are the five kinds of offerings, the setup of the priestly ministry, dietary laws, health laws, and the Day of Atonement. Within the chapters that focus on sanctification are rules for purity in intimate relationships, rules for loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself, rules for personal conduct including the conduct of priests, the seven special holidays, Sabbath years and the year of Jubilee, the rewards and punishments for obeying or disobeying God’s laws, and rules regarding vows and dedications. An overarching theme in the first part is that blood is necessary for sacrifice, and an overarching theme in the second part is that God calls us to be holy because He is holy.

What was it like to live under the law? What was it like to be a priest? It wasn’t easy. It was bloody. There were constant reminders of the seriousness of sin, yet there was a powerlessness as you watched your people, and even you yourself, sin again and again and again.

I am reminded that Christ said He did not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it. I am also reminded of Romans 13:10 which says that love is the fulfillment of the law. We are not called to live by the Law handed to the Israelites, but we are called to have our sin atoned for and taken away, and we do this in and through Christ; we are also called to live holy lives (holiness defined by the New Testament teachings, not the minutiae of the Law of Moses), and as we know, we can only do this in and through Christ as well. Therefore a proper response for us is to call on Him to be our fulfillment of this law, by being our high priest, our sacrifice, our scapegoat, our teacher, our guide, our everything. Recall how I explained that sharing a meal with someone linked the two people together? In this light, reflect on Rev. 3:20 as we close. Jesus says,

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with Me. – Rev. 3:20

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