I want to be honest, Leviticus is not the most exciting book to read. Historically many pastors have strayed from teaching its contents and when they do they teach it as moral case studies. Unless we view the Scriptures as Christian Scripture we too will fall into this category of ignoring one the many books of our “bible”. I want to attempt to help you see this a bit clearer with today’s reading.

Put yourself in the shoe of a Hebrew. You have been delivered from the slavery that has oppressed you your entire life, you have seen plagues utterly abase the greatest kingdom ever, you have seen the mighty Pharaoh (a god in and of himself) humbled, broken and eventually drowned in the same waters that were miraculously parted and then released on the greatest military around. Later this God that Moses has talked about you have heard, you have seen Him come down in a cloud, feed you from the sky,  give you water from a rock and graciously enter into a relationship with you by the way of a covenant.

Now, you will begin to understand just how Holy this God. He is terrifying, all powerful, all knowing but in spite of all of this He is full of grace. However this grace is not free, something (and later someone) has to pay for God not to utterly obliterate you and that is where I want to pick up.

Death is forever before the Hebrew. As you read through Leviticus I want you to keep the concept of DEATH before your eyes, it is the scarlet thread so to say of our biblical narrative and will unfold beautifully in the person and work of Christ.  So go back a few thousands years.  I want you to see the knife slit the throat of the lamb, bull, goat and ram,  I want you to see the blood trickle down their neck as they scream and kick. I want you to hear the squealing, see the priest wrestle with the animal. I want you see the pools and pools of blood. Now I want you to smell these animals. I want you to smell the blood. Look at the heart, look at the liver, look at the kidneys, look at all that blood. Look at the blood on Aaron’s ear, his clothes are saturated in blood, he stinks. The smell is nauseating, it is disgusting to see the animal, with all of its skin, eyes, ears and teeth, being cut up. Now I want you to see the fire that is kindling, I want you to see the priest THROW all of this stuff into the fire, I want you to see the remainder of some of these animals, thrown outside of the camp, look at the dung smell it, touch it, let the scent soak into your skin.

Now, see a HOLY GOD only blinking at your sin, because tomorrow it is going to happen again, and the next day, and the next year, year after year, day after day, the smell, the death, the sacrifice is perpetuated. And day after day, sin is before God and He graciously accepts this sacrifice but only temporarily. These scents, these deaths, these innocent animals, are a PLEASING sacrifice to the Father. Because HE HATES SIN! And He WILL NOT be approached, talked with, bargained with until His wrath and hate for sin has been propitiated!

Now after all of that, think of His Son Jesus Christ, who was also innocent who bore the wrath of His Father, agonizing in the garden, beat, mocked and spit on and nailed to a cross. And much like the sacrifice of these animals just became another thing, they got used to the scent. Many today are used to the story of our Lord, they come Easter after Easter, Christmas after Christmas, they drive pass church after church, they hear the stories, hear the songs, they know all about this and guess what? They too have grown cold!  But not only them those who have experienced this grace are bored with the story of Jesus. We say “I get it He died on the cross, I got it already, can’t we move on”. But our actions show we haven’t got it. We see the obedience of the Lamb and yet don’t follow in His footsteps. Yes we need to hear more of this Jesus. Our reading in Matthew deals with this. Much like God judged the Hebrews for their passivity, Jesus will judge others for theirs! Lets not take Leviticus too lightly my friends.

Atonement, Propitiation, Sacrfice, Wrath

The extreme detail and exquisite design of the tabernacle and everything that went in it is something to marvel. They used the very best materials (gold, bronze, silver, acacia wood, and the best essential oils known to man) to create a place of worship for the Lord God. But as I read today’s OT reading, I couldn’t help but think, “All of the splendor and majesty of the tabernacle was still not good enough for true worship. Christ still had to come. In fact, He was already slain and waiting for the Father to dispatch Him at the time when they were actually building the tabernacle!” We must keep this in mind as we are sifting through the Scriptures this year in order to understand the depth and severity of the Messiah and His redemptive work.

Speaking of redemptive work…

In our NT reading, we are in the middle of Passion Week. Christ is coming closer and closer to death, but before He dies He has to set the Pharisees straight once and for all. Now, let me pause right here to say this: The Pharisees were NOT “bad” men! In most teachings they are depicted as some rebellious God-hating sinners when in fact these guys were morally upright. They kept all the laws, were well-versed in the Scriptures, kept all the holy holidays, and were keepers of the temple ordinances. These were nice men with good intentions, but as the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and that’s exactly what Jesus was saying.

Jesus repeatedly calls them hypocrites because all the good that they were doing outwardly didn’t amount to a hill of beans because their hearts had not been transformed. They knew the Scriptures—they TAUGHT the Scriptures—yet they did not know the One to whom the Scriptures were about. He accuses them of being clean on the outside but dirty on the inside. He tells them that their proselytizing is worthless and that they make it harder—if not impossible—to enter the Kingdom.

Whoa, Jesus! What are you trying to teach us here?

The implication of the word hypocrite has everything to do with the condition of the heart. You can know the Word, teach the Word, be the first one in the church and the last one out, pass out tracts and evangelize on the street corners, pay your tithe, fellowship with the brethren, and do all the things that make you look righteous on the outside…But if your heart has not been transformed by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, if you do not understand that worshiping God is not restricted to a majestic place or merely something that we do but that it starts with a transformation of the heart, you are a hypocrite and no good will come from you. And on that Day, He will say, “Depart from me. I NEVER knew you…”

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Today’s reading has us listening in to the conversation God had with Moses. God is giving details on how He is to be worshipped and not only that, who is allowed to approach Him. We have before us the purification of the priest, the instruments of worship, how God is to be approached and what must be offered to Him as acceptable. You see God gave CLEAR details and nothing else will be accepted. The result of approaching God wrong, offering something unacceptable, using the wrong instruments and even substituting something else for what HE has commanded resulted in only one thing. DEATH!

Today; however, many believe they can worship God however they please. You hear “come as you are” or even worse, many teachers in the body of Christ feel that anything and everything is acceptable. Others say “don’t judge”, this my friend is in a specific context and it is not that we don’t judge, we don’t judge wrongly or hypocritically. But we MUST make a judgment call on what God calls acceptable worship and what He does not. As ambassadors of His word we have no choice. And just in case we believe that God only kills in the Old Testament we only need to read Acts 5:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 11:27-32.

But why we must ask? Because God is Holy, Righteous, Just and Perfect and He is not to be played with. God is not a nice cosmic teddy bear that you can hug whenever you are feeling down, nor is He like Santa Claus, big jolly with a red suit bringing gifts and candy to good little boys and girls. Nor is He like a jolly ol’ grandpa who allows the children to behave unruly when they are with Him. God is not like us and any God who does not look like the God of Numbers 16:25-35 is a god of our imagination. However….

God has provided a way. We will see a High Priest who does not need to offer up atonement for Himself  (Hebrews 9:11-28). He will be the all sufficient, ram, lamb and bull. No need for bells to be tied to Him, no need for Him to kill a bull at the opening of the tent, no need for Him to slay a young ram and poor its blood on the alter, nope! He is all sufficient 100% God and 100% Man. We will see the blood of bulls and goats can never atone for the people. It will tell us in Romans that God only winked at our sin, but every year more bulls, more goats, more doves, more lambs had to die. More incense, more perfume, more anointing oil, had to be burned and poured. Thank God of Jesus Christ.

Finally in our NT reading we see this “come as you are” also being rejected. There is a parable about a great wedding. The original invitees not only rejected the invitiation but killed the King’s servants. You see what the response to that was right (Matthew 22:7). He then went out and called those who were not invited and many came; however, one “came as he was”. And the results were tragic for that fella.

God will only be worshipped on His terms. He is too Holy to negotiate with man. Do not be fooled that you can come as you are, you must come, covered with the blood of Christ or you will hear on that day “depart from me, I never knew you”. Don’t be numbered in that number friend. Trust wholly in the Lord Jesus, He has approached God on your behalf, you only need to be sprinkled in His blood.

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