As you are reading through your Bibles, you ask me a LOT of questions when you get to Leviticus

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1 So, Can I or Can t I? Leviticus October 12, 2014 As you are reading through your Bibles, you ask me a LOT of questions when you get to Leviticus If we believe the Bible literally, does that mean I can t wear a shirt that s made from two kinds of material? (19:19) Can I really not plant corn and beans together in my garden? (19:19) Is it OK to tell my son that the Bible forbids tattoos? (19:28) Actually, these chapters are pretty popular outside the church as well. When I Googled Leviticus 18, I got over 8 million hits! [To put that in some perspective, I Googled John 3:16 and got over 62 million hits!] And, of course, most of that interest is fueled by Leviticus 18:22, Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable. And, of course, when we get to chapter 20 which contains the penalties for breaking these commands, it says in 20:13, they must be put to death; their blood will be on their own hands. So what do we do with verses like these? If you check around the Internet especially on YouTube you ll find some pretty clever and resourceful rejoinders to these passages. Their gist is something like this: So, you claim homosexuality is wrong because of Leviticus 18:22? Then you must also believe it s wrong to harvest a whole field (because that s forbidden in 19:9) Or that it s wrong for an employer not to pay his or her workers every single night (because that s commanded in 19:13) Or that it s wrong to plant two kinds of seed in the same field or wear clothes with two kinds of material (19:19) And, surely, you believe it s evil to cut off the hair on the sides of your head (19:28) And, while you re stoning that gay man, I hope you re also stoning the little kid who gets upset when his folks don t buy him a new ipad and calls them names (20:9) as well as the straight man who is unfaithful to his wife with another woman, because 20:10 commands that adulterers (men and women) should be put to death! 1

2 And I hope someone has condemned your Fellowship Committee, because they ve announced they re serving pulled pork at your Harvest Dinner in direct disobedience to Leviticus 20:25. [And as one YouTuber reminded me the Old Testament not only forbids eating pork but even touching the dead carcass, so throwing a FOOTBALL is clearly SINFUL!!] And says our critical friend on YouTube don t even get me started on the Christian Tattoo Association! Leviticus 19:28 clearly condemns tattoos! So, again I ask: What DO we do with all these verses? Let me just say, as a practical matter, when someone asks me what I believe about homosexuality, I NEVER refer them to Leviticus 18. It just opens up this whole can of worms, and my guess is they re not going to listen to my nuanced discussion of hermeneutics, which is the science of Biblical interpretation! So, I just refer them to Jesus and Paul in the New Testament. Jesus said, If you want to know what marriage is all about, and what the boundaries of sexual activity are, just go back to the Garden of Eden: a man leaves his mom and dad and becomes united to his wife and they are one flesh. All other intimate sexual behavior is prohibited. By the way, that makes us equal opportunity offenders in TODAY S WORLD, because we believe it s just as wrong for straight people to have sex outside of marriage as it is for gays! And you can find Paul s unambiguous thoughts on all of this in Romans 1. So that s where I send people who are interested in what the Bible says about sexual behavior. But, again, what about us? How do WE understand those prohibitions in Leviticus, and those commands to put those offenders in death (chapter 20)? For us, we DO need to talk about some of the nuances of Biblical hermeneutics or interpretation. We DO need to take a close look at the Biblical text and ask some hard questions. The quick and dirty EASY answer to all this would be to quote Romans 10:4: Christ is the end of the law so there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Christ is the End of the Law! So Leviticus is INTERESTING but pretty much irrelevant. I can IGNORE all this stuff! Free from the Law, Oh happy condition. 2

3 Now I can sin, and there s no perdition! Before you laugh too much, I came across a very well-written article on a site called, BibleThumpingLiberal, that made this very point and quoted the eminent evangelical New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce to bolster his argument. His point was (NOT F.F. Bruce s!) that Paul told us we need to jettison the Law, so homosexual behavior is OK now, because that s an Old Testament thing, and we re New Testament Christians. So, I don t think we can just pitch out the Law and wash our hands of Leviticus, because let s face it there s some good stuff in here. 1. Chapter 18 is basically saying, Don t have sex with any close relatives or anyone else or anything else except your wife or husband. Everything else is out of bounds. PERIOD. 2. And then a lot of chapter 19 simply restates the Ten Commandments either quoting them exactly or pointing out how we should live them out: Do not lie, Do not steal. Etc. Or, it involves practicing the Second Table of the Law to love your neighbor as yourself. (Did you know Jesus got that from Leviticus 19:18?) So, because you love your neighbor, you leave the corners of your field unharvested so the poor can come in and get some free food. You take special care of people who are deaf or blind or elderly. You look after the aliens and outsiders, because we, as believers, are Exodus people ourselves. (19:13 14) We are ALIENS or strangers in this world. So, a lot of these verses are reminding us to live out the Moral Law of God among our neighbors. And these principles are as true today as they were in Moses s time. 3. Now, there are some things our neighbors do that we SHOULDN T emulate, and that s what some of these specific passages deal with. You don t practice divination or sorcery (19:26). That is, you don t try to communicate with the dead. You pray to the Lord not to your ancestors. That s what s going on in 19:28 the pagans, as part of their mourning rituals, would cut themselves; and God says, Don t grieve like your pagan neighbors. And there s that tattoo verse. What do we do with that? 3

4 Clearly, in this passage, God is associating the tattoos with these pagan rituals and is forbidding them on that basis. I think the question we ask today [because tattoos today don t necessarily carry that same pagan connection] is not, Is it WRONG? but, Is it WISE? and different believers will answer that question differently. 4. Finally, we just don t know why God commands some of these things. Don t cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. (19:27) Don t mate different kinds of animals or plant your fields with two kinds of seeds. Don t wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. (19:19) I ve heard lots of suggestions but no clear reason for these. The best suggestion I ve read on the clothing [probably not static electricity or allergies] was that the High Priest wore a robe made of wool and linen, and this was a way that God let the people know that there was something very special about him. They were NOT priests. So, you do some things just because God says so whether they make sense to you or not. On the other hand, clearly, these fall into that category of NOT being part of the MORAL LAW they are different from the Ten Commandments, and so I think we can say (just as we said with the sacrifices earlier in Leviticus), now that Jesus has come, we are no longer under obligation to these laws. And, by the way, that is certainly true of the penalties of chapter 20. Those are part of the civil and judicial laws of the nation of Israel, and we are not obligated to follow them any more than we have to have a Year of Jubilee every 50 years, where we take a year-long sabbatical and give our property back to its original family. Those were laws to govern a specific nation, and we are not that nation. So, I hope I ve given you some help in navigating these chapters and in see how they apply to us today. But here s my concern with all this (and Pastor Andy can tell you that I ve been struggling with this all week): I think it s too easy to come to a passage like this one, and look at it very narrowly [ Exactly what do I have to worry about here? or Can I or Can t I ] and fail to see the big picture in this text. And the big picture is that this IS the Word of God, and God is speaking to us TODAY through it. 4

5 So my job, when I come to a passage like this, is not like Thomas Jefferson to take out my scissors and cut out all the stuff I don t like or need and paste the rest together in my own personal Bible. My job and your job is to listen to the voice of God and let this Living Word speak to us. And here I m going to lean heavily on a great new commentary in the Tyndale series by Jay Sklar who teaches Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary. Sklar says the big issue through this whole book of Leviticus is God s holiness. And he draws three points from these chapters: 1. We re to IMITATE God s holiness. 19:2, Be holy, because I, the Lord your God, am holy, a command that PETER repeats word for word in the New Testament. Jesus showed us how to do that, didn t He? This holy God came down to our unholy world and without compromising one ounce of His holiness He showed us what God is all about. 2. We re to imitate His holiness by OBEYING His laws. 19:37, Keep all my decrees and all my laws and follow them. I am the Lord. Do you want to change the world? Live like Jesus! 3. We re to remember that holy living involves ALL OF LIFE. 19:3 36 True holiness is incredibly PRACTICAL and especially involves our relationships with others. We must live among our neighbors with integrity, honesty, faithfulness and love. Sklar says, Holiness becomes REAL as we live out the Lord s love to others. And when you realize how TOUGH that is, and how often you FAIL, just turn back to Leviticus 16 and let it take you to the CROSS! Rev. Robert Smallman Bible Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church in America) 1605 Highway G Merrill, WI