And already some of you are thinking, Leviticus? Why would he preach on THAT book?!

Transcription

1 Welcome to Leviticus Leviticus 1:1 17 August 17, 2014 I m beginning a brief series on the Old Testament book of Leviticus this morning. And already some of you are thinking, Leviticus? Why would he preach on THAT book?! Well, here s why: 1. Because it s in the Bible! You see, we re not just New Testament Christians, we re BIBLICAL Christians, and since roughly 4/5s of the Bible is the Old Testament, we need to hear what it says. I love that Andy is preaching from the Minor Prophets just as I preached from Psalms before our last series on James. In a pinch I d rather have the Gospel of Mark than Leviticus, but we re not in a pinch! 2. Because we need Leviticus to make sense out of the death of Christ. We talk about the Centrality of the Cross, but WHY did Jesus have to die? Why couldn t He have just taught and healed and loved us and then gone back into heaven? Leviticus will tell us. 3. Because so many of you have asked me QUESTIONS about Leviticus from your own reading of the text. And there are some strange and even confusing things in the book that we should talk about: Can you wear a shirt made from two different kinds of thread? Not according to Leviticus! Leviticus forbids TATTOOS. So, should you get yours removed? We ll talk about all kinds of interesting things like that and try to figure out how to apply what this ancient book says to us today. 4. Finally, I m preaching from Leviticus because I ve never done it before, and I m excited by the challenge. My plan is to look at the major topics in the book, rather than try to preach through every chapter, so I hope to go through the book in less than 10 messages, but we ll see how it goes! Before I start, I want to remind you of the Traveling Instructions diagram based on British pastor Dick Lucas ideas that I ve included in the bulletin. 1

2 When we read any portion of the Bible but especially unusual passages our natural instinct is to jump immediately into our situation and ask, So what does that mean for ME? So let s do that! And with Leviticus, our instincts are to immediately try to turn it into a CHRISTIAN book and see Christ in it (as, of course, we should). But I m going to try to slow us down just a bit, and try to get us to listen to the book as though we were just getting it from Moses way back in the Sinai desert! Because it needs to be a Hebrew book before it can become a Christian book, and we need to put ourselves in the shoes of those original hearers and readers before we can cart it into the 21 st century. The Israelites had lived for 400 years in Egypt think about that! 400 years ago for us would take us back to 1614! So, Egypt had become their home. Now, Moses at God s command had taken them away from their settled home and was leading them on this 3-week journey back to their ancestral home that God had given to Abraham. For reasons we don t have time to cover this morning, that 3-week journey turned into a 40-year trek in the Sinai desert, and it s during that journey that God told Moses to record this book of Leviticus. If you look at the structure of the book, roughly half of it has to do with offerings and worship and half with much more mundane things. I suspect the Israelites had two big things on their minds: 1. How can I get along with this Holy God who is really scary to be around (remember the thunder and lightning as Moses was getting the 10 Commandments? Try calling THAT God the Man Upstairs!) 2. But also, how can I get along in this unholy world and with our unholy soon-to-be neighbors in the Promised Land. So, with all that in mind, we come to chapter 1 and, literally, without any introduction, the book begins with God telling Moses precisely how to bring an offering. (Now, there are a bunch of different offerings in Leviticus, and I m not going through all of them, so I ve included an insert to help you.) I. God is with His people and reveals Himself to them Leviticus 1:1, The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting. As Israel journeyed through the desert and set up camp at each stop, they would erect the Tent of Meeting or Tabernacle right in the middle of the camp. 2

3 That may not seem too remarkable to you, but keep in mind that God is a holy God That means that He is set apart from us. He s not one of us; He s not created but the Creator. He is, by His very nature, totally set-apart from us. And yet, here He is, living among His people in a TENT! And, more than that, He s TALKING to them. Think about it: because God is totally OTHER from us totally set apart totally HOLY if He were to remain silent, we d never know anything about Him never even know He was there! But He condescends to live among His people and reveal Himself to His people. There s a wonderful verse in John 1:14 where John picks up on this theme as he tells us about Jesus: And the Word was made flesh and lived for a while among us. John was using a word that reminded his original readers of the Tent of Meeting in Leviticus: And the Word was made flesh and TENTED among us. One of my Old Testament professors always translated this, pup tented among us. In Leviticus, the Holy, invisible God came down among His people through the glory of the Ark that was kept in the Most Holy Place of the Tabernacle or Tent. And the only time ordinary people saw the Ark was when the Levites were moving the Tabernacle but even that was a pretty scary proposition that had to be done in a very particular way. But in Jesus, this glorious presence of God takes on skin and bones and becomes one of us and gets his fingernails dirty as He works as a sweaty carpenter! I hope you can begin to see the wonder and the humiliation of the incarnation Jesus in the flesh.! This holy God comes right down to us and reveals Himself to us as a human being of all things. If it weren t so true and so amazing, it would border on blasphemy! So, God was not just with those ancient Israelites, He is with US! He is Immanuel, the With Us God! And He continues to reveal Himself to us not only in Jesus, but in the Word that His disciples recorded about Him. 3

4 I was just talking to someone who has been going through some tough times, and he said to me, You know the one thing I ve never doubted through all this process is that God has been walking with me through this. II. God decides how we should approach Him I m not going to spend a lot of time here except to observe that God gives His people very explicit instructions about how they are to worship Him Even down to which side of the altar you re to kill the animal and which parts of the animal to wash, which to discard, and which to burn. God not we decide how He is to be worshipped. And if you were to glance at chapter 10, you d see what happened to a couple of guys who tried to offer worship in the WRONG way! (Clue: it didn t turn out well for them.) I point this out just to let you know that even today we re not free to make worship up as we go along the Bible let s us know what we can do. This has NOTHING to do with the style of worship whether we sing contemporary songs or traditional songs. But we worship God properly when we use songs, prayers scripture and sacraments but you probably won t see us holding a festival to some Greek goddess anytime soon on a Sunday morning! III. Finally, God relates to us through sacrifice It is no mistake that Leviticus begins so abruptly with instructions about sacrifice, because as strange as it may sound to us today that s what allows a holy God to live in the midst of his often unholy people. Let s just walk through this chapter together and note some things about how sacrifice worked: 1:3, the person came before the Lord with an animal without defect. You couldn t cull the herd and bring some sickly bull it had to be your BEST. 1:4, the person laid his hand on the offering and probably confessed his sins over the animal in doing that, you understood that your sins and defects were being symbolically transferred onto this perfect animal. And the animal, vs. 4 continues, will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. The animal takes my place and acts as a RANSOM, freeing and purifying me from my sins. He becomes my substitute: what is about to happen to that animal on whom I ve placed my sins is what SHOULD have happened to ME! 4

5 The New Testament, as we ll see in a moment, has even more to say about this. 1:5, could suggest that the one bringing the sacrifice actually does the slaughtering (though it could also be translated, The bull shall be slaughtered presumably by the priests) But the point is this innocent bull is killed so that I can live! And his blood which symbolizes the life that has been taken from him is sprinkled around the altar. In our own day obviously because of the cross we re shielded from all this, but Leviticus reminds us in a very graphic way that sacrifice is a costly and a messy business. Our worship today is pretty sanitized, isn t it. But when you worshipped in the Old Testament you couldn t help but see all the death and blood around you and smell all the smells of a slaughterhouse. And you knew that your sin was the cause of all this pain and ugliness. John is aware of all of this when he writes in his First Letter, if anyone does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense Jesus Christ, the righteous One. [He s without defect, isn t He?] He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours [we Jewish Christians] but also for the sins of the whole world. Translators coming to this verse have a choice: they can translate it atoning sacrifice or something to that effect, or they can use a $2 word that s more accurate but which nobody knows: Propitiation. Unless you come to our Tuesday Afternoon Bible Study! Here s what John is saying: When Jesus died for you and me, He was satisfying the wrath of a Holy God against us. He was our substitute just like that bull in Leviticus He took God s wrath against sin upon Himself so you and I wouldn t have to! So because of Jesus, and His death in our place, God is not our ENEMY, He s our FRIEND and even our FATHER! We re His friends and children! That s what Paul is talking about when He says in Romans 5, We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Not just a feeling of inner peace (as wonderful as that is), but we are literally at peace with this Holy God because Jesus took our place on that awful cross. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:21) 5

6 And that s what Leviticus 1 is all about! Rev. Robert Smallman Bible Presbyterian Church (Presbyterian Church in America) 1605 Highway G Merrill, WI