Hi, I’m Laura. I just finished reading through Leviticus, and that’s all recorded here on previous episodes of Bible News Press, and I wanted to share some thoughts I had as I was evaluating what I had read.
I think reading through Leviticus is challenging and it seems hard in a few ways. It seems hard in that the laws and the regulations seem harsh and unyielding. And we’ll get into that more later.
It seems hard in that there are a lot of details that are complicated. And then in conjunction with that, it is hard because some of the parts are difficult to understand even when you have the rest of the Bible to compare them to. They’re just things that the average person doesn’t have enough knowledge to know what they mean.
But when you put Leviticus in the perspective of the whole Bible and what we know God is like, I think we can compare it to learning to swim. It may sound harsh to explain to someone that if they try to breath underwater, they will die. Or if they go out in the deep or in fast moving water they will be swept away. But it is a reality.
Sin is like that. It is destructive and life-threatening. To continue with the analogy of swimming, God is using Leviticus to help us understand that not only do we need him to show us how to swim, he is our strength to do the swimming.
I think it is important to notice that Leviticus starts with instructions for sacrifices and offerings. True to form, knowing our human limitations, God makes clear the way of repentance and forgiveness. He shows what needs to be done when we can’t, inevitably, follow all of his laws.
But there are two sides to the issue, because he still has to help us understand the depravity of sin and why we need forgiveness. That is what the law is for.
Now, let’s get into some details. He says, “Be holy, for I am holy.” So then you have to go back and review “what does it mean to be holy.” Sometimes this word holy can tend to be a religious word that we just think of as, oh, having to do with God. Or it has been coopted religiously to have to do with certain rituals or officiation within the church.
But in that statement, God is inviting us to be holy like him. That’s kind of mind boggling!
When you look up the word holy in the dictionary, it says that which is set apart. And it is associated with the idea of to be whole or to be healthy. In the context of Leviticus, we can see that this would mean “to be set apart from sin for what is good and right.”
There is no relativity in holiness. You either are or you aren’t.
There are several places in the New Testament that expound on the idea that the law is a model to point us to Christ, who is the ultimate and final and only path to holiness.
Even people of the Old Testament who had faith and were doing their best to follow the law were always more counted for righteousness for their faith, or for their trust in God, and there was always hinting that they had some idea that there was this mystery of redemption that was going to be revealed.
It is curious to note that in the oldest known book of the Bible, Job, he is carrying out sacrifices and things apart from being part of the nation of Israel and apparently well before the law was given. So this idea of sacrifice, of shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sin, was already established.
For a pretty quick review of how we are not under the law, you could go listen to the reading of the book of Galatians that I also did recently.
So, we’re not under the law. But reading Leviticus, even if you know that, can be confusing. I see 3 main categories of things in the law and how those things are clarified in the New Testament.
- There are those things that we are obviously told we are free of. We don’t have to worry about clean versus unclean foods, or circumcision, or the legality of the Sabbath, or daily sacrifices, or offering of animals.
- There are things that are listed as still obviously bad and wicked. Things like sexual sins, sacrificing children to Molech, cheating or stealing, as well as delving into ocultic powers.
- In the third category are things that are no where mentioned again. Things like how to trim your beard, mixing your seed or your fabric, or whether or not there is mildew in your house, or how concerned should you be about whether a woman is having her period or not.
When you remember that Jesus himself says that the law is summed up in loving your God and loving your neighbor as yourself, these categories make sense. In category 1 are things that are no longer an issue or were dealt with by the cross. In category 2 are things that are perversions of God’s creation and are harmful to people.
And things in category 3 just don’t seem to matter because culture does change and they don’t anymore, they do not currently, have anything to do with idol worship or distinctly pagan practices. They appear to have been matters of appearance, much like the merely braiding of hair was in the New Testament.
There is obviously nothing sinister about braiding the hair or exactly how the beard is trimmed. It has to do with what message was being sent by doing that. If a certain action no longer carries that message, then doing it doesn’t matter or not.
Much like I’ve heard in the past, the discussion about whether or not to have a Christmas tree, because somewhere in the past somebody worshipped trees. It just doesn’t matter. If you’re not worshipping the tree, you can enjoy the tree in your house if you would like to. And I think you can safely say that most people do not understand the cutting of a Christmas tree to be an act of pagan worship in our day and age.
Jesus also made quite a clear statement that what goes into a man, physically, does not defile him. And he labeld the Pharisees and the Sadducees as white washed tombs, because they carried out certain rituals, but their hearts were not following after God.
This is a theme in other places in the Bible, like Psalm 51:17, Hosea 6:6, and Matthew 9:13, that you can’t just give sacrifices. If you don’t understand what is supposed to be happening with them, that you are supposed to be repentant, they are meaningless.
So, just to clarify further on this topic of repentance – there are, again, 3 things that stand out to me.
- It was clearly provided for that the penalties were for the unrepentant. You could approach God and ask to be forgiven.
2. Repentance and contriteness were implied in the sacrifices. Just the idea that they were supposed to put their hand on the head of the sacrifice and recognize the degree of death, the blood that had to flow from this innocent, perfect animal for their sin, was supposed to help remind them about the sin and bring them to a place of humility if they weren’t already there.
These were not just outward rituals or formulas to appease a capricious God. They showed how bad sin was and that only blood could wash it clean.
There’s another interesting story in the New Testament that underscores that following the law is not just about the ritual. Remember the story of the rich young ruler who was trying very hard to follow the whole law and Jesus did not correct him when he said he had followed the whole law.
Apparently he had offered the appropriate sacrifices, but God, knowing his heart, said to him that he was lacking one thing and that was a step of giving up his things that he was attached to so that he could be totally given over to God. It wasn’t that wealth was bad and it wasn’t that this guy had a bad attitude, per se, it was that he was holding back something of himself. And –
3. There are main characters who broke the law and were blessed after repentance. Or that they lived according to repentance when they erred. The most obvious example is David. He was accused of both murder and adultery, and those are things people are supposed to be stoned for.
But he died still receiving the promises of God on deathbed, and he is described as a man after God’s own heart. Repentance is key.
There were a couple of specific things toward the end that I wanted to mention. One is regarding the idea of having slaves. And it looks like God condones slavery. I think you could say that it’s like divorce, where he’s saying, when you do this, if you do this, you can’t enslave your brothers. And I think that in this context, this is more of an example of “those who are not God’s children (and after the New Testament, that means those who have not believed in Jesus) ARE slaves to sin.
That is the picture there in Leviticus. People who were not the children of Israel were not God’s people and they were inherently slaves. It’s very clear in the New Testament that slaves are to attempt to be free if they can, but they are also not to have bad attitudes about whatever position in life they are in, in this evil world where people do bad things to other people.
And the other odd thing is in the last chapter, where it’s talking about the valuation of vows for people. And it seems like God doesn’t value women or very young people or very old people. But I think if you look at the last sentence of that paragraph, where it says if someone is too poor to pay the valuation for the vow, then the priest should help them decide how much they can pay.
I think those valuations for those vows are an expression of economic reality and God was not asking as much for a woman because she couldn’t be valued as much in that society. It’s not that he doesn’t value her as much. And, again, that is made very abundantly clear in other places in the Bible and in the New Testament.
So – I hope my thoughts on that are somewhat helpful and can help you evaluate what you’ve been reading in the context of the whole Bible. I will also put a link to a particular Koinonia House article, by Chuck Missler, that I found interesting about Leviticus.
And in the near future here, I’m going to be recording the few Bible News Press time traveler articles that I wrote about Leviticus. Meanwhile I will also be re-recording some of the chapters of Genesis that I need to get recorded from the World English Bible, instead of the copyrighted New American Standard Bible.
And if anybody has any particular books of the Bible they would like me to read sooner rather than later (because I do plan on getting to them all), or particular topics that you would be interested in having a discussion on, then please feel free to send me an email via the forms on the website, thehappyhomeschool.com, where this podcast is hosted.
The Most Important Book: Leviticus
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What Does God Think About Slavery ?
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