Leviticus Notes

These notes were made in 2002 as part of a journaling experiment.  They have not been revisited or revised in the time since they were first penned.  Be aware that they represent thoughts immediately after reading and without benefit of further investigation (in most cases) or reflection.See the accompanying outline.

April 6, 2002

Leviticus 1-2

On initial examination, the text included in these two chapters of Leviticus, chapters that concern the proper ways of making sacrifices to God, seem very archaic, obscure, and just plain weird.  However, there are some important truths contained here that apply to us even though we don’t take an “animal from either our herd or our flock” to the tent of meeting to be sacrificed.  What are those important truths?  I’m glad you asked.  Let’s look.Sacrifices should be made.  Up in verse 2, as God speaks to Moses out of the Tent of Meeting, he does not say, “If you bring offerings” or “If you feel like bringing offerings.”  He says “When you bring an offering.”  It is expected that people will bring an offering.  We should want to bring an offering.  Giving something of ourselves to God is a worthwhile thing.  The animal offerings described here might strike us as terribly wasteful.  “What’s in it for me?” is not even thought about here.  The nation of Israel is here giving up something wholly and holy to God.  There is no worldly investment here.  This sort of giving has to be an act of faith.  You could say that a good Baptist’s gifts to a building fund or to the budget of a church are to some degree an investment expecting a return.  I give to my church because I love God and I believe in the work of my church, but I also expect to get something—like a better church—out of the deal.  But when I give to missions, then I really am not expecting anything in return.  Similarly, the sacrifice here doesn’t do anybody any good.  It just blesses God.  The only way that this sacrifice will pay off in any form is if God determines that it should pay off.Certain sacrifices are appropriate.  Throughout this passage, the implied and overt commandment is that there are certain things that will please God in the way of a sacrifice.  For us, certain things that we give are suitable and pleasing, “an aroma pleasing to the Lord,” while others are not smiled upon.God expects our best.  One of the things that seems clearest here is that God doesn’t want seconds.  If it is a bull, then it has to be a strong, perfect male—“without defect.”  Obviously this prefigures the gift of Jesus, a male without defect, but I think that there is something to it beyond just the symbolism.  Let’s think about this from an animal husbandry perspective.  When I give an animal that is without defect, I am giving of my best.  I am making a real sacrifice.  If I were giving of my chickens, then I would be giving up one of my potential breeding stock.  I notice that in the case of birds, there is no gender distinction made.  But if I give up a bull or a ram, then I am giving up a strong, large animal that could impregnate many females.  That’s important.  When I give up a female, I give up her genetic potential in the limited number of offspring she could produce.  But in the case of a male, I am giving up his genetic potential in a much larger number of offspring.  This is a significant sacrifice.God doesn’t impoverish us.  While the sacrifice of a male animal without defect is significant genetically, it is not devastating to the herd or the flock.  Why do I say that?  Unless I am sacrificing my only male, I do not cut down the potential number of offspring that can come from my herd or flock by sacrificing that one male.  I do take away one particularly strong piece of DNA, but I can do this as an act of faith.  God typically does not work in such a manner as to give us calves or lambs out of thin air.  Barring a dramatic miracle, we have to expect that we can only have new births from existing females.  But God can certainly bless us through genetic good fortune.  If I give up my best male, God can still give me the same number of young and even make them strong and healthy.God understands our ability to give.  This passage could demand a particular sacrifice, but it allows some flexibility.  I can give a bull, a goat, a sheep, or grain.  I can give a bird.  Clearly if I am a rich man with lots of bulls and I choose to give a dove, then I am being disrespectful of God, but there is no slight placed on the person who brings an offering of birds.  This echoes the story of the widow’s mite.We give to a particular recipient.  I could sacrifice chickens out here in my garden if I wanted to.  The Israeli could have saved time and sacrificed that bull or that grain out in the south forty.  But each section of these two chapters stipulates that the sacrifice be done at the Tent of Meeting—the temple in later years—at the hand of the priests, the Sons of Aaron.  This suggests that I cannot simply give my tithe to any good cause that I want to.  I should bring my offering to my own church.We give partly to support the clergy.  In the case of the grain offerings, the bulk of the offering is not burned on the altar but is given to Aaron’s sons, the priests.  Why?  I doubt that they just kept it in the back room.  This was part of their support. As I suggested before, there is a good bit of symbolism implicit and overt in these two chapters.  I am thinking specifically of the prefiguring of Christ in the sacrifices.  First of all, the animal sacrifice sections, all of the animals have to be males without defect.  Jesus was, of course, a male and He had no defect.  A defective bull would not be a suitable sacrifice.  God would not accept such a sacrifice.  Its smoke would not have produced “an aroma pleasing to God.”  Similarly, the sacrifice of a sinful person, a person with defect, has no meaning to God.  I notice that while the grain offerings are partial offerings, with the priests taking some of the grain for themselves, the animal offerings were whole offerings.  There wasn’t the option of hanging onto a big chunk of meat.  Similarly, Jesus was offered up whole.  He didn’t give part of himself.  He gave all of Himself.  In the case of the grain offerings, it is stipulated that there should be no yeast in any of these offerings.  Yeast, in most of its appearances in the Bible—only one exception comes to mind—is a symbol of sin.  Certainly it was a symbol of sin in the case of the Passover regulations.  We don’t sacrifice sin on the altar.  Sin does not create an aroma pleasing to God.  However, the passage specifically states that we can have yeast in something that we bring as an offering of firstfruits.  That suggests some difference between the sacrifice on the altar and the sacrifice of firstfruits.  I’m sure that we will get more on this later, but I am intrigued right now to find out what we’re talking about.  Finally, we have to salt our offerings, although it is not completely clear—yes it is, never mind.  What does the salt do?  It doesn’t do anything.  None of these sacrifices actually do anything.  They are not magic.  They serve as reminders.  That’s all.  The salt serves as a reminder of God’s covenant.  The salt of the covenant.  That’s an interesting idea.  Why would salt be equated with the covenant of God?  I don’t know.  I’ll keep my eyes out for that one.  Salt is an interesting item in the Bible.  It is both a good thing, as here or in the idea of being salt and light, and a bad thing, denoting death or lifelessness.  That’s intriguing.

April 8, 2002

”‘If someone’s offering is a fellowship offering, and he offers an animal from the herd, whether male or female, he is to present before the LORD an animal without defect.  ² He is to lay his hand on the head of his offering and slaughter it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. Then Aaron’s sons the priests shall sprinkle the blood against the altar on all sides.  ³ From the fellowship offering he is to bring a sacrifice made to the LORD by fire: all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them,  ⁴ both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the covering of the liver, which he will remove with the kidneys.  ⁵ Then Aaron’s sons are to burn it on the altar on top of the burnt offering that is on the burning wood, as an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.As if Leviticus were not strange enough to modern ears, we get to chapter 3 with its instructions on what to do in the case of a “Fellowship Offering.”  The main difference seems to be in the way that the fat and internal organs are handled.  In all of the cases that we reviewed yesterday, we heard about the way that blood was to be treated in the sacrifices.  The blood was to be drained out of the animal, whichever species it turned out to be, and some of it was sprinkled on all four sides of the altar.  Then, in Lev 3:17, we hear the prohibition on blood: “This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live:  You must not eat any fat or any blood.”  Okay, I guess I understand the blood part of this.  The blood represents the blood of Jesus.  Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin and so forth.  But what is the deal with this fat?  I’d like to understand that one as well.                Although it isn’t stated here overtly, there is a inferrance to be drawn regarding these fellowship offerings.  The previous offerings were basic whole offerings.  The entire offering, minus the blood which had been sprinkled onto the sides of the altar, was burned on the altar.  There wasn’t anything left.  In the case of the grain offerings, this is different, but we’re talking about animals at this point in chapter three.  But these fellowship offerings, presumably, allow us to eat the meat.  You can’t eat any fat or blood, but presumably you can eat the rest of what there is in this animal.  You burn the fat and you sprinkle the blood, but the rest is available to eat.  What is a fellowship offering?  Presumably the Israelites knew the answer to this question, so they didn’t bother to ask and Moses didn’t bother to tell them.  I’ll have to dig a bit to get the answer to that question.                

So far in this trio of chapters, we have discovered three special substances.  First we have the blood which is, in all of the animal cases, going to be sprinkled on all four sides of the altar.  Second, we have the fat, which in all of the animal cases, is going to be burned on the altar (although in the whole offering cases, the fat is simply burned with the rest of the animal).               

The word that is used in the case of the whole offerings was qorban, which simply means offering.  The word used in the third chapter is shelem which is rendered as peace offering.  In the NIV, the translation is fellowship offering, while in the King James it is peace offering.  Some commentators suggest that the distinction lies in the qorban being a sort of compulsory gift where the shelem is an expression of thanks for some particular blessing.  The Bible Knowledge Commentary (BKC) suggests that the fat, rather than being the gross obesity that we Americans might think of it to be, is synonymous with the best of the animal.  So we are sprinkling away the life blood, the symbol of the blood by which we would be saved.  We are burning away the fat, the best that represents our best, perhaps?  And we are left with the good, the meat.  Does that make sense?                 

I’m running out of stuff to write about today.  I think I used all of the good material up on Saturday.                We’ll notice that the animal portion of this chapter is not parallel with the one from the first two chapters—or actually from chapter one since it was the one dealing with animals.  Chapter two dealt with grain offerings.  How was it different?  Let me explain.  In the first chapter, we have three sections.  The first section deals with offering bull.  The second deals with offering an animal “from your flock,” a goat or a sheep.  Then the third one deals with the offering of birds.  We’ll remember that the poor family of Joseph and Mary, after the birth of Jesus, made an offering of doves.  The offering of birds seems to have been the thing for people who couldn’t afford to offer a bull or a ram.  In the third chapter, we once again have a three-fold division of the material.  The first section is just like the first section of chapter one, the offering of a bull, an animal from your herd.  Then we have the animals from your flock.  But this time, the sheep and the goat are treated separately.  Why would that be?  And why were they treated together in the first chapter?  That’s a simple question to answer, I think.  The difference between chapter one and chapter three is basically that in chapter three we are getting into the details involved with the internal organs of the animal.  You can’t treat a sheep and a goat in the same manner because they are both plumbed differently.  Then, with all three sections of chapter three taken up, we find that there is not the corresponding “bird” section for this chapter.  Why would there be no provision for the sacrifice of birds in the fellowship offering section?  Do poor people not need to make a peace offering?  That’s an intriguing question.  This is something that suggests to me that there is a more compulsory aspect to the offerings in chapter one.  Because there was this compulsoary aspect, God made provision so that everybody, even if they are very poor, would be able to participate in the offering.  However, since the fellowship or peace offering seems to be something that is more of an optional nature, we are left wondering if the poor would simply not be required to participate in that.   Obviously if it is optional you would not be required to participate, but what I am trying to say is that you wonder that they were not given some method for participation.  I am also left wondering what happened to the meat.  Did it go to the priests or did it go to the family.  Was this sort of like the Passover lamb, which Peter and John took to the temple to have killed and prepared?  Is that what a peace offering is all about?  These are the questions to pursue in the future.

April 9, 2002

Leviticus 4

This entire chapter wraps up this portion of the sacrifice discussion that leads off Leviticus.  All of the sacrifices described here revolve around when someone within Israel “sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the Lord’s commands.”  In each case we have something like this going on.  The person who has done the sinning brings a sacrifice to the temple.  He is to present it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting.  The person who has committed the sin is to lay his hand upon the head of the offering animal.  In the case of the whole nation of Israel sinning, the elders lay their hands on the animal, presumably as representatives of the whole nation.  After that the animal is slaughtered.  The priest then takes some of the blood and sprinkles it all over the place.  They then burn the entrails in the same manner as it was done for the fellowship or peace offerings.  Finally, the remaining carcass of the animal is not burned on the altar in the temple, nor is it given over to the persons making the offering for them to consume.  It is instead hauled outside the camp and burned there.  Actually, this last part is only mentioned when the priest and the whole community sin.  I’m not sure if we should apply this practice to the lay individuals.  In fact, there are some fair reasons why it would make a logical sense for it not to be applicable to all.  When the priest sins, the sin is, literally or figuratively, in the confines of the temple.  When the whole nation of Israel sins, then the sin is figuratively within the temple as well, sort of.  By taking the animal outside of the tent of meeting, which I think it is not wrong to say represents the nation of Israel on one level, the people are symbolically casting the remnants of that sin out of their presence utterly.  When a leader or an individual sins, that sin is really just within them.  The big motion of taking the sin outside of the temple is not as necessary.  I might be reading something into this here that really isn’t present, but I think that there is some merit to this.  What do we learn from this?God expects more from leaders than from common people:  In verse twenty-two, the leader is required to bring a male goat to the temple.  In verse twenty-seven, a member of the community is required to bring a female goat.  The male being more valuable than the female, it is reasonable to assume that what we have here is the valuing of the sins of the leaders at a higher level than the valuing of the sins of the common people.  That’s an important point.  All too often these days it seems as if leaders see themselves as the privileged ones.  Watching the History Channel last night, I saw a program that described the various survival schemes that both the U.S. and the Russian governments had devised in order to be sure that a nuclear war didn’t wipe out their nations.  In both cases, the people who were going to be preserved were the leaders.  Their logic was that it was important to the nation’s well-being to preserve the leaders.  When you think it through, however, you realize that after a nuclear holocaust, the leaders wouldn’t have anybody to lead.  So what were they preserving themselves for?  They were preserving themselves to save their sorry carcasses, that’s what!  Leaders are not only no better than the common people, but they are held to a higher standard than the common people.  Even though the sins being described here are all unintentional, the leaders are required to pay a higher price for their sins.God expects more from clergy than from anybody else:  It is no coincidence that this passage lists the sins of the priests first.  God expects more from the leader than from the individual man.  God expects more from the nation of Israel as a whole than from the individual, leader or common person.  God expects the most from the priests.  The priests are required to bring a bull, not a goat as all of the other individuals have to bring.  God expects a great deal from clergy today.  Does God hold their sins to a higher standard today?  I think that it is reasonable that He does.  After all, when the member of the clergy sins, it has the strong potential to lead many astray.  How many people have used the sins of a preacher as a pretext for their own falling away from God?  That’s a silly reason, but it happens nonetheless.  When you cause one of these little ones to stumble, Jesus told us, it would be better that a millstone were tied around your neck and you were tossed into the ocean.  Even today, clergy are held to a higher standard.  Unfortunately, too many of them don’t seem to recognize that.  They seem to realize the perks that come from holding an ecclesiastical title, but they don’t recognize the responsibility that comes with that.  I was thinking the other day of the sad case of Lindy Reed.  Lindy, when pasturing at Birchwood Baptist Church, had a peculiar habit.  While the rest of the world went onto daylight savings time on Saturday night/Sunday morning, Lindy suggested that his church go ahead and stay on the standard time for that Sunday.  Was he doing this in order to serve people?  I don’t think so.  After all, any visitor who might come on that day or any sporadic attender who hadn’t heard that he was manipulating the clock in this manner would wind up coming an hour early.  That’s not exactly serving people.  Was he serving his people, the people in the know?  I don’t think that makes sense either.  After all, most of us have to get out of bed earlier on Monday morning than on Sunday morning.  If we’re losing an hour of sleep, I’d rather lose it on Sunday morning when I’m already getting to sleep a bit later.  So who did he serve by this?  I’d say that he was serving himself.  I don’t think he liked to lose that hour of sleep.  He didn’t have to get up particularly early on Monday, so rather than suffering a tiny bit himself on Sunday, he let everybody else adapt their lives to his.  Now, I don’t know for sure that this was his thinking, but it would seem to be consistent with what the guy did.God holds us accountable for all sins, intentional and unintentional:  There are those who believe that if you don’t know that a sin exists then you are not accountable for it.  Of course Romans teaches us that God has written the law on our hearts so that there really is no excuse.  But at least in the case of Israel, ignorance is no excuse for the sinner.  In fact, the offering for sin that is unintentional seems to be more rigorous than the offering that is described in chapter one.  So my question is this.  What was that offering for?  You might think of it as a sin offering—presumably an intentional sin offering—but you can’t imagine the sacrifice for intentional sin would be less rigorous than the sacrifice for unintentional sin.  So what is going on here?So far we have had just plain offerings.  We have had the fellowship or peace offerings.  We have had the sacrifices for unintentional sin.  So where is the sacrifice for intentional sin?  Perhaps we are going to get to it, but perhaps that sacrifice is only available in the person of Jesus.One final comment.  As messy as all of this sounds, I am really glad that we do not have to contend with doing these sacrifices today.  I’m glad because the final sacrifice has been made, but I am also glad for a simpler, more selfish reason.  It’s just gross.

April 11, 2002

I’m starting to think that the theme of Leviticus could be, “How many different ways can a person sin.”  The answer to this question seems to be that there is an almost endless manner of ways in which a person can sin.  In the previous chapter we had sacrifices to be made in the case of someone sinning unintentionally.  Now, in chapter five, we have the sacrifices to be offered in the case of someone sinning without knowing it.                The various sections here don’t seem completely consistent.  Some of them seem to be things that you commit and then discover.  In other words, you didn’t know that you sinned, but once you learn about it, then you are guilty.   Here’s an example.  “If he touches human uncleanness—anything that would make him unclean—even though he is unaware of it, when he learns of it he will be guilty.” (5:3)  Several of these paragraphs say something very similar to that.  But the first one, the one about not speaking up to testify, does not have something about you not being guilty until you learn about it.  I thought that was really weird when I first read it, but now that I think about it for a minute, it makes perfect sense.  You can certainly touch uncleanness without knowing it.  That’s an easy thing to have happen.  On the other hand, you can’t very well choose to not speak up in a situation where you might be able to testify about something that you have seen or learned about.  You can’t fail to speak and not know about it.  So really that isn’t strange at all.  What is strange is that this sin of omission—failing to speak up when you know something important—is mixed in with all of these other sins of ignorance.  What do we learn from this chapter?Sin is sin:  It does not matter whether you know you are doing it or not at the time that you are doing it.  Sin is sin.  Sin makes us less than unholy and thus separates us from God.  It seems to me as if this chapter, and perhaps the chapter preceding as well, are set here to be a “Thou shalt not quibble” barrier.  Many people, reading the Mosaic Law have thought that it seemed exceptionally arcane and Byzantine.  But in reality, I think that this law is simply hitting all of the details so that there aren’t any failures to communicate.  The people of Israel had to be shown all of the different ways in which they could sin.  This reminds me of the passages in Paul’s writings when he talks about sinfulness.  First, in Romans, he talks about the law being the power by which God makes sin visible.  That’s the main purpose of the law.  Here, in Leviticus, we have the law being explained and it is being explained in excruciating detail.  We understand that there are a million ways to fall short of the mark.  Second, I’m thinking of the passage somewhere—I thought it was in Romans—where Paul talks about the evil people inventing ways to do evil.  Here, God is laying out all of the ways to do evil and inventing ways to atone for those sins.  Ultimately, of course, the fulfillment of the law was such that God only invented one real and lasting way to atone for these sins.Sin is conscious:  Maybe I mis-named that header.  Sin is sin, as I said in the previous chapter, but the sinner is not guilty of the sin, according to this chapter, until he becomes aware of the sin.  How many times does chapter five say “when he becomes aware of it” he is guilty.  This could be confusing, but I don’t think that it needs to be.  The sin is always sin.  If I do something but I do not know it, then I have sinned, but I am not guilty for that sin until I realize my sin.  One of the definitions of “sin” is to “miss the mark.”  If I am shooting a rifle on a range, I can shoot and shoot and shoot.  I might miss the mark regularly, but until I pick up my field glasses and look to the target and see where my bullet hit, I am not really aware, not cognizant, of my error.  I’m still responsible for my shooting, am I not?  I suppose I am, but let’s assume that my bad shooting was not as the result of a careless aim.  Let’s assume that my bad shooting is the result of a faulty site, a windy range, or somesuch.  If that is the case, then I am still missing the mark.  When I become aware of it, though, I am responsible for it and need to make correction.  I cannot be expected to make correction for it until I am aware of it.  I cannot be expected to take responsibility for it until I know what has happened.Forgiveness of sin is not a paying thing:  When you first read this chapter, you might think that sin is the sort of a thing that you can buy your way out of.  After all, when a person sins in one of the unintentional things that are mentioned in the first half of the chapter, becoming unclean, failing to speak up, and the like, then he is to bring a sacrifice of a lamb, a female lamb, to the temple.  When a person sins unintentionally in doing “one of the Lord’s Holy Things,” then the sacrifice is a ram.  What are the Lord’s Holy things?  Might that be the Ten Commandments, the really core laws?  I think that is a reasonable interpretation.  Why do I say, then, that forgiveness is not something that is paid for?  Well, I don’t exactly mean that it isn’t something that is paid for.  I mean that it isn’t a money thing.  In the case of the lesser offenses, there are levels of sacrifice.  You can bring a lamb.  If you can’t afford a lamb, then you can bring a pair of doves.  If you can’t afford a pair of doves, then you can bring a ephah of wheat.  In the case of the serious sins, you must bring a ram.  But I think that it is reasonable to say that this is not a shake-down.  Sin is not something that you buy your way out of.All Sin is Not the Same:  This is an area where I think that Baptists get somewhat confused.  We rightly note that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  We point out that our righteousness is like filthy rags.  We say that all sin separates us from God whether we tell a single harmless lie or murder hundreds.  That is true on one level.  However, this chapter definitely separates some sins from others.  They are all sins, both the sins of uncleanness and the sins against the Lord’s Holy things, but they do not have the same penalty.  They are all sins and require a sacrifice, but, in the Mosaic Law, the sacrifice is not all the same.  Some sins have options; others do not.  Some sins require a more valuable sacrifice; others require a less valuable one.  All sin is not the same.  All of our sin receives the same sacrifice in Jesus Christ hanging on the cross of Calvary.  But all sin does not have the same result.  Some sins are more serious than others.  Some sins cause more problems in my life than do others.  I suppose that we should see that some sins only separate me from God.  I do not want to say that as an “only” but I don’t have better words for it.  Some sins only work to separate me from God, while other sins work to separate me both from God and from men.  If I think a hateful thing about someone driving on I-435 today and that sin goes no further, then the only effect that I can see is that this sin puts a wedge between me and my God.  If, however, I yell at my children, then I not only harm my relationship with God but also harm my relationship with my children.

April 12, 2002

This just gets difficulter and difficulter.  In chapter six, the progression of sins continues.  Here Moses talks about sins about which we are aware.  He gives a whole list of them and focuses on property sins.  But then he leaves off with a catch-all phrase “if he commits any  such sin that people may do.”  That’s pretty wide open.  Finally, in this case, the story includes something other than just offerings on the altar at the Tent of Meeting.  In the case of the known, property sin, the sinner is to make restitution, adding twenty percent to what was defrauded or stolen from the other person.  What a refreshing difference that is from the two extremes of current experience.  In one case, nobody wants to own up to their own sins.  If somebody cheats somebody else, they will take all manner of steps to ensure that they never have to admit that they have caused somebody else a loss.  We have lawyers running all over the land to make sure that we can tie these claims up for a long time.  What does that do?  It keeps the sin and the resentment in the land.  In the case of Leviticus, the matter can be closed out quickly.  If you steal a ten-shekel goat from me, then you need to give me ten shekels for the goat and then two shekels for the twenty percent that is the punitive damage.  And then things are done.  The plaintiff has no cause to complain after that.  The criminal has no need to continue to fear a legal assault.  It is done.  What happens in America?  Rather than being satisfied with being repaid with the addition of twenty percent, people, again fueled by the greed of lawyers, seek incredible amounts.  An African-American woman is detained at Dillards, wrongfully stopped for shoplifting.  She sues Dillards.  What did she lose?  She lost her time, which has to be of some value.  She lost the ability to get some sort of a premium for which she had a coupon.  What was her monetary loss?  It was probably something like $100 at the most.  And what did she seek?  Was it $120 that she sought when the lawsuit came down?  No.  She sought an award in the millions.  I don’t want to defend some yutz of a security guard who can’t be any more skilled than to arrest a person based on the color of her skin, but how in the world can anybody claim that being wrongfully detained for a half hour is worth millions of dollars.  If that is the case, I wish somebody would wrongfully detain me.                  We have, after this little conclusion of the specific instructions on the various sins that people might commit, a sort of review or general statement of the procedures to be followed.  There are three types of offerings mentioned in this passage.  We have the burnt offerings first.  The burnt offerings are the whole offerings.  They were the ones mentioned back in chapter one.  Burnt offerings seem to take the whole animal.  Then, second, we have the grain offerings.  The grain offerings were placed in the same category as the burnt offerings which I find rather confusing.  The reason that I find it confusing is that rather than burning the whole offering, the entire measure of grain, the priest is instructed to take some of it, a “memorial portion” and burn that on the altar.  The remainder of the grain can be consumed by the priests.  Why is it that this grain offering, which seems to serve the same function as the burnt animal offering of a bull, a goat, a lamb, or birds, is partially consumed by the priests while the burnt offering seems to be completely burned?  That seems odd to me.  The third type of offering mentioned in this section on the “regulations” is the sin offering.  The sin offering is specifically described to include an allowance for the priests to get a good meal out of the deal.  The way that those Israelites sinned, those priests must have eaten pretty well.  What a curious spectacle.  The girth of the priests might have been a measure in those days of the sinful nature of the people.  But of course, besides being a measure of sin, that girth would also have been a measure of the repentance of the people.  Skinny priests might have indicated either very holy people who simply didn’t sin and then didn’t bring their sin offerings to the Tent of Meeting.  Or it might have indicated very wicked people who were sinning all over the place and, in addition to their sins against their fellow man, they were sinning against God by ignoring the provisions for sacrifices here in the book of the Law.                I want to wrap this up by thinking for a few minutes about sacrifices today.  We don’t bring sacrifices today.  We bring offerings and we might think of those two things as being the same, but they are really not the same at all.  Let’s look at the differences.  Clearly the most obvious difference is that offerings do not get burned, where sacrificies get at least partially burned.  Beyond that, offerings go one hundred percent to the use of the church.  Nothing is destroyed.  Sacrifices range from being partially destroyed in the case of the burnt offering to being partly destroyed in the case of the grain and the sin offerings.  Offerings are practical matters, where sacrifices are not practical in an earthly sense.  They are ritual representations of the sacrifice of Jesus and the dedication of the people to the Lord.  Offerings are similar in some ways to sacrifices, of course.  Offerings come out of our best, if we are being obedient.  Offerings are a sacrifice of sorts.  But nothing dies when we make an offering.  Or maybe I should say that something dies, but it is a part of me that dies when I make an offering.  Is the offering of money something that creates an aroma pleasing to the Lord?  I think that it is, because it means that we are humbling ourselves.  We have to remember that those animals represented currency and a measure of wealth in the days that we are studying.  They didn’t have money in those days.  So we should not make too big of a distinction.  Sure, there is no shedding of blood, but neither was there the shedding of blood in the case of the grain offering.  The sacrifical system at the Tent of Meeting served two purposes in those days.  On the one hand, it served the purpose of ritualistically demonstrating the future sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.  But just as importantly, perhaps, it trained up God’s people to be sacrificial in their giving.  In other words, it demonstrated God’s sacrificial action at the same time that it prescribed the people’s sacrificial action.  That isn’t too hard to understand is it?

April 15, 2002

I have to say at this point that I am tired of offerings and sacrifices, their regulations and so forth.  How am I supposed to make any sense of all of this?  The first thing that I have noticed today is that we have added yet another category of offering to the list.  First we had sin offerings, general offerings, fellowship offerings, and ordination offerings.  We were told that those offerings (most of them at least) could be offered using an animal from the herd, a bull, an animal from the flock, a goat or a sheep, a bird (or a couple), or by using grain.  And then we were given regulations concerning each permutation, who could do what, where it was to be done, and so forth.  Now today, we add a new offering, the guilt offering.  Wouldn’t a guilt offering be the same as a sin offering?I am wondering if perhaps the guilt offering is what they were talking about in chapter one.  In that case they didn’t really name the offering.  It was simply an offering that a person might want to bring to the Tent of Meeting.  That would give us offerings for guilt, which would seem to apply to everyone.  We would have the more “special occasion” sin offerings used to cover specific sins.  We would have the fellowship offereings which were used to give a special blessing to God.  Finally, we had the ordination offering, a particular and special offering that applied only to the sons of Aaron.  What do we learn today?  This is getting harder and harder as time goes on, but I’ll see what I can conjure up.Offerings are intended to provide for the priests:  Aside from whatever other purpose offerings might serve, they were designed to help feed and provide for the priests.  How do I know that?  Well obviously there are several places where the instructions specifically tell us that the priest is to receive this portion or that portion of the sacrifice.  It specifically tells us in some cases that the priest must eat this within a certain period of time.  For example, the fellowship offering, if offered as a thanks offering, had to be eaten on the day that it was offered.  If the offering was given on account of a vow, then the resulting bread could be eaten the next day but not after that.  This much is clear enough, but I have to think that this food was to provide not just for the priests but for their family and perhaps provided something for them to sell to raise other funds.  Why do I say this?  The passage says that nobody who is unclean can eat these things.  Would that apply to the priest?  I suppose that it might apply to the priests, but probably it applies to whoever else might get the food, either a  member of the priest’s family or someone else.  Think about this.  What if one-twelfth of Israel was composed of priests.  We know this isn’t the case.  Roughly one-twelfth of them would be Levites, but not priests.  If there were that many, then they would be receiving eleven offerings each per year, I suppose.  Perhaps it would be more.  In reality, of course, we’re looking at more like several hundred offerings per priest.  Those boys would certainly have been big old fatties if they ate all of this stuff.  Some of these things they are instructed to eat themselves.  Other things are simply said to be legal to eat.  That again suggests to me that they were able to sell these things.How we give is just as important to God as what we give:  This entire passage, all seven chapters so far, is really interesting in one regard.  God is constantly giving very specific instructions.  Lay your hand on the animal here.  Put the carcass here.  Burn it.  No, take it outside of the temple confines and burn it there.  But be sure that you burn it in a holy place.  You have to do it this way and not that way.  At the same time, God gives a lot of flexibility as far as what sort of animal can be brought.  It can be a bull, a goat, a sheep, a dove, or even grain.  It doesn’t even have to be an animal, does it.  So what is God’s problem here?  Is he just inconsistent, being so particular in this spot and being completely wide open in the other spot?  I think that the message is reasonably clear.  It matters very much to God how these things are done, but God is not inflexible.  Every one of the instructions is something that anybody who cares can follow.  But if I care and I am very poor, then I cannot give a bull or a ram.  That would just wipe me out.  God is not looking to wipe the worshipper out.  On the other hand, God wants a real sacrifice.  I like some of these regulations though.  Let’s look at one in particular.God wants genuine worshippers:  The thing that sticks out in my mind today is in Leviticus 7:30:  “With his own hands he is to bring the offering made to the Lord by fire.”  Why does that stick into my mind.  Why would they make the rule if it were not a rule that needed to be made.  When I worked for the Boy Scouts and later when I did training, I often responded to people who complained about the flurry of regulations that we had to follow by saying that every one of those rules represented a law suit or an accident.  People don’t make rules and laws unless there is a need for that rule or law or at least a perception of a need.  So why do you have to tell the offering giver to give it with his own hands?  I can imagine that there might be a temptation to “mail it in.”  When you are a successful person, perhaps giving a banquet, you might want to make something of a show of giving an offering.  God wasn’t interested in the offerings of posers who made a big show of their offering but were really just offering stuff.  God therefore required that the giver bring the offering to the Tent of Meeting himself.  This leads me to another thought.The real offering was human:  God does not require human sacrifice, but in reality that is what He wants.  I am not saying that God wants to see Isaac or anybody else lying on an altar and killed.  No, God wants people who, when they give, give of themselves.  When the rich person who gives the fellowship offering gives it with his own hand, he is having to give of himself.  That’s a good thing.  I’m led to think of some of the Hollywood types who will get all misty eyed about some charity and do a benefit show to raise money.  These people might even give some of their own money, but rarely do they give much if anything of themselves.  They will perform a song or two but in reality they probably receive as much promotion out of that as they are giving to the charity.  They might give some money, but they typically have gobs of money.  So what are they really giving.Brother Paul told a very moving story yesterday morning about his mother-in-law, Vera Hand.  Mrs. Hand cared for her epileptic son, Becky’s older brother, for some sixty years, taking care of him regardless of what hardship that put on her life.  That was a true sacrifice.  When God calls us to bring the offering to the tent of meeting with our own hand, he is asking us to truly sacrifice.  We aren’t supposed to just give.  We are supposed to sacrifice.  To truly sacrifice, we have to give ourselves.

April 16, 2002

The entire chapter for today deals with the ordination of Aaron and his sons to be priests before the Lord.  This is an interesting chapter, quite foreign to our sensibilities, but I think possessed of some useful material for us.  Let’s pause for a moment and think about ordination that I have seen.   In the RLDS church, the ordination was done in a fairly straightforward manner.  The candidate would be seated in a chair and then be flanked by two ministers, typically elders.  One of these two ministers would then pray after placing their hands on the head of the candidate.  This form of prayer looks very much like both their prayer over the sick and their prayer of confirmation that typically follows baptism very quickly.  In my Baptist church, the candidate is instructed to kneel before the assembled church.  Then a gang of deacons and ministers surrounds the candidate and lays their hands upon him.  Those who cannot reach the candidate place their hands on the arm or back of the person in front of them.  They all pray quietly for a moment and then somebody, typically a pastor or a senior deacon prays on behalf of all those assembled.  I know that my experience in the Baptist ordination was much more powerful than the RLDS one, but basically they do about the same thing.  The idea of “laying on of hands” which the RLDS confuse with the prayer for the sick, is certainly important to this ordinance.  It suggests the passing on of authority from one person to the next.  It suggests the conferring of power.  It suggests selection.  From Leviticus 8, though, I get the sense that it suggests something else.  More about that in a moment.  Obviously the ordination procedures in Moses’ day were considerably different than those that we practice today.  Still, I think, they set out to do the same thing functionally.  Let’s look at a few questions.Who was the ordination to benefit?  The one person or entity who did not need the ordination ceremony was God.  God could simply say, “You are a priest,” and be done with it.  I think that there is a two-fold answer to this question.  First of all, the ordination ceremony that was done on Aaron and his sons as well as that done in Protestant churches today was performed in order to send a message to the people.  Let’s look at Leviticus 8.  Who was there?  Moses was instructed to gather the “entire assembly.”  This wasn’t the sort of thing where they just invited friends and family.  It wasn’t something where they asked whoever wanted to show up to come.  Moses was supposed to gather the entire assembly.  I read that as everyone.  I’m not sure that means absolutely everyone, but I am sure that it meant most everyone.  Why did they all need to be there?  We see the same sort of thing in the current churches.  The RLDS, with their long, drawn out prayers and such for confirmations and so on—can you imagine them having to endure two hundred of those every year?—sometimes have baptism and confirmation services at off times.  They’ll do it for a select group on Sunday evening or on a weekday evening.  They never, to my knowledge, though, have an ordination other than “in front of the entire assembly.”  They do it before the whole church in a Sunday morning service.  Why?  They want everybody to see it.  First Baptist Church of Raytown does it a bit differently.  We have our ordinations at the evening service, which is smaller.  But you might think of the evening service as being before the “entire assembly” where the morning service includes a lot of strangers, visitors, and tangential members.  The people need to see the person on whom hands are laid as a minister.  They need to be allowed to see this person in a new role.  It was that much more important in the case of Aaron and his sons since they were the first priests and their role was so obviously separated and Holy.  The second beneficiary of this ordination has to be the minister himself.  After all, it is one thing for a body of believers to change the way in which they see a person.  I can go from seeing somebody as just a good guy to seeing him as a minister.  That’s doable.  But I think that it is probably harder for the candidate to see himself as something different.  After all, you don’t feel different.  You don’t really look different.  I think that it is important for Aaron or anyone else to have that big event where, in the presence of the entire assembly, he is ceremonially set apart as a minister unto the Lord.  I doubt that Aaron felt completely comfortable with this whole thing even after the process happened, but this series of events surely helped him to get into his new role.  I look at that last passage of this chapter, where Aaron and his sons are required to sit at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting for a week, and I think that this underscores this twofold benefit of the ordination.  What would it have been like if, after being ordained, Aaron and the boys had simply gone back to their homes and taken up their lives as they had previously been?  I would imagine that whatever benefits had accrued to them psychologically from this would have quickly worn off.  But by sitting there for a week, the guys had to see themselves as priests twenty-four seven.  They were not simply goatherds or metal-smiths or anything they had been before.  They were sitting here for seven days in the entrance to the tent of meeting.  I think that would have to be important.  But they weren’t just sitting in the tent of meeting.  They were sitting at the entrance to it.  So why would God have them sit there?  He wanted the people to see the men there.  He wanted to associate them with the tabernacle and with his service.  I just thought of a parallel ceremony.  After twelve years of schooling, students don silly-looking hats and robes and parade across a stage in order to receive diplomas.  Despite the pride of the family at their graduates, most of the people really don’t see their kids as being all that different after graduation.  In fact, they are just as young and dopey afterwards as they were before.  Similarly, my recollection of graduation was not that I felt suddenly transformed.  I felt the same.  I didn’t know any more.  I didn’t seem to be a different person.  By having the Aaron clan sit there, God was encouraging them to see themselves as different people.  That’s an important thing for all of us.I didn’t get very far with my questions.  And I need to start wrapping this up.  There are a few more observations that I would like to make.  In this ordination described in Leviticus 8, the laying on of hands is involved just as it is involved in all of the ordinations of the Bible.  However, I find it interesting that they don’t lay hands on Aaron and his sons.  What happens instead is that Aaron and the boys lay their hands upon the bull and the ram.  Why is that?  I am not sure about this, but I think that there is something to the idea that we should look at present-day ordination in this way.  The laying on of hands, while it might symbolize the conferring of authority and power, is also a symbol of sacrifice.  Just as Aaron and the sons laid their hands on the head of the bull about to be sacrificed, so deacons lay their hands upon the head of a would-be deacon about to sacrifice his life to the well-being of the church.  I find it hard to write through this, because I have really never thought of myself as a deacon in that way.  If we focus on that aspect of the laying on of hands, then we will see ordination in a very different light.I could go into the oil representing the Holy Spirit and the significance of the clothing.  I was taken with the smearing of blood on the ear, the thumb, and the toe.  Is that to indicate that Aaron was to be holy in what he heard, what he did, and where he went?  I’m not real strong on that regard either.

April 18, 2002

It’s a regular sacrifice fest today.  In chapter nine, I am not certain whether we have represented Aaron and his sons doing all of the things commanded of them in chapter eight or a different process.  Actually, I am sure.  Aaron and the boys were commanded to sit at the entrance to the tent of meeting for seven day.  This chapter takes place on the eighth day.  So this is after all of the other stuff.  Aaron and the sons have been installed as and ordained and so forth.  Now, with our clergy in place, we have essentially the grand opening of the tabernacle.  Maybe it is my overall down mood right now, but I am having trouble really sinking my teeth into this one.  Here’s what I come up with.Obedience is Important:  This is going to be continued in the next chapter on a negative note, but for right now we have some positive things.  At least three times in this chapter we have the affirmation that Aaron and his sons did the sacrifices in the manner that they were commanded.  In the first two we find that it was “as the Lord commanded” or “as the Lord commanded Moses.”  In the third one, it is “as Moses commanded,” which I read to be synonymous with the other two.  How did they do this stuff?  They did it as God had commanded.  That’s important.  They knew the rules.  Knowing the rules is important.  You cannot do right unless you know the right thing to do.  But besides just knowing the rules, Aaron and his sons followed the rules.  What does that say about them?  Does it say that God is some kind of celestial bean counter who gets really worked up about every mis-step?  I don’t think that is the case at all.  I think that the message that God wanted to send here was that He was Holy.  God wanted to impress upon His people that they should be obedient, that God was worthy of obedience.  That’s important.  Obedience to these details is a matter of respect.  That’s the reason why the military prescribes salutes, standing to attention, and other such matters of discipline.  It is not that standing to attention will make you a more effective soldier or save your life in and of itself.  No, marching and the manual of arms won’t make you a better fighter, but it will make you a better soldier.  It will make you more disciplined and it will make you pay better attention to your superiors.  Let’s face it, if some Army lieutenant is worthy of attention and respect, how much more is the Living God worthy of our attention and respect.  God is not interested in our opinion.  God does not need our improvisational skills.  God wants our obedience.  That’s an intriguing thought in today’s society.  In the United States today, we privilege the individual over just about everything.  What is important to us?  Civil liberties and individual rights.  “I did it my way” and “You’ve got to sing your own kind of music” are the anthems that are our day.  So what’s my point?  My point is that we are not the center of things even though we think we are.  God is the center of things and that is what God was trying to tell the people in this case.  In this chapter, they were listening to his message.Worship Begins with Giving:  That’s an unpopular idea, but it is really true.  We tend to bury giving into a little pocket of our worship services.  Giving is not important.  We like to think that we’ve gotten beyond all of that.  We don’t want the preacher telling us things about giving.  We want to just give what we feel like giving.  And we sure don’t want a big deal made about it.  But the key thing here is that it is not about us and our wants.  Yesterday, I bought a new car.  My old Cavalier was six years old, poorly maintained, and had 96,000 miles on it.  Penny thought that I should get a new car, so I did.  After my mother gave me a check for $20,000 last week, I could have bought just about any car that I would have wanted.  I could have bought the Dodge Dakota truck that I really longed after, but after looking at them, I knew that I couldn’t do that.  I knew that it wasn’t about me.  I knew that I had to buy something more economical and modest.  That was something of a sacrifice, just as giving my tithe and my offering out of that money will be a sacrifice.  How could I worship God with a Dodge Dakota in the parking lot?  I could I suppose, but it would be considerably harder.  I’m not saying that no one should have a nice car, but I am saying that at least at this point in time I should not have anything better than a Chevy Cavalier.  Worship begins with giving.  There’s a whole lot of giving that goes on in this chapter.  We have to give of our substance, but we also have to give of our lives.  That is perhaps the most essential thing here.  Aaron and the sons were giving of themselves.Worship is a Physical Thing:  It is coincidental that I should read this chapter today.  Last night in choir, Gene Calhoun made some comments about worship.  I love listening to Gene talk about worship.  He sometimes overdoes it and takes up a lot of rehearsal time, but the ideas are almost always golden.  He pointed out that if you look at the passages in the Bible in which worship is described, it just about always—he might have said always—includes the raising of hands.  That’s what we have here.  “Then Aaron lifted his hands toward the people and blessed them.”  We, as Baptists, don’t think a lot about hand gestures.  That stuff just seems too Catholic for us.  There is certainly something to be said for resisting empty gestures and meaningless rituals, but we should not ignore the fact that these things happen in the Bible.  What else happens here.  Gene pointed out that Biblical worship usually involves falling on our faces before God.  And what happens in chapter nine?  After all of the sacrifices were done and after Aaron had blessed the people, fire came out from the presence of God and consumed the burnt offering.  Wow!  The people saw it and “they shouted for joy and fell facedown.”  Facedown—that’s the name of the record label that Emily is so enamored with and that she went to California to fraternize with.  I love that combination.  The people shouted for joy and fell facedown.Worship is Communal:  Perhaps just as important as any of this is the fact that worship involves the entire community.  We don’t just have a priest doing things on behalf of the people here.  We have a priest doing things that involve the people and we have the importance of the people’s response.  “We fall down, we throw our crowns at the feet of Jesus.”  Hey, I did pretty well today for a guy who didn’t think that he could think of anything to write about here.  What do I learn from this passage?  I am not thinking that I need to go out and offer a bunch of blood sacrifices to the Lord.  That has been done on my behalf by the great and eternal High Priest.  But I do believe that I need to offer myself as a living sacrifice to the Lord.  I believe that I need to worship through giving, giving of my time, giving of my obedience, giving of my substance, and giving of my person as I worship without worrying about the reactions of others.  I have been half-hearted on every one of those items in the past.  That’s a real shame.  I need to confess that to God and seek to do better.

April 19, 2002

What a mighty God we serve!  That’s one response that we can have to this passage in which Nadab and Abihu, two of the sons of Aaron who were serving as priests with him are struck down by God because they brought “unauthorized” fire.  What precisely does that mean?  I’m not sure.  God started the fire for the altar in the previous chapter.  Presumably that fire remained burning day and night, so when these lads brought the unauthorized fire, I suppose they were popping out their Bic lighters and starting a new fire.  Now why would they do that?  This wasn’t a particularly easy thing for them.  They didn’t have matches or lighters.  Why not just go to the altar and get a light?  I do not know.  But God didn’t have any patience for this sort of thing.  He struck them down and then commanded Aaron not to mourn for the boys.  Wow.  That’s tough.  Of course some people might say, rather than “What a mighty God we serve” something like “What a cruel or capricious or unfair God we serve.”  I can dispense with the unfair thing right away.  When my kids are told to do something, they have long been very quick to say, “That’s not fair.”  They really don’t know what they mean when they say “fair.”  Fair indicates that people are being treated differently.  We typically try to show the kids that no one else in the same situation is being treated differently.  That’s something, but in reality no one else is ever in precisely the same situation.  Nadab and Abihu were not treated fairly, were they?  They went into the holy place, thus they would have died had they been anybody else.  It’s not fair that they got to go in there.  They had been instructed on what to do and on what not to do.  So what is unfair about them being punished when they don’t obey.  Is it cruel for them to die?  Is it capricious?  No and no.  One of the problems that we have when we start judging the actions of God is that we simply cannot evaluate the things that God does according to the standards of men.  It is similar to the judgment of children on the actions of adults.  The people who would call God cruel are a lot like Olivia when she goes stomping away from some situation screaming, “Nobody loves me.”  We as mere humans have no ability to judge the actions of God.  How presumptuous it is of us to think that we have any opinion to offer on the things that God does.  Let’s see.  God is omniscient, omnipresent, and all powerful, but, a creature limited in every possible way, have the ability to have some comment on the actions of God.  That’s just pitiful.What can we learn from this chapter?Ministers are held to a higher standard than ordinary people:  I suppose that anybody who had offered unauthorized fire would have been struck down, but we have to recognize that ministers are held to a higher standard.  Do I have an evidence for that?  Funny you should ask, because I do.  In the aftermath of the killing of these men, Aaron and his remaining sons are instructed not to mourn over the deaths of their sons and brothers.  That’s pretty intense stuff.  You would think that a father could mourn his sons, but there I go again judging the actions of God, rather like an amoeba judging the actions of a human.  The priestly men from Aaron’s family were prohibited from mourning, but the rest of the family and indeed the entire nation was allowed to mourn.  Ministers are held to a higher standard.  God then goes on to instruct them that they are to drink no alcoholic drinks when they go into the tent of meeting.  God does not say that drinking fermented drink is evil.  Instead he seems to be describing it as unholy and common.  Leviticus has a fourfold distinction in actions.  There are things that are holy and things common.  There are things that are clean and those that are unclean.  Alcohol is presumably common, since these men are not prohibited from it altogether.  It is just when they are serving before the Lord.  Why is drink prohibited at that time?  I think that answer is pretty obvious.  Alcohol impairs the senses.  Alcohol is lawful but not holy:  If alcohol is merely common and not unclean or sinful, then shouldn’t it be allowed to us?  It is allowed to us.  But in some of Paul’s writings we learn that all things are lawful but not all things are helpful.  That’s an important thing.  We also learn that we are all priests serving before the Lord as Christians.  So what does that say about our use of alcohol?  I would say that since the curtain in the tent of meeting (or the Temple) was ripped and we were allowed to have unbroken access to God, that we all have the potential to be in God’s presence, not just in the temple but at all times.  If I can be in God’s presence, why would I not want to do so?  Romans instructs me to make my life a living sacrifice.  Sacrifices are made on the altar in the temple of God, so I don’t really think that I should be influenced by alcohol when I am in God’s presence.   The Bible is remarkably consistent and clear.  Drunkenness is a sin.  Alcohol is not unlawful but it is common.  Since we are called to be holy, alcohol is not something that we need within our bodies.  Are there other things that are equally as common as alcohol?  Yes, but that one is named separately here.God is not unfeeling:  At the end of this chapter we find out that even though God is holy, He is apparently not without the ability to make an exception when it is warranted.  Aaron and his remaining sons have offered the sin offering but they did not eat the sin offering.  Instead they burned it up.  Moses at first criticizes Aaron for this action, but then Aaron basically says that, having lost his two oldest boys, he isn’t in the mood to eat.  I think that we can all understand that sort of thing.  There are times when you feel like eating and times when you just don’t have the heart to eat.  Why did God allow Aaron to get away with this deviation from the rules but he didn’t allow Nadab and Abihu to get away with their deviation?  We really don’t know.  They might have been able to offer their own excuse along the lines of that which their father offered had they been given the chance, but they were dropped pretty much in their tracks without the opportunity to speak.  So why did Aaron live while his sons died?  I don’t know.  The only assumption that can be made is that God knew Aaron’s heart just as he knew the heart of the sons.  Perhaps the sons were warned within their hearts.  Perhaps Aaron had already made his peace with God regarding this matter.  I don’t know.  Perhaps when we get to heaven we can ask God.

April 20, 2002

Okay, I thought I had trouble before today.  What in the world am I supposed to say about chapter eleven.  Chapter eleven is the sort of thing that people make fun of in the Bible.  You can eat this and this and this, but not that and that and that.  And there seems to be no rationale to it.  Maybe that’s it.  Maybe God’s entire point here was just that there wasn’t any rationale basis for these decisions.  People have various interpretations for the Mosaic regulations on dietary requirements.  Some would say that they are completely manmade.  Moses decided that in order to have some authority, he had to order certain sacrifices and command that certain foods could not be eaten.  He wanted to keep control.  Why did Moses order people not to eat pigs?  Perhaps Moses didn’t have any pigs.  Maybe that’s it.  Perhaps Moses was simply looking out for number one and Jews to the present day have suffered from bacon privation because of his greed.  That’s one view.  Are there others?  Sure.  Perhaps Moses just didn’t like pork.  Maybe he had a problem with shrimp and lobster.  Then, aware or unaware, he might have projected his fears and his preferences onto his people.  He turned his aversions into religious commands.  Might that be the case?  I don’t know.  Some argue that these were just superstitious requirements.  Somebody ate pork and got sick; therefore, pork became unclean.  That is an argument that some one-track-brain “free thought” yahoo threw at me several years ago.  This was the same guy who asserted that Christianity—or maybe it was religion in general—had never done anything good for the world.  He claimed that the dietary laws had arisen because of some chance encounters.  This strikes me as a pretty facile “Just So” story.  After all, in those days somebody would have gotten sick eating just about everything at one time or another.  And many people would have eaten pork with no bad results.  So what’s the big deal?  A further explanation is that this was God being incredibly wise.  After all, you can get certain diseases, which I can say but certainly cannot spell from eating improperly prepared pork.  God was just looking out for his people.  That explanation makes sense on the surface of it, but has some other problems.  Think this through.  Do all of those animals that are proscribed have diseases associated with them if they aren’t handled exactly right?  I guess that they probably all do but only because all meats have such diseases.  What about chickens and salmonella?  Certainly getting that is far more likely than getting anything from a lobster.  So why did God not also proscribe chickens.  Chickens are highly efficient producers of eggs and meat, but then pigs are highly efficient producers of meat, much more efficient than cattle, which are allowed.  So where’s the logic here.                I would argue that those who are searching for logic here are on a fool’s errand.  Perhaps the entire point of this passage is not that there is some hidden logic to God’s commandments.  Perhaps the point is simply that God is God and whatever he defines as clean is by definition clean.  Whatever he determines to be unclean is unclean.  If God doesn’t want us eating pork, then we just don’t eat pork.  We don’t have to rationalize it.  We just follow God’s commands.  That’s all.                Presumably the clean animals have been clean since the creation of the earth.  Presumably the unclean ones have been unclean since their creation as well.  We know that Noah took seven pairs of all of the clean animals on the ark with him while the unclean animals came two by two.  Either Noah knew what was clean and what was unclean, or God had already decided and arranged for Noah to have all the clean ones in sufficient numbers to take care of himself later down the road.                Let’s be clear that God is not saying that these animals are evil.  They are unclean.  What does that mean?  The term “ceremonially unclean” is used here.  Clearly, if you were unclean you could not go to the tent of meeting and do your sacrifices.  Aside from that, I’m not quite sure what unclean means.  It is not the same as evil.                Am I unclean if I eat shrimp or pork today?  First of all, I’m not sure how relevant the idea of clean and unclean is to me today.  But on the other hand, Jesus superseded the dietary law.  Jesus fulfilled the law.  That suggests to me that this portion of the law, the requirements of a ceremonial nature, is not a commandment for all time.  Jesus did not supersede the law concerning killing and adultery, but he did supersede the sacrificial and ceremonial system.  Therefore, these commands regarding foods do not apply to anybody today in reality.  Of course the orthodox Jews still hold to these things because they do not realize that they have missed their messiah’s arrival.  I am doubly exempted from the ceremonial law because I am a Gentile.  There is nothing here that says that this applies to Gentiles.  That thinking, however, can be a double edged piece of reasoning.  After all, we like to point to a lot of standards and commandments from the Torah in order to support our positions today.  But if I can brush aside chapter eleven and the prohibition on eating bugs and vultures, then why can’t I brush aside all of those other commands as well.  I want to be careful about those things.                The most important phrase in this chapter is a simple one.  “Be holy, because I am holy.”  That’s what God wants of us.  God lets us know what holy means.  He calls us to holiness.  We should be holy in what we eat.  And I know when I am not being holy with what I eat.  Today, I don’t believe that holiness derives from avoiding pork and lobster.  No, today, holy eating entails not eating to excess.  It involves eating the right things.  If I am to be a living sacrifice, then I should be “without blemish.”  What do you call a person who is carrying around fifty extra pounds?  That’s a blemish.  God had to spell it out for the people of Israel 3,500 years ago, but he has written the law on our hearts.  We know when we are going against Him.  So what do we do?   I eat a lot of Cheez-It crackers and candy.  I have a Boulevard Burger even though I have no right to lousy eating day.  That’s not holy.  I am called to be holy for God is holy.  I am not required to follow the guidelines in chapter eleven, but I am required to be holy or at least to strive toward holiness.

April 22, 2002

A mere eight verses to write about today.  But what a topic.  This is the sort of thing that is sure to make the Gloria Steinem’s of the world nuts!  How dare, they might say, the creator of the entire universe declare that a woman is unclean after giving birth to a baby.  How dare him to say that giving birth to a baby girl is more significant in making the woman unclean than giving birth to a baby boy.  There you are, establishing right here in words that boys are more important that girls.  How dare him to even say that a woman is unclean after her monthly period.  That just isn’t right, is it?  Let’s examine this stuff today.                First of all, we have to remember exactly what is being said here.  The woman who has just given birth to a baby is not declared here to be evil.  She is declared to be unclean.  What does that mean?  It means that she cannot go to the tent of meeting and she cannot touch anything that is sacred until this time of waiting is completed.  Is that different from being evil?  You bet it is.  But still, why would giving birth to a child be something that would make a woman unclean?  It seems to have something to do with blood.  The people of Israel are commanded not to eat any blood.  Blood makes people unclean.  There is always blood involved in child-birth.  Okay, but why does this work out in this manner?  I don’t really have an answer for that.  Ultimately, the matter is not something that I have to be able to wrap my mind around.  Is God being somehow cruel when he says that a woman is unclean during that period after giving birth?  No.  Is it his call to make?  Yes.  That’s really all we need to know.  Going before God is not a right.  It is a privilege.  No one can demand access to the most high.  Why does God want the woman who has just become a mother to stay away from the sanctuary?  I don’t have a clear answer to that.  Perhaps there is something here that is supposed to remind us of our sin.  By bearing a child, the woman brings the potential for more sin into the world.  By bearing a girl, the woman brings not just the potential for that girl’s sin into the world but the potential for that girl’s child-bearing into the world.  That might explain why the penalty time for girls is longer than for boys.  But really I think that in using the word “penalty” I am erring.  This is not really a penalty.  It is a time of uncleanness.  That’s different.  Certainly the woman could sit around the house brooding and feeling resentful about this whole state of affairs, but it seems to me that she might just as easily use this time to reflect on spiritual matters.  It is rather like fasting actually.  When you fast, I don’t think that the actual lack of food is a positive thing from a spiritual point of view.  There is nothing about not eat as I see it that is a spiritual plus, although I confess that I might be in error in this view.  But the fact is that when we fast, our hunger and the realization of the cause of our hunger, causes our minds to be turned toward God.  Similarly, if everything were exactly the same for the woman on the day after she gives birth as compared with the day before she gives birth, then what would there be to turn her mind toward God.  And what an important time this is, in the first days of a new child’s life, for a parent to be turned toward God.                Is giving birth to a child a sin?  I can see how a person might be inclined to read this thing in that manner.  But I don’t think that you need to read it in that manner.  The burnt offering, which we read about way back in chapter one, is not to be taken as a sin thing.  But the sin offering is clearly an offering for sin—hence the name.  That brings us back to the question, is giving birth to a child a sin?  That might be the way that you could read this, but I don’t think that’s a sound reading.  Giving birth to a child is never condemned in the scripture.  It is, instead, often referred to as a blessing in various ways.  So why is there a sin offering associated with it?  I see it as much more of a positive thing than as a negative thing.  Rather than atoning for any specific sin associated with child birth, the sin offering that is made on behalf of the mother after the period of uncleanness is really a matter of focusing that mother as a parent.  Should this new mother be concerned with her sins as she sets out to properly raise this baby?  That is not a particularly positive activity, dwelling on the sins of the past.  Why not have this sacrifice in order to give the woman a sense of cleanness and readiness to be a parent.                Of course we can scarcely read this passage without thinking about Mary and Joseph following these commandments and taking the baby Jesus to the temple for this purification and sacrifice.  They had to follow the provisions of verse eight, bringing two doves to the temple, one for the burnt offering and the other for the sin offering.  They apparently could not afford the lamb for the burnt offering.  In reality, of course, they were bringing the lamb at the same time.  They did not bring a lamb.  They brought The Lamb.  How significant that John the Baptist should greet Jesus with the words “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.”                This brief chapter in Leviticus, that I am trying so desperately to squeeze 1,000 words out of this morning, carries several simple messages for us.  What might those messages be?  Let’s see what we can come up with:Parenting is Important:  God could have simply ignored parenting.  He didn’t decree any special ritual or sacrifice for some other activities in life.  I may be mistaken, but I don’t think that marriage finds much representation in this book of the law.  So why is child-birth and parenting significant?  That strikes me as a big duh question.  Parenting is important because we can so easily foul up the raising of our children.Uncleanness is not sin:  Just because a woman is not able to go to the temple does not mean that she is evil.  She is unclean.  That’s all.  We should not associate uncleanness with a  state of sin.God is not a sexist:  Just because the period of purification for a woman is longer for the birth of a girl should not give us the notion that God hates girls.  As stated before, the birth of each child adds to the potential for sin in the world.  That is at the same time a blessing and a curse.  It makes sense for us to reflect on this potential and approach it soberly.  This period of uncleanness can certainly be seen as a time for reflection and introspection.

April 23, 2002

And I complained yesterday about the brief chapter on childbirth being difficult to get a handle onto.  Chapter 13 of Leviticus is really far out for today’s sensibility.  The first forty-six verses deal with the cleanness and uncleanness associated with various forms of skin disease.  If you have a skin disease that looks like this, then you have to go to the priest.  The priest will then decide whether you are clean or unclean.  This decision might involve putting you in isolation for up to two one-week periods.  What fun.                What I find hard to decide in reading this passage is whether it is a teaching of a strictly practical nature or of a spiritual nature.  Or perhaps is it of both?  Let me explain.  I can understand how teachings about infectious diseases, skin-based or otherwise, would be of immense practical interest to a people when they are talking about their corporate worship.  You have thousands of people spread over a good-sized area of land.  They take care of their animals and tend to their families.  If somebody has a skin problem, that is a worry but not a cause for panic.  However, if you take that same person and bring them into close proximity with those thousands of people as they gather together at the tabernacle, then you have a real problem.  Perhaps that is a panic.  That’s what I mean by a practical problem.  It is rather like the idea of “be still and know that I am God” applied in a worship service.  Yes, there is an important spiritual element involved with that, but there is just as importantly an important practical element.  Be still and then other people can hear.  Another aspect of this commandment that might have something to do with practical aspects of worship is the effect that the disease will have on others during worship.  I find it difficult today to worship if the person standing next to me has a bad odor about them.  I find it difficult to sing in the choir when I have a bad singer behind me.  The person who is unclean because of a disease will be a distraction to those around him.  Once again, we have to remember that unclean does not mean evil, just as the fact that my shoes—practically every pair of shoes that I own right now—are unclean.  They’re sitting back by the sliding door onto the deck right behind me now.  I don’t dare wear them into the house lest I leave a trail of dirt and worse—remember, I am a chicken farmer—throughout the house.  My shoes are not evil, but they are unclean.  That simply means that they cannot go everywhere that they might go when they are clean.  And important truth about unclean shoes is that they can become clean.  I can consciously clean them with a pick and a rag, or I can just sort of wait for them to become clean through normal wear. 

If this is not a practical element, or not just a practical element, then what spiritual significance does it have?  Is it a picture of something?  I’m led to believe that this is at least part of the issue here.  The skin disease elements of this seem clear enough when considered as a practical matter.  But what about this mildew thing?  I can catch a skin disease by rubbing up against the person next to me at the tent of meeting, but can I catch a mildew by rubbing up against their clothes?  I’m not entirely sure, but I have never heard of that sort of a thing.  What we have here it seems is a series of commandments regarding what we do when we have infections, afflictions that are infecting either our bodies or our clothing.  What are these infections supposed to represent?  I have to think that they represent sin.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that all of these things are caused by sin, except in the broadest sense that original sin brought sickness and death into the world.  No, Josiah doesn’t get leprosy because of his sin.  But the infection does provide a picture of sin.  With that in mind, let’s examine some qualities that we might deduce from this picture that God provides here:

Sin spreads:  Certainly God wants us to banish sin from our lives.  When it is in an “infectious” form, then we have to banish it from our lives.  We cannot have a virulent strain of sin moving in next door just as we cannot have an infectious skin disease next to us when we go to worship.Sin scars:  The skin diseases that are described here often leave scars behind.  One of the things that the priests were to look for was the scars of the diseases.Scars are not unclean:  I love this one.  The priests examined the sick person and looked for signs of active disease, but the scarring proved a good sign.  If the disease had progressed all over the person’s body and all of the skin had turned white, then essentially this person had become one big scar.  The scar was okay.  The scarred person could return to the assembly and was considered clean.  That’s a beautiful picture since we all have the skin disease of sin.  What do I mean?  Think about it.  How many people do we know who have the scars of sin?  All of us do.  We are all scarred.  The question is not whether or not we wear the scars of sin.  The question is whether that skin is still an active, spreading infection in our lives.  If it is an active, spreading infection, then that person is to be cut off and considered unclean.  That person is not to be considered completely evil.  They are considered unclean, just like my muddy shoes.  My muddy shoes will never be as nice as they were when I bought them, but they can be made clean again.  They will always carry the “scars” of dirt, but they can be admitted to the house once more.  The scars that we carry are not badges of honor, but they should not keep us out of God’s presence.  The same goes for the mildewed clothing.  If the damage has been done, but the mildew is no longer a threat to spread, then you can wear your scarred and damaged garment.  But if the mildew continues to spread and remains a threat, then it must be destroyed.The Clergy Have a Role to the Sick:  This should seem obvious, but in some cases we find ministers who only want to minister to those with no real problems.  The clergy here, the sons of Aaron, are called to inspect the sick person and determine cleanness and uncleanness.  Many ministers today have no problem going into a hospital room and ministering to a person with cancer.  But what about the person with the cancer of sin.  Does that same minister as readily go to that person and minister to them.  More importantly, does that minister go and declare that person clean or unclean.  I wouldn’t want to have to be that minister.

April 24, 2002

We’re back to skin diseases and mildews today.  I can’t help myself as I read over these regulations but to think about the responsibility of the people of Israel.  Knowing that these rules and regulations were in place, how many of the men of Israel would have found themselves in denial.  I’m especially thinking about the mildew in the house.  Do I want to go and tell the priest if there is a mildew in my house?  No, I’m probably just going to wait to be sure that it won’t go away.  When I think about the level of denial that I have seen in people regarding their houses during my lifetime, I can only imagine what those people would have said and done.  Think about my Uncle Nort.  Nort had a serious problem in his basement that involved a bulging crack that ran from the corner of a basement window down to the floor.  When heavy rains came, Nort got all manner of water in his basement.  But did he address the true nature of the problem?  Did he admit that he had a foundation problem?  No, he thought that the problem was really just drainage out in his back yard.  As it turned out, however, Nort didn’t end up being the fool.  After his passing, his son—who is a fool in his own way—sold the house at what I thought to be a deliciously high price.  But that’s not my point.                I have to return to the things that I was talking about yesterday in this vein.  Is this passage of scripture really just about diseases and the like?  I don’t think so.  Instead, I think that these infections represent sin and the way in which sin can infect our lives.  So what do we learn about sin from this chapter?Sin cannot be ignored:  If you have a mildew in your house, you have to go and tell the priest.  That’s just the way that it is.  In the case of today, if I have a sin in my life, I cannot simply sit by and make of it a private matter.  I cannot ignore it.  If I do, then I am sure to have it spread and worsen.  One of the things that Gene Calhoun said last week about evangelicals being too proud to fall on their faces before the Lord seems to resonate here.  Are we too proud t confess our sins before other people, the very sort of people who can pray for us and assist us in our recovery from sin.  Men, I think, are especially bad about trying to be the Lone Rangers.  That is a place where I really admire Allen Palmeri. Allen does not hesitate to go to others—counselors and ministers—when he feels a need.  He commented on the fellow who took us all to Promise Keepers last year and described that man as the best Christian Counselor he had ever experienced.  That would suggest that, for the statement to have any real meaning, he has experienced at least several of these counselors.  I could then comment that this man was probably the best counselor with whom I had ever talked.You can’t live with sin:  If your house has some mildewed stones, then you have to call the priests and have them check out what sort of a mildew that is.  I just can’t relate to this.  What sort of a mildew is destructive?  I’m not clear on this.  However, there apparently is such a mildew.  And if it is discovered, then the affected stones have to be carved out.  That would have to be a very expensive proposition.  When I think about a mildew in my life, I have to think about the mildew that revolves around my use of the Internet.  The Internet is every bit as vital to me as those stones in the wall of that house are to the homeowner.  Yet, if I read this passage correctly, I should be tearing out those stones and removing the net from my life if this mildew is destructive.  Do I believe that?  Do I take it seriously?  I’m not seeing that I do.  Instead, I seem to think that I can just use those stones differently.Sin isn’t the end of all things:  If you have a mildew on your wall, then those stones are taken out and discarded in an unclean place.  That does not, however, mean that you have suddenly been given a new window.  No, rather than having a new window, the homeowner has to gather some new rocks and some new plaster and timbers and replace the old ones.  That means that I do not have to completely tear the net out of my life.  But I do have to tear out those stones and then replace them with good clean stones.  That is a reasonable thing that I can deal with.  However, there is a continuation to this that is a bit daunting.Recurring Sin requires heavy action;  What if the mildew returns after you have torn out the offending stones and thrown them in an unclean place only to replace them with new stones, timbers, and plaster?  In that case, the entire house has to be torn down.  This makes me think of the place where Jesus says that if your eye offends you, it is better to pluck it out than to have your whole self thrown into hell.  That’s strong stuff.  How many of us, however, have the guts to tear down the sinful house?  For example, do I have the nerve to cut myself off from the net?  If I find that my job causes me to sin, would I be able to turn away from that job?  I would probably react in much the same way that I react to the thought of getting rid of the net.  I say something like, “Oh, that is just such an essential part of me that I can’t possibly get rid of it.  I just need to learn to deal with it.”  The problem is that I have already  learned to deal with and the way that I deal with it is to indulge in the sinful behavior.  That’s perhaps too strong, but there is a kernel of truth there.You can be cleansed of your sin.  This is the best of all.  Jesus is the Great Physician.  He can cleanse us of our sins.  In the Mosaic law, we have some strange rituals.  The person who has been cleansed of the disease or the mildew is commanded to bring a pair of doves to the temple.  One dove is killed above a clay jar and some fresh water.  Then the live dove is bound up with hyssop, which reminds me of Psalm 51, and red cord.  The bound up dove is plunged into the water.  Is that a picture of baptism?  The dead dove whose blood fell into the water would represent Jesus.  The live dove would represent me.  What about the red cord and the hyssop?  I don’t know about that one.  The key thing is that we can be cleansed of our sin.  IN the case of a skin disease, the sacrifices that are made are reminiscent of the ordination sacrifices made for Aaron and his sons.  Is that a coincidence?  No, I think that God is showing us that in being cleansed of our disease or our sin, we are new people, freshly made and restored to the chosen people.  That’s a great promise.

April 25, 2002

Everyday these chapters seem to get stranger and stranger.  Or perhaps I should say that they get less intuitive with each passing day.  Yesterday, a person could claim that the focus on the people with skin diseases had to do with a desire for public health.  That’s what a skeptic would claim.  This was a way for the Israelites to prevent infectious diseases from spreading among the people.  Today, however, that does not seem to be a valid argument.  A man with a bodily discharge—whatever that means—might conceivably be a threat to public safety, but a man who has had an emission of semen or a woman who is having her period (or who has had it within the past seven days) does not pose any kind of a public health risk.  So why would they have created these rules?  Some of the liberal skeptics would probably say that this was the result of ignorance on the part of the writer of this passage.  Perhaps they would suggest that it demonstrates a phobia regarding matters of a sexual nature.  They would probably argue that this was an attempt to control women more completely.  That last argument, however, seems to me a particularly week one.  How does making women declared unclean control them.  It keeps them out of the temple and away from clean people, but so what?  That doesn’t seem to me to be anything that would really aid in the control of women.  It doesn’t seem to be a very effective tool of a patriarchal society bent on keeping women in their place.  Let’s take up then the crazy notion that God wanted it this way.  Why would God care if a man who had had a discharge of semen or a woman who was on her period came into his presence?  I don’t have a really good answer for this, yet there is a concluding passage at the end of chapter fifteen that indicates that this is indeed why all of these regulations, strewn over the previous several chapters, are in place.  The passage says, “You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.”  That explains things to some degree.  It explains why God would not want the people coming before Him when they are unclean or why He would want them not to be ignorant regarding matters of cleanness and uncleanness, but it really does not explain why these people would be considered unclean or why God would mark these things as unclean.  Why not set aside a blackhead or a muscle ache as a mark of uncleanness?  I just don’t know.                Actually, I do have a theory on this question.  What does holy indicated?  Holy indicates that a person is completely dedicated, one hundred percent pure, unblemished by sin, and so forth.  But does a period or a semen emission blemish a person with sin?  I don’t think so.  However, all of these things might be seen as drawing a person’s mind away from God.  Let me start with the thought of a person with a skin disease.  If I go to church with a skin disease, then what am I going to be thinking about?  You know that I am going to be focused on the itching and the chafing and the rawness and everything else concerned with my skin disease.  Am I going to be able to keep myself focused wholly on the Lord God?  Probably not.  If I have just been engaging in sexual communion, will I be able to focus completely on communion with God?  I don’t think that I will.  If a woman is having her period, won’t her mind be divided between that subject and her worship?  I would think that it would be.  These are outward signs of things that divide us from our worship.  We should remember that there are many other things that divide us from our worship.                When I look at worship, I realize that there are many skin diseases, many discharges, many emissions, and many periods that are getting in the way of true worship.  Many people out there in the congregation are suffering from a mildew in their house.  We always say that it is good that these people come to church to worship, and it is good that they come, but these people are not fit in that state to come before God face to face.  We have to remember that worship at the temple was different from the worship that we practice today.  We also have to remember that cleanness today is different from the cleanness that they had to practice back in those days.  How are these things true?  Let’s look.  First of all, the Israelites were responsible for their own cleanness.  They had to stay clean.  There were many things that could make them unclean, and they had to be aware of each of these things and take pains first of all to avoid those things and second of all to meet the requirements for purification and so forth.  How does it work for us as Christians?  Jesus has declared us clean.  We miss the significance of Jesus’ words in John 15:3, when He declares that the apostles were already clean.  He wasn’t just using loose words and a spur-of-the-moment metaphor.  He was using a word that would have special meaning for these Jews.  They would understand that they would be able to come to the temple not because they had met the rules that I am studying in Leviticus but because Jesus, through the Word, had made them clean.  That’s really cool.   Cleanness, however is not a completely unimportant thing to us.  Just because Jesus makes me clean when I come in to worship, that does not mean that I do not have to concern myself with the sort of things that distract me from God.  Sure I can come into his presence right after having sex or after touching Penny after she has had her period, but that’s not the point here.  There are many things that make me mentally unclean.  They aren’t going to leave me sprawled out on the floor of the church because of my impertinence in coming before God in that state.  But these things do have the potential to keep me from ever getting into the presence of God.  I’m reminded of that wonderful song that Waterdeep sings.  “Whatever thing that I have carried in this place, that will keep me from seeing you, I will lay it at your feet.”  What proportion of people today carry something into worship that makes them unclean and keeps them from the presence of God?  I’d say that it is very high.

April 26, 2002

Thankfully we have finally gotten onto something new.  There is only so much bodily emission and mildew regulation that a person from my era can take before the eyes glaze over.  This morning, my eyes are struggling to be awake, so something a bit more relevant and focused is a welcome relief.  Here in chapter sixteen, we have the instructions to the priests regarding performing the rituals for day of atonement, Yom Kippur.  This day, which is to be held as a lasting ordinance to the people, and which has been held as a lasting ordinance by them for the past three thousand years plus, is an important one in the Jewish calendar and religion.  The sacrifices are several, so let’s try to break it down.  Aaron is to enter the tent of meeting and go to the Holy of Holies.  He is to take with him some coals from the fire and some incense.  The incense he is to burn in the Holy of Holies because God’s presence dwells in the cloud above the Ark of the Covenant, above the atonement cover.  The smoke from the incense is to obscure Aaron’s view from God.  Nobody else is supposed to be in the tent while Aaron is in there face to face is it were with God.  While Aaron is in the Holy of Holies, he is to sprinkle blood first from the young bull that he has sacrificed and then from the ram that he sacrificed on the atonement cover.  Interestingly in both cases these sacrifices are males, prefiguring the sacrifice of Jesus that would ultimately open the way for us into the presence of God.  The bull is supposed to be the sin offering for Aaron himself and presumably for the remainder of the priests for whom he stands in.  The ram is supposed to be the sin offering for the people.  I think that this two-fold sacrifice and offering of the blood on the atonement cover is significant, since it involves Aaron getting right with God before he even thinks about atoning for the sins of the people.  Jesus was able to proceed directly to the sacrifice of the ram, echoing the ram that Abraham found in the thicket after the angel stayed his hand from sacrificing Isaac.  Jesus could proceed straight to that sacrifice because he needed no sin offering.  Only he could go into the Holy of Holies and not worry about the incense to obscure the sight of God.  Only Jesus had the blood that could offer the permanent atonement.  The blood of bulls and rams was not what God ultimately wanted.  These were only a picture of the supreme sacrifice that God had prepared since the foundation of the world.                After he had attended to the sprinkling of blood in the Holy of Holies, Aaron moved out into the Holy place.  The passage is not terribly clear about what he did here.  It just says that he was to do likewise in the Holy place.  Obviously he did something here in order to cleanse this place and atone for the sins of the people.  Finally, he was to move out to the altar and do his atoning there, repeating the same process by sprinkling blood on the altar.  After all of this sacrifice is completed, Aaron was to take the two goats that had been prepared for the day.  He was to do the current equivalent of flipping a coin and take the unlucky goat to be a burnt offering.  The luckier goat was the scapegoat.  It is rather ironic that today people use the term scapegoat to indicate somebody who is blamed for everything and who is sacrificed so that others might be protected.  That really isn’t the deal at all here, is it?  The scapegoat here in Leviticus escaped—hence the name.  The scapegoat symbolically carried the sins of the people away from wherever they dwelled.  The unlucky goat was the one selected by lot for the burnt offering.  Aaron divided these two up.  Then he changed out of his linen garments and proceeded to offer the burnt offering of the unlucky goat.  Why did he change out of his fancy duds?  I really don’t know.  Maybe he was supposed to be just part of the people at this point, while when he was meeting with God he had to be completely set apart.  With all of these duties done, Aaron, the scapegoat handler, and the unlucky guy who had to drag the remains of the bull out to the outskirts to dispose of it had to go and wash up carefully.  That’s the day of atonement.                So what do we learn from all of this?  Certainly we learn that the Jews don’t worship this way any more.  I don’t see Steve Gerson putting on his linen garments in the Fall so that he can go sacrifice a bull and a ram and so forth.  There aren’t any scapegoats.  This festival has changed greatly since the destruction of the temple.  I need to ask Steve what they do on Yom Kippur.  What can we take from this?You don’t go before God casually:  Even though the veil in the temple was torn away when Jesus died, that does not mean that we should come before the Living God in a casual attitude.  On Yom Kippur, Aaron or his descendent was to be the only person able to go before God.  In doing so, Aaron had to be careful.  He had to wear all of the linen garments.  He had to prepare the censer of incense.  Aaron had to wonder, as he walked before God, if he would suffer the same fate as his sons.  In fact we are reminded of the deaths of Nadab and Abihu at the very outset of this chapter.  Obviously it would be on everyone’s mind.  Today, I can come before God more freely than can Aaron, but I don’t think that this means I should do so casually.  I do not have to wear linen garments, but I should dress my heart appropriately.  I do not have to burn incense to obscure the face of God, but that does not mean that I should simply stare into that face and treat it like I would treat the face of a peer.  No, prudent people realize that despite the open-door policy, our God is still an awesome and a holy God.  It does not make sense to go before him in a casual manner.You get right from the inside out:  This is rather a stretch here, but I think that the idea is sound.  It would make sense that Aaron would start on the outside of the tent of meeting.  You would think that he would first make atonement at the altar.  Then you’d think that he would proceed into the holier places.  He’d go into the tent first and finally make atonement in the Holy of Holies.  That’s what I would think they would do, but that’s not what God commanded.  Rather than doing it from the outside in, God commanded them to start in the inside.  They were to make atonement before God first.  Then they were to work their way out.  What did that represent?  I think that it indicated getting right with God and then distributing that rightness to the various aspects of their day-to-day life.  You don’t clean up your act first and then, when you get perfect, go to God.  No, quite to the contrary, you cannot clean up your life effectively without first setting things right with God.  You cannot handle the peripheral matters while the important matters in the middle are still messed up.  If you handle those peripheral matters first, they will be fouled again by the time you attend to the central things.  That is why we must start with our relationship with God and allow everything else to flow from that.Lord, thank you for providing the means of atonement for me through the sacrifice of your son.  Thank you for allowing his blood to be eternally sprinkled on my behalf.  I want to serve you more, seeing how deeply you have loved me.  Thank you for that.  I pray this in the name of the Lamb of Calvary.  Amen.

April 29, 2002

We began Leviticus in the temple.  First we get all of this stuff about being clean and being unclean.  We learn how to sacrifice all manner of animals for all manner of reasons.  We learn about the ordination of the priests.  We just learn all sorts of things.  Finally, in Leviticus 16, we hear the rules for conducting the rituals for the Day of Atonement.  That’s what Leviticus has been so far.  As the commentaries all seem to suggest, we can find chapter 16 to be a turning point in this book.  Or another way to think about it is that the entire book of Leviticus revolves around the axis of chapter 16 and the Day of Atonement.  What we learn in this next chapter is the beginning of the rules and regulations for life outside of the temple.  Specifically, we learn some thing about the need to avoid sacrifices away from the temple.  Then we are told about the prohibition on eating blood.  What do these two things have to do with one another?  That might seem a difficult question on the surface, yet the answer lies beneath the surface—literally.  The answer that joins these two is blood.  What do we learn from Leviticus 17?  Let’s take a look at it and see.You Can’t Treat Blood with Contempt:  That’s the overall message of this chapter.  You really can’t treat blood with contempt.  Think about it.  Blood is a symbol of life.  This chapter says that a creatures life is in its blood.  That’s true from a biological sense, of course, but there is more to it than that.  How can we not treat blood with contempt?  We can’t just shed it anywhere and we can’t leave it in what we eat.You can’t shed blood to the wrong God:  Why should God care about where people conduct their sacrifices?  In the past, God allowed people to do their sacrifices pretty much wherever they wanted.  But for some reason, at this point, they had to do them in the Tent of Meeting or noplace at all.  Why?  I think that this gets down to several questions regarding the sacrifice.Who Can Conduct the Sacrifice?  Obviously if you don’t go to the Tent of Meeting then you do not have Aaron and his sons doing your sacrifice for you.  Since they are the only ones who have been set aside to conduct the sacrifice, it only follows that you would have to come to Sacrifice Central in order to have your sacrifice done properly.  If you go somewhere else to do your sacrifice, then you have someone else—perhaps yourself—doing the honors.  While that someone else might be a nice and reverent person, that does not give them the right to do what God has set aside the Aaron family to do.  When I think about the COCAKARLDS people, one of the things that troubles me most signficiantly is the presumption that they show when they claim to hold the Aaronic priesthood.  After reading about what happened to Nadab and Abihu, do they really want to carry that responsibility?  Of course they show even greater presumption in saying that someone is a priest after the order of Melchezidek.  That, of course, makes this person a priest after the order of Jesus Himself according to the author of Hebrews.  You do not want the wrong person conducting your sacrifice.To Whom Can Sacrifice Be Made?  If you go into the tent of meeting, there can be little doubt about who is the object of the worshipper’s veneration.  The Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the object of the worship there.  But what about out in the fields?  Might the worshippers have some odd ideas going on that indicate that ultimately they are worshiping a different God.  Let’s face it.  Once you start changing the rules for how the sacrifice can be conducted, you essentially start changing the God to whom you are performing the sacrifice.  Let’s think this through.  If God tells me that I am not to commit adultery and I go ahead and commit adultery, then I am either disobedient or I am changing the very nature of God.  How would I be changing who I perceive God to be?  I do that when I change the rules.  The people who try to rationalize homosexual behavior and make it normative change the nature of God.  They assert that God is not a clear speaker.  They assert that God does not reveal himself in any definitive way.  From that assertion it is a very short logical jump to believe that Jesus was simply a good teacher who had a lot of nice ideas for how people should behave to one another.Blood Must Be Respected:  Even in animals, blood is important.  The blood of animals sacrificed in the temple represents the blood of Jesus that would be shed on Calvary.  Can I treat that blood with a cavalier attitude?  Can I eat it?  Think about the symbolism there.  Eating something is just about the most cavalier thing that a person can do.  Unless I am commanded to eat something, then you’d have to say that I am literally being self-indulgent.  If the blood is the vehicle through which my salvation flows, can I treat it with contempt?  Of course I can’t.  So, no more blood pudding or bloody meat.  No more vampirism for me.  But that’s not the end of the story.  If I sin knowingly, then am I not treating the blood disrespectfully?  Am I not doing something just as bad as eating it?  That’s right.  I have to respect the blood, the blood of the animal and the blood of Jesus.We Will Disrespect the Blood:  The section on becoming clean again, toward the end of the chapter, suggests that while it is not at all okay for a person to have “blood on their hands” it is expected that from time to time this will happen.  There are some sins that are not forgivable on earth, but most sins can be recovered from.  God does not want us to disrespect the blood that saves us, but He does know that we inevitably will.  He provides the way to become clean again even after we sin and disrespect the blood.  Yesterday, I sinned knowingly.  I disrespected the blood of Jesus.  Thankfully, I am not forever condemned by my actions.  Instead, God has provided the way for me to be cleansed with hyssop.  I do not have conform to a bunch of ritual cleansings.  The cleansing that I need, that I will receive, is a spiritual one.  Hopefully I can cut down on my need for this sort of cleansing as time passes.

April 30, 2002

April has now just about passed into the past.  I face May and then the summer tomorrow.  My life seems to have gone into an accelerated mode.  Why am I writing these things here?  I don’t know, but I just thought that I would.  This chapter in Leviticus, number 18, consists of a whole lot of “Thou shalt nots.”  These are not matters of uncleanness.  Many of the things that have gone in the previous chapters—eating this and touching that—have been simple matters of uncleanness.  We have to recognize that some things make us unclean while other things are what are described here as “detestable things.”  Another way to think of this is that there are different standards of behavior and holiness for different places.  In this chapter, God says that the Canaanites defiles themselves with these detestable practices, sexual sins and child sacrifices.  The result of this defilement was that “the land vomited out its inhabitants (18:25).  That’s profound.  The land vomited out its inhabitants.  The land, ehretz, can apply to any land, or to the whole earth, but here it seems to refer specifically to the land of Israel, the promised land.  After all, the Canannites did not find themselves vomited out of the entire earth.   I paused for a moment when I read this.  Thanks to the nice people at the Logos Library System, I have cleared up a doubt in my mind.  It occurred to me that the idea that the Canaanites had been vomited out by the land would be anachronistic because at this time, the nation of Israel was still wandering around in the wilderness, nearly forty years from their date for entering into the land and the time that the Lord would begin to uproot the Canaanites and drive them out before Israel.  A check on the verb that the NIV translates as “vomited” or simple past tense in English shows however that it is in the Hebrew Imperfect which can be translated in various ways.  I think that perhaps the King James got it best when it says that “the land vomiteth them out.”  The idea here is that the land is in the process of vomiting the people out.  It has already begun—after all, if it hadn’t then the report of Caleb and Joshua wouldn’t have as much power.  This process is continuing and will continue in the future.  Okay, I got off track there.  The detestable things must not be done or the land will vomit the people out.  There is a certain standard of behavior that is required for even staying in the land.  Then there is a standard of behavior involving cleanness.  The result of deviating from this more stringent level of behavior is to be cast out of the camp.  Several times in the previous chapters we here that the result of some behavior is to be put out of the camp or not allowed into the camp.  Finally there is an even more stringent level of behavior that is required when coming to the Tent of Meeting.  There are things that you can do in the land that you cannot do in the camp.  There are things that are fine in the camp that are not acceptable before the Lord at the Tabernacle.  I suppose that we could continue this and say that there are even more restrictive and stringent codes of behavior, applying only to the priests and ultimately to Aaron as we draw nearer to God.                All right.  let’s take a look at these specific things that are prohibited here and try to discover some things about God and our right relationship with Him from what He prohibits us from doing.  I can come to several conclusions by reading these prohibitions.Sex is about relationships and not about physical pleasure.  I don’t think that God is unaware that sex is physically pleasurable.  I believe that He made it that way on purpose, but He also does not want us view that as the primary fact of sexuality.  This chapter lists fifteen specific heterosexual sins that we are not to get into.  Most of these deal with family members.  Far from being a concern for genetic problems, the reason stated here for the prohibition on incest is that it will dishonor the other person.  We are to hold our family relationships in more esteem than potential sexual liaisons.  We are not to dishonor people in our family by fooling around with each other’s spouses, siblings, and so forth.  That’s a really sensible piece of law.  The Law of Hollywood would have it that we are all creatures unable to govern our passions.  If I am attracted to my brother’s wife, then it is inevitable, in the world of Hollywood, that I will fall into bed with her sooner or later.  Of course there is a very real threat of this happening.  When you live in close proximity with people, you have greater access and greater temptation.  Of course this is not just about incest either, since the law here mentions having sexual relations with your neighbor’s wife.  Apparently the Canaanites were into the who Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, “everybody belongs to everybody” mentality.Children are not to be sacrificed to a god.  What is this prohibition doing here in the middle of all of this sexual stuff?  I don’t really get this and I need to look into it.  I would have to stretch this a long way to have it seem applicable to our situation today.  The remaining practices, however, are still applicable.Homosexuality is wrong.  “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman.  That is detestable.”  You hear these people who say that the Bible is not clear on this matter.  Hogwash.  In order to say that homosexuality is okay, you have to say that the Bible is wrong.  Period.  Of course these people will go on and say, “We don’t practice all of those sacrifices, do we?  You can’t pick and choose.”  So far, as I read through Leviticus, I am not picking and choosing.  Clearly we are here, in Leviticus 18, into a whole different place than we were with all the stuff about ordaining Aaron or being ritually clean.  These are, as I said above, detestable practices that caused the Canaanites to be vomited out of the land.  What will happen to a people who normalizes adultery?  What will happen to a people who says that sexual relations among the family are acceptable and normal?  What will happen to a nation that normalizes homosexuality?  What will happen to a nation that normalizes bestiality?  We are on our way to all of these things and have nearly succeeded in several of them.God will judge sinners.  Regardless of what we say or how we rationalize our sins, God will judge us for them.  People know when they are sinning by and large.  I certainly know when I am sinning.  When people willfully give up the righteousness of God and give themselves over to these sorts of sins, what can we expect?  When the religious leaders in the nation assist in this process, when they say that sexual sin is not important, when they say that homosexuality is not important, what can we expect?  I believe that God is getting ready to judge the United States.  We are perhaps the richest and most wicked nation ever to exist.  We are certainly the richest, but I don’t know that we are the most wicked.  If I throw in one more variable, however, then I know that we are the most culpable.  We are not just wicked but we are knowingly wicked.  We know better and we do these things.  God save America.  We certainly can’t save ourselves.

May 1, 2002

May Day!  May Day!  M’aiddez!  Help me.  What does that have to do with anything?  I don’t think that it has a thing to do with anything.  But I said it anyway.  Leviticus 19, our text for today seems to be a catch-all of commandments that don’t seem to have a whole lot to do with one another.  They are not all dealing with ceremonial cleanness.  They are not all dealing with the mode of performing sacrificices.  They don’t focus on the priests.  They don’t deal with skin diseases or mildews.  There is no significant mention of sexual morality here.  This is just a leftover basket of all sorts of things.  Some of these commandments echo the Ten Commandments.  Some of them seem more ceremonial.  Some deal with economic justice while others focus on spiritual matters.  Let’s dig into them and see what some of the noteworthy ones seem to tell us:Be Honest:  There is a whole series of commandments here that tells the people of Israel the need for honesty.  All of these are in double quotations, since they largely are drawn from Deuteronomy.  I’m not sure if they are somehow clearly double-quoted in the original or if the editor of this Bible has just made this assumption.  That doesn’t really matter that much.  How did God tell the people of Israel to be honest?  He said, “Do not steal, do not lie, do not deceive one another.” And so forth.  In other words, Moses is telling the people that they need to deal uprightly with their peers.  They need to show respect for those with whom they share the land.  Think of the problems that arise in a normal society.  (I’m really not all that sure what is normal about our society.)  Last week, this nineteen year old kid in Germany went into his former school, from which he had been recently expelled, and opened fire with a shotgun and a pistol, killing seventeen people.  Obviously this young man was not showing respect for those with whom he shared his home.  Did they show respect to him?  I don’t know.  Many of the problems in society stem from this sort of a lack of respect from man to man.  When I look at the Enron scandal, I realize that these people went wrong when they stopped respecting their peers, the investors in Enron.  These people saw themselves as better than they were.  They justified their actions somehow and decided to steal in complicated and illegal ways from their investors.  “Do not defraud your neighbor or rob him.”  That would seem like a pretty obvious thing to say to people, something that ought to go without saying, but it does not.Be Compassionate:  Here’s a commandment that seems to me to be sorely lacking, not just in government and business circles, but in the realm of the church these days.  How compassionate are we?  First let’s look at how God said that we should show compassion in this chapter in Leviticus.  “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen.  Leave them for the poor and for the alien.  I am the Lord your God.”  That’s pretty straight-forward if you are an agricultural person.  If you are not an agricultural person like the bulk of us are not, then it is not quite so clear.  It seems to me that message here is not to love your profits more than you love other people.  Why?  The profit motive is a good thing.  After all, competition is such that the gleanings that come in might be the thing that separates a successful from an unsuccessful endeavor.  We don’t want our company, or our business, to crash and burn do we?  Of course the person who thinks in this way thinks in a way that disregards—not to mention disrespects—God.  How is that?  Let me give an example.  If I average writing 3,500 words a day, I could try to sell every single word that I write.  I could absolutely try to maximize my earnings by writing nothing that does not go into the cash box.  But when Pat or Gene or somebody asks me to write a devotional guide, I earn nothing of a financial nature.  I am leaving things behind.  When I write the reference book articles on Venezuela and Cuba, I will be leaving some of the gleanings to Allen (and allowing him to do some of the work for me).  I do not see this as a particularly bright financial move from a strictly humanistic viewpoint.  However, if I really trust God, then I have no worry when it comes to leaving some of my bounty behind.  After all, where did the crop in the field come from?  If I do not obey God’s commandment to leave some of my “harvest” for the poor, then I am certainly not showing either trust for nor respect for God.  Will I see as big a harvest in the future?  I doubt it.   This chapter also says “Do not hold back the wages of a hired man overnight.”  We see a lot of abuse of working people within our society.  Some of that has been reduced in the past, but a great deal of it still goes on.  Once again we are talking about people doing things to others and showing disrespect both for their brother and for their God.Be Reverent:  Mixed in with the rest of these commandments are several that order the Israelites to be holy and not do things toward God that show disrespect.  In fact, the whole chapter begins by saying “Be Holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”  That’s a tall order.  I suppose that if God starts out a chapter of mixed messages by saying be holy, then we can assume that these are at least part of what is required to be holy.  What does this chapter tell us about our dealings directly with God.  There is a repetition of the injunction against making idols.  There is a repetition of the Sabbath-keeping commandment.  The one that sticks in my mind however is “Do not practice divination or sorcery.”  I am looking around my world and seeing a lot of indulgence for divination and sorcery.  Going down to the UMKC library yesterday I saw a sign for a palm-reading psychic.  Another psychic ran a little shop down the hill from Raytown City Hall for a couple of years.  Eventually the joint went out of business.  You would have thought that they would seen that coming.  A movie just appeared on TV regarding this guy who supposedly can communicate with the dead.  He’s James Van Praghe or something along those lines.  They will treat something like that as if it were real and genuine, but will they have a bio-pic on Billy Graham who is a demonstrably real phenomenon?  Not just yet.  They’d probably bungle it.  The religious conservatives have gotten a lot of grief over their opposition to the Harry Potter craze.  After all, the critics say, these books are just fiction.  That may be true, but the people who will defend Harry Potter sure wouldn’t defend a series of books in which the protagonist is an unreconstructed segregationist.  When a movie comes out, like Black Hawk Down, in which people of another race are treated as targets, you’ll get the critics, who are taken seriously, crawling out of their holes and crying the blues.  In short, Leviticus 19 seems to be about showing proper respect first for your God, then for your superiors (which we didn’t get to), then to your peers, and then to those less fortunate.  Good bye.

May 2, 2002

Did God think that we didn’t get this stuff from chapter nineteen?  He essentially repeats the most ugly and physical (and especially sexual) of these sins here in chapter 20.  Let’s see what Moses has presented to us today.  First of all the prohibition against offering children to Molech is repeated.  In reading some commentaries yesterday, I read that some people believe that this referenece does not indicate child sacrifice.  The guy who wrote the NAC commentary suggested that human sacrifice WAS the meaning, but he admitted that there are many who see it otherwise.  Some people apparently assume that since this whole thing is in the midst of a bunch of sexual commandments, then it must be something of a sexual nature.  Their assumption is that “giving children to Molech” means to make temple prostitutes out of the children.  That’s almost as sick as human sacrifice.  I have no idea, of course, what this scripture refers to and I’m not sure that I really care.  After all, I’m not going to do either one of these things.  The thing, however, that I wonder about is why did God here single out Molech?  There were other gods of the Cannanites, so what is the big deal about this guy?  My theory, and I’ll confess that I really don’t have nearly enough evidence to call it more than speculation, is that Molech is singled out here because of children.  Baal and Ashtoreh got the older folks in trouble, but Molech is the one who swallowed up, either through prostitution, human sacrifice, or some other nasty practice, the little children.  I think that the critics who argue that this passage must refer to a sin of a sexual nature since it is in the midst of all of this sexual sin here in both chapters 19 and 20 really are either suffering from inattention or a dirty mind.  There are plenty of non-sexual sins in this passage.  In chapter 20, the Molech passage is followed directly by one about divination, which is then followed by an injunction against mistreating your father and mother.  Oops.  My mistake.  The passage on sacrificing to Molech was back in 18 and then again in 20.  But that’s okay.  You see, I think that the entire 18-20 run of scripture is a series of messages regarding the relationships that the adults, specifically the men, are to have in the land that God is going to give to them.  Look at the commandments.  They are to have right relationships with each other, with those weaker than them, and with those stronger than them, including God.  The chapter 20 instance is a great example.  Don’t abuse your power over your children by sacrificing them in whatever way one sacrificed a child to Molech.  That’s a commandment regarding right relations with those weaker than the average person.  Then God turns around and commands respect for the next generation up.  As inall of the Bible, the key element, the essence of sin can be boiled down to selfishness.  You can worship the Lord God, the only God worthy of your praise, or you can worship the Lord Self, which is not worthy of your praise.  You can mistreat your children, exploiting them for your perceived gain.  Or you can raise your children in the fear of the Lord.  The choice is yours.  You can curse your parents and ignore their needs and desires.  Or you can honor them and attend to them as they grow older.  The choice is yours.  You can mistreat that person who works for you, using your relationship with him to exploit him and cheat him out of money.  Or you can deal honestly and fairly with him.  The choice is yours.  You can take advantage of your relationship with family members for your own selfish sexual desires.  Or you can serve as a trustworthy family member, strengthening this person and supporting her.  The choice is yours.                The big difference between chapter 20 and the previous two chapters here is that the penalties are here associated with the sins in most cases.  The way I read it, it is almost as though God were getting their attention in chapter 18, saying, “these are the things that I do not want you to do.”  Then, in chapter 20, he revisits many of these same sins and say, “If you insist on doing these things, here’s what will happen to you.”  The penalties are pretty severe.  The first several sins, including cursing your mother and father, lead to death.  Adultery leads to death when it concerns the neighbors wife.  Adultery that involves ones mother, or “his father’s wife,” is a cause for a death penalty.  Adultery that involves one’s son’s wife, or your daughter-in-law, is a cause for death.  Why does he mention all three of these?  Why not just let adultery speak for itself?  I think that God is trying to point out the cases of adultery that people might attempt to excuse because of their “special” nature.  I might be wrong, but I think that is the move that God is making here.  The penalty for homosexual sex is death.  The penalty for marrying both a woman and her mother is death.  The penalty for bestiality is death.  That’s tough.  Then there seem to be some milder penalties meted out for serious but not quite so awful sins.                Incest with a sister is a sin, but it is apparently not quite so bad as these other things.  I would assume that the sister here is not married or she would fall into the “other man’s wife” category.  As I read this, this brother-sister, husband-wife pair is to be cast out of the people but not killed.  The same goes for people having sex during a menstrual period.  That’s unclean but not nearly as forbidden as these other things.  The penalty is much less severe.                I want to finish up today by looking at verse 26.  “You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.”  That’s pretty straight-forward, but it is the sort of thinking that causes a lot of trouble today.  If we follow the theology that says that in some ways the promises and expectations placed on the people of Israel have been transferred to the church, the wild branches grafted into the true vine, then we have to see ourselves called to holiness here.  We have to see ourselves called to be a people apart, a peculiar people.  It used to amuse me so when the COCAKARLDS would take that “peculiar people” phrase from Paul’s writing and apply it to themselves without any understanding of the meaning of the words.  Oh, who am I kidding.  When I heard it while I was in that camp I didn’t have any idea that “peculiar people” came from the Bible.  I thought that it was something specific to the Book of Mormon or something.  But anyway, all too often we see ourselves as fitting in all too well with the dominant culture.  Yet we are called to be a people set apart from the other people to be God’s own.  We are called to be different.  Just because the world says that you do not have to respect parents does not mean that we should take a pass on that commandment.  Just because the world says that sexual morality is old-fashioned does not mean that we have to accept this conclusion.  Just because the world says that the spiritualism and witchcraft practiced today are acceptable expressions of a person’s exploration of the spiritual realm does not mean that we have to agree with this.  We are called to be holy just as God is holy.

May 6, 2002

Here it is, God finally tips his hand here in chapter twenty-one and shows that He is not a politically correct man of the present day.  After all, how could he have the nerve to suggest that it would make some difference whether a priest marries a virgin, a widow, or anyone else.  Doesn’t God know that everybody belongs to everybody?  And then there’s that stuff about a descendent of Aaron who has a defect—we really prefer to call these people differently equipped—not being able to be a priest.  That is clearly just a total affront to this person’s dignity, isn’t it?  Who is God to be telling somebody that he can’t be a priest?  He’s just God, after all.  He has to consider that person’s feelings just like anybody else, doesn’t he.                As fun as this stuff is to write, we need to get down to the nitty gritty.  Let’s see what we can learn by reading this chapter of Leviticus.  The first question that I would want to ask is how applicable this stuff is to us in the twenty-first century.  I would have to think that it is only applicable in principle.  We do not have priests who offer sacrifices to God.  Nobody has to wear the linen garments and go into the temple in order to kill the animals and put their parts on the altar.  Certainly we don’t have anybody serving as the high priest.  Nobody that I know will ever be going into the most Holy place in order to sprinkle the blood of the sacrifices onto the mercy seat.  That job has been taken for all time by Jesus.  So how applicable is chapter twenty-one to our present situation?  I would say that it is applicable only in principle.  We have to adapt these teachings, but we should not absolutely apply any of them to any of us because we are not priests after the order of Aaron, regardless of the foolish talk of the COCAKARLDS.  We can learn a good deal about the way that God worked with the people of Israel before the coming of Christ by reading this material.  We can also learn some general things about the idea of holiness and dedication to the Lord from this chapter, but I think that it is dangerous or at best wrong-headed to try to apply this stuff directly to clergy of today.  For example, is there any reason why my pastor should not mourn the loss of a friend these days?  Let’s say that Becky Brooks’ brother succumbs to his illness.  This man has severe epilepsy and has endured a very trying life.  Still, he is Becky’s brother.  Will Paul not suffer along with his wife when this fellow dies?  I would think that he would.  And doesn’t that make sense?  Is there any reason why he should not suffer along with her?  He is not a priest.  He does not have to worry about making himself ceremonially unclean through this action, so why should we worry.  Chapter twenty-one does not apply that directly.  So what in the world does this thing teach us?  What can we learn from reading this chapter?  Let’s find out.God expects more from his ministers:  In order to follow God and serve Him, we sometimes have to make sacrifices.  In the nation of Israel, there was nothing wrong with marrying a widow.  The High Priest, however, could not be married to a widow.  He could not be married to someone who had been divorced.  God here created a rule that only applied to this one person.  Still, if you wanted to become the High Priest, then you had better attend to that rule.  You couldn’t serve God and yourself as well in this situation.  We might think that once you have become the High Priest, you would just avoid this stain, but if you think about it for a minute, then you’ll realize that these people who became the High Priest probably did not do so until they were at least middle aged.  They had probably been married for several years before having that honor placed upon their heads.  So even though they were not High Priests before they married, they still had to think about this matter if they were to retain the option of becoming the High Priest when the job came open.Ministry means serving God more than serving yourself:  There was no taking off of time in the priesthood of God apparently.  You could not go and defile yourself when you best friend died.  You could not go and make yourself unclean just because a neighbor died.  That seems rather tough, but that is the way that God wanted it.  He did not, mercifully enough, require the priests to ignore their families in a similar way, but He did apply that sort of a standard to the High Priest.  The closer that the servants came to God, the more that was required of them.  The closer that these men came to God’s presence in the Holy of Holies, the more that God expected them to separate themselves from worldly matters and attend themselves to heavenly matters.Things aren’t always fair by human standards:  I had some fun up above with the political correctness that infects my day.  We act as if it makes no difference whether someone is blind or deaf or leg-less or whatever.  Certainly there are great things that these people have to offer to society, but in the eyes of God, these people are not going to serve before the altar.  Why is that?  I suppose that God is saying here that just as only an unblemished sacrifice is appropriate for the most important sacrifices, so only an unblemished priest is appropriate to offer these things to the Lord.  But doesn’t God care what is in the priest’s heart much more than what is on the exterior of his body?  Yes, but God also wanted the temple to be a picture that taught the people about the nature of God, the nature of their relationship with God, and the nature of the sacrifice that would eventually come through Jesus.                But here’s the most bitter irony.  The person with a blemish could not serve before the altar of God, but who gave the person that blemish?  God did.  That doesn’t seem fair.  Why should God create somebody who was eligible by lineage to be a priest and then make this person unfit to serve through the imposition of some blemish.  What a silly question.  Do we really think that the creator of the universe has to work by the rules of fairness that we would concoct?  Do we really think that the most important thing for God to do is to play by the rules as they seem fit to us?  That is nonsense.  God is a God of love and of justice, but it is not love and justice as humans conceive of it.  Would humans have conceived of love and justice being meted out in the form that God gave them to us through Jesus?  I don’t think so.  This might not seem fair, depriving an otherwise eligible priest of his office due to some birth defect, but God’s actions are fair by their very nature.  God is the arbiter of all that is fair.  This gets back to the idiocy of the people who criticize the Faust myth and say that Faust was a hero because God was enforcing unreasonable moral standards.  That’s just hogwash  God’s standards are reasonable by definition because God is the basis of all reason.

May 7, 2002

Today is Alyson’s seventeenth birthday.  That has absolutely no bearing on my understanding of Leviticus, but it is certainly the center of the girl’s yearly calendar.  Salute.  In this chapter, we seem to be going over some familiar turf once again.  If I were reading this book as a submission to a composition class, I would probably criticize God or Moses—“and honestly, who DID write this book, Moses?  Did you do it or did you get rather a lot of help from God?”—for not being very well organized.  You can see the organizational sprawl if you look at the outline that I have created below.  In the early chapters, we learn about the animals that are supposed to be used for the various sacrifices.  Then that information gets repeated here in the low twenties of the chapter numbers.  Later, in the middle of the book, we find all manner of ways for a person to become unclean.  Does God settle for one time to tell the people how they can become unclean?  Heavens no.  Again He repeats it here in Leviticus, toward the end.  This time, of course, there is a bit of a different twist to it.  Last time the focus was just on people, on worshippers, but here the focus is on the priests.  Nevertheless, don’t you think that people could figure out that if something makes the normal people unclean then it would make the priests unclean as well?  Yeah, I suppose that I would criticize the Composition I student Moses for his poor organization if he were to turn this paper in to me.  I’d ask him why all the things about uncleanness weren’t with the other things about uncleanness.  I’d say, “Why didn’t you put all of the regulations on the priests in one place?”  Think about it.  Moses is telling the people how to do sacrifices before he had established that there were priests.  What was up with that?  Why didn’t he keep all of the regulations about what animals could and couldn’t be used for sacrifices together?  I don’t think that there is really a good explanation for that in composition class terms.  The more that I think about it, though, the more that I realize that this book tries to organize the material for an entire culture.  Not only is it trying to discuss a culture in an expository manner, it is trying to actually create that culture, or at least the religious aspects of the culture, from the ground up.  That would seem to be a challenge.  By mixing some things up, by placing the commandments about what animals can be used for what sacrifices not only in the section on the various sacrifices at the beginning of the book but also here in this section on the regulations for the priests, God is making the connections for the people.  He is showing them that these are not just discrete and separate items.  No, everything here works together.  By repeating some of the information regarding cleanness when He talks about the priests, God is not being redundant.  He is underscoring the importance of cleanness for the priests and at the same time underscoring the importance of the priests.  Repetition is a powerful tool to use.  Since this chapter is rather repetitive, we don’t get a lot of entirely new principles.  At first, nothing really jumped out at me.  Only after a bit of thought did I come up with a handful of interesting things.Men are responsible for their families.  The section of this chapter that talks about who may and may not eat of the sacrifices that are brought  to the temple is rather interesting in that it allows that the defining thing in who is allowed to partake of this food is that person’s connection to the man of the house.  The priest, naturally, can eat of the sacrifice.  But who else?  The priest’s family.  His wife and his kids.  The priest’s daughter can eat of the sacrifice but only until she marries.  Of course if she marries a priest then she would continue to be able to eat of the sacrificial meat, but she would be getting that right through her husband and not through her father.  If her husband were to die and she would suddenly find herself once again under the support of her father, then she would once again be able to eat.  Fathers are responsible for their families.  Fathers are to lead their families.  My family and I have been watching the PBS special called Frontier House.  In this show, three families were placed in a valley in Montana and told to go about life as if it were 1883.  The three families showed varying degrees of success.  The most successful family was a couple of newlyweds.  When Nate came to the valley, he brought his father with him.  Nate and his dad worked to put up a cabin and accomplish other tasks in preparation for the time when Nates’ bride would arrive and the two would celebrate their marriage there in 1883 garb.  That was cool.  This family, the Brooks family, succeeded because both of them were young and strong, but I think that they mostly succeeded because Nate stood tall and strong and provided leadership to his family.  The other two families only partially succeeded.  The Glenn family, husband, wife, and her two children, fared reasonably well.  But the family fought incessantly.  The man—Mark, if I remember correctly—became detached.  The guy worked like a pack animal, but he did not provide leadership for his family.  Instead he just backed off and let things sour.  He allowed his wife to bubble off with her two kids rather than asserting some degree of leadership over the entire family.  Would his wife have accepted his leadership?  I don’t know, but I do know that the guy really didn’t give much of an effort to providing that leadership.  Instead he just sort of faded off.  I find that most annoying because I see myself in Mark.  The third family, the Clunes, were the least successful physically, but they were also the second most successful socially.  They at least came out of the valley with an intact family which in the end, in 2002 is far more important than coming out with a big pile of firewood.  Where did the Clunes suffer?  Again, I think that they suffered because their man, Gordon, was a whining ninny.  Gordon did not set forth a great example.  Instead, he complained and pussyfooted around.  He skirted the rules.  His group could have done the best of the bunch, with four basically adult people in the group, but they cheated and bent the rules at every opportunity.  Frankly, I found them incredibly annoying.  I know that this is far afield from Leviticus, but it just had to be said.God commands odd things.  I do not know why it is wrong to sacrifice a mother and child from among your flock or your herd on the same day.  I don’t know why you have to wait seven days before sacrificing a calf or a lamb.  That doesn’t make any sense to me.  It seems reasonably humane, but what is seven days?  I don’t know.  Perhaps I can learn an answer to this.

May 8, 2002

Having survived ALyson’s birthday, I will now try to write intelligibly about the Jewish calendar of events.  This chapter includes the instructions for the major festivals of the Jewish year.  First, we have Passover, which stands at the very beginning of the Jewish year as well as at the beginning commemoration-wise of their identity as a people.  The children of Israel were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.  After hearing their cries, God sent Moses to deliver them.  Moses led the people out of Egypt through the power of God.  Finally, after vexing Pharoah with a series of plagues, six of them as I recall, Moses announced that God would send the worst plague of all.  Every first-born child in the land of Egypt would die.  The only thing that would save anyone would be the blood of a lamb smeared above and to the sides of the doorposts of a home.  This blood stood as a sign, a testimony, of this home’s belief in the delivering power of God.  In recognition of this time of passing over as well as this time when God delivered the people from sin, the Jews to this day recognize Passover, celebrating by eating unleavened bread, by sharing together a Passover Seder meal, and by remembering the story of the Passover in Egypt.  This festival makes a great deal of sense even without the Christian interpretation that has been placed on it.  When I think back to my college days, though, I realize that my beliefs might have taken a turn to the right direction twenty years ago.  I remember reading things in the William Jewell Library about the parallel symbolism of Easter and Passover.  I recall thinking that this was really a great parallel, something really interesting and noteworthy.  What if I had really connected to this and been drawn into a genuine belief in Christ alone rather than getting sucked along for fifteen years into the empty beliefs of the COCAKARLDS?  I have no idea of where I might have ended up, but I don’t suppose that I should look too wistfully at that.  I pretty much like where I have ended up.  Perhaps things could not have turned out as well had I made my break with the unbelievers too early.   Perhaps my family would have been adversely affected.  I just can’t know.  But I digress.                Fifty days after the feast of Passover, the Jews are commanded to observe the festival of Pentecost.  For this feast, they are to wave a couple of loaves of bread before the temple as well as sacrificing seven male lambs, a bull, and two rams.  That’s quite a sacrifice, in fact it is a sacrifice that far exceeds the one required for the Passover.  That seems rather strange when you think of it.  If the Passover marks the Independence Day of the Jews, then you would think that it would be marked by the greatest sacrifice, but this Pentecost observation requires more.  In Christian symbolism, of course, Pentecost represents the time when the Holy Spirit came to dwell within the hearts of believers.  So what is this great sacrifice?  I think that it should be the great sacrifice of our own lives.  I return once again to Romans 12.  What sacrifice does God really call for from us as believers?  This reminds me of a song that I wrote a number of years ago:  “Will I give Him my lunch or perhaps my last dime, will I give to Him all of my talent and time.  When I asked the Lord what He thought was his due, He answered I want all of you.”  God wants the sacrifice of our lives.  In reality that is what this entire book of Leviticus is about.  God is trying to get across to the Israelites that what He wants from them is a one hundred percent devotion.  Perhaps the biggest failing that the Pharisees had was that they saw the Law as a bunch of rules to be fulfilled so that they could be justified in the sight of God.  Their goal was to find ways to fulfill the law and still do whatever they really wanted to do.  There is a lot of that brand of Pharisaical behavior going on today.  In fact, if we are honest about the matter, all of us engage in that sort of Pharisaical behavior now and again.  I want to do my thing, but I am stuck with the inconvenient fact of God’s laws.  Therefore, I have to figure out the things that I can do in order to avoid those laws.  It’s not that hard.  I have the commandment about the Sabbath, but I really want to go to the Chiefs game.  So what do I do?  I rationalize.  I tell myself that by going to church I am fulfilling the commandment about the Sabbath.  But I digress again.                After Pentecost, there is a long, hot summer with no festivals.  Then come the fall, I find another cluster of three related festivals.  First a strange little festival crops up with no real explanation.  The first two made a certain amount of sense.  The next two make a good bit of sense on the surface, but what is this trumpet thing about.  This one simply presents itself in a couple of verses.  The understanding these days among Christians is that this festival of trumpets represents the gathering of the Jews back into the land of Israel.  I have been there.  I have seen the people.  I continue to follow the news.  I have to believe that I am living in a day that represents the conclusion of the age.  The trumpet began blowing back in the nineteenth century when Jews began to move toward Palestine.  Then in 1948 the pace accelerated.  In 1967, they came back into possession of Jerusalem.  Ever since this influx began, the Canaanites who live in the area have been attacking the Jews.  Just last night, another suicide bomber exploded a bomb in a crowded pool hall, killing at least sixteen people.  What a world.                The Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, comes next.  On that day, the High Priest was to walk into the Holy of Holies for the only time all year.  On that day, the High Priest was to sprinkle the blood from the sacrifices on the mercy seat, making atonement for the sins of the people throughout the year.  One day’s ritual covered the sins of an entire year?  That’s nothing.  In the death of Jesus, blood sprinkled on the heavenly mercy seat and covered all of the sins, past, present, and future, for all of mankind.  Wow!  That’s a big sacrifice.                The final festival is the feast of Tabernacles, Sukkoth.  This one ostensibly represents the time when the people dwelt in booths in the wilderness and received the law from the hand of God.  In Christian interpretation, this festival is said to represent the time when the people will once again dwell with the Lord in the Land and rule with Him.  I believe that I will live to see this happen.  I believe that it has to be soon.  Perhaps we’re talking about the return of Christ today.  I’m all for it.  Perhaps it’ll be this year.  Perhaps it will be in five years.  We cannot predict God’s timetable, but the situation seems to be arranging itself for a conclusion.  Perhaps I am completely wrong and the day of the Lord will not come for another thousand years.  If so, then I am just wrong.  I can live and die with that.  But I really feel as if events are arranging themselves for a showdown, a conclusion.

May 9, 2002

Chapter twenty-four brings us ever closer to the end of Leviticus.  I will have to admit that I’ll be sorry when this book is completed, although I am finding it continually harder to find new things to write about since the book seems to be so repetitive.  Nevertheless, I am succeeding.  This chapter is a peculiar thing, since it begins in a quite ordinary fashion, giving instructions on more temple practices, but then it proceeds to interject a narrative of a woman who blasphemes the name of God.  The only other narrative that found its way into this book so far has been that story of Nadab and Abihu.  That one made a great deal more sense because it dealt with the matters that were even then going on in the tabernacle.  This story, however, seems terribly out of place.  We’ll come back to that in a moment.Let’s look first at the discussion about the goings on in the holy place of the tent of meeting.  Inside that first enclosed room of the tent (and later of the temple) you would find three articles of furniture.  You’ll find the lampstand, consisting of seven lamps, over to the left.  You’ll find the golden table over to your right.  Then you’ll find the incense burner directly ahead of you and standing in front of the curtain that separates this room from the Holy of Holies where the ark of the covenant sits and the Shekinah glory of God dwells.  I find this chapter interesting because it gives the regulations for priests to do something that none of the people were ever going to see, aside from other priests.What was the symbolism of having the lamps in the lampstand burn twenty-four seven?  I don’t really know.  My first inclination would be to say that the seven lamps represent the seven days of creation.  If that is the case, then possibly the whole thing represents time.  After all, Aaron is commanded to keep the lamps burning continually.  Actually, now that I re-read that, it says that Aaron is to tend the lamps from evening until morning.  Does that mean that they allowed them to go out during the daylight hours?  I suppose that is possible.  I am reminded of John’s gospel and the ascription to Jesus of the title “Light of the World.”  The light shown in the darkness and the dark has not overcome it.  This gives us several possible symbols.  First of all, the light of the lamps could represent Christ as the light of the world.  That, however, does not seem to cover the entire meaning of this thing.  I think that somehow the idea of time has to be worked in here too.  After all, this whole idea of holiness in Leviticus instructs the people of Israel to be holy as God is holy.  They are to be holy with all of their lives and with all of their times.Across the room, we have the table of showbread.  What is that all about?  Of course every time that we see the number twelve in the Bible we have to be reminded of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Even in the case of the other prominent number of twelve, the twelve apostles, we are told in revelation that these twelve were assigned to the twelve tribes.  So what does the showbread mean?  Once again, we can have a symbol of Christ.  Jesus is called the bread of life somewhere in the gospels.  Aaron and the other priests, standing as representatives of the people, eat the bread.  That is they take the bread into themselves.  They sustain themselves on it.  This little event prefigures the act of Christian communion.  Also on the table sits a measure of incense.  This incense is burned in the incense burner.  The incense, it says in verse seven, is placed next to each row on the table to represent the bread.  How does incense represent bread?  It only represents it when God says that it does.  Then the incense is burned, signifying that the bread is somehow burned and consumed and offered on the altar.  Again, we have a double meaning.  If that is the case, then the burning of the incense represents once again the sort of living sacrifice that we have so beautifully described in Romans 12.  The bread represents the people of Israel.  The incense represents the bread.  IN being burned, the incense represents the offering up of the people’s lives in the service of God.  Once again, God calls the people to be Holy for He is Holy.After all of this temple stuff, we have this peculiar little story interjected along with some unexpected details.  The son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian man starts a fight.  In the course of this fight, this mixed-race boy blasphemes the name of God, using it in a curse.  Why is this story here?  I am not entirely sure.  This is the sort of odd arrangement that causes the know-it-alls to assume that Leviticus was cobbled together by editors.  Apparently these editors had to be too unsophisticated to organize things in a manner that didn’t show all of the seams.  This sort of prejudice really indicates an arrogance of the present day.  In the minds of the higher critics, these editors were too stupid to notice the inconsistencies in their own work.  Just because many present day writers are careless does not mean that ancient writers were similarly careless.Now back to this young man.  What became of him?  The first thing that I really love is that this group did not rush to judgment.  They obviously knew that blasphemy was wrong or they would not have gotten worked up about it.  They “put him in custody until the will of the Lord should be made clear to them.”  They wanted to know, probably, how responsible a man who was of mixed parentage was for breaking the laws of God.  They also did not want to compound the sin by punishing him in a rash manner.  I wish that our law enforcement and criminal justice system could be trusted to be so deliberative today.  Rather than rushing to gain a conviction or an acquittal, what if they waited “until the will of the Lord should be made clear to them.”  Instead, we play legal games.  The careers of prosecutors, police officers, and defense attorneys are made by the fate of those accused of crimes.  Ultimately the biggest determinant of the fate of these criminals (or those wrongly accused) is the depth of their pockets.  That is a shame that needs to be remedied.In this chapter, Gods will is revealed and the justice that is meted out is severe.  The young man is stoned.  Those who heard him do it stand as witnesses by placing their hands on the young man’s head.  Then the whole assembly stones him.  What would have happened if only one person placed his hand on the young man’s head?  I would assume that the assembly would have been a bit more thoughtful about whether or not to throw their stones.  This reminds me of the procedures for stoning contained elsewhere in the Torah (or maybe they are not in the Bible itself).  These procedures put a significant responsibility on the witnesses to such a degree that the guilt will ultimately be placed directly on them if they act unjustly.  I would think that this would help to eliminate injustices.  In the American system, we work very hard to de-humanize the process.  We like to think of this blind figure of justice as a good thing, but maybe the blind figure needs to remove the blindfold and really pay attention to what it is doing and who it is hurting.  Okay, I’ll get off of my soapbox now.

May 13, 2002

Chapter twenty-five gets us into troublesome territory.  I’m sitting here on the Monday of finals week and wondering whether I really have the gas to write about this and process it this morning.  I’m really looking forward to what this week brings, but I’m not sure that I have the energy to work through it.  We shall see.                This chapter is all about property rights.  And what topic gets us into more trouble these days than property rights?  My mind is immediately taken to Psalm 24 as I read this chapter:  “The earth is the Lord’s, the world and all those that dwell in it.”  That is the attitude expressed in the Sabbath and Jubilee provisions of this chapter.  When I think about what this chapter says, it says that next year at Jabberwocky Manor, I should be observing a Sabbath year.  It says that after living on this land for six years, I should not plant or prune or do anything to take care of production here on my property.  Is that really what is being said here?  Absolutely.  That wouldn’t be a terribly challenging thing for us.  It would simply mean that we wouldn’t have to fool with putting in a garden next year.  But what would it mean for an agricultural people like the Jews?  It would seem to mean that they were to be utterly reliant on God.  They wouldn’t plant or reap.  They would just see what the land produced and eat that.  What an act of faith that would be.  Of course the promise that God makes here is that on the sixth year, the harvest would be equal to three harvests.  That way the Israelites would eat on the seventh year, through to the harvest of the eighth year and still have some harvest left over.  That’s a big harvest, but that is what God promises in here.  When you think about the idea of a Sabbath year, you realize just what a step of faith that would be.  A person could work really hard for six days and get all of the work done so that on the seventh day, no work would need to be done.  However, you can’t really fake it like that for an entire year.  Unless God intervenes and preserves the people during the Sabbath year, there would simply be starvation.  Did the Jews have enough faith to actually observe the Sabbath year?  I don’t know.  Think how much faith would be required to observe the Jubilee year.                The idea of the Jubilee year is even more radical than the idea of the Sabbath year.  What does the Jubilee year mean?  In effect, it means that when I bought Jabberwocky Manor, I wasn’t actually buying the property.  I was buying the use of the property for a period of years.  How long would I get to use this five acres?  I would get to use it for at most 49 years.  That’s a good long time, but when you buy property, typically you expect to be able to keep it.  This is a challenging provision as well and one that wouldn’t sit well with modern people.  Let’s take a look at some of the lessons that we can learn from this chapter.The land belongs to God:  God’s gift of the land of Israel to the twelve tribes is far more important than any little petty transactions of sale that they might have done after that gift.  God gave certain land to Benjamin, certain to Judah, certain to Gad, and so forth.  That property was to remain their property regardless of the ups and downs of life that might get in the way.  Why?  It was to remain in their possession because the gift that God made was not revocable.  Sure the people could squander their gift, but they would ultimately get it back.  And when would they get it back?  They’d get it back at the day of atonement, in the Jubilee Year.  This sort of thinking does not set well with people these days.  Thinking along these lines would mean that my property would revert to the original owner every half century or so.  I don’t think that this sort of stuff would apply to us in twenty-first century America, since God did not directly give us the land, but it is still a remarkable idea.God will provide:  What a great idea.  Give the land a year off every seven years.  The provision of a Sabbath year every seventh year not only makes good environmental sense but it makes good spiritual sense.  It is funny how often the ways of God, the things that look like foolishness to the eyes of man, can make good practical sense if you look at them in the right manner.  As I said before, it would require a major act of faith to not plant on that seventh year.  Of course it wouldn’t be that great of an act of faith if you have already watched that triple harvest come in on the sixth year, but knowing the hearts of men, I am sure that many people would be tempted to believe that it was not the gift of God that provided them with a bountiful harvest during the sixth year.  No, they would decide that this sixth year harvest came as the result of their hard work and their skill.  They would decide that God was not rewarding their obedience but their righteousness.  They would sit and rationalize over matters and decide that God wanted to bless them even more.  “Yeah, I got that huge harvest last year.  I could sit back and all the land (and myself) a Sabbath this year, but it would be really great to go ahead and plant this year and get ahead.  After all, I should build up some savings for when that Jubilee year rolls around.Personal Freedom is not the be all and end all:  It seems so weird to us to sit here and think about rules governing the proper way to administer slavery.  But that is exactly what God is doing here in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus.  People were even allowed to sell themselves into slavery.  Now who would want to sell himself into slavery?  I think that it is clear that some people in our society would be better off being the responsibility of somebody else.  Now don’t get me wrong here.  I am not saying that people ought to be grabbed from Africa and thrust into chains for all time, but I am saying that some people simply don’t do well on their own.  Let’s think about a dog for a moment.  Some dogs are perfectly capable of supporting themselves without human intervention, while others would quickly get themselves into trouble if humans weren’t around.  I think that it is the same thing when it comes to people.  Some people simply do not fare well when it comes to liberty.  Of course I am sitting here thinking that I would not fall into that category.  But how many of us are truly at liberty?  Most people do not really live in complete liberty.  Look at the Frontier Home show.  Those people were mostly at liberty.  They had to live or die on their own.  The opinion of the experts who evaluated the homesteaders’ preparations was that one family would survive, one might, and the third would definitely not survive.  That’s the truth of the matter.  Many people simply don’t fare well by themselves.  Some of us are “slaves” of a huge corporation or an institution.  Some of us are “slaves” of the government.  Unless we are in prison, we can escape this form of slavery, but perhaps more significantly, we can be dumped by our “slaveholder.”  In the slave situation described here in the Old Testament, we are allowing someone else to take responsibility for us.  This involves trading of liberty for the ability to have some security.  The slaveowner, I would presume, could not simply fire or “lay off” the slave.  Personal liberty is not all that we think that it is.

May 14, 2002

This God of mine is not just an awesome God.  He is a demanding God.  This chapter, number twenty-six, starts out with a couple of repeated commands.  Do not set up idols for yourself.  Observe the Sabbath.  Reverence the sanctuary.  These are God-oriented commands.  I am reminded here of the story of the rich young ruler.  When Jesus asked the ruler if he had obeyed the law, the ruler said that he had.  Jesus then named off some of the ten commandments, but he restricted himself to the person-to-person commandments:  don’t steal, don’t kill, and so forth.  The rich young ruler had obeyed all of those.  Had he always obeyed the “religious” commandments?  Had he always put God ahead of everything?  Had he always observed the Sabbath?  I rather doubt it.  He didn’t seem to respond well when Jesus suggested that he give away everything that he had and follow God.  This guy was sold out to rules rather than being sold out to God.I really love the reasoning in these first few verses of chapter twenty-six.  God does not say “do not set up an image because it will hurt my feelings” or “observe the Sabbath so that you’ll get the rest that humans need.”  No, God says that they should do these things.  Period.  “I am the Lord.”  As I read that, God is telling the people of Israel that He really doesn’t have to give them a reason to do what He is telling them to do.  This is something like the parental reasoning of “Because I told you so.”  “I’m your mother, that’s why.”  When you are in a position of sufficient authority, you don’t have to explain your actions.  When my children continually ask “why?” I take it as a sign of their questioning of my authority and a matter of disrespect.  I’m not saying that they should never ask “why” or that they cannot do so in a respectful manner.  I’m saying that when they question my authority, they are showing a lack of respect.  Similarly, people try to question God.  They ask why God would require this or that.  They assume that God didn’t mean this.  Clearly, they might suggest, God really didn’t approve of slavery.  Clearly the presence of slavery in the Old Testament regulations indicates that human hands had a significant part in this document.  Surely God is as wise as we enlightened people in the twenty-first century are.  Is that right?  Surely God didn’t mean what he said about divorce only being allowable in the case of adultery.  Surely God didn’t want people stoned to death just for blaspheming the Name.  Surely God really didn’t condemn homosexuality.  Surely that couldn’t be God talking.  And if it is God talking, then we really question just how just a God He could be.  After all, surely God would be as wise as we are.After this portion of Leviticus, God gets really heavy.  The simple message of the remainder of this chapter is that if the people do what God has commanded them to do, then they will be blessed beyond belief.  The flip side is that if they do not obey God’s commands then they will be visited by a continuing and worsening series of afflictions, all designed to draw the people back to God.  Finally, the passage ends on a note of hope.  Even though God’s punishment has run through a number of levels and the people have been largely destroyed and scattered out of the land, God will be faithful to them if they turn from their sins.  That’s good stuff.  What do we learn from reading this passage?God does reward faithfulness:  I believe this.  I do not believe that God has ever expected perfection.  I think that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  He would not expect more from me than He expected from my grandfather or from Martin Luther or from Abraham.  God expects a circumcised heart.  God expects an effort and a desire to righteousness.  After all, if He did not expect the people of Israel to commit some sins, then why would he have made all of the provisions in the sacrificial law for sin offerings and the Day of Atonement.  If they were looking for perfection back then, then they wouldn’t have had any room for those things.  God wasn’t expecting perfection back then and He isn’t looking for it now.  He is looking for a heart aimed at righteousness.  Most of the time I have a heart aimed at righteousness.  Most of the time I am rewarded.  I remember a couple of years ago, I had determined that it was important for our family to “work our way up” to tithing.  We had been giving some amount—perhaps $30 a week—to the church.  Maybe it was more like $50 a pay period.  I don’t know.  Whatever it was, it amounted to significantly less than a tithe.  Then, one day—I believe it was in the late spring—I thought that I should gradually increase that number until we reached a tithe.  After a couple of weeks in that frame of mind, I had a realization.  If I really believed that God had called me to tithe, then I should not work my way up to it.  I should simply tithe and trust that God would attend to my needs.  I decided right then that, regardless of finances, I was going to write the check that would represent a tithe the next Sunday.  The very next day, my father gave me a check for $10,000.  Wow!  I hadn’t even acted on my decision yet, but God rewarded my faithfulness.  I have believed in the wisdom of the tithe ever since.  I do not assume that God will always pay me back in such a direct and generous manner, but I do assume that I will be more blessed in giving what God has commanded me to give than in not giving what God has commanded me to give.God does punish wickedness:  I remember back in the day, when I was still in the thrall of the COCAKARLDS.  Patsy Boos, a woman of much knowledge and little spiritual insight, taught a class on Introduction to Scripture.  This class had little to do with scripture, it turned out.  But that’s neither here nor there.  One of the things that I heard Patsy say several times was that her daughter had been involved in a terrible car accident and people had wondered what her daughter had done to deserve this happening to her.  Patsy then proclaimed as if she were one with authority:  “God does not punish us like that for our sins.”  Rubbish.  I am not saying that every bad thing that happens to a person is the result of some sin, but this chapter makes it quite clear that God does punish people when they wander away from Him.  The book of Job also indicates that God will allow bad things to happen to test a person.  The book of Hebrews tells us that God disciplines those whom He loves.  Patsy’s daughter might have just had a wreck, but she might also have been walking astray from God and needing some discipline.  To deny that is to deny the loving discipline of God.God loves His people:  Why did God promise to discipline the people if they strayed?  The answer to that is simple.  He wanted to bring them back to Himself.  He isn’t a peevish God.  God does not punish those for whom there is no hope.  I don’t have a scripture reference for that, but I believe that it is true.  God knocks those on the head whom He wants to bring back into the fold.  God has certainly knocked me on the head a few times and in doing so He has definitely let me know that this was no coincidence.

May 15, 2002

And so today we wrap up the read-through of Leviticus.  How apt this is since today is the ending of something, the last day of interaction with students at school for the spring semester.  Of course, just as I so often do, I am simply looking at the multitude of variables in my life and ascribing some significance to this one, seeing meaning where there is probably just coincidence.  Leviticus 27 strikes the ear of the twentieth century reader as odd.  It is all about dedicating things wholly to the Lord.  Why do I say that these things seem strange.  Here’s the deal.  As I read this, if a person wants to be dedicated to the Lord, he must go to the temple and PAY.  Now days we think that we’re doing God a favor when we dedicate ourselves to service.  We think that we’re doing God a favor when we make a gift of property or money.  In this case, God says that we can do this but we have to pay to make the thing dedicated to the Lord.  I’m unclear as to why anybody would ever want to do this with themselves.  What would be the benefit.  There are some messages that we can take from this.  Let’s just charge right into these.We are not our own:  Probably the most important lesson that we can take from this chapter of Leviticus and from the entire Bible is that we are not our own.  We have been bought with a price.  For the Christian that price involves the shed blood of Jesus on Calvary.  For the children of Israel, the price was the act of God in bringing the people who were slaves up out of Egypt at the hand of Moses.  We have been bought and paid for, and we exist at God’s whim.  We like to suppose that our lives are our own, that we can do with these lives whatever we will, but this chapter reminds us that these lives are not ours.  Even when we seek to “give” our lives to God, we are really just trying to give Him what is already His.  If I am to give my life over to God, then I should expect that I will have to pay rather than being repaid.  Why?  I’m not exactly sure why, but that is the way that God has set it.  I suppose that part of this matter might be an issue of humility.  I once again go back to the trough of the COCAKARLDS.  Everybody in that community wants to be a member of the priesthood.  They think that there is something wrong if they are not ordained.  They think that there is something wrong if an adult is not at least a priest or an elder.  But in reality, their little priesthood game is nothing but an exercise in ego stroking.  What does their priesthood require of them that is not required of normal members?  Nothing.  Oh, they have a priesthood review every couple of years, but let’s face it.  They don’t want to get too nit picky since people might get angry if told that they actually have to do something with their ordination.  Most people tend to see this office as more of an honor than as a duty.  They certainly don’t have to sacrifice anything for it.  In other denominations, ordination is going to require some sacrifice.  You might have to give up earning power.  You might have to sacrifice money and time to attend seminary.  You might have to forego a fancy house or control of your own destiny as to where you live.  These people do pay somewhat for their service.  Being a Baptist deacon does not cost particularly, but serving God as a Bible Study teacher or by going as a short-term missionary to Venezuela does cost.  I had to pay my own way to Venezuela last year.  I got to give myself to God and then pay to do it.  Is that a parallel experience?  To some degree I think that it is.What we have God gave us:  Going along the same track, we come to the idea of private property.  When a person wants to dedicate a field to the Lord, things happen in a particular manner.  If you are dedicating some of your family property, then you give the allotted amount and the land is made holy to the Lord forever.  The ultimate landowner is changed.  On the other hand, if you dedicate land that you have purchased from somebody else since the Year of Jubilee—that is you are dedicating land that you bought from the family to whom it ultimately belongs—then the dedication only lasts until the next Jubilee year.  That’s interesting.  What we learn from this is that the only person who can give away land that God has given to them is that person.  I can sell my birthright for a brief time, but in the year of Jubilee, that birthright will be returned to me.  If I sell my birthright, my ancestral land, to a stranger, that land remains sold until the Jubilee.  If that other person, that stranger, decides to gift that land over to the Lord, then the gift only lasts until the Jubilee year.  But again, you can’t just give your land away.  Your land is not really your land.  God has given you the land, but ultimately, a la Psalm 24, everything belongs to God.  Everything belongs to God.  You can’t give away what does not belong to you, so you have to essentially buy the property and then give it away.  That’s very strange to western ears.  Unlike Esau, we cannot simply squander our birthright.  For the Israelites, this meant that they could not give away the land that God had given to their family.  For the Christian, this means that we cannot give away the redemption that our Savior has bequeathed to us.  I cannot give up my ancestral land because in reality it does not belong to me.  It belongs to God and God has allotted it to me.  I cannot give up my salvation because it does not belong to me.  Christ bought my salvation with His own blood.  It belongs to Him, but He has allotted it to me.We Owe  a Tithe:This has to be a preacher’s favorite passage.  One tenth of everything that we possess belongs to God.  The folks from the COCAKARLDS have it all wrong.  In their world, you tithe on a tenth of your increase.  You take the amount that you made, subtract out the amount that you needed to live, and then tithe on that.  That seems like a really reasonable and fair way to do things, but in reality they chisel you pretty effectively by saying that only gifts given, unrestricted, to the denomination are counted as tithes.  That money that you give to support your local congregation doesn’t count toward tithing. What sort of nonsense is that.  But I’d like to talk about the first nonsense first.  What does this passage say?  “A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord.  It is holy to the Lord.”  That seems pretty clear to me.  One tenth of everything.  That means that if I grow ten bushels of peas, then one of them belongs to God.  If I grow 100 apples, then 10 of them belong to God.  If my hens lay 1,000 eggs, then 100 belong to God.  That seems very simple.  This does not say that I should take the total amount of produce and then subtract out the amount that I needed.  Let’s see, my hens laid 1,000 eggs.  My family ate 200 of those eggs, which leaves 800, so my tithe is 80.  No!  My tithe is 100.  The key thing is not some sort of rational, humanly thought-out plan of justice.  The key thing is obedience to God.  God said to give a tithe, so we are to give a tithe.  As the preceding part of this chapter suggested, we might desire to give much more to God, but we are to give no less than a tithe.

May 16, 2002

So having gone through the twenty-seven chapters of Leviticus, I find myself staring back on page after page of history, page after page of the commandments of God, transmitted some 3,500 years ago through Moses to the people of Israel.  If I were to sum up Leviticus, what would I say that I find there?  I guess you can’t do a whole lot better than Warren Weirsbe, who named his commentary on Leviticus Be Holy.  Be Holy.  Why should we be Holy.  Several times, Leviticus has God saying, “Be holy for I am holy.”  God is Holy and therefore we are to be holy and like God.  Leviticus is not a book about our best interests on the surface.  Leviticus is not something like the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  It’s not the Eight Habits of the Heart.  It’s not How to Win Friends and Influence People or How to Sell Anything to Anybody.  No, Leviticus is a manual that tells us how to glorify God through our lives.  Leviticus tells us how to be Holy for God is Holy.  How are we to be Holy?  Leviticus tells us that.  It tells us that we are to be holy through our worship.  Leviticus describes a world that has at its certain the Holy of Holies, the most Holy place, the room behind the curtain in the Tent of Meeting where the Ark of the Covenant resides and the Shekinah Glory of God dwells.  That’s the center of the universe that Leviticus creates here.  That rarefied spot is the place where God meets with the High Priest once each year on the Day of Atonement.  That is the center of the universe just as one Friday in the spring on a hill outside the city wall of Jerusalem, the cross of Jesus represents the focal point of history.  The world that Leviticus describes radiates out from that focal point.  It radiates around that focal point, just as our lives are to be arrayed around and radiate out from the focal point of Christ’s cross.  We have the Holy place, the larger room of the inside of the Temple or the tent of meeting, where the showbread is spread upon the golden table, the place where the lampstand burns seven lamps day and night forever, the place where the incense is burned before the Lord twice each day.  Moving further from the focal point of the world, we move into the court of the temple or Tent of Meeting, where we find the altar and the bronze laver.  It is here that the various sacrifices are offered up.  It is here that the normal people can come and participate in the worship of the Lord.  Then we radiate out into the camp.  Even though the arrangement of the camp is not contained in the book of Leviticus, we can get it in Numbers.  There we find that, when the people of Israel were encamped in the wilderness, the tent of meeting stood at the very center of the camp.  To the north, south, east, and west of the tent, were the camps of the various Levite groups, with Moses, Aaron, and their sons encamped at the east and entrance to the tent area.  Then, the remainder of the tribes, all twelve of them, were arrayed around the perimeter of the camp.  Beyond the camp was a place of decreasing holiness.  Outside the camp wasn’t a place that you really wanted to be.  The further you proceeded away from the tent, the less Holy the place became.  For the people of Israel, the proper orientation was to look inward, to put one’s back to the uncleanness on the outskirts of the camp and to turn one’s face toward the tent of meeting, to orient oneself toward the court, the holy place, and finally to the Holy of Holies.  Interestingly, not everyone had to go into the Holy of Holies.  In fact, only the High Priest got to go there and that only one time a year.  What a beautiful picture that is.  Even though the worship of the entire nation focused on the Ark of the Covenant and the presence of God that dwelled there and the covenant that was represented by that piece of furniture, only one person in any given year was required to go into that most forbidding of places.  Similarly, even though the worship of Christians is focused upon the cross of Jesus, we do not actually have to go to that cross in the way that Jesus went.  We cannot go to that cross, just as no one besides the high priest could go into the Holy of Holies.  No one else could do the work that the High Priest had to do; no one else could do the work that Jesus had to do on the cross.  Only the priests could do the work that they had to do in the Holy Place.  All of Israel turned their faces in toward that part of the Temple structure as well, yet only a select few, those called by virtue of their birth into the house of Aaron were able to and required to do the work of maintaining the light of the lamps, of arranging and eating the bread, and of burning the incense before the Lord.  Similarly, not all of us are called to minister before the Lord as full-time ministers.  We are not all called to preach or give our lives in a vocational sense.  But worship does not end at the door to the Temple area, in the entrance to the temple courtyard.  No, the holiness, while concentrated in the tent of meeting’s various areas, radiates out into the camp.  The holiness must be maintained within the camp.  That’s the beautiful thing for the rest of us.  While we are not called to go into the Holy of Holies in order to sprinkle blood upon the mercy seat once and seven times before the Ark, while we are not called to go into the temple and eat the bread, maintain the light of the lamps burning for all time, or eat the bread that lay upon the table of showbread, while we are not called like the Levites to devote ourselves to the various support services that surrounded the tent of meeting and later the Temple, we are all called to be holy for God is holy.  We are called to concern ourselves with cleanness.  The Holy of Holies is the center of the holy area of the Lord, but the holiness does not end at the curtain that demarcates the courtyard.  The holiness has to continue into our homes.  That’s a big part of what Leviticus is about.  Leviticus tells us, each of us, whether we be the high priest, a levite, a normal man, or a woman, what we must do to be as holy and righteous as we can hope to be.  That’s the story of Leviticus.  It tells us what we must do to be holy in various areas.  It discusses how we must worship.  It tells us how we should give of our resources.  It tells us how we should eat and dress and house ourselves.  It tells us how we should conduct ourselves with our fellow man.  It tells us what we cannot do in the realm of sexuality.  Leviticus, far from simply being a set of rules that God sets out in some sort of fit of capricious requirement-making, is a manual for holiness.  Paul will later tell us that this book is designed to show our sin, and this is true.  Leviticus, as the heart of the law, is designed to make clear just how far we are from the Lord who is holy.  God is holy and we are not.  That is the ultimate message of Leviticus.  Yet it is not as dismal a message as we might think it to be given what Paul has to say about it.  Instead, this message has laid within it the pre-figuration of the gift that Christ would give us.  Where Leviticus demonstrates our uncleanness, it demonstrates the power of God to make us eternally clean.  While Leviticus shows us the multitude of our sins, it leads us toward a method for that God has prescribed to wash away those sins.  While this book gives the requirements for a ritual that atones for the sins of the people once each year, it points toward the eventual gift of Christ on Calvary’s tree, an eternal Day of Atonement that would wipe out all the sins of all the people for all time.  Hallelujah, what a Savior.  Why did I begin reading this book some five weeks ago?  What led me here?  I can only say that God led me here.  I was looking for the next study that I needed to do to take me beyond the Steve Farrar study that I was about to wrap up.  I went to the Family Christian Bookstore and there found the Weirsbe book, Be Holy.  Something told me that I should take that book and work through it in order to study Leviticus.  What a strange choice, yet what a rewarding choice.  The Weirsbe book has been largely ignored as I just pushed my way through Leviticus on my own.  Most of the time I really didn’t need anything more than my NIV Bible and perhaps the language helps provided by Logos.  As I was reading and writing my way through this book, I came to realize that my next project needed to be Hebrews.  The connection between the two is fairly clear.  Hebrews makes clear some of the things that I have claimed in these past paragraphs.  So it’s on to Hebrews for me.

Okay, I’m done with Leviticus for now.  I’m sure I will come back to it, but this is enough apple picking now.