Sunday 09 • 02 • 18

The Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying... — Leviticus 1:1

Father, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. Lord, you are a rock and our fortress and our redeemer. Amen.

So, Leviticus, really? Yes. Leviticus, really? Today, we are starting a sermon series that's going to take us up to December looking at probably what is maybe the most challenging book in the Old Testament. And here's why we're doing Leviticus: in many ways, the book of Leviticus takes all the questions that people have about the Bible and pushes them to the edge, pushes them to the outer edges.

Think about how many people—maybe this is your experience—who have started to read the Bible through. Like, "I'm going to do this in a year. I'm going to start reading the Bible through the year." And so you go through Genesis, and you're like, "Okay, some interesting stories. Maybe it's a little weird stuff in there, but I'm getting through Genesis." Exodus is very compelling, and then wham, you hit the Levitical wall. You get into Leviticus and there are all of these rules and regulations. There's lots of weird stuff about mildew and bodily emissions. There's all this technical language, all the sacrifices to slog through, the festivals to slog through. It is technical and it is weird and it's bloody, and it introduces the idea of people being unclean, which is really not very nice. There are kosher foods that they couldn't eat. It's just challenging on multiple levels, and that's where most people die—somewhere around Leviticus chapter eight or nine. It's just like, "Maybe we'll skip to John. I love John."

I think that Leviticus is sort of pure concentrate form of all of our problems with the Bible. So much of it to a modern person seems random, primitive, maybe barbaric. There's a little bit of, "How about we move past this?" As you read this, in some ways, this whole series is going to be an answer to the question: why bother? Why bother? So many people dismiss the Bible. But I think that something is dangerous in the modern soul. When we look at something ancient like this and think, "Oh yeah, we've got this down. We don't need to listen to that"—something happens. That's wrong. When we think this is so old and so foreign that I don't have anything to learn from this, we miss something important.

If nothing else compels you to stay with us in this study, I want you to consider this: this book has survived millennia and been treasured by lots and lots of people before us. And that alone should make us say, "Well, maybe there's something in here. There's something in here."

For example, how do you feel about the phrase "love your neighbor"? Do you feel like, as a culture, if I look at the news, I think we nailed it? I think we know exactly what we're doing with that one and we can move on? You know where that phrase came from? Jesus said that. But where did He get that? He got that from Leviticus. So maybe we haven't nailed it yet. Maybe we aren't past this yet. It's a time for us to look at this together.

The Three B's: Barrier, Backstory, and Bridge

Today, I'm going to take us through the first verse. We didn't get very far in the reading that was emphasized. Here's where we're going to start: we're going to talk about the barrier, the backstory, and then the bridge. The barrier—what are the obstacles that Leviticus presents us with in faith? What is the backstory to this book that we need to understand? And then, how could this book possibly be a bridge for us to understand who we are, who God is, and what we're doing here in this world?

Three B's—yes, on a holiday Sunday, I'm making it easy for you. The barrier, the backstory, and the bridge.

The Barrier

We'll start with the barrier. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this because it's fairly obvious. As I talked about reading through the Bible, Leviticus is an obstacle for many people in terms of embracing the Bible. I appreciate that there was an exchange on the TV show "The West Wing" years ago that was all about the book of Leviticus. In it, the president, President Bartlett, has an exchange with a woman who's a conservative pundit based loosely on Doctor Laura. She's called Doctor Jenna in this. They have this conversation—he comes in and she's sitting at this table, and this is how it goes. I'll try to represent it right.

President Barlow says, "Hey, good morning. I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination." Now, he's being sarcastic with that comment. Doctor Genesis says, "I don't call homosexuality an abomination, mister president. The Bible does." President Bartlett says, "Yes, I know. Leviticus."

Leviticus 18:22

President Bartlett responds this way: "Chapter and verse. I want to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown student, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when asked when it was her turn. What would be a good price for her, do you think?

"Well, while we're thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?

"Here's one that's really important because we got a lot of sports in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing clothing garments made from two different threads?

"Think about those questions, would you? One last thing, while you may be mistaking this for your monthly meeting of the ignorant tight ass club, in this building where the president stands, nobody sits." It's sort of the drop the mic moment. He walks away.

The reason I read that is I think that he captures something that a lot of people wrestle with when they open up the Bible, particularly this part of the Bible. Like, really? Leviticus? You know, all kinds of obstacles and barriers, things like, isn't this book ridiculous? Isn't it violent? Is it dangerous for us to read this book? These are many more. We're going to answer all of these as we go through this fall. I'm excited about doing this, because I think if we understand the book of Leviticus, we understand more about what it means to be God's people. And it helps us to understand what it means to talk about the Bible with people that we know and care about.

Two Extremes to Avoid

But there are two extremes I want to avoid really quick. So, I need you to help me with this as we go through this in your community groups. The first is the Jesus juke. Jesus juking the Old Testament. Now do you know what juking is in football? If someone jukes you, right, you know, if the guy with the football is running at you and you're playing defense and he fakes left and then goes right and you follow the juke. That's what a juke is. You stumble the wrong way to try to catch him.

Now, Jesus juking is a phrase that has to do with taking something that's a joke and spinning it with a little Christian gloss to make it really serious. So, example—this summer, I was reading on Twitter, an acquaintance of mine posted something about a guy doing push ups outside Starbucks in the airport, right? You know, and makes a kind of lighthearted joke about it, like, isn't this guy nuts? And somebody responds, wouldn't it be when we get it right? Says, "Imagine if we were that dedicated in our faith, family, and finances." That's a Jesus juke. You know, it's like, woah, you know, it goes from, woah, there's a weirdo doing push ups in the mall to, let's make a very serious statement about faith. You're in this moment. That's the Jesus juke. Everybody familiar with this?

You know, it's not very nice and there's another kind of Jesus juke that we Christians do all the time with our Bibles that's also not very nice. And it's this: functionally speaking, to be New Testament only Christians—it's to ignore and disregard whole sections of the Bible under the banner of "Jesus has come and we're done with all that." And that's sort of true but it's not really true.

See, don't get me wrong. As you'll see this fall, we're going to talk about typology. I'm going to really explain that word. We're going to talk about how Jesus fulfills the commandments and the regulations of this book. In fact, I'm a real big fan of the whole book of Hebrews which just majors on how the whole system here is fulfilled by Jesus. But I want to warn you not to Jesus juke your Old Testament because a lot of times in doing that—Jesus has come so we're done with all that—we actually create a Bible within our Bible as Christians. We're like, well, I love the New Testament and some Psalms and Isaiah 53 and some parts of Genesis and the parts that I can sort of make really easily into something I can see how this is about Jesus. And when we do that, we miss the richness. We miss the subtlety.

We miss the complexity, and we don't really savor all that the Bible has for us and who God is and the way that Jesus has come. And so we need that.

The second thing is we're going to be really careful not to cherry pick the Old Testament. You know what cherry picking is? Cherry picking is when—and this is illegal in most sports—your team leaves a guy down by the goal, a woman down by the goal from your team whose job is simply to stand by the goal if the ball comes down there, kick it in or throw it in real quick. And it's illegal in basketball and hockey and soccer. That's called being offsides.

But you know, I want to be careful that we don't do the same thing with the Bible. That we don't go through the passages of the Bible and pick and choose which ones we like and which ones we don't like. Christians are accused of this all the time of being hypocritical in the way we apply the Old Testament. It's like we say, arbitrarily, "This one's for all time. That one's not." So we're going to be really consistent. Try to be really consistent and not get offsides, okay? And that's how we understand this.

So let's go to Leviticus and see if we can understand any of why this book matters. Just a little intro this morning. I want to show you the backstory. Did you know that for the Hebrew people, this was not a ridiculous book. This wasn't a hard book. In fact, this is the book that they would have discussed behind the blue door in the kids' class. This is the first book that was given to Hebrew children to begin to memorize. They thought this was the easy stuff. They didn't think this was weird. They didn't think it was all that hard. They didn't think it was dangerous for sure.

We call this book Leviticus, which comes from the word Levi, which was one of the 12 tribes that was tasked by Moses. They didn't get land inheritance. Instead, they got the care of the temple and the tabernacle as their inheritance and they were fed from that. That's where we get the word Leviticus. It's a priestly manual. In fact, some of it feels like we're reading a handbook that is shorthand and scholars say there are some things that are assumed here that we understand but we don't understand. If you come up to me after service and think I'm going to know everything about Leviticus, there are going to be parts where I'm like, I'm doing my best, but even the best scholars say this reads like a priestly manual, and there are some parts that are just assumed we understand.

But the Hebrew people did not call this book Leviticus. In fact, I got my Hebrew Bible. If you want to see this up here, the word is not Leviticus in that way. If you go to a Jewish synagogue today, they don't call it Leviticus. They call it Vaikra. Vaikra. And Vaikra means "and he continued calling." And it's all one word.

So if you have Jewish friends, tell them you're studying Vaikra. That name shows us that this book is hard to pick up and just study independently because, stay with me, this is higher level exegesis. If God continued calling from the tent of meeting, that means he was calling them before. You got that? See, this is higher level biblical interpretation you're getting only at CTK.

It means there's a story before this. If you just pick up Leviticus today and start reading it, it's sort of like watching season two without knowing what happened in season one. You're like, what is the Upside Down? Why does Jon Snow know nothing? What happened to Luke Skywalker's hand? Who's the queen of dragons? You would miss all of that if you just started with season two.

And so when it says "and God continued speaking from the tent of meeting," we know that something happened before that's really important for us to understand in order to open up this book. So let me tell you about season one, which is called Exodus.

Exodus: The Foundation Story

Exodus is, if you're not a Bible person, the second book of the Bible. It's the book that details lots of these stories. God raises up this person named Moses who's going to lead his people out of slavery. God's people had been in slavery in Egypt for four hundred years. God raises up Moses. He goes to Pharaoh. It's the "let my people go" story. It's the ten plagues story.

There's the going through the Red Sea. There's God's law given at Sinai and then there's the instructions for building the tabernacle. That's what Exodus is. But here's the thing, the big theme of Exodus is basically this dualism: Is God absent or is God present?

The book of Exodus begins with the problem of God's apparent absence. People in slavery for four hundred years. Four hundred years of being owned by Pharaoh, four hundred years of forced labor camps. Pharaoh at this point is working on a policy of slow extermination of the Jewish people. He goes to the midwives and he says, "Kill all the baby boys." What happens over generations if you remove all the males from society? That society cannot reproduce. He's working on a slow extermination policy of destroying the Hebrew people.

Exodus begins this way: Where's God? People are crying out to him. It looks like God's absent but God is present to his people. And this is where it continues to go. God reveals in Exodus his plan to be with them. This is the great whole theme of the whole Bible—God's desire to be with his people—and this is the theme of the book of Exodus. God hadn't abandoned them.

So he initiates this. Over and over, God tells Moses to go talk to Pharaoh and tell him, "This is my message. Let my people go." People remember that part. Why? So they can come and worship me in the desert. He wants to be with them. God begins this process. He leads them out to Mount Sinai and he declares his law, and the law is really based on this: "I'm going to be your God and you're going to be my people. I want to be with you."

Then the last part of the book—the boring part of Exodus—is all the details of how God wants them to build him a tent called the Tabernacle. Think about it. God's people are camped in a desert. They're all in tents. God wants his tent to be in the middle of them, the Tabernacle. This is supposed to be a gigantic tent, and it's super detailed. I mean, all the stuff on how they're supposed to build it and exactly the measurements and all the details—that's next week's sermon. We're going to talk about the Tabernacle a whole lot next week. But the main idea of the Tabernacle is God wants to be in the middle of the camp with all the people.

But then you get to the end of Exodus and look at the passage that's printed for you there in your worship folder. Exodus 40, verses 34 and 35. Exodus 40 is the last chapter of Exodus. You get through the verses right before us, and it says Moses finally finished setting up the tent. He puts the base and all the curtains. They put the big basin of water. They create, they put the holy of holies. They set up the altars. They do all this stuff. They set it up, and then you get to verses 34 and 35.

Listen to what it says:

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. — Exodus 40:34

So far so good. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Here's the tent. God's coming in his tent. Gonna be great. Then verse 35:

And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. — Exodus 40:35

Here's the problem. This is a big problem. God is near them. They're not with him. They're not with him yet.

See, the ultimate goal of creation is: we're going to be with God. And even Moses—I mean, if anybody can be with God, God had been with him on Mount Sinai—but Moses is not able to go into the tabernacle. He's not able to enter the tent.

So here's the precise wording I want you to get: The tabernacle—the description of the shape, big tent—but the purpose of it, it's given here in verse 35: the tent of meeting. So the tent looks like it's supposed to look and God's presence is in there, but it's not functioning right now the way it's supposed to function. It's not doing what it's supposed to do. Nobody can go meet with God in it. Not even Moses.

So this is the problem. Exodus begins with God's absent. He looks absent but he shows himself present. It ends with God's present but we can't be present to him. What's the answer to that? Leviticus.

Leviticus as the Answer

Leviticus is the answer to that. See, something's not right. So Leviticus is not some accident. It's not some priest who had too much wine one night and wrote out some weird stuff. It's the answer to that problem. That's why this picks up and God continues calling, because we know this can't be all there is. And even though Leviticus is a provisional answer, it was an answer to that.

Let me show you how I know this. Okay, again, we're getting nerdy this morning.

The way that Hebrew language and literature works is like this. In Hebrew, Hebrew was written for hundreds and hundreds of years without punctuation and without any vowel signs. They have no way of emphasizing things in Hebrew except for by doing so within the language. There's no bold print, no italics, no underlining, no bold print. So the way that they emphasize things in Hebrew is by repetition, by repeating things. And you can see this if you read the Psalms. A lot of times you read Psalms and it sounds like whoever's writing that says the same thing twice. That's important. They're saying the same thing in two different ways. That means that's really important.

Well, here's how that works with books because that's how it works in sentences. When I was a kid, I used to read the comics every Sunday, and there was always a comic called Blondie that featured this guy named Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood would make these sandwiches, gigantic Dagwood Bumstead sandwiches. They were bread on each side and layers and layers of stuff in the middle—meat and cheese and pickles and everything else in these sandwiches. So I want you to picture a giant sandwich this morning. This is how we're going to understand the first five books of the Bible.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy are a giant sandwich. You have two pieces of bread on either side. You have Genesis on one side, and you have Deuteronomy on the other side. And then you have Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers in the middle. The Bible shows us over and over here with this sandwich structure that Leviticus is a big deal.

These five books are called the Pentateuch, which means five scrolls. But it's not just that these happen to fill up five scrolls. These are five books that go together that are meant to be read together. And Leviticus is the meat. It's the meat in the middle. And that's no accident.

For example, Exodus and Numbers contain almost identical numbers of words. They're almost perfectly symmetrical—that's book two and book four. Leviticus of all of them is the shortest of the books. Genesis and Deuteronomy, the bread on both sides, end with a patriarch—Moses and Jacob—blessing the people. The second half of Exodus, book two, is all about the setting up of the tabernacle. The first part of Numbers, book four, is about the taking down of the tabernacle. Do you see what I'm saying? The whole structure points us like it's a big arrow saying, "Hey, Leviticus, really, really important here. This is the meat in the sandwich."

Who will ascend to the mountain of the Lord? — Psalm 26

It's like the whole of the Pentateuch is going, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, right here. Read Leviticus. This is how God can be with his people.

Okay, you may be like, "That's nerdy." I'm going to give you another one. Let's look at Leviticus. Leviticus is 27 chapters long and the absolute middle point, the literary center, if you will, of Leviticus is chapter 16. There are 18 speeches of God before that and there are 18 speeches of God after that.

Well, Leviticus 16 is kind of a big deal because it is a description of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. When God had his people, the high priest would go in on that day only into the Holy of Holies and they would do two things. They would take one goat and essentially put the sins of the people on the goat and drive that goat out into the wilderness to symbolize like God is sending your sins away. And then there would be a sacrifice of another animal, a sheep. They would take the blood and sprinkle it all over the holy place, all over the altar, and it symbolizes God's cleansing of that. Again, Leviticus, bing, bing, bing. This is the big deal. Leviticus 16.

If you were a good Old Testament kid growing up, you'd be like, "Wow. Leviticus 16 is the center of the center." How will God be with his people? How can we be near God? Who will ascend them out in the word? Moses can't do it. Bing, bing, bing. Leviticus shows us. Only by sacrifice. Only this way.

This is why Leviticus, in the words of Jewish theological seminary professor Benjamin Sommer, is the most Christian section of the Hebrew Scriptures. I know some of you read through this and hit a wall. You're like, why would I want to read this book? And yet, listen to this. What we might consider meaningless weirdness, this guy is saying, is the most Christian section of the whole Pentateuch. Don't miss it.

It sort of reminds me of this guy. He was born and given the nickname Emmanuel. At his baptism, he was called the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. He called the temple my father's house. He was crucified, driven outside the city, sent out with all the sins of the people on his shoulders, killed there, and the curtain miraculously ripped from top to bottom. He told the thief on the cross next to him, "I tell you today, you'll be with me in paradise." Sort of reminds me of that guy.

So maybe, just maybe, studying Leviticus would be really helpful for us to understand the fullness of what's given to us in Jesus and what we're doing here as this church and what the purpose of life is, where this whole thing is going, and why it matters so much that we worship him and know him.

Looking ahead, this is a really difficult book to read. We're not going to go verse by verse. We only did one today. Some Sundays we're going to do a little chunk and some days we're going to do four chapters. We're just going to fly over them because my point is not an in-depth study. I want this book to be a bridge for you. I want you to get three things out of this as we study it.

Three Things to Gain from Leviticus

First, there's good news in the shadows. This is hard work. There's going to be some heavy lifting. But you all are above average in this church, so we're good for this. This book is about the gospel over and over again, but it's the gospel in the shadows. It's hard. It's not easy. It's not as immediate as the gospel of John. You're all tempted to quit Leviticus and go read that, but there's good news here.

The fourth-century African theologian and father of the church, Augustine, says this about the Old Testament. He says, the new is in the old concealed. The old is in the new revealed. So the picture is like a big, dark, dusty basement called the Old Testament. You get this flashlight—the light of Christ—and you get to wander around and you trip over things. There's a lot of stuff in that basement. You're like, what is this? And you shine the light of Christ and you're like, wait, wow, this really matters. It's not a lot of old junk down there. There's a lot of beautiful, awesome stuff down there that's hard to see. So we're going to have to work for it.

Second, healing and holiness. I want you to understand healing and holiness. Holiness is probably a bad word in the Christian church—a word that people shrink back from. We picture someone who's uptight and stuffy and rule-oriented, always calling someone out for having a good time. But the word holiness is more akin to our word wholeness. It's becoming what God intends us to be. God reveals this—that's the little secret key to reading all the holiness codes about what you eat—because holiness is really about becoming a whole person, about becoming who God has made you to be, how he's designed people to function. God prescribes a way for people to be in relationship with him, and it involves us becoming whole. That's really what's caught up in this. I want you to discover that in Leviticus.

Third, the reality in rituals. Chapters one through six detail five sacrifices for us. In the last part of the book, look at all the festivals. We're going to look at those too. All these rituals. In general, Americans don't like rituals. Some of you come here and say, I like this church, but I don't like this stuff. Why do they have to do the confession of sin and all this liturgy stuff every Sunday? Because there's reality in rituals. Sure, some rituals are rote and meaningless. Nobody's like, there's deep meaning in brushing your teeth every morning. That's a ritual you do.

But there is deep meaning in coming and confessing your sin every Sunday and being reminded of the gospel and assurance of pardon. There's deep meaning in that. And God is into rituals. There's reality in the rituals that help form us as people into the kind of people that know and live and desire and breathe after and enjoy God and what He enjoys.

So I want us to understand these rituals so we can understand the rituals we do in our church.

The Antiques Roadshow

Let me close this way. I'm a big PBS nerd. Really, that's the only station I watch, truth be told. There's this show that comes on and has come on for years on Saturdays called Antiques Roadshow. You might have seen this before. Antiques Roadshow stars this guy named Mark Wahlberg, who is not Marky Mark, doesn't look anything like him, not nearly as cool. He's just this guy who they go from city to city across the country, and they stop at flea markets. And they do essentially appraisals for people of stuff from their basement.

You show up and there's a long line of people and they're like, "I don't even know what this is. I got this from my grandma's house. Is this worth anything?" And he'll tell them, "Yeah, that's a piece of junk," or "Actually, that came from Europe and it's worth about $25."

I remember watching one years ago where this guy had this painting and they ripped open the back and inside was a copy of the Declaration of Independence. And he's like, "That's an original. I can't give you a value to it. It's priceless."

My prayer for you, my prayer for us is as we go through this book, that may feel like junk from the basement in some cases, and you may be like, "I don't like this." I hope I can help you as an appraiser and open up the back and say, "Look, look what value, look what is hidden here that is beyond value for you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen."