Sunday 10 • 14 • 18

We want to turn our attention to God's word. Peter? Oh, there you are. This is a reading from Leviticus.

The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron saying to them, "Speak to the people of Israel, saying, 'These are the living things that you may eat among all the animals that are on the earth. Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven footed and chews the cud among the animals, you may eat. Nevertheless, among those that chew the cud or part the hoof, you shall not eat these. The camel, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. And the rock badger, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. And the hare, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you. And the pig, because it parts the hoof and is cloven footed, but does not chew the cud, is unclean to you. You shall not eat any of their flesh. You shall not touch their carcasses. They are unclean to you. For I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves with swarming things that crawl on the ground. For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. This is the law about beast and bird and every living creature that moves through the waters and every creature that swarms on the ground, to make a distinction between the unclean and the clean, and between the living creature that may be eaten and the living creature that may not be eaten.'" — Leviticus 11:1-8, 44-47

The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Would you join me in prayer? Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. Lord, you are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.

The Levitical Food Laws

So today we get into a little bit more of the crazy of Leviticus. So no shrimp, no bacon, but yes, locusts. Yes, to locusts. I heard one speaker liken the book of Leviticus to the crazy uncle in your extended family. So like, Christians love to treat this book like it's the crazy uncle in the broader books of the Bible where it's like, you know the uncle's out there, you're embarrassed, you don't invite him to the wedding, you hope he doesn't show up and crash the wedding and drink too much and say things that embarrass you, right? That's what people think about this book. This is just the start. We're diving into the crazy this week, and it will get way more so next.

This morning we're looking at the food laws, the dietary restrictions and requirements for the people of Israel. But this isn't a chapter about what would Jesus eat. I'm not going to talk about whether you should be vegan or paleo, Costco or Whole Foods, McDonald's or Whole Foods. That's not what this is about. In fact, that's my point actually. The food laws are really not about food.

We're going to look this morning at three sections—really simply: explanation, what's the motivation, and then what's the application. So kind of like the what, the why, and then how—or how does this matter to us?

Explanation of Food Laws

From the get-go, I need to say two things by way of a caveat, a broad statement across the front. First is this is not what you think it is. It's not what you think.

Why are there so many rules in Leviticus? I mean, we are a people who hate rules and regulations. For example, if you went to a swimming pool this summer and there were more than maybe two rules on the board, you didn't read them. I can almost guarantee you didn't read them because we don't like rules and regulations. If it's more than two or three, we glaze over, we skip it, and we move on. So what's the point of all the rules and regulations?

I want you to just remember that you are not the people who first received this book. The book of Leviticus was written to a group of people who had been in bondage, in slavery in Egypt for four hundred years. That is twenty generations. And something happens to a people who have been in that kind of society, ordered that way for that long. If you've ever seen the movie Shawshank Redemption, Red talks about people being institutionalized, where after a while, they don't know how to live on the outside. And these people are in that place. Four hundred years of slavery, never having choices about what you eat, where you go, your schedule, what you do—these people have been institutionalized.

And so God's provision of all of these requirements and regulations and rules—this is not about curbing their freedom. This is about giving them rails to run on. These people did not know how to have a society, how to relate to other people, what you eat, how you order your day, how you think about time, how you think about relationships and marriage and all those things.

And this book was a tremendous provision for people who had to be taught how to be human again. So this is not what you think it is. This isn't about works righteousness. It's not about curbing freedom. It's about survival for some ex-slaves trying to be a society again.

Second thing I want to say is these categories are not what you think they are. They're going to introduce a category that we're going to see in a lot of Leviticus that is one we don't think of and we actually might even think of as abusive. The category of clean versus unclean. That sounds really harsh to us. But again, it's not what you think. The clean versus unclean are not about moral purity. They're not about sin and wickedness or righteousness or not sin. They are about what we would use the language today of being something that's appropriate or not appropriate.

If you're a parent, those are some of your favorite words. "That is not appropriate behavior for this restaurant." What we're saying is there is something fitting to a particular context, and God is giving these rules and regulations for them, not for them to prove like, "If I do them, I'm sinless," but "This is what's appropriate for people who know Me. This is what's appropriate for people who follow Me." And there are good reasons behind these.

Think of it this way. Every culture has customs that are particular to that culture. Some cultures say it is inappropriate to wear shoes inside the house. You will not be arrested if you wear shoes inside someone's house because it's not a law. It's a custom. They're saying it's not fitting. That's not appropriate. We have all kinds of things about how you greet people, how you dress. I didn't wear my white pants because it's after Labor Day, right? But custom and code like that are about what's appropriate and what's not appropriate.

The Food Laws Classifications

Here are the food laws that are given in this passage. There are three classes of animals given in this passage. We've only printed the first part because this is super detailed, and we would have been here a long time reading it. But it makes for a fun afternoon reading on a Sunday.

Verses one through eight are about land animals. Then you get verses nine through 12 about water animals, and then 13 through 23 about air animals.

So here's the classifications. On the land, what's clean—what's considered clean, appropriate food for you—is an animal that chews cud and has a cloven hoof. An animal that chews cud but does not have a cloven hoof? No, no, no. An animal that doesn't chew cud but has a cloven hoof? Again, no, no, no. So I know some of you are disappointed. No camel. No rock badgers. I know you're all interested in eating that. No.

In the water, verses nine to 12, fish with fins and scales are fair game. But sorry, fins with no scales? Not okay. Scales with no fins? Not okay. So again, no lobster, no sushi, no eel. You're not eating that for lunch today.

In air animals, lots of birds, but not birds of prey. So sorry, those of you who have gotten a taste for bat or owl. That's not on the list. Also, some insects. The ones that have four legs and then jointed back legs like crickets and locusts, but I'm sorry, no spiders. No spiders.

And then finally, a couple other subcategories. Nothing dead or in touch with death and pretty much anything that swarms on the ground, in the water, in the air.

Again, this isn't about righteousness and wickedness. This isn't about moral purity. In giving these laws, it never says you're righteous in God's sight if you eat this way. You're unrighteous if you don't. This is a category we don't traffic in—clean and unclean. They're not morally pure. So if that's the case, what are they about?

Bad and Better Explanations

I'm going to give some bad explanations and some better ones because I think some of you have been exposed to some of this before. I just want to make sure we're on the same page. What are some bad answers for them? What's behind them? The motivation for the food laws. Here's a couple of things that are unhelpful.

First, it's been argued that this is about hygiene, that this is about animals that will not get you sick. But the reality is eating uncooked pork and eating uncooked beef can both give you E. coli and salmonella. And Jesus comes along—we'll talk about this later—and undoes the dietary restrictions. And it's not like between the fifteenth century B.C. and the first century A.D., lots of things had changed with regard to trichinosis.

There's got to be something more. Some people have advanced that this is maybe about cultic practices—that the surrounding nations sacrificed some animals and others are not, identifying certain animals associated with pagan gods. But the reality is that the surrounding cultures sacrificed some of the same kinds of animals as Israel. That didn't work either.

Third, it's been argued that some animals were understood symbolically. Because of its behavior, an animal is clean. So for example, an animal that chews its cud reminds us that we should be people who are chewing on God's word, meditating, right? And we're not to be like pigs who wallow in the filth. But that only works with a couple of the animals on this list. It's hard to draw those out. Again, speculation.

Last bad answer is this is completely arbitrary. This is like your dad who said, "because I said so." Here's what's the problem with that: God in this passage, in verses 44 and 45, actually gives an answer.

Do these things because I'm holy. — Leviticus 11:44-45

It's not arbitrary. Now, you may not be able to connect those dots real easy and say, "Well, this is what this has to do with God's holiness." But it's not ever just an arbitrary "God says it, we should do it." There are reasons.

Better Answers

If those are bad answers, are there better ones? Yes, I have three for you.

First, in many cases, the food laws have to do with an association with death. And God is always on team life. A lot of the unclean animals on the list are carnivores or scavengers. God is represented over and over in Scripture as the God who is about life. Death is unique to Christian theology—death is unnatural. Death is an enemy. Jesus Christ comes to undo the powers and forces of death. God is not about death, and therefore, the animals that appear on your plate are to reflect that. You have this performance art on your plate at dinnertime, where animals who are about the taking of life or feeding upon something that's already dead are not to appear on your plate because God is about life.

Second, the food distinguishes people groups. Food always distinguishes people groups. Part of the function of the food laws was to prevent Israel from having dinner with the surrounding countries. Israelites could eat beef while Egyptians did not. Arab foods include the camel and the hare and the mouse, which Israel didn't eat. Canaanites ate pork, which Israel did not. Food still to this day associates different foods with different people groups. Kimchi is Korean, injera is Ethiopian. We know that food groups distinguish a group of people. And God's setting apart particular food laws is one thing to say: You are to be different. You are to be distinct, and your menu is to reflect that. You're not supposed to take on the practices of other countries around you.

But by far the best one and the most important one that I want you to understand is that it's about holiness. It's about holiness. And I want to credit a woman, Mary Douglas, who's a British anthropologist for this. She's written a book called Purity and Its Dangers. Her thesis statement is this: individuals will conform to the class to which they belong. Let me explain what that means.

For the Israelite, the standard land animal was an animal that chews cud and has a cloven hoof. That includes cattle, sheep, goats. Animals that don't fit those categories are sharing multiple categories and don't fit. Sheep, cattle, goats, deer—cloven hoof, chew cud. Gazelle—chews the cud, has a cloven hoof. But other animals which don't meet those specifications are sort of outside the category. They span more than one category.

In the same way, they had a concept of an ideal bird. An ideal bird is one that sits on a tree branch, sings, eats nuts and berries. Ideal birds include the kind of birds that we think of as ideal birds, like our state bird, the cardinal. But not vultures, not seagulls. Those are not part of this ideal bird category.

In the same way, we have an idea of what a fish is ideally. And their idea was—the same as today—a marine animal that glides through the water, has fins and scales.

So virtually all such animals have—let me think about this. Even today, in our category of seafood, it's hard for us to think of clams as fish. Right? We sort of think of them as different. They thought that same way. Even in our modern diet, we're like, "There's a difference between salmon and carp." We have a pecking order to these things.

This is why something like eel doesn't make the cut. It swims, it has fins, but it doesn't have scales. Lobster doesn't show up. The same principle applies to insects, which is kind of gross to us. But like locust crickets—that's the ideal insect. Four legs, two in the back, two more that are hinged, the big ones. That's ideal. Spiders don't fit.

The Food Laws Were About Purity of Form

So what I want to show you is the food laws were not about food at all. They're actually about—they're a high level performance art that's about purity of form. Purity of form. On your plate, every meal, the foods that you eat say, "This is what God is like. Purity of form."

This is because holiness—with an H—it's a big idea. Holiness is very closely linked in the Bible to wholeness—with a W. Holiness is very closely associated in the Bible with wholeness, meaning a whole person or a whole thing. So what is of one type or category is clean. What sort of spans more than one category is unclean.

For example, geckos. Geckos have scales like a fish, and they crawl on the land. You don't eat them. I know that's disappointing, right? But you don't touch the gecko because of that. You don't touch the eel because of that. You don't touch the camel, the pigs. They span more than one type. And therefore, like the animals that are the pure forms—the pure ideal forms—those represent something about God. God is pure. God is all the way down pure. And He wants His people in their palate, for crying out loud, to reflect that.

Isn't that amazing? This is what God's like. And God wants your plate to show off. For the Israelites, this is what your God is like.

Application for Us Today

Now, application for us. How in the world does this apply to us? Well, the good news on the one hand is it doesn't, right? You can have whatever you want for lunch today because in the Bible, we know that Jesus comes along and overturns the food laws.

He called the people to Him, and He said to them, "Hear me, all of you, understand. There's nothing outside of a person that going into him can defile him. But the things that come up out of a person are what defile him." And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, "Are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach and is expelled?" Thus he declared all foods clean. — Mark 7

Jesus is underscoring this very same thing in your Bible. Look, the food laws were never meant to be a means of your righteousness before God. The way that Israel ate was never meant to be a production mechanism for them to be righteous. It was supposed to be a visual aid to say, "This is what God is like. God is pure. God is holy."

In Acts chapter 10, you get a second statement on all clean foods. Peter, one of the 12 disciples and now a leader in the early church, has a dream. The Gospel at this point has gone just to the Jews. But Peter is invited over to this guy Cornelius's house—he's a Gentile. Before he's about to go over, he has a dream where God shows him all the animals and says, "Go, take and eat."

Peter in the dream is like, "Surely not, Lord. Some of these are unclean animals that I'm looking at here."

And God says, "Don't call unclean what I've called clean."

Peter wakes up and understands, "Oh, the Gentiles now—who beforehand were sort of unclean people—are now being welcomed in. God is saying, look, the food laws are now fulfilled in Jesus, and the span of your diet is supposed to look like the span of My kingdom now. And all these groups are welcomed in."

Peter struggled with this later. He shows up in the book of Galatians, and he doesn't want to eat with some people who were of Gentile background. And Paul, brand new convert, opposes him and says, "Look, the basis of your righteousness with God isn't based on your food. It's based on Jesus. You're supposed to be eating with these people now. What God has once called unclean is now clean."

See, what Peter was doing in that moment is what Christians do all the time. We reverse the order. Christians do this all the time. We're like, "Oh, it's my doing of these things that makes me acceptable in the sight of God. This is what gets me in."

My observing particular rules and regulations, me acting like trying to be a good person, that's what gets me in. But see, that's never what the gospel has been about from the Old Testament to the New. The Old Testament to the New declares to us, it's God who makes us clean, who declares us righteous in His sight, and therefore calls us to live a holy life, not the reverse. This is why we struggle. The Christian life always says, look, you are clean through the work of Christ in you on the cross. In his death and his resurrection from the dead, that's yours by faith. You are made clean. Now go live in the cleanness.

This is why we see this in verse 45. The end of this chapter, we read here:

I, the Lord, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You will therefore be holy for because I'm holy.

Not try to be holy, and then I'll bring you in. This is already true for you. See, our hearts always want to mix up the Gospel and reverse the order.

Second, yes, there's an application for how you eat today. You know, what we should eat is a question of discipleship. Americans have a very complicated relationship with food. You know the trends. We overeat. It's called gluttony. We undereat. We use foods in ways that are never meant to be used to deal with our emotions, to make ourselves look a particular way. We obsess about food. And we're even self righteous about food.

You know, I love Jim Gaffigan, a stand up comedian. He says this in his stand up about McDonald's. He says, I'm tired of people acting like they're better than McDonald's. It's like you've never set foot in a McDonald's, but then you have your own McDonald's. Maybe instead of buying a Big Mac, you read Us Weekly, Hey, that's still McDonald's. It's just served up a little different. Maybe your McDonald's is telling yourself that Starbucks Frappuccino is not a milkshake. Or maybe you watch Glee. But this is what he says, It's all McDonald's. McDonald's of the soul, momentary pleasure followed by incredible guilt eventually leading to cancer. And I love it.

But look, we can be self righteous about it. Man, this happens all the time. And yet, our discipleship should include our eating. Food is essential to how we live, to how we function. But in this cultural moment, and in this place, and in this congregation, man, we love food. We love to talk about food. Love to talk about where to get good food. We love to talk about the place next door that serves lots of new foods. We are evangelistic about food more than anything else. And it makes me wonder sometimes, do we really think that bread is the bread of life rather than Jesus? Because we act like that. We act like bread is the bread of life.

Lauren Winter, a Christian writer, says this, God cares about our dietary choices. That should come as no surprise. You only have to read the first two chapters of Genesis to see God's concern for food. Humanity's first sin was disobedience manifested in a choice about eating. Adam and Eve were allowed to eat anything they wanted except for the one fruit that they chose, and the New Testament makes it clear that God cares about the most basic aspect of our lives. This is a God who is interested in how we speak, how we handle our money, how we carry our bodies. He's also interested in how we live with food. What does your relationship with food tell you about your relationship with Jesus? Is that an area of discipleship for you?

Making Distinctions

Finally, and most importantly, this is the big idea I've been trying to get to, and we're going talk a lot over the next couple of weeks. We get into the other clean laws. The clean laws, like I said, it's not really about food. It's really about what we see in verse 47, making distinctions. Read with me verse 47:

This is the law about beast and bird and every living creature that moves through the waters and every creature that swarms on the ground, to make distinctions between the unclean and the clean, between the living creature that may be eaten and the living creature that may not be eaten.

See, the Israelites were to make distinctions in their diet, to make choices between what was clean and unclean, between what is appropriate for those who identify with this god and what's not appropriate for the people who identify with this god. See, remember, the clean laws weren't about righteousness and wickedness. They were not about a performance that you do that curries God's favor. It was about living and showing off in your diet and showing off in the everyday meal of what's on your plate of what God is like, and it's what's appropriate for you in living in relationship with that God. What is really appropriate, it's about making distinctions in the small things. This is all about what discipleship is.

For us, New Testament Christians, following Jesus means we also are called to make distinctions over and over about what is appropriate, about what is fitting to knowing Jesus Christ and being freed from our sins and being set free to live a new life with Him, with this group of people. What's appropriate? And it's all about making distinctions in the very smallest parts of our lives.

See, if this God is holy, you are to be holy, pursuing a life of holiness. Not let's be honest, it's really not the big stuff. It's all the little stuff. It's all the little bitty things. It's all in the small, daily, boring, trivial—hey, what's for dinner? That's where life happens. That's where learning to live with distinctions really matters.

See, God is the one in the first page of the Bible who makes distinctions. Light, dark, land, sea, sky. He makes these distinctions. And so to follow him—this is true throughout Leviticus—his people are to learn to make distinctions. It's chapter 10, chapter 11. We're going to keep going with this. See, this is in the ordinary and the everyday.

Horatius Bonar, one of my favorite dead Scottish preachers, probably yours, he summed it up this well. He said, "Holiness is not measured by one great heroic act of mighty martyrdom. It's of the small things that a great life is made up. The small choices."

You know, Paul Tripp, a current writer, he's sort of rewritten that statement. He says it this way: "We all live in an endless series of little moments. The character of a life isn't set in 10 big moments. The character of a life is set in 10,000 little moments of everyday life. It's the themes of struggles that emerge from those little moments that reveal what is going on in our hearts."

You know what a GoPro camera is? It's one of those cameras they put on their helmet and you ride your BMX bicycle down a giant ramp and do flips. GoPro is meant to follow an active life around. What if I mounted a GoPro to your hat for the week and filmed your little moments? You know, how you talked to a coworker. What'd you listen to in the car? What were you worried about in the middle of the night? How you answered that child? How you related to your spouse or your parents? How you related to your boss? If we could film all those things, the 10,000 little moments of this week, and then next weekend we got together, got some popcorn, sat on the couch, and watched the movie, what would it tell us? What kind of a God would it say that you worship? That you're following?

See, are you making distinctions? Are you learning to live like, "This is what's fitting to a life that I now have, being cleansed by Jesus and trying to follow Him and understand what it means to be holy"? See, this is because holiness with an H is closely, closely related to holiness with a W. It's closely related.

See, is the direct trajectory of your life moving more and more to like every moment is sacred because Jesus is with me in it? I've been cleansed by Him. I'm learning to follow Him in the little bitty, the seemingly insignificant.

Let me close with this. When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in Middle Tennessee and had a farm. My grandfather was a gentleman farmer, and they raised like 120 purebred Hereford cattle, which are brown and white beef cattle. We would go to the farm, one of my favorite places to go as a kid, and always loved the farm life, and we'd go back to our home. Well, my younger brother is five years younger than me. And I remember when he was little, probably four or five, he was just obsessed with the farm and everything about the farm—loved the tractors, loved the cows. And I remember my mom asking him one day, she's like, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And she expected the answer was a farmer. And instead he says, "I want to be a cow when I grow up."

And it's like, what? I mean, this is a unique child. This is a special kid. But can I put it this way? That's not a bad ambition, people of CTK. Right? If God says pure forms, choose the cud, has the cloven hoof of one type—pure forms. That's what I'm like, and that's what I want you to be like. Then maybe all of us should want to be a cow, not a camel.

Which way is your life heading? You following Him more and more, making distinctions in the small so that He might get great glory. In the name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.