Distinguishing the Particular and the General

            We’ll encounter this same difficulty in Deuteronomy, but Leviticus 26 is one of those chapters that can really be warped as we try to move from text to application.  Simply put, these words of blessing and of punishment are spoken to Israel, as part of the Mosaic covenant; we are not part of Israel, under the Mosaic covenant.

            This means that we cannot read them in terms of works-righteousness.  That is a serious temptation when we’re dealing with ‘if-then’ language.  It takes very little imagination to go from “If you walk in my statutes . . .” to “God’s blessings—including redemption and everlasting life depend on my obedience.”  The New Testament completely disallows that kind of thinking for the child of God.

            Perhaps a greater, more insidious, temptation is to try to apply these words to the conditions in the world today.  We hear it often enough, “If our country just returned to God, then good things would follow.”  But, look, these words are specific to Israel, as part of the Mosaic covenant.  Is the Lord sovereign over all the nations? Yes.  Is He alone able to send rain in due season?  Yes.  Do believers in every nation rightly look to Him for blessing?  Yes.  But has He specifically tied His blessing to national obedience for any nation other than Israel under the Mosaic covenant?  I don’t think so.  Rome had an incredible 500-year run, and for much of that peak time they considered Jews and Christians alike at least an annoyance or even a danger.

            There is much in the will and mind of God that is simply inscrutable.  Without clear words from Him addressing us specifically, it becomes dangerous to extrapolate from our conditions to some idea about how we could change our conditions by our own efforts and dedication.  Apart from that, Christians need to recognize that they do not live in Israel under the Mosaic covenant.  Why God raises and humbles the nations and when He chooses to do that is up to Him.  We have a calling.  It is to be salt and light in the world, irrespective of where we live in that world.

            Let us be careful about generalizing words intended for a particular time and place.
--reposted from February 9, 2011

Israel's Holidays and Ours

            Israel celebrated—ok, Israel was supposed to celebrate three great feasts each year.  I say ‘supposed to’ because 2 Kings 23:21-23 leaves the impression that Passover was missed pretty often.  True, you can read it two ways:  either Israel hadn’t celebrated the Passover in almost 600 years, or, more likely, they hadn’t celebrated it particularly well in 600 years.  Either way, these festivals apparently didn’t dominate Israelite life like the Lord intended.  (On the other hand, there is evidence of faithful observation in at least some eras of Israel’s life, as, for example, in the lifetime of Jesus, Luke 2:41-42.)

            Anyhow—three great feasts:  Passover, Pentecost (Feast of Weeks), and Atonement/Booths.  Passover commemorated the Exodus out of Egypt.  Pentecost was a harvest festival.  Booths commemorated the time in the wilderness.  The marking of time in this way reminded them of God’s provision:  He had brought them out of Egypt.  He led them to a land of milk and honey, in which they would have enough.  And He had preserved them in the wilderness.  The festivals pointed to God’s grace and reminded them of His faithfulness.  And, of course, they had their weekly Sabbath, which the Lord explains two ways:  first, as a reminder of His creating work, and second, as a reminder of their former toil as slaves and their present freedom.

            One thing that interests me is the way the Lord used those Old Testament holidays as a sort of template for His ‘main’ event.  It should come as no surprise to anyone that Jesus’ crucifixion coincides with the Passover—after all, most of us have heard that story told every Lent for years and years.  I suppose one thing that is surprising is that Jesus’ death is not connected to the Day of Atonement.  (Given the course of later theological thought about the death of Jesus, that connection would make sense.)  Passover, not Atonement—what might that mean?  While we probably don’t want to parse these things too finely, the emphasis in Jesus’ death is perhaps more to the ‘release from oppression/freedom’ side than the ‘atonement’ side.  That is, it may be more about death’s oppression and the slavery of sin of the human race than it is about ‘how an individual gets right with God,’ although I am certainly not excluding the latter!

            Then, 50 days after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit is specifically tied to the feast of Pentecost.  So, at least part of the significance of the pouring out of the Spirit in Acts 2 seems to be that God provides freedom and fullness (harvest) for His people, even as they find themselves without ‘a land of their own’ in this present, evil age.

            In terms of pattern, at least, it’s interesting that the church, from those earliest days, kept these things going.  They celebrated from the earliest days a ‘sabbath.’  (The Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, was transposed to Sunday, the day of resurrection, but it’s still a weekly celebration of God’s mighty acts of salvation.)  The first annual holiday the church recognized was Easter, followed quickly by the annual celebration of Pentecost.  Apparently the church recognized that she, too, needed the structured reminders of who she was, to Whom she belonged, and what He had done to make her what she was!

From Holiness to Holiness

            Today’s reading covers 3 chapters in Leviticus, but I want to comment on just one—Leviticus 20.  Very often we struggle to find the logic in these passages, that is, we don’t always see how one topic leads to another.  However, I think we can discern the connections in this chapter.

            First, in the regulation forbidding child sacrifice (Leviticus 20:1-9), there’s a significant term, namely, that worshipping Molech, one of the gods of the Ammonites, is the same as prostitution.  ESV points it a little more pointedly, “whoring after Molech.”  The phrase is used again of those who pursue mediums and necromancers.  One of the aspects of idolatry is that it involves a betrayal of the Lord’s trust on the same level as the breach of trust that adultery causes in a marriage.  That is, it desecrates the holy bond between the Lord and his people.

            This sexual/marital image of idolatry, then, leads to the next section—Leviticus 20:10-21.  In that section, we find detailed regulations regarding the sorts of sexual relations that are disallowed among the Israelites.  There are issues of kinship—both consanguinity (being a close blood relative) and otherwise.  There are issues of homosexuality.  There are issues of bestiality.  Just as idolatry involves an adulterous breach of trust with the Lord, so also the sexual ethics among His people are to be marked by faithfulness and self-control.  Unlike the popular message of our cultural revolution, Leviticus does not accept, “If it feels good, do it.” Instead, Leviticus wants to say, “You are a human, not an animal.  You are made in the image of a holy God.  Therefore, control your appetites.”

            Finally, we come to the third section:  Leviticus 20:22-26, especially 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” (NIV).  Just as idolatry has a sexual/marital overtone, and just as sexual ethics have a connection to God’s holiness, so the holiness of the Lord undergirds the regulations for holiness among God’s people.  (Not incidentally, one should note that Jesus says almost the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount.  “Be perfect, therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

            So, it is important that we see our lives under the category of God’s holiness.  He created us in His holy image, created us to reflect His goodness to the world.  In Jesus, He recreated that holy image and renewed His call that we should reflect His grace into the world.  From the holiness of God, we see that we are called to holy dedication to the Lord (Matthew 22:37), and from that holy dedication we are called to holy live (Romans 12:1).

The Heart of the Thing

            In Leviticus 16 and 17, we come to the heart of the book.  By God’s own declaration, Israel is His holy people (Ex. 19:6).  By their own actions, they are faithless idolaters (Ex. 32).  How will a sinful people, with sinful leaders, participate in the holiness of their God?  They will participate in that holiness through atonement: lesser sacrifices that we have already read about and the great day of atonement described in ch. 16.  The meaning of so many blood sacrifices is explained here, too.  “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11).  Follow the logic:  the wages of sin is death (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 6:23).  The life is in the blood.  Putting to death and pouring out the blood equals a substitution:  in this case, an animal’s death where a human ought to have died.

            However, there are two limitations to this system.  The book of Hebrews notes, “According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper” (Hebrews 9:9).  Further, the writer of Hebrews also notes that the sacrificial system had to be repeated year after year and day after day (Heb. 9:25-26)  Or, put it another way:  the death of a bull or a goat or a dove can’t repay the debt incurred when man sinned.  These thing are only foreshadowings of the great atoning sacrifice—the once-for-all death of Jesus.  Here in the one who was fully and perfectly human and fully and perfectly God there is the atonement that was needed, the Life that alone could count for all lost human lives.  If we hope to understand Leviticus at all, we have to see the cross behind it.

Skin Diseases, Discharges, and the Wasting Sickness of Sin

            The Christian reader, especially after so many centuries, must surely scratch his head in bewilderment over aspects of Leviticus.  What do childbirth, skin diseases, ‘discharges,’ and menstruation have to do with one another?  Why do we care about them?

            I feel a little repetitious here, but two things help us sort through this regulation.  First, Israel was to be God’s treasured possession (Ex. 19:5).  The old King James Version translated that Israel would be God’s peculiar treasure.  That may actually help.  Israel was to be unique among the peoples of the earth, because she was uniquely the Lord’s.  So, the Law’s almost obsessive concerns are indications of the detail with which that particularity was marked off.

            Second, I noted a few days ago that the Law is concerned with issues of life and death.  Discharges of blood—even from something as blessed as childbirth, deep skin diseases, menstruation—they all look like symptoms of death.  Death is the consequence of sin; God’s holy people are to be characterized by His holiness; therefore anything that reminds of death doesn’t fit with them.

            There is a deeper thought here, too.  Sin is not just skin deep.  Sin is not a discharge that defiles for a moment and gets healed.  Sin is a wasting disease that corrupts the very character of humanity and leads us inexorably to death.  The very detailed regulations about dealing with these things help us see that sin is not easy thing to handle:  it is even harder than keeping straight on all the Levitical practices.  Indeed, it’s impossible to remove all the corruptions of sin.  So, the Levitical practices again pull the Christian ahead to Jesus, who alone is clean, who alone is spotless, who alone is deathless, and they pull us ahead to the fact that He died anyhow to heal the uncleanness that so burdens our race.

Approaching God

            In Deuteronomy 4:24, the Moses warns the people of Israel not to forget the covenant the Lord made with them, and he declares, “Our Lord is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”  Nadab and Abihu found that out the hard way.  The scene is like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the fire of the Lord going out from the Lord and destroying them.  The whole thing seems pretty harsh, especially the bits where Aaron and his surviving sons (notice that Leviticus points out twice that they’re the surviving sons) aren’t allowed to mourn them or attend to their burial.  It’s this kind of thing that gives God a bad name.

            On the other hand, the Lord describes Himself as a consuming fire to make this point:  His holiness marks Him as completely different than our fallen race.  Sure, the Lord walked with Adam in the cool of the evening, but that intimacy was destroyed in Adam’s rebellion.  When Adam was banished, no human could enter God’s presence again—especially on human terms.

            Part of the significance of the tabernacle was that God in His mercy had provided a way in which sinful humans could approach Him and receive not judgment, but mercy and forgiveness.  Nadab and Abihu wanted the presence of God on their own terms, and a holy God would not stand for that.

            We can’t have God on our terms.  He’s not Santa Claus that He must bring us presents when we are good.  He’s not our man Friday to be at our beck and call.  He’s not our therapist that we might justify our behavior to Him and find a non-judging presence.  He is the Lord God Almighty, and He is the Lord, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

            To know the God who reveals Himself in the Bible is to hear His judgment that says we are poor, miserable sinners.  And it is to hear His grace, as St. Paul beautifully puts it, “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).  He continues to provide a way into His presence and it is through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf.  Trying to approach Him any other way but through this merciful gift is sure to result in the same fate that Nadab and Abihu suffered . . .

Priestly Privilege

            It struck me in today’s reading (Lev. 7-9) that Aaron and his priestly sons received portions of a lot of the sacrifices offered in the tabernacle.  They, and they alone, were allowed to eat them.  There is the exception of the peace offering, which formed the basis for a communal meal.  That makes sense, because it was intended to establish what we know as the “communion” effect of the Lord’s Supper, that is, the peace offering was intended to establish peace with fellow members of the people of Israel and with God.

            Now, these two things got me thinking about the Lord’s Supper.  I wonder what Jesus had in mind when He established it?  I think we’re probably supposed to think two things.  First, the Lord’s Supper pretty clearly brings forward the OT peace/fellowship offering.  Paul calls it a ‘participation/fellowship’ in the body and blood (1 Cor. 10:16), and he talks about the Lord’s Supper in a way that takes seriously that eating the Body forms us as ‘the body’ of Christ.  So, it’s a communion in the sense that just as we are united with the Body and Blood of Christ, we are also unified with one another at the altar in the mystical body of Christ.

            A second thought occurs to me, too.  Under the Mosaic covenant, only the priests were allowed to eat the majority of the sacrifices.  Now, in the New Testament, all Christians are called priests and kings.  So, I wonder if this is in the background of the Lord’s Supper, too, that, once, this sort of holy-making meal was the privilege of only the few, but, now, it is the privilege of all of God’s people—declared holy through faith in Jesus and maintained in their priestly holiness through their participation in the Lord’s Supper.