Leviticus 1 - A Holy God and Radioactivity

Podcast Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

Hello, and welcome to Tabernacle Talk. We are in season four, which is now going to be the fifth book of the Bible that we're in. We've already completed Acts, book one of Psalms.

We've read through Zephaniah, which was a personal favorite of mine. I'm never quite gonna look at the book of Zephaniah in the same way again. And then second John is where we were at on Friday.

And now we are beginning in the book of Leviticus. Now I know there's probably someone going, ah, great, you know, I really wanted us to go over David and Goliath right away.

Don't worry, I know at some point, as we continue to journey through God's Word together, either through here or through our Tabernacle Baptist Essex Sermon Podcast, we are going to get to the Bible.

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One of the things that's kind of guiding me as I'm going through everything for our church is a desire to obey Acts 20, where the Apostle Paul told the elders, the pastors of the Ephesian Church, he says, I did not shirk from, I didn't shy away from

presenting to you the whole council of God. And so that's why I bothered you in Tabernacle Talk.

It's because I want to be faithful to give to you, whether you are a person here at our church, maybe you're a friend, maybe you're just someone that stumbled across this podcast and you want to know more about the Bible, whether you're my

father-in-law, I just want to give a quick shout out to dad. Love you, hope you're doing good.

But whatever life situation you find yourself in, I want to be faithful to communicate to you, not just the easy portions of the Bible, but the parts that we go, huh, why is that in there? That seems kind of weird.

And so today we're going to start off in the Book of Leviticus.

I want to give a little bit of background for the book, right as we start off that way, you know where we're at, especially if you're new to church, if you're new to Christianity or the whole story of the Bible, maybe you know about Jesus.

If you've been with us, you know about Acts now. The Book of Leviticus comes in the continuing story of God and his people. So Book of Genesis, God starts off the world.

He makes it very good and humanity plunges us all into darkness that we voluntarily choose to violate God's rules and God's ways of living. We do things that are against his character.

We fully embrace sin, anything that we think, say or do that goes against God's law and God's character. As a result of that, God said, I am going to rescue humanity from themselves. And he says, I'm going to do this through bringing the Messiah.

So Genesis 315 is that very first promise. It's called in theological terms, the Proto Evangelion.

It's that first promise of the Messiah that God would send someone from the descendants of Adam and Eve that would crush the head of the snake, the serpent, the devil, the spiritual being that tricked Adam and Eve into disobeying in the garden.

And he says, I'm going to bring a descendant. And so he chose to do that through first kind of the line of Seth, one of Adam and Eve's kids. He then chose through Noah and through keeping him and his family safe.

Then he chose through Shem, Noah's son. And then a little bit later, he chose through Abraham, who was a descendant of Shem. And then he chose Isaac instead of Ishmael, Abraham, one of Abraham's other kids.

Then he chose Jacob instead of Esau, who was one of Isaac's kids. And then he chose of Jacob's 12 sons. He chose Judah.

And then on and on and on it goes. So you have Jacob's 12 sons. They all go into Egypt through a great set of circumstances that actually our church will be going through next year in the Book of Genesis, and we'll learn all about that.

So all of that takes place. They're in Egypt, and they are there initially as guests. They're honored.

Joseph, one of Isaac's sons, or sorry, one of Jacob's sons, is held in high esteem. He's very important in the kingdom, and so everything's good.

A couple hundred years pass, and now the children of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, are no longer in good graces. Instead, a new regime has come into Egypt.

There was some battles and stuff that had taken place, and as a result, a group had come in from the outside that wasn't initially from Egypt. They had come in from the outside, and now they were in charge of Egypt.

And because Jacob and all of his descendants were somewhat loosely related to the previous administration's people, these new people that did not have that same relationship, they very much distrusted the Hebrews.

And so they tried killing a bunch of their sons so that there would not be a population growth as God was continually blessing them, and they put them into slavery. But God used a man named Moses.

About 400 years after Israel had arrived in Egypt, God used Moses to bring them out of Egypt. They were rescued from slavery. God did the ten plagues on Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea.

He gave them the law at Mount Sinai. And you can read about that in the Book of Exodus. And so all of that's happening.

There's all of these good things that are taking place that God is rescuing His people. He's saving them.

He's given them a leader, Moses, who is going to take them back into the promised land of Israel, where they had been prior to the famine and things that had happened that prompted them to go to Egypt in the first place.

So now they're coming back to the promised land. They've received the commandments from God that He gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. And as Moses is coming back down the mountain from Mount Sinai, he hears a sound.

He tells Joshua, who's kind of his right-hand man, he tells him, hey, it sounds like there's warfare that's happening down in the camp of the Israelites. And Joshua goes, no, it's not warfare. It's not warfare.

That's singing, like there's music going on. There's worship that's happening. And sure enough, Israel, during the time that Moses and Joshua had been up on the mountain, they had gotten antsy, and they went, okay, Moses is never going to come back.

He went up onto the mountain, and there's been clouds overtaking there, and we've seen lightnings, we've seen incredible things happening, and so we think maybe Moses is dead.

So we need someone new who's going to kind of communicate to God for us, or like, who are we going to worship now?

And Aaron, Moses' brother, has all the people give him a bunch of gold from earrings and different things that they had been given by the Egyptians kind of in a like, hey, get out of here, take our stuff, make all of the plagues and things go away.

So then Aaron takes all of that gold and he makes a golden calf, and they begin to worship this calf. And Aaron said, hey, these are the gods, this is the God that took you out of Egypt. And he made a golden calf.

Moses and Joshua come down, and God is irate with the children of Israel.

So he's making this covenant, he's making this promise to them that I'm going to be your God, I'm going to watch over you, I'm going to give you this land, I'm going to give you incredible blessings. One day the Messiah is going to come.

All of these good things that he's trying to set up this relationship with them, and in the process of, if you will, the wedding ceremony, while he's saying the vows, they are already committing idolatry against him.

They're breaking one of those Ten Commandments of don't make any graven images, don't make any idols to worship. And God forgives Israel, but there's something at the very, very end of Exodus that happens.

God goes, I wanted to just be with you guys, but your sin, your wickedness, your unholiness, when it comes into contact with God's holiness, it would immediately wipe you out.

As I was thinking through kind of an illustration of how we might think about that today, radioactive things are not inherently bad at all.

You can have some clean energy that happens through a nuclear power plant, and it might be able to do great things. I think about my microwave that I used last night to heat up some food. That microwave is great.

Those radioactive things, it's awesome. It makes it so that something that was cold can now be made hot, and it's wonderful. But for me, I'm not made up of the type of material that can be shot with a bunch of radioactivity and be completely fine.

It would damage me completely, very much, especially depending on what type of radioactivity it is. And so it is in God's presence that His Holiness repels, it attacks, it destroys sin. It destroys imperfection.

And God says, I don't want to destroy you. I want to be with you. And so He instructs Moses and the children of Israel to make a tabernacle, a big, elaborate tent that God's presence would live in that tent.

It's not a physical body that was there, but its presence was there in an incredible way. And as a result, then He would be able to still be with the people.

And as they continue to journey through, the Book of Leviticus doesn't deal as much with this, numbers and Deuteronomy does.

God's presence would then, when it was time to kind of leave camp or whatever, God's presence would leave the tent and it would go in front of the children of Israel and kind of guide the way of where He wanted them to go next.

But there was a problem that even there with the tabernacle, with God's presence there so that the children of Israel wouldn't be overcome by God's presence. I'm going to read from Exodus 40 and ending in verse number 33 going from there on.

So it says, So at last Moses finished the work, then the cloud, the cloud of God's presence is glory, covered the tabernacle, and the glory of Yahweh filled the tabernacle.

Moses could no longer enter the tabernacle because the cloud had settled down over it and the glory of Yahweh filled the tabernacle. So now Moses has been in God's presence before.

He was in God's presence on Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments, received much of the law. So all of that's happening.

But now in verse number 36, now whenever the cloud lifted from the tabernacle, the people of Israel would set out on their journey following it. But if the cloud did not rise, they remained where they were until it lifted.

The cloud of Yahweh hovered over the tabernacle during the day, and at night, fire glowed inside the cloud so the whole family of Israel could see it. This continued throughout all their journeys.

So the problem at the end of the book of Exodus is, yes, God's with us and we have this tabernacle where God's presence dwells, and great things are happening, but, verse number 35, Moses could no longer enter the tabernacle because the cloud had

settled down over it. So because God is there, his holiness has now made it so there's somewhat of a gap between God and his people that he doesn't want to be there. He wants to be in close connection.

Leviticus 1 and verse 1 says, Yahweh called to Moses from the tabernacle and said to him, so Moses can't go inside.

Now, at the end of the Book of Leviticus, at the start of the Book of Numbers, we read this statement being made by Moses as he's writing. He says this in Numbers 1, where he says, Yahweh spoke to Moses in the tabernacle, in the wilderness of Sinai.

So something happens between the end of the Book of Exodus and the beginning of the Book of Numbers that Moses, who before could not enter into the tabernacle, where God's presence was, now in the Book of Numbers, he can, and God's speaking to him

from within the tabernacle. So what happened? It was God made a way for his people to be in connection, be in community with him, gave them a way, if you will, a radioactivity suit. He gave them a way that they could be in his presence and not die.

So he says this. I'm going to link a video for the Bible Project. Their summary of the Book of Leviticus is incredibly helpful.

The book is written, for those of you that are listening, I'll try to explain it. So it's made up of three main parts that mirror on either end. So the very first part of the book and the very last part of the book both deal with offerings.

Then you have one level into the book, both right after the beginning and right before the end. That portion deals with the priests and who they were and their qualifications.

Then one level in again, so we're like the third level in, so this is near the middle of the book. You then deal with the moral purity, the standards that the children of Israel were to keep. What would make them righteous or unrighteous?

What would make them holy or unholy? What would give them purity or impurity? As the book of Leviticus goes through, there are two things, two main things that it talks about.

Number one, that we all are sinners. We do bad things, and as a result, there needs to be a justice for sin, but God doesn't want to destroy us in His justice.

He wants to keep us alive, and so He makes a way for sin to be punished, for there to be justice that occurs, but without destroying us.

Then, not only do we sin and have there be consequences as a result of that, like I punch someone in the face, and there has to be justice as a result of that. I spend the night in jail, whatever.

But also it then makes the environment in which we live is now tainted. There is impurity. There is something that will not sin, is not quite right with how everything is in our world or in our place as a result.

And so God not only needs to deal with punishing sin, He also needs to remove any effects of sin, any of the presence of sin. And so much of Leviticus deals with that, both justice for sin and then the removal of sin's effects.

So there are certain things that are in the book of Leviticus. We'll go over these in several weeks now, I think, as we get to about that center point of the book.

That things that are kind of anti-life, dead things, things that do not picture God's life-giving presence, those things would make you ritually impure, things that were not sins.

It wasn't a sin to touch a mushroom, but it would make you ritually impure for a couple days or a week. And so you had to wait during that time before you entered into God's presence.

It wasn't that you had sinned, but it was that you were ritually impure for that time period that God said, okay, wait until you come into the Tabernacle. Wait before you give a sacrifice. Don't do it while you are ritually impure.

It wasn't a sin to bury a loved one. But He did say, wait a week until you then come back into My presence. So it's realization of who God is, that He is the life giver.

And so you cannot enter into His presence with these symbols of death. You can't enter into His presence while ignoring His nature. You can't come into the nuclear power plant, into these particular areas without your hazmat suit.

It is vitally important because God loves us. He wants a relationship with us, but our sin has separated us from God. And so Leviticus is all about God going, here's how you can be right in my presence without my holiness destroying you.

With all of that said, we're going to start off in Leviticus chapter 1 and verse number 1, and we're going to read about the burnt offering. So there's several offerings.

There's a burnt offering, a grain offering, a peace offering, and a sin offering, and a guilt offering. So as these different offerings take place, they're for different reasons. There are different things that are communicated.

The main thing that I'll mention with many of these is there's a picture that's being said that we don't often think about, and that is blood equals life.

That when something is sacrificed here in the Old Testament, number one, it's a picture of Jesus. That Jesus, in the perfect way, shows us in the book of Hebrews what all of these pictures ended up meaning. Like, what was the point of all of this?

It was to picture Jesus, and it was to, if you will, provide that hazmat suit that now Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit inside of us.

That though God lives within us, we are not overcome or destroyed by his presence anymore because of what Jesus has done. He has taken away our sin.

Once for all, he has exacted the perfect justice was met on Jesus on the cross, and he took away our sin. And one day, the sin will be gone from our physical bodies entirely. So, first is the burnt offering.

Yahweh called to Moses from the Tabernacle and said to him, Give the following instructions to the people of Israel. When you present an animal as an offering to Yahweh, you may take it from your herd of cattle or your flock of sheep and goats.

If the animal you present as a burnt offering is from the herd, it must be a male with no defects. Don't bring in the worst of your things to God. Bring what genuinely matters to you, what is good.

Bring what is right and perfect, because that's how God deals with you. Bring it to the entrance of the Tabernacle so you may be accepted by Yahweh.

Lay your hand on the animal's head and Yahweh will accept its death in your place to purify you, making you right with him or making atonement for you.

Then slaughter the young bull in Yahweh's presence and Aaron's sons, the priests, will present the animal's blood by splattering it against all sides of the altar that stands at the entrance to the Tabernacle.

So here is the first thing of blood that God has given life and as he'll mention elsewhere, the life is in the blood.

It's a picture of God's life is now cleansing all of these areas in our environment that have been polluted by sin that now this life is going in all of these places.

So justice is met out here on the bull, but God is now cleansing the presence that now God's life is in all of these places where before sin had been. He says, Then skin the animal, cut it into pieces.

The sons of Aaron the priest will build a wood fire on the altar. They will arrange the pieces of the offering, including the head and fat on the wood burning on the altar, but the internal organs and the legs must first be washed with water.

Then the priest will burn the entire sacrifice on the altar as a burnt offering. It is a special gift, a pleasing aroma to Yahweh. This is the same type of thing that Noah did after he got off of the ark.

He said, thank you, God, for saving us, for keeping us safe, and he made his sacrifice, and it said this exact same thing, that it was a pleasing aroma to God.

Not that God needs to smell something good in order to forgive you, but it's this action of worship, of saying, I want to be in your presence.

Here there is this burnt offering, this complete thing that I'm giving to you, that I don't gain anything from it. It's poured out completely for you, God.

If the animal you present as a burnt offering is from the flock, if it's a sheep, it may be either a sheep or a goat, but it must be a male with no defects. Slaughter the animal on the north side of the altar in Yahweh's presence.

In Aaron's sons, the priest will splatter its blood against all sides of the altar, then cut the animal in pieces, and the priest will arrange the pieces of the offering, including the head and fat on the wood burning on the altar.

But the internal organs and the legs must first be washed with water. Then the priest will burn the entire sacrifice on the altar as a burnt offering. It is a special gift, a pleasing aroma to Yahweh.

I think here of the sacrifice that is on the wood on this altar, and I can think of Jesus who carried his wooden cross as far as he could, and then that's what he was crucified on. He was the one that was slain for us.

He was the sacrifice on the wood on our behalf. He says, If you present a bird as a burnt offering to Yahweh, choose either a turtle dove or a young pigeon.

The priest will take the bird to the altar, wring off its head and burn it on the altar, but first he must strain its blood against the side of the altar.

The priest must also remove the crop and the feathers and throw them in the ashes on the east side of the altar. Then grasping the bird by its wings, the priest will tear the bird open but without tearing it apart.

Then he will burn it as a burnt offering on the wood burning on the altar. It is a special gift, a pleasing aroma to Yahweh.

So here for this burnt offering, there are some offerings that a portion of it would go to the priests and that's how they would eat, how they would feed.

Most of Israel had been given land that they would till, that they would have food and animals and crops and produce and all of that. The priests didn't have any of that. Their only way of existence was through God's people giving these offerings.

But the burnt offering was one that there was no peace left over for the priest. It was strictly, hey, all of this is being given to God. This is a burnt offering that is done for him.

And I think too, as you read there, some pieces of the offering were cast off the east side of the altar. I can think even Jesus as he left Jerusalem, as he would become that payment for sin.

He left Jerusalem and he went to the east side over to Gethsemane. And that's where he was taken.

So all the way through Leviticus, I'm going to highlight again and again and again, hey, here's Jesus, here's where Jesus is, here's how this applies to Jesus.

Because that's what Leviticus is meant to draw us into as the writer of Hebrews makes very, very clear in chapters 7 through 10. He highlights over and over and over again. Hey, here's why all of these things took place.

So again, this is a interesting study. It's something that's very outside of our normal thinking as Christians in the 21st century. But the important part of Leviticus is this.

God loves you. God wants to have a relationship with you. But God had to provide a way in which our wickedness would not be immediately destroyed by being in God's presence.

If you are saved today, if you know the Holy Spirit in your life, be thankful that God has not destroyed you, that though you think wrong things and you do wrong things and though you say wrong things, it is not that God's presence destroys you

anymore. Instead, because of what Jesus has done, now you can live at peace with him. You can have a relationship with him. You can have this forgiveness through Christ's sacrifice, not through you having to bring a sacrifice.

So hope this kind of intro to the book is helpful for you. We're going to go through some of the other offerings. We'll see some cool ways in which Jesus ties into all of it.

Later as we get into the book, I'm excited to look at some of the things that are items of moral purity for God's people that are good for us to take hold of and that are even reiterated in the New Testament for holy living.

So as we go through this, my prayer is that you would follow along. And don't be scared of Leviticus. It is God's word.

It is perfect. It is good for us to meditate on. Thanks for being here today and see you tomorrow.