Background to Leviticus

Leviticus as the Foundation for Understanding the New Testament

Turn with me in your Bible, please, to Leviticus, Chapter 1. Leviticus, Chapter 1. This evening, I wish to provide somewhat of an introduction, by means of background, to this book. I'm not sure how in the world to turn that into a sermon, but I'm going to give it a good shot anyways.

Leviticus, Chapter 1. Let's ask the Lord's blessing upon our time. Lord, indeed, as we handle your Word, remind us that your Scriptures tell us that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Remind us that all Scripture is profitable, it is God-breathed. Therefore, give us an understanding of the relationship of the various parts of your Word to one another, that we may grasp your truth, we may be good students of your Word, that we may have a proper and sound understanding.

Therefore, we may with confidence speak your truth to others. We pray in Christ's name. In the experiences that I've had while traveling, I had one opportunity many years ago to visit the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

Now, I have mentioned to you all before that I am afraid of heights. I've been working on that. A couple of weeks ago, I rode a bicycle up to the top of Mount Evans. Let me tell you something, there are a couple of places on the way up to Mount Evans where the road just seemingly goes off into nowhere.

It was quite an experience for me, but I would still have a difficult time climbing a ladder onto a roof. It's the issue of being able to fall off the thing that really bugs me. I can look out the window of a plane as we're landing and as we're turning, and it's straight down, and that doesn't bother me at all, because I figure the whole plane's got to fall out of the sky for me to fall out of it.

So, that's not a big deal, but I still don't like even so much as a high step stool. So, when I got up into Lady Liberty, if any of you have ever climbed up inside, you know that the stairs go up in a circular fashion, and so the outside of the stair is fairly wide, but the inside is you're just holding onto it with your toes.

And I got to a certain point and decided that that was as far as the adventuresome part of me was going to allow me to go, and so I waited for the people to come down afterwards. But as you look at Lady Liberty, if you can think about what the statue looks like, and it's hard if you haven't looked at it, but if you want, go home and Google some images of the Statue of Liberty.

The statue itself is 151 feet tall from its foot to the top of the torch, 151 feet. Guess how tall the pedestal is? It's 150 feet. So, when you look at it, it's pretty much, you know, there's the statue, and then there's this very, very tall pedestal that it is situated upon.

And most people don't think about that when they think about the statue, but there is a pedestal that it is built upon that is literally as large as the statue itself. And when you think about that as, I think, a very appropriate illustration that I stole from another Reformed Baptist pastor, most of us think about the Bible, and we think about the great texts of the Bible.

We think about some of those tremendous chapters in John. John chapter 17, wow, height of revelation. We think of Philippians chapter 2, the Carmen Christi. We think of Ephesians chapter 1. We think of Romans chapter 8.

And if you're a Calvinist, Romans chapter 9. If you're not a Calvinist, forget about Romans chapter 9. And we think about these tremendous texts. And, yeah, once in a while we think of a certain psalm, maybe Psalm 23.

And you think of Isaiah 55, and you think of a few things like that. But primarily when you think about the great revelation of God, they're found in the New Testament. But just like Lady Liberty would not be able to stand there without the pedestal she was designed to stand upon, it would not have been able to weather all the storms that have blown into New York Harbor over the years since she was erected.

In the same way, we hopefully recognize that so much of what we see in the New Testament, so much of what we revel in in the New Testament is based upon a foundation that we really need to recognize. And the better we know that foundation, the more we're truly going to appreciate the beauty of what has been built upon it.

And so we come to what is, for many people, the lowly book of Leviticus. The book that has stopped more people from reading straight to the Bible than any other book in the Bible. I mean, let's just be honest.

How many times have you heard somebody say, well, I made it through Genesis, and Exodus wasn't too bad, but then I ran Leviticus, and that's when I went and read the Gospel of John or something like that.

And they end up not making it all the way through. And we recognize why. Most of us have never met a leper and are not overly interested in the exact way of examining the hair in the middle of a leprosaur.

And if you're trying to read through the Bible, especially in the morning, it can take way too much coffee to make it through something like that. It's just understandable at that point. But I want to point a couple things out to you, and hopefully in preparation for laying a foundation for our looking at the Holiness Code.

And that is, there are approximately 69 verses or sections of the book of Leviticus that are cited or alluded to in the New Testament. About 69 of them. In about 107 passages in the New Testament. So, over a hundred times the New Testament writers go back and either quote from or make a specific allusion to events, teachings, sections of the book of Leviticus.

So, if we want to really understand the New Testament. In fact, remember when we were working through Hebrews, we got to the section about the Yom Kippurim, the Day of Atonement, as we discovered. And what did we do before we worked through what the writer to the Hebrews said about where the various utensils were and where the altars were and the holiest place and the holy place.

What did we do? We actually sort of stepped out of Hebrews for one week, and we went back to Leviticus chapter 16. And we read through Leviticus chapter 16. Why? Well, the only way you're going to be able to understand that portion of Leviticus, the only way you're going to be able to understand the issue of the veil and the mercy seat and the offering of the Day of Atonement and what the high priest is doing and how all of this is related to Jesus going into the presence of the Father having accomplished eternal redemption.

The only way to understand any of that is to recognize that the author expects you to know, not just to have read through, but to really know Leviticus chapter 16. So, the whole argument of the writer was God showed Moses exactly what to do.

All of this that Moses was given was God's intention to put this shadow upon the earth that would allow us to see the fulfillment in Christ. And where is a lot of that stuff found? In the lowly book of Leviticus.

The Name, Structure, and Priestly Voice of Leviticus

Now, its name, interestingly enough, in our English Bibles comes from the Latin Vulgate. The Hebrew for Leviticus is just the first word of the Hebrew text. Yikra, he called. The Lord called to Moses from the tent of meeting and so that's just what they call.

He called. And it's interesting that if we were to utilize the same nomenclature or tradition, I guess, that we use in the Gospels where we put Jesus' words into red ink. If we were to put Yahweh's words into red ink, the reddest book of the Old Testament would be Leviticus.

Yahweh said this, Yahweh said that. It's almost all direct quotation of Yahweh giving instruction to primarily the Levites. This first half of the book focused especially upon the duties of the priest, the Levitical order.

But this is Yahweh speaking. Now, when we think about the origin of the book and the authorship of the book, you would think for us it would be very simple, but you need to understand that if you, like I, believe that there was a man named Moses, that he lived amongst a people called Israel, that he was involved in such things as the deliverance of the people from Egypt and the organization of the people and their traveling toward the promised land and all the things that the first five books relate to us.

If you believe that that's true, that puts you in a small minority of people who call themselves Christians today. I've said many times to you before that one of the most dangerous places that you can go spiritually is a Christian bookstore.

Because lining those shelves is not only a tremendous amount of false teaching, but especially when you get to the commentary section, you will discover that to believe as we believe concerning the consistency, inspiration, and authority of the Bible is a minority position today, and especially when it comes to looking at the Old Testament literature that is published today by how we have given in primarily to the liberals when it comes to the Old Testament.

Are there not still good conservative Old Testament professors out there? Yes, there are. But even in most of the conservative seminaries today, you will have perspectives being presented that literally were unknown in the first 1 ,700 years of Christian history.

And so you can find some good commentaries out there. I'm not saying that they're not there. But in reality, the vast majority of what is published would in essence say that Moses, if he existed, was probably little like what we find revealed to us in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

That if there was a man named Moses, he has been tremendously altered and changed by the passage of time. And that what you have in the Pentateuch, in those first five books, is a mishmash of the writings of all sorts of different groups of people coming together.

And many today would say that the book of Leviticus did not take the final form that it has today until after the Babylonian captivity. They at least will admit that there was such a thing as the Babylonian captivity starting in about 586 BC.

And that when the people come back, then in what we've been seeing in Nehemiah, there is a great focus upon the priesthood and the rebuilding of the temple and things like that. And so there was a need for a manual for the Levites in essence.

And that's where Leviticus comes from, at least in its final form. It's redacted together from all these different sources. And then as it's put together, it's projected back in time. Because if you can associate it with Moses, if you can associate it way back, then it gives it more authority.

If it's just simply something that's being written by the priest at that point in time, it wouldn't have much in the way of authority. And so when you go to the Christian bookstore, you buy commentaries, the vast majority of them have been infected by what's called the Graf Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis.

Isn't that a big, nice, long phrase that we can all discuss over some nice food this evening? We can talk about the Graf Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis. But what is that? Well, basically, Wellhausen argued that when you look at anything in religion, there's been evolution.

And in religion, it evolves from simple to complex. And so the theory is, and you'll find this being applied to every aspect of religion by liberal scholars today, and even by many conservative scholars today, unfortunately, the idea is that the original worship of this loose-knit group of people that eventually become known as Israelites must have been very simple.

It had to be very, very simple. There could not have been much in the way of structure. And then as generations go by, traditions develop, and so things start to become codified, and you get more and more formalization until finally, after the Babylonian captivity and the restoration of the people to Israel, you have this very structured manual put together that codifies how the people are to worship and helps keep them together.

They needed to have something like this because so many had died during those attacks and during the exile. And they needed something to define the people of God. And so that's what you have. Now, why is that important for you to know?

Because we don't believe that kind of thing. Well, the problem is, many of the people that you're going to speak to today are individuals who have been exposed, not necessarily, they've never read Wellhausen.

They probably haven't read any of the commentaries that produce this stuff. But they've taken a religion class at the local community college, taught by someone who heard that himself in his education, and so he's repeating it as absolute gospel truth.

And so you will have said to you by many a person, well, don't give me this Leviticus 18 stuff. You've got to realize that it didn't have anything to do with a guy named Moses, and it comes along much later in time.

If you just would read more widely, then you wouldn't believe all this kind of silly stuff. Well, that's an interesting theory. And it's out there, and it's common, but it's fascinating to me. Most of you know that I went to a seminary that was, well, not nearly as conservative as the one that Pastor Fry went to.

Well, the old covenant, anyways, as they say. Not the new covenant. That has nothing to do with covenants. That's just seminaries. But I almost feel like being prepared to duck behind the pulpit here.

Some of you may not know this, but the first seminary I went to was Fuller Theological Seminary. And Fuller today is not what Fuller was when I went there, and Fuller when I went there wasn't what Fuller was when Fuller got founded.

That's for certain. It is a case study in how the vast majority of seminaries fly to the left at speeds that are sad to observe. But I went to Fuller, and so I was exposed to all of that kind of perspective in regards to Leviticus, and I had to read an entire commentary on Leviticus that was just based upon this entire idea of multiple sources rather unskillfully sewn together and edited together, and you can see how badly it was done and that kind of stuff.

That was what was presented to me in the classes on the Old Testament. And yet I can tell you that there wasn't much discussion of, well, why do we approach the text in this way? It was just assumed. And when you hear about the vast majority of scholarship, and scholars say this, may I help to demythologize something about scholarship?

There may be great and brilliant scholars in the world, but the reality is that there is only so much gray matter between here and here in anybody's brain. And things become so specialized that most of the time we are accepting what we've heard from this person and that person and that person, and we're putting stuff together, and most of the time, most scholars have not done all the background reading in all these other areas.

So when they say the vast majority of scholars accept this, they accept this perspective, what they're saying is they take it as a given. It's not that they've actually done the study themselves to be able to verify that.

They just go, well, it makes sense to me, and you go on from there. And so when it comes to these issues, when I would ask questions in class, I was taken aback by some of the answers that I got. And there are so many reasons to question the idea that the book of Leviticus was put together from maybe some earlier materials, but certainly nothing going back all the way to Moses.

Certainly nothing going back to someone who claimed to have heard from God. But let's think about just some surface-level issues in the book of Leviticus. We read through Leviticus not that long ago.

Those of you who are here on Sunday night, anyway, read through the book not all that long ago. What kind of Judaism, what kind of experience of the people of Israel is assumed in the text of Leviticus?

Now remember, we're not talking, what's the big shift that takes place as far as worship goes? Remember what the book of Hebrews is focused on? It is not focused on the temple. It is focused on the tabernacle.

Because that's what God had revealed to Moses, and that becomes the pattern, the earthly pattern that shows heavenly things, remember? Well, if you're putting together a manual for the Levites who are living in Jerusalem around 500 B .C. or so, approximately, is that what you find in Leviticus?

I mean, if you just read the book, the book reflects the wilderness. It reflects the wanderings of a tribe of people, not a settled people at all. It reflects pre-temple Judaism. For example, remember the lepers?

Where are the lepers to go? Outside what? The camp. Not the city. It's not going to a certain city or to a certain colony. They go outside the camp because the camp's still moving. It reflects a very primitive history, the very history it records, in regards to the people of Israel.

The idea of, for example, the idea of the people being able to gather at the tent of meeting, just come together, is assumed. That's not easy to do once they're in the land. Once they're in the land, there's this dispersion, and there's days' worth of travel, and you can't just simply have all the tribes come together just like that.

And yet, that's the reality of later Israel, and that's certainly the reality once Israel's returned to the land. You still have all sorts of other cities. And so, what you have does not reflect that.

So, what theory would you have to come up with when you actually look at the book of Leviticus? You'd have to go, well, yeah, it was still from around 500, but these were smart people. And they're already willing to, in essence, be dishonest and say, God said this to Moses, and God said that to Moses.

And so, they're also willing to be dishonest and create an entire context for the book that had nothing to do with what they're actually going to be using the book for. I mean, I guess if you're really into conspiracy theories, this would work pretty well, but for most people, you're going, well, wait a minute.

You're starting with the assumption of not just a certain level of literary dishonesty. You're really saying here that they're sitting around going, well, we need to really make this look like it's really ancient.

So, let's project it way back, and let's put some serious thought into this. Yeah, it's going to make it a whole lot less useful for what we want it to be used for, but it's a good trade-off. Really?

There's another problem. If we were to work through the book of Ezekiel, which I'm not suggesting I'm ever going to try to do, but it's one of the toughest books. I nominate Pastor Frye for that after Nehemiah.

But, I mean, where else can you go after Nehemiah but to Ezekiel, right? That just makes sense to me. If you look at Ezekiel, you will discover that Ezekiel often refers to material from Leviticus. He makes allusions to Leviticus.

So, now what are you going to have to do? Well, now you're going to have to backdate Ezekiel, too. And so, even though Ezekiel clearly is living during the time of the exile itself, he experiences that and becomes an exilic prophet and so on and so forth, how can he be referring to a book that isn't put together yet, assuming that everyone he's prophesying to not only had already known the contents of that book, but had for a long time before that?

There are just so many problems with these theories that it really makes you go, Is there an overarching reason why you all are doing this? And there is. There is, because unbelievers need to find ways around believing what this book has to say.

And so, if you can chop the Bible up into pieces, And my friends, let me tell you something. The most common problem that I have heard mentioned by people that I was counseling over the years about losing their faith in the Scriptures has come from these kinds of attacks upon the Bible.

Well, look, all these brilliant, smart people accept the idea that the Bible is a pile of self-contradictory fiction. And they're smarter than me, so I can't believe it. It is an attack. And that's why, well, let me give you another reason, as a Christian, that I think might be relevant to you.

At least two times, and probably more than that, but at least two times, once in the Synoptic Gospels and once in John, Jesus refers to a text from Leviticus. It's only in Leviticus. It's not found in Genesis or Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy.

It's only in Leviticus. And he refers to it as having come from Moses. As the law of Moses. Now, you would think, for a Christian, shouldn't that pretty much end the debate? I mean, if Jesus thought it was from Moses, and Jesus is God incarnate, might want to take his authority on that matter.

Might be a good thing to do. And for you and I, that might be enough, but think with me for a moment. How do people respond to that? It's not like our liberal friends don't read the Bible once in a while.

And so, what will they say? If you say to someone, you're discussing something Leviticus says, and you say, well, you know, Jesus himself viewed the text of Leviticus as having been given by God to Moses.

It's the law of Moses, and Jesus had a very high view of that. It's like, well, yeah, but you need to realize that's just Matthew's understanding of what Jesus. Jesus never said that stuff. And especially with John, the vast majority of modern scholars, John, oh, you know, it's so different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke that, you know, this is just John's ruminating and thinking about the meaning of Jesus' teachings much later on, you see.

And so, when Jesus specifically refers to circumcision being given by Moses, and it goes back to Leviticus, there in the Gospel of John, and that's just John's understanding. John thought that Moses had given Leviticus.

Matthew thought that Moses had given Leviticus. Now, what is the assumption behind all of that? The assumption behind all of that is we don't have a clue what Jesus said. We don't have a clue what Jesus believed.

And yet, that's what you'll be told in many a theological seminary today, is no, no, no, no, you can't call Jesus a witness on this because, and they're not going to put it out this boldly, but what they're saying is we don't know what Jesus said.

We have no way of knowing. And so, those disciples, they were making stuff up to, have you noticed that the fundamental assumption of all this is what? Guilty until proven innocent. You can't look at what the Bible actually says of itself and allow it to be a harmonious whole.

No, no, the idea of harmonizing, that is the heresy of modern liberal theology. The only way to get published is to emphasize the diversity, that's a nice term that's used. I don't find that term overly friendly anymore myself, but the diversity of the biblical text, rather than the harmony and the unity of the biblical text.

And so, you wonder why modern theology looks so little like Christian orthodoxy, because it doesn't have the same foundation any longer. But when you don't start with those kinds of assumptions, when you don't start with the assumption that, well, I'm going to begin by assuming that Leviticus was put together by people who were trying to deceive others.

And you and I need to understand, that's the starting assumption these people have. They were trying to deceive others, to establish their own priestly authority, or whatever else it might be. When you don't start there, if you read the text, look at its history, it's never going to lead you to that conclusion.

And so, you've got to start with that type of assumption, and unfortunately, as I discovered, challenging that kind of assumption in theological education is not overly recommended and highly encouraged.

You end up being your seminary's token fundamentalist, when you dare even ask those kinds of questions in class. And so, there's lots of reason to look at Leviticus and ask the question, How did Jesus view it?

Well, he viewed it the same way that we do, or I guess it would be better to say, we view it the same way that he did. He referred to it as the law of Moses. And therefore, when it says, And the Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, This is direct divine revelation that has been preserved for us for about 3 ,400 years now.

About 3 ,400 years. And therefore, the types and shadows that it presents to us, and the moral law and code that it explains to us remains just as relevant today as it has ever been. And mankind is only depriving itself of great light and wisdom from God, by dismissing what God has said with such clarity in these words.

And so, when we look at the Holiness Code, and even when we look at only the portion of it that we're going to be focusing upon, chapters 18 through 21, we are not saying that the rest of the book is unimportant.

We're not saying that it would not be worthwhile working through it chapter by chapter, and so on and so forth. But what we do need to recognize is, we're focusing upon that which has been the primary center of the attack that is found today if you get out your smartphone, get out your tablet, get on your computer this evening, and put in Holiness Code Leviticus.

I haven't done this, but I can just guarantee you. Google that. And the vast majority of what will come up will be negative attacks upon anyone who would be so foolish as to think that Iron Age morality is relevant in our day today.

Is this Iron Age? Let's put it another way. Could there be anything that was written in the Iron Age that would be relevant in the Computer Age? For many of our compatriots, the answer to that is no. For most millennials, the answer to that question is, are you kidding?

If it was written before there was a 2 in the year date, it's irrelevant. If it wasn't written on a keyboard, it's irrelevant. Nobody before the young generation today had a clue about anything. That seems to be the perspective of many.

But certainly, for a large number of people, and for a large number of Christians who've never thought through what the issues are, could something that was written in the Iron Age be relevant in the day of DNA?

The answer should come flooding to your mind. If the words spoken to Moses from the door of the Tent of Meeting came from him who designed DNA, then yes, a foolish person would think otherwise. In fact, we have only now come to understand DNA, and yet the one who designed it gave wise instruction to his people as to how they should live, and live in such a way as to avoid many of the disease problems that ignoring his law brings to mankind.

How did they know that before they knew about DNA? You see, folks, it all goes back to presuppositions. It all goes back to where you start. If God is God, and God is the Creator, and God is the Maker of all things, then what he says in the Iron Age is just as true, and just as wise, and just as valuable as what he would say in the DNA.

It is only the assumption that, well, we're on this learning curve from stupid to really smart. I don't know about you, but the more I study history, that curve ain't going up. Our technological learning may be going up, but just in my own experience, the attention span of mankind is going like this.

But the idea is, no, no, no, no, no. We're going up like this, and so if it was back then, it can't be as good as it is now. You can't possibly challenge that thinking if that's the way you really think in your own life as it is.

And so I remind you, for the person who follows Jesus Christ, his perspective and his teaching is absolutely final. As we saw in Matthew chapter 19, he could go back to the Pentateuch, go back to the Law of Moses.

There he went back to Genesis, and he could take those words, and he could say to men 1 ,400 years later, Have you not read what God spoke to you? And held them accountable. Therefore, only when we follow in his footsteps, only when we have the same high view of Scripture that he did, can we speak the Word of God to people with the assurance that it really is the Word of God and carries his authority.

When the church loses that confidence, the church no longer speaks to the world with authority. And that's what we're seeing today. You want to know the fundamental reason why denomination after denomination after denomination is collapsing in regards to moral and ethical sanity?

Look back in their history. At some point, every single one of those denominations has lost the belief that this is actually God speaking. Every one of them. Every one of them. As you know, in this place, we believe that God has spoken in his Word.

That men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That all Scripture is Theanostos. It is God-breathed. And that gives us the foundation to be able to look to the book of Leviticus and to see and to do the work to recognize what is moral law and what is ceremonial law and what is judicial law for the people of Israel at their particular point in time and to try to map these things out properly.

That's going to take some work, but if you don't have confidence in dealing with the inspired Word of God, why would you bother? But once we have that conviction, half of the battle in the conversations you will have is to overcome the prejudice, the unfounded prejudice of ignorance that keeps the person from even hearing what the Word of God has to say.

And so, while Yitra, Yahweh called, Yahweh spoke. Without that conviction, we have no reason to listen to what the rest of the book says. All those denominations that have abandoned that and said, well, but it's our tradition.

Well, your tradition is a woefully small basis for any society to look to. But the Word of God, the revelation of God, the One who made us, the One who wrote the manual, His words are a solid foundation upon which to base human behavior and a guide to how we can truly experience life and life more abundantly.

Prayer for Faithful Submission to Scripture

Let's pray together. Our Heavenly Father, we once again desire that Your Spirit would work within our hearts so that when we hear the claims of the Word, that we bow the knee, that we lower our heads in submission to the authority of the Scriptures themselves, that we believe what our Lord Jesus taught us, His apostles taught us, the prophets taught us, that You have not left us in darkness.

You have given us guidance. You have given us direction. So, Lord, as we look to this book of Leviticus and we especially consider what it says about how we are to live and how we are to behave, O Lord, may You write upon our hearts Your truth and give us true faith to accept, understand, and believe so that we might proclaim with confidence.

We pray these things in Christ's name.