It feels a little awkward divulging that this year is the first where I am, with purpose and a chronological plan, reading the Bible cover to cover. I’m so excited! I soon realized, though, I couldn’t do it in a year the way I need to, so I’ve given myself permission not to rush toward a checkbox. Exit pressure and stress, enter enjoyment!
The few people I’ve mentioned my study plan to responded with similar questions: Have you gotten to Leviticus? Are you really gonna read it or just skip ahead? What did you think of Leviticus?
If you haven’t read it yet, Leviticus is a continuation of Exodus, more detailed Godly guidance for the children of Israel on how to live as His, no longer slaves, which is all they ever knew in Egypt where He rescued them from. He never leads us out or in to anything, or leaves us to our own to figure it out and since they didn’t know how to not be slaves or that their destiny was to live near Him, He gives instructions in Leviticus; but oh how they resisted…
And so my answer regarding the reading of this book: Honestly? I found it delightful. Mine wasn’t the slog through the bog that some folks experience. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying ritual slaughter and death penalties and rampant infectious leprosy in clothing and house walls is delightful.
What makes the biggest difference to me is getting to study it in light of the New Testament. The tone and context would be completely different absent what Leviticus often points to, the allusion and symbolism, the foreshadowing of new covenant—redemptive forgiveness, light, salvation, and eternal hope. It’s like the New Testament functions as a drone, zipping to the past to hover high over tablet, tents, and tabernacle, like an eagle-close-to-heaven perspective on the true heart and purpose for all the details meticulously spelled out in 27 chapters.
Because of love!
Because God loved these wandering tribes so much!
Because His desire is always to draw near.
He needs them to know who they really are so they can know who HE really is.
To grasp that they are chosen and holy and sacred.
That every boundary and direction He sets is for the best, their good, so they can live highly favored and set apart.
So they don’t look like the world around them because of Who is in them, with them, for them.
He’s a good, patient Father who knows kids need to be told and reminded and led by example and reminded and cherished and loved in sometimes harsh and tough ways. But His way is higher, every bit of Fatherly guidance designed to draw them near to Him. He wants these precious desert children close-close, no bubble space whatsoever! A foretelling of what He wants us ALL to know—here and now and tomorrow.
We are these same children in His eyes! We are the same loved, the same led, the same provisioned. But we have the benefit of history, an aerial view via a new covenant, and all God’s love squeezed into baby-Jesus and cross-Jesus and resurrected-Jesus. Just like in the New Testament, Leviticus is filled with forgiveness, redemption, atonement, being set apart as holy, worship, rest, offerings, and sacrifice.
If you haven’t yet made a Leviticus journey, here are a few glimpses of God-paths crafted as divine bridges linking the former and greater covenants:
~~ One of the big and beautiful truths God wants them to take hold of He states in chapter 11 verses 44:45: For I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy… For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. And He adds a more personal touch to the same message in 20:26: And you shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be Mine. Holy to ME, that you should be Mine.
Paul appeals with a like message to us in Romans 12:1-2: I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
God loves and makes holy and gives us His name and brings us out from where we used to live so we don’t have to live and look like that any more. He did it in the old (that’s gone) and He did it in the new (that lasts forever).
~~ …that you may distinguish between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean (chapter 10 verse 10). Here and throughout the book, He establishes what is and what isn’t for Israel, making clear that there are differences. Again, because of love, because of holiness. He wants us to know it matters to Him… within ourselves and in our relationship with Him. In our homes, places of work, schools, and churches. In what we watch, what we listen to, what we say, what we think. In who we’re with, where we go. Even now there is holy and unholy, clean and unclean. We get to choose; He wants to lead us in our choosing.
~~ Forty-four times over 16 chapters, God says I am the LORD or I am the LORD your God. Forty-four times He made an opportunity to remind of who I AM—I am your reason, I am your freedom, I am the one who loves you higher longer wider deeper, the one who prepares promise and abundance, the one who adores you, the longsuffering one who never gives up on you, when you are enslaved, in the grip of your false king saying no I can’t have you, when the enemy chases you down as you finally get away; I am your God in the face of impossible obstacles, in both wilderness and water; I am the one who leads you in the daylight and the dark, who you can count on no matter what; I’ve never forgotten you, not once. I AM.
~~ For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.
This is in Leviticus 17:11… but doesn’t this look like Jesus on the cross? Pouring His life-blood out on that altar for our atonement, forgiveness, redemption? It says right here that life is in the blood… and through His blood is how He gave us His life and our new life.
~~ Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not cast them away, nor shall I abhor them, to utterly destroy them and break My covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God. But for their sake I will remember the covenant of their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 26:44-45)
When you’re in circumstances of opposition, whatever that looks like, I’m still yours and you’re still Mine; I’m watching out for you. I haven’t forgotten the promise I made long ago to your way-back-when family; it wasn’t just for them but for you too, because I AM God.
The covenant of old, now confirmed and continuing by promise in the new:
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)
When you are in these overwhelming, ridiculous, relentless, hard, trying, stressful, grief-laden, maybe even dangerous life-days, through Me you still overcome! And like I promised, there’s nothing that can pry you away from Me and I’m certainly not letting go of you; I put all My love into My Son to have you and I love Him too much to let you slip away. Words mean things; blood means everything.
~~ Chapter 27 is about persons, property, or animals dedicated to the Lord. Babies through to seniors, male and female, animals clean or unclean, houses, and fields could all be consecrated to the Lord and were given a value set by the priest according to God’s instructions. If someone wanted to redeem (gain or regain possession in exchange for payment) what had been dedicated, they had to pay the priest’s valuation plus one-fifth. Because redemption is always more.
We see this proved out through Christ as the ultimate example and perfection in the new promise; He sacrificed His life, paid for in blood, for the sin and condemnation of all mankind, resulting in justification of life. Paul tells about us and this valuable redemption in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
Charles Spurgeon spoke beautifully about this passage(1):
You will notice the text says, “Ye were bought with a price.” It is a common classical expression to signify that the purchase was expensive. Of course, the very expression, “Ye were bought,” implies a price, but the words “with a price” are added, as if to show that it was not for nothing that ye were purchased. There was a something inestimably precious paid for you; and ye need scarcely that I remind you that “ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold;” “but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”
As did John Piper(2):
But the love of God says, “If you will trust me, and return to me, I will pay it for you—in fact I will pay it with the price of my own Son.” The gospel of Jesus Christ is that all who believe in him are bought with a price.
. . .
When God bought us he did not buy us as slaves but as dwellings. His aim was not to make us work for him, but to make us full of him. “Filled with all the fullness of God” as the apostle Paul says (Ephesians 3:19).
Redemption is always more. It was true in Leviticus and it’s true for us in Christ.
Even in just this one book as example, we can see how God’s divine wisdom established foundational history and then confirmed His intentions all along through the new covenant promise. Isn’t it exciting to open the lid of the Word and find these old and new treasures mixed together telling the same story, of God, I AM, and the forever rescue we have through His Son Jesus Christ?
These are the commandments which the Lord commanded Moses for the children of Israel on Mount Sinai (Lev. 27:34). This has reference to the whole book. Many of these commandments are moral: others ceremonial and peculiar to the Jewish economy: Which yet are instructive to us, who have a key to the mysteries that are contained in them. Upon the whole, we have cause to bless God, that we are not come to Mount Sinai, that we are not under the dark shadows of the law, but enjoy the clear light of the gospel. The doctrine of our reconciliation to God by a Mediator, is not clouded with the smoke of burning sacrifices, but cleared by the knowledge of Christ, and Him crucified. And we may praise Him, that we are not under the yoke of the law, but under the sweet and easy instructions of the gospel, which pronounces those the true worshippers, that worship the Father in spirit and in truth, by Christ only, who is our priest, temple, altar, sacrifice, purification and all. - John Wesley (3)
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(1)Charles Spurgeon:: https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/sermons/1004.cfm
(2)John Piper:: https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/you-were-bought-with-a-price
(3)John Wesley:: https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Bible.show/sVerseID/3605/eVerseID/3605/RTD/jwn