Alright, I think my goal by the time the end of this series is completed is that when that song comes on, we like break into line dancing because we're so excited about Leviticus. All right, you with me? Yeah. It's good to see so many of you back. To be honest, I wasn't sure after Larry announced that we were going to be doing a series in Leviticus, how many of you would choose to come back?

In fact, at the 1030 service last week, mind you, this is Easter. Larry announces we're doing Leviticus as our next series. And from somewhere back in that section of the room, I just hear this.

And I don't blame you, but I would just say, try preaching on it. Then you will really, really feel that. Actually, I was just even talking to Brooke and she asked her daughters like, hey, do you want to come to church with me today or do you want to go to youth? And they're like, aren't they doing Leviticus downstairs? And she's like, yeah.

She goes, I'm not going down there. So it's fair. Leviticus is a fairly strange book. It's a little weird, very different. And in fact, here's just a couple of excerpts, a couple verses that I pulled out of it just to kind of wrap our heads around how strange Leviticus is.

So here's one. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. Did anyone check to make sure they didn't have any polyester blends today? Anyone? Nope.

One maybe? Okay. All right. You're just pure cotton. We're good.

All right, great. Only one person is clean in the entire room. All right. Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard. Morning.

Yep. You are sinners. So sinful for shaving to me. And I actually trimmed my beard this morning, so I think I am actually probably not okay to teach today. So I think we should turn it over to Larry.

Except for this verse, a man who has lost his hair and is bald is unclean.

So I don't think Larry can preach either. So I think we should just wrap it up, go on your way. No one is fit to preach Leviticus and we can just do our own thing, right? It's such a strange book. And I think as you get into Leviticus, let's be honest, if you have ever tried to read through the Bible in a year.

You get to Genesis, and you begin January 1, and you start reading in this creation story and fall, and you read about, like, the downward spiral of humanity and God's redemption in that and this call of Abraham, and it's these narratives that are so packed with life and vitality, and maybe they're a little confusing, but at least there's enough of a through line to kind of keep you anchored. And then you get to Exodus, and it's the prince of Egypt, and it's God performing miracles and freeing and liberating his people, and you love that story. And then you get to Leviticus, and it's somewhere around the end of January and the beginning of February, and you think, wow, I've been doing really good. I read through the whole Bible in a month or the whole beginning of the Bible. And then you start reading about offering sacrifices and killing bulls and laying your hands on bulls or lambs before you kill them and killing doves.

And you read way too much, in my opinion, about bodily fluid, right? And you're just thinking, what in the world is this book? It's so bizarre for our sensibilities. It's so foreign to many of us. And has anyone in the room ever traveled to a foreign country or maybe interacted with a culture for an extended period of time very different than your own show of hands?

You've been in that situation, okay? You get off the plane, and you walk into an environment where maybe you can't read any of the signs. You don't know the language of the people you're interacting with. You don't know what the customs are or the dialect that people are interacting with. You're careful because you don't want to offend anyone.

And you don't know if you interact with a certain person in a certain way, that'd be an offense to you. And what happens in those spaces is something that we call culture shock, right? You enter this new environment, and you feel so overwhelmed by all of the experiences that are new to you, different from you, foreign to you, from your way of seeing the world. And it can overwhelm you. It can cause this kind of culture shock.

But what happens if you stay in that environment long enough is that oftentimes that culture shock begins to wear off, and you develop an appreciation for the culture or the environment that you're interacting with. Right? And maybe you even have an appreciation of your own culture, your own experience, and where you come from. And I think in some ways, that is the book of Leviticus to us. We are interacting with a culture and a worldview so drastically, drastically different than our own.

But I believe if we stick in it long enough, if we stay in this space that makes us a little uncomfortable, then I believe we will develop not only an appreciation for their world and how they saw God interacting with them, but even a deeper appreciation for our own world and our story with Jesus. Because I truly believe this. While Leviticus is strange and very weird and oftentimes brutal and bizarre, at the heart of Leviticus, we see the heart of God and his desire to be with his people. And it reveals something deep to us about the character and nature of who God is. And I think the more we understand Leviticus, then actually the more we will begin to understand who Jesus is, what his mission was in the world, and what he has done for us.

And so I actually think Leviticus is one of the most important books in all of scripture. So I'm excited for this series. It might be a little dense. Today we're going to be looking at some of the key themes of Leviticus. I think Leviticus is too foreign for us to just jump straight in and start diving into the text and looking at the first seven chapters of Leviticus and the entire sacrificial system.

So we're going to actually zoom out a little bit, look at context and a few of the key themes that will kind of anchor us as we go throughout the journey of the next few weeks in the strange world of Leviticus. And so today we're going to look at God's holiness, Israel's sin, and God's solution for Israel's sin. You with me? Okay. All right, there we go.

There's like five of y'all. And it doesn't matter because we're still doing it anyways. All right, here we go. All right, let me pray for us first, though. Heavenly Father, God, we truly do believe that your word, every bit of your word God, comes from you, and it is useful for us.

God, you say that your word does not return empty. You say that it is useful for teaching and rebuking and correcting and training God. That means that even the strange world of Leviticus is useful to us. But God, it can be challenging to navigate. It can feel foreign.

So I just pray, God, as we dive into this series, as we begin this journey through the strange world of Leviticus, that you would make yourself so real, so apparent to us. God, I pray that even today, as I try to explain some of the complexity of this book, now I ask God that my words would even just fade away. And that this might just be a conversation between you, your holy spirit, and each and every heart in this room and those even joining us online. God, I pray that we would encounter you in this story and we would see you more clearly. We would understand the story of your redemption.

And God most of all, that we would understand your heart for your people. That at the center of this story is a God who desperately, desperately wants to be with his people. And it's in the name of Jesus that we pray these things. Amen. Right.

So before we dive into Leviticus, straight off the bat, it's important to get a little bit of context about where in the gospel story, in the story of scripture, this book falls. And so you have the story of Genesis. God creates, and the world falls and breaks down, and everything begins to deteriorate. And God begins his redemption plan with a person named Abraham. And the rest of Genesis is a story about Abraham and his family leading them all the way to Egypt, where they're enslaved by the egyptian pharaoh.

And God shows up and redeems them, rescues them, performing signs and wonders, and then leads them out of Egypt and brings them to Mount Sinai, where God essentially performs a marital ceremony with his people. He wants to create a covenant with the people of Israel and say, you will be my people. I will be your God. I will dwell with you. And he gives them the law, the Ten Commandments, and he gives them instructions for how to build a tent, the tabernacle, where God's presence will rest with the people of Israel.

And in the middle of this marriage ceremony, Moses goes back up to the mountain to interact with God. And while he's away, the people, like, they're literally at the altar with God, and they become unfaithful immediately. It's as if the bride and the groom are saying their vows, and then the groom leaves the wedding ceremony and doesn't even make it to the reception because he drives off with the bridesmaid. That's essentially what the people of Israel do to God in this moment. And so the trauma from that decision, the trauma of that unfaithfulness, causes a chasm between God and his people.

God wants to dwell with his people, but their unfaithfulness has caused a rift in the relationship. And so we close the book of Leviticus, or, I'm sorry, of Exodus, and the tent has been built. And then it says this as the book closes in Exodus 40 34 35, then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. So what we see as the book of Exodus closes is they've built the tent. They've built the place where God's glory and his presence is going to dwell.

And it kind of beams over from the mountain. I kind of picture it like the laser beam in Independence Day, except it doesn't destroy everything, right? But it's like God's prayer presence descends from the mountain into the tabernacle. But as God's presence rests there, Moses cannot enter the tent because of the rift and relationship between what Israel has done and who God is. And then if you turn the page to Leviticus one, it says this, the Lord spoke to Moses from the tent of meeting.

So God is in the tent, Moses is outside of the tent, and God calls out to him from inside the tent, because Moses can't have a conversation with God face to face. He can't encounter God's presence. But something that's fascinating is the book directly after Leviticus, numbers. It opens with this statement in numbers one. One.

The Lord spoke to Moses in the tent of meeting. And so you have this progression. The book of Exodus ends, and Moses wants to be in God's presence. The people want to be with God, but they are unable to do so because of the sin and uncleanliness that's a part of their community. And God wants to be with the people, too.

But there's a barrier between them being able to be one with one another. And so Leviticus opens, and God begins giving Moses instructions from inside the tent as Moses is outside. And then after Leviticus, it opens and Moses is in the tent. And so what happened? How was Moses able to enter the tent?

The answer is the book of Leviticus. And so what we need to understand from the outset is that every instruction, every ritual, every word, every activity that takes place, every law about bodily fluids and about sacrifices and blood, all of it, every single bit of it, even down to the pieces of not shaving your beard, it is all centered around the idea that God wants to be with his people, and he wants his people to have access to his presence. You see, at the heart of Leviticus, the purpose of Leviticus is this.

Leviticus sets out to answer how an unholy people can live in the presence of a holy God. That's the heart of the book. It is that God is holy and wants to be in relationship with his people. But because they are unholy, they are corrupt, they are sinful, they are full of disease and defilement and all sorts of sickness. There's a clash between the ability for them to interrelate.

And so as we go through today, what we're going to be looking at is some of the interaction that God has with the people. It's all centered around this idea of God being holy, wanting to be with his people and providing them with a way to exist with him. Does that make sense? And so the first theme that we're going to look at today is God's holiness. And I think when we come to the idea of holiness, we have a lot of misconceptions in our world about what holiness is and what it isn't.

Because when I think of holiness, I think of the person who, let's be honest, they're a little bit aloof. They probably think they're better than me. They show up to church and they are like dressed to the nines. They have this whole aura about them. They don't want to get dirty.

They're kind of like selective about who they interact with. And they think they're separate from the world. They don't want to interact with the world. Self righteous idea that this distance created, that holy people are those kind of people who separate themselves from the rest of us sinners. And I think we can kind of transport that vision, that understanding of holiness onto God.

And so we see God is somehow like self righteous, somehow distant, aloof, that he's perfect and that we're not. And that that's the whole problem with what's going on in Leviticus. The problem is that's actually not the picture of what Leviticus paints of who God is. Leviticus does not say that God is just some deity in the sky who is holy and distant and aloof. Absolutely, God is pure.

But it's not that God does not exist in our broken, dirty world. And in fact, Leviticus is trying to make the opposite point, that our world is broken and fallen, and a holy God is actually doing everything he can to move towards people who are sinful and unholy. So it starts with a very opposite reaction, I think, of how many of us understand holiness. In Leviticus 19, one, two, it says this. The Lord said to Moses, speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them, be holy because I, the Lord God, am holy.

I think sometimes when we read that, we can assume God is saying, I am morally pure. So therefore you need to be morally pure or else. And if you don't show up exactly how I have commanded you. If you don't show up and follow all of the rules and regulations that I've given you, then I am so holy, so distant, so pure, so perfect, and you are so not all of those things that if you don't show up absolutely the way that I show you to, then I cannot wait to smite you. That I am just ready.

I'm trigger happy and I am ready to take you out of the picture. But that is not the picture that Leviticus gives us at all about God's holiness. See, in Leviticus, God's holiness is not just about moral purity. God is not set apart from us just because he is morally pure and he and we are not. It's not that he doesn't concern himself with dirty sinners.

The idea of holiness is actually much deeper in the story of Leviticus than I would argue in all of scripture. Because at its essence, holiness is not simply about moral purity and following rules or regulations. Holiness at its center and how it describes who God is. Holiness is much more about God being the sole source of life and all of existence. That holiness has much more to do with God being separate from the rest of creation because he is the sole author and creator of all life.

And within that it contains elements of purity and holiness that we kind of traditionally think about. But it's much broader and more expansive than our typical understanding of what holiness is. Here's a circle illustration to maybe help us understand a little bit about how holiness works in Leviticus. So if you read through Leviticus, what you'll see is there are different layers of holiness throughout the Israelites camp. So in the center there, that box, we have a picture of the tabernacle and where it says the letter a, that's the most holy place, the holy of holies, where God's presence would dwell with Israel.

It's where his presence would rest in the center. And there was curtains and containments around that that would keep the people from having access directly to God's presence, presence because of how sinful they were. But then outside of that was the holy place where some people could go. Outside of that was the courtyard where the priests could exist. And then outside of that box, the courtyard was where the camp of Israel existed.

And so as you move further away from the most holy place, you can see that there's kind of this lessening of holiness, that God's presence rests and creates a sacred space at the center of the Israelites camp. And the further you move away from that space, the more unholy things become. Not simply because people are sinful and make bad choices, the further away they get from God, but because God's holiness actually emanates from that space, creating sacred space for the people of God to interact with him. And so what I get that this is dense, but what you see in Leviticus is this idea that God's holiness, his holy presence, is actually contagious to the people around him. And the further you get away from God's presence, the further you get away from his holiness.

But here's the issue, is that sin is also contagious, and sin also interacts with this holy space and holiness. In Leviticus, it's almost as incompatible, holiness and unholiness as incompatible, like light, darkness, they literally cannot operate in the same space. And so what happens is when unholiness comes into contact with holiness, it almost creates this violent chemical reaction, according to Leviticus. It's almost like, you know, when you put the mentos in the coke bottle and it, like, spurts out and explodes? That's a little bit of what is going on in Leviticus.

When unholiness comes, comes into contact with God's holiness, a violent reaction takes place. And it meant that God's holiness, his presence in the place where he dwelled, was constantly under threat of contamination from the sinful Israelites living around it. The best way that I've heard to explain this, and actually, a few years ago, when I preached through Leviticus, I used this illustration. But everywhere I read how to understand Leviticus, this illustration comes up that when we look at this image, what we should understand is that at the center of this image, in the most holy of holy places, it's almost like the center of a nuclear reactor, and it's a place of immense power and holiness. And when you interact with a nuclear reactor, you have to come into that space with certain understanding that you are interacting with immense power, right?

And so let's say, for instance, that you had an opportunity to tour a nuclear reactor. And as you walk into that space, you stop in kind of a room outside of the nuclear reactor, and you interact with a tour guide, and he gives you instructions about how you are supposed to behave when you enter the next room, he's probably going to tell you, like, hey, actually, you need to change certain elements of your clothing, and you need to put on a certain suit to protect you from what's going on in there, and maybe wear a hat so in case anything goes wrong. And he's going to tell you that hey, don't start pushing people around or start a tackle football game next to the nuclear reactor. That could be very bad for us. There are certain expectations of how the people would interact with that immense power in a nuclear reactor.

And all of the regulations, all of the rules, all of the stipulations around Leviticus all have to do with this idea of interacting with God's immense power, this life giving source of energy, and how they interact with that as a people who are defiled by disease and death and sin without causing a chemical reaction that will cause the nuclear reactor to explode. Now, here's the thing. I think when we come to these stories of Leviticus, we can think, man, it just seems like God is just ready to blow up at any moment. But if you think of a nuclear reactor, there's actually nothing inherently wrong or bad about a nuclear reactor. It's all about how you interact with it and all about how you utilize it.

And I think the same is true of God. While God is not neutral, it does talk about God judging sin and being perfect and holy. The understanding we have to have is that God wants us to be able to enter his presence, but he is creating an environment. He is giving us these rules and regulations in Leviticus to help the people understand how to interact with this immense power and holiness that's in their midst without contaminating it and causing either God's presence to leave or causing the nuclear reactor to combust. And so what we see in Leviticus is this idea that even down to some of the instructions about how God is giving them the clothing that the priests are supposed to wear, how they are supposed to enter the temple, who is allowed there, and who is not allowed there, all of it comes back to this idea of these instructions about how to interact with the nuclear reactor, not because it's bad, but because it is that good.

So here's a good example. If you think back to one of the previous examples I gave about how you're not supposed to mix clothing in the presence, the priests weren't supposed to have clothing that was made from two different types of material. It was like a very strange instruction to us, but this was the material that the priest would wear into the presence of God. And so it's this specific instruction about essentially, like, what kind of hazmat suit do you need to enter into the presence of God? But why not mix materials?

Well, it's actually rooted in the genesis story, where God creates the entire world in the entire universe. And one of the most common verbs that's used in the beginning of Genesis is that God divided. So God divides night from day. He divides water from land. He divides different sorts of animals.

He divides humanity from the rest of creation. The verb divide is used again and again and again. And what it is saying is that God, in his desire for order, is making order out of the chaos. And part of how God creates order is by dividing the chaos of creation. And so then when it comes to a command to not mix materials, it's calling back to this ancient story that God is a God of order, not chaos.

And God is someone who doesn't mix different substances, but actually creates separation from them in order that they might flourish and be the way that they're supposed to, to be. It's a very different worldview from our own. But then you can see and understand how the priests who go into the temple are supposed to live out and embody that teaching about a God of order, not of chaos, even down to the clothing material that they wear into his presence. See, every detail in Leviticus is designed to help us understand who God is and what his character is like. But when we come to those kinds of regulations and those thoughts, we can almost have this assumption that it's this distant, aloof God, that his holiness separates him from us and that there's no way for us to interact with him, and that he's only concerned with making sure that we follow the legalism of the law and we make all the sacrifices we're supposed to and that we follow every instruction down to a t.

We think of the holier than thou churchgoer who is too good for everyone else. But what we actually see in Leviticus, in all of these regulations, all of these rules, all of these rituals, and what we have to understand about their worldview is not that God was trying to distance himself from the people, but he was trying to move towards the people and giving them instructions for how they could live together and coincide together. The problem for the Israelites is that they are sinful, they are not holy. And that sinfulness, it goes way beyond just kind of the personal morality that you and I think of. I think when we think of sin, we think of, like, a personal transgression, and there's a way we can think of sin that, you know, oh, I thought this thought, or I did this thing, and I shouldn't have done it.

And so I'll just, like, say a prayer to God. And it's just kind of between me and him. It doesn't affect anybody else. I don't have to worry about it. But I know sin is bad for my heart, my soul.

So if I say a prayer, ask God for forgiveness, then he'll forgive me. Anybody have that relationship with sin? I'm not asking you to raise your hands. You don't have to raise your hands there. But we kind of have this individualistic mindset about sin is just between me and God.

And maybe every once in a while it comes out and it hurts someone around me. And then I need to apologize and ask for their forgiveness too. But the ancient Israelites had a very, very different view of sin than we did. Israel's sin is not about just personal transgression. Israel actually believed, and in Leviticus, sin is more of a force that has an impact not just on people's hearts and souls, but actually on the physical world.

The way that they conceived of sin is that it's a force that leads the world back into a state of chaos. If God is a God of order and creates out of chaos, then sin is the disintegration of God's created order. It disintegrates, literally, the atmosphere of God's environment and good and clean world. Tim Mackey of the Bible project, he says this about sin in Leviticus. He says in Leviticus, human sin is an act that vandalizes, infects, and defiles God's good world.

It's almost as if sin has a physical substance to it. In the Book of Leviticus, has anybody ever gotten, like, tree SAP on your hands? Maybe you're hiking and you used a tree to get up one of the steps or the inclines, and then you came away and your hand was just like covered in SAP. I mean, it is so hard to get SAP off of your hands. It can contaminate everything that you touch and it just begins to spread.

So if you try to wipe it on your shirt, then it's on your shirt, and then you touch your shirt later, and then it gets on your water bottle and it, like, it just continually, it invades and contaminates the things that are around it. That's almost the picture of sin in Leviticus, is that when people sin, we're connected in this web together, that as I sin, it's not just between me and God, it actually affects you. Even if I didn't sin against you, it contaminates the environment of our community. So you could imagine just in a room this large, it's. What time is it?

It's 11:00 in the morning. Now, most of us came to church today. And actually, all of us in the room came to church today. But I would guess that when you're on your way to church, it's mostly a good day. And you could say, like, yeah, I didn't actually probably send too much on my way to church, man.

That's not all of us. I know for sure we have fights on the way to church all the time, but let's just say you're better than I am. And so you show up to church, and maybe as you enter in, there's, like, a thought here, a thought there. Someone else has a thought. Someone interacts with someone in an unkind way.

And you can see that there's this compound nature to the effect of sin that in a room, even just this size, if we were to count up and tally all of the ways that we sin today, I mean, it becomes a pretty long list pretty quickly. But it's not just sin between you and God. It actually contaminates the relationships and the environment around God's presence. And what we see in Leviticus is that this sin, it contaminates, it creates this substance that the people cannot get off of themselves and they can't. It contaminates the land and the atmosphere.

In fact, there's a point in Leviticus that it says that sin can kind of compound so much that the substance can grow so much that if they continue in sin with. Without asking for repentance, without changing their ways, then it will actually make the very land that they're living on so sick that it will vomit them out. It's a very physical reality. It's not just spiritual in the book of Leviticus. And so the problem is, what do you do about that?

If sin has this corrosive, acidic substance that can degrade the atmosphere, degrade relationships, degrade a great community, then how do we get rid of it? How do we allow ourselves to be in God's presence? How does God make a way, a solution for us to be in his presence? God's solution to that substance of sin is the sacrificial system. And in the first seven chapters of Leviticus, there's five different solutions God offers for how the people are supposed to interact with the sin in their world.

Now, the first two are a grain offering, and these actually aren't in order of the way they're laid out in the first seven chapters, but there's a grain offering and the fellowship offering. These are two ways of saying thank you to God by giving back a part of what he's given to you in produce or in flocks. And then there are three different types of purification offerings, the burnt offering, the purification offering, and the restitution offering. And there are three different ways of saying I'm sorry to God for wrongs done to others or to God that result in the forgiveness of sins, in the purification of the community. And so it all has to do with animal sacrifices, which is a very foreign concept for most of us.

How many in this room have killed an animal in the last week? Not a single hand. And that's okay. If you have, you can. I don't know, maybe you were hunting or fishing or, I don't know.

It's not really hunting season, but, like, some of us have killed. Anybody killed an animal ever in your life? Okay. Yeah, a few of us. It is a very messy, sticky process, right?

Like, it's pretty gross and it's pretty involved, and there's lots of blood, and it's just such a foreign experience for so many of us. In fact, about a year ago, I was taking Camden, my daughter. We like to go on chick fil a dates in the morning for breakfast. Anybody like chicken biscuit from Chick fil A? Hey, man, the group last night, no one had ever had a chicken biscuit from Chick fil A.

And I was like, what is going on with you people? If you have not, you need to go to chick fil a this week. This week and go to breakfast. They serve it till 1030. Chicken biscuit.

Put a little honey or strawberry jam on it. It's delicious. You'll love it. But this is way too detailed and beside the point. I was eating chicken with my daughter, Camden, and as we're eating chicken, she goes, hey, dad, have you ever thought about how the chicken that we eat rhymes with chicken on the farm?

And I thought, oh, no, who's going to tell her? And I realized, oh, I have to tell her. So we had this whole conversation about, yeah, it's actually the same chicken, sweetheart, the chickens we saw on the farm are actually the same chickens that we eat. And she's like, well, how do we eat them? Well, we kill them, right?

Like, it's so far removed from her world and her experience and her reality that most of us do not have a relationship with death, where we see it on a daily basis. And so when it comes to the sacrificial system and we think of families bringing in goats or lambs or cows into the presence of the temple, and they're cutting the throat and catching the blood in a basin, and then the people, the priests, dip their fingers in the blood and start sprinkling it across the entrance to the temple and to the tabernacle. It's all such a very foreign experience to us. None of you had to slaughter a goat to come to church today, right? It's completely remote from our experience.

And so this is the part of Leviticus that I think feels really challenging for us, because we think all sorts of questions, like, why was this the solution? Why did we have blood as the solution for all the sin and the substance that contaminates our world and our reality and our relationships? Like, couldn't God have come up with just water? That's a lot cleaner. There's so many things that feel foreign to us about how to interact with this idea of the sacrificial system.

Not to mention some of it makes us uncomfortable because we know other cultures around that time also had sacrificial systems. And so was it just that God kind of commandeered the way that other people interacted with the world at that time? And here's the reality, is there were other cultures, and they had sacrificial systems that looked fairly similar to the story of Leviticus and the early people of Israel. But here's the key difference. In all of those other cultures, their sacrificial systems were all centered around the idea that they had to appease fickle or angry gods.

And so if you wanted to make sure that God sent rain to you or protected your family or gave you victory in battle or made sure that your house didn't fall on top of you while you were sleeping, is you would make sacrifices in an effort to try to win that God's approval and make sure that that God wasn't upset with. And that was the whole basis of the interaction around their sacrificial systems. All of it was centered on making sure an angry God did not kill you. And I think sometimes when we come to stories like Leviticus, we impose that worldview because that's something we're very familiar with, and we think that's what's going on in the book of Leviticus. And so God says, you know, you have to slaughter this goat in order for me not to strike you down and destroy you.

The issue is that that is actually nowhere present in the story of Leviticus. There is not one time in the entire book where an atonement sacrifice, a sacrifice that is meant to cover over sin, is given or instructed to be given because of God's wrath or anger. You see, it's as if God is taking a system and a structure in the culture at the time that would have been very familiar to the Israelites, and rather than building on that structure and saying, hey, you need to sacrifice to make sure that I don't kill you, God is taking that element of culture and redeeming it with a different purpose and a different intent, which is what our God does all the time. Culture is always going in ways that are against God's wisdom. And he takes those moments and those situations, and he redeems them and transforms them to his will and his purposes and his good.

You see, what God builds off of is in that culture, life was considered to be in the blood and literally God's breath, the source and essence of life. God's life was considered to be in the blood of all living things. And so the understanding was, if you wanted to sacrifice it, and this was beyond just israelite culture, if you wanted to to sacrifice in order to appease God, then the more precious the blood, the more chance you had of appeasing that God. And so it's why you see sacrifices that are like, yeah, we'll kill a dove. And it's not really that precious.

It's just a little bird. But a cow in an agrarian society is really precious because it's a work animal and something that can feed your family. And if you really want to go to the extent to absolutely make sure you please the gods who are upset with you. That's why you see some things like child sacrifice in other cultures, is because what could be more precious than the lifeblood of a child and your future as a society? And so it was the ultimate sacrifice to try to appease angry gods.

What's fascinating is that in Leviticus, God strictly prohibits that type of behavior. He says that this sacrificial system, this way of dealing with sin, it's as if the blood and the life that's in the blood is the detergent that can clean the substance of the sin. But it's not because God is just trying to be a piece. It's all rooted in God's desire to be with his people. And in fact, the way Leviticus frames the whole sacrificial system is that the goats and the cows and the chickens and whatever else might have been slaughtered to atone for sin, to make a sacrifice.

It's actually not the people giving God their things. It's that God has given those things to Israel so that they can find a way to sacrifice and to exist in God's presence. The source of the sacrificial system doesn't originate with us giving our things to God. It's God giving to us what is necessary to make a way for us to be with him. You see, at the heart of Leviticus, the big idea of Leviticus is God graciously provides a way for sinful and corrupt people to live in his holy presence.

That's the entire heart of this book. And we have to understand that as we get into some of the rules and rituals that we experience and that we see in this book. Because if we miss this, then it's so easy for us to revert back to an understanding that it's all about appeasing God's wrath and his vengefulness and that he just can't wait to smite people who are sinful. No, it's completely the opposite. God is holy.

We are sinful. God wants to exist with us, and so he makes a way for us to be with him. But it's grounded in love, not anger and wrath. And, in fact, you see this picked up in the New Testament. So Jesus comes onto the scene, and as he begins interacting with people who are the people that he spends most of his time with, the people who are unclean and who are sinful, the people who would never be allowed in the tabernacle, maybe they didn't even have enough money or finances to afford the sacrifices that they were supposed to do.

But instead of those contaminations, those sins spreading to Jesus, when they touch him, the opposite happens. Jesus isn't contaminated. He is so holy that his cleanliness actually extends and redeems those he interacts with. With. And then when we come to the cross and when we see Jesus sacrificial death for us, it's so fascinating in one John, the way that he talks about the atoning sacrifice of God, it's not in anger or in resentment or frustration or bitterness at all.

Listen to how John frames the atoning sacrifice of God. Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love God does not. Or whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

This is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love, not that we loved, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God.

But if we love one another. God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. Love. Love is the center of the sacrificial system that leads us to the point where God himself provides the atoning sacrifice for us to be in relationship with him, to cleanse us of the residue of sin that mars all of our lives. And not just our hearts and our souls, but our very communities and the world that we exist in.

Jesus was sacrificed so that we could be made clean and exist in God's presence. In fact, it goes deeper and even richer than that because it says in the New Testament that God's very presence is no longer confined to a tabernacle or a temple, but lives within, within us, sinful and corrupt as we are. Do you see the riches of God's grace in Leviticus and how it goes all the way to Jesus and to you and me today? You see, when we come to the table, it's our chance to embody and live that story because we no longer have to sacrifice an animal in order to be in God's presence. Christ was the final sacrifice.

And so when we come to the table and we take communion, we remember the bread that was his body broken for us. And we remember the cup which was his blood shed for us, making atonement, covering over our sins so that we could be with God forever in this life and in the life to come. What a beautiful, beautiful story in a very, very bizarre book. And so as we come to the table today, I invite you, we have elements around the room. Gluten free is in the center in the back.

And I would invite you to come remembering that story, embodying that theology, that belief that God loved his people so much that he was willing to not only create this sacrificial system, but live out that sacrificial system on our behalf. Will you pray with me, heavenly Father?

God, I think when we come to stories in books like Leviticus, sometimes it's easy to get lost in the weeds and caught up in the details. And I know that today in many ways was very dense. God, I pray that you could just speak through all of that, that you would speak to our hearts, our souls, and help us recognize the depths that you went to so that we could be with you. That even in an era of grace that we live in, looking back on the rituals and the regulations, God, you have not changed. From the very beginning, you were a God who was holy and yet wanted to be with an unholy people.

That God, even in our continued unfaithfulness, our continual refusal at times to live for you and to love for you. God, you still choose to love us.

God, I pray that that story would just emanate from our hearts, resonate deeply within us, because that's the story that actually produces transformation and change.

God, it is in your holy name that we pray. Amen.