Line by Line with Albert Mohler

Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 11:1–12 — Leviticus Series
February 13, 2022

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus Q & A — Leviticus Series
February 06, 2022

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For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 10:1–20 — Leviticus Series
January 30, 2022

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 8:1–9:8 — Leviticus Series
December 12, 2021

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 7:1–38 — Leviticus Series
November 14, 2021
Let's open with prayer. Our Father, we’re just so thankful You give us the opportunity, once again, on this morning, brisk air, beautiful foliage, reminder, not only of the changing of the seasons, but of our own temporality. Father, recognizing that we, too, are like these leaves Father, we pray to receive as much of your Word as we may until that day when we see You face to face. And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 
So, as we're studying Leviticus and we are studying the law as it was given to Israel in preparation for Israel's arrival in the land of promise, as we are looking word by word and line by line through this amazing book in which we see a yearning for Christ that we immediately recognize. We have seen it in so many different aspects. First of all, just in the sense of sin and guilt, it brings about the necessity of the entire sacrificial system, and then of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of humanity that cries out for some remedy. There has to be some rescue and that rescue cannot come from the human center. The rescue has to come from God Himself. Is there anything I can do, guys? Is there anything here? Okay. 
The yearning for atonement actually becomes very clear, as we saw as we got to chapters five and six, where the priest makes atonement. And there's the promise of an atonement, a peace with God, the problem of our sin and our guilt being removed. That raises the issue of the guilt, and, as it turns out, the guilt is not just a subjective experience of feeling and perceiving one's sinfulness. It is the actual objective reality that our sin creates this affront to God that He cannot accept. But we see it over and over again because it happens over and over again, the sacrifices. 
By the time you get to chapter seven in Leviticus, we have the recognition that this is the daily life of Israel. This is the center of the daily life of Israel. The daily life of Israel is largely consumed in the process of these sacrifices. And you say, well, this is where the Levitical priesthood. Yes. But notice who's bringing all these animals to the Levitical priests and notice how the preparation, the actual conducting of these sacrifices is going to require the attention of the people. And there are certain sacrifices in which all the people are called to draw near. We're going to see one of those this morning in chapter seven.
We've also seen, and this is perhaps the greatest theological insight thus far as we're going through Leviticus. We've also recognized that for all of the atonement that is promised, for all of the effect of the sacrifices, for all of the sin that is dealt with here, nothing is dealt with permanently, and the priest needs a priest. And that's also going to become more clear. 
Now, we have chapter seven before us, and after that, of course, chapter eight. Chapter eight's a decisive break in the book of Leviticus. So, after chapter eight, that is starting with chapter eight, we will be looking at instructions directly to the priesthood, which means that even as God called to Moses and spoke to Moses, this is instruction for all of Israel. And that includes chapter eight and what follows. This is not just given for the priests. It's not a secret knowledge. 
Something else is really important. There is no secret priest book in Judaism. There is no secret preacher book in Christianity. Now that needs to be understood because over against the various priesthoods of paganism, there is almost universally—and I don't think I actually need the ‘almost’—there is practically universally, a secret meaning, a secret code, a secret cultus known to the priesthood and not known to the people. That's a part of the priesthood’s powers, a part of the priesthood’s stewardship is that they know things. They have access to truths. They know ancient books, ancient writings, ancient authorities. They know how to read ancient stones. Whatever it is, they have knowledge that the people don't have. 
Have you noticed that that's not true of Israel? I mean, have you noticed that in Genesis and in Exodus, and we'll see it everywhere in Scripture. But in other words, it doesn't just come to us in Leviticus, but it comes to us in a big way in Leviticus, because we recognize how different this is than a traditional priesthood. A traditional priesthood is not only set apart, it is a cult unto itself. And what it does is the cultus, and the priesthood is usually entered by some form of initiation in which you enter as a novice and as a novice, you are taken into the mysteries in an ever deeper way.  
You see this in Buddhism, for example, in most of its classic forms. But even in ancient paganism, such as the Canaanite religions, there's every reason to believe that the priests knew things that the people were never to know. That is just not the case in Israel. The law is given to Israel. The law is not given to the priest. There are instructions to the priest in the law given to Israel, but every single member of the covenant people has equal access to God's Word, equal access to these instructions. Now, as you fast forward in biblical history, then you go to a couple of things that become very clear in the New Testament, and especially in the writings of the apostle Paul, because he will say, “At various times there is a mystery, but it's the mystery we proclaim to you.” So, in other words, it's only a mystery to the unbelieving world. 
The gnosis, the epistemological tribal reality, is the entire people. The gnosis is given to the entire people, not just to the priesthood. This sets Israel apart. And not only that, it's a public book, which means even though the knowledge is given to Israel as a part of God's covenant gift, it's shared with others. The Torah was not something secreted away. It eventually became known. And of course, we have a relationship to it in which we speak of it in terms of Old and New Covenant, Old and New Testament. This gets back to the fact that, as the reformers had to make very clear, based upon the clear verdict of the Holy Spirit led earliest church, based upon the teaching of the apostles, based upon what they had received from Christ, all of Scripture belongs to the church. The church is accountable to all of Scripture.
But as we are in Leviticus, coming to chapter seven, this is the continuation, and indeed the conclusion, of the opening section of Leviticus, about the nature of the sacrifices, the nature of the offerings. In chapter seven, verse one, we read, “This is the law of the guilt offering. It is most holy.” Now wait just a minute! In the previous chapter, we had details about the guilt offering. Yes. And so, one of the things that we will find is that there's, it's not just the repetition. A lot of this language by now is quite familiar to us. It is also the fact that there are different questions answered in different portions of Leviticus. Who—that is, who is to do this? The priest, in one case the high priest. Who is to do this? When is it to be done? Well, when the sin happens, when the sin happens, when someone's expressing thanksgiving, et cetera. The how is very important. 
Chapter seven says in verse two, “In the place where they kill the burnt offering, they shall kill the guilt offering, and its blood shall be thrown against the sides of the altar. And all its fat shall be offered, the fat tail, the fat that covers the entrails, the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins, and the long lobe of the liver that he shall remove with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as a food offering to the Lord; it is a guilt offering. Every male among the priests may eat of it. It shall be eaten in a holy place. It is most holy.”
Now, remember that we have this, this kind of concentric set of circles, and the innermost circle is the Most Holy Place. So, as you think about even the geography or the topography of the temple. But this is also related to Israel's own identity and experience—there's a ‘holy’. Then there's a ‘most holy’, in the New Testament often referred to as the Holy of Holies. Well, when you see the phrase ‘most holy thing’, that means particularly set apart. Now, that also means that Israel is issued a particular warning, lest Israel handle most holy things in a way that is unworthy. 
In verse six, “Every male among the priests may eat of it. It shall be eaten in a holy place. It is most holy. The guilt offering is just like the sin offering; there is one law for them [both]. The priest who makes atonement with it shall have it. And the priest who offers any man's burnt offering shall have for himself the skin of the burnt offering that he has offered. And every grain offering baked in the oven and all that is prepared on a pan or [in] a griddle shall belong to the priest who offers it. And every grain offering, mixed with oil or dry, shall be shared equally among all the sons of Aaron.” 
So again, a lot going on here. But in the sin offering and the guilt offering, which we are told follows one law, so it is one pattern. The priest who performs a sacrifice, eats the meat of the sacrifice—that is allowed to him. And remember, that's a restricted amount of the animals, we shall see. What's also important here is that the skin of the animal sacrificed is given to that priest. 
These skins are very, very important. You'll remember in the book of Genesis when Adam Eve in their embarrassment, after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they made—you got to love the Geneva Bible in its modesty—they made ‘aprons for themselves’. And they did make aprons for themselves, but they were made out of leaves. They were not going to be very substantial. And remember, after the Lord confronted them in their sin, a part of the Lord's care for them after their rebellion and sin was to make coverings for them out of skins of animals. And so, this use of skin shows the fact that that nothing in the animal was left without a purpose, nothing, and that the skin had value in it tangibly. It went to the priest who made the atonement. 
The grain offerings would last longer. It's the other thing that comes up about the meat offerings. And you'll notice that it appears that right then the priest who deserves to eat of the meat, eats of it. And it's because meat spoils, it's because meat is perishable. You do it right here. You do it right in the view of the people.
The grain offerings are a bit different because the grain offerings will last longer, and they are shared with the other priests. The one who officiates at the offering has the first fruit of the offering, but shares it then equally among all the sons of Aaron.
Verse 11, “And this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings that one may offer to the Lord. If he offers it for a thanksgiving…” So that's reason number one, thanksgiving. “…then he shall offer with the thanksgiving sacrifice unleavened loaves mixed with oil, unleavened wafers smeared with oil, and loaves of fine flour well mixed with oil. With the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving he shall bring his offering with [the] loaves of leavened bread. And from it he shall offer one loaf from each offering, as a gift to the Lord. It shall belong to the priest who throws the blood of the peace offerings. And the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for thanksgiving shall be eaten on the day of his offering.” There again, the meat to be eaten immediately. “He shall not leave any of it until the morning. But if the sacrifice of his offering is a vow offering or a freewill offering…” That's the second. “…it shall be eaten on the day that he offers his sacrifice, and on the next day, what remains of it may be eaten.” So that would be what remains of the animal that wasn't eaten, still allowable to eat on the second day, but as you shall see, not on the third. 
Verse 17, “But what remains of the flesh of the sacrifice on the third day shall be burned up with fire.” So, first day you may eat it. Second day, if any is left over, you may still eat it. Third day, no! Now notice what comes next. In verse 18, “If any of the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offering is eaten on the third day, he who offers it shall not be accepted, neither shall it be credited to him. It is tainted, and he who eats of it shall bear his iniquity.” So again, there's a there's judgment here. These laws are not merely suggestions. This is not the etiquette of sacrifice. This is the law of sacrifice. These are instructions. If these instructions are taken lightly, then basically the entire sacrifice is invalidated. 
Now, again, we just can't help fast forwarding, fast forwarding to the fact that, on the cross, Jesus was both priest and offering. He's our Great High Priest who offers Himself. And He offers himself in such a way that it was a perfect sacrifice. It was received as a perfect sacrifice. So, it was actually the first perfect sacrifice, which means to say, when you look at the danger here of even making an error in the offering and the sacrifice being basically invalidated, you recognize that this is a clumsy, clumsy thing. It's a hit or miss thing, not because of God's character, but because of the human character, those carrying it out. Not only their character, but their competence. You get a slippery priest, you're going to have guilt. First of all, upon the priest himself. 
Now, the holiness code becomes more clear as we look at verse 19. “Flesh that touches any unclean thing shall not be eaten.” And remember, there are a lot of unclean things. If a clean thing to be sacrificed touches an unclean thing, it becomes unclean. “It shall be burned up with fire. All who are clean may eat flesh, but the person who eats of the flesh of the sacrifice of the Lord's peace offerings while an uncleanness is on him, that person shall be cut off from his people. And if anyone touches an unclean thing, whether human uncleanness or an unclean beast or any unclean detestable creature, and then eats some flesh from the sacrifice of the Lord's peace offerings, that person shall be cut off from his people.” 
Now ‘cut off from his people’. What does that mean? That is an incredibly strong word of judgment. This doesn't sound like something for which there can be a remedy. Let me tell you, it may be worse than you think. Look at Exodus, chapter 31. Look at verse 14. “You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.”
So, there it appears that there is at least a connection between the death penalty and being cut off from your people. But we need to be careful. It is a parallelism here. In other words, we're not told that being cut off from the people is being put to death. We're told that someone is to be put to death, who is a Sabbath breaker, but then it's explained that such a person is to be cut off from his people. Now, capital punishment would certainly do that, but so would exile. And what we can only describe in the Old Testament as a, an exile from the covenant, being cut off from the covenant, it appears, just put it in context, that that is what is contemplated in Leviticus. And this will show up elsewhere when someone is cut off from his people. And if there is a death penalty, that's invoked, it applies. 
But there are cases in which we have the language, ‘He shall be cut off from his people,’ where it does not appear that there is any death penalty, but rather one is basically excommunicated, is the best way to put it. That would be our closest at hand term for this. It would be someone who is now exiled, cut off from the covenant and from the covenant people. 
The point of course we see here in Leviticus, is that getting the sacrifice wrong endangers, not only the sacrifice, but it slanders God and it mal priests. It is an injury for the entire people. And as we have seen, sin and guilt are real objective categories. They are real obstacles between us and a holy God. They are an affront to God's majesty and His holiness. They are an objective barrier between God's covenant people and Himself. The sacrifice is the way that that barrier is removed. As we see in these sacrifices, for a time God's wrath will be held back, for a time. But that ‘for a time’ is very important because that's how the covenant people existed. 
And that's also how we exist. We are not under the mediation of a priest who performs repeated sacrifices. That sacrifice is once for all. For us, before a time is not awaiting the great sacrifice, because that's already taken place. For us, the ‘for a time’ is in this time awaiting the glorification that is to come. It's one of the things we have to remember is that Christ’s atoning work purchased our glorification. We are not yet glorified, but no more sacrifice will take place. 
In the horizon of Israel's just endless sacrifices until, until again, logically, logically, and we see it in the text going all the way back to Moses—in fact, going all the way back to the promise to Abraham—it's there that something's going to have to bring a conclusion to this. Someone's going to have to finish this. He is, we speak of Christ as the ‘author and finisher of our faith,’ but for the temporal horizon of Israel for so long as their generation shall come, it's daily what we are seeing here. 
In verse 22, “The Lord speaks to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel, saying, You shall eat no fat, of ox or sheep or goat. The fat of an animal that dies of itself and the fat of one that is torn by [the] beasts may be put to any other use, but on no account shall you eat it. For every person who eats of the fat of an animal of which a food offering may be made to the Lord shall be cut off from his people.” There it is again. “Moreover, you shall eat no blood whatever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwelling, places. Whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people.”” 
Now again, I think I told someone that, you know, there have been people who have heard this or read this text and been afraid to order their steak in a restaurant anything but well done. That is not what's being referenced here. And as a matter of fact, in the slaughter of beef or of meat, the bleeding of the animal, the blood is removed. There's still some in the flesh, but the actual circulatory blood is removed. So, what’s the background here, what's the problem? Well, let's just say we have foreground, and then we have long foreground. In the immediate foreground, and in the background to this, are the pagan sacrifices, pagan priests, because blood has been recognized, even in the most animistic cultures, as being of importance to the cultus. Now, this is explained, of course, in the Scripture where we are told that in the blood is the life. Just think of a text like Genesis 9:4, the life is in the blood. 
If you're trying to find the mystery of life, which let's just say you're an ancient people, you're cut off from any form of direct, special revelation. You have the general revelation, you're made in God's image, you’re in a place where you do not know Torah, you do not hear the revelation of God, and you're trying to figure out what life is all about. It doesn't take you long to figure out that life is in the blood. Life is in the blood to the extent that if someone loses blood, they die. Life is blood to the extent that all the creatures that we would consider as animal creatures, even like unto us, there is blood. The life is in the blood to the extent that, if you have someone who's cut and the blood is spurting out, when the blood stops pulsing, the person is dead. 
Now, if you take the life is in the blood in a pagan way, you literally mean the life is in the blood, which is one of the reasons why you will find, you know, in ancient cultures in Central and South America, especially with human sacrifice. And you look at the reason for the human sacrifice. There's an impulse. We've got to have some kind of blood sacrifice, it needs to be as innocent as possible, which is why so many of these are children. Found also in Canaan. Remember, the purpose here is to prepare the Children of Israel for entering Canaan, while not becoming Canaanites. And a part of what the Canaanites are doing, particularly in sacrifices to Molech, is they're sacrificing their children. 
Some years ago, an archeologist came to Southern Seminary for a conference and was speaking about modern archeological finds, and mentioned that so many of them actually, in the ancient near east, have been completely accidental. In other words, there's certain tells or mounds where people know we ought to dig there and see what's there. There are certain civilizational spots, you could just say Jericho or other places, not to mention Jerusalem, or we know we know what this place is. And we know, as you dig down stratum by stratum, you're going to find all kinds of interesting materials. 
But other things have been found elsewhere, especially in the ancient Near East, nearly entirely by accident. One of them came in Syria, very close to the Golan Heights, which means very close to Mount Carmel, you know, headed in that direction, very close to Israel. And what was found was a dumping place of dead bodies. And the dead bodies had been sacrificed and burned. And the dead bodies were all of children, about ages four and under. All of them had been clearly sacrificed in some kind of sacrificial system. They'd been killed and their bodies burned. But what was noted about this, this horrible find was that what was shocking is that the main leg bones in all of these skeletons had been broken, and it was so that the children could not crawl out of the fire. 
And you look at that and you go, “Oh!” This blood sacrifice, in a pagan sense, makes the sacrifice and the priesthood the focus, and this blood, the idea that life is in the blood. You know, the priest would smear themselves with blood and there would be orgies of blood. That's not what you see here. In fact, the detailed instructions given to the priests in Leviticus are such that there is no confusion between the sacrifice that God has ordered and the pagan sacrifices, and the eating of blood is a part of this. 
Notice that Israel's not just all, “No, it's not a good idea to eat blood.” No, it's not that. They are told, “You shall not eat blood. If you eat blood, you are cut off again.” We think the best meaning of that would be an exile cut off from the covenant. That's how threatening such a confusion would be. 
And by the way, it's also fat. You're not supposed to eat the fat. And the fat is not the blood. You know, we don't have a sacrifice of fat. But it just shows you again, that God's holiness code is very detailed and every part of it is useful. And what God says about the fat is, “You can use it for a lot of things. You can’t eat it.” And so, the fat could be reduced to oil, it could be reduced to grease, it could be used for polish, it could be used to light a lamp. It could be used for all kinds of purposes. Can't be used for just outright human consumption.
Verse 28, “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel, saying Whoever offers the sacrifice of his peace offerings to the Lord shall bring his offering to the Lord from the sacrifice of his peace offerings. His own hands shall bring the Lord's food offerings. He shall bring the fat with the breast, that the breast may be waved as a wave offering before the Lord.”” Now remember a wave offering is symbolically a way of demonstrating the purpose of the sacrifice. And remember, one of the central purposes of the wave offering is thanksgiving. It could be also to vow a vow. 
I was a telling group about having Eta Linnemann speak at Southern Seminary. It’s a long story—I won't tell you how I introduced her, and she didn't come. But she was one of, she was Rudolph Bultmann, the great liberal New Testament scholar in Germany, fountain head of theological liberalism. Eta Linnemann was his first female doctoral student and became very, very famous as a liberal biblical scholar. She didn't believe the Bible was the Word of God. She was a Bultmannian. She never married.  
And Professor Linnemann, toward the end of her life, went on a retreat with and ended up and being in a hostel in Germany, run by German pietist ladies. And she became a Christian toward the end of her life. She was a professor of New Testament. She didn't believe anything. And then she became a believer. And then she had a problem because she's got all these books, she's been publishing all these years. And now she's a Christian and she actually believes the Bible's the Word of God. And so, she actually wrote a very interesting letter to the German academy saying, “Please disregard everything I've ever written.” And she wrote two books defending the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture.
And so, she was still alive. I wanted to bring her to Southern to speak. And, you know, sure was a wonderful thing to have Professor Linnemann come. It was wonderful, but it was very German. And I will just tell you that I introduced her to banquet only to discover that German professors do not speak while people are eating. And you'll hear me tell this again, sometime when it's appropriate to the event, but she just said, “I dos not speak to chewing peoples.” And she was a teutonic lady professor. Yes, okay. 
But the students, and of course had all these students, all these wonderful seminary students who had come to hear Professor Linnemann, and they're also polite and so kind, and they don't want to do anything improper, and they don't want to laugh at this professor, but she was as German as German could be. And it comes down to this, this particular passage, because she would just say at full voice, she was so excited about this. You believe this is the Word of God. Now it wasn't just, and she said, “And Abraham wowed a wow before the Lord.” And she just repeated it over and over again. And I'm sitting up there on the platform, looking at these students who are going, “Abraham wowed a wow before the Lord.” And sure enough, so I'll never, I just promise you once you've heard that, you can never unhear it. “Abraham wowed a wow!”
If you do vow, a vow, a wave offering is an appropriate way. And again, it's shown before the Lord. It is a wave in the sense that it's held up. And yet we have more about the wave offering that comes up here. If you do, then you'll notice that the central thing here is the breast. “He shall bring the fat with the breast, that the breast may be waved as a wave before the Lord.”
Now, what is it about the breast? Well, here's an interesting thing and I have no great explanation for this. It's just, it just is. And that is that the prime parts of the meat in ancient Israel were identified as the breast and the right thigh. Now, if you go into your butcher shop and talk in terms of the right thigh, I don't think you're going to get a whole lot of comprehension. But that was how it was defined. Now, other parts of the meat may be eaten. other parts of the animal may be consumed, but the prime pieces were the breast and the right thigh. 
The point here is that the wave offering, if you're doing this because you vowed a vow, you’re doing this because you are expressing thanks to the Lord. Or you're doing it as the church would call it later, ‘unbidden’. In other words, there's no requirement to do it. You just feel an urge to do this, this wave offering it under the Lord. Then you bring the prime parts, no inferior parts. If you really are moved to do this, you're moved to do it rightly. 
“The priest shall burn the fat on the altar, but the breast shall be for Aaron and his sons. And the right thigh you shall give to the priest as a contribution from the sacrifice of your peace offerings.” So, not the left thigh. And again, I don't know if it's just the historic distinction between left and right that is reflected in Scripture, but it's the right thigh. 
“For the breast that is waved and the thigh that is contributed I have taken from the people of Israel, out of the sacrifices of their peace offerings, and have given them to Aaron the priest and to his sons, as a perpetual due from the people of Israel.” So, in other words, this is just ongoing. So, for long as Israel under this covenant shall exist, God has given to Aaron, to the Levitical priesthood, to the Aaronic priesthood with Aaron at the very top, and to the priests, they're given these prime pieces of meat as a ‘perpetual due’. 
“This is the portion of Aaron and of his sons from the Lord's food offerings, from the day they were presented to serve as priests of the Lord. The Lord commanded this to be given them by the people of Israel, from the day that he anointed them. It is a perpetual due throughout their generations. This is the law of the burnt offering, of the grain offering, of the sin offering, of the guilt offering, of the ordination offering, and of the peace offering, which the Lord commanded Moses on Mount Sinai, on the day that he commanded the people of Israel to bring their offerings to the Lord, in the wilderness of Sinai.” 
So, so much has transpired here. We are seven chapters through Leviticus, and we have seen now most of the rules concerning the sacrifices. Notice how they're listed here, just for helpful summary at the end, set out for us—burnt offering, grain offering, sin offering, guilt offering, ordination offering, peace offering. 
Now back on Mount Sinai, when the Children of Israel were told to bring their offerings, they were just offerings. But now there are all these different kinds of offerings. The fulfillment of every single one of them, all of them and all of them together and more, is Christ. So, once again, we are struck by the fact that in Israel, there was a singularity of priesthood, but there was an endless multiplicity of sacrifices. And in Israel, it was a priesthood that was through Aaron, to Aaron's sons and descendants, and then beyond them to the tribe of Levi and the Levitical priesthood. So, it was an exclusive priesthood. If you were in other tribes, you were not a priest. If you were not of Aaron’s seed, then you're not Aaronic. Still, multiple priests, one priesthood, multiple priests. We have a singular Priest, and the sacrifice is a singular sacrifice. 
So, there is more to come in Leviticus, but at this point, we have the great satisfaction of knowing that even as Israel is saved here for a time by these sacrifices, even as God's wrath is held back for Israel for a time by these sacrifices, the reality is, look at the language like ‘perpetual do’. Look at the repetition. 
You know, you look at this and you recognize that when we speak of our, say week, we think of our week, we as Christians. There are Christians who think of their weekly schedule differently than we do. There are those who might be in a very highly liturgical church, say Anglican, high church Anglican, and they may begin every single day with the morning offices or matins. And they may go all the way through even song in the evening, if they are in an order, they may actually do the hours following in prayer, day by day by day. 
But nonetheless, what we are looking at, if indeed this is a Christian church, if it is a Christian practice, then we are looking at the fact that if something of that is missed, let's say that the building suffers a problem and people can't meet together for the meeting, or it can't happen by some kind of obstacle. Norice no guilt remains, no guilt remains, cause these are not sacrifices. These are services of prayer. These are times of Bible reading. It's just extremely different.  
For Israel, an interruption in the sacrificial system meant that guilt remained. Now, this just leads to all kinds of things that we will see as we fast forward in biblical history, including what it meant for Israel to be carried off into captivity. Or what it meant for Israel, and remember, this is now in the background, for Israel to have been captive to Pharaoh in Egypt. So, Israel is in the unusual and frightening position of recognizing that, if its infidelity leads it to be separated from this tabernacle, separated from its priesthood, its priesthood unable to function, then the sin just builds up and the guilt just increases, which by the way, shows again, God's mercy. Helps you to read the prophets, helps you to read Jeremiah, for example, helps you to understand Nehemiah because how is it that God's going to allow this people back because their sin and their guilt is ever more immense. 
By the way, one other thing, and I just want to mention this very clearly. The early church recognized, and the book of Hebrews is the quintessential representation of this, the early church recognized, based upon the teachings of Christ himself and then the teaching of the apostles, that the ‘once for all’ nature of the sacrifice of Christ meant that whatever the church does, whatever the church does in worship, whatever the church does in preaching, whatever the church does just in talk, we must be extremely careful about sacrifice language. 
If we are going to use sacrifice language, it has to be for ourselves. It has to be only in the sense of Romans chapter 12 in which Christ’s people are called to be ‘a living sacrifice’. But there can be no other kind of sacrificial language. We've got to reserve that now all for Christ. Is that really clear? We have to reserve that all for Christ. Well, you know, what sacrifice must be made for the forgiveness of our sins? That sacrifice was made. That sacrifice was accepted. Not only did Christ die on the cross as a Great High Priest, He was resurrected as the very Son of God by the Father. That sacrifice received and blessed in full. Any confusion of that, thus, is a deadly confusion.  
Now I want to fast forward to the 16th century. In the 16th century, let's just look at Martin Luther, just to take one example. So, let's just take the seminal reformer in the 16th century. Martin Luther, when in 1517 he posted those 95 theses. And again, we don't know exactly how they were posted, but, by tradition, on the Wittenburg door. But we do know they existed to the extent, and they were published to the extent, that the Archbishop of Mainz has them and has to decide what to do with them within days of Luther having posted them. And that's a matter of the church's record. 
But you'll notice that Luther didn't go after the Mass. Luther doesn't go after the very center of the Catholic Church’s cultus. He just assumed that, as a monk, or better described a friar, as an ordained priest of the church, he just, he just received that. 
But as he begins to come to terms with Scripture, we see Luther forced into what can only be considered boxed alleyways from which there's no escape. And that's how Luther gets to so many of the doctoral insights of the Reformation. When he's involved in a disputation and he's accused of trusting the Scripture rather than the Magisterium, rather than the Pope, Luther says, “Yeah, that's actually what I'm doing.” And then when he's pressed further and further, it's the Scripture, and the Scripture, and the Scripture, and Luther gets the hard way to the fact that it's Scripture alone, by the fact that in his argument, he's got nowhere else to go. 
The same thing with justification. Luther doesn't begin, what we would call the Reformation, by understanding the faulty doctrine of justification in the Roman Catholic Church. But the more he is taken into the world of Scripture, and the more his argument has to be based just in Scripture, and the more Scripture has to become his soul doctrinal authority, the more he recognizes that it's not faith and anything. And again, it's just then the process of, with his life on the line, you just have to, all of a sudden, realize it's this or nothing. By the time he gets to Worms with Scripture, “Here I stand, I can do to other, God help me.” 
But he got to the Mass, and he got to the Mass. And you think of his writing on what he called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, speaking of the Catholic Church. And he gets to it, and he gets to it with the recognition that the Catholic Mass is a sacrifice. He was taught this. He was taught the central theology of the Mass is that it is a sacrifice. So much so that Christ is crucified again. So much so that by transubstantiation, what is there on the altar, called the tabernacle, is a vessel for holding what is claimed to be the transubstantiated body of Christ crucified again. 
And that's why Luther responds with this complete abhorrence of the Mass, where he says, “You can have the Mass, or you can have Christ, but you cannot have both, for Christ died once.” And He doesn't sit on an altar. He certainly doesn't sit on thousands and thousands of altars in bits and pieces. Christ, and Christ whole, and Christ alone, reigns with the Father. And the sacrifice is done. And it is a slander to say, any sacrifice is needed, or any sacrifice can add a thing to what Jesus accomplished and which Jesus concluded with the words, “It is finished.” 
So, I just want to leave you with that as, when we're next together, we'll look at chapter eight and the actual instigation, installation of the priesthood. It's just so encouraging to me to think of not just what we do when we're together here at Third Avenue Baptist Church, but what we don't do. 
Do you notice something? There’s no mess for us to clean up after the service. There's no blood spattered all over this place, and it's not because it's not necessary. It's because it's been done. So that should get us ready for worship.  
It's been a privilege to be with you looking at these first seven chapters of Leviticus. We'll be turning a chapter, as in a whole section of Leviticus, when we're together next. 
Let's pray. Father, we're just so thankful for all You've given us in every single word, every syllable, every sentence of Scripture. Father, we ask to read all of Scripture in order that we may know Christ, in order that we may know Him more fully, follow Him more faithfully, and see your Gospel displayed in Him more gloriously. Father, we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 5:1–6:30 — Leviticus Series
October 24, 2021
Good morning. Good to see you all. Just as we drove in, the sun peaked through the sky, it was a good thing to see this morning, but it's a wonderful thing to be together as we continue in our verse by verse study of Leviticus. To that we will turn in just a moment–but first, let's pray.
Our Father, with grateful hearts we thank you once again that we have the privilege of being together in this place, at this time, for this hour, dedicated to the study of your word. And Father, we pray that this hour will be for the increase of our knowledge, and for the increase of our godliness, and the increase of your glory. We pray this in Christ's name, amen.
I had the privilege of preaching at a college church in Wheaton three times this past Sunday. I was talking to folks, and then they would say, “I want to thank you for your studying Leviticus.” And I'm thinking, “well, you're there, I'm here, but because of the internet, there are folks who are following the study of Leviticus.” And they said, “well, what's the biggest surprise?” I said, “well, I think, I think the biggest surprise has been for those in the class. The fact that we spent so many weeks, and we're only in Leviticus four,  I think that's probably a surprise, because it's just much richer material than a lot of Christians would anticipate.” But we are looking towards one of the hinge chapters in the book of Leviticus. We're going to find references back and forth, even as we're going to find references back to Leviticus in the book of Deuteronomy, you're going to find Leviticus cited as we go forward. Even throughout the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, amazingly enough, Jesus is going to quote Leviticus when he is asked, “what is the greatest commandment?” So we're not there yet. But we are going to pick up the pace a bit this morning, because we are headed towards something in the text ahead. That is just vital for us to know. 
I think one of the insights of studying Leviticus is that in almost every chapter, there is something that just stands out at us, and we say, “okay, that's just incredibly clarifying.” The last time we were together, as we were looking at Leviticus chapter four, we saw the objectivity of sin so very clearly demonstrated in the fact that even unintentional sin by a priest means that the guilt has fallen upon Israel. So guilt is not just a subjective experience. Guilt is an objective reality, because sin is an objective reality , and then make atonement–as we saw later in the chapter, the only answer to sin is atonement–but now we start chapter five. 
“If anyone sins in that he hears a public adjuration to testify, and though he is a witness, whether he is seen or come to know the matter yet does not speak, he shall bear his iniquity; or if anyone touches an unclean thing, whether a carcas of an unclean wild animal, or a carcas of unclean livestock, or a carcas of unclean swarming things, and it is hidden from him and he has become unclean and he realizes his guilt; or if he touches human uncleanness of whatever sort of uncleanness this may be with which one becomes unclean, and it is hidden from him when he comes to know it and realizes his guilt; if anyone utters with his lips a rash oath to do evil or to do good, any sort of rash oath that people swear, and it is hidden from him when he comes to know it, and he realizes his guilt in any of these; when he realizes his guilt in any of these and confesses the sin he has committed, he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he has committed, a female from the flock, a lamb, or a goat for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin. 
But if he cannot afford a lamb, then he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he has committed two turtle doves or two pigeons, one for his sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. He shall bring him to the priest, who shall first offer the one for the sin offering. He shall ring its head from its neck but shall not sever it completely, and he shall sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar, while the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar; It is a sin offering. Then he shall offer the second for a burn offering according to the rule. And the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin that he is committed, and he shall be forgiven.
But if he cannot afford two turtle doves or two pigeons, then he shall bring as his offering for the sin he has committed a 10th of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering. He shall put no oil on it and shall put no frankincense on it, for it is a sin offering, and he shall bring it to the priest. And the priest shall take a handful of it as its memorial portion and burn this on the altar, on the Lord's food offerings; it is a sin offering. Then the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin which he is committed in any one of these things, and he should be forgiven. And the remainder shall be for the priest, as in the grain offering.”
Well, that was 13 verses. Interesting territory here. Notice the very first sin that's mentioned: “if anyone sends that he hears a public adjuration testify, and though he was a witness, whether he's seen or come to know the matter yet does not speak, he shall bear his iniquity. What kind of society was Israel? Just as as God's covenant people, what kind of society was it? Well, it was a society of law. Now you say we are a society of law, and indeed we are. The difference is Israel was a covenant theocracy. So when Israel was ever asked, “where did you get your law?” Israel would respond, “It was God's gift to us.”
Now this gift was given, of course, through Moses, and as we see repeatedly in Leviticus, we are told that the Lord spoke to Moses, telling him to tell the people he called Moses out from the tent and spoke to him. He will speak to Moses, and we'll see this again and again–the Lord spoke to Moses. He gives the law through Moses, which gives us that privileged place, most honored place of Moses in the entire history of Israel. Now was the giving of the law, in the eyes of Israel, a good thing or a bad thing?
And this is where, being Protestant Christians we have to unthink a bit in order to rethink a bit. If we unthink something, it would necessarily be the fact that we have this instinct in us that the law is bad, and grace is good. Now it's more complex than that, but it just comes down to that. The letter kills, the spirit gives life. The old covenant can bring no salvation–it just holds back the wrath of God, as we see in Romans chapter three. The new covenant brings salvation, the old covenant is just getting us to the new covenant by promise and by contrast. 
But if we go back to the experience of Israel, Israel receives these laws as a most unspeakably precious gift. Now this is true for two reasons. One horizontal, the vertical of course is most important. And the vertical means that the great thankfulness for this law is that they are rightly afraid of God destroying them, as he destroyed the Egyptians, as he destroyed by flood. How do you make certain you don't do whatever brought on those punishments? You need the law, and you need the law not only in the thou shouts and the thou shout nots, which we certainly need–all of us need that–but you need the law in order to know what to do when there is a transgresion of the law, because there surely there will be transgressions of the law. And then the question will be “now what?” what if a 10 year old shoplifts– I realize that's a bit anachronistic, but nonetheless let's assume it's a shop–if a 10 year old shoplifts, do you execute him? Do you put him outside of the people forever? Do you cut him off from his people? What about if someone lies? In this case, You'll notice that the law that God gave Israel is in essence a constitutional law. And in this sense, this is one of the great jumps forward of humanity. Now, if you're looking at this from an anthropological perspective, you're going to say “here's something absolutely amazing.  And in this area of the world, kind of the cradle of civilization in the basin of Mesopotamia, and then coming over to the Levant and towards the Mediterranean, and even in north Africa, in Egypt, there is an explosion of law. 
Now, if you're a liberal Old Testament professor, you say, “See, this is just a human development. All this, necessity of law, society's now reached the point where the law has to be codified, whether it's the code of Hammurabi, or it's the law of Egypt, the  Pharaonic law,  or if it's the Mesopotamian codes–there are these laws that all of a sudden appear sometimes on clay tablets. You can say, “here are laws,” because eventually if you're going to have any society that becomes systematized and rationalized as the sociological language, you’re going to have to have “law,” because in order to have any kind of stable society, it needs not just to be a matter of tribal fiat. Tribal fiat means, if you do this on Tuesday, and you come before the elders, and they say, “you're out,” and you come on Wednesday, and to someone with the same law transgression, they say, “20 lashes,” it's by fiat. That doesn't work very well. You can't really have a society that way. You need advertised laws, and so it's a part of what you see.
Now, in Deuteronomy, one of the sweetest of passages in Deuteronomy chapter four finds Moses reminding the children of Israel when they received the law, and just reminding them, “has any other people received laws so sweet?” And he puts it this way–”Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking from the fire and survived?” So Israel's law from the beginning is God's gift. Israel is a covenant theocracy. The laws are God's laws mediated through Moses, to the people–their sweet laws. So Israel has received the law as a gift. Now, just think of another context, think of your own home with young children. Your home had better be a theocracy there. It had better be a house of law–a house of grace, too, but a house of law mediated through parents. There are “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” If the child does not learn to live within the “thou shalts” and “the thou shalt nots,” then we shalt not have a society worth living in. But the point is that you've got to teach the law–even just putting the law out there is not enough. You've got to teach it, which is exactly what's commanded to the children of Israel in Deuteronomy chapter four, as well as Deuteronomy chapter six with the shema. 
But you also have to have a way of dealing with transgressions of the law. You have to have it in your home. What do you do? The child disobeys you–do you put them out the front door, and slam the door, and that's it? No, you’ve got to have some way of dealing with it. But the other thing is you need some way of dealing with it to be also as a part of the law. The consequences and penalties should be a part of the law, which it is in terms of American penal code. 
This starts out with something as formal as the law process of determining guilt, requiring testifying and testimony. And in this case, someone has failed to testify. We're not going to dwell on this for very long, but this is a very sophisticated at the law code. It's very sophisticated. This implies a court process. It implies in evidentiary process. It implies the, the weighing of evidence, and it requires testimony. Testimony is important. You'll see it repeated in the structure over and over again. Thus, it is a sin not to testify when you should testify, but then very quickly it turns to the purity code in verse two: “if anyone touches an unclean thing,” and notice the comprehensiveness here, “whether a carcas of an unclean world animal, or the carcas of an unclean livestock, or a carcas of an unclean swarming thing,” death  is something that simply is to be avoided. Death is uncleanness.
Mary and I were at a visitation at a funeral home just recently, and, having grown up in our teenage years in south Florida, this was something we were not shocked by, although it was still kind of shocking. There was a Christian family, which is the reason that we were there in this funeral home, and there was a Jewish visitation next door, and it's shockingly different. If you walked in the wrong room, you will see the body just on a board with a sheet over the body. Of course it's following the Jewish burial ritual, which means the body has to be buried basically within 24 hours, and so it's a very quick process. And it is because the body is itself now unclean, because it is dead. 
Death is to be avoided. The death of an animal, and all the rest. This is not so much in the process of the slaughter of an animal for the ritual purposes or for food. This is when you come across the carcas of a dead body. That’s why you go around it. Now this will show up even in the New Testament and something like the parable of the Good Samaritan. There's a lot of moralizing in the parable, but we tend to over-moralize it and miss deeper theological significance when the people cross to the other side of the road, because they think he's dead. They're doing nothing but following the instinct that has been driven into Judaism for centuries–you avoid dead things even if they look dead, because you become ritually unclean, but it's not just the dead. You notice what follows: “If he touches human uncleanness of whatever sort, the uncleanness may be with which one becomes unclean.” 
Okay, this is great. 10 year old boy comes in. Can you just imagine mother looking at him and saying, “son, of whatever sort the uncleanness may be with which you have become unclean…” There are all kind of ways to become unclean. This refers basically, however, to things that come out of the body that will make one unclean–contact with any number of things. Then you come to know that sacrifice is necessary. Verse four– “a rash oath, whether for good or for evil.”So this implies there’s an oath that's rash, right? If it's a rash oath, that's the bad oath. That implies there's a good oath. And on this, the Bible is complex. 
And we can just say in summary, there are contexts in which an oath is necessary. Even God takes one in his own name, but oaths are theologically, morally risky, and it is just dangerous to make them unless uniquely necessary. But you'll notice that if there is to be the sacrifice for what is discovered to be sin, or realized to be sin, or remembered to be sin, then it begins with a female from the flock, a lamb or a goat for a sin offering. Now again, a female is a less expensive animal. So we are not dealing with the kind of transgression that would require a male from the herd, unblemished. So in this case, it can be a female, and it can be a lamb or a goat. The goat, the more expensive, the lamb, the less expensive in this case and the more numerous.  So there would've been more sacrifices of lambs than of sheep. And that also points to our Christology. But as verse seven tells us if the sinner cannot afford a lamb, then two turtle doves will do, or two pigeons. And one will be for the sin offering, one for the burnt offering. But then in verse 11, we're told if you cannot afford two turtle doves, or two pigeons, he shall bring is his offering that he has committed, a 10th of an  ova of fine flour. So that again is the grain offering. So basically this covers everyone. So all of Israel is covered within the provision for this sin offering. It will be repeated. It will be made necessary often. Thus there will be lots of pigeons, lots of turtle, doves, lots of goats, lots of lambs, lots of flour, but this covers everyone in the social and economic system of Israel. No one is outside of this provision is made for everyone. And here's the thing, God knows the heart, right? So God knows what you can bring. If you can afford to bring a goat and you bring the flower, God knows. 
Now in verse 14, we shift from the sin offering to the guilt offering. Basically, the very best Old Testament scholars and theologians are hard pressed to explain exactly what the difference is. That's because when we think of sin, we think of guilt. We think of sin. The one goes with the other. The context appears to make the distinction. This is again a new section, because in verse 14, the passage begins “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying ‘if anyone commits to breach of faith and sins unintentionally in any of the holy things of the Lord, he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation, a Ram without blemish out of the flock, valued in silver shackles, according to the shekel, the sanctuary for a guilt offering,’” continuing in chapter five, ‘“if anyone commits a breach of faith and sins unintentionally in any of the holy things of the Lord,’” And this refers then to the sacrificial system, the priestly system, “he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation, a ram without blemish of, of the rock valued in silver shackles. According to the shekel, the sanctuary for a guilt offering, he shall also make restitution for what he has done a miss in the holy thing, and shall add a fifth to it and give it to the priest. And the priest shall make atonement for him with the ram of the guilt offering. And he shall be forgiven if anyone sins doing any of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done, though, he did not know it, then realizes his guilt. He shall bear his iniquity. He shall bring to the priest to ram without blemish out of the flock or it's equivalent for a guilt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him for the mistake that he made unintentionally, he shall be forgiven. It is a guilt offering. He has indeed incurred guilt before the Lord.” 
Just work backwards from that last sentence–”he has indeed incurred guilt before the Lord.” So here's the thing, brothers and sisters, it is vitally important that we know if we have incurred guilt before the Lord, it is just incredibly important. It's between us and our creator. Something has come between us and our relationship, and because of the holiness of God, our relationship is not only imperiled, it is directly and eternally threatened by this guilt. We need to know the guilt. The law is a gift in telling us both what the guilt is and how the transgresion may be forgiven in this case, looking at the guilt offering, which continues by the way into chapter six. You'll notice again, that a lot of this has to do with things that are even unintentiona, in this case, bringing to the ram to the priest. That is a ram. So now you're talking about a more expensive animal. The ram–like the bull–is a sign of power, and it may well mean that the power there is pointing to the powerful nature of sin. The more powerful the sin, the more powerful the substitute that is required in the sacrifice. A ram is understood to be very powerful. 
Another statement to Moses in chapter six, verse one: “the Lord spoke to Moses, saying ‘if anyone sins and commits a breach of faith against the Lord by deceiving his neighbor in a manner of deposit, or security, or through robbery, or if he is oppressed his neighbor or found something lost and lied about it, swearing falsely, in any of all the things that people do and sin, thereby…’” You’ve got to love that verse, that little phrase in verse three. There's one of those comprehensive verses. Like, “we're gonna be absolutely specific. We're gonna be exhausted, but we can't actually be totally exhaustive.” There are sins that are not listed here, and they simply come under this clause in verse three: “in any and all the things that people do and sin thereby, if he has sinned and realized his guilt and will restore what he took by robbery or what he got by oppression or the deposit that was committed to him, or the lost thing that he found or anything about, which he has sworn falsely, he shall restore it in full and add a fifth to it and give it to him to whom it belongs on the day he realizes his guilt.”
A  couple of interesting things there. By the way, “finders keepers” is not a part of the Old Testament law. That was a part of the playground law. But finders keepers is actually not a part of the law. If you find something that belongs to someone else in the covenant community, you have the responsibility to return it to her, to return it to him. This comes down to ways people have financially–or in items of value– cheated their fellow members of the covenant  community. They've either held a deposit and not given it back. They have stolen robbery that could be extortion. It could be just theft. It could be just about anything, even squaring falsely at someone's loss. If he ascend to realize his guilt, you have to make restoration and you have to make a restoration with a half tithe, did you notice that? Only it's not a half tie. It is a double tithe. I've heard people say it's a half tie, but a fifth i twice as much as a 10th, not half as much as a 10th. And that's real compensation. That's paying back a restitution and recognition of loss. Verse six–”And he shall bring to the priest as his compensation to the Lord a ram without blemish out of the flock or it's equivalent for a guilt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord. And he should be forgiven for any of the things that one may do and thereby become guilty.” Again, the comprehensiveness, “any of the things that one may do.” And we do–not only may we, we do–and thereby become guilty. 
Now, all of that through chapter six verse seven, over the last several chapters has been just extremely interesting, because it's given us a catalog of the different kinds of offerings: the burnt offering, the sin offering, the wave offering, the guilt offering, and all of these offerings.They're brought with regularity, and we understand the system. Again, there’s a part of it where we  just don't fully understand the total distinction between a sin offering and a guilt offering, but it appears, as I said, even there's a horizontal, and there's a vertical element to this. It appears that the guilt offering in this case might well have to do with something that is more often sending against a neighbor or another, another member of the covenant community, but in any event, even that's a sin against God. 
We understand that sin at the horizontal level is always sin at the vertical level. There's never a sin against another that is not ultimately a sin against God. All sin requires atonement, catalog of all of these matters of sacrifice and atonement, but there's a shift. I said we were headed towards something this morning, and we see this shift in verse eight of chapter six. Now we're talking about the priests and the offerings. “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying ‘command Aaron and his sons…’” okay, here, we have something else. So you have the priest and you have the prophet. Moses is the prophet. Aaron and his sons are the priests. Who commands whom? The Lord doesn't speak to Aaron what he should say to Moses. The Lord says to Moses–reveals to Moses–what he is to say to Aaron.
Heres something else about the old Testament priesthood. The old Testament priesthood is bound by law. There is no creativity to it whatsoever, the task of the priesthood. This means the entire priesthood. But in this case, you can think perhaps especially of the Levitical priesthood, but the entire priesthood is to do the same thing every time, exactly the same way. According to the law, to innovate in no direction to turn neither to the left, nor to the right now, the same thing was emphatically true of the prophet. The prophet was not to say something like what God had told him to say, but rather was to say exactly what God had told him to say. Exactitude on the part of the prophet, exactitude on the part of priest. But the priest is absolutely dependent upon the prophet who mediates the word of God. Now they're being told what they are to do. 
“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying ‘command Aaron and his son saying, this is the law of the burnt offering.’” So this is giving us the priestly side here. “The burnt offering shall be on the hearth of the altar all night until the morning. And the fire of the altar shall be kept burning on it. And the priest shall put his linen undergarment on his body.” We read about all that in Exodus. When we went verse by verse through Exodus, we saw all of the clothing that was dictated concerning the priesthood, including the undergarments. “And he shall take up the ashes to which the fire has reduced the burnt offering on the altar and put them beside the altar. Then he shall take off his garments and put on other garments and carry the ashes outside the camp to a clean place. The fire on the altar shall be kept burning on it. It shall not go out. The priest shall burn wood on it every morning, and he shall arrange the burnt offering on it and shall burn it on the fat of the peace offerings. Fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually. It shall not go out.” That's just another important thing. The fire is just to be kept burning. This is a sacrificial system. The fire's going to keep burning, because the people are going to keep sinning. The fire's going to keep burning because this is a continual process, which also helps us to look forward to the cross. And, and when in the holy of holys, the veil was cut in two, in theory, a fire was to be kept burning from Sinai unto Calvary. That fire is not to go out the fire of what will be required as perpetual sacrifices. 
You'll know what is the attention to the garments worn by the priest. And again, we saw this in anticipation in Exodus, when we were told exactly what they are to be, how they are to look, what is to be the length of the hem, exactly what color is to be where, and that was when we saw the attentiveness to under garments. And you say, “well, why all the attention under garments? no one sees them. That's the purpose of under is not to be seen, but why the undergarments of the priests, why are they so important?” Because the priest is human and human things happen, and whatever happens must not get near the altar.  Does that make sense? 
And so the undergarments are to protect the outer garments, lest the outer garments become themselves unclean, and the priest administration would be nullified. It’s interesting, this comes up right here because this is instruction to Aaron and his sons in verse 14. “This is the law of the grain offering the sons of Aaron shall offer it before the Lord in front of the altar. And one shall take from it a handful of the fine flower of the grain offering and it toil and all the frankincense  that is on the grain offering and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, a pleasing aroma to the Lord.” So that means he receives the sacrifice, a pleasing aroma. As we see in the New Testament, we're to offer under God a sacrifice, a pleasing sacrifice of praise.
verse 16: “and the rest of it, Aaron and his sons shall eat. It shall be eaten unleavened in the holy place, in the court of the tent of meeting. They shall eat it. It shall not be baked with leaven. I have given it as their portion of my food offerings. It is a thing most holy like the sin offering and the guilt offering every meal among the children of Aaron may eat of it as decreed forever throughout your generations from the Lord's food offerings. Whoever touches them shall become holy.” Okay, a lot here, but just consider this. No leaven,  even after the offering has been offered. So, you know, it was to be brought unleavened and it is to be according to this command, given by God, to Moses, for Aaron and his sons, it is to be kept unleavened.  Why? Unleavened bread is a reminder of the Exodus. It is a reminder of the haste with which the children of Israel left Exodus. It is a sign of haste. The absence of yeast is  a sign of haste. They are to maintain that.
Now I, I like bread. I know we cannot live by bread alone, but we can try. There are a few things more pleasant than bread, warm bread with butter. Mary makes it, I eat it. That's the deal. And there are just few things more pleasant. We sometimes go to places just because of the bread, but I like leavened bread. I like bread that rises. I like bread with lots of stuff in it. There are people who like plain bread. I like bread with all kinds of stuff in it. I like this bread that I get every once in a while when I'm running around and I'm traveling, and I just need something when I'm traveling. I like this bread called good seed. It's made by–maybe you've seen this–It's made by a bakery of a man who had been a convict, a prisoner. And he got out of prison and started a bakery. He bakes good bread, and good seed is really, really good bread. It's got lots of stuff in it. It makes me feel righteous when I eat it. Unlike the wonder bread I ate as a boy, because I wanted to build my body strong 12 ways. Like the big strong kid whose picture was on the package. But basically,  I was eating air, that white bread, so I I'll eat good seed. 
Now, every once in a while we have unleaven bread. We'll go to a restaurant and they'll serve pita or something like that. Or, you know, just mildly leavened bread. t's just not bread. You know, this will be a lot better with yeast, but the point is uneven means haste, and they're not post sacrifice to allow yest inside the holy place ever, for to bring it is to desecrate it. In verse 19, “the Lord spoke to Moses saying…” and, and what's interesting here is how these new statements, these new revelations by God, through Moses come more repeatedly here. Verse 20, “This is the offering the Aaron and his sons shall offer to the Lord. On the day when he is anointed, a tenth of an efa of fine flour as a regular grain offering, half of it in the morning, half in the evening, it shall be made with oil on a griddle. You shall bring it well mixed in baked pieces, like a grain offering and offer it for a pleasing aroma to the Lord. The priest from among Aaron sons, who is anointed to succeed him, shall offer it to the Lord as decree forever. The whole, all of it, shall be burned. Every grain offering of a priest shall be wholly burned. It shall not be eaten.” Now, why would that be the case? Why would they be able to eat the burn offering that is brought by someone other than a priest, but not this offering? It is because they are to receive nothing from the sacrifice for their own sins. If this sacrifice is with reference to a priestly sin, then the priests have no access to the food. It is all to be burned.
Verse 24, “the Lord spoke to Moses saying, ‘speak to Aaron his sons, saying, this is the law of the sin offering. And the place where the burn offering is killed shall the sin offering be killed before the Lord. It is most holy. “Now, You'll notice what why and most holy is the holy of holys, which in the Hebrew is the most holy place. So this is the closest you get to the presence of God. The closest you get to the judgment of God, most holy and items can become temporarily most holy because of their proximity to God's presence and his wrath and his justice. 
Verse 26, “The priest who offers it for sin shall eat it in a holy place. It shall be eaten in the court of the tent of meeting, whatever touches its flesh shall be holy. And when any of its blood is splashed on a garment, you shall wash that on which it was splashed in a holy place.” Notice the repetition of holy set apart under God and the earth and where vessel in which it is boiled shall be broken. “But if it is boiled in a bronze vessel, it shall be scoured and rinsed in water. Every male among the priests may eat of it. It is most holy, but no sin offering shall be eaten from which any blood is brought to the tent of meeting to make atonement for the holy place. It shall be burned up in the fire.”
Well, as we're looking at this, something shall jump out at us. People need a priest. People need a sacrifice. The habitual sin of the people requires this habitual cycle of all kinds of sacrifices and all kinds of offerings to be made to the Lord. This circumstance requires this offering. This circumstance requires this sacrifice. It is to be done exactly this way. The priests are not to be creative in any way. They are to follow the law scrupulously. The priests themselves fulfill not only a priestly function, but they are a part of the sacrifice. They are not apart from it such that if they become unclean, the sacrifice is nullified. Furthermore, if they become unclean or they act, and as we know, even unintentionally, if a priest should sin in the midst of this process, not only does the priest sin and bring guilt upon himself, he brings guilt upon the people by his sin. This is a representational ministry, which again helps us to understand Christ, but there's something else here we just have to notice. And that is the fact that we do not have a priestly class that is separated in its sinlessness and thus in its lack of need for sacrifice, that would be something indicative to us. That would be very important. That might be the way we might think it would happen. 
I mean, it's hard to imagine having a judge who's a criminal, right? We wouldn't want to nominate to the Supreme court someone who had done time for extortion or embezzlement, that just wouldn't happen. Because we're Christians, we know that our judges are sinners, but they better not be criminals.  If we we're inventing a priesthood, we're going to invent a priesthood immune from sin. Right? I mean, I would, because how am I gonna trust a priest who keeps sinning? 
I delivered the Paige lectures at Southeastern seminary this week on the Christian witness in  a post-Christian age and had to take time defining what a post-Christian age means, and what it doesn't mean. Just trying to present to young seminarians the challenge of what it's going to mean to live in a rapidly changing culture in which history is split into three, in the Western mind now, before Christianity, then Christianity now after Christianity, it’s a totally different  field, and a big change. I used as my main illustration of where you can see this most graphically, the nation of Ireland, because it's Ireland that demonstrates this probably better than any other place on planet earth, because Ireland had a clearly pagan pre-Christian past. There there's evidence of it all over Ireland. Yet Ireland also represented at least institutionalized Christianity, this absolute dominance of Christianity in what is now the Republic of Ireland, overwhelmingly the Roman Catholic church up in the Northern provinces and what is now often referred to as Olster or, Northern Ireland, very Protestant, with a significant Catholic minority.  But in any sense, it was so overwhelmingly Christian that. You should hear the lecturers. Trust me, you'll find, you'll find them fascinating. I'd give little advertisement for it. Why? Because I found it fascinating. I really enjoyed giving the lectures, but one of the things I pointed out is that the very height of the troubles in, in Ireland as they were called, it was said that Irish people were so Christian, that if they met a Jew Jewish Citizen of Ireland, that citizen will be pressed to say, “well, are you Catholic Jewish? Are you Protestant Jewish?” That's how dominant Christianity was. Those were the limited options, but now Ireland is post-Christian in a way that is just very difficult it to explain lots of reasons. But the post Christianity of Ireland is seen in the fact that a generation ago, church attendance was above the nineties. And now it is below the twenties and plummeting, and morally, there has been a complete revolution in social mores and even in the law of Ireland in the 1980s, Ireland by referendum overwhelmingly outlawed abortion. Then by referendum, just in more recent times, it has is passed a far more liberal law. Ireland's the only country on earth that by referendum has adopted same sex marriage and had an openly gay prime minister, et cetera. 
This is unthinkable. You used to see priests everywhere. Now, priests don’t appear in public in any priestly garb, priesthood just disappeared. That's a big thing, but a part of what in the Republic of Ireland in the Catholic tradition is now at least partly an explanation for the disappearance of Christianity on the ground for this post-Christian status is the failure of the priesthood time is leaving us here. But the failure of the Catholic priesthood in Ireland has been catastrophic. This is because of the Magdalene Laundries. If you're familiar with the homes for unwed mothers, where it turns out horrible, horrible things were happening, and they still find burial grounds for both the mothers and their babies. It's just devastating to know what was going on there, the pedophilia crisis  in the priesthood, just a general imorality in the priesthood. The point is the entire credibility of the church. And of course, that's a priestly church. If you're going have a sacred little ministry in your priestly church, those priests better priests, but it's the collapse of the reputation and the credibility and the integrity of the priesthood that meant that everything just fell apart. 
That was a danger for Israel. If the priest did not have integrity, if the priesthood did not fulfill its responsibility, then the entire people would be severed from the God who had made covenant with them by their sin. But there's more to it than that. And this is just what I want us to see. And we'll pick this up next time we're together because is time is running out, but here's the most important thing we need to understand. This is the whole point of following through this and stopping here. It is because we need the recognition that the priests need a priest. It's astounding. The priests need a priest. And by the way as we shall see, a priest sins, there are sins for which atonement can only be made by the high priest, by Aaron or his appointed son as high priests. So priests need a priest. In Hebrews, we will see the need of a priest for a priest is made very clear by the fact that the high priest, when he inter solely representing Israel into the holy of holies, because there's no human priest to whom he can now turn for priest. He has to go into the holy of holies and offer sacrifice not only for the sins of the people, but with reference to his own sin, the priests need a priest. So this is crying out. This entire system is crying out for a priest who needs no priest. The book of Hebrew, says that when Jesus entered that tabernacle not made with human hands, and when he shed the blood, his own blood, not taking the blood of an animal, he made full atonement for sin, because it is only when we come to Christ and the new covenant that we find a priest who needs no priest until then God's people were dependent upon these priests. The priests were dependent upon the priests and nothing was finished because the human priesthood could finish nothing. 
Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for even the detail of what we read for the shocking nature of this kind of text, from how we would compare the Old Testament to the New. Father, help us to find joy in reading the book of Leviticus word by word, help us to find joy and knowledge, even in knowing the details of the law, but above all, help us to yearn for Christ and find satisfaction in Christ alone, our prophet, our priest, our king, we pray in his name, amen.

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 4:1-35 — Leviticus Series
October 10, 2021
Well, good morning. It's good to see you all spectacular October morning and wonderful to be here together for the study of God's word. And we are in Leviticus looking at chapter four in our adventure in, this central book of the Pentateuch, the third book of the Bible, and the book of the law. In this case, the specific instructions were given to the people of Israel known as Leviticus with specific reference to the Levitical priesthood. The performance of sacrifices. As we see here at the beginning of our study together. We're going to be looking at chapter four, continuing this morning, but let's open with a word of prayer.
Our Father, we pray that you will open your word and open our hearts simultaneously and open our minds to understand. And Father, we seek the deep things in your word. Things hidden from before the foundation of the earth that you have revealed to us. Father, we pray this for Your glory and for the health of your church in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.
This morning, no doubt you gave some thought to coming here and for the study of God's word and for worship. You gave some thought to what would happen here. We've often described the distinction and the book of Leviticus in terms of the Cultus. Well, all that's required in terms of preparation and specificity, even all that's required in terms of the physical objects from the tent of meeting and the tabernacle to what will eventually be the temple and the most holy place. The spectacular cloth that arrayed within the site of the room. The specific grandeur and priestly nature of the vestments, the robes worn by the priests and by others.
We compare that to the fact that we don't have a uniform. There, there are no priestly garments. There's no priest here, but as we look at the passage of our consideration today, beginning in Leviticus, chapter four. It's just yet another stark reminder of how much attention this required of Israel for Israel to be faithful to this law, it had to give constant— virtually hour by hour attention—to itself and to the preparation for what would be necessary sacrifices.
Today, we come to the sin offerings. This is what most Christians think of as the very heart of the sacrificial system. Now we've seen there are other offerings— guilt offerings, peace offerings, burned offerings— but, now we come to the sin offering and I think most Christians, even as they think, "We know what this, this kind of offering's going to be about. We know what this sacrifice is going to be about," would be shocked to find out actually how chapter four begins.
Now, for one thing, this is a new passage in Leviticus. You know that because of the phrase, "Now the Lord spoke to Moses." So, when this comes, this is like a separate Oracle experience. Moses is receiving this separate from what has come before.
"And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel." Another thing we need to note. So this is not a secret priest code. Which again tells us something about how central this was not just to the priesthood, but Israel. This is not secret information that is supposed to be released only to the priests who have this gnostic, that secret knowledge. No, this is the knowledge of Israel. The Lord spoke to Moses. Moses is to speak to the people. He is to tell them exactly what he has received from the Lord, not just the priests, all of Israel. "Speak to the people of Israel saying if anyone sins unintentionally in any of the Lord's commandment about things not to be done and does any one of them if it is the anointed priest who sins, thus bringing guilt on the people, then he shall offer for the sin, that he is committed a bull from the herd, without blemish to the Lord for a sin offering." That's pretty straightforward. It's big.
There's something here that Christians might just rush past without recognizing what's taking place here. Not just in times past, but particularly in our times. In our times there is a lot of effort to minimize sin. Now that's probably been a human project ever since Genesis three. So, we get that, but there's a sense in which, in our time we have rather sophisticated mechanisms to try to deny the sinfulness of sin.
For one thing, we've had the modern redefinition of human beings, from being sinners who are agents to being victims, who are acted upon. So, there is a sense in which there's a lot behind this; you have the entire revolution in terms of Freudianism and the psychotherapeutic revolution that creates the self. What is wrong is from outside the self, it represses the self. Freudianism is a lot more complicated than that. But the point is that the average American thinks of sin as something far less than a falling short of the glory of God in a violation of God's law, that brings on God's wrath, and that brings on guilt.
The big thing in this shift of sin is the idea that whatever sin is, it should not bring about a sense of guilt. When most people today talk about guilt, they talk about something subjective. "I feel guilty." You know, if you go to the psychotherapist, you're likely to hear that guilt is something you need to overcome. It is something that has been imposed upon you. Now, in terms of the Christian vocabulary, our understanding of guilt is first and foremost, that it's an objective reality. It's an objective reality that is not necessarily our sense of it because it exists, whether we sense it or not. It's an objective reality because it is indeed the guilt of having transgressed God's law. And with sin comes guilt. We understand that the parallel word is shame. Shame is the experience, individually or collectively, of having sinned.
By the way, National Public Radio this morning as I was shaving. I turn on the top news segment from National Public Radio. When I begin to shave just to provide some kind of thrill to see if I can listen to that news and still not cut my throat, as I'm shaving. This morning it was a particular challenge because they were talking about the women's marches all over. Especially in response to the Texas abortion bill. A woman was coming on the program and one of the NPR reporters said a central purpose of the march is to help women to understand there should be no stigma attached to abortion. One of the women speaking just said, "I had an abortion simply because I didn't want to be pregnant and there's nothing wrong with that!"
You just listen to that. You go, "Okay, there's the battle cry. There's the battle cry of rebellious humanity. 'I had an abortion simply because I didn't want to be pregnant', you know, deal with it. There's no stigma here. There's no shame here." But you need to notice something that we just read at the beginning versus chapter four in Leviticus. It's the refutation of modern, liberal Protestant theology that minimizes sin. It's the refutation of modern evangelical stupid—there's a lot of that—that minimizes sin. It's the refutation of the idea that we can sin without guilt.
Look at what we read. "And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel saying, 'If anyone sins unintentionally in any of the Lord's commandments about these things not to be done and does any one of them if it is the anointed priest who sins thus bringing guilt on the people.'"
So here's how inextricably linked sin and guilt are. The link is so powerful that if unintentionally— this is how the whole text begins—if one of the priests sins unintentionally, he brings guilt upon the people. So you'll notice it's almost as if that verse was given to us to refute this modern argument of the minimization of sin. This is natural for Israel. Israel was hearing this as if it knew what sin is and now it's just being told how the Lord will have them deal with sin. But in this case, it's an unintentional sin by a priest that brings guilt upon the entire nation. It turns our theology on its head, and it's right there and it's natural. You'll notice this is just the natural argument of Leviticus. This is why all the sacrifices, why all the offerings, this is why all the requirements. It's just mind-blowing to recognize what we're being told here.
God takes sin so seriously that if a priest unintentionally sins it brings guilt upon the entire nation. What then is to be done? Again specificity. "Then he, then he shall offer for the sin that he has committed a bull from the herd without blemish to the Lord for a sin offering. He shall bring the bull to the entrance of the tent of meeting before the Lord and lay his hand on the head of the bull and kill the bull before the Lord. And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting. And the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the Lord in front of the veil of the sanctuary. And the priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense before the Lord, that is in the tent of meeting and all the rest of the blood of the bull he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And all the fat of the bull of the sin offering, he shall remove from it, the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is on the entrails and the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins and the long lobe of the liver that he shall remove with the kidneys, just as these are taken from the ox of the sacrifice of the peace offering. And the priest shall burn them on the altar of burnt offering, but the skin of bull and all its flesh with its head, its legs, its entrails, and its dung, all the rest of the bull he shall carry outside the camp to a clean place to the ash heap and shall burn it up on a fire of wood on the ash heap It shall be burned up."
It's a lot there. One of the things we are going to see is that Israel is given a certain scale of sin offerings. In this case, it begins with the most significant and that is a sin of a priest that brings guilt on all the people. What kind of sacrifice would be required? Well, it is a sacrifice of a bull without blemish. Now in the pecking order, in the economy of the animals in this agrarian context, a bull is the most expensive animal of all. So you're talking about a very expensive sacrifice and it has to be provided.
One of the things we note just as a matter of economy here is because of the nature of sin—how often we sin, how often Israel sinned, how often the priests would sin even unintentionally— then there would be the need for a lot of bulls to be brought. So one of the things you have to see in the background of Leviticus is the economy of the sacrificial system. This is a massive economy. And in the case of this particular sacrifice, there's nothing left. So the priests are not eating this. Otherwise, the priests would benefit from his own sin. And that's one of the reasons why at the very end of what we read the animal is taken to the place outside the camp where it's burned utterly, as a sacrifice to the Lord.
But you'll notice that he's to bring the bull to the entrance to the tent of meeting. So this is before the Lord. So the sacrifice itself was taking place out front, but looking into the tent of meeting. So it's outside. Nothing's brought in until it is intentionally by instruction brought in. Notice again, the substitutionary transference here. He shall bring the bull to the entrance of the tent and before the Lord and lay his hand on the head of the bull and kill the bull before the Lord. Laying on a hand again, this is a priestly way of indicating representation, substitution, sacrifice.
We're told what happens here and it's similar to the burnt offering, but it's not exactly the same. And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting. So as you picture it, you have the tabernacle and outside the tent, you have the actual sacrifice of the animal and laying on of hands. And then the animal is butchered, it's slaughtered. And then what is taken into the tent and towards the most holy place is some of the blood from the animal. This blood is going to be sprinkled. You'll notice in verse six, "And the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the Lord in the front of the veil of the sanctuary."
Mary and I have had the delight of having our daughter, Katie, and our grandkids with us just for a few days this week, it was a precious, precious time. This is just being afflicted upon you, sorry. Benjamin's five and Henry's three and Mary Margaret's about six months. It's the two boys that are the center of storm and fury.
We love watching them play, and playing with them, these two little boys. Energy from each other and their constant reference to each other. In my library, I have a couple of bookstands, with the antique and aquarium Bibles of significance on them. They look like pulpits to these two little boys. So, they decided that they would take it upon themselves to go down to my study and preach. Benjamin is learning so much at five. He can preach, he can really preach. I mean, he can get up and tell you about the entire sequence of the Old Testament events. He can tell you about the invasion of the Hyksos into Egypt. It's just incredible what this five-year-old already knows.
There are other things that he hears that he doesn't really know. At one point he was talking about God giving Noah a rainbow sign. And he talked about the rainbow. Then he said, he gave him a sign. You know, he put up a sign like God, putting up a yard sign, "Look at the rainbow, you idiot." God put up a sign. As he was preaching, and by the way, that meant that his little brother went to the other pulpit. He kind of mimicked words coming from Benjamin. But the preaching is pretty much centered on sin. A five-year-old gets there pretty fast. The fact that the Lord, God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But they did God put them out of the garden. And then Noah and the flood God's judgment on sin is big. Because if you're five that you get. You don't get it in its fullness, but you get that is the point. It takes an adult to miss the point. It takes an adult's defense mechanisms. It takes psychotherapy and liberal theology and all the rest to avoid just how grotesque sin is.
But for Israel, just think about the fact that most days, in the cycle of Israel's life, this is just being constantly done. And this sprinkling of blood, when you think about it being brought into, to the tent of meeting. Some of it is sprinkled here and some of it is sprinkled there. By the way, the number seven is big, because we also got a sermon on Jericho and Joshua. And how many times, seven times. “Why”, you asked,”Was it seven times?” Because God told them seven times. That is the right answer. But the number seven just comes up again and again and again. This number of, of perfection pointing to divine glory and the divine command, the divine command is that this is to be done seven times. It's interesting. This is different.
Part of it is sprinkled in front of the ail of the sanctuary. So that veil is what separates the holy place from the most holy place. What is the new testimony we referred to as the holy of holies? At least that's what we think of it more often as the most holy place.
"And the priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense before the Lord that is in the tent of meeting." So this is the incense piece. The horns, remember, are where on the corners there would've been raised like the horns of an animal. Some of it is to be sprinkled there as well. Now you must remember that also what has to follow this is the cleansing, the ritual cleansing of all. But then you have a dead animal. You just took the blood into the tent of the meeting.
So verse eight, "And all the fat of the bull of the sin offerings should be removed from it." At this point, you think, "Well this is going to be all removed because parts of it are going to be burned, you know, in the offering and parts of it be dealt with this way and that way, part of it, the priest will eat." No, this is different because this is a sin offering. We are given all the details about what is to be removed, but you have the prize pieces burnt at the altar of the burnt offering. Then the rest of it—here's the other just blockbuster part of this passage— "all the rest of the bull, he shall carry outside the camp to a clean place to the ash heap and shall it up on a fire of wood. On the ash heap, it shall be burned up." Amazing. Outside the tent, outside the camp.
So now we have spatially, as we're thinking about this, we have the camp and then we have the tent in the camp. You approach it within the camp. It's all within the little society, the little civilization where Israel—Israel's not a little people at this point, this let's call it the metropolis of Israel. Some things have to go outside.
Aristotle said that every city civitas begins with families who first of all, identify with each other. Then secondly, identify against the world. The world is a violent place, Aristotle understood. So if you see a city, two things have happened. People gather together and this will be family structures. They gathered together and, out of their commonality, they said, "Let us live together." But in order to survive, they had to say, "Not only are we committed to each other inside this civitas, but we are against the rest." In other words, defensive. Others will try to come and take us, or what is our own.
Aristotle's point was that as you have a city like that—what we would just call the camp of Israel—there has to be a definition, a clear definition of what is inside and outside. So that’s why during this time of human history, you often have city walls and you have city gates. Aristotle is right. That's how a city starts. People saying, "Let us live together." But then, in order to live together in peace, they have to be ready to define themselves and defend themselves against the world. The wall, thus the gate, is a camp. Remember Israel isn't yet a city. This is a moving metropolis. This is a nomadic people being led by the Lord until they can go into the Land of Promise where they will inhabit the land. You notice the verbs in the Old Testament. They're passing through this territory, they will inhabit. They're going to possess, that's another important, Old Testament word. They're going to possess this Land of Promise, but they're just passing through here. But even when they are a camp, rather than a city, there has to be an inside and outside. There are things that take place outside. And by the way, that's true for us.
There was a controversy, just a matter of, about two years ago, because— here's an obvious fact a lot of people don't think about. Evidently, it's an obvious fact, a lot of people in New York City in Manhattan didn't think about it. Guess where the garbage goes produced by all those millions of people in Manhattan. Well, here's the answer. It doesn't stay in Manhattan. Manhattan can't do anything with all this garbage. It produces a lot of garbage. It has to go somewhere. Basically, there are only two ways out of Manhattan for that trash. One is by ship and the other is by train. A couple of years ago came the scandal of the fact that a lot of the garbage in Manhattan was being taken by night on these stinky garbage trains that were going to places like Southern states and some other places where landfills were created so that what New York produces and can't handle being taken elsewhere. Well, there was outrage at the fact that these Manhattanites were exporting their garbage. Someone else has to take their garbage. And after all, these are the people who want the green new deal. Meanwhile, in order to flush their own commodes and do everything else. They have to just put it on a ship and put it on a train and ship it somewhere else.
But the point is you can't live in Manhattan if your garbage stays in Manhattan. Here's a little clue. It's bad enough when it's there long enough to be picked up and put on a train or on a ship. One of the first things I notice about being in a place like Manhattan is not just the tall buildings. It is the tall smells. You have a real clear idea that human beings are living in Manhattan, doing all the human being stuff that produces all the human being stuff.
One of the other things I learned as a boy scout, there are certain things inside the camp, certain things outside the camp. You don't build your latrine inside the camp. That is not good form. That doesn't work very well. That adds up too. If you're, you know, a bunch of boy Scouts adds up perhaps to some temporary inconvenience. If it's long-term, it's called typhus. It's deadly. This doesn't work.
Israel had to have an inside and outside the camp and understand outside the camp means two things. It means outside the civilization, it's outside the civitas. It's in the territory that the city's not claiming as its own. It's not defending this territory. It's not the civilized territory. It's not the inhabited territory, but more than that, it's a distinction between where we live and we keep clean and what's outside with a different set of rules. The camp becomes very important. Outside the camp will be important to our salvation where Christ dies outside the camp. Outside the city walls of Jerusalem. He has taken out where the garbage is burned, where he dies for our sins.
But right now, this is outside the camp for what is left of the bull. The bull was taken outside the camp to a clean place, to an ash heap. "And on the ash heap, it shall be burned up." The Lord doesn't want this part of the bull. Like the burnt offering, the prize parts are to be burned on the fire. But in this case, what's left, pretty graphically described, is to be burned outside the camp.
In verse 13, "If the whole congregation of Israel sins unintentionally, and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the assembly, and they do any one of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done, and they realize their guilt when the sin, which they have committed becomes known, the assembly shall offer a bull from the herd for a sin offering and bring it to the front of the tent of meeting. And the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before the Lord. And the bull should be killed before the Lord. Then the anointed priest shall bring some of the blood of the bull into the tent of meeting. And the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before the Lord in front of the veil. And he shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar that is in the tent of meeting before the Lord and the rest of the blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering. That is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And all of its fat he shall take from it and burn on the altar. Thus he shall do with the bull as he did with the bull, with the sin offering. So shall he do this. And the priest shall make atonement for them and they shall be forgiven, and he shall carry the bull outside the camp and burn it up. As he burned the first bull. It is the sin offering for the assembly."
So much here that you understand is that the heart of the gospel. The word atonement shows up here. The priest, by this sacrifice, is making atonement, "at-one-meant," for sin. This is not just illustrative. The sacrifice is not just demonstrative. Something objective is taking place, an atonement is made. There again is the prefiguring of our salvation. Our salvation is not merely on the fact that Jesus died as a demonstration, as an illustration, but rather that he died objectively to gain our salvation. Something objective happened. An atonement is accomplished.
This is the people sinning. You'll notice the unintentional is made clear. And you'll notice that unintentional doesn't mean "unsinful." This all begins with unintentional sin. An unintentional sin, which is seen in retrospect. Once it becomes known, then the guilt is known. The guilt was already there. Because the guilt is objective the atonement is objective. What subjective is our understanding of our sin?
So when the people sin, unintentionally, and when it's known to them, then the sacrifice has to be made. You'll notice it follows pretty much the same symmetry. It has to be a bull.
It is sacrificed as instructed. The blood is taken inside the tent, as instructed. And then the rest of the bull, after the prize parts are burned, as in the burned offering, it is taken outside the camp and burned up. In verse 22, "When a leader sins doing unintentionally, any one of all the things that by the commandments of the Lord his God ought not to be done and realizes his guilt or the sin, which he has committed is made known to him. He shall bring as his offering a goat, a male without blemish, and shall lay his hand on the head of the goat and kill it in the place where they kill the burnt offering. Before the Lord, it is a sin offering. Then the priest will take some of the blood of the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar of burnt offering and all its fat he shall burn on the altar, like the fat of the sacrifice of the peace offerings. So the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin. And he shall be forgiven." Back up in verse 15, something happened. We ought to note.
It says in verse 15, "And the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before the Lord." Now, the elders repeatedly in the Old Testament, we were told about the elders of Israel. Particularly, in this period. We, we hear about the elders of Israel. Here's what we don't know about them. Almost everything we don't know about them. We don't know much about them at all. We don't know how many of them there were. They're probably the heads of the houses. That's probably it, but we really don't know. Clearly, this is a group of men identified as elders who have a spiritual responsibility— probably more than spiritual. It's probably all so political and economic and in every other way. But they are the leaders of Israel. These are the men who are the leadership of Israel. This is an eldership. Again, you see pointing towards the church. It's pointing to the church, but we don't know a lot about these elders, but the very fact that they are cited is important to us. In other words, they have the responsibility, the stewardship, the agency, the leadership assigned to them. But one of them may sin. And that's what we're looking at here. You see the elders of Israel.
Now, we're told if a leader sins, it's the same pattern of unintentionality of a sin that becomes known. You'll notice that in this case, it is not a bull, it is a goat. Now, what does that tell us? It tells us that sin is in every case, an infinite transgression against holy God, but there's a scale of sacrifice. It began with the priest. Remember the sin of the priest brought guilt. Not just, sinfulness, but guilt, objectively, upon all the people. Therefore, it had to be a bull. Bulls are the most expensive, most precious of all the animals, making the sacrifice very clear. If the assembly of Israel itself sins, that corporate sin, also a bull is to be offered. But here, after we had a reference to the elders in verse 15, now we're told about a leader, if he sins it's a goat. That doesn't mean his sin is less significant. It does mean that the sacrifice for it need not be, as it was in the first two cases, a bull. It also tells you about the pecking order. As we will see a little further in the text, it's a bull, then a goat, and then a lamb.
Now you say, well, why would a goat be more precious than a lamb? Actually, I know too little about, either goats or sheep, to be able to define that. Except for the fact that evidently in Israel and likely elsewhere sheep reproduce faster.
You notice the goat is to be treated pretty much like the bull. So much so that it is said to be like the burnt offering, as the fat of the sacrifice of the peace offerings. Verse 27, "If any of the common people, sins unintentionally in doing any one of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done and realizes his guilt or the sin which he has committed is made known to him, he shall bring for his offering a goat, a female without blemish."
This is a less expensive sacrifice than the leader, which was a male goat. Now it's a female goat. "For his sin, which he committed. And he shall lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and kill the sin offering in the place of the burnt offering. And the priest shall take some of his blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of the burnt offering and pour out all the rest of his blood at the base of the altar and all its fat he shall remove. As the fat is removed from the peace offerings and the peace shall burn it on the altar for a pleasing aroma to the Lord. And the priest shall make atonement for him and he will be forgiven."
So this is an individual sin. And in this case, it is a female goat. Notice the provision of verse 32, "If he brings a lamb as his offering for a sin offering, he should bring a female without blemish." So in other words, the preference is for a goat, but you have an allowance for a lamb.
"Then the priest shall take some of the blood from the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of the burnt offering and pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar and all its fat he shall remove as the fat of the lamb is removed from the sacrifice of peace offerings and the priest shall burn it on the altar on the top of the Lord's food offerings and the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin, which he is committed and he shall be forgiven."
So what we have here in chapter four, is the fourth part. If a priest sins, or if the people sins, if a leader sins, or if any of the common people sins. So that's another breakdown. In the breakdown of animals, it is a bull, he-goat, she-goat, lamb. Then a breakdown of the hierarchy of the consequences of sin starts with the priest. Isn't that interesting? It starts with the priest. It doesn't start with the assembly. It starts with the priest because the priest is the mediator, his sin becomes paramount in consideration.
You'll notice that once again, you have the Lord speaking to Moses. You have to look back and wonder when Moses brings this—you think of the Lord, God almighty giving Moses the law. You think about the tablets of stone. Not that many words on the stone. In fact, in the Hebrew, "These 10 words." It's like my dad used to say, "I'd like to have a word with you." I noticed when I was very young, it was never just one word. My dad says, "I want to have a word with you.". And it's like, you know, "weather." No, he never had just one word with me. It was a word.
It's the same thing. When you say these 10 words, it's the 10 commandments. There are more words than 10. Can you imagine what it was like for Moses, even to communicate this? As I've been working my way, word by word through Leviticus, and then putting it in the context of the Pentateuch, the Pentateuch in the context of unfolding theology of the Old Testament. That within a canonical theology, the two testaments together. You look back and go, "You know, there are a lot of amazing things to think about," because you can think about, for example, what it would've been like for a church in Philippi to receive this letter from the apostle Paul and for the letter to be read aloud. Got that, got that.
But just think about Leviticus. Just think about the fact that it's been a fairly hard process for us to just hear the same words over and over again in the complexity of all of this. Some of you are because you love God's word, taking notes. Just imagine that this had to be an inscripturated revelation because who can keep all this straight? Part of the gift of God's words. Part of the gift of Torah, of law. Even as Israel was told to commit all this to its heart. I mean, there's incredible specificity here. We're just four chapters into Leviticus folks. And already you could not keep this straight. If there was an exam on this material, how would you do? Well, what about if someone's life is depending upon this? What about if the life of an entire people is depending on this? We need inscripturated revelation. We need as much as Israel needs it. We need the Word. We need the Scriptures. We need the Bible.
Imagine Israel hearing this for the first time. You'll recall that the pattern is the Lord God spoke to Moses. Remember he called to Moses, from the tent as Leviticus begins. But he says this to Moses, it's not just, "Hey, Moses, I'm letting you in on exactly what we're doing here." It's Moses receiving this in order to teach it to the people. In my own imagination, I have to think about what that would've meant. But then you think about all the generations of Israel, even in just the process of children coming along and young men becoming older men and elders passing and elders coming. This has just got to be taught all the time. It's being taught by the fact that it's happening, but Israel has to be continuously told "We didn't come up with this." This is what the Lord said to Moses. Right now, Moses is with them. These are the books of Moses. The Lord speaking to Moses. Moses also has a mediatorial role here.
As you look at chapter five going forward, and that's where we will turn next, you'll notice specific kinds of sins. Verse one, "If anyone sins in that he hears a public adjuration testify and though he's a witness, whether he is seen or come to know the matter yet does not speak, he shall bear his iniquity." We shall see that touching unclean things, you know, et cetera. So there can be specific sins that are going to follow specific sacrificial responses.
But in chapter four, we just need to note the magnificent weight of this chapter. Even beginning with the Lord, speaking to Moses about the sin of a priest that isn't just a liturgical mistake. Even if done unintentionally, it brings sin and guilt upon the entire people. And the people cannot remove their own guilt. That's the point. And that's the point of the gospel. We cannot remove our own guilt. Guilt is an irresolvable problem for us because the offense is not something that we can make compensation for. We can't pay for it. This animal cannot pay for it.
As we see in Hebrews chapter nine, we thought about this so many times, but we have to think about it again. "It is impossible for the blood of bulls or goats to take away sin." I remember that song that I have known virtually all my life, "What can take away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus." This is all pointing to Christ. Yet, I hope looking backward helps us to understand that this is all on the mind of Jesus in his earthly ministry. This was all the purpose of God.
God did not have this as plan A, which failed, and Jesus was plan B. From the beginning, this was to point to a sacrifice for sin. "Once, and for all", as the apostle Paul would say, to take away our sins. By the time you read Leviticus, chapter four, you recognize this is about unintentional sins. One priest can sin, and the entire people be guilty. Then guess what? Here's the reality guess where Israel was right after every one of these sacrifices. Right back where it started.
This was the terror to me when I was about 12 or 13 years old. Hearing preaching about sin. When I recognized there was no safe place. I can confess all my sins knowing he's faithful and just to forgive me my sins, and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness. Yet, I will probably sin as I'm asleep before I awake. I'll awaken, think of sinful thoughts and I'm right back where I was.
So, here's where Israel is always needing more bulls. But for Christ, we would be behind an infinite line of bulls that would only buy us time. Let's pray. Father, we're just so thankful for all You've given us in Your Word. We thank You for this incredible chapter in Leviticus, chapter four. Father, thank you for bringing us face to face with guilt, face to face with atonement, and by Your grace face to face with Christ. Our great high priest who made full atonement for our sins. Father, it is in His name that we pray. Amen.

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Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 3:1-17 — Leviticus Series
September 26, 2021

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For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 2:1-16 — Leviticus Series
September 19, 2021

You can find Dr. Mohler's other Line by Line sermons here.

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For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.
For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.

Third Avenue Baptist Church
Louisville, KY
Leviticus 1:1-17 — Leviticus Series
September 12, 2021
Good morning. It’s good to see you all and a privilege to be together for the study of God’s Word. Let’s pray together.
Father, with great joy we come before you, we come before your Word. We pray that your Spirit will open our eyes to see, our hearts to receive the Word, but also that you will, during this time, use our study of Leviticus to draw us to Christ. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. 
Someone came up to me during the week this past week and said, “I understand you’re now teaching verse by verse through Leviticus.” I said, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.” And they said, “How’s it going?” And I said, “Three weeks, two verses.” 
That’s how it’s going so far. It will pick up in the sense that there are natural breaks in the text, but Leviticus takes some time to enter and to consider. For one thing, we are entering a world that even for Christians is more alien than we might like to think. When you look at even the first two verses of Leviticus, you see something that to Evangelical Protestants is recognizably Biblical, but not recognizably liturgical. 
I am so thankful for the way that we order Christian worship here at Third Avenue Baptist Church. It is ordered here basically as it would have been ordered during any of the major churches of the Reformation. It is ordered here by the Scriptures, that is the regulative principle at work. At least in theological theory, you ought to be able to go to any church of like practice and basically you’re going to see worship follow a very similar kind of pattern. But there is not a specificity about our worship in a way like we have already seen in just a couple verses in Leviticus, which marks the liturgical responsibility of Israel regarding scrupulousness in attention to the sacrifices. 
There is no similar text in the New Testament that says God orders the church, “When you come together, you must do exactly this, this person is to do exactly that.” Now, of course, we have: the preacher of the Word, we have the office of the elder that is set apart for teaching, we have liturgical orders in the New Testament, not only for the centrality of the preaching of the Word, but for the singing together and “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs”, we have prayer, all very clearly indicated in terms of what we are taught to do and what we see modeled in the early church in the book of Acts and in the Epistles. But it’s just not the same, it doesn’t feel the same. There’s no situation in which God called together all the Church and said, “Now sit down and I’m going to tell you exactly how you are going to do this. You do not deviate from this pattern, you do it exactly this way.”
That just calls us to the huge question, did God get looser in the New Testament? Is this a God who just grew exhausted with this “hyper-scrupulosity”? That’s what the liberal, Biblical scholars of the 20th century called it. “God’s hyper scrupulous and in the church he is less hyper-scrupulous.” Well of course not. Number one, God doesn’t change. Number two, the New Testament is not the correction of the Old. That’s a fundamental issue. The New Testament is not a correction of the Old. The New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old. Anything here that seems alien to us is fulfilled in the New Covenant. That’s helpful for us to understand and that will continue as we consider much of the Mosaic law. Nothing is nullified, not one word of Scripture, not one jot, not one tittle falls away unfulfilled. There is no New Testament correction of the Old, in any sense. Anything that seems alien to us or odd to us is that which is explained by fulfillment in Christ. And if there’s any part of the Old Testament that may seem alien to us that is fulfilled in Christ, it certainly is first and foremost the sacrificial system. 
We began by looking at the first two verses of Leviticus. We’re just going to read them and then enter into this longer passage about the first kind of offering that is detailed in Leviticus: the burnt offering. 
“The LORD called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting” (Leviticus 1:1), now wait just a minute. One of the things we could have spent time doing, even in looking at those first few words, is just to remember how the Lord calls persons and speaks to them. Who is the first person? It’s in the opening of Genesis. The Lord called to Adam and spoke to him. This is something about the imago dei. The Lord made all the creatures, but he doesn’t speak to your dog. Your dog is under no impression that he does. If you think God is speaking to your dog, the problem is you. We were talking just this week about the fact that the only creature that thinks that COVID is a great thing is the dog. First of all, you have people staying home which is exactly what they want. If you’re quarantined, you’re stuck in and the only person you can see is the dog. As a friend of mine said, “If you have COVID, you can’t smell the dog.” The dog thinks it’s a very good deal. God made all the creatures for his glory, but he speaks only to us. 
At numerous times, the Lord will call to someone and speak to them. In this case, the Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘When any one of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock. If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish. He shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting that he may be accepted before the Lord. He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. Then he shall kill the bull before the Lord, and Aaron’s sons the priests shall bring the blood and throw the blood against the sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And he shall flay the burnt offering and cut it into pieces, and the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire. And Aaron’s sons the priests shall arrange the pieces, the head, and the fat, on the wood that is on the fire on the altar; but its entrails and its legs he shall wash with water. And the priest shall burn all of it on the altar, as a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.’” (Leviticus 1:2-9)
Five major kinds of offerings or sacrifices that we will find in Leviticus. First, the burnt offering and that's where we are right now. And then the grain offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and the guilt offering. If that sounds complicated, it is! We will take every one of them in turn, but the first is the burnt offering. And this burnt offering is not explicitly a sacrifice for sin. It is a sacrifice for worship. So that's where Leviticus begins. The first of the sacrifices is a sacrifice for offering. It is to offer under the Lord a pleasing aroma by this burnt sacrifice. But the burnt sacrifice is so fundamental. And furthermore, in the New Testament, when there are references to Christ as sacrifice, it is often the reference to this particular sacrifice. 
Now it is also the case that, for example, as you look through the Old Testament, there are situations in which we are told that a sacrifice is not accepted, that the sacrifice is considered unacceptable to the Lord. You can see it in a passage like Jeremiah chapter 14:12, where the Lord says, “Though they fast, I will not hear their cry, and though they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them.” So the false prophets, for example, or the prophets who were misleading Israel, or Israel when it is into idolatry and disobedience, the Lord simply will not receive it. Even in the language that is used in the Old Testament, he will not allow his nostrils to receive their sacrifice or their sacrifice is a stench in his nostrils rather than the pleasing aroma that is mentioned here. 
Now, what's also interesting is that this pleasing aroma is liturgical. A part of Israel's worship is to make certain that the Lord in observing their worship and even in this particular sacrifice, which has the smoke coming up from the altar and coming right up towards the heavens, that God in essence receives this as a pleasing aroma. It is a form of worship. And that's what liturgy is. It’s liturgia, it's what we are called to do in worship. And you say, well there's Israel. Israel is to do the sacrifice of the burnt offering, a male without blemish and there are several things here we need to note, but I want us to think about the last word in the paragraph, that last phrase, “a food offering with a pleasant aroma to the Lord.” This burnt offering produces an aroma. And again, that's Israel, the Old Testament, that's the old covenant. It is literally a pleasing aroma. So there it is, a pleasing aroma for Israel. But what about for the church? 
Well, consider a text like Hebrews chapter 13. If you turn to Hebrews chapter 13 and we look at verse 15 through 16, we read this, “Through him,” that means through Christ, “let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” So this is the continual offering up of a sacrifice of praise, even a pleasing aroma will come back again in the New Testament. What is the liturgy to which we are called? Is there a sacrifice? No. And as I say, one of the worst things that ever happened to Protestant churches is that someone began calling this piece of furniture an altar. And we've talked about this. It is not an altar, that is a misrepresentation. 
There is no sacrifice here that calls for an altar. The church itself is an altar in that sense, that we are offering up our hearts and our lives. This is where the sacramental churches and the more sacramental they are, the more confused they make this entire issue for Christians. And of course, this is one of the major issues in the Reformation where the rejection of the mass was not just a rejection of its priestly character. It was a rejection of the fact that the mass is a continual re-crucifixion, a continual sacrifice of the Lord. In a Catholic mass, there is an altar which refutes the words of Jesus, “It is finished.” You see similar kinds of passages in the New Testament, in Philippians 4 verse 18, in 1st Peter 2:5. Jesus is once for all this sacrifice and aroma pleasing to God. 
Notice something else that we see here in Leviticus about this burnt offering. There's something here we might miss if we go too fast. Notice what is to be done as the animal is brought, look at verse 4, he, that is the one bringing the offering, shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. So what's happening there? The physical picture, the picture reminds of what's actually happening here which is extremely important. So the animal is brought, in this case from the herd. And so you have a goat or you have a cow, in this case, a male cow, it's a bull. Maybe younger, maybe older, but it has to be without blemish and it is brought from the herd. In both cases, it is an acceptable sacrifice. It is brought, and as the animal is being prepared for the sacrifice, what does the bringer of the sacrifice do? He lays his hands upon the animal. Why? Well, number one, it certainly would indicate he's taking responsibility for this sacrifice. “This is my sacrifice. I'm bringing this sacrifice.” But there's something else there and you feel it. There is an implied transference of sin and guilt from the one bringing the sacrifice to this animal. This is a substitutionary sacrifice. It is not the substitutionary sacrifice, for as we know the blood of bulls and goats cannot atone for sin, but they are a sacrifice that will hold back God's wrath against sin, as Paul makes clear in Romans chapter 3. This laying on of the hands it's something that is of critical importance, because this is a substitutionary sign. 
Now, Psalm 88:7. The Psalmist says to God, in his confession of sin, “Your wrath lays heavy upon me.” Psalm 88:7, “Your wrath lays heavy upon me.” That was the Psalmist’ understanding of the nature of his guilt and his sin. It was laying upon him heavily. The same kind of language is used here about the hands being laid on the animal. It is a heavy laying on of hands. Here's the thing we need to recognize as Christians. Right now our sin is heavily upon someone. Our salvation is brought about by the Father, through the Son in such a way that our sin no longer lays heavily upon us, but our sin was imputed to Christ. Our sin lays heavily upon someone. In Israel, the sin of the nation will lay heavy upon someone. Upon whom will it lie? That's a huge question.
It gives us really incredible encouragement as we come to worship. We're coming to worship and to celebrate the fact that our sin lays heavily on Christ. Jesus paid it all. All to him we owe. Sin had left its crimson spot, he washed it white as snow. Our sin was not made a light thing in the atonement of Christ. It was imputed to Christ in full. On the cross, the Father, as it were, lay his hands upon his son. This language is rich with Christological meaning that Israel could only anticipate but that we have to see in retrospect. 
You'll notice that the animal here is to be completely consumed. No part of this sacrifice is to remain, even for the priests. They are to burn it all. We talked about the fact that the undignified parts are to be washed. And that means the entrails and the back legs, simply because you know what happens to the back legs of animals in the pasture. They are to be washed and again, this is just a part of “Wash me, wash me clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” The washing language is not just about illustrations or bathing. It is right out of Levitical imagery. That washing is washing for atonement. It's washing, even for sacrifice as we see here. 
Now one thing you just need to understand is that this means that the sons of Aaron had a very bloody job to do. This is something that you don't get from Sunday school pictures you're shown as an elementary school child in Sunday school. You don't get the image of what these priests were doing. Remember something else. Those of you who were with me going verse by verse and word by word through Exodus, remember all the scrupulous detail to the beauty of the priestly garments. Understand that every time they performed a sacrifice, those priestly garments ended up covered in blood, which is another picture that we just miss because we don't have the experience of Israel. Even as they will start out with these clean garments, the first sacrifice that comes is a sacrifice in which there will be blood everywhere. 
I did grow up, basically, in a grocery store. My dad was in the grocery business my entire life. He was manager of a Publix store, which is by the way coming to Louisville, the fourth quarter of 2022, I think. It was a different world when I grew up. I went in real early in the morning. I started working for my dad the day I turned 14. I went in real early in the morning and the butcher's uniforms were white. They didn't stay white for long. I determined, I was 14 years old, that was not the job I wanted. They had to do things that I did not particularly enjoy seeing done, although there was a wonder about it, I really did not want to do that. All you have to do is look at a butcher's apron in the course of the day and then multiply that many times out because those animals have been bled. The animals brought for sacrifice have not been bled. It would make what you would see in a butcher shop look absolutely, and quite accurately, pale by comparison. 
The whole point of this is that the animal is to be brought, it is to be rightly handled. Every part of it is to be used in the sacrifice. The priest shall burn all of it on the altar, a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. That is the burnt offering. But very quickly we are told of his gift for a burnt offering is from the flock, that is a sheep or a goat, he shall bring it, “a male without blemish, and he shall kill it on the north side of the altar before the LORD, and Aaron’s sons the priests shall throw its blood against the sides of the altar. And he shall cut it into pieces, with its head and its fat and the priest shall arrange them on the wood that is on the fire on the altar, but the entrails and the legs he shall wash with water. And the priest shall offer all of it and burn it on the altar; it is a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.” (Leviticus 1:10-13) 
You have first from the herd and then from the flock. This is from the most superior sacrifice, the greatest sacrifice, which was a bull or a male from the herd. Then the second is a male from the flock. The third is a bird. Do you notice the structure is almost exactly the same? When it was a sheep or a goat or an animal from the herd. The bull, the sheep, the goat, they’re to be treated basically the same. The picture would be the same. The picture's a little bit different for the bird. Verse 14, “If his offering to the LORD is a burnt offering of birds, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves or pigeons. And the priest shall bring it to the altar and wring off its head and burn it on the altar. Its blood shall be drained out on the side of the altar. He shall remove its crop with its contents and cast it beside the altar on the east side, in the place for ashes. He shall tear it open by its wings, but shall not sever it completely. And the priest shall burn it on the altar, on the wood that is on the fire. It is a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the LORD.” (Leviticus 1:14-17)
I really can't remember the first time I read the Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. I was about 13 years old. And I just admit, I had no theological imagination for why this would be necessary. I mean, here it is. It's in the Bible. We're supposed to know this. The details are graphic. It's a turtledove or a pigeon, and those are related. I'm not sure exactly how to tell the difference, but nonetheless, a turtledove or a pigeon. It's a big bird with a big chest. Turns out that's important. You bring the big chested bird to the altar and with hands, you basically rip it wide open. The inside of the bird is dumped to be put in the ashes. The bird’s flesh and its head are to be flayed out. Most commentators looking at this will say that the effect of not tearing the bird in pieces means that it remains intact and recognizably a bird, rather than just being torn apart in pieces. That's why the Lord here tells Israel not to tear the bird apart in pieces, but rather to rip it open and lay it flat for the sacrifice. The priest shall offer all of it and burn it on the altar as a burnt offering, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. 
That's chapter one. From the herd, from the flock or a bird, scrupulous detail as to how exactly the bird offering is to take place, but parallelism between all three. Who would bring the one and who would bring the others? This has to do at least in part to two things. Number one, the relative wealth of the one who is bringing the sacrifice. Some accommodation is made in this three tier structure for those who may not be wealthy enough. They may not have a herd. They may not be able to bring an animal from the herd. They may not be able to bring even an animal from the flock, but they can buy birds. 
Remember that by the time you get to first century Judaism, what's called second temple Judaism, you have the sale of such things for sacrifice. The sale of all kinds of wares, such that Jesus will cleanse the temple, the money changers. Involved in this entire enterprise are those who have the animals for sale so that by the time you get to second temple Judaism, you don't necessarily bring your animal from Galilee down. Instead, you purchase an animal there. You have various various pictures here. Repeatedly in the Old and the New Testament, but particularly the Old Testament, you will see where there's a sacrifice, the burnt offering, and it's birds. That indicates someone who's of lowly estate. This is someone who can't bring a bull and can't bring a male goat or a sheep but can bring a bird, or arrange for a bird. That's the first issue here. The second issue is an issue of the heart. Let's say that someone, in bringing a bird offering, may at some point bring any one of these three animals, even of a certain degree of wealth, because there would not be an infinite number of bulls available. Even for someone who might be very, very wealthy. That's another reason why, at least in part, this is to be a male animal. The male animal is considered superior to the female animal. 
That continues today in such things as bloodlines of even thoroughbred horses. A part of it is because one male is in reproductive value, more valuable than one female because of the fact that the male can impregnate many females. The male was more precious and more costly in this respect. Israel's thinking constantly in these terms. But as you think of these offerings, these burnt offerings, the offering of a bull would be a major offering. But you'll notice that in God's eyes, the one who can bring only a turtledove is also offering a sacrifice pleasing under the Lord with an aroma pleasing to the Lord. There’s another aspect of these burnt offerings that certainly comes to our mind. This is the fact that this is in a culture in which the sacrifice of any animal could be very costly. This is a culture made up of people who must live off of their animals and off of their crops. They must live off of these animals. Many of these people may very seldom have had, for instance, beef to eat. Notice that the priority here is the sacrificial system. And so even as we think of worship, this is very costly for Israel. And it's very costly in another way. 
Mary and I were out on the boat on the lake over Labor Day weekend. We were coming in the evening and I smelled a campfire. I turned to her and said, “That's just always a good smell.” Somebody was cooking something on that campfire, and it smelled mighty fine. Things smell better as I get hungrier. But imagine what it would've been like to be in the camp of Israel, with the sacrificial system going on and to be hungry. Imagine what it would be like to smell these smells, and maybe you do not even have access to such an animal. What you would be told over and over again by olfactory senses and all the rest is that the centrality of everything is God. That God is the superior one whose demand is first and foremost, and must be recognized as such. What Israel may not enjoy except on festival days, and perhaps even then scaled by wealth, is what is to be brought to the Lord as the first function, the first responsibility of Israel. 
You see this echo also throughout Scripture in which we are to bring our best to the Lord. That means even the disposition of our hearts. It means even the use of our voices. It means that we are to bring our best because of the solitary, singular priority of worship, worship of the one, true, living God. The burnt sacrifice is a sacrifice that would be so obvious to the entire community. Everyone would know that the liturgical life of Israel is central. It would be such that the smell of the entire community, in the sense of Israel as an encampment, or Israel later, as Jerusalem will become the home to the temple. It will be that to approach Jerusalem will be to approach, not just sights and sounds but smells. 
Here comes another thought for us as Christians. What about how un-smelly our worship is? Israel's worship was loud, almost chaotic. When you look at and approach the temple it would have been absolutely chaotic, which is a part of the judgment that Jesus brings upon them. But even if it had been entirely orderly, according to the dictates of the Lord, it still would've been a pretty confusing thing to see. I've never really had to worry about bringing a goat to church. I do have a hint that it would be even more difficult than bringing a toddler. it's one thing to walk up and to worry about where to put our car and how to get inside. But just imagine trying to get through birds and livestock. Birds and livestock do things, even as you bring them to the tent of meeting, they're still doing stuff and all this is just going on. 
And then all the noise. Animals aren't quiet, especially when they tend to be scared and confused about where they are. Birds, just don't even get me started, and pigeons, seriously. You look at this and then you think, well, here we are. There's not a bird in sight. No goats, no sheep, no bulls, not even grain or cereal, as we shall see in chapter two in the grain offering. 
Do we have less? Is this less? This has been a part of the liturgical envy that has marked Christians from the beginning and has led many into error. For one thing, the olfactory. We just don't have any. Well, we kinda hope not to have olfactory worship, let's just put it that way. The fact is that there isn't any, or there isn’t supposed to be any distinctive smell of Christian worship. But there are churches where the first thing that you will confront is the smell of the place. 
I've seen this more in the east, more than in the west. The further east you go in Europe, into the lands of orthodoxy, the more the smells grow in intensity. Some of you may have been in St. Mark's there in Venice. You walk in and the first thing that hits you is just, boom, smell. For centuries, oils and fragrances and incense have marked this place. There isn't a molecule of the stone that doesn't cry out all these smells. You walk in here and it's dried paint, that's it! We have less. But liturgical envy leads a lot of people to want what have sometimes been called the smells and bells of liturgical worship. “So we're gonna try to bring that in because we need some noise, that's what we need. We need some noise and some cacophony and if it's not gonna be bulls and sheep and goats and birds, then let it be bells. By that I don't mean bells in a tower, I mean the bells that you walk in some of these Eastern churches and there's just lots of noise that's going on, because we need some noise. And we need candles. We need smells. We need lots of smells.”
I am an Anglican in music. I used to, as this very strange teenager, I would have records and I would be able to listen to some of this music. I was in choirs and actually sang some of this music. Then the CD and before that the cassette and now we can stream just about anything. I think one of the most beautiful arrangements of “O Come All Ye Faithful” is at Westminster Abbey. You can YouTube this - that's a verb, by the way, YouTube - and you can Google, you didn't know you could but you can, it's a verb. You can YouTube the Christmas Eve service at Westminster Abbey in London and the best one is from about five years ago. Here's the thing you're going to notice. Westminster Abbey is such a moving place, simply because of the history that kind of overwhelms me there. Nothing liturgical but theological and historical. This particular service is very typical of what goes on there at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve. Everybody processes in to, “O Come All Ye Faithful”. How appropriate is that? “O Come All Ye Faithful”, let's come. So they come, except between the third and the fourth verse there's this long interregnum. The organ is doing magnificent things. All the anti trumpets are blowing. It was better when I couldn't see it. It was better when I heard it but I didn't see it because now I see it and what do I see? I see the Dean of Westminster take a censer filled with incense and swing it around. I have done things in my life that I just felt would make me extremely self-conscious, but I’ve got to tell you, whatever it takes, I would not have it to stand in front of you with a burning incense thing on a chain and swing it around. I just lack whatever gene evidently that is. And I not only have to see him fling this thing around, but he's taking the incense so that it gets on the people. 
“You just come here and blow a little on you, and blow a little on you.” There's a nativity scene and I'm thinking, “No, don't do this.” First of all, don't have the nativity scene, but okay. If you’ve got to have one, don't do what you're about to do. Sure enough, he goes over and puts some incense on the nativity scene. At this point, I just close my eyes, “Please give me the music.” He stops that and then the final resounding verse of “O Come All Ye Faithful”. I look at that and the smells and the bells, is that what you're here for? And we don't have any of that. 
Here we are in nonconformity, nonconformity in part to that. We just keep looking at this building but we don't really look at it a whole lot, because it's not made to look at. It's just a reminder of the fact that there is this liturgical envy that falls upon Protestants and evangelicals and especially those of us of the Puritan stripe, and we say that proudly. It’s a reminder of the fact that there are things we don't have in worship that others have in worship. It's because we don't think we're supposed to have them. You look at Israel and you say, “Israel had all this cacophony. Israel had all this noise. Israel had all this blood. Israel had all these smells. Israel had all this liturgical detail.” That's just not what we're given. 
Why are we robbed of all this? Where are our birds? Why are we robbed of all of this? Israel had this picture all the time, over and over again every day. Remember this is not just the Lord's day. It's not just the Sabbath. It's very different, this is daily. There isn't any Lord's day here, it's daily! If Israel needed that picture, don't we need that picture? If Israel needed these sights and these sounds, how do we get around with a God-centered world if we don't have the God-centering olfactory and auditory input that Israel had. If Israel needed the daily ritual, then how is it that we don't need this? 
Evidently, it's because it's all fulfilled in Christ. But that still raises that question and it's the final question we'll consider this morning. If we don't do this, then what do we do? In other words, what is it that we do? What is it that we do that gets us through the week in a God centered way? What is it we do in worship that makes the one, true and living God so evident, so infinitely prominent that it orders everything we think and everything we do and everything we are? We are left with what are rightly called the ordinary means of grace. The ordinary means of grace. They're not extraordinary. They're ordinary. That doesn't mean they're ordinary in the sense of something to be taken for granted. They're ordinary in that these are the plain, simple, ordered means of grace. First of all, the preaching of the word of God, which you'll notice is absolutely absent here. It's absolutely absent. It's in the background, not in the foreground. They're living Leviticus, they're not reading Leviticus. For us it is the preaching of the word of God, which is why, rightly ordered, the building we would use for worship would have a pulpit in the middle for the centrality of the word of God.
The fellowship of the saints, an ordinary means of grace. We're together and we encourage one another with Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. We pray for one another. We draw strength from one another. There's something very different in singing one of these hymns alone than singing them together. We sing them together, that's the ordinary means of grace. The ordinances, baptism and the Lord’s supper, they center us. Even on the Lord's days when we do not have the activity before our eyes, they're always embedded in the worship. And there is the expectation that they're embedded in our very understanding of who we are as a church. 
If you are frustrated with the ordinary means of grace, you're frustrated with the once for all completeness of the atonement accomplished by Christ. With the horrible sounds, with the horrible noise, with the horrible sights, with the horrible auditory, olfactory and in every other sense imaginable, the horrible events of that Friday that we dare to call good - all of this came to an absolute end. That is why the veil in the temple was broken. That is why Jesus said, “It is finished.” This is why the apostle Paul will say it is infinitely superior. The writer of the book of Hebrews will say the very same thing. It is infinitely superior, this new covenant, in every way to the old. If we are envious for the smells and bells, it's like Israel looking backward to Egypt. What we have is infinitely better.

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