by Ray C.
Stedman
………………………….
I do not know what
your reaction is to this book
but I suspect that some of you are not too excited about it. This is
where most
people bog down when they start reading through the Bible. You go
through
Genesis in fine style, learning about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and
all the
things that happened to them. Then you get into Exodus where you have
such
dramatic incidents as Moses' confrontation with Pharaoh in the court of
Egypt,
the opening of the
Well, I can
understand that. I know that this book
is a bit difficult. It does appear to be very dry. It could be called
the
dryness barrier. If you can penetrate the dryness barrier you will find
the
Bible a fascinating book indeed to read all the way through.
Leviticus reminds me
of visiting a factory without
a guide.
When I first came to
this area I went to
My second impression
was of mass confusion. Nobody
seemed to know what they were doing. Men were running here and there,
paying no
attention to one another, some getting in the way of others, and the
machines
were all working away with no apparent harmony or connection at all.
Then Mr. Stirm joined
me, and began to take me through the plant. He showed me first one
corner and
explained what they were doing there, and then a certain machine and
what it
did. We continued in this way until we ended up in the shipping
department
where the final product was visible. When I saw the final product I
then
understood the factory. It all made perfect sense. I was no longer
confused.
This is what you may
experience with the book of
Leviticus. You come into it and find many strange ceremonies and
sacrifices,
many odd restrictions, diet problems, and various other difficulties
which all
seem to be so meaningless. But then you discover that they have a very
complex,
intricately articulated relationship moving toward a purposeful end.
That end
is stated clearly in this book and I want to start with it this
morning. If you
want to understand Leviticus, one verse right near the center of the
book will
help you. It is found in the 20th chapter, the 26th verse. Let's read
it
together:
"You
shall be holy to me;
for I the LORD am holy and have
separated you from the
peoples, that you should be mine." (Leviticus
That is the purpose
of the book of Leviticus. God
is saying to these people of
Perhaps you were
turned off right away by the word
holy in this passage. I do not know what you think holy
means.
You probably read into it things from your past experience which make
it
unpalatable to you. Most of us associate it with some kind of grimness.
We
think of holy people as those who look as if they
have been steeped in
vinegar or soaked in embalming fluid. I used to think of the word that
way, and
holiness was not attractive to me at all. It repelled me. But I ran
across a
verse in Scripture which spoke of "the beauty of holiness"
(1 Chronicles
But most of us react
initially to this word as did
the little girl who happened to see a mule looking over the fence at
her. She
had never seen a mule before, and she said to it, "I don't know what
you
are, but you must be a Christian -- you look just like Grandpa."
Others associate it
with strangeness, apartness,
as though holy people are weird, peculiar individuals who live out in
the
desert somewhere, remote from the rest of us. We think of them as
"different."
But the Bible itself
suggests none of these ideas
concerning holiness. If you want to get at the meaning of this word you
must go
back to its original root. This word is derived from the same root from
which a
very attractive English word comes. This is the word wholeness.
So that holiness
means "wholeness," being complete. And if you read wholeness
in place of holiness everywhere you find it in the
Bible you will be
much closer to what the writers of that book meant. We all know what wholeness
is: It is to have together all the parts which were intended to be there, and to have them
functioning as they were intended to
function.
That is what God is
talking about. He says to this
people, "you shall be whole, because I am whole." God is complete; he
is perfect. There is no blemish in God; he lives in harmony with
himself. He is
a beautiful person. He is absolutely what a person ought to be. He is
filled
with joy and love and peace. He lives in wholeness. And he looks at us
in our
brokenness and says to us, "You, too, shall be whole."
That word wholeness
has power to awaken
desire within us. We long to be whole people. Don't you? Don't you want
to be
what God made you to be, with all the ingredients of your personality
able to
be expressed in balance.
That is to be a beautiful
person, and that is what God is after. That is what the book of
Leviticus is
all about. In fact, the whole Bible is on that theme.
We are so aware of
our own brokenness, of our lack
of wholeness. We know how much we hurt ourselves and each other. We are
aware
of our inability to cope with life. We sometimes put up a big facade
and try to
bluff our way through as though we are able to handle anything. But
inside,
half the time, we are running scared. That is a mark of our lack of
wholeness.
We also know our diabolical power to irritate, to enrage, and to
inflame others
-- and ourselves. But this great statement in Leviticus
Man has lost his way.
He was made in the image and
likeness of God. When man first came from the hand of God he was whole.
Adam
functioned as God intended man to function. He was functioning in the
image and
the likeness of God. But now we have lost that likeness. We still have
the
image, but the likeness is gone. T. S. Eliot says,
All our knowledge
brings us only closer to our
ignorance,
And
our ignorance brings us closer
to death.
But closeness to death does not bring us closer to God.
And then he asks this
question:
Where is the life we have lost in
living?
Isn't that the
question so many millions are
asking today: Where is the life I have lost in trying to live? Why
don't I know
the way out? How come I am so up tight, so hurting, so
broken?
God determines to
heal man's brokenness and to
make man whole again. And he knows how to do it -- he says so: "You
shall
be whole; for I am whole, and I have separated you from the peoples."
It
is a process of separation. The reason we are so broken is that we are
involved
in a broken race: Our attitudes are wrong. Our vision of life is
twisted and
distorted. We believe illusions, take them to be facts, and act upon
them. We
are following phantoms and fantasies and delusions.
So God must separate
us. He has to break us loose
from conformity to the thought patterns and the attitudes and reactions
of
those around us. He has to deliver us from all that, straighten out our
thinking, set our minds and hearts aright, and correct our tangled,
fouled
relationships.
This is a process
which takes infinite patience
and love, because it is voluntary -- God never forces us into it. It
can occur
only to those who trust God enough to respond to his love.
When I was a boy in
my early teens I once tried to
entice a female deer out of a thicket into a little clearing and to get
her to
take an apple from my hand and eat it. She was a wild doe, and very
much
afraid. She saw the apple and obviously wanted to come and take it --
but she
was afraid. She would venture a few steps toward me but then would
become
frightened and retreat into the woods. Then she would come out again,
stand
still and look around for a minute, then start grazing as though
indifferent. I
stood perfectly still, holding out the apple. She would come a bit
closer --
then a twig would snap and she would disappear back into the bushes.
Now, it was perfectly
possible for her all along,
if only she had known it, simply to walk right up and grab the apple
and start
eating it. I would not have hurt her at all. I wouldn't have tried to
capture
her, nor have done
anything else to her. But she
didn't know that.
I was there a long
time, at least half an hour,
trying to get her to come out of the woods. Finally she came about
halfway
toward me and stood there with her neck stretched out, trying to muster
the
courage to reach for that apple. Just as I thought she was going to do
it a car
passed nearby and she was gone! I had to eat the apple myself.
That strikes me as
such an apt picture of what God
contends with in reaching out toward man. It takes infinite patience
and love
to impart the necessary understanding to fearful, hurting men and women
like
us.
That is why God gave us his Book. He starts in kindergarten with us. He
starts
with pictures and shadows, with visual aids, in order to show us what
he is
going to do some day. All the ceremonies and offerings of the Old
Testament are
shadows and pictures of Jesus Christ. So Christ is here in the book of
Leviticus. God shows us, through his people
"Well," someone might
say, "I
thought Jesus Christ was God's way to wholeness." That is exactly true.
He
is. But his availability is not limited to us, you see. Men and women
before
the cross were also hurting and broken and fragmented, just as we are.
They
needed Christ also and he was available to them. The way they saw him
was
through these pictures. Thus, as they understood what these pictures
depict,
and laid hold of that, they came to the same joy and peace that we have.
If you do not believe
that, then read the Psalms
and see how much David understood of the presence and the grace of God
in his
life. He was a man who was healed by God. He came to understand that
God was
his strength and his very life, and that God could meet every need of
his heart
and work out all the tangled relationships in his family and in his
personal
life. He reflects all this in the Psalms he wrote.
Leviticus, then, is
full of Christ. All the
sacrifices, the rituals, the ceremonies, and all the rest, pictorially
describe
Jesus Christ and his work, and how he was available to men and women
then. And
as we read this book from our vantage on this side of the cross we will
learn a
great deal about how Jesus Christ can meet our needs now. Therefore,
this is
not just a historical book. It isn't just for Jews. It is a
tremendously
practical manual on how to live as a Christian. We will see this as we
go
along.
But there is even
more: When you read the book of
Leviticus, and understand what it is saying, it will help you to
understand
yourself. You see, in Jesus Christ God took upon himself the form of
man. Jesus
came to this earth, God in the flesh, and dwelt among us as man -- man
as God
intends man to be. He came to where we are. And everything that he was
and did
as man is what we also are or can be. So, as you read this book you
will
understand more about yourself, and about what your
great, crying needs are, and about how you operate.
We are a mystery to
ourselves. We don't even
understand how we think. We are baffled by our own experience. Don't
you feel
that way? Remember the way Paul expresses this in Romans 7:
"The good
things that I want to do I cannot do; and the evil things that I don't
want to
do are what I do," (Romans
Because that is true,
the book falls into two
basic divisions. The first part speaks to man's need. It reveals where
we are
as people, and sets forth God's answer to that need. The second part
reveals
what God expects from us in response. First comes
God's provision, and then the performance which results from that
provision.
This morning we will undertake only a brief survey of the book so that
you will
have a guide to it. We won't go into any detail.
In the first sixteen chapters there are four elements which set forth
man's
need and reveal what we are like: The first is a series of five
offerings. I am
sure that God gave us five fingers on each hand so that we can remember
the
five offerings: First is
the burnt offering, then the
meal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, and, finally, the
trespass
offering.
These are all
pictures of what Jesus Christ does
for us. But they are also pictures of the great, fundamental needs of
human
life. We can summarize them in this way: These five offerings
speak of
the two essentials for human existence -- love and responsibility:
We can never be
complete persons if we are not
loved, or if we do not love. Love is an absolutely essential ingredient
of
life. Nothing harms or distorts or disfigures or blasts a person more
than to
deny him love. But there is another essential, too. In order to be
whole, in
order to have self-respect and a feeling of worth we must have a sense
of
responsibility. We must be able to accomplish what is worthwhile. We
need both
love and responsibility. These offerings describe them and show us how
they
work.
The second element in
these chapters is a priesthood.
This priesthood is provided to help us handle
the emotional and intellectual problems which we face in trying to work
out the
relationships involving love and responsibility.
All of us, even the
children among us, have lived
long enough to know that, when we try to live, we constantly run into
emotional
and intellectual problems. We get upset, we get turned off, or turned
on, we
get excited, or depressed -- we have all kinds of emotional problems.
And we
get puzzled and bewildered, baffled and uncertain as to what to do --
all kinds
of intellectual problems. So a
priesthood is provided
to help us with these problems.
In the Old Testament
this priesthood was the sons
of Levi. That is where Leviticus got its name. But for us the
priesthood is not
only Jesus Christ, our Lord and High Priest to whom we can freely come,
but it
is also each other. In the body of Christ, we are all made priests --
one to
another. That is why we need each other. Basically and fundamentally we
cannot
get along without each other, because we have these problems with which
we must
be helped.
The third element is
the revelation of a standard
by which we can tell the difference between the true and the false, the
phony and
the real, the helpful and the hurtful, between death and life.
Isn't it strange that
man in his natural condition
cannot tell the difference? That is why there are thousands and
thousands of
people who are doing things which they think are helpful but which end
up to be
very hurtful -- and they do not understand why! When the results begin
to come
in they cry out and say, "What's happened, what has gone wrong? Why am
I
in a mess like this?" It is because they could not tell the difference.
So a God of love
tells us the difference. He sets
forth a standard by which we can distinguish between that which is
essentially
hurtful and that which will actually help us.
Finally, in this
first section there is an
opportunity to respond -- voluntarily. We need that, too. God never
imposes his
will upon any of us. We constantly need help. And we need to be brought
to a
place where we can recognize this. Then we have to answer in some way,
we must
give a response. This opportunity was provided in the Day of Atonement,
as we
will see. If, when we thoroughly understand our need and God's
provision to
meet it, we then say "No" to him, he will let us do so. And we might
never return to that point again. But God always gives us a long period
of
preparation in which he leads us into a full understanding before our
rejection
of him can become final.
The second section of
the book, Chapters 17
through 27, describes the performance which is possible on the
basis of
the provision God has made, i.e., the kind of a life that can be lived
on this
basis. But notice the order! God never mentions performance to us until
he has
fully discussed provision. He never speaks about our behavior until he
has made
clear the power by which we are to act.
I must admit that we
in the church often get this
backwards. And a great deal of damage has been done to people by
insisting that
they act according to a certain behavior pattern without giving them
any
understanding of the power by which to do so. There are times when, in
all
sincerity, and because we don't understand the Scriptures very well, we
actually teach people that they must live up to a certain standard
before God
will accept them, that they must produce, come through, or God won't
love them.
That is totally wrong! That is the lie of Satan! That is deadly
legalism -- yet
we all have all had our part in it.
But that is what God
is here to correct. He never
does that. He always helps us first, and once we understand the basis
upon
which to act, then he sets forth for us the pattern, the standard of
performance. Here again there are four elements: First there is the
understanding of the basis for wholeness. This basis is blood. Anyone
who has
read the Old Testament knows that it is full of blood. There are all
these
strange sacrifices, thousands of them offered every year -- bulls and
calves
and goats and sheep and birds of all kinds, offered up all the time --
a
veritable river of blood flowing through the Old Testament.
Many people, looking
at this, say, "Well,
Christianity is nothing but a slaughterhouse religion." Why is all this
blood shed? Because by this means God is trying to impress us with a
fundamental fact: He is telling us that the issues of our life run very
deep,
that they can be solved only by a death, that the basis for wholeness
is life
given up, that we will never make it merely on the basis of our natural
life.
We must somehow discover a new kind of life. And we have to give up the
old
before we can have the new!
That is what he is
telling us. We can't have both!
The struggle of the Christian life is that we keep trying to hang on to
the old
way of life and refuse to accept the new. This is what the blood speaks
of. We
will understand this more fully when we come to it in our study.
The second element is
the practice of love in all
the relationships of life. The Bible, you see, is intensely practical.
It is
not nearly so concerned about what you do in the temple as about what
you do in
the home as a result of having been to the temple. So this book goes
into the
relationships within the family, among friends, and with society in
general. It
shows us exactly the kind of love relationship that God makes possible
for us
in all these areas.
The third element in
this last section is the
enjoyment of the presence and power of God -- man in relationship to
God,
worshipping God, and turned on by a living, exciting God! We will learn
what
the temple portrays about our relationship to God and about how to
think of
him. The most important thing in life is to know the living God who is
behind
all things!
The last element is
an awareness of the issues at
stake, of how important they are, of how our entire life stands in the
balance
at this very point, and of the fact that a decision is expected. There
is a
choice that we can make. And God brings us finally to that very place
and helps
us to see that in the final analysis it is entirely up to us to choose.
God
never says, "I'm going to make you leave your misery." Rather, he
says, "If you prefer being broken and don't want to be healed you can
stay
right where you are. But if you want life, then this is what is ahead."
God never forces his will upon us. But he sets the choice before us,
makes it
very clear, and then expects a response on the basis that he has given.
In closing we should
return to our key verse:
"You shall be whole because I am whole, and therefore I am separating
you
from the peoples, in order that you should be mine," (Leviticus
Many of you know from
your own experience that
after you became a Christian, became God's, you realized that there was
a sense
in which you had belonged to him all along. Paul the Apostle says, "God
separated me unto himself from my mother's womb," (Galatians
Last Sunday at
That is what God is
saying to us. That is what he
is really saying! He sees our hurt and our heartache and our longing
and our
brokenness, and he says, "You're MINE!" But that isn't all. Because
of his power and wisdom God says, with that wonderful hopefulness of a
loving
father, "You shall be mine, healed, made whole, with all you blemishes
and
deformities corrected, all your faults straightened out, all you
iniquities set
aside, all your tangled relationships unsnarled. You are going to be
mine. You
shall be whole, for I am whole." That is what this book is about, that
is what
the Bible is about, and that is what Jesus Christ is about.
This past week I had
the encouraging experience of
talking with three people who, two years ago, I would have said were
absolutely
hopeless. I would not have given a snap of my fingers for their chances
of ever
being straightened out because of the mess they had made of their
lives. They
were hostile and rebellious and so torn up inside that they could not
get along
with themselves or anybody else. No one could even talk to them, let
alone
reach them with the truth. They were ruined, literally ruined. But now
the
healing has begun. It is very evident that they are on their way to
wholeness.
God is correcting the problems of their lives. And that is what he is
doing
here with us.
I don't know anything more suggestive of this for us than the Lord's table, to which we now come. This event tells us of how God, in love, began the process of healing. It portrays for us how he began to reach out to us in the cross, in the suffering of Jesus, and how he broke the power of darkness and began to set us free. So we will observe this event which our Lord Jesus gave us to teach us the meaning of these ancient sacrifices: a life poured out for us, a life given up in order that we might have a new basis of living. That is what wholeness is all about. It is in order that we may be his.