The Way to Wholeness
Lessons from Leviticus
Ray C. Stedman
Discovery House Publishers
Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501
The Way to Wholeness © 2005 by Elaine Stedman All rights reserved.
Discovery Press Publishers is affiliated with RBC Ministries, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Discovery House books are distributed to the trade exclusively by Barbour Publishing, Inc., Uhrichsvilie, Ohio.
Requests for permission to quote from this book should he directed to: Permissions Department, Discovery House Publishers, PO. Box 3566, Grand Rapids, M149501.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV), (c) 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society, and are used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Stedman, Ray C. The way to wholeness: studies in Leviticus / by Ray C. Stedman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 157293-119-i (alk. paper) Bible. O.T. Leviticus--Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BS1255.52.S74 2004 222'. 1306-dc22 2004023140
Printed in the United States of America 05 060708 09/SB /10 98 76 5432 2
CONTENTS
PART ONE: Basic Human Needs
1. The Way to Wholeness (Leviticus 20:26)
2. The Need to Belong (Leviticus 1)
3. The Need To Respond (Leviticus 2)
4. The Need for Peace (Leviticus 3 and 7)
5. The Need to Confess (Leviticus 4:1-5:13)
6. The Need to Restore (Leviticus 5:1-6:30)
7. The Need for a Priest (Leviticus 8:1-9)
8. The Work of a Priest (Leviticus 8:10-36)
9. The Present Glory (Leviticus 9)
10. Strange Fire (Leviticus 10:1-7)
11. How to Be a Priest (Leviticus 10:8-20)
12. God's Standard for Our Lives (Leviticus 11)
13. The Cure for Leprosy (Leviticus 12:1-13:46)
14. Sick Garments and Diseased Houses (Leviticus 13:47-14:57)
15. The Most Feared Chapter in Leviticus (Leviticus 15)
16. The Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16)
PART TWO: Basic Human Behavior
17. Blood and Sex (Leviticus 17 and 18)
18. The Power to Do (Leviticus 19 and 20)
19. Free to Serve (Leviticus 21 and 22)
20. God's Calendar (Leviticus 23)
21. The Pattern of Humanity (Leviticus 24)
22. Liberty and Rest (Leviticus 25)
24. Promises, Promises (Leviticus 27)
Leviticus 20:26
Let's face it: Most people are not very excited about studying the book of Leviticus. If you have ever made a commitment to read the Bible through, then you probably remember taking an easy and enjoyable trip through Genesis and Exodus. The first two books of the Bible make fascinating, page-turning reading, because every page is drenched in human drama. In Genesis and Exodus we find the compelling stories of such heroes as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. We read about the creation of the universe, the fall of humanity, the heartbreak and triumph of Joseph, Israel's captivity in Egypt, and the story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt, climaxed by the parting of the Red Sea. It's no wonder that Hollywood has made several spectacular movies from the stories in Genesis and Exodus!
But then comes Leviticus. The drama evaporates. Suddenly, you are plodding through a catalog of offerings, ceremonies, dietary restrictions, specifications for the priesthood, and various other instructions that seem alien to our place and time. That is where many well-intentioned students of the Bible run out of gas. That is where many a well-intentioned commitment to Bible reading falters and fails.
So let's admit at the outset that the book of Leviticus is not an easy book to study. It can seem a hit dry--until you understand the meaning and the rich spiritual reality that underlies these ceremonies and instructions. Exploring the depths of God's truth is never boring, never dry. Once we begin to understand what these ceremonies and instructions mean, and their relevance to our lives today, the book of Leviticus truly becomes one of the most fascinating hooks of the Bible.
Reading the book of Leviticus without grasping its underlying reality can he like walking through a busy factory without a guide. When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay area, I visited a large steel products factory operated by Ed Stirm, one of the founders of Peninsula Bible Church. When I arrived at the building, Ed was busy, so while I waited for him I went out into the factory area and looked around by myself.
My impression was one of chaotic activity and tremendous noise. There were machines pounding and clanging, machines that hammered metal flat, machines that ground up metal, machines that spit out parts of various shapes. There was no apparent harmony or connection between what one machine did and what another machine did. There was so much noise, I couldn't hear myself think! Against this background of mechanical noise, I saw people scurrying here and there, moving dollies loaded with metal and getting in each other's way.
Finally, Ed joined me and took me on a guided tour of the plant. He took me from place to place, showed me what each machine did, what kinds of parts each machine made, and how these parts were assembled. He introduced me to people, told me what they did, and explained how one person's job connected with the work done by another person in the factory. He explained the assembly line and showed me how all the different parts of the operation flowed together. Finally, he took me to the shipping department, where he showed me the completed product, as it was being boxed and wrapped.
By the end of the tour, everything that had confused me before now made sense. What had seemed like a mass of chaos and noise a few minutes earlier had become a symphony of motion. It not only made sense, but it had become fascinating.
The same is true of the book of Leviticus. If you come to Leviticus without any background, without understanding how each part of the book connects to every other part of Leviticus and to the Bible as a whole, then it will seem chaotic and meaningless and, yes, boring.
But if you have a tour guide to Leviticus to help you make sense of it all, then I believe you will find it one of the most important and meaningful books of the entire Bible. You'll see that these ceremonies, sacrifices, and restrictions form intricately articulated relationships that reveal the plan of God for our lives.
Holiness and Wholeness: The Key to Leviticus
The key to Leviticus is found in a single verse located near the center of the book. All of the secrets of the book are unlocked by Leviticus 20:26:
"You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and have set you apart from the nations to be my own."
This is the purpose of the book of Leviticus. Here, God tells the people of Israel--and He tells Christians today--"You shall be holy to me." Why? "Because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have separated you from all the nations around you, so that you will be exclusively my people." What God said to Israel so long ago He also says to Christians today. The promises that appeared in picture form in the Old Testament now belong to us who live on this side of the cross. This profound truth will become even more apparent as we move deeper into Leviticus.
Look again at those words that God speaks to Israel and to us: "You are to be holy to me." What does that word holy mean to you?
Some people associate holiness with strangeness or peculiarity. They think of holy people as being weird or different. This misconception is fostered by the stereotype of ancient holy men who lived as hermits in the desert, remote from other people, a little crazed perhaps, possibly even seeing strange visions and talking to themselves. If this is your image of a holy person, then you probably don't find anything attractive in holiness. In fact, the word probably repels you.
For other people, the word holy suggests a sort of grim religiousness. They think of a holy person as someone who has been steeped in vinegar. Many of us react to the word holy the same way the little girl reacted the first time she saw a mule looking at her over a fence. She had never seen a mule before, so when this long-faced animal peered at her, she said, "I don't know what you are, but you must be a Christian--you look just like Grandpa!"
That's the way I reacted to the word holy when I was much younger. I thought of holy people as joyless, solemn people who prayed all the time, sang grim, gloomy hymns all the time, and never had any fun. The word holy was not attractive to me. In fact, it repelled me.
But my impression of holiness began to change when I encountered several verses in Scripture that spoke of holiness as a beautiful and glorious thing. For example, 1 Chronicles 16:29 tells us, "Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name. Bring an offering and come before him; worship the LORD in the splendor of his holiness." (These words are echoed in 2 Chronicles 20:21; Psalm 29:2; and Psalm 96:9.) 1 began to realize that if holiness is a thing of splendor and beauty, then my mental image of holiness must be all wrong--and I began to explore what the Bible truly means by that word holiness.
The word holiness comes from the same Old English word from which we get our word wholeness. The Old English word is hali or halig, which had such varied shades of meaning as wholeness, completeness, health, and even salvation. So when we talk about holiness, we are truly talking about wholeness and completeness. And when God says to us, "You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy," He is telling us that we are to be as whole and complete as He is.
There is no blemish in God; He lives in harmony with Himself. He is whole and perfect. That is the beauty and splendor of His holiness. And this beautiful, splendorous, holy God looks at us in our brokenness and says to us, "You, too, shall be whole, as I am whole." When we experience God's wholeness and His holiness, then we become fully what He intended us to he. All of the parts of our selves are present and functioning as God intended them to function.
That word wholeness has power to awaken a longing within us: We are aware of our brokenness, and we long to he whole and complete. Don't you want to be what God made you to be? Wouldn't you want to have every aspect of your personality function in perfect balance? That is what it means to be a whole and holy person. That is the beauty and splendor of wholeness and holiness. That is what God is after in our lives.
And that is what the book of Leviticus is all about. It is, in fact, a theme that runs throughout the entire Bible.
As a human race and as individuals, we are self-conscious about our brokenness, our lack of wholeness. We are aware of our inability to cope with life. We know how powerless we are to control bad habits, chronic sins, temptations and addictions, the things we say and do to hurt the ones we love. We put up a big façade and pretend that we are in control and there is nothing wrong with us. But underneath the façade, we are hurting, full of shame and guilt, and we are running scared.
But God, in Leviticus, tells us that He knows all about our brokenness and pain. He knows that our lives are riddled with sin, shame, and hurt. Our brokenness stands in stark contrast to His holiness. Yet His love teaches out to us, right where we are, and He makes a wonderful promise to us: "You are to be holy to me because I, the Low, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own." This is the wonderful plan and purpose He has for our lives.
Separate and Set Apart
We were created in perfection.
If you carefully read the creation account in Genesis 1, you may notice an interesting detail: At the end of every creation day, God looks on what He has created and sees "that it was good." Then in Genesis 1:27, the creation account undergoes a subtle but important change: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." And Genesis 1:31 tells us that at that close of the day on which human beings were created, "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."
Not just "good" but "very good."
When Adam first came from the hand of God, he was perfect and whole. He functioned as God intended humanity to function. He bore the beauty and splendor of the image and the likeness of God.
As human beings, we were lovingly fashioned by God, and He looked upon its and said that we were very good. But the human race has become misshapen and deformed by sin. Yes, God's image is still stamped upon us, but that image has become marred and damaged. We are no longer whole.
If you accidentally drop a quarter into a garbage disposal while it is running, that quarter will get hacked and nicked and possibly bent. Turn off the disposal and retrieve the quarter, and you'll be able to tell it is a quarter. You'll be able to recognize the image of George Washington that is stamped upon it, but that quarter will no longer be what it once was. It will he marred and damaged. That is what has happened to the image of God that is stamped on you and me.
We were made in the image and likeness of God--and we still have His image, but we have lost His likeness. There is a semblance of God, but the completeness and wholeness of God have been lost.
In his poem "Choruses from the Rock," T. S. Eliot laments that all of human knowledge only brings a greater sense of our ignorance, and all of our ignorance only draws us closer to death. And though we are approaching death, we are no closer to God. "Where," the poet asks, "is the Life we have lost in living?"
Isn't that the question millions are asking today? Where is the Life I have lost in trying to live? I seek knowledge, but I have no wisdom. I seek pleasure, but I have no joy. I keep chasing after happiness, but I have no satisfaction. I seek to make a living, but I have no life.
But here in Leviticus, God steps into the broken mess we have made of our lives and promises to make us whole again, just as He is whole. And He knows how to do it: "You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own." How will God make us whole and holy? Through a process of separation.
The reason we are so broken is that we are involved in a broken race. We have been infected by a broken and sin-ridden world. Our attitudes are wrong. Our view of life is twisted and distorted. We mistake illusions for truth, and we end up chasing phantoms. So God must separate us. He must break us loose from conformity to the thought patterns and attitudes of the people around us. He must deliver us from this world, straighten out our thinking, set our minds and hearts right, and untangle our fouled relationships.
But God will not make us whole against our will. If we choose to remain broken, He will allow it. This process is completely voluntary--God never forces us into it. Some will choose to become whole and holy, and some will not. God will deliver only those who trust Him enough to respond to His love.
Christ Before the Cross
Once, when I was in my early teens, I saw a deer in a thicket at the edge of a clearing. I had an apple in my hand, so I tried to entice her out into the clearing by holding out the apple, She was a wild doe and very afraid of me, but she was also hungry, and she wanted that apple. She would venture a few steps toward me; then her fear would overtake her and she'd retreat into the woods. Then she'd come out again, stand still; look around for a minute, seemingly indifferent to my presence. All the while, I stood perfectly still, holding out the apple. Finally, she'd edge closer--then a twig would snap, and she'd disappear back into the bushes.
Now, I wouldn't have hurt her. If she'd only known my intentions, she would have been perfectly safe in walking right up and taking the apple from my hand. 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 take it, a car passed on the road nearby, and she was gone! I had to eat the apple myself.
This is a picture of what God contends with in reaching out to the human race. It takes infinite patience and love on His part to reach out 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 its what He is going to do someday. All the ceremonies and offerings of the Old Testament are shadows and pictures of Jesus Christ. When we understand the meaning of these ceremonies and offerings, it becomes clear that Christ is pictured here in the book of Leviticus. God shows us, through His people Israel, His way of healing human guilt and pain. This is God's way to wholeness.
"Well," you might say, "I thought Jesus Christ was God's way to wholeness." That is exactly true. But Jesus is not the way to wholeness only for those who believed after the cross. For thousands of years before Jesus died and rose again, men and women were hurting and broken, just as we are. They needed Christ, too--and He was available to them centuries before He came to earth in human form. How? Through the pictures and symbols of these ceremonies in Leviticus. When people grasped the reality behind those pictures, when they laid hold of Jesus through faith in the One who would someday come to save them, they came to the same joy and peace that we have as Christians.
We see this principle clearly as we read the Psalms. There we see how much David understood of the presence and the grace of God in his life. Some of the psalms give us a picture of the divine nature of the coming Messiah. For example, Psalm 2:7 tells us, "He [the Lord] said to me, 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father.'" Others speak of the Messiah's humanity; for example, Psalm 8:4-6 tells us, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet."
Other messianic passages in the Psalms include Psalm 110:1-2, which Jesus quoted as proof of His authority (see Matthew 22:43-44); Psalm 110:4, which speaks of Christ's atoning and priestly role; Psalm 42:9, which speaks of His betrayal; Psalm 118:22-23, which speaks of Christ being rejected by the people; Psalm 22, which speaks of His suffering and death; and Psalm 16:8-10, which speaks of His resurrection. David was a man whose hurt and guilt had been healed by God. He understood that God was his strength and the source of his life. Only God could meet every need of David's heart and work out all the tangled relationships in his family and his personal life.
Like the Psalms, which were written centuries before the birth of Christ, Leviticus is filled with pictures of Christ. All of the sacrifices, rituals, and ceremonies of Leviticus are pictures of Jesus Christ and His work. From this side of the cross, we can see Jesus clearly in the pages of Leviticus.
So Leviticus is not merely a book of history, not is it merely a catalog of religious rules and regulations. It was not written merely for the people of Israel. It is a tremendously practical and relevant manual on how we are to live as Christians.
But there is even more to this powerful, practical book: When you read Leviticus and understand what it is saying, it will help you to understand yourself. It will reveal to You the person you truly are and the person God created you to be.
We are a mystery to ourselves. We don't even understand how we think. We are baffled by our own experience. We are driven by motives and urges we don't even understand, much less control. Paul expressed this painful dimension of our existence in his letter to the Romans: "For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing" (Romans 7:19). That is a penetrating, probing analysis of what is going on in your life and mine.
In the same way, the book of Leviticus shows why we do the things we do. It leads us to a deeper, richer understanding of ourselves. It is designed to meet us where we are, in our sinfulness, our helplessness, and our hurt. As we learn how to accept the healing grace that God offers us, Leviticus will reveal to us the beauty and splendor of wholeness that can be ours.
In Jesus Christ, God took upon Himself the form of a man. He came to this earth, God in human flesh, and He lived among us--a man who was everything God intended human beings to be. He came to us in the midst of our brokenness. Everything He was and did as a man is what we also can be and do. So as you study Leviticus, you will discover not only Christ but also yourself. You will learn what your deepest needs truly are and how God has met those needs in Jesus Christ.
An Overview of Leviticus
The book of Leviticus falls into two basic divisions. Part One speaks to human need. It reveals our condition as human beings and sets forth God's answer to our need. I call the first part of Leviticus (Leviticus 1-16) Basic Human Needs.
Part Two of Leviticus reveals what God expects from us in response to Him. This section shows God's provision for our wholeness, and then it reveals the performance that results from God's provision for our wholeness. I call this second part of Leviticus (Leviticus 17-27) Basic Human Behavior.
Part One: Basic Human Needs. In the first sixteen chapters of Leviticus we find four elements that set forth our need and reveal what we are truly like.
1. Five offerings. The first element is a series of five offerings. I believe that God gave us five fingers on each hand so that we can remember the five offerings: (1) the burnt offering, (2) the meal offering, (3) the peace offering, (4) the sin offering, and (5) the trespass offering. These five offerings are pictures of what Jesus Christ did for us when He was sacrificed upon the cross. They are also pictures of the great, fundamental needs of human life.
These five offerings speak of the two essential ingredients of human existence: love and responsibility.
We can never be complete persons if we lack this first ingredient, love. We can never be all that God created us to be if we are not loved and if we do not love others. Love is an essential ingredient of life. We were made to love and be loved. Nothing hurts and distorts a human soul like the denial of love.
The second essential ingredient is a sense of responsibility. As human beings, we have duties and responsibilities to other human beings and to God. When we live responsibly, meeting our responsibilities to God and others, we gain a sense of self-worth and self-respect that comes from God.
In order to be whole people with healthy relationships, we need to experience both love and responsibility. The offerings that are presented in Leviticus show us the role that love and responsibility play in our lives.
2. The priesthood. The second element in this first half of Leviticus is the priesthood. In Leviticus, God provides the priesthood to help us handle the emotional and intellectual problems we face in trying to work out our relationships with love and responsibility.
In the Old Testament, this priesthood consisted of the sons of Levi. That is where the book of Leviticus gets its name. Leviticus is the Latin form of the Greek word leutikos, which means "Levitical--having to do with the Levites, the sons of Levi." In Old Testament times, God established the priesthood as ministers of God's Law and God's grace to the people of Israel.
In New Testament times, the Levitical priesthood was exchanged for a new priesthood consisting of Jesus Christ Himself--our Lord and High Priest--and all Christian believers. That's right; in the body of Christ, the church, we are all priests one to another. We are to practice the priesthood of all believers. We cannot get along without each other, because we all have problems with which we need help. And when we need help, we can go to Jesus, our High Priest, and to one another in the priesthood of all believers.
3. The revelation of God's standard. The third element in this section of Leviticus is the revelation of God's standard by which we can tell the difference between true and false, holy and unholy, wholeness and brokenness, real and phony, life and death.
It seems amazing but it's true: In our natural condition, we cannot tell the difference. There are thousands and thousands of people who are doing things they think are good and helpful, yet they are causing hurt--and they don't understand why their best intentions create pain in their lives and the lives of others. They cry out and say, "What did I do wrong? Why am I in this mess?" It's because they could not tell the difference between true and false, whole and broken.
God loves us and wants us to know the truth. He wants us to be able to tell the difference between true and false. So He has given us the book of Leviticus in which He sets forth the difference between that which is harmful and that which brings wholeness, health, and happiness. Now that God has made His truth known, we have no excuse if we continue to do the things that cause harm.
4. An opportunity to respond to God. The final element of this section of Leviticus is an opportunity to respond voluntarily to God. The Lord never imposes His will upon us. We constantly need His help, and we must come to a place where we recognize our need. Once we recognize our absolute brokenness before God, we need to give Him a response. So, in Leviticus, God gives us the opportunity to voluntarily say yes to Him. This opportunity was provided in the Day of Atonement (or in Hebrew, Yom Kippur), the observance of which is set forth in Leviticus 16.
But what if, after we recognize our need of God's help in our lives, we say no to Him? He will, of course, allow us to do so. We can say no to God--but there's a very real danger in doing so: We might never return to that place of opportunity again. God is gracious, and He often allows us a long period of time before our rejection of Him becomes final. But we never know, and we should never presume upon God's grace.
Part Two: Basic Human Behavior. The second section of the book, Leviticus 17-27, describes the kind of lives we can lead because of the provision that God has made for us. Notice that when God divides Leviticus into two parts, the order of the two parts is very important. Leviticus 1-16 discusses God's provision, because His provision comes first. Then Leviticus 17-27 deals with our behavior on the basis of His provision. God never speaks about our behavior until He has made clear that the basis of our behavior must he His power alone. We cannot live as we were meant to live in our own power. We can only live as God treated us to live when we base our behavior on God's all-sufficient provision.
In the church, we often get this backward. A great deal of damage has been done to people by insisting that they behave in a certain way without helping them to understand the power by which to do so. Some Christians, out of an inadequate understanding of the Scriptures, teach people that they must live up to a certain standard of behavior before God will accept them! This is totally wrong, and it is a lie of Satan. It is deadly legalism, not biblical truth.
That is the great misimpression that God seeks to correct through the book of Leviticus. God never expects us to be holy and whole in our own power. He always provides His power first, so that we can understand the basis upon which we are to act. In Leviticus He gives the pattern for becoming a whole and holy people. Here are the four elements of that pattern.
1. The blood. The basis for wholeness is blood. You see this throughout the Old Testament. A river of blood flows through the Old Testament in the form of sacrifices that seem strange to our thinking. There are thousands and thousands of sacrifices offered every year--bulls, calves, goats, sheep, and birds of all kinds.
Though the sacrifices of Leviticus ceased to be practiced centuries ago, they are not, as many people suppose, mere relies of a bygone era. These sacrifices have a powerful, life-changing meaning for us today. They are symbols designed to teach us the truth about ourselves and our relationships, especially our relationship with God.
Many non-Christians look at how important the blood of animals is in the Old Testament and how important Christ's blood is in the New Testament, and they say, "Well, Christianity is nothing but a slaughterhouse religion! It's all about blood! Why is all this blood being shed?"
It's because God is trying to impress us with a fundamental fact: The brokenness of our lives runs very deep. It is a problem that can be solved only by a death. The basis for our wholeness is that a life must be given up, the lifeblood of another must be poured out. Our brokenness cannot simply be mended by our natural efforts. We must have a new kind of life poured into us. We must give up the old before we can receive the new.
God is telling us that we can't have both the old life and the new. As Christians, that is our continual struggle: We keep trying to hang on to the old way of life and refuse to accept the new. The blood of the Levitical sacrifices speaks to the fact that the old must pass away so that we can receive the new. We will explore this principle in greater detail as we move through our study.
2. Love in relationships. The second element that becomes clear in the second half of Leviticus is that God tells us to practice love in all the relationships of our lives. The Bible is an intensely practical book. It is not nearly so concerned about what you do in the temple as it is about what you do in your home as a result of having been to the temple. So this book deals with our relationships within the family, among our 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.
3. Enjoying the presence and power of God. The third element of the last half of Leviticus is the enjoyment of the presence and power of God--humanity in relationship to God, worshiping God, and empowered by the exciting reality of the living God. The most important thing in life is to have a personal relationship with the living God, who is the source of all life and of everything good.
4. An awareness of the issues at stake. The final element in the second half of Leviticus is an awareness of the importance of the issues of life and eternity. God demands that we make a choice. No one else can make this choice for us. 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, then that is up to you. If you so choose, you can stay right where you are, and you can die in your brokenness. But if you want life, then you can choose life, and I will give it to you."
God never forces His will upon us. But He does set before us the choice--a clear and unambiguous choice between life and death. He expects us to respond. He demands that we choose.
Throughout our study of Leviticus we must remember the key verse that unlocks the meaning of the entire book: "You are to be holy to me because I, the LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own" (Leviticus 20:26). That phrase "to be my own" has a unique, emphatic sense in the original Hebrew language. It is as if you can put all three tenses in a single word, so that God is saying, "You were mine, you are mine, you shall be mine."
As a Christian, you may have had an awareness that after you committed your life to Jesus Christ, you not only belonged to God at that moment, but there was a sense in which you had belonged to Him all along. The apostle Paul once wrote, "God... set me apart from birth and called me by his grace" (Galatians 1:15). Yet, for much of his life, Paul was an enemy of Christianity and a persecutor of Christians! Even so, Paul could look back upon his life and say that he was God's all along.
"You are mine," God tells us. "Even though you have been an enemy, even though you have been fighting me, you are mine! You have been mine, you are mine right now, and you will be mine for eternity." Even in our brokenness, our fragmented and imperfect state, God puts His loving hand upon our lives and says, "I have set you apart to be my own. You belong to me!"
I once heard about a service at a rescue mission in a city in the Midwest. It was a service for children, in which children put on the program. One little boy, about six years old, gave a recitation in the program. The boy had a birth defect which caused his back to be misshapen so that he was humpbacked. As he walked across the stage to give his recitation, he was shy and nervous. Not only was he self-conscious because of his physical condition, but it was the first time he had ever attempted a public performance. Doing the recitation was a great struggle for him.
There were two older boys in the back of the room who were chronic troublemakers. Just as the little boy was walking across the stage to begin his recitation, the two older boys in back called out, "Hey, kid! Where are you going with that pack on your back?"
The little boy stopped in his tracks and started to cry.
A man got up from the audience and walked up onto the stage. He knelt beside the little boy and put his arm around him. Then he said to the audience, "it must take a very cruel person to say such a thing. This boy has a condition that is not his fault. And he loves Jesus and he wanted to come out here and recite something for you all to show you what Jesus means to him. And I want you to know that I'm proud of this boy, because he is my own son. I love him just the way he is, and he belongs to me."
And the man hugged his son and led him off the platform.
That is what God says to us: He loves us just the way we are, and we belong to Him. He sees our hurt, our heartache, and our brokenness. He says to us, "You're mine, and you have always been mine. What's more, you will always he mine, and you will he made whole. All your blemishes and deformities will he corrected, all your sins will be set aside, all your tangled relationships will be straightened out. You will be whole, for I am whole. You will be holy, for I am holy."
That is what Jesus Christ is about. That is what the Bible is about. And that is what the book of Leviticus is about.
The rituals of Leviticus speak to us today as they spoke to the people centuries ago. The sacrifices of Leviticus point us to the sacrifice on the hill called Calvary where the life of God own Son was poured out for as, so that we might be whole and holy, so that God might set us apart to be His own.
So turn the page with me, and let begin our exploration of the rich and rewarding truths of the book of Leviticus.
Leviticus I
Someone is coming. As you read through the Old Testament, you feel this sense of expectation. On page after page, you see a great emphasis on an approaching figure. You get a clear sense that Someone is coming. We see it in prophecies, shadows, and pictures of the future. All of Old Testament history seems to focus our attention on a coming moment in time.
And it is not just the prophetic books, such as Isaiah or Malachi that tell us that Someone is coming. We can see it clearly even in the books of Old Testament law, in the book of Leviticus. The ceremonies, rites, and sacrifices of Leviticus are written in love, written in blood, and shout to us: Someone is coming!
Because we live on this side of the cross, we know who that Someone is: Jesus the Messiah. This, in itself, is a remarkable testimony to the divine authorship of Leviticus. Only God Himself could have prescribed offerings that so accurately depict the coming of Jesus.
Unfortunately, many people look at Leviticus and see only meaningless rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices. But these rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices are far from meaningless. They are pictures drawn by the hand of God to illustrate His truth. The Old Testament is filled with such pictures, and God employs them in His Word to prefigure something that is yet to come. The New Testament calls such pictures "shadows." In Colossians 2:1-17, Paul writes that the Old Testament dietary laws, religious festivals and celebrations, and Sabbath days "are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ." And Hebrews 10:1 tells us, "The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming--not the realities themselves."
These pictures are visual aids God uses to impress His truth upon our minds. After all, we human beings are not very smart. We think we are, because we can invent complicated gadgetry like computers and space shuttles. But, in contrast to the wisdom and greatness of God, we know nothing at all. So God teaches its as you might teach a child. Kindergarten teachers never start out by writing complex mathematical formulas on the blackboard for children to learn. They start with simple arithmetic, using pictures to illustrate the concepts involved ("one apple plus two oranges equals how many pieces of fruit?"). That is how God began teaching the human race--with pictures and shadows.
God's Pictures: The Law and the Tabernacle
In Exodus, the book immediately before Leviticus, we find the story of Israel's redemption from Egypt. Look at the components of that story and see if they remind you of a deep spiritual truth.
The people of Israel were in slavery under a cruel and vicious king. Then a deliverer came who spoke for God. By means of the Passover, God sheltered His people under the blood, which was splashed onto wooden crosspieces that framed a doorway. God's angel of death passed over the people, and the deliverer led the people out of bondage, through the depths of the sea, and into a place of freedom.
In this story, we also see a picture (a type) of how all humanity was in slavery to a cruel king named Satan. The people were in bondage to sin and death. Then came a deliverer, Jesus Christ. He served the Passover meal; then His blood was splashed on a wooden cross, and that cross became the doorway of escape. The angel of death passes over all who place their trust in the deliverer, Jesus. He leads us out of bondage, through the deep places of this life, and to a place of freedom from sin and death.
Exodus also records two more pictures God gave Israel as visual aids: The Law and the tabernacle. Let's look at each of these pictures and see how they illustrate profound and practical spiritual truth:
1. The Law. In Exodus 19 we find a dramatic and terrifying scene. Three months after leaving Egypt, the people of Israel gathered before Mount Sinai. A trumpet sounded--a blast that must have been very much like an air raid siren today. The mountain was wreathed in flame and smoke, the ground shook with a great earthquake, and the people were terrified. God said to Moses, "Come up here! I want to talk to you!" And Moses went up on the mountain alone.
I have never envied Moses that trip, or that awe-inspiring and terrifying encounter. But it was there, on the mountain, that God gave the Law to Moses.
The Ten Commandments (recorded in Exodus 20:3-17) are nothing more or less than God's revelation of His expectations of us. The Ten Commandments tell us the kind of people God designed and created us to be. When He made us in His own image, He made us to live the kind of life that is described in the Ten Commandments. Some of them pertain to our relationship with God: "You shall have no other gods before me,ĶYou shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God." Others deal with our relationships with family and neighbors: "Honor your father and your mother. "You shall not murder,ĶYou shall not commit adultery."
These commandments speak to us with power and authority, because something within us knows they are right. God has, in a sense, written aspects of the Law into every human heart. This is why everywhere in the world, no matter what culture you observe, you will find a sense of responsibility and accountability to God and an awareness that human beings should live up to a certain standard. This sense of oughtness--we ought to do this and we ought not do that--is evident throughout the human race.
2. The Tabernacle. Along with the Law, God gave Moses the pattern of a building--the tabernacle. God told Moses, in effect, "Don't vary the pattern; build it exactly as I have told you." The book of Hebrews tells us that the tabernacle is a picture of humanity and of what God intends to do--and that is to live in us. So God designed the tabernacle the same way He designed us: in three sections, spirit, soul, and body. In the tabernacle there was the outer court (representing the body), the Holy Place (representing the soul), and the Holy of Holies (representing the unfathomable, mysterious aspect of out being called the spirit). God designed the tabernacle as a picture of humanity so that we could understand ourselves and how God intends to dwell within us.
God illustrated His presence in the tabernacle by means of a bright, shining light which seemed to have no visible source. That light was called the Shekinah, and it was the visible mark of the presence of God. It was not God Himself but only a picture of God, for no human eye can see God. But that light reminded Israel that this is where God intends to dwell--in the human tabernacle, which the tabernacle represents. God's dwelling place is in you and me, His people.
The Law that was given to Moses at Mount of Sinai was the Old Covenant. God said to humanity, "This is what you ought to be." Thus the Law made an absolutely inflexible demand on the human race. God said, in effect, 'Any deviation from this Law must be punished because it means that you are failing to be what you were made to be, and this can't be ignored!" And the human race said, "All right, we'll keep the Law." And they tried--
But they failed. Why? Because someone has thrown a monkey wrench into the human machinery: We are all fallen As fallen creatures, we are incapable of keeping God's perfect Law.
The Law is like the instruction manual for your car, but with a nasty twist. Imagine this: You have bought a new car, you've carefully read the instruction manual, and you've promised yourself that you would faithfully follow every instruction. But every time you go out to drive your car, you find that someone has put water in your gas tank and sand in your oil--nothing works right. That is what it is like for us as human beings when we try to live in obedience to the Law. That Law, which seems so simple to understand and whose demands are so fair and reasonable, becomes in practice a set of demands that we can never hope to meet.
That is why God, after the tabernacle was built, gave the people of Israel a whole series of sacrifices as a picture of the New Covenant, the new arrangement for living. In these sacrifices there is death and blood--yet there is also a priest who helps us with our spiritual and emotional hurts, who pronounces God's forgiveness of sin, and who helps us experience a restored fellowship with God, even though we have broken His Law.
The Sacrifices
The sacrifices of Leviticus are shadows and pictures. The slaying of an animal and the shedding of animal blood cannot save us. But the blood pictures for us what can save us: Jesus Christ. The animal sacrifices are a picture of the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross. The sacrifices pictured for the people of Israel a future event, which we now look upon as an historical event. When the people of Israel made these sacrifices, their faith was not in the shed blood of animals but in what that blood pictured, even though their understanding of that picture was limited. Though they didn't know Jesus Christ by name and had never heard the gospel that we have heard, their faith was in Him and in the work He would one day perform upon the cross for all of humankind.
The book of Leviticus opens with these words, which speak of the sacrifices that God has ordained:
The LORD called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting [that is, the tabernacle]. He said, 'Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'When any of you brings an offering to the LORD, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock" (Leviticus 1:1-2).
Notice that this whole system of sacrifices was never given from Sinai. It was given from the tabernacle, the place where God had come to live with humankind. This is significant for us. God never placed the demand of the Law upon us without also intending to meet it from within, from the life of Jesus Christ within us, which is God dwelling in us. So God has made a provision for the problem of breaking the Law. He has dealt with the problem of guilt, shame, condemnation, self-hatred, and all the other afflictions that attack us from within and keep us from experiencing the wholeness God created us to have.
Five offerings or sacrifices are presented in Leviticus, and each of those five offerings represents one aspect of the work of Jesus Christ. Each of these offerings followed a pattern that was fulfilled when Jesus Christ died on the cross and met all the requirements of our holy God. These offerings are (1) the burnt offering, (2) the meal offering, (3) the peace offering, (4) the trespass offering, and (5) the sin offering. When Jesus died, He took our place and made these offerings in our stead. That is why God put Him to death.
The five offerings reveal what we are as fallen human beings, as children of Adam, as heirs of the Adamic sin nature. So if you want to understand yourself, then heed these offerings. They represent what Jesus Christ had to become in order to help us. They tell us who and what we are.
The Burnt Offering
The first of these five offerings is the most basic one, the burnt offering, which followed a five-step pattern:
First step: A selection of the sacrifice. The burnt offering had to be an animal sacrifice, and, as we shall see, it was always a male, without blemish, without any kind of defect or disfigurement at all. Animals were the most valuable possession of the Hebrew people, so an animal was a costly sacrifice taken from their most valuable treasure--their herds.
Second step: They laid hands on the offering. What does that mean? God was teaching the people the principle of substitution--the fact that we human beings are all tied together, we belong to one another, we share life together, and there is a way by which one of us can substitute for another. To deal with our deepest guilt, however, that substitute had to be a spotless, sinless person. And the only human being who ever fulfilled that qualification was Jesus Christ. That is why He is the only one who can substitute for us and redeem us.
This rite of identification, the laying on of hands, is God's expressive way of teaching us that we belong to each other. That is why, in the church today, when we commission a person to do ministry in the church or on the mission field, we will bring that person before the entire congregation and lay hands on him or her. By this symbolic rite we say, "We are with you, we are one with you, we are praying for you and supporting you financially, spiritually, and emotionally." In the sacrificial sense, the rite of identification said that the people were identified with the sacrifice--not with the animal itself but with the sacrifice of the One the animal represented, the coming Christ.
Third step: They killed the animal immediately. God never allowed any compromise on this step. He did not say, "This cute little lamb is innocent of any wrongdoing, so just drain a half pint of blood and I'll be satisfied." God wanted to impress upon us the fact that our sin problem is so deeply rooted in our lives that nothing but death can solve it. It cannot be mitigated or disguised by some temporary expedient. The awfulness of sin requires the immediate death of the substitutionary sacrifice.
Fourth step: They sprinkled the blood and burned the portions of the sacrifice as an act of consecration and commitment to God. The instant the animal died, it became acceptable to God. Death solved the problem of separation and alienation so that the sacrifice could be offered to God.
Fifth and final step: They experienced a ceremonial indication of a restored relationship. Usually they sat down and ate part of the meat of the sacrifice. This is where the Hebrew people got their meat dishes, because they could eat only the meat of their sacrifices. Every animal they killed had to be slain at the door of the Tent of Meeting--that is, the tabernacle. There were some offerings, like the burnt offering, from which they could not eat. But with these God gave them other means of indicating that the relationship was restored and that there was peace again.
The burnt offering was the most frequently offered sacrifice in Israel. Every morning and every evening the priests would give a burnt offering. It was called the continual burnt offering and it had to fulfill certain requirements: The offering had to be a male without blemish, and it had to be totally consumed by fire.
First Requirement: A Male Without Blemish
The first requirement of the burnt offering was that it was always a male without blemish. The people had three choices as to the kind of animal:
"If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he is to offer a male without defect. He must present it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting so that it will be acceptable to the LORD. He is to lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. He is to slaughter the young bull before the LORD, and then Aaron's sons the priests shall bring the blood and sprinkle it against the altar on all sides at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. He is to skin the burnt offering and cut it into pieces. The sons of Aaron the priest are to put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire. Then Aaron's sons the priests shall arrange the pieces, including the head and the fat, on the burning wood that is on the altar. He is to wash the inner parts and the legs with water, and the priest is to burn all of it on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD" (Leviticus 1:3-9).
If you were rich, you brought a bull. But if you could not afford a bull or if you did not have a herd of cattle but only a flock of sheep or goats, then another provision was made:
"If the offering is a burnt offering from the flock, from either the sheep or the goats, he is to offer a male without defect. He is to slaughter it at the north side of the altar before the LORD, and Aaron's sons the priests shall sprinkle its blood against the altar on all sides. He is to cut it into pieces, and the priest shall arrange them, including the head and the fat, on the burning wood that is on the altar. He is to wash the inner parts and the legs with water, and the priest is to bring all of it and burn it on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD" (Leviticus 1:10-13).
Every action described in these verses is symbolically significant in picturing the coming work and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We will see this more clearly as we go along. Finally, if you were very poor and had no animals, you could bring a bird:
"If the offering to the LORD is a burnt offering of birds, he is to offer a dove or a young pigeon. The priest shall bring it to the altar, wring off the head and burn it on the altar; its blood shall be drained out on the side of the altar. He is to remove the crop with its contents and throw it to the east side of the altar, where the ashes are. He shall tear it open by the wings, not severing it completely, and then the priest shall burn it on the wood that is on the fire on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD" (Leviticus 1:14-17).
All of this sounds very bloody and gory to our sensibilities today. But God is saying something important to us through all of this death and bloodletting. He is indicating by these sacrificial animals that a provision has been made for everyone, so that God's people can be made whole and holy. No one is left out. Even the poorest can offer something as a burnt offering. You may remember that when Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem to be circumcised on the eighth day, they gave a burnt offering of a pair of doves (see Luke 2:2124). It is amazing to realize that the offering they made on that day symbolized the coming sacrificial death of Mary's own son.
Why did God require that this first offering, the burnt offering, always be male? It is because in the Scriptures a male always stands for leadership, initiative, and dominion. Females in Scripture always signify support, following, and response, and there were certain offerings for which a female animal was specified. The people of God were told specifically what to do because these symbols were intended to teach them truths they needed to know.
So the burnt offering had to be a male without blemish or disfigurement. This is a recognition of the fact that in this most basic of all offerings, God was dealing with man as a king, as a sovereign. Man was made to rule. He was never made to be in bondage to anyone. That is why we are restless when we are enslaved or held in bondage of any sort. We cannot stand it, for something deep within us was made by God to rule.
In Psalm 8, David looks up to the heavens and asks, "What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?" And then he answers his own question: "You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet" (Psalm 8:4, 6). All the fish and other inhabitants of the seas, all the animals and birds, everything is put under the authority of man. That is man as God created him. And man still feels this. That is why we are not content unless we are running things in this world.
No scientist is content to be excluded from an area of knowledge. No explorer can rest if any mountains are left unclimbed. When Sit Edmund Hillary conquered Mt. Everest, he was asked why he did it. His reply: "Because it was there." All this is a dim remembrance of the dominion God gave man. This dominion is symbolized by the selection of the male for this offering. The sacrifice of the male was the sacrifice of a ruler, of one who has dominion. It symbolizes the sacrifice of Jesus the King.
Second Requirement: Totally Consumed
The second requirement of the burnt offering was that it must be totally consumed. Nobody ever ate the meat of the burnt offering. Look at Leviticus 1:6-9:
"He is to skin the burnt offering and cut it into pieces. The sons of Aaron the priest are to put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire. Then Aaron's sons the priests shall arrange the pieces, including the head and the fat, on the burning wood that is on the altar. He is to wash the inner parts and the legs with water, and the priest is to burn all of it on the altar. It is a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD."
In Leviticus, there were three sacrifices that were said to be "an aroma pleasing to the LORD." The first of these is this burnt offering. God says that there is something about man which, when he recognizes his right to rule and gives himself wholly to it, is pleasing to God. God is thereby teaching us that man was meant to be His, wholly and totally. The whole human being--body, soul, and spirit--is to be the dwelling place of God. Only a human being who is indwelt and ruled by God is able to rule as he was meant to rule.
This is a recognition of the most basic hunger of man. It is a reflection of our need to belong, to be accepted, to beloved, to have an identity, a relationship, a cause to live for, and even to die for. The human soul is forever restless without a sense of belonging. We will never find fulfillment until we find it in committing ourselves totally to God. You and I are searching for someone to love us. That is the most primitive and basic hunger of our lives.
We like to think we have a godlike ability to control our own destinies. We try to run the universe and have everything revolve around us. Our will to complete autonomy and self-determination was well stated by William Ernest Henley in his poem "Invictus," in which he thanks "whatever gods may be" for his "unconquerable soul." He ends his poem with these defiant lines: "I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul."
It is a satanic lie that a human being is master of his or her own fare. God could flick off a little switch inside your body and you would be instantly dead from a heart attack or an aneurysm. You'd have nothing to say about it. No human being runs his own life or controls her own destiny. Humanity is not God. We were not made to exist on our own. We were made to belong to someone else. When God says, "I have set you apart from the nations to be my own," He is telling us what our purpose is, what we were created to be--God's own people, a people who belong to Him.
Perhaps you have detected a paradox at this point. Here are two great truths, linked together in Scripture, which seem to contradict each other: Man was born to rule, but he was also made to belong to God. Man was born to be king over all, but he was made to be under the authority and ownership of God. In fact, human beings are not happy unless they are possessed by God. These truths appear contradictory, but they complement and complete each other.
A number of years ago, a young man in his late twenties came to our church--we'll call him Michael. He was in trouble with the law because he had been caught bilking people out of their money. For years Michael had lived as a con artist, taking advantage of people. Now he had been caught, and he wanted to mend his ways and start a new life. As I met with him, I learned his story.
Michael had not known anything about his origin or identity until he was fourteen years of age. He had grown up in foster homes. At age fourteen, he got an after-school job in a store, and while working there, he embezzled five thousand dollars. He used the money to hire a private detective agency to trace his family background. Every cent of the stolen money went for that purpose. He couldn't rest until he knew who he was and where he came from--and he was even willing to risk imprisonment to find out. The detective agency was able to uncover the information the boy wanted and reported back to him.
The agency told Michael that he was the illegitimate son of the daughter of an American missionary couple. While in the Philippines with her patents, the girl had fallen in love with a young Filipino man, and she'd had a baby out of wedlock. Because this was a matter of shame and embarrassment to the missionary family, the parents arranged to have the baby taken back to the States and placed in foster care. That baby--who was Michael--grew up in an orphanage and never knew his family background until he paid five thousand dollars in stolen money to find out.
The years of not knowing who he was or where he belonged had taken a toll on Michael. He was in the grip of that ancient paradox: He was born to rule and born to belong to another. Yet he had no sense of belonging, because he didn't know where he came from. His lack of identity and belonging drove him to steal in order to find his origins, and after the first theft, he kept stealing until he finally got caught and didn't want to live as a thief anymore.
In a real sense, we are all born as Michael was. Until we find God and allow Him to become the Master of our fate and the Captain of our soul, we are doomed to feel lost, cast adrift in the universe, without a sense of where we came from, without a place of belonging.
That is what the burnt offering tells us: Our most basic quest in life is to belong to someone, to be identified with someone, to be loved and accepted and possessed by someone. There is nothing more pitiable and pathetic than that person who feels no one loves him, no one cares for his soul.
Third Requirement: Death
A third requirement of the burnt offering is that it must involve a death. In these offerings, death is always a picture of the sacrificial death of the Lord Jesus Christ on our behalf. Only by means of the death of an acceptable substitute--which is Jesus--can human beings ever satisfy their great longing to he possessed by God. So we must give ourselves to God through Christ, acknowledging that He owns us, that we belong to Him: "You are not your own; you were bought at a price" (1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a).
Many people rebel at this idea. They say, "I don't want God to run my life; I don't want to be God's little robot." But God does not exploit us or treat us as robots or slaves. He loves us more than we love ourselves, and He wants us to be fulfilled and satisfied. Only when we truly belong to Him can we truly be free and happy. That is one of the great paradoxes and life-changing truths of the Christian faith.
You can find a certain amount of satisfaction in having a family to belong to, and in knowing where you came from in a human sense. But you will never find complete satisfaction by merely knowing your human origins. Your hunger for belonging can find its ultimate satisfaction only in a relationship to God through Jesus Christ. It is the death of Christ that opens the door to that relationship.
I once shared a speaking platform with Dr. Henry Brandt, the noted Christian psychologist. He told a story about when he and his wife were dating and talking about marriage. They told each other that they wanted to give themselves to each other's happiness. He said, "I'll never forget the night my wife said to me, 'Henry, dear, I want to spend the rest of my life just making you happy!' I thought, Isn't that great!? This beautiful woman wants to dedicate her life to making me happy' I thought it was tremendous--and then we got married."
The first week of their marriage, Henry Brandt told his wife, "Every Thursday night I go out with the guys. Tonight is Thursday night, so I'll be out late. Don't wait up for me." His wife, he said, reacted very strangely! She said, "But you can't leave me all alone!" He said, "There are lots of things you can do, and I'll just be out one night a week." She said, "You can't do that! You're married now! You have to stay here with me!" And Henry Brandt wondered to himself, What happened to her promise? Here is her first chance to make me happy, and she has blown it completely!
Eventually, Dr. Brandt realized that there is a great deal of joy in the fact that a husband and wife truly belong to each other. Even so, the deepest yearning for belonging can never be fully satisfied apart from a relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
This is what the burnt offering says to us: Only through the death of Christ, which brings us into a relationship with the living God, can this universal desire for belonging be met. That is what accounts for the great sense of joy and relief so many people feel at the moment they surrender their lives to Jesus Christ. It is a feeling that says, "Now I belong! God is my Father! For in a family. I'll never be alone again! I belong to God!"
Fourth Requirement: The Sacrifice Must Be Continual
The fourth and final requirement of the burnt offering is that it must be continual. This requirement is given in Leviticus 6, where God gives additional instructions to the priests about how to make these offerings:
"The fire on the altar must be kept burning; it must not go out. Every morning the priest is to add firewood and arrange the burnt offering on the fire and burn the fat of the fellowship offerings on it. The fire must he kept burning on the altar continuously; it must not go out" (Leviticus 6:12-13).
What is God saying by that? Simply that this is the most basic relationship of your life. No other need can ever be met until this need is met. Every morning and every evening the people were to offer the burnt offering. It would consume the wood and the meat all through the day and all through the night, so that the fire never went out. The burnt offering was the central and most basic of the five offerings. Through the symbolism of the burnt offering, God says that you can never satisfy any other hunger of your life until you have satisfied your hunger for God love. Until you are His--body, soul, and spirit--you can never know peace.
If you want to solve any other problem of life, you must begin by coming into a relationship with God the Father through His Son, Jesus Christ. You must be able to say, "I belong to the Father. I am a child in His family. I know Him as my heavenly Father. I am loved by Him." A relationship with God is the starting point for restoring every other relationship in your life.
This, then, is the meaning of the burnt offering: It satisfies our need to belong, because it represents the continual sacrifice of Christ in our lives, Christ the One without spot or blemish, the One who was completely consumed, who died and rose again, and who opened the door to a relationship with God the Father. Because of the burnt offering sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that relationship can never be broken. We will never be abandoned, never forsaken, never lost. We have our identity and our place of belonging in God.
Leviticus 2
There is no more universal food than bread. Almost every culture around the world has its own version of it: white bread, wheat bread, rye bread, pumpernickel, sourdough, French bread, muffins, croissants, matzo, pita, tortillas, and on and on. Bread is symbolic of life and in fact is called the staff of life because we lean on it as a person leans on a wooden staff for support. Bread is also one of our most important social ties, for we break bread together as a sign of friendship and hospitality.
Here in Leviticus, as in our everyday lives, we see that bread, and the grain flour from which bread is made, has a symbolic importance far greater than we usually realize. In Leviticus 2, we come to the second of the five sacrifices, called "the grain offering" in the New International Version. Many other versions call it "the meal offering," while the Revised Standard Version calls it "the cereal offering." In the King James Version it is called the "meat" offering because "meat" was the old English word for "food." There is, however, no meat, no animal flesh whatsoever; in this second sacrifice. Of the five sacrifices in Leviticus, this is the only bloodless sacrifice, involving no animal death.
The grain sacrifice could be offered in any of three forms. The first form was that of simple, fine flour, which is a biblical symbol of idealized or redeemed humanity:
"When someone brings a grain offering to the LORD, his offering is to he of fine flour. He is to pour oil on it, put incense on it and take it to Aaron's sons the priests. The priest shall take a handful of the fine flour and oil, together with all the incense, and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD. The rest of the grain offering belongs to Aaron and his sons; it is a most holy part of the offerings made to the LORD by fire" (Leviticus 2:1-3)
This sacrifice or offering was clearly intended to be food for the priests. Leviticus 2:4 describes a second form in which the offering could he presented:
"If you bring a grain offering baked in an oven, it is to consist of fine flour: cakes made without yeast and mixed with oil, or wafers made without yeast and spread with oil. If your grain offering is prepared on a griddle, it is to be made of fine flour mixed with oil, and without yeast. Crumble it and pour oil on it; it is a grain offering. If your grain offering is cooked in a pan, it is to be made of fine flour and oil. Bring the grain offering made of these things to the LORD; present it to the priest, who shall take it to the altar. He shall take out the memorial portion from the grain offering and burn it on the altar as an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD. The rest of the grain offering belongs to Aaron and his sons; it is a most holy part of the offerings made to the LORD by fire.
"Every grain offering you bring to the LORD must be made without yeast, for you are not to burn any yeast or honey in an offering made to the LORD by fire. You may bring them to the LORD as an offering of the firstfruits, but they are not to be offered on the altar as a pleasing aroma. Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings" (Leviticus 2:4-13).
So the people could bring the grain in the form of loaves or cakes of unleavened bread which could be baked, grilled, or pan-fried. The third form of this offering is found in Leviticus 2:14:
"If you bring a grain offering of firstfruits to the LORD, offer crushed heads of new grain roasted in the fire."
The people could take freshly harvested wheat and shake the grain out by hand and crush it. That was then acceptable as a cereal offering. It is obvious that the essence of this offering was that it was bread, the staff of life. This theme is the key to the grain sacrifice. All through the Old Testament you find people offering the grain sacrifice, often in the form of three loaves of bread. And in the tabernacle there was the showbread--the twelve loaves that God had commanded to be displayed on a special table before Him at all times (see Exodus 25:30).
Why was the sacrifice of bread so important in Leviticus? The reason becomes apparent when you turn to the New Testament and see how Jesus spoke of Himself After the great miracle when He fed five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, Jesus told the people, "For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world...I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty" (John 6:33-35). He told the people that He Himself was to he their food. We are to feed upon the character, person, and life of Jesus, because He is the bread of life from heaven.
The words of Jesus give us a clue as to what the grain sacrifice depicts. It is a description of humanity as God intended it to he. Humanity was displayed in its perfect form only in Jesus Christ--the perfect, unsullied, God-pleasing humanity of the Lord Jesus.
Many people today think that the gospel, the good news, is that Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we might go to heaven when we die. But that is only part of the gospel. The truly good news is that Jesus Christ died for you in order that He might live in you today. It is the life of Jesus in us today that is the exciting part of Christianity. If you are not linked with His humanity and all that He is, then you are not enjoying the fullness of the Christian experience, because that is what Christianity is all about.
"I have been crucified with Christ," wrote the apostle Paul, "and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20a). The perfect humanity of Jesus Christ is available to live in us and through us. All the fullness of His life, the fineness of His character, the balanced quality of His humanity--all of this is available to us. As His character becomes more and more our character, we can offer our humanity back to God to use as He pleases. When we do, our very lives become "an aroma pleasing to the LORD." That is the fullness of the gospel, and that is what the grain sacrifice is all about.
Fine flour is a beautiful symbol of redeemed or idealized humanity. In Scripture, fine flour is used to symbolize either the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ or the redeemed and refined humanity of those who are new creations in Christ. If you take a pinch of fine flour and run it through your fingers, you'll find that you can't feel any coarseness, any granularity, any roughness. It is smooth, powdery, and consistent.
This is why fine flour is such an apt picture of the humanity of Jesus, and of humanity, as God intended us to be. Now, if we wanted to symbolize our natural humanity as it is, apart from Jesus Christ, it would be something like rough-cut oatmeal, coarse with chips of husk and straw and other chaff. But humanity as God made its to be, and as He intends us to be, is a balanced life, smooth and refined and consistent.
What is Included
Three things always had to he included in the grain sacrifice and two things always were excluded. Each of these items has great symbolic importance for our lives. The three things always included were oil, incense, and salt. Every mention of the grain sacrifice in any form includes oil and incense. The oil was used in two ways: It was mingled with the fine flour, and it was also poured on top of it. This is very instructive, as we will soon see. The incense was a perfume, a delightful fragrance. The use of salt is specified in Leviticus 2:13:
"Season all your grain offerings with salt. Do not leave the salt of the covenant of your God out of your grain offerings; add salt to all your offerings."
Again, we have these marvelous visual aids that God uses to teach us what He wants to accomplish in our lives. In our new humanity, which we have received in Christ, God wants to make sure that three elements are present--elements which are symbolized in the grain sacrifice.
The first element is oil, that is a type, or picture, of the Holy Spirit. All through the Scriptures you find that oil symbolizes the Spirit of God. In the grain sacrifice, the oil is to be used in two ways. First, it mingles with our humanity. This speaks of the indwelling Spirit. When you became a Christian by faith in Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God was poured out in your heart (see Romans 5:5). The Spirit came to live in you, and He has become an inseparable part of you, mingled with your humanity. This is called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit, we are all baptized into one body, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:13.
As you live the Christian life, you also need to have the Spirit anointing you and empowering you. To be anointed with the Spirit is to have the Spirit poured out on you. As Paul goes on to say in that same verse, "and we were all given the one Spirit to drink." This was true of Jesus Christ in His life. He was filled with the Spirit from His mother's womb. But then came the day when, in the baptism at the river Jordan, the Spirit of God anointed Him for His ministry.
The second element that must he added is incense, most commonly frankincense, a dried resin extracted from the boswellia tree, which grows from Africa to India. Leviticus 2:2 says, "The priest shall take a handful of the fine flour and oil, together with all the incense, and burn this as a memorial portion on the altar, an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD."
When the Scriptures talk about "an aroma pleasing to the LORD," they speak of something that God desires in our lives--not something outward and showy but something inward and authentic. What this is, I believe, is made clear by various passages in Scripture which speak of the things that delight God. Let's look at just a few.
I will praise God's name in song
and glorify him with thanksgiving.
This will please the LORD more than an ox,
more than a bull with its horns and hoofs (Psalm 69:30-31).
Don't bother to bring the ox or the bull! Just bring a thankful, cheerful, praise-filled heart! That will please the Lord. And in the New Testament we read:
Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that confess his name. And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased (Hebrews 13:15-16).
In these and other passages, God tells us that the fragrant, pleasing frankincense of our lives is a thankful, cheerful, obedient heart. That is what delights Him. As we present our redeemed humanity to Him, that is what He wants to see.
The third element that must be added is salt, which is a preservative. In the days before refrigeration, meat was preserved by salting it. Beef jerky is a form of salted, dried meat that you can buy today. It is preserved in much the same way that meat has been preserved for thousands of years.
Jesus once told His disciples, "You are the salt of the earth" (Matthew 5:13a). In other words, "You Christians are intended to be the thing that keeps society from becoming rotten and corrupt." He also said, "You are the light of the world" (Matthew 5:14a). Light is revealed truth. Salt is truth that is obeyed in the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we want to understand what is wrong with the world today, we need only look to ourselves. The Christian church has been preaching the truth, but it has not been obeying that truth. Until Christians obey what God has said about living moral, merciful, compassionate lives, there is no preservative in society. The world will continue to decay around us. But when the church begins to live as salt and light, living out Christ-like love and righteousness toward the world, then the church will be salt and light as God intended it to be.
That is why God says in Leviticus, "Add salt to all your offerings."
What Is Excluded
There are two things that must be excluded from the grain sacrifice, and both are mentioned in Leviticus 2:11:
"Every grain offering you bring to the LORD must be made with out yeast, for you are not to burn any yeast or honey in an offering made to the LORD by fire."
God did not want any yeast added to the grain sacrifice. Why? Because yeast is a leavening agent. It causes bread dough to rise and expand, to puff itself up. Yeast, then, is a picture of that aspect of human nature that puffs us up: pride.
Someone once said, "Human beings are odd creatures. When you pat them on the back, their heads swell up." Pride is a sneaky thing. We in the church have figured our ingenious ways to disguise our pride and make it look like humility! It is said that a church once gave its pastor a medal for humility--but they had to take it away because he wore it! We are all susceptible to the yeast of pride.
Paul said to the Corinthians, "We know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge [that is, pride in one's knowledge] puffs up, but love builds up" (1 Corinthians 8:1). This is so true. God is saying, "When you come to offer your humanity to me, don't mix in any human ego with it. Don't do this for your own glory. Don't try to take credit for yourself." As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:29, no flesh, no human being, shall glory or boast in God's presence. God rejects the yeast of human pride.
The second thing that must be excluded from the grain sacrifice is honey. What's wrong with honey? Normally, nothing. Honey is usually spoken of in positive terms in the Bible, as when the Israelites were promised a land flowing with milk and honey. But here in Leviticus God rejects honey as part of the grain sacrifice.
Honey is not refined like sugar. It is natural sweetness. Honey, in this symbolic sense, refers to the natural sweetness of human nature. There are some people who could be called naturally sweet. They have a sweet disposition. They are charming. They are nice. But God says," Don't bring your natural sweetness to me because it won't work." The only sweetness God accepts is the sweetness of the perfect humanity of Jesus Christ working in us. He does not want our natural attributes. He refuses the honey we try to mix in with the grain sacrifice of our lives.
We Are Made to Respond
As you read through Leviticus and the rest of the Old Testament, you find that the people of Israel never offered a grain sacrifice by itself. It was always accompanied by an animal sacrifice. These grain offerings were designed to go with one of the animal sacrifices, and most often with the burnt offering. That is why it is put right next to the burnt offering in the order of the sacrifices. There is the burnt offering, then the grain offering, then the peace offering. The grain sacrifice is always offered in connection with the burnt sacrifice.
This tells us something significant about the meaning of this grain sacrifice. The burnt sacrifice was focused on our human need to be loved and accepted, our need to belong. But if God reaches out to you and says, "You are mine," then that lays a demand upon you, doesn't it? You need to do something; you need to respond to His love. He has reached out toward you; you need to reach back toward Him. That is what the grain sacrifice is all about. It tells us that we can never be fulfilled until we respond to the love of God.
We are made to respond. Usually we respond to others in the same way they approach us. If I approach you with affection and an embrace, you will probably respond to me the same way. If I approach you with criticism and accusation, you will probably criticize and accuse me in response.
God has reached out to us in love, so you'd think we would respond to Him in love as well, but it doesn't always work that way. Why not? Because there are sometimes barriers of fear, suspicion, and selfishness that need to be removed before we are able to respond in love to the love of God.
As long as we are unable to respond, there can he no progress in the love relationship between ourselves and God. The One who loves us and reaches out toward us cannot go any further in developing the relationship as long as we are unwilling or unable to respond. Even God, the Almighty and Omnipotent, can do nothing more with us until we say yes to what He has offered us.
That is why Hebrews 4:2 tells us that when the good news reached the people of Israel, "the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith." In other words, the people did not respond to the message God gave them. They did not say yes, so God could do nothing more to build a relationship with them. This is why Paul writes this heartfelt plea to the church in Corinth:
We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange--I speak as to my children--open wide your hearts also (2 Corinthians 6:11-13).
Paul says, in effect, "There's nothing limiting us. We love you and want to help you. I want to minister to you, but you won't respond. You won't open your heart."
This is why God is often represented in the Scriptures as pleading with humanity. "'Come now, let us reason together,' says the LORD" (Isaiah 1:18). "Come to me," says the Lord Jesus, "all you who are weary and burdened, and Twill give you rest" (Matthew 11:28). God is forever pleading with humanity to respond to the love He has demonstrated toward us.
In Hebrews 11:6 the most basic approach to God is described in this way: "Anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." God has been seeking us, and He says, "Now it is time for you to begin to seek me. I've been reaching out to you. Now it is up to you to respond to me." Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. This is the law of response in human nature. This is why John says, "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
This is why the grain sacrifice is the second of the five sacrifices. In the burnt sacrifice you have God reaching out and saying, "You're mine. I want you." But in the grain sacrifice we must respond and say, "Yes, Lord, I'm yours. I give myself to you." This is what God is after in our lives. Love creates the possibility of response. But if that response is refused, then a relationship is impossible.
This is why many Christians never seem to move beyond a certain level of relationship with God. At a certain point, some Christians stop saying yes to His love. Some of us reach a point where we sense that God wants us to turn over an area of our lives to Him--and we don't want to. We want to hold on to that habit, that character flaw, that addiction, that sin. So we say no to the love of God that reaches out to enfold us. As long as our response to God is no, the relationship is dead in the water. Nothing more can happen.
This is why we sometimes have to go through a time of crisis or trial before we will finally turn to God and say yes. As we noted before, God sometimes has to remove barriers of fear, suspicion, and selfishness from our lives before we are finally ready and willing to respond in love to the love of God. And sometimes the only way to remove those barriers is through a time of crisis. When all the props are knocked out from under us, when we can no longer rely on ourselves but must seek God's help, then we finally turn to God and say, "Yes, Lord! I accept your love for me! Help me!"
Of course, it is far better if we never have to go through such a trial before we will say yes to God. It is much better if, in the quietness of our hearts, we will simply and gratefully respond to the love God has shown us and say, "Lord, here I am. Here is my redeemed humanity, with its oil and frankincense and salt, but with no leaven and no honey. I want to be yours, so that today you can express all that you are through me. I give myself to you. Here I am, Lord. Let's walk together this day."
When you make that response to God, you offer Him the grain sacrifice of your life, just as Jesus, the Son of God, continually offered the beauty of His life, the spotlessness of His humanity, in an ongoing relationship with the Father. Is there some area of your life that you have withheld from God? Is there something in your life that keeps you from responding to His love and saying yes to a relationship with Him?
I pray that you will respond to Him by offering Him your whole heart, your whole life, without any reservation or holding back. Do not shut Him out. He loves you and wants to build a relationship with you. He wants to live through you, so that you can become all you were created to be.
So respond to Him, my friend. Say, "Yes, Lord, here I am. I need your love. I need to belong. I need to be identified with you. And as you have reached out to me, I now reach out to you. Let this be my grain offering to you, so that everything you are, I may be."
Amen!
Leviticus 3 and 7
Some years ago, a number of artists were commissioned to paint a picture of peace. One artist depicted peace as a calm and tranquil sea under the moonlight. Another depicted peace as a mother and child reading a book together in a sunlit garden. But the picture that won the prize pictured a turbulent mountain waterfall with its noisily plunging waters. Yet, half-hidden behind the waterfall, not far from the thundering waters, was a bird's nest with a mother bird sitting quietly and serenely on her eggs. That was true peace--a safe and quiet little space in the midst of a noisy and raucous world.
In Leviticus 3 we come to the third of the five sacrifices, and we find that this third offering is a picture of peace in the midst of trouble and conflict. This offering has beautiful power to symbolize a truth that affects us deeply in our relationship with Jesus Christ. All five of these offerings are pictures of aspects of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and these five sacrifices follow a logical order. The first sacrifice, the burnt offering, testifies of the universal human need for love. The second sacrifice, the grain offering, speaks of the need for our response to God's love. And when we respond to His love, we experience joy.
In this third sacrifice, God pictures for us out universal need for peace. It is no accident that in Galatians 5:22, where Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, the order of the first three elements of that fruit are love, joy, and peace. That order was planned by the God who designed human life. That is why these Old Testament sacrifices are just as eloquent in expressing human need as the New Testament revelation is. This is the evidence which convinces me that the Bible comes from a more-than-human hand. The truth of the Old Testament and the truth of the New Testament corroborate each other, proving both Testaments to be genuine products of God's own hand.
As the Israelites brought these sacrifices, they were learning these truths. It's true, of course, that an Israelite could bring a sacrificial offering in a purely mechanical and perfunctory way, just as some people today attend church mechanically and without sincerity. If an Israelite made a sacrifice to God without his heart being right with God, the sacrifice was worth nothing. It was nothing but a dead ritual, a meaningless act that God would not bless. We can attend church the same way today, singing hymns without meaning the words, hearing a sermon without applying it to our lives, bowing our heads in prayer without bowing our hearts. If that is the way we attend church, we might as well have stayed home and read the Sunday newspaper instead.
God does not want ritual for ritual's sake. The rites and rituals of Leviticus are meaningful only if they reflect the reality of our lives. When an Israelite brought a grain offering to God, he was to do so as a joyful response to God's love. In the grain offering the Israelite was opening up his life to God.
Now here, in the symbolism of the peace offering, God pictures for us how He meets another basic, fundamental need of the human heart--the need for peace. It is impossible to live a fulfilled, satisfying life without peace.
Essentially the Bible talks about two kinds of peace: (1) the peace of God, the supernatural sense of peace that comes through God's presence--the peace of knowing that all is well, even in the midst of trouble, because God is in control; and (2) peace with God, the experience of God's forgiveness.
This second kind of peace, peace with God, will be pictured for us in the next two sacrifices, the sin sacrifice and the trespass sacrifice. But the peace offering pictures for us the first kind of peace, the peace of God. It is peace not in the sense of an end to hostilities but in the sense of emotional stability of an untroubled heart. That is what we need: a sense of security of wellbeing, of confidence that things are under God's control and that all things will ultimately work together for good, even though things are not good right now.
The peace of the peace offering is what was pictured by that painting of the mother bird sitting on her eggs beside the waterfall. That is the kind of peace we can have--peace in the midst of trouble and conflict. That is the peace God pictures for us in the peace sacrifice.
Choosing What Is Better--the Peace of God
The kind of peace pictured in this sacrifice is best known by its absence. We know when we are not at peace. We have all felt that sense of tension and anxiety, the butterflies in the stomach that won't go away, the inability to get your mind off a troubling subject. No matter what you do, it is there, throbbing inside you. That is the absence of peace.
A lack of peace can create all kinds of disturbances in the body--nervous twitches, indigestion, ulcers, insomnia, and even emotional breakdown and nervous collapse. So the need for peace is a fundamental human need. (If you think the Bible is not practical, you have not even begun to understand this Book. It deals with human life as it really is.)
You probably recall the story of Mary and Martha in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 10:38-42). When Jesus visits their home, like any good hostess, Martha goes out into the kitchen and gets busy preparing a sumptuous dinner in the Lord's honor. She is a perfectionist, and she must have everything just so--but Jesus has come unexpectedly, so she is unprepared.
She tries her best, but she becomes nervous and upset when she doesn't have all the kitchen resources she wants to put on a fabulous feast. To put this story in an updated context, imagine Martha opening cupboards, rummaging in her refrigerator, wondering, What shall I do? Perhaps she spills flour on the linoleum and the coffee boils over and everything is ruined. Finally, she can't take the pressure anymore. She goes into the living room where her sister, Mary, sits at the feet of Jesus, quietly listening to Him. Martha instantly becomes angry that her sister is not helping in the kitchen. But it's not Mary that she blames. Instead, she blames Jesus!
"Lord," Martha snaps, "don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" She is probably annoyed with Jesus for showing up without any advance warning. This sort of blaming behavior is characteristic of a troubled heart.
Now, I have always appreciated the fact that Martha at least did not hold anything in. I suspect Jesus appreciated her candor as well. She wasn't the kind of person who goes into an icy silence for weeks. Martha got it off her chest. This little rhyme could well have been written to describe Martha:
There's a gladness in her gladness when she's glad,
And a sadness in her sadness when she's sad.
But the gladness in her gladness,
And the sadness in her sadness,
Are nothing to her madness when she's mad!
How does Jesus answer when Martha blames Him for her stress and anxiety? He replies, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not he taken away from her." Only one thing is needed, Jesus says. What is that one thing? Peace. Mary chose peace by listening to the One who could set her mind at ease. Martha had missed it by worrying and obsessing over the details of a meal.
But didn't Martha have a right to be upset over the fact that Mary didn't help with the meal? In the original Greek version of this account there is a strong suggestion that Mary had already been in the kitchen and had done her part. She had prepared a simple little repast that was perfectly adequate. But Martha wanted to put on a banquet, and she became frustrated when she didn't have everything needed to put on an elaborate show of a meal.
Martha had missed the point of the Lord's visit, but Mary had chosen the one thing that was needed: peace. That kind of peace--the peace of God that passes human understanding--is what the peace offering is all about.
Four Distinctives of the Peace Sacrifice
The New International Version of the Bible, from which we take our text, is a very good and readable translation. For some reason, the editors of the NIV have called the peace sacrifice by a different name, "the fellowship offering," with a note at the bottom of the page that reads, "Traditionally peace offering." Most of the other translations of this text, including the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version, and the New American Standard Bible, use the term peace offering. In reproducing the NIV text of Leviticus 3 (and throughout the rest of this book), therefore, I have replaced the word fellowship with the bracketed word [peace]:
"If someone's offering is a [peace] offering, and he offers an animal from the herd, whether male or female, he is to present before the LORD an animal without defect. He is to lay his hand on the head of his offering and slaughter it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. Then Aaron sons the priests shall sprinkle the blood against the altar on all sides. From the [peace] offering he is to bring a sacrifice made to the LORD by fire: all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the coveting of the liver, which he will remove with the kidneys. Then Aaron's sons are to burn it on the altar on top of the burnt offering that is on the burning wood, as an offering made by fire, an aroma pleasing to the LORD.
"If he offers an animal from the flock as a [peace] offering to the LORD, he is to offer a male or female without defect. If he offers a lamb, he is to present it before the LORD. He is to lay his hand on the head of his offering and slaughter it in front of the Tent of Meeting. Then Aaron's sons shall sprinkle its blood against the altar on all sides. From the [peace] offering he is to bring a sacrifice made to the LORD by fire: its fat, the entire fat tail cut off close to the backbone, all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the covering of the liver, which he will remove with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made to the LORD by fire.
"If his offering is a goat, he is to present it before the LORD. He is to lay his hand on its head and slaughter it in front of the Tent of Meeting. Then Aaron's sons shall sprinkle its blood against the altar on all sides. From what he offers he is to make this offering to the LORD by fire: all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the covering of the liver, which he will remove with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made by fire, a pleasing aroma. All the fat is the LORD'S.
"This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood" (Leviticus 3:1-17).
Here in Leviticus 3 we notice four distinctives about the peace sacrifice that mark it as different from the other sacrifices we have examined. The first distinctive is that the peace offering could be either a male or a female animal.
"If someone's offering is a [peace] offering, and he offers an animal from the herd, whether male or female, he is to present before the LORD an animal without defect .... If he offers an animal from the flock as a [peace] offering to the LORD, he is to offer a male or female without defect" (Leviticus 3:1, 6).
Leviticus 3:12 says that it was also possible to offer a goat; in any case, the animal could he male or female. That is significant. God makes these distinctions in order to impart truth: The burnt offering could be only a male because it deals with man in his capacity to rule, his dominion over all things. And the one thing that is necessary to a man in order that he be able to rule is that he himself be possessed and loved. That is why a male was absolutely required for a burnt offering.
But here in the peace offering we are not dealing with man in terms of his overall purpose in life, his archetypal relationship. We are dealing now with humanity and the human condition. It does not make any difference whether you are a leader or a follower, whether you are in a position of authority or not. You need peace in any case. Therefore, either a male or a female is an adequate expression of the peace offering. (Now, perhaps, it is becoming clear why the distinctions between the five sacrifices are so important to recognize.)
The second distinctive mark of the peace offering was that all the fat was to be consumed upon the altar.
"From the [peace] offering he is to bring a sacrifice made to the LORD by fire: its fat, the entire fat tail cut off close to the backbone, all the fat that covers the inner parts or is connected to them, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins, and the covering of the liver, which he will remove with the kidneys. The priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made to the LORD by fire" (Leviticus 3:3-5).
Similar provisions for the offering of lambs and goats are contained in Leviticus 3:9-11, 14-15. Look also at Leviticus 3:16-17:
"The priest shall burn them on the altar as food, an offering made by fire, a pleasing aroma. All the fat is the Low's. This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: You must not eat any fat or any blood."
This restriction is explained further in Leviticus 7. Why were the Israelites not permitted to ear any of the fat or blood? Blood is a symbol of the life. This is God's way of impressing upon the Hebrew people, and upon all of us, that life is sacred to God. Life belongs to God. It is His to control. Humanity should treat life with respect and care. The Hebrews were reminded of this fact every time they were told they were not to eat blood.
The fat, too, is the Lord's. In the Scriptures, fat is a symbol of the richness of life. We think of fat-marbled meat as rich meat, the prime cut, and that is exactly what this symbol portrays. The richness of life comes from God and belongs to God.
All that is rich and enjoyable in life comes from God. As Paul writes, "Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?" (Romans 2:4). God showers His love and His richness upon the just and the unjust alike in order that He might show its all that everything that makes life worth living comes only from God. As James puts it, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17).
The Hebrew people were told to take the fat and carefully remove it, especially the interior fat that was on the inner organs of the body. They were being taught that all the inner richness of life, everything that delights a person from within, is from God, belongs to God, and comes only from God.
A Picture of the Love and Strength of Jesus
The third distinctive mark of the peace offering is extremely important. We find it described in the law of the peace offering in Leviticus 7:28-34:
The LORD said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites: 'Anyone who brings a [peace] offering to the LORD is to bring part of it as his sacrifice to the LORD. With his own hands he is to bring the offering made to the LORD by fire; he is to bring the fat, together with the breast, and wave the breast before the LORD as a wave offering. The priest shall burn the fat on the altar, but the breast belongs to Aaron and his sons. You are to give the right thigh of your [peace] offerings to the priest as a contribution. The son of Aaron who offers the blood and the fat of the [peace] offering shall have the right thigh as his share. From the [peace] offerings of the Israelites, I have taken the breast that is waved and the thigh that is presented and have given them to Aaron the priest and his sons as their regular share from the Israelites.'"
Only two portions of the peace offering animal were to be eaten: the breast and the right thigh. But before they were eaten, they were offered, in a sense, to the Lord. They were not burned upon the altar. That would have ruined them as food for the priests. They were me