All right, I'm going to try and do the impossible in the next few weeks. Somebody asked me right before the service started, are you really going to preach this book? I've never heard anybody ever even try it. And I said, neither have I. So I'm going to tell you a little story that I made up, but I think it's probably Pretty typical. In fact, when we were at our RBNET meetings, one of the preachers in one of the mornings basically said as much as what I'm gonna say here. So this guy is a typical new convert. He's eager to learn and he wants to obey God. And so he asks his mentor, what can I do to grow as a Christian? And he was told, go read your Bible. So he embarks on a new journey to read through the whole Bible in a year. Have any of you ever tried this? Okay? The reading requirements begin easily enough, just 18 verses in the Gospel of John. But he quickly learns that this won't be the easiest of assignments. Four chapters a day of Genesis keep him very busy, and he's a slow reader. But the material's interesting, and it's even fun, and so every day he gets a little more excited. Then after a few chapters, it changes over to Job, because what he's doing is he's reading through the Bible chronologically. This is the way that I've done it most of the times I've tried it. Job is an unexpected change of pace, certainly readable and understandable. Then he returns back to Genesis, finishes that, and begins making his way through Exodus. It's now well into February. He's been in this for several weeks, and things are going amazingly well. He's learning so much about his new faith and his God. And suddenly he comes to the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Now he's heard about those before, but he wasn't prepared for what followed. Several chapters of strange and sometimes outdated feeling laws, followed by a couple of interesting historical chapters, followed by over a dozen chapters that give exhaustive and exhausting detail about how Moses is to make a tabernacle. It's kind of hard to stay awake, especially when he's reading night after night after a long day of work. To make matters worse, several of those chapters repeat themselves verbatim. Why do I have to keep reading the same thing? Then he enters into the impossible. He enters into Leviticus. Chapter after chapter of tedious, monotonous laws about things that no one does anymore, sacrificing animals, going to a temple with various offerings, and so on. With the addition of scores of seemingly random and inexplicable rules from everything to moldy houses, to nocturnal emissions, to lists of clean and unclean animals, he has absolutely no idea what the point of this is. He feels like throwing the book across the room, but he thinks better of it because he knows it's God's word. But if this is the way the rest of the Bible is going to be, he's not sure he can read another chapter. Now, more than one sincere Christian has felt this way when they come to Leviticus. This book is so ancient and it's so different from anything resembling the modern world that most people have no idea what to think about it. Many preachers won't touch it, and teachers won't offer it as classes, and students, if they are our classes, they're not going to take it. Entire systems of theology and ethics are rooted in overthrowing everything about this book. It just seems so hopelessly out of touch to so many people. In fact, it seems worse than that. It seems downright mean in several places. I don't blame people for not understanding the book. Although these kinds of visceral reactions against it are rather unfathomable to me. I mean, you can go and buy a study Bible to help you. But we live in an age that does not want to look deeply into God's word. And Leviticus is one of the deepest parts of God's word. And one that few understand because it's so hard to even want to care. But did you know that this 27 chapters book contains more direct speech by God himself than any other book in the Bible? And have you considered that it is placed at the center of the Torah, the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, which forms the foundation of all scripture? One would think that that's probably important. Indeed, I would argue that it's at the heart of most of what the New Testament refers to when it talks about the Old Covenant passing away. And even that is misunderstood. There is much confusion here because many people think that the language refers of the Old Covenant to the Ten Commandments as if we're no longer under any sense of obeying them because we're in an age of grace. They don't understand Leviticus. We're living in a wretched generation in the church, friends. We are wretched intellectually. We are wretched morally. Holiness is passe. Nothing is sacred. Certainly not space that we dwell in. Religion is so yesterday. Spirituality is what's in. Ritual is set aside for the novel, or at least the mystical. Monotony and daily rhythms have to give way to adrenaline rushes of ever-renewing excitements in our day. The God of love is no longer the Levitical God of wrath, that's what we're told. We're totally forgiven in Christ, so let's move on with the living already. And because of these things and more, I'm undertaking to study this book as a church together. Today, I will only be introducing the book. And I'm going to be looking at only the first verse. And don't worry, I'm not gonna go one verse at a time through Leviticus, okay? I just want to look at the one verse today as a way of introducing the book. It's the first verse, is what it says. The Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting. Now you can hear, even at the beginning, how the Lord is speaking directly. The Lord called Moses, right? Now later, we will look at the expansions of this verse in the Targums. And we'll see that they do two things for us that will help us. They're going to root this verse back in a very important passage in Exodus. And then they will ground the whole book in the most important thing that we can think of as God works its message out in our souls. And that is about the one who is speaking to Moses. So let's kind of deal with some details of the book. First question I want to ask is who wrote Leviticus? Now this is probably the most controversial and debated question in the Pentateuch as a whole, so that's all five books, not just Leviticus, at least it is today. In the 19th century, Protestant so-called higher critics sought to do something kind of unique in history. They wanted to get behind the text to try and figure out how it came down to us. which is actually kind of an interesting idea to try to do. What they were trying to do was take it apart and then put it back together in order to figure out things like authorship. And when I took a class on the Pentateuch in college, this was 30 years ago, I remember both a feeling of utter boredom when the guy was talking about this and not a little anger at my professor for spending so much time talking about what he called the documentary hypothesis. It's sometimes called J-E-P-D, and if you are going to want to read through Leviticus at all in kind of studying this with me as we go through it, you're going to run across this. It's inevitable, so I'm going to tell you just a little bit about it. What this idea is that there was supposedly about four very late sources from about 850 to 500 BC that even later editors used to compile the whole Pentateuch. And the letters are just kind of named after what they have nicknamed these sources. And the idea was that there was at least four of them that had different parts of the Pentateuch and each kind of had their own take on the story. And then probably around the time of Ezra or later, some scribe or maybe a group of scribes decided that they would compile this all together in five books. So Leviticus was written in this thinking almost entirely by a very late priest after the return from exile in an attempt to get the Jews to take their religion seriously. After all, it had just happened to them in Babylon. So it should be no surprise that this theory remains the dominant one in mainline schools to this day, for about 150 years, I suppose. Now, evangelicals have given very serious pushback to it, in part because the whole point was to subvert the Christians' belief in the authority of the Bible. It's just a human book. Moses didn't really write it, other Jews did. Now, there's editorializing that takes place throughout the Pentateuch. And the idea is that as you're copying the scrolls for the next generation, at some point, you're so far removed from what Moses said that, well, you need to kind of add a little bit of an editorial note to help him understand what's going on there. So you have things like different spellings of Nephilim so that an Aramaic speaker would know what that is. Or you have someone writing about Moses' death. Moses did not write about his own death, okay? Some people actually think that he did. He didn't. It's an editor later on. Or you might come across something that says, and it's still here to this day, or something like that. That's an editorial note to help the people understand something about the text that the scribe thought was important. But I think that it's time that Christians take seriously again what Christians and Jews believed about the authorship of this book for millennia. That God gave it to Moses and oversaw the transmission of the text in its final form. However interesting that editorial process may be, it's far more important to take the basic claim that this is Moses' book at face value. I think it's absolutely essential because that's how the book starts off, right? The Lord spoke to Moses and said, and if that's not true, then why care about anything that it says? So our very first verse, the Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting. God spoke to Moses over the course of his time in the wilderness. Moses faithfully wrote it down and most likely, soon as the tabernacle had been completed is when this book began to be written. So there is human authorship and there is divine authorship. Now, Andrew Bonner is the youngest brother of the famous hymn writer, Horatius, in our hymnal. And he has a commentary on Leviticus that I'll probably be using quite a bit. This is what he says. He says, there is no book in the whole compass of that inspired volume which the Holy Ghost has given us that contains more of the very words of God than Leviticus. It is God that is the direct speaker in almost every page. His gracious words, listen to how he puts that, His gracious words are recorded in the form wherein they were uttered. This consideration cannot fail to send us to the study of it with a singular interest and attention. And that's a very different way to approach the book than tearing it apart. okay, in order to somehow get back to the truth behind it. This is the approach of faith, the only way a Christian should ever come to the Holy Scripture. So that's the authorship. I want to look at some structures and themes here. So what is Leviticus about? So first, it has a singular theme that all the other things that you read in the book drive home. This is what someone has said. Leviticus seems to have a unified overall theme, which is how to protect the holiness of the house of God. All right? That's what the book is about. How to protect the holiness of the house of God. I want you to notice the very first verse again. The Lord is speaking to Moses from the tent of meeting. This is his house. This is established right away in the first verse. And so in this way, other themes like holiness and purity and sin and God's wrath and man and his soul and ritual and symbolism and typology, all of this is going to fit into the larger purpose of the book, how to maintain the holiness of God's house. So how does all of this unfold? I'm going to give you a kind of big picture way of thinking about the book of Leviticus. The most common way that scholars do this is to look at the book linearly. Usually they'll break it up into about four sections, okay? Here's a couple of examples. The first seven chapters are about offerings, various kinds of offerings. Then the next three chapters are ritual systems that are founded. So the things that took place that were commanded in Exodus, now they're going to be carried out in Leviticus. Then you have about five chapters of cleanliness laws, and then you have the last 10 or so chapters are what they call the holiness code. Okay, and so basically those are the way that those kinds of outlines run. I think they're helpful. I also think they're kind of cold and clinical ways of approaching the book. So it might be better to see it grouped thematically. And so you can do it like this. You can have the first 10 chapters talking about approaching the house of God. Then you have the next five chapters which are cleansing the house of God. And then you have the last chapters which are meeting with God at the house of God. And I like this one for its ability to help you understand the key theme of the book, the house of God. Leviticus tells us about how we are to approach a holy God who comes to dwell in our midst. This concerns his space, his house, his stuff, his people, his land, and so on. And then it's also possible to see the book as a kind of a complex chiasm, or someone calls it a ring. And when you do that, chapter 19 becomes the center of the whole book. And that adds fascinating layers that help us bring out a point made by Mary Douglas in her commentaries on Leviticus. Why do we find Leviticus so hard to read, she basically asks. Perhaps it's because we're approaching it the wrong way. We do not let it affect us the way it was written. Instead, we demand that it fits our agenda. And often a modern agenda is in direct conflict with the book. And so people throw the book out, as so many have done today. Or maybe we take it one chapter at a time and so we get lost in the trees and we're not able to see the forest. This isn't proverbs. It's written more like a Chinese poem or an English sonnet. So this is what she says, in the sonnet, there is the expectation that each part contributes fully to the development of the rhyme structure, that a complex theme will be deployed and that the ending will return to enlarge and more richly affirm the opening lines. The meaning which is elusive and scattered in the parts are read in isolation or in strict linear sequence becomes coherent. So, That means that the beginning of this book is very important, and it also means that you have to stick with it. All will become clear at the end. And part of my purpose today is to help take you to this ultimate purpose before our time is finished, so that you can understand the whole point of Leviticus up front. So those are kind of some structure and theme things. Let's look at the title of the book. The title. Leviticus. This comes from the Latin word Leviticus, all right? So that's where we get it. It's a translation of the Greek word leutikon, which you find in Hebrews. This is the title that the Septuagint translators chose to give the book. Now you might think that this title refers to the Levites. The Levites are actually only mentioned a single time in the book, and that's kind of almost as an afterthought. The title does not refer to the Levites. Rather, it refers to Levi, who is the third son of Jacob, and through him to the priests. And hence, the book is often called by the Jews something like the Manual of the Priests, or the Book of the Priests, or the Law of the Priests. Those are the titles that they give this book. But you say, isn't a Levite a priest? This is a very important question. The answer is no. All priests are Levites, but not all Levites are priests. Priests are simply those people who descend from the tribe of Levi, the third born of Jacob through Leah. There was a Levitical order that certain qualified men from the tribe could serve in the tabernacle in a kind of Old Testament equivalent to the diaconate. They were called the Levites. Their responsibilities were to serve and to guard the house of God. But it was the priest's duty to offer sacrifices. They were the special intercessors that represented man to God. Levites couldn't do that. They could only aid. So just for a moment, I want you to consider Levi. This means you have to go back to Genesis a little bit, okay? There's one particular bizarre story in Genesis where the sisters of Jacob's sons, the sister, Dinah, is raped. And so there's a calculated and brutal plot that's carried out by Levi and his brother Simeon. to make the entire city swear to be circumcised in order that the king would have to take Dinah as his wife after he had disgraced her like this. All right? So the town agrees to this, incredibly enough. And when they're all lying there in total pain, these two men swoop down and kill the entire city in revenge. Now, this becomes a curse for both Levi and Simeon. When you come to the end of Genesis, Jacob has this deathbed thing going on where he blesses or curses his sons. And at this, he says that God will scatter you in Jacob and disperse you in Israel. He says this to both Levi and Simeon. In other words, they're not going to have an inheritance among the tribes of Israel because of what they did here at this story. So what ends up happening is that Simeon ends up being enveloped by the tribe of Judah, and they cease to be a tribe with its own identity at all. They just get lost. But God does something that only God can or would do with Levi. He turns the curse into a blessing. His scattering is still going to happen, but now it's going to be for the benefit of the entire nation. In fact, this blessing is a covenantal blessing and I think this is really important. I want you to understand this point. The Book of Jubilees is what they call the Little Genesis and it's about 70% of Genesis and then kind of 30% of Jewish editions that are probably oral traditions. And they summarize the implication of this, this is what it says. The seed of Levi was chosen for the priesthood and Levitical orders to minister before the Lord always just as we angelic hosts do. And Levi and his sons will be blessed forever because he was zealous to do righteousness and judgment and vengeance against all who rose up against Israel. Jeremiah refers to then what is taking place here in this blessing now of Levi as the covenant with the Levitical priests. And Nehemiah calls it the covenant with the priesthood and the Levites. And Malachi calls it the covenant with Levi. When you read systematic theologies talking about covenants, they never talk about this covenant. It's inexplicable to me. They'll talk about and Noah, and they'll talk about Abraham, and Moses, and David, and they never talk about this covenant. Jubilees tells us that on his deathbed, Jacob said, Jacob did this, he put garments of the priesthood upon Levi, and he filled his hands, and Levi served as a priest in Bethel before Jacob, his father, apart from his 10 brothers, and he was a priest there. So all of this is to say that my belief for many years now has been that Leviticus is named this way because this is the covenantal document that God gave to the priests in order to guide them to be the guardians of Israel's religion for the sake of the people. And in this way, it's not the Mosaic covenant. It's a different covenant, just like the covenant with David is a different covenant from Moses. Now that has implications for what the Old Covenant means in the New Testament. I'm sure at some point in this book we'll talk about that, but that's for later. At this point I want to turn to the targums of this verse. And I do this for teaching purposes and for edification and for preaching, which is really why the targums were written in the first place. So let me tell you about a targum in case you've never heard this. A targum is basically a paraphrase. of the scripture that often gives additional commentary for the sake of helping people understand the meaning. So I kind of liken it to something like the Message Bible. I don't really consider the Message to be a Bible, it's more of a targum. It's helping people to understand the text. These things were written down in Aramaic not in Hebrew and that's one of the reasons that they're writing in a different language and so they need to explain things to people that were speaking a different language now and that were pretty far removed from a lot of the things in the scripture. So there are actually three targums on the Pentateuch. All of these date to the first and second centuries in terms of when they were written, but their traditions go back way before this. One of these targums is called Onkelos. He's possibly named after a Roman convert to Judaism, who many people think is actually the nephew of Emperor Hadrian, who built the famous wall between England and Scotland. It's almost always this one that sticks the closest to the text of the scripture, and in this case, it's almost identical. Onkelos says this, then the Lord called to Moses and spoke with him from the tent of meeting, saying. That's basically the scripture, right? There's two other targums that are called Neophyte or the Jerusalem targum, and then one called Pseudo-Jonathan. Both are probably four times as long as both Onkelos and the biblical text on this verse. Four times as long. and those two are virtually identical. So I just want to read one of them to you. Listen to this. This is how Leviticus starts in the Targum of Neophyte. And when Moses had finished erecting the tent and had anointed and consecrated it and all its accessories, and the altar and all its accessories, Moses thought in his heart and he said, Mount Sinai, whose consecration is but the consecration of a moment, and whose anointing is but the anointing of a moment or an hour, I did not ascend it until the time when it was spoken with me from before the Lord, the tent of meeting, whose consecration is an eternal consecration, and whose anointing is an eternal anointing, but it is just that I should not enter within it until the time is spoken with me before the Lord." Now that's all kind of like, what in the world is that even talking about? I'll tell you here in a minute. Finishes, then the Debera, or the word, called to Moses and the Lord spoke with him from the tent of meeting saying, so it ends with the scripture. But it gives all this preliminary information at the beginning. What's so interesting about it is that what this is doing is it's rooting Leviticus in Exodus 19 in the language that we read in the law this morning of the short moment, the three hour idea, okay? So, it's a vital chapter to understand Exodus 19 if you're gonna read Leviticus. So, what this is doing is it's connecting the house and the mountain, okay? Sinai's the mountain, the tabernacle's the house. In scripture, God dwells on mountains and then God dwells in a tabernacle or a temple. He changes the place of his dwelling. So what happened on Mount Sinai when Moses went up is now being repeated in Leviticus. But now it's from the confines of the tent of meeting. This is God's new house. So Moses is in God's house and the Lord is speaking directly to him. That's the first thing it's doing. Second, it is in this chapter in Exodus 19 that Israel is called a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Now this is something that Peter and John both say when they're talking to Christians. The point is, there was a moment when the entire nation of Israel was considered priests, not just one tribe. And in the New Testament, that status transforms from the physical nation of Israel to the spiritual priesthood of the believer in Christ. But something terrible happens in between. As this chapter unfolds, we learn that Israel is eager to obey the Lord. Moses then has them prepare for their priestly washing and consecration. And on the third day, which is what the Targum's referring to when it talks about a brief moment or an hour, there was thunder and lightning and a very loud trumpet blast. And the angels of Sinai were signaling that the Lord had come in his new sanctuary. And it was terrifying, as we read earlier. God warns the people not to come near. But then a peculiar thing is talked about. It says, let the Levites who come near to the Lord consecrate, or let the priests who come near the Lord consecrate themselves. Let them go down and come up and bring Aaron with you, but do not let the priests and the people break through to come up to the Lord, lest he break out against them. So what this is doing is that it's saying that there are priests, a subclass, a group of Levites that are in the midst of the priest of the nation. The whole nation is considered priests and yet you have this tribe of priests here. This is only explained by what happened with the man Levi and the promise God gave to him. Okay, so the chapter ends, God comes in the next chapter, gives the Ten Commandments, and the people are completely terrified. And then Moses disappears for 40 days. And by the time that they, you know, you come to day 35 or whatever, they've totally lost hope. And they decide to take matters into their own hands. They forsake the holy worship of God. And where do they do it? They forsake it in his own holy territory at the mountain where he dwells. And they fashion him in their image and they desperately want to control him because nothing is happening. Moses is dead and they are lost in a barren waste to die, at least that's what they think. So then the story continues and God hears the partying of the people down at the bottom of the mountain and he tells Moses that he's so angry that he's going to destroy them all. But Moses acts like a good priest and he intercedes for the people and the angel of God stays his hand and he doesn't kill him. God's wrath is staved off. Almost. Almost. Because when Moses comes back down, something happens. The sons of Levi gather to him. And remember, he's a Levite, by the way. That's where he comes from, just like his brother Aaron. And then, like their ancestor before them, they take out their swords and they begin hacking the people to pieces. It's exactly what Levi did. This time, though, it was at the Lord's command. God commanded them to do this. Now, what has happened in this event is so significant that the entire book of Leviticus needs to be written. So Scott Hahn summarizes this, he says, the expression kingdom of priests is never again applied to the Old Testament Israel as a nation. The rabbis recognize this loss of royal priestly privileges. So what happens? The Golden Calf Incident made it necessary for Moses to implement a complex program of covenant renewal before the first generation could leave Sinai for one year. This renewal of the covenant with Israel is precisely what sets about doing in Exodus 35 through 40, and then in Leviticus 1 through 26. In other words, almost the entire book. In Exodus 34, God renews the Sinai covenant that he had ratified earlier in Exodus 24. He then extends a new and distinct covenant first to Aaron at the end of Exodus, and then to the priests and his sons throughout the first 16 chapters of Leviticus. And this new Levitical covenant will govern all the congregation of Israel in the last half of the book of Leviticus. In this bicovenental system then, the priestly code was formulated to teach and prepare Aaron and his sons and the Levites to assume priestly authority over the 12 tribes because they lost their priestly status. Because of what happened at Mount Sinai with a golden calf, Leviticus has to be written, right? It is this covenant renewal that allows God to not destroy the people. and more to actually give them a chance at a new beginning, even though they sinned so mightily against him. But things are different now after the golden calf than they were before. Their access to God will have to be mediated by the Aaronic priests. because they're not priests themselves anymore. A major theme of Leviticus therefore comes to the foreground. You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules. If a man does them, he shall live by them. I am the Lord. That's Leviticus 18.5. And in this way, you can only understand Leviticus once you understand the stories of Genesis and Exodus. And yet this book becomes the very heart of the Pentateuch. Leviticus is the middle book of the five. Why? Why would this book actually be called Sifra, the book, by the Jews? Well, I think you just heard why. If you do what God says, you will live. If you do not, you will die. That's very serious, isn't it? All of this turns upon a vital fact that when God chooses to dwell in your midst, you become his people. It is his land and things have to be consecrated because they belong to the Lord, not to you. And that's what it means to learn to be God's people. He has to show you what this means in order to show you what he is like. So Leviticus, reading Leviticus impresses one thing upon the reader if you sit down and read it. What it impresses upon you is that this is very serious business. From the tedious nature of the preparation of the various offerings. I mean, just think about what we read just in the Day of Atonement. How long would it take you to memorize all the things Moses had to do there? That's just for that one thing. Okay, to the laborious recitation of law after law after law, to the impression that you get is that while this covenant gives the nation a second chance, they had better learn how severe it is when they break the covenant. In fact, I believe the difficulty many people have in reading the book is part of the point of the book. You cannot come away from this thinking that God takes purity and holiness in any way other than deadly seriously. In fact, I think part of the purpose is to overwhelm you in this, so that in the impossibility of carrying out the things, you might end up seeing the grace in the book. And yes, there is much grace in Leviticus. Here's Bonner again, he says, This is the glorious attraction of the book to every reader who feels himself a sinner. The New Testament has about 40 references to its various ordinances. The rites here detailed were very typical, or were typical, and every type was designed and intended by God to bear resemblance to some spiritual truth. The likeness between type and anti-type is never accidental. The very excellency of these rites consists in their being chosen by God for the end of foreshadowing good things to come. So I want to say something provocative at this point. And in this case, I do not think that, I do not think that doing these laws, remember I read that verse, okay, back in Leviticus, you shall therefore keep my statutes and rules. If a man does them, he shall live by them. I do not think that doing these laws refers particularly to moral commandments. That is to keeping the 10 commandments. It isn't that God doesn't care if you keep those, of course he does. Those commandments exist for all peoples at all times, generally speaking. And Paul seems to take that verse and apply it both to the moral and ceremonial law, but in the context of living by them, this is Leviticus we're talking about. Immediately after it gives that verse, it says the Lord starts talking about sexual purity laws. And you might think that those are just kind of fleshing out of adultery commandment. And so it's just purely moral when you read them. And of course, there's obviously a moral component to those things. But the focus of those is not so much moral as it is ritual. Now there's obviously overlap, but the two are not the same thing. So for instance, when you're reading through this book, you come to, what's the deal with wearing clothing made of two different kinds of material? Like probably everyone in this room is doing that right now. That's not a moral thing, okay? Or just because God says an eagle is, quote, unclean and even worse, quote, detestable, this does not mean that an eagle is like an aberration that comes from the fall and God hates eagles. It's not the point. This is... about symbolism, okay? We're gonna come to all of this in due time. The context of the sexual laws is about the contamination and ritual purity around the house of God. This has to do with something called sacred space or holy ground, and especially postmodern people no longer think anything like this, okay? And by the way, I don't think that we necessarily should, at least not in the context of the way Leviticus does it. Okay? There is still sacred space and common space, but it's different now. And by the way, symbolism still matters in the way that you build your churches. But that's just a soapbox. We can talk about that later if you want. Okay? Common space or sacred space exists where God dwells. In the Old Testament, God dwelt in the tabernacle. or on the mountain. He did this in the land that he chose to make his own. That's the sacred space. So Dr. Heiser says Leviticus is concerned with what goes on in Yahweh's territory, his inheritance. Levitical theology is concerned over what is allowed to go on, to go into or not into Yahweh's domain. He starts talking about how other places are controlled by other divine entities and demons, not Israel. That isn't the way it's going to work with Israel. They will not be like the rest because they are chosen and special and specially loved. And so Leviticus sets them apart. Now in the New Testament, the occupation of physical land has been transformed from physical people or two physical people whom God indwells and who make up the new man and the body of Christ that we talked about in Ephesians. So that now his domain, his presence, his sacred ground is not located in one land far away over the sea that we need to worship because it becomes a nation. The sacred space is where the church is. and it's where God's people are. It's when they're having dinner together, or they're in school, or they're in court, or they're in prison. Wherever a Christian is, that's God's sacred space. Now that has huge implications for how you think about Leviticus, because now it's not just out there, it has to be inside of you, because you're the place that is holy, all right? So here I want to take you to the second reason for bringing up the Targums. There's one thing that Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds to Neophaedia, the very end, this is what it says. Then the word of the Lord called to Moses and the word of the Lord spoke with him from the tent of meeting. Saying. Now, go back and read Leviticus 1.1 in your Bible and what you'll see is that word of the Lord is the addition. Word. In fact, the word here is spelled in two different ways in this targum, and the second one is the word memra. And both of these are functioning not as words, as in the words of God came and he heard them floating around in his head. but rather they're referring to a person called the Word of God. This is the Logos, this is Jesus. The Targum is saying that Jesus came and spoke to Moses. I'm editing a couple of books by a couple of Puritans right now that are talking all about these Targums and how the Jews knew Jesus and they're writing about him in their Targums, they're explaining it to the people. It isn't just God talking to Moses, it is Jesus, the Word, talking to him. This means that it is Jesus who is indwelling the tabernacle as he is surrounded by the glory cloud of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is sitting enthroned above the cherubim in the Ark throne. Jesus is saying very specific things to Moses about his place and time. This is a book about Jesus and his holiness, what he is like and what it's like to be in his presence. You know what that means? It means that this entire book should be in red letters. All of these questions that people have about especially sexual ethics, Jesus never talked about homosexuality. Read Leviticus. Who do you think is talking to him? But we'll get to that again in due time. In these last days, Jesus indwelt a human body. So you see there's a transfer from a tent to a body. And Jesus became a man. The word became Emmanuel, right? God with us. And that word then fulfilled the law, particularly in Hebrews. He fulfilled the Levitical law. Listen to Hebrews 7-11. If perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood, for under it the people received the law, what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek rather than one named after the order of Aaron? All the sacrifices, the day of atonement, the offerings, Jesus gave the perfect one to his father. Inasmuch, he ascended to the heavenly tabernacle, as Hebrews says, to make atonement for sins and to make the space clean once for all. Therefore, there is no more need for the tedious, laborious rituals of Leviticus. Not because God has changed, but because God came in human flesh. And he transferred the place of his indwelling from a tabernacle made with human hands to a tabernacle made by God. And then this is transferred, as it works out in the church age, through his body, which is now the church, the Christian. And the sacred space is where you are, not where Israel is. The Holy Spirit now indwells all who call upon the name of God. You are his temple. But that means that the principles behind the reasons for these laws remain. The laws themselves don't, but the whole idea of why they exist in the first place hasn't changed. God hasn't changed. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. What you're going to see chapter after chapter and week after week is the seriousness with which our Lord takes holiness. God's people today desperately need to hear this. It might be the greatest need of the hour, in fact. And you will see it in the way he tells you to approach him. You will see it in the way that you are to live like him. You will see it in the way you are to contrast to the world who does not know God or his ways. But most of all, you should see it in the way that it typifies and glorifies Christ. You should see it, what it must have meant for him to perform all of these things in his life. Read Leviticus and then think about Jesus doing all of these things perfectly. And you should see it in how he performed them for you. Brothers and sisters, if we get bored and tired reading through this book, then we have not considered the Christ who gave it, nor the Christ who spent his life studying it and reflecting on it and obeying it. If we can't imagine ever doing all these things, then we have not considered the Christ who did them all perfectly in his incarnation for us. And if we feel the freedom of not being under such religious ritualistic purity laws as these, may it never be because we are people that have forgotten that somebody had to do them. And because he did them perfectly, we have a once for all freedom of being considered ritualistically pure forever in God's sight because Christ is in us the hope of glory. There might be someone here who does not know this hope. It could very well manifest itself in your sitting here thinking to yourself that you can't imagine what a nightmare the next few weeks are gonna be. Some who do not know Christ nevertheless still get excited about exercising their minds in Romans or their emotions in the Psalms. But Leviticus exposes us at the root of who we are. Turn to Christ and he may open your heart to see the beauty of this book. The heart of the Torah needs to be the heart of God's people in the new covenant. Friend, if that is your heart, then I ask you to, if that's not your heart, I ask you to inspect your heart very closely. Because the laws here reveal God's holy and righteous nature. And they are also showing you his mercy and kindness and grace. The people who absolutely turned their back on him were given a second chance, covenantally speaking. God gave them a new covenant with the Levites. And in Christ, a new covenant has come. And God invites you to drink deeply of the wine and eat of the choice morsels of his covenant goodness in Christ, the great high priest. who's broken down the wall of separation and made atonement and satisfied God's wrath and stood in the gap as a sacrifice and pleased his father in all things. Also that you can know the goodness and truth and beauty of the God who condescended to Moses to lead the people into the promised land. Let's pray together. Lord, we do ask that you would bless not only the hearing of your word in Leviticus 1.1, but in the next months as we look deeply into what is going to be a difficult book to try and work our way through. It's so unfamiliar. I'm excited about where you'll take our church. I'm excited about where you'll take me personally as I learn more about a book that I have never really studied before. I pray, Lord, that most of all what will happen is that you will be glorified in our church and that you will lead your people into a new kind of thinking about holiness that we haven't considered before, and that you would lead us into a greater appreciation for the freedom that we have of not being under these laws by showing us how much Jesus actually did for us in fulfilling them on our behalf. I pray most of all that the triune God and the great Lord Christ himself would get glory as we go through this book and that your spirit would be pleased to do this for us in Christ's name, amen.