The following message was given at Grace Community Church in Minden, Nevada. All right, so if you notice the title, this is gonna be our title probably for the next message or two. A Garden, a Mountain, and a Tent. That is, by the way, that's in a sense the message of Leviticus. It's the message of the Pentateuch. So what we're going to do is we're going to read a few passages from Leviticus to kind of orient ourselves and then one from the book of Hebrews and So we're going to start just in Leviticus 1 and verses 1 & 2 Then the Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, When any man of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of animals from the herd or the flock." Now what we're going to see is that This whole book is God instructing Moses, and it's for the sake of the priesthood and also for the sake of the people. And right from the beginning you see the Lord calls to Moses, speaks to him, and then will give him instruction for seven chapters on offerings and sacrifices. Leviticus chapter 11, Suzeb. laws of cleanness and uncleanness as it relates to animals, and so forth. And verse 44 says, for I am the Lord your God, consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. And you shall not make yourselves unclean with any of the swarming things that swarm on the earth, For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God, thus you shall be holy, for I am holy." This is the law regarding the animal and the bird and every living thing that moves in the waters and everything that swarms on the earth, to make a distinction between the unclean and the clean, between the edible creature and the creature which is not to be eaten. One of the things that we're gonna see is that there are going to be purity laws, and we'll talk about what makes something clean, what makes something unclean, why is the remedy for taking something that's unclean and making it clean, why did God institute that remedy, and you can at least see that the purity laws were designed to keep Israel as a separate nation, a holy nation among its neighbors. All right, Leviticus chapter 16. This is instruction for Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement. And if you turn to the end of the chapter, verse 32, So the priest who is anointed and ordained to serve as priest in his father's place shall make atonement. He shall thus put on the linen garments, the holy garments, and make atonement for the holy sanctuary, and he shall make atonement for the tent of meeting and for the altar. He shall also make atonement for the priests and for all the people of the assembly. Now you shall have this as a permanent statute. to make atonement for the sons of Israel for all their sins once a year, and just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so he did." And then one last text in Leviticus. Leviticus chapter 19. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to all the congregation of the sons of Israel, and say to them, You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy." Right? And then one passage in the book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 10, starting at verse 1, for the law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form or image or substance, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, so talking about the Day of Atonement, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered? Because the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have had consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices, there is a reminder of sins year by year, for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. Therefore, when he comes into the world, he says, Sacrifice an offering you've not desired, but a body you have prepared for me. In whole burnt offering and sacrifice for sin you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, Behold, I've come in the scroll of the book. It is written of me to do your will, O God. After saying above sacrifices, offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you have not desired nor have you taken pleasure in them which are offered according to the law then he said behold I've come to do your will he takes away the first in order to establish the second By this will, we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." Well, if that's not exciting to you, I don't know what is. So, we're starting a new book. I actually have absolutely zero idea how long this will take us. It may be short, it may be long, I have honestly no idea. But I do love starting a new book. I love introductions. I mean, I can do, if you look at some of the introductions I've done, they're three, four, five messages long. And I love introduction, and it gives me an opportunity to do a lot of different things. And so before we jump in, I want to just point out a few resources that some people like to read along or read extra as we're going through the resource there, Joshua. So these are resources for the Pentateuch. And the one on the left is From Paradise to the Promised Land, An Introduction to the Pentateuch by Desmond Alexander. It is fantastic, absolutely wonderful. The middle one is The Dawning of Redemption, The Story of the Pentateuch and the Hope of the Gospel. It's a little shorter, okay, but really good. I wouldn't put it up there unless it was really, really good. And then the last one is a pretty basic overview of the Pentateuch, but it's written by Gordon Wenham. And anything that Gordon Wenham wrote, you should read. He was, he's with the Lord now, one of the best Old Testament scholars of the last 50 years. And so this is sort of his basic handbook in the Exploring the Old Testament series. All right? Now, if we move from the Pentateuch in general, and I have other favorites too, but decided to only give you just a few. I didn't want to overwhelm you. The next slide there, please. So, let me just say that notice Gordon Wynnum is in the middle. Best commentary on Leviticus, period. The one on the right, Ken Matthews, very devotional kind of commentary, but my favorite book of all on Leviticus is on the left, Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord? A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus by Michael Morales, who also has a very, very fine book on Exodus as well. And it is full of rich biblical theology, and I will, in fact, next week probably most of it will be taken from Morales' insights, which are not just his. Several others have contributed. And so if you like to read, which I hope you do, I hope, ladies like to read more than guys. Did you know that? Okay. It's absolutely true. Women read more than men. Okay. And so, why are some of you grinning and shaking your head, Ray? Anyway. Oh, oh my goodness. We better hurry up and get to the end of Leviticus. All right, so anyway, read along. And if you don't want to read a commentary or a book on the Pentateuch, then just read a couple chapters of Leviticus every day. Crossway puts out a nice little, just a little notebook type thing. It's got the text of, it has Bible text on one side and then room for notes on a blank page. and they have one for Leviticus, and so you can just read and take notes and so forth. So what we're going to do in this introduction is we're going to answer a couple of questions first, and I thought that the first one, why preach from the law, would be a good sort of big question, and it's relevant because Daniel's preaching in Exodus, right? And Daniel's gonna be, once we get through the plagues and the Red Sea, we're gonna come up to a bunch of laws, right? And so one of the big questions is why preach the law? And not many preach from the law, and by law, I'm speaking specifically, at this point, of the law of Moses. And so, few preach from the law today, and let me just say, fewer preach from the book of Leviticus. So, just a question to throw out there. So, among Christians, just sort of generally speaking, is the law viewed negatively or positively? Yeah, negatively. There are lots of reasons why people have a very negative view of the law. One of my favorite New Testament commentators, Charles Cranfield, has said that most Christians have, quote, muddled thinking and unexamined assumptions when it comes to the law. And I think that that's absolutely true. So why do you think the law is not preached more frequently in our evangelical churches? I have a huge list here, so what's that? Okay, you can't preach law without preaching about sin. Okay, so yeah, so that kind of does it in for some people. Tim? Okay. They don't see Christ, they've not been... So Daniel will resonate with this. Lots of people were taught, like I was, you read the Bible from left to right, okay? You don't read later revelation into earlier revelation, although of course Jesus and the apostles did. But you read left to right, not right to left, okay? I've said sometimes that reading the Bible is like reading a mystery novel. You get to the end, you see the plot, you see all the details, how it fits together, you go back, and then as you're reading, you're like, oh, well, that's why the gun was on the table, and that's why Colonel Mustard was in the library, or whatever, and it all starts to make sense, and so you read the beginning in light of the end, but we're not usually taught to do that, so we don't see Christ, okay? So there are other reasons, too, Yeah, Nathan. Okay, the fear, yeah, if you preach, I mean, let's just face it, the idea of if you preach law, you must be preaching legalism, right? That's kind of the one for one equivalent that people see, yeah. Yeah, it's like we don't look at the law through the lens of the New Testament. And so, you know, it's almost like they're, it's like we treat them like they're two different separate books, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so a lot of people are not averse to preaching, you can do it, or here's 10 rules for your life. They just don't wanna take those from Leviticus, right? All right, yeah. Okay. Sure can be, right? So, I have a few here. I think that one of the reasons why we don't preach, so let's just say the Old Testament in general, Law of Moses in particular, because a lot of Christians, a lot of pastors, think that it's irrelevant for the church because it was only intended for the nation Israel, okay? Another reason, and I think this was alluded to several times, is that the general perception is that law is opposite of grace. So we're not under law, but we're under grace, so why go to the law? Right? I mean, so it's not just that it's just for Israel, but it's like, and it's not for us, because we just have grace. As much as I love Martin Luther, I think Luther has had a terrible influence on the church in terms of perspective on the Old Testament. Luther actually says some horrendous things about Moses that actually they're kind of funny because it's Luther, but they're terrible. But let me just read one to you. He says, just as the chief teaching of the New Testament is really the proclamation of grace and peace through the forgiveness of sins in Christ, so the chief teaching of the Old Testament is really the teaching of laws, the showing up of sin, and the demanding of God. So you have this really sharp antithesis. So what do you think you wanna hear? Message of grace and peace, or of a demanding God and laws that reveal sin? One writer saw this article about 30 years ago, and he's talking about the Mosaic Law and some of the things that cause Christians to kind of tap the brakes a little bit when it comes to the law, and he says that many of the regulations seem to us inapplicable, unintelligible, or even nonsensical. I mean, quite honestly, just take the old standby, don't boil a kid in its mother's milk. You're like, I like my kid. Baby goat, by the way. He goes on, he says, the stipulations of the Pentateuch regulate cultural practices, right? So there's stuff that's sort of unique to Israel as a nation, as a culture. Instructions and customs that are really unknown or little known outside of the ancient world of Israel and seem to be inapplicable and in many cases meaningless outside that world. So you're talking about the world of the ancient Near East, and you're like, well, what does that have to do with us? It's a totally different world. It's an ancient world. It's pre-modern world. I mean, why should anybody spend time in the Old Testament who walks into a room and turns on an electric light? Right? I mean, we live in enlightened times. Why would we want to read about these pre-modern people? or their customs. He goes on, he says, the code of laws was issued by God to lay out detailed groundwork for and regulate the various affairs of an actual, political, geographically defined nation. And in a sense, that's true. There's gonna be stuff that is completely relevant to Israel as a geopolitical people. And then he says one more, and he says, the law was formulated to establish and maintain ritual or customs in worship that have been discontinued within the church. So he just says, okay, so we go to church on Sunday. We don't go to church on Saturday. We don't bring a lamb with us. We don't bring two turtle doves if we're poor. We don't have, there's no blood. It's totally different. You have a priesthood, you have smoke, you have a special tabernacle, later a temple. I mean, you just have stuff that just we don't do anymore. And so for that and probably several other reasons, it just seems to so many people that the law in general, the law of Moses in particular, is just irrelevant. But I'm gonna argue that the Bible teaches us that, number one, the law is good. Think about Psalm 19, 7. The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. The statutes of the Lord are wise, making wise the simple. They're to be desired more than gold, than much fine gold, than the drippings of the honey in the honeycomb. Moreover, by them your servant is warned. And so the psalmist celebrates, we don't even have time to look at Psalm 119, but the psalmist just celebrates the idea of Torah. The psalmist celebrates the idea of statutes and ordinances and all of the things that God gave to Israel to govern her life. Well, you go, well, that's the Old Testament. Of course that's the way they're gonna think. Well, the apostle Paul says in Romans chapter seven and verse 12 that the law's good. And the commandment in particular, the 10th commandment, you should not covet, the commandment is holy and just and good. And so for Paul, why is the law holy? Because God is holy. Why is the law good? Because God is good. So we have to understand that the law of God, whether it is in particular the Mosaic Covenant, or more broadly speaking, the Old Testament, it is a revelation of the very character of God. And so the responsibility is on us to wade through and look and see how God is reflected and how Christ is pointed to and what we can learn from the Old Testament. So here's something that might really help us. And that is we always use the word law. So the reason we use the word law is because in the New Testament, the term namas is used, which most naturally ends up getting translated as law. But in Hebrew, it's Torah. And Torah actually just means instruction. In fact, most Old Testament scholars think that the word Torah comes from a verb which means to point out. Do you think our perception on the law would have been a little different if we would have maintained the idea of instruction? Or Torah? I think the answer is yes. Torah is God's instruction to his people. And so Sidney Gray Donis, he says, the Creator's Torah enables God's people to live with the grain of the universe. That law is a reflection of the goodness of God for the good of His people. And so the law is good, right? The law is Torah, it's instruction, that's actually a gift. By the way, you understand that there's even grace in God giving the Torah. You have to understand that. That's a gracious act by God to give Torah. We're talking about why we should preach the law. I would also say that we need to understand that law and grace are not enemies. If you treat them like enemies, you're going to like one and dislike the other. And so they're not enemies, they're actually friends. Now, law and gospel are not the same. They're different, but they complement each other. And by that I mean complement with an E, that is they complete each other. And so there are different functions of the law, and one, of course, is a civil use that restrains evil, so you have laws. By the way, our human laws are a reflection of the divine law, okay? a reflection of the law that's written on our hearts, a reflection of the codification of that law in the Ten Commandments. Sometimes people will refer to natural law, that is the idea of that which is revealed through creation, through conscience. And so that curbs the evil of society, okay? So just think about the goodness of society that there's a law that says you shall not commit murder. The murder still happened, the answer is of course, but the idea is that the law tells us you don't kill people. You don't steal from people. You don't take somebody's wife. You don't lie. And all of those things end up being codified for us in our criminal laws. By the way, even our civil laws. So you have a civil restraint that's law, but you also have what's called the first use of the law, which actually is to reveal our sin. So Romans 3.20, through the knowledge, or through the law comes the knowledge of sin. So is that a good thing? It's a really good thing. By the way, that function of the law to reveal sin is a diagnosis. It's actually cruel to have somebody in front of you that has a terminal disease, and you don't want to hurt their feelings, so you just tell them that they're okay. No, you tell them the truth, and the law of God points out our sin. And so that is what's called the first use of the law. Is that useful to us? And the answer is yeah, because there is no good news unless you have bad news. There is no gospel unless you have law. By the way, if you have no law, you have no need of gospel. And so, but there's also a third use, which is a guide for the Christian to live his life. Just recently in Las Vegas, preaching at the Law Gospel Conference there, I said, so if you were a Christian in the early church, you would have gone through what was called catechesis, okay? So we get the word catechism from catechesis. And if you would have gone through catechesis, you would have learned three things. The Apostles' Creed, that is what you are to believe. The Lord's Prayer, which is how you are to pray. And the Ten Commandments, which is how you are to live. I think that if you took a new Christian in the 21st century and said, I want to take you through catechesis and this is what we're going to do, they'd think that we were bonkers. And yet it was just a standard staple in the early church. And so what does the law do? The law actually points us to faith in Christ. And so Romans 10.4, Christ for righteousness is the end or the goal of the law for everyone who believes. The law became our pie-to-go-goss to lead us to faith in Christ. That idea is, I've likened it before to a prison guard, okay? And what does he do? He actually, he's in charge of every move you make, and he's driving you somewhere, controlling your every move, and making sure you do what you're supposed to do, and that's what the law does. And so it gives us the knowledge of sin that leads us to faith in Christ, it establishes the law in our hearts in the new covenant. How does the Christian, Okay, so here's a trick question. Can a Christian fulfill the law? The answer is no, and then yes. So you cannot fulfill the law for your own salvation. Okay? You cannot fulfill the law for your own justification. Now, is that law fulfilled for your justification? And the answer is, of course it is, but it's fulfilled in Jesus Christ, okay? But now, do Christians fulfill the law? And the answer is, we most certainly do. That's actually the language of Romans 13 and Galatians 5. The Christian fulfills the law by the Spirit through love. That's why Paul says love is the fulfillment of the law, all right? So the law actually serves all these different purposes, and far from undermining or abolishing the law, In a sense, faith establishes the law, both in terms of salvation and ethics. Remember what Paul says at the end of Romans 3. So then, do we nullify the law through faith? May it never be. Rather, we establish the law through faith, all right? So the law's good. It's God's instruction. It brings us to Christ. It shows us how to live. Jesus, somebody mentioned this earlier, Jesus actually in the Sermon on the Mount says, I did not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill. Now, if most people's view of the law were correct, then Jesus would have had to say, I came to abolish the law. I came to nullify the law and the prophets." And that's not what he says. He says, I came not to abolish, but to fulfill. And so what does he mean by that? Well, it's a big question, but his mission was to come and fulfill the law, and the idea of fulfill here points, the Old Testament points us to Christ as its fulfillment, and so what Jesus does is instead of abrogating the law, what he actually does is he fulfills it in that he properly interprets it for us and fulfills its message for us. Okay? Now, how do we know that that's what he has in mind? Well, because almost immediately after that statement, you end up having these antithetical statements. You've heard it said, but I say to you. He's not saying, kick Moses out. What he's saying is, this is, I'm telling you what this actually means. He gets to the heart of the issue of the law. Okay? The law is never meant to just be externals. Okay? How do we know that? Because Jesus says, just as an example, you've heard it said, you shall not commit murder. But I say to you, everyone who's angry with his brother and says, you raka, you empty head, you fool, you idiot, right, is guilty. before the court and liable to God for doing what? Well, committing murder in the heart. So it's not just the external, well, you know what, I should go to heaven because I never actually have killed anybody. And Jesus says, well, hold on a second, the law goes deeper than that. The law actually is talking about the intent of your heart. And if the intent of your heart is murderous, you're a murderer. Or what about, you've heard it said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you, so you get that, you've heard it said, but I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to lust after her in his heart has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So you have heart adultery. So in other words, Jesus says, don't pat yourself on the back because you've never been in bed with a woman that's not your wife. There's an adultery of the heart that God sees, that God knows, that brings guilt. And so Jesus doesn't come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it for us. And so, The Torah, the Old Testament, so by the way, when he says law and prophets, he's talking about the totality, that's just a way of saying the whole Old Testament, right, is the promise plan of God that points us forward in many ways, but it also, Torah also reflects God's values. This is, this will get down to the nitty gritty here. God's values flow out of God's character. By the way, is that true of you? Do your values flow from your character? Absolutely. So, one Old Testament commentator, J. Sklar, who's a very fine commentator on Leviticus, he says, while not every law is enforced today as it was originally expressed, the values embodied in every law remain valid and should be lived out by the people of God today. So in other words, the original expression may have a cultural, historical, even Old Testament scholars will talk about the cultists, they're not talking about the cult of CrossFit, they're talking about They're talking about cult in the sense of, it's a Latin word, having the idea of ritual, rite, order of worship, so forth, okay? And so what he's saying is, is that you look at the law, and yeah, there are gonna be things that are unique to the original expression of that, But the burden that we have is to figure out how it still applies today. In other words, the values are still applicable because they still teach a principle. Now sometimes those values teach something that we could call a moral law. Sometimes those values teach what we could call maybe a civil law, and maybe something that has even, let's take something that's even changed. So take dietary laws, for instance. Leviticus is gonna give us all kinds of stuff that you should and shouldn't eat, and yet Jesus turns around and declares all food to be clean. Okay? So you can eat lobster, Daniel, and you can eat pork, right? So all food has been declared clean. So then the question, oh, well, then those laws don't matter anymore. Well, they still do. They're not applicable in the same way that they were to the Jewish people. but they're applicable to us and it is our burden to actually determine what is the principle that's being drawn out here. And I'm gonna say that the whole issue of clean and unclean, especially food laws, ends up being a, there's a huge lesson as to what makes them clean and unclean, all right? So, Torah then reflects also God's expectation of how His people are to live. Gordon Winham, he says, the principles underlying the Old Testament are valid and authoritative for the Christian, but the particular applications found in the Old Testament may not be. The moral principles are the same today, but insofar as our situation often differs from the Old Testament setting, the application of the principles in our society may well be different too. Now we're just gonna do just a quick exercise to show you exactly what I'm talking about. Does anybody know what the sixth commandment is? You shall not murder. Okay? That's a good one. All right? You have the 10 words written by the finger of God. By the way, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, known in the Old Testament itself as the Ten Words, are the only thing in the Bible said to be written directly by the finger of God. By the way, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, is also only one of three things to be placed inside the Ark of the Covenant. So, let's just say the Ten Commandments actually do stand out, even in the Old Testament, as something which is special. Alright? So, you shall not commit murder, Exodus 20 verse 13. what happens in the flow of all these other laws that seem so tedious to us or maybe irrelevant. I'm gonna read you one, and it says, when you build a new house, it's Deuteronomy 22, eight, when you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof. So what's a parapet? Yeah, sort of like a fence, a guardrail, right, for your roof so that you will not bring blood guilt on your house if anyone falls from it. Okay, so let me point out just a couple of quick things. Number one, this law, what would we call that kind of law today? OSHA. Yeah, we'd call it a building code. Right? Now, how many of you have a flat roof and you need to put a parapet around? Like, none of us. You really can't have a flat roof in northern Nevada. It will cave in on you during the wintertime. Okay? So, you go, well, I don't have a flat roof. I don't need, we don't hang out on my roof. In the ancient world, did people hang out on their flat roofs? They most certainly did, right? So you go, oh, well, that's totally irrelevant. First of all, the commandment, Deuteronomy 22, 8, is an application of you shall not commit murder. Okay? You see why? put the fence around the top of your roof so that you won't be guilty, right? You won't take on blood guiltiness, is the way that it says. So why would you be liable of blood guiltiness if you didn't put a parapet around the top of your roof? Somebody could fall off. Now, do you see why that's an application of you shall not commit murder? Because there's also a positive corollary, which is you shall preserve life. By the way, all the commandments, if they're a prohibition, have a positive corollary of something that's enjoined. The command not to commit murder also has the positive corollary to protect life. So in order to help keep the sixth commandment, you build a parapet. So does that have any application to us? The answer is, it most certainly does. Okay? So is that law gonna give us an absolute exhaustive list of all the things that we should do? No, it lays down a principle, what our confession calls a principle of general equity, and what is it doing? It's actually teaching us to take responsibility that somebody would not be injured or killed. So, if you have a pool, guess what? Do you leave your gate open with a sign saying, neighborhood kids, swim at will? No, you keep your gates locked and you have to build a fence. Why? Because there's a moral principle that says that you need to do whatever you can do to preserve life. So if it snows here, we'll see all the deacons and their kids and a bunch of other people out shoveling snow and putting down ice melt, right? Why? I mean, what's wrong with just saying, well, you know what, if they're old and they fall, it was their time. God appoints the day of your death. I mean, maybe that was, you know. So just leave the ice on and let's see who makes it. No, you actually take the extra effort to do what? To help preserve life, right? And so the law, even though there may be laws that culturally don't fit us in the way they did originally, you look for the principle So that that principle then is something that is God's direction for us. And so the goal is to look to Torah, number one, to see it in terms of the way that it points us to Christ by showing us our sin and the idea of promise and fulfillment in him, but then it's also to look for the principle and find appropriate application. And so should the church be teaching the law of God? The answer is absolutely. Absolutely. And we don't teach it in a way that you get up there and rant and rave about all of the penalties and stipulations should be fully in effect. Okay? There are people that do that. Okay? And they would want all of the capital crimes to be capital crimes for us. Okay? Typically called theonomists. We would look at those principles and we would say that these are principles of general equity that help govern life. In a sense, it is God's gift to help His people live with the grain of the universe. So now the question is, why then preach Leviticus? Because Leviticus is certainly not Deuteronomy. Right? So Exodus is gonna be fascinating because Exodus is going to, it has certain movements, and it's going to culminate with building this tabernacle, okay? Which I can't wait because Daniel loves lumber and he's good at cutting boards and there's gonna be just a lot of natural insight into the construction of the tabernacle. But there's a reason why Leviticus follows, and then Numbers follows Leviticus, and then, by the way, Deuteronomy. I'll show you that in a second. And so why in the world preach Leviticus? Because what you have in Leviticus is you have a lot of blood, okay? You have a lot of entrails. You have a lot of smoke. You have, by the way, we do not even appreciate, can you imagine what these priests looked like after a day of sacrifice? Guess who's being sprinkled with blood? They are. The people are. By the way, that mobile tabernacle, guess what it would have looked like? It would have been, it would have looked some ways like a slaughterhouse. And then you have stuff that you should burn and stuff that you shouldn't burn, stuff that you should eat, stuff that you shouldn't eat, and you have how to consecrate priests, and then you get all these weird laws like skin disease stuff, right? And you're like, well, you know what? I go to the dermatologist for that now. I don't go find a Levitical priest, you know? And they give me a little cortisone or whatever, and I'm good. The fact is that there's going to be all these weird laws, weird to us, in the book of Leviticus. And so, I love what one pastor said, he says, rarely studied and even more rarely preached, Leviticus often becomes that graveyard where your read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan goes and dies. So why preach Leviticus? Well, I gotta hurry up here. Number one, because it's part of all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness, right? It's God-breathed, and it's given to us for doctrine and instruction, all right? A second reason we should preach Leviticus is that the themes of Leviticus are indispensable to our understanding the New Testament. Do you ever realize that? You actually have no categories when you get to the New Testament if you don't have the categories of Leviticus. Stuff like sacrifice, atonement, holy, clean, unclean, priesthood. That is all the stuff of the New Testament, and so it's indispensable to understanding the New Testament. Leviticus has more direct speech by God Himself than any other book in the Bible. If I would have asked you what book of the Bible do you think has the most direct speech by God, I doubt that Leviticus would have just popped into mind. And yet, the entire book is governed by, and God said to Moses. And God said to Moses. Next, the Pentateuch is the foundation of the whole Bible. The first five books of the Bible are foundational for the whole Bible. The prophets make no sense apart from the foundation of the Pentateuch. The Gospels make no sense apart from the prophets whose ministry is based on the Pentateuch. everything from covenant blessings, to covenant curses, to the messianic promises. And so, if the Pentateuch is foundational to the whole Bible, we should probably understand the Pentateuch, right? Now, we studied Genesis, which was great, loved every minute of it, but now we're doing Exodus, and now we're gonna do Leviticus. So, Joshua, can you turn that next slide on real quick for me? If the Pentateuch is foundational for the whole Bible, Leviticus is the heart of the Pentateuch. How do you know? Well, it's in the middle. Do you think it's in the middle by accident? There are no accidents. It's in the middle for a reason. So, and I tried to line this up. This is from Michael Morales. Genesis serves as prologue, all right? Then, bump it over, Exodus, leaving Egypt, building the tabernacle. Okay, that's probably a pretty good quick summary, right? Leaving Egypt, building the tabernacle. Leviticus, right in the heart, is tabernacle service. Okay, then Numbers dedicating the tabernacle, preparing to enter Canaan. You see how leaving Egypt in Exodus then parallels entering Canaan in Numbers, all right? And then Deuteronomy ends up being epilogue. But notice Leviticus is actually the centerpiece of the Pentateuch. And it's the centerpiece for the Pentateuch because the, and I'll just tip my hand since we're gonna run out of time, there's going to be this massive emphasis, when God actually plants the Garden of Eden, what is he doing? It is a garden temple, okay? And Adam and Eve are supposed to do what? They're supposed to dwell, by the way, Adam is, this is so fascinating, the exhortation to Adam in Genesis 2.15 is, our Bibles usually say something like keep and cultivate. Actually, the combination of the two words are priestly words, okay? He has to keep it and guard it. Okay? So Adam was supposed to be a priest in the garden temple, doing what? Communing with God. Alright? What happens? He gets exiled. Okay? He gets exiled. The message of the Bible is how to get back into communion with the Lord in his presence. And so the garden temple is also, so Eden is also called the mountain of the Lord in Ezekiel 28. Guess where God is often seen to dwell. So then think about who may approach my holy hill. He who has clean hands and a clean heart, who swears to his own hurt, so forth, right? So the whole thing is going to be, how can man dwell with God? That is the question of the Bible. And Leviticus is going to answer that question for us. In other words, it's in the middle for a very significant reason, okay? Now, guess what's at the heart of Leviticus? Day of Atonement. Okay? So understand this, so Leviticus is the middle of the Pentateuch, and Day of Atonement is the center, or the heart, of Leviticus, all right? And so, Leviticus actually stands as a unique book in that it separates Israel from the nations at virtually every level. Ari Letter, who is a Jewish scholar, he's a Christian, he says, without Leviticus, Israel would be just another among many nations in Canaan, all right? And so we'll probably just end there, pick up next week with the title, and then, but here, let's do this. Joshua, go to my last slide. How many of you know what movie that's from? Some of you. Saving Private Ryan, okay. So let's say, let's say that I said to you, hey, my favorite war movie of all time is Saving Private Ryan. Have you ever seen it? You're like, no. Come over to my house, you gotta watch it. It is so good. And let's say I turn the TV on, and that's the scene that comes up. Now if you've seen it, you know what this scene is. Okay? That's Captain John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, who's talking to James Private, James Francis Ryan, played by Matt Damon, and he says his dying words are, Earn it, James. Earn it. And then let's say I just stop the movie and go, wasn't that awesome? Now, would you have the suspicion that it was awesome? Would you know why it was awesome? The answer is no. You have some guy that's fatally shot in the chest leaning up against a German motorcycle. There's chaos all around. Airplanes are going over. And he says, James, earn it. Just earn it. And you know that it's pretty awesome, but you don't know why. What do you need to know in order to know the significance of that scene? Okay, you need to know the context, but what do you need to, if you've seen the movie, what do you actually have to know? Well, you have to know that the opening scene starts with the Allied forces landing at Normandy and the tremendous sacrifice that they made. And then you'd also have to know that Captain John Miller made it through Normandy. A living hell on those beaches. and he made it through with a group of men. What else would you need to know about that scene? You'd need to know that actually at the Department of War there were all these secretaries that were writing letters to mothers who had lost their sons, and then you would have to know that one secretary actually discovered that there were three Ryan boys all killed on the same day, and there was a fourth brother. And then you'd need to know that Captain John Miller and his group of men that actually did survive Normandy were commissioned to go and find Private Ryan so that a mother would not be grieved of losing all four sons in a war. Then you would have to know that the journey that Captain Miller goes on with his group of men to find Private Ryan and try to get him back safely would result in the loss of many of his own men. And then he finds him. And then he dies in the process of bringing him back safely. So, if you have the context, you can't just drop in at the movie at that point. You'll know it's cool for some reason, but you won't know why. What you need to know is you need to know everything that went before, so that when he says, James, earn it, earn this, What he's saying is, honor the sacrifice of those that just gave their lives so that you could go home. Live in a way that honors that sacrifice and vindicates what they did for you. Live in a way that validates their sacrifice, okay? And so, just jumping into Leviticus tonight and saying, and the Lord said to Moses, if any man brings blah, blah, blah, it would be like just landing right there in that scene in Private Ryan. And everybody would be like, okay, I know this is pretty cool, and I know he's gonna tell us about Christ, but there's like seven chapters of this? And it's like all the same? Guess what we need? We need the entire backstory for this to make sense. And so that's what we'll do next week. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the book of Leviticus. Thank you for the Old Testament. Thank you for the law of Moses. And Father, we pray that we really would be whole Bible Christians and that we'd love the totality of your word. And we ask that this study would be rich and enriching to our own souls as we move ahead. In Jesus' name, amen. We hope that you were edified by this message. 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