Good morning. I hope that the feed is working okay at Blue Ridge. I'm coming to you from my sofa this morning. I appreciate the prayers and concern of all my friends and the church family at Blue Ridge. Unfortunately, the sciatic nerve problem that I've had for going on 10 years now, has really flared up at the moment. And I'm having a lot of trouble walking and keeping balance and those sorts of things. And so just out of some prudence to prevent having a fall and having you all have to help me get up out of the floor and all that sort of thing, I'm going to be sharing the word from home this morning. But thank God for the technology that lets us be able to do that. You know, technology is both a blessing and a curse, but it certainly does give us the opportunity to be able to share the gospel in ways that just wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. So we're thankful for that this morning. We're looking at Leviticus chapter 2. Most of you were with us last week, probably as we began Leviticus, and it's a book of instruction about public worship, essentially. It's about how we give offerings to the Lord, about how we make sacrifice, about how the sins of people are covered by those sacrifices. And so Leviticus 2 kind of comes just right on the heels of Leviticus 1 with a follow-up to the instructions that are given there. If you remember, The first chapter of Leviticus is about animal sacrifice, about burnt offerings that were given on the altar for the sins of the people. And those included bulls and rams and goats and pigeons or doves, those kinds of things. And it gave very specific instructions for how those sacrifices were supposed to be handled and how they were made and how those things brought relief from the penalty of sin and the wrath of God against sin for God's people. So let's look at Leviticus chapter two. I'm just going to kind of read through the chapter and then we'll pull it apart a little bit. When anyone brings a grain offering as an offering to the Lord, his offering shall be a fine flower. He shall pour oil on it and frankincense on it and bring it to Aaron's sons, the priest. And he shall take from it a handful of the fine flower and oil with all of its frankincense, and the priest shall burn this as its memorial portion on the altar, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. But the rest of the grain offering shall be for Aaron and his sons. It is a most holy part of the Lord's food offerings. When you bring a grain offering baked in the oven as an offering, it shall be unleavened loaves of fine flour mixed with oil or unleavened wafers smeared with oil. And if your offering is a grain offering baked on a griddle, it shall be a fine flour unleavened mixed with oil. You shall break it in pieces and pour oil on it. It is a grain offering. And if your offering is a grain offering cooked in a pan, it shall be made of fine flour with oil. And you shall bring the grain offering that is made of these things to the Lord. And when it is presented to the priest, he shall bring it to the altar. And the priest shall take from the grain offering its memorial portion and burn this on the altar, a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord. But the rest of the grain offering shall be for Aaron and his sons. It is the most holy part of the Lord's food offerings. Sorry, my screen just skipped on me a second here, so. No grain offerings, verse 11, no grain offering that you bring to the Lord shall be made with leaven, for you shall burn no leaven nor any honey as a food offering to the Lord. As an offering of firstfruits, you may bring them to the Lord, but they shall not be offered on the altar for a pleasing aroma. You shall season all your grain offerings with salt. You shall not let the salt of the covenant with your God be missing from your grain offering. For all your offerings, you shall offer salt. If you offer a grain offering of firstfruits to the Lord, you shall offer for the grain offering of your firstfruits fresh ears roasted with fire, crushed new grain, and you shall put oil on it and lay frankincense on it. It is a grain offering. And the priest shall burn as its memorial portion some of the crushed grain and some of the oil with all of its frankincense. It is a food offering to the Lord." Now, I know that seems kind of repetitive, but it's very specific kind of instruction for how it is that we go about making these offerings. So last week, we kind of got our feet wet a little bit with Leviticus. We saw how animal sacrifices were commanded to appease God's wrath against sin for the people of Israel. And the burnt offerings of bulls and sheeps and goats and birds was the primary means that God gave for the people to be forgiven. But there were other offerings too. And one of those that we see here in Leviticus 2, the other most common one were grain offerings. These come kind of paired back to back in Leviticus one and two, because when a sacrifice of grain was made and a burnt offering of an animal was made, if they were made at the same time in the temple, the grain offering always came second. So you would have the offering of say, a lamb on the altar, and you would follow the instructions in Leviticus 1 for how that sacrifice was to be made. And then there might be an offering of cakes of wheat or barley or something on the altar to the Lord, and then that would be according to these instructions in chapter 2. In Hebrew, we have this word, mencha, which is used to describe the grain offerings here. And it's a word that we see other places, like in the book of Judges, for instance, that talks about the kind of offering of thanksgiving that the people would make to a gracious king. It's this idea of giving an offering of thanks for the mercy and the kindness and the watch care of the king. And so you can certainly see the kind of connection here with giving thanks to God at the temple as we come and bring the first fruits of the harvest and burn them on the altar. And we give thanks for God's goodness, his mercy, his grace, his provision for us. And so we essentially are the subjects of the king who are thanking him for his goodness. And so when we do that, essentially the grain offering, the temple had the same purpose as the offerings of flesh as the burn offerings. And that was to express Thanksgiving and to thank God for his mercy. So we see that the grain offering could kind of come in two ways, either raw, essentially you just brought grain, or more often made into cakes. And when we take cakes here, it's not the kind of thing that you and I might think of when we think cakes. I have a mental image. I definitely have a mental image of what I think cake is, right? I mean, when someone says cake, there's this thing that flashes in my mind. It's like a five-layer southern red velvet cake with cream cheese, pecan, frosting, and all that stuff, right? That's not quite what we're talking about here, though. What was offered in the temple would have been more like pancakes or flatbread, sort of like pita or something like that, because there's a very specific provision here that no leavening could be used at all in the loaves that were offered to the Lord. Cakes of grain like this would have been a staple thing for God's people, been a main part of their diet because it would have been a reminder to them that everything in their daily lives should be consecrated to the Lord. So what they offer is something that would be a common part of their own diet. Essentially, they're taking from their own food reserves and giving to the Lord. And there's this reminder that we have everything that we have, even the simple bread that we eat every day, we have that because of the grace and the mercy of God. providing for his people. And like the burnt offerings, the grain sacrifice had to be pure. It couldn't have any kind of mixture of anything that would cause it to ferment or rise. No leavening, no honey could be added to the grain because that seems to relate to the people's understanding of fermentation and the idea that there's a kind of decomposition that takes place when you ferment grain to raise bread. And that's actually fairly accurate since the yeast that caused the leavening do digest the carbohydrates in the flour and so there is some degradation that happens there. Clearly that wasn't a process that was understood by ancient people. But you know, this again is an example of how we say scripture wasn't written to be a science textbook or a history textbook or whatever. And yet, we find again and again that it's scientifically accurate and sound in what it does say. So while it doesn't set out to explain the process of fermentation, no one had microscopes back then. No one understood that there were living organisms called yeast that fermented grain and caused bread to rise and that kind of thing. Nobody knew that. But they knew the truth. of God and they understood in a way within the context of their time that there was something happening there. And that was associated again and again through scripture, not always, but most of the time when we see things like yeast and leavening referred to, it's the idea of something that's unclean. Part of that is that, where did you get the yeast? Well, you got the yeast from old steel bread dough, or you got it from the gleanings from the bottom of a wine cask, those kinds of things. So it was kind of sludge. It was kind of leftovers. It wasn't the first fruits. It wasn't this beautiful, pristine offering of grain that you just harvested. It was something that was kind of secondary. It was something that was sort of using up leftovers to be able to make something. And that's how you got your bread to rise. Again, they didn't understand the scientific principle, but they knew that's where it came from. That's how they got their bread to rise. And so God forbid that. Honey specifically is forbidden because it caused the fermentation process to work a lot faster. It was the main source of sugar that ancient peoples would have had in this part of the world. And when you added sugar to or added honey to grain that you were fermenting, then it just rose that much more and that much faster because the yeast eat the sugar faster than it can plain starch. They don't have to convert it. They produce that much more carbon dioxide gas as a waste product, which is what causes the bubbles that raise the bread and cause it to be fluffy and all that kind of stuff. And so lots of times when we see leavening referred to in scripture, it's an allegory. It's a reference to sin. because it's this mixing in of something that's imperfect. It's this mixing in of something that's not the first fruits, that's not the perfected first offering. And the purity that God demands here for these offerings, for the grain offering to be pure and unleavened, goes back to the same ideas like the burn offerings, that the animals had to be pure and unblemished, they had to be spotless and perfect. You couldn't have, you couldn't offer up a goat or a lamb with a gimpy leg or a weird ear or some kind of strange marking or something, they had to be perfect. It had to be the very best that your land produced. And that points us again and again through the burn, that the sacrifice that would atone for sin had to be perfect. That God's requirement was for a perfect sacrifice. And of course, we only find that perfect sacrifice in Christ. There could never be a perfect sacrifice in anything that people offered because it was always going to be tainted. It was always going to be something less than absolutely pure. And that's a reminder that on our own we could never be holy, that on our own we could never be righteous apart from God. These sacrifices were temporary at the very best. They needed a permanent, perfect sacrifice that would relieve them from the burden of having to come and offer burnt animals and grain and those kinds of things. And Christ would fulfill that ultimately. Now, oil and frankincense were allowed to be added to the grain offering because they were associated with gladness and celebration and thanksgiving. And again, as I say, this is sort of a thanksgiving to the king for his graciousness to his people. It's a thanksgiving to God for the grace that forgives us of sin. Salt was part of the grain offering because it was a preservative. But I think symbolically, it has an awful lot to do with the idea that the covenants are preserved. They are perfectly maintained by God's faithfulness. And so salt becomes kind of an image of that. And in fact, it talks about the salt of the covenant and that you're not allowed to omit that. It has to be included in the grain offering. It's a reminder, too, as we see again and again in the New Testament, that salt is something different. Salt is something that stands apart from the world. As God's chosen people stand apart from the lost world around us, as salt gives flavor and interest to food, if you ever try to cook, say, chicken or beef or something, and you don't put any salt on it, if you've ever been on a salt-restricted diet or those kinds of things, It needs something. If you don't have salt, you've got to find something to substitute for it. Because without it, if you cook, just take a really nice steak, and you don't put any salt on it at all, and you grill it, it doesn't really taste like steak very much. Salt brings out the beefiness of beef. It brings out flavor. You add salt. In cooking, I love to cook, you add salt whenever you put vanilla in a dish, because salt makes vanilla taste more like vanilla. You use it with chocolate because it brings out the flavor of chocolate. You use salt with a lot of things because it amplifies flavor. And so salt here was a reminder of the difference, the setting apart of God's people. It was a reminder of the preservation of God's covenants, and that that was through God's faithfulness, not through anything the people could do, but through God's goodness, the very thing that they're giving thanks for. And then there's this last aspect to consider here. And then when a grain offering was made, you had a portion, what was called the memorial portion here in Leviticus 2, that was set aside, that was burned on the altar as an offering to the Lord. In ancient understanding, they thought of the incense, the scent of the offering that was made as it burned, that smoke going up and rising in the direction of heaven, as being something that was pleasant in God's nostrils. Whether we should interpret that literally is a whole other thing. Some church traditions really treasure the idea of incense and those kinds of things because of this kind of instruction. I personally don't know that it's meant to be taken in that literal kind of a way. But again, this was the understanding of ancient peoples in an ancient time and place who didn't really know an awful lot about science or technology or whatever, but they knew the smoke rose upward. And they thought of upward as being the direction of God's dwelling. And so their sense was that when they burned these offerings and the smoke drifted upward, that would be pleasing to God. And indeed, scripture says it was. But you had this memorial portion that was sacrificed by fire. We use the term immolated to refer to making a burnt offering like this, whether it's grain or whether it's meat or whatever. Immolated comes from the Latin for grain. And so it actually refers to this kind of grain offering. But you had that portion that was burned. And then the bigger portion, was for the priests, it was for the Levites, it was for Levi and his sons, those people who ministered in the temple, in other words, and it was to supply their food. It was to provide their livelihood, to keep their families fed. Since ancient times, the leaders of God's people have survived, at least in part, by the generosity of God's people to provide for their livelihood. And that's something that scripture encourages us toward, that we should be generous and we should support those who minister the gospel. and that we should make an effort to make sure that those who dedicate their lives to sharing the gospel are taken care of as best we're able to, to make sure that they have a livelihood and that they don't go hungry and that their children are not starving and naked and those sorts of things. And so this is an example of that very early on in Leviticus 2. So we have a little layers here to this grain offering. On one level, it emphasizes the need to dedicate ourselves to the Lord, to provide for the work of those who minister the gospel to us. It reminds us that in giving the fruits of our land and of our efforts, that those things are consecrated to God. That the land itself, that the physical ability that makes us able to raise crops and farm animals and those kinds of things, that that is something that should be consecrated to God. Our work, our energy, those kinds of things. And it's a reminder that everything we have, including that ability to do work, comes as a blessing from God, that we would have nothing, that we wouldn't have food, we wouldn't have physical ability, we wouldn't have anything if it weren't for the Lord. So today, we make offerings in a different kind of way. Scripture tells us that God no longer desires burnt offerings, that those kinds of things are not specific to the worship of God's people under the new covenants, but that God desires the sacrifices of a pure heart, of repentance, of right worship, of a desire to glorify him, and it'd be near to him, that those are the things that God seeks from his people. And so today we make those kinds of offerings, but it's still with remembrance that our ability to do those things, my ability to get up out of bed and go to church on Sunday morning, or to get up on Thursday morning and read the scripture and pray and be able to talk to God and be able to praise Him, to be able to sing His praises and be able to speak about Him and glorify Him before people, that those things, the energy that lets me do that is the gift of God. that the energy that lets me work to be able to earn a living for myself and my family is God's grace in my life. And we make these offerings as thanksgiving. We seek to live holy lives in thanksgiving to God. We seek to be near to him and draw into his presence and to praise him and lift him up with our voices and with our hearts and our prayers, because we're thankful to the merciful King who provides for us. I think it's important that we bear in mind that, you know, we think sometimes we get this teaching from some quarters that the sacrificial system, that everything kind of under the old covenants was a whole different means toward salvation. And that it was a way of people earning salvation through works. It was not. Salvation has always been through God's grace. It's always been through the person and the character of Christ. Those who live before Christ's birth, lived and were saved through faith in the coming Messiah. By the gift of God's grace, they learned through things like the sacrificial system to look forward to that perfect sacrifice that would eternally atone for sin, that would eternally make them right before God and do away with the need for slaughtering and killing animals and burning grain and all those kinds of things. In the same way, pardon me, In the same way, God's people were appointed to hope that lay ahead for them in Christ. Those who came after Christ, obviously our faith is in Jesus. It's given by God's Holy Spirit drawing us to trust him and to put faith in the work of Christ at the cross as being the only righteous sacrifice, the only permanent and perfect sacrifice that fulfills the very thing that God's law demanded under the old covenants. And so Jesus said, I didn't come to do away with the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them. In the same way, our worship today doesn't, it's not a different way to please God. It's not a different way to appease God for sin. God's appeasement against our sin, the relief of God's wrath against our sin is always through Jesus Christ and his perfect sacrifice. Today, we're able to celebrate that together. We're able to rejoice in his name. We're able to glorify him together. Honestly, even in trials, one of the things that struck me the last few days is I've been struggling with my back and I'm stumbling around and last night fell on the floor and was kind of, you know, very frustrated with the fact that I just couldn't stand up. I realize, though, in the midst of that, and I'm not trying to sound like a martyr here or anything, but I mean, I really, legitimately, this is something that God has taught me over time, to give thanks for my trials, to give thanks for my struggles, to give thanks for the days when it hurts and it's hard because I have the sure promise of God from the days of old to God's people up to now, that everything that God allows in my life, if I'm His, if I'm in Christ, everything He allows is for my blessing and for His glory. It doesn't mean it's all pleasant at the time. It doesn't mean it's all fun to go through. I'm not saying that at all. I'm not saying you should enjoy suffering. I don't think that's an oxymoron. Nobody enjoys suffering. But at the same time, I can give thanks to God because whether I can see it or not, right here on the surface, I know this, that God is sanctifying me. He's making me more and more into the image of Jesus Christ as he teaches me to suffer well. He's leading me to have things like patience and forbearance and long suffering through the experiences of this life and the hardships that we all go through. And every one of you has those. And he also is glorifying himself. Somehow, some way God is bringing glory to himself as he helps me to survive through the trials in this life. And so what's the response of my heart? to give thanks to the gracious King for all of his provision, for all of his kindness, for all of his mercy to me, the very thing that God calls on his people to do here in Leviticus. Let's pray together. Father God, thank you for grace. Thank you, God, for the personification of grace in Jesus Christ, that in your spirit and human form, that as you walked as a man in this world, that we could be able to see and understand and have record of what grace truly is. That those who had labored under the sacrificial system for generation after generation were set free from the responsibility to offer up grain and meat and those kinds of things to appease your wrath because you've told us that in Jesus Christ, your wrath against our sin, if we're in him, is forever appeased. That you are never angry and never again will be angry with your children who are in Jesus Christ. God, I can think of no better reason to worship you. We don't worship in this age because it's required to seek forgiveness from your anger against us. We worship exactly because your anger has already been appeased perfectly in Jesus. We worship because you are so worthy. You're so gracious and you're so good, God. This morning, as we lift our voices in song and prayer to you, Father, let the aroma of that Be pleasing. Let that bless us and glorify you. In Jesus name, amen. Thank you so much for being with us this morning. God bless you.