We come once again to the book of Leviticus. It's a hard book, I know. And if I was going to read to you all of chapters 13 and 14, we'd be here a long time, and you might even feel a little bit lost. But I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to read the first part of Leviticus 13 and a brief portion of 14 also, so that you might understand what we're talking about. It's not just or really about skin diseases as much as it is about our spiritual need of healing and cleansing. And we see that in the examples that I'm going to be giving you in the Old Testament and the New that are there in your outline. your bulletin. So then, let us listen first to the first part of Leviticus 13, and it might be less familiar. Try hard to concentrate, see if you can figure out what it's all about, and hear God's Word. The Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying, When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a case of leprous disease in the skin of his body, Then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest, or to one of his sons the priest. And this priest shall examine the diseased area on the skin of his body. And if the hair in the diseased area has turned white, and the disease appears to be deeper than the skin of his body, it is a case of leprous disease. When the priest has examined him, he shall pronounce him unclean. But if the spot is white in the skin of his body, and appears no deeper than the skin, and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall shut up the diseased person for seven days, and the priest shall examine him on the seventh day. And if in his eyes the disease is checked, and the disease has not spread in the skin, then the priest shall shut him up for another seven days, and the priest shall examine him again on the seventh day. And if the diseased area has faded, and the disease has not spread in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him clean. It is only an eruption. And he shall wash his clothes and be clean. But if the eruption spreads in the skin after he has shown himself to the priest for his cleansing, he shall appear again before the priest, and the priest shall look. And if the eruption has spread in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him to be unclean. It is a leprous disease. When a man is afflicted with a leprous disease, he shall be brought to the priest, the priest shall look. And if there is a white swelling in the skin that has turned the hair white, and there is raw flesh, and the swelling is a chronic leprous disease in the skin of his body, and the priest shall pronounce him unclean, he shall not shut him up, for he is unclean. And if the leprous disease breaks out in the skin, so that the leprous disease covers all the skin of the diseased person from head to foot, so far as the priest shall see, then the priest shall look, and if the leprous disease has covered all his body, He shall pronounce him clean of the disease. It has all turned white, and he is clean. But when the raw flesh appears on him, he shall be unclean. And the priest shall examine the raw flesh and pronounce him unclean. Raw flesh is unclean, for it is a leprous disease. but the raw flesh recovers and turns white again, then he shall come to the priest, and the priest shall examine him. And if the disease has turned white, and the priest shall pronounce the diseased person clean, he is clean." And then chapter 14, for a bit of resolution, The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, This shall be the law of the leprous person for the day of his cleansing. He shall be brought to the priest, and the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall look. Then, if the case of leprous disease is healed in the leprous person, the priest shall command them to take for him who is to be cleansed two live clean birds and cedar wood and scarlet yarn and hyssop. And the priest shall command them to kill one of the birds on an earthenware vessel over fresh water. He shall take the live bird with the cedar wood and the scarlet yarn and the hyssop and dip them in the live bird and the blood of the bird that was killed over the fresh water. And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease. Then he shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird go into the open field. And he who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and bathe himself in water, and he shall be clean. And after that he may come into the camp, but live outside the tent seven days. On the seventh day he shall shave off all of his hair from his head, his beard, his eyebrows, He shall shave off all of his hair, and then he shall wash his clothes and bathe his body in water, and he shall be clean. What a relief. Let us pray for God's blessing upon his word. Teach us again, Lord, the wonder of true spiritual and internal cleansing. Help us to come to Christ for that true spiritual cleaning that we need in Jesus' name. Amen. One time I was sitting in my family room in the downstairs area of one of our houses back years ago. And a strange insect kind of appeared from near the chimney. And it flew down and kind of landed on the couch next to me. And I thought, what is this? It was an ant, but it was big and it could fly. I thought, what in the world is this? And then I saw a few more and I thought, I'm in trouble. Because you're never really infested with ant. You're always infested with ants. In this case, carpenter ants. Do you know what those are? They eat the wood of your house like termites would. And we had them. And I had to get somebody out to clean them up because if they hadn't, they would have eaten a lot of the wood in our house and we would have been in severe trouble. Your house could be rotted with termites. And if you find a termite, you don't just stomp on the critter, you find the rest of them. You have to get something deep inside the wood in your house. Some of you may have cars that were up north, and we've had a number of those, and we might spot a little rust spot on one of the fenders. And the tendency you might have is take a little paint, slap it on there, problem solved, right? If you see a little rust spot on the surface of your car, you can guarantee there's a lot more rust deep inside. I had a car that was so rusted it broke in half. I'm not kidding you. We drove down the road, it broke in half. It was limping down the road because I had pretended it wasn't a problem, but it was. Now, on the case of this matter of skin diseases, you might look at a little spot on your skin and say, what's that? Is it important? Is it not important? Now, I'm not saying this is all about learning to be a dermatologist and learning to diagnose your skin, though it still has a good example in that whole problem. If you go to a dermatologist, he'll look over your skin and say, that's okay. Not a problem. It's a mole. No problem. Or this is a cancer and this is serious. And probably, you know, there's a certain kind of skin cancer from which you can actually die. It's called melanoma. If you have it, you better get rid of it really, really quick. However, It's not just about rot in your house, rot in your car, or even rot in your skin or in your body. It's really a ceremonial object lesson, as Leviticus and all these ceremonial laws tend to be. Christ, in fact, is the fulfillment of this passage in that he is the high priest who declares you clean not just from these ceremonial diseases, but from the rot of sin that thoroughly infests your body and your soul. Now, we haven't dealt with a lot of these passages in Leviticus. We've skipped over the unclean animals. God gave the curse to the serpent and some animals were unclean. We skipped over childbirth and the curse on the woman, the woman second, as she will have pain in childbirth. It will be a problem because of the fall. But we do come now to the law of the leper, cleansing the leper. And we're going to see examples, if you want to look in your outline, of examples from the Bible. Four examples from the Old Testament and four in the New. Now, if you found this skin problem, a general skin disease, you would find all these details about the hair turning white and all that. You know, it's kind of a messy thing. But it gave the priest something to go on, because if it was a serious disease, it could be deadly, and it could even spread in the community. And if it was not, then he would be counted ceremonial and clean after a certain procedure would happen. Then, eventually, cleansing would be declared by the priest that God had delivered this person from a serious disease, and then he could be restored to worship in the community. Probably many of you know in the New Testament, lepers were isolated. They couldn't come into the synagogue. They couldn't worship. They were kept isolated as was true even across the world. And by the way, we're not actually talking about what we would call leprosy, which is otherwise known as Hansen's disease. That's really in some ways a more particular example, but it's not that example as bad as it is. Other examples of things that could infest your body and are any result of the curse. It all goes back to the curse in the Garden of Eden upon Adam. He says, Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground, thorns and thistles it shall bring forth. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. But now, listen to this, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for you are dust. and to dust you shall return." So Adam, and for that matter all of our bodies, subject to the decay that came to our physical beings because of sin, they go back to the dust, to the earth. And when you look at the scriptures describing what's happening with leprous diseases, it is though decay has begun to set in a little early. Even before you turn to dust in the grave, dust returns to you. Decay begins to show itself in your body in different ways. The dust to which we shall return is postponed but not completely eliminated because the problems we have are more than skin deep." Now you probably know that expression. that beauty is skin deep but ugly is to the bone. That might be a southern expression. I also used to hear when I first moved to the south you'd have your kids or somebody being nasty and you know fighting or something and then the mother would go don't be ugly. Well it doesn't mean don't have a big nose or something it means Don't act sinful. Don't do things that are really truly ugly because of course we know from the scripture it's not all about physical beauty. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain. Proverbs 31 says, but the woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. So it's not about your outside, it's about your inside. That's the real problem. It comes from within the heart, but it's expressed in flesh and bones and skin. And illustrations throughout the Bible, I'll give you a few of them. Job 7-5, of course, we know what happened to him. He had all kinds of health problems. My flesh is clothed with worms and dirt. My skin hardens and then breaks out afresh. And of course, you may remember he scraped his skin. It was disgusting until God restored him. Psalm 73, my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. My flesh and my heart, my body and my soul, all affected by sin, but ultimately God heals both, but primarily He's focused upon our hearts. Psalm 32, a psalm of confession of sin, when I kept silent, my bones wasted away. I know it's an expression, kind of a figure of speech, but it still says, in effect, this sin is deep within me. Job 30, my skin turns black and falls from me, and my bones burn with heat. The Bible speaks about our bodies as kind of a symbol of our great need of a Savior. None is righteous, no, not one. Romans 3. All have turned aside. Then he begins to list body parts. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Their paths are ruin and misery. In the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before. Their eyes, throat, lips, mouth, feet, paths, eyes. an expression of how sinful we are. We talked about total depravity, that's it. Now give some examples, and I want you to see there is a spiritual problem associated with this particular skin problem in many cases, not in every case. We'll see that later. But first of all, Miriam, she plotted, you may remember, against Moses together with Aaron. And her sin was rebellion, and ambition, and leprosy, or this kind of skin disease resulted. And if you're following along in your outline, you can say Miriam and the sin was rebellion. Interestingly enough, the cure took seven days and there was no priest involved. Not at all. She was just healed by God's grace. There's a famous illustration of Nahum in the Syrian. He shows up and of course his whole being is tied up with pride and idolatry. And he too was leprous or had the skin disease. And his pride was shown when Elisha says, go wash in the Jordan River. He says, I got plenty of rivers back home. They're better than this one. Why should I do that? And his servants go, look, you came all this way. Listen to the prophet, do what he says, wash in the Jordan three times, and he did, and he was healed, and no priest was involved here either. This was a demonstration that God heals the rebel and the idolater, whether they be Jew or Gentile. And then there's the example right in the story of Naaman of Gehazi, the servant who, when Naaman said, I don't want to take any gift from you, but the gift was given anyway, and the greed and the lies and the theft of Gehazi were this. I'm going to take this stuff anyway. And the leprosy of Naaman went on Gehazi and his descendants. And what was the cure? There was none. No cure. This man had that stamp of uncleanness because of his greed for the rest of his life, as short as it was. Finally, Uzziah, in 2 Kings 15, the sin was idolatry. The high places were not taken away. The Lord touched the king so that he was a leopard to the day of his death, and he lived in a separate house. He defiled the Lord's house, so he had to be quarantined. by himself until he died. All of these were examples of spiritual heart problems. The healing would come ultimately through God's grace. Now, Elisha was a prophet of hope and healing and resurrection, but he was not the Messiah. And therefore, it was ultimately God who would, through the coming Christ, heal us of our sin problems that are more than skin deep. If you look at chapter 14, you see the cleansing of the priests by grace, and we read that the first few verses. And it is an interesting process. I won't go through it again in detail, but there are a couple of birds involved. I like to call it escape bird. One bird is killed, the other bird is let free out into the desert as if your sins are flying away. Your uncleanness is gone. And there is redemption, there is payment for sin, there is sacrifice. And now this man who was unclean is ready to worship God again in the fellowship of the saints. And he may be clean. The good words at the end of chapter 14, verse 9, he shall be clean. What a relief. Now, interestingly enough, these ceremonies of showing yourself to the priest, there's no recorded example in the Old Testament of it actually happening. Now, it's likely that it did. We're just not given any examples. You also probably know that many times the people of God did not obey the seventh-day Sabbath of the land or the Jubilee year the way they should have. They're supposed to, but they didn't. Same thing in this case. Many cases you're going, this is way too much trouble. However, some were healed, as we've seen, by the power of God. Now, when do we find an example recorded in the Bible of someone being cleansed of their skin disease, showing themselves to the priests, and being cleansed? Through Christ himself, in the New Testament, in the Gospels. It is Christ himself who took the curse of Adam and absorbed the penalty so as to give us new life and produce cleansing from all our uncleannesses and all our unrighteousness. So we find Christ's unique power that deals with sin that is surely ugly and more than skin deep. The first example is from Luke 7, 22, the Messiah's prophecy. Are you the one to come or shall we look for another? He answered them, go and tell John what you've seen and heard. The blind, listen to this list of Jubilee good news. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed. We just kind of skip over that and go, I don't know what that was. But the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news preached to them, and blessed is the one who is not offended by me. So we come to the example then in Matthew chapter 8. One of the most startling things about this passage is a little bit hidden. I wanted to look at it again, just to catch this little detail. Lord, if you will, make me clean. Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, I will be clean. What is the most horrifying thing that Jesus did there? He touched the leper. You weren't supposed to touch a leper. If you did, you would be unclean, too. That's why they were always separated. quarantined and put in their house and they had to go see the priest. You're not supposed to touch a leper. You'll be unclean. Jesus is not made unclean by touching the leper. Instead, he cleanses the leper. He heals him. He, Jesus, the source of all purity and power, actually transmits that healing power to someone who otherwise would be separated from from God, as it were, immediately his leprosy was cleansed. He restores the outcasts. He touches the untouchable. He breaks the boundaries of the law and does what the law says you can't do. And he is not defiled. He is undefiled. pure. And then he says, see that you say nothing to anyone, but go show yourself to the priest, offer the gift, in other words do Leviticus 13 and 14, for a proof to them. And that's the first example we have in the Bible of that actually happening. Same thing in Luke 11. We read about the ten lepers that were cleansed. Remember that? Even more grace. Not just to one, but to ten. This time from a distance. And as they went on their way, they were cleansed. They were healed as they went. And this shows the one true internal reality is the point. Because they were supposed to go show themselves to the priests, and Jesus had declared them clean from that distance. And as they went, they were cleansed. Then one of them suddenly praised God. The other lepers must have gone to themselves. Well, that was easy, sort of. We're glad for that. Who this man was, we don't care. We don't know. We're just glad to be cleansed. But as you may remember, that famous incident where one of them, particularly a Samaritan who was already counted as unclean by the Jews, was cleansed by the power of Jesus and his heart was changed so he could turn back to Christ and Christ would accept him and declare to him that your faith, that faith of the Samaritan, had made him well. So Jesus again cleanses, but his real point is about your heart and your life being cleansed. So much so that instead of isolating himself from the lepers in his community, he went and ate drank, according to Matthew 26, with the leper, inconceivable, especially for the Jew. Ha! That can't happen. What is he doing over there? He's already hobnobbing with who knows what all kinds of riffraff, you know, the prostitutes and the tax collectors, and now he's hanging out with lepers? How can this guy be a holy man? He doesn't even listen to the law. But of course, we know that Jesus is the one who cleanses and redeems. Job, as he comes towards the end of his experience of exile, says, I know that my Redeemer lives. And at last, he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, which it would be, and yet in my flesh, I shall see God. Job had ahead of time hope of the resurrection through the coming of Christ who would heal him not just for a time or restore a family to him, but cause him to be raised again from the dead and his flesh, his life, would be restored. Now we have to be really careful not to fall into the trap of the Pharisees who might think that every time someone has a skin disease they had a particular sin problem. Sometimes we do see that in the Bible. And they had to learn their lesson about their sin. But sin is universal. Everybody's a sinner. All of us have uncleannesses within our hearts and lives. Sometimes they're not seen at all on the outside. And the Pharisees loved to say, well, these people must have been special sinners. Or if we're not healed of some disease, some people will say, well, that person didn't have enough faith. Remember, these were signs during the time of Christ and the apostles of our universal need of cleansing, which is the whole point. The point is the power of Christ not just against skin diseases or leprosy, as important as that is as a symbol and a sign, but against sin. Remember, all sins ultimately come from the heart. All sin ultimately is more than skin deep. The things we see on the outside are but symptoms of much deeper problems like the flying ants, which were carpenter ants, or the termites in your house, or the rust in your car, or the eruptions in your flesh, you need to be cleansed before the Lord in a deep way. You are unclean in soul before the Lord. Sometimes you might say to yourself as you struggle with sin, what in the world is wrong with me? It's nothing outside. It's from the inside. We have fear of cancer, and some people die of cancer, as we've heard, and some of our neighbors, for example. But the real fear is dying in sin. Isaiah recognized that he was a man of unclean lips, and was from a people of unclean lips. And nothing undefiled can ever enter the city in Revelation 22. And we will have to be cleansed before we come into the presence of God. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ provides a spiritual equivalent of the cleansing by the priests in the Old Testament, particularly. And you can imagine someone who was maybe raised in the church and he wanders far, far away, and he becomes an outcast, and everybody is sorrowful over his lost faith. But perhaps he returns, like the prodigal son, and is restored into the presence of God and of his people, and the angels in heaven rejoice when even one sinner is redeemed. But sin is sneaky, like these kind of diseases. It has an imperceptible beginning. It starts with little tiny things. Questioning God, starting to complain, starting to wander, starting to fall into various kinds of sin, serious or otherwise. Sexual sin, financial sin, all kinds of sins. Point is, when you see sin coming in your life, you jump on it. You don't say, well, it's not that serious. It's just one little tiny sin. I bet it's not. I bet it's not. If you complain once, there's a complaining heart inside. You gossip once, you just have hateful expressions all the way through you, and you just happen to let it out there that one time, and then you realize, oops, what else might be inside of me that I can't see? Sin has an imperceptible beginning, but it grows. It can even become contagious. That is, your sin can affect others. Like a little leaven, remember what Jesus says, leavens the whole lump. So watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees. Pride. Self-righteousness. If you even, Jude says, if you're corrupted by sin, burn the garment. He's not talking about burning the garments in the Old Testament from uncleanness, though that's what it comes from. But get rid of anything connected with sin in your life. Consider Christ. He associated with tax collectors, sinners, and lepers of all kinds, and he called them to cleansing, salvation, and forgiveness. But take care, because the outcome of any sin is more hideous than any skin disease. A hideous outcome, the torments of hell, turn you into a creature that C.S. Lewis would say you would hardly recognize. You would look kind of like a demon, Lewis would say. You become abhorrent to everyone around you because you have become a carrier of sin. And the ugliness of sin is more than skin deep. And then, though you may not see the result right away, ultimately sin takes over your life. Everything one day will be revealed in the last day. Make this the day of your repentance. Be sure your sins will find you out. Are you unclean before the Lord? You wonder again, what is wrong with me? I'm afraid of cancer, but what should we really be afraid of? You recognize there are some very clear lessons from this really tough passage. Let me summarize them for you in conclusion. The disease of sin is more than skin deep. Simply removing outside sins are not enough. Jesus taught that you must be cleansed from the inside. The disease of sin can rapidly spread. Desire and temptation, if they're not quenched right away, grow into terrible, pervasive sin. And without dealing with that sin, that sin may corrupt many others. And it will make you unfit for service. It will destroy your relationships with your loved ones. It will isolate you from the people of God. It will separate you ultimately from God himself because no unclean thing will enter into the temple of the Lord. Oh no, we're all unclean. What are we going to do? Come to the great High Priest who shed his blood, who touched the unclean, who made them well, and who heals our sin-sick souls. And finally, we can rejoice because we're clean, clean, clean indeed. Praise be to the blood of the Lamb, shall we pray. Lord God, hear our prayers. Help us to know that there is a fountain whereby we may be cleansed of all of our sinful stains, and thus rejoice in seeking to live lives that are pleasing and holy unto you, in Jesus' name.