Leviticus 15-22 Recap | OT Ep 15

In this episode, Austin and Ashley delve into the themes of ritual cleanliness, particularly as compared to pagan worship practices, including child sacrifice and "seed sewing" acts at the pagan temples. They discuss the significance of the Day of Atonement, the moral and ceremonial laws in Leviticus, including the intimate relationships of various kinds and the implications of these laws for modern believers. They emphasizes the importance of understanding God's commandments as a means to live a holy life, the further holiness required of the priests and the high priest, and the redemptive work of Christ in relation to the Old Testament laws.

Reading Plan - Old Testament in One Year
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tSmSv3JOd-gCJS6VSFMtu-iv14NZ45_M/view?usp=sharing

Chapters

• 0:00 Discharges and "Unclean" situations (Ch 15)
• 2:41 The Day of Atonement (Ch 16)
• 5:31 Life in the Blood (Ch 17)
• 9:21 Sexual Ethics (Ch 18)
• 14:41 Community, Welfare, and Blended Fabrics (Ch 19)
• 18:33 Old Covenant vs New Covenant (Ch 20)
• 20:31 Holiness Standards for Priests (Ch 21-22)

Transcript

Hey everyone,

My name is Austin. And my name is Ashley. Welcome to the Clean Slate Podcast. Where we're finding Jesus in the Old Testament.

Welcome back friends. Today in episode 15, we're going to be recapping Leviticus chapter 15 through 22. We have a lot to cover today, so we're just going to get right to it.

The first part of chapter 15 has to do with men having some sort of discharge, whether it's just normal, God created intercourse with his wife or an abnormal discharge related to an infection or something of that nature. The second part of chapter 15 has to do with women having some kind of discharge. Again, whether it's normal, God created intercourse with her husband or her period, which is a bloody discharge or an abnormal discharge. As a nurse, some of these instructions make total sense.

You have a discharge or touch the area where someone with a discharge was sitting, take a bath and wash your clothes. Pretty straightforward, right?

Something I want us to really get into here is that despite our presuppositions of hygiene, unclean does not mean unhygienic, right? We've talked about that in previous episodes. It's very easy in this particular chapter to attribute that adjective in some of these cases. But God is still saying that these scenarios make you ritually unclean, not sinful, not unhygienic.

Just do not perform the rituals in the tabernacle until that discharge is complete.

Another interesting cultural point for this chapter

God is specific, even about sexual discharges here. Go back with me to when we talked about the various pagan gods that were worshiped in Egypt. Not just in Egypt, but in many cultures at the time, it was believed that little G gods were responsible for, quote, sowing seed into the earth to make it flourish.

So people would actually go to the sanctuary at the pagan temples to mimic their little G gods and have ritualistic acts of sex at the temple believed to bring about what they were asking the pagan gods to do. So God specifically addresses this to say, you, people of Israel, are not going to act like that and God keeps them away from those practices that they could have so easily fallen into after seeing other people worship their pagan gods in that way. Yahweh just goes ahead and nips that in the bud here.

Now, this next chapter, chapter 16, is the center and the heart of the book of Leviticus, in the very middle of the Torah. You could say that this is the Good Friday of Leviticus. So without any more spoiler alerts, I will turn that over to Austin, who is absolutely giddy to share this with you guys.

There is so much we could talk about in chapter 16. This chapter is akin to Genesis chapter 15 in that it is saturated with gospel.

For time's sake, I will talk about only two of the realities that are going on in this chapter.

The first reality has to do with the two goats that are first introduced in verse 7. One goat is to be killed as a sin offering to the Lord. The other goat is to be released into the wilderness.

It’s important to notice that normally only one animal is involved as a sin offering, but this is the Day of Atonement. This is a special day.

We see in verse 15 that the high priest is to kill the first goat and offer the atonement of all the people of Israel.

he has done this, is to lay his hands on the second goat, confess onto that goat the sins and transgressions of all the people of Israel, and then in verse 22, the goat symbolically bears the sins of the people into a remote area. Friends, in these two goats, we have a miniature glimpse into what Christ would do for us of the cross.

Jesus was the sacrifice who had his blood spilled for us in order that there was a sacrificial offering for us so that we may have peace with God. The second goat was then sent away from the people carrying the sins of people with it and we see in Psalm 103 our sins are removed as far as the east is from the west so far that we will never see them again. They are truly gone, truly a thing of the past because we are truly forgiven.

The second way we see Christ in this chapter is from the angle of the high priest.

I would like for us to take notice that on this day, he starts his day in very plain linen, not in his high priestly garb. Again, after the atonement is made, the priest emerges from the holy place in his high priestly clothes.

This is another clear picture of Christ who before the cross was, as the prophet Isaiah foretold in Isaiah 53, very plain and ordinary in appearance.

But when Christ arose from the grave, he arose as the conquering priest king and was subsequently seated at the right hand of the majesty on high, like we see in Psalm 110.

Believe me, there is so much more in this chapter, but there is enough truth in these two points to keep us going for a while.

You may remember in the last episode we discussed the moral law and the ceremonial law and the differences of those two.

As we enter into chapter 17, really you kind of start seeing the moral law play itself out. And the way you know something is a moral law and not a ceremonial law is that you see the same law propagated in the New Testament as well, the same commandment in the New Testament as well. So we're gonna jump into 17 and start working our way through this.

In the first nine verses of chapter 17, God is specifically forbidding the shedding of sacrificial blood unless it is done only at the entrance of the tent of meeting. In verse 4, God uses a very strong language that implies the shedding of sacrificial blood of an ox, a lamb, or a goat in any place but the door of the tent of meeting would be tantamount to murder and would bear with it the death penalty.

Now, if you've been on this journey with us for the last few episodes, you've probably guessed that there's a reason for this. That reason comes to the surface in verse seven, where God says, they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons after whom they whore. shall be a statute forever for them throughout the generations. Again, really strong language.

But if you've read later passages in the scriptures, you'll know God likens his relationship to Israel to a marriage in where he is the husband and Israel is the bride. When Israel worships other gods, Yahweh says that they are being unfaithful to him and their covenant.

So what is being said by God here, why He is making such a strong demand, is that He is trying to keep them from falling away from the covenant they have made with Him,

by telling them not to sacrifice any longer to other gods or more accurately, demons.

The second half of chapter 17 has to do with eating or drinking of blood.

In a previous episode, we've covered how God already stated this was forbidden and the reason is that pagan cultures had a practice of drinking the blood of animals they sacrificed to their pagan deity, believing that it would give them the life force or power of that animal. The central point really comes in verse 14 where God explains the life of every creature is its blood. Its blood is its life. Think for a moment of the Gospel of John in chapter 6,

verses 53 through 56 specifically, where Jesus, seeking to thin out the crowd of unbelieving Jews had been following Him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.

of my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him. Of course, Jesus was really talking about the Last Supper, which he hadn't instituted yet. But when you view what Jesus said here with the Leviticus 17 lens, you can see one of the Jews in Jesus' day that had been following him out of curiosity, but not faith, found this statement so troubling.

I think there is a little message here for us, a call to faith. There comes a moment when you’ve seen enough to know Jesus is your Savior, your Messiah, and you have to put your presuppositions behind you and put your faith in Him and Him alone.

He won't suffer forever those who follow him only out of curiosity and not out of faith.

As we move into chapter 18, I want to express that I know that chapter 18 is a chapter a lot of people struggle with. This is the first chapter where there's an expressed prohibition against several things that we have already seen in the Bible, one of them being homosexuality.

To that point, we can easily view this chapter as a list of do's and do nots. And I'm not saying that there isn't some of that there. But honestly, the scriptures, while they're easy to understand, are often deeper than what they first appear. Now what I'm not saying is that there's a lot of room for nuance here. What I am saying is that there is more going on than just a list of don'ts.

The scriptures speak two words to us all the time. They speak a word of life and a word of death. What I mean is that God continually offers us His way of life, which, you know, His commandments, putting faith in Christ, 

or a way of death, trusting ourselves, or making our desires or our wants our own idol. If you think about it, this happens from Genesis in the the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil all the way to Revelation. This framework I'm building here for us finds its grounding in verse 24 and 25 of this chapter.

They read, “do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”

You see friends, sin leaks. It never just affects you. It affects the people around you down to the very land in which you live.

These laws about our sexuality are laws of life. God is not trying to take anything away from anyone. He is inviting you in to follow Him and His way of life, His law that leads to life.

As we work our way through this chapter with that framework in mind, I want to simplify verses 6 through 19, saying that the idea of uncovering nakedness isn't just about seeing someone naked. If you look at verse 8, it says, “You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's wife. It is your father's nakedness.”

You see that when there are two people, joined in marriage, uncovering the nakedness of one is uncovering the nakedness of the other. Remember, sin never just affects you alone.

This prohibition continues down and you begin to get the idea that God is really defining what life-giving sexual relationships are, by the boundary around what we should NOT do.

So think about it this way. Again, he's not trying to take something away from you. He's trying to put a guardrail on this path and this way of life to keep you from straying into the path of death.

Then in verse 21, there seems to be an out of place statement where God says, you should not give any of your children to offer them to Molech. And so, profane the name of your God, I am the Lord. This, of course, isn't out of place because God knows what he's doing.

The worship of Molech involved sexual rituals and the male worshippers of Molech would often have sex with prostitutes in the temples that propagated this sort of worship. The children of those unions as well as the children of people who were seeking a blessing from Molech would be sacrificed to this demon that they worshiped.

So think about this. This whole discourse so far has been putting boundaries on sex relations between men and women. So in the middle of this discourse, God is telling the Israelites they are not to do what the nations in Canaan and sacrifice children they didn't want to this demon of the ancient world. God is telling them that children wanted or not are not to be sacrificed on the altar of Yahweh was telling the Israelites,

that you can't be a nation that seeks to follow him while sacrificing your children. I pray that we heed this warning in our time as well.

In verse 22, God says, you shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.

Again, this is the first time we see God give a prohibition towards homosexual relations. And I want you to notice in that prohibition, He is not saying the people who do that are an abomination. He's saying the act is an abomination.

Friends, please hear me. If you're someone who has struggled with homosexual attraction or you do struggle with it, there is grace for you in the Lord Jesus Christ and he offers forgiveness.

I did not want to move past this point without saying that God offers forgiveness to all sinners, no matter what type of sin they've committed. All we have to do is repent of our sins and put our faith and trust in Christ, in Christ alone, for forgiveness. And we are forgiven. As I said earlier in chapter 16, our sins are spread as far as the east is from the west, and we'll never see them again.

Landing the plan on this chapter, again, this verse is 24 and 25, where God is explaining these laws are not only good for the people and their future generations, but for the land itself. God is pushing His people to follow His word of life.

Now we'll move into chapter 19. So this chapter is actually the most addressed chapter of Leviticus in the entire New Testament. Chapter 16 is a close second, but overall chapter 19 is the most quoted or alluded to chapter of Leviticus. So this chapter addresses how are these people, this giant family, how are they to live with one another? After their reminder, you shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.

which by the way is a very personal statement. I am the Lord your God, reminding them that he has made a way to dwell with the people of Israel and have a personal relationship with him. God starts with every one of you shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall keep my Sabbaths. The word order there is very interesting in that the mother is listed first and for God to have her listed first shows his demand for respect for mothers as well.

Then God reminds them about the Sabbath and not to make idols.

and moves into addressing the welfare of the needy, whether it is the poor or the sojourner. So the Israelite farmers are commanded to not harvest every single part of their field or vineyard and leave the corners of the crop for those people.

So notice, God doesn't say gather all of your food and donate a portion of it. No, He says to leave it and the poor or the sojourner are able to come and glean it. So there's a level of dignity that they are able to maintain in having to work in some regard to provide for themselves.

We see this played out in Ruth, which is one of our favorite books of all time.

We'll get there before we know it this year.

But in that book, we'll see that this law not only protected the poor and the sojourner, but also protected the lineage of King David and ultimately King Jesus himself.

So God goes on to say multiple different ways to love our neighbor as ourselves.

God wants his chosen community to remain as such, a royal priesthood, a holy nation set apart from the rest of the world. To that point in verse 19, God says, do not let your cattle breed with a different kind or sow with two kinds of seed in the same field or wear a garment of two kinds of material.

This is one that gets argued a lot from those that try to make Christians stumble. But this again is not that it is sinful. It is to represent the call of the people of Israel to be set apart by God and not mixed in the ways of the world. This is not about cattle or seed or clothing, friends. It's the call to ceremonial set-apartness, ceremonial holiness.

To further that point, verses 26-31 of this chapter may seem a little random to us, but each of these address practices of pagan worship or rituals of the Canaanites.

Holiness requires Israel not to act like the pagans in any area of life. The tattoos referenced here are not your favorite Bible verse or of the random flower you may have somewhere. This was regarding cutting your body in a certain way or tattooing certain symbols on your body for pagan idol worship. Please don't do that.

Please don't tattoo your body for idol worship.

The chapter ends with the concept to be fair to sojourners in judgment and weights and measures.

That since the Israelites had been strangers in Egypt and knew what it was like, they should treat the strangers living among them just like themselves.

So chapter 20 is very akin to chapter 18, but the punishment is set forth for violating those laws. we see that the punishment is either death, exile, or barrenness.

Again, as we said before, that may seem harsh, but you see over and over in chapter 20, the call of God is to be holy as he is holy. And if you've been with us for a few episodes, you know that's been the call throughout Leviticus, is to be holy as God is holy. So a question can often arise here about, well, do Christians think that people who commit these or break these laws should be put to death or exile? Now, the answer to that is no.

And the return question usually, well, why not if you're trying to seek to follow the whole Bible? We have to remind people that what we call the Old Testament, couple hundred years ago, people referred to as the Old Covenant. And what we call the New Testament, up to a couple hundred years ago, people referred to as the New Covenant.

Friends, we live in the new covenant now. And even though, as the scripture says, that the wages of sin is death, which is why everyone dies, right? Everybody dies. No matter what sin they've committed, they die at some point. You may live to be 99. You may live to be 70. But the sin we all commit in our life catches up to our mortal bodies. But in this new covenant, there is the offer of redemption through Christ.

There is no need for anyone to be put to death for committing one of these sexual sins that's outlined in chapter 18.

God again has provided a way our sins to be atoned for. And either those sins can be paid for on the cross by us putting our faith and trust in Jesus, or we will bear that punishment at end of our life eternal separation from God.

Aren't you so thankful to be under the new covenant, the blood of Jesus that washes us white as snow?

Moving into chapters 21 and 22, these deal with the Lord's demand of holiness for the priests. To start, I just want to read the study note from the ESV study Bible. "While priests have been ordained and are holy in terms of their office, that holiness is only an outward one. It does not necessarily mean that they have inner holiness of heart and conduct.

More stringent regulations of holiness are required of the priests because they work directly with the holy objects of the sanctuary.

In verses five and six, priests were prohibited from making bald patches on their heads, shaving off the edges of their beards, or making cuts on their body. These are pagan mourning and burial practices. of Israel oversee the ceremonial worship of the people, and therefore, no Canaanite ritual is to penetrate the priestly system. Even in burial practices, the priests are to be holy.”

Then we get to verses 10 through 15, and those verses are addressed for the High Priest. We see the High Priest is subject to even stricter holiness regulations than even the ordinary priest.

We end this chapter with the Lord speaking to Moses about acceptable offerings.

reminds them that it should be without spot or blemish. I'm so thankful that the Lord Jesus, the spotless lamb, was our sacrifice make atonement for the sins of all who would call on His name.

Amen. Me too. to end our recap for today. May His grace abound to you and to me as we study to find Jesus in the Old Testament.