Gooding, David: 2 - Leviticus

Tonight, for our book of Old Testament survey, we are to consider the third book in the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus. Shall we introduce ourselves to the study by reading from that book, Leviticus chapter nineteen. Leviticus chapter nineteen. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto all the congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy. Verse 18. Thou shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. I am the Lord. Chapter twenty six, if you will, please. Chapter twenty six and verse twelve. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and ye shall be my people. I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their bondmen. And I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you go upright. God illuminates our minds with his holy words. The lesson of the book of Leviticus is well summed up in the constantly repeated phrase to be found in that book, God's word to his ancient people, Israel, you shall be holy, for I am holy. We who are Christians will immediately recognize that this ancient injunction to the Israelites is equally applicable to us who are Christians. It is repeated, for instance, in the first epistle by Peter as God's direct command to us, equally as to Israel, you shall be holy, for I am holy. Therefore, it will require very little adjustment for us as we read this ancient book to see its application to our daily living. We shall, of course, as Christians, note some things that are a trifle strange. In the standards that God set Israel for their observance in holiness, we shall notice the special and considerable emphasis that is laid upon physical, bodily holiness. It is not that physical holiness is all that is required in this ancient book. We shall read of holiness in every department of life, holiness in social terms, holiness in moral terms, holiness in spiritual terms. But we shall nonetheless, as Christians perhaps, notice the particular emphasis of this book on bodily and physical holiness. There are reasons for that, of course. You may remember that Saint Paul, talking to Jews and Christians alike in his epistle to the Galatians, observes that under the Jewish times, God was dealing with his people as a parent deals with a child. Whereas in Christian times, now that God's Son has become incarnate, God deals with his people as grown-up sons and daughters. That is not to treat of the Jewish period as though it were somehow unworthy. None of us would underestimate the importance of childhood training. Certainly there are lessons that we may not carry beyond childhood. Certainly there are lessons that in childhood we learn sufficiently so that we no longer need to be taught them when we arrive at adulthood. Certainly there are lessons in adulthood that receive greater emphasis because they are perceived to have much more importance. So is it between Judaism and Christianity. You will find a different emphasis in Christianity on holiness, an emphasis that, uh, bears more upon the spiritual level of our lives. Nonetheless, we do not, as I say, we do not underestimate the importance of Israel's childhood lessons. God began with them, placing the emphasis on physical and bodily holiness. It is in the cleanliness of his body that a child begins to form those concepts that are going to be very useful later on in holiness of spirit. A child can see his hands get dirty. A child can eventually taste the disagreeable taste of filth and learns the need of physical and bodily cleansing easily. It is from those concepts of physical stain and physical dirt and physical filth that a child begins to form his concept of the seriousness of spiritual stain and moral filth and spiritual defilement. It was important, therefore, that in those ancient days, God should place a tremendous emphasis in Israel upon physical and bodily cleansing. We shall learn lessons therefrom, and more of that anon. The other area in which you will notice as a Christian a difference between Judaism and Christianity is herein. Though God set his people high standards of holiness in the Old Testament, God was realistic enough to realize that his people would not always attain those standards of holiness and tenderness. Therefore, there arose the searching practical question, what was to be done when his people, with all the best will in the world, fell short of the standards of holiness that God required of them? There were therefore instituted in Israel an elaborate system of cleansings and washings and purifications by the blood of animals, by holy water. We who are Christians will at once notice the vast difference between Israel's system for cleanse- cleansing the defiled and that great cleansing that is offered us through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Again, the differences may be traced in part to this, that with Israel, God was beginning to teach them as a father teaches a child. He taught them the need of physical holiness, of physical bodily cleansing. And for that purpose, they use water. As Israel progressed under God's teaching to consider spiritual and moral defilement, even they could begin to see that water, however holy and however plentiful, sprinkled upon one's body, cannot really get down to the root cause of spiritual defilement. As they realized that there was not only defilement that could defile their bodies, but a more serious defilement that arose from inside the human heart, evil thoughts, impure desires, malevolent actions. Jews began to see that no m- no quantity of holy water sprinkling one's external flesh could possibly suffice to cleanse that fountain of uncleanness that is the human heart. And therefore, they came to see that their ancient system of cleansings were inadequate, but pointers to that deeper and more effective cleansing that Messiah himself should bring by his own sacrifice and death. We shall then, as we read it as Christians, notice this difference as well. But now, for a while, let us revert to this basic concept of holiness. It is, I suppose, if one may speak for another, not exactly the most attractive topic that one could launch of a Wednesday evening in the heat of the evening, holiness. Yes, you might have come to listen with more zest to a harangue about courage or about ambition. Holiness, many of us feel, is rather a negative thing. It smacks of the hospitals. It smacks of antiseptics. It seems a negative thing in life. We are more interested in the positive virtues, courage, energy, love. Holiness? It seems a bit negative. And like schoolboys who are itching to get out to play their games and enjoy life, we haven't much patience with all the regulations that bid us clean our hands and clean our hearts. We want to get on with the business of positive living. Holiness seems a bit negative. And I shall have to admit to you that the book of Leviticus, as indeed the New Testament, is full of this negative side of holiness. Leviticus is the inspired protest against all kinds of filth and dirt, physical, moral, and spiritual, and social. He very negative. But then I suppose in our more sensible moments, all of us can see that the only, uh, attitude that you could rightly adopt to kinds of filth is a negative one. At least I hope that if ever I come to be operated upon by a surgeon in hospital, I hope my surgeon, when he's poking around inside me, will take a very negative attitude to every bug that he possibly comes across. How would you like a surgeon who, in the middle of your operation, saw a bug or two creeping along his surgical glove and said, oh, a bug, oh, oh, that's just a little bug, but don't let's be too negative about these things. You would hope, when it came to your physical health, that a surgeon would be as negative as it is possible to be over every possible source of infection, of uncleanness. And far from these negative ideas being old fashioned, the more we learn about medical science, the more we see the utter importance of being absolutely negative when it comes to all those defilements and bugs that can plague our physical health. We mustn't be surprised, therefore, to find a book like Leviticus full of negative commands. Thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that, thou shalt not do the other, thou shalt cleanse this away, thou shalt purify that till it's gone, you will clean the other. Away with dirt, away with filth, away with everything that can defile us physically, morally, spiritually. I cannot speak because I do not know of the prevalent attitudes in modern society here in Southeast Asia. I can tell you with great sorrow of heart that in many parts of my own country, men have given up on this strict attitude to uncleanness. We live in an age of permissiveness in my country. And while men will care diligently for their bodies and demand the most careful and scrupulous cleanliness for anything to do with their physical health, when it comes to their moral health and their spiritual health. We live in an age where permissiveness is running riot. Though we hadn't the sense to see that if physical uncleanness will damage my physical body, moral and spiritual uncleanness will damage my soul and spirit, and if I leave them go unchecked, it will damage them irreparably. God revive our interest in books like Leviticus and fill us with the sense of importance of all his negative commands against defilement of every kind. But then we should be doing the concept of holiness a wrong if we were allow ourselves to think that holiness is merely negative. Even in this ancient book of Leviticus, written in the days of Israel's childhood, holiness as God conceived of it was an exceedingly positive and warm and living thing. The command, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, is often thought by Christian people to be a specifically Christian command. It isn't, of course. It comes from the Old Testament. I took the trouble to read the verse to you this evening so that you should see that this command, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, comes from no other book than the book of Leviticus itself. It lies at the very heart of the concept of holiness that God had for his ancient people, a positive driving force of love for my fellow man. That is holiness. To be content with a negative abstinence from dirt and defilement isn't enough for the holiness of God. The holiness of God is the holiness of a love that burns unquenchably for the good of his subjects, for the good of his creatures. He bids us be holy as he is holy. His standards are this, we shall love our neighbor as ourselves. So in the very context in which that verse is found, you will find the lawgiver has been talking to us about the way we treat our neighbors in business, thou shalt not cheat him, in social concerns, you shall care for the widow, and thus and thus and thus, in all the practicalities of life, and the reason and motivation behind the individual commandments is, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But you will see at once in that very verse that tells us that we are to love our neighbors, that the love of God is a holy love. It is not mere weak sentiment. Therefore, God says, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, and thou shalt not suffer sin upon him. If he sinned, thou shalt rebuke him. Here very often, uh, we lack courage, don't we? Because really we lack love. We don't want the other fellow to lose face. Now we would expect it from our medical doctor if he found us sick, that he would tell us. But when it comes to our spiritual and moral health, we all become very squeamish. I do, I know. So failing in love that I'm prepared to let my friend get away with substandard behavior and not rebuke him. God, forgive me in my cowardice that I don't care for my friend more than I do. Loving my friend as God loves him would mean pointing out graciously and kindly when he sins, that the man may be delivered too from this spiritual uncleanness. You may have thought too, as you read Leviticus, that when the Israelites had performed all the positive commands and observed all the negative ones, life for him must have become somewhat of a slavery. That wasn't how God viewed it. I suppose, uh, when we were little boys and were taught to wash behind our ears by insistent mamas and servants, and that, uh, people insisted that we took baths and so forth and so on, we found that a bit of a bind. The incessant, uh, command, thou shalt clean thy teeth before going to bed, and all that kind of thing was a bit of a bondage to us. We've grown up, I hope, now, so that we don't, um, any longer regard it as a bondage. Cleaning our teeth, we say to ourselves with, uh, suitable self, uh, concern. My, I must clean my tooth, for what if my front tooth were to get diseased and fall out? What a, what a horrible spectacle it is to see somebody with a missing front tooth. No, it was not a bondage as God intended it. God thought the very reverse. Hear then God's concept of holiness as he maps it out for his people. This is a holiness required of you, he said, for this reason. You once were slaves, and I have redeemed you, but not only redeemed you, I propose to come down and walk among you and with you, gracing you with my divine company and society. You shall be holy, therefore, for I am holy. I bid you consider this staggering grace of God. Why must I be holy? Why must I give up my filthy ways? Why? Because once I was a slave, and filthy ways, ways are suitable maybe for slaves, but I have been redeemed and called to keep company with the divine persons. And if it be true of Israel that God came and walked with them through the desert, and pitched his house and palace and tabernacle among them, and called them to fellowship with himself, how much truer is it of us who are Christians? Our bodies, we read, are the very temple of the Holy Ghost, and God himself by his spirit is pleased to dwell among us. Therefore, we are called to behave in such fashion as may grace the presence of Almighty God. You will remember that this is the lesson that Saint Paul preaches to his converts at Corinth. You will hear him reechoing this ancient sentiment taken from the book of Leviticus. Just let me explain to you that in ancient Greek, their customs were not perhaps our customs. In a country like ancient Greece, in a city like ancient Corinth, sexual immorality was at a very low standard. You would have had to tell a Greek, even after he became converted to Christ, you would have to tell a Greek that fornication was not a thing that Christians did. For an unconverted Greek, it was as ordinary as taking your breakfast. None would have ever questioned it. How then will the Apostle Paul wean these Greeks away from the sordid manner of behavior? He says, thus consider, consider that your very bodies are temples of the Holy Ghost, who resides in you in all his divine glory and splendor. If God dwell with you and walk with you in life, then you must, you are required to develop habits of behavior that are suitable to the divine residence now in your temple of your body. And secondly, says God, you once were bondmen, but I have broken the yoke of your bondage so that you may go upright. This is God's concept of holiness, that a man be delivered from all that would bow him down and degrade him, and learn to walk upright through life with full human dignity, and face life, and walk through life as a son of God, as God originally intended. That's God's concept of holiness. Therefore, as I come back to some few particulars, and we have not time except for a few, therefore perhaps you will understand God's early insistence with Israel on physical and bodily holiness. God starts his lessons always at the elementary level, and he delivers his divine protests against all that would dishonor and degrade the human body. He deals with despiling disease and specifies methods of cleanse, cle- cleansing. Disease, we see, degrades, doesn't it, and breaks the human body. He deals also with pagan customs that would dishonor and degrade the human body. In the ancient world, there were sundry religions. In the worship of their gods, men were required to cut their bodies and mutilate their bodies and degrade their bodies. God protested against it. God will not stand by and see pseudo-religion degrading people's bodies. God made man's body. Though man's body be ruined and fallen and broken through sin, it is God's eventual intention to redeem man's very body. Therefore, God insisted that man should not degrade his body by pseudo pagan religious rites and ceremonies. You will find God's protest against all perversion of sex. Of course, perversions of sex, permissiveness of sexual mores, in the end degrade human love, do they not? And if you want an example of it, come to our major cities in the West. It leads not in the end to the exaltation of the human body, and certainly least of all to the exaltation of womanhood, but to the degrading of the whole thing to the level of the animal. Therefore, God delivers his inspired protest against all permissiveness and perversion of sexual mores. Holiness too, as I say, was to penetrate into their business life. It was a weakness of many in ancient religion that religion wasn't concerned with morality, it was merely concerned with appeasing the gods. In Greece, for instance, or in Rome, if you wanted to be interested seriously in morality, you would have gone to the philosophers, not to the priests. Religion was a matter of paying your rates and taxes to the gods, keeping the demons happy so that they wouldn't send you disease, or they'd fight your enemies for you, or they'd, uh, uh, make your business deal a success. It was not concerned with morality in the normally accepted sense of that term. In the ancient world, Judaism stands like the snows of Mount Everest, towering over the heat of the plain, with a divine insistence that true religion be concerned with true morality, and a religion that is not concerned with morality is pseudo-religion, and in the end, a cruel deception of the human spirit. I shall never forget a friend of mine that I met when he was already an elderly gentleman. In his earlier days, he was a member of a spiritist church. He didn't deny, after his conversion to Christianity, that the spirits he worshipped were real spirits. They were real enough. But when I asked him what first led him to Christ, he said, I began to discover that in all my worship of the spirits, I made no moral progress. It was a dead end, morally. He found in Christ and in Christ's Sermon on the Mount and the repetition of the ancient laws of holiness, of morality, the thing that his human spirit craved for, genuine moral progress. And moral holiness is to penetrate, says God's word, the whole of our life, family life, business life, school life, and all else. Now let us turn very briefly to the other side of the story. Israel were to be holy, says Leviticus, ultimately for this reason, that God had called them to be his people. God had come down to live among them in that ancient tabernacle and temple, and therefore they were to be holy because God dwelt in their midst. But as anyone might know, knowing his own heart, to have gloriously high standards is one thing to fulfill them is another. And Israel, as we, were a fallen people. They came woefully short of the standards of holiness that God set for them. What then was to be done? A good deal of Leviticus is devoted to telling us what provision God made for those ancient Israelites to cleanse them. There was cleansing by blood. There was cleansing by water. There was cleansing by the blood of animals slain as victims upon the altars of Israel. You will perhaps say with your modern mind, but what good did it do to take an animal and kill it? What use an animal's blood? Well, quite so. Even some of the ancient Jews saw that likewise. When a person had sinned and he brought his sacrifice and the animal, perhaps a bullock was killed. It is evident that the poor old bullock knew nothing about it. The innocent victim had no concept of sin, knew nothing why the knife should be plunged into his vitals and his life be offered. What was God doing in those ancient days, ordering cleansing of sin by the shedding of blood. Well, he was teaching people, first of all, that sin is a serious matter. It cannot be brushed under the carpet and neglected. Therefore, before God can forgive, the standards of his holy law must be vindicated. The penalty for the breaking of that law must be paid, so that at one and the same time, God can forgive the sinner, but maintain his law. That is a problem with us still today, isn't it? Many people speak as though it were enough when you have done a sin to say, well, I'm sorry, and that's the end of it. That cannot be, can it? Suppose in a moment of carelessness I get drunk and I drive my car down your road and run over your child. Do you suppose it's enough for me to say, oh, what a pity, I'm sorry I did that. Now, in the future, I will make up my mind not to run over any other children. Will that satisfy you? And if when you protest, angry at my folly, my foolish carelessness and selfishness that let me get drunk and murder such a potential life. If when you protest, I turn around and say, but why all the fuss? It's done now, isn't it? You can't undo it. Let bygones be bygones, and I'll start afresh. That will add insult to the injury. Am I going to say that that death of that child doesn't matter? If it doesn't matter, the child doesn't matter, and if the child doesn't matter, you don't matter, and in the end, I don't matter. True love finds it impossible ever to say that sin doesn't matter. Because God loves us, therefore he must say that sin matters, and before he can grant us discharge from our guilt, the penalty must be paid. Hence the array of sacrifices in these Old Testament books. The New Testament, as indeed some of the later prophets in the Old, give us to understand that in addition to this practical lesson that sin costs, without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness. God was preparing Israel's mind for the coming of that true sacrifice, even the sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord, that should avail to put away the guilt of sin. Israel's sacrifices were like toy money compared to real money. I wonder whether you in this part of the world as children were given toy money to play with. If not, then let me tell you that in my day, when parents gave us toys that were of educational value, we were given toy shops. Uh, the girls were very good at keeping the things. There were little bottles of imitation sweets, and then you were dished out with imitation money, toy money, and you went along and you bought the sweets and you gave your note and you got back some silver cardboard that had to do for money. Why, even we kids knew it was only pretend money, it wasn't real money. And yet, though it was a game, it was preparing our minds for our adult life, when one day we should be able to handle real money. The real cost of sin, not to be paid by the toy money of ancient animal sacrifices. The real cost of sin, to be paid by the sacrifice of God incarnate, human and divine, understanding as none else could understand the hideous debt of sin, and facing it, and bearing its consequence and punishment in his own body at Calvary, that God's standard might be maintained, and God be righteous in the cleansing of the sinner who repents from the guilt of his sin. Similarly, you will find in ancient Israel's worship many cleansings by water. Again, it is evident that water was very good for some of those cleansings when they were cleansings of literal detirement of the skin. But for some of the defilements for which literal water was prescribed in Israel, for some of those defilements, it became very evident that literal water was inadequate. Why use it? Because once more, God, by these outward ceremonies, were- was preparing men's minds for the necessity of a deeper cleansing that should be one day made available to men through God's Holy Spirit poured out by the ascended Christ. It is true, of course, that some Israelites, so we read in the New Testament, became so attached to their outward rights and ceremonies as to stop there, as though they were completely adequate. There were gentlemen called Pharisees, for instance, even in our Lord's time, and they were punctiliar. They washed the cups, they washed their hands before eating, uh, they wouldn't eat with defiled Gentiles. They were punctilious in observing the outward washings of their physical body and seemed blind to the deeper need of their hearts. And our Lord had to point out to them that it's not really what goes into a man that defiles him morally and spiritually. It is what comes out of a man defiles him. Evil thoughts, envies, murders, adulteries. These things coming out of a man defile him. And if that be our plague, it would be a mockery to offer us a little water sprinkled on our bodies, as though that were enough to cleanse, uh, the evil habits of our hearts. Therefore, the New Testament bids us view these ancient ceremonies, I say, as but infant object lessons, parables of that great cleansing that one day Messiah himself should bring by the dispensing of his Holy Spirit. We who have found redemption from the guilt of sin through the blood of Christ, need to remember that there is this other cleansing that cleanses not from the guilt of our sin merely, but from the defilement of evil habit and uncontrolled urge. Listen to Paul the Apostle, speaking of the Christian equivalent of these ancient Jewish ceremonies of washing. He said thus, writing to his fellow missionary Titus, he says, Titus, we ourselves one time were foolish, disobedient, living in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. What marred characters we were, Titus. It wasn't merely that we had done sins and were guilty, it was that we were twisted personalities, marred in our very makeup. What could reach us and cleanse us and make us anew? He says thus, after that the kindness and love of God, our Savior toward man, appeared, not by works done in righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy he saved us by the washing of regeneration, which he poured on us abundantly by his Holy Spirit. Ask that the New Testament and salvation in Christ bring us to the reality, to the full-blown adult reality of holiness that was foreshadowed in the infant lesson that God began to teach his people Israel in the wilderness of Sinai those many centuries ago. Shall we just ask God's help that we might remember and practice the lessons he has just taught us? O God, we thank thee for erecting in our world thy challenge and command to holiness of life. As we perceive the ruin and the defilement that sin has spread, we pray, O Lord, that thou will give us the wisdom to listen to thy voice, to learn thy standards, to determine to pursue them. And since, O Lord, we come short of them, work in us that repentance we do beseech thee, that you'll acknowledge our needs and bring us to Jesus Christ, thy son, for cleansing from guilt and cleansing of character that he can offer and that we so sorely need, as we now give thee thanks for thy word, in his holy name. Amen.