Chapter 14: How Leviticus Reveals the Path to God's Presence
We ended the book of Exodus with a problem. God cannot be in the presence of his people, or rather God’s people cannot be in his presence. Ever since the fall into sin, people have been separated from God’s presence because of their sin. If there is sin, there cannot be relationship.
However, God made a promise to Abraham that he would make him into a great nation, that he would give that nation a land to call their own, and that the whole world would be blessed through them. This became the nation of Israel. Exodus is about how God saves Israel out of Egypt to be God’s special possession.
At the end of Exodus we encounter a problem. God gives Moses extremely detailed instructions for how to build the Tabernacle. As Moses completes the Tabernacle God comes down, and since we are following the big picture story of the Bible, we expect this to be a solution to the fall of sin. God had given Moses instructions to build a Tent of Meeting. Could this be the solution to the fall into sin? Would God finally be with his people again?
As the book of Exodus closes, God enters the Tabernacle. But it doesn’t work. God is there, but the people cannot enter the Tabernacle, because God is there. If they did, they would die. So as the Book of Leviticus begins we see the problem still hasn’t been solved.
Leviticus opens with this line:
Leviticus 1:1 CSB
1 Then the Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting:
God speaks to Moses FROM the Tent of Meeting. Moses wasn’t in the tent, God had to speak to him from inside the Tabernacle, while Moses waited outside.
It is this problem that the book of Leviticus tackles. How can God finally be with his people?
Now we have to admit – Leviticus is not one of the easiest books in the Bible to read. It is all instructions about grain offerings and sin offerings and bodily fluids and skin diseases. When we read it we can’t help but wonder what relevance this book has to us today. We rarely get excited about reading Leviticus.
But we should because Leviticus lays the foundation for how God’s people could finally live with God. It teaches us about God’s holiness, it teaches us about who we are, and it shows us how God will deal with sin. So what is in it?
7 Sections
The book of Leviticus can be broken up into 7 main sections, with a little epilogue tacked on at the end. Like much Hebrew writing the most important part of the book is in the very centre of the text. We call this a “chiastic structure” which is just a fancy word to say the most important part is in the middle. So Leviticus is laid out this way (if you want to see a great video about this – check out the Bible project video here).
Ritual Sacrifices (Ch. 1-7)
Priesthood instituted (Ch. 8-10)
Ceremonial Purity (Ch. 11-15)
Day of Atonement (Ch 16)
Moral Purity (Ch. 17-20)
Priesthood protected (Ch. 21-22)
Ritual Feasts (Ch. 23-25)
Ritual Sacrifices
The first section is in chapters 1-7. These deal with ritual sacrifices. Some of these sacrifices were free will offering, which were a way for God’s people to thank him for his provision. The second half of these sacrifices were sin offerings. These detail various ways in which individual israelietes could ask God’s forgiveness for sin. These sacrifices were a way of saying sorry to God.
So this section details how people could interact with God in everyday life. The provide a way for people to have a relationship with God. If you have a good harvest – well there is a way to say thanks to God for that. If you do something wrong, even unwittingly, well there is a sacrifice for that.
But what is particularly important for us to understand from this section is that all the sin offerings were animals that were sacrificed. The animal had to be slaughtered and their blood had to flow to remind Israel how much their sin costs to forgive. As in the Passover – if there is no blood, there is no passing over. The cost of sin is death.
Ritual Feasts
We find this section in chapters 23-25 and these chapters lay out the ritual feasts Israel was to observe, starting with the Sabbath Day. The ritual feats that God institutes for Israel are to remind them of the Sabbath Day. It is on the Sabbath day that God entered into creation to rest in it and to enjoy it. This was the day God came to dwell in his creation and so God is organising the ritualistic feast system to point to the fact that God wants to return to the peace and Shalom that existed before the Fall into sin.
By organising Israel’s calendar around these ritual feasts God reminds them each year about who they are worshipping and why. He is the one who saved them and he is the one who will somehow restore the relationship with his people despite their sin.
Priesthood instituted
This occurs through chapters 8-10. God sets aside the priesthood through Aaron and his sons. God gives them detailed instructions for ritualistically purifying themselves. They are to offer sacrifices for their own sin, so that particularly Aaron, the high priest, could be clean in the Lord’s presence. Then something very special happens in chapter 9. Aaron and Moses, after having been ritualistically purified, enter into the tent of meeting - and they don’t die!
So we learn the lesson, that to survive being in God’s presence we need to be washed clean of our sin. On the flip side, Aarons son’s don’t respect the purification system and so they walk into God’s presence to offer an “unauthorised fire”. They mess with the way God declared the Tabernacle was to work, and when they then come into God’s presence they are destroyed. They died, because they were not holy, and God is holy, and so in their unholiness they were consumed by God’s fire. It is a haunting reminder that being in God’s presence is an awesome privilege. God is to be approached with reverence and with awe.
People CAN enter into his presence, but only after they have been purified, only after their sins have been atoned for.
Priesthood protected
It is for this reason that the corresponding section in chapter 21 and 22 go into so much detail about how the priests were to be selected. Priests were to be the purest of people. Their children had to be pure, their offerings had to be pure, they had to be people of exceptionally high moral integrity. As far as could be determined, the priests were to be the holiest people in Israel.
Ceremonial Purity
Chapters 11-15 detail a whole sections of rules we could consider weird today. This section lists all the ways in which Israelites could become impure. Contact with bodily fluids, skin diseases. Touching mould, touching dead bodies, eating impure animals and so on. Now why would these things make you impure? Because they represented things that were to do with death in the Israelite mind. God was the God of life, and for them to be ceremonially unclean and in God’s presence would be a problem. If they had been “infected” with death, they needed to become clean again. That is how you related to God.
Moral Purity
In chapters 17-20 we read about the moral purity that was supposed to characterise Israel. If there was one phrase that could describe in this section of the book it would be this: “Be holy, because I, The Lord your God, am holy”. This section describes in great detail what a holy people look like practically. Remember Israel was on the way to the promised land in Canaan, and so they were supposed to live different to the Canaanites. They were supposed to care for the poor. They had to be people of social justice. Their sexual ethic had to be different. If Israel was supposed to be a blessing to all the nations, they had to show the world how good life under God’s rule was. These chapters lay out a society of moral purity that would set Israel apart to be just that.
Day of Atonement
At the very centre, (chapters 16) of the book of Leviticus was the day of atonement. Even though Israel had been given all these offering ands sacrifices to atone for their own sin, it still wasn’t enough. Since people were still sinful, God graciously provided a day, once a year, where Israel’s sins would be dealt with. This day was called the Day of Atonement.
The Day of Atonement was the centrepiece of Israel’s priestly system and it gives us the clearest indication in the Old Testament of what is required for sins to be forgiven. The Day of Atonement shows us the 2 ways in which Jesus deals with our sin.
The Day of Atonement featured two goats. The first was a purification offering. Now Leviticus is clear that this animal had to be perfect, it had to have no defects whatsoever, and it would be slaughtered for the sins of the people. The blood of this goad would be sprinkled on the atonement cover, on the Ark, right in the centre of the Tabernacle. Remember that the Ark contained the two tablets of the Law (the 10 commandments), and above the Ark was the Mercy Seat which is where God’s presence and glory would live. So the blood of this sacrificial goat would literally and figuratively cover the law from God’s sight. The blood offering stood between God’s holiness and purity, and the people’s sin.
This is what Jesus’ blood does for us. It stands between us and our impurity and sin, and God’s holiness. The reason Christians have access to God’s presence today is because Jesus’ blood worked! It covers us and our requirement to keep God’s law perfectly.
The second goat was the scapegoat. This goat taught the Israelites what God did with their sin. It was a sign of how God removed the sin from the people. After the people’s sins were covered by the blood sacrifice of the first God, the sins of the people would ceremonially be put onto this scapegoat. It would then be sent into the wilderness and taken out of the camp.
This shows us what happens to our sins. When Jesus hung on the cross, we were covered by his blood, and then our sin was transferred from us onto Jesus. Like the scapegoat, he was taken out of the city and died alone for the sin of his people.
The book of Leviticus teaches us to appreciate this gruesome and tragic, but precious, gift.
As John the Baptist remarks in John 1:29
“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”