O how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day. Your commandments make me wiser than my enemies… I have more insight than all my teachers. Psalm 119:97-99
Leviticus is a much maligned and misunderstood book. Atheists, not understanding the context of what they are reading, sometimes like to quote from Leviticus to get a laugh or to mock God. For example, someone anonymously posed the following questions:
Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed even though it is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?
I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean. May I still play football if I wear gloves?
But it is not only unbelievers who mock Leviticus. I have frequently heard pastors make jokes about both the content and complexity of the book, perhaps not realizing that what is recorded in Leviticus are the very words of God spoken directly to Moses:
Leviticus 1:1 Yahweh called to Moses, and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them…”
So before we mock, or worse yet, discount what we don’t understand we should take to heart the words of the Apostle Paul:
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. 1 Timothy 3:16-17
All Scripture, including Leviticus, is both inspired by God, the Creator of space and time, and given to us for our instruction. In other words, God gave us Leviticus to teach us something that is vital and necessary for our wellbeing, something profitable.
Leviticus is the third book of the Torah, the third of five books that the Creator God personally and directly gave to Moses at the time of Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. In order to better understand Leviticus, we must first briefly go back to the history of mankind’s origins, the book of Genesis.
In the book of Genesis our first forefather, Adam, was created from the dust of the earth in the image of God and granted rights and responsibilities as a son of God. Luke 3:38. Together with his wife, Eve, the first couple were to bring order to, rule over, and cultivate the earth. They were to be fruitful and multiply the human race, populating the earth with the terrestrial sons and daughters of God. Additionally, Adam was instructed to guard his inheritance because, although he did not yet know it, there had been a rebellion in heaven and another created sentient being from a heavenly realm, Lucifer, had rebelled against his Creator. Lucifer, whose goal from the beginning has been to usurp God’s reign, Isaiah 14:13-14, had plans to recruit Adam and Eve to join his rebellion. And that is just what happened. Adam, knowing full well that death would be the inevitable natural consequence of disobedience, nevertheless flagrantly revolted against his Creator. Romans 5:12. When Lucifer promised the first couple that they could be like God, Genesis 3:5, Adam gave in to his impulses and defied his Creator, and in so doing corrupted the knowledge of good and evil. And the rest is history, or as C.S. Lewis noted:
What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods” — be their own masters — invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Harper)
From the beginning God’s law, based on God’s perfect character, was and is the embodiment of life. As such the only outcome for sin, corruption, and defilement was death. God is holy, perfect, incorruptible, pure, and without sin. 1 John 3:5. In him and him alone is the miracle of life. However, Adam and Eve’s actions stained them with sin, disease, and the resultant curse of death.
We are finite creatures. Our nature is engineered by our Creator. Our biological and spiritual attributes are assigned to us. To believe that we can revolt against our created nature without consequence is folly. Think of it this way: God also created other beings. For example, imagine the consequences if a fish, wanting to assert his autonomy and independence from God rejected his created nature and revolted against living within the constraints of water. Instead of finding freedom from the constraints of water he would find death on land because he rejected the reality of his created nature.
Living as we do among a people with unclean lips, Isaiah 6:5, we have grown callous to the persuasiveness of the evil and the folly that surrounds us. Rather than measuring ourselves against the standard of the One and Holy God, we measure ourselves by ourselves. When we compare ourselves with our fellow defiled neighbors God says that we lack understanding. 2 Corinthians 10:12. Only when we measure ourselves against God, the true standard, do we discover that we are not the people who we naively imagine ourselves to be. Our guilt and shame are insidious and imbedded deep within our core. Sin has corrupted all of our thoughts, rationalizations, and actions.
Whereas humans suffer desperately with guilt and shame,
mind you, we’re brilliant tacticians at shifting the blame
(James Frazer, Strange Species, soundcloud.com)
Amazingly, rather than immediately carrying out the death sentence and cleansing the newly created world of our defilement, God instead, promised to redeem his wayward image bearers. And with that promise he clothed Adam and Eve with animal skins. In other words an innocent lamb lost its life to provide a covering for the couple’s shame, disobedience, and corruption. Genesis 4:4. Why? The death of the lamb served as a place-holder looking forward to a greater Promise. God promised Adam and Eve that he would provide, at an undisclosed future time, a Redeemer, an uncorrupted second Adam, 1 Corinthians 15:45-47, the Lamb of God, John 1:29, to defeat Lucifer and undo the curse of death brought on by the actions of the first Adam.
While mankind waited for the Promised Redeemer to appear, God instituted animal sacrifices as a temporary substitute satisfying the requirement of death. These sacrifices did two important things.
First, these sacrifices were a constant reminder to all of the human race that death was the inescapable consequence for sin.
Second, these sacrifices were a reminder that, one day, God would, in an act of undeserved grace, through self-sacrifice, defeat death and in so doing, would provide a way for Adam’s race, the exiled sons and daughters of God, to be welcomed back into his eternal Kingdom.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4:10
From that time forward, as the history of the Bible unfolds, from Abel, to Noah, to Abraham, and to Moses we see sacrifices offered to God as a temporary covering for sins, anticipating the day when the Creator himself, Jesus Christ, Colossians 1:16, would come to earth in human flesh and in death, sacrifice himself in our place, taking our punishment, as the perfect Lamb of God. Hebrews 9:26
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Romans 5:12-15
With this background the sacrifices detailed in Leviticus begin to make sense.