1. Leviticus - Friday Night Genesis, Friday, Mar 2, 2012
In our journey through the Bible we will spend this weekend looking at a picture of God in
Leviticus. While Genesis spanned some 2500 years, and Exodus quickly covered some 400 years
to bring us to the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, we have now come to a complete
historical stand-still. We are still with the Israelites at the foot of Sinai, right where we left them
at the end of Exodus. I hope you have had the opportunity to read the book of Leviticus and the
fortitude to persevere to the end of the book. Last month a few people told me that they were
curious to see what I would draw out of the book of Leviticus, and to be honest I was curious
about that too! 
Before I launch into tonight’s topic I do want to set up a bit of a foundation that will help us
wrap our minds around what is described in Leviticus. While Exodus dealt mainly with civic law,
it seems Leviticus deals a good deal more with ceremonial law. Having said that, rolled into
those ceremonial laws many of you will recognize the basic precepts of hygiene. In the days way
before microscopes and any appreciation for the existence and work of germs, bacteria and
viruses, this does seem to be the simplest way to impart the basics of good hygiene. Then there
is Chapter 18, which could make a few saints blush. But seriously, if God has to spell it out that
having sex with your relatives, your mother or animals is not the right thing to do, my questions
are not about the God giving this law, but about the moral compass (or lack thereof) of the
people who required such a law to begin with!
And then there are all those sacrifices. To be completely honest, I do not understand the
symbolism of everything that they did, nor how they perceived those things within their cultural
background, but I just want to provide a few clues that I have found which have at least helped
me understand why their church services had more in common with an abattoir than what we
consider church today. You may remember the incident of the golden calf from Exodus chapter
32, and how the way that they worshipped the golden calf seemed remarkably similar to what
the sacrificial laws look in Leviticus. In Leviticus 17 God tells Moses that the sacrifices must be
brought to the Sanctuary. “This is so that the Israelites will bring to the LORD the sacrifices they
are now making in the open fields. They must bring them to the priest, that is, to the LORD, at
the entrance to the Tent of Meeting and sacrifice them as fellowship offerings.” (Lev 17:5). So

2. people are already making these sacrifices to various “gods” out in the field! It seems that
sacrifices were a common practice in that day and culture and that was their understanding of
how you worshipped a god. So God uses their practices to point them to the true God and has
them bring those sacrifices to Him. He gives them detailed instructions as to what they should
bring and how they should handle it, because what the people of that time did in their attempts
to win the favor of the deities could be truly scary. Leviticus 20 talks of people sacrificing their
children to a god called Molech. Man, I look at my 6 month old daughter, and she is so precious
to me, I cannot fathom how anyone could come to a place where they are prepared to burn
their own child as a sacrifice to a god! That is truly sick! And that is why God has to say - don’t
get creative, this is what and how you need to sacrifice for various offences and occasions.
All of which brings me to the topic for this evening - a verse that, without context, could frighten
and discourage even the most ardent of saints. “ The Lord said to Moses, ‘Speak to the entire
assembly of Israel and say to them: Be holy because I, the Lord your God am holy.’” (Leviticus
19:1,2) Now, I have grown up in church, and have heard a lot about the standards we have to
keep in order to “be able to stand before a holy God”. And so when you see something as black
and white as this in the Bible, where you are told to be holy because God is holy, and by
implication God is now the standard that you are now trying to attain, you just want to throw up
your arms and say “it’s hopeless, I’ll never get there!” But as I got to wrestling with this topic, I
got to see something truly beautiful and exciting. And there may be some of you here who will
get to the end of the presentation tonight and say ‘it took you this long to figure this out?!”, but
I’m just excited to share with you what I have learned over the last few weeks, so I hope you will
bear with me and at least share in my joy. We’ll kind of deconstruct this and first build up a few
pieces of this puzzle and then bring them all together in the end.
First of all I want to deal with the whole idea of holiness. What is holiness? The definition most
often employed are that something holy is something that is special, set apart, different than
everything else around it. But is something holy because it was once declared holy, or is it holy
because it was created to be special, it has inherent special meaning? For example, 4 th July is a
holy day to all Americans. Now, did the founding fathers just get together and say “we’ll make
4th July a special day in this new nation.”? Or is there something that happened on 4 th July 1776
that makes that day different and special from all other days in this nations history? And so on

3. 4th July we have a holiday, we celebrate, we have fireworks and air shows, because it is a special
day for us as a community. There is another holy day that I would do well to remember - March
7, 2004. That is the day Kelley and I got married. There is nothing special about that date on the
calendar, what makes is special for us is what we did on that day.
There is also a holy day mentioned in the Bible. “By the seventh day God had finished the work
he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the
seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had
done.” (Genesis 2:2,3). Now let me ask you a question: does God get tired? If I were to do a
project, say, finishing our basement, when would I rest? When I got tired! But does God get
tired like we do? No. He rested because He had finished the project - He had finished the work
of creation. And so God created this day to be a holy day, a memorial to His act of creation and
the birth of our planet. Notice, God made the day holy, and then in Exodus 20 He simply says
“remember to keep it holy, because in 6 days God created the heaven and the earth and on this
day He rested.” He made it holy all we have to do is to keep it holy.
Can any of you remember another time when God rested on the Sabbath after finishing
something? Some 2000 years ago, on a cross, Jesus said “It is finished” and He bowed His head
and died. He rested on the Sabbath and then rose again on Sunday. He once again rested
because He finished something, and that was the work of salvation.
And it is this that I want to really focus on tonight. Because when we see all the laws and rules
like we do in Leviticus, our mind immediately goes to a place where we want to earn our
salvation by keeping the rules. But just like God made the Sabbath holy and then just told us to
keep it that way, it is the same with our salvation. After Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, the
spiritual world of the Jews was turned upside down. Many of their understandings, many things
that they held near and dear to their heart no longer mattered. And so there was a letter
written to the Hebrews that has been preserved in our Bibles that looks back at all the Jewish
laws and history and explains those things in light of the ministry of Jesus. And in Hebrews 4, we
find a little study on the Sabbath rest. Here the author of Hebrews says that although the
Israelites of Leviticus had the same message preached to them, they never entered into God’s
rest because they did not combine it with faith, in other words, they did not fully trust God. And

4. then he goes on to say: “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone
who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.” (Hebrews 4:9,10)
We are to rest from our work of trying to earn our salvation, because God has already
accomplished that work.
So let’s come back to Leviticus for a moment. After God told the Israelites to be holy, because
He (God) is holy, He then launches into this mantra that carries through to the end of the book:
“I am the Lord who makes you holy.” Wow! That changes a few things! Yes, we are called by
God to be holy, but whose work is it to make us holy? God says “I am the Lord who makes you
holy.” You see, the Israelites have just come out of Egypt, and they were on their way to Canaan.
Both these cultures had a good deal of influence on the spiritual life of the Israelites. And both
these cultures worshiped a whole host of cantankerous “gods” that controlled everything: rain,
sun, rivers, fertility, illnesses, pests…. You get the picture. These “gods” never engaged with the
people, which might have had something to do with the fact that they didn’t exist. But people
believed in them never the less, and so they did whatever they could think of to try to win the
favor of these “gods”, so that they would send the rain, take away the illness, give them victory
in war or whatever it was that the particular “god” was supposed to be in charge of. And so they
sacrificed all kinds of things to these gods, and when there was no response they would sacrifice
some more, going even so far as to sacrifice their own children in order to win the favor of these
“gods” so that they would merely provide the essentials for their livelihoods!
In the light of that kind of a mindset, what God does is incredible. Not only is He actively
engaging the people, not only is He providing for their livelihoods, but God is proposing to
engage with them on a heart level. Changing them at a heart and mind level to be holy people.
The only thing you expected from the other “gods” in these cultures was things you needed for
life or avoiding suffering. Becoming a better person never figured into it. Being changed at a
heart and mind level however is a process that doesn’t happen overnight, and so God starts with
some rules of good conduct, just as you might lay down some basic rules of the house for a
toddler. “Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the LORD, who makes you holy.“ (Leviticus
20:8). Once again going back to the book of Hebrews which explains a lot of things from this
period, this is what we read: “Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best;
but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.” (Hebrews 12:10).

5. However, the rules and regulations were not to be the end of it all. When Jesus was here He told
us: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48). And once again,
without the context, you may read this text and throw up your arms and say: “there is no way I
can be as perfect as God!” If you read the context in which Jesus said this, however, you will
realize that He was talking about loving your enemies and how God sends the rain and the sun
on all people regardless of their relationship to Him. Those who understand Biblical languages
say that this text would better be translated as “you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect”, because the original is ambiguous. You shall be perfect is both a command to be
perfect, but also a promise that when God is done with us we shall be perfect in love. God is
looking to reproduce in us His holy character of perfect love.
We are inextricably linked to God, and so the call to be holy because God is holy is not an empty
phrase. If we go right back to the beginning we read: “So God created man in His own image, in
the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27). In the
beginning, God created us in His image, which means that He also reproduced in us His holy
character of perfect love. Just like with the Sabbath - the memorial to creation, He created us
holy, all we had to do was to keep ourselves holy. Ever since Adam and Eve threw that away,
God has been working to restore His image within us. This is His work, because only He can do it.
Our ideas of holiness can often be very warped. And so we are called to rest in God and the
work that He is doing in us. We may no longer be sacrificing our children in order to win God’s
favor, but we are still prone to trying to work for our salvation. God is simply saying to us what
He was saying to the Israelites all those years ago: rest in Me. Simply follow my instructions
because I am the Lord that makes you holy. I made you in my image, and I want to restore you
back into my image. And so one day you shall indeed be perfect in love as your heavenly Father
is perfect. I am the Lord who makes you holy.

6. However, the rules and regulations were not to be the end of it all. When Jesus was here He told
us: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48). And once again,
without the context, you may read this text and throw up your arms and say: “there is no way I
can be as perfect as God!” If you read the context in which Jesus said this, however, you will
realize that He was talking about loving your enemies and how God sends the rain and the sun
on all people regardless of their relationship to Him. Those who understand Biblical languages
say that this text would better be translated as “you shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect”, because the original is ambiguous. You shall be perfect is both a command to be
perfect, but also a promise that when God is done with us we shall be perfect in love. God is
looking to reproduce in us His holy character of perfect love.
We are inextricably linked to God, and so the call to be holy because God is holy is not an empty
phrase. If we go right back to the beginning we read: “So God created man in His own image, in
the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27). In the
beginning, God created us in His image, which means that He also reproduced in us His holy
character of perfect love. Just like with the Sabbath - the memorial to creation, He created us
holy, all we had to do was to keep ourselves holy. Ever since Adam and Eve threw that away,
God has been working to restore His image within us. This is His work, because only He can do it.
Our ideas of holiness can often be very warped. And so we are called to rest in God and the
work that He is doing in us. We may no longer be sacrificing our children in order to win God’s
favor, but we are still prone to trying to work for our salvation. God is simply saying to us what
He was saying to the Israelites all those years ago: rest in Me. Simply follow my instructions
because I am the Lord that makes you holy. I made you in my image, and I want to restore you
back into my image. And so one day you shall indeed be perfect in love as your heavenly Father
is perfect. I am the Lord who makes you holy.