Read: Leviticus 23:1-3

There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a sabbath to the Lord. Lev 23:3

The weekly sabbath had begun at Creation. God worked six days and then he rested on the seventh day. God did no work on the sabbath. This was reinstated and renewed in the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai when God reminded his people that the sabbath was at the heart of all his work.

I often hear Sunday referred to as the sabbath. And perhaps you think that is just an old-fashioned word for Sunday. But that is completely wrong. Sunday is never the sabbath, and never was the sabbath! A transference is made of these ideas which is totally unbiblical. The seventh day was Saturday. The first day was Sunday. And Saturday was to be observed as the sabbath, as it still is in Israel today.

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Read: Leviticus 22

Keep my commands and follow them. I am the Lord. Do not profane my holy name, for I must be acknowledged as holy by the Israelites. I am the Lord, who made you holy and who brought you out of Egypt to be your God. I am the Lord. Lev 22:31-33

What tenderness and compassion there is in those verses! I am the LORD, he says, who brought you out of bondage, out of slavery. I set you free. And I want to heal your life and bring you into a land of abundance and promise, of excitement and blessing and fruitfulness, with a sense of worth and power, and to be your God, to be available to you to teach you how to live as men were ordained to live in the beginning — in dominion over all the earth, over all the powers and principalities that exist in the universe, and to walk as free people, healed and whole. That is why I speak to you this way, the LORD says. That is why at times I will not allow you to exercise ministry even though you want to, until you deal with the blemishes of your life. When they are healed, then your ministry can begin.

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Read: Leviticus 20

I am the Lord your God, who has set you apart from the nations. You must therefore make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds. Do not defile yourselves by any animal or bird or anything that moves along the ground — those that I have set apart as unclean for you. You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own. Lev 20:24b-26

Note how carefully God identifies himself with each one of these instructions. He signs his name, as it were, after each one. He gives us a practical admonition and then says, I am the LORD your God. The name he uses here is his covenant name: I am Jehovah. That is, I am the Living One, the Eternal One, the Sufficient One. I am the God who is Enough. That is what Jehovah means.

What is God trying to impart to us by this format? Two things are involved. The first is authority. This underscores something very important. It is that we must discover how to distinguish between right and wrong, truth and error, on the basis of what God says — if we are in relationship to him. There is a different standard for the people of God.

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Read: Leviticus 19

Keep my decrees. Do not mate different kinds of animals. Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material. Lev 19:19

How many of you are observing that last law? Almost all garments today are made of mixed stuff, of blends of natural and synthetic fibers. A literal adherence to this stricture is no longer of any significance, because it is dealing with substances which never were inherently wrong. Whenever God employs things symbolically and says that something connected with them is wrong, they are no longer tended to be taken literally but are meant to illustrate attitudes of mind and heart which are dangerous. The Israelites had to obey these literally, because that is how they learned what these attitudes were. But we need to understand that God is teaching in a graphic way here that there are certain unmixable principles which are unalterably opposed to one another and that we are not to try to put the two together.

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Read: Leviticus 18

No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord. Lev 18:8

Next to the preservation of life the most powerful human drive is sex. Sex, as we are beginning to understand these days, is like a great river which, when it flows quietly between its banks, is a boon and a blessing to us. But when it is raging in full flood, inundating the landscape in permissiveness and promiscuity, it is terribly destructive and hurtful. God’s Word is careful to regulate us and help us in this area. It is amazing that God takes the risk of letting us have this fantastic power in our lives. He doesn’t take sex away from us if we misuse it. He takes that risk with us, with a plea to us that we learn to keep it within its banks.

You can see how God underscores the purpose of these instructions. They are to make you live, not die — not be restricted, not narrowed and hemmed in and prohibited from expressing yourself. No, quite the contrary! They are there so that you might live, might enjoy life to the fullest degree, might find it whole and rich.

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Read: Leviticus 16

When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites — all their sins — and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry all their sins on itself, to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness. Lev 16:20-22

All the iniquities, all the transgressions, all the sins were placed upon the head of this goat. The goat is a picture of Jesus: He is represented as satisfying the heart of God for us and rendering God free to love us without any restraint at all by his justice. God’s justice has been satisfied. He is free to forgive us at any time and to love us. Christ also bears the whole weight and load of our guilt, all that which the Devil tries to use as a basis upon which to ground his accusations against us. All this is to be sent back to him from whence it comes. When our Lord died he went into the wilderness of death like this goat, and returned to Satan all the accusations which he has against any believer at any time.

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Read: Leviticus 15

When a man is cleansed from his discharge, he is to count off seven days for his ceremonial cleansing; he must wash his clothes and bathe himself with fresh water, and he will be clean. On the eighth day he must take two doves or two young pigeons and come before the Lord to the entrance to the tent of meeting and give them to the priest. Lev 15:13-14

The unavoidable diseases, afflictions, and discharges mentioned in this chapter are of a much less serious nature than the leprosy with which we have been dealing in previous chapters. You remember that when the leper was cleansed he had to go through a much more rigorous ceremony which included several offerings. But here the very simplest of the offerings is prescribed — two turtledoves or two young pigeons: one for a sin offering, one for a burnt offering — the cheapest, the most available of the offerings. Yet God never once sets aside the requirement for the blood of an innocent substitute to be shed in the place of one who is defiled for any reason whatsoever. By this means he underscores the great fact that human nature needs to be dealt with by blood. It is a deep and complicated problem. It cannot be solved by a mere rearrangement of surface symptoms. God is constantly underscoring that for us in these offerings.

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Read: Leviticus 14

The priest is to go outside the camp and examine them. If they have been healed of their defiling skin disease, the priest shall order that two live clean birds and some cedar wood, scarlet yarn and hyssop be brought for the person to be cleansed. Lev 14:3-4

In Chapter 14 we move into a further development of this whole matter of handling leprosy. Here we have the cleansing of the leper. Notice that the leper does not go through all the ritual which follows in order to be healed; he does it in order to be cleansed. He is already healed. Healing is something only God can do. It is the sovereign act of God and it takes place in the inner life of a believer. His cleansing of a person allows the one who is healed to understand God’s basis and purpose for the healing. God wants the inner cleansing to be reflected in the outward life and actions of the person who is healed. That is the picture which is drawn here.

You and I can’t heal our leprous hearts. If there is some wrongful attitude within us, if we burn with envy or jealousy or resentment toward one another, if we are impatient and upset and angry at heart — we seldom see these things in ourselves until God puts us into circumstances where they are brought out — and then the only thing we can do is take them to him because we are helpless victims caught up in these dangerous attitudes. When you finally see yourself like that, then you can say, Lord, heal me! And God does! With a touch of his grace he changes our attitude. We stop being defensive about it and we admit it. And then the leprosy is arrested, its action is stopped, and we are healed.

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Read: Leviticus 13

When anyone has a defiling skin disease, they must be brought to the priest. Lev 13:9

The purpose of this chapter is to enable the detection of leprosy. When the Bible uses this term, it is not merely referring to the disease that we call leprosy today, Hansen’s disease. That is included in the term, but the Hebrew word translated leprosy here also includes other contagious and infectious skin diseases. They all were recognized to be dangerous and damaging, a serious threat not only to the individual but to the whole camp of Israel, and so they were to be detected. The process of detection was prolonged and careful inspection. The priest was to look at the symptoms, then shut the diseased person up for seven days, examine him again, and shut him up for another seven days. At the end of that time he could determine whether it was leprosy or something less serious.

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Read: Leviticus 11

I am the Lord, who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy. Lev 11:45

In this section we face the need for a standard, a measuring stick by which we can distinguish between good and evil. That is not easy to do. Modern philosophies tell us that there is really nothing harmful, that it is only our perverted thinking which makes things wrong, and that if we would but change our thinking then anything and everything is right. But you don’t find anything like that in Scripture. The Bible tells us that we are living in a world where truth and error are inextricably mixed and that you cannot easily tell one from the other. How do you tell the difference before it is too late, before you have to learn through sorrows and sadness?

With these Israelites, his concern was expressed on the physical level — he actually regulated their diet. In this chapter, you have dietary laws distinguishing clean animals from unclean, and various sanitary practices are included as well. Many of these practices have a commonsense basis in staying healthy. God kept his people physically whole through many of these regulations.

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Read: Leviticus 10:1-10

Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, contrary to his command. So fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Lev 10:1-2

The very same Shekinah which had consumed the sacrifice now flashes out again to destroy these two priests. What a shock this must have been to Aaron, to his remaining two sons, and to the whole camp of Israel.

What do you think your reaction would have been if you had been part of this scene? Many of us reading stories like this have come up with the idea that God, especially the God of the Old Testament, is a God of vengeful judgment. But God is acting here just as much as a God of love as he is in any other part of the Bible. His nature is love. And he never deviates from what he has revealed himself to be. So this action must be in line with his nature and character of love.

There are several features in this passage which help us: The first is that this sin on the part of these two priests was not a sin of ignorance but one of presumption. They knew better. It wasn’t that they were simply doing something at which they had no idea God would be offended. They had been told emphatically that he would be offended. In Exodus 30:7-9 God had precisely said, Be careful; do not offer the wrong kind of incense. So this was a violation of the direct command of God. God never visits with judgment anybody who is struggling in ignorance to try to find him.

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Read: Leviticus 7

The meat of their fellowship offering of thanksgiving must be eaten on the day it is offered; they must leave none of it till morning. Lev 7:15

Isn’t that strange? You could eat the flesh on the day you offered it if it was an offering of thanksgiving for some particular thing. Or if it was just a general expression of your gratitude toward God you could save some of it for the second day. But under no circumstances were you ever to eat of the flesh of that peace offering on the third day. It had to be burned with fire. If you tried to eat any of it, that was an abomination unto God.

Now, what is God saying here? Well, it is a very practical truth. He is saying that there must be no separation between the peace that you feel and the source of that peace, the sacrifice which provided it. You must not separate the two. In other words, you must not depend upon the feelings of peace that are given to you. Don’t try to live on those. Once peace is given as a result of trusting the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf don’t just say, Ah, now I feel much better! I think I can go on now, and tomorrow I’ll just expect this peace still to be here and I’ll reckon on that. Don’t shift your dependence from the One who gives peace, to the feeling that is produced.

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