It’s ok to admit that Leviticus is one of those books that you tend to avoid.
All the laws and details can get you bogged down and it can be challenging to understand the benefit of reading through it.
But as always, truth is everything. All these intricate detailed things are what mankind was supposed to conform to be even considered ‘good enough’ towards God. How impossible is it all? No wonder we needed Jesus Christ!
Leviticus 1-7
Link to Online Bible to read Leviticus 1-7 is here
Reading Leviticus 1-7 today, in our current culture, Western Christian Civilisation, it is difficult to grasp the procedure of animal sacrifice, of all the elements of offerings and sacrifice. How do we understand:
– the role of the priest
– the role of blood
– the steps of purifying (what is accepted, what is rejected)
– the impact of blemishes on an offering
– of memorials to the Lord
– of how that is a sweet savour to the Lord
What about:
– the role of unleavened bread
– the importance of first fruits
– the different kinds of offerings
– the meat offering (with frankincense and oil in it)
– the peace offering
– sin offerings, in all forms
– heaven offerings
The offering, or the oblation, is something brought near the altar that is sacrificial, a present.
>> Question: what do we bring SACRIFICIALLY to God? Something that costs us.
What can you offer God?
Leviticus 1-7 is where we start to see the key role of blood. It’s sprinkling. The statements made about it that are ‘perpetual’ – in other words, they are still active today.
‘It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings that ye eat neither fat nor blood’ (Leviticus 3:17).
In Acts 15:28-29, when the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, are evaluating what God is saying, this was the verdict:
‘For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things; That ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if you keep your selves you shall do well.’
So, Christians that are eating meat with the blood still in it – hmmmm….you might want to rethink that.
The blood is intrinsically important.
Even if we don’t understand all the elements of it – blood is intrinsically important to God.
It’s still important to be aware of these things, you can’t turn away your head and just say to yourself ‘Jesus Jesus’, even he, as a Jew, had to know these things. The gospel is to the Jew first and then to the Greek. It is Hebraic from its inception until now. Ignorance is not good.
It makes you appreciate Jesus though. And the New Testament. The New Covenant.
It makes me love the Apostle Paul for writing about these things, explaining how all these laws have now been fulfilled in Christ. How the offering of the Cross has now fulfilled all righteousness. Because all these offerings, all these steps, could never add righteousness to a human being. Never.
Something happens to you when you read the bible like this. It is life changing. You find your place in the history of the world, in the plans of God, ‘from before the foundations of the world’ (as Peter says).
Read The Bible YOURSELF
Why don’t more Christians read their bible – cover to cover, all of it?
The tendency to rely on:
- only relying on a church leader to tell you what its saying
- other people explaining it to us
- devotionals that take out one little thought,
- looking for a scripture that you can use to apply to your own thinking….
All of this makes for weak believers. Satan must laugh at how ineffectual the Christian world can be.
But we are not like that! We are people that know their God (and are getting to know him more and more) and DO! We know and DO! We are not passive. We are not complacent.
We are people of the word of God, of faith, of the Spirit and of power.
Anything less is deny the impact of Christ in me, the hope of glory.
Thank God for Jesus Christ!
