What's the point of Leviticus?

Someone asked me this the other day (thanks Jonny!) so I said I'd try and write a brief summary post on my blog. For more detail Mark Dever's sermon on the whole of Leviticus is excellent and can be found here.

In its context the book of Leviticus anwers the question "how can a messed up and sinful bunch of people like the Israelites live in relationship with a holy God?" The answer to that question, and the central theme of Leviticus, is that they can only maintain such a relationship by making regular sacrifices that deal with their sin, as individuals and as a nation. The book of Leviticus lays down how these sacrifices are to be made in great detail (which is why we often find it boring) and also examines the terrible consequences that follow when people don't make the sacrifices correctly.

So it's a book that's all about the importance of worshipping God "rightly" i.e. as he sayshe must be worshipped, but it's also, in a very important sense, a book abouthow God's people can still relate to God when things are "wrong".

The first chapters of Leviticus set out the five main types of offering, three of which (the sin offering, guilt offering and burnt offering) are about making sins right, principally with God but also with other people. The other two offerings (the grain offering and fellowship offering) are more about a response of God's people to the wonderful truth of being forgiven by God. In addition to this Leviticus 16 describes the "day of atonement" offerings; an annual set of sacrifices that accomplished much the same thing as the sin, guilt and burnt offerings but for the whole nation rather than an individual Israelite.

The New Testament understands these sacrifices as being fulfilled by Christ in slightly different ways to each other. The offerings that are to do with atonement are fulfilled by Christ in his death on the cross (Hebrews 9:11-12, indeed the whole of Hebrews 7-10 deals with this). The thank offerings are fulfilled by Christ in that through his death he creates a people (the Church) who offer their entire lives to him as sacrifices (Romans 12:1 is about this).

Leviticus also deals with the creation of a category of people (the priests) who will offer the sacrifices before God on behalf of the worshippers. These priests are to wear wonderful garments when they stand before the people (because they represent the glory of God) and they are to wear the simple linen garments of a slave when they stand before God on the day of atonement (because they represent the humility of people before God). The priests have very precise insturctions about how to iffer the sacrifices, because it is vital they realise that being made right with God is something he does that happens at his initiative and in his way.

The laws in Leviticus (mostly in chapter 11 onwards) are designed by God to make clear to the people that they MUST keep offering these sacrifices because they are unclean. There are two types of laws. Some show that you are unclean when you DO certain things (like eat pork) and others show that there are just some things about who you are (like havind a period or a discharge of semen) that make you unclean before God. This is designed to show that sin is not just about wrong things we do (though thaose are important!) but about who we are; that there is something corrupt in our nature. In one sense there is no reason why God chose prawns rather than beef as an unclean food (though it is possible there may have been some secondary health benefits in a primitive culture); the food is unclean because God says it is, and that is designed to teach the people that God defines sin and uncleaness not us. The laws deliberately made Israel different from the surrounding nations and cultures in various ways to show them that God's people are not the same as everybody else - not because they are inherently better but because God is calling them to change and be different.

The detail of the laws and the inevitability that you will become unclean again and again in normal everyday life is designed to show the people that the only way they can stay in relationship with God is through continually offering the sacrifices God has specified.

But in his earthly ministry Christ said that some of the laws (especially the food laws) were no longer applicable (see Mark 7:1-23 for this). Why was that? Because those laws were designed to teach the people f God to be different from the surrounding nations as a nation state - by having certain external things (as well as many attitudes and values) that were different.

But Christ's coming opened up the possibility of being made right with God (by trusting in his death on the cross) to people of all nations (in Mark 7 the pronouncement ofa ll foods as clean is immediately followed by Christ seeing a number of non-Jewish people converted to follow him). His people could no longer be distinguished by the kind of things that you can make happen externally in a nation state but ONLY by their values, attitudes and ways of thinking, speaking about and acting towards God and other people (which is one of the reasons it's significant that the sign of initiation into the Christian life, baptism, leaves no mark in the flesh, unlike the mark of initiation into Jewish life, circumcision).

How then should we view these Levitical laws today not that Christ has come and, because of his one sacrifice, we don't have to offer blood sacrifices any more? A couple of suggestions:

a) we should thank God that we don't have to keep the food laws any more because Christ has fulfilled them, along with all other laws that marked out Israel as a nation state, by transforming his people from an ethnic groupo with a few incomers to a global community for all who trust him.
b) we should read the laws and be reminded that there are all sorts of things about us as people that make us unclean by nature and keep coming back to Christ as the source and fountain of salvation, life and cleaness to us.