Dear church,

Here’s a section of Scripture we may think has no modern application at all. There no longer is a priestly class. Jesus fulfilled the role of the priests once and for all when he died on the cross and then entered into the heavenly throne room at the right hand of the Father. 

If the priests were considered sacred – the holy ones of God – Jesus was the Most Holy One. There is none like him.

And so we might think there’s not much for us here as we consider how priests went about their funeral duties and whom they could marry and who could eat from the holy food and what the physical condition of a priest could be. (I’m looking at Leviticus 21:1-22:16 for this blog, so you might want to keep reading a little further.)

But there is still truth here – things that tell us about God and about who we are to be as his children. And, by the way, the “priesthood” now includes you (1 Peter 2:9).

It is this fact we ought to keep in mind as we read this chapter. 

A priest was not to mourn like everyone else mourned. A priest was one who ministered to the people, who represented the life that God breathes into creation. He did not let his hair hang loose in grief. He did not tear his clothes as he mourned death. His grieving was to be marked by the knowledge of life. 

Likewise, we do not mourn as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). As Christians, we know that physical death need not be the end. For us, death has lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15). 

A priest also was to take marriage seriously. Someone who had been defiled was not to be married. This bothers us. How judgmental! But keep in mind, the priests were to model godly marriages – one man, one woman, healthy offspring. Marriage was to be a holy thing, set apart for God.

Marriage is no less so today. Read Ephesians 5:22-33. And how does a person today become holy, anyway? Only by the blood of Christ. Perhaps we can see here the need for believers to marry other believers – who are nothing more than sinners who’ve been made clean by Christ (2 Corinthians 6:14). 

And then there are the disabled priests. They were “blemished.” No blemished sacrificial animals could be sacrificed. Blemished priests, likewise, were limited in their tabernacle service. As we have seen already in Leviticus, physical ailments were incompatible with the presence of God. Again, we groan at this. 

That is, we groan until we realize that, indeed, physical blemishes and ailments are incompatible with the presence of God! This is great news after all, if you keep an eternal perspective. The physical problems you experience today will have no place in eternity, which you will spend with God in your resurrection body. The fact that these physical problems can’t enter into God’s presence might be a downer today, but “today” is only temporary. We have a happy and healthy eternal life awaiting us.

Think on these things. You are a priest, after all.

Chris

Dear church,

When God created the heavens and the earth, he did so in an orderly way. Go back and read Genesis 1 again. God created things, and he separated things from one another. There were different kinds of things. He brought order out of chaos. Everything lived as it was designed to live. 

God’s people are to remember that. The false religions and ideologies of the world want to return the chaos. For instance, the great lie of the transgender movement is that God wasn’t all that orderly – that there’s not just male and female. There’s mixing and matching and different shades of gray. 

Holiness, however, has always been about purity and the maintaining of the order God gave us. We don’t mar his created order by creating our own different kind of order. That would be to set ourselves up as little gods. 

And so to be holy, we stay away from false religion and ideologies that try to put God’s order back into chaos. 

We understand the boundaries that God gave us. We understand the difference between love and lust. We understand how God created things, and we keep that in view. And we repent from our efforts to set up our own order for creation. 

As such, we don’t curse our parents, because in the order God gave us, parents are to be honored. We don’t commit adultery because marriage was designed to be a commitment for life, and chaos ensues when adultery is committed. We don’t commit incest, homosexual acts, or bestiality, because these things introduce confusion into God’s order. There are lines that ought not to be crossed. 

These infractions are made worse when committed as part of pagan religious practices. We stay away from these things. 

Perhaps the most important thing that this chapter teaches is that God has established how we are to live, and there will be forces in the world that will try to add chaos back into God’s good creation. 

We need to stay clear-eyed and focused on how God wants his people to live, even in the face of the temptation to join into the chaos that defines sinful humanity.

Chris

Dear church,

Did you know that your life is a reflection of God and his character? As a Christian, you have a solemn duty to reflect your Creator and Redeemer. God told the Israelites, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

Our holiness may look a little differently than that of the ancient Israelites, with their partially harvested fields and unmixed cloth and untrimmed beards. But, if we pay attention, we learn the principles behind their holy ways are no different than ours. 

We are to uphold justice. We are to worship well and obediently. We take care of the poor – so they too can worship well and obediently. We speak truth. We forgive. We don’t mix the holy with the unholy. We recognize God’s proper created order. We know how to discern the difference between good and evil. And we stay far from anything that looks like idolatry or false worship. 

We’re a different kind of people. The world ought to see how we live and notice the difference. 

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus found this to be the most important aspect of our holy living, right after loving God with everything that we have (Mark 12:28-34).

The principles laid out in Leviticus 19 – even if the cultural specifics have faded from view – form the basis for how a Christian ought to live. We still are to be holy (1 Peter 1:16).

“And you shall observe all my statutes and all my rules, and do them: I am the Lord.”

This command has not changed, and neither has humanity. Holy living remains a foreign practice for us. We still find ourselves drawn to sin.

And so we rely on the Holy Spirit. And we read. We remember. We strive to be the people God has called us to be. We live out our redemption as God’s people with every bit of seriousness we can muster. 

And we count on God’s grace as we do. 

Chris

Dear church,

The great devotional writer Oswald Chambers said this, “You no more need a holiday from spiritual concentration than you heart needs a holiday from beating.” We must remain vigilant. We need to be constantly paying attention to the spiritual forces in our lives and to the drawing of our own hearts. 

Are we being obedient to God or not?

This is what Leviticus 18 is about. The people of Israel had just come out of a pagan land and culture, and they were about to enter into another pagan land and culture. And God’s people were to obey God alone and not fall into the sins of the people of the land. 

God’s people were to live holy lives. They were to be set apart and different – peculiar, even, in the eyes of the other nations. 

This is a very difficult thing for humans to do. “Everybody else is doing it,” we might argue in our defense. If everyone else is doing it, it must be OK. There must be no harm in it. 

And our parents would say, “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff, too?” Case closed. 

But the case is not closed, and we know this. It is very hard to resist the pull of the world’s ways. And the reason it is very hard to resist the pull of the world’s ways is because we tend to like the world’s ways. We are sinners – every one of us. 

God calls us to live lives of holiness. But in our hearts, we want to pursue our own thing. And the world appeals to this desire. It beckons us with promises that it will satisfy every physical desire we have. 

And it promises to like us more if we live according to its standards instead of God’s. 

And so Leviticus 18 is incredibly applicable for today. We are God’s people, and we are living in a culture that lives according to standards that are different than God’s. And God calls us to obey him despite the way in which the world is moving. 

“I am the Lord your God,” he said. He said this to open the chapter, and he said it to close the chapter. This is an important phrase. This is a statement of God’s sovereignty. God is in control. And not just that, God has chosen his people out of the world to be his and to receive his blessing and to bless the world. 

When he told the Israelites, “I am the Lord your God,” he was reminding them that he had done good things for them, and more good things would come to them. They were a special people because they had a special relationship with the Creator of the universe. 

But they were to live as the Creator designed them to live – and to not follow the sinful practices of the world. 

A little bit of a history lesson is in order here. The Canaanites were the descendants of Ham, one of the sons of Noah. The most important part of Ham’s story is in Genesis 9, where Noah got drunk and lay naked in his tent. And Ham walked in.

“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.’ He also said, ‘Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant’” (Genesis 9:22-27).

Ham and his descendants, the Canaanites, were cursed because of the lack of respect that Ham showed to his father, Noah. Rather than discreetly covering over his father’s nakedness, Ham further exposed it. I don’t think any physical sexual act occurred here, but it did lead Ham’s family down a long descent into sexual depravity.

Where Ham violated the order of creation – where sons were to honor their fathers – so his descendants violated the order of creation in their acts toward one another. The snowball rolled down the hill and grew bigger and bigger. 

Hundreds of years after Ham’s sin, the Canaanites had built into their culture a whole range of immoral actions. 

One of them was incest. This violated the creation order. You can notice how the euphemism of “nakedness” is used for sexual intercourse here. To “uncover” one’s nakedness meant to violate that person sexually.

Another of the Canaanites’ sins was the flagrant violation God’s laws of ceremonial purity – typified by sex during a woman’s “menstrual uncleanness.” According to Leviticus 15, this rendered a person “unclean” for period of time. God’s people were to remember God’s holiness – his own super-cleanness – and the sacredness of blood, which belonged to God and was used for atonement. The Canaanites, of course, disregarded all of this.

Another sin of the Canaanites was the sin of adultery – sleeping with someone who is married. 

Another sin of the Canaanites was the turning over of their children to the false God of Molech. This likely is a reference to child sacrifice. But it also could be a turning over of their children to the pagan shrines, where the children would serve as ritual prostitutes.

Another sin of the Canaanites was the sin of homosexuality – yet another violation of the creation order. Men were not to have sex with men, and women were not to have sex with women.

Finally, another sin of the Canaanites was the sin of bestiality. This, too, violated God’s creation.

We can stop here consider the application of this text for our lives today. All of these sins remain in our world. I saw an article recently about a man who wanted to marry his adult daughter. This is incest. 

The flagrant ignoring of God’s ceremonial law – now centered on the shed blood of Jesus Christ – is rampant in our culture. People don’t try to live holy lives. 

Child sacrifice is rare, but not unheard of across the globe. Of course, adultery is common in our culture, as is homosexuality. Bestiality even is discussed in some circles. 

But our culture wants to pull us into this way of living – to declare something that’s not holy as something that is holy.

This is most obvious right now with the issue of homosexuality. Homosexual acts are sinful. That’s made clear right here in Leviticus 18. It shows up again two chapters later in Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”

Homosexual acts were declared sinful in the Old Testament, and they still were sinful in the New Testament. 

Jesus in Matthew 5:17 said he did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfill them. Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial law on the cross. The moral law remains the same. Jesus carried out the moral law in his own life, and empowers his followers to do the same. God’s creation order remains the same as it always has. 

Homosexual acts still were sinful in Matthew 19, when Jesus described what marriage is: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4-6).

Homosexual acts still were sinful in Romans 1. The apostle Paul said, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27).

Homosexual acts still were sinful in 1 Corinthians 6. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

Homosexual acts are sinful. So is incest and adultery and child sacrifice and bestiality and anything that runs contrary to God’s will or to his created order. 

But as the apostle Paul notes, there is hope for us all!

In 1 Corinthians, Paul was writing to people like the Canaanites. These were people who had fallen into sin. “And such were some of you.” But they were saved out of that sin by the blood of Jesus Christ. 

Remember the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16. The priests washed themselves. The man who took to scapegoat, which symbolized the people’s sins, out into the wilderness – he washed himself. The one who burned up the remains of the sin offering outside the camp – he washed himself. 

And Paul said to anyone who turned to Christ in faith – and who turned away from the world’s ways – “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” Our sins are washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ!

And so we need to remain crystal clear about sin. It is what it is. It violates the commands of God. It is a turning inward toward oneself and away from our Creator. 

But God has provided a way for anyone who would turn back toward him. And that way is Jesus Christ. Jesus paid the price for all of our sins. Anyone who takes refuge in him is blessed (Psalm 2:12). The world lies and tells us we will be blessed if we follow its ways. God says, “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” – the Son of God.

After we come to know Christ and are filled with the Holy Spirit, we begin better to recognize the difference between God’s ways and the world’s ways. And yet we still can become lax.

And so we remember again the words of Oswald Chambers, “You no more need a holiday from spiritual concentration than you heart needs a holiday from beating.” Pay attention. Read your Bibles. Listen to the Holy Spirit. Don’t fall for the lies of the world that tell you it will like you better if you take a holiday from your spiritual concentration. 

Commit yourself to obeying God. “I am the Lord your God,” he said. “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does them, he shall live by them: I am the Lord.”

Chris

Dear church,

Do you live a life of obedience to Jesus Christ? Do you honor him by seeking to follow his commandments for your life?

Starting in Leviticus 17, God gave his people many commandments. 

“For the life of the flesh is in the blood …” God’s people were to take blood seriously. It represented life. To see the blood drained out of an animal, which was a common part of the religious and agricultural life of Israel, was something to behold with reverence. As the blood drained away, so did the animal’s life.

And besides, God said, blood was given for atonement. The blood, representing life, was to be given over to God as people sought atonement for their sins. This is why they weren’t to consume it, to treat it like common food.

Certainly, this chapter reminds us how the people of Israel were to be set apart from the nations around it. The prohibition on eating blood was part of that distinctness. Pagans may eat blood, either casually or as part of their pagan worship rituals, but God’s people were not to do so. 

This prohibition was so important that it caused a stir in the early church. The apostles decided the prohibition on eating blood was one that the first Christians ought to maintain – most likely because of the pagan worship connotations built into the practice of consuming blood. See Acts 15.

Meanwhile, Leviticus 17 also commanded God’s people not to make sacrifices away from the tabernacle. If they made offerings, they were to bring them to God. Again, this appears to be a pushback against the pagan rituals of the land – “So they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices to goat demons …”

God’s people were to be holy, and they were to be fully dedicated to him and to reject idolatry.

When Jesus came along, he announced he came to fulfill the Law and not to abolish it (Matthew 5:17). And then Jesus did something astonishing: He told his followers they were to drink his blood (John 6:54)!

Jesus didn’t mean this literally, as we do not have access to the physical flesh and blood of Jesus. He is at the right hand of the Father (Acts 7:55-56; Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20). 

But Jesus did mean we are to consume his flesh and blood by faith. His blood represents life – full, eternal life – and by putting our faith in him and his atoning death on the cross, we are taking that life into ourselves. We picture this as we take the bread and cup during the Lord’s Supper.

By faith, the blood of life enters us. And we have eternal life. 

It is clear then that this matter of blood continues to be a serious one for Christians. Blood represents life, and human life ought to be cherished. But most important of all is the blood of Jesus Christ – the blood that was given for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:26-28).  

Jesus gave up his lifeblood for us. And so we cherish the blood of Christ.

But do we do this?

We obey Him. We don’t go on “sinning deliberately.” We don’t set aside the commands of Christ. We don’t “trample” Jesus underfoot. We don’t “profane the blood” of the covenant. Read Hebrews 10:26-31, which has direct connections to Leviticus 17.

We honor the blood of Jesus Christ by seeking to obey his words. 

Chris

Dear church,

Right here in the middle of the Law of Moses, we find God giving his instructions for the Day of Atonement. A Christian must approach this text with wonder.

For 1,500 years, God’s people practiced the Day of Atonement with the understanding there was much sin in their lives. And that sin defiled their relationship with God. It blocked them from entering into God’s presence. And so the high priest would enter into the Holy of Holies, behind the veil where the ark of the covenant was, with the blood of the sacrifices of God’s people. 

Two goats would be slaughtered that day – one as a sin offering, dying in the place of the people of Israel, and the other as a goat “that departs.” The sins of the people would be laid upon that goat, and it was released into the wilderness, cut off from the people, where it would perish. It was a visual reminder of the cost of sin and the ridding of sin from among the people of God. 

To fully grasp this text as a Christian, you need to do some more reading today. Here’s a partial reading list: Isaiah 53; Hebrews 9-10; Matthew 27:51; Galatians 3:13; Colossians 2:17; 2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Peter 2:24.

If you read those passages, you will see that Jesus Christ fulfilled all the requirements of the Day of Atonement. This ritual was carried out in full when Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Everything that the Day of Atonement set out to do, Jesus has finished once and for all. 

Spend some time with this chapter here in the heart of God’s Law. It is so vitally important to see the need for atonement for sinners – for “all their sins” (Leviticus 16:16). We need a way back into the presence of God.

Jesus has provided that way. 

At the end of the chapter, God tells the people when they were to carry out the ritual – on the tenth day of the seventh month each year. The people were to approach that day with reverence.

“You shall afflict yourselves and shall do no work, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you. For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins. It is a Sabbath of solemn rest to you, and you shall afflict yourselves; it is a statute forever.”

To “afflict” oneself has connections with self-reflection, with sackcloth and ashes, with mourning, with fasting. The season of Lent carries forward some of these themes into the church’s life. 

Rituals don’t have much meaning if your heart is not in them. Prayer, fasting, music worship, Bible reading, the Lord’s Supper, baptism – they require a heart that is ready. 

To afflict oneself means, basically, to come to terms with who you are. If the reality of who you are without God doesn’t feel like some kind of “affliction” to you, then you have fooled yourself. 

We are sinners in need of grace. We don’t measure up to the holiness of God. Our sinfulness carries with it a steep price. The weight of guilt for our sins ought to feel like an affliction. It ought to pain us. We ought to be “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37).

And it ought to make us eager for our Savior. 

I suppose some in our culture would encourage us never to feel this way – to feel like sinners. These people would only want us to feel good about ourselves. They know there is real danger in hopelessness. 

But biblical “affliction” only comes to those who are ready for Jesus, for the Author of our atonement. Our affliction leads us straight to the hope of eternal life. 

If a person never finds himself or herself afflicted by sin and looking for the solution, that person is, unfortunately, lost. Prayer is needed.

But this is not the case for you. You are a Christian. You understand your own sin and the cost of it. 

Perhaps a good exercise on a day like this would be to do the following: Think about one area of sin in your life. It could be covetousness or lust or deceit or bitterness. You know what it is for you. 

Write it down on a piece of paper – just a word or two. Carry that “sin” around with you. It belongs to you, after all. You’ll feel that piece of paper when you reach in your pocket for your keys or into your purse. You’ll remember. This is a sin that you have in your life, a sin you have committed perhaps many times. 

You’ll be afflicted. When you are, you’ll be reminded you are ready for Jesus.

Then come to church on Sunday. Take Communion with the church family. Take the bread and the cup – symbols of Jesus broken body and shed blood, reminders of Leviticus 16 – and leave that piece of paper at the table. 

Thank God for the new life you’ve been given.

Chris

Dear church,

Here, we have a graphic chapter to think about graphic things – things that have to do with sex. But for the most part, this chapter isn’t describing sex in its proper sense. The conditions described in Leviticus 15 are derivatives of sex, the unsavory offshoots of sex – bodily discharges connected to the reproductive organs in our bodies. 

Sex is a very earthly and physical thing. It is not bad or evil. God gives it as a blessing for husbands and wives. And it’s really important for the idea of being fruitful and multiplying! Sex is a gift. That’s an important thing to remember about this chapter. 

But, again, sex is something of this earth and this life. Sex was not to be brought into the holy sanctuary of God. Keep in mind that some of the pagan religions believed otherwise – and God’s people were to be set apart from that sensual mindset. 

Notice the chiasm that forms this chapter – first a discussion of unusual bodily discharges in men followed by one about the (relatively usual) emission of semen in men, and then a discussion of the (usual) menstrual cycle in women followed one about unusual bodily discharges in women.

Cleansing sacrifices were required in some cases, and mere washing was required in other cases.  

Nothing about these conditions is holy. God wanted the people to know that. They could not enter into the sanctuary services while in such a state. They were not whole in the sense that everything was operating normally in their bodies. 

People afflicted with these conditions – and I assume every healthy man and woman would be afflicted with something described in Leviticus 15 at some point in their lives – were not considered in these text to be sinners. That is, these conditions weren’t necessarily brought on by sin. They just were in an unclean or common state as a result of their reproductive processes. 

And God was holy. His long-term plan is to bring us, finally and completely, out of that unclean state and into his perfection. The common will become holy, forever. 

He does this by grace. And we believe he will do it in faith (Matthew 9:20-22).

So how do we apply this text today to our lives, where these rules no longer are in place and now that we know the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all impurities?

I suppose we recognize that reproduction is meant for this life. And major problems or small quirks in our reproductive processes also are temporary. They will not last forever. God has a better future in store for us, when these problems will be healed and cleansed by God himself. 

We understand that God is holy, and he is drawing us into his holiness even now. This is a reason for hope.

Chris

Dear church,

The cleansing ceremonies described in Leviticus 14 didn’t heal a person, and they didn’t clear the mildew out of a home. This was not magic. And that’s important to understand as we read a chapter like this. Some other religions look to rituals like these to carry out healings, as if the healing something a person can do by saying and doing the right things.

Israel’s rituals instead marked and celebrated the healing work of God. The person who was healed, and the owner of a home that was found cleansed, could only look to God. He is the one who purifies. 

God in Exodus 15:26 described himself as the “healer” of Israel. God later said, “I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal” (Deuteronomy 32:39). The Israelites were to recognize that if they were healed of their skin diseases, and if their homes were found to be clean of impurities, it was God who did it. 

And then they brought their sacrifices. They marked the moment. And they surely expressed their gratitude. They returned a gift to God (Matthew 8:1-4).

Two birds were brought. One was killed, and one flew away – free. It was a visual reminder of life in this fallen world. We rejoice when we find our freedom, when we walk away with our lives. We understand it could have been different. 

How do you respond to the blessings of God? When you pray for God to move in your life, and then he does, what is your response?

“Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Hebrews 13:15). 

I wonder whether we celebrate enough together as a church. 

Chris

Dear church,

Death and life do not go together. An Israelite marked by signs of death could not enter into the holy presence of God. 

One tendency is to look at this chapter and say, “How cruel of God to deny people access to him when they were sick – or happened to have mildew on their clothing. It’s not their fault!”

But nowhere in this text is the person with a skin problem, or the person with mildew, being chastised for sin. Rather, this text is simply dealing in facts. Skin problems were a sign that the world is wasting away. Mildew is a mark of our world’s fallenness and the way that decay spreads and infiltrates otherwise good things. 

One had to be whole to go into God’s presence. 

So what about those who were barred from the activities at the tabernacle – or worse yet, barred from life in the community altogether? What were they to do?

First, these folks still could worship God from wherever they were located. They still could give him praise. They still could lift up their prayers to him. Yes, it was not as good as being able to join in with the community to worship at the tabernacle. But they weren’t entirely cut off from God. They could cry out to him.

Second, and most importantly, these folks could find their hope in the resurrection. Their hope lay in the future fulfillment of all of God’s promises. They couldn’t settle into their easy chairs in the evening and know everything was great in their lives right now and they had everything they needed or wanted. Their eyes had to be on the future, hoping in the redemption of God.

Did you know that in some mysterious way, we are living in both places at once – clean and unclean? And it is good for us to recognize this as we read this chapter. 

On the one hand, we have full access to God through the blood of Christ. We are washed clean of our sins and can stand confidently in the presence of God (3:11-12). Not only can we come to God because of Christ, but he comes to us. We are now, as the church, the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). Christians dwell with God in close communion because of Christ.

But at the same time, we must be looking forward in hope. Like the person quarantined with a skin disease – by the way, not everything written about in Leviticus 13 is actual “leprosy” – we have not yet come into the closest possible communion with our Creator. The apostle Paul wrote about this:

“For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:9-12).

The laws about skin disease and garment mildew were reminders to the Israelites that death still reigned on earth, and contamination of body and possessions remained a threat. We still live in a world marked by sin and death. 

We’ve overcome this through Christ. The hope of eternal life is now ours. In the meantime, we faithfully live out our lives in our perishable bodies – bodies marked by the sting of death until Christ returns and grants us the full transformation that comes with resurrection. (See 1 Corinthians 15 and Romans 8).

So how are we to think about a text like Leviticus 13 today?

If you’ve ever been sick, you know about how frail we are as humans. You know about the brokenness of this world. You know something about decay and death.

And if you’ve ever had a possession that was destroyed or food that rotted or mold in your house, you know the self-destructive nature of our fallen world. 

None of that has any part with God. Jesus came to remedy things for those who would believe. 

This is a call for hope. We should hope not in the material things around us – all of which are marked for destruction, including our own bodies. Rather, we should hope in Christ and his resurrection, when he makes us fit for eternity. 

There’s more to life than what you see around you.

Chris 

Dear church,

The idea of a person being “unclean” has a negative connotation. We think about the unwashed masses of humanity, people we don’t really want to be around, people who smell badly or talk poorly or don’t live up to our own standards. 

It is wrong for us to think this way about anybody. No one is more “unclean” than we are!

According to Leviticus 12, a new mother was “unclean,” and we might think there was something really wrong with her – that she did not please God.

I don’t think that’s the case at all. Child-bearing is the chief purpose of humanity, laid out at the very beginning. “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it …” (Genesis 1:28). 

If God blessed humanity and gave them this first commandment, it cannot be that God was somehow unpleased with a new mother when she was obedient to the commandment. 

I think this has more to do with flesh, blood, and the holiness of God. There is a messiness and brokenness to being human, as we shall see in this chapter and in the two that follow. In our lives in the flesh, we go through periods and seasons when we are not whole. I think “wholeness” might be a better way to think about “clean” and “unclean” here.

When we go through seasons when our bodies are not whole, our bodies are not operating in the normal way. Things are on us or come out of us that we wouldn’t always want to be on us or come out of us.

God wants humanity to come into his presence in wholeness – in wellness. And we will never be fully well or whole until we stand in front of God in our resurrected bodies. That’s the main point we need to take away from this text as Christians. 

The purification process is a reminder that we are not what we need to be, physically or spiritually, in order to stand before a perfectly holy God. Sin broke both our spirits and our flesh. All of life is marked by the brokenness caused by sin. And Jesus provides the cure for both our broke spirits and our broken bodies.

Moreover, when a woman gives birth, she is marked by blood and other bodily fluids. I’ve been a close eyewitness to this on four separate occasions! When blood comes out of a person, it is a sign of a weakening of that person. Blood signifies life, after all, and God wanted his people to take the flow of blood seriously. 

Consider the use of blood in the sacrificial system. Only one kind of blood was to be brought into the holy places – the blood of the sacrifices approved by God himself. 

And so a new mother was able to take respite during her time of purification. No sacrifices were asked of her for 33 or 66 days. The birth of boys or girls were treated differently – male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27), and this difference was acknowledged in the Law.

But fundamentally, this text is one that pointed out to God’s people – yet again – their inherent brokenness and imperfection in light of their holy God. They needed to find wholeness before they could enter into his presence. 

It points us to the resurrection. 

The apostle Paul said, “I tell you this, brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:50-53).

We must understand this as Christians. Blood flowed out of the body of Jesus Christ when he was put to death outside Jerusalem. It was the ultimate blood of atonement that covers over our sins.

But we still are living in our flesh and blood. We cannot stand, as it is, in the physical presence of God. We still are being sanctified as we live out our days in this life. But a day will come when we can stand in the holy places, when we receive our perfectly whole resurrected bodies. 

Today, perhaps, might be a day to think about the way in which your body is telling you it is “perishable.” What is breaking down? What isn’t functioning correctly? What is un-whole about your body right now? Now think about the resurrection. There is much hope for us in Christ!

Chris